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Inside Politics

Pieces Of Titan Sub Wreckage Retrieved From Ocean Floor; Trump Responds To Tape: "I Did Nothing Wrong"; Giuliani Interviewed In 2020 Election Interference Probe; Trump: I had "Copies Of Many Different Plans"; Trump On Audio Tape: "It Was Bravado"; Biden Responds To Alleged Hunter Text; Soon: Biden To Outline Economic Vision; WH Launches New Messaging Push With "Bidenomics"; Biden: Putin "Absolutely" Weakened By Events In Russia. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired June 28, 2023 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you to you Tim Taylor for explaining all that and also to our Paula Newton. We should just remember there, there were five people, as you mentioned. Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, his son 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, explore Paul-Henry Nargeolet and Stockton Rush was the founder of OceanGate, and all of them perished in this accident.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you all for joining us. This has been CNN News Central. Inside Politics starts now.

DANA BASH, CNN HOST: Welcome to Inside Politics. I'm Dana Bash in Washington. Breaking moments ago, new photos. You can see them here. It shows pieces of the Titan submersible pulled off the ocean floor. I want to go right to Ottawa and CNN's Paula Newton. Paula, what do those pictures tell us?

PAULA NEWTON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, it was quite a spectacle. As we watch the video coming in from St. John's harbour there this morning. Those are quite large pieces, Dana, of the debris. And again, we want to be sensitive to know that five people lost their lives and tragic circumstances at the depths of the Titanic wreck.

But when you look at the stills, and you see them coming off the Horizon Arctic, it for investigators will prove that they actually have some investigative material there that is quite significant. In fact, if you look at some of those pieces, you can match them to the body, the outer shell of that Titan submersible.

We do have a statement as well from Pelagic Research. They are the company that first was able to deploy their remotely operated vehicle to, as I said, the Titanic wreck more than two miles to the bottom. They say that they are now continuing with what they call their demobilization efforts. From their offshore operations, they say it will take several days.

But again, clearly, they must have been satisfied just in the last few days with how they were able to map out the debris, which was apparently in two major locations, and then be able to -- as you can see for yourself, so significantly raise those pieces of debris.

I was actually speaking to the crew that were in charge of operating the ROV, and they were also helping with trying to lift those very large pieces from the Horizon Arctic on to the certainly the St. John's harbour front, where now investigators from the Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. Coast Guard will be looking over these pieces of debris and deciding where this goes next. Dana?

BASH: Yes. And that is obviously a very big part of the next step for these investigators, some of whom you said, you're talking to trying to use what they found and figure out what happened.

NEWTON: Yes, absolutely. And I have to say there are at least four to five separate investigations, the most significant being the Transportation Safety Board right now, the U.S. Coast Guard, which is basically initiated an investigation at their highest levels, but also, Dana, what is crucial for those pieces of debris is also a criminal examination. They're calling it now the RCMP, the national police here.

They're going to decide whether or not to also launch a full-blown investigation. And given their access to what perhaps they may get, whether it's interviews or debris, which is highly controversial, because one is a safety matter, the other is a criminal matter.

But given what we are seeing in those pieces of debris, it may give them more clues more quickly as to whether or not a criminal investigation is even needed. And again, Dana, of course, it goes without saying, we are looking at pieces of debris, but those five people lost their lives. And these must be incredibly chilling sites for the family and friends that lost those five on the Titan submersible.

BASH: Yes, Paula, as you were speaking, I was thinking that exact thing and we have photos of those five who lost their lives on that submersible up on the screen, as we talk about and look at the images of the debris that was found in the ocean. Appreciate that report. Thank you so much.

And now we're going to turn to Donald Trump's bravado defense, Trump is a showman. He is now pinning his legal hopes on convincing you and a jury of his peers that he was just showing off and not actually revealing classified secrets. The former president said, plenty yesterday about his case and the tape that is at the heart of the special counsel's prosecution. Mr. Trump's bottom line, he didn't do anything wrong.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, 45TH U.S. PRESIDENT: What did I say wrong on those recordings. I didn't even see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong. We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up. In fact, you could hear the rustle of the paper. And nobody said I did anything wrong. Other than the fake news, which of course is Fox, too.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BASH: That was Donald Trump talking to our old colleague, Paul Steinhauser up in New Hampshire. Trump offered another explanation as well. When that concern you believing that he's a liar. Trump says, what you hear on the tape is him just showing off and that there was no document, especially one that was secret.

We're going to kick off our coverage on this topic with CNN's Sara Murray. Sara, you covered Donald Trump from the beginning, I think from the escalator moment back in 2015. You know him well and kind of how he sees himself. Given that how does this comport with what is happening with him on the legal front?

[12:05:00]

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well look, I think it's interesting to see him openly admit bravado, which we've certainly seen from him in other circumstances. Let's just look at what he actually said to semaphore for a second. I mean, he's talking, of course, about these documents. He's rustling around, and he said, I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado. I was talking and just holding up papers. He goes on to say, I didn't have any documents.

So, I think it's not surprising that we're going to see Donald Trump, and frankly, probably his legal team try out a number of defenses when it comes to making arguments against this case. But I do want to point to a line in the indictment.

When they talk about this instance, you know that we now have the audio recording of that we've played in the run up to describing that in the indictment, they refer to it as Donald Trump showed classified documents to others. The prosecutors don't write that Donald Trump just described classified documents.

We don't know exactly what their evidence is to backup that line of the indictment. But we do know that they've interviewed at least one person who was sitting in that meeting, and you can bet they're asking that person as well as others, you know, what was in that pile of documents? Did you see classified markings on them? What exactly was he waving around, Dana?

BASH: Yes. And that is a really, really key piece of CNN's reporting. Sara, before I let you go, I want you to talk about some other exclusive reporting that you have about the January 6 piece of the special counsel's probe.

MURRAY: That's right. We learned that Rudy Giuliani, who of course, was an attorney for Donald Trump did sit down with federal investigators in recent weeks. A political adviser to Giuliani says, it was a voluntary interview and says it was conducted in a professional manner.

We don't know what the focus of this meeting was with federal investigators. We do know that they've been focused on a lot of things Rudy Giuliani was involved in, including the fake electors' plot. They subpoenaed Giuliani months ago about payments, he got around 2020. And frankly, they've had a lot of questions for witnesses about the lawyers who were working around Donald Trump after 2020, including Giuliani, the folks that were spreading these baseless election lies, Dana. So, it could be any number of things that they talked about with Giuliani behind the closed doors.

BASH: It sure could. Sara, thank you so much for that reporting here. To share their reporting CNN's Gloria Borger, CNN's Paula Reid, who was also on that Giuliani reporting, and CNN's Katelyn Polantz. Nice to see you all. Thank you all for being here.

Paula, I'll start with you because I can't even keep track of the stories, they break anymore. So just pick one and talk about now. I'm kidding. Let's talk about the Trump defense.

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Well, it's been a long evolution, right, when the Mar-a-Lago was searched by the Feds. But the former president and his allies came out with this idea that he had a standing order to declassify everything. So, he didn't actually have anything that was classified.

Few weeks later, he said that this was all ridiculous because he could declassify things with his mind. Then the defense evolved to be that he didn't know what was in the boxes. How can you declassify something if you don't know what's in the box?

Now we have this tape, right? This is a key piece of evidence from the special counsel. Not only is he the one who says their secret, he and first they're classified, he says he can't declassify them. And one of the new pieces of information we got from CNN attaining this tape is that he says, these are the papers, right?

So, it's been these conflicting, contradicting, ever evolving or devolving, depending on how he looked at it, explanations for what happened here. And at the end of the day, none of this absolves you of potential criminal liability.

BASH: Gloria, before you jump in, I want to play a little bit more of his latest explanation on the papers. He did this yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, and mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects. And what was said was absolutely fine.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: OK. And then he spoke to Semafor, and he said, "did I use word plans? The word plans. What I'm referring to is magazines, newspapers, plans of buildings. I had plans of buildings, you know, building plans. I had plans of a golf course."

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, he's dissembling here. He's trying to come up with a new excuse every 10 minutes. And just because he said it was bravado, which may be true. It's not mutually exclusive to say that also, these are classified documents. He did say, as Paula said, these are the papers. Look what I found here. It's cool. And it's in a bunch of these boxes, which by the way, he had over a year to go through and sort of sort out.

So, if you have golf clothes, and golf shoes and newspaper clippings, one would think that if you had important top secret classified documents, you might take the time to go through them and hand back to the archives exactly what they were looking for. And he still hasn't explained why it took him too much time other than the fact, well, I'm a very busy man.

[12:10:00]

BASH: Yes. Well, there's all that. I mean, just going back to golf plans and the newspaper articles and things that he said, it was just last week or the week before when he was talking to Bret Baier, and he was pretty specific that it was something that was related to the military.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRET BAIER, FOX NEWS HOST, SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRET BAIER: And you were recorded saying that you had a document detailing a planned attack on another country that was prepared by the U.S. military for you when you were president. The Iran attack plan, you remember that?

TRUMP: Ready. It wasn't a document, OK? I had lots of paper. I had copies of newspaper articles. I had copies of magazines. Bret, there was no document.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Well, he also said that talked about the attack plan. And mentioned the fact that in the past, that it was stuff that he's declassified. But Katelyn, talk about this from the perspective of the lawyers and being on the defense team for somebody who's running for president. Because usually when you're in this kind of trouble, not that we've ever had anybody in this kind of trouble before, but when somebody is up against indicted on federal charges, they don't speak in public. But he's a candidate for president, who's trying to convince voters to still support him.

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And I mean, his lawyers have even acknowledged before that, well, he's different, he is running. We can't actually tell him to stop talking. He's so used to doing these media appearances and to performing as a candidate. But every single thing now, we need to start talking about in the context of a trial.

He's a criminal defendant, headed to trial. Every single thing he says, the prosecutors are watching, and they are using and thinking about, can that factor into our case? Is that something that we can show the jury, it's certainly admissible. And it would certainly be the sort of thing where they can play tape after tape. Oh, he says, now they're documents. He says they're not plans, but they are papers. I mean, you stack those up in front of a jury. And it becomes something that is quite notable in telling the story of what Trump knew and what he had and what he was showing.

And as much as we want to talk about Trump as a candidate in a campaign, these court appearances are campaign appearances in many ways where he does appearances. And when we get to a trial, it very well will likely happen before a campaign and (crosstalk)

BORGER: And he doesn't listen to his lawyers. I mean, I've spent the last couple of years talking to Donald Trump's attorneys, and they say, no matter what you tell him, he does whatever he wants.

REID: He's having trouble finding a new lawyer.

BASH: Well, that's a good point. There's something else happened this morning. And that is President Biden spoke out for the very first time about what is allegedly a text or WhatsApp text that his son Hunter sent to a businessperson that he was trying to get help for and with, where he said, he Hunter said in this alleged text, that his father, who was the former vice president at the time was sitting next to him. The now president said that that wasn't true. Listen?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would love for you in your 20s shakedown text message. Were you sitting there? Were you (crosstalk)?

JOE BIDEN, 46TH U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, I wasn't, and I don't know. No.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And again, this IRS whistleblower who brought us that WhatsApp message says, Gloria, that that the money trail involves Hunter's dad.

BORGER: Right. Well, that's a pretty emphatic no. And it was sort of like, no, are you kidding me? I wasn't sitting there. And you know that the Biden's have talked openly about their son's drug addiction. And I think that what you're going to hear, if you hear anything, by the way from the White House, because they're trying to be very quiet about this, is that Hunter Biden was in a very bad way and was saying and doing things that he should not have done. And I'm actually surprised that that the president even said anything about it.

BASH: Yes. But it is interesting that he flatly denied that he was sitting with his son. All right, thanks, everybody. And next hour, President Biden is branding the economy with his own name, who will argue the country has turned the corner. It's a callback to another election and another commander in chief will explain after a quick break.

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[12:15:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BASH: President Biden has a big sell to make to Americans. It's time to trust Bidenomics. His team thinks the worst effects of inflation are in the rearview mirror. And it's time to sell the president's impact on a gradually healing post pandemic economy. Next hour, the president will speak in Chicago where he will lay out his vision, focusing on the middle class.

CNN's Jeremy Diamond is there with him in Chicago. Jeremy, you've been speaking to administration officials about this new push. What are they telling you?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Dana, if you remember back to the midterm campaign, the last midterm campaign, President Biden really didn't campaign on the economy. But the president's advisors now feel that the economy is in a much different place in a place where they can actually run on the economy where they can tout what they believe is a strong economy.

One that's where inflation is cooling, the jobs market remains strong, and where they believe it's increasingly likely that we are headed for that elusive soft landing rather than falling back into a recession. And yet, Dana, in poll after poll, Americans remain very pessimistic about the economy.

A recent CNN poll in May found that 23 percent of Americans find that the economy is at least somewhat good. 77 percent say that they believe that the economy is in poor shape. And what's more voters are also blaming the president for this, with a majority of voters saying that they disapprove of the president's handling of the economy.

[12:20:00]

And so, flipping those numbers really is the president's central political challenge heading into this reelection season. And they now believe that Bidenomics, this term that they are using, which is going to be a key part of the president's speech today is going to be the messaging vehicle effectively for the president to sell his economic record, to sell his vision for the future, and also importantly to contrast it with Republican trickle-down economics. Dana?

BASH: Jeremy, thank you so much for that reporting. And joining me now to discuss is the national co-chair of President Biden's reelection campaign, Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. Thank you so much for joining me, sir. The president, as you just heard, he decided to sell his economic plan as Bidenomics. Is it wise for him to tie not just his name, but more importantly, his reelection campaign on something that is very unpredictable, like the performance of the economy, there's 16 months to go until the election?

SEN. CHRIS COONS, (D-DE): Well, Dana, as you well know, President Biden has long held beliefs that building our economy from the bottom up in the middle out, focusing on strengthening the middle class, and bringing back strong manufacturing jobs, is the best way for us to rebuild our economy, to strengthen our society, and to be competitive globally.

And the record over the last two years shows that it's working, instead of the trickle-down approach of the Republican Party that relies on tax cuts for the very wealthy to ultimately produce better results for working families.

President Biden, as you know, signed into law, three major pieces of legislation, to invest in infrastructure, to bring advanced manufacturing plants back to the United States, and to reduce the costs facing working families. And the results show that they're having a real impact.

We have the strongest post pandemic recovery of any advanced economy in the world, more than 13 million new jobs created, while President Biden has been in office including more than 800,000 manufacturing jobs. So, I don't think this is a big risk, Dana. I think he's running on his record, and it's a strong one.

BASH: And that leads to the question about his record versus the perception that is out there. Obviously, what he's trying to do is to change that perception. But I just want to show our viewers where that is right now. It's really very much underwater. 38 percent of Americans, that's it, they approve.

And there's some very positive economic trends, which you talked about, given the fact that, you know, you are a senator, you're not in the White House, you're not in the bubble, like the president is, you talk to constituents. What do you think that the president and his top aides need to say to get through to people that what the economic factors are in the data is actually should match how they're feeling because how people feel is how people vote.

COONS: How people feel really does matter, Dana, and what our president and his cabinet are doing is going on the road, going across the country to demonstrate the ways in which state and local governments are using the billions of dollars that are being invested, for example, in building out cable so that everyone in the country gets access to broadband.

The president's speech that he's about to make is in Chicago, not in Washington. And he's focusing on manufacturing, something that helped build the middle class, and under Republican economics drained out and got shipped overseas. We are seeing the strongest resurgence of manufacturing, which is the foundation of a strong middle class in decades.

So, it does mean, Dana, that we need to go on the road and that members of the administration need to go out and show the link between the bills the president has signed into law, the groundbreakings that are happening for new plants all over the country, and the path forward from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting to even better job growth in the future.

BASH: Senator, you are in Europe now. You're meeting with NATO allies. I want to ask about the U.S. commitment to funding Ukraine. I don't need to tell you, Congress has already approved $100 billion, actually more than that to help Ukraine last year. President Biden just said this morning that Vladimir Putin is absolutely weakened in the wake of the uprising over the weekend. How quickly does Congress need to act to capitalize on this moment in Russia?

COONS: Well, what's most important is that the brave Ukrainian fighters who are on the front line with new equipment, with new training, make progress. The distraction, the weakening of Putin's regime and of the Russians on the frontline in the area of Ukraine that they have brutally occupied. That weakness should create a moment of opportunity here.

We also need to stand strongly with our European allies and partners in continuing to support the Ukrainians who are taking the fight to the Russians. I've had a series of meetings here with European leaders, with our NATO partners and allies, they have contributed significantly.

[12:25:00]

They've taken in huge numbers, millions of Ukrainian refugees. They are providing direct economic support, billions indirect economic support to the Ukrainian government and they have matched the United States in terms of their overall investment.

In some cases, they've even been forward leaning in terms of providing advanced equipment like tanks that are critical to the counter offensive that's currently underway. So, I'm here with a bipartisan group that was providing encouragement and reassurance to our European partners, because I believe deeply in President Biden's leadership, and I frankly, Dana, I think that's part of what caused this weekend uprising by promotion and the Wagner troops.

They took enormous losses in the fight for Bakhmut. There is now fissures or cracks in the Putin regime fights internally between different segments of their military. And I think that's partly happened because of President Biden's very capable leadership, holding together the NATO alliance in the face of Russia's aggression.

BASH: Senator Chris Coons, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

COONS: Thank you, Dana.

BASH: And House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tries to clean a mess of his own making. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:30:00]