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Biden Reneges On Campaign Promise And Pardons Son; Trump Picks Loyalist Kash Patel To Lead The FBI; Syria And Russia Ramp Up Strikes On Syrian Rebels. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired December 02, 2024 - 05:30   ET

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

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[05:30:50]

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: All right, 5:30 a.m. here on the East Coast. A live look at that beautiful bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania very early on this Monday morning after Thanksgiving. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.

In the closing weeks of his presidency Joe Biden now going back on a promise he made while he was still the Democratic candidate for president on whether or not he would pardon his son Hunter. He said this as recently as June.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID MUIR, ANCHOR, "ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT": Let me ask you, will you accept the jury's outcome -- their verdict -- no matter what it is?

JOE BIDEN, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes.

MUIR: And have you ruled out a pardon for your son?

BIDEN: Yes.

MUIR: You have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: But the president has now had a change of heart. CNN learning that while his family, including Hunter Biden, vacationed on Nantucket for Thanksgiving the president felt Hunter had been wrongfully targeted by his political opponents and that his son had endured enough.

One of those political opponents crying foul over the pardon. House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer reacting with this statement Sunday night. He said in part, "It's unfortunate that rather than come clean about their decades of wrongdoing, President Biden and his family continue to do everything they can to avoid accountability."

Before the pardon became official on Sunday night I asked the leading Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Jamie Raskin, whether the president should pardon his son.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Should the president pardon him?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): I mean, again, that is a unilateral executive power -- you know, power that --

HUNT: And should he use it?

RASKIN: Well, you know, the power exists for the president to show mercy for people who have committed crimes.

HUNT: I get the sense you're not going to answer my question.

RASKIN: Yeah. I just -- I don't know the answer now. I'm not in the --

HUNT: OK.

RASKIN: -- pardon office. But it does give me the opportunity to say there is a process for doing this --

HUNT: Sure.

RASKIN: -- with a pardon attorney and it's -- they shouldn't be passed out like Oreo cookies.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: All right, joining us now to talk about the political fallout of this pardon is Margaret Talev, senior contributor at Axios. Margaret, good morning to you.

MARGARET TALEV, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR, AXIOS, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR DEMOCRACY, JOURNALISM AND CITIZENSHIP, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY: Good morning.

HUNT: So there's probably going to be a lot more Democrats being asked about this today --

TALEV: Yeah, you think?

HUNT: -- in the way and that, of course, happened before this actually came down. Obviously, Raskin there struggling a little bit to talk about it.

The conundrum here for Democrats is really that Donald Trump has been out there arguing that the Justice Department has been unfairly pursuing him for political reasons and Democrats have been trying to say that no, that's not the case. These prosecutions aren't political. Going after Donald Trump was not the wrong thing to do. It was not a political prosecution.

How does the president's decision here impact this debate going forward? TALEV: I think it will give some ammunition to President-elect Trump and the people that he's nominating to these roles. Talking points for Republicans to make points that they would have made anyway and to pursue these steps and policies and actions that they would have pursued anyway.

And I think the reason that this is a surprise or felt like a surprise last night when everyone's phones exploded is mostly because President Biden spent so many months saying that he had ruled out doing it, not that he is going to do it. I think President Biden cares what you think about him but not as much as he cares about his son. And he's getting on a plane to Africa and decided to it immediately.

HUNT: Yeah. Maybe I was the only one that was not surprised by this because I partly felt that considering the way he has talked about his family in public meant that if he had this power, it seemed difficult to me that -- to not use it.

But that said, I mean, the sources that I had talked to about this said he was very concerned about his legacy --

TALEV: Yeah.

HUNT: -- in terms of what this would do to it but that his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, perhaps was someone who felt that the family needed to have this happen or they would be -- I mean, and you can kind of read into it in the statement, right, that they felt like this was going to go on and on and on with no end in sight.

[05:35:00]

I mean, what do you know about those dynamics?

TALEV: My colleague Alex Thompson at Axios, who has covered this administration really closely, is -- will write -- is writing in a piece today that the president -- President Biden has felt a lot of guilt over the -- what his son has been through in these last few years. And you might think to yourself what? Because you could equally argue that maybe Hunter would feel a lot of guilt about what his actions put his father through.

But that President Biden feels very strongly that if he were not in the White House his son would not have gone through the political treatment of his political opponents and then ultimately this process and the way it has played out inside the justice system.

So I think there were those push and pulls both in the overt arguments you could see, like from Hunter Biden's lawyer making the arguments and laying sort of the groundwork on paper for this to the internal conversations happening among the family not just in Nantucket this weekend but between the president and his -- and his wife in -- let's say in many months before but certainly in the days before, you know.

HUNT: Certainly ongoing, right.

So Margaret, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about Kash Patel who, of course, the president-elect announced over the weekend he's going to nominate to be FBI director. Of course, implied in that nomination is the firing of Christopher Wray --

TALEV: Yes.

HUNT: -- the current FBI director who still has three years left on a 10-year term. He, of course, was appointed by Donald Trump and left in place by President Biden.

There have been some concerns voiced by John Bolton, for example, about this pick but there also have been a lot of Republicans who have come straight out and said that they want to see Kash Patel confirmed.

One of them was Mike Lawler who is a New York congressman from a swing district. I had him on "STATE OF THE UNION" over the weekend. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Do you have any reservations about Kash Patel serving in that role?

REP. MIKE LAWLER (R-NY): No. Donald Trump campaigned on reforming the FBI and the Department of Justice, so I don't know why any of this is frankly surprising to people.

President Trump has nominated in Kash Patel someone who served as chief of staff at the Department of Defense, someone who served as deputy director of the NSI, someone who has served as a senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee. He was a federal prosecutor under the Obama administration. And so certainly has requisite experience for this role.

I think there's no question President Trump made very clear that the Department of Justice and the FBI would be reformed if he was elected to a second term. And I think obviously, with the selection of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel that's exactly what he's going to do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: I thought it was pretty remarkable he was willing to say he has no reservations at all about this.

TALEV: Yeah. I was actually pretty surprised about that interview. You know how editors always take the word "reform" out of copy that reporters try to put it into --

HUNT: Yes.

TALEV: -- because they're like what does it mean? Reform is in the eye of the beholder. There is reform and then there's, like, reform, right?

And so I think what Kash Patel promised in his out years between Trump term one and this incoming term is -- to go after journalists, to go after political critics. And it's a plan that is highly tied to -- highly -- tied highly to his support personally for President-elect Trump.

HUNT: Um-hum.

TALEV: And I'm glad that you sort of connected the dots here because I think we will never know was President Biden always going to pardon his son even if Kamala Harris had been elected president. But I think coming right after Trump's statement that he would tap Patel to lead the FBI, President Biden could perhaps look down the road at some of the tactics that we might see under a director Patel.

The question is what is the Senate going to do? Not what is Mike Lawler going to do, but what are the Republicans --

HUNT: Yeah.

TALEV: -- in the Senate going to do? And there is some real concern I think about whether Patel's past statements suggest that he would want to lead the FBI with the level of independence -- political independence from the president that has been the hallmark of the last 50 years.

The reason that FBI directors served for 10 years at a time and spanned more than one presidency is because of Watergate, Richard Nixon, and cover-ups out of political allegiance to a sitting president and a desire to make sure that never happens again.

[05:40:05]

So this would be a return to the pre-Watergate era in terms of how people think about the FBI director. It could have a lot of implications not just for this president but for future presidents.

HUNT: Yeah, for sure.

All right, Margaret Talev for us this morning. Margaret, thank you.

TALEV: Thanks.

HUNT: I appreciate it.

All right. Ahead here on CNN THIS MORNING a rebel uprising in Syria. Were Russia and Iran too distracted by their own conflicts to see the attacks coming?

Plus, blowout in a blizzard. The 49ers just couldn't handle the cold against the Bills. The Bleacher Report up next.

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[05:45:00]

HUNT: Syrian and Russian jets stepping up their strikes on rebel forces in Northern Syria after a surprise rebel offensive cost the regime control of Aleppo, the country's second-largest city. The newly formed rebel coalition calls itself the Military Operations Command. So far, they've captured key sites across Aleppo, including the airport. The rebels also claim to control all of Idlib.

And while the Syrian regime may have been caught off guard the White House says they weren't. I asked national security adviser Jake Sullivan about that Sunday on "STATE OF THE UNION."

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HUNT: Was the U.S. government surprised by how swiftly these rebels took over?

JAKE SULLIVAN, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Let me tell you one thing we weren't surprised by. We were not surprised that these rebels would try to take advantage of a new situation in which the Syrian government's main backers -- Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah -- were all distracted and weakened by conflicts and events elsewhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: All right, CNN political and national security analyst David Sanger joins us now. David, good morning.

I actually kind of want to start there with what Jake Sullivan would or wouldn't say about what happened here. Do you think the U.S. government was caught off guard by the speed of this takeover?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST, WHITE HOUSE AND NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES, AUTHOR, "NEW COLD WARS" (via Webex by Cisco): I'm sure they were probably caught off guard by the speed. But the fundamental dynamic that Mr. Sullivan described Kasie I think is right.

Think about it. The main backers of Syria's Assad government, which has been fighting a civil war here now for, what 13 years, were Russia, Hezbollah, right, and the Iranians. Hezbollah has been virtually destroyed by the Israelis. The Iranians, right now, are a bit in retreat and stunned by the loss of not only Hezbollah but Hamas. The Russians are busy elsewhere.

So the fact that the rebels were able to come together secretly and do this is you know, in retrospect, not surprising. But I have no indication that anybody picked it up in advance.

HUNT: Hmm.

So to this point -- and I asked Jake Sullivan about this as well over the weekend because obviously a lot of these groups are -- you know, some are designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. It's -- there's a lot of muddy water.

Is it in the U.S.'s strategic interest to have something like this happen?

SANGER: Well, first of all, the freedom fighters who were involved here are not exactly Washington's greatest collection of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. They -- some of them belong to a group that was until a few years ago tied to al Qaeda. They are a little bit less hardcore than al Qaeda, but they are not -- they're not great poster icons for battling against Assad.

That said, I think the U.S. is going to probably do its best to stay away from this, at least in any overt way, because what Assad wants the most is to show that it's really a plot by Washington to oust him. Certainly, every president since Barack Obama on has said that Assad has to go, so you could imagine why Assad might view it that way.

But, you know, we've had other moments where we thought Assad just could not survive and somehow through a combination of gassing his own people and just sheer brutality he's managed to hang on.

HUNT: So David, how does this play into -- and obviously, you mentioned, and Sullivan talked about how all of the forces in the region and the distraction thereof allows this to happen.

But big picture -- we've also seen some other developments here over the weekend. Obviously, there was that really devastating video of the Israeli American hostage Edan Alexander that was released over the weekend. There is, of course, Donald Trump set to come into office -- questions about -- Sen. Lindsey Graham has come straight out and said that he thinks that Donald Trump wants a ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel conflict before he is inaugurated.

How do you understand all of these competing forces that are shaping things right now in the last 49 days of the Biden presidency?

[05:50:00]

SANGER: Well, it's a pretty complex scene. I think the first thing that President-elect Trump is learning is that he is entering a world that's a lot more complicated than the one that he left in 2020 when he left office -- or early 2021.

I think the second thing that we are discovering along the way here is that you are watching these new cold wars with Russia play out across different borders. Even this weekend, right? I mean, the protests in Georgia over an effort by the government to delay their joining of the European Union. That's pretty much a Russia versus Washington element. Syria's deep interest to Russia because they have one of their few, outside of Russia, naval ports there and keep ships there.

I have no doubt that the president-elect would love to see a hostage deal prior to taking office but he'd probably love to see one in the first days of taking office even more.

HUNT: All right, David Sanger for us this morning. David, no one I'd rather talk to. Thank you so much for being here.

SANGER: Thank you. Great to be with you, and I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.

HUNT: You as well. See you soon, I hope.

All right, time now for sports. The Bills ice out the 49ers amid a howling snowstorm in Buffalo.

CNN sports anchor and former Buffalo Bill Coy Wire has this morning's Bleacher Report. Good morning, Coy.

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: What's up, Kasie.

Look at this scene. I mean, the temperatures were freezing, and fans came out to help shovel snow. Matt Collins, the receiver for the Bills, just showed up barefoot to the stadium.

The 49er California boys -- they never stood a chance in this one, Kasie. They were like fish out of water. The receivers -- they didn't know how to get their footing. The linemen were doing bellyflops. They didn't know to click their cleats together to get the snow out before the snap, while James Cook and the Bills -- they were running like they had snowshoes on with afterburners.

Cook had 107 yards and a touchdown. Snow games like this always make you feel like a kid again, Kasie.

So it's fitting that Josh Allen and Amari Cooper created a play that looked like it was drawn up on a playground. Allen passing to Cooper. Cooper pitches him the ball and watch Allen leap for the touchdown. Amari said he caught the ball and was wondering what Josh was doing there, so he said, "Here you go." One of the wildest touchdowns of the season. Allen gets credit for a passing touchdown and a receiving touchdown.

A complete blowout AKA snow-out in Buffalo -- 35-10. The 49ers now 5- 7. They lost their star running back Christian McCaffrey to another injury as Buffalo clinches a playoff spot and their fifth-straight AFC title.

And Josh Allen -- he got engaged this week and became the first quarterback to score in rushing, passing, and a receiving touchdown in the same game.

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JOSH ALLEN, QUARTERBACK, BUFFALO BILLS: It's got to be up there. I wish he got credited for something there -- an assist or a passing touchdown. But again, I kind of threw a bad ball so I was just kind of chasing it and it was kind of tipped around. He made a heck of a catch.

AMARI COOPER, WIDE RECEIVER, BUFFALO BILLS: It was over there.

ALLEN: Yeah. I threw it and it was just kind of sticky on -- sticky hand, and I just kind of chased the ball just to be there. And we made eye contact and --

COOPER: That's what it was, yeah.

ALLEN: -- he just pitched it, and I had to go make a play. It was dope.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WIRE: So dope. Now the Jaguars' quarterback Trevor Lawrence says he is home and feeling better after suffering a concussion during yesterday's 23-20 to the Texans. Lawrence had to be carted off the field in the second quarter after that late hit there from linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair.

As Lawrence laid on the ground you can see that huge brawl breaking out between the two teams. Al-Shaair was ejected along with Jags' cornerback Jarrian Jones. Tight end Evan Engram received a 15-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

EVAN ENGRAM, TIGHT END, JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS: Yeah. I mean, it was just a -- it was a dirty hit I think I received. Those hits are always in question. Trevor was going down and I just -- I saw it out of my peripheral. I got a pretty clear view of it and in that moment, just instincts was just -- it just didn't feel like a clean hit. So I felt I'd stick up for my quarterback.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WIRE: All right, Kasie, the consequences of the Michigan-Ohio State postgame brawl have been announced. The Big 10 fined the schools $100,000 each for their involvement in the melee following the Wolverines' stunning upset over the number two Buckeyes on Saturday. Police used pepper spray to break the players up. They were punching and shoving. The conference says it considers this matter concluded now and no other fines or suspensions will be handed out.

The final college rankings will be about a week from now Kasie, so we'll see who those top 12 teams will be for the playoffs.

HUNT: Indeed, we will. And yeah, not a lot of glory there in Columbus at the end of the game, but I just got to say go blue.

WIRE: Well played.

HUNT: Coy, thank you --

WIRE: You got it.

HUNT: -- and congrats on your Bills.

WIRE: Thank you.

HUNT: I appreciate it.

All right. In our next hour here on CNN THIS MORNING how can Democrats move forward in Republican-controlled Washington? We'll talk to Democratic Congressman Glenn Ivey about that.

[05:55:00]

Plus, Hunter Biden pardoned. So what changed from earlier this summer when President Biden said this about his son's conviction?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I said I'd abide by the jury's decision, and I will do that. And I will not pardon him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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HUNT: It's Monday, December 2. Right now on CNN THIS MORNING --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MUIR: Have you ruled out a pardon for your son?

BIDEN: Yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: A change of heart. President Biden going back on a campaign pledge about pardoning his son Hunter.

And --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KASH PATEL, TRUMP'S PICK FOR FBI DIRECTOR: We're going to come after the people in the media.

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HUNT: An FBI shakeup. What Donald Trump's pick to lead the FBI says he would do on day one if put in charge.