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Trump Wants People To Sympathize With The Kavanaugh Family; FBI Could Deliver Their Report On Kavanaugh As Early As Today; White House Claims FBI Has Free Reign Wherever Their Investigation Takes Them. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired October 3, 2018 - 6:00   ET

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


[06:00:00]

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: ...upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don't know, but I had one beer. That's the only thing I remember.

(APPLAUSE)

And a man's life is in tatters. A man's life is shattered. His wife is shattered. His daughters are beautiful, incredible, young kids. They destroy people. They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: I wonder why the President left out the part, John, where she said that she remembered that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her, put his hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN HOST: And the laughter that she remembers.

CAMEROTA: Right. She did - he left that out.

BERMAN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Now, you'll remember when President Trump, initially, called Christine Blasey Ford credible after her testimony. And remember when Kellyanne Conway said that Ford should not be insulted? What happened? So, we learned this morning that the FBI could deliver its report on Kavanaugh as early as today. But the FBI is still interviewing more people.

It's unclear what impact that will have on the timing. So, let's bring in CNN Senior Political Analyst, John Avlon, Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent and CNN Law Enforcement Analyst, Josh Campbell, and Washington Post Reporter - White House Reporter, I should say, Seung Min Kim.

Thanks to all of you for being here. So, Josh, what do we know about where the FBI is? They're still interviewing more people. How could they - why would they be ready earlier than Friday, I think, is the question. JOSH CAMPBELL, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: So, that's the question. I don't know if they will be ready. I think there are a couple of different competing narratives here. On one hand, the White House is saying that the FBI has free reign. They can go wherever the facts lead them.

We've talked long about this caveat where they still have to go back to White House and request that permission. The one thing, here, that is so puzzling is, why is the arbitrary one week deadline clock still running?

So, Mitch McConnell said that, you know, there will be a vote this week no matter week. Those two things can't both be true. You can't tell the FBI that they can go where the facts lead them, you know, do what they need to do while at the same time saying, oh, but by the way, here's a time, this needs to be wrapped up. That'd make sense.

BERMAN: You know, on the subject of both things can't be true?

CAMPBELL: Yes.

BERMAN: Christine Blasey Ford can't be credible in the President's own words. And then be - as he depicted her last night as he was mocking her to cheers in the crowd, in Mississippi. And Seung Min, I want to play for you, one more time, what the President said just a few days ago about Christine Blasey Ford in a way that his aides were so proud. They were so proud that the President wasn't attacking her and saying she was credible. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I feel like her testimony was very compelling. And she looks like a very find woman to me - very fine woman. And I thought that Brett's testimony, likewise, was really something that I haven't seen before. It was incredible. It was an incredible moment, I think, in the history of our country. But, certainly, she was a very credible witness. She was very good in many respects.

(END VIDEO)

BERMAN: A credible witness he says, Seung Min, that he mocked - who he mocked last night in Mississippi.

SEUNG MIN KIM, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST: Well.

BERMAN: What do you see as the impact of that?

KIM: Well, it was just - you're right that it was just such a dramatic difference in tone. I mean, I think, even from the beginning once the allegations initially broke, we - the aides had talked about how surprised they were with the - with the President's restraint on attacking Dr. Ford.

And you've also seen Senate Republicans try to take that tack. I mean, most Senate Republicans do still support Judge Kavanaugh. They are the Zima (ph) defenders of him. But they've been really careful not to attack Dr. Ford, especially as she delivered this very emotional testimony.

But what we saw last night at the rally in Mississippi was the most direct attack yet, from the President, on Dr. Ford and her credible, and her performance at the hearing. And it would be interesting to see how the President's comments affect the major key swing votes that we're watching in the Senate such as Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

I would imagine they're not happy with those comments. But I would also that I would imagine those three senators - those three powerful senators are still waiting for the information that the FBI is bringing back to them as early as today. And they're really hinging their final decisions on the - on that report.

CAMEROTA: John, I mean, just what about Kellyanne who said - who said if people took - saw this with Kellyanne, the first thing - this was the first statement out of the White House. Listen. She should not be ignored, she should not be insulted. And people thought, OK, good, we're off to a very good start. And now - I mean, last night, she was insulted.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Oh, she was directly attacked by the President of the United States at a rally where people cheered.

CAMEROTA: In fact, I have her lawyer's response. Let me read this via Twitter. A vicious, vile, and soul-less attack on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, is it any wonder that she was terrified to come forward? And the other sexual assault survivors are as well. She has a remarkable profile and courage. He is a profiling cowardice.

AVLON: Look, it is sometimes difficult covering President Trump. Things fall into normalcy. Oh, this is President Trump playing offensive, politically, in a time when he's trying to push his Supreme Court nominee through, preaching to the faithful. This is unprecedented in American history.

[06:05:00]

A President of the United States attacking a victim of sexual assault.

And yes, days ago his aides were praising him and Kellyanne sort of led the charge on the administration's response on this. But it does remind me of that poem he used to love to recite on the campaign trail, the Snake. Which is, basically, about, no matter what people say you are, they revert to the mean.

Well, in this case, the President seems to have been talking about himself. And this is a new low. This one will matter. And I would not be surprised if it has an impact on the Collins and Murkowski votes as much as the FBI report coming out. This is going to be difficult to bridge for folks. This is - this is an insult without precedent.

CAMPBELL: Can I say, as a former law enforcement officer, and John hit on it. When you're talking about victims, one of the hardest things that you can do, first of all, is try to appeal to someone to come forward to law enforcement. To say, look, you've been victimized. I know this is very personal, but you need to come forward and tell your story so that law enforcement can get to the bottom of it.

We know sexual assaults go underreported. So, to see the Commander in Chief, the head of government, the head of the executive branch of law enforcement for that matter, publically mock someone and shame someone.

What message does that send to - to potential victims that are out there, right now, watching around the country? Whenever they feel victimized are they going to pick up the phone or are they also going to be worried that they're going to be mocked on national television?

BERMAN: You know, and something - this is really important, this two pronged attack. And it's been happening subtly, now, it's not so subtle, for a few days because when Lindsey Graham was shouting the other day on the Senate floor.

He was talking about process. But he has to be talking about Professor Ford's credibility because if he thinks that she is credible, it's unclear to me what the problem was with having her testify.

Now, you have the President saying, no, she's not credible. Overnight, you had the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, with this letter questioning the veracity of some of the things that Professor Ford said.

It does seem that, politically, now - what you are getting from Republicans is a much more direct attack in these waning days before the vote about just what Professor Ford is saying in saying she is not credible.

KIM: And, that's exactly right. And I think you also can't reconcile the fact that Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford testified two very, you know, contradictory things. Dr. Ford said she was 100 percent sure that it was Judge Kavanaugh who assaulted her at that house party in the early 1980s. Judge Kavanaugh said absolutely, 100 percent, it was not me. Both stories cannot be true.

And definitely, maybe, in addition to Dr. Ford, Senate Republicans have really escalated their attacks. Again, on the - so many other accusers have come forward. I think there was an extraordinary statement released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last night that discussed very personal details about the third accuser, Julie Swetnick.

That was, kind of, unprecedented in our eyes. And I do think in the final days of the - of the Kavanaugh nomination, we're expecting Mitch McConnell to take procedural steps later today that would tee up a vote - a key vote for Friday. I think you're really seeing Senate Republicans, you know, pull on all the stops to make their case that Judge Kavanaugh is the one who is telling the truth. And, you know, Lisa, Susan, Jeff, you know, come with us, and listen to us. CAMEROTA: So, more evidence continues to come out, John, about the heavy drinking culture of this prep school that Brett Kavanaugh was part of. And that he, sort of, led the charge of. There's a letter that has been released from 1983. He left it for his fellow bros that had all rented a beach house in Ocean City, Maryland. I had a beach house in the town over, Dewey, Delaware. I hated every second of it. It was so gross. I truly know this culture from the same era.

And here's what the - he - he left this for his friends. I think we - here's a portion. I think we are unanimous, that any girls we can beg to stay there are welcome with open... The danger of eviction is great. And that would suck because of the money, and because this week has big potential. Interpret as you wish.

(LAUGHTER)

He signs it as Bart, OK?

AVLON: Yes.

CAMEROTA: So, a lot of this is significant. He calls himself Bart which is the same alias that his friend Mark Judge used in his memoir about a hard drinking - I don't know why he didn't sign it barf since that's what, apparently, this character Bart always did. He said we're loud, obnoxious drunks, in the letter, and FFFF is, allegedly, according to a classmate, a really - really vulgar reference to what he wanted to do to girls.

AVLON: And - and during his second hearing, he said it was a reference to, I believe, squeeze (ph) stuttering. And the reason this is relevant to some folks is, does this establish a pattern that the - that Kavanaugh's defense initially laid out in the Fox interview where he's, primarily, interested in football, and - and, you know, sort of, an ultra-boy type figure.

CAMEROTA: How does it not?

AVLON: It doesn't fit with the reality.

CAMEROTA: How does it not counter that?

AVLON: It - it is. This is primary evidence from the time that would contradict details of his self-depiction. Now, does that become disqualifying? Is that (ph) rise to the level of perjury?

[06:10:00]

It really does become a question of, first of all, what are you going to focus on because it has nothing to do with the alleged sexual assault, which is far more seriously obviously.

CAMEROTA: Well, but it has to do with excessive drinking again -

AVLON: It does, and -

CAMEROTA: - and what happens when there's excessive binge drinking. AVLON: And whether he's been honest, right? He didn't the George W. Bush when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. I think the question is, is it frat culture on trial? Is being squeeze wingman disqualifying for the Supreme Court.

BERMAN: What Republicans are saying and what Orin Hatch is saying among others is that Brett Kavanaugh did testify "sometimes I drank too much and sometimes I did things during that time that I regret," and they are now saying that that covers everything. And so -

CAMEROTA: So that's fine, but he's also memory - I mean, he says that he didn't have memory lapse. Everybody else -

BERMAN: He says he didn't blackout.

CAMEROTA: There's now a growing body of witnesses and evidence that he did drink too much and did have memory lapses.

BERMAN: These are people who say he must have had memory lapses. Again, it's hard to prove that he had it without being able to get in his brain.

CAMEROTA: No, some of his classmates said that they know he had memory lapses. The next day he couldn't recall things that they had done with them.

BERMAN: If it's provable, if the FBI's asking that, they'll look for that (ph) -

CAMEROTA: Well, we have actual people who say they are aware of his memory loss.

BERMAN: I think one of the things about Bart and what this does show more than anything else is how Brett Kavanaugh - I almost called him Bart there - is a political actor. This is a guy who isn't just a great judge or a legal mind here. It's a guy with vast experience in politics navigated this hearing with carefully worded things because Pat Leahy asked him about the name Bart, whether or not he was the Bart O. Kavanaugh is Mark Judges book. Watch this exchange.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY (D), V.T.: He references a Bart O. Kavanaugh vomiting in someone's car during beach week and then passing out. Is that you?

KAVANAUGH: Mark Judge was a friend of ours in high school who developed a very serious drinking problem. Now, as part of his therapy or part of his coming to grips with sobriety he wrote a book that is a fictionalized book, an account.

LEAHY: I understand -

KAVANAUGH: I think he picked out names of friends of ours to throw them in as kind of close to - for characters in the book. So, you know, we can sit here - LEAHY: Are you Bart Kavanaugh that he's referring to? Yes or no?

KAVANAUGH: You'd have to ask him.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BERMAN: That's not saying yes or no. That's not saying no, but that's not answering the question, Josh. That is ompuskating (ph) to the highest order when we now know he signed his name Bart O. Kavanaugh. Does it matter? Well, that's a separate argument there, but are you being less imperfectly forthcoming?

CAMPBELL: Right, and that's a question and I'm glad we played that clip because that really brings it all back to the current place and time. Now, we've talked a lot about kind of this frat boy culture and lot of things have gone on. Not many people are faulting, you know, a college kid for going and partying and getting drunk, but what you played there is the key issue.

It's not about drinking. It's not about what, you know, someone's done in their past when it comes to alcohol. It's why is a federal judge sitting in front of the United States Senate, making statements that other people are saying are not consistent with the facts. That is the issue. Why is a judge - someone who is supposed to be fair and honest and truthful - being called into question?

That is something we need to get to the bottom of. And by the way, not only Republicans and Democrats, but the judge should welcome a very thorough investigation because if he has nothing to hide, that's something that will clear his name.

AVLON: I just do think that the worst of our 16, 17, 18-year-old letters if this becomes a precedent. Even if it's relevant to questions of veracity and accuracy. Everybody's worst letters from high school would look idiotic. Maybe not this idiotic. Maybe not this specific subculture of stupid, but we do need to be thoughtful about the precedent.

CAMEROTA: You know, I agree. Look, I don't want everybody to be held responsible for what they did at 15, 16, 17-years-old, of course not. Of course there was a lot of bad behavior all around. It's that when it's connected to sexual assault -

AVLON: Yes.

CAMEROTA: - we need to look at it.

AVLON: Absolutely.

CAMPBELL: And someone, by the way, who's in a position that is judging other people as part of his profession cannot stand forward and say, "yes, I did something. I'm going to tell the truth about it. I'm requiring other people to do the same to me, but I'm not going to do that when sitting in front of the United States Senate, allegedly."

BERMAN: Whether that person is Brett O. Kavanaugh or Bart O. Kavanaugh or Bart Kavanaugh, Brett Kavanaugh, either way.

CAMEROTA: All right. Thank you very much, panel. Now, to another huge story, fraud, sham corporations and more. There is a bombshell New York Times report on President Trump's family taxes, and it suggests that he is not the self-made millionaire that he claims to be.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:15:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My father gave me a small loan of $1 million, I came into Manhattan and I had to pay him back and I had to pay him back with interest.

I started with $1 million; I built a $10 billion company.

And my father gave me a very small loan in 1975 and I built it into a company that's worth many, many billions of dollars.

I built that into a massive empire and I paid my father back that loan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: A small loan. So, keep that in mind over the next few minutes. New this morning, the New York State Tax Department has confirmed it is investigating a report in "The New York Times," that President Trump helped his parents dodge millions of dollars of taxes.

This new exhaustive report alleges that then, citizen, Donald Trump was involved in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud and then there is this dozy, which will likely get under the skin of that president who likes to portray himself as a self made man.

Quote, "by age three Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars from his father's empire. He was a millionaire by age eight. In his 40s and 50s he was receiving more than $5 million a year."

What did you get for an allowance when you were a kid? Two hundred thousand dollars? Does that sound right?

CAMEROTA: No, no. I don't think that that sounds right. I think it was less than that. And I also don't think that $1 million is a small sum to be loaned.

BERMAN: Joining us now is one of the journalists who broke this remarkable story. Senior writer for "The New York Times," David Barstow.

David, thank you very much for being with us. It must be nice for you to see daylight after what must have been months and months buried in a dark room looking over documents.

A lot of people have now read this article and the thing that jumps out is, you say, outright, in words that is almost never used, they're never used in journalism, that Donald Trump was part of a fraud.

[06:20:00]

Explain.

BARSTOW: Yes, we use those words obviously with great care. And only after a year and a half of very careful digging and assembling more than 100,000 pages of documents including over 200 tax returns from inside the Trump family itself.

And in simple terms we were able to track that the Trump parents, Fred and Mary Trump transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to the Trump children. And that under the 55 percent estate and gift tax rate, at the time turns, translates to a tax bill of about $550 million dollars.

CAMEROTA: But they paid a minuscule amount of that.

BARSTOW: The tax records that we obtained showed that the Trump children, the family ultimately paid just about $52 million of that. And so the question is how did they avoid over $500 million in taxes?

CAMEROTA: And what is the answer to that?

BARSTOW: And the answer is two parts. Some of it is through legitimate tax avoidance strategies. But what we also uncovered was this series of tax evasion strategies. And there are one very simple component of that was to portray on tax returns $20 million apartment buildings as if they were really only $1 million apartment buildings. That's one tactic that the Trump family used.

And we know that the president was deeply involved in setting up that strategy of essentially systematically low balling the value of real estate, as it transferred from mom and dad to the kids. But we also found things that were even more overtly fraudulent than that. One of the things we found was this obscure little company called All County Building Supply & Maintenance. I'm like the heck is this?

And it turns out what this was, it was a company that the Trumps set up to siphon cash out of Fred Trumps empire in a way that would disguise huge cash gifts as if they were legitimate business transactions. And one of the things I wanted to stress is if you - if you read through the story we tried as much as possible that we felt we could to protect our sources to actually show the documentation. Here are the invoices, here are the tax returns, here are the bank records, so that you can actually sort of see our math.

CAMEROTA: How did you get your hands on the tax returns? There's been so much said about how President Trump won't release his current tax returns, or his recent ones. How did you get your hands on so many old tax returns?

BARSTOW: I can't tell you.

CAMEROTA: Did you ever get close to uncovering more recent tax returns?

BARSTOW: I can't say that either. But it is true that in this story, this story does not - we did not in this story describe Donald Trumps personal tax returns. What we do find though for the first time in those 200 tax returns that we did put our hands on, is we see actual money flowing from various Trump family trusts, partnerships, and companies into the pocket of Donald Trump.

BERMAN: So let's talk about that. Because we played this out in the beginning, where Donald Trump, he always like to say I got a small loan, a million dollars. We can argue whether that's small or not. But his claim is he got a million dollar loan from his father which he paid back with interest.

BARSTOW: Yes.

BERMAN: And that's it. And everything else, the rest of his empire he boot strapped his way up the massive success. That's not what's in this reporting.

BARSTOW: We ultimately were able to document 295 different streams of revenue that Fred Trump established and set up to enrich his son Donald Trump.

CAMEROTA: To the tune of $413 million from this father's real estate empire. So president - Donald Trump before he was president, got not one million, he got $413 million from his father.

BARSTOW: Plus another $60 million in loans. So that $1million loan that he talks about, what we actually were able to document was, it's actually $60 million in loans, which in today's dollars would translate to about $140 million.

CAMEROTA: That he never paid back.

BARSTOW: Many of the loans he never paid back. And there's one transaction in particular that we describe where he had run up the tab with dad. And he used a series of transactions involving one of his buildings to avoid paying dad back.

[06:25:00]

But in a way that also allowed his father to dodge $13 million in gift taxes and income taxes.

BERMAN: So, Sarah Sanders put out a statement overnight on this and it sounds like it was dictated by Donald Trump, maybe with the help of a lawyer and there's a lot of hyperbole in here, but there is one sentence that -- in here -- on fact, she goes, many decades ago the IRS review and signed off on these transactions. Is that true A? B, is there any direct legal or criminal implication of what you've reported? And, how about civil? BARSTOW: So, yes, the IRS did look at these tax returns. Yes, they did sign off of them. they actually did push back a little bit and at least a couple of cases we found that the IRS auditors said to the Trumps, well wait a minute, hold on, you're undervaluing assets. But, it was pretty modest pushback.

In terms to your second question, because the events that we're describing, most of them have been in the 1990s, in terms of the tax dodges, that's too far ago, that's too long ago. It's past the statute of limitations for criminal accountability for tax evasion.

However, civil tax fraud, there's no statute of limitations on that. So potentially, tax authorities could go back and look at these transactions and if they decided that they were indeed fraudulent, as we described in this story, they could seek very stiff civil penalties.

CAMEROTA: But, how did the IRS miss it. I mean, this is glare -- I mean, the way you all describe it, and again, you have spent day -- weeks and weeks poring over --

BARSTOW: Months.

CAMEROTA: Months and months, poring through all of this. But, how could -- the IRS is supposed to catch these things.

BARSTOW: So, first of all, the IRS is usually looking at a particular year, right. They're looking at this in small slices. We're looking at sort of the overall strategy that the Trump family employed using some pretty sophisticated techniques involving some obscured types of trust.

And, in terms of the way, as our understanding, especially from reporting in on what happens in an IRS audit when they're looking gift and estate tax returns, if you're an IRS auditor and you're able to squeeze a couple million dollars more out of a rich family, that's a good days work.

But from the Trump family's perspective, they're more than happy to pay a couple million dollars more in taxes if they're evading $500 million in taxes.

BERMAN: Just a final question, we will get a lot more of a window onto what really happened if the president ever did release his personal tax returns?

BARSTOW: It's incredible what you can learn from a tax return. It just is amazing if you really dive deep, you can squeeze a heck of a lot of information out of a couple of pages of a tax return.

BERMAN: Which is why we'll likely never, ever, ever see that.

CAMEROTA: But, there are reporters like David Barstow on the case. Thank you for combing through all of this so the rest of us didn't have to for months and months. Thanks David, for sharing all of your reporting. BERMAN: Great story.

BARSTOW: Sure.

BERMAN: The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia rising again overnight and there could be a new disaster looming. We are live on the ground next.

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