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Confederate Flag to Come Down in SC; Interview with Sen. Lindsey Graham; Schwarzenegger Accused of Cronysim in Reducing Prison Sentence of Political Ally's Son. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired July 09, 2015 - 08:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:33:34] MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Here we go with the Thursday edition of the five things you need to know for your new day.

At number one, lawmakers voting to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse in South Carolina. Governor Nikki Haley calls it a new day. The flag could come down as soon as tomorrow.

Markets are looking to rebound today following that technical glitch that froze the New York Stock Exchange for hours yesterday. The outage adding to jitters overseas already building over the market meltdown in China and the ongoing debt crisis in Greece.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus asking Donald Trump to tone down his comments about immigrants. Trump not backing down, telling our Anderson Cooper the president is to blame for an influx of undocumented immigrants.

Baltimore's police chief is out of a job. The mayor firing Anthony Batts for his response to the April riots and a recent spike in the homicides.

About two million people are expected at a mass with Pope Francis in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It will get underway in about 90 minutes time. It is the second leg of his South American tour.

For more on the five things, be sure to visit newdaycnn.com for the latest.

Chris.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: All right, so the Confederate flag has flown in his home state since he was a toddler. So, how does South Carolina's senator and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham feel about it coming down and what about Trump elbowing people like him almost out of the race? His answers, ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:38:54] CUOMO: Big things going on. The Confederate rebel battle flag coming down in South Carolina, Donald Trump making all this noise on the GOP side of the presidential candidate ring. And guess who's in the middle of all of it? Senator Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina, and he joins us now on NEW DAY.

Senator, thank you for joining us.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you.

CUOMO: Let's start with the news that matters, certainly the flag coming down in your home state.

GRAHAM: I have lost you.

CUOMO: Oh.

GRAHAM: I'm sorry, I lost you there.

CUOMO: Can you hear me now, senator?

GRAHAM: I hear you now.

CUOMO: Beautiful. Let's start with the headline, the flag is coming down.

GRAHAM: Lost you -- lost you again.

CUOMO: Lost me again. Let's try a third time. Can you hear me now?

GRAHAM: Sorry, Chris, I can't hear you.

CUOMO: All right. Let me keep trying.

You know what we're going to do. Let me take a quick break. Let me get the senator on because this conversation is much better with two sides.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:43:19] CUOMO: Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina joins us now on the show.

Senator, can you hear me?

GRAHAM: Yes, I can.

CUOMO: All right. No more of this trick pretending you can't hear me because you don't like the question.

GRAHAM: Who are you? Who are you?

CUOMO: All right, so the news of the flag coming down in South Carolina, what does it mean to you?

GRAHAM: It means that we can move forward. It would be impossible, I think, to keep the flag up in (INAUDIBLE) state after the shooting. And Representative Horne's statement on the floor I think summed up why we had to move it. And it gives us a new start, sort of a fresh start. Let's take advantage of it.

CUOMO: Let's listen to Representative Jenny Horne because she did capture the emotions certainly.

GRAHAM: Uh-huh.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Could you ever have imagined this happening 10 years ago, five years ago, six months ago?

STATE REP. JENNY HORNE (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: No. The flag had been flying my whole entire life. And if you would have asked me last year if we would ever remove the flag from the statehouse grounds in my lifetime, I would have said there's no way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Now, you're a very seasoned man and politician. To what do you attribute how quickly you and so many others changed their minds about the battle flag?

GRAHAM: After the shooting, the flag became a symbol of this hateful young man and the families of the victims made this possible. The way they embraced the man who killed their loved ones with love and forgiveness. And Reverend Pinckney had been asking to remove the flag for quite a while. It made it impossible for my state and me not to embrace that request of removing the battle flag because it did become a roadblock to us moving forwards after the shooting.

[08:45:00] The day before the shooting Republicans and Democrats were OK with a compromise. After the shooting, nobody was OK with a compromise. And after the families embraced the shooter and demonstrated a kindness and love that I can't even imagine, representing my state better than I could ever hope to, the flag had to come down. And thank god it has.

CUOMO: So hopefully this move is a step in a direction that has many more steps to come.

GRAHAM: Yes.

CUOMO: And we'll be watching for that.

So we go from tolerance and an expression of it, to intolerance expressed in the form of Donald Trump. Do you stand by and listen to what he says with any idea of belief and acceptance? Do you take any of what he says as truth?

GRAHAM: No. I think it's just out of sheer ignorance, the comments he's making. Here's what I say, the 11-plus million illegal immigrants come here mostly to work. They come from poor and corrupt countries. The overwhelming, vast majority are good, decent, hardworking people trying to find a better life for them and their families. Among the 11 million, there are some bad people.

But he's got it absolutely wrong. This wave of immigrants, even though came here illegally, is just like every other group that came. They came here to do jobs that other people wouldn't do. They were looked down on and talked bad about. So when Donald Trump says these things, I want to let people know from all over the country that I've been trying to fix illegal immigration for a decade now, and that's not my view of the 11 million. We need to fix this problem, but the 11 million are not made up of rapists and drug dealers.

CUOMO: While you can say that Donald Trump is part of the problem, not the solution, is he the price that politicians like you must now pay for not getting anything done on immigration because he gives voice to the outrage if nothing else?

GRAHAM: Yes, I think he expresses frustration. But frustration doesn't cut it with me. I'll put my record up against Hillary Clinton or anyone else. You remember when President Obama ran in 2008 that he promised to fix immigration in the first year of his presidency? He never lifted a finger. We did Obamacare, we did the stimulus. We did Dodd-Frank. Hillary Clinton was a member of the United States Senator.

President Obama failed miserably when he had 60 Democratic senators, a Democratic controlled House, so the Democratic Party is to blame here too. But my party has quite frankly not risen to the occasion. And Donald Trump is digging a hole with Hispanics that, if we don't stop digging, we're never going to win the White House.

So at the end of the day, I'll put my efforts up of trying to fix immigration, at my own political detriment at times, because it needs to be fixed starting with the border.

CUOMO: Segue to going from that international situation to what we're dealing with with ISIS on the war. Let's use Trump as the segue. Because when you came up, he mentioned your views on foreign policy. Listen.

GRAHAM: Yes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "AC360": Lindsey Graham just today tweeted why would any group vote for a party if it embraces that view? I sure as hell wouldn't.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, look, Lindsey Graham -- I think he's always been very nice to me, but he wants to bomb everybody. All I know is every time I watch Lindsey Graham, he wants to bomb everybody. Let's bomb everybody. Lindsey Graham has his views.

Look, I'm very, very strong on the border. We have to create a country. We have a country. You don't have a country if you don't have a border.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: All right, forget about the definition of a state there at the end. But the "Lindsey Graham wants to bomb everybody". This is a nod toward your feeling that we should have more troops in there, that you wanted more of a surge, more American presence on the ground, which you know is unpopular with the American public. Do you stand by that?

GRAHAM: Yes, and I don't think it's unpopular with the American public to stop radical Islam from coming back to our shores. The strategy we've deployed in Iraq and Syria is a miserable failure. ISIL is not being degraded and destroyed. We've trained 60 people from the Free Syrian Army to go and fight ISIL inside of Syria while they recruit a thousand a month.

President Obama's strategy to degrade and destroy ISIL is not working. And I think radical Islam wants to hit us here at home, and Syria is a great launching pad.

So if I were president of the United States, we would have more troops inside Iraq to destroy ISIL inside of Iraq. And we'd put a regional army together to go in on the ground in Syria where the caliphate headquarters exist, and we'd have to be part of that regional army to destroy the caliphate.

There is no way I know, Chris, to defend America without some of us going back over there to do the fighting.

CUOMO: The problem is clear. But you want to give a nod to the complexity of the solution, right? President Obama --

GRAHAM: It is, yes, totally.

CUOMO: -- wanted to bomb Syria. You guys held him off on that, remember? It was too much, it was too extreme.

GRAHAM: No.

CUOMO: Putting boots on the ground there, Senator, we did that for a lot of years with great results in terms of killed on the ground, American included, but it didn't fix the problem.

GRAHAM: Right.

CUOMO: So is that the same direction to go again?

GRAHAM: The surge did work. I've been to Iraq and Afghanistan 35 times. I know exactly what works and what doesn't.

[08:50:03] We didn't have the right security footprint after we took Saddam down. We took the Iraqi army down. That was a mistake. I share blame for that. But the surge in 2008 and '09 did work. In 2011, President Obama was told to leave 10,000 troops behind. Iraq was in a good place security-wise. Political progress was moving forward in Baghdad. And when we pulled all of our troops out, Iraq deteriorated like I and others predicted.

So I know what does work, and you've got to stabilize Iraq. But if you don't get Syria right, you're going to lose Lebanon and Jordan, and you'll never fix Iraq without getting Syria right.. And we have no plan when it comes to Syria. That's where we're most likely to get attacked from, is Syria. And we have no game plan in Syria. CUOMO: Senator, thank you for your thoughts about this. We're going

to see what happens with the Iran negotiation. I welcome you back on NEW DAY to discuss the outcome there. Please come back.

GRAHAM: Thank you.

CUOMO: Mick?

PEREIRA: All right, we're going to turn to California here. Arnold Schwarzenegger still taking heat for reducing the prison sentence of a political friend's son. Is it a case of cronyism over justice? The murder victim's father joins us next.

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PEREIRA: I'm going to take you back to 2008. 22-year-old Luis Santos was stabbed by Esteban Nunez after Nunez and a friend were denied entry into a party.

[08:55:00] Nunez, for his part, pleaded guilty in exchange for a 16 year prison term. But in early 2011, outgoing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger commuted Nunez's sentence to just seven years. Nunez happens to be the son of the Fabian Nunez, the former assembly speaker and political ally of Schwarzenegger.

Joining us this morning, Luis's father, Fred Santos, and the family attorney, Nina Salarno. Thank you so much for joining us. First of all, Mr. Santos, I know it's been some time, but that pain never goes away. I'm so sorry for the loss of your son.

FRED SANTOS, SON WAS STABBED TO DEATH IN 2008: Thank you. Thank you for having me on the show.

PEREIRA: Well, I know it's probably a hard thing to talk about. We had a legal setback to your case in June. The Sacramento superior court found, and I'll read this, that the judge said, quote, "We are compelled to conclude that while Schwarzenegger's conduct could be seen as deserving of censure amid grossly unjust, it was not illegal."

That must be a very tough pill for you to swallow, to know that they felt it was unjust, yet it was not illegal.

SANTOS: Yes. It was very disappointing decision for us. And it is more disappointing because they were really basing the decision on a single word, a definition, or their definition of a single word of what "proceeding" means. To me, proceeding means that certain actions were taken and what the governor did, the governor took certain actions and that is a proceeding. But according to the judges, that is not a proceeding.

PEREIRA: Nina, I'll get you to explain what he means by this proceeding, because it all comes down to Marcy's Law, which is also known as the Victims Bill of Rights Act, and you feel it was a violation of that law, correct?

NINA SALARNO, ATTORNEY FOR SANTOS' FAMILY: Yes, it's been our contention ever since that it was a complete violation of a constitutional right to victims to be heard before there's any change in a sentencing. And what Mr. Santos was referring to is the court is hanging their hat on that the word. "Clemency" or "Commutation" was not written in Marcy's Law, yet there's a very broad definition to say any change in any sentence and asks the rights of the victims. And it's our contention that the appellate court was wrong and we're on our way to the California supreme court to prove our point.

PEREIRA: You're taking this, as you mentioned, to the California supreme court. Well, it's interesting because very soon of that, back in 2011, Mr. Santos, the California legislature changed -- passed a law actually saying that they require the DA to be given at least ten days' notice that a commutation has been filed. Would that have made a difference to you, sir, in terms of that? Would the ten days notice that he was going to commute the sentence of your son's killer, would it have changed your loss at all?

SANTOS: That -- it's hard to tell. At least it would have given us a chance to plea our case with the governor, to try to convince him not to issue the commutation. But we were never given the chance as required by Marcy's Law.

PEREIRA: Is it true that then Governor Schwarzenegger reached out to you to apologize?

SANTOS: He did write us a letter after the media started making inquiries and after we started complaining that we have never heard a single word from the governor's office. And then a token letter was written to my family.

PEREIRA: And that didn't sit well with you, did it, sir?

SANTOS: No, it did not. He claimed to understand how I felt. And I don't think he is capable of feeling how my family feels when our son is murdered and a politician does a favor to his friend by reducing the sentence of the son's murderer.

PEREIRA: And, Nina, that's your big complaint in this. You say this is dirty politics, this is cronyism at its worst.

SALARNO: It is absolutely dirty politics at its source. It's definitely cronyism, dirty politics, at its best. There's so much to point to. The appeal was dropped within two months prior to the commutation. And there's never an appeal dropped by an inmate unless something, then all of a sudden now we have a commutation. It was definitely backdoor politics in California.

PEREIRA: Nina Salarno, thank you so much for talking about this. We know it's something that you're taking very seriously and taking to heart. Mr. Fred Santos, we send our best to you and your wife. Again, our condolences of the loss of your boy.

SALARNO: And thank you for having us.

PEREIRA: We should also let you know that we reached out to former Governor Schwarzenegger. We did not hear back. We also invited Fabian Nunez to participate in the interview, but he was unavailable.

That wraps it up for NEW DAY at this hour. Whoa, that's a different show, isn't it, Chris?

Time for "NEWSROOM" with Ana Cabrera. She's in for Carol Costello. Good morning to you, dear.

ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR, "NEWSROOM": Fun times. Time flies. Good morning to you, Michaela.

The "NEWSROOM" starts now.