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Sweeping Investigations into Trump; Dems Speak out Against Barr; Vote on Barr Today. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired February 07, 2019 - 12:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:00:21] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us.

Democrats begin their aggressive new oversight with the president and his policies, and the president complains he is being harassed.

Plus, negotiators report progress as they try to reach a deal to beef up border security and prevent another government shutdown. But they cannot answer the biggest question, if they do make a deal, will the president sign it?

And Virginia faces political paralysis. The governor, attorney general, face demands to resign over racist incidents decades ago. And a woman says the lieutenant governor sexually assaulted her in 2004. All three are Democrats, putting pressure on national party figures who take tough stands when it is a Republican in the bad headlines.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D), CALIFORNIA: I think there should be an investigation to determine what happened. But certainly her letter reads as -- it's quite detailed and suggests that there's credibility there. But there needs to be an investigation to determine what exactly happened.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Back to the Virginia drama in a few moments.

But we begin with what you might call investigations, inc, and with the president making clear he is not happy. House Democrats now have sweeping power, and, today, offers a curtain-raising glimpse of how they intend to use it to investigate the president and question his cabinet agencies.

Today, hearing some of the administration's family separation policy and on presidential tax returns and the question of whether Congress can compel their release. But the big marker comes from the Intelligence Committee and its newly reconstituted probe into the president's potential links to Russia. The Democratic chairman, Adam Schiff, laying out five investigative areas of interest. They are broad, and they include if any foreign actors, not just Russians, hold leverage over the president and his associates. The president this morning taking to Twitter saying Schiff and Democrats are guilty of, quote, presidential harassment.

The Intelligence Committee chair says it's incumbent now on Democrats to find the facts. But listen here, Republican critics say this answer proves Chairman Schiff has already reached a verdict and it now hunting for evidence.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: We're going to get to the bottom of whether the Russians still possess financial leverage over the president. We would be negligent in not doing so.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: There were complaints about Devin Nunes when he ran this committee when the Republicans were in power. The -- with me -- let me introduce -- I'm sorry, fellows, I was getting ahead of myself.

With me to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's MJ Lee, Michael Shear with "The New York Times," CNN's Phil Mattingly, and Tamara Keith with NPR.

I was so excited to get to that, I didn't introduce my guests.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The enthusiasm was palpable.

KING: Lunch is on me.

The Democrats complained for two years Devin Nunes was off on a -- you know, just off the rails, wasn't pursuing facts (INAUDIBLE). Is there now a risk that the Democrats do the same thing. Let's start with Adam Schiff saying, if the president -- if Russia still has leverage over the president. Where's the evidence Russia had leverage over the president? I know this has long been rumored, suspected, some financial dealings, but that's not in the public record. Why get to the end of the score before we've played the game?

MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": There's a lot of tension between the pressure that is on Democrats from their base, from the partisans who are so angry with what Trump has done over the last couple of years who want them to finally take the power that they have and use it in a political way. And the pressure from the other side, which, you know, compels or would try to compel a sense of bipartisanship, especially in the intelligence community, which historically has operated -- prior to this administration has operated in a real bipartisan way. And I think the people who are in power on those committees understand that at the end of the day those investigations are more effective if they are bipartisan because when they're not, you end up having the result of the Nunes committee or other committees where, you know, when they've taken a partisan view, it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't produce anything that's got any real political -- lasting political impact. And I think that's the tension that they're trying to work out.

MATTINGLY: Yes. And I think it's tension that's felt by leadership, without question. I think when you talk to members of leadership, you talk to their staff, they would like people to try and strike a balance, take your time and do this the right way.

And I think it's important to note that you can lay out the top lines of what you want an investigation to actually reach for or try to uncover, but the reality is, these things take time. It takes time to get documents. It takes time to staff up. It takes time to do a lot of things. And so kind of the instant gratification I think a lot of Democrats assumed might come with subpoena power isn't going to be a reality.

Perhaps a better model or a better way of look at how Democrats are using varying techniques is what's going on with the president's tax returns right now. The House Ways and Means Committee today holding a hearing on the subcommittee level where they're going to be making the public case for the tax return. They're not immediately going to be voting to try and get the tax returns. They're going to bring up people to testify. And I think that's the model that leadership would prefer people take, but there -- as Shear notes, there's just a lot of pressure to deliver immediately.

[12:05:05] KING: And so we'll have different committees doing different investigations. Some of them are about Democratic questions about the president himself. His taxes. Why don't we see his taxes? We've seen every other president's? About the Russia probe and about maybe other foreign players. Some are about administration policies.

Elijah Cummings is the chairman of the Oversight Committee. He's a little bit more careful in his public comments than Chairman Schiff in the Intelligence Committee. Listen to him here saying, this is our constitutional job. We'll do it right.

He says here, we're going to do our homework first. What Republicans would do is they would go out and make headlines a week or two before the hearing and then look for some facts to prove the headlines. We're not doing that.

You mentioned the pressure. Can Democrats stick to that standard?

TAMARA KEITH, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, NPR: Well, the chairmen, who are the chairmen of these committees, certainly want to try because they -- you know, the president has demonstrated that he's willing to go to the well of the House and criticize the investigations. He's willing to go to Twitter to criticize the investigations. And they want to be able to push back and say, look, we're being deliberate. We're going through this in a step-by-step manner. And so that's where they are.

And, you know, the reality is that although we're very focused on the tax returns, we're focused on the Russia investigation, some of the investigations and oversight that Congress is likely to do, that the House is likely to do, that will be significantly more painful for the Trump administration, is policy oversight, looking at those family separation, some of these other things that aren't going to get the big headlines in the same way unless they hit pay dirt, in which case it could be a really big problem.

MJ LEE, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Though it is clear that there are certain issues that are clearly going to be much more personal for the president, particularly when you look at issues pertaining to his company, issues related to his tax returns and how he himself and his family have conducted business in the past.

I think he is learning the lesson right now just how different the world is when your party does not control both chambers in Congress. Democrats are forging ahead with what they said they would always do, conducting investigations, launching probes, holding hearings. This is what they always made clear they wanted to do.

But I think this balancing act of making clear to the public, too, that this is not just going to be all partisan, that there are, you know, important policy issues that we want to look at as well and it's not just the -- sort of the shiny objects out there and especially the politically salient ones that we're interested in. that is going to be a political balancing act for the Democrats.

KING: It's a great point because the challenge is two-fold. Number one, on the Democrats now that they have the power. Can they -- will they conduct credible investigations, follow the facts, take it slow, sometimes keep your mouth shut and be quiet until you get to the end, or will they look to generate cable TV, fundraising letters and the like?

And then the flipside is, how does the administration adjust to this new world order? Two years of a Republican Senate, a Republican House, there were hearings but there was not aggressive oversight. There was not demands for documents. There was not more efforts to put cabinets secretaries in the seats.

You mentioned family separation. The cabinet secretary relevant to that wouldn't come today, so the deputy is there. Democrats are saying, sorry, you have to be here, your boss should be the chair.

All right, let's start with the president. This is him going after Adam Schiff. They've sparred for a long time. The president on Twitter -- he is the chairman, Mr. President, he has the right to ask for things. The president says, so now Congressman Adam Schiff announces, after having found zero Russian collusion, that he's going to be looking at every aspect of my life, both financial and personal, even though there is no reason to be doing so. Never happened before. Unlimited presidential harassment. The Dems and their committees are going nuts. The Republicans never did this to President Obama. There would be no time left to run government. I hear other committee heads will do the same thing. Even stealing people who work at the White House. A continuation of witch hunt!

MATTINGLY: I mean I think that, look, as somebody who was in the -- covering the Congress when Republicans took over in 2011, I think Congressman Darrel Issa would have some words about the idea that the Oversight Committee hasn't pursued similar types of investigations. I believe, and I'm paraphrasing here, it was something like, we want a hearing -- oversight hearings seven days a week for 40 weeks. And basically -- and the White House had to staff up and basically form a response team to address what they saw coming and what did end up coming.

I think it also provides a lesson of sorts to the Democrats, which is -- and there's a lot of historical precedent for this, is when you get a little bit too far out in front of your skis or when you make the point that you're just here to investigate and then leak and then try and create headlines before you've done a fulsome investigation, things can spin out of control and you can lose control of whatever it was you were trying to pursue.

SHEAR: Well, and just to sort of -- to sort of follow up on Tamara's point about the policy, one of the messages -- one of the things that really aggressive oversight from Congress on the policy decisions does is it pushes down the message to the bureaucracy that when you're sending e-mails, when you're writing memos to each other, when you're having meetings and discussing some of these really controversial policies, whether it's the travel ban or the family separation policy or, you know, the transgender ban, those are all of a sudden not going to be protected by a friendly Congress, right? Like, you're going to -- you're under -- at risk of having that deliberative process, you know, exposed to the public, which, for the first two years of the administration, he really didn't have much threat. I mean there was reporters trying to do that. But they had Congress kind of steadfastly blocking those requests and not letting that stuff come out. And that won't happen anymore.

[12:10:13] KING: And so the question is, how does it -- does it get settled (ph) a month from now? Have people figured out the new world order or are we -- are we in combat for the next two years till the election in the sense of Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, there's been some pushback to try to get him up to testify. It looks like that will happen. But the Democrats have a subpoenas in their back pocket just in case he doesn't show up.

Maxine Waters wants the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to come up before her financial committee to talk about Russia sanctions. Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services, they want him up there on some of these issues to -- they keep getting pushed back to the delays. Some of this has been, oh, the government shutdown. Oh, we need more time. OK, when will we get to a place where we know whether this is going to work or not?

LEE: Well, I was going to say, you know, on the tweet, just going back to that for a quick second, the word "harassment" similar to the term "witch hunt," which the president uses all the time. I think it's very telling when it comes to his mindset and how he views all of this. He has spent the last two years not getting used to the idea of the political reality. And he, of course, is new to Washington, relatively speaking, that Congress is there to conduct oversight and he has not had to really confront that until this moment.

And I think when the starting point for the president is that he is constantly ticked off at the Democrats. That, obviously, doesn't bode well in terms of what we could see in the next two years in terms of Democrats and Republicans coming together and actually trying to get things done legislatively.

KING: And to your point about the familiar language, it's the president's effort to tell his supporters, whatever you hear, don't believe. That's what the president's trying to do. We'll circle back to this.

Up next, though, the president's pick to be the next attorney general faces a key vote in just a little bit. But first, the former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, remember, this is him talking about how he lost the job.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFF SESSIONS, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL: Do the right thing every day and usually things will work out. No. Usually they work out. (INAUDIBLE). At least in the United States they fire you, they don't shoot you, right? (INAUDIBLE) place to come back to. It's good to have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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[12:16:22] KING: The Senate Judiciary now just minutes away from a vote on President Trump's nominee to be the next attorney general, William Barr. The vote set for 12:45. And listening to Democrats in the lead-up this morning, it's pretty clear this vote will be along party lines.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. DICK DURBIN (D), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: I'll be voting against Mr. Barr. I hope I'm wrong. I hope, if he's the next attorney general, and he's likely to be, that what I saw in his family, what I saw in his resume, what I've seen to his commitment to the issue of justice will come through clearly and he'll stand up for this Constitution, even if it's against the wishes of this president.

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: I can't think of an assertion of executive privilege where he -- or executive power where he's found any real limits. I will not be able to vote for him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Manu Raju joins us live on Capitol Hill.

Manu, you had a quick conversation with Bill Barr this morning. What did he say?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he didn't say much. These nominees typically come through the halls while they're meeting with members. Bill Barr doesn't answer reporters' questions.

But I tried asking him if he's confident he'll have the votes and if he's spoken to the president. Here's how he responded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Mr. Barr, do you think you have the votes today?

BILL BARR, ATTORNEY GENERAL NOMINEE: We'll see.

RAJU: Yes.

Have you talked to the president at all?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: So shaking his head no, he did not speak to the president.

Of course, his conversations with the president of interest to this committee -- to the committee, especially the Democrats, who are particularly concerned about how he'll handle the Mueller report when it comes out. He has said both privately and publicly that he would agree to release a report consistent with Justice Department guidelines, but that does not go far enough for Democrats who are saying that they want full assurances that that report will come out and that he won't interfere with the Mueller investigation at all. Republicans themselves feel OK about it. Lindsey Graham, John, just moments ago said that while Barr told him that the White House would not assert executive privilege or that he would not allow the White House to assert executive privilege to hide wrongdoing and the Mueller report, he said he would hold Barr to that. Democrats, not far enough for them, John.

KING: We'll see how this one plays out. So it looks like no Democratic votes in the committee. We'll see when it gets to the full Senate.

Manu Raju, appreciate that, on The Hill.

Which -- let's start on that for a minute because this is interesting. If you talk to Democrats privately, especially the older Democrats who remember Bill Barr from the George H.W. Bush administration when he was attorney general, they say he's an adult. They say they disagree with him. Of course, he's a conservative and they're more liberal. But they think he's a grownup. They think he's up to the job. They think he respects the department. They're surprised that this president nominated somebody with such experience, and yet almost all the Democrats are going to vote no.

MATTINGLY: Yes. First credit where it's due, that Manu was able to get a nominee to say anything in the hallway is a definite accomplishment.

LEE: Sure.

MATTINGLY: You might not think that's a lot of sound. That's a lot of sound from a nominee.

No, look, I think it's really instructive of the reality we're in right now where Democrats are pretty much almost across the board going to oppose ever single Trump nomination, particularly for a cabinet agency or particularly for judicial nominations. We're seeing a lot of that as well.

I think Dick Durbin, the sound you played from -- from Senator Richard Durbin was really important, where he listed through all of the reasons why this was probably a great pick. And I think when you talk to Democrats in a more candid setting, they would acknowledge, to your point, we probably couldn't have asked for a better pick to this.

The executive power concerns are real. And obviously there's a lot of real hang-ups and concerns about kind of the ambiguity of his response on the Mueller report and how it would be released. But to be fair, there's a lot of ambiguity in terms of what he can do with Justice Department guidelines there. And so he was massaging the answer to kind of the best of his ability. I think it's more reflective of the fact that if you are a cabinet nominee or if you are a circuit court judge or kind of whoever you are from the Trump administration, odds are you're going to be opposed by all -- most, if not all Democrats.

[12:20:01] KING: And the chairman, Lindsey Graham, made a joke this morning about, you know, the next president of the United States could well be on the Judiciary Committee because several members of -- several of the Democrats running --

MATTINGLY: It's true.

KING: You know, on the committee are running.

One of them is Amy Klobuchar, who, again, is more of -- she fashions herself -- we'll see how this plays out if she gets into the presidential race on Sunday, as most expect -- she fashions herself as less partisan, more centrist, but even her on the committee today saying, sorry, no.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: In our system of government, the attorney general doesn't just have great powers, but has great responsibilities. And that is why we must look no only to this nominee's qualifications and his family and his work in the past, which is impressive, but we must look at his judgment to see if he can be the kind of attorney general that we need right now in this nation's history. His 19-page memo to me tells it all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That memo was questioning some of the Mueller investigation. Bill Barr at the hearing said he was acting off press reports. It was Monday morning quarterbacking. He didn't have any facts. He gave them assurances he would let Mueller do his job. He gave them assurances he would try to release as much as he could. But he's nominated by Donald Trump, therefore the Democrats vote no.

KEITH: Well, yes, and also that memo pretty much guaranteed that Democrats were not going to be able to support him because it was -- it was seen as projecting to President Trump about what kind of attorney general he could potentially get. Now, Barr insists that's not what he was doing. He was just a guy on the sidelines offering some advice. But that is a big problem for Democrats and something they can't go for.

But, you know, even -- I think it was Durbin who said, you know, he reminds me of Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, who he felt was doing the job to do good for the country. But that still Durbin and the others are not -- are not going to be able to support him.

SHEAR: You know, it's -- what's interesting is if you think back to the early days of this administration, when I -- when certainly President Trump, and I think the people around him didn't understand the long-lasting implications of the Russia probe, right, and all of the decisions, the firing Comey, firing Flynn and everything, and I think there was a sense then -- because they didn't know, they didn't understand the Washington and Washington politics and the -- they were new to it and I think they had no idea. And especially in this day and age when the new cycle is 13 seconds, right, and nothing is lasting, this shows just how lasting that story fundamentally is. Everything is viewed through it.

KING: Including the Democrats' votes on Bill Barr in the sense that --

SHEAR: Right, that's what I mean.

KING: In the sense that they treat him as an adult but they look at President Trump, who clearly made clear throughout, we've been 92 days now since Jeff Sessions was fired. But in Jeff Sessions' tenure, the president made clear almost every day he thinks the attorney general's supposed to be a lackey and a lap dog, and do his business, not follow the Constitution, but protect the president. That's one thing.

He also -- you see, again, this -- our new poll last hour. Here's some pressure on Bill Barr and the Congress. Eight-seven percent of Americans, which means most Republicans, too, 87 percent of Republican -- I mean 87 percent of Americans, including most Republicans, think the Mueller report should be made public. The Democratic concerns that it won't have some legitimacy. In actions taken by the president in a new filing by his legal team, the lawyers for the Trump campaign have a file in court because we know the Southern District of New York has asked for all these transition files as they investigate the dirty money coming into the Trump transition and what happened to that money. They've gone in questioning, are they protected from disclosure by the Constitution? Are they protected from disclosure by the Presidential Transition Act? Are they protected from disclosure by evidentiary privilege? So clearly the Trump legal team saying here, we might fight this.

LEE: Yes. And it is very, very significant that, you know, when Democrats are sort of putting up their flares on this issue that it is so important for them to have clarity on whether as AG he would fully disclose to the public and to Congress the full Mueller investigation, that they have the public's backing on this, right? The polls showing 87 percent of all Americans, and actually this was across party lines. The majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans saying, yes, we would like to see this, too. I think that is going to be important in terms of how Democrats think about their political capitulations.

And just overall, you know, Phil, you were talking about sort of the overall opposition from Republicans to a lot of the Trump nominations going forward, especially when it comes to this AG nomination. This position has become so entirely synonymous with the Russian investigation and the sticking points for the Democrats are almost entirely about that, right? How are you going to handle the investigation? Are you going to be supportive of Mueller finishing it? And, again, the fact that they have the public support is a big deal.

KING: It will help going forward. We'll see as this one plays out. We'll keep track of that vote a bit later in the hour.

Up next, turmoil in Virginia, especially in the Democratic Party. Can all three top officials hang onto their jobs?

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[12:29:28] KING: Time. That was the one-word answer from a top Virginia Democrat today when asked how party elders hoped to resolve the commonwealth's leadership crisis. All three of Virginia's top Democratic officials face potentially career threatening scandals. Today, "The Washington Post" editorial board joining a massive list of those calling for the Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, to resign.

That comes after a second Virginia Democrat, the attorney general, Mark Herring, revealed he too, like the governor, wore blackface. In Herring's case, to a party once.

[12:29:55] And we now know Professor Vanessa Tyson, the woman who has come forward accusing the Democrat Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of sexual assault told a Virginia Democratic congressman about her alleged attack over a year ago.