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White House: Senate on Track to Introduce Trump's Proposal Today. Analysts Examine Rudy Giuliani's Comments on Discussions Between Trump Organization and Russia on Trump Tower During Presidential Campaign; Government Shutdown Continues over Border Wall Funding. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired January 22, 2019 - 8:00   ET

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

[08:00:00] JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: -- trying to square those things that just don't match.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: A.B., you see a little bit of the same thing here. You say that the president's real lawyers in this case -- not his P.R. lawyers -- must have just gotten really upset about what Rudy Giuliani was saying in public.

A.B. STODDARD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, REAL CLEAR POLITICS: It seemed last night before "The New Yorker" interview that that's what happened. That Mr. and Mrs. Raskin and Emmett Flood, we have seen reports from Maggie Haberman and others from "The New York Times" and other outlets, that people around the White House and his team preparing for the Mueller investigation in the report are getting frustrated with Rudy Giuliani. I wonder why.

But I think that reading "The New Yorker" piece at the crack of dawn this morning, I have come around that he did a walk-back because they are upset about what he revealed on the Sunday shows. But he did his even if it happened, it's totally cool, line with "The New Yorker." So I think that that's part of a strategy on his part, an intentional plan to spill this stuff out just like he did on Sean Hannity's show about the Stormy Daniels payment, just like he did last week with Chris Cuomo about collusion so that in the end when it all comes out, we are familiar with parts of it.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Here is what we are talking about. This is the latest "New Yorker" article. So "The New Yorker" reporters ask him about "The New York Times" quote that he gave "The New York Times" in which he said, yes, the conversations about the Moscow Trump Tower were going on up through the election. So the reporter says to him, "The Times" just made that quote up? And Giuliani says, I don't know if they made it up. What I was talking about was if he had those conversations they would not be criminal. The reporter says, if he had them, but he didn't have them? Giuliani says he did not have the conversations. Lawyers argue in the alternative. We went to court we would say we don't have to prove whether it's true or not because even if it's true it's not criminal. And that's why Mueller will not charge him with it. I'm so glad your brought that up, Chris Cillizza.

CHRIS CILLIZZA, CNN POLITICS REPORTER: The complexities at work there rhetorically are really, really towering. Here's the thing that I can't get around. Rudy Giuliani told "The New York Times," quoting Donald Trump, that Donald Trump had told him that conversations about Trump Tower Moscow were going on -- again, he quotes Donald Trump here -- from the day I announced until the day I won. So if "The New York Times" is wrong it is because Rudy Giuliani quoted Donald Trump. He made that quote up. He didn't say, hypothetically, Donald Trump said to me the conversations were going on from the day I announced until the day I won. He directly quotes Donald Trump that "The "New York Times" quotes him quoting Donald Trump.

So either he made it up, which I think is now the most likely outcome, or he made it up which I think is, again, the most likely outcome.

(LAUGHTER)

CILLIZZA: There is just -- you can't get around that. That was Giuliani's hypothetical. You can't quote the president telling you something and then say, a, you never said it, and, b, you were speaking hypothetically.

BERMAN: You impressed Jeffrey Toobin even there. I could see it.

TOOBIN: You must have taken logic classes in college or something.

CILLIZZA: Yes, a lot of Plato readers.

TOOBIN: Yes. Plato and Rudy mentioned in the same sentence. That doesn't happen often. But can I say that I think we get into the weeds here, and it's important to remember that what all this means is the president, then the candidate Donald Trump, was lying for years -- literally for years -- about his relationship with Russia.

BERMAN: Can I just say --

TOOBIN: That's what this means. And it means that he had divided loyalties. It means that he was trying to do business with Russia, which is controlled by Vladimir Putin, at the same time he was advocating for an American foreign policy that was more sympathetic to Russia.

BERMAN: Can I just say, we just had Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut here, and I asked him about that very thing. It's clear the president lied about what he was doing with Russia in terms of business during the campaign. But is that against the law? Is either doing business with Russia against the law during the campaign, or lying about doing business with Russia during the campaign against the law?

TOOBIN: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Lying to the public, lying to reporters, lying in a presidential debate, none of that is illegal. The sanction is supposed to be political. The marketplace of ideas. You are supposed to be repudiated at the polls or in the press. But you are absolutely right. None of that is a crime. The only crime is lying in an official proceeding, and those certainly are not official proceedings.

CAMEROTA: A.B., I was just telling John earlier that I had the opportunity to get out of the news cycle for the past three days.

[08:05:02] BERMAN: She was off. That's a different way of saying I had a long weekend.

CAMEROTA: Not only was I off, I was in the hinterlands. So I left outside of the metropolitan area, and I was with about 20 friends, and Giuliani never came up. Now, these are politically plugged-in people. OK, so President Trump came up, the "Buzzfeed" article came up. The Democratic field of what it's going to look like came up, the Republican response came up. But nobody mentioned Giuliani. And so, I just think to Jeffrey's point, we get in the weeds of all this, but I don't know if in his role as a P.R. agent he's making much of an impact on regular people.

STODDARD: That's such an interesting question. He has said this before about whether or not his reputation is permanently destroyed and it will be fine because he'll be dead. He doesn't seem to care. The job was to go on TV and flood the zone. I think it's perfectly clear he's doing what Donald Trump wants him to do, which is to keep us mired in a conversation about these details, so permanently in the weeds that we don't take the step back that Jeffrey is talking about.

And John, I thought your questioning was very interesting about whether or not it's illegal. But had we known at the time that President Trump had been dealing, trying to get something done that could happen only with the assistance of Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, while the Russian Federation was, according to our 17 intelligence agencies, interfering in the election to defeat Hillary Clinton, help Donald Trump, and subsequently we know that Putin had this over Trump, had we known he was compromised by an adversarial government he might not have been elected.

BERMAN: It's a great point. Just because something is not illegal doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Things matter and should matter to voters. They have to decide how much it does and how much it doesn't, but they certainly have a right to make informed decisions, and it's not clear that they had the right information or the full information to make those decisions here.

All right, Chris Cillizza, we are in day 32 of the government shutdown. The president made a speech on Saturday of a three-day weekend proposing that the government should be reopened and making perhaps some concessions there that he would grant the temporary legal status or postpone deporting DACA recipients and Dreamers and the like. Where is it today?

CILLIZZA: Nowhere. I think they'll hold a vote, as Alisyn mentioned in the open there. They'll hold a vote today. It's not going to get the 60 votes it needs. Well, I should say, I'd be stunned if it got the 60 votes it needs to move beyond unlimited debate to invoke cloture and to have a final vote, and that will be that.

The problem here is the reason DACA would need to be temporarily extended is because Donald Trump's Justice Department got rid of it. So I think Democrats say, well, you did this thing and got rid of it. Now you're saying, I'll kind of give it back to you for some time but I need money for my wall.

We continue to be immovable force and unstoppable object, which is Donald Trump saying I want money not for border security but for the wall, and Democrats saying, we are not giving you money for the wall. The longer it goes on -- I always compare it to waiting in line at an amusement park. If you are in line for five minutes and your kid starts to get antsy, you don't have all that much invested. You can get out of line relatively quickly, right. You've only been there for five minutes. You wait in line for two hours, it doesn't matter how antsy the kid gets. You are staying in dang line until you get to the front of it.

We are in the two-hour range now. Thirty-two, this suggests, the longer this goes on, the more entrenched, the more invested both sides have become in their position, and I think the more difficult it becomes to find common ground. So with every passing day I think the likelihood of it going literally another month gets higher.

CAMEROTA: Nancy Pelosi, as you know, had said we are not going to negotiate while the government is shutdown, because that's a bad precedent to set. If we did that then the president could in the future shut down the government again and know that we'll come around again. And that makes, of course, logical sense. But every day we talk to people who are affected by the government shutdown who are trying to decide between feeding their kids and putting gas in their car, and they just say, please, Washington, just open the government.

TOOBIN: That's right, but one side has to blink for that to happen. And that hasn't happened yet.

And what makes this shutdown different from other shutdowns is that it's not just a financial dispute. It is not just about two numbers that you can bring together. There is the wall and there's no wall. And that's where we are. And also the Democrats have the principle, they say, on their side, which is we don't negotiate about keeping the government open over policy differences. We open the government and then we have the debate.

[08:10:05] But people are suffering. People are out there, and so the question is when does one side give up their principles? And the answer to that is, I have no idea.

BERMAN: We have seen Republicans nervous from the beginning of this largely because the president said he would own this shutdown and there were senators. There are more Republican senators in tough states at this point than there are Democrats.

CAMEROTA: Not many. Still there's about six on the record.

BERMAN: I understand. But really in terms of Democrats in red states there's like one.

CAMEROTA: For sure. But the six number, in terms of the -- Susan Collins, they haven't budged much.

BERMAN: It has not budged much. But in terms of how many Republicans might be in the middle as opposed to Democrats, I think there are more Republicans. But A.B., my question is, do you think that any Democrats are feeling the heat right now?

STODDARD: I do. I think the Democrats on the House side, not the Senate 2020 map but on the House side, you have 40 Democrats who beat Republicans either in seats where Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, some in Trump seats. And so in talking to them, you can really feel a sense of heightened anxiety as this goes on. They are actually ready -- the longer it goes on, the sooner they want to break the line at the amusement park because their constituents are saying we thought you were going to go to town and work with the other side. These are moderate and/or Republican districts. So that's a huge challenge to Pelosi as this wears on and it affects the economies beyond just federal workers, but places in Trump country, too.

It doesn't mean that that isn't also weighed against the pressure that Alisyn mentioned, which is that if you give in now and President Trump feels that his fit was rewarded -- remember, his administration asked for $1.6 billion and it got $1.6 billion. And then because of the election or Ann Coulter's tweet he changed his mind, he made this a demand. If he feels he got through this, he'll do it again when the debt ceiling is reached in March and the next fiscal deadline comes on September 30th.

CAMEROTA: All right, we have that to look forward to.

TOOBIN: Can we have more parenting advice from Cillizza?

CAMEROTA: I like that analogy.

CILLIZZA: I have a whole word document I can send you, Jeff.

TOOBIN: I think he's America's dad, don't you think?

BERMAN: He hasn't taken me to the amusement park in a long time.

(LAUGHTER)

BERMAN: So I'm feeling a little bitter about this one.

CAMEROTA: Who can't relate to deciding are we are getting out of this line right now or are we not getting out of this line right now?

CILLIZZA: That's the worst.

BERMAN: Why didn't you go to the bathroom before we got here?

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: A.B., Chris, Jeffrey, thank you very much.

Democrats say that President Trump's shutdown deal is a nonstarter, but it is also not sitting well with some of his supporters. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [08:16:33] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to introduce legislation to end the shutdown today, but that legislation is expected to be dead on arrival with no Democratic support.

Joining us now to talk about what's going to happen is Rick Santorum. He's a former U.S. senator and CNN senior political commentator.

Good morning, Senator.

RICK SANTORUM, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good morning, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: You ran for president.

SANTORUM: I did.

CAMEROTA: Yes, you did. If you were president today, would you re- open government before all of this was hashed out because you have heard stories of people suffering?

SANTORUM: No. I mean, one of the things I would look at is maybe a trust-building measure. I think one of the things we have seen in the negotiation is that neither side believes the other side. You know, in any negotiation, we'll stand up and follow through with what they said they were going to do in private negotiation.

So, you know, try to do some trust-building. I mean, there's maybe open one department. You can say, look, we'll open -- let's pick a department -- Agriculture Department, you know, because all these different food safety issues and some other things going on.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

SANTORUM: There might be -- look, as a measure of good faith we'll open up the Agriculture Department. Let's sit down and talk about a compromise. And if you're looking at it, I mean, the only one that's put forth an idea that is really a compromise, a proposal, has been the president. And --

CAMEROTA: You mean this one that they are thinking about voting on today.

SANTORUM: Right. I mean, clearly, as much as it's been panned by the other side, there are things in the president's compromise that many Republicans don't like. In fact, the president hasn't even been excited about doing.

So, the idea that he hasn't moved at all and he's talking much broader than just the wall. He's talking about a broader package of border issues and I think he's open to more things the Democrats --

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: Rick, they have also snuck in things the Democrats will never agree to. For instance, in the new legislation they would vote on today they want minors in Central America to, for the first time, have to apply for asylum in their home country.

You think a minor can go to a government office in Honduras, a place that is riddled with drug, and gang violence and abject poverty and start the asylum process there? You think that government is set up to help and have a good asylum process? That's why they're fleeing their country? I mean, how do you expect anyone to vote for that?

SANTORUM: The idea that we'll make it easier, that they don't have to come to the border is a step in the right direction. The idea that we have to cross Mexico to come here and take that dangerous trek is, I think, one of the reasons we have the humanitarian crisis we have today.

CAMEROTA: Yes, isn't it an illustration of how desperate they are? In other words, I mean, my point is politically speaking, of course this is a nonstarter. That's not how the asylum system works in the U.S. That's not how it's worked for decades, in generations. So, of course, it's a nonstarter for Democrats to say, it is disingenuous when the Republicans snuck that in.

SANTORUM: Look, there will always be things in legislation that are subject to negotiation. What's happened here there is no negotiation. The president has put out a proposal.

[08:20:01] We have seen no counter-offer by the Democrats. I mean, we got a couple of Democrats come forward and say, well, I'd be willing to do this or do that, but nothing from Schumer or Schumer and no serious conversations going on.

And I know the Democrats believe that this is a political battle that they are winning and they don't have to negotiate, because they believe they are winning at the polls. I think ultimately, the president -- I don't think the president is going to back down. I think this is going to go on for much longer. I have been saying for weeks I don't see any end in sight in this.

And at some point, you know, there has to be a good faith negotiation. If the president keeps -- is the one who keeps putting forth ideas and compromise and the other side says not a single dollar -- excuse me, one dollar for a wall, I just don't think that's a winning position in the long term as people suffer.

CAMEROTA: Well, but let me try to represent what I think their position is, because I don't think you are accurately presenting Nancy Pelosi's position which is we are not doing this while the government is shut down. Don't use 800,000 federal workers as a political football.

SANTORUM: Yes, that's not -- that's never been a winning argument as far as I've seen.

CAMEROTA: Why not? Their point is if we do it now president Trump can shut down the government when he doesn't get his way.

SANTORUM: So, we'll put a temporary fix in place and we'll shut down the government again when that time runs up if the Democrats don't negotiate.

So, the idea that the Democrats are going to somehow become reasonable after and somehow going to reach across, they reach across and come up with some sort of true compromise when both sides get something they want, that that's going to happen when the government re-opens? No. What we're going to re-open the government and close it again.

So, this is -- this makes no sense at all, the idea that we won't negotiate with a gun to our head. Look, the reality is, both sides shut down the government. It happens in every government shutdown. Both sides shut it down.

CAMEROTA: But not on policy. What we've been told is this is about immigration policy.

SANTORUM: This isn't about policy. This is about numbers appropriation. No, this is -- this is about appropriation. This is exactly what -- it's one thing to say as Chuck Schumer said we are not going to pass a continued resolution until we get DACA fixed. But that had nothing to do with appropriations.

This has to do with appropriations. This has to do with money --

CAMEROTA: And a wall which is policy.

SANTORUM: Well, every appropriation is policy. There's no appropriation of dollars that doesn't have a policy recommendation behind it.

So, no. This is an absolutely appropriate thing for an impasse. We want to spend money on this and you don't.

CAMEROTA: Is it appropriate to shut down and you think it's appropriate to shut down the government over it?

SANTORUM: Of course not. I don't think it is appropriate ever to shut down the government. Having been through the first major government shutdown in the mid '90s, it was a bad thing to do then. It shows a lack of leadership, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. I think both sides are to blame for this.

CAMEROTA: I mean, just one more thing, Rick, because you know that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi thought they had a deal a year ago. They feel they have negotiated in good faith with President Trump. They've gone over there, they had lunch, they thought they had a deal on DACA.

His spokesperson came out. They thought they had a deal and then the president switched course. And so, they don't believe anymore that the president will go along when he says he will.

SANTORUM: Yes, Look, I think we have seen that out of chief executives now for quite some time that people get in the room, they make deals and then they walk away and they have different ideas of what the deal was or, you're right, they go back and check their political base and they find out there wasn't support for what they were doing and back away.

Look, I'm not saying the president doesn't have blame here. I think the president has not always stood by his word whether it's public or private negotiations. That's led to a lack of trust.

And he has some -- that's one of the reasons I'm actually proud he's put forward a concrete proposal here. Hopefully, he continues to do so. If this isn't accepted, then he puts out something else to continue to move the ball forward and do it in a public way, because, obviously, his private negotiations, there is suspicion as to whether he'll stick by things he says privately.

CAMEROTA: OK. Last question. One-word answer. Is Rudy Giuliani being helpful or hurtful to the president's cause at this point?

SANTORUM: I don't think -- the answer is hurtful. And I don't think any P.R. person out there talking about the Russia probe for this president is positive. Let the Mueller investigation, which is wrapping up, let it wrap up and let the chips fall where they may. That's the best strategy for the next few weeks.

CAMEROTA: Rick Santorum, thank you very much.

SANTORUM: Thank you.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Interesting.

All right. The Democratic field for president taking shape. Who has a real chance? We're going to look inside the numbers. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:28:50] BERMAN: The Democratic line-up for 2020 taking shape with new entries nearly every day.

California Senator Kamala Harris, the latest to announce her bid. So where does she stand?

In our monthly power ranking of Democrats, joining us now, Harry Enten. There's something about Harry, our senior writer and analyst. He worked on it with America's dad Chris Cillizza.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN POLITICS SENIOR WRITER & ANAYST: You're also a dad.

BERMAN: I am, but he's America's dad.

So, in the power rankings, you have Kamala Harris I would say pretty high.

ENTEN: Yes. I'm not sure if you can get higher than number one. It's quite difficult, I believe. Yes.

Look, Kamala Harris is very high at this point. And I think a lot of people, why is that? Why would Kamala Harris be so high given her poll numbers are, we can get to them in a second.

CAMEROTA: What's the difference between a power ranking and a poll?

ENTEN: A power ranking is where Chris and I are basically going through and looking at the different variables that tended to predict who wins nominations in the past instead of just looking where the polls are right at this point.

CAMEROTA: Fascinating.

ENTEN: Fascinating, right? This is what I like to be -- I like to be fascinating. Last week I was Henry Winkler, this week I'm me.

(CROSSTALK)

ENTEN: Yes. So, if we were to look at Iowa, you know, we did a poll there last week. What I looked at is say, OK, do you know who Kamala Harris is? If you do know who she is, do you have a favorable or unfavorable rating of her?