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New Book Reports Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley Feared Former President Trump Would Attempt a Coup after Losing 2020 Presidential Election. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired July 15, 2021 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: The select committee on modernizing Congress has offered 97 suggestions focused on improving bipartisan, civility, and transparency.

But it's clear that many Republicans intend to obstruct any action. Congressman Chip Roy caught on tape saying he wants 18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done before the midterms. Democracy depends upon an assumption of good will between fellow citizens, but that assumption has been broken by Donald Trump and his minions. And that's why there needs to be accountability before there can be unity. Because if conservatives can't clearly condemn a potential presidential coup, what can they condemn? If this isn't wrong, what is?

And that's your Reality Check. NEW DAY continues right now.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and all around the world. It is Thursday, July 15th. And we do begin with the explosive revelations about just how close American democracy came to the edge. Jaw-dropping excerpts from a new book about the aftermath of the 2020 election.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: These excerpts obtained by CNN's Jamie Gangel are from the upcoming book "I Alone Can Fix It" by two Pulitzer Prize winning "Washington Post" reporters. And among the revelations here, America's top generals feared that then President Trump would attempt a coup after the election and planned ways to stop him from doing that. This is the first time in modern U.S. history where there was a potential showdown between the commander in chief and his military.

BERMAN: General Mark Milley and the other Joint Chiefs plotted mass resignations, one by one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, something of a reverse Saturday Night Massacre. According to the book, General Milley also viewed Trump as an authoritarian leader. And as for the big lie on the election, Milley told his aides was, quote, "the gospel of the Fuhrer."

KEILAR: And then in another scene in this book, General Milley publicly confronts the White House chief of staff during the Army-Navy football game and grills Mark Meadows about whether Trump would fire the FBI and the CIA directors. And this book also claims that Milley and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo privately met, Pompeo telling Milley that the, quote, "crazies are taking over," which is an account that Pompeo denies.

BERMAN: So the book also describes tense moments that played out during the January 6th Capitol attack and in the aftermath, including Liz Cheney telling Jim Jordan during the riot, quote, "You f-ing did this," and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her fears that Trump would use nuclear weapons during his final days in office. The book describes a private conversation she had with General Milley, and he reassured Pelosi that the military would not carry out an order that they believed was illegal.

KEILAR: And then finally, the book talks about Trump's disdain for German Chancellor Angela America. During an Oval Office meeting about NATO and German, according to the book, Trump refers to the German chancellor as, quote, "that bitch Merkel."

BERMAN: Joining us now, CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash and CNN political analyst Carl Bernstein.

Dana, just to you, big picture here, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs so nervous about a coup that he's plotting with other generals about how to take evasive action. Just put this in a big picture for us. How significant?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Really, I can't think of anything much more significant than what you just described and what this book describes, particularly when you kind of go back in time to the beginning of America, one of the -- I think I heard you use the term "bedrock" in the last hour, John. It is true, one of the bedrock principles of American democracy is the separation of the military and civilian leadership, and, more importantly, for the civilian leadership to be on top. That's why the president of the United States is the commander in chief.

And in this case, it's kind of a brain twist, if you go back in time again to what the founders thought, it is not that the military leadership was trying to overtake the civilian leadership. In this case, the top military leader was trying to stay, apparently, according to this book, stay in his lane with his uniform on, but still try to protect the democracy from the man elected to the top spot.

We know that General Milley has some reputation fixing to do after what happened during the protests in June of 2020 when he was in uniform outside at that photo op. But still, I think an important thing to say is that he is one of few people in and around the president who doesn't have political aspirations, either currently or in the future, which is probably why we are hearing what appears to be the unvarnished truth as opposed to those who are more worried about their own political viability and are keeping quiet.

[08:05:12]

KEILAR: Carl, one excerpt from this book, Milley on preventing an attempted coup, he says, "They may try, but they're not going to f-ing succeed," he told them, "You can't do this without the military, you can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We are the guys with the guns." He was trying to assure many people around him who had concerns.

CARL BERNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely. What this extraordinary reporting reveals is something actually builds on what we already knew, that we had a crazy, delusional, authoritarian, dangerous, criminal president of the United States. And we knew it through all four years of his presidency. And what's happening in this book and a couple of others, and probably more to come, is we are now seeing that picture filled out and our worst fears fulfilled through actual specific acts and words of the horror and terror that this deranged president of the United States visited upon our country, the Constitution, and our system of governance.

But what's so important here is that there is nothing in these revelations, as awful and terrible as they are, that Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders did not know about Donald Trump, his character, his authoritarianism, his recklessness, his homicidal negligence through the pandemic. All of this was known to our leaders, and the party of Trump and the party of McConnell, and what we saw in the insurrection, these are all things that were embraced up until the last minute by McConnell and Republican leadership, and they continue to be embraced, Trumpism, in all its derangement, terror and horror.

BERMAN: Just one more quote so people know exactly what Carl and Dana are talking about here. General Milley on the big lie and what Trump was saying about the election lies. He said "This is a Reichstag moment, Milley told aides, the gospel of the Fuhrer." The "Reichstag moment" refers to Adolf Hitler using the burning of the German Parliament basically to seize all power in Germany, suspend habeas corpus, suspend civil rights, a coup, more or less, of sorts there.

Dana, Carl hits on something here that I think is super important, too. This isn't now just a history book.

BASH: Exactly.

BERMAN: Right. It's a book about someone who is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, who has the full support, as far as I can tell, from the Republican establishment now in power. That's the leadership certainly in the House of Representatives and Republicans around the country.

BASH: That is such a critical point, John, because we aren't just starting to see the first, second, third drafts of history. We are talking about current events. And we are talking about current events, not just when it comes to a potential run for president again by Donald Trump, but also about what's going on in the Congress right now, about the fact that you have the Republican leadership knowing -- clearly knowing what is in this book and probably a whole lot more about what happened leading up to January 6th, and also post-election. But they are still completely embracing, or in a fulsome way denying the misinformation, the conspiracy theories that are being propagated by the former president and conservative media who prop him up. They are embracing it. That's just the bottom line.

By not saying publicly, even at the behest of one of the officers who was very seriously injured, to please stop the conspiracies, they are continuing to propagate those conspiracies. And that is what is so dangerous. And they are doing it because they think that that is what is going to get them back into the majority in 2022, both in the House and in the Senate. And so it is very, very much a current political crisis, because we're not talking about two ideologies that are being fought out about taxes or about budgets or about social issues. We're talking about truth and lies, full stop.

KEILAR: I want to ask Dana something, and then, Carl, have you weigh in on this. But I wonder, Dana, you speak on those Trump allies. And I wonder if they and Trump supporters will look at this and say, oh, it's an example of the deep state, and it went all the way up to the president's top military adviser, or is Milley inoculated from that?

BASH: He's not inoculated from that. You know how we know that? Because he testified pretty recently on Capitol Hill, and he went at it with Republicans about the idea ever of Critical Race Theory.

[08:10:03]

Not about this topic, but it's just generally speaking about something that has become very politicized. And he was attacked, and they really went after him for trying to explain, as we know now through this book, and also through that testimony, through clearly, a clearly educated, well-read historical perspective of why he thought it was important to not just dismiss the idea of learning more than -- even if you don't support something, you need to learn. Talking about reading Karl Marx and other things, not because he's a Marxist, but because he's a leader and he thinks it's important to know history.

So that's a long way of saying, you're exactly right, that this will be -- we can write this statement that is going to come out -- I'm surprised it hasn't already -- from the former president trashing Milley, and it will be shared on social media and in conservative media by his minions.

BERMAN: We know, Barbara Starr reporting, General Milley is not going to comment on this. I suppose it's not surprising. Carl, your thoughts?

BERNSTEIN: He's not going to comment, but also I just want to say something, what Dana was just saying, that this idea of the delusional deep state that is part of the Trumpist agenda needs to be dismissed immediately. And we need to go back to the specifics and the expansion of the reporting on the authoritarian, dangerous, and as Milley himself has now raised the question of neofascism, Trumpism as neofascism. He has raised the question in the language of brown shirts.

We didn't do it here on the air. The general, the Joint Chiefs, the head of the Joint Chiefs has done this. We need to take this moment and say, how did we get to a place where the leader of the American military compared the president of the United States to Hitlerian fascism? We didn't say it. He did. This is a moment. That's the importance of this book and perhaps the importance of some of the other books. We are finally getting behind the scenes as to what our leaders were saying and knew about Trump.

But the other thing is, on our air, cable news, this network, MSNBC, Trump's derangement was reported, reportorially nailed down. A good number of people, myself included, but I don't want to take the credit for this, there are a number of people that early on said this is a deranged, dangerous, authoritarian president of the United States, starting in 2017.

And yet his party, the people around him in the White House, they did not go public, including some of the people who are quoted in these books. Why the hell did they sit still instead of warning the American people out loud, instead of just talking to us? We have a lot of questions to answer as we know in an expanded way finally what has occurred in this terrible, terrible, awful period of our history.

KEILAR: Carl Bernstein, Dana Bash, thank you so much, both of you, for being with us this morning.

We also learned in this book how Nancy Pelosi feared Donald Trump would use nuclear weapons in his final days in office, and George Conway will join us next.

BERMAN: Also ahead, is Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer ready to retire and make way for, perhaps, a younger liberal justice? What he's saying in a CNN exclusive. And a legal win for Britney Spears. The judge takes her side after a key request in court.

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[08:17:27]

BERMAN: We've been discussing how top military officials feared that then President Trump would attempt a coup after the 2020 election.

Joining us now with his take on the bombshell revelations from "The Washington Post" reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker's new book about former President Trump's final year in office, attorney, contributing columnist to "The Washington Post", George Conway.

George, last night when the story broke, it was on "AC360", Jamie Gangel's reporting about what's in the book. I saw you were watching along, I think with the rest of us who were watching. And your basic reaction was kind of, wow, here we go.

GEORGE CONWAY, CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: Wow, I mean, it was shocking, but on another level, it wasn't surprising because Trump telegraphed what he was going to do for months before January of 2021.

During the campaign, he said that he could only lose if the election were rigged. He said that this would be the most corrupt election in history because of mail-in voting. He did all -- he attacked the election immediately after he realized that votes weren't coming in. He had people in the Oval Office during -- after the election talking about the possibility of declaring martial law and rerunning -- having the military rerun the election.

I mean, this was all of a piece for his personality and for who he was and what he had been doing for four years, but particularly in 2020 and 2021. And what's interesting, one aspect that's interesting to me about Milley's observations about this potentially being a Reichstag fire moment, and comparing this to other situations in history was the two groups that really were most alarmed, I think, in 2015 and 2016 -- and I wish I had followed it more then -- about Trump's possible election and later his election were the psychologists and the psychiatrists who viewed Trump as a classic malignant narcissist in the way that the psychologist Erich Fromm described, tried to describe the great tyrants of history. And they're looking at it from the inside out.

The other people -- the other group is consist of the foreign policy and national security types, including many Republicans who saw Trump as dangerously unfit for office. And they were looking at it from the outside in, from the historical examples of demagogues who had these very same characteristics, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, pathologically lying, completely devoid of morals, completely devoid of any conscience.

And they saw -- it's one of the reasons why so many Republican foreign policy types saw -- you know, were so terrified of Trump is because they were students of history. And Milley, like all these generals as was discussed, you know, in your last segment, you know, he's a student of history. These modern flag officers are students of history, and that's why he immediately, you know, he's latching onto what he's seeing. He's seen historical parallels to the Reichstag fire which was an event, nobody knows who caused it, the historians debate, but Hitler used that to, you know, to, first of all, pass a law to deprive citizens of their civil liberties and later enabling act, the so-called enabling act, which basically the Reichstag gave all of its authority to the chancellor, who became the fuhrer.

You know, the danger here was that Trump would try to use the disorder that he was fomenting as an excuse to do something extra legal, invoke the Insurrection Act, but possibly -- which they apparently drafted an order earlier on, but to use it to keep himself in office. In fact, to talk about things that he was telegraphing in 2020, he talked about delaying the election. There is no legal possibility of delaying election.

If this is how the man thought and that's why it was so terrifying for people who are really cognizant of history and legality, and it's interesting. You know, in order to make this succeed, he needed the people with the guns, as Milley pointed out. He didn't have them. They were willing to resign seriatim one by one to make sure the republic stayed alive.

And then we talk -- I was here with you last week. We talked about the lawyers willing to resign en masse at the Justice Department before they were going to support any of this. It was just a remarkable, remarkable story that you have to wonder, as Carl Bernstein just said, how did all this come to pass? And it's something we really need to come to grips with as a republic, and it's something that I hope the January 6th committee, the select committee reviews.

And I think one aspect that we need to strongly consider as something that Speaker Pelosi raised last year, which was the 25th Amendment. I mean, here is a man who for four years -- everybody in Washington knew, Republicans, Democrats -- he was mentally unstable. He was deranged. He was unfit for office.

And he was really unable to carry out his duties of office to any serious degree and was, you know -- and so the reason why the 25th Amendment was never invoked was because it takes the cabinet to do that and the cabinet all owes their jobs to Trump. There is a provision in the 25th Amendment, section four, which allows Congress to create a new body, maybe independent experts, whoever, who could make an assessment under the 25th Amendment. That's something that needs to be seriously done because we can't have this happen again. It's just -- it's just terrifying.

KEILAR: You mentioned Milley was a student of history, George. Specifically he was a student of -- is a student still of World War II history. I mean, there's one "New York Times" anecdote where it says, don't get him going about a certain battle in North Africa that involved the Nazis. I mean, he's really into the minutiae of it. He described these anti-government extremists who are fans of Trump as the brown shirts, the militia that aided the Nazis, right?

And I wonder because looking to the past, how it looked to the future. We are very much in the middle of this as Republicans are whitewashing this, what happened with the insurrection. Do you think this is going to be at all a wake up call?

CONWAY: It should be, but we've had a number of wake up calls and the Republicans keep pressing the snooze button. And they have just -- January 6 should have been the ultimate wake up call, and yet we're still -- we are where we are. He's still the front runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. That's just a terrifying thing.

You know, there is all this talk about the deep state. Well, the deep state, you know, that's what we're going to hear. We're going to hear something about the deep state and Milley as people are talking about earlier. The deep state consists of people who are dedicated professionals, dedicated patriotic Americans who view their duties to the country and to the constitution more seriously than Republican lawmakers have.

BERMAN: George Conway, we appreciate you coming in, joining us today. Really, thanks for the discussion.

Up next, justice Stephen Breyer setting the record straight.

[08:25:00]

What he says about the question of his possible retirement. A CNN exclusive.

KEILAR: Plus, dramatic moments in the Free Britney case. What a judge will now let her do after another tearful plea in court.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: We have a CNN exclusive. Justice Steven Breyer is finally addressing his retirement prospects. He is facing mounting pressure from the left to retire so the Democrats, while they're still in the majority, can replace his seat with a younger member and preserve the balance on the court.

CNN's Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic is here with this exclusive interview that she did, and also with us is CNN chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin.

All right, Joan, this is a fascinating interview. I will say sounds like he likes his job. And even as he thinks health is the main factor for whether he'll retire, he's very healthy.

JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN SUPREME COURT ANALYST: He's healthy, he's happy, and he's not going anywhere soon.

When I talked to him yesterday, you know, we're up in New Hampshire. He's very relaxed. He's wearing shorts and sandals, feeling none of the pressures of being in Washington and hearing from all his liberals back here saying, go, go so that President Biden gets his first appointment to the high court. But he said he hasn't made his decision.

[08:30:00]