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Cohen on Capitol Hill; Trump Arrives for Summit; Castro Warns GOP; GOP Urging to Stand with President. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired February 26, 2019 - 12:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:00:15] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thank you for sharing your day with us.

Behind closed doors today and a public hearing tomorrow. Long-time Trump fixer, Michael Cohen, says Donald Trump's lawbreaking stretched into his presidency. Team Trump says Cohen is a proven liar.

Plus, a summit sequel. The president and Kim Jong-un are in Vietnam, preparing for their second face-to-face meeting. North Korea's nuclear arsenal is the main focus.

And, feeling the Bern, take two. Bernie Sanders promotes his agenda in a CNN town hall and imagines a general election debate against President Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, we'll bring a lie detector along. And every time he lies, it goes beep.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Back to that in a bit.

But we begin the hour on Capitol Hill with the private prelude of tomorrow's public and main attraction. Today, day one of Michael Cohen's three day tour of Capitol Hill. Today, a behind closed doors session with the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Cohen will play tour guide to candidate and businessman Donald Trump's dealings with Russia, including how involved or not the president was in negotiating a Trump Tower Moscow deal.

Tomorrow, the big event, Cohen testifies to the House Oversight Committee, on camera, where Cohen, we are told, will say he broke the law and that the president played a role in those crimes while in the White House. A senior White House official telling CNN, aides will watch closely and take notes. They also expect the president to stay up past midnight in Hanoi to watch Cohen testify. The White House today says Cohen is, quote, a convicted liar, a disgraced felon, and that anyone who takes him at his word is laughable.

Credibly questions do loom large, both for the witness and for the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: What's the most important thing you can learn today?

SEN. RICHARD BURR (R), NORTH CAROLINA: The truth.

QUESTION: Are you sure you can trust Mr. Cohen?

BURR: He sure has a track record of questionable -- questionability doing things.

QUESTION: Your Republican colleagues are going to look to poke holes in his testimony, say that he's an unreliable witness. Do you think that he's a trustworthy witness for your committee?

REP. GERRY CONNOLLY (D), VIRGINIA: Well, I would say that the person they're trying to protect is an unreliable witness isn't he?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: CNN's Manu Raju up on Capitol Hill.

Manu, let's start with today. Are we getting any indication of what's going on behind closed doors?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're trying to get information about why Michael Cohen lied in 2017 when coming before this very committee, as well as the House Intelligence Committee, about that Trump Tower Moscow project that the president and him and the Trump Organization were discussing back in 2015 and 2016. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying about the extent of the conversations. He downplayed that when he testified before, even suggesting that it ended -- those talks ended in January 2016, when now he admits they occurred all the way until June of 2016, right as the Russian interference campaign was beginning. Republicans and Democrats want to know why he lied, what documents he has to show the president's involvement and how much the president knew about what he was going to say before coming to this committee back in 2017.

Now, this hearing has been going on for about two and a half hours now. Some members have been trickling in and out. We expect the questioning to go on for much of today to focus on the Russia investigation. Tomorrow, John, when he comes before the House Oversight Committee in a public setting, Russia won't be the main focus. Instead it will be all the other aspects that Michael Cohen was involved in, particularly those hush money payments that occurred to silence those alleged Trump affairs, including with Stormy Daniels, the role that the president played, the president being implicated in those crimes. Other issues such as those expected to be a dominant focus tomorrow.

The question is, will people view his testimony credibly? Republicans already dismissing it. The White House too. Democrats say that he's saying that he just wanted to protect the president, why he lied before. We'll see how the lawmakers ultimately respond and the public does too.

John.

KING: The beginning of an interesting three days ahead.

Manu, appreciate that, live from The Hill.

With me in studio to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Abby Phillip, Dan Balz with "The Washington Post," CNN's Kara Scannell, and Maggie Haberman with "The New York Times."

The question is to what end here? Michael Cohen is prepared to testify -- you have very detailed reporting on this today -- that yes, he, Michael Cohen, committed crimes, but that the president was his partner in some of these crimes while he was residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That would open up new potential windows. Number one, would it feed Democratic calls for impeachment? You can't say this is a campaign thing. It was a long time ago. It was the business world. What is -- what is -- what should we be thinking about here as the significance of the next few days?

MAGGIE HABERMAN, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": I mean I think it depends on who you are, number one.

KING: Right.

HABERMAN: Number two, I think that there's a lot that we don't know about what Michael Cohen will bring to this testimony in terms of documentation to back up what he is going to say about potential criminal wrongdoing, which is what our reporting shows that he's planning on doing.

[12:05:06] Look, if you're Michael Cohen, this is a chance to, I think, say, yes, I did these things but I did these things at the behest of my boss. We have seen Michael Cohen say repeatedly that he does not want to go down as the villain in the Trump story.

If you're House Democrats, you're looking for more evidence of things you can use if you're leaning toward impeachment or trying to bring an impeachment case for things that might augment that. If you are the president's supporters or if you are in the White House, you are looking at a way to undercut Michael Cohen and you're going to think that this testimony might provide an opportunity.

So I think the one asterisk that we put on all of this in terms of the president's allies and what the president says, and I was looking at what Burr was saying before about, you know, he has a history of questionable doings, referring to Michael Cohen, so does the president.

KING: Right.

HABERMAN: And there is a habit for people in the White House, and the president himself, of acting as if the office sort of shields him from all of that, that the historic power of the White House and the respect that the office usually gets shields him from that. He has a history of a lot of things too, including not telling the

truth. And that's going to come into play here.

KING: Right. There's no question he has a history of not telling the truth.

HABERMAN: Right.

KING: And the question -- so who do you believe in this case.

And, Kara, in terms -- some of us follow the investigation. Mueller has said very nice things about Michael Cohen. The Southern District of New York, not so nice. Their investigation is more complicated of Michael Cohen.

But here's one of the things that Mueller said in this sentencing memo. Cohen provided relevant and useful information concerning his contacts with persons connections to the White House during the 2017- 2018 time period. Fourth, Cohen described the circumstances of preparing and circulating his response to the congressional inquiries, while continuing to accept responsibility for the false statements contained within it.

So the potential here is, a, can Michael Cohen -- can he prove -- Maggie's point about documentation is key, that the hush money payments were campaign finance violations and the president knew it and the candidate knew it. Not just make this go away, but who are breaking the law and making it go away. And then, number two, the question raised there is, did somebody in the White House, whether it's the president or someone else, know Cohen was going to lie to Congress?

KARA SCANNELL, CNN REPORTER: That's right. I mean it's interesting because in the Southern District of New York criminal complaint and charges that they brought against Cohen, they adopt his view of those facts. So they -- it appears as though they have some information that supports what Michael Cohen is saying, and that is the basis for which Cohen pled guilty, and they included it in their own court filings under their own name. They didn't just rely on Cohen saying that.

By contrast, and what is the open question here, is on the special counsel case. I mean they make that statement about Michael Cohen. And in Michael Cohen's own filing, he says that he remained in close and regular contact with White House based staff and legal counsel to client one. Now, there is no charge or -- and even a suggestion by Michael Cohen or by the special counsel's office that Trump was one of those people, or who these people in the White House were or what they knew. So that's really the open question.

I think -- you know, I don't know how much we'll get to that in a public hearing because this relates a bit more to the Russia investigation, but it's possible that, you know, Michael Cohen is asked that question, I guarantee that. The question is, does he answer it and what does he say about who in the White House knew and what the lawyers knew. We do know they were all communicating at that time, the lawyers, because Michael Cohen was then on Donald Trump's side. You know, he was still the loyal fixer and that they were preparing his testimony. So there was a lot of information that the Trump Organization had that Michael Cohen needed to fact check against and that the president had that they needed to check against.

So, to what end can Cohen say that this was -- you know, that someone was culpable in this, that he was being coached to lie, that he was told, you know, I think Cohen has said, you know, to stick with the message, but how does he back that up and what does stick with the message mean? Does that -- is that like sort of a pattern of an implicit direction by Trump of telling him how to handle certain things, or was that Michael Cohen's interpretation of something and that's why we haven't seen the special counsel weigh in, in this -- in any way yet.

KING: Right. And the Democrats say, and they do, have every right to aggressive oversight. Just as the Republicans had when they controlled the House of Representatives. But there's also the timing. They have the right to oversight. We're also in the early days of the 2020 campaign. And that plays out. You can't make that go away.

Listen to Hakeem Jeffries here. He's a member of the House Democratic leadership; Just came out of a meeting a while ago. Listen to how he describes what he -- the value he thinks Michael Cohen will bring to Congress.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D), NEW YORK: Well, the American people deserve to know whether Donald Trump has been functioning as the president of the United States of America or as the equivalent of an organized crime boss. Michael Cohen can shed some light on that very important question.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Now, a Trump ally will say, that gives you the politics right there. A Democrat will say, we want to lay this out. We want to see if he has the documents to back this up.

I guess my question is, how much of this going to be show and how much is this going to be tell?

DAN BALZ, CHIEF CORRESPONDENT, "THE WASHINGTON POST": Well, the public session is going to be a lot of show. I mean I think everything we know about these kinds of moments, they become spectacles. And I think one of the challenges for the Democrats is not to overreach and to try to set the expectations or the bar so high that it falls short of that, that they have to have precise questioning and not simply antagonistic questioning or questioning that is so antagonistic toward the president that it doesn't produce real information or real evidence.

[12:10:32] You know, it's, as everybody says, he has to go beyond his public statements. He will have to bring additional information to that hearing. And I think that will be the real test of his performance. But the question for the Democrats is how much they over interpret what he puts on the table and what it all adds up to once we see the Mueller report and the other investigations.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I mean this is not a court of law that we're about to step into tomorrow. But, at the same time, there's a need here for Democrats to be very disciplined in how they deal with Michael Cohen. A lot -- a lot of the reporters in this room have dealt with Michael Cohen. He is often a kind of slippery figure. He's often exactly the most, you know, organized in terms of how he presents information. This is not a James Comey type of testimony where you have someone who is -- who is familiar with how to answer questions in order to accurately lay out everything that he has to say.

So I think if Democrats want to get concrete information that people are interpreting as trustworthy out of someone who, you know, the -- the president's allies are right, is a convicted liar, they have to do it in a very disciplined way and they can't be creating a scene that might make Michael Cohen just seem like an opportunist in this particular environment. I mean he is not -- the president is not an most -- you know, objective narrator of the situation, but neither is Michael Cohen. And Democrats should be very cognizant of that, that he is a pragmatic figure to the public, not just to the president's allies.

KING: And this -- these clouds, investigative clouds, have traveled with the president every time he goes overseas. But I think in this case, understanding who Michael Cohen was, understanding how close they were despite the president's effort to say he was this two-bit lawyer who did minor legal stuff, they were close for more than a decade. He was his fixer and his lawyer. He was around the campaign.

I imagining here it will be past midnight in Hanoi and the Internet @donaldjtrump will be following this testimony, no?

HABERMAN: I mean it seems like a likely guess. And if he -- if there -- he sometimes has the history, the president, of a delayed response to these kinds of things, so he might watch it and we'll get a tweet storm several hours later.

I do want to make one point, though. And this is Abby's point about the over -- the over playing their hand by Democrats. There has been a -- especially on Twitter, a desire to describe Michael Cohen as the person who was the most involved in everything that Donald Trump did. That's actually true. He worked for Donald Trump for ten years. There are several other Trump organization people who were pretty closely involved, among them, Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization, who I believe Michael Cohen is going to end up having to talk about in his testimony. But I think there is a desire to overstate what he can do as well. And I think people are going to arm themselves if they reach to far (ph).

KING: Go into this with --

HABERMAN: Just have eyes wide open, right?

KING: Legitimate -- legitimate skepticism. Let's see where the documents are. Up next for us here, President Trump arrives in Vietnam hoping for

what he calls a tremendous summit with the North Korean Dictator Kim Jong-un.

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[12:17:13] KING: President Trump now 8,300 miles away from all of today's drama on Capitol Hill. Pageantry on display as the president landed in Hanoi, Vietnam, a few hours ago to set the stage for his second summit with Kim Jong-un and a big moment on the world stage. The big question is whether Kim is ready to deal on the substance. He made a vague promise at the first summit to work toward denuclearization. And President Trump, you remember, declared the nuclear crisis over, but North Korea has actually done little or nothing to scale back its program.

Kaitlan Collins is in Hanoi, just after midnight there. And what are the preparations for the president's big summit?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, right now the president is back at his hotel after he touched down here earlier. That's where he's going to stay for the night before things really get kicked off tomorrow.

First, they're going to have something a little bit different than what they did in Singapore and that's going to be a dinner between the president, the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and, of course, Kim Jong-un and a few North Korean officials that are going to be at that small dinner before kicking off the official summit the next day.

Now, the question after that meeting that they have, the president and Kim Jong-un, John, of course is going to be, will there be some signing ceremony and is that signing ceremony going to be anything meaningful?

Now, the president says there is success in the evidence of the fact that North Korea has stopped missile testing after that summit in Singapore, but officials in his own administration say that North Korea is still a nuclear threat and that they're unlikely, if ever, to denuclearize. So whether or not they can even come to an agreement on what denuclearization looks like over the next two days is still a big question that is looming here in Hanoi tonight, John, because, of course, White House officials have admitted to reporters in recent days, they still haven't come to an agreement on that despite a slew of meetings since that first summit eight months ago.

KING: Uncertainty heading into it. It will be interesting to watch.

Kaitlan Collins, appreciate the live reporting there.

Coming up for us next, Republicans face a loyalty test over the president's big emergency declaration.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [12:23:47] KING: House Democrats voting today to swat down the president's national emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern border. The vote testing Republicans' willingness to defend the president, especially after many of them have publically disagreed with his choice of invoking executive authority. Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro, the lead sponsor of the measure, is warning Republicans they will regret standing by the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JOAQUIN CASTRO (D), TEXAS: I would ask them, Willie, to follow their instincts and to put the Congress and the country above, really, their fear of losing a primary because they're out of favor with Donald Trump.

It's important for the senators to realize that they are opening a Pandora's box for decades to come if they allow this president to get his way on this. He will come back for more, and future presidents, both Republican and Democrat, will come back for more.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Laura Barron-Lopez from "Politico" joins our conversation.

So the Democrats are likely to win here in the sense that they have the votes in the House. It looks like they're going to squeak it by in the Senate, although they still need one more Republican to come out publically and say so to get there. But nowhere near their veto-proof majority, right?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "POLITICO": Right. So it looks like it will pass -- I mean it will definitely pass the House. A number of GOP defections are going to happen there. Need one more Republican in the Senate. But Scalise, the House minority whip, said this morning that he's positive that they will have the numbers to sustain a veto. So that looks like where it will end up.

[12:25:14] KING: That's where it ends up. So what is the importance of the statements?

BALZ: Well, the statement is simply one more example of the Democrats saying we have -- we have power that we did not have before and we are going to continue to try to use it to show our opposition to the kinds of things you're doing. I mean it is -- it is another way that they can elevate issues that they didn't have the opportunity to do when they didn't have the House.

PHILLIP: And I think it also is damaging to the president that he's going to have both chambers of Congress repudiating him in this way and he's going to have Republicans siding with Democrats on an issue that is to the core of what he's trying to do over this next year and a half.

And, you know, this is all going to end up being in litigation, and all of that is going to count against him. In many ways this is a question of whether the president has the right to usurp the power of the Congress when Congress has made it very clear where they stand on this particular issue. And this is just going to be one more piece of evidence showing that not only has Congress made it clear in the appropriations process, but after the president took this action, they told him that they believe that this was the wrong course of action, and they did it in a somewhat bipartisan way, somewhat bipartisan considering that it's only going to be a few Republicans (INAUDIBLE).

KING: And as we watch -- you make interesting question, how many defections? What is the scope of the Republican defections? Because this is a test. Remember, the shelf life of principle in this town is not very long. When Obama was president and he did DACA by executive order, he did other things by executive order, Republicans screamed it was the imperial presidency, it was overreach.

To your point about the House leadership, listen to Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise here saying, we're with the president.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R), MINORITY LEADER: There is a national emergency at the southern border that the Democrats will declare today doesn't exist.

REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R), ILLINOIS: To deny that there is even a problem on the border is beyond me.

REP. STEVE SCALISE (R), MINORITY WHIP: Ultimately, we're going to stand with the president in making sure we can secure this border and confront this national crisis.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The word president is key there in the sentence that for anybody -- yes, there are still tensions within the Republican Party about the Trump takeover. But when it comes to votes, a vast majority are going to be with the president because even though they don't like this, most of them don't like this, they look at the polling, the president's approval rating among Republicans is 85 or 90 percent.

HABERMAN: You just now -- I mean that's the issue here, right, is that at the end of the day the bet is that the majority of these elected officials, voters, support the president's view. Not all, however. And so you have a lot of people who are in purple states who are going to be defecting. But we don't know the final number. It does not look like it will ultimately end up syncing with what the president wants to do.

This is going to be, what propels this president going through 2020 and that's why you're seeing him double down on his base over and over and over.

BALZ: Another aspect of that, to your point, Maggie, is, the Republicans who decide to vote with the Democrats on this, would they do that if this were really at stake?

HABERMAN: That's a very good point. BALZ: Right.

HABERMAN: That's a very good point.

BALZ: I mean everything we've seen is that when, you know, when things are potentially costly for the president, the Republicans are with him --

HABERMAN: That's right.

BALZ: Basically, you know, close to 100 percent. And I think some of them have a kind of a free vote on this, but it's another revealing moment of where the Republican Party is.

BARRON-LOPEZ: If I could just say, there's a number of House Republicans, Republicans like Will Hurd in Texas, who -- this is a tough vote for them. You know, they'll likely going to side with Democrats because they barely won re-election this last cycle. So there's a number of Republicans who are going to be top targets for Democrats hoping to further expand the majority. And it's votes like these where they could get hit by their constituents.

KING: And, to that point, when we watch the Senate vote -- it will pass the House. The question is, what's the depth of the Republican defections and then look at a map. Are they from weak districts? What are they trying to say?

On the Senate side we know Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, they're the three who have publically said they're going to side with the Democrats. Collins and Tillis are on the ballot next year. Very different states, Maine and North Carolina, but competitive races potentially for both of them.

Tillis wrote this in "The Washington Post." As a U.S. senator, I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress. As a conservative, I cannot endorse a precedent that I know future left wing presidents will exploit to advance radical policies that will erode economic and individual freedoms.

That is the constitutional conservative stance that many Republicans say that's where they are, but most Republicans are not going to vote that on this one.

[12:29:29] PHILLIP: Yes, and it's been notable that some of the Republicans who had questions about this when the president announced it haven't really said where they're going to vote this time around because many of them, to Dan's point, are going to side with the president because of the hold that he has on this party. And yet I think the argument is a real one. Putting politics aside, there is a real argument here to be made about what this says about what Congress' power is going to be in the future, not just for a future Democratic president, whenever that happens, but for the President Trump going the last time he's going to be seeking money for this wall.