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New Day

Don Lemon Speaks about his Alex Holder Interview. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired June 24, 2022 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, the filmmaker, who has hours of interviews with Donald Trump and his family from before and after the insurrection, who testified to the January 6th committee just yesterday, well, he spoke to Don Lemon about what he was asked. Don is here with us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: We won Georgia. We won Michigan. We won Pennsylvania. We won them all.

IVANKA TRUMP, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: As the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard. And he campaigned for the voiceless.

PHILIP RUCKER, DEPUTY NATIONAL EDITOR, "THE WASHINGTON POST": It's interesting to see Ivanka Trump say that her father wanted every vote to be counted, because Trump's mission in the days after the election was to stop the counting of votes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right, it's a clip from the documentary "Unprecedented" from Discovery Plus, whose parent company also owns CNN. In it, Ivanka Trump, interviewed in December of 2020, mirrors the position of her father and his supporters who were then challenging the results of the 2020 election. It differs from what Ivanka Trump told the January 6th House committee when asked how she reacted to then Attorney General William Barr, when he said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

[08:35:05]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

IVANKA TRUMP, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: I respect Attorney General Barr. So, I accepted what he was saying.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BERMAN: CNN's Don Lemon interviewed the filmmaker, Alex Holder, who interviewed Trump and his inner circle before and after January 6th. This is a clip from that interview.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

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 6th.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: I'm sure there's a lot that was left on the editing room floor, right, because you only have a, you know, 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 Ivanka Trump's sort of reaction to her father's position on the election is in the documentary. But there's 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, in -- 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.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Joining me now is the anchor of CNN's "DON LEMON TONIGHT," Don Lemon.

Don, this is interesting because it's footage we have not seen, the documentary, but also you talked to Alex Holder hours after he was testifying behind closed doors with the January 6th committee. It's a perspective we just haven't seen.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR, "DON LEMON TONIGHT": Yes, and it was the first question that I asked him, what was that like, what were the focus of their questions, what was the focus of their questions, and he said they were keenly tuned in or focused on what Ivanka Trump had to say. And that was surprising to me.

What about the inconsistencies? He interviewed Ivanka Trump three times. And as we know, Ivanka Trump said something different to the January 6th commission. Under oath she said, well, I believe when Bill Barr said that this was BS, I believed that. And so, you know, that's how she conducted herself during that time. She told the filmmaker two different things. One was that she said that they should exhaust every legal remedy. And then she said, they should count every single vote. But then she said she believed Bill Barr.

Now, I was -- you know, they talked to Ivanka Trump three times. She did three different interviews. Jared Kushner did three different interviews. Eric Trump did two interviews. Donald Trump Jr. did one interview and they tried get him to do another. And I said, well, why were they so focused on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner as well, why did they do three interviews? Well, they were advisers to the president. And it suddenly dawned on me after I - as I was speaking to him, they wanted to know, I would imagine, what was she doing, what was her mindset, what had she told her father during and possibly other advisers during that time. So they were focused on her and Jared Kushner because they were advisers to the president, rather than just on sort of the color around Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

BERMAN: What's so interesting about Alex Holder and the fact of this documentary is that somehow it only entered into the national consciousness in the last few weeks. The committee only found out about it recently. The footage was only turned over recently. But, obviously, Alex Holder has known about it for a long time.

Did you get a sense of whether he thinks or has thought that he had something special in his pocket this whole time?

LEMON: I think he thought that he had something special, but I don't think he realized the magnitude of this. He didn't realize how big it was, I think, until the subpoena came and he said, look, here I am, a documentary, a documentary, however you want to say it, potatoes, potatoes, filmmaker, who was just doing his job. He asked to interview the family, they agreed to these interviews hour and hours and hours, upon hours of interviews, and then all of a sudden he's sort of sitting on a gold mine, a treasure trove of information, so to speak.

He said, listen, just days ago I was just sort of this unknown filmmaker trying to get my documentary put out there. And now I've been subpoenaed by the Congress and I have - and I walk around with two armed security guards because I'm concerned about my safety. So, he's concerned about -- that something similar to what happened on January 6th could happen to him, or the threats that people are getting, Republicans, many of them, that -- who are speaking out against Donald Trump. Or I shouldn't say even against, who are just telling the truth, he's concerned about his safety and the safety of his family as well. So, I don't think he realized what he was stepping into.

BERMAN: And the committee wants the raw footage, which, you know, for people in TV, not in TV, you know, we shoot a lot of video.

[08:40:00]

LEMON: Yes.

BERMAN: And then only a small fraction of it makes it into the final product. But there's a lot of extra stuff which has extra things in it.

LEMON: He said that they didn't ask him for every bit, because there are hundreds of hours of footage. They asked him for specific things that he's willing to give to the commission. He says he's willing to cooperate with them. If they call him back again, he's willing to do it publicly. But he said it was a -- it was a nerve-racking experience because he wasn't sure what the focus of their questions would be.

And specifically he said he, you know, he asked -- I asked him and he asked them as well about January 6th specifically, and being on The Mall, being at the Capitol. He said that he anticipated -- he and his director of photography anticipated, he said, I bet Donald Trump will get that group of people, that large group of people to march down to the Capitol. And he said, surely enough that happened.

And I said, well, I sounds to me that you're saying that Donald Trump is responsible, or partially responsible for what happened. And he said, absolutely. He -- not only that, he told 75 million people that the election was stolen and that it was fraudulent, and so he is responsible for this. And the January 6th commission asked him about that - committee -- and that was his response.

BERMAN: Another key question through all of this has been Donald Trump's state of mind. Did he think he won? Hold that thought.

LEMON: Yes.

BERMAN: We're going to take a quick break, because he gave you some key insight on that.

LEMON: You'll be surprised by this news.

BERMAN: We're going to have much more of Don's interview and clips from the documentary ahead.

This is CNN's special live coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:45:29]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEX HOLDER, DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER: 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 was 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.

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

HOLDER: Absolutely. I changed my mind to the point that he didn't really believe it. I -- my conclusion was that Donald Trump genuinely believes that he won the 2020 presidential election. And that is terrifying.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: That was the filmmaker, again, behind the docu-series "Unprecedented," Alex Holder, sitting down with CNN's Don Lemon after he testified before the January 6th committee.

Such a fascinating moment there, Don. He's convinced that he believed it, and yet, you know, I just wonder what you think there. Maybe that's Donald Trump trying to convince people to believe it by seeming like he believes it.

LEMON: After Donald Trump had already convinced himself.

Listen, there's no way in hell, as we would say growing up in Louisiana, that no way in west hell that Donald Trump believes, or anyone, reasonably believes that Donald Trump won the election, after 60 some odd court cases, after every legitimate adviser around him telling him and everyone in the administration and all of his crazy fake truth brigade that what they were putting out was BS. There's no way that he believed that he won.

But that is - that is the -- if you want to say this - I know people are going to get upset, the brilliance of what Donald Trump does. He co-opts people, right, into his own reality, and he gets them to believe, right? He creates his own reality and then he co-opts people into it. It is the sign of a narcissist. We all know people who have done that. He never does anything wrong. And he tries to convince people otherwise. And he gets a lot of people to believe that. This illusory truth effect that people, if you say something loud enough and often enough that people will believe it. And that's what he has done and I think he's done that to himself.

You know, obviously, deep down, it's obvious, Donald Trump knows that he lost the election. But he has lied so much about it, his ego is so big that he cannot admit it to himself publicly or at least to his conscious self that he lost the election, so he keeps up this facade, this fakeness, this lie and he just spreads it out to the rest of the country. And to get a smart person, like the filmmaker, he co-opted that filmmaker. That filmmaker said, look, I believe that Donald Trump absolutely believes that he won the election. There's no way in west hell that Donald Trump believes that he won the election. He just did not. It is the big lie.

BERMAN: And -- but that is what, if this ever gets to a court and a prosecution, it could come down to a version of that question.

LEMON: Yes.

BERMAN: And what will matter is, Bill Barr, the attorney general, told Donald Trump that he didn't win.

LEMON: You lost.

BERMAN: Jeffrey Rosen, who was the acting attorney general, told him you lost.

LEMON: Ivanka Trump says, I believed Bill Barr, right? BERMAN: And Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general, told him, you lost. There was no corruption here.

But Donald Trump's response to all of that was, you guys may not be following the Internet the way that I do.

LEMON: And, you know, of course we should believe everything that's on the Internet. Of course you should believe everything that's on Twitter. Listen, the Internet is not the real world. We know that. We work in this media landscape. And especially the toxic media landscape that is the Internet, that is social media.

Twitter's not the real world. You can read a lot of things on Twitter. Facebook is not the real world, right? It is - it's fake. And so people get on the Internet and they believe that. They believe -- they go to places where there aren't standards, there aren't standards, there aren't practices, there aren't - there are no levers to make sure that people are telling the truth and they believe it.

When I would interview Donald Trump, I think it was 6 to 8 times I interviewed Donald Trump, almost every single time he brought a poll, much of the time it was a fake poll showing, well, this is that, and this is that, and this is that, and, no, and he would bring this to me. And he would spread that to his people. And, again, what he did was, illusory truth effect, he got people to believe that he was the person in that board room on the "Celebrity Apprentice."

And if you read something often enough, if you say it loud enough, if you put it on the Internet, people will believe it.

[08:50:03]

So, people believe, as we know, Donald Trump won the election, and they have -- you can't convince them otherwise that he is lying. Donald Trump is a liar. He did not win the election. Joe Biden is a legitimately elected president of the United States. There was no election fraud that -- and there is no proof that the election was stolen, period, full stop.

BERMAN: Don Lemon, anchor of CNN's "DON LEMON TONIGHT," brought to you by Don Lemon Productions, thank you for being with us.

LEMON: Star of Don Lemon.

BERMAN: Star of Don Lemon Productions.

LEMON: (INAUDIBLE).

BERMAN: Thanks, Don.

LEMON: Good to see both of you, especially Brianna.

BERMAN: Breaking overnight, a key step forward in the Senate's bipartisan gun safety bill with 15 Senate Republicans voting yes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) KEILAR: For more than 15 years, CNN Heroes has been honoring everyday people changing the world.

But this Saturday we'll take a look at some not so everyday people making a real difference.

[08:55:03]

Erin Burnett sat down with Ukrainian-born actress Mila Kunis, who created a Go Fund Me campaign that has raised millions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIN BURNETT, CNN ANCHOR, "ERIN BURNETT OUTFRONT": The effort caught the attention of Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who reached out to Kunis and Kutcher for a video call.

MILA KUNIS, ACTRESS: It was very, very smart. There was no chitchat. It was literally, like, get down to business. Like, who do you know that can assist with this? Who do you know that can help with this? Can you call this person? Can you get this person? Can you connect this to these people? And Ash I were super fortunate where I feel like our rolodex is really fat and that is probably one of our greatest superpowers is we can get a lot of people on the phone.

BURNETT: The couple met Zelenskyy and his wife a few years earlier in Kyiv and left that meeting believers in Ukraine's new leader.

KUNIS: Sometimes you meet a magical unicorn and you go, I hope that you succeed because you're a normal, nice human being who has the best intent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: "CNN Heroes Salutes" premieres Saturday at 10:00 p.m. Eastern.

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