Return to Transcripts main page

Inside Politics

Manafort Met with Assange; Mueller Says Manafort Lied; Trump's Pitch in Mississippi. Pelosi Votes for Speaker. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired November 27, 2018 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00] BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Afghanistan has been problematic. Three American families getting the worst possible news this holiday season.

Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: That's absolutely right and we put a spotlight on them and we lift them up.

Thank you, Barbara. Really appreciate it.

Thank you all so much for joining me. "INSIDE POLITICS" with John King starts right now.

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you, Kate.

And welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us.

The polls are open in Mississippi. It's a Senate runoff Republicans should win easily, yet the GOP is nervous about this final vote of the midterm election year.

Plus, one day before Nancy Pelosi faces a key leadership test, plus 38 is the blue wave gain for the Democrats. And with two races still counted, it could, well, hit 40.

And more lying allegations against Paul Manafort. The special counsel says the one-time Trump campaign chairman is breaking the terms of his plea agreement by lying instead of cooperating. The president's lawyer accuses the special counsel of unethical behavior, something we know plays well with the boss.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You still have deep state, but one by one we're getting them out. You have deep state bad people. You have a lot of phony stuff going on. But, you know what, one by one we're winning. We're winning, winning, winning.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We begin the hour with major new wrinkles in the Russia election interference investigation, including new reporting that drives at the very thing the president says doesn't exist, collusion. "The Guardian" newspaper says Paul Manafort, in the spring of 2016, paid a secret visit to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. That visit alleged to have happened at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The paper says it's unclear why Manafort went to see Assange or what the pair discussed. Manafort, according to "The Guardian," met with Assange three times, first in 2013, then in 2015, and finally in 2016.

Manafort's lawyers refuse to answer questions about these alleged meetings. WikiLeaks says this is fiction, that Assange and Manafort have never met. But "The Guardian" sites an internal Ecuadorian intelligence document listing a Paul Manaford (ph), with a "d," as a well-known guest at its London embassy, which has harbored Assange since 2012.

The timing of the last alleged meeting, around March 2016, would be just months before WikiLeaks dumped thousands of hacked Democratic e- mails, e-mails stolen by Russia, on the Internet. March 2016 also happens to be the same month Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign.

Now, Manafort was already big in the news today. The special counsel, Robert Mueller, now accusing him of lying after signing a plea agreement in which he promised to cooperate.

With me this day to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Dana Bash, CNN's Phil Mattingly, CNN's Shimon Prokupecz, and Lisa Lerer with "The New York Times."

We can hire you if you feel left out.

Let's start with the potential significance of this "Guardian" reporting. I say potential. Our team is trying to work on this to see if it can confirm it. WikiLeaks says it's fiction. But if Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange in the very month he became chairman of the Trump campaign --

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: If it's true, of course it would be absolutely huge. You know, we -- as you said, we are trying to see if we can corroborate it on our own. It has not happened yet.

I will just tell you that the Manafort legal team, by direction, or order, I should say, of the judge, they're not supposed to talk about things like this. But Rudy Giuliani, who is very open about the fact that he does talk to the Manafort legal team, told me this morning that this is just false. That's the information that he has from Manafort's lawyers, that these -- that this meeting never took place. Meetings, I should say. Take that for what it's worth, but that is the statement of Rudy Giuliani after speaking to Manafort's attorneys.

KING: And we'll watch this play out. Let's pause for a second on that, "The Guardian" question.

I want to get some more context on this remarkable court filing by the special counsel, again, accusing Paul Manafort of breaking a signed cooperation agreement. The special counsel now says Manafort instead is lying to federal agents. Sol Wisenberg is the former number two to Ken Starr. He joins us to

share his insights.

So, Sol, take me inside this. If you were in this special counsel team, you have a witness who you think is central to your investigation, and the special counsel now says he has proof Paul Manafort is repeatedly lying. What does that tell you?

SOLOMON WISENBERG, FORMER PROSECUTOR: It tells me that if they can prove it, Paul Manafort has significant additional exposure unless, of course, he gets pardoned, and he'll have no exposure then.

But keep in mind that this is a plea agreement, an allegation of the breach of the plea agreement. So Mueller does not get to unilaterally make the determination that Manafort has breached. That's something that he's going to have to present evidence on and the judge will have to make a decision.

But also keep in mind that Mueller has said, I'm going to file a sentencing memo in detail Manafort's, quote, crimes and lies, end quote. Now, Mueller has been very limited because of his position in what he can say publically. And he hasn't really -- his team hasn't really done a lot of leaking. But one area where he's not limited is what he can say in a -- in a court filing. And so he can say pretty much anything he wants to in a sentencing memo that he's going to file. And that could be a very important public relations document.

[12:05:28] KING: Right. And that's where we've learned most of what we know about the Mueller investigation has been in -- sometimes it's a sentence or two, sometimes it's a page or three that he puts in these court filings.

Sol, let me -- I asked you from the special counsel perspective. Let me ask you to flip. If you were Paul Manafort's defense attorney, I mean, someone who is 69 years old, already facing 10 years maybe in prison, knowing that if he gets caught lying to the special counsel he will spend the rest of his life in federal prison. Why would you lie? What would you have -- how big would what you have have to be for you to do that?

WISENBERG: Well, first of all, we don't know -- we don't know that he did lie. Sometimes prosecutors and case agents believe -- have a theory of a case, they believe somebody is lying because what they say doesn't fit their theory. And that could be what's going on here.

Now, let's assume that Manafort is lying. It could be that he fears something or somebody greater than he fears Mueller. Or it could be that he's been playing for a pardon all along.

Keep in mind, this is a remarkable fact that I don't think enough people have commented on. A few weeks after Manafort announced his plea agreement and said that he would be cooperating, Rudy Giuliani said, well, Manafort is still in a joint defense agreement with us. That is virtually unheard of in federal criminal practice. Imagine, if you will, that John Dean, while he was cooperating with Archibald Cox, was still in a joint defense agreement with Richard Nixon. This just doesn't happen.

So if Giuliani was telling the truth, that would just be astonishing. If you were a prosecutor, that would be mind-blowing and you would not be happy about it.

KING: Appreciate your insights, Sol Wisenberg.

It's a key point. We're in this spy novel drama that's played out for a couple of years and we think we're getting closer to the end, but actually maybe we're not. It keeps getting more mysterious.

Sol, appreciate your insights.

To that point, Shimon, I want to bring you in. I just want to read this from the filing from Bob Mueller. The government will file a detailed sentencing submission to the probation department and the court in advance of sentencing that sets forth the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies, including those after signing the plea agreement here in. So the special counsel is saying Paul Manafort, after saying he would cooperate, has been lying and lying and lying and we're going to prove it.

SIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Repeatedly lying, right? You -- this just doesn't happen. You don't get a cooperation agreement and then you start to lie to FBI agents, to prosecutors. I mean this is the special counsel. There are career people on this team. There are veterans on this team. There are FBI agents that have spent dozens of years working these kinds of cases. You don't go into a room and think you can get away with lying, especially before the special counsel, which time and time again has shown us that they know a lot more than anyone who goes in there and thinks they can get away with lying. It just doesn't work.

What's --

KING: But, you know -- forgive me for interrupting, if you know the history of the case, the question is, what's he -- what's he worried about, if he's worried?

PROKUPECZ: Right.

KING: If he's worried. Is he just stubborn and thinks he's smarter than the prosecutors and he can lie to them? Is he worried about something he knows about the president? A lot of people think morally, is he worried about something he knows about the Russians and giving up information that could get him in trouble if he's then put in prison?

PROKUPECZ: Or stuff that could hurt him or his family. Look, there's always been this concern that Paul Manafort, because of the people that he's dealt with throughout his entire life, his career, the lobbying work, that he had dealt with unsavory characters, specifically people with connections to Russian mob, right? And so there's always this concern that something was going to happen to him if he started spilling the beans. When you -- when you go in and you meet with prosecutors and FBI

agents, they don't just ask you questions about, you know, one case that they're investigating. They're going to ask you questions about everything that you may have had contact with, people you may have had contact with. So there could be something that clearly spooked him here when they started asking these questions.

But what's really telling to me is just the repeatedly lying. That, to me, means that they kept bringing him in, they kept asking him questions, and they knew he was lying but they were still bringing him in and still bringing him in.

KING: And at a time when an acting attorney general, and we're not sure what will be made public by the Justice Department, if Bob Mueller filed a report today, we don't know what the acting attorney general will put out. But now we do know there will be a court proceeding in which he is not restricted in what he files. He's allowed to do the business -- his day job, if you will, doesn't -- because it's -- this is a pending, ongoing investigation and he can file something in the court that tells us whatever he wants to share.

LISA LERER, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Right, and that's another key piece of this, that this may be a reflection of Mueller getting a little nervous about what's going to happen with this investigation, particularly if a new attorney general comes in who has to approve the final report. So this is a way, as we've seen in the past, for him to get some information out in the public domain without having to go through the Justice Department channels.

[12:10:09] KING: And we see in the president's tweets, we talked about Rudy Giuliani and I want to hear more about that conversation, but you also see in the president's tweets in recent days, he understands something's happening. He knows a lot more than we do and he always has. And so when you see his mood go from, I don't like the special counsel to being rar (ph) about the special counsel, you get a sense of what's happening with the president. The phony witch hunt continues. The fake news media builds up Bob Mueller as a saint when actually he's the opposite. Terrible gang of angry Democrats.

You can -- you read all of this. And Rudy Giuliani told you this. This is about the president. He's been upset for weeks about what he considers the un-American horrible treatment for Manafort. Manafort has been railroaded. He may or may not have been guilty of serious crimes. He -- read that again, he may or may not have been guilty about serious crimes. He's railroaded even though he's guilty of serious crimes. This is their mindset. You could probably indict half of Washington, he says, for one of the charges against Manafort, not registering as a foreign lobbyist.

BASH: Right. But, look, the argument that Giuliani made to me that the president is making to him and others behind the scenes and making it very clear publicly now in his tweets is that they didn't have anything on Manafort that they -- that they could actually take to the bank in a court of law beforehand, they didn't think. And the only reason they can do it now, or they're trying to do it now, is because of his ties to the president. That this is, you know, prosecutorial overreach, that they're trying to get at the president any way they can and they're trying to do it through Manafort. It's not that the president and Manafort have this, you know, deep, long lasting relationship or friendship. Not at all. It's that he sees this as Exhibit A right now of the way that the Mueller team is kind of overdoing it.

Now, whether that's fair, you know, that's to be determined, but that is what is behind at least some of what we're now seeing in terms of the president really throwing Twitter tantrums about Mueller.

KING: He knows things we don't know.

BASH: Yes.

KING: We'll get to Mr. Mattingly in just a minute. We've got to take a quick break.

When we come back, they're voting in Mississippi right now. It's the last big election of 2018. Can the Democrats win another Senate seat in the south? We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:16:20] KING: A live look here. You're looking at voting in Byram, Mississippi, where the final balloting of this big 2018 midterm election year is underway. It's a Senate runoff between incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy, he's a former congressman and Clinton administration cabinet member. The Democratic challenger cast his vote a bit earlier in Ridgeland.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE ESPY (D), MISSISSIPPI SENATE CANDIDATE: If only African-Americans would come out to vote for me. And even if they come out in record numbers, I won't win. I know that. And I've known that all the time. And I've known that throughout my career. So we have to have a good number of crossovers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: You heard Secretary Espy there talking about a good number of crossovers. That is critical to him today.

This state is red. Now, you're looking here at the election a couple of weeks ago. The reason they're having a runoff today, Cindy Hyde- Smith came in first, Mike Espy second. You see the other challengers down here. Nobody got over 50 percent. That's why they have the runoff.

This is a ruby red state. President Trump carried it by more than a dozen points. For Mike Espy to win, he knows, let me just show you the demographics here, yes, Mississippi has the largest percentage of African-American in the country. However, even if the African-American turnout is overwhelming, Mike Espy knows he needs to cut into this, get a decent number of the white vote. Now, people look at this -- Democrats look at this and they remember

last year in neighboring Alabama Doug Jones won. So they say maybe it's possible we can do that again.

Well, let's take a look at the comparison. This is what we'll look for tonight as we count the votes. Yes, Doug Jones won, a stunning win in Alabama. He got 88 percent of the non-white vote. He got 30 percent of the white vote. That is Mike Espy's challenge because a couple of weeks ago, in the first election, Mike Espy did match up 86 percent of the non-white vote, but he won only 15 percent of the white vote in the initial election that led to the runoff. That is why that is a key test for him tonight. Cindy Hyde-Smith Republicans view her as a weak candidate. A number of mistakes, most of them on racial issues.

The president, two rallies in the final day to try to bring out support. He says this election, he barely mentions her name. It's not just about her. To the president, this is about him and having a bigger cushion in the Senate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We need 53. We want to get to that 53 number. They don't believe it, but they don't want to talk about it. But that's OK. We have to get 53-47. That will be a wonderful, wonderful day. So tomorrow's a big day. Tomorrow is a big day. Only with a strong Senate GOP majority can we defend your tax cuts, defend your Second Amendment, protect your Medicare and Social Security and confirm judges.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That's the president last night.

"Bloomberg's" Sahil Kapur joins the conversation as well.

I'll start with you, Phil. In the sense, when the president talks about 53, he does it in a funny way but he's right. He's right, especially if he has 53 and it comes to judges, for example, or other nominees, he worries less. Not at all, but he worries a lot less about the moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, for example, who have caused him some trouble in the past.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Anything you can do, as we've seen over the course of this entire 115th Congress, to take the moderate -- take all the power out of the moderates' hands is beneficial for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, it's beneficial on nominations. That's going to be the primary thing, particularly with Democrats controlling the House. It gives them space. It gives them breathing room. And it gives them opportunities to move things that he specifically wants.

People -- again, you pointed out, people might scoff at one more senator, what's that -- what's that actually going to mean? That's cushion. That matters. What does one less senator, because he lost Alabama mean? It means that people are a lot more skittish when it comes to nominations. KING: Right.

MATTINGLY: We've seen it on judges over the last couple of months. It's happening right now on The Hill with Jeff Flake threatening to withhold his vote on some votes. That matters. Well, it matters. It does.

KING: If Mike Espy wins tonight, there will be panic in the Republican Party.

BASH: Yes.

KING: You wrote a very smart piece about this. Democrats want to say, look, we did this in Alabama last year. And they did. And Doug Jones' win was huge.

[12:20:02] Even though they're neighboring states, they're different. Alabama is more urban, where you have the concentration of African- American voters in higher numbers, number one, so your turnout challenge for Mike Espy is bigger because you've got to turn them out in rural areas. But you also don't have the bigger suburbs where we've seen more moderate Republicans flip on the president.

SAHIL KAPUR, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "BLOOMBERG": Right. And I spoke to the top strategist for the Espy campaign, who also, by the way, advised the Doug Jones campaign, and he distinguished the two and he said they are very different. He said Mississippi is tougher terrain than Alabama. He said it's more rural, less urban, less suburban, more conservative, more polarized. Basically everything has to go right for the Espy campaign for them to pull this off. And their formula to victory, as they see it, is an overwhelming Democratic turnout, particularly African-Americans who they hope are energized by Cindy Hyde-Smith's comments. They believe that they need to win about 25 percent of white voters. It could be a little higher again depending on turnout. That either means that Cindy Hyde-Smith's turnout for her has to crash or they have to peel off some Republican- leaning voters who are likely, in this case, to be younger, to be women, to be college educated. It's a very, very tough task in Mississippi.

BASH: And as controversial as Cindy Hyde-Smith's statements and photo seem from up here in the north, it's a quite different scenario than Roy Moore. I mean she is not Roy Moore on a million levels. And that makes a huge difference. Candidates matter.

KING: Right. And yet -- and yet the Republicans are so nervous about her weakness as a candidate, in part, and mostly because of her racially charged comments, the racially charged photos. But, also, she's not a great communicator. She's from the establishment in a state that's become much more of a Tea Party state. They worry about that.

So the final mailer, this is from Matt Viser and Dave Weigel in "The Washington Post," Mississippi Republican Party sent out a mailer urging supporters to get to the polls, but it has Trump's image and quotes on both sides and never once mentions Hyde-Smith's name or whom voters are supposed to be supporting. Not a message of strength.

LERER: No. I mean, look, her -- she's called her campaign bus the MAGA wagon, because it's just a giant picture of her and the president on the side. This is definitely our last referendum on the president, at least for a while. We have a couple gubernatorial races we'll have in 2019. But this is really -- think people will be looking at how well she does to extrapolate some messages about the president.

And, you know, 25 percent of white voters may not seem like a lot, but this is the most racially polarized electorate in the country. So for Mike Espy to get 25 percent of white voters actually is an extremely high bar.

KING: Right.

LERER: So I don't say any outcome is impossible in the Trump era. I've learned my lesson about politics these days. But this is a really tough one for Democrats.

MATTINGLY: It's also worth making clear that in a special election, after a holiday, we've all debated how much, when the president comes in, does it really matter. How much do these rallies really matter. Drawing attention to something that a lot of people probably have no idea is happening. When you're extremely popular in a state, you'll have a very popular Republican governor in a state, that matters, that makes a difference. That should carry over tonight, but, we'll see.

KAPUR: And to Phil's --

KING: Right. And convincing Mississippi Republicans, who might have some unease about her, maybe they don't -- maybe they don't like -- don't like the racial comments or maybe they don't think she's conservative enough, she's not a Chris McDaniel Tea Party, the president says this is important to me. That matters in Mississippi.

KAPUR: Right. And to Phil's point --

LERER: And it's worth noting --

KAPUR: The cushion of 52 to 53 senators makes a big difference with Republicans are heading into an election cycle where they're going to be on defense.

KING: Right.

KAPUR: You've got Susan Collins of Maine up for re-election. That's going to be a tough hold.

KING: Right.

KAPUR: Cory Gardner of Colorado is up for re-election.

KING: You see the pictures right now. This is your Republican incumbent. She was an appointed senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith, walking into vote right now in Mississippi. Mike Espy voted a bit earlier. Brookhaven is the town where Cindy Hyde-Smith is voting. You see her walking into the polling place right there. A little hug to a supporter there.

Whatever your politics, election days are always tough for the candidates. They put a lot of time into this as we watch this play out.

All right, we'll keep an eye on that race.

When we come back next, the Democrats could be on the cusp of grabbing 40, that's 40 House seats. House -- one of those Republicans losing is Mia Love. She conceded her race and returned, shall we say, the no love for the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MIA LOVE (R), LOSES REELECTION BID: The president's behavior towards me made me wonder, what did he have to gain by saying such a thing about a fellow Republican? This election experience, and these comments, shines a spotlight on the problems Washington politicians have with minorities and black Americans. It's transactional.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:28:51] KING: Welcome back.

Democrats now have the advantage in the last remaining uncalled House races. Xochitl Torres Small leads Yvette Herrell in New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District and California's 21st Congressional District swayed blue overnight. T.J. Cox, the Democrat, now leading by fewer than 500 votes.

Right now that gives the Democrats a net gain of 38 seats. They'll have 233 in the new House. But House leader, Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, could claim up to 40 if both of those uncalled races go to the Democrats and she heads into a meeting tomorrow to try to make her case to become the next speaker. Tomorrow's close party meeting leaves Pelosi in a bit of a bind. A lot of opposition. But the question is, does she have the votes?

MATTINGLY: Tomorrow, yes. And tomorrow's just a majority of the caucus and the expectation is she'll clear that actually rather easily. And the big question comes in January when they have to go to the House floor and she needs a majority on the House floor to get the votes. And that's where the current opposition could create real problems. Just kind of vacillating back and forth between 16, 17, 18 members. Sixteen is probably what she needs to keep it at or under.

[12:59:55] Here's something to keep in mind over the course of the last couple of days, and I think you always should have kept this in mind. She knows what she's doing. She's done this before. And she's damn effective at what she's trying to do right now. And when you separate the fact from tomorrow's vote is pretty much a sure thing and then she'll have