Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

E-Mails Between Clinton And Powell Released; Trump: I'll Release Taxes If Hillary Releases E-Mails. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired September 08, 2016 - 07:30   ET

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

TAKANO: As I said, there's been a robust debate within the Armed Services Committee among both male and female members of Congress. A lot of...

CAMEROTA: But what's the answer?

TAKANO: Well, the answer for the moment is to keep these prosecutions within the chain of military command. The military commanders have been successful in arguing to the policymakers to give them a chance to get it right.

And they know very much that hanging over their heads like a sword of Damocles is the possibility that will take it out of their hands and put it into a civilian court. So right now, Congress is giving the military the benefit of the doubt to go back and get it right.

CAMEROTA: Congressman Mark Takano, thank you very much. Great to have you on "New Day" with your take on last night.

TAKANO: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Let's get to Chris.

CUOMO: All right, so the e-mails came up in this commander-in-chief forum last night, obviously talking about Hillary Clinton's use of the server. And now, there's a big piece of the puzzle that you didn't hear about last night but you're going to hear about on "New Day" coming up.

The e-mail from Colin Powell to Hillary Clinton -- what did he say about what she should do and what she should avoid? A closer look at the messages next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: So the House Oversight Committee released an e-mail exchange between Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of State Colin Powell in the hopes of shedding light on what Colin Powell told Hillary Clinton to do about the use personal e-mail. Let's bring in David Gregory.

He's our CNN political analyst and host of the "David Gregory Show" podcast.

Hi. DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Hi there.

CAMEROTA: This answers a lot of questions, actually, and raises some new ones.

GREGORY: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Because Colin Powell had lately denied that he was the person giving her the blueprint for what to do about her personal e- mail.

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: Here was his denial. He said, "Her people have been trying to pin it on me. The truth is, she was using the private e-mail server for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did."

It turns out that's not true according to Congressman Elijah Cummings, who released this e-mail exchange. He says two days into her assignment as secretary of state, she contacted Colin Powell to say, "Hey, how do you deal -- deal with this with personal e-mail?" And he gave her the blueprint.

GREGORY: Right. He gave her the blueprint. Let me point out again, my wife, Beth Wilkinson, is an attorney, represents Hillary Clinton's aides in the e-mail investigation, not the former secretary herself...

CAMEROTA: Of course (ph), so you have the scoop. So what is the real scoop, yes (ph)?

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: Yes, yes, right. So I don't actually have the real scoop. But in this case, I mean, it's hard for me to decipher how long, you know, based on this she was still using the private server.

What is clear is that she did reach out. She wanted to get information on how to handle her personal communications. And that's what he's counseling her on, which is to be careful about doing it.

But here is a way that I did it. He's definitely offering her that advice.

CAMEROTA: Here are some of the things he tells her according to these new e-mails. He's talking about blackberries, palm pilots. He said they gave out signals and could be read by spies, et cetera.

That's what the State Department was worried about.

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: "I had numerous meetings with them, the State Department. They never satisfied me. And the NSA, CIA wouldn't back off.

So we just went about our business and stopped asking. In other words, here he is expressing frustration with how tightly controlled they wanted his e-mail to be.

GREGORY: That's right, which is -- and so in this case, Hillary Clinton is trying, just as he was, to find a way to have private communication that wouldn't trigger the law, that wouldn't become public record. Again, still a matter of dispute as to whether, you know, he was ever using a private server.

He was not. He was using a private telephone line, he says. And...

CAMEROTA: A personal computer attached to a private telephone line...

GREGORY: Right, right.

CAMEROTA: ...we now know. So he was sort of jerry-rigging (ph) his own system as well.

GREGORY: Right. He's not -- just to be (ph) -- it's not clear to me whether, you know, State Department rules -- well, we know State Department rules did not allow for the private server. Her level of knowledge about that based on her conversation with him is not a hundred percent clear to me.

CAMEROTA: Here is where he talks about warning her about what could happen with her personal e-mails. Colin Powell tells her, "There is a real danger.

If it is public that you have a Blackberry and it is a government one, and you're using it, government or not, to do business, it may become an official record and subject to the law. Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data."

I mean, he's...

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: ...warning her that this will be a problem. And she, it sounds like, interpreted this to mean, OK, I'll set up my own system.

GREGORY: Yes. Look, what's not in dispute is that this was not illegal, right, because the FBI said, there was nothing that was illegal that she did here and didn't recommend any charges. What's also not in dispute is that this was really bad judgment on the part of Hillary Clinton, regardless of what advice she was getting from former Secretary Powell.

And she's admitted that as well. What's also clear is that, you know, anybody who's a high government official is looking for a way to have some private communication and that became even more complicated, even since 2008, in terms of how we treat e-mail and the vulnerability of e-mail.

Of course, President Obama went through this as well where initially, he wanted to have his own Blackberry as well.

CAMEROTA: Well, what does this change? Now that we know that Colin Powell did try to say, hey, this is very dicey...

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: ...and by the way, the State Department -- Department is all up in your business...

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: ...and you should try to do something so that they're not, what does it change in terms of our perspective on how she handled this?

GREGORY: You know, I don't think it changes a lot. The political war over this, why she made a decision to delete thousands of e-mails, which was a mistake, why she handled this, the explanation of this, the accountability for this in such a poor manner -- that's still going to be political grist for the mill.

Again, what's important is that there was nothing illegal about this. And...

CAMEROTA: I mean, is -- is that right because -- is nothing prosecutable the same as nothing illegal? I mean, the fact that the FBI said you'll never win this case and...

GREGORY: Right.

CAMEROTA: ...we can't prosecute, that that was their recommendation, doesn't that still mean that something improper and possibly legally suspect happened?

GREGORY: No. In our system of justice, the FBI investigates. And if you don't recommend charges, then you don't charge because there's no case there. That is our system of justice.

It is striking to me that the FBI director does something that he would normally never do, which is talk publicly about why he didn't decide to recommend charges and why the Attorney General Loretta Lynch is not standing up for judicial independence. Whatever your politics, our justice system is such that if you don't decide to charge somebody, you don't talk about it.

In this case, this is completely in the political environment. And so this is going to keep being debated. And you have members of Congress who apparently believe in judicial independence, who are calling for this to be relitigated and reinvestigated, which again, is not our system.

CAMEROTA: David Gregory, thanks so much.

GREGORY: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Great to get your insight. Let's get over to Chris.

CUOMO: All right, thank you very much. Governor Mike Pence is ready to release his tax returns. Donald Trump still refuses. Does Trump have something to hide?

We're going to ask one of the few people who have actually seen Trump's tax returns, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: When the audit is complete, I'll release my returns. I have no problem with it. In the meantime, she has 33,000 e-mails that she deleted.

When is she going to release her e-mails? She probably knows how to find it. Let her release her e-mails and I'll release my tax returns immediately.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CUOMO: No, he won't. And his campaign and surrogates came out quickly to say, well, no, no, no, you know, he still has that audit. There's a lot of pressure on him to release his taxes for the obvious reasons.

Candidates for president have done this since Richard Nixon who started the practice and doing so under audit. So is he going to release them? No. What does that mean?

And why might he be doing that? Let's discuss that with two people who have unique perspective on this situation. We have executive editor at Bloomberg View and author of "Trump Nation: the Art of Being the Donald," Timothy O'Brien.

Also joining us, the co-author of Trump's "The Art of the Deal: the Seminal Work of Donald Trump," Tony Schwartz.

It's good to have you both here. The simple question, do you believe that Trump is trying to hide things and that's why he's not releasing his taxes?

TIMOTHY O'BRIEN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, BLOOMBERG VIEW: Of course he is. And -- and I don't think he's going to release them because of that. I think the stuff that's in the returns, Chris, is going to go right to some foundational myths that he's campaigned on.

His success as a businessman, whether or not he's a generous philanthropist, the kinds of financial and business pressures he'd come under should he enter the oval office, you know, we know as (ph) the executive isn't beholden to a lot of the same conflicts of interest laws that everyone else in the federal government is. He'd have a lot of latitude as president to wheel and deal from the oval office.

And I think the tax returns are a demonstrable record of -- of -- of his business wherewithal and his business operations. And for those reasons, I don't think he'd want to make them public. CUOMO: Now, as somebody who was tasked with figuring out how to

translate what he thinks onto the page, you know, trying to really give shape to what he thinks, when Donald Trump says I'm under audit, nobody would give their taxes under audit, well (ph), he has to know or someone had to tell him. That's what Nixon did.

He was under audit and gave them (ph). And then he'll say, well, I get audited all the time by the way because I'm such a strong Christian. That type of tactic on the taxes, where is that coming from with this with man?

TONY SCHWARTZ, AUTHOR: An utter contempt for the truth. A belief that you can say anything and that that's acceptable, even if it's patently false -- we saw that last night throughout the 30 minutes. Trump will lie with impunity and reflexively.

And he does it on the taxes. But he did it in five different ways last night. And what he's done is he's made telling -- telling lies acceptable.

CUOMO: You said this about when -- when -- when the idea of him being against the Iraq war -- now, people who support him say, why do you harp on this so much? The war was wrong.

He's against the war. Isn't that good enough? And obviously, the answer is no, because when you're testing somebody as a potential leader, you want to know where their head was on key judgments.

You weren't surprised. You said, of course, he'll keep doubling down and saying he was against it, even though there is no proof. Where is the confidence coming (ph) in doubling down?

SCHWARTZ: It's the -- I would actually -- I would actually describe it, Chris, as an absence of conscience. So if he believes that it serves him well to say he was against the war, you can show him a videotape of him saying, I was actually for the war and he'll say, well, that actually, no, that didn't happen, and -- and in his own mind, virtually believe it.

(CROSSTALK)

O'BRIEN: And he's gotten -- and he's gotten away with this for decades. I mean, this is a -- a pattern of behavior that he's deft in and he's -- has an unusual level of expertise because he's been able to lie or evade for decades without really being called on about it.

And I think in this election cycle, he's under a different kind of scrutiny.

SCHWARTZ: If you look at -- if you look at what every person who spends time with Trump, unless they're really at a point of such abuse and so much battering, which will eventually happen if you deal with him, if you're part of his group, every person knows that he's lying. Every person who works for him knows who he is.

Mike Pence is releasing his tax returns. It's an explicit statement that this is what you should do. What's happened is that we have eliminated the idea that -- and we have focused on the notion that there's -- we can talk about Hillary Clinton in the same breath with Donald Trump.

The truth is, we ought to talk about Mike Pence or Hillary Clinton or Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush or Joe Biden -- any of them are over here with Hillary Clinton, and Donald trump is a man uniquely unqualified to be president.

O'BRIEN: And you know it's bled into his staff. You know, when -- when Katrina Pearson (ph) recently said that Trump didn't flip-flop on immigration...

(CROSSTALK)

CUOMO: He just changed the words.

O'BRIEN: ...he completely changed the words, you know, it's -- I mean, his staff is sort of has...

CUOMO: The burden of the spinmeister around a candidate is always a difficult one. And they can often wind up being handcuffed by what the candidate says. That may be a unique challenge when it comes to Trump to be sure.

But let me ask you this. He says if she releases the e-mails, I'll release my taxes. There's a problem with that premise. She has no e- mails to release.

She gave over whatever she has and whatever she didn't she (ph) destroyed...

(CROSSTALK)

O'BRIEN: And -- and you can say (ph)...

CUOMO: ...which you could criticize she shouldn't have deleted them.

O'BRIEN: And he's been saying this for 18 months. He's been saying for 18 months. This is not a new statement. When Hillary Clinton releases his (sic) e-mails, I'll release my tax returns.

In the interim, between 18 months ago and now, he said on three or four different occasions, OK, it's the right thing to do. I will release my returns. And then he hasn't.

SCHWARTZ: Right. Let me be very clear. Donald Trump will not release his taxes. He has defined it as too costly.

If Hillary were to, in some way, meet his challenge, he would find another way to say, well, I can't do it because of that. What he doesn't want to do, he's not going to do.

What he believes to be true, even if it's not, he's going to say is true. This is why he's a unique candidate for president of the United States. I mean, just the fact that last night, he said so many complimentary

things about Vladimir Putin ought to be a sign to his supporters that this is a man who wants to be a dictator. He wants to be able, like Putin, to declare the equivalent of Martial Law.

We can't have that person be president. And we oughten (ph) to put...

CUOMO: Tony, he says he just wants to be on good terms with someone so he can have a relationship and stop the obstructionism that we've been dealing with presently. But your point is well-taken.

I've got to leave it there. I appreciate your perspective on Trump as always. You, too, Timothy O'Brien. I lean on you for -- on your reporting on a regular basis.

It's good to have you both here.

O'BRIEN (?): Thanks, Chris.

CUOMO: Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: Chris, polls show that many voters do not trust Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. So which candidate lies the most? We will ask the people, keeping track of the truth in politics, that's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: All righty, fact or fiction -- the 2016 candidates both facing issues of honesty in this election and not faring well. You know why? Because they don't tell the truth enough according to the fact checkers.

We have a new CNN poll showing that 50 percent of voters said on Donald Trump or you've got 50 to 35. Read the numbers for yourself. Who's more honest and trustworthy?

Trump has the advantage. But that doesn't mean that people feel that any of them -- either of them are that trustworthy in general. So what did we see last night in the fact check?

And what does it mean on this race overall? We have a great guest for it (ph) to weigh in on this and what's happened to date. We have the deputy editor for PolitiFact, Katie Sanders.

Katie, it's good to have you here. So I love the different ways...

KATIE SANDERS, DEPUTY EDITOR, POLITIFACT: Good to be here (ph), thank you.

CUOMO: ...that you reconcile voracity on your side. I love the pants on fire index. What stood out to you last night about whose truthiness rose to the top?

SANDERS: We fact-checked several claims from last night. You can find all of them on our website. We have a pretty good wrap-up. But I think what stood out is that Donald Trump continued to say that

he opposed the Iraq war. And once again, we've rated this several times -- we rated that false.

He has not pointed to any evidence on the public record that shows he opposed the war before it started. He did start to oppose it while it was happening and when it wasn't looking so good.

But this continues to be not true.

CUOMO: Now...

SANDERS: On Hillary Clinton -- I'm sorry. Go ahead.

CUOMO: Go ahead, please. I was going to ask you that, on Hillary Clinton's side?

SANDERS: Yes, Hillary Clinton took some tough questions from Matt Lauer about her e-mails. But she made a really technical point about the classified markings and what -- and the e-mails that she got from those -- or that the e-mails that she -- she didn't receive any with the -- the classified header, if you will.

So we checked the claim about that as well.

CUOMO: And what would (ph) you say?

SANDERS: We found her wording was really careful. But it was leaving out part of the story, so we rated it mostly true.

CUOMO: Because you believe that her saying it didn't say classified on the top of it wasn't enough to explain the context of the decision she should have made?

SANDERS: Right, and she was still, you know, James Comey (ph) said she still received e-mails that were classified. They just didn't have that explicit marking and that she should have known that the information within them was highly sensitive.

CUOMO: Now, an easy (ph)...

SANDERS: Even if they weren't marked in that way.

CUOMO: ...understood. The interesting disparity that we have between PolitiFact and the polls is that in the polls I just showed, 50 percent of people believe that Trump is more truthful, more honest -- whatever word you want to put on it than Clinton. But what you have found with your pie charts that you do of truthiness, shows something else.

Let's put them up. What have you found in terms of these two candidates and their relationship with the truth?

SANDERS: Well, the pattern is actually, like you said, it's pretty much the opposite. Now, we have to stress that we don't fact-check everything they say. We're not academics who look at a random sample of statements and try

to figure out who was lying more. But of the statements we choose to fact-check because we think they're interesting or provocative, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have very different relationship.

Trump's statements are largely more inaccurate than Clinton's. It's kind of like an inverse. Clinton gets as many -- about as many statements on the correct side as Trump gets on the wrong side.

CUOMO: Is that because you cherry pick your choices and you overload on instances of what Trump says and you go easy on Clinton?

SANDERS: No, that's not why the -- the breakdown is that way. You know, I -- I don't know what's going through their heads. But I think if you look at their background, Trump is in his first election ever.

He comes from an entertainment background. And his focus (ph) -- he talks about harmless exaggeration. So maybe it's not surprising in that some of his statements aren't as kind of the weeds (ph) of policy detail or a lawyerly as Hillary Clinton's statements.

We've been checking Hillary Clinton since she ran for president back in 2007, 2008, which was our first election that we were covering. So we've always fact-checked her statements, especially when her statements sound dubious like on her recent comments about her e- mails.

But we don't, you know, we choose what we want to fact-check. But we're not just like letting things go on one side and not covering one candidate. We're covering them both pretty aggressively.

CUOMO: This election, we have never had two candidates with such low ratings when it comes to trust and honesty. Why do you think that is? We use terms like post-fact and post-truth.

What do those mean to you? What do you think our reality is today?

SANDERS: I think a few things. When we did our analysis, we compared our fact-checking of this election to 2008 and 2012. We weren't -- we weren't all that surprised.

We -- we knew that it felt like things were getting more inaccurate. But we didn't know until we looked at the numbers. And what we found was that in 2008, it was more honest than 2012.

Twenty-twelve, the statements were more honest than 2016. So do I think that means we're in a post-truth era? I've heard that a lot.

But I do think that fact-checking still matters. And I think that it's really widespread. You're seeing a lot of, you know, news organizations that don't specialize in fact-checking like we do.

Take that on, and we love seeing when journalists are calling out inaccuracies, you know, as quickly as they have been. I think that's -- that's the biggest service to voters. And I think what voters want. CUOMO: Any news organization that is not in the business of fact-

checking is not a news organization. Katie Sanders, you are helpful to the process.

It was good to have you on "New Day." Thank you very much.

SANDERS: Thank you.

CUOMO: All right, this was a big night. We got to see the two candidates on the same stage at different times answering tough questions about national security. Who came off more like a commander-in-chief?

Let's get to it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: I don't think the guy is qualified to be president of the United States.

TRUMP: Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble.

CLINTON: We have to defeat ISIS. That is my highest counterterrorism goal.

TRUMP: I have a substantial chance of winning. If I win, I don't want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.

OBAMA: This is serious business. And you actually have to know what you're talking about.

TRUMP: I think I would have a very, very good relationship with Putin...