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Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper Enters 2020 Race; Pelosi: "Point Will Be Made" On Wall If Trump Forced To Use Veto; Rand Paul Won't Back Trump's "Emergency" For Wall Funds; New Poll: Trump Sees High Disapproval Among Minorities; Democrats Document Requests Demand Info From Trump's Orbit. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired March 04, 2019 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00] JACKIE KUCINICH, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE DAILY BEAST: In his record he did oversee legalization of marijuana, but initially he was against legalizing it for recreational use. Now, he came around to it, but there are -- there are going to be some parts of his record that are going to cause pause where the energy is right now in the Democratic Party.

JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: And that energy is probably one of the reasons for this. Now, it's early in the campaign. Don't go running off to Vegas with any of these polls. But look at the Granite State poll for University of New Hampshire last week and find John Hickenlooper, he would be there at zero. You know he's at zero percent.

Now, Bernie Sanders is on the top even before. Joe Biden is at second. Everybody knows the former vice president.

I would think if you're Hickenlooper and you're trying to make your way. I saw him in Iowa a couple weeks ago. He's doing the traditional, you know, Milky Way run. He is very an entertaining charismatic guy in small groups. He's not a big speech giver.

You try to -- that's why I do think, I would say think if you're Hickenlooper or Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg, is that sort of the competition for that space?

ELIANA JOHNSON, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, POLITICO: Yes, I think its right.

TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Yes and that space is actually getting more and more crowded. We had Inslee get in the race last week, Biden is expected to get in, you

have Bloomberg. Even Beto O'Rourke in some way is seen as more moderate because he hasn't glommed onto all of the most progressive policies that the Democrats are pushing. So there was that a thought earlier, the process that everyone would be fighting it out on the left and then someone in the middle would be able to sort of be the anointed person to go through and win. But now that area is getting really crowded and it's not clear whether or not that lane will end up becoming too crowded and leaving room for someone on the left to take over. JOHNSON: Yes, to me Democrats seemed to have a choice between two types of candidates. On the one hand somebody relatively new who could provide the sort of excitement of a Barack Obama type candidate, or somebody with a lot of name recognition who can tout themselves as sort of an experienced person like a Joe Biden who could take it to Donald Trump.

And Hickenlooper, to me, though he has experience, he's not particularly exciting and he certainly doesn't have as much experience as a Biden. And so he seems to me to fall in this sort of middle area where he may just be unlikely to get attraction. Then again, all the things we thought we knew about how politics work, we don't really know, you know?

KUCINICH: It's right.

KING: That's a great point in the sense that, you know, if you take the David Axelrod Theory, that Trump was the anti-Obama. Obama was this new one's guy everything. Trump was all boom, boom, boom, everything is black and white.

So listen to Hickenlooper here. This is an ABC interview where he says, I get things done. I will sit down with Republicans and get things done. In polarized environment, you wouldn't think that's your appeal, right? Democrats want somebody who's more fighting with Republicans. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN HICKENLOOPER (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I learned this in the restaurant business. When someone is angry, you don't, you know, fight back on and argue with them, you repeat back their words. And if Mitch McConnell cut it if I got came end up -- when I come into office, I would go to Mitch McConnell to his office and I would sit down with him and say, now what is the issue again? And we would talk and I would continue to speak back to him. Sounds silly, right? But this works. This is what I did with the suburban mayors and they hated the City of Denver.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now he seems to be thinking that the idea you actually talked to somebody as his novel idea. And he's the first one to think about having a meeting with somebody disagreed with. However in today's Washington, they are in a lot of meetings between people who have big disagreements. But is that a primary message? Can you sell that in the primary upbeat nice to the Republicans and -- ?

JOHNSON: Yes, I mean, Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden are going to be saying the same types of things. Joe Biden has already taken a lot of flak for that which is why I think Hickenlooper is he's lesser known but he's going to be saying the same types of things as some of these other candidates, but again, you know, who knows.

KUCINICH: Biden got a lot of backlash.

JOHNSON: Exactly.

KUCINICH: Yes and I think and I -- and that is going to open up a lot of ways that, you know, these moderate candidates that are trying to reach across the aisle, it could not be a better fit for them on the front end.

KING: But the -- and most interesting thing in this race, there's so many different candidates, different issues, different positions. So, could we start the debates tomorrow?

Up next, then there were four. Congressional Democrats getting Republicans boost in their border wall fight with President Trump.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:43:20] KING: Topping our political radar today, a report that President Trump personally pushed top aides to make sure the Justice Department blocked the AT&T/ Time Warner merger.

We knew the President opposed the merger because of his dislike of CNN. But he's denied any personal involvement in the ultimately unsuccessful Justice Department efforts to block the merger. The New Yorker though reports the President called Chief Staff John Kelly and top Economic Adviser Gary Cohn into the Oval Office and said he was angry. The Justice Department had not yet filed suit and that he want that the deal blocked. Cohn reportedly told Kelly to ignore the President's request.

The former Attorney General Eric Holder says he's not running for president in 2020. He was Attorney General under President Obama announcing his decision today a "Washington Post Op-Ed". Holder didn't spell exactly why he's not running for president. He says, he'll do everything in his power to make sure, "The next Democratic president is not hobbled by a House of Representatives pulled to the extremes by gerrymandered districts."

President Trump fight with Congress over his border has gone a lot more interesting. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, now the fourth Republican to say he will not support the President declaring a national emergency as a way of funding the project without Congressional approval. Senator Paul's defection now give Senate Democrats just enough votes to block the President that would pave a way for veto showdown.

If the President exercises that authority, Congress could try to override in and even Speaker Pelosi admits, that's it's how its order.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think it will survive a veto if it goes that far?

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D), HOUSE SPEAKER: I've seen it's very hard to have a veto but the point it will be made. But, you know, hopefully it was fraud within the event. We'll fight him in the Congress. We'll fight him in the courts. We'll fight him in the Court of Public Opinion. What he's doing is wrong and the Republicans know it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: CNN Congressional Correspondent Phil Mattingly joins us now live. And now Phil, why only four Republicans in principle a lot more than four Senate Republicans oppose this?

[12:40:06] PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I think that's true and I think that also underscores that these will not be the only four Republicans who will eventually vote yes on the resolution of disapproval to block the President's national emergency. And if you want evidence of that, I'll give you kind of two points to pay attention to.

Senator Lamar Alexander, veteran senator from Tennessee, kind of considered a pragmatic deal maker of some sort, last week -- late last week going on in the Senate floor and essentially asking the President to rescind the national emergency declaration, trying to give him other options to pursue the money to fund his border wall. It was described to me by some people who watch him, it's been a brushback pitch to the White House. In other words, I'm going to vote against you on this if you continue to push forward.

Now, he's going to push forward. There is no sense from the White House or here on Capitol Hill the President will withdraw the national emergency declaration. The other thing to pay attention to, close door meeting.

Last week, Senate Republicans at their weekly conference lunch with Vice President Mike Pence, with the lawyer of the Justice Department. People who were inside that meeting, one of them told me it was a mess, Senate Republicans really trying to pin down in a contentious manner the vice president and the Justice Department lawyer making clear they had severe reservations about the President moving through with this. On constitutional grounds, on executive power grounds, that said the magic number wasn't necessarily four. The expectation for the last couple weeks is that the Senate would be able to pass this.

Magic number is 20. Twenty Republicans defect, that means it's veto- proof. At this point in time nobody I'm talking to expects that number. They might have reservations but they're not necessarily going to vote against the president. Both on political grounds and on kind of recognition that this is the leader of the party, this is what he wants to do, this is their crucial issue. And so a veto likely will survive, John.

KING: And an interesting debate. We'll watch those numbers as it plays out. Phil, appreciate the live reporting from the Hill. When we come back, some positive transcends some warning signs and some new polling looking at the President's reelection bid.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [12:45:59] KING: Six hundred and ten days now until Election Day 2020. You're keeping count at home, right? 610 days. And a new set of numbers that for President Trump raises the old question, is the glass half full or half empty? An uptake in job approval in the latest NBC Wall Street journal poll and some decent numbers in key states, but also some significant warning signs. Let's take a look.

Let's start with the president's approval rating, still below 50 percent, 46 percent in the poll now, below 50 percent but for this president close to his all-time high of 47 percent in the NBC Wall Street journal polling. So the government shutdown for example, did not tank the president's approval rating. For President Trump that's a relatively strong number.

Here's a question. Will you vote for or against? Look at this historically, 41 percent of Americans now say they'll definitely or probably vote for Trump's reelection. His problem is 48 percent nearly half say they definitely or probably would not vote for him.

How does that compare? President Obama was in much better shape going into his reelection, George W. Bush much, much better shape going into his. Only Bill Clinton under water like President Trump was. Bill Clinton of course went on to win, so President Trump could say, OK, there's a way to reverse this.

But look at only 42 percent for Bill Clinton, 42 percent for George W. Bush said no, 40 percent for President Obama, 48 percent, that's a warning sign for the president nearly half of Americans are inclined at this moment not to vote for him for re-election.

Here's a fascinating question, which map did the Democrats try to engineer in 2020? For the president, you're happy with this. NBC Wall Street journal polling found including in the states he flipped, the blue wall Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, the president runs ahead of the Democrats right now.

So if you're President Trump, you're looking at your map and you think I can do in 2020 what I did in 2016. The challenge for Democrats in these Sun Belt states, they currently lead. That includes North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Arizona, all these Blue States down here, the Democrats leads now a generic Democrat. President Trump carried them all last time.

Do the Democrats make a bet and contest those states? Maybe some of this scope (ph), that's one of the big questions as we head into 2020 cycle. Here's one thing, the president over the weekend sounding really confident.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They came from the mountains and the valleys and the cities. They came from all over, and what we did in 2016 the election we call it with a capital E, it's never been done before.

This has never, ever happened before and now we have to verify it in 2020 with an even bigger victory.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Somebody help me with what never, ever happened before.

DAVIS: Nobody ever win the presidency before?

KING: We've elected presidents before and we've elected presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College before. Help?

OLORUNNIPA: Yes, not much I can do to help you there, but I do think the president is sort of saying he wants to recreate the magic of 2016 which sort of shocked the world and he was able to bring out voters that no one expected to come out to vote.

Now what we saw in 2018 was Democrats who maybe sat (ph) at home in 2016, thinking Hillary Clinton that was already going to win or because they weren't inspired, they came out and record numbers as well.

So we're likely to see this big clash in 2020 where President Trump was obviously going to have his vote, his base voters coming out to vote. Democrats are fired up and thinking that they can make him a one-term president, so they're not going to have as much trouble jimmying up the support of their base voters as well. It is going to be a clash to see which base can turn out at the highest levels and with the president at 45 percent, 46 percent, it's really going to end up being about base turn out at that number.

KING: And if you're a Democrat that would just be a cake walk because you're hearing about all these, you know, investigation and his approval ratings down, it will not be. Those poll numbers tell you that we head into the cycle in a very contesting environment.

Here's where the president still look strong, 88 percent of Republicans approve of him, 60 percent of rural voters, white voters who do not have a college education six and ten, men 54 percent. So that's the basics of the Trump 2016 base if you will.

Here is the president's problem and it's a big problem. African- Americans 88 percent disapprove, 64 percent of Latinos disapprove, 61 percent of women disapprove, white voters with a college degree 55 percent disapprove. So you see the two coalitions right there to your point, the question who can organize that turnout and then the Democrats have to decide, which map do you fight?

[12:50:03] JOHNSON: Look, I think the challenge for Trump is going to be that, look, Democratic base is fired up and the Trump base is fired up. The Trump base and Republicans have remained very loyal to him, but that is not enough for him to win. And while the president has done a tremendous job of keeping his base enthused, he has not really even attempted to expand it.

He won by 70,000 votes over three states and that was with a lot of people who were Obama voters but came over to Trump. We saw in 2018 that a lot of those people went back to the Democrats. The question is, can Trump expand his coalition enough to win the White House again in 2020? Those are voters the two parties are going to be struggling for. They went to Democrats in the last election.

It doesn't mean that they'll stay with the Democrats in 2020. Obama lost in the midterms, so did George W. Bush. Trump could win them but he doesn't seem to be putting a lot of effort into winning over the sorts of independent voters who said, what do we have to lose between Trump and Hillary? We're going to take a chance on the new guy. That's not the calculation they're going to be making this time. Trump is a known commodity.

KING: Trump is a known commodity. The numbers up -- fascinated by these numbers. If you're the Democrats you're looking at those mid western states, better be prepared to fight. Quick break, we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. President, are you going to cooperate with Mr. Nadler?

TRUMP: I cooperate all the time with everybody. And you know the beautiful thing? No collusion, it's all the hoax. You're going to learn about that as you grow older. It's a political hoax. There's no collusion, there's no anything, folks going to see (ph) that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The president taking a question there and about North Dakota State football team about will he cooperate with this document requests we talked about at the top of the hour. The House Judiciary Committee Chairman 81 individuals and organizations demand for documents.

Two things for the president, number one he said I always cooperate. Democrats might dispute that. And then number two he said it was a political hoax. So there's -- we know his mindset about what he thinks about it, the question is what do they do about it?

DAVIS: Well, and the other thing that you heard him say is there's no collusion. Like he's still focused on like that this is only about Russia and the election interference, which it is about. I mean, they are investigating that and I think, you know, one of the motivations here is to sort of backstop the Mueller investigation in case there isn't a lot of disclosure out of that investigation.

Jerry Nadler the chairman of the judiciary committee wants to build that record, you know, in the Congress. But it's about a whole lot more than that. And the fact that he's just coming back to this and where there is no collusion, shows you that the president and maybe the people around him haven't quite grasped the full scope of what they're dealing with here with this request and that they're going to have to go through issue by issue way beyond the campaign and figure out, you know, what -- where their liabilities are and what their able to share or willing to share.

[12:55:11] KING: It's a great point in a sense that that's the President's default and the CPAC speech the week that he kept attacking Robert Mueller. When, if you -- this document request is based on Michael Cohen's testimony in which he did talk about maybe he got tipped off about the Julian Assange e-mail dump, so that's one issue there.

But insurance fraud, lying to banks, inflating your assets, campaign file its violations allege and the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, Trump inauguration questions, Trump organization questions, this has a lot more to do than the possibility of Russian collusion.

OLORUNNIPA: And if you remember what Republican did during the Michael Cohen hearing and they didn't try to defend the president on any of those substantive issues. They really just try to tear Michael Cohen down and say this is all about politics. Michael Cohen wants a book deal or movie deal, they didn't really get into the substance and I think you're seeing the same thing from the president where he's saying, you know, this is all politics, it's a political hoax but he's not defending himself.

You haven't seen the White House or anyone close to the president really defending him over these substantive issues about, you know, all of these various crimes that were alleged that don't have anything to do with Russia or collusion. So it'll be really interesting to see if that -- this is all politics argument holds up over the test of time.

KUCINICH: Well there's no new ones to that, right. And that's a lot easier argument to make if you're just calling it all presidential harassment which he's done and calling it a day. You don't have to get into details that way.

KING: You don't have to get into details. And so the point where he says, I always cooperate. I mean Democrats would laugh at that in the sense that even just in recent days, our chairman comments with the oversight committee has said I've been asking for weeks and weeks for documents about security clearances.

Then New York Times has this big report that the former chief of staff and the former White House council both wrote contemporaneous memos because they didn't like the process that landed Jared Kushner with his security clearance.

That's over the objections of the CIA, over the objections of others. The president has said he didn't get involved. The "New York Times" reports quite clearly he did. And so he said, I always cooperate. That's laughable on its face.

JOHNSON: Right. I think one of the things we're going to try to see Democrats draw out is the way that normal processes have been averted by this White House. And it could be a fruitful campaign issue for Democratic candidates. I think the coordination between the investigations which if Democrats are smart, they'll try to have come to ahead in September, October, November of 2020. There will be some coordination between these investigations and then the Democratic campaign which will give whoever the Democratic nominee is a very fruitful issue to run on or multiple issues.

OLORUNNIPA: And if you have the President's own chief of staff and his own White House counsel writing contemporaneous memos saying that this is upsetting or this is something the president is doing that's not right, it takes away the argument that this is all political that Democrats are only worried about this because it's a political hit -- drive on the president.

You have the president's inner circle concerned about what he was doing over security clearances and saying that this is potentially a national security threat with the way the president is behaving. I think Democrats are going to push that hard to say that this is not just about Democrats trying to take out the president, this is really about people even close to the president who are concerned about the way he's carrying out his office.

KING: And do you have the sense in your reporting, or the Democrats, do they understand this? You just made the point. It's a good point I think that that the president himself perhaps has not wrapped his mind around the totality of this, the scope of this, the breadth of this, the very different position he's in because Democrats now have this power. The House Republicans and the Senate Republicans protect the president. They did not have aggressive oversight for the first two years.

So as they process that, are the Democrats ready for this in terms of the management, the quality and the caliber of the investigators, and then the political will to sort of keep down the, you know, keep down the people who scream impeach, impeach, every time they see something that could be potentially damaging.

DAVIS: I mean, listen, I think they are ready. They've planned for this. The question is open as Jackie said earlier whether they will manage it well, right. That's the big question. But I think they have, you know, they've recruited and spent out a long time and worked hard recruiting, you know, highly qualified people to lead these investigations.

They've been meticulously trying to plan this out so that, you know, I think this document request today is the culmination of a, you know, week, months-long process of going through thing by thing and saying, OK, what are the roads that we want to go down? What do we want to pursue?

And while they are casting a wide net, you have to imagine that they have -- and I do believe that they have plans in place to pull on all of these threads in various ways.

Now, will they be able to do what Eliana just described where they sort of mute the crescendo at the moment that they want to be reaching it in terms of laying out all the information for voters and for the public? I don't know. But I certainly think that there's a lot of opportunity here for them to lay out a pretty compelling case.

I think the big question though is going to be is, to what extent is the White House going to cooperate with this? I mean, he says I always cooperate with everyone but, you know, there's executive privilege. They kind of avoided that issue a bit with the Mueller investigation because they waived executive privilege on a lot of things.

This is a whole different ball game. This is a Democratic Congress and I can't imagine there won't be some pretty substantial fights about what they get. Are they going to get that memo that they want about security clearances or any of this other information?

KING: While wait approve its political hoaxes to release all the documents, but I suspect that's not the course they will take and try to make that case. Thanks for joining us on CNN "INSIDE POLITICS".

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