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Evidence Shows Trump Pressured DOJ to Overturn U.S. Election; Feds Raid Home of Jeff Clark, Ex-DOJ Official at Center of Coup Plot; Documentary Filmmakers Refute Claim That Trump Had Control. Aired 7- 7:30a ET

Aired June 24, 2022 - 07:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Even bleak.

[07:00:01]

The officials laid out how Trump attempted to weaponize the Justice Department for his political gain, pressuring them relentlessly with demands like this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICHARD DONOGHUE, FORMER ACTING DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: What I'm just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That pressure, those calls, it was relentless, almost daily, pressure to say things that were not true, that these officials told the president were not true and pressure to do things that arguably were not legal.

Then there was the scheme to install this man, Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer and election lie promoter into the top job at Justice. Federal investigators raided Clark's home Wednesday, the day before he was to be the focus of the congressional hearing. Clark described the raid overnight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEFFREY CLARK, FORMER JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: At one point, you know, 12 agents and two Fairfax County police officers went into my house, searched it for three and a half hours. They even brought along something, Tucker, I have never seen before or heard of, an electronic sniffing dog, and they took all of the electronics from my house.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: And new fallout this morning from revelations that six Republican lawmakers sought preemptive pardons from former President Trump before and after the attack on the Capitol. That is according to emails and testimony revealed by the January 6th committee.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Was Representative Gaetz requesting a pardon?

ERIC HERSCHMANN, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE LAWYER: I believe so.

The pardon that he was discussing, requesting, was as broad as you could describe.

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, FORMER AIDE TO TRUMP WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF MARK MEADOWS: Mr. Biggs did. Mr. Jordan talked about congressional pardons but he never asked me for one.

Mr. Gohmert asked for one as well. Mr. Perry asked for a pardon, too. I'm sorry.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did Marjorie Taylor Greene contact you?

HUTCHINSON: No, she didn't contact me about it. I heard that she had asked White House Counsel Office for a pardon.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: So, what were the roles of the pardon seekers in January 6? Let's bring in Tom Foreman to walk us through that. Tom?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: If you look at all six of the folks we are talking about right now, they have all forwarded some version of either this didn't happen or I wasn't asking for myself or you don't under the circumstances. But let's look at who has been talked about here.

Mo Brooks from Alabama, he spoke at the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, remember that big quote, start taking down names and kicking ass, is what he told the crowd, said this week that he's willing to testify but only if it's in public and Trump rescinded his endorsement of Mo Brooks for all of that in March in his race down.

Matt Gaetz down in Florida, he also echoed Trump's lies about the election, saying he won when, in fact, Joe Biden won. He defended Trump right after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And it's not clear what his pardon request would be about because his request, according to what we heard in the hearing, was incredibly sweeping. It was for basically his entire existence up until this point. He should be cleared of everything. Remember there's a big investigation in Florida about possible sexual trafficking there that he has been implicated in in some fashion. So, we don't know about that.

Representative Scott Perry in Pennsylvania, he pushed the whole scheme for Jeffrey Clark to take over the Department of Justice during White House meetings, according to a former aide to Mark Meadows. He acted as a conduit between Clark and Trump in this whole effort to overturn the election. That's what the testimony has shown.

Andy Biggs in Arizona, he was pushing there for the Arizona GOP House speaker, Rusty Bowers, who we have heard a lot about, to throw out the Biden electors and put in Trump electors. This is really the heart of the state-level scheming that has come out in all of these hearing, the idea of saying state to by state, just throw out what the voters wanted, put in the people you want and say that is what our state is for, in all cases, they wanted to favor Trump.

Representative Louie Gohmert down in Texas, he spearheaded the lawsuit seeking to force Vice President Pence to throw the election to Trump. And days before the January 6th attack, they reportedly flagged -- the Capitol police reportedly flagged comments by Gohmert as being potentially inciteful of violence there. He is one who has gone the route of saying, if I had conversations like this, it was for other people, not for me if, I was seeking any kind of pardons there.

And then Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from down in Georgia, who just routinely has spread false claims about the 2020 election and a lot of other things, she referred to the efforts to challenge the election results as our 1776 moment.

Again, almost all of them have forwarded some version of saying it wasn't for me or I didn't do it or you don't understand the circumstances, but, as you've noted earlier today, as we will be noting a lot as we move forward, if, in fact, the testimony is true, that gives some sense of an awareness, a notion that there is possibly something being done illegally here and that it shouldn't be done.

[07:05:15]

And importantly, really important to note, all of the implication of all of these people in this testimony is not coming from Democrats, progressive, liberals, people who are out to get them, the implications are coming from the Trump team, from people within Trump land, which is going to make it difficult for them to keep saying, I wasn't involved, everyone is lying about me.

KEILAR: Very helpful context. Tom Foreman, thank you.

BERMAN: So, one of the key moments from the latest hearing was this from former Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-IL): Let's take a look at another one of your notes. You also noted that Mr. Rosen said to Mr. Trump, quote, DOJ can't and won't snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election. How did the president respond to that, sir?

DONOGHUE: He was responded very we quickly and said, essentially, that's not what I'm asking to you do. What I'm just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right. Joining me now, former Federal Prosecutor Daniel Goldman, he was lead counsel on former President Trump's first impeachment and he is now running for Congress in New York. Also here, CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin. I want to stipulate that both of you just seconds ago told me you did not even think this hearing, as big as it was, was the most significant development yesterday. I will get to what you think is bigger in just a moment. But, Jeffrey, you do think -- you agree with Trump administration officials who say this was the most damaging hearing yet. Why?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Because you had the president himself repeatedly going to his Justice Department team and not asking for the votes to be counted, not asking for any sort of legitimate investigation, just asking for the election to be overturned.

You know, the issue with intent -- and, obviously, we are talking about a criminal investigation here -- the issue with intent goes to, did the person know he was doing something wrong? And that quote you just played with Donoghue where that President Trump is saying, you know, just say it's a fraudulent election and I will take care of the rest. That suggests that the president has no interest in actually counting the votes and winning legitimately. All he's interested in is overturning the election. It's an extremely damaging set of facts.

DANIEL GOLDMAN, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: And that was after he raised every single one of the conspiracy theories. So, it wasn't even -- he can't now say, oh -- he can't try to back out of it and say, I was just saying, you know, that they should really look into this investigation because he went down every single one of the theories, and Richard Donoghue who had said he was closer to the facts because they spent inordinate resources on these crazy wild conspiracy theories, literally went down every single one and said, you are wrong. That is not true.

And then his last thing that he resorts back to is, all right, fine, just say it's corrupt and I will take care of the rest. It's just like what he said to Zelenskyy back in the first impeachment, just announce the investigations, I don't care whether you do them. So, it's a pattern and it's pretty devastating evidence.

BERMAN: Okay. I want -- his defense here, though, is, potentially, I believed the election was corrupt. Why did I believe the election was corrupt? He says because he was looking at the internet. Watch this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONOGHUE: The president yelled out to his secretary, get Ken Cuccinelli on the phone, and she did in very short order. Mr. Cuccinelli was on the phone. He was at number two at DHS at the time, I was on the speakerphone and the president essentially said, Ken, I'm sitting here with the acting attorney general. He just told me it's your job --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right. This isn't the bite. I will play that bite in just a second. The bite that I was going to play, and I'll read it out to you was, you guys might not be following the internet the way that I do. So, he's been told repeatedly by senior Justice Department officials, by the White House counsel that what you are saying is not true, but he says, I have the internet.

GOLDMAN: There is a doctrine in criminal law called willful ignorance, where you would basically say any reasonable person would understand that you -- in this case, that you know these claims are false and you are searching for any thread of, you know, crazy conspiracy theories on the internet, but that if a reasonable person would understand based on the experts telling him what the facts are but he chooses not to believe it.

[07:10:00]

It's effectively putting your head in the sand. And you cannot avoid criminal intent by putting your head in the sand. That is a doctrine that they would apply in this case. It's consciously avoiding knowing the actual evidence when you have every reason to understand it.

TOOBIN: And the level of craziness of some of these theories that came out yesterday, you know, manipulation of Chinese thermostats, Italy manipulating the voting machines over the internet from Italy, I mean, just bonkers stuff that they were pushing.

BERMAN: I now want to shift to what you both agree was the most significant development in the last 24 hours, which was the raid by Department of Justice investigators into the home of Jeffrey Clark, this person whom Donald Trump wanted to install as the acting attorney general. Talk to us about the significance of that, Jeffrey.

TOOBIN: You know, that's a congressional hearing and, you know, people are going to make the judgments about what political impact it has. This is a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice of a very senior lawyer who was very close to Donald Trump in this period. This means that the Department of Justice had probable cause to convince a judge to order a search warrant of someone who was intimately connected with President Trump during the January 6 period, and it means they're investigating him. I mean, we didn't even know that he was under investigation until yesterday.

It suggests that this investigation is reaching into the Oval Office to a degree that we did not know, and the Justice Department had been criticized previously for not doing anything. And it means the investigation is happening now in real-time.

GOLDMAN: I would just caution that the fact that Donald Trump went to such a degree to pervert the Department of Justice shows how anti- American he is, how much of an anti-democratic figure he is. But as to Jeffrey Clark, this is a year-and-a-half after the events and they have probable cause to believe that he still has evidence of a crime in his house. You can't rely on something a year-and-a-half ago to get a search warrant. It's relatively recent. And if I'm Jeffrey Clark, I am marching into the Department of Justice to cooperate as soon as I can because you are much better off cooperating before you're charged and coming clean, you get a lot more benefit for your cooperation if you don't wait until you really are pressed and have no choice. TOOBIN: However, the only place we know Jeffrey Clark was marching was to Fox News and Tucker Carlson's show last night. So, that doesn't suggest he's on the brink of cooperating with the Justice Department.

GOLDMAN: That is true.

BERMAN: Can you back up and talk to me more about the probable cause issue there, the fact that his electronics appear to have been obtained by these investigators and the issue, what would a judge would have had to have determined there?

GOLDMAN: So, in order to get a search warrant, you have to show that there's probable cause that this individual committed a crime and that there's probable cause that there is evidence of that crime in the place where you are searching. And they clearly got a search warrant both for his home and for all of his electronic devices.

And it's not a low bar. You really need -- particularly a year-and-a- half after at least the events that we know about, you have to have relatively recent evidence that he is in possession -- recent evidence of his criminal wrongdoing.

TOOBIN: And the Justice Department has separate rules for searches of lawyers' property and lawyers' residences and lawyers' possessions because there is such a risk that they might disclose attorney/client privilege issues. And so the fact that they searched a lawyer's house and a lawyer's possession suggest that they had even more evidence than they would in an ordinary search.

BERMAN: Jeffrey, just finally, you've been a skeptic all along about whether or not there would be charges here from the Justice Department at the highest levels. Are you less skeptical?

TOOBIN: I would say I'm less skeptical. I mean, a criminal investigation is so different from a congressional investigation that, you know, just a few stray comments in a congressional hearing is not enough to, you know, say that there's a criminal case here. But yesterday, when you saw the totality of President Trump's behavior, it certainly looked like a criminal investigation was warranted at the minimum. And, you know, with we'll see about a prosecution.

GOLDMAN: And I will say based on the evidence that we know of now that more and more has been revealed during these hearings, and I would caution that I would need to really drill down with a lot of the extraneous witnesses, but based on the evidence we have, I would charge Donald Trump.

BERMAN: Daniel Goldman --

TOOBIN: That's him, that's not me.

BERMAN: Jeffrey Toobin -- understood. A difference of opinion but I appreciate the discussion very much.

The former president and his adult children sat down for several interviews for this new documentary surrounding January 6. [07:15:05]

They say they were promised editorial input over the final product. The documentary filmmaker says, not true.

KEILAR: Plus new this morning, the Senate passing the first bipartisan gun safety bill in nearly 30 years and the Supreme Court making it easier to carry firearms in public.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: So, in the midst of everything that took place over the last 24 hours, this dramatic hearing from the January 6th committee, word that federal investigators raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, the January 6th committee also had an interview with a documentary filmmaker, a filmmaker who had spent time interviewing the former president of the United States, the former vice president of the United States, Donald Trump's children.

[07:20:03]

The committee talked to this documentary filmmaker to get his take on what he was told and the footage that he also turned over to the committee.

And also our Don Lemon sat down with this documentary filmmaker to ask about exactly what the committee was focused on. Here is a bit of it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ALEX HOLDER, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: I think they were interested in them talking about the election and about whether the election had any irregularities and also their comments, if any, on January 6.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: I'm sure there is a lot that was left on the editing room floor, right, because you only have a certain amount of time to put a documentary together, you don't have forever.

HOLDER: Yes.

LEMON: Was there anything that they were interested in that does not appear in the documentary?

HOLDER: Yes. So, I mean, the main one being there's sort of a -- the first part of the Ivanka Trump's sort of reaction to her father's position on the election is in the documentary, but another part of it that didn't make it into the documentary, and they were interested in her entire sort of piece on that particular point.

LEMON: Inconsistencies perhaps because she says one thing to her father, she says another thing to the committee, and perhaps something different in your documentary. Were they focused on possible inconsistencies from Ivanka Trump?

HOLDER: I think so, yes. I had this debate with our director of photography, Michael, about whether or not the president actually believed that the election was rigged. And I was of the opinion that, of course, he doesn't really believe the election is rigged. This is just sort of Donald Trump rhetoric. But after that interview, when he left and I was now thinking about what had just happened, my entire position changed. He absolutely, genuinely believes that he won and that the election was stolen from him.

LEMON: And in that moment, you changed your mind?

HOLDER: Absolutely. I changed my mind on the point that he didn't really believe it, i.e., my conclusion was that Donald Trump genuinely believes that he won the 2020 presidential election, and that is terrifying.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: CNN had previously reported that several of Donald Trump's closest allies sat down for this interview after being assured that they had editorial input over the final product, according to two people familiar with the situation. This claim has been denied by Alex Holder and his team.

And joining us now to discuss this further is Alex Holder's lawyer, Russell Smith. So, Russell, looking at what Alex said there, do you think that Ivanka Trump perjured herself?

RUSSELL SMITH, ATTORNEY FOR DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER ALEX HOLDER: It's a great question and the committee lawyers actually asked me before we did our first interviews with them, and I said, we are just going to leave it up to the committee lawyers.

I'm a civil attorney. Of course, we have perjury law in civil law, but a lot of this has to do with state of mind. She said on interview with Alex Holder in the documentary eight days after Bill Barr said the election claims were bullshit, she said on air that -- you know, on the camera, that she stood by it essentially and that President Trump needed to pursue every available remedy to defend the American people and have every vote count. So, she -- and then she testified more recently in April under oath before the committee that she accepted Bill Barr's conclusion.

So, those are two opposite statements. And whether that's perjury or not, I don't know, because, you know, she could say that she changed her mind in eight days. So, I just don't know whether it's perjury and we just decided to leave it up to the committee to figure that out and refer it to the Justice Department if it's perjury.

KEILAR: Well, the question is which of her statements does she truly believe?

SMITH: Yes.

KEILAR: Do you believe the one that she told Alex is what she truly believed?

SMITH: I tend to believe that and I tend to think that, more recently, you know, two years later, she understood that she could be in trouble -- this is my personal belief -- for supporting false election claims. You know, people are being charged with crimes based on that. And so I think she changed her story, honestly. That's just my opinion.

KEILAR: Russell, well, to that point, if she did believe what she told Alex and she told the committee something else under oath, wouldn't that be the definition of perjury?

SMITH: It could be, but it's her mental impression. So, she could just say I changed my mind. I'm not her lawyer obviously and I don't know what her defense would be, and I think there may be bigger issues than whether Ivanka Trump was lying.

[07:25:02]

KEILAR: Maggie Haberman reports that there's anxiety within the Trump family about what they said in the film. Should there be?

SMITH: I think there should be anxiety from any presidential team and family that is under cameras for months and kind of forgetting that the cameras are rolling sometimes, because you never know what you're going to say. So, it's remarkable that Alex Holder was granted this access, especially after Michael Wolf was given similar access and wrote a tell-all book. So, what they were thinking when they allowed a filmmaker in there, I don't know.

KEILAR: Did Alex allow Trump's team editorial control or input? Did they ever ask for it?

SMITH: Absolutely not, in fact, the opposite. Alex said at the beginning, I could only do this if I had -- if I, Alex, had full editorial control because I'm a journalist.

KEILAR: Are you concerned for Alex's safety?

SMITH: A little bit. We have a security detail following with him at all times.

KEILAR: Has he gotten threats?

SMITH: Not direct threats, just wild statements about him from the left and the right, extreme left and extreme right, about him.

KEILAR: How problematic do you think this footage is going to be, legally speaking?

SMITH: I'm not sure legally, but, definitely, it creates a bad impression about the integrity of the Trump family, especially Ivanka.

KEILAR: Russell Smith, thank you so much for being with us on New Day. We appreciate it.

SMITH: Thank you.

KEILAR: And for more on what Documentary Filmmaker Alex Holder told our very own Don Lemon in their sit-down interview, don is going to join us live here shortly.

Next, a former deputy attorney general joins us live on what he thinks is Donald Trump's legal exposure after these new revelations about the coup attempt. Plus, the key quote from Trump that prosecutors are zeroing in on.

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