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William Taylor is Interviewed about Russia Using Bombs; Trump Accused of Criminal Conspiracy; Lviv Prepares to Fight Russia; U.S. Targets Russian Billionaires. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired March 03, 2022 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00]

WILLIAM TAYLOR, VP, STRATEGIC STABILITY, U.S. INSTITUTE OF PEACE: With these kinds of weapons. These kinds of weapons are barred. These kinds of weapons are -- represent war crimes.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: We've heard from the president that perhaps it's too early to tell if war crimes have occurred. Do you disagree with that assessment?

TAYLOR: It's very evident that the Russians are attacking civilians. They are intentionally attacking civilians, Brianna. That's a war crime.

Now, you do have to do the investigation and the evidence is there and the evidence is being collected. But, yes, in my view, it's clearly a war crime.

KEILAR: And, look, it's a -- it's a legal question as well, right, that, as you mentioned, it does have to be investigated.

What is your concern at this point? Your biggest concern.

TAYLOR: My concern is our ability to get weapons, ammunition to the Ukrainians. Ukrainians are fighting hard, ferociously, valiantly and they are holding off the Russians in many plates. However, the Russians have an incredible advantage in this military effort. They have a 10-1 advantage in most of the weapons systems. They have an incredible number of soldiers. Some not well trained. Some deserting. Some turning back. But, nonetheless, they can pour equipment and pour resources and pour military equipment into Ukraine.

Ukraine is fighting that, but they need our help. They need it now. It's not tomorrow. It's not the next day. The Ukrainians need it now. That's my concern.

KEILAR: You've heard the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, say any third world war will be nuclear and it will be destructive. So yet another nuclear threat that is being bandied about either by Putin or one of his, you know, top officials.

Do you take these threats seriously?

TAYLOR: Brianna, you have to take seriously those kind of threats. However, I don't believe that either Mr. Lavrov or, more importantly, there's only one decision maker as we know, Mr. Putin. I don't believe Mr. Putin is suicidal. I don't believe he would commit suicide in this effort.

Nuclear weapons have no place -- no place in the world, certainly no place in this conflict. I don't believe that this is -- this is performance. This is what they're trying to rattle. They're trying to intimidate. This is what they've done all along is to intimidate President Zelensky or President Biden or the west. And so far they've failed. So far they have failed. We are standing up. The Ukrainians are standing up. And they'll continue to do that.

KEILAR: Yes. Homicidal, perhaps. Suicidal, no. I think it's an important lens as we try to figure out what Putin's calculus is ahead here.

Ambassador, thanks for being with us this morning.

TAYLOR: Thank you, Brianna.

KEILAR: Just released, a stunning court filing by the January 6th committee claiming that former President Trump was part of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. We'll talk about the significance of that ahead.

Plus, yachts, private jets, luxury apartments. How Russian oligarchs may finally be paying a price for Putin's war.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:32:19]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, our special coverage of the intensifying war, Russian invasion of Ukraine, continues in just a moment.

But first, new this morning, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol alleges in court documents that former President Donald Trump and one of his lawyer, John Eastman, were part of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. The committee writes, quote, President Trump and members of his campaign knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, but the president nevertheless sought to use the vice president to manipulate the results in his favor.

Joining me now, CNN's senior legal analyst, and former federal prosecutor, Elie Honig.

First, just the context of this court filing in which the January 6th committee, for the first time on paper, is saying a crime may have been committed.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, John, first things first. This is not an indictment. This is not criminal charges. This is, however, very important.

Here's what's happening. The committee wants to get copies of these emails between John Eastman, this lawyer who recommended that Mike Pence has the power to essentially overturn the election, and Donald Trump. Eastman's response, however, is, no, committee, you don't get these documents because they're protected by the attorney/client privilege. Those are confidential communications.

However, there is an exception to the attorney/client privilege. The committee is saying -- it's called the crime fraud exception. Meaning, if the communication between the attorney and client relates to an ongoing crime or fraud, then there is no privilege. So the committee is saying, you two, Eastman and Trump, we believe were engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Therefore, we get the emails.

BERMAN: So -- exactly. I mean a lawyer can't tell a client to break the law.

HONIG: Right.

BERMAN: That's the crime fraud provision right there.

HONIG: Yes.

BERMAN: This is a civil case. So, how do you prove that? What's the standard of proof here that the judge will have to decide on?

HONIG: So, it's lower than an indictment, of course. If this was a criminal charge, you would have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the unanimous satisfaction of a jury. Here it's going to be up to the judge who will decide whether by a preponderance there's enough evidence that there's a conspiracy.

What the committee's actually asking the judge to do is say, judge, I want you to take a look at these emails.

BERMAN: Yes.

HONIG: What we call in camera, which means sort of in private back in your judicial chambers. The judge will look at those documents and we will get a ruling from the judge. It will be appealed, but we'll get a ruling from the judge saying, I do find there's a basis here to believe there was a criminal conspiracy.

BERMAN: And that's significant, right?

HONIG: Very much.

BERMAN: A judge is going to lay eyes on this and decide if at least a minimum burden is set here that a crime may have been committed. There may be another audience, Elie, for all of this, and who's that? HONIG: Knock, knock, Merrick Garland, are you listening? This is clearly, to me, directed from the January 6th committee over to the Justice Department.

[06:40:00]

If you look at this document, it almost reads like what an internal DOJ prosecution memo would read as. You see all the facts laid out. You see the legal arguments, why the committee says this was not just some sort of aggressive effort to challenge the election. This crossed the line into fraud. And they lay it out with citations. The case law with citations to specific pieces of evidence.

And I think what the committee is really trying to do here, and we've seen them do this in other context, Adam Schiff has done this explicitly, is essentially saying, DOJ, don't wait for us. This is your job, DOJ. We've not seen any sign DOJ is doing that. But they're trying to change the political temperature here.

BERMAN: Yes, the committee itself can't prosecute, right?

HONIG: Right.

BERMAN: It has to come from DOJ.

Just on the legal point, John Eastman, what's the difference between being wrong, right, being wrong about the law can say and being criminal?

HONIG: As a lawyer, you are allowed to make aggressive arguments, strange arguments, even novel arguments, maybe even ridiculous arguments. What you cannot do is argue something that you know to be false. And that's why this document goes to great pains to explain why this was not just some aggressive legal theory. They say DOJ, at the time, said, no, Donald Trump has not won this election. The FBI said that. DHS said that. They even quote John Eastman himself admitting to one of the lawyers, I know that if this gets to the Supreme Court will lose 9-0.

So, the argument the committee makes is, this crosses the line from just an aggressive or unusual legal argument and crosses over into outright fraud.

BERMAN: Very quickly, an Oath Keeper pled guilty yesterday and agreed to cooperate.

HONIG: Yes. Yes.

BERMAN: What's the significance here?

HONIG: Yes, well, it's a big deal because now DOJ will know everything that the Oath Keeper knows. The deal when you cooperate with DOJ is, you have to tell us every, every crime you committed, every crime anyone else committed. How high up that goes, I guess we'll be seeing. But this is how you climb the ladder, DOJ, if they are climbing the latter, is doing it awfully slowly, but this is the step on the way. BERMAN: Elie Honig, Counselor, great to see you this morning.

HONIG: Thanks, John.

BERMAN: Next, CNN's Anderson Cooper speaks with Ukrainian residents who are stocking up on supplies, and weapons, and preparing to fight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: You have a message to Vladimir Putin. What is it?

What would I tell him, he says? I would tell him he can go (EXPLETIVE DELETED) himself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:46:26]

BERMAN: We have brand-new video just in from the Ukrainian ministry of defense. Look at that. They posed this just moments ago, writing, the enemy does not go unpunished. Allied artillery men inflict heavy fire damage, destroying columns and clusters of Russian occupation forces. Ukrainian artillery -- and you can see it operating right here, more than 30 shots we counted there -- works as always clearly, accurately and as efficiency as possible. Again, that post from the Ukrainian ministry of defense. We ourselves can't verify where exactly this video is from or when it was taken. But a message and video evidence, they say, of acts of defiance.

Brianna.

KEILAR: Yes, look, there's a battle right now, isn't there? There's a battle for morale, I think. And even as Ukraine may be outgunned here by Russia, certainly they may be winning that morale fight.

Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are finding ways to defend their country and to fight Russia's invasion. In the city of Lviv, where no bombs have landed as of yet, defiant residents say they are preparing for the worst.

CNN's Anderson Cooper has more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): In an old factory in Lviv, they prepare for war as best they can. Welding steel to block roads, hedgehogs (ph), they're called.

COOPER (on camera): These are most effective, I'm told, when the ground is soft and that they can get dug down into the earth or perhaps even on a cobblestone street they can dig down between the cobblestones. But with a hedgehog this size, it's unlikely to be able to stop a Russian tank, but perhaps a vehicle or Humvee. COOPER (voice over): Lviv has so far been mostly unscathed. At night,

air raid sirens sound, but the fight is still further east. Each night, each day, the determination here grows.

At a brewery in Lviv, they now make Molotov cocktails. Teras Mosilco (ph) says they've made 2,000 at least using empty bottles of a popular anti-Putin beer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's Putin (INAUDIBLE), which means Putin dickhead. And you would see it --

COOPER (on camera): Wait, the beer is called Putin dickhead?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

COOPER: How long have you been making Putin dickhead beer?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's actually -- we started to brew this beer in 2015 because in 2014 the Russians came to Crimea peninsula and gathered in eastern regions. So, this label has a history already, so.

COOPER: Wow.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. What you see normally --

COOPER: That's quite the -- that's quite the image.

COOPER (voice over): It's a primitive weapon, but potentially deadly. These Molotov cocktails also have additional materials in them to ensure the fire will stick to whatever it's thrown at.

COOPER (on camera): Petrol alone isn't good enough. You want something to make it sticky so that it sticks on -- on a person.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Yes, to stick on a surface.

COOPER: When we got here to the factory, there was a group of maybe 70 or so men who were all standing around a car. And there was somebody in a uniform, Ukrainian in uniform, who was explaining to them how to throw a Molotov cocktail inside a vehicle to the best effect. There's a lot of people here who are trying to get as much training as they can in order to be able to face Russian forces if and when they come.

COOPER (voice over): In another neighborhood, residents gather supplies and send them wherever they're needed.

Spike strips to puncture tires.

[06:50:00]

Flat jackets with metal plates inside.

We're continually sending them to our guys there throughout the day, he says. Here you can see camouflage nets. They're used as a cover so that the enemy doesn't know where our tanks and armored personnel carriers are located. In the other room, we have medicine and groceries.

A week ago he was a construction worker. But then Putin invaded and everything changed.

COOPER (on camera): You have a message to Vladimir Putin. What is it?

COOPER (voice over): What would I tell him, he says? I would tell him he can go (EXPLETIVE DELETED) himself.

Fourteen-year-old Andre's (ph) school is closed. He says volunteering makes him less nervous about the war.

COOPER (on camera): Are you scared?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For first time on first day I was. But now I understand that we need help and support our soldiers and people. And then we will live in peace -- in peace.

COOPER (voice over): Before leaving we meet Pavlo (ph) and his son Artur (ph), just 10-month-old, wrapped in the Ukrainian flag.

He told me, I just want to say my son Artur will learn to say "glory to Ukraine" faster than he says mom or dad.

COOPER (on camera): Those will be his first words, (speaking in foreign language)?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Yes.

COOPER (voice over): Anderson Cooper, CNN, Lviv, Ukraine.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: I don't know. That might be a mouthful for a little baby. But you see sort of, I think, that this is what parents are trying to impart to their kids there. I think they're showing that they're modelling what they want for their children.

BERMAN: And a 14-year-old -- to think a 14-year-old isn't in school right now but is helping piece together defensive weapons there. And a lot of this is mental health. A lot of it has a very practical value. We've seen it other cities around Ukraine. But some of it is giving people just something to do so they can feel like they're pitching in and fighting back. I think that's so important right now.

KEILAR: Yes, finding that purpose is incredibly important for their morale.

So, Russian oligarchs are starting to feel this pinch, this pinch of Putin's war as a new Justice Department task force is setting its sights on their yachts, their planes and other high-dollar assets.

And also, we are on the ground in Ukraine where the mayor of the port city of Kherson is indicating that his city has fallen to Russian forces.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:56:28]

BERMAN: New efforts by U.S. law enforcement to make Russian oligarchs feel the pain of Putin's war. The Justice Department announced a special clepo-capture (ph) task force targeting Russian yachts, jets, real estate. France is already taking action, seizing one oligarch's yacht docked on the French Riviera.

CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans here with the details on this.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Yes, this is what they're doing, John. They're going to target yachts, real estate and ill-gotten riches of Putin's inner circle, the oligarchs with wealth parked around the world. Prosecutors and federal agents working with experts in money laundering, tax enforcement, national security, all to target Russia's tycoons.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're joining with European allies to find and seize their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets. We're coming for you, ill-begotten gain.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: With our allies, a vice grip tightening around Russia's oligarchs. $39 billion of their wealth has evaporated since the Russian stock market collapsed. That stock market, by the way, still closed. Closed since last week. Closed again today. The Russian ruble is cratering. It's worth less than a penny. They can't move money out of Russia. Capital controls now. The government prohibiting transfers of more than 10,000. And sanctions have frozen the western assets of those closest to Putin. Sanctions are crippling the Russian economy. And Russia's billionaires control roughly 30 percent of the wealth within Russia. Get this, that's double the share of billionaires in the U.S.

But they also have significant wealth stashed overseas, in offshore accounts, luxury homes, yachts, sports teams. That's what the west plans to target and confiscate. There are already reports of yachts being seized in Germany. We can confirm the yacht seized in France.

Even so, it's going to be challenging here. Oligarchs have spent three decades amassing these fortunes and hiding them by putting ownership under the friend of a friend, shell companies or maneuvering to distance themselves from their big assets.

Not on a sanctions list, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea Football Club. He transferred stewardship to that team, he said, to the club's charitable foundation. And now, John, announces that he plans to sell it.

BERMAN: Yes, that was really interesting. And he says he's going to give the proceeds to the Ukrainians. ROMANS: So the proceeds would be huge. He bought that club early 2000s

for something like $187 million. There have been offers as high as $3 billion for that club. So imagine how much money that is. Would he really give it to the Ukrainian -- victims of the Ukrainian conflict? We'll have to wait and see.

BERMAN: The other thing is, when you're talking about seizing yachts, it sounds complicated, but if it's in your port, you can just go do it, right?

ROMANS: That's right. And it takes a lot of people, actually. I mean how many people are on those super yachts.

One question I have, if you're looking at sanctions, can you even employ a captain to move a ship like that, right, because that person would be violating sanctions against -- so, it's all very fascinating. And this is what this team at the Justice Department is going not go after, anybody who violates any letter of these sanctions, your stuff will be gone.

BERMAN: You know, and the idea is hit the oligarchs where it hurts and by doing that you're hitting Putin where it hurts, because he depends on those oligarchs.

ROMANS: Right.

BERMAN: Christine Romans, thank you very much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

BERMAN: And NEW DAY continues right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BERMAN: And good morning to our viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Thursday, March 3rd. I'm John Berman with Brianna Keilar.

And breaking news, Kherson appears to have fallen. The first major Ukrainian city to be taken by Russian forces.

[06:59:58]

This is a city very near the Black Sea. It is a very strategically important city of some 300,000 people now under Russian control.