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Trump Escalates 'Rigged' Election Claims; Melania Trump Speaks Out; Interview with State Department's John Kirby. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 18, 2016 - 07:00   ET

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

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Melania Trump decides to take to the airwaves, does interviews defending her husband. She does it with Anderson Cooper in a CNN interview. She says the women accusing him of unwanted advances are lying.

[07:00:13] There is so much at stake. We have just one day until the final face-off. Last time you'll get to see Clinton and Trump head to head. It's tomorrow night and just 21 days until the election. Let's begin our coverage. We've got CNN's Manu Raju live in Vegas -- Manu.

MANU RAJU, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris. Yes, Donald Trump really needs a stellar debate performance in this debate hall behind me tomorrow night.

Polls continue to show him struggling and losing, both nationally and in key battleground states, which is probably one reason why that Donald Trump repeatedly is saying that he's the victim of an unfair system.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: They even want to try to rig the election at the polling booths. People that have died ten years ago are still voting. Illegal immigrants are voting.

RAJU (voice-over): Donald Trump ramping up his unfounded claim that the election is rigged.

D. TRUMP: You look at what's going on in St. Louis and many other cities. There's tremendous voter fraud.

RAJU: His willingness to accept the election results if he loses now in question.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, TRUMP CAMPAIGN CHAIR: Mr. Trump would, if there is -- absent overwhelming evidence of any kind of fraud or irregularities.

RAJU: Trump frustrating many Republican leaders, who have rejected his allegations of rigging.

JON HUSTED (R), OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE: As a Republican, I want to reassure Donald Trump and all Ohio voters and voters across the country that the system is not rigged.

RAJU: The Republican nominee also intensifying his feud with House Speaker Paul Ryan after he said he wouldn't defend Trump.

D. TRUMP: Maybe he wants to run in four years, or maybe he doesn't know how to win. Maybe he just doesn't know how to win. I mean, who can really know?

RAJU: Trump taking his rage against the establishment, and Hillary Clinton, a step further in Wisconsin.

D. TRUMP: It is time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.

RAJU: Trump proposing a package of ethics reforms, aiming to tackle corruption in Washington, including tighter restrictions on members of Congress and White House officials taking on jobs as lobbyists.

D. TRUMP: This will go a long way to ending our government corruption.

RAJU: A proposal sparked by his accusations that the FBI and State Department engage in a criminal conspiracy.

D. TRUMP: This is felony corruption.

RAJU: After newly-released documents suggest a top State Department official pressured the FBI to declassify an e-mail about Benghazi that was on the private server Clinton used while secretary of state, possibly in exchange for offering to help station FBI agents overseas.

MARK TONER, STATE DEPARTMENT DEPUTY SPOKESMAN: The allegation of any kind of quid pro quo is inaccurate. There was no quid pro quo.

RAJU: Clinton is not commenting. She's been off the campaign trail for days, preparing for tomorrow's final debate.

Clinton's campaign now setting its sights on historically conservative states, as she widens her lead in the polls, deploying her daughter Chelsea, Michelle Obama, and Bernie Sanders to Arizona in hopes of turning that red state blue.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

RAJU: Now, part of that effort to go into those conservative states to deliver what the Clinton campaign hopes is a landslide victory come November and also help deliver the Senate to Democrats, this is part of an effort to drop a million dollars into Missouri and Indiana, two states central to the Senate majority. The question, Chris, is whether or not Hillary Clinton will have the coattails to turn Congress Democratic -- Chris.

CUOMO: I want to ask you to answer that question, because I know you got the hot hand at the table, so get back to it. Let's discuss now with CNN political commentator and former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski; and CNN political commentator and senior advisor to a pro-Clinton super PAC, Paul Begala.

So it's working. I saw in a poll 41 or even more percent of Trump supporters believe the race may be stolen from him. I keep hearing the word rigged, rigged, rigged. Your problem is there is no proof to pin these allegations of widespread voter fraud. So let's move past the proof to convince me. But why do you think this works for Trump?

COREY LEWANDOWSKI, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think what you have in this system is look what the Pew Foundation put out. They said there's about 2.75 million people who are registered in multiple states. There's about 1.8 million people who are deceased that are still on the voter rolls. And what we're saying, what Donald Trump is saying...

CUOMO: Doesn't mean they get to vote.

LEWANDOWSKI: It doesn't mean they don't get to vote.

CUOMO: You're saying they get to vote.

LEWANDOWSKI: If there's one case of voter fraud, there's one case too many. We know that for sure.

CUOMO: No, no, no. Two different points. You're right. One case is one case too many. No question. There's so much proof, there's so many studies of people who have looked at literally a billion votes, and they find a handful of fraud, prosecuted cases. Handful. No proof that any election could have been jimmied by these types of things.

[07:05:07] And he's saying large-scale voter fraud. Not provable. Cannot be substantiated. The question is, why does he think it helps him?

LEWANDOWSKI: We don't know if it's provable or not until the election is over. And let's say this...

CUOMO: That's a different point. He's already saying it exists.

LEWANDOWSKI: But if Donald Trump wins by 30 electoral votes, it's not a question. If he wins the state of Pennsylvania by 200,000, no question.

CUOMO: If he wins, it's not a question. He's not going to complain about the system if he wins.

LEWANDOWSKI: If Hillary Clinton wins the state of Pennsylvania by a million votes, one or two votes isn't going to make a difference.

The question is, do we have the best system in place right now? Do we know that these people exist on the rolls in multiple states? Are people taking advantage of it? Of course they are. We know that unequivocally. And what he's saying is let's do the best job possible so we can maintain...

CUOMO: He's never --he's never said that. He said it's going to be stolen from him.

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Can I just bring a little perspective here from planet reality? CUOMO: Yes.

BEGALA: The case you mentioned, study you mentioned, Loyola Law School.

CUOMO: That's just one of them. You've got the Brennan Center, News 21. There's a whole bunch of them.

BEGALA: The Loyola study looked at 1 billion votes cast in America over a 15-year period, found 31 individual cases of voter fraud. Thirty-one out of a billion. The Bush Justice Department believed this hype, right, because they're all a bunch of political people. And they put together a task force. "We're going to get voter fraud." They investigated; they prosecuted. They found, I think, 86 cases out of hundreds and hundreds of millions of votes over a five-year period.

It does not happen in America. What undermines our democracy is people like Donald Trump saying the system is rigged, when this is the greatest democracy in human history. What undermines our democracy is letting Vladimir Putin come in here and monkey around with our elections, who's Trump's big buddy. So there is threat to our democracy.

And as David Frum pointed out in a previous segment, it's a message; it's a terrible message for Trump: "The system is rigged, go participate in the system."

Folks, the system is not rigged. You need to go vote. If you vote for Trump, God bless you. If you vote for Hillary, God bless you. But the system -- this is America. Our democracy exists and works because better people than Donald Trump risked their lives and laid down their lives for this democracy. And it is really despicable the way he's undermining our democracy.

CUOMO: Begala is very righteous this morning.

BEGALA: I am.

CUOMO: But now he's going to get a punch in the nose. What do you make of these e-mails with Kennedy, one of the undersecretaries of the State Department, obviously, in some kind of -- you know, the way they're setting it up, it's like a desperate struggle to try to declassify e-mails to protect Clinton, maybe even a suggestion of a quid pro quo: "I'll give you more people to station and make something secure overseas if you take care of me on this." Smells bad.

BEGALA: Ambassador Kennedy is a career diplomat, a career foreign servant. He's not a political hack like me. He is engaged with a career FBI official in the kind of to-and-fro that bureaucrats have all the time about what should be classified and what should not. This is retroactive classification, looking at it after the fact, saying, "Well, this should now be classified." That kind of stuff happens every day.

CUOMO: So you're saying the system stinks so don't blame anybody? BEGALA: The system, I think we overclassify. I think your government

hides way too much from you. I do. And I worked at the government. I had top-secret security clearance. We classify way too much. But that's a different matter. You should have some separate -- I think, some sort of blue ribbon commission.

CUOMO: Trump calls it a felony corruption.

BEGALA: Please. That's nonsense. This is two bureaucrats wrestling over what should be declassified.

And by the way, FBI agents were upset about it. Hold on a second. The FBI now says -- there are reports in that that says it's the FBI who asked for this deal, not the State Department.

CUOMO: There are varying reports.

BEGALA: Yes, there are.

CUOMO: Lewandowski, this means more to you than it does to Begala. Tell us why.

LEWANDOWSKI: You know what? In 25 years being involved with the federal government, never, ever, ever, and I had top-secret security clearance when I worked on Capitol Hill, have I ever heard of two bureaucrats in such a public way fighting over the classification of an e-mail.

This is -- this is not a WikiLeaked document. Don't forget. This is an FBI...

CUOMO: Not WikiLeaks.

LEWANDOWSKI: It's a 302 that the FBI agent filed that said exactly this. Undersecretary Kennedy asked me to change the classification of an e-mail so that we could keep that e-mail out from the public to protect Hillary Clinton. And it says in the e-mail, quid pro quo. This isn't an alleged. It says in the e-mail quid pro quo, and we will give you billets overseas specifically for FBI agents, to serve in Iraq.

That's not a potential. It's not maybe it's a quid pro quo. It is now.

CUOMO: Paul says this is the way the system works.

LEWANDOWSKI: So for the last 30 years that you've been involved, have you ever heard a discussion like this about the classification of an e-mail between two, quote/unquote, "bureaucrats" to protect the secretary of state who said, "We'll give you something if you change the classification, because we don't want this e-mail going public?" Of course not. This is typical -- you know what this is?

BEGALA: Declassifying it makes it public.

LEWANDOWSKI: This is typical one rule for the elite and a separate rule for everybody else.

CUOMO: Answer the charge.

BEGALA: It's baloney. It's baloney.

LEWANDOWSKI: Have you ever heard this before?

BEGALA: It's baloney. Look, what you have, first off, as I said before, there's also evidence in e-mail traffic that it was the FBI who asked for this deal.

CUOMO: And the FBI does deny any quid pro quo.

BEGALA: The FBI says there's no quid pro quo. The State Department says there's no quid pro quo. But Donald Trump, a professional liar, says there is. So I'm sorry. I'm going to believe the FBI and the State Department.

[07:10:06] CUOMO: Well, no, one of the agents. One of the agents, in their e-mail.

BEGALA: And that phrase is used in there, but both sides now dispute that.

CUOMO: Except that somebody did say it. It didn't come from Donald Trump's mouth. It came from something he read in an e-mail.

LEWANDOWSKI: And when Undersecretary Kennedy didn't get the answer he wanted from the first FBI agent, he asked three additional agents to make this incident happen. Now, whether or not it took place or not, changing that alone, asking for something like that, is a felony. That's the bottom line. He should step down immediately.

CUOMO: Hold on, hold on. Why would it be a felony to ask to declassify an e-mail?

LEWANDOWSKI: Because you can't do that under the laws of this rule, under the laws for a quid pro quo.

CUOMO: You can't -- oh, you're including the quid pro quo. Asking to declassify, that happens all the time. That's all I said.

That's fine. But not for a quid pro quo. To say that I'm going to do this to protect Hillary Clinton so that we will give you something in exchange is illegal, and he should step down immediately.

CUOMO: You think you should wait -- you think you should wait until you actually have proof of a quid pro quo before you say felony corruption?

LEWANDOWSKI: I read the FBI's 302. Either the FBI agent is lying or Secretary Kennedy is lying.

BEGALA: Both the FBI and the State Department say there is nothing wrong. The only people spun up about it are Mr. Lewandowski and his pal, Mr. Trump. LEWANDOWSKI: that means...

BEGALA: I expect it's because they're 21 days to go before an election that they're going to lose.

CUOMO: All right. I've got to go. Corey, Paul, as always.

All right. Tomorrow night you get to see this on a much higher level. The final showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. CNN's debate coverage starts at 4 p.m. Eastern.

Alisyn, party at your house. Don't buy the cheap chips.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: You got it. Nachos all around, Chris. See you at 4.

Meanwhile, what did Melania Trump think when she heard that audiotape with her husband making lewd comments about women? What she told Anderson Cooper, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:15:58] CUOMO: Melania Trump deciding to defend her husband. We're hearing from her for the first time since her speech at that Republican convention, and she's speaking to CNN's Anderson Cooper about this flurry of recent controversies and whether the media is to blame.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MELANIA TRUMP, WIFE OF DONALD TRUMP: I was surprised, of course. But I was not surprised that the tape came out. I was not surprised about that.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Why?

M. TRUMP: Because as I said, many people from the opposite side, that they want to damage the campaign. And why now? Why after so many years? Why three weeks before the election?

COOPER: Your husband has said maybe that he felt the Clintons had something to do with it or the media. What do you think?

M. TRUMP: Well, this was the media. It was NBC. It was "Access Hollywood." It was the left wing and left-wing media. And you could see that. And the way it comes out, everything was organized. Every Friday, every Friday something comes out.

So they play, they play, they play. And it was hour after hour. I watched TV with hour after hour, bashing him. Because they want to influence the American people how to vote. And they're influencing in the wrong way.

COOPER: The information about your husband's 1995 taxes were released right before the debate -- first debate. Then this came out just days before the second debate. You're saying that's not a coincidence. M. TRUMP: No, that's organized, yes. That's -- they planned that

way. Because they don't want to talk -- the opposition doesn't want to talk about WikiLeaks and the e-mails and Benghazi and all the rest of the stuff. They don't want to -- they don't want to talk about it. So they -- they said, let's do something so we will hurt his campaign.

COOPER: "The Washington Post" was -- leaked the tape, released the tape. NBC had it for -- they said they had it for several days, and they were reviewing it. But you believe that it was -- that NBC could have released it. You think they knew about it long ago?

M. TRUMP: Yes, they knew a long time ago. And I'm sure they did. And "Washington Post" -- when did we hear or read any great stories from -- about my husband or about me. The true stuff, the -- the facts, the real stuff. Or "New York Times." We never read. They're bashing, bashing, bashing.

COOPER: You feel they've been very unfair?

M. TRUMP: Yes.

COOPER: Right now the latest polls show, I think, 60 -- more than 60 percent of people believe your husband made some sort of unwanted advances. What do you want those people to know? What would you say to them?

M. TRUMP: That my husband is kind and a gentleman. And he would never do that. That everything was organized and put together to hurt him, to hurt his candidacy.

COOPER: Organized by the opposition?

M. TRUMP: The opposition, yes.

COOPER: The media, Clinton.

M. TRUMP: The media, Clinton. Yes.

COOPER: You think they're working together?

M. TRUMP: Yes, of course.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Here to discuss everything you've just heard, CNN political commentator and senior writer for "The Federalist," Mary Katharine Ham; and CNN political analyst and "USA Today" columnist, Kirsten Powers. Ladies, great to see you.

Mary Katharine, I'll start with you. So Melania there, she blames the Clinton campaign. She blames the media. She blames "Access Hollywood." She blames Billy Bush in a different part for, quote, "egging" her husband on. What did you think of that?

MARY KATHARINE HAM, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Some of it's more effective than other parts. I would say that October surprises are not coincidences. That's why they're called October surprises and not July surprises. So that -- she's got a point there.

CAMEROTA: Mary Katharine, hold on a second. So do you think that the women who have come forward, at least nine who have come forward with accusations of having been groped by Donald Trump, you think that they are coordinated somehow?

[07:20:10] HAM: No, I don't actually think they're coordinated. I think that the media is fairly aggressive about finding folks at this point in October, because they're always aggressive in October. I think that it's not crazy to think that, oh, this seemed to be quite a coordinated rollout, as it was with Alicia Machado, as well, where there's a "Cosmopolitan" piece and a "New York Times" piece. That doesn't make the allegations not true. That's what she has to deal with. And that's the part that I think was completely ineffective.

But the idea that more things break in October is not some sort of made-up thing.

CAMEROTA: OK. Kirsten, what did you hear?

KIRSTEN POWERS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I heard her be really playing the victim, I think much the same way that Donald Trump plays the victim and blaming other people for what happened. So blaming Billy Bush for so-called egging him on. Of course, we're talking about, at this point, a grown man, you know, who is 59 years old, is being egged on, I guess, by this, you know, "Access Hollywood" reporter, which raises a lot of questions about what would happen if he was president, you know, how he could be egged on, perhaps, by Vladimir Putin or other people like that.

So I -- I guess I'm one of the few people who didn't find it very effective. I've heard a lot of people saying she was very effective. I think if you only saw an outtake of her saying that he didn't do it and this is not the man that I know, that's effective.

But I don't think playing the victim and blaming other people and all but invoking a left-wing conspiracy, much the way Hillary Clinton invoked a right-wing conspiracy when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, I don't see how that moves anybody, you know, to their side.

CAMEROTA: Yes. Mary Katharine, what about that point, that if he can be egged on by Billy Bush, what would happen if he were in the White House?

HAM: I think that's the argument THAT many of his primary opponents made, that many conservatives like myself, who didn't think he was a great candidate, made during the primary, that "Hey, this guy can be egged into pretty much anything in his Twitter stream. So maybe, as president, that would be not be an admirable quality. That would be a problematic quality.

And that's the part of Melania Trump's interview that was not at all effective for her husband. And there were other parts. I think Kristen's right. If you just hear the denial part a poised and Melania is an interesting figure, then you go, OK, well, maybe that softens it a bit. But then you hear the other stuff and think, maybe not.

CAMEROTA: Kirsten, she also said that it's fair to bring up Bill Clinton's past accusers but not fair to bring up her husband's, who are -- there's no evidence, she says, and they're discredited. How does that logic work?

POWERS: It doesn't work. So this whole time we have -- and remember, they were attacking Bill Clinton before this happened. We have Donald Trump actually sitting with accusers of Bill Clinton and basically saying these women must be believed. And then, when he's accused, everything is flipped on its head, and now you're not supposed to believe anybody.

So they really can't have it both ways. They can't go after Bill Clinton, who also isn't running for president, and then say don't listen to any of these women.

I think another thing that she said that was problematic is the boy -- you know, this is boy talk. And I have, you know, two boys at home, talking about her 11-year-old son and her husband, which again is not really reassuring.

And then another thing she said was Anderson asked her, you know, "Do you think that what was said on this tape describes sexual assault? And she said no. And then she -- then she goes on to say he didn't say that he did it, but in fact, he did say that this is something that he did. I mean, that's kind of the point.

I think that if -- if these women had come forward absent that tape, I think it would actually be a little different, because the problem is what he said on the tape. The problem isn't the timing of when it was released. The problem is what he said, that he said that he does this.

CAMEROTA: OK. Ladies, Mary Katharine, Kirsten Powers, thank you very much. Great to talk to both of you -- Chris.

CUOMO: The State Department is facing tough questions this morning following a release of new e-mails in the Hillary Clinton private server investigation. Is there evidence of quid pro quo? We get answers from State Department spokesman John Kirby next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:28:08] CUOMO: All right. Here's the situation. Documents released by the FBI show Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy trying to convince FBI officials of a particular e-mail being declassified that involves Hillary Clinton. In other notes released by the bureau, an FBI official said he told the State Department he'd look into the e-mail if the department looked into his request for personnel in Iraq, fueling allegations of a quid pro quo. This for that.

Here to respond, State Department spokesman John Kirby. You've got the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform, Jason Chaffetz, saying this is proof of a violation of law. Donald Trump says it is felony corruption. Is there proof of this quid pro quo?

JOHN KIRBY, STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN: No. Not only there is no proof, it's absolutely not true. Completely false allegations. It just didn't happen that way.

Now, what did happen, half of what you said is right. Pat Kennedy did call the FBI and try to get a little bit better understanding about why they wanted one particular e-mail classified secret. We didn't see it that way. We didn't think it needed to be classified. But the FBI held firm to their position. The e-mail remained classified. And that e-mail redacted is on our website. You can look for it yourself.

But there was no bargain sought by the FBI. There was no bargain rendered. This was simple inter-agency conversation about the classification over one particular e-mail. So there was no wrongdoing here.

CUOMO: What do you make of these agents saying otherwise? Saying -- one of them saying he asked for something about other -- you know, billeting other troops, security. And then the other guy saying that he felt it was a quid pro quo situation. What do you make of that?

KIRBY: So there was a request by the FBI for some additional slots in Iraq. That was a separate conversation than the one we were having with them about our concern over this particular e-mail. That conversation did happen. Both those conversations happened. But to try to link them together and say there was some sort of bargain sought is just not accurate.

Now, I can't speak for the individual who said this in an interview.

[07:30:02] And, remember, Chris, what we're talking about are notes from interviews. We're not talking this document that you're talking about that got released. It's not facts, it's not conclusions, it's not investigative results. It's notes from an interview.