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Trump Says, Can't Say I'm Happy About Bipartisan Border Deal; Why Trump's National Emergency Threat Concerns the GOP; Trump Calls on Freshman Democrats to Resign Over Her Remark; Conservative Klobuchar Is Trump's Worst Nightmare. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired February 12, 2019 - 14:00   ET

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


[14:00:00] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Starbucks CEO independent Howard Schultz will be live in Houston, Texas, with Poppy Harlow talking about the 20 election that is tonight at 10:00 Eastern. And that is it for me. "NEWSROOM" with Brooke Baldwin starts right now.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN. Thanks for being with me. It looks like we can put those fears of another government shutdown to rest and if you don't believe me, just listen to the President.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't think you're going to see a shutdown. I would never accept if it happens but I don't think it's going to happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That was Trump just a bit ago reacting to a deal struck by bipartisan group of lawmakers just days before the deadline to keep the government open. Here's what's in this thing. A little over $1.3 billion for a new border barrier, funding for I.C.E. to House more than 45,000 in detention centers and $1.7 billion increase in homeland security. The deal was just the first hurdle. Up next you have the vote and key voices on the right, both in the media and on Capitol Hill say, this isn't good enough. House freedom caucus chairman mark meadows a close Trump ally tweeting that the deal isn't serious and that, quote, Congress is not doing its job. And while the President says another shutdown isn't likely that doesn't mean that he approves.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, will you sign Congress's border deal?

TRUMP: I have to study it. I'm not happy about it. It's not doing the trick, but I'm adding things to it and when you add whatever I have to add, it's all -- it's all going to happen where we'll build a beautiful, big strong wall.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: CNN's Abby Philip is live at the White House and Abby, we just heard the President say that he's adding things to this deal struck by Congress.

ABBY PHILIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It's not clear exactly -- sorry, Brooke. I think I lost you here.

BALDWIN: Can you hear me, Abby?

PHILIP: It's not clear what President Trump meant by that. He's referring to this conference report. The problem is if President Trump decides all of a sudden that he's going to change or add to this bill, it could be a serious problem. Republicans and Democrats have been haggling over this for weeks. They would have to go back to the drawing board to get buy-in for whatever President Trump wants to add to it. There is one thing that President Trump has been working on with his aides for weeks now behind the scenes and that is potentially getting money together from other parts of the government in order to build the wall without Congress appropriating the money for it, at least not at the levels that he had asked for, $5.7 billion. Now if he takes what Congress gives him in this bill and then adds to it money that has been pulled from other parts of the government, then he might be able to get a number that's closer to 5.7. If the President wants to go back to the drawing board with lawmakers just a few days before this February 15th deadline, that could be a major problem. It could mean that they don't end up getting to the end of the road here before the government shuts down again. That being said, I think a lot of people took what President Trump said in that room that there's not going to be a shutdown as at least one positive sign that if he doesn't want a shutdown, the only way to not have a shutdown is for him to not sign an appropriations bill, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Abby Philip, thank you, at the White House and aside from proclaiming himself a master negotiator and a top businessman, a border wall was the one thing President Trump staked his campaign on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We are going to build a great border wall.

And who's going to pay for the wall?

Mexico!

Who's going to pay for the wall?

Mexico.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House, the President's promise ran into reality and no matter what he says to rally his base, the facts just cannot be denied. We all know Mexico isn't paying for any of it and then there's Trump's latest claim we don't need to build the wall, we just need to finish it. Here he was in El Paso.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Today we started a big, beautiful wall right on the Rio Grande. Now, you really mean finish that wall because we've built a lot of it. It's finish that wall.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Now, let's just pause, shall we, that the U.S./Mexico border is nearly 2,000 miles long. Physical barriers, pedestrian and vehicle fencing currently cover about a third of that. So, there's no fence at all for the Rio Grande and while construction is set to begin this month, the Rio Grande valley, the size of the project is only 14 miles.

[14:05:00] Translation -- there's a long way to go to finish the wall. But let's keep going. Because during the State of The Union the President said a wall helped the city of El Paso, Texas, go from, his words, one of the most dangerous cities to one of the safest and he doubled down on that just last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I don't care whether a mayor is a Republican or a Democrat, they're full of crap when they say it hasn't made a big difference. I heard the same thing from the fake news. They said, oh, crime stayed the same. Didn't stay the same. Went way down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Here's the truth from 2005 to 2007, El Paso had the third lowest crime rate for a city its size and that was before a wall was built in mid-2008 according to factcheck.org and when you hear the President say, violent crime dropped overnight thanks to the wall, that's false too. FBI data shows that over the span of five years both before and after the wall was built, El Paso's violent crime increased. So bottom line, El Paso was never one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. and a wall did not solve any problems with crime it may have had and those folks are just the fact. Let's bring in political reporter Chris Cillizza and when asked whether he would declare a national emergency, the President says I'm considering everything, so give us the historical context for this? How does this emergency compare to others?

CHRIS CILLIZZA, CNN POLITICS REPORTER AND EDITOR AT LARGE: Let's run through it. Thank you for doing, in fact, check segment. Let's get through some more facts. Facts. OK. First of all, broad scale, 1976 the national emergencies act is passed which tries to sort of make specific what you can and can't do but national emergencies have been declared before that. Let's run through the big ways in which they're declared, Brooke. 9/11, bush 43, the Iraq war, the great depression, FDR interestingly enough.

That's pre-1976 but FDR closes all banks so all these banks don't fail and worsen the great depression. Immediate reaction to something pressing, right, something that might fit our most obvious definition of national emergency. Swine flu, this was the h1n1 flu. Obama declared this. Trying to make sure all the resources possible, whether that's hospitals or urgent care were deployed to help deal with that. Nixon, this is fascinating, Nixon dealt with a postal strike. Postal workers went on strike for eight days. He deployed the national guard to deliver your mail. 58 national emergencies have been declared, Brooke, since 1976. Of those 58, 31 are ongoing and the reason is because most of these deal with sanctions. Bush -- the Iraq war still in place, sanctioning, trying to put in place sanctions to keep other foreign actors usually from abusing our relationship with them. Nuclear proliferation, again easy for me to say -- Clinton did this in the middle of his first term saying, biological chemical and nuclear weapons are a huge danger to our country and to the world.

We need to direct resources to deal with any Americans who are working on proliferation. We need to cut that back. So, you know, there's all that and then there's the politics. This is important. Our new colleague Mike warren, he wrote this piece about why Republicans really are afraid of a national emergency declaration. This is important.

OK. Trump declares national emergency. Possible he said all things are on the table as you said. The House, which is controlled by Democrats in case you've been on another planet for the last couple months, they passed a resolution, a privilege resolution that essentially says, we oppose this. Privilege resolutions gets into the nerdy weeds of Congress but they have to have a vote in the Senate. Mitch McConnell couldn't table it. They'd have to vote and what would that mean? An up or down vote on Donald Trump declaring a national emergency over the border wall, right?

You've seen Mitch McConnell time and time again in the Senate try to avoid putting his Republican conference in a place where they need to say, huh or you huh on whether a border wall, works, number one and certainly in this case, whether there should be a national emergency declared over it. This scenario is a political nightmare. He would not be smiling if this happened. That is Mitch McConnell's smile, by the way. He would not be smiling if that happened and that's another reason that there's legal and political worries about going down this path. That's why Trump may say I don't like this deal, but he's also hedging on a shutdown because I think he knows maybe signing this deal is the only viable thing to move them forward. Back to you, Brooke.

[14:10:07] BALDWIN: Is it the Mark Meadows of the world that have the louder voice or Mitch McConnell?

CILLIZZA: Correct.

BALDWIN: Excellent, explanation. Thank you very much. Catherine Rampell is with me. An opinion columnist is with me and Doug Heye for the RNC.

Welcome, to both of you. Catherine, let's just dive in. Trump says a shutdown is unlikely. It sounds like he's leaving this door open potentially for executive action, which of course wouldn't require Congressional approval. Mick Mulvaney says there are pots of money, so that said, what are potential options moving forward and where are these pots of money? CATHERINE RAMPELL, OPINION COLUMNIST, "WASHINGTON POST": Those were

excellent questions. I think I want to take a step back first which is to say that as I see this, Trump actually got something for essentially nothing, right? Everybody's talking about how Trump got nothing out of this or at least he got a worse deal as I see it, he got almost $1.4 billion for a wall that we don't need and that most American don't want. Democrats did not get anything major in response. The deal last year was over a grand bargain relate to go dreamers for more money so they didn't get that. Maybe Trump should just quit while he's ahead. Accept this money and say, you know what? I'm getting something, the Democrats didn't really get anything in return. He can declare a national emergency but that's going to cause lots of problems with his co-partisans on the hill, of course. Not to mention in the courts. That's a whole other issue here and the fact that even if they can cobble together the money they still have to go through eminent domain. It seems very unlikely that this is a winning strategy for him.

BALDWIN: Doug, do you agree with Katherine? Should he just take it and run with it?

DOUG HEYE, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: I think so. This is the least bad option we have out there and unfortunately. it's one of the reasons that people are so cynical about politics right now. This is ultimately could be resolved as just an issue over semantics so that Trump says he has a wall, Democrats say he hasn't and everybody goes home and is either happy or relatively unhappy. There's an opportunity for Donald Trump whether here or more broadly. If you look at what the White House did with criminal justice reform, that can be a blueprint for how to get big things done and get them done on a bipartisan fashion. If Trump wants to be as you referred to him earlier as the great negotiator that he promised us that he was going to be, immigrations an issue where he can take his base if he's willing to, they trust him, they will go with him on immigration and he can cut a deal that not only other Republican candidates that he beat in 2016 wouldn't have been able to cut but also that he can truthfully say I got something big done that Barack Obama didn't. He should seize that opportunity.

BALDWIN: Which we know he likes to say whenever he possibly can.

RAMPELL: There's a possibility for a grand bargain here and -- whether it's related to dreamers which there's a lot of bipartisan support for finding a legal path, a permanent path for those Dreamer kids, DACA kids, versus a wall or what have you. There's opportunity for a grand bargain and there's no reason why that grand bargain has to involve like whether IRS refunds go out or whether air-traffic control workers get paid? Why are any of these things related?

BALDWIN: He weighs in on that during this meeting this afternoon. He also weighs in on the firestorm surrounding the freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her tweet that was anti-Semitic. Here was the President.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: Congressman Omar is terrible what she said and I think she should either resign from Congress or she should certainly resign from the House foreign affairs committee. What she said is so deep seated in her heart that her lame apology -- that's what it was -- it was lame and she didn't mean a word of it, was just not appropriate. I think she should resign from Congress, frankly, but at a minimum she shouldn't be on committees, certainly that committee.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So lame apology so says this President, Doug, this is the guy who once upon a time said grab them by the you know what and talked about s-hole countries and the recent trail of tears tweet, trail of tears genocide, a dark period in this country, Charlottesville, good people on both sides, Muslim ban. I could go on. Should she resign? Here he is saying all of this from his perch at the White House.

[14:15:09] HEYE: As you've highlighted, Donald Trump is not the best messenger here. From the perspective of having worked for Eric Canter, I've seen a lot of this kind of ugly rhetoric used. We would hear so often talked about New York bankers and we knew what that meant. This apology wasn't unequivocal. She equivocated in the second paragraph. That's part of what's unacceptable about this. While I don't think she needs to step down for this, it certainly is troubling in what we've seen and this also mirrors a rise in anti- Semitism in the Democratic party and in the global left. We see this in the labor party in the U.K. as well. It's a real problem. I'm glad Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer spoke up about this. Democrats need to do a better job of policing themselves.

BALDWIN: The messenger is problematic. Doug and Katherine, thank you so much on what's happened at the White House.

Breaking news in the case of one of the world's most notorious drug lords, EL Chapo has just learned his fate.

Amy Klobuchar is the President's worst nightmare.

New revelations on Bill Cosby's life behind bars while he thinks prison is an amazing experience. You're watching CNN.

[14:20:08] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: A long awaited verdict today in the trial of the world's most notorious drug lord, El Chapo guilty on all ten counts. He now faces life in prison after 34 hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of engaging in criminal enterprise. The international manufacturing and destination of cocaine, heroin and other drugs and possession of firearms and money laundering, so with me now CNN legal analyst and former homicide prosecutor Paul Callan. Six whole days of deliberation like what took them so long.

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Why did it take so long?

BALDWIN: Right. CALLAN: Everybody's watched the Netflix series so we all know about

El Chapo. Six days wasn't so long for such a complex indictment. This indictment was -- when I looked at it, I was stunned at the complexity and what this jury was required to do. They would be deliberating on count one and that would correlate with other things that were in count seven of the indictment. It was a very complicated one. It also went on for three months and it's not unusual for -- one rule of thumb you hear sometimes is that it's one day of deliberation per week of a trial, so six days, not at all unreasonable here.

BALDWIN: OK.

CALLAN: In terms of the case.

BALDWIN: Sentencing isn't until June 25th but the first charge carries a mandatory life sentence, but, you know, as we well know, he's this notorious escape artist and wasn't part of the deal in the extradition with Mexico that he be locked up presumably forever in a super max facility up here, so he ain't getting out is what I'm saying.

CALLAN: I would say he's not getting out. The crimes that this case focused on were, you know, really unbelievable and this is a guy who has said publicly he may have been involved in the killing of two to 3,000 people. He had such an elaborate and huge drug operation, he even had a submarine that was delivering some of the drugs to the United States. I don't know how the wall would stop a submarine, but it demonstrates that a lot of drugs come in through unusual means into the United States and El Chapo -- he ran a billion dollars drug cartel so this is huge this conviction.

BALDWIN: When Mexico, something -- when Mexico extradited him to the U.S. off the table was the death penalty.

CALLAN: I found that to be fascinating especially given the huge number -- thousands of Mexican citizens were allegedly murdered by this cartel but they required the U.S. to agree that they would not put him to death if he was convicted, so that's -- usually when we extradite from other countries that don't custom mayoral use the death penalty we face that condition.

BALDWIN: Likely lifetime witness protection, I could keep going, El Chapo, what a trial, case closed. They say they'll appeal but you say no dice.

The list of Democrats running for President is getting longer, more diverse. One conservative joins me next to say it is Senator Amy Klobuchar who poses the greatest threat to the President.

Plus, another apology over the use of blackface, this time is from members of a police department. We'll be right back.

[14:25:05] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Amy Klobuchar the latest addition to this Democrats line up is getting praise from an unlikely source, Republicans. Amy Klobuchar is Trump's worse nightmare. Here's one section I wanted to highlight for you, quote, forget all those recent allegations that's she may have been mean to her staff unless there's something more such as tolerating or hushing up sexual harassment all this shows is that Ms. Minnesota nice might just have the touch of steel a real leader kneels. No one ever accused Margaret Thatcher of being Ms. Congeniality. Welcome Henry OlSEN. What you're throwing down there is no one is going to accuse senator Klobuchar of being Ms. Congeniality which may be a good thing.

HENRY OLSEN, COLUMNIST, "THE WASHINGTON POST": She'll be tough enough to fight back but not over-the-top enough to make herself look foolish. I think there's a couple of Democratic contenders who have cross that had line and have a habit of crossing the line and that just plays into Donald Trump's hands.

BALDWIN: You point out that ever since Amy Klobuchar came on the statewide scene that she has been crushing every election, why?

OLSEN: I think it's because she knows how to appeal to the two swing groups in America, the moderate suburbanite and the blue collar Democrat who crossed lines to vote for Trump is that she got on the statewide scene and she wiped out a Republican in the tough race and it's because she knows how to put those groups together and that makes her very tough competition for Trump.

BALDWIN: She may not have major name recognition yet but I would bet that people will remember this exchange. We all remember the exchange that she had with Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Here was the clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D), MINNESOTA: So, you're saying there's never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before or part of what happened?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[14:30:00]