Return to Transcripts main page

NEW DAY

Rosenstein Plans to Leave Justice Department after Barr Confirmed; Manafort's Lawyers Accidentally Reveal That Manafort Shared Campaign Polling Data with a Russian Operative; Trump Uses Oval Office Speech to Pitch His Wall. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired January 9, 2019 - 07:00   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

[07:00:13] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Good morning, and welcome to your NEW DAY. We do begin with breaking news in the Mueller investigation.

A source tells CNN that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein plans to leave the Justice Department once William Barr, the president's nominee for attorney general, is confirmed. That will likely happen sometime in February. Barr's confirmation hearing begins next Tuesday. And I have to say the stakes just went up in a big way.

We should note our sources say Rosenstein is not being forced out.

He has overseen the special counsel's Russian investigation for more than a year. And with him gone, it means that oversight of the probe will be led by people who have expressed open and public hostility to at least parts of it.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We often talk about the news deluge --

BERMAN: Often.

CAMEROTA: -- that we're all experiencing. And this morning is no different, because that big Rosenstein news this morning comes at the very same time that we can report a major development in the Mueller probe.

Lawyers for former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort inadvertently revealed that Paul Manafort shared internal Trump polling data with one of his Russian associates who is tied to Russian intelligence. It is the clearance evidence yet of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Meanwhile, there's also a government shutdown, and the president meets again with congressional leaders today after his Oval Office address last night to the nation where he made his case for the border wall. This, as the government shutdown enters day 19.

But first, let's get to Laura Jarrett. She is live in Washington with all of the breaking Rosenstein news. What have you have learned, Laura?

LAURA JARRETT, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, good morning.

Well, Rosenstein, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, the man who has been overseeing the Russia investigation since its very inception, plans to leave the department soon after Bill Barr, the president's pick for attorney general, is confirmed by the Senate.

Now I'm told by a source familiar with Rosenstein, saying that he's not being forced out by the White House, but he has informed them of his plans. And he wants to ensure a smooth transition for Barr. Naturally he never planned on staying forever, and it's understood that, if confirmed, Barr would want his own deputy at the department.

But of course, the big question this raises is what effect, if any, Rosenstein's departure would have on the Mueller investigation, the Russia investigation? As Rosenstein has been running the probe since he appointed Mueller in May of 2017 and has continued to oversee it day to day, even after Matthew Whitaker came on as the acting attorney general in November.

But this news, of course only raises the stakes for Bill Barr's confirmation next week, as well, which was already going to be contentious, given his past critical statements on Mueller -- John.

BERMAN: He will be asked, "Will you let the investigation go on? How much latitude will they have? Does Mueller have the right to investigate obstruction?" All of these things out in the open in the next few days.

Laura, stick around with us. Also joining us now, the author of "The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller's FBI and the War on Global Terror," Garrett Graff; and CNN political analyst David Gregory.

Garrett, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general has become a household name, which you cannot often say about deputy attorney generals or attorneys general, I should say.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

BERMAN: He's become this big deal. He's to let this investigation go on. He appointed Robert Mueller. With him gone, what impact does that have?

GARRETT GRAFF, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: It's hard to say. And I think that sort of one of the things is that, you know, in this news-packed environment, it's important to understand that this really is, potentially, a totally normal thing.

Deputies attorneys general typically serve about 18 months, so the idea that Rod Rosenstein will have actually made it two years is, in fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Rod Rosenstein's tenure at the Justice Department.

As you said, this is someone who we have woken up every morning for 18 months, wondering if he's been fired overnight. I can't even count the number of breaking news events where we thought he was being fired, you know, within the hour.

And this is someone who has overseen the probe, as you said, and has protected Robert Mueller since his -- since his appointment. And I think, in many ways, one of the things that we can say is that, if Rod Rosenstein is stepping down, he understands that his legacy and his -- the way that history views him is tied up in the Mueller probe and sort of whether he did a good job protecting that. And so if Rod Rosenstein is planning to step down, in some ways, that's the strongest sign that things are OK with the Mueller probe and that Rod Rosenstein feels confident that the investigation will continue through to its conclusion.

CAMEROTA: One more thing about Rod Rosenstein, David Gregory. You know, my FBI sources, they speak -- they hold him in such high regard. They really felt that the Mueller probe was in good hands with him. And they felt that Rod Rosenstein's just personal credentials that were really sterling, and that he put country above personal ambition or anything else.

And, you know, he took -- he received a lot of the president's wrath over these past 18 months or however it's long. You know, the president retweeted that image of Rod Rosenstein as being one of the people behind bars.

So it's not a surprise that he would want to exit at this point, and who knows what this means for the Mueller probe?

GREGORY: Right. But it is, as Garrett says, a little bit more orderly, because there were so many points along this path where he could have been fired, where we thought he was going to be fired over disclosures to "The New York Times," about his thinking about Trump and whether he should be opposed by those within the cabinet; invoking the 25th Amendment, where he said he was just joking.

It's clearer here that conversations between Rosenstein and the White House could have been, "Look, he's going to want a new attorney general. When that happens, you should probably go with him." Maybe Rosenstein said that.

But I am hard-pressed to believe that -- that there's any problem with the probe. I think that Rosenstein, who's been working with Mueller, overseeing Mueller -- I think Mueller's an adult, I think he understands what the timetable looks like and what the -- the politics are like here in terms of just going forward with his job. I think everybody understands that.

And I think, as you said, John, the questions now for Barr will just be "Will you let him finish his job?" And I think that will be the commitment that they try to wrest out of him.

BERMAN: And it will be interesting to see if senators, and particularly Republican senators, demand an answer to that. We're so used to hearings where people, nominees squirm out of answers to specific questions. This is a pretty basic question that William Barr should answer. And we can point out where he's been on some of these matters. You

pointed out that when Robert Mueller was appointed, at first he was good with that.

CAMEROTA: Before Bill Barr didn't like the Mueller probe, he did like the Mueller probe.

So in May of 2017, William Barr said this about Robert Mueller's appointment. "His appointment is good news for those concerned over the troubling way the investigation was handled over the summer and fall, as well as the many government leaks," Barr told this news organization. He added, "I am confident that Mueller will keep his eye on legitimate areas of inquiry and not let this investigation degenerate into a sprawling, ceaseless witch-hunt to 'get something' on the president's associates."

BERMAN: However, a year later, this is, by the way, he always thought that it was legal to fire James Comey, which is something that Mueller is at least looking around into.

A year later, in June of 2018, Bill Barr said, "Mueller should not be able to demand the president submit to an interrogation about alleged obstruction. If embraced by the department, this theory would have potentially disastrous implications, not just for the presidency, but for the executive branch as a whole and the department in particular."

You know, Laura, I think a lot of people thought Bill Barr was a safe nominee, because he's held the job before and seen as an establishment figure. On the other hand, he's also someone who has had problems with the way Robert Mueller has done some things.

JARRETT: Yes. I think he was widely, you know, even by Democrats praised initially, until that memo came out where he had gone on for something like almost 20 pages, explaining why he thought Mueller should not be delving into obstruction of justice surrounding the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

You know, his view is espoused by many conservatives, who think that this is a unitary executive. And so the president can't be under investigation for something he was allowed do. The firing is something he can do as president.

But it's interesting when Rosenstein was asked about those comments at a press conference just a few short weeks ago, he said Barr doesn't have all the facts.

And so it's clear there that he, at least, wanted to distance himself, at least in some way, from those comments. And he said, you know, obviously, people make comments about the probe all the time. But the people here at the Justice Department really know what's going on.

But I think the big question for Barr is what does he do with the report? So even if Rosenstein is gone by the time Mueller has sort of formally wrapped the investigation part of it, meaning the grand jury is winding down, all the sentencing is -- what happens to that report? And if that takes many more months after Rosenstein is gone, how does Barr handle that? I think that's the big questions senators are asking.

GREGORY: Because where does the report go? Ultimately, this becomes a political process if there's ever going to be impeachment. That's an issue for the House and for the Senate. And the person who is overseeing the investigation can make a decision about what gets into a report, what is ultimately sent up to Congress, what becomes public.

And that's why his opinions about whether obstruction of justice is fair game in this investigation, whether this has become a witch-hunt. The hopeful sign is just that, is that Rosenstein has said, "Well, he doesn't know everything," and then he falls into line once he knows the full breadth of the investigation.

CAMEROTA: OK. So Garrett, let's talk about the other big news coming out of the Mueller probe, and this wasn't supposed to come out and be public of the Mueller probe. But Paul Manafort, the former campaign chair of the Trump campaign, his lawyers forgot, I guess, to redact this information.

[07:10:05] And so now the public knows that Paul Manafort shared internal polling data from the Trump campaign with a Russian associate who is tied to Russian intelligence. Is this not the dictionary definition of collusion?

GRAFF: It certainly seems that way from what we know, because Paul Manafort remains unable to actually figure out how technology works. I mean, he's been tripped up by Microsoft Word track changes. He's been tripped up by backing his encrypted texts up to the cloud, and now, you know, he can't copy and paste correctly. So this is data that we were not supposed to know that -- but obviously, Mueller knows.

And one of the things we have seen in previously court filings is Mueller pointing to Konstantin Kilimnik, this Russian business partner of Manafort's as having ties to Russian intelligence in 2016.

Now, if Paul Manafort just wanted to share polling data with a former business associate, you know, he can send the link to 538, like everyone else is following.

The fact that he's flying to Madrid to have a private conversation with someone involved in Russian intelligence, you know, it doesn't get much more of a blinking red -- blinking red light than that.

BERMAN: We should note, the Madrid meeting, according to Manafort's people, happened --

CAMEROTA: After the election.

BERMAN: -- in 2017 after the election.

CAMEROTA: In January, though. I mean, shortly after.

BERMAN: Yes, yes. But the sharing of the poll information, "The New York Times" report, did include private, you know, proprietary campaign polling in the spring of 2016. Why do you share that with a guy that you know to be connected to

Russian intelligence, as Mueller's documents told us that that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates did know? They knew, Robert Mueller says, that he was connected to Russian intel.

I find it fascinating also, Laura, that the Mueller team is asking Paul Manafort about this. Asking about the sharing of polling data, even after Manafort pleaded guilty. It shows what Mueller has been looking into the last few months.

JARRETT: Absolutely. And asking about their conversations about potentially changing the administration's position on the Ukraine. I think that's the real question, is whether there's a link between those two. And whether the fact that, you know, that Kilimnik is interested in this data and willing to do something for it, in return for the administration then taking a different position. I think that is the key link that's left to be explored here.

And of course, you know, they messed up the redactions, but that was Mueller's data that was supposed to be redacted, and so they have a response that's due next week now in this case. And so it will be interesting to see how they handle it, as well.

CAMEROTA: David, quick final thoughts.

GREGORY: It's just interesting that, again, what we know is that this team was open for business to deal with the Russians, whether it was opposition research, whether it was sharing information about the campaign, whether it was coordinating on policy toward the Crimea and Ukraine, which is what Russia wanted, they were open to work with them. And the question is why?

It also underscores how incompetent this team was around him, because there weren't real foreign policy officials willing to go work for Donald Trump. So we had guys like Manafort who were hopelessly compromised with his ties to Russia.

BERMAN: David Gregory, Laura Jarrett, Garrett Graff, thank you so much for being with us. Appreciate it.

President Trump delivered his first Oval Office address last night to try to convince the American people that there should be funding for his border wall. So did he do the job? Maggie Haberman of "The New York Times," with her inside reporting, joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:17:40] CAMEROTA: President Trump delivered a prime-time address from the Oval Office, defending the shutdown and pushing his border wall. So what was the feeling about it inside the White House? Joining us now is CNN political analyst and White House correspondent for "The New York Times," Maggie Haberman.

Maggie, great to see you. So they felt it went well, it accomplished what? MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: They -- well, one, they got

through it. Right? There were no -- the bar -- that's setting the bar very low, but there was a lot of concern around people close to the president about how would he do at this kind of a format. He has never done this before. He doesn't favor the teleprompter, as we know. He tends, when he is doing the teleprompter speech, to go off- script, or he starts talking back to the speech and sort of speaking to himself as he's reading it. And you can't really do that with an Oval Office live prime-time address. And he -- and he read through it so they were happy with that.

They were happy and there was a big emphasis in this on with people I spoke to, that he had projected a sense of calm and, frankly, normalcy for lack of a better way of putting it. I think that there is a concern in the president's orbit about how he is perceived historically in line with other presidents. So that's one thing.

In terms of the messaging, they felt as if he held firm. They did believe that he had put more of a human face on it by describing it as a humanitarian crisis. It was striking, because that's actually language much closer to what Democrats have been saying, except they say that this is a crisis of the president's making.

We didn't hear a whole lot new last night. It's not clear to me how many converts he is going to get. It's also not clear if he turned off people, right, who are not necessarily in line with him already. But I just don't see how anything moved.

And I think the smartest thing that we saw -- that I saw this morning written about this was from Phil Klein at "The Washington Examiner," saying the president did not make the case for why this happened now. Why do this now?

And I've heard privately from former administration officials they don't understand why he didn't do something like this sooner. Even if it wasn't an Oval Office address, some other kind of address, if he felt as if he should have been making the case a while ago, that this was a crisis. Because it's rather abrupt now.

BERMAN: If he thought it was a crisis --

HABERMAN: Right.

BERMAN: -- he may have been able to get more out of it when Republicans controlled the House --

HABERMAN: Correct. Correct.

BERMAN: -- for instance.

HABERMAN: Correct.

BERMAN: I mean, you point out that he needs converts. He needs converts among the American people. The polling on this hasn't been good for him. A majority oppose the wall. He also probably needs converts in Congress, forget the Democratic

House, inside the Senate. But he appears to be losing ground in the Senate, where you have the likes of Lisa Murkowski, Shelley Moore Capito coming out and saying they would like to see the government opened, these appropriations made while you have the discussions about what do on the border.

Does the White House feel like it's losing ground within Congress?

HABERMAN: Privately, the White House is aware that they are on the cusp of things flipping pretty rapidly when people miss their paychecks this week, and they are worried about that.

They also are aware, at least some of them are, that they squandered a real opportunity for the president to try to set the tone and the frame for why he was doing this. You know, he canceled his vacation to Mar-a-Lago. He stayed in Washington, which a lot of people did not think he was going to do. But he did nothing with that time other than tweet. He didn't appear publicly. He didn't do an interview that was focused specifically on setting an agenda. It was all very reactive.

And so they now know that they are about to lose or are in the process of losing a public relations war.

That he also -- we didn't hear him last night speak about specifics. How many miles of fence you would need, how many more beds you would need. He just talked in the same sort of broad strokes that we have heard him over and over and did not make a fresh case.

They are aware there's not much more they can do with the current set of facts and with people dug in. And this is why people who don't favor him calling for a national emergency, which you know, he pointedly did not to do last night, are concerned that he is going to do that eventually, because they see it as his only way out.

CAMEROTA: I thought a really effective part of his speech last night was talking about the personal stories. When he talked about the personal stories, the parents who have lost children to, you know, undocumented criminals, that was, I thought, you know, obviously, it's tugging at heartstrings; and that's going for the emotional punch, but I thought it was effective.

On that note, the White House did something really -- many Democrats saw as very unseemly, and it was certainly norm-breaking. They put out a fundraising appeal on the Oval Office. In other words, the Oval Office speech last night, which has generally been reserved for dignified national emergency moments, they put out this fundraising appeal on that, with all sorts of inflammatory bullet points and saying that the president needs people to immediately contribute.

And he will know their names if you contribute tonight, he will get a list of their names. He will know who the most patriotic Americans are if you give tonight because of his speech from the Oval Office. What was that? HABERMAN: I might -- I might be a bit jaded but I didn't consider

that to be a national emergency on its own, that fundraising e-mail. I think that both parties have started fundraising off of all kinds of moments that would have been seen as anathema before. This president certainly has blown through most norms. But he has also created a permission structure where a lot of people are doing that now.

Look, I think that what was, I think, more concerning to the Democrats I spoke to was the fact-challenged aspects of his speech. He did not refer, noticeably, to that terrorism number that Sarah Sanders had been promoting over the weekend that was just not true. Right?

But he did actually continue to talk about this as an emergency in terms of drugs coming over the border, and he misstated things like that.

I think that you have seen Oval Office addresses more reserved for -- or at least preserved in terms of their factual nature. They are fact-checked very carefully. This one was fact-checked more than what the president says on a daily basis, but it still contains some -- some falsehoods.

BERMAN: Maggie, you also have a byline or are on the byline in some of the Paul Manafort reporting. And your reporting is that the polling that was handed over by Paul Manafort -- and also your reporting is Rick Gates -- to Konstantin Kilimnik, it happened in the spring of 2016? And what type of polling are we talking?

HABERMAN: Sure. It was our understanding is that Paul Manafort asked Rick Gates, who was Manafort's deputy, to turn this polling over to this associate who had Russian ties.

It's not clear exactly what this was supposed to show. It was -- it was some internal polling, but mostly, our understanding is that it was information from the website RealClearPolitics. A lot of that is -- a lot of public information, in other words. And mostly top lines. Mostly sort of horse-race type of information about the primary. We don't know if it was more than that.

When you turn over private polling, that tends to be less about just convincing somebody that someone is going to win. It usually contains more targeted data.

But the goal, as we -- one person described it as the effort was to essentially help Paul Manafort get paid by people who owed him money. But, again, this is -- this is a problematic connection when people are trying to say, you know, no ties to Russia and no collusion. This is pretty direct.

CAMEROTA: But just to be clear, your reporting is that he did turn over internal polling that was not public?

HABERMAN: That is our understanding. That is our understanding. But, again, we don't know the breadth and depth of it. It was primary polling. It was not head to head against Hillary Clinton. BERMAN: Maggie, lastly, back to the speech for a second. The

president tweeted overnight. He called it a very interesting experience, which isn't as diffusive as he normally is. He did say he's getting a lot of praise for it. I suppose that's not surprising.

But in calling it a very interesting experience, I was reading what you were saying yesterday. You also said you've been hearing all day that he didn't want do the speech to begin with.

HABERMAN: That's right. Look, he -- he -- there's a reason, as one person close to him put it to me, there's a reason he has not done one of these for two years; and it's because he hasn't wanted to. And he made that pretty clear to officials when he finally relented.

He had been urged by a number of people, you know, this was Mick Mulvaney. This was his associates on the Hill. This was a bunch of other advisers in the White House who thought that he should do this kind of speech, that it was the right moment for it and it was the right setting for him.

He doesn't like doing these kinds of things in the Oval Office. He also doesn't, as we said before, does not like these teleprompter teaches. He knows that he doesn't have a crowd to feed off of. They're not the best format for him.

And you saw him, at this luncheon with network anchors earlier in the day, when -- it was an off-the-record lunch, but we got reporting out of it -- he said, you know -- and he was talking about the speech and his trip to the border tomorrow. He basically said he didn't really, you know, see the point of doing this, "But these people" -- and he pointed to his communications advisers -- "say that I should."

It was sort of a classic Donald Trump, which is he's going to have it both ways. He's going to -- he'll own it if both of these things go well, and if they don't, he's already cast the blame on who's responsible.

CAMEROTA: So Maggie, some pundits thought before the speech that the president was going to use the opportunity, given that it was the Oval Office, to declare a national emergency, as he had threatened at some briefings. And so is that off the table?

HABERMAN: No, it's still on the table. But there are some concerns about it within the White House, and there are concerns about it among some of the president's conservative supporters, who consider it, A, a bad precedent; and, B, the type of government overreach that conservatives have generally -- especially the types of conservatives who backed the president, have generally argued against.

They think that it goes into a concerning territory, especially because it will immediately be court-challenged. And while the president never minds a court challenge, the expectation among some in the White House is he will lose pretty quickly on this, and then what has it gotten you?

That said, it still remains his likeliest path out of what is right now an impasse between him and the Democrats.

BERMAN: The argument for it is he gets to end the shutdown and say, "I fought for this until the bitter end."

HABERMAN: Exactly.

BERMAN: "It was some crazy judge," in his words, "that overturned it."

HABERMAN: That's right.

BERMAN: Maggie Haberman, great to have you with us. Thanks so much.

HABERMAN: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Democratic senators stopping all business in the Senate until they can vote to end the shutdown. Will that move work? We ask the senator leading that charge, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)