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Yovanovitch Testifies at Impeachment Inquiry; Schiff: "Take Witness Intimidation Very, Very Seriously"; White House Releases April Trump/Zelensky Call; Jim Jordan Says Trump Tweets Not Witness Intimidation. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired November 15, 2019 - 11:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:00:08]

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Hello. This is Anderson Cooper. This is CNN's special live coverage of the second day of public impeachment hearings.

It has now led to accusations of witness intimidation against the president. We'll explain that in a moment.

First, to the only witness speaking publicly today, Marie Yovanovitch. She's also the sole person in the Ukraine saga who asserts being an actual victim of corruption.

Remember, fighting corruption is the reason the president gives for investigating his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, but the Yovanovitch testified she believes she lost her job as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine due to her record for rooting out crooked players in Ukraine.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARIE YOVANOVITCH, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO UKRAINE: Ukrainians, who prefer to play by the old corrupt rules, sought to remove me. What continues to amaze me is they found Americans willing to partner with them, and working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. ambassador.

How could our system fail like that? How is it that foreign corrupt interests manipulate our government? Which country's interest are served when the very corrupt behavior we have been criticizing is allowed to prevail?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: She said those, quote, "willing Americans," include President Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped push a smear campaign against Yovanovitch, accusing her of partisans and bad behavior that she denied under oath.

The false stories against her also led to President Trump removing her in May, despite a strong effort by multiple high-level officials in the State Department to try to defend her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): In the face of the smear campaign, did colleagues at the State Department try to get a statement of support for you from Secretary Pompeo?

YOVANOVITCH: Yes.

SCHIFF: Were they successful?

YOVANOVITCH: No.

SCHIFF: Did you come to learn that they couldn't issue such a statement because they feared it would be undercut by the president?

YOVANOVITCH: Yes?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: In a remarkable moment under already extraordinary circumstances the president began tweeting attacks against Yovanovitch as she was testifying. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff asked Yovanovitch to react.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCHIFF: And now the president, in real time, is attacking you. What effect do you think that has on other witnesses coming forward and expose wrongdoing?

YOVANOVITCH: It's very intimidating?

SCHIFF: It's designed to intimidate, is it not?

YOVANOVITCH: I mean, I can't speak to what the president is trying to do but I think the effect is to be intimidating.

SCHIFF: Well, I want to let you know, Ambassador, that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: I want to turn to our attorneys here, Elie Honig, the former assistant U.S. attorney for SDNY, and, Laura Coates, former U.S. assistant attorney for D.C.

Is this witness intimidation?

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: To me, it's textbook. Look at what the president did. He tweeted out a direct personal attack on this witness clearly related to her testimony while she was testifying.

I've prosecuted witness tampering cases. I've tried witness tampering cases. To me. this is right down the middle.

The question who, is going to prosecute it? Not Bill Barr. There's a question whether you can prosecute a sitting president.

But the question is, what is Adam Schiff going to do. He interrupted the proceedings to call out this tweet. It seems he may be considering this as an article of impeachment.

COOPER: Laura?

LAURA COATES, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: It demonstrates that the president has thought that this witness is particularly under his craw, somebody not even in service at the time when the now damaging phone call has gotten out. What is it that she's able to provide that allows him and wants him to go and directly attack her?

Because this did not begin on the July 25th phone call. It started long before that when they tried to oust her. So the testimony is all the more important, that foundation.

Also remember, while there's an OLC opinion that says this president, a sitting president could not be indicted for a crime, everybody who follows suit with this president who tries to either confirm or market or promote that tweet, that ideology about trying to in some way intimidate a witness, they are all fair game and should take notice that there's no OLC opinion that says nobody -- that everybody is going to immune to you.

COOPER: Elie, there are supporters of the president who would say, look, why isn't it OK for the president to express his frustration or express himself for what he's seeing on television?

HONIG: He's allowed to express his views. The problem is you have to look at his intent. When is he doing it? In the middle of her testimony. And are the attacks substantive or are they personally directed at her? So it all comes down to the intent.

How can you ignore the timing? It's while this is happening. And, by the way, he has a track record of doing this, right? I mean, Mueller called him out for doing this towards Manafort, Cohen, everyone else who might potentially testify. So it's not like this is his first time out of the gate. I think he has an established pattern here.

[11:05:07]

COOPER: Gloria?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: I think, in a funny way, it makes her move believable and more credible as a witness because, here the president is threatening her, smearing her in real time while she's testifying about how she was threatened and smeared when she was ambassador.

And for those who say, well, that never happened, just like at what's happening in real time now, and you would have to say oh, yes, I understand it, and I understand how this works.

(CROSSTALK) COATES: And her reaction to it. You saw her face when she heard the news. Kind of blinked and shoulders slumped for a second as she tried to regain her composure.

This is not somebody trying to be a partisan hack or somebody who loves being here. It was her reacting.

Imagine what it felt like for a career diplomat, the highest-ranking female in the State Department, I believe at the time in Ukraine, especially to have this attack happen coming out of left field.

COOPER: Scott?

SCOTT JENNINGS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. I don't think it was smart for the president to tweet at her today. I found her to be pretty compelling figure. She clearly loves her country.

I mean, she may have policy differences with the president and that's fine. And she admitted in her testimony and she understands these positions serve as the pleasure of the president.

But to attack her today I think while she was testifying only served to elevate her concerns.

I mean, her timeline doesn't match up with some of the events in question.

So a legitimate strategy on this would have been to ignore it and to say, well, in the past, she said she knows she serves at the pleasure of the president. In the past, she's praised the Trump administration's decisions on the Ukraine, specifically to provide lethal assistance and just leave it at that.

But when you start attacking someone who is at the table, who is already giving a fairly compelling statement, it elevates them.

And I suspect this is now going to spiral out for the rest of the day and make her testimony perhaps more important than it should have been to the overall question of the inquiry, which, in some case, she doesn't really -- she doesn't have the correct timeline on.

COOPER: Tim?

TIM NAFTALI, CNN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: I don't know the legal consequences of the president's tweet. But I'll tell you this. For open-mind pedestrian, fair-mined Americans, it proved the climate of intimidation that Ambassador Yovanovitch was explaining.

And let me tell you, we've not seen a climate of intimidation of public servants like this since is the McCarthy period. If somebody can be taken down by a series of false accusations, promoted by the president and his family, we are in a period -- it's like the '50s.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Not false allegations. These are conspiracy theories, which have become the basis for U.S. foreign policy.

NAFTALI: That's what happened in the 1950s. My point -- Dwight Eisenhower didn't do it. Thank god the president of the United States didn't do this in the '50s. He could have been tougher against McCarthy.

But the point is that's what McCarthyism is all about, innuendo, false accusations, conspiracy theories, to take down career professionals. That's what -- to take them down, to undermine the policy of the United States.

(CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: I'm sorry. One other issue that made no sense about me about the attacks on her today. What else can you do to this person? You already run her out of her job. She's already been effectively maligned by her boss, the president of the United States.

BORGER: Publicly.

JENNINGS: Publicly.

And to sort of continue -- there's no more -- there's nothing else you can do to this person. You can attack them publicly during their testimony and maybe you think you're continuing to hurt them. I don't know how you can hurt her anymore.

So from a strategic perspective, a strategic communications perspective, it makes no sense to me to do that.

COOPER: I want to quickly go to Manu Raju on Capitol Hill. I think he's getting reaction -- Manu?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Adam Schiff came out and made very clear that he views this as witness intimidation and takes it, quote, "very, very seriously." That was the first reaction that he had out of this testimony this morning. Did not weigh in about what she has said but weighed in on what the president has done.

And I tried to ask him directly whether or not he views this as an impeachable offense, he would not comment on that.

Other Democrats believe that it certainly could be an impeachable offense. So that will be a debate for this caucus going forward as the investigation proceeds.

There are some Republicans, too, who have taken some offense to what the president has said.

Including Congresswoman Stefanik, who is a Republican, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. And she just told our colleague, "I disagree with the tweet. I think Ambassador Yovanovitch is a public servant, like many of our public servants in the foreign service."

So that's a rare break from House Republicans from this president. But we are hearing from other Republicans weighing in on her testimony so far. A number of Republicans I've talked to so far saying they disagree with her concerns, essentially saying the president is well within the rights to remove her from the post.

They are saying that the president didn't trust her. That's what Mike Conaway, a Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told me.

[11:10:04]

And one Republican, Tom Yoho, who sits on one of three committees, a part of these investigations, told me he was skeptical of her sworn testimony that Giuliani was mounting the smear campaign against her.

So you probably will see ultimately not surprisingly this reaction coming down along party lines. But at least one Republican breaking with the president on this tweet this morning as Democrats warning, Anderson, that this is textbook witness intimidation.

COOPER: Manu Raju, thanks.

Dana?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I was just going to add to what Tim was saying. You talked about this being like McCarthyism. It's almost worse in that McCarthy used horrible tactics but he had a very clear ideology, a policy goal, which is to get rid of Communism.

Here there's no policy goal. It is a political goal. It is the president of the United States trying to further his political future, full stop.

And that's the other thing that comes through here very, very clearly is that you have a president pushing actual conspiracy theories.

A conspiracy theory that we now know his own Homeland Security adviser, Tom Bossert, said to him in private, stop talking about this CrowdStrike thing. This is the notion of a server being in Ukraine.

COOPER: A server in Ukraine.

BASH: It is not true, and it is going to hurt you, and he -- he didn't care.

And so all of this is to push a conspiracy, which he decided that he was going to believe because it helped his political agenda, and American foreign policy, democracy, took actual real corruption that Marie Yovanovitch described that she was fighting in Ukraine be damned.

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Look, she says U.S. foreign policy was hijacked, a tough term. She was personally kneecapped. In her opening statement, where she talked about the U.S. hostages in

Iran, the victims in Benghazi, for a career diplomat, she had really smart political skills to essentially look at the Republicans and say, you're going to come after me, I'm part of a larger family. I'm part of our history and part of the fiber of what we do as a country.

This is choosing time for Republicans. Let's set aside the question, is this impeachable for a minute. Is the this the way to run a government? Is this the way to treat your people? Is this the way to handle things?

And so that's the first choice Republicans have to make. Are they going to come out of this and say the president did nothing wrong? That's indefensible. Again, it's a whole separate question. An impeachable offense, what should we be doing with this?

Let me leave that aside. You cannot listen to these witnesses, especially her, and come out and say the president did nothing wrong. If he wanted her recalled, he should have just recalled her. But to be partner with Rudy Giuliani in this smear campaign is reprehensible.

To the other point about the timing of the tweet, she's in the committee. She's actually testifying.

But the president also knows, as he sends that tweet that, number one, Mr. David Holmes, the career foreign service officer, who overheard the call with Gordon Sondland, is about to testify, and Mark Sandy, of the Office of Management and Budget, who knows about the decision to withhold aid. Who did it? Who ordered it?

When people raised their hands and said, it might be illegal to do that, who said keep going forward with that? He's about to testify under subpoena and then, in a couple of days, Gordon Sondland himself, the ambassador --

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: So you're saying he's not just witness intimidation of Marie Yovanovitch, it's future witnesses.

KING: If you're one of these other witnesses and you're about to testify and you're about to say something that might not fit the president's view of this, you can see that right there --

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Someone like Yovanovitch and all these other people who are testifying, who are even lower level, if you get attacked by the president of the United States and you're a well-known person on television or something, you have some safety net or people behind you. They are not making a lot of money. They don't have security. They are completely vulnerable.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: And you have the most powerful person in the world personally coming after you. There's a lot of people out there, you know, who take that as a clarion call to go ahead and take action.

KING: I covered the White House of almost 10 years. One of the gifts of the United States government, Democratic presidents and Republican presidents, one of the gifts of the job is, when you meet these people, when had you traveled the world.

They are people who don't make a lot of money, who are away from their families, and could teach and be lawyers and have consulting and lobbying jobs here in Washington, D.C. They are all around the world. I never knew whether they were Democrats or Republicans.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: They are serving their country.

COOPER: It's a minor point but in the president's tweets he's saying look where she went, you know, everywhere she went terrible things happened. She was taking hardship posts --

(CROSSTALK)

BASH: Exactly.

COOPER: In Somalia.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Anybody who has been in Somalia, it's been run down for a long time.

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: Remember, we're talking about witness tampering and witness intimidation. It's, as you point out, more of an umbrella term.

[11:15:04]

Remember how this all began with a whistleblower complaint. That and the idea that, if you were to see and witness something that was wrong, if you were to witness an abuse of power, if you were to witness to something that was an unofficial back channel that subverted U.S. diplomatic policy in Ukraine or anywhere else, look what happens to you.

Look what the next domino effect will be. This is not just about witnesses who are testifying tomorrow and next week. It's very much about the idea of that whole adage of, see something, say something. That gets obliterated every single time the person, who is the head of the executive branch of government, whose job it is to enforce the law, says no.

COOPER: I've got to get a quick break in.

In moments, the testimony from the ousted U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, it's going to continue.

Plus, we'll listen to her describe how the president's attacks are having an impact on U.S. foreign policy.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:21:00]

COOPER: Continuing coverage of a dramatic impeachment hearing, dramatic in ways perhaps many didn't expect, during which the president is now accused of witness intimidation.

But before the ousted ambassador's testimony, the White House made a curious move involving the first transcript of the president's call with Ukrainian president, the one that the president has been touting now for several days.

Want to go to Pamela Brown at the White House.

Pamela, explain what's gone on.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: There appears to be a key discrepancy, Anderson, between the initial readout of that have April call between the President Trump and President Zelensky and the transcript that the White House just released of the call back in April.

Because, in this initial summary of the call that the White House put out hours after it happened back in April, it says that the two discussed corruption, saying that "The president expressed his commitment to work together with President-Elect Zelensky and the Ukrainian people to implement reforms that strengthen democracy, increase prosperity, and root out corruption."

But, Anderson, nowhere in the three-page transcript is there any mention of corruption, which is also notable, because a big White House talking point was that president was so concerned about corruption and Ukraine, and that was one big reason why he withheld aid. So that does raise the question of why that wasn't raised in this call.

And it appears that either the White House made up some details of this call in the initial readout by saying the two talked about corruption or that part was simply taken out of the transcript.

We've asked the White House for an explanation on the discrepancy and we haven't heard back.

And another interesting part of call memo the White House released today is the president making reference to a White House visit, inviting President Zelensky to come to the White House once he's settled.

As we know, Anderson, that's not happened. That's been the center of him people inquiry along with the military aid in terms of a possible quid pro quo, where this White House meeting was conditioned on the Ukrainians announcing publicly investigations into the Democrats and to the Bidens.

But clearly, the White House believed that releasing this transcript today would be exculpatory. It was time for that clearly. Representative Nunes could read it during the hearing. And it appears to be an attempt to counter some of the controversial damaging information that came out from that are July call with Zelensky.

But it also raises questions of what changed in that time frame between April and July, in July, when the president brought up the Biden investigation and the Democrat, the DNC investigation. What happened in that time frame to change the conversation so dramatically with President Zelensky?

We know that in that time frame the president's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was also stepping up his efforts to press Ukraine to publicly announcing the investigations of the president.

So it certainly does raise some questions today -- Anderson?

COOPER: Yes. Fascinating that the White House put out a statement that actually turns out not to be true, wow. I feel like that has happened many times before.

[11:24:00]

Let's take a quick break. Testimony will continue.

Pam Brown, thanks.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCHIFF: What we saw today, it wasn't enough that Ambassador Yovanovitch was smeared. It wasn't enough that she was attacked. It wasn't enough that she was recalled for no reason, at least no good reason. But what we saw today, witness intimidation in real time by the president of the United States.

Once again going after this dedicated and respected career public servant in an effort to not only chill her but to chill others who may come forward.

We take this kind of witness intimidation and obstruction of inquiry very seriously.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: That's Adam Schiff earlier.

We're going to have more of the testimony from Marie Yovanovitch in just a few minutes.

Jim Jordan, Gloria, is saying it's not witness intimidation. Why? BORGER: Jim Jordan is saying it's not witness intimidation because

she wouldn't have known about the tweet in real time had Schiff not brought it up.

COOPER: That doesn't make sense. It's not just witness intimidation of her. It's also of any future witnesses coming forward.

BORGER: Of course, of course. And -- and that is assuming the case that Adam Schiff would make.

[11:30:02]

And the question that I have is, going forward, what will the president's attorneys tell him to do? Will they lock him in a room without a television set and say you cannot tweet anymore?