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Inside Politics

Police: Suspect Killed after Terror Attack Near London Bridge; Trump Says Taliban Peace Talks Back On; NYT: 'How Kamala Harris' Campaign Unraveled'. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired November 29, 2019 - 12:30   ET

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

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT/ANCHOR: -- Taliban talks he ended are back on.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:34:58]

HENDERSON: The breaking news: what police call a terrorist attack on London Bridge, several stabbed and a suspect wearing a hoax suicide vest shot and killed by police. We'll bring any new details to you as we learn them.

But turning to politics now and a disconnect after a presidential Thanksgiving Day trip to a war zone. President Trump is back on U.S. soil this morning after a surprise trip to troops in Afghanistan and a surprise disclosure while there. The president says the Taliban talks he abruptly ended months ago are back on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Taliban wants to make a deal. We'll see if they want to make a deal. It's got to be a real deal. But we'll see.

The Taliban wants to make a deal. And we're meeting with them, and we're saying there has to be a cease-fire. They didn't want to do the cease-fire, now they do want to do a cease-fire, I believe. It will probably work out that way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENDERSON: But this morning, senior administration officials say that the president got ahead of the government process. And we'll go now to Pentagon -- to the Pentagon and CNN's Barbara Starr.

Barbara, there's a question of why restart the Taliban talks right now. Has the security situation in Afghanistan changed since the president ended the previous negotiation?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, perhaps not, you know. And earlier today, the Taliban themselves put out a statement, underscoring, perhaps, the president is a bit ahead of reality here, saying that if the Americans want the talks to resume, well, then they'll resume.

The president's policy right now is to try and draw down U.S. troops in Afghanistan. There are about 13,000 there. He'd like to bring it down to about 8,600.

The Taliban are watching that very carefully, obviously. They watch all of this. If U.S. troops are being withdrawn, could the Taliban perhaps hold out, you know, until in fact, all troops are withdrawn and then come back?

The goal has been to get a cease-fire from them before you really sit down and talk. That is not at all clear right now, because the conditions on the ground really have not changed. There have been, continue to be suicide attacks and, in fact, ISIS cells, as well as the Taliban operating inside that country.

Not clear if these talks really did get under way when the Afghan government, which is critical to this, also being brought into the fold.

So the president a bit ahead of where things might be. Certainly, talks behind the scenes, but really actual peace negotiations with those so-called deliverables like a cease-fire perhaps not just yet.

HENDERSON: Thanks for that report, Barbara.

And we're going to go now to CNN's Kaitlan Collins, who is in south Florida with the president.

Kaitlan, a senior administration official is telling CNN that the president overstated where things actually are between the U.S. and the Taliban.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And right now, White House officials aren't really giving a lot more detail about what it is, exactly, that these negotiations that the president said have started back are going to look like.

Now, yesterday wasn't the first day that the president had hinted at this. He said as much last week in an interview with "FOX and Friends." And of course, what's notable about this, is it's just less than three months after the president had declared these talks with the Taliban dead and they collapsed in pretty stunning fashion after he invited Taliban leaders to Camp David, a trip that he later announced he was scrapping when we first learned of it because of that Taliban attack that left an American soldier dead.

Now, the president got out of here in pretty secret fashion, Nia. He left about 7 p.m. Wednesday night, took a military plane that was pretty bare bones to D.C., where he then, inside an airport hangar instead of out on the tarmac like he normally does, got on the other plane, the same model as Air Force One, the one he took down here.

And that is when they made that trip in the middle of the night to Afghanistan, with all the lights in the plane off. They had the window shades drawn, essentially not to give away their location or the fact that this trip was happening.

They kept it really quiet. There had been questions about why people like the national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, had traveled with the president during this Thanksgiving holiday.

And then you saw the president returning to Florida this morning pretty early on, and now he has been spending the day at his golf course since getting back from Afghanistan.

HENDERSON: All right. Thanks for that, Kaitlan.

And here with me to share their reporting and their insights, we've got Toluse Olorunnipa from "The Washington Post" and Julie Hirschfield Davis with "The New York Times"; Olivier Knox with SiriusXM; and Molly Ball with "TIME."

Thank you all for being here after your Thanksgiving.

Olivier, I'm going to go right to you. You heard the president there saying over and over again the Taliban wants a deal. The Taliban wants a deal. How badly do they want a deal? Is the president actually speaking correctly there? And how real are these talks that he said have been restarted but other folks have said he's getting a bit ahead of his skis at this point?

OLIVIER KNOX, CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, SIRIUSXM: I think one of the really important dynamics is something that Barbara underscored, which is everyone knows that the president wants to get the United States out of Afghanistan.

American military officials have been saying for years and years that there is not a battlefield solution to the war in Afghanistan, that there will have to be some kind of a negotiation between -- or I should say among the United States, Taliban and the Afghan government.

When the president says we'll see, I think he's on target.

The thing I'd underline, though, is I think what we're starting to see here is the 2020 calendar affecting some of these policies. The president ran on a couple different things, including better burden sharing among allies, and -- and on this pullback, on paying attention to the home front.

So what you're seeing now is the administration pushing Japan to pay more for troops based there. We're seeing South Korea to pay more for U.S. troops based there. Pushing NATO to reduce the American burden to the alliance. That's now happened. In very symbolic fashion, but that's now happened. And I think it's possible that's what we're seeing in Afghanistan, as well.

HENDERSON: And you heard the president of Afghanistan there really try to flatter the president, something that he knows has often worked. Here he was yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ASHRAF GHANI, PRESIDENT OF AFGHANISTAN: We have inflicted an incredible defeat on ISIS.

What we have done to wipe out al Qaeda South Asia is tremendous. And thank you.

People talked a lot about bin Laden, but what you did to eliminate was al Baghdadi, who was an organizer and not a talker, is much greater accomplishment. Congratulations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENDERSON: And Toluse, could this flattery have any effect on what the president clearly wants to do, which is draw down troops, if not withdraw completely, because this is something he's promised many of his voters that he would do as president.

OLORUNNIPA: Yes, it's fascinating to see these world leaders sort of try to publicly kowtow to the president. They know he has a very fragile ego. They know he cares about what world leaders are saying about him. And I think that's what Ghani was saying in that -- in that clip.

He's trying to make sure that the president doesn't fulfill some of these promises to pull troops all the way out. He wants to keep U.S. troops on the ground for at least longer than they would under Trump's ideal situation.

And because we know that the president has asked his advisers, why are we even there? Why are we in Afghanistan? What is the end game? And he said that we don't want to fight to a tie.

So I do think that there was some of that public flattery, in part because he wants the president to stay committed to at least keep the presence of troops on the ground for at least the next year, as the president goes through his campaign and tries to make the argument that he was able to fulfill his campaign promise that he brought troops home.

HENDERSON: And you've seen this president, Julie, kind of try to figure out what campaign promises, in terms of foreign policy, he's actually going to be able to fulfill. Right?

If you think about North Korea, no dice there in terms of denuclearization. You think about, in Iran, some sort of nuclear deal. Pulled out of that. There's nothing new on the ground there.

So where does he go with Afghanistan? What sort of victory might he be able to declare?

JULIE HIRSCHFIELD DAVIS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think what we saw happening when he said several times during his trip that, you know, the Taliban want a deal, the Taliban want a deal, is he's not only sort of wishfully thinking out loud, but he's also messaging to his base that this is going to happen. What I've been doing is actually working, and this is going to yield some sort of ability to pull American troops back in the way that he has promised would happen.

But what was fascinating about what Ghani said was it's kind of like the best possible praise you could ever give Donald Trump, not only that killing al-Baghdadi was a good thing, but it was better than what Barack Obama did when they took out Osama bin Laden.

And I think that is also where we're going to see the president go increasingly, is all of these other promises he's made, including to try to pull more troops out of Afghanistan than it looks like he may be able to by the 2020 balloting, really don't matter, because they took out al-Baghdadi and that that was the biggest delivery they could have delivered.

HENDERSON: And Republicans -- we'll hear from Tom Cotton -- might have something to say about this. That's one of the areas where Trump has had a lot of disagreement come from on areas of foreign policy. Here's Tom Cotton.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. TOM COTTON (R-AZ): We have to remember that Afghanistan is the place from which the 9/11 attacks were launched and the place that still has the highest concentration of foreign terrorist organizations anywhere in the world. The reason we're in Afghanistan is to protect our own citizens right here at home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENDERSON: Sounding like a Republican hawk, right? Tom Cotton.

MOLLY BALL, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "TIME": Sure. I mean, the irony is, as Julie said, that Trump is so concerned with accomplishing things that he blamed President Obama for not doing; but he finds himself in Afghanistan in a very -- a similar situation. Dragged down into a quagmire not of his making, after spending so much of his campaign vowing to get us out of there.

And still, we are there because of these domestic political considerations, because of the domestic security situation, because the situation on the ground in Afghanistan is not one that most military leaders feel we can responsibly just leave there and wash our hands of.

And so just as Obama found himself spending eight years trying and failing to extract the American presence from Afghanistan, Trump is now in a very -- pretty much the same situation.

[12:45:10]

HENDERSON: And we'll see if Syria is any guideline. Because of course, he sort of went against what many people thought he should do in Syria, went his own way and declared victory, essentially. Up next, the Kamala Harris campaign facing some harsh critics from

inside the tent.

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[12:50:09]

HENDERSON: We've been following breaking news this hour on the terror attack in London. The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, spoke about it a few minutes ago. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BORIS JOHNSON, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER: Clearly, the Metropolitan Police are continuing their investigations. And I can assure you and assure everyone that anybody involved in this crime and these attacks will be hunted down and will be brought to justice.

And I think the message that we send to them and anyone associated with this type of attack is one that will be familiar. And that is that this country will never be cowed or divided or intimidated by this sort of attack; and our values, our British values will prevail.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENDERSON: Nick Paton Walsh joins me from London.

Your reaction to the prime minister there, talking about London not being bowed and cowed by a terror attack of this sort.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: It's, sadly, a familiar message to many Londoners, many people across Britain who have seen attacks like this over the past years.

This is the first time, really, that Boris Johnson as prime minister has had to deliver such a speech. And just ahead of a British general election here.

But behind me, you're seeing police continuing their investigations as he said. We've just seen a substantial vehicle here coming in to presumably assist part of their investigations here. We've seen lots of armed police coming and going over the past hours. They're trying to be sure there's no residual threat in vehicles here or anywhere else in some of the many buildings here in the heart of central London.

And of course, now, key question's who was this man? He is now dead. Who were the people who he attacked? Where did this attack begin? We do know police were, in fact, called to a premises at about 2 p.m., after which we see this graphic video on London Bridge.

Many questions now at the heart of the investigation, not least the motivation behind this attacker.

Back to you.

HENDERSON: Thanks so much for that report, Nick.

And we'll be right back.

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[12:56:49]

HENDERSON: It's the tale of the Kamala Harris campaign in two stories from the "New York Times."

This is the front page of "The Times" just a few days after that powerful June debate performance by Senator Harris with a story by Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin.

Almost exactly five months later, this story out today. J. Mart, Alex Burns and Astead Herndon: "How Kamala Harris's Campaign Unraveled." They obtained the resignation letter of a Harris campaign state operations director who is now joining the Bloomberg campaign.

She wrote, "It is unacceptable that, with less than 90 days until Iowa, we still do not have a real plan to win. Our campaign for the people is made up of diverse talent which is being squandered by indecision and a lack of leaders who lead."

Molly, that is rough stuff. You wrote a fantastic cover story on Kamala Harris about a month ago or so. I'm sure, based on what your reporting has been, a lot of this isn't really a surprise to you.

BALL: No, what's a surprise is that she has failed to turn it around, despite literally months and months and months of hearing this kind of frustration.

And you hear -- you know, it's reporters; it's people inside the campaign; it's people outside the campaign; it's pretty much every voter that you meet on the campaign trail who goes to see her.

And the common theme is people want to like her, and then she doesn't close the deal. She's not able to articulate a consistent and compelling message that makes those votes who'd show up for her, who are interested in what she's selling, that makes them decide, yes, this is the candidate I can commit to.

And the "Times" story and "The Post" story today have really laid out this -- this frustration, especially within her team that she hasn't been able to make those decisions.

HENDERSON: And she's been all over the place in terms of message. Here's a clip to show some of her kind of all-over-the-place messaging.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Truth. Justice. Decency. Equality. Freedom.

Our mother would sit up trying to figure out how to make it all work. That's something most Americans know all too well. And that's what my 3 a.m. agenda is all about.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's tearing us apart. She'll bring us together. This is Trump. And in every possible way, this is the anti-Trump.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HENDERSON: And now Toluse, her -- one of the messages is she's the one who can bring back the Obama coalition in the way that Obama had it in 2007.

OLORUNNIPA: Yes. They tried out a number of different messages over the past several months and just tried to see what has stuck. And it's been difficult to follow her campaign, because there have been so many different messages.

And one of the biggest debates that she's having internally is whether she wants to be sort of this progressive left-wing California liberal or whether or not she wants to be more of a moderate. And both of those lanes are currently clogged up in the fact that she's kind of vacillating between the two of those. It makes it difficult for any voter to stick to her when there are other -- so many other options.

HENDERSON: And Julie, this was a policy-heavy campaign, I think, in a way that some folks who got in didn't necessarily predict it and maybe weren't ready for. And she has had issues with some of her policies.

DAVIS: Right. And some of this goes back to the candidate herself. I mean, they have tried out a different -- a lot of different messages and a lot of different strategies, but as Molly said, it's her lack of ability to stick to one policy prescription, one set of policy issues that she really wants to be her trademark that has put her where she is today.

HENDERSON: Yes. For her, it seems like it's do or die Iowa.