Return to Transcripts main page
New Day
U.S.-Backed Forces Launch Bid To Seize Raqqa; FBI Clears Hillary Clinton Again In Email Review; Fake News & The 2016 Race; SNL Breaks Character To Rebel Against "Gross" Election. Aired 5:30-6a ET
Aired November 07, 2016 - 05:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:32:05] CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: As Iraqi troops battle to push out ISIS in Mosul, U.S.-backed forces are also launching a bid to liberate the Syrian city of Raqqa from the terrorists. The operation to seize ISIS' so-called capital announced just days after Iraqi forces entered the city of Mosul. The operation in Raqqa includes multiple Arab and Kurdish groups. It's a true coalition effort. It's going to be carried out in coordination with a whole host of international back-up.
ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: A South Carolina man accused of chaining a kidnapped woman inside a shed for two months now charged in a quadruple murder cold case. Investigators say Todd Kohlhepp confessed to a 2003 massacre at a motorcycle shop after his arrest last week for the kidnapping of Kala Brown. When authorities searched Kohlhepp's property they found three other bodies, including the remains of Brown's boyfriend.
CUOMO: A 5.0-magnitude earthquake rocking central Oklahoma last night. It could be felt as far away as Dallas, Kansas City -- even Little Rock, Arkansas. The epicenter was located near Cushing, Oklahoma, about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa. There are reports of damage, mostly to buildings. No serious injuries -- that's the good news.
CAMEROTA: We do have some breaking news out of Philadelphia right now. The strike shutting down parts of the city's transit system is over. A tentative deal has been struck between SEPTA and a local union. Many people worried that this strike could have affected voting in the battleground state of Pennsylvania if it kept voters from getting to the polls.
CUOMO: Hillary Clinton cleared again by the FBI. Director James Comey doing something else that's unprecedented. This time, Comey, right on the eve of the election, saying the emails have been through and there is nothing there. The question for him, did Comey cross the line? We're going to ask a former FBI senior intelligence official, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:38:05] CUOMO: All right, you have a real war going on in Iraq and in Syria, and we're going to talk about the implications for these two major offenses. And then, you have this political war going on here on the eve of the election.
The FBI director, James Comey, going, once again in a breach of protocol, to Congress, and this time to say Clinton will not face any criminal charges after reviewing these newly-discovered emails. They were mostly duplicates and personal emails not relevant to the FBI investigation. Should he have done it? What does it mean? What does this war effort mean?
That's the main question we'll start with, with CNN counterterrorism analyst, former CIA counterterrorism official, and former FBI senior intelligence adviser, Phil Mudd.
Phil, let's deal with what matters in an existential sense first. This move into Mosul -- we're seeing as the second-biggest city in getting it, but now as that's going on, Raqqa. Why so close together?
PHIL MUDD, CNN COUNTERTERRORISM ANALYST: I think what the military is trying to do and what the strategy is here is to prevent ISIS from surging back into Syria because they felt comfortable in Iraq. To keep pressure on them in both locations ensures, in short, that Syria doesn't turn to be -- turn out to be a back door for Mosul. That the ISIS fighters in Mosul can't just go back across the border. It's a good move.
CUOMO: Quickly, why am I safer, as an American, if these go well?
MUDD: Bottom line for terrorist groups, if you don't have safe haven to plan and organize long-term attacks over the course of years it's difficult to execute operations in places like New York and Washington.
CUOMO: All right, thank you for that.
MUDD: You bet.
CUOMO: And we'll have to see how it goes and, obviously, that will be fundamental to assessing its success, even reverberating back here at home.
That takes us to the FBI. I believe your words were it is a solid call for Comey to come out and send this letter to Congress. You'd do the same thing. He's between a rock and a hard place. How do you feel about what he's done now and its net effect on the Bureau and the race?
[05:40:05] MUDD: Chris, do you have videotape on that? I think I'd like to withdraw those statements.
CUOMO: I do. I think you might have even been wearing my tie.
MUDD: Look, there's a couple of things here. First, my judgment at that point was that they had something substantial to review and, therefore, it was worth it for the FBI to say we're going to look at this. Now, in retrospect, it turns out there wasn't anything to review. I don't think that's the key decision, Chris. The key decision goes
back to two events last summer. Number one, the FBI and the FBI director's decision to come out publicly in the case, initially. The FBI typically doesn't do that. When Comey did that, he forced himself now, months later, to say when I told you it was closed publicly, I've got to tell you it's reopened publicly.
The second thing we're not talking about is Loretta Lynch's decision to meet President Clinton on the tarmac of that airport. That led to, really, a difficult decision for the FBI director about how to proceed when the attorney general really had backed away from the case.
CUOMO: No question that that compromised the situation.
MUDD: Yes.
CUOMO: Comey was put in a situation of wearing two hats, fundamentally --
MUDD: Yes.
CUOMO: -- as prosecutor and main criminal investigator, and he did that part. But now, we had this second iteration and it comes to the fallout of this. People will get a final look at how Clinton and Trump deal with this situation. For Trump's part, he's saying, once again, it's proof it's rigged. That Comey's, obviously, in the bag for Clinton and you can't go through that many emails that fast. Your take?
MUDD: My take is yes, you can. First of all, what they're doing is to determine how many are duplicates. Evidently, a lot are. That's an electronic process. You don't have to have a human being doing that. And second, you have an army of people 24/7 looking at the remaining emails, saying are they personal or are they classified?
I think one of the problems, in this case, is the FBI felt pressure to do that 24/7. Not a good way to run an investigation, but it was the attorney general and the FBI director who put themselves in that position in the first place.
CUOMO: What do you think happens with James Comey after this? Do you think it's a survivable situation? If you were Hillary Clinton, do you throw your arms around him and say hey, we had our differences but let's move forward together. What do you think happens?
MUDD: Boy, that's a difficult one. Remember, the FBI director's position is not a political position.
CUOMO: Right.
MUDD: That's a 10-year appointment to ensure that the FBI director doesn't get politicized.
CUOMO: Yes.
MUDD: He was only sworn in three years ago so she's got a couple of options. She can't fire him. She's got to either throw her arms around him or ice him out so much that he says I'm done with this. In my judgment, the best solution here -- because he has a terrific reputation, I think, still, in Washington -- the best solution is to ensure that he doesn't put out the word or his team doesn't put out the word that the new President of the United States or president- elect, if it is Hillary Clinton, has squeezed him out. That is not a good message.
CUOMO: Phil Mudd, thank you very much for the perspective --
MUDD: Thank you.
CUOMO: -- as always. Alisyn --
CAMEROTA: OK, Chris, a little levity. Some of the campaign's best laughs have come from "Saturday Night Live" with Alec Baldwin as Trump and Kate McKinnon as Clinton. But it's what they did this weekend that has everyone talking. That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:47:20] CAMEROTA: As the election winds down voters are still searching for information. But some of the information out there -- well, it has not been true. It's been false. How has all of that affected this race?
Let's bring in our media experts. We have CNN senior media correspondent Brian Stelter, and CNN media analyst Bill Carter.
So, guys, we've talked a lot about how this election, like none other, has been a fact-free zone. And I think the bottom line, as Comey put out yesterday, there are no indictments against Hillary Clinton.
BILL CARTER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST: Right.
CAMEROTA: No crime, basically, is what that says.
CUOMO: With respect to the emails.
CAMEROTA: Yes, with respect to the emails, no pending charges.
CARTER: The investigation is complete.
CAMEROTA: The investigation is complete but has the damage been done because there's been so much misinformation, Brian?
BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Certainly, more coverage of the original Comey letter than this new letter and that's, partly, because we're only a few hours away.
CARTER: Yes.
STELTER: We're less than 24 hours away from the first polls opening.
CARTER: Right. STELTER: I didn't say -- I'm sure on the East Coast so there's going to be less coverage of this follow-up letter. In that respect, the damage is done. People --
CARTER: And the fact that millions of people voted already based on the information that came out nine days -- 10 days ago.
STELTER: People are free to believe whatever they want. They can choose their own sets of facts. But tomorrow, there's only one set of facts. There's only one set of data and that is the actual votes. What I hope is that the country -- the citizens -- can agree to believe that set of data tomorrow.
CARTER: It is real, yes.
STELTER: Donald Trump's talk of a rigged election -- of a stolen election -- he's starting to ramp that talk back up.
CARTER: Back up, again.
STELTER: That is concerning for the moment, though.
CUOMO: Well, but it will be interesting in an election that's been completely unpredictable, right? You couldn't have written it. You would have gotten laughed at any producer's house if you did. It may wind up in a very common scenario which is a foe of Clinton overreaches, and that's what we're seeing with Trump right now. You can call it whatever you want but I don't think Rudy Giuliani had any information --
CARTER: No.
CUOMO: -- from a current member of the FBI that there were going to be indictments, OK? Trump ran with it. He didn't have any factual basis for saying there were going to be indictments. He said it, anyway. He allows people to feed off fake items online and blogs that purport to be media but aren't -- they're mouthpieces -- and fuel those things. And now, he's saying, once again, a man who he just praised as being the standard of integrity, James Comey, is in the bag for Clinton.
CARTER: Right.
CUOMO: And, is this proof of him overreaching and being at his most wild when it counts most, the day before the election?
CARTER: Well, it's certainly another example of that, but it's gone on throughout this campaign and it gets trumped by the next thing he does. That's been happening, but there won't be a next time.
CUOMO: But there won't -- there won't -- tomorrow they go to the polls and the last time they're seeing him --
CARTER: And the last thing they hear --
CUOMO: -- he's raving like a lunatic about something -- CARTER: Yes.
CUOMO: -- that he can't prove.
[05:50:00] CARTER: Yes. Well, that's true.
STELTER: I think his campaign -- I think Jason Miller and a couple of others will tell you that Trump's on message. That Trump's not tweeting, that he's not changing the subject. He's not even beating up on the media as much as he was.
CUOMO: But you can't be on message by saying she's going to be indicted and she is a criminal, and the FBI director just said that, unless you want to say the FBI is corrupt. If that's what he wants to say -- that's his closing argument.
STELTER: Remarkable that the final days is that there continue to be so many falsehoods from this campaign. There's no attempt to stick to the facts, even at the end of the campaign. And you know what the fact-checkers would say is they've experienced this for 16 or 17 months. That it's always been this way. Fifty-seven ratings of four Pinocchio's by "The Washington Post" for Trump versus nine four- Pinocchio ratings for Hillary Clinton.
CAMEROTA: This is --
STELTER: It's a pretty out-weighted situation.
CAMEROTA: This is why Jennifer Palmieri, of the Clinton campaign, says "Friends, please remember that if you see a whopper of a WikiLeaks in the next two days -- it's probably a fake." Well, who knows? I mean, who knows at this point, you know?
CARTER: A really interesting point. We'll see.
STELTER: The potential for people creating fake news --
CARTER: Fake stories.
STELTER: -- fake emails, and trying to plant them out there at the worst possible time -- the most vulnerable time, which is the last two days of the election.
CARTER: And you have to say one thing about this, which for Hillary, is that if that does happen it's very dismissible, even if it is true. You could probably get away with it for a day by saying well, you can't possibly believe that.
STELTER: Right.
CUOMO: But, the WikiLeaks is not known for being inaccurate.
CARTER: They're not, but --
CUOMO: People do take the emails and then doctor them. We've seen that. CAMEROTA: That's inaccurate.
CARTER: Yes.
CUOMO: Right, but that's on someone else, it's not on Wiki.
STELTER: What you're saying is, if it's on wikileaks.org it has tended to be true.
CUOMO: Yes, it has.
STELTER: There haven't been fake emails on that site.
CARTER: But I don't think the public is going to make that big a distinction in the last day, especially if the campaign says you can't believe that and maybe there's enough baked in there.
STELTER: You know, I think that this is on viewers and on readers to be on guard in these final public couple of days. If you see something on Facebook that seems too good to be true, it probably isn't true, you know. We need sort of a slow news movement here to be skeptical and be scrutinizing these kinds of stories.
CAMEROTA: Are you slow rolling the news?
STELTER: Slow rolling the news.
CARTER: Yes, right.
CAMEROTA: Let's talk about "Saturday Night Live" --
CARTER: Yes.
CAMEROTA: -- because this weekend they did something interesting. They pivoted from --
CARTER: They did.
CAMEROTA: -- from parody to poignance --
CARTER: Yes.
CAMEROTA: -- in one -- in one of their opening skits.
CARTER: Yes.
CAMEROTA: And that was that Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon decided to sort of grasp hands and make an attempt at healing the country, so watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KATE MCKINNON, CAST MEMBER, NBC "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE": This whole election has been so mean.
ALEC BALDWIN, GUEST ACTOR, NBC "SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE": I mean, I just feel gross all the time. Don't you guys feel gross all the time about this? (CHEERING, APPLAUSE)
MCKINNON: You know what I think can help us? Let's get out of here.
BALDWIN: What? Where would we go?
MCKINNON: You'll see, come on.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STELTER: Ah, wishful thinking.
CAMEROTA: I know, but I was -- I was getting a little choked up watching it. It was working.
CARTER: People gave it that reaction.
CUOMO: That is a low bar, though. Camerota has a very easy feel, you know.
CAMEROTA: I mean, I am craving this.
STELTER: OK, I'll purpose it right now. Donald Trump's going to be at 52nd Street and 6th Avenue. Clinton's going to be at 34th and 11th. They can meet in the middle --
CAMEROTA: Kumbaya.
STELTER: -- right in Times Square.
CARTER: Right, right.
STELTER: Right in Times Square tomorrow night.
CARTER: Yes, and we'll all be on Mars the next day.
CAMEROTA: Yes. I mean -- but, that is what people are craving. That was just a nice -- I don't know. I thought it was --
CARTER: But also, it said that the writers of the show --
CUOMO: Yes.
CARTER: -- they've exhausted this.
CUOMO: Yes.
CARTER: They can't do anymore. It was sort of an admission. We can't -- it's all gross. We can't say anymore. They, like, wanted to back off, I think.
STELTER: It's saying something really important, which is we've got to see some leadership tomorrow --
CUOMO: That's right.
STELTER: -- from Trump and from Clinton. And from both sides -- from the Paul Ryan's of the world. If Trump won't get up there and speak, Paul Ryan and Mike Pence have to speak. It Clinton, somehow, you know, does not pull this out, even though she's winning in the polls -- if she does lose, she's going to have to help this country step to president Trump.
CARTER: Yes.
STELTER: Leadership will be key.
CUOMO: And also, look, as writers of "SNL" have proved that everybody played a role in getting us to where we are right now, everybody's going to have to play a role in getting us to somewhere better.
CAMEROTA: Guys, thank you.
CUOMO: All right, up next, the FBI director's decision to clear Hillary Clinton again, less than 48 hours before Election Day is a big deal. Now, it can't un-ring the bell, right? So how can this wind up being not so damaging? Not an easy question. Some theories ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:58:25] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's a rigged system and she's protected.
CUOMO: Hillary Clinton cleared by the FBI, once again.
JENNIFER PALMIERI, HILLARY CLINTON'S DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS: We're glad this matter is resolved.
TRUMP: It's up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box.
HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: There's a lot of anger in this election, but anger is not a plan.
TRUMP: Just think about what we can accomplish in the first 100 days of a Trump administration.
CLINTON: It all comes down to you, my friends. Our progress is on the line.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.
CUOMO: Good morning, welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Monday, November 7th, 6:00 in the East.
Hillary Clinton getting a late break in the final hours of this campaign. The FBI director coming out, sending another letter to Congress, and this time he says we looked at all the newly-discovered emails. There is nothing there. There will be no indictment of Hillary Clinton based on the email scandal. The cloud of suspicion, though, is still over her head.
CAMEROTA: Well -- and Donald Trump is still saying that the system is rigged and asking the American people to "deliver justice" at the polls. Both candidates are barnstorming battleground states in this final day of campaigning, just one more day until the election.
Let's being with CNN justice correspondent Pamela Brown in Washington. Good morning, Pamela.
PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning to you, Alisyn. FBI investigators under intense pressure, worked around the clock to review the large volume of emails that surfaced, according to sources. And key to this effort was software that was refined from its previous use for the initial private server investigation. As one official said, without this technology this would have taken a lot longer.
