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Trump Attacks Women Who Have Accused Him Of Sexual Misconduct; Trump Attends Appeals Court Hearing In E. Jean Carroll Case; Trump Attacks Judiciary After Appealing Carroll Verdict; Today: Judge To Decide If He Will Delay Trump Hush Money Sentencing; Harris Raises $361M In August, Nearly Tripling Trump's Haul; Trump Focuses On Battlegrounds Rather Than Trying To Expand Map. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired September 06, 2024 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00]

DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm Dana Bash, and we are following breaking news. You are looking at live pictures of Trump Tower where Donald Trump is speaking to reporters, which he has been doing for more than a half an hour at this time.

After leaving a New York City courtroom where his lawyers are pushing federal appeals panel to throw out the jury verdict that found him liable of sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. His focus so far has been attacking Carroll, and not just Carroll, other -- several other women who have accused him of sexual assault or sexual misconduct over the past several decades. He has been attacking them and their stories one by one.

I am lucky to be surrounded by legal and political experts, CNN's Paula Reid and Elliot Williams, as well as Kristen Holmes and Jeff Zeleny. We're going to monitor this and go back in because I really feel that it's important for our viewers to hear some of the way that he is talking and continuing to talk as we speak, because we have the benefit, as I said, of fact checkers and people to put everything in context.

Let's just start with -- again, this is about E. Jean Carroll. He did not have to be at this hearing. He wanted to be there. He wanted to be there to come out and to talk to reporters, which he is doing right now. But he is not just making this about E. Jean Carroll. He is bringing up, unilaterally, one by one, stories of women who allege that he made unwanted sexual advances and more to towards them.

Let's just give you one example, one snippet of what we have been hearing from the Republican candidate for president, a former president who wants the job back again. He's been talking about this kind of thing for more than a half an hour. Here's an example.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: She said, in 1979 I was in an airplane with her, commercial flight, and we became very intimate, and she said I was making out with her. And then after 15 minutes, and then she changed her story a couple of times. Maybe it was quicker that I grabbed her at a certain part, and that was when she had enough.

Now, so think of the impracticality of this. I'm famous. I'm in a plane. People are coming into the plane. And I'm looking at a woman, and I grab her, and I start kissing her and making out with her. What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances? And frankly, I know you're going to say, it's a terrible thing to say, but it couldn't have happened. It didn't happen, and she would not have been the chosen one.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: She would not have been the chosen one. This is Donald Trump, two months out from a campaign where women are trying to decide who to vote for, particularly in the suburbs of key swing states. And he is going one by one against women who have made allegations against him, and not only denying them which is his right to do but impugning them and suggesting that they would not be worthy of his advances.

This in particular is Jessica Leeds, who in 2016 alleged that Donald Trump made unwanted advantage -- advances to her on a plane in the 1970s. And again, as you just heard, Donald Trump denied that. I won't get into all of the details here. I just want to talk about -- and by the way, we're monitoring this because he is still going off right now in this event.

Kristen Holmes, you talk to Trump sources all day long. Can you explain how they thought that this was a good idea for him to be doing, or the measures that they clearly unsuccessfully took to stop him from having this kind of event?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: OK. So, a couple of things, a lot to unpack here, obviously. Just to start with the reason that he is bringing up all of these women. So, the entire appeal is based on the fact that these women were allowed to testify in the E. Jean Carroll case, Jessica Leeds, as well as Natasha Stoynoff, who also accused Donald Trump of unwanted advances that he -- she forcefully kissed her at Mar-a-Lago in 2005.

[12:05:00]

John Sauer, who is the attorney for Donald Trump, is arguing that none of this should be allowed -- should have been allowed and that the decision was tainted because of -- he should have never allowed. The judge should have never allowed the Access Hollywood tape and clearly Donald Trump is freelancing here.

He is going off of whatever he heard in that courtroom, and now he is taking it and regurgitating it to members of the press. This was not, obviously, what was planned for today. I mean, spoke to a number of advisers. What is he going to say?

Now, it's always a risk for anyone who is close with Donald Trump to present a press conference that Donald Trump is speaking out without any topic --

BASH: And by the way he hasn't taken a question. HOLMES: He hasn't taken a single question. And that was also --

(CROSSTALK)

HOLMES: To be very clear, when I was asked about this by our own staff, whether or not he was going to take questions. The most likely answer is not a lot of them, because on a day like today where Donald Trump is sitting in court, this is exactly what he wants to be doing. He wants to just talk and talk and talk and claim that he is the victim, and that is something we have seen time and time again.

So, is this how they thought it was going to play out? No. Did anyone think this was a good idea in this, likely not. I'm not in touch with them right this second. They're all in the room with him. As we saw, his aides are flanking him in that Trump Tower press conference right now. But this is not what they told me he was going to be doing today.

BASH: So, I should say that the Trump lawyers, one of them, at least, I'm told has now taken the microphone and is making the legal case that you just described. Saying, that these other incidents, allegations should not have been -- should not have been included in the case in which he was found libel, this E. Jean Carroll case, which is part of their appeal.

Forgive me for my voice. I'm obviously losing it. Jeff Zeleny, I just want to say on the politics of this. How is this kind of rambling discussion about allegations of women against him. No matter if this is part of a legal strategy in a court of appeals or not in the court of public opinion on the campaign trail. How is this not a gift to Kamala Harris?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Look, it's not helpful to his campaign. I'm not sure if it's as big of a gift to Vice President Harris because we've heard it before, and so much of this is baked in. Voters out there are deciding upon this election. I mean, the sliver of voters who have -- who are still undecided are likely not to be swayed by anything shocking that the former president has done.

I mean, who could sort of get beyond the shock factor of what happened in 2016. I mean, in the final -- I think back eight years ago, really right now, during this point of the campaign, we all thought that -- or so many people thought that, you know, this was going to be politically devastating and dooming for him. It was not.

So, look, I think at this point, what I am more sort of intrigued by is how focused is he on the race at hand. He is very much in the middle of a very, very competitive race, a different race than he thought he would have. And what does this do to sort of advance his fight against Vice President Harris. It does nothing.

So, I'm not sure if it hurts him with his supporters. It doesn't, obviously, but you know, all this is fodder for the debate next week, but something has rattled him without question, and Vice President Harris is at this very moment. She's a debate camp in Pittsburgh, preparing for the biggest moment in the campaign next Tuesday. BASH: Now Paula, I do want to, of course, touch on the reason that he went voluntarily to this hearing -- at this first appeals hearing. And talk about the case in general, because there were two E. Jean Carroll cases. And I'll just put up on the screen. And I want to bring you in for our viewers, what we're talking about.

In this case, the jury awarded $5 million in damages. He was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump said the evidence, as we've been talking about, allow -- was allowed that shouldn't -- should have been excluded. A decision was not expected before -- the decision for the appeal is not expected before the election actually hold that thought.

We have Kara Scannell, who was inside the courtroom today. Kara, describe what you saw in that hearing?

KARA SCANNELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Dana. So, the whole hearing lasted less than 30 minutes. But when Donald Trump entered the courtroom, he had to walk right past E. Jean Carroll, who was sitting at the table behind with her attorneys. He didn't make any eye contact with her.

There was another table for him, and there was an empty chair just across the aisle from Carroll, maybe three feet away. He chose not to sit there. Continued walking to the far end, and then took a seat there, where he greeted one of the sketch artists in the courtroom.

Now the focus of this hearing was on their challenge to the judge's rulings. But his attorney, John Sauer began it by saying that this was a quintessential, he said, she said. A lawsuit funded by Trump's political enemies.

[12:10:00]

And at this point, one of the appeals court judges cut off Trump's lawyer and saying to him, you know, focus on the arguments -- that legal arguments that you have in this case. So really trying to steer him back from more of the inflammatory statements and focusing in on what they were here to talk about. The lawyers each had 10 minutes each, so they had to make their arguments quickly.

And one of Sauer's main arguments relates to Jessica Leeds. One of the women who testified at the trial, who said that Trump had groped her on an airplane in the 1970s. And John Sauer Trump's attorney argued to the judges that it wasn't illegal then. It wasn't a crime to grope a woman or sexually assault someone on an airplane.

When E. Jean Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan, got up, she argued to the judges that it actually was a crime then to assault anybody on an airplane in the 1970s. So, technical arguments here about whether the testimony of Jessica Leeds, and another accuser should have come into the trial.

They also argued about the Access Hollywood tape. And on that tape, of course, Trump is quoted off mic. You can hear him discussing how he gropes women and grabs women just because he wants to. So, these are the nature of the arguments.

But at the outset, one of the appellate judges had said to Trump's attorney, you know, it is very hard to overturn a jury's verdict based on evidence decisions made by the trial judge. So already laying down that this is a high hurdle for Trump to meet in order to get a new trial in this case.

Now interestingly, you know, this is the case that involved the finding of sexual abuse and defamation, and the jury awarded Carroll $5 million. There was that second trial earlier this year where the jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million for defaming -- for Trump having defamed Carroll by repeating many of these same statements, the statements that he is actually repeating right now at this press event that he's holding.

So, he's repeating a lot of the statements that two juries have found to be defamatory. I reached out to Carroll's attorneys. I haven't heard back on that point yet. But clearly, you know, a day that got under Trump's skin in court today, less than 30 minutes, he didn't respond to reporters' questions in the brief moments that he was passing by us. So, no response from him inside, though, of course, he's saying plenty outside. Dana?

BASH: Thank you so much for that. And really, really interesting color about what happened in that courtroom. And also, that last point that Kara made Paula Reid about the fact that what he is doing, got him in so much trouble, 83 and change.

(CROSSTALK)

BASH: That was a costly set of statements that he's repeating right now.

PAULA REID, CNN CHIEF LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Certainly, he is the client from hell. But to be honest, no one in America is talking about E. Jean Carroll. I covered this for a living. And this morning, this was probably number three on the list of biggest stories that I'm covering.

He is bringing the attention to her and to this case, relitigating this in the court of public opinion. This is his choice. This has been their plan for a while. He is not attending most of his legal hearings, because we know, there's a lot going on in his legal portfolio, but I was told he will attend certain appeals. And I asked why. They said, look, they're important to him.

But the fact of the matter is, Dana, any minute he is going to get some really serious legal news. And that is an answer on whether he will or will not be sentenced in his New York criminal case before the election. That is serious. And yesterday, he got some really bad news from Judge Tanya Chutkan that were never received before seen evidence in the January 6 case, will likely be released before the election.

So, he has some really damaging potentially events happening on his legal calendar. So, the fact that he's spending all his time, all of this energy, all of this oxygen on E. Jean Carroll, it's a choice. Clearly, it's a poor one personally, potentially politically, but it may also just distract him from the really serious things he could be facing over the next 48 hours.

BASH: Elliot, pick up on the second case of the three that you talked about. Because right now the plan is for the sentencing or the guilty finding, 34 counts guilty, that sentencing is supposed to be the 18th, so next week. So what Paul is referring to is whether or not that's going to still happen next week, or whether it will be delayed till after the election.

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Right. And what we saw just yesterday from another judge saying, this was Judge Chutkan in Washington D.C., saying that she did not care about the election, that ultimately the legal system had to carry on as it was going to do when she was --

BASH: That they might care.

WILLIAMS: They might. That they might. And this is that each judge, as his lawyers would say, sweet, generous, their own little world and they control their courtrooms. Now, to be clear, whatever happens in New York is going to be appealed on any number of bases.

Number one, the former president will have a right to appeal whatever his sentence is. But number two, he's probably going to raise an appeal based on the fact that, I'm the president of the United States.

The Supreme Court has now weighed in on this issue, and maybe I shouldn't have been sentenced in the first place at all. So, whether the judge sentences him on September 18, or at some point in the future, we're not done seeing the end of this litigation. And the courts have not finished weighing in on.

[12:15:00]

ZELENY: We've certainly seen Donald Trump try and conflate very separate legal cases over the years. To me, that's also what he's doing right here now, is just doing the windup act that we've seen that everything is against me. And of course, these are separate cases. He does not have to be there. He didn't have to be at the E. Jean Carroll case. But to me, it's just -- he's giving fodder to his supporter.

WILLIAMS: What's truly remarkable about this press conference that he's doing now. And Kara picked up on this a little bit. It's really hard to overturn a jury verdict that the standard is called abuse of discretion. You have to find that the judge's ruling was so bad that it abused his discretion.

As a judge, that's a really high burden to meet. He's most likely, can't say, you know, who knows, most likely going to lose this one. So, this is really just personal bluster and attacking women, not really making the strong legal case that he could make in any of the other ones that he had.

HOLMES: Well, and just one quick thing, because I know we're talking about the politics as well. This is the opposite of what his campaign has been trying to do for the last several weeks. They've put him in smaller venues with smaller crowds, with speeches that they say are supposed to be on message, whether it's the economy or immigration.

They have put him in press conferences, but they have tried to narrow the scope of each one with a focus. Again, it's Donald Trump, so it's as much focus as you're going to get from the former president. But it is certainly not this. It is not him freewheeling with no topic and listing off the laundry, list of grievances that he feels from everybody who has betrayed him in the last, however many years.

BASH: Yeah.

HOLMES: So, the entire kind of system that they've tried to build around to present him as someone who could be president, now you have him standing here, just doing whatever he wants.

BASH: And I take your point from earlier about the fact that the Access Hollywood tape did not move the needle. It didn't even seem to move the needle with critical female voters. I just wonder if -- now, because of other factors --

ZELENY: It's a different campaign.

BASH: A different campaign, a different time in the gender gap is very big.

ZELENY: Right.

BASH: Don't go anywhere because we're going to continue to monitor what is happening in New York. But up next, we are going to turn to a stunning hall. Kamala Harris raised more than $360 million, just let that sink in, $360 million in August, triple Donald Trump's total. The question is, will those dollars translate to votes?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:20:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BASH: The money is pouring in for Kamala Harris. The vice president announced her campaign raised a whopping $361 million in August, nearly tripling the Trump campaign's pretty large haul. In and of themselves, that's $130 million.

CNN's Eva McKend is in Pittsburgh, where Harris is hold up preparing for next week's debate. Eva, I'm guessing the campaign is very happy about the money, but also understands that there are stakes that are far more wide reaching than money right now.

EVA MCKEND, CNN NATIONAL POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. Dana. Let's run through the numbers. $361 million for August alone. $404 million cash on hand. $615 million since July, the launch of the campaign. It is an extraordinary amount of money. But yes, big money doesn't necessarily translate to big votes. But what it does, is it allows the vice president to compete in a very specific way. We know from covering politics that the biggest currency in a campaign is the candidate's time. Well now, she doesn't necessarily have to be beholden to these big glitzy fundraisers. She can spend that money on rallies or in community, doing smaller campaign events.

So, the campaign likes where they are on that front. They do believe that they are well positioned, and they are touting that a lot of this money is from small donors. People who are newly engaged in the process.

So how are they going to use all of this money? We're going to see a lot of it on TV and digital advertising. They're also going to use it to shore up campaign staff and shore up the field offices that they have across the country. Despite all this, though, they routinely say they still view themselves as the underdog, and they understand, Dana, that in the coming weeks, this is going to be a hard-fought contest until the very end. Dana?

BASH: Sure. Well, Eva, thank you so much for that reporting. I appreciate it. My great team of reporters is here with me. And Jeff Zeleny, you've covered a few campaigns, as have I. Money is always a key issue. As Eva said, one of the biggest challenges is how much of the candidates time you need to devote to raising money.

That's I would assume, the fact that they have more than $400 million cash on hand. They can kind of take their foot off the gas on that -- on that line of scheduling. But can you just again, put into context this money and what it actually means when you're trying to get votes. Because we've had underfunded candidates win for president and down ballot, many, many times that I can remember, money didn't always matter.

ZELENY: Right. Without question, I mean, money does not win elections, but without it, you cannot get your message out. And so, Eva's there in Pittsburgh, the vice president in Pittsburgh. Let's talk about Pittsburgh for a second.

[12:25:00]

Western Pennsylvania is really one of the most important slices of the geography -- here, it's expensive to put ads on television. At the steelers game, for example, over the weekend, and she is advertising there, that costs tens of thousands -- of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So, the reason that the money is important. This allows the Harris campaign, really to have a robust advertising strategy across all seven battleground states. They do not have to pick and choose where to spend money. They can spend full bore everywhere. So that is what the money allows them to do, as well as have a robust campaign operation.

They have more offices out there -- a huge amount more than the Trump campaign. They've been less transparent about how many offices they have, but as I travel around the country, you see these big offices that costs money. So, the money here is important.

But even more important, perhaps than the top line is a statistic that from the month of August, of the 3 million donors, 1.3 million of them had never given money before. Those are small dollar donors. That means they can send in 25 bucks again. Should they want to?

So, look for debate night on Tuesday to be another big opportunity to raise money. So, she does not have to attend another fundraiser for the rest of the campaign if she doesn't want to. My guess is she'll do a couple to touch hands, but they've largely gotten the big dollar money. Now it's small donor money to grassroots money. But again, it doesn't win elections, but without it, you can sure lose.

BASH: Yeah. Those repeat customers are really key, those small dollar donors. Kristen, you and Steve Contorno have some terrific reporting that is very much related to this. And the headline, as Trump said he was expanding the battleground map, his campaign spending suggests otherwise.

Trump's campaign and his allies have reserved about $160 million in airtime this fall with nearly all of it planned for the same states that proved pivotal in the 2020 election, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, Trump's pull back from historically blue turf is reflective of a tightening race and a political landscape remade in the aftermath of the Democratic ticket shakeup.

As I'm reading that, I'm remembering talking to one of his pollsters at the RNC, and he was talking about New Jersey and Minnesota and Virginia. And that's obviously, according to your reporting, not being discussed.

HOLMES: No. This is now much more of a traditional race in the sense that the states that are always hanging in the balance. These critical swing states are back in play in terms of they are going to determine the election. There was a time when Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket in which they felt like they couldn't lose.

They felt like they had this opportunity to potentially expand the map to the Virginias, to the even New Jersey. That was like their real pipe dream there, Minnesota. They held events there. Everything has shifted with Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket. Now, if you talk to the campaign, they say nothing has shifted. This is just where they're spending money. But they weren't even spending money on ads when Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket.

Now you can see they're pouring all of these resources, and Donald Trump's travel has changed. He has been in Pennsylvania a number of times. He's going to be going back before you saw him doing events in Virginia, doing events in Minnesota. Nobody could understand why he was doing this. They truly believe they could expand the map.

Now this race, at least according to their finances, is focused on the same states that originally were going to be the states that determined the election and have determined elections in years past.

ZELENY: That's some red states, though Georgia and North Carolina.

HOLMES: And Georgia is a big one, because Georgia, I'm told, they are going to be all over the state. Obviously, we saw the kind of falling on his sword that Donald Trump did to the popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp there. They need him in that state. And that was a state that they just thought they were going to win when Biden was at the top of the ticket.

BASH: I want to weave back in the legal part of Donald Trump's fall because as we were just very, very starkly reminded, it is still a part of the campaign, and you cannot separate the two. Elliot, Paula was talking about the questions that are surrounding the allegations that he tried to overturn the election, the federal case and the revisiting that because of the Supreme Court decision on immunity. I want you to pick that back up.

WILLIAMS: No, absolutely. And the Trump team did not do particularly well yesterday in Judge Chutkan's court. She was sort of -- she appeared to be frustrated with some of the arguments they were making, and ultimately issued a ruling that will allow them the calendar favors Jack Smith's team right now.

Now, again, this is another case that because of the quagmire that the Supreme Court created this past summer, is not going anywhere anytime soon. There will be multiple appeals that will probably go up there. They don't necessarily have to take them on, and they may well not, but it's still a complicated legal mess that they left for all of us to try to sort out.

But again, right now, she put a thumb on the scale a little bit for Jack Smith and his team, by letting them sort of present the arguments that they think, where the president -- where they can bring evidence against the president and then we'll see what they do it.

REID: And they probably needed a win, because really the Supreme Court gutted their ability to hold that trial before the 2024 election.