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Trump Warning to Iran; Manafort Trial Begins; Trump's Approval Rating Up Slightly. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired July 23, 2018 - 12:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:00:28] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us.

President Trump launches an all caps late-night Twitter rant at Iran, warning of war if Tehran threatens the United States again.

Plus, angry tweet storms about Russia meddling too, filled with falsehoods as the president's former campaign chairman goes on trial this week.

And as Democrats warn a Justice Brett Kavanaugh would threaten health care and the special counsel investigation, new conservative ads target vulnerable Democratic senators.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Heidi Heitkamp has a decision to make, does she support Kavanaugh and prove she's on the side of the president and you? Or does she side with the radical liberals in Washington, D.C.?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Back to that story later.

But we begin the hour with the president's all-caps Twitter warning to Iran and the question of whether it's furthering or undercutting a carefully crafted administration policy rollout. Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before. That tweet from the president shortly before midnight.

That threat jarred national security officials here in Washington and immediately overshadowed a carefully detailed speech given last night by the secretary of state. Out at the Reagan Library in California, Mike Pompeo nodding to louder and more visible protests in Iran in recent weeks and making the case that 40 years of Iranian revolution have delivered little to the Iranian people.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE: The level of corruption and wealth among Iranian leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the mafia more than a government.

America and other countries spent years straining to identify a political moderate. It's like an Iranian unicorn.

Sometimes it seems the world has become desensitized to the regime's authoritarianism at home and its campaigns of violence abroad, but the proud Iranian people are not staying silent about their government's many abuses. And the United States, under President Trump, will not stay silent either.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: That message from Secretary Pompeo to Iran citizens, the United States is with you. But the message from Pompeo's boss is the one dominating the headlines, even as the White House struggles to explain exactly why the president sent that menacing tweet. The White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders telling reporters the president was responding to a Sunday speech by the Iranian president. In that speech, President Rouhani said Tehran prefers peace but was prepared for, quote, the mother of all wars.

But the president's national security adviser, John Bolton, saying the president has been talking about Iran for days now and said his words should not be taken lightly. This from John Bolton, quote, President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.

With me in studio to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Dana Bash, Michael Shear with "The New York Times," NPR's Ayesha Rascone, and Amy Walter Cook -- Amy Walter with "The Cook Political Report." There, I got that out. See, it's been too long since you've been here. I can't even speak.

Why is the question? A pre-midnight tweet from the president of the United States, all caps, shouting at Iran, shouting to the world. We do know he was coming back from Bedminster. That's when he tends to look at his briefing materials late at night to think about the next day.

Why?

MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": I mean I think there's a host of different possibilities where I don't think we know yet why. One possibility is that it was just a sort of distraction ploy. He's had a bad couple of weeks, especially a bad week last week in terms of headlines, and so this is one way to kind of shift -- shift the attention of the media, get us talking about something else.

The other possibility though is that he is trying to run a play, a foreign policy play that he, in his mind, has been successful, and that was the North Korea play, where you demonize and ratchet up the rhetoric against Iran only to then, you know, sort of create a crisis that you then sort of come in and try to solve. And, you know, I think Bolton is sort of suggesting the latter. The evidence seems to suggest maybe the former since there's -- there was no evidence that this was sort of something that was being discussed at the White House that we know of before this. So -- but I -- but I -- but I think we'll have to sort of see what the -- you know, what beats two, three, and four are before we really know.

KING: And Iran is a much more complicated play. North Korea has an audience of one. Kim Jong-un calls the shots. In Iran, you have the ayatollahs, then you have President Rouhani. It's a much more complicated situation.

SHEAR: Yes.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: : Yes, I was -- to that point, I was going back and forth on text with a Democratic senator who said exactly that. This is not a country we should casually threaten to fight with because their internal and regional dynamics are much, much different from North Korea. And we know that.

[12:05:07] Iran, it bears repeating, is very much connected to not just what's going on in Iran and its nuclear capability and so forth, but playing in a not so undercover way in Syria and in -- elsewhere in this very, very volatile region. And it is dangerous to do this. Not saying that he doesn't have a plan, but it certainly, on its face, looks a lot more like a distraction than a plan.

KING: A, in part, the president was responding to this from the Iranian president, President Rouhani, who, by most accounts, is considered more of a moderate. A lot of people think, be careful, Mr. President, if Rouhani somehow lost his grip on power, you might get somebody even more conservative.

But this was the tough talk from Rouhani the president was responding to.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT HASSAN ROUHANI, IRAN (through translator): Mr. Trump, don't play with the lion's tail. This would only lead to regret. You will forget regret it.

You are not in a position to incite the Iranian nation against Iran's security and interests. The Iranian nation knows its interests and sacrifices to protect them. You are mistaken.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It is tough talk. But if you go back through years and years and years of Iranian leaders giving speeches, this is almost like for breakfast you have bacon and eggs and you call the United States terrible.

AYESHA RASCOE, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, NPR: It seems like President Trump, though, he really seems to believe that he was very successful with North Korea and that kind of playing this madman, you deponent know what I'm going to do next, it can throw people off. And I think that he feels like he can make that play, or that possibly he can make that play with Iran. Now, it is a very different situation. And it's also a test of this idea of America first. When you're talking about -- when you're looking at Iran and you have Secretary of State Pompeo saying we're talking to the Iranian people and we're telling them we're with them and almost getting close to this idea, do they want regime change, well, what happens if there is regime change? What happens when the people rise up? How much would America intervene? And that's a -- that's a big question.

KING: Is it also a question of who's on first? Meaning, we often have these conversations about the president, especially on Russia policy. The president sounds soft. His administration's actually taken a lot of steps. They're pretty tough when it comes to sanctions and the like.

Mike Pompeo was out at the Reagan Library doing something previous administrations have tried as well, but, amen for the effort. And the State Department kicking in with a sophisticated effort, tweeting in Farsi, as Pompeo gave his speech, essentially saying, hey, people, look at your leadership. He said that the ayatollahs have a, you know, $96 billion hedge fund, that they're stealing money from their people. That they're -- they're paying -- well, let's just listen to him here. Listen to Mike Pompeo's voice talking -- telling the Iranian people, your economy's struggling right now. Look what your regime is doing with your money.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE POMPEO, SECRETARY OF STATE: Today, thanks to regime subsidies, the average Hezbollah combatant makes two to three times what an Iranian firefighter makes on the streets of Iran. The bitter irony of the economic situation in Iran is that the regime uses the same time to line its own pockets while its people cry out for jobs and reform and for opportunity. The Iranian economy is going great, but only if you're a politically connected member of the elite.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, again, every administration since Ronald Reagan, the Iran hostage crisis at the end of the Carter years has tried this. But it is worth trying, especially when you do see evidence in Iran that the sanctions now back -- some sanctions back in place because the president pulls out of the Iran nuclear deal. Just broader dissent within the Iranian people. If you're the United States of America, you want to tell those people you're watching and you're here to help.

AMY WALTER, NATIONAL EDITOR, "COOK POLITICAL REPORT": Well, this is the non-tweeting way of having a response to Iran. This is the policy answer to why they did not like what they saw of President Obama and the Iranian deal there. The message from the Obama administration was, we get the sanctions back, the Iranian people get money, the economy does well. It's win/win, right? And they are able to rise up with a better economic situation.

That obviously has not happened because you can't trust the Iranian leadership. They're going to take it. They're going to line their own pockets, right? So that is a very sort of traditional way to make policy, right, just to say, this administration made policy this way, saying x would happen. X has not happened. We need to take a new tact. That, of course, is very different than tweeting in all caps about how we're going to do whatever the most horrible, terrible thing we could ever do with you.

But I agree with almost everyone around the table that this is more of a pattern than it is anything else, right? The thing about the president, we always say, he's so unconventional. He's so unpredictable. No, he's not. This is totally predictable in that he -- his message is, I am strong, the U.S. is strong, no one's going to mess with us, and as long as I project that, then we're going to win.

[12:10:01] KING: Well, what's the risk in that though? What is the risk in that if you -- never threaten the United States again. That's what the president said, never threaten the United States again.

Again, it is like oxygen in Iran for the leadership to threaten the United States of America. That is one of the ways they deal with the dissent in their own country. They try to create a distraction that the United States is the boogie man. You know, don't -- don't worry about what's happening here at home.

SHEAR: But one of the things that's been undermined over the last, you know, almost two years is this idea that the president's words carry an immense amount of weight around the world. I mean the truth of the matter is that because, as you noted, there's been this now real disconnect between what the president says and what the administration actually does. There's -- there is less danger than there was under previous presidents that the Iranians are going to actually sort of force the president to actually follow through on his words.

Basically people think that this is just his sort of twitter rantings and we can sort of go about our business. You'll see more -- I mean the Iranians aren't going to back down. The Iranians aren't going to stop criticizing America. And what will happen is nothing will happen. You know, we won't go to war with Iran. And people will sort of shrug. And the word of the president of the United States will have been undermined (INAUDIBLE).

KING: Well, in an odd way it's hard to -- well, I'm about to say "we," the president's words should have no meaning. That's an odd thing to say.

But I hope you're right in the sense that, to Dana's point about the neighborhood, it's a lot more complicated. A lot more complicated.

SHEAR: I agree.

KING: You have Israel right now in the stand-off with Iran. There's been military action in Syria about Hezbollah, about Hamas. Some people worry that there will be some provocation. Remember when those navy personnel will taken in a ship in the -- in the Gulf. There's a lot of worries that you get people testy and on edge, that then there's a miscalculation. SO we'll see how this one plays out.

A break as we continue to watch.

Up next for us here, Robert Mueller's first big courtroom test. The Paul Manafort trial kicks off this week, including a big hearing this morning.

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[12:16:02] KING: Welcome back.

This is a giant week in the special counsel investigation. And the president, not surprisingly, aggressively trying to steer the conversation. Take a look. These tweets just in the past 48 hours. A witch hunt. A rigged witch hunt. A discredited Mueller witch hunt. An illegal scam. All that from the president of the United States.

No public response from the Mueller team because it does its talking in the courtroom. There's big action there today and throughout the week. The Paul Manafort trial opens Wednesday. The final pretrial hearing underway as we speak right now.

Trump's former campaign chairman facing 18 charges, including bank fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. Important to note these charges unrelated to the 2016 Trump campaign. They have to do with work Manafort was doing in Ukraine prior to his campaign service. The 69-year-old faces the prospect, though, of spending the rest of his life in prison. He's also scheduled for a separate trial on other charges later this year.

Our crime and justice correspondent, Shimon Prokupecz, is outside the courthouse.

Shimon, we're learning Manafort in the courtroom now. What else are we learning at this final pretrial hearing?

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Yes, John, so some decisions here, some rulings from the judge. He just granted a request from prosecutors, from the special counsel's office, a request they had made that he grant five witnesses immunity. These are five mystery witnesses. We don't know anything about them. But prosecutors had last week asked the judge to grant these witnesses immunity so that they can come in and testify, not have to take the Fifth. They could freely testify without the fear of prosecution. Clearly these are important witnesses to the prosecution. So the prosecutors had asked that the judge go ahead and give them immunity. And that just occurred moments ago.

Other procedural matters here in court today involve the request over documents, Manafort's attorneys asking the judge to delay this trial because the late production of some of these documents. And that decision, we expect, among other things, more procedural, kind of cleaning of the house matters to take place at some point this afternoon. Everyone is due back in court at 2:00, John.

KING: And given what we've seen play out in the recent weeks and months, the tensions between Manafort and the special counsel's office, I would say this is unlikely, but we're always open to the possibility of a surprise. Any possibility of a plea deal?

PROKUPECZ: Certainly that is possible in this case, John. It's usually difficult once a trial starts to give a plea deal to anyone. However, that could change if somewhere along the way Manafort decides to cooperate with the special counsel. Of course, there has been a lot of talk that all these charges, this one and obviously the case in D.C., is all about putting pressure on Manafort, who, if convicted, would likely spend the rest of his life in jail. He is 69. Perhaps this is all about putting pressure on Manafort to cooperate. That is always a possibility.

KING: Shimon Prokupecz at the courthouse in Virginia. Keep us posted if there are any other significant rulings.

Back in the room now.

Again, to be careful and fair to the president, this trial has nothing to do with the 2016 campaign. However, it does have a lot to do with the credibility of the special counsel's office, which is under constant attack from the president of the United States.

This is one trial. There are other cases still in the system. There are sentencing of national security adviser has admitted lying. Former deputy -- Manafort's former deputy admitted lying. So there are people closer to the president who have admitted lying to prosecutors who will be sentenced later. How important is this trial for the special counsel, who, again, doesn't talk in public, only the courtroom?

BASH: It's important -- I think you hit it right on -- when it comes to the special counsel's credibility and their ability to successfully prosecute a key player in Trump world. But it is important to note that the prosecutors in this particular case explicitly said that they do not plan to show any evidence -- to present any evidence relating to collusion with Russia at this broader Manafort trial.

[12:20:00] But there is also one aspect of it that shows -- or they will -- the prosecutors will allegation that Paul Manafort -- one of the things that he was working on, one of the loans that he got, was from a financial institution. The executive at that financial institution was asking for a quid pro quo, to work on the Trump campaign and then to work in the White House if he won.

So this also, if you kind of take it up to 10,000 feet, is a reminder also, even if it doesn't have anything to do with collusion, that this is a guy who candidate Trump brought in at the highest level of his campaign. And he had literally decades of allegations of pretty, you know, working with pretty bad guys around the country.

KING: And it's no surprise -- it should have been no surprise --

BASH: And making millions off of them.

KING: It should have no surprise to the Republican nominee for president --

BASH: Exactly.

KING: Donald Trump in the spring of 2016 that there was a lot of flashing lights around Paul Manafort --

BASH: Exactly.

KING: Including in the Russia area.

And so the president's been attacking this process from the beginning, and including tweets over the weekend. Here's one. So President Obama knew about Russia before the election. Why didn't he do something about it? Why didn't he tell our campaign? Because it's all a big hoax, that's why. And he thought crooked Hillary was going to win. Well, he was told. He was told. Our Marshall Cohen here at CNN, others reporting from CNN, that the president was personally warned in August 2016 by senior U.S. intelligence officials, that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would attempt to infiltrate his team or gather intelligence about his campaign. So he -- the president -- sorry, sir -- is lying. Why?

RASCONE: The president, he also in that tweet called it a hoax again, and the White House is now saying he was just saying collusion is a hoax, not the whole thing. But President Trump has over and over again kind of conflated this idea of whether his election interference and collusion and he just seems to want to say it's all -- it's just fake. Everything's fake. Don't pay attention to that.

And I think that when you look at this Manafort trial, even though it has -- it's not really connected to the campaign, I wonder how much it will upset the president to see these headlines, to see what's happening. He just doesn't like anything from the special counsel. And any attention to that. And so his reaction to it could, I think -- I think will be interesting to watch (INAUDIBLE).

KING: And to see -- to that point, to see, as this investigation moves on and the other cases are resolved and the other investigative questions are answered by Bob Mueller, including, will the president ever sit down for an interview -- if not, what happens to the final report -- to see the professionalism. That is one of the thing that everybody tells you about the Mueller operation, that the guys working for Bob Mueller know what they're doing and they have re-created meetings to the point that the people at the meetings are stunned that they know more about it than they did.

SHEAR: The only -- the only thing I would say is that it's also -- you know, Bob Mueller has, in some ways, been the great white hope for Democrats in the last couple of years. That they sort of imbue in him this idea that he's going to be the one that's going to sort of solve this political problem of Donald Trump for them.

And this could be an example of where, you know, if the Manafort case goes forward and it turns out that Paul Manafort, maybe, in the end, didn't ever really have a lot that he could give up on Donald Trump, as Dana was suggesting, you know, it's another reminder, I think, for Democrats that we don't know where the Mueller investigation is heading. It could head in some direction that, you know, Democrats would like to see and Trump is ousted from office or some other -- through some other political -- or maybe not. And this could be a reminder that we don't know.

KING: That's a great point. It is not a witch hunt. It is led by a very serious, credible person. But we don't know a whole lot. We're still waiting on that one.

SHEAR: Right.

KING: An excellent point.

Up next for us here, the president's popularity and a question every Republican candidate on the ballot has to answer.

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[12:28:31] KING: We're approaching 100 days to the midterm elections. It's 106 if you're counting at home. The biggest single factor in a president's midterm election year is the president's approval rating. Some new poll numbers today show the president's actually inching up a bit. If you look here, new NBC/"Wall Street Journal" numbers, that's still historically low if you compare it to other presidents, but it's higher if you go back eight, nine months, look at the president, 38 percent last October, up to 45 percent in this polling now. Again, still below 50, but that's better news for the Republican Party, better news for President Trump.

Let's take a closer look at the numbers within his own party. Why don't more Republicans stand up to the president when they disagree with him? Because Republican voters love this president. Eighty-eight percent approval among Republican voters, as you see. President Johnson and Kennedy, Democrats here, Eisenhower, Nixon, George W. Bush. Only George W. Bush had a higher approval rating among fellow members of his own party, the president's own party. And, remember, that was after 9/11 when George Bush's poll numbers were off the charts. So the president is very strong with the Republican base. Republicans don't like to cross him.

One of the interesting things during the Trump presidency, there are some Republicans who say they're Republicans because of Trump. There are other Republicans who say they're Republicans. They were Republicans before Trump. They're a little ambivalent about the president. That number, the percentage of Republicans who say they're both, Republicans and Trump Republicans, has spiked a bit in the last month. Why? Could be a blip. Could be we're getting closer to the election and Republicans are getting more unified. One thing we do know, in most of the country, not all of the country, but most of the country, if you are a Republican on the ballot, you look at these numbers, that's why you're seeing so many candidates saying, vote for me, I'm with Trump.

[12:30:06] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Trump needs fighters in the Senate. Fighters like Kevin Nicholson. Nicholson has a real plan to help Trump drain the swamp.