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House Democrats Ramping Up The Pressure On The Attorney General To Release What We Now Know Is A More Than 300-Page Mueller Report; Senior White House Adviser And The President's Son-In-Law Jared Kushner Just Spotted On Capitol Hill; Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired March 28, 2019 - 12:00   ET

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

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[12:00:10] PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN HOST: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm Phil Mattingly. John king is off today.

Today, House Democrats ramping up the pressure on the attorney general to release what we now know is a more than 300-page Mueller report.

Plus, Senator Cory Booker sells his message and his personal story in last night's CNN South Carolina town hall.

And House speaker Nancy Pelosi just moments ago defending the Intelligence committee chair from House Republicans and President Trump. She says she is proud of all the Democratic committee chairs who are part of the process.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D), HOUSE SPEAKER: You mean, name them? Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Richie Neal -- oh, and there's a piece of this Elliott angle.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: To be fair, it's a lot of committee chairs. You can forget one or two (INAUDIBLE), but remember those names.

All right. We begin with the fight over releasing the Mueller report. Democrats want to see the full un-redacted version, all 300-plus pages. Just in the last hour, House speaker Nancy Pelosi with this warning. Democrats won't take no for an answer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PELOSI: How can I just say this more clearly? Show us the report. We have to see the facts. We have to see what the report is. And we do not need an attorney general whose job interview was that the President is above the law, that doesn't think a President can be indicted, to be our interpreter of something that he should just show us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Now, the President says he will leave the release up to his new attorney general, but that hasn't stopped him from lashing out at the media and targeting Democrat Adam Schiff on television last night, then on twitter this morning.

Saying quote "Congressman Schiff who spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking should be forced to resign from Congress."

Now Schiff, who took over as chair of the House intelligence committee in January, says, attacks from the President are quote "nothing new.' And he is still insisting evidence shows the Trump campaign did collude with Russia, whether Mueller could prove any crimes were committed or not.

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REP. ADAM SCHIFF (R-CA), HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Now I have always said that the question of whether this amounts to proof of conspiracy was another matter. Whether the special counsel could prove beyond a reasonable doubt the proof of that crime would be up to the special counsel and I would accept his decision, and I do. But I do not think that conduct, criminal or not, is OK. And the day we do think that's OK is the day we will look back and say that is the day America lost its way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Now CNN's Manu Raju joins us now from Capitol Hill.

And Manu, it was only a couple days ago where both Republicans and Democrats seemed to agree, we want to see the report on the top line. Now it seems things are headed in a very different direction. What's the latest right now?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL REPORTER: Yes. The Democrats are planning to ratchet up the pressure and call for the release of the full Mueller report. And Nancy Pelosi made that very clear in a press conference just moments ago. They are not willing to conceive virtually anything. You have heard about Adam Schiff say from several days that he finds it continue forward with this investigation, that he is not ready to say there was no collusion between Trump and Russia.

And I had a chance to ash Nancy Pelosi directly at here press conference about the lying that is in the bar of letting the Mueller report saying that the Mueller probe did not establish the Trump campaign coordinate or conspire with the Russian government in 2016 election interference.

I said, are you willing to accept that there is no collusion? She would not say that she is willing to accept that. In fact, she said that - she called the Barr letter condescending. She called arrogant and she demanded the full release of the report. Now, at the same time, you are hearing the Republicans still align

with the President, call for Adam Schiff to step aside, saying that he -- they have no faith in his leadership, and the rhetoric intensifying rather remarkably over the last hour.

Nancy Pelosi called Devin Nunes' behavior in the last Congress almost criminal. Republican said they have absolutely no faith in Adam Schiff and he should resign as chairman. So once again, that committee, the House intelligence committee divulging into partisan squabbling. But nevertheless, the big question is will the Mueller report be released. Jerry Nadler told me last night felt that there is no commitment from Bill Barr to release the full report. But we do expect it to come out because the question is when and how much we ultimately see -- Phil.

MATTINGLY: The House intelligence committee devolving in a partisan squabbling, Manu. This is the same as it's been for three years. No, but look. Keep an eye on the space. It is very explosive.

Manu Raju on Capitol Hill, thank you very much.

And here with me right now to share their reporting, their insights, their scoops, Seung Min Kim from the "Washington Post." Michael Shear with the "New York Times," CNN's Michael Warren and "Associated Press'" Elana Schor.

So there. I actually want to start with Adam Schiff and what we saw today because it was actually pretty explosive. House Republicans made it very clear that they were going after him right away. Take a listen to this exchange between two lawmakers, including Adam Schiff, during that hearing this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[12:05:19] SCHIFF: There is a different word for that than collusion, and it's called compromise. And that is the subject of our hearing today. Mr. Ambassador, you will be recognized for your opening statement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Will the gentleman yield?

SCHIFF: I will not yield. Mr. Ambassador --.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You are going to say we think you want allow us to speak of what we think.

SCHIFF: You can use your five minutes to speak. You attacked me in your opening statement.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I have not had an opportunity to respond at all, especially to your statements of what we think because no one over here thinks that at all. You cannot speak for us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Attorney, you are not recognized. (END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Got all that? Guys? Everybody clear on where things stand?

But look, Adam Schiff, I believe, yesterday, the DNC chairman (INAUDIBLE) announced that he is the fundraising chief for front line Democrats of the party. He is not going anywhere. You heard from the speaker, you heard from everyone else. Where are the Republicans going for here? What is their baseline move as we have seen all this?

SEUNG MIN KIM, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Well, Adam Schiff has been one of the most vocal Democrats when it regards to all the ups and downs in the developments of the Russian probe over the last two years because he has been in that position as top Democrat on the House intelligence committee to see the information and to go as far as he can to talk about what he knows about the Russia probe. But now Republicans feel that he's been misleading, that he has lied considering what the Barr summary of the Mueller report has come out.

But I think Democrats would -- the point that Democrats are making is still pretty important, that we haven't seen the report. We haven't seen the 300-plus pages that the report spans and what exact kind of evidence and what kind of actual information that the special counsel examined. I think that they are waiting to see -- that's why you are seeing kind of this next big fight shift to the release of this report. And I think that Republicans feel Adam Schiff was too far out on his skis for much of the last two years, but they are hoping, you know, the Democrats are hoping that what you see in that report, if and when it does come to light, will kind of back up some of their arguments.

MICHAEL WARREN, CNN REPORTER: This is a delicate balance for Pelosi. She is trying to manage a conference or a caucus I should say where you have people like Adam Schiff who has been so out front on this issue of collusion. You have a large number of progressives who are still convinced, I think, that there is more to the story. She is able right now to say we need to see the full report, sort of this transparency play.

But then there are also the sort of more moderate members of her caucus who really want to sort of move on. And one of they are talking about healthcare which we will talk about later and some more pragmatic solutions on climate change. She is trying to balance this all out. This is a really tough thing for any leader to do. I think hiding -- really not hiding, but sort of saying that the issue right now is transparency, release this, gives her a little bit of breathing room on this issue, but it's not going to go away. And I think there is some concern that progressives may push more for more information, more probing, and that's going to be difficult for her.

ELANA SCHOR, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: Another place honestly where this balancing act is really helpful is the 2020 Presidential race. Because across the capital you have six senators running for the nomination who are also taking a similar tone to Pelosi, saying let's be measured, let's wait until we see the full report, but not leading to the conclusion that some of Pelosi's liberals are doing. So this is pretty helpful for those senators.

MATTINGLY: Yes, that is a great point. It seemed like there was a pressure release to some degree, where this was all building up. It wasn't the big kind of, I don't know the right word is, takedown shot that people thought it might be. And therefore from a moderate members for people running for President, you can just say, we just want to see the report.

But I have also notice there has been kind of an evolution of a sharper tone on how the report should be released. And part of that is people find discussion with the attorney general has made clear there will be redactions related to grand jury material, related to intelligence community request but it sharpen. And take a listen to what the President had to say about the attorney general last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our new attorney general Bill Barr is a great gentleman and I have heard about him for years. He is a great - he is a great man. Had he been there initially, this all would not have happened because what's gone on there is just a disgrace to our country. I purposely didn't want to involve myself in this whole thing. I wanted to let other people do it. And I wish it didn't take so long.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: So I obviously don't work in the justice department, but I don't think that was necessarily helpful to the attorney general as he goes through this entire process, but kind of what -- how does -- you cover the administration, Mike? How does the administration kind of deal with this moment?

MICHAEL SHEAR, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, look. I think in some ways the administration, in their exuberance of the first few days after the Barr letter came out, they have sort of dug themselves into a little bit of a hole, right. The President, Sarah Sanders, all of the top aides have said so in such over the top language that there is no evidence of collusion, no evidence of obstruction of justice. And at the same time the President and the aides have sort of, you know, generally said, we are happy, we are fine with the report to be released.

And so, you know, they are in a position where at, you know, some point when it this report comes out, there will probably be some redactions. There will be things we won't see. But if it's more than 300 pages long, there is going to be a lot we that will see. And the question will be, you know, it's hard to imagine a report that has the kind of evidence that we all know is in there.

I mean, you know, we have been reading about this for the last couple of years. You know, it's hard to imagine how a lot of that evidence doesn't undercut the message that the administration has been putting forward over the last couple of days. And so they are going to have to deal with that in the backlash that that could -- [12:10:59] MATTINGLY: It was undeniably a strategic effort to get out

in front and frame this the way they did, and the framing certainly took a couple days, but there are more issues to drop on this in terms of the report at some point.

SHEAR: And sometimes the short-term gain that you get from, you know, sort of getting the good headlines that they clearly got, right, I mean, for the first few days. Sometimes that doesn't last over the long term.

MATTINGLY: We'll see.

All right. Up next, the House minority leader Kevin McCarthy really doesn't want to talk about his health care conversation with the President.

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[12:15:34] MATTINGLY: Welcome back to INSIDE POLITICS.

President Trump has clearly landed on a new messaging strategy for Republicans. Health care is going to be our thing. Take a listen to his tag line on FOX News last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We are going to do great. We are going along with Texas. We are winning the case and we are going to have great health care. The Republican Party will be the party of great health care, you watch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And preexisting conditions and choices?

TRUMP: All included. We are going to have preexisting conditions, absolutely.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Noted.

All right. The President may say it's going to be great but there's actually no plan out there yet. A senior White House official tells CNN the administration has no fresh plan to replace the affordable care act despite backing that court rulings striking down the full earlier this week.

However, they plan to submit some kind of replacement sometime this year. Now if you ask a Democrat on the Hill what they think of that strategy, they might quite literally start laughing. Here's Congressman Joe Kennedy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JOE KENNEDY III (D), MASSACHUSETTS: They have no plan. They haven't had a plan. Republican colleagues will concede that they don't have a plan. There is no concrete decision from any Republican in Congress that if this court case is successful, what would happen next?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: So, look, they have had plans. They tried plans. The House has passed plans when the House was controlled by Republicans. The House is no longer controlled by Republicans, it is controlled by Democrats. The Senate was never able to figure a way out.

Seung, I'm going to steal a little bit from you story from this morning. She is very good. The framework as I understand it, from the administration officials who support it going to this lawsuit, it is promises made, promises kept, let's make clear that we are going to repeal things or repeal and replace. From Republicans on Capitol Hill, it's, oh, my goodness, what are you doing right now? Is that fair?

MIN KIM: Basically. Well, I have talked to allies of the President about the health care issue in the last couple days. And the President and he also kind of hinted at this in his free-wheeling lunch with Senate Republicans earlier this week, but he sees health care as the one kind of unfulfilled campaign promise, you know. He did as far as he could go on the wall, you know. He has cut taxes. He has done other things. The judiciary has been transferred.

So he has done a lot of that but health care has been his struggle. And he has been fixated on that since the repeal ever failed in the Senate in 2017, which is why he is so focused on it right now. But certainly correct, like that Republicans particularly on Capitol Hill are not eager with this.

But I will say that because it is a live issue now. It is in the courts. It is in the fifth circuit currently. It will almost certainly make its way up to the Supreme Court. And we, at the end of the day, we don't know how the Supreme Court is going to rule. So I do think Republicans do have to have a plan at some point. Should it be struck down by the courts? I think that's part of the argument that Republicans say, we should do health care. That's kind of what they have been arguing. But there's no doubt politically this is a really tough situation for Republicans.

Look at the Senate map in 2020. You have got Susan Collins who has been very vocal on this issue. Cory Gardner and Tom Tillis who when we asked about them about the DOJ filing earlier this week just really kind of backtracked and say like, well, we need a plan. We need to protect preexisting conditions. They don't have a plan.

WARREN: Well, and what House Democrats are really giddy about this opportunity, they view what happened in 2018. It wasn't about Trump for them, and particularly these districts that they won from Republicans. It was about health care. It was about pushing this message in these districts. They are sort of licking their lips going, yes, let's get into this and really kind of have a debate about this.

The President, on the other hand, seems to be approaching this from a, this is important to fulfill my campaign promise and we will figure out the details later. I think that you are seeing this from not just members on Capitol Hill but sort of conservative health care policy experts are going, well, there has to be a plan.

The problem in 2017 was there was no plan that Republicans were sort of unified around. What John McCain ended up going thumbs down on was not even really the ideal for what Republicans wanted. So this is a problem that Republicans haven't figured out a solution yet, and here they go.

SCHOR: It's also impossible to understate how great the timing is for Republicans right now. When the Mueller report or while Barr summary of the Mueller report comes out, some presidential candidates are caught on the back foot, trying to sort of take these nuanced approach and wait. Let's not have an opinion until we hear what Mueller had to say in full. I mean, all of a sudden they get a health care gift. All of the sudden you see these presidential candidates got to say, wait, what voters really care about when I'm out campaigning is health care, and they are not wrong.

[12:20:11] SHEAR: Well, and look, it's not in theory, it is not crazy for Republicans to want to deal with health care. They saw what happened in 2018. They got clobbered by it. The problem is the same problem for Republicans that it has been not just even since the Trump administration came in, but since, you know, Obamacare went into place and they have been preaching this idea of repeal and replace for how ever many years, is that they never had the replace. They never did the work to figure out what are they going to replace it with? What is the - I mean, and it's a difficult, you know process.

I mean, it reminds me of a different issue. I talked to a lawmaker once years ago on a completely different issue, and I said, what's your plan? And he leaned in really close and he said, there is no plan. That's the plan, you know. It makes no sense.

MATTINGLY: But it's also a really good point. This is a very complicated subject. This is a very personal subject. If you poll people on this subject, this is always in the top one or two of the things they care about. And the Republicans want to do essentially roll back and particularly on medication expansion, roll back a new entitlement. If you go over the course of the last 80 years in the United States of America, it's pretty darn difficult to do that. And when your tradeoffs are, you want to give more choice but to do that, you are going to have to roll back things that people liken the law or at least make them - give waivers for those. That is problematic --.

(CROSSTALK)

SHEAR: And it is intertwine with you. Economy in hugely deep ways with many industries, insurance industries, medical industries. And so, it is the kind of thing that you don't write out from the back of a napkin and submit and say this is finish.

WARREN: And it cuts against the President's own sort of political theory about health care which is, remember, he said I'm not going to cut Medicare and Social Security. I'm not going to reform those as Paul Ryan wanted to do for so many years. He was all about essentially expanding entitlements from the 2016 campaign trail that he might even argue and that helped him win the election. This cuts against them --.

MATTINGLY: We are going to talk about this a lot more, I promise.

But in the meantime, when we come back Jared Kushner is spotted on Capitol Hill. We are going to explain why when we come back.

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[12:27:00] MATTINGLY: We just learned about this right now. A senior White House adviser and the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner just spotted on Capitol Hill. Manu Raju is there because Manu Raju is everywhere.

Manu, tell us what you know at this point in time.

RAJU: Yes. This was an unexpected development. We were not expecting Jared Kushner to come back to the Senate intelligence committee today, but we could saw him leaving this committee room just moments ago after senators on the Senate intelligence committee spent the morning interviewing him.

Now we do know that for some time that the Democrats and -- mostly the Democrats but some Republicans, too, wanted to re-interview Kushner after he first met with committee staff back in 2017 as part of this committee's Russia investigation.

Now, there's been a lot that has happened since then. There were a lot of developments and that members, and particularly Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, has wanted to re-interview Jared Kushner. He also wanted to re-interview other key players, such as Donald Jr., someone who also just met with staff. But it was unclear whether that would happen or not. Richard Burmester, the chairman of the intelligence committee, never confirmed publicly which witnesses were coming. So the fact that Kushner was here was a bit of surprise this morning, but all part of this committee's effort to finish up its Russian investigation.

And the aftermath of Bill Barr's letter to Congress saying that it did not establish that the Trump campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government. Burmester brought out a statement saying that he expects this investigation to end within weeks or month. I made asked him about that. He says he still has not seen any evidence to support the notion there was collusion.

But Democrats are not willing to go there yet. Mark Warner would not say to me earlier this week, Phil, whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. He says he wants to see the full Mueller report. But nonetheless, Kushner being here signed with this committee's investigation still ongoing. It is nearing its end but they want to bring back some key witnesses and Jared Kushner is one of them, Phil.

MATTINGLY: Yes. Sharp out Manu Raju, thanks for that reporting. Again, reminder, the Senate intelligence committee, really the only

bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill into Russian meddling, an alleged Russia meddling, still ongoing at this moment with Jared Kushner, in attendance today.

All right. Up next, a look at how Senator Cory Booker is drawing the line between himself and other Democrats. But first a quick look as to how he's trying to keep it light.

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SEN. CORY BOOKER (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I'm worried about where this is going. Is this CNN or TMZ?

And it's very clear that you are involved with fitness.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's the only one here in a short-sleeved shirt.

BOOKER: And I believe that you should register your guns.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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