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Trump Says He Was Being Sarcastic About ISIS Founder; Do Trump And Clinton's Economic Plans Add Up? Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired August 12, 2016 - 07:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN GUEST ANCHOR: -- and thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Congrats to your son and to you as well.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You're so welcome.

KEILAR: And we're following a lot of news, so let's get to it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: President Obama is the founder of ISIS. They must love him. He's the founder and she's right there with him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The press' coverage of him is so unfair.

HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He wants America to work for him and his friends.

TRUMP: Aren't e-mails a wonderful thing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gold rush for Team USA. Phelps is now 4 for 4 at the Rio games.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Simone Manuel became the first African-American swimmer to win Olympic gold.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast ever.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This was all about the gold for the red, white, and blue.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Welcome to your NEW DAY. Alyson is off. Brianna Keilar is joining me. What a great week. Thanks for being here.

KEILAR: Of course, my pleasure.

CUOMO: Appreciate. All right. Up first in the election, Donald Trump now says he was being sarcastic when he falsely claimed President Obama and Hillary Clinton are the founders of ISIS. He said it in a tweet this morning while watching this show. However, he kept doubling down when people were trying to let him say he was being sarcastic about it. It has raised concerns about the campaign, and we'll take you into those.

KEILAR: Meantime, e-mail questions continue to haunt Hillary Clinton's campaign. The latest on ties between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Is this a relationship that caused a conflict?

Let's begin with CNN's Athena Jones. She's live in Washington for us. Good morning, Athena.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Brianna. Here we are ending another week that has been dominated by the outrageous statements of the Republican nominee. As Chris just mentioned, now on Twitter just a little while ago, Trump seemed to walk back his latest favorite line of attack against the president and Secretary Clinton, saying, that he's just being sarcastic. This after repeating this over the top dig again and again all day yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I call President Obama and Hillary Clinton the founders of ISIS. They're the founders.

JONES: Donald Trump refusing to back down from his latest controversy.

TRUMP: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, these are the founders of ISIS.

JONES: Despite growing concern within the Republican Party about the effect his rhetoric could have on vulnerable congressional races.

TRUMP (via telephone): All I have to do is stop funding the Republican Party. I'm the one raising the money for them. In fact, right now I'm in Orlando. I'm going to a fundraiser for the Republican Party. So if they want to do that, they can save me a lot of time.

JONES: Sources tell CNN that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus denied he was considering shifting funds from Trump's presidential bid to down ballot races, but he did speak to Trump about his tone. This after Trump spent an entire day repeating a false claim that President Obama literally is the founder of ISIS.

TRUMP: He's the founder of ISIS. Barack Obama is the founder.

(via telephone): I meant, he is the founder of ISIS, I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award.

JONES: Back in February during a CNN town hall, Trump placed the blame for the rise of ISIS squarely on the Iraq war.

TRUMP: The war in Iraq started the whole destabilization of the Middle East. It started ISIS. It started Libya. It started Syria. In all fairness, Bush made the decision.

JONES: The Republican candidate also making waves this morning for saying he would allow American terror suspects to be tried at the military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.

TRUMP: Well, I know that they want to try them in our regular court systems, and I don't like that at all. I would say they could be tried there. That will be fine.

JONES: As for his rival, Trump continuing to raise questions about the nature of the State Department's relationship with the Clinton Foundation.

TRUMP: Aren't e-mails a wonderful thing? Right? What a great invention. When you go home, I'm not going to do it because if I mention it, they'll play it down. So I'm not going to mention it.

JONES: Meanwhile, Clinton hitting Trump's economic plan, accusing the billionaire of using his campaign to benefit the rich.

CLINTON: He called for a new tax loophole. Let's call it the Trump loophole.

JONES: With less than three months until Election Day, Trump already entertaining the possibility of losing in November.

TRUMP (via telephone): At the end, it's either going to work or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to have a very, very nice long vacation.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JONES: Now Trump campaigns in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is stepping up the pressure on him to release his tax returns. She plans to release her 2015 tax returns soon. Her running mate, Tim Kaine, and his wife will be releasing the last ten years of their returns.

[07:05:00]She's also releasing a new web video today featuring top Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, and Senator Ted Cruz all calling on Trump to release his returns -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right, thank you very much. Let's bring in Michael Cohen, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, special counsel to Donald Trump himself. Always a pleasure, Counsel. Thank you for being here. Congratulations on the birthday of your son. Got to celebrate the good things.

MICHAEL COHEN, EXECUTIVE VP, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: Big 17, right.

CUOMO: That's big. Your boss, Donald Trump, tweets this morning, says I'm watching the show. You guys are missing my sarcasm. When I say founder of ISIS, President Obama, I'm being sarcastic. But he has spent the last couple of days insisting that he's not being sarcastic.

Bill O'Reilly, Hugh Hewitt, giving him opportunities to say exactly that. What you mean is that Obama is responsible for their growth. No, no, no, they're the founder. So what are we supposed to believe when he says something like that?

COHEN: I think the best thing is if Mr. Trump called in, had a conversation with you himself.

CUOMO: Any time. Any time. The offer is open.

COHEN: There's nobody better to answer Mr. Trump than Mr. Trump.

CUOMO: The question is, should people have doubts about whether or not you can take him at his word?

COHEN: I think you do take him at his word for everything.

CUOMO: But that's how he got into this situation. No, I mean founder, I said founder.

COHEN: I watched your show yesterday with Mayor Giuliani. What he was talking about is how the mainstream media wants to pick on every single word. Again, I think Mr. Trump will answer this question better than anybody else. I think it should be left for him to answer.

CUOMO: We'll talk. I know you want to talk about the Clinton e- mails. Just to make a point --

COHEN: I'll tell you what I'd really like to talk about is her --

CUOMO: We'll talk about that as well. When she said short circuited, we're all over it for days. When she calls something a mistake instead of apologizing, we're all over it for days.

COHEN: But we're talking about when someone says that they short circuited, that's about themself. Mr. Trump is claiming that, you know, President Obama and Secretary Clinton are the founders of ISIS. What he's referring to, and he's talked about it so many times is, of course, the fact that ISIS grew and grew out of control and is now a threat to our national security.

CUOMO: But he muddied it. At the town hall, he blamed Bush for ISIS. In 2007, h, said to Wolf, we should get out of Iraq right now, which is now a strategy that he's criticizing in President Obama. So he's been all over the place on this.

COHEN: Well, I'm not so sure. I think he's --

CUOMO: You're very sure now. I just told you.

COHEN: That doesn't mean I believe that either.

CUOMO: You want to see it, 2007 with Wolf, here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: How do they get out? You know how they get out? They get out. That's how they get out. Declare victory and leave. Because I'll tell you, this country is just going to get further bogged down. They're in a civil war over there, Wolf. There's nothing that we're going to be able to do with a civil war. They are in a major civil war. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: Get out, that's what he's criticizing --

COHEN: But I don't think you saw the beginning. What he was talking about is economically it is a disaster to the United States, spending trillions of dollars that we do not have.

CUOMO: Fine. That's a rationale for getting out. Now he's saying it was a big mistake.

COHEN: But the clip is not in its entirety. It's a little unfair because, yes, maybe three or four seconds of that clip proves the point, but it doesn't prove what you're saying.

CUOMO: Getting out was either right or wrong. He says it was wrong. There he said it was right.

COHEN: The question I believe was about the fact that economically it was destroying this country. What Mr. Trump has always said is make America great again and putting America first. We can't afford to be the protectors of the world. They should pay us back, which is what he was always talking about. Take the oil.

He was talking about, you know, yes, get out because we were losing soldiers. Our American children, our soldiers, our money is all being depleted and wasted on protecting a country that probably really didn't even want us there.

CUOMO: Money is always a consideration in these things. We always refer to blood and treasure. Sometimes there are certain things that are more important than money. Those are decisions a president has to make. The question is --

COHEN: Not when you're $20 trillion now in debt and you have a Secretary Clinton who's sitting there and wanting to in her new plan talk about a $1.2 trillion increase to our already existing deficit. It's insane.

CUOMO: And the test for both of these candidates is what do you want to do and how are you going pay for it. Part of assessing that is when you tell me something, can I say, all right, that's what it is. Michael just said what it is. I know.

COHEN: You mean Mr. Trump.

CUOMO: That's what this founder thing is about. At the town hall with Anderson, he said Bush is to blame for ISIS. Now he says Obama is the founder of ISIS, which is several things. One, false. He's not the founder of ISIS. Everybody knows that.

[07:10:07]Two, it is inconsistent with what he has said in the past. And third, and this would be the worst implication, is that by saying Barack Hussein Obama is the founder of ISIS, it feeds into a narrative that Trump has been part of before, which is trying to undermine the credibility of President Obama as a patriot, as an American. COHEN: Let's also not forget who it was that was the original birther in the movement. It was the Clintons during the last campaign. They're the ones that started the entire birth certificate issue.

CUOMO: If that were true, I'll give it to you -- for the sake of the argument. There's plenty of argument to be had there. Does that make Trump doing it right?

COHEN: I don't know --

CUOMO: If somebody else was doing it, does it make right?

COHEN: When Mr. Trump first started speaking about the birther, it was a reporter that asked, what do you think about it? I don't know if he is or isn't.

CUOMO: You know he loved it and he never backed off. Now he won't talk about it.

COHEN: He's not the one who advanced it. The media advanced it because it came from Donald Trump. I think only Mr. Trump can answer and will answer for his tweet.

CUOMO: He's welcome on the show. He's said he won't come on to talk to me.

COHEN: I don't think that's true.

CUOMO: You don't think what's true?

COHEN: That he won't talk to you.

CUOMO: Then why hasn't he come on?

COHEN: He's been busy doing other things like campaigning.

COHEN: I like your explanation. I take your explanation as true. I hope we can schedule it very soon.

COHEN: I'll work on it as soon as I see him.

CUOMO: Thank you very much. So you want to talk about economics. Let's do so. What do you hear in the Clinton plan that you think is worthy of criticism and that shows Donald Trump is a better choice for president?

COHEN: First of all, Hillary Clinton has never created a job for anyone other than her daughter through the Clinton Foundation. This e-mail scandal is something I believe that the media, while you'll tell me that you have spent an enormous amount of time on it, I think you've spent more time on the gentleman that was climbing Trump Tower than they did on these e-mails.

This goes to the heart. She talks about temperament. Mr. Trump has exactly the temperament that the United States of America needs right now in order to put it back together. She hits all the buzz words last night. Her speech writers are fantastic.

The problem though is it lacks authenticity and lacks any sense of reality. She talks about we're going to create jobs. This woman has never created a single job in her entire life.

Donald Trump, tens and tens of thousands. His economic group that he's put together, millions of jobs around not just this country but around the world. We also talk about --

CUOMO: Is it a straight line analogy to say he created jobs in the private sector, therefore he knows how to do it in the public sector? It's very different.

COHEN: Why is it different?

CUOMO: One, you're doing it on a curve of profitability and --

COHEN: America needs to be profitable. How else are we going to reduce our debt?

CUOMO: Understood, but government is not run like a business. You do a lot of services through government because the private sector won't do them because you can't make money doing them.

COHEN: What about public/private partnerships?

CUOMO: Very good.

COHEN: Something Mr. Trump is also extremely well versed at.

CUOMO: How is he well versed at public/private partnerships? Just so people understand.

COHEN: He's been involved in public/private partnerships. Even the ferry golf project is a public/private partnership as his (inaudible), which, of course, he's famous for. Going back to her speech writers, she talks about Mr. Trump is negative, Mr. Trump is pessimistic. We're really not that bad.

She starts to talk about her dad that owned a lace company. Fifty percent of the people she's talking to out there in the public, they don't own their own company.

Actually, they may not even have a job at the present moment despite our 4.9 percent unemployment rate, which I have to agree with Mr. Trump emphatically upon, it's absolutely inaccurate. When you travel the country and you speak to people, they don't have the jobs.

CUOMO: It's not inaccurate. You're saying that it doesn't tell the whole story.

COHEN: It does not tell even part of the story.

CUOMO: The number is what it is.

COHEN: The number is made up. It's made up in order to make people feel good.

CUOMO: Hold on a second. The number is not made up.

COHEN: It is made up.

CUOMO: You can argue that you should look at labor participation or you can look at underemployment, fake.

COHEN: There's an old expression. Numbers don't lie, people do. It's how they manipulate the numbers in order to make the American people feel good. Why? Because she thinks it's going to then say, well, we're going to continue with the Barack Obama policies, which I believe have failed this country, and that's going to be her ticket into the White House. She starts talking about Mr. Trump's temperament. Again, he is exactly what this country needs.

CUOMO: How and why?

COHEN: Because he's a natural born deal maker. That's what this country needs. Our NAFTA is a disaster. We need to start making money from being the United States of America one way or the other. Just as everybody else.

[07:15:07]CUOMO: But is she wrong when she suggests that he is negative in saying that America is in a terrible situation?

COHEN: America is in a terrible situation. Our infrastructure --

CUOMO: Do you think America is the greatest country in the world?

COHEN: Absolutely, but we have so much potential to be so much more and we have to be more. Because if America is not great and America is not strong, the world is not strong. We're a moral country.

CUOMO: So you think America is the best country in the world, but you don't think it's great?

COHEN: OK. That's not what I'm saying.

CUOMO: I think message matters. Not for us so much, right? You're counsel, I'm a journalist. But when you're president of the United States, the message you put out matters. We were in rough shape when President Reagan said we're a shining city on a hill. Why? He wanted to put America at its best. Bring people together.

COHEN: You can't drop pixie dust on the American people's heads and tell them this is their fairy land. We are a great country. We have tremendous opportunity and possibilities. But we are not taking advantage of it because we don't have the leadership, and we need to be better, not just for ourselves but for the whole world. When America's strong, the world is strong.

CUOMO: True.

COHEN: Because that's who we are as a country. We need somebody, an outsider, who's not, you know, going to bow his head to foreign leaders, who's not going to allow special interest donors to control him. No one will control Donald Trump.

CUOMO: A little cozy to Putin for a guy who doesn't want to bow his head. Don't you think (inaudible) on Putin?

COHEN: Donald Trump and Vladimir -- Vladimir Putin is not a donor to Vladimir Putin. And by the way, we better get along with Russia because we need Russia in order to defeat ISIS and in order to stabilize the world. We can't go back to cold war situation where they're bad, we're good. We've become a global world. We're not just the United States of America anymore. We are involved in the world. We need Vladimir Putin in order to help.

CUOMO: Michael Cohen, Counsel, always making a strong case for Donald Trump. Appreciate you on NEW DAY.

COHEN: Thank you.

CUOMO: Please tell the boss he's welcome on the show whenever he wants.

COHEN: When I see him this morning.

CUOMO: Thank you very much, sir -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Open invite, that's right, Chris. New e-mails shedding light on the relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Was it too cozy, and could this damage Clinton now? We will be hearing from a Clinton supporter next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:21:32]

KEILAR: Donald $ump now claims he was being sarcastic when he falsely claimed President Obama and Hillary Clinton were the co-founders of ISIS. This amid questions about the ties between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.

Joining us now to talk more about this is Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton. He is an Iraq war veteran. He's also endorsed Hillary Clinton. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us.

REPRESENTATIVE SETH MOULTON (D), MASSACHUSETTS: It's good to be here.

KEILAR: You bring a unique perspective to this. You're a Marine veteran. You served four tours in Iraq doing counterinsurgency there. When you hear Donald Trump say this, just react to this because he was very adamant about the fact that Hillary Clinton and President Obama are the founders of ISIS and yet now he's saying that he's being sarcastic.

MOULTON: You know, Donald Trump has shown that he lies every single day. Then the next day he tries to claim it was sarcasm. He's completely reckless and unfit to be our commander-in-chief. I mean, what happens when he presses the nuclear button and then the next day says, oh, I'm sorry, I was just being sarcastic. It's ridiculous that we're even talking about someone like this being our commander-in-chief.

And it's dangerous for our troops. Let me tell you how this plays out on the ground in the Middle East. I was visiting the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan just three weeks ago.

These troops have to work every single day with our Afghan and Iraqi partners. In fact, we're trying to make sure that they take the fight to ISIS themselves.

But when Trump claims America is the founder of ISIS, that's something that ISIS uses against us. That's something that ISIS uses to recruit fighters, to recruit terrorists, to attack American troops.

It makes the work of our troops harder. And it just shows that Trump has absolutely no idea what it takes to fight ISIS, what it takes to be commander-in-chief, and he has certainly no clue what it means to put your life on the line for our country.

KEILAR: He's making a point, certainly not subtly, but he's also making a point that many critics of President Obama's have made, which is that pulling out of Iraq so quickly and so totally left a vacuum that ISIS was able to fill.

It's been different in Afghanistan. He's kept troop levels there. Does he have a point, though, that there was a vulnerability created by this administration?

I mean, you're someone who did counterinsurgency, trying to make sure Iraqi forces were ready to go, only to see American forces leave and sort of some of that work thrown away. Is there a point though that there should be this criticism of the Obama policy on Iraq?

MOULTON: Look, I've been someone who myself has said that we've made some mistakes in Iraq. But Trump has no plan to fix them. President Obama has shown that he knows how to fix the problem. That's why he's kept troop levels where they are in Afghanistan and that's why I've been pressuring him to make sure we have a political plan to ensure the peace.

Because as we all know it's not enough just to kill ISIS fighters because they can just recruit more. Trump has no plan to defeat ISIS. He says he has this super secret plan to defeat ISIS, and yet he won't even tell anyone what it is.

So he's totally unprepared to take on this fight and just by the statements he's making on the campaign trail, he is helping recruit terrorists to fight against our troops every single day.

KEILAR: He does have a lot of support from veterans though. Certainly some veterans support Hillary Clinton, but I think it's fair to say that a large chunk of them are supporting Donald Trump. What do you make of that? [07:25:10]MOULTON: Well, actually, I saw some statistics that veterans are donating a lot more money to Secretary Clinton's campaign because we know that Secretary Clinton is respected around the world.

Look, veterans are a diverse group of people. I would never claim to speak for all veterans. But when I was visiting the troops in the Middle East, I had several troops, quite a few actually, come up to me and say they wanted to know my opinion about the election.

Because they're concerned about what Donald Trump is saying on the campaign trail every day. You know, I was on a trip with Republicans, with colleagues on the Armed Services Committee.

In fact, I was the only Democrat there. I make a very important point of not trying to turn these things into political trips. But the troops came to me because they were concerned about the things that Trump is saying and how it hurts their work every single day on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

KEILAR: You are for Hillary Clinton. She's struggling right now when it comes to her e-mails. We know from new e-mails there's really quite a bit of an overlap between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when she was at the helm of the State Department.

You have a majority of Americans who don't believe that she is honest about her e-mails. How does she shake that, and how does she, I guess, turn away from what are really bad optics for her?

MOULTON: Look, this is all a Republican ploy to make a big deal out of nothing. The Justice Department, Director Comey, said there was no intentional wrongdoing with her e-mails. She alone -- she herself has admitted that she made some mistakes, but we're moving on from that. What the Trump campaign is trying to do is distract attention from the fact that he's --

KEILAR: So is it just created by Republicans? I mean, I look at it, the facts of the case, and I think there's something there that should be scrutinized. Is it really just Republicans piling on, or is this fair questions?

MOULTON: Look, it has been scrutinized. It has been scrutinized. It's been concluded that there was no intentional wrongdoing. That's what Director Comey said himself. So the fact that we continue to talk about this and distract attention from the important priorities of the day, the fact that Trump has an economic plan that Senator Kaine's own former Republican economic adviser says will put us into a recession and cut 3.5 million American worker jobs, that's a real problem.

And the Trump campaign doesn't have an answer to that. So they're just trying to focus attention back on Secretary Clinton's e-mails. Secretary Clinton has an economic plan that will grow the middle class.

She believes the engine of economic growth in America is the middle class in America. Trump believes the engine of economic growth is his billionaire pals on Wall Street and that's why his economic plan includes the Trump tax loophole, and other tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So what do you do when you have a situation like that and you're Donald Trump, where your economic plan is going to put the country into a recession, when your plan to defeat ISIS has no substance whatsoever and in fact is being used by ISIS to recruit attackers against American troops.

What will you do? You try to talk about Hillary Clinton's e-mails because that's the only argument he can make. We have to realize we have an important future ahead of us. We've got to grow the economy here at home, and we've got to defeat ISIS abroad.

Secretary Clinton has a plan to do both. Donald Trump does not. That's the only reason why he's talking about these old e-mails.

KEILAR: All right, Congressman Seth Moulton, thanks so much for being with us. We do appreciate your time -- Chris.

CUOMO: All right, the big question that we are talking about here is something that you heard the whole time you've been talking about politics in your own life, which is when can you take a politician at their word? That's the issue that's raised by the founder comment by Donald Trump. So what is the answer about Trump on this score? Can you take him at his word? Let's let the panel have at it next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)