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North Korea Releases Video of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launch; U.S. Calls for U.N. Sanctions against North Korea; Interview with Attorney General Brian Frosh of Maryland. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired July 05, 2017 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Together we are facing the threat of the reckless and brutal regime in North Korea.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: U.S. officials calculate this is likely an ICBM.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need to know what the strategy is and how we're going to deal with this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president may realize that his options in this world are very limited.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's going to take a worldwide effort to get North Korea to stop what they're doing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any patriot ought to care about foreign affairs. It is very conspicuous that this president has chosen to deny it and not discuss it with Russian officials.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our relationship with Russia is not different from any other country.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I guess I wish he'd treated Vladimir Putin more like he treats CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Wednesday, July 5th, 8:00 in the east.

And we do begin with North Korea releasing new video of its first intercontinental ballistic missile test. The U.S. and South Korea responding to the escalating threat with a show of force of their own, conducting a joint military drill to send a message to Kim Jong-un.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: The North Korea threat likely to dominate the G-20 summit this week. President Trump is expected to depart for Europe at any moment. In fact, you see movement there. During the summit, the president will hold a long-awaited, face-to- face meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin. CNN has every angle covered so let's get the very latest from CNN's

Barbara Starr. She is live at the Pentagon. Give us the reaction there, Barbara.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Alisyn. Keeping an eye on Andrew's Air Force Base there outside Washington as Marine One approaches, the president taking off for G-20, North Korea likely to be near or at the top of the list after they fired that intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea putting out additional video this morning showing their launch. This is changing the security calculation for the world and especially for President Trump because the Trump administration, just like the Obama administration, had made clear they would not allow North Korea to have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could attack the United States or a nuclear warhead.

Kim Jong-un, this video, that's his message -- we have one. So what do they do about it now? We saw dueling videos really late yesterday. The U.S. firing its own missiles off the coast of South Korea, a 200- mile range missile that could fire into North Korea to hit their air defenses, their radars, a message back across the DMZ a little bit.

But as the president goes to the G-20, the fundamental question is, what does he do now? You have Russia and China wanting the U.S. to stop military exercises with South Korea. That's not going to happen. He's got a big item on the agenda and no clear solutions. Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: OK, Barbara, thank you very much for that.

Obviously we're keeping an eye on the live pictures there as the president gets ready to depart. We're looking at Marine One, so we will keep an eye on all of that for you. Because of the looming threat from North Korea, President Trump does go to Europe for the G- 20 summit, but all eyes will be on his first face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin.

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux is live at the White House with more on this. Good morning, Suzanne.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Alisyn. When President Trump left the White House this morning, reporters shouted questions to him about North Korea. He ignored them, but he did say we are going to do very well. As you know, his first stop will be in Poland. It is going to be a 15-hour trip there, then on to Germany for the G-20 summit. The issues, immigration, climate change, U.S./Russia relations, and of course all of this taking on much greater significance in light of North Korea's missile launch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: President Trump departing on his second international tour one day after the Pentagon confirmed North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, one that analysts say could reach Alaska. North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un taunting the United States, saying the launch was a Fourth of July present to the Trump administration. As the U.S. responds with both a military and diplomatic show of

force, calling for an emergency session at the United Nations Security Council to be held today followed by a strongly worded statement from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, stressing that global action is required to stop a global threat, and declaring that the U.S. will enact stronger measures against the North Korean regime.

Tillerson's hardline stance in stark contrast to this terse 23-word statement following Pyongyang's missile launch in April.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president has made clear to us that he will not accept nuclear power in North Korea.

MALVEAUX: North Korea's aggression likely to dominate discussion during this weekend's G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, including his first official bilateral meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and his second meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

[08:05:10] Putin and Xi joining diplomatic forces and releasing their own plan to defuse tensions with North Korea after a meeting in Moscow Tuesday, calling for a moratorium on nuclear and missile tests while also urging the United States and South Korea to stop conducting joint military exercises, and specifically condemning the deployment of U.S. missile defense systems in the region.

The White House tells CNN there is no official agenda for President Trump's meeting with Putin, although pressure is mounting for Trump to directly address Russia's interference in the 2016 election, though officials say it's unlikely.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What is the Trump administration's strategy for countering all of this Russian aggression? They don't have one.

MALVEAUX: President Trump also set to meet with skeptical European leaders seeking reassurance about America's commitment to NATO after President Trump chose not to affirm his support for the alliance in May.

TRUMP: Twenty-three of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they're supposed to be paying for their defense.

MALVEAUX: The president's unpopularity in the region already sparking protests with thousands expected to converge on Hamburg during the summit.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: President Trump boarding Air Force One, getting ready to take off for his European trip. This comes as the president apparently delivering a dig not only to the Obama administration's approach but also to the president of China. In his latest tweet this morning, I want to read it to you, saying trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40 percent in the first quarter, so much for China working with us. But we had to give it a try. One of the meetings that we'll be watching closely again is his meeting with the president of China, President Xi. Alisyn?

CUOMO: Appreciate it.

Let's bring in the panel, CNN politics reporter and editor at large Chris Cillizza, CNN political analyst David Drucker, and author of "Nuclear Showdown, North Korea Takes on the World," Gordon Chang.

Gordon, the president choosing to tweet about this situation going on, whether we have the tweet or not, basically this time the president saying, well, China-North Korea trade grew by almost 40 percent first quarter, so much for China working with us, but we had to give it a try. We had Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin on the show. I asked him, is it as simple as this? He said no. There's a problem doing diplomacy by tweet. But this is a little bit of a hole the president just put himself in, isn't it.

GORDON CHANG, AUTHOR, "NUCLEAR SHOWDOWN, NORTH KOREA TAKES ON THE WORLD": This particular tweet not so bad, but the one just after the missile launch was terrible because it was lighthearted tweet, saying Kim Jong-un doesn't have anything better to do. We have got to remember that on the first of this year Kim Jong-un said he's going to test an ICBM. On January 2nd, Trump said it isn't going to happen. So it was really wrong for Trump on Sunday to say this doesn't matter because it does. It also undercuts some very good diplomacy Trump engaged in last week. He just undercut it with tweets. So --

CAMEROTA: Wait a minute, I don't understand. You mean that people like Kim Jong-un is taking President Trump's tweets seriously and responding to them? How is it undercutting the diplomacy?

CHANG: I don't think that it really matters what Kim Jong-un thinks, but it does matter what the Chinese think. And last week Trump put sanctions on the Chinese bank, he sold arms to Taiwan, he did a number of things to impose costs on China, which was the right thing to do.

And then just after the missile launch we had these lighthearted tweets saying maybe China will help us. That was really the wrong tone for the president of the United States. It confuses China, and clearly it shows the president being less than resolute, which is what we needs to be going into this meeting not only with Xi Jinping of China but also Vladimir Putin, who also has a lot of equity in the North Korea matters. So what Trump did was undermine himself with a few 140-character messages.

CUOMO: Also, look, it's about using a blunt force object on a delicate situation. Even the Chinese sanctions, Mnuchin was very careful to say this is about the bank, not the country. We're going after the bank for what it did, we're not going after China. So they're trying to be subtle; these tweets are the opposite.

David Drucker, in terms of what the party, what his support base is expecting out of this trip, especially the face-to-face with China and Russia, what do you see as the mandate?

DAVID DRUCKER, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, I think that for Trump there's still so much unknown about what he really wants to do with American foreign policy because you look at what members of his national security team do, and we have a very sort of conventional American and Republican foreign policy, putting sanctions on the Chinese bank, beefing up security in NATO.

[08:10:00] And yet you have the president and his rhetoric suggesting otherwise.

So I think the interesting thing about this trip will be to see, number one, if he finally personally starts to treat the Russians as an adversary the way the rest of his administration has, or whether he continues to coddle Vladimir Putin. And does he send a personal message of reassurance to NATO or does he continue to them guessing and leave that sort of thing to other members of his administration.

I think it would help him and help his leadership, especially looking at what has happened in North Korea, if he would start to embrace what we have seen from General McMaster, his national security adviser, General Mattis, his defense secretary, in terms of backing up the idea that the U.S. is going to be engaged and not going to allow these things to proliferate. But as with Trump, hope may spring eternal. I just don't necessarily see him changing his tune personally, and I think that will continue to create a dichotomy in terms of what the administration does behind the scenes and how the president is leading out in front.

CAMEROTA: And then, Chris Cillizza, we have that joint statement and the joint appearance of President Xi of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. They sure didn't seem like they need the U.S., their alliance.

CUOMO: Put the U.S. on even footing with North Korea in terms of what each side needs to do.

CAMEROTA: How do you explain it, Chris?

CHRIS CILLIZZA, EDITOR AT LARGE, CNN POLITICS: Well, Donald Trump said that he would deal differently with the world than Barack Obama, and the implication was that Barack Obama was too deferential, didn't play tough enough.

Donald Trump is not yet six months, coming on six months into his administration, but, yes, the reality would suggest it's much more difficult -- it's much easier to say it than to actually do it. I do think at some point the rubber has to meet the road in terms of -- the era of strategic patience is over. OK, well, what does that mean? You had David Sanger from "The New York Times" on here in the last hour who in his piece in the "New York Times" outlines the fact that there are just not any good options here for how we deal with North Korea. How do we exert influence over Russia and China when they have very different geopolitical interests and goals than ours, and when they are still, frankly, testing out Donald Trump to see what they can get away with at some level, to see how he is going to deal with them?

And so I think these trips do matter in that regard, and to Gordon's point, to start trip off with a series of tweets is, yes, very Trumpian, but in some ways is the problem. If you had to isolate Donald Trump's biggest problem in his first five-and-a-half months in office, it's Donald Trump. It's his willingness to undermine, go against his administration's attempts both domestically and in terms of foreign policy to keep a consistent message, to say this is what the strategy will be. This is the tactics, this is the strategy. He just continues to undermine that at every turn.

CUOMO: All right, so let's help the people out at home, Gordon, let's upset the premise. The premise is these tweets, the flippancy that the president likes to employ, it's a problem overseas. We've heard that here at home. People don't really buy it. They're like this is who Trump is. He's strong, he's brash, he's disruptive. He's a big talker, he's unpredictable, it shows muscularity. It makes people sit up and take notice. And depending on your partisan stripe you feel one way or another about it at home. Is it any different on the international scale, and if so, why?

CHANG: In Seoul, where I just was, and there is deep concern about Trump's reliability, you know, the South Korean policy establishment has always taken the U.S. as a constant, and right now they're very concerned about where U.S. policy is going.

Now, I think that right now we're in a position where every solution going forward is going to be ugly, and so there are no no-cost solutions. But at the same time, though, Trump I think needs to be much clearer in laying out the roadmap not only to the Chinese and the Russians but also to our friends and allies in the region, because if there's a solution, that solution also runs through Seoul and Tokyo, and we've got to remember that our friends have got to be with us or we have no chance of crafting any sort of way forward.

CAMEROTA: And Gordon, you are so steeped in this. You've studied North Korea, you've written a book about North Korea. What did you think when it was confirmed that it was an intercontinental ballistic missile?

CHANG: Well, this changes everything for a number of reasons. First of all, they now can strike the U.S. homeland. They were testing heat shielding, which is very high art. But also this missile that launched yesterday came from a Chinese launcher. It was a mobile truck, a transporter erector launcher.

We need to start asking Beijing some very pointed questions, not only in private but also in public, but how come all this Chinese equipment and Chinese missiles are showing up in North Korea's inventory?

[08:15:02] Because if we don't start asking Beijing those questions, we're never going to get to where we want to be with Beijing because we're so far apart in our perceptions of what the Chinese want and what we want them to do.

CAMEROTA: Thank you for all the expertise. Panel, thank you very much.

CUOMO: All right. So, the White House is encountering some resistance as it tries to collect voter data from state officials. Maryland's attorney general calls the request, quote, repugnant. Why? He's here next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Forty-four states now refusing to comply with the Trump administration's Election Integrity Commission. Maryland's attorney general tweeted that he finds the request, quote, repugnant, because it appears designed only to intimidate voters and to indulge the president's fantasy that he won the popular vote.

Joining us is Maryland's attorney general, Brian Frosh. Mr. Frosh, thanks for being here.

BRIAN FROSH (D), ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MARYLAND: Thank you, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Why do you call this request repugnant?

FROSH: Well, they propose to invade the privacy of millions of Marylanders and hundreds of millions of United States citizens and to no good end. I mean, it just is pretense that there was massive voter fraud. President Trump did not win the popular vote. And no matter how often they say it they can't prove it to be true merely by repetition.

[08:20:00] The fact is that it's a fantasy and the information that they seek is very private. It's not just people's address, name, phone number, but they ask for Social Security information --

CAMEROTA: The last four digits of the social security number so not the entire Social Security number. They say that it's not private. They say this is all public information.

In fact, we just had the Missouri secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, on. Let me just play for you what he says that counters what you're claiming. Hold on. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAY ASHCROFT (R), MISSOURI SECRETARY OF STATE: We are just going to release that publicly available information that is routinely released to candidates, to news organizations, and anyone that actually makes that request.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: What are you saying, Mr. Frosh? They're publicly available and they release it regularly.

FROSH: Some of it's publicly available and some of it is not. And in combination, it is not publicly available.

And the real purpose of is voter intimidation. They want to make sure that people think twice before they vote. That's not what America is about.

We want to encourage people to vote, and I think the purpose of this, besides indulging the president's fantasy, is to stop people from voting. If they have a criminal history, they've had a brush with the law, if they're recently immigrated to the United States and United States citizens. They want to make hem think twice before they exercise their constitutional franchise.

CAMEROTA: But, look, what you also hear on the other side is, we know there is some voting fraud. There is voter irregularity. We know this.

Now, no one can ever prove that it's at the level, the vast voting fraud that the president has claimed. No one has any numbers that suggest it's at all in the numbers he has said in terms of 3 million votes. That doesn't exist. All secretaries of state say not in their state.

However, everyone has a handful of cases. They're trying to fix the system.

FROSH: Well, they're expending an enormous amount of energy and intruding on private information of hundreds of millions of people to deal with a handful of cases. What's the reason for that?

CAMEROTA: They say that all voting fraud is bad and that they're going to try to clean up the system.

FROSH: Well, you know, we do a pretty good job of prosecuting voter fraud when we find it. We don't find it very often. It's certainly not organized. Occasionally some individual votes who isn't entitled to vote or votes under a name that the person isn't entitled to vote under.

But in Maryland, I think we had two cases in 2012. That's the last time we found voter fraud. It's not because we're not looking.

And I have to say the prosecutors in Maryland, most of them are Republicans. The overwhelming number of local prosecutors are Republicans. If there were voter fraud in the 2016 election, I'm pretty sure they would have been trying to root it out, trying to show that President Trump really did win the vote in Maryland. It didn't happen.

CAMEROTA: One of your congressmen, the Republican, Andy Harris, thinks that if you don't comply, that the fed should stop any dollars flowing into Maryland. In fact, he's going to submit legislation to that effect. What's your response?

FROSH: I think that's a silly proposal. We're not talking about a real problem here. We're talking about a made-up problem or a very, very tiny one. And --

CAMEROTA: But what if federal dollars are deprived if Maryland is deprived of those?

FROSH: Well, you know, I think there are 40-plus states that have declined to provide this information. What are they going to do, cut off aid to every state in the country that fails to comply? I think that's ridiculous. And, look, you know, I was out at a series of parades and meetings

yesterday for July 4th. I shook hundreds, maybe thousands of hand. There were lots of people who were very upset by the request. There wasn't a single individual who said to me, please, turn over my private information to this commission, I want them to know who I am, where I live, what my Social Security number is, the last four digits, military, criminal.

CAMEROTA: Mr. Frosh, I guess my last question is what if you don't? What happens? Does this voter fraud commission go away or is there some penalty for states?

FROSH: You know, I think they ought to focus on real problems. They ought to stop wasting taxpayer money and engaging in this massive effort that is designed only to stop people from voting rather than encouraging them to vote. That's what democracy is about. We want people to participate. This goes the wrong way.

CAMEROTA: Brian Frosh, thank you for your perspective on all of this with us.

FROSH: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Chris?

CUOMO: All right. So, the Reddit user who tweeted the video of President Trump punching a CNN logo is breaking his silence.

[08:25:04] He is apologizing. Why? Next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: OK. So the Reddit user behind the Trump/CNN body slam video is apologizing and not just for the video. There was offensive content in this man's kind of, whatever, locker box, Reddit, his Web site. And this comes after CNN was able to identify the user, tried to contact him.

So, let's discuss the impact of this. We've got CNN politics reporter and editor at large, Chris Cillizza, and CNN media analyst Bill Carter.

So, there are a lot of issues to unpack here, right? CNN is not identifying this man. Why? Because in part he apologized, and said this was a mistake, not this video all by itself.

BILL CARTER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST: No.

CUOMO: What do we know about what this man was doing and what do you make of the decision of CNN not to say anything?

CARTER: Well, and what he was doing was vile. An awful lot of stuff was anti-Semitic, racist. He put up a chart of everybody at CNN that was Jewish.

He was obviously a -- you know, not a prankster. People are defending it, well, this was just a joke.