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National Archives Asked Trump to Return Documents Throughout 2021; DOJ Expected to Turn Over Redacted Mar-a-Lago Affidavit Today; What's in Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Plan; U.S. Service Member Injured in Rocket Attack in Syria. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired August 25, 2022 - 06:00   ET

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

[06:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm John Berman. Brianna is off. CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins with us here on this NEW DAY.

A new extended timeline in the fight for Donald Trump's presidential records. It raises new questions about his defenses. Plus what President Biden's student loan plan means for millions of borrowers. And the bigger issue it will not solve.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Justice for Kobe and Gigi. That's the message from Kobe Bryant's widow Vanessa Bryant after a jury reached a decision in the case over the crash photos that have been taken of them.

And it was a deadly Independence Day in Ukraine after Russia launched a deadly missile attack on a train station killing at least 25 people including two children.

BERMAN: So it turns out the National Archives has been after Donald Trump to turn over documents since the waning days of his presidency.

Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Kaitlan Collins.

COLLINS: That's quite the greeting for everybody waking up, pouring some coffee.

BERMAN: Yes. Exactly. It's been going on a long time. Enjoy your coffee. And we do begin with new CNN reporting overnight. An e-mail from the National Archives reveals how long Donald Trump has been holding sensitive documents that he should not possess. The e-mail indicates that records were not returned despite a determination by a top White House lawyer that they should be.

A source says there were about a dozen e-mails and calls over the course of 2021, 2021, this is last year, including a May 2021 e-mail from the National Archives to Trump's lawyers that reads in part, quote, "It is also our understanding that roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records were kept in the residence of the White House over the course of President Trump's last year in office and have not been transferred to the Archives despite a determination by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel in the final days of the administration that they need to be."

The "Washington Post" first reported on this e-mail.

COLLINS: And this morning the Justice Department has about six hours left before a deadline to turn over a redacted version of the affidavit that was behind that FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. A judge will then decide whether to release that version or just keep it shielded from public view.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz joins us now. And Katelyn, we're obviously expecting this deadline, but really what are the big questions here of what's next?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, what's next is a filing under seal from the Justice Department today in court. We might not see anything at all today, but we are waiting to see what the Justice Department does here, what they want to reveal, if anything, regarding what is in that affidavit, what happened in this investigation up until that search.

And we are learning even since this hearing last Thursday whenever this plan to redact this affidavit was put in place by the judge in Florida. We are learning little by little more about what was happening with the Archives. So that is that entity in the executive branch that would have been talking back and forth with the Trump lawyers until this became a criminal investigation and really throughout 2021 there was a message of concern that the Archives was communicating over and over again.

They were negotiating with the Trump team and it ultimately culminated in that return of boxes, 15 boxes in January, that when the Archives received they were even more concerned because they realized there were classified documents. So this is that backstory leading up to that. The "Washington Post" is reporting for the first time this particular letter from Gary Stern, the general counsel at the National Archives to the Trump team, and it's just flushing out how that back and forth was going and it really wasn't going well for the Archives.

I mean, they, at that time, before this initial return of boxes, they expected there to be 24 boxes. They ultimately ended up getting 15 in January. They were under the impression that Trump's team knew or their liaisons knew that there needed to be things returned and the Archives was looking for specific things. They thought things like that hurricane map with the Sharpie drawing on it, that that was missing, that the Kim Jong-un love letters were missing.

That's what they thought they needed to get back from Mar-a-Lago, and then ultimately when they did get back those boxes there were things that were more concerning there, things with highly sensitive designations, classified designations on them in January of this year.

[06:05:07]

And so theoretically all of that should be in this Justice Department affidavit used in court. We still don't know what's in it, but we're waiting to see if anything that the Justice Department is willing to reveal, especially now that we're learning more about what happened with the Archives.

BERMAN: All right. Let's stick on that subject for a minute, Katelyn. Stick around if you will. Also joining us now is former deputy director of the FBI and CNN senior law enforcement analyst, Andrew McCabe.

Andrew, today noon is the deadline to submit the redacted affidavit that the judge has asked for justifying the search of Mar-a-Lago. Take us inside that process, if you will, Andy, into what the FBI or what the prosecutors will try to keep in or what they might be willing to keep in and what they necessarily will try to black out.

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Sure, John. So it's helpful, I think, to think about the two separate parties that are involved on the same side there. So you have the FBI and the Department. From the FBI perspective they are going to be incredibly sensitive about revealing any fact that could in any way shed light on the identity of a cooperating witness or an informant. That is absolutely core to the FBI's existence. It's protecting the identity -- the identities of informants and people who provide the FBI with information.

On the Justice side it's a little bit different. What DOJ is likely anything to avoid in this situation is turning over an overly redacted report that might provoke the judge into sending it back to them and telling them to take another shot at it, to try to do better, to try to reveal more. So it's important to DOJ with this very first submission to submit something that's going to look like they actually tried to do this in a reasonable and transparent way.

So I would expect to see them reveal all sorts of facts that we probably already know. In the end it probably won't be that revealing, but they have to take a real cut at it.

COLLINS: Yes. And of course the big question is whether or not if the judge does like that redacted version, does that get released today? What does that look like?

Katelyn, while we're dealing with the back and forth here of what this affidavit is going to look like, you know, we're learning so much more about the back and forth between Trump's attorneys, Trump's representatives and the National Archives over, you know, what had been framed when this search happened of Mar-a-Lago as they were kind of caught off guard, they thought they had been cooperating, but clearly there was ask after ask after ask from the National Archives to get documents, and maybe they were getting some of them, and it's still not entirely clear, though, why they didn't get all of them.

POLANTZ: Right. And Kaitlan, what's so fascinating about that is that we're learning about this 2021 interactions but also just in the last couple of days we've learned about interactions in May, we've learned about interactions in June through different sources and there is the possibility that all of those things are in that affidavit as well. The Justice Department might be able, and perhaps should be comfortable by now, revealing what their side of the story was. The May interactions, that was something that the Archives themselves acknowledged they put out a letter between the Archives and one of Trump's lawyers saying, you know, we found classified documents in what you returned to us in January. We really need to tell the FBI and have the intelligence community look at these as well.

We've given you guys the ability to make arguments as to not sharing those with any other parts of the executive branch, but it's time. We really have to do this now. So that was that May interaction the Archives is acknowledging. There also is Trump's team outlining what they believe happened in June whenever the FBI and the Justice Department came to visit Mar-a-Lago, came to look at that storage room, asked to put the padlock on the door, subpoenaed the videos.

And so all of that ends up being part of this case. This is not a case that just began a week before the Mar-a-Lago search and ended soon after.

BERMAN: It was almost a constant state of being from the end of the Trump presidency.

Andy, back to the redactions on the affidavit for a second, if you will. You said you expect or suspect that they will try to present a document that may provide information that's already out there, already know. What do you mean? I mean, what are the types of things that they might be OK with people knowing now?

MCCABE: Sure. So there's all kinds of innocuous facts that are widely known by the public. So facts that would talk about the location to be searched, facts that would discuss, as Katelyn just mentioned, the kind of timeline of prior meetings that we now know are not only known by the public but have been revealed by government entities like the National Archives in the letters that we've seen recently.

So all of those facts that have been officially acknowledged and are already well-established in the record I would expect that the department will try to show those facts in the affidavit to the extent some of them are in there in an effort to look like they legitimately tried to be as transparent and they could be.

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BERMAN: All right. Andrew McCabe, Katelyn Polantz, great to see you both this morning. Again a deadline today. What we find out today, that remains to be seen. Thank you both.

So President Biden set to cancel student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans. How exactly will this work? What you need to know about whether you qualify.

And a Georgia elementary school student tests positive for monkeypox. The new safety measures to consider as children go back to school.

COLLINS: I know parents are worried about that. Also the death toll is rising in Ukraine after a Russian missile strike hit a train station on independence day there. We will get the latest on the ground in Kyiv next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Help is on the way to millions of Americans after President Biden laid out a plan to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for certain borrowers.

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The president admits there are many critics.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Now, I understand not everyone -- not everything I'm announcing today is going to make everybody happy. Something is too much. I find it interesting how some of my Republican friends who voted for those tax cuts and others think that we shouldn't be helping these folks. Something is too little, but I believe my plan is responsible and fair.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right. With us now CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans.

Christine, look, there's been a lot of heat on both sides over this.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Sure.

BERMAN: But what I'm hoping is that people can come away knowing what's actually in this before they make a decision whether they like it or not.

ROMANS: Exactly. What's in it and who will it help. Now look, this is $10,000 of student debt relief if you didn't receive Pell Grants and you're earning less than $125,000 a year. If you went to college and you received Pell Grants, right, these are low-income students, it's $20,000. Trying to address inequality here in this relief.

The forgiveness applies only if you're earning less than 125 grand and the student loan pause that has been since the pandemic, that will be done at the end of December. So January 1st if you have student loans you're going to have to start making those payments here again.

So this is going to affect something like 20 million people will now have a zero balance on their student loans. 20 million people. 43 million people overall qualify in some way for all of this.

BERMAN: Yes. Huge percentage of people who hold student debt have $20,000 or less.

ROMANS: That's right. And so immediately this is breathing space in the budget for those people.

BERMAN: And when you talk about Pell Grants, again people who have Pell Grants, everyone who has a Pell Grant knows they have a Pell Grant, first of all.

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: People who don't may not know what it is but it helps lower income people specifically pay for college, roughly $60,000 or less, correct?

ROMANS: Yes. That's absolutely right. So that's trying to address the fact that a lot of people with student loan debt are middle class Americans, right, and so you want to make sure that you're helping people on the lower end of the income ladder, too.

BERMAN: OK. Who doesn't this help?

ROMANS: Well, this doesn't help anybody who went to a state school and paid for all of it, anybody who paid off all of their student loan debt or as many people have criticized people who couldn't afford to go to college in the first place and didn't and chose a different path. There are some who are saying that's taxpayers basically subsidizing people who are rich enough to go to college in the first place.

You know, Mitch McConnell made this point, he called it student loan socialism and you've heard from some Republicans and a few Democrats that it's just not fair, a slap in the face to every family who sacrificed to save for college, every graduate who paid their debt and every American who chose a certain career path or volunteered to serve their armed forces in order to avoid taking on debt. The policy is astonishingly unfair. That's what Mitch McConnell says.

There are others who criticize it saying it will be inflationary. Goldman Sachs out with a big report this morning, a lot of other economists saying in the long term it might be a little bit or maybe a wash. Remember, Joe Biden made this promise before inflation was a real problem. There is something to be said for starting those student loan payments again in January, that will take a little money out of people's budgets, so that could be counter inflationary.

We will have to wait and see. The most important thing about this was getting some of that debt off the books of young people who are being held back by it.

BERMAN: Right. For one moment, there's a ton of student debt out there.

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: Student debt is the second highest amount of debt after mortgages, correct?

ROMANS: That's right. And you know why? It's because it costs so much to go to college. This does not address the root of the problem and this is a very big problem in the American economy. We have just now forgiven a whole bunch of student loan debt which is going to help people get some breathing space as I said in their budgets, but the winners are the colleges that just keep raising tuition again and again and again. You know, we know the value of a college degree is so important, we

know you make so much more money over the course of your working lifetime if you have a college degree. We push for kids to get college degrees if it's appropriate for them and we allow them to take on sometimes debt that it would be almost physically impossible to pay back, especially people who go on to graduate school.

BERMAN: This doesn't do anything to get the colleges to figure out their problem with this exploding tuition cost. I understand, I read this morning that the Web site for the federal loans.

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: You know, it broke down because so many people were checking. Is it clear yet how people find out how they get this money or get forgiven for this money?

ROMANS: So even young people around here signing up for these alerts from the Department of Education so that they can find out, get any update about when this is going to happen. They're going to have to roll out some kind of a portal soon. They're telling people to go talk to your loan servicer, find out, you know, do you have private loans, do you have public loans, you know, federal loans, figure out what your loan package looks like, so you can see what needs to be forgiven and where you are.

But you need to really be aware that you're going to start paying payments again in January after several years of not paying any payments. That's something that people need to start getting set up. You need to pay these loans.

BERMAN: But more to come. More to come on the actual mechanics of it.

ROMANS: More to come on the actual --

BERMAN: Stay tuned. And clearly people are staying tuned.

ROMANS: Yes.

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BERMAN: Christine Romans, thank you very much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

COLLINS: All right. Let's bring in CNN senior political analyst John Avlon.

And obviously the mechanics of this will be very important because there were so many questions yesterday. There has been a lot of debate over who benefits, who doesn't, is this a good decision, is it a bad decision. It will in the end, though, help a lot of people.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely. I mean, millions of people. Look, in the outlines of this policy you can see the Biden administration trying to find that Goldilocks sweet spot, right? You know, they're trying to make sure it's capped at $125,000, that it's more generous for people who have had Pell Grants, that it's coinciding with the final renewal of this extension which has had folks not paying their school debt through the pandemic.

But still you see folks on the far left grousing it's not hot enough, you know, they wanted a $50,000 loan deferment. And then folks on the far right saying it's, you know, school-based socialism and terribly unfair.

I think the fundamental point is that a lot of folks who've been struggling with school debt, you know, the bottom half of the economic scale are going to find themselves with a lot more breathing room than they had previously. And I don't see how that's bad politics at the end of the day, as well as good economic policy if you're trying to grow the economy out from the middle and bottom as Biden campaigned on. So it's a promise kept from the political standpoint.

BERMAN: From a purely political standpoint there are people who look at this and say the people it helps are young university grads who are skewing toward the Democratic Party.

AVLON: You know, that's a perennial, you know, accusation on the part of conservatives who say, look, Democrats are going to try to give folks a lot of free stuff and buy votes in effect. But, you know, the flip side is saying that this is somehow by being weighted to college graduates, only a quarter of Americans attend college that itself is elite. But again there are income caps at this to make sure it's helping people disproportionately who have Pell Grants, who are in the middle class or certainly not rising the wealthy.

I think the bigger challenge, if we want to skate to where the puck is going is looking at the legal challenges that will come down. The Department of Justice put out an OLC opinion saying this is based on the 2003 law and the pandemic, but there will be challenges to this and so watch this space. Even though a lot of Democrats are breathing easier today politically because Biden made good on a promise, you know, there will be challenges.

COLLINS: But do President Biden's critics have a point when they say, you know, what Mitch McConnell was saying yesterday, there are a lot of people who didn't go to college because they, you know, lived within their means and adjusted for this, and so they did not go to college for this choice and they were basically saying it's unfair because of that. And the White House has pushed back on Republican criticism, well, you know, no one is complaining about tax breaks, for example.

AVLON: Yes.

COLLINS: And Republicans aren't complaining about how unfair that is.

AVLON: And I think that is a fair point. And among the other things that were announced yesterday is, you know, targeting schools that had been really predatory towards college students with -- you know, really forcing people into debt and also really trying to emphasize the kind of loan forgiveness for people in public service professions. Look, the right is going to hit this because they probably see it as

potentially popular but also a dangerous precedent. I think for the people being affected by it, especially given that those -- folks are going to have to start paying their student loans again at the end of the year, this will give folks some breathing room in a meaningful way if they took that risk to go to college.

Is it going to be without controversy? No. People particularly who just paid off their loans might be frustrated, I get that.

COLLINS: Yes.

AVLON: But for folks who are struggling with that debt right now this is a bit of a life raft.

COLLINS: Yes. I know a lot of people who do see it that way.

AVLON: Yes.

COLLINS: This is really -- they're very thrilled about this because of course it does help.

AVLON: Yes. There we go.

COLLINS: John Avlon.

AVLON: All right.

COLLINS: John Berman.

All right. An American service member who has been injured in the latest exchange of fire between U.S. troops and Iranian backed groups in Syria, we have new details that came in overnight for you.

BERMAN: President Biden set to speak with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy today as the death toll from a Russian missile attack on a train station rises.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:28:10]

BERMAN: New overnight U.S. Military officials say a rocket attack in Syria left a U.S. service member injured. The attack targeted coalition bases that housed U.S. troops. This is in apparent response to U.S. air strikes against Iranian-backed groups that had been operating in the region.

CNN's Oren Liebermann live at the Pentagon. Oren, what's the latest on what you've learned?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: John, this has all played out very quickly over the course of the last 24, 48 hours. So on Wednesday evening Syria time, U.S. Central Command says several rockets were fired at two bases that housed U.S. troops, bases used by the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS in Conaco and Green Village. In that attack U.S. officials say one service member was injured at the Conaco site with minor injuries and two others are being evaluated for injuries with minor injuries. We'll certainly wait for an update on that.

In response U.S. attack helicopters opened fire on the source of the rocket attacks and according to an initial assessment destroyed three vehicles and launching equipment used to fire those rockets as well as killed two or three people responsible for carrying out that attack. Again, that's an initial assessment so we will wait to see what new information there is about that today. But this happens less than 24 hours after the U.S. carried out a strike on nine bunkers in northeast Syria used by Iranian backed groups, according to the U.S. to house ammo as well as to carry out logistics support for Iranian backed operations in Syria.

Now Iran denies any involvement here but it's clear who the U.S. believes is responsible. In responding to the attack that injured the service member, the U.S. says they're not looking for conflict with Iran but the U.S. will not hesitate to defend its people and its capabilities in Syria. And let's not forget the strike on those bunker comes a week after separate attacks on two other facilities in Syria, a rocket attack and a drone attack.

So, John, we've seen this move very quickly and we'll look to see where it goes from here.

BERMAN: Look, the pace of this back and forth has certainly accelerated.

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