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New Day

Book Says, Staff Says Trump Flushed Papers Down Toilet at White House; CNN Reports, Russian Figure Skater with Failed Drug Test is a Minor; Family Says, Bob Saget Died After Accidental Blow to Head. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired February 10, 2022 - 06:00   ET

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

[07:00:01]

ELLE REEVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It felt like we had a mutual understanding that whatever our difference is, things have gotten really intense out there.

BIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. Look, Elle, what a tremendous report, just taking us into his mindset. It is so essential as we try to understand what people are. Elle Reeve, great report. Thank you.

And New Day continues right now.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. It is Thursday, February 10th. I'm John Berman alongside Brianna Keilar.

And we do begin with breaking news. Staff members at the White House residence discover wads of printed paper in a clogged toilet and believe that former President Trump was trying to flush documents. That and other explosive revelations in a new book by CNN Political Analyst and New York Times Washington Correspondent Maggie Haberman. We have been waiting with baited breath for this book.

KEILAR: So, this certainly adds a new dimension to Trump's indiscretions with White House documents. A source telling CNN the National Archives has asked the Justice Department to investigate how Trump handled White House records. It's also seeking a review of whether the ex-president violated the Presidential Records Act, including the handling of classified information.

And Maggie Haberman is with us now. She is also the author of Confidence Man, The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

Maggie, we start with the toilet. Tell us what you learned.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning, guys. Thanks for having me. So, as I was reporting out this book, I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged. The engineer would have to come and fix it. And what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up wet, printed paper, meaning it was not toilet paper. This was either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, they believe he had thrown down the toilet.

What it could be, Brianna, it could be anybody's guess. It could be post-its, it could be notes he wrote to himself. It could be other things we don't know. It certainly does add, as you said, another dimension to what we know about how he handled material in the White House. We have known for several years since my colleague, Andy Carney, broke the story that Trump was ripping up pieces of paper and that his staff was having to tape it back for archival purposes. This is how he has handled documents and pieces of paper all of his life in terms of ripping them up. But this was something different and it was not, as I was told, an isolated incident.

BERMAN: Several times? Several times, Maggie?

HABERMAN: This is something that they would -- they would periodically find this to be the case. You know, the exact number, John, I'm not certain of, but it was not just once.

BERMAN: And his toilet, like no mistaking whose toilet it was?

HABERMAN: It was in the pipes. I mean, it was in the pipes. And this was his bathroom. So, yes.

BERMAN: And I'm asking about the specifics, again, because we have heard again from Andy Carney's reporting for years now, he would tear things up. You tear things up, you throw them around and you thrown them on the floor. That's one thing. You walk them into a toilet and you flush them down, that seems to be another.

HABERMAN: It's definitely different. And, again, John, I can't get in his head. I can't speak to what the motive is. I can't speak to why he did it. It's, I think, important to note, Jeffrey Toobin has talked a lot about this over the course of the last day, that the motive on why somebody does this in terms of records, poor recordkeeping in the White House, that would become, you know, a focus if there is some kind of investigation into how he handled material.

As you say, it's been known for a very long time that he was not exactly necessarily tucking everything away. And certainly there had been issues with previous White Houses about records-keeping. But this was the first time I had heard something like this, let's put it that way.

KEILAR: He has the ability to declassify information.

HABERMAN: Yes.

KEILAR: So, clearly, this is trying to hide information. And I think the reason that someone would do --

HABERMAN: Brianna, I don't want to say clearly. I don't know what his motive is.

KEILAR: All right. I understand you're not saying that, Maggie, but this is highly unusual. And this would have the effect of obscuring the information that was on those papers. I think it's important, Maggie, and obviously you know this having covered Trump for so long, he has a habit of trying to hide information, from everything, from classifying stuff that shouldn't have been classified and hiding it. I mean, this is something that he has done over and over again.

HABERMAN: This is not somebody for whom transparency was not a premium in that White House, as we know. And we talked about this many times over the course of four years, the lack of transparency. Again, whether his motive was to try to disappear something, to make it go away, whether he was just standing there, he is an unusual person. And so I can't -- again, I can't get in his head as to why he was doing it, but certainly it raised questions amongst staff.

[07:05:02]

BERMAN: And, again, it's just one more piece in this mosaic now, when we are learning about it just now as you, for the first time, show us the cover of your upcoming book, which we're very excited about, Confidence Man. Again, it adds to this discussion of classified items being found at Mar-a-Lago. It adds the discussion of the January 6th committee being given papers that are torn up and pieced together.

Also we're learning in this book, which we've been waiting for with baited breath, and there's the cover, we're seeing just for the first time this morning, Maggie, Donald Trump is still in contact with Kim Jong-un? What's going on here?

HABERMAN: So, he says. Now, again, what he says and what's actually happening are not always in concert, John, but he has been telling people that he has maintained some kind of either a correspondence or discussion with Kim Jong-un.

I think it is not necessarily unusual for a former president to maintain some kind of contact with other foreign leaders, or former foreign leaders. This would obviously be unusual because this is the only one, to my knowledge, that he is saying that he is still in touch with. And as we know, he had a fixation on this relationship.

Those letters from Kim Jong-un that The Washington Post, in terrific reporting, reported on the fact that he had taken with him to the White House the original copies, he would wave them around, as I understand. He would wave them around in the White House and he would wave them around at Mar-a-Lago. He would have them in these boxes and he would take them out and show them.

This was a relationship -- he has got pictures on the wall of his office of Kim Jong-un. This was a relationship that was very important to him and it's pretty striking given who Kim Jong-un is.

KEILAR: I do have a question about the photo on the cover, Maggie. Tell us about that choice.

HABERMAN: Sure. So, Brianna, this is a book that is different -- there's been a number of exceptional books about the Trump White House. This is not just a Trump White House book. This is a book about the former president, the arc of his life, beginning in his life in New York City and how that world shaped him and then shaped the world that he created in the White House.

And so the younger picture is to convey, A, this is a different book but also this is something that is anchored in a different period of time, at least in the beginning, and then it goes through the White House years and to Florida in the past year.

BERMAN: Well, if toiletgate or flushgate, I haven't decided which one I'm going with yet, if that's just the first revelation we are getting out of this book, I expect to learn many more things, very much looking forward to it. Maggie Haberman, thank you so much for joining us this morning with this new bit of information.

KEILAR: Fascinating bit of information here.

And let's talk about this now with CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig.

Okay. So, Elie, Maggie isn't going to go as far as to talk about what the motive is of the flushing documents, but you have some experience where this has happened in some cases that you've been involved with. Tell us.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. I had a case that brings this one very much to mind. I did a case when I was a prosecutor here in New York where we were going to arrest a member of the mafia. And the FBI knocked on the door, said FBI, open up. He didn't open up. The guy took a bunch of documents relating to gambling and loan sharking, started ripping them up and throwing them in the toilet. FBI then let themselves in and actually scooped the documents out of the toilet, let them dry out and put them back together.

Now, I don't think that's possible here, but I think the point here is intent is crucial, right? Was this an attempt to get rid of the documents for some bad reason, or was this sort of just the lazy habit or a thoughtless habit? But flushing things down the toilet is different, right? John, I see from your face.

BERMAN: Yes. No, it's just -- it's not -- papers aren't drain-o, like documents aren't drain-o. There is only one reason to flush papers down the toilet.

HONIG: I've never been in the west wing or the residents, but I guarantee you there are garbage cans and recycle bins all over the place there. So, you have to ask, why the toilet?

KEILAR: Why the toilet? Some things -- I will tell you, I have a 3- year-old. Some things do get things flushed down the toilet in house, mostly Hot Wheels.

BERMAN: Your son is not under federal investigation, yet.

KEILAR: And no one is flushing documents.

HONIG: Yes. And, look, the classification issue is important here too, as you said, Brianna. The president, not the former president, but when you are in office, you have the ability to declassify a document. Now, if you're going to do that, there presumably would be some record of that, some document saying, the president hereby declassifies. You can't just say, I, the president, hereby declassify you. I'm alone in the bathroom, rip, rip, flush. I don't think that's going to do it. So, one of the questions was, were these documents declassified at the time?

However, even if not, there are still other laws that could be implicated. Even if a document is completely declassified, if you tried to destroy it and it is subject to the Presidential Records Act, that is a crime. If you try to get rid of something because you're obstructing justice, that's a potential crime. I don't think it's likely DOJ gets there but that's what's in play.

KEILAR: Or if you took notes on the document. That is also a matter of presidential record.

BERMAN: Yes. And, again, the classified issues deals very much with this information that's been found at Mar-a-Lago, the classified information being reported that was discovered there.

[07:10:07]

Did he unclassify? You can't retroactively do that. I'm not sure it matters when you're flushing stuff down the toilet whether it is classified or not. I mean, I know it would raise the stakes there, but it does get to intent of hiding something.

Elie, I just want to ask, and I think this is a very important question here, the totality of this, the flushiing, the classified stuff, the tearing. Merrick Garland, once again, is faced with a big decision here. Does he choose to investigate this?

HONIG: Yes. So, I think this situation is a little bit different than the January 6th, because whenever Merrick Garland, for the most part, or DOJ is asked about, what are you doing about January 6th? We ask all the time sort of here in media, but he's asked sometimes and he always falls back on, easy prosecutorial boiler plate. We follow facts and law. We follow facts and law. Wherever that may takes us, that's where we go. Now, we have a specific referral from the Archives on a specific issue to the Justice Department. And so I think DOJ officials can and should and will be asked, what are you doing with that referral? Have you received it? Are you doing anything with it? It's harder to just go back to the facts and law, wherever it takes. That is really a yes or no.

So, look, there's a lot of questions being asked. I have asked a lot about what Merrick Garland is or is not doing. I think January 6th itself is a much, much bigger deal than this, but this puts him on the spot.

KEILAR: Fascinating. Elie, thank you so much for discussing this.

HONIG: Can I offer one? Toilet watergate? Doesn't that work?

KEILAR: Guys, you haven't landed on one yet.

HONIG: Sorry.

KEILAR: So, I'm just going to --

BERMAN: That's not bad.

HONIG: It's better than yours.

BERMAN: It's better than mine.

KEILAR: I'm going to ask you to keep working. I know you have it in you, okay, but we're not there yet.

All right, more breaking news this morning, this explosive scandal that could derail the premier event at the Olympic Games. CNN has learned that a Russian figure skater has failed a drug test, and that person is a minor.

All right, the language here is very precise. It's important. Listen carefully. The implications are clear. The six-person Russian team has not yet received their gold medal for winning the team event this week. The medal ceremony was supposed to take place Tuesday night, but it was delayed for what's being described as legal consultations.

KEILAR: So, we're being very precise, as we mention, with this language here, but you can get the implications. It is not clear exactly as well when this test, when this positive test was taken. Was this taken at the Olympics? These are things we're trying to get to the bottom of. The only minor on the Russian figure skating team is 15-year-old Kamila Valieva, and she made history on Monday. And she had the eyes of the world on her, becoming the first woman ever to land a quad at the games, and doing it at 15, just unbelievable. We were all watching that.

Joining us now to discuss, CNN Contributor Patrick McEnroe, he captained the U.S. men's tennis team at the 2004 Olympics and is also an ESPN Commentator.

PATRICK MCENROE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Good morning, nice to be here.

KEILAR: Good morning. Thank you for being with us. What questions is this raising for you at this point in time and how big a deal is this?

MCENROE: I guess my first reaction to a Russian Olympic athlete supposedly testing positive is am I supposed to be surprised? I mean, this is sort of the M.O. This is why they are not being called the team from Russia. There is called the ROC, Russian Olympic Committee team. So, they probably should never have been allowed to come back to the Olympics to start, but let's look at what we do know and what we can say, which is that somebody has tested positive, as you have reported, it sounds like it's a minor. I sat there this other night and watched this incredible figure skater land a multiple quad. It's about doing the four spins. I'm thinking, wow, this is unbelievable.

And we in sports, as a former athlete, we're always looking to push the envelope. What can we do to be better? Our diet, what we put in our system, when we eat, how much we eat, what kind of liquids we take, creatine, all these -- I took all these things when I was a professional tennis player. I'm going to be honest, I didn't know exactly what was in all of them every time I took them. Then we got tested. So, she got tested.

The thing about this story is why was a positive test so early? I mean, we're hearing that it was supposedly taken in December. Again, is that reporting that we can do, or is that still being investigated?

BERMAN: We do not know when the test was taken.

MCENROE: Okay.

BERMAN: There is some reporting out there that it was taken earlier. I'm not sure functionally how much that matters to the discussion at play here, only that we're only learning about it now, and that would be odd in its time. But if it's during your training, if it's during your train, that that -- well, I imagine that would have an impact on your eligibility for the Olympic Games, right?

MCENROE: Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. I'm just saying why is it coming out at this point in time after the skater has been allowed to skate and been allowed perform and wow the world, assuming it is this 15-year-old who we all think it is, and go before the world and do this incredible performance that nobody has ever done in figure skating?

[07:15:07]

KEILAR: If we look at what happened that got Russia to this point, you have Russian athletes not competing technically for Russia, you're not surprised. But I think what is surprising is just how much this cuts down this fairy tale, right, this Olympic fairy tale of the sport that people are watching. I mean, this is Oksana Baiul kind of stuff that people were expecting and that they were seeing in this team event and maybe expecting for the main show. I think that's why it really hits.

MCENROE: And I think it goes back to sort of if we can take a 30,000- foot look at this, right, the start of these Olympics, with all the human rights going on in China, with looking at a ski slope where there's literally now snow anywhere else on the mountain. I mean, it's bizarre. Looking from the helicopters above, you see the slope for the downhill and there's no snow, okay? So, China created this.

There is the -- for the freestyle, for the mogul, where they do the tricks on the ski, it's in the middle of an industrial site, right? And then all of a sudden there is just a stream of white. It's bizarre. And why? It's all about the money. This is what it's about. This is the sad part of this whole thing. It continues to grow and grow and grow. And so when your an athlete, who knows if she even knew what they were giving her.

BERMAN: Oh, yes, she's a minor. I mean, there are serious reasons to believe she didn't at that age.

MCENROE: And it's like we have got to get a quad, we've got to show the world. Obviously, she's a tremendous talent. She can wow the world, as she did. So, we're going to keep pushing the envelope, we're going to keep pushing it. We have seen athletes in our country do it in individual sports, team sports as well. You are going to keep pushing and pushing. Why? For the next big payday or for the pressure that you're under from your own committee. And when does it end?

BERMAN: And, look, all I have to say is the delay between when we first learned about this and the fact that they haven't come out --

MCENROE: Still haven't announced anything.

BERMAN: It does raise the possibility of shenanigans behind the scenes at the Olympics, which there is poisonous politics all the time. So, God only knows what's going on --

MCENROE: I will leave that for you two to dissect later on. But, yes, Russia, China --

BERMAN: Patrick McEnroe, great to see you in person.

MCENROE: Nice to be here.

BERMAN: I look forward to many more discussions like this.

MCENROE: You got it. Thanks, you guys.

KEILAR: So, up next, we are now getting more details about what happened to Bob Saget, what was just revealed as the shocking cause of his death.

Plus, New York is lifting mask mandates for businesses as several states have announced similar rollbacks against the CDC guidance.

BERMAN: And the North Carolina Elections Board says it has the authority to disqualify Congressman Madison Cawthorn from running over his role in the January 6th insurrection. We will speak with Cawthorn's lawyer ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:20:00]

BERMAN: So, for the first time this morning, we are learning how Full House Star Bob Saget died last month in a hotel room in Florida. His family released a statement overnight. It reads, authorities have determined that Bob passed from head trauma. They've concluded that he accidentally hit the back of his head on something, thought nothing of it and went back to school. No drugs or alcohol were involved.

CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon. Brains are his business. Sanjay, you read something like that, he bumped his head on something and died from it. How can that happen?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it is really sad and unusual situation in terms of what happened specifically to him. He was alone in his hotel room, had this -- it sounds like a pretty significant blow to the head but did not think anything of it, as you mentioned. But people can develop collections of blood on top of the brain in the form of, for example, what's known as a subdural hematoma.

I'm going to show you an image of that. I mean, again, just from what the families describing, what authorities found, was that you sometimes can have little veins that, as a result of a blow to the head, those little veins tear and blood starts to accumulate. You wouldn't know it at the time necessarily. Again, you would feel the blow to the head. You would think, look, I'm okay, fell backwards, maybe hit the back of his head in the bathroom or on the head board getting into bed, but something pretty significant. But over time, that blood starts to accumulate, it pushes pressure, puts pressure on the brain, including the brain stem. Someone may lose consciousness, lose their ability to breathe on their own. If they're by themselves, nobody is keeping an eye on them, that can be sort of how that tragic sequence of events unfolds.

Somebody like this comes to the hospital, typically, the goal is to just basically decompress the brain, so the brain doesn't have this pressure on anymore, remove the blood collection. But if someone doesn't show up at the hospital within hours, you could accumulate enough blood in certain situations to really, sadly, have this outcome.

KEILAR: And they don't know until it's really too late. You know, the bump on the head may not seem like a big deal. How common is this, Sanjay?

GUPTA: Well, you know, people who have blows to the head and then develop some bleeding on the brain, that's not usual. The idea that someone would die of it and not having it checked out or anything, that is unusual. I mean, there are certain risk factors, people who are older. What happens as you get older, your brain does start to shrink a bit. And as a result, you have more room to accommodate some of that blood. So that could be an issue. Someone on blood thinners could take what would have otherwise been an innocuous amount of bleeding and turned it into something more significant. We don't know if he was. He was 65 years old, so that's not that old. But the brain does shrink a little bit with age.

And then again, did he have a blow to the head in the past even that may have caused a little bit of blooding and this then worsened it?

[07:25:04]'

There's all these factors. We don't know precisely what happened here. But that sort of scenario is not unusual. I see older patients oftentimes who are getting into the car and they hit their head on the frame of the car, that hurts. They don't think anything about it. And then a couple of weeks later even, it may take that long for them to accumulate enough blood to actually start causing problems. They can't even remember when they hit their head in the past that caused this problem. So, it does happen, about a quarter of people who hit their heads significantly like that may accumulate some amount of bleeding but not always obviously like this, not always so dramatic of the amount of blood that it sounds like he had.

BERMAN: Look, it's why you have to take head injuries seriously, all of them. Better safe than sorry. Get them checked out if you have any concerns at all.

Sanjay, I want to talk about COVID a little bit right now because you have some new reporting on why you say the U.S. is still not getting it right on COVID data.

GUPTA: Yes. I mean, this is interesting. If you look at sort of the inefficiencies overall on data, there are several things that sort of have jumped out here. You know, just the overall data and how it was transmitted since the beginning of the pandemic mainly was coming from the states, not from the feds. So we, as a result, were not hearing some of the priorities laid out as a nation versus localities still having to sort of submit their data and then make decisions based on that. That's an issue.

I mean, even most recently when vaccinations were approved for 5 to 11-year-olds, as reporters, we were trying to get data. How many people are taking the vaccine? It took about a month for the CDC to sort of update their dashboard on this.

The data systems are really inefficient in this country. To report a COVID death requires six separate steps from state to feds, feds back to states, to actually confirm that. It can take a long time. And as a result, again, we're always lagging. We talk about when to lift masks, when to actually stop some of these mitigation measures. That's based on data. The data we have is often -- it's not adequate nor is it timely either. There are inconsistencies in the data.

Again, just as a reporter for two years, it's kind of remarkable that if we hear positive test, does that mean it's a test of a single person or could a person have had three positive tests and that leads to three positives in a particular locality? Still, there are states that do this differently than other places, so we still don't know for sure what a positive means one place to the other. PCR versus antigen tests, they're still not often categorized between these types of tests with COVID, for COVID. I mean, this is something that we have been asking about since the beginning, but only recently in New York and in L.A. did we start to see that sort of data.

Now, it doesn't necessarily make a difference to hospitals, I can tell you, because if someone is diagnosed with COVID in the hospital, they still need to go into isolation. People need to wear personal protective equipment when visiting them in their room, all that sort of stuff. So, it's a huge task in the hospital whether you are diagnosed with COVID before or after you come into the hospitalization. But a lot of this is just the overall underfunding of public health, which was a problem pre-pandemic.

But right now, I mean, I talk to people at the state level who have data. When they enter that data, there is actually no communication with the feds. It has to go through different systems in order to actually be accessible. And I just bring it up to that level of detail because everything we talk about in terms of whether to lift mask mandates, what the mitigation measures are going to look like going forward, why we always seem to be caught behind is because of some of those inefficiencies I've just described.

KEILAR: Before we let you go, Sanjay, we learned that Prince Charles has tested positive again for COVID. The last time was 2020. Your reaction to this, and also if he has spent time with the queen recently, which we know that he has, what would the timing, what would the window of risk be there?

GUPTA: Yes. So, I mean, first of all, the idea that omicron is such a different virus, that even if you've had COVID in the past, I think this is really important, people oftentimes think, hey, I'm good, I've had it in the past, I think omicron has proved that because it is so different, that immunity that you may have had from previous infection has not been that protective against this particular variant. It is that different a virus in this regard.

In terms of incubation, people often will develop symptoms much more quickly with omicron if they are going to develop symptoms at all. You remember, we used to say five days, right, between the time of exposure to the time you develop symptoms, with delta, it was more like four days, with omicron, it's more like three days.

And then if you were someone who has contracted this even if you're vaccinated and all that sort of stuff, it can happen. You are about five times less likely to contract to get infected if you have been vaccinated versus not, but you can still get obviously infected and you could still transmit. So, everyone that has had close contact with Prince Charles would need to be tested, obviously, and followed to see if they develop any symptoms.

[07:30:04]

KEILAR: Yes. Sanjay, thank you so much for hitting on all of those topics. We appreciate it.