Return to Transcripts main page

CNN This Morning

Trump Open to Deporting Homegrown Violent Criminals; Makena Kelly is Interviewed about DOGE Access to Taxpayer Data; Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) is Interviewed about Tariffs and AI. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired April 15, 2025 - 06:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:33:53]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. RO KHANNA (D-CA): There are things that matter more than simply the size of one's endowment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: Harvard is refusing to bend to the government's demands, rejecting its request for policy changes on campus.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Audie Cornish. I want to thank you for joining me on CNN THIS MORNING.

It's half past the hour here on the East Coast. And here's what's happening right now.

No surrender. Harvard University's president says the school won't comply with Trump administration demands to change school policies. The president wants to cut Harvard off from more than $2 million in federal grants and $60 million in contracts over student activism and DEI policies. Harvard's president says it won't, quote, surrender its independence or its constitutional rights.

And Harvey Weinstein's retrial begins today with jury selection in New York. An appeals court threw out his previous conviction and 23-year prison sentence. The case today includes an allegation from an accuser who wasn't part of his first trial.

And a hearing this afternoon could help determine the next steps in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He's the man the Trump administration admits they mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

[06:35:02]

The Supreme Court ordered them to facilitate his return, but both the U.S. attorney general and the president of El Salvador say he's not going anywhere.

And so, for now, he remains in El Salvador's notorious mega prison. So, who could be next on the deportation list? Maybe U.S. citizens.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Group chat is back.

I want to start with you, Phil, because I know you've done some investigating into this kind of policy. What's the thinking here?

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: Yes, about a month ago, myself, my colleague Priscilla Alvarez, did a deep dive story into how President Bukele first brought this idea to Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio was -

CORNISH: So, he brought it to the secretary of state.

MATTINGLY: Yes, when Rubio visited El Salvador on his first foreign trip swing through Central America. And who brought it to Nayib Bukele, but Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater, who was in contact with him and has a good relationship with him.

And that matters a lot here, because that was the genesis of the U.S. sending undocumented immigrants down to El Salvador, as we've seen, and as, obviously, there's a current major political issue that the administration is dealing with here, but it's also the genesis of the idea of sending American criminals down to El Salvador, which, when it was offered to Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, the State Department didn't really say a whole lot. I think they understood the legal - it was rather - rather tenuous.

CORNISH: Like a new Guantanamo situation? Or, like, what's the offer here?

MATTINGLY: So, this is - this is why we - you should pay attention to what's being said right now. And, actually, there were a couple of comments that Trump made related to this yesterday that hinted at some things that are going on behind the scenes.

CORNISH: Yes.

MATTINGLY: And what they are trying to figure out right now with private contractors, and Erik Prince and his operation to have a proposal that's in play as well, is basically giving the U.S. some type of military base/diplomatic operation that would be U.S. territory within El Salvador. In exchange, the U.S. would help finance multiple prisons, like the CECOT prison that is where - kind of the infamous one that everybody talks about. And that would be a plausible way to make this happen. Why? Don't have a great answer for you on that.

CORNISH: But to your point, this hot mic moment between the president, President Trump, and the president of El Salvador gives us a sense of just how into it this idea he is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Homegrown criminals next. I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. Build - you've got to build about five more places.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: OK, I want to process what we're hearing here because Phil has given us a lot of information.

You got to build about five more places.

KEVIN FREY, WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, SPECTRUM NEWS NY1: Right.

CORNISH: It's - just it's like, we're gearing up for something, right? This is not just a winding down of a smaller story about one deportee. What are you guys hearing in your reporting or where you're from?

GABBY BIRENBAUM, DC CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEVADA INDEPENDENT": I think this is why, you know, if you're a U.S. citizen, it's so important to pay attention to what's happening to visa holders, to TPS recipients. You know, people who don't - permanent residents, whatever. If they can, you know, sort of disappear, someone under that legal framework, and we're seeing right now at the Supreme Court, as we talked about, whether that can occur.

You know, obviously, the idea that he could deport U.S. citizens is pretty legally implausible, like Phil said. But it's all about sort of making strides here, right? If they can do it to one population, they can sort of escalate that and escalate that. And so, I think, can he do it, right, with sort of the thesis of Trump 1.0. I think Trump 2.0 is less, can he do it. It's, he's going to try to do things. Is - you know, are the courts and are these co-equal branches of government powerful enough to stand in his way?

FREY: You know, and it's not clear exactly - I mean we're reaching one of those moments right now as kind of we're butting right up against the courts to see exactly what they will do. You have Democrats basically saying the courts need to hold the line, potentially hold the Trump administration in contempt. And we'll see exactly where that lands.

The other thing I find kind of interesting about all of this is, we've now seen the precedent from the Oval Office meeting just yesterday that we're kind of setting up the space where if they go through with this sort of plan, you can have, well, it's not my jurisdiction. Well, it's not my jurisdiction. And then you're left in this black site space essentially.

CORNISH: Yes. And also, what's the definition of facilitate.

FREY: Correct. Exactly.

CORNISH: I definitely want to know the definition of homegrown. Like, I don't want that to be a broad definition.

FREY: Correct. And so when you have this kind of - you're setting up this scenario where - maybe to run the hypothetical a little too far, but you kind of have to, where you have a U.S. citizen sent to some foreign prison, and there's no real ramifications for how to get them back should the legal process play out, or what the legal process even looks like.

CORNISH: Phil, I want to come to you before we move on because I feel like this is one of those moments where, in the media, we'll be accused of, like, spinning this up or overhyping or raising alarms. But, I mean, what you're telling me out of your reporting is that we're on a path to someplace, and we're not there yet.

MATTINGLY: Yes. So, figuring out, one, the - the build process, the actual getting U.S. territory and what it would actually look like process, the financing of this.

[06:40:05]

CORNISH: But you've laid out some of them, military contractors, a foreign country that's willing -

MATTINGLY: There are proposal - there's a draft proposal that the administration has their hands on.

CORNISH: Yes.

MATTINGLY: There are other contractors that are also trying to get in that space. They believe that this is a viable option right now. They believe this is something - clearly, El Salvador's president put it on the table initially. And, clearly, the Trump administration, despite some initial reticence, is now - look, this is one of those situations where, if people accuse you of getting spun up or making too big of a deal about something, you point them back to what the president was saying. The president was talking about this explicitly in the Oval Office with President Bukele. This was not something that they were hiding the ball on. It is very clear that this is something that they're talking about.

How they do it, the timeline for what that would be, and also the process that they would actually pursue, nobody really knows right now. But the only thing that I think everybody needs to keep in mind, and we've talked about this before, failure of imagination is not something that people, I think, should be able to claim at this point in time.

CORNISH: Right.

MATTINGLY: And it is clear, when you watch in the Oval Office, that this is something that kind of animates them, and that they think is a plausible idea. And based on everything we've seen over the last three months, why wouldn't they?

CORNISH: Yes. All right, stay with us, we've got a lot more to discuss here because as we close out tax season today, I want to talk about the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and its reported plans for the IRS.

Joining me now to discuss her latest reporting on this, senior politics reporter at "WIRED," Mckena Kelly.

Good morning, Mckena. Welcome to the show.

Right now the IRS runs dozens of different systems housed in on site data centers in the cloud. You got to have special permissions. Workers have like need to know access. So, what's this hackathon trying to do? How is it trying to change things?

MAKENA KELLY, SENIOR POLITICS REPORTER, "WIRED": Yes. Sure.

So, last week what happened is that the IRS brought in a group of dozens of career IRS engineers, along with two DOGE representatives, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, and a handful of Palantir engineers, down for a three day summit hackathon at the IRS building in D.C., where they all sat together and planned out this giant project to connect all systems and all data within the IRS into one centralized area where someone or a variety of people with special permissions would be able to basically get access to whatever IRS data they sought with this new system. And these discussions are still ongoing this week as well.

CORNISH: You know, you mentioned Palantir. I think I just heard that NATO is finalizing a deal with them for AI-fueled information sharing between nations, right. So that's the use in a military context.

Can you talk about what it means for these outside engineers to be able to create the systems that talk to each other, that house our data in the IRS?

KELLY: Sure. I mean this is something that folks in the government have been wanting to do for a very long time. Earlier last month I reported that DOGE was talking about something similar at the Social Security Administration and wanting to rewrite the Social Security Administrations' code base. And these projects, you know, these are commonly called modernization projects. And typically they take anywhere from like 5 to 10 years to accomplish. And so even if you come at this IRS project with a perspective that it is something good, wanting to get it done in the 30 day timeframe that DOGE is wanted to finish it in, and a lot of people sent a lot of red flags.

CORNISH: Talk about those red flags, as you mentioned, I think in the "Wired" reporting, the Trump administration actually canceled a lot of those modernization projects that were actually in place to do all this in order to do it this 30 day way. So, what are the red flags in this 30 days?

KELLY: Sure. For 30 days, I mean, there's a lot of things that can go wrong. Maybe you forget some kind of system to hook up, or even, you don't have enough time to test all possible edge cases to show - you know to prove that your system is set up properly and that it's not going to miss anyone, that it's not going to miss, you know, anybody specific tax return or miss anybody's, you know, data and get it wrong, mismatched Social Security Numbers, mismatched names or addresses and things like that.

CORNISH: Right. So, we - excuse me. So, we know that essentially the IRS has our work histories, right. It has our Social Security Number. It has all of this information. Is there a threat of someone creating a backdoor? Is there a threat of someone having access to this information that could use it in a private industry context, without our permission? Are those concerns overblown from civil liberties folks?

KELLY: Yes. So, I mean, what happens here is, when you have it in an easy, you know, to glean at place, it becomes a lot easier to see everything at once. Right now the IRS and the SSA and other agencies, a lot of this data is inherently siloed.

[06:45:03]

So, it's more difficult for people to access it. You have to be like a certain type of, you know, worker to access certain types of data. All the conversations that I've had with IRS workers over the last week have basically said, when you leave your, you know, your day long training of your first day at the IRS, the first thing, if you did not learn anything, what I'm told, you're told, you learn that you're not supposed to access peoples' taxpayer information. If you just, like, decided to look up someone who maybe, you know, is a - somebody who you might be dating or something like that, that is like an immediate, you're no longer working in government ever again type thing. And so this - this kind of system that is being made would possibly make those kinds of searches easier.

CORNISH: Mckena Kelly, thank you so much.

Still ahead on CNN THIS MORNING, the Trump administration now thinking about another carve out on tariffs, this time for cars. We'll talk about that and more with Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, who will join us live.

Plus, fumble. How the White House visit for college football's national champs didn't go exactly as planned.

More from the group chat after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:50:24]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That $86,000 car becomes a $103,000 car overnight.

But I'm telling you right now, the impacts of these tariffs are going to make Americans lose jobs. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: OK, so that's one car dealership owner describing how those new 25 percent tariffs on all car imports are affecting prices for his vehicles. But now in the middle of all these tariff changes and chaos, President Trump is considering yet another exemption, this time for car companies.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

I'm looking at something to help some of the car companies with - switching to parts that were made in Canada, Mexico and other places, and they need a little bit of time because they're going to make them here. But they need a little bit of time. So, I'm talking about things like that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Stock prices for carmakers like Ford, General Motors, Stellantis all went up 3 to 4 percent after those comments.

So, joining me now to talk about this is Democratic Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia.

Congressman, thanks for being here.

REP. DON BEYER (D-VA): Thank you, Audie. Thanks for the invitation.

CORNISH: So, you're not just any congressman in this conversation. We're talking to you because you, at one point, sold cars, and then you actually have gone back to school to do machine learning and AI. So, so you are uniquely positioned to talk about two things here. One, the effect that these tariffs are having now on this industry, and, two, the hopes for the future, right, in some scenario where manufacturing is brought back to the U.S.

So, first just reacting to the now. What does it mean when the president can just say, oh, there's an exemption? Does that kind of undercut the argument for the tariffs? Does that - does that help the industries that start complaining?

BEYER: Not - not in the middle run or the long run. It may help today. I talked to a number of car dealer friends. You know, I sold out five years ago. So, I have no - no interest in it now. But still a great emotional interest in it. And what everyone is telling me is that they have no idea what's coming next. There's an enormous amount of uncertainty.

I asked a dear friend yesterday, who has lots of dealerships, can I count on him to hire some of our unemployed federal workers? He said, no, because he doesn't know what's coming. In the short run, the fear of tariffs is making the dealerships very busy places, but they're selling out of everything that's hot and they're very concerned that the next round is going to be $10,000, $15,000, $25,000 more expensive. CORNISH: I love that you were talking about displaced workers because

we were hearing from the head of the United Auto Workers union in recent days. Here's what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHAWN FAIN, UAW PRESIDENT: The Trump administration is the first administration in my lifetime that's been willing to do something about this broken free trade system. Tariffs are the first step, but we need to put out our vision for an auto industry that doesn't leave behind working class people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Trade policy has been a fault line running through the Democratic Party, and it breaks apart in these moments. So, what do you say to those voters who agree with Sean Fein?

BEYER: That tariffs have never been good for our country. The last time we had tariffs like this was Smoot-Hawley in 19 - the early 1930s, June 1930, and that gave us the Great Depression.

Tariffs make us poorer. They are a tax on the American consumer. They lead to retaliation. We've seen the retaliation the EU is willing to do last week. China is hitting us with 124 percent tariffs. Our expenses are all going to go up. And it's not going to bring back those kinds of jobs that went overseas for comparative advantage.

American workers don't want to be, as Lutnick said, screwing tiny little screws into tiny little iPhones. We want the service jobs and the - the much more technical manufacturing jobs that exist right now. And that's why they're not coming back. And we don't really want them back. We want to employ American workers with the skills and the education that we have.

CORNISH: The backdrop to all of this are these rapid advances in artificial intelligence. And - because they have a direct implication to what we mean when we talk about the future of manufacturing. On my podcast I was talking to Microsoft's CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, and he actually says that - we were talking about regulation. And I was asking him sort of what more could be done. Does there need to be more regulation?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN, CEO OF Microsoft AI: And so I think that, in most of these situations, we have to wait, you know, and see, monitor closely, be prepared to react really fast, be proactive and transparent, hold ourselves accountable in the best possible way, invite, you know, invite everybody in to kind of debate and discuss what they're seeing.

[06:55:09]

And just keep a very open mind. But so far, I don't see any evidence that it's time for some unprecedented regulatory action.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Congressman, you're on the Congressional AI Task Force. The president has rolled back many of the AI protections that the Biden administration had put in place via executive order. But I know you're studying these things. So, what is your response to what you just heard?

BEYER: It reminds me of Saint Augustine, who said, dear Lord, make me a better person, but not yet. And that's what I'm hearing from the Erik Sprits (ph) and the Sam Altman and Mustafas, is that, yes, there's room for regulation, but not yet. And I think that that's - we want a light touch on regulation. Certainly, we want to keep the world open for innovation. But it's time to look at things like transparency and safety. One of the things that Trump's AI executive order did was it - it undid the safety institute at the National Institute for Standards and Technology that Biden had created. And I think that's a mistake. We need to be leading on it, not suppressing innovation, but making sure that our models are tested, that they're safe and that they're transparent.

CORNISH: Congressman Beyer, I have one more question, which is that essentially you have a lot of Democrats praising Harvard for how it's sort of standing up to the Trump administration. You, among others, have been critical of the Democrats not having a unified voice, a unified message when it comes to standing up to the Trump administration. What would you like to see? Does this feel like a turning point?

BEYER: Yes, I was very encouraged by it. Very discouraged by the Paul Weiss (ph) and the Skadden Arps (ph) that caved. I think we've learned, going back to the Old Testament times, that when confronted with a bully, the best thing to do is to stand up to that bully rather than just surrender. And those folks who surrendered so far, history is not going to treat them well. Harvard is strong enough to last one Donald Trump presidency.

CORNISH: Congressman Don Beyer, thank you for your time. Thank you for being here on CNN THIS MORNING.

BEYER: Thanks, Audie.

CORNISH: It's now 56 minutes past the hour. I want to give the rest of you the roundup, some of the stories you need to know to get your day going.

At this moment, fire crews are battling a large fire burning at a pallet company in east St. Louis. These are live images of those flames. CNN affiliate KMOV reports an explosion from a truck near the building actually started this fire. And it's being fueled by the wood that's used to make those pallets.

Also, former President Joe Biden set to give his first public speech since he left office. This evening, he's giving a keynote address at a conference in Chicago.

Plus, Vice President J.D. Vance had a bit of a fumble with the Ohio State University football team. The national champs brought their trophy to the White House. But as he picked it up, it broke into two pieces. The former Ohio senator joked that he did it on purpose to prevent anyone else from winning it.

Phil, you're the only person I want to hear from on this.

MATTINGLY: Yes. Shout-out TreVeyon Henderson for having his back right there. No fumbles in his career.

Look, he's a Buckeye alum. J.D. Vance, but he also went to Yale. We don't expect the Ivy League kids really to perform. That's why, you know, those of us not Ivy Leagues -

CORNISH: This is just -

MATTINGLY: Stop sending me the clip. Everyone in America has sent me the clip.

CORNISH: Everyone knows you're the one -

MATTINGLY: I've seen it. I get it.

CORNISH: You were like, I go to Ohio. I care about football. And so now you get the clip.

MATTINGLY: Yes, it was awesome. The whole - no, the event.

CORNISH: Oh, oh, the event. The event.

MATTINGLY: But, like, you should know, the gold part detaches. Like, everybody who watches football knows that. So, I'm a little skeptical of -

CORNISH: Oh, wait, for real?

MATTINGLY: Yes, it's not supposed - you pick up the gold part, not the base.

CORNISH: You're not starting a conspiracy theory, are you?

MATTINGLY: No. No, I've just watched football.

CORNISH: OK.

MATTINGLY: Like, that's how -

CORNISH: OK. Fine.

MATTINGLY: My team won. I watched them pick it up repeatedly.

CORNISH: Let me just get back to the news, OK, and this side of the group chat. There's always one part of the group chat that you have to be, like, mute.

MATTINGLY: Oh, cruel.

CORNISH: Anyway, we're going to talk about what we're keeping an eye on today. We're going to start with Kevin.

FREY: Thank you.

So, AOC and Bernie have been hitting the trail in - out west. They did this last month. They're doing it again now. They've been hitting some -

CORNISH: We're talking massive rallies. You're, like, hitting the trail. This is thousands of people.

FREY: Massive rallies. Yes. Well, yes. Fair. Tens of thousands of people at these various events.

CORNISH: Yes.

FREY: Not all of them in very blue areas. And so, they wrapped up Idaho and Salt Lake City over the last two days. They're supposed to go to Montana tomorrow. They're wrapping up some California ones today. So, just keeping an eye on that and what it says about the - the Democratic angst and desire for some sort of message at this moment.

CORNISH: OK. Gabby Birenbaum, I mean, you know Nevada, but what's your look ahead?

BIRENBAUM: So, I'm looking at, I think, Kevin, you are too, in Nevada and New York and some other states, there are these Republicans whose districts have - districts have reaped massive benefits from the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate law that Democrats passed in 2022. This is a key area that Republicans are looking to cut spending. They're looking to revoke some of these tax credits towards companies in the renewable energy space. And it puts a lot of Republicans in an awkward position because they've -

[07:00:00]

CORNISH: Right. There were Republicans who really moved forward in the renewable energy space.

BIRENBAUM: Yes. And you don't have to be, you know, super into climate change to feel that there's a business case to be made, that these - this is jobs, this is energy savings, what have you. And so they are sort of working behind the scenes. And we're going to see if they're able to influence the bill.

CORNISH: Last seconds to Phil.

MATTINGLY: Trump administration officials have been very dismissive about China's ability to fight a trade war publicly.

CORNISH: Right.

MATTINGLY: Something changed yesterday. Kevin Hassett, the National Economic Council director, said the rare earth export controls were very concerning that had been put on. China basically controls the entire market. Absolutely integral. They're concerned. And that's interesting to me.

CORNISH: All right.

FREY: That's for me (ph).

CORNISH: Thanks to our group chat. Thank you for waking up with us.

MATTINGLY: Wake up, Kevin.

CORNISH: I'm Audie Cornish. CNN news, the real news, "CNN NEWS CENTRAL" starts right now.