Return to Transcripts main page

NEW DAY

Draft Mueller Doc Outlines Stone's Efforts to Seek WikiLeaks Docs. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired November 28, 2018 - 07:00   ET

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


JEROME CORSI, ROGER STONE ASSOCIATE: Roger Stone writes in July and says, "Get to Assange."

[07:00:05] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What an amazing coincidence: WikiLeaks dump hours after the "Access Hollywood" scandal.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Giuliani said that they have known for some time that Manafort was moving away from this plea deal.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He was endearing himself to the president, with the ultimate goal of getting that presidential stroke of the pen.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: He sees what's going on with Manafort. He sees what's going on with Roger Stone, and I think it's really troubling to him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What obviously happened is completely abhorrent. Some kind of response to that certainly would be in order.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As an intelligence guy, I would want every morsel that would cast light on the whole event.

JOHN BOLTON, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: I haven't listened to it. Unless you speak Arabic, what are you going to get from it?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. And a busy day it is. We begin with very interesting developments in the Russia investigation this morning.

We have the clearest window yet into how the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is looking into the possible connections between people close to the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

CNN has obtained drafts of court documents that suggest that Mueller plans to show how Trump adviser Roger Stone allegedly sought information and those stolen e-mails from WikiLeaks using a different operative, a conservative author named Jerome Corsi, as a go-between. They include an e-mail from Jerome Corsi to Roger Stone, saying that WikiLeaks has dirt on Hillary Clinton and plans to release it right before the election. JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: And there's more. The president's former

campaign chair, Paul Manafort, he is denying a report in "The Guardian" that he secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the campaign. Both Manafort and Assange deny it vehemently.

However, Rudy Giuliani does tell us that the Trump legal team has been in contact with Manafort's people. They've been exchanging notes on what the special counsel was asking Manafort, even after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

So what does that tell you about what's in Manafort's head? Does it tell you he might be angling for a possible pardon?

We have a lot to discuss with former federal prosecutor Laura Coates; former White House press secretary under President Clinton, Joe Lockhart; and CNN political correspondent Sara Murray, who broke the story about the new documents in the Russia investigation.

So Sara, I want to start with you to lay out what we see here. Because, look, every day for over a year we have seen saying we don't know what Robert Mueller is doing. We don't know what's going on in this investigation.

Well, now for the first time, we know exactly what's going on as it pertains to Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi.

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. And what's interesting about this, you know, this is a draft filing that we're seeing now. So who knows what they would have changed between now and when they actually wanted to release it.

But it did not outline the way Corsi lies, but shows you the lengths Roger Stone was trying to go to to get his hands on the documents from WikiLeaks.

The fact that, you know, he went to this guy, named Jerome Corsi, and said, "Get to WikiLeaks. Get to Assange," and then encouraged him to go to another person, named Ted Malloch, and said, "You should send him to the embassy to try to get information form Assange."

Now, Roger still insists that he did not get any information in advance of its release from WikiLeaks. He never saw the Podesta e- mails early.

And Jerome Corsi insists that he was never actually in touch with WikiLeaks. That's for investigators to sort out.

But this e-mail traffic does show you how badly Roger Stone wanted these e-mails. And it shows Jerome Corsi suggesting he knew, you know, that WikiLeaks had dirt and when they were going to drop it.

CAMEROTA: Right. Here's a portion. This is an e-mail from Jerome Corsi to Roger Stone, which seems to fly in the face of his claim that he doesn't know anything about WikiLeaks or what they're up to.

"Word is, friend in embassy plans two more dumps" -- of course, he's referring to Julian Assange -- "one shortly after I'm back, second in October. Impact planned to be very damaging. Time to be -- time to let more than [the Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta to be exposed as in bed with the enemy if they are not ready to drop Hillary Rodham Clinton. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting Hillary Clinton old memory, bad, has stroke, neither here nor she well. I expect that much of the next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle."

He sure knows a lot for somebody who's not in touch with WikiLeaks.

MURRAY: When I talked to him yesterday, he acknowledged, you know, "There are some things I said that may have given Roger Stone the impression" --

CAMEROTA: "That I knew something."

MURRAY: -- "that I knew something, that I was in touch with WikiLeaks," but he insists, you know, "I never spoke to Assange, never met with Assange."

CAMEROTA: But then how does he know all of this?

MURRAY: That's a great question. He says, you know, maybe he heard it somewhere, some of it. You know, he says he sort of came to connect the dots and figure out that WikiLeaks must have had John Podesta's e-mails.

I mean, even Jerome Corsi, when I spoke to him yesterday, said prosecutors were not buying this explanation. It was a point of frustration when he was talking to Mueller's team. He said, "So, you know, you're expecting us to believe you were on vacation with your wife, and you just divined that WikiLeaks had the Podesta e-mails?" So you know, a lot for investigators to sift through.

[07:05:00] BERMAN: So Laura, what's really interesting is that the Trump legal team knew about this over the last few weeks when the president was answering those written questions from the Mueller team. He knew it when he was getting agitated so clearly in public and meeting behind the scenes with his lawyers.

In this, we understand, is part of the reason he was upset, because in that filing Sara was just talking about, the draft filing -- P-109 here in the control -- Corsi said, "In the summer of 2016, associate, ['Person 1']" -- that's Roger Stone -- "who Corsi understood to be in regular contact with senior members of the Trump campaign, including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump, asked Corsi to get in touch with Organization No. 1."

It is in writing from the special counsel that Roger Stone was in touch with the president. Why did that make the president's team so nervous?

LAURA COATES, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, obviously, because if there's somebody who has a direct connection to Julian Assange and a direct connection to WikiLeaks and knows in advance there's a coordinated attack to try to influence the 2016 presidential election, well, he should be nervous. Because there's not this many coincidences in the entire existence of humanity, John. This would have to be as coincidental perhaps -- I don't know -- as the big bang theory at this point in time.

The president is justified in his -- I don't know -- at one point I'm sure it was paranoia. At this point, seeing it in writing, seeing that the special counsel -- and no prosecutor puts in writing what they do not have evidence to support, and has been corroborated, and has been verified by multiple sources before they're actually going to go in front of an open court and actually try to argue this.

Now, this is the draft pleading, so it hasn't made its way to a formalized legal proceeding. Different iterations are going to be there.

But the president in his connection and discussions with people behind the scenes through his counsel, is well aware that Manafort -- I mean, Mueller is not acting on a broomstick or a witch hunt. He's acting on actual facts in the absence of coincidence, which constitutes evidence.

CAMEROTA: Joe Lockhart, can you believe that these two characters, Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, are even around the White House or the incoming president or a campaign, a winning campaign?

These guys -- Jerome Corsi is an inveterate conspiracy theorist. The crackpot theories that he has peddled, from 9/11 being an inside job, to -- I could go on and on and on.

BERMAN: Birtherism.

CAMEROTA: Birtherism. It gets -- I think Pizzagate. I mean, I think that it was just -- it was just all the craziest stuff. So I understand why it would be hard for investigators to try to sift through the nonsense that these guys are telling them.

JOE LOCKHART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, we shouldn't be surprised, because the candidate and now the president was one of them. He was behind birtherism. He retweeted things like Pizzagate and things like that. His family members traffic in this sort of information. It was part of their strategy.

You can already anticipate the White House defense, though, which is, "I don't know Roger Stone." We had Corey Lewandowski just a few minutes ago, trying it out.

You know, Roger Stone, it would be like my old boss, Bill Clinton, saying, "I barely know James Carville. I just" -- and I'll tell you this. Particularly when politicians get in trouble, they tend to reach back to people they've known over the years and trust; and the last people to know about those conversations are the staff. I mean, you know, this is why they have cell phones.

So you know, I think that's really where Mueller's, you know, zooming in on, is just how much conversation there was there. The other thing that I find really interesting in this is Mueller and

-- excuse me, Manafort and Trump had a joint defense agreement --

BERMAN: Not an official one. They were cooperating.

LOCKHART: But once he started cooperating, any lawyer will tell you, you stop cooperating with the other side.

CAMEROTA: You stop talking to the other team.

LOCKHART: You stop talking to the other team, because you're getting information, you know, based on the back and forth. The fact that he continued -- his lawyers continued to share that information is a big deal and, I think, gives you some insight into what Manafort is really trying to do.

BERMAN: I want to come back to that in one second, because that's a huge deal and worth a lot of conversation. But I just want to finish up on Corsi and Stone if I can, Sara, with you, because Corey did say that he never heard the president talking to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks. But Corey was crystal-clear that the president and Roger Stone talked all the time, and it was possible that he talked about it. He just didn't know about it.

And Rudy Giuliani in "The Washington Post" issued a non-denial denial about this. I just want to read that, because it's a little emotional. I think it's important. "Rudy Giuliani, attorney for Trump, said the president does not recall ever speaking to either Stone or Corsi about WikiLeaks." Does not recall but not ruling out that possibility.

And why that's so important to me is it has to do with these written answers to questions that Mueller provided.

MURRAY: And it does make you wonder: OK, so is that the same thing they wrote down on that paper that they handed over to Robert Mueller?

And you know, that is a much squishier line than what Roger Stone, you know, says to me when I ask him, "Are you sure you never had any conversations with Donald Trump about WikiLeaks?"

[07:10:03] He says, "Absolutely not. I'm sure that when he writes the answers to the special counsel, he will say that we had no such conversation." You know, that's a much sharper denial than what we're hearing from Rudy Giuliani.

CAMEROTA: And just one more thing, Sara. Because everybody remembers the "Access Hollywood" tape, because that gripped the country's attention. There is a nexus here now between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks and Corsi. And we see it in some of these e-mails. They knew -- Roger knew that the Billy Bush tape was going to drop, somehow, hours before it did and said to Jerome Corsi, "Now would be a good time."

MURRAY: Yes. This is according to Jerome Corsi's version of events. He said he got a bunch of phone calls from Roger Stone. And he believes they were earlier in the day before the tape came out. And Roger Stone says, you know, "Look, if your buddy, Julian Assange, has got anything, now is the time to tell him to drop it," trying to get Corsi to sort of help him mitigate the fallout.

Now, Roger Stone vehemently denies that.

CAMEROTA: But that does happen. Then it does happen the same day.

MURRAY: Yes, the tape comes out. WikiLeaks stuff comes out almost roughly 30 minutes after that. Stone says, "I didn't know the tape was coming. Corsi doesn't have any evidence to corroborate his version of events. It's total B.S."

Again, Mueller knows a lot more than we do. He has records of these conversations that we don't have, so we'll see.

BERMAN: Just added one more to this pile of coincidences.

LOCKHART: And the only people who knew about the tape were "The Washington Post" that got the tape, and the Trump campaign. They were given a heads-up this was coming. So if Roger Stone is not involved at all in the Trump campaign, how does he know this is coming?

BERMAN: All right. I want to shift now to what you were talking about a moment ago, Joe, and put this to Laura Coates. Because another big bit of information came out overnight. Actually, it was yesterday.

Dana Bash reporting that Paul Manafort's legal team has been in contact with Trump's legal team, sharing with the president's legal team what the special counsel was going after with Paul Manafort. They're sharing information. Now, this is not a joint cooperation, joint defense agreement officially, but it is cooperation, the type of cooperation, Laura, that you don't normally see after someone pleads guilty and agrees to sing before investigators.

COATES: Of course you don't, because it disincentivizes for the government who is the one that has the upper hand in the leverage, in the plea negotiations and the actual cooperation agreement. It disincentivizes for them to actually be forthcoming and be open-minded about what you're giving them, because they have to actually assume and they have to believe that you, in fact, are a truthful and credible witness who's providing information without an axe to grind, without some sort of bias and without some other ulterior motive.

And so the question you have to ask yourselves here is whether or not Manafort was sharing the information with Trump's legal team because he was jockeying for a pardon, perhaps. I mean, he certainly has followed the line, in terms of, "Listen, they tell me that I'm lying to them. It's akin to the perjury trap that you were speaking of, Mr. President, all this time through your counsel. This is the reason not to talk to them, because frankly, I'm telling the truth. They think I'm lying. It's a perjury trap." That plays to his ear quite well.

But the question for people looking forward is, well, has the president welcomed this? Has the president's team invited this? Was it a two-way deal? Does he expect now to get a pardon?

Because if he does, and if this is not a unilateral one-way street or even a dead end, then you have questions of obstruction of justice that come into the picture. And you think to yourself, well, is the president trying to influence or intimidate, through his counsel, a witness that is known to be cooperating in a federal investigation? If he's dangling a carrot, that can seem like influencing a witness, and he's got an additional problem.

CAMEROTA: Joe, listen, you worked in the White House that had its own share of legal issues and pardon issues. How distracting is all of this when the White House is attempting to do other work?

LOCKHART: It's -- it can be very distracting. In the administration that I worked in there was a, really, separation between the people who worked on this; and President Clinton was able to, I think, during the day focus on his job.

I think as we got into the evening, there was some private railing about this person and that person, but you never heard it publicly. This seems to consume Donald Trump, though, and Twitter seems to be his conscience. It's -- we see it. It plays out. And you tend to find the volume and vitriol in the -- in the subject of the Twitter and the tweets as leading up to something coming.

So you know, I don't think they've done a very good job, both of concentrating on the peoples' business or separating out. It just feels like this consumes everyone there.

BERMAN: Joe Lockhart, Sara Murray, Laura Coates, thank you all very much.

A lot to digest this morning. We continue to look at all of it.

In the meantime, all 100 U.S. senators, they'll get a briefing today about Saudi Arabia's role in Jamal Khashoggi's murder. What will Congress do to hold the crown prince accountable? We'll discuss.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:18:59] BERMAN: A draft court filing obtained by CNN sheds new light on what Robert Mueller may know. This document shows the special counsel planned to argue that former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone made an effort to get advanced notice of WikiLeaks' damaging document dumps about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Joining me now to discuss is independent Senator Angus King of Maine. He serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator King, thank you so much for being with us. I'm sure you've been following the news over the last 12 hours or so. And connecting the dots is not easy. But if the special counsel now has these e- mails indicating that Roger Stone knew something about what WikiLeaks had, what's the significance there?

SEN. ANGUS KING (I), MAINE: Well, I think it certainly is significant for Roger Stone. The then question becomes what did Roger Stone's connection -- what was Roger Stone's connection to the campaign, to the president, to the upper reaches of the campaign?

Roger Stone, you know, issued a public statement somewhere back along in the fall, saying something to the effect of, "Wait until you see what's going to come out on Podesta." So he's on record as having some knowledge about what's going on with WikiLeaks.

[07:20:09] But I think you've got to go back and make -- connect some of the dots earlier, and that is, what we know, virtually to a certainty, is that the Russian intelligence agencies stole these e- mails and downloaded them to WikiLeaks. And then WikiLeaks became, as a part of that, how did those e-mails then become public to influence the American election, which was Russia's intention.

So that is pretty well-established.

The question is, the one you're asking, what was the connection, if any, between the campaign and WikiLeaks in terms of the timing or the magnitude of the releases of the e-mails that took place in late September, October of 2016?

Now that -- that's all public information, John. I'm not going to talk to you about what our committee is finding, because we're -- we Re working alongside, parallel, if you will, to Mr. Mueller on our own analysis.

BERMAN: Yes, and I'm not asking you for the top-secret committee information here. But you did bring up one point here we knew before: that Russia was working with WikiLeaks. We see from these e-mails that Roger Stone, connected with the Trump campaign, might be working with WikiLeaks.

But my reading of it, is there anything in there which actually connects Stone with Russia? Any proof that he knew that it came from Russia or colluded with Russian intelligence?

KING: No, I don't think that's yet been established, but I'm not privy to all the information that the Mueller investigation has. So I think that's a question that remains to be answered.

BERMAN: Big day for the Senate today. The secretary of state, along with the secretary of defense, are scheduled to brief senators at 11 a.m. this morning on the war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia's role there.

Obviously, this is connected, at least in terms of sentiment and U.S. support, to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And there are a lot of questions from a lot of senators.

First off CIA director, Gina Haspel, who knows more about, really, the Saudi connections than anyone else, won't be at the briefing. Do you think she should be?

KING: Yes, I do. I'm disappointed that she's not going to be there, because I think the information that the CIA has is important and should be shared with -- with the entire Senate. But this is -- what you didn't mention is, this meeting is, in a

sense, preparation for a very important vote later on today on a resolution to, essentially, withdraw our military support for Saudi Arabia with what's going on in Yemen.

I think frankly this might be an effort to forestall what looks to me like a momentum building for a favorable vote on that resolution, which is, in some ways, a test vote on the -- what the future relationship should be with Saudi Arabia, at least in terms of their involvement in Yemen.

This same motion failed by about ten votes back in March. I think the votes are there today to move it forward in a positive way.

The vote's a very big deal, and you can see the administration knows it's a big deal, because the secretary of state wrote an op-ed in "The Wall Street Journal." And again, there's a connection between the Jamal Khashoggi investigation and the Saudi war in Yemen in terms of what the 100 senators think now about Saudi Arabia and the future relationship.

And Secretary Pompeo made a pretty stark accusation. He says, "Is it any coincidence that the using the Khashoggi murder as a cudgel against President Trump's Saudi Arabia policy are the same people who supported Barack Obama's rapprochement with the Iran regime."

I don't remember Lindsey Graham, for instance, supporting Barack Obama when he was making, you know, the deal with Iran. I don't remember Marco Rubio, who's got problems with Saudi Arabia, doing that. That seems to be a pretty wild accusation from the secretary of state.

KING: No, and I don't really understand the relevance of that observation. And -- and by the way, I'm one of the ones who voted not to table this resolution back in March, having nothing to do with Khashoggi, obviously long before any of that happened.

I think there are very good reasons for us to get out of the business of supporting what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen. It's one of the most serious and tragic human disasters in recent history. The estimate is 85,000 children in Yemen have starved to death. And granted, it's a civil war. There are people on both sides. The Iranians are involved on behalf of the Houthis.

But we're -- what worries me is the word "complicit." If we're refueling planes, which we've stopped but it could be continued again; providing targeting advice, being involved with that kind of effort, we're complicit, it seems to me. And that's why I voted the way I did last March and intend to vote that same way today.

The Khashoggi piece is part of it.

BERMAN: Right.

KING: I think it's feeding into it, but the real question is should we be supporting what looks like an irresponsible policy in Yemen? BERMAN: The national security advisor, John Bolton, told reporters

yesterday he hasn't listened to the audio recording of the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi because he doesn't speak Arabic. Is that a sufficient explanation?

[07:25:11] KING: I'm pretty sure somewhere in the United States government, there are people that could translate that tape for him. Of course, he should listen to it. That, to me, is a kind of deliberate ignorance, to not want to listen to what is important evidence in a serious case.

By the way, I want to make one more parenthetical point about Yemen. Aside from the civil war, we have a very important counterterrorism effort going on in Yemen that has nothing to do with the civil war, nothing to do with Saudi Arabia or Iran, but has to do with AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Very dangerous people, very dangerous people threatening this country, and that's got to be -- that's carved out of this resolution we're talking about today. That needs to be continued.

BERMAN: Not part of the war on terror, ISIS in particular, AQAP.

I do want to ask you something that just developed over the last few minutes. Ivanka Trump, who's an advisor to the president, also the president's daughter, it came out that she was using her private e- mail for government business inside the White House. She was just asked about it on ABC. Let's listen to what she says.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

IVANKA TRUMP, DAUGHTER/ADVISOR OF DONALD TRUMP: In my case, all of my e-mails are on the White House server. There's no intent to circumvent, and there were mass deletions after a subpoena was issued. My e-mails have not been deleted. Nor was there anything of -- of substance, nothing confidential that was within them. So there's no connection between the two things.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So the idea of "Lock her up" doesn't apply to you?

I. TRUMP: No.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Obviously, you were in Congress during the Hillary Clinton e- mail questions. Ivanka Trump says, "Nothing to see here." Is that explanation good enough?

KING: Well, I think it's -- it goes part of the way. I mean, obviously, there are two -- there are differences between the two cases. But the fundamental is the same, which was a White House official or, in Hillary Clinton's case, the secretary of state using a private e-mail service that doesn't have the same level of security as the government. I mean, I think that's the issue.

There are differences, of course, but I think it's something that needs to be considered. And, frankly, given the attention to the secretary Clinton issue during the campaign, I'm just surprised that anybody in the White House wouldn't understand what the rules of the game were going forward.

BERMAN: Senator Angus King of Maine, always a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks so much, sir.

KING: Thanks, John.

BERMAN: Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: All right. A new report reveals what caused that Boeing passenger plane to crash in Indonesia. What the pilots had to do as that plane was going down.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)