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Jewish Community Hides In Synagogue Basement As Putin's Anti- Nazi Campaign' Bombards Town; UN: More Than One Million Have Fled Ukraine Since Russian Invasion; Jan 6 Committee Alleges Trump & Allies Were Part Of "Criminal Conspiracy" To Overturn Election. Aired 12:30- 1p ET

Aired March 03, 2022 - 12:30   ET

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

[12:30:00]

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: The Ukrainians trying to hit back against that convoy to keep it out of the capital. But right now, the Pentagon desperately worried that the Russians are going to make progress that they will get to keep, that they will encircle the city lay siege to it, and take control of the Capitol if not soon, at least in the coming days, John.

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: Barbara Starr important reporting from the Pentagon. Thank you, Barbara.

We've all watched this over the past week. The truth is crystal clear, Ukraine siege as Vladimir Putin some war of choice. But to sell it at home, Putin spends his big lie that Ukraine is a threat. Its government, he says filled with Nazis. CNN's Sam Kiley here exposes the absurdity of that visiting Uman and Ukrainians sheltering in a synagogue.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Air raid sirens in Uman. Civilian seeking shelter from Russian bombs in what Vladimir Putin says is partly a campaign to rid Ukraine of a Nazi leadership. The absurdity of this claim lost on no one here heading to the basement of a synagogue.

(on camera): The Jewish population of Ukraine has suffered terribly over the last few hundred years. It's had pogroms that have been inflicted on it by this Iris (ph) regime, it's suffered miserably under stalling. And of course, the Jews here were murdered on mass by Hitler.

(voice-over): The tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is a pilgrimage site for thousands of Hasidic Jews, and has flourished under Ukraine's recent governments. Now, the streets of its Jewish community are almost deserted, the result of Putin so called denazification program. Military sites and the town was bombed on day one of the Russian campaign against Ukraine.

(on camera): Do you think Ukraine has a government of national socialists of Nazis? That is what Putin says. YEHUDA TURGIMAN, WORSHIPPER IN UMAN: No, I think in Ukraine, you see that Ukraine in the last year, they give us to come to Rabbi Nachman. They don't make us problem.

AVIRAM DIAMOND, JEWISH WORSHIPPER FROM NEW YORK: I have been living here for seven months and it's been amazing, very loving, and very caring for the Jewish people.

KILEY (voice-over): Putin has called on Ukraine's military to rise against the government, which he says, is a gang of drug addicts and Neo Nazis who settled in Kyiv and took the entire Ukrainian people hostage. On Tuesday, Russian bombing of Kyiv's radio tower also damaged the Holocaust memorial at the Babin Yar were more than 30,000 people were murdered in 1941. Many tens of thousands were murdered later.

Now, Ukraine's Jewish President suggested that Putin is following Hitler's lead. He said this kind of a missile strike demonstrates that for many people in Russia, our Kyiv is absolutely alien. They don't know anything about our capital, about our history. But they have an order to erase our history, to erase our country, to erase all of us.

In Uman, the synagogues underground to meek the bathing complex is a bunk of a Jew and Gentile alike.

DASHA BORSCHT, UMAN RESIDENT: I know that Uman is Jewish, but exactly this place where we are, I just know that it's bunker. It's safe to be here. That's why I am here.

KILEY (voice-over): Like many people in this town, Dasha and her family are joining an exodus out of Ukraine. For those left behind, there's little but the promise of a long hard winter.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KILEY: Now, John, one of the two -- there are two major claims used by Putin for this invasion. One is to protect the Russian population that has been smashed to pieces quite literally with the assault on Kharkiv, a city of a million and a half people, more than three quarters of whom speak Russian as a mother tongue. And Mariupol which is now surrounded with people unable to get leave their homes, according to the mayor, also, Russian majority mother tongue speaking area.

And then of course, there's this absurd denazification campaign, clearly undermined by the evidence of the synagogue which I'm standing just a few 100 yards away from. We are under blackout. There have been sirens earlier on in the day, and this is a town like so many others that remains in fear of this invasion, an inspired by two entirely false claims, John.

KING: Sam Kiley, grateful to you and your team for continuing just to bring us the cold, hard, and sad truths from Ukraine. Sam, thanks so much.

[12:34:42] When we come back, 1 million and counting, Ukraine war is creating a sad and dangerous refugee crisis. We'll give you a live report from the ground next.

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KING: More than 1 million people, more than 1 million people are now refugees of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. You see the path. They have taken out of the country here to Poland to Slovakia to Hungary to Romania to Moldova that in just one week. It took three months for the refugee count from serious Civil War to hit the 1 million mark. CNN's Sara Sidner joins us now. She's along the Polish-Ukrainian border watching this sadness, this flight unfold. Sara?

[12:40:03]

SARA SIDNER, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Look we're at a train station in Przemysl, Poland. This is the first place where a lot of people who take the train out of places like Kyiv or Lviv come. And you will see people are constantly coming. I mean, the people that you're seeing there that are not in, that have those vests on, they are from Ukraine, they are just arriving. When they arrive, and this wasn't here yesterday, John, Jerry (ph) is going to show you the sign. That sign says you are safe.

The people of Poland, the organizations of Poland, have tried to make sure that people understand that they are welcome here. That Ukrainians in particular, they have been very clear that they are welcome to Poland that they are going to get help. There are signs all along here. And there are look, I mean, these are donations, by the way, people have brought these for people who are fleeing war for their children. And there are so many children. There are so many mothers and children because as, you know, the men who are between the ages I think of 18 and 60 something, have to stay behind and fight.

And so what you have is a huge number of women and children, they -- when they first get here, they can get a free SIM card. And why is that important? Because if their phones don't work, they can't communicate with anybody in Ukraine or anywhere else, if they don't have the proper SIM card, so they set that up. The train right here that you're seeing, I mean, people again, they're going deeper into Poland, these are refugees, you can see they're full, it's completely packed full with, you know, nowhere to sit, every single chair is taken.

I want to bring you in, and Jerry (ph) and I are going to just bring you in very quickly to what has been incredibly organized. And by the way, a lot of this is organized just by regular people, regular Polish people who have decided that this is what they need to do for people who are running from war. It's pretty chaotic because there's just so many people in here. But again, the minute you walk in, there are tables.

Look to my left, they've got hot food for people that they have been bringing in all day long. To my right, they have people holding signs and telling you, hey, if you need to go to this place, or that place, not just in Poland, but in Europe, we see a lot of Germans here who are offering to take people into Germany. And so what you're seeing is a crush of human beings who are all trying to find a safe place to sleep tonight, and a place that they can go and you're seeing the volunteers.

Look, this man has a sign, she has a sign, Denmark, eight people, she can take you for free. That's what her sign says. And so people are coming from all over Europe to try and help with the refugee crisis. And, yes, it is turning into a crisis because as you mentioned, John, a million people and that amount of time and where are more than 50 percent, so more than 500,000 people have come right here to Poland. And this is one of the first stops in which they can be in a city where they can try to find their way. We are 20 minutes from the border to find their way to some sort of semblance of safety. John?

KING: Sara Sidner, grateful to you and your team. It is heartwarming to see such kindness in the face of such horror from Vladimir Putin, remarkable, remarkable reporting. Thank you, Sara.

[12:43:21]

When we come back here, a major story here in Washington, D.C., a major escalation by the January 6th Committee, a brand new court filing alleges that Donald Trump while President committed criminal acts and his conspiracy to ignore the election and keep power.

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KING: A blockbuster from the January 6th Committee. In a new court filing, the House panel asserts it has evidence then President Donald Trump committed crimes in his effort to hold power by getting the Vice President or Congress to block certification of the 2020 election. The filing is part of a Committee effort to force Trump lawyer John Eastman to surrender emails and other documents, Eastman insists are protected by attorney-client privilege.

But the committee asserts the privilege cannot be used to shield crimes and says this, evidence and information available to the Committee establishes a good-faith belief that Mr. Trump and others may have engaged in criminal and or fraudulent acts, and that plaintiff's legal assistance was used in furtherance of those activities.

With me to share the reporting and their insights Jackie Kucinich of The Daily Beast, CNN's Ryan Nobles, and Tarini Parti from the Wall Street Journal. This escalates it in the sense that you now have the official Committee of Congress before a federal judge saying we believe the evidence says the President committed a crime. Therefore his attorney cannot say attorney-client privilege. This will now be played out, Eastman will fight it, will get played out. We're going to learn even more of the evidence that's beyond this filing.

TARINI PARTI, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Right. This is of course a civil case. But I think the depositions in this filing were very interesting, because so far, we of course, saw what President Trump did, you know, in real time to push his false allegations we've seen since seen much more reporting detailing that. But this really details the pushback side from Pence's lawyers, you know, DOJ staffers. So the depositions were really revealing and also kind of showed the level of cooperation that the Committee is getting from Pence's top staffers.

KING: And let me read a bit more from the excerpt because it's important just to go through the details here. The evidence suggests an inference the President Trump, Plaintiff, is John Eastman there, and several others entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort.

[12:50:13]

Ryan, you've been covering the Committee in some time. What they're saying here essentially, is this is not Donald Trump just insisting I won.

RYAN NOBLES, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right.

KING: This is Donald Trump knowing he lost.

NOBLES: Yes.

KING: Being told by party after party after party, he lost. We tried all the recount, sir, you lost. We tried suing sir, you lost. And then saying I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway.

NOBLES: Yes. And what they outline. And this is the first time that we've seen transcripts of depositions, you know, we know that the Committee has held hundreds and hundreds of interviews with people that are very close to Trump. And this is the first time we've actually seen the transcripts of those depositions. And there's an instance in there where Jason Miller, one of his senior advisors, one of the most loyal Trump acolytes, tells the committee that Trump received a briefing from an election analyst in the days after the election, who insisted that he was going to lose the election.

This was before the networks even called it. And you see instance and instance, where people that were loyal to Trump that cared about him, insisted that it was time for him to give up this gamut. And he instead rejected the advice of those individuals and instead brought in these questionable conservative lawyers from the far right, who kept pumping him with this false idea that there was some path for him to overturn the election, and what the Committee is alleging. And this is them saying the quiet part out loud, you know, for the most part, they've tried to shy away from any idea that this was in a criminal investigation, that this was a legislative function.

This is the first time then saying out loud, this wasn't just an attempt to try and find a legal maneuver to try and win back the White House. He was actually committing a crime, and someone needs to look into this even -- KING: Well, that's where you get the somewhat part before you jump in. I just want to put one of our legal analyst, Elie Honig, was on air earlier today. This is where you get look when you read what we know from this committee. Then you read the new things we learned in this filing. The corruptness of this is crystal clear. The question is, is it a crime? And who answers that question? Well, Elie Honig puts it this way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ELIE HONIG, FORMER STATE AND FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Knock, knock, Merrick Garland, are you listening? This is clearly to me directed from the January 6th Committee over to the Justice Department. If you look at this document, it almost reads like what an internal DOJ prosecution memo would read, as you see all the facts laid out, you see the legal arguments why the Committee says this was not just some sort of aggressive effort to challenge the election, this crossed the line into fraud.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The question is does Merrick Garland and does his senior team at the Justice Department view it that way or do they think American tradition is he's a former president, it might stink, but we're not going there.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: We don't know what the DOJ is doing because they haven't said any kind of indicator one way or the other. But, you know, as Elie said, I can't say better than him. This does seem like the Committee is looking toward a referral to justice on a criminal basis. And because obviously, the Committee can't, you know, weigh in in terms of something is criminal or not, that's not what they do, but they could refer it.

And that is -- this is a is a big hint that might be where we're going. But I just wanted to say really quick, in addition to the Jason Millers of the world, these boldface names, this report also included some of the folks in Michigan who were being pressured and had all of these details about the things that were happening on the ground level from the campaign, pressuring these individuals and their testimonies reminding us that it's not just the President's inner circle, whose names we all know, it's people in, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan, places were in even, you know, in Georgia, which we all know a little bit more about, who were getting pressured, who were being pressed, who were being told to overturn their, you know, fellow citizens votes.

KING: It's a very critical point. There are a lot of people out there who think this was, you know, last November or two November's ago. Let's please, can we just move on. But the fact that you learn more information about how detailed the plot was, Trump tried with this governor didn't work, move down to this person, moved on to that person.

This adviser said, Mr. President, I can't do this anymore. He goes and you mentioned he finds John Eastman. We can just put up on the screen. He wrote to the memos essentially trying to get Mike Pence, you know, you can essentially ignore the Constitution and subvert. It was participating in the War Room at the Willard Hotel before January 6th.

So this is part of the idea being that the Committee is saying for it is that the Trump knew he lost, and he just kept searching for people to help him cheat.

PARTI: Yes. And the heated exchanges that this deposition includes between Pence's lawyers and Eastman while January 6th was going on really revealing. I mean, they, you know, they refer to Eastman as a serpent in the ear of the President, really colorful language here that shows what was going on.

NOBLES: And, John, what the other thing too that I find so compelling about this evidence is that throughout this entire process, Trump and his acolytes tried to paint this as a ground up, right? That these are just grassroots supporters, so concerned about election fraud, and they want to get involved, that's why they created this fake set of electors, that's why they convince their state legislators to conduct audits. What we're seeing time and time again, this was a top down coordinated effort that was started and fueled by Donald Trump and his desire to win back election.

KING: And I just want to know for the record, we have this, I'm not going to read from it. This is a statement from the former president of the United States, where he says, no, the committee's out to get him. You can judge the evidence, read the filing yourself.

[12:55:20]

And we end with that today. An emotional moment on Capitol Hill Senator Ben Ray Lujan getting a standing ovation, hugs there from his colleagues, returning to the Hill this morning. It's been a little more than a month just over a month since the senator suffered a stroke. Lujan said it's good to be back.

It's good that you are back and healthy, Senator. Thanks for joining us in Inside Politics today. Ana Cabrera, Anderson Cooper pick up our coverage after a quick break.

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