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CNN This Morning

Today, Trump, Haley, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) Blitz New Hampshire; Trump Urges Supreme Court to Keep Him on Colorado Ballot; DOJ Says, Uvalde Massacre Could Have Been Stopped Sooner. Aired 7- 7:30a ET

Aired January 19, 2024 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MARC STEWART, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: To balance all of these forces.

[07:00:01]

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, it's a fascinating story and the cascading effects of it are so important. Marc Stewart, thank you.

And CNN This Morning continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIKKI HALEY, REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I refuse to believe that the premise of when they formed our country was based on the fact that it was a racist country.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It shows a stunning lack of leadership on this issue.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No one can be different in a party where you cannot split from the figurehead of the party.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: The former president told the Supreme Court to keep him on the Colorado ballot, warning there will be, quote, chaos and bedlam if it doesn't.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: If they don't have immunity, no president is going to act.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That rhetoric can match violence at his beckoned calling.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Fani Willis is fighting back against allegations of an affair with her lead prosecutor in the Trump case.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a conflict of interest. The two of them are profiting off of the investigation.

FANI WILLIS, FULTON COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY: You can say some will never see a black man as qualified.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The U.S. Justice Department calls law enforcement's response to the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, a failure.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Acknowledgement at the pain and the grief that these families have been suffering.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I hope that the failures end today, do right by the victims and survivors of Robb Elementary.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: Good Friday morning, everyone. I'm Phil Mattingly with Poppy Harlow in New York.

And it's just four days until the New Hampshire primary, and Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis all blitzing the Granite State today. The looming reality is that Trump could slam the door shut on this race, the entire primary race on Tuesday with a big performance.

Just minutes from now, Nikki Haley is kicking off a very busy day of six campaign stops, her schedule capturing the sense of urgency as she makes the case she's the only one standing in Trump's way.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: So, during her town hall on CNN last night, Haley tempered expectations and ditched any talk of a win in New Hampshire. Instead, she told our Jake Tapper her goal is to finish strong.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Governor Sununu is predicting a win for you here in New Hampshire, but he's also saying a strong second place finish would be, in his words, great. Would a strong second place finish be great for you?

HALEY: What I want to do is be strong. We're not going to know what strong looks like until those numbers come in.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Now, for his part, the frontrunner, Donald Trump, relentlessly focusing his attacks on his former U.N. ambassador, trying to undercut Haley's message of electability among Republicans, and in a head-to-head matchup with President Biden.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: She's not going to make it. She has no chance. She's got no way. MAGA is not going to be with her. We're leading everywhere now and she's not. She has one obsolete poll that she likes. It was about two months old where she was leading Biden. Well, those days are gone. She's not leading Biden anymore.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: CNN's Eva McKend starts us off. Eva, it is a huge day on the trail in New Hampshire, just a couple of days out. What do we expect as we head into this final sprint? EVA MCKEND, CNN NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER: Well, Nikki Haley is really trying to capture every voter she can in the Granite State. What we saw last night from her, Phil, is her telegraphing this new approach where she ties Trump and Biden together as being part of the past, as she argues she offers a new generation of leadership that America needs.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MCKEND (voice over): Nikki Haley, barnstorming New Hampshire with just days to go before the primary.

HALEY: Look, I mean, we want to do better than we did in Iowa. That's my personal goal.

MCKEND: And Haley spoke to a statement she made earlier this week during an interview where she said, America has never been a racist country.

HALEY: America is not perfect. We have our stains.

MCKEND: She said as a child she experienced racism but also maintains she refuses to believe the premise America was ever a racist country.

HALEY: I was a brown girl that grew up in a small rural town. We had plenty of racism that we had to deal with. But my parents never said we lived in a racist country.

MCKEND: Haley wants voters to consider what a rematch between former President Trump and President Biden will mean for the country.

HALEY: Do we really want to have two 80-year-olds running for president? We need people who love America and realize if your time is gone, move out of the way.

TRUMP: And I think cognitively, I'm better than I was 20 years ago.

MCKEND: Trump hitting back at Haley, calling his former U.N. ambassador weak.

TRUMP: She would not be able to handle that position. She would not be able to handle the onslaught. With all of that being said within the Republican Party, I want to bring unity.

MCKEND: Trump has sharpened his attacks against Haley, even resorting to calling her by her first name, Nimrada, an attack meant to be a racist dog whistle against his rival.

HALEY: I know President Trump well.

[07:05:00]

That's what he does when he feels threatened. That's what he does when he feels insecure.

MCKEND: On Thursday, Trump's lawyers filed a brief to the Supreme Court urging them to reverse Colorado's decision to remove him from the ballot. Trump is claiming Biden is the real threat to democracy in response to Biden arguing the same thing about him.

TRUMP: Well, we put on three great justices and you have some other great justices up there and they're not going to take the vote away from the people.

Now, Biden is a threat to democracy.

MCKEND: Biden, for his part, is looking to the general election, campaigning in North Carolina. The president is facing a primary challenge in New Hampshire. Even though he is not on the ballot, his supporters are hoping Biden can win the primary as a write-in candidate.

Representative Dean Phillips, who is running a lesser known operation against Biden, is campaigning in New Hampshire and picked up a key endorsement from former Democratic candidate Andrew Yang.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MCKEND (on camera): Now in New Hampshire, Haley is expected to benefit from a more moderate Republican primary electorate. But Trump, he returns to the state today for an event in Concord. And he's really hoping to have a decisive victory in New Hampshire to continue to dull the momentum of his rivals. Phil, Poppy?

HARLOW: Eva, thank you very much for the reporting.

Joining us at the table this morning, Editor-in-Chief of the National Review Rich Lowry and CNN Contributor Cari Champion. So, glad you guys are both here.

I do want you both to weigh in on the answers that Nikki Haley keeps giving on Civil War and on racism in this country. There's a difference in saying America is not a racist country now and never was a racist country now. She also talked about her own personal experience with racism, Cari.

Phil laid out so wonderfully last hour how it was -- you saw it, how it was built into the founding three fifths clause, the founding fathers being slave owners, presidents being slave owners. Why is this such a difficult question for her to answer?

CARI CHAMPION, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: It's not a difficult question. It's disappointing, too. And it's also disappointing for me to hear her refer to herself as a brown girl who knows that when you tell children this is a racist country, they immediately feel some type of way. They feel inferior.

So, this brown girl says, I like to know where I'm at and what I'm dealing with and I am aware of what I have to overcome. I grew up very well aware of the fact that this country was racist, the three fifths clause things in which we don't even teach in school right now, I had to learn on my own through my parents. And for me, that helped me, It helped me understand where we are. When Nikki does this, when she tries to do this erasing of history, because that's what it sounds like to me, erasure, it's so disrespectful to my ancestors, it's disrespectful to the people who helped build this country, for her to say that it didn't happen or that she doesn't want to believe it happened.

Now, what if, in fact, she does become president? Let's just fast forward, right? Let's just play the what if game. What if she does become president and she says this is where she goes, and she touts that this is not a racist country, someone is going to believe that. And then all of this history that we have, this complicated history with this beautiful country that we love, goes away for a percentage of people who look just like me, who say, well, that's not fair, that's just not true. You can't change history. And it's so disappointing.

And I don't know if she's trying to get along with people. I don't know if she's trying to speak to people. In fact, I do. I know she's trying to win some people over who are in the middle, but she's being completely disrespectful to an entire group.

RICH LOWRY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, NATIONAL REVIEW: Yes, I think there's an implied fundamentally, when she says it was never a racist country, it's never fundamentally a racist country. And a lot depends. Are you going to judge the founding by 21st century standards or by 18th century standards? Because the founding generation, unfortunately, did not invent racism, they did not invent slavery, which were persistent throughout all of human history.

And the great advantage and benefit of the founding was they advanced these ideals that eventually eroded the legal racist regime in this country were a great tool for Martin Luther King and others. And she's not saying we're perfect. I mean, she says she experienced racism herself, but the idea she said last night used the term self-loathing.

So, I think there are a lot of people who -- the history is complicated, that's absolutely right, but want to erase the complication on the other end and say, oh, it was all about racism. That's all this country has ever been about, and that's false and a lie.

MATTINGLY: I think you make an interesting point, and this is why I've been a little stuck on how this keeps becoming a little bit of an issue for her. You can acknowledge what happened in the past and not undercut the founding -- either the founding fathers, the ideals of the country, the continuous evolution, trying to become a more perfect union, and yet people seem to get stuck on it. Like you're not trying to offend people if you're saying Thomas Jefferson owns slaves.

[07:10:02]

LOWRY: Of course. And she said last night, we've overcome things.

MATTINGLY: Yes. No, question.

LOWRY: Obviously. No one really denies that. So, look, she got in a space where the slavery thing was a flat out gaffe. And there's just no way to explain how she couldn't have a decent answer to that. But I think for a well-intentioned person, it's clear what she means what she's saying no.

CHAMPION: Well, intentions don't -- they don't work for me. You know what I mean? It's just insulting, quite frankly. You cannot run for -- to be the president of the United States of America and not acknowledge its history clearly, plainly, concretely.

Two things can be true. This could have -- yes, the precepts of this country that were racist. Do you think it's better today? Great, Nikki, that's fine. I'm with that. It makes perfect sense. But you can't create your own way of describing this because she's leaving out the entire group.

LOWRY: Precepts, like all men are created equal, it's racist, it wasn't racist. Now they made an accommodation to a fact on the ground that they soon would go away.

CHAMPION: All men were not created equal, and you know that. No, all men are created equal. No, no, that's not true. The Constitution, literally -- and you laid this out perfectly, Phil, earlier, the Constitution was very clear that there was a three fifths clause for people who were not free. So how are we all created equal? The idea, sure. I love this idea. But they weren't referring with my ancestors.

LOWRY: And the idea was extremely powerful and has done more to define American history than the racism.

And, look, they assumed they were wrong, that slavery would go away. So, they weren't going to mention it in the Constitution and hope eventually progress would erode it. And in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, race relations got better. You know, the north -- you had many missions, statues in the north. What happened, there was terrible backsliding in the South eventually in the 19th century. And then we have a terrible Civil War over.

CHAMPION: Yes. We're going to have to agree to disagree because our experience are different, right? My experience is very different. So, all I was saying, what Nikki needs to do is be very honest. Yes, the slavery question was a complete gaffe. They're not even hard, but she wasn't even asked if this country was racist. She was asked, I do believe by the reporter, the anchor, are there racist people in your party? And she was like, this is not a racist country. No one even asked her.

HARLOW: Are you in a -- I don't have the exact quote, but what Brian was asking her was essentially, is this a racist party? Are you part of a racist party? Right, Phil?

CHAMPION: And she said this is not a racist country. No one asked her that. So, I'm really curious as to why she --

LOWRY: Maybe she believes that me.

CHAMPION: I have a hard time understanding why someone would not acknowledge the two truths She could believe that. That's fine.

LOWRY: This is not a fundamentally racist country. Why did Indian immigrants come here and thrive? Why did black immigrants come here and thrive, Asian immigrants come here and thrive?

CHAMPION: We don't all thrive. We are not created equal. We are not the same.

LOWRY: We are created equal. That is the fundamental truth. You deny that people are equal?

CHAMPION: Physically, sure, we can walk and we can move and we can say and we can do. But the world in which I live in is not going to be the same world that you live in. The way that I experience America is not going to be the way that you experience.

LOWRY: You're created equal. You're all equal. You deny that?

CHAMPION: Yes, that's not what I'm talking about.

LOWRY: But you said repeatedly not all of it.

CHAMPION: There's nuance here. So, if you would allow me to finish, I can tell you.

The truth is, is that my experience is going to be different than your experience. And as a black woman in this country, I can tell you I have not been created equal. I have been treated equal, rather, in very many instances. Nikki can believe what you want.

LOWRY: She said the same thing.

CHAMPION: One second. Nikki can believe what she wants, but she can't turn around and say that's just what we're going to do for our children. If I say this is a racist country, my children will grow up feeling inferior. That's not true.

LOWRY: She said she experienced racism and you shouldn't -- the country's not defined by that, people shouldn't be defined by that and you can overcome it. That seems an uplifting message, a fundamentally American message to me.

CHAMPION: It seems like it's a message of erasure, for me.

MATTINGLY: It's just --

LOWRY: Of what? Erasure?

MATTINGLY: I think what's most -- there's a lot to dig into on this and we will continue to do so but the fact that this became a central issue on some level because of her doing, and I don't know that this helps move the ball forward for her politically right now but it's certainly a discussion that's always worth having.

Cari Champion, Rich Lowry, thanks, guys.

HARLOW: Come back.

CHAMPION: Thank you, I appreciate it. Of course, thank you.

MATTINGLY: Well, chaos and bedlam, that's the warning Trump's legal team is writing to the Supreme Court when arguing that he should be on the Colorado ballot.

HARLOW: Also the judge in Donald Trump's election subversion case in Georgia is now going to consider a motion that would disqualify the Fulton County district attorney who brought the case, Fani Willis, from her own case. What she's saying about the decision, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back. This morning, a chilling warning from Donald Trump's legal team. In a filing Thursday, they laid out their argument that the Colorado Supreme Court got it wrong by ruling to take him off the ballot there. Trump's lawyer is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in their favor or risk chaos and bedlam.

MATTINGLY: Speaking of chaos, that's what Trump is warning will happen if he isn't granted presidential immunity. He was asked about his closing arguments to New Hampshire voters on Fox News last night. Here's how he answered.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TRUMP: The United States, and I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about any president, has to have immunity, because if you take immunity away from the president, so important, you will have a president that's not going to be able to do anything. Because when he leaves office, the opposing party president, if it's the opposing party, will indict the president for doing something that should have been good, like Obama dropped missiles and they ended up hitting a kindergarten or a school or apartment house. A lot of people were killed. Well, if that's the case, he's going to end up being indicted when he leaves office. He meant well. The missile went in the wrong direction and other things.

Look at Biden. What would happen to Biden? He's killed our country with his policies. The border is a disaster. Everything he does is a disaster. What he did in Afghanistan is the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, giving them $85 billion worth of equipment, killing our soldiers, wounding horribly our soldiers and leaving people behind, well, when he leaves office, if he doesn't have immunity.

[07:20:01]

Now, I think it's horrible what he did, but he probably -- I don't know. It's hard to believe, but he probably meant well. It's hard to believe that he meant well, but the man is incompetent.

But you have to leave -- you have to leave immunity with the president. If a president is afraid to act because they're worried about being indicted when they leave office, a president of the United States has to have immunity, and the Supreme Court is going to be ruling on that. If they don't have immunity, no president is going to act. You're going to have guys that just sit in office and are afraid to do anything.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MATTINGLY: It was an interesting spin on a closing campaign message that was requested.

Joining us now to go over the legal arguments, Elie Honig. I want to start there and not the full 90 seconds because it would take a while to dissect all of that. But the idea of absolute immunity, what the former president is saying right now on a legal basis, what's your response to it?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So, Donald Trump actually has the kernel of the right principle. The problem is in the execution. Yes, we do have immunity in our courts, in civil cases, we don't know about criminal cases. We may learn as a result of this. But the problem is it doesn't apply to anything that a president does. It has to apply to something within the scope of the job.

He gave the examples of Obama or Biden ordering a military strike, for example, or a border policy. Those are obviously within the scope of what you do as president. Therefore you would have civil immunity, maybe criminal immunity. The things Donald Trump is charged with, the question is, are they inside or outside that scope? Prosecutors say they're outside the scope. You cannot be covered for something outside the scope or else that would lead to, to coin a phrase, chaos and bedlam.

HARLOW: How is this going to play out -- well, because it's not up at the Supreme Court yet, the immunity.

HONIG: Right.

HARLOW: So this is an appellate court that could decide any day.

HONIG: Yes. D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has the case. We could get a ruling today, it could be next week. Next stop will be if Trump loses, and I think he will, he'll try to get it to the Supreme Court.

MATTINGLY: You mentioned chaos and bedlam. Can you walk us through the filing last night in that case?

HONIG: 50 pages, we're going to tick through it in a couple of minutes. Donald Trump, this is the 14th Amendment case, trying to get him restored to the ballot in Colorado.

Trump's team makes five primary legal arguments. First, they argue that the president does not count as an officer of the United States. You may think, how could that possibly be? If you look at the 14th Amendment, it lists certain offices, senator, representative, elector of president, not president, not the president, Trump's team is saying, but the other side's going to say, well, it also says hold any office under the United States. There's textual arguments both ways on that.

Argument two that Trump makes is, there was no insurrection, I did not engage in insurrection. That's really a factual question. Trump says, I've not been charged criminally with insurrection. That goes a certain distance, but that doesn't answer the question. He has not been charged by Jack Smith with insurrection. Supreme Court is not going to touch that. That's not for them. They don't make factual findings.

The third argument Trump makes, and this one we've talked about before, and I think there's something to this. He argues it's not up to the states. Colorado doesn't get to decide whether it's qualified. Maine doesn't get to decide. It's up to Congress. And to that end, they cite Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which says the Congress shall have the power to enforce by legislation the provisions of this article.

So, the question is, is it up to Congress? That's what Trump says. Or can the states decide? That's what Colorado says.

Okay, those are the top three, but there's two other sort of new ones that I found really interesting. There is one argument Trump says that the 14th Amendment says you cannot hold office, but I can still run for office. Now, when I first read that, I thought what the heck's the difference, right? If you can't hold office, how can you run? But here's the catch. The 14th Amendment actually says that Congress, by a two-thirds vote, can essentially undisqualify somebody.

And so what Trump's argument is, is, well, I can run, there's a scenario where I run and win, and then Congress undisqualifies me, in which case I can't take office.

I actually ran that by a friend of mine, who's a law professor, who wants Trump off the ballot. I said, what's your answer to that? He said, I don't know. I mean, we'll see when the other side files the brief.

And then the final argument that Trump makes on the last side is something called the electors clause, which says if it is up to the states, the Constitution says it's actually up to the state legislatures. And Trump says this came from the courts, the Colorado Supreme Court. Therefore, even if it's up to the states, they did it wrong.

So, there you go, 50 pages, five arguments, two minutes.

MATTINGLY: And I feel like the law professor's response is everything. I don't know. Which I feel like is the moment we're in right now.

HONIG: It's healthy to say, I don't know.

MATTINGLY: No, no, no. I'm not criticizing. I think it's great. And I think it underscores we are in a very uncharted territory. Elie Honig, I appreciate you.

HONIG: Yes.

HARLOW: Thank you.

HONIG: Thanks, guys.

MATTINGLY: Well, Houthis fired missiles at another U.S.-owned commercial ship for at least the third time this week.

HARLOW: Also a blistering Justice Department report on the police response to the Uvalde school massacre. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta joining us to discuss, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:25:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MERRICK GARLAND, ATTORNEY GENERAL: I think the report concludes that had law enforcement agencies follow generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: That was Attorney General Merrick Garland, not mincing words, after the release of a scathing report on the Uvalde school massacre that left 19 students and 2 teachers dead back in 2022.

The 575-page Justice Department report confirms what we've long known. It should have been stopped sooner. Instead, it took 77 minutes for officers to stop one of the deadliest school shootings in history.

The Justice Department report details a series of critical failures in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training, concluding, quote, was the single most critical failure was treating the situation as a barricaded standoff, not an active shooter case. The report says law enforcement also failed to secure the crime scene, failed to establish standard operating procedures and failed to adequately communicate with the families.

Joining us now is Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. She's the third highest-ranking official at the Justice Department and oversees its police reform efforts. I appreciate your time this morning.

I want to start with -- there's a lot I want to get to in the report. But how this actually came to be, my understanding is, the back story of how the Justice Department got involved, how you specifically got involved. Actually, I think it underscores a community trying to figure out a path forward after this horror.

[07:30:05]

Can you explain how the Justice Department, in a state like Texas, which is not.