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Matt Lauer's Handling of Presidential Forum a Disaster?; Clinton and Trump on Foreign Policy. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired September 8, 2016 - 15:00   ET

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


[15:00:03]

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We have a nearly $800 billion -- think of that -- $800 billion annual trade deficit with the world. We trade with the world. We have a trade deficit of $800 billion. Who is negotiating these deals? Who's doing it?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hillary Clinton.

TRUMP: That's actually very good. Hillary Clinton is absolutely a good answer, Hillary Clinton and people like Hillary Clinton that haven't got a clue.

And the clue they do have goes to their donors and the special interests, believe me. That's money coming straight out of the states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Maine and so many others. I have seen so many. It is so sad.

When I campaigned during the primaries, I saw everything. And it was so sad to see communities that have just been left jobless, where the companies have moved to other countries, Mexico in particular, but other countries. By ending foreign currency manipulation, product dumping and other predatory trading practices, we will be able to open thousands of new plants and factories across America.

In driving over today, I passed so many places, factories; 20, 30 years ago, they were thriving. And they're just dead. Worthless. A real estate person, you wouldn't pay anything. Worthless. We will put them back into action again.

The future is filled with limitless possibilities for our nation and exciting opportunities for our wonderful children. We all have to do and we just have to work. We all have to work. But we all have to cut our ties with the failed politics of the past.

You have to cut your ties. Have to cut your ties. These are the people that put us in this situation. They're not going to take us out. They're not going to take us out. That includes in wars.

And Hillary Clinton created a lot of the problems, and now she's saying how she's going to take us out. She doesn't have a clue. Not even a little clue. We have had such a failed foreign policy with the people we have now, a failed education policy, a totally failed economic policy, and underneath it all a failed political system that rewards politicians for how many donors they have or how many journalists they know, not how many Americans they help to live better and more prosperous lives.

That's how they get rewarded. They will talk to you and talk to you. They will come in to Cleveland. She will be saying what a wonderful job she's going to do. She will get your vote. Then she will say see you in four years. She might even say see you in four years, suckers, because that's what it is.

(LAUGHTER)

TRUMP: See you in four years, suckers.

But the failures of the past are about to end. That ending begins on a very special date for this country, November 8. Get out and vote. We will have one American nation. We will be one American people. We're fighting to give every child in every forgotten stretch of this country the chance to live out their dreams in safety and in peace.

That means a safe neighborhood, a quality education, and a secure, high-paying and exciting job. We only have bad jobs. We don't have good jobs anymore. Many of our good jobs have left. They're gone.

This is how we will rebuild our future. This is how we will make America great again for everyone.

God bless you, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, people. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, here he was, Donald Trump speaking in the all-important state of Ohio. He is back in Cleveland addressing a room -- actually some couple rows of schoolkids in there.

The address was billed as an education speech, but let's point out that basically the first 15 to 20 minutes, he really hammered Hillary Clinton on that private e-mail server that keeps dogging her, the drip, drip, drip, and also and on the Clinton Foundation before he then pivoted and talked about his stance on the war in Iraq, about ISIS, about how he stands by -- how says he would have taken out Osama bin Laden years before he was ever found there in that hideout in Pakistan.

[15:05:03]

You are watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

We got some great voices to bring in here to talk about Trump, and Clinton and everything else, Mike Pence, this interview that -- exclusive interview that Dana Bash just scored there in the Reagan Library.

But let me just reintroduce Dana Bash, our CNN chief political correspondent. A.B. Stoddard is here, associate editor at RealClearPolitics. And Gloria Borger is still with us, CNN chief political analyst. Ladies, let's just begin with, A.B., since we haven't heard from you

yet, just on this speech, and most notably he didn't lead with education. He led with, to sort of quote him, why Hillary Clinton is a liar.

A.B. STODDARD, REALCLEARPOLITICS: Right.

Well, I think he's looking and his team is looking at the fact that her numbers have deteriorated so rapidly in the last few weeks. And while his haven't grown remarkably, this is really taking a toll on her when you have a bunch of editorial boards around the country like "The New York Times" saying it is an ethical imperative that the foundation be neutralized and folded into another group, it stops taking donations immediately, and perhaps even that it should be closed, and you even have Democratic lawmakers who support Hillary Clinton like former Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell coming out and saying, yes, it put a chill in her support.

And we're seeing that in the polls. And I think it also scares off Republicans who are opposed to Donald Trump who are never going to vote for him and are choosing between voting for Hillary Clinton, staying home, or voting for one of the third-party candidates. And this kind of talk about her lying and her making these reckless decisions depresses her vote. That's what the goal of the Trump campaign is now.

BALDWIN: We just got new numbers on the Quinnipiac polls. We will get to them in a second. But spoiler alert, it is a close race.

Gloria, let me remind everyone, in case you missed Hillary Clinton standing outside of her new 737 this morning, here she was behind the podium, formally addressing the press corps. Here's a look back at what she said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's hard to forget what Trump did last night. It was a test, and he failed it.

He trash-talked about America's generals, saying that they have been -- quote -- "reduced to rubble." Even I was shock by this, and I didn't know much could shock me coming out of his mouth anymore. He praised Russia's strong man, Vladimir Putin...

(BOOING)

CLINTON: ... even taking the astonishing step of suggesting he prefers the Russian president to our American president.

(BOOING)

CLINTON: That is not just unpatriotic. It is not just insulting to the office and the man who holds the office. It is scary. It is dangerous.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) CLINTON: It actually suggests he will let Putin do what Putin wants, and even make excuses for him.

What would Ronald Reagan say? This is a time to put country over party. I would be saying that even if I were not running against him. We have never been threatened as much by a single candidate running for president as we have been in this election.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: So, that was actually after the press conference outside the plane. It was just fresher sound, essentially saying the same thing. She was speaking there earlier today in Charlotte.

What is she up to with all of this, do you think, Gloria?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, look, I think she's playing to the base that she needs to motivate to get out there. I think Donald Trump gave her an awful lot of opportunity last night.

And not only seeming to say, OK, Putin's better than President Obama. I kept thinking, by the way, what if Democratic candidate Obama or Democratic candidate Kerry had done that same thing and said, you know, Putin is a stronger leader than the current president of the United States, I wonder how people would react in this country to that.

And I think that she came out on that tarmac and just said he's scary, he's dangerous, which plays into her whole notion that it's a risk to elect him president of the United States. And I think you're going to hear more and more of that.

And what Trump is doing is saying don't trust Hillary's judgment because she voted for the war in Iraq and he says he didn't support the war in Iraq, although we know that he did as of September 2002. And that was a month before there was a war vote in the Congress.

So they're going to keep talking past each other this way because they have to get their voters out to vote. And that's what we're going to see for the next days.

BALDWIN: We know that they were both in two key states, North Carolina and in Ohio today. We some have new polls, Dana Bash. Let me bring you in here.

[15:10:05]

As we are looking on the screen at the numbers, I said a moment ago, tight race. I mean, tight race.

DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Incredibly tight. Pennsylvania is the one state in these new polls that are coming up from Quinnipiac in some of these battleground states. Pennsylvania is the one state where Clinton has a real lead over Donald Trump, maybe not that surprising, since Pennsylvania has gone Democratic for quite some time. North Carolina, she's slightly ahead, but not by much. It is still

very much neck and neck. Ohio and Florida, dead heats between the two of these candidates. I think what A.B. was talking about before with regard to concern that some of the drip, drip, drip on Clinton's e- mails and the foundation that would suppress her base, guess what, Brooke?

These polls, Democrats are looking at and saying it seems counterintuitive to think that the Democrats are happy about race races, but these polls are wakeup calls to Democrats, who really can't fathom the idea of Donald Trump as president, a wakeup call to them to get -- to activate, to get their friends active and to energize a base that really needs energizing, based on not just these polls, but our national poll that we had out earlier this week that Donald Trump supporters are much more energized than Hillary Clinton's.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: Actually, as we talk about polls, I just want to stay on this, and someone who is polling in some of these states, sort of in the neighborhood of 10ish percent, Gary Johnson.

BORGER: Right.

BALDWIN: I know you all know where I am going with this. Let's just tell all of you watching, Gary Johnson, a Libertarian nominee for president, he made some news today, but not in the best way for him and his campaign. Here he was initially on "Morning Joe," and then following it up on "The View." Roll it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?

GARY JOHNSON, LIBERTARIAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: About Aleppo. And what is Aleppo?

QUESTION: You're kidding.

JOHNSON: No.

QUESTION: Aleppo is in Syria. It's the epicenter of the refugee crisis.

JOHNSON: OK. Got it. Got it.

No excuse. I was thinking in terms of acronym, Aleppo. That's no excuse whatsoever. But the dynamics in play in Syria are...

QUESTION: I think it is a disqualifying statement, frankly.

JOHNSON: Fair enough. And fair enough.

(CROSSTALK)

QUESTION: So will you get out of the race now? JOHNSON: No.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: I mean, you watched all of that. I watched and I just kind of like, ooh.

BORGER: I think it is disqualifying.

BALDWIN: Yes.

BORGER: I mean, I truly do. And when you look at the polling in Pennsylvania, he's got 9 percent. In North Carolina, he has 15 percent of the vote.

So people are clearly looking for something else in those states. He's doing pretty well. I think, in Ohio, maybe 14 percent. So people are looking for some for something else and somebody else to support. But then he didn't know anything about where Aleppo is or in fact what it was?

I think people are going to start asking themselves whether that's somebody they would want in the Oval Office.

BALDWIN: Yes.

Hillary Clinton, let me just pivot to this. She was asked today by a reporter whether she thinks there is a double standard in the media as far as coverage Trump vs. Clinton. And this was her response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: I have been somewhat heartened by the number of articles recently pointing out the quite disparate treatment of Trump and his campaign compared to ours.

I don't understand the reasons for it. I find it frustrating, but it is just part of the landscape that we live in, and we just keep forging ahead.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: A.B., what do you think?

STODDARD: Well, I think that if she's lied so many times about this e-mail server, and it really has been very flagrant and it's been revealed both by the FBI, but also even more damningly by the internal I.G. report from the State Department that much of her sort of statements that were supposed to exonerate her have been proven to be lies.

But when you look, Brooke, at the truth-trackers like PolitiFact and stuff, Donald Trump lies much more than Hillary Clinton, and so she's feeling frustrated that he's kind of held to a different standard. And if he shows up as has a Teleprompter speech and doesn't have sort of a self-destruction, implosion, that he could get a bounce back in the polls.

So, that's what they're frustrated by, is that she doesn't have a good answer for these things. She gets in traps where she says things that are not true and she lies, but that Donald Trump goes out and says things like take the oil, which is inexplicable, compliments Putin last night, insults generals, and said something very inappropriate about his intelligence briefing that most experts today say could not have possibly been true, and that he gets away with it because he's sort of held to this Donald Trump standard that she's not held to.

[15:15:22]

And that frustrates her campaign.

BASH: Brooke?

BALDWIN: Well, Donald Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, you start. I just wanted to you, Dana, at the Reagan Library on Mike Pence. You are there for this exclusive interview. Tell me about your conversation.

BASH: Well, I just have to say though that you hear A.B. talking about lies who more, you wonder why people are looking for somebody, even if he doesn't know where Aleppo is in Syria.

But moving on from that, yes, we are at this beautiful place at Simi Valley, California, Reagan Library, because Mike Pence gave a speech here just a short while ago and the whole speech was about comparing Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, both in terms of the eras, then and now, and the men.

So, I had a chance to talk to him exclusively. This is part of our conversation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: When you talk about him being humble, I know that on the campaign trail, you talk about that as well and you do it as you compare him to Donald Trump.

I think even Donald Trump would say that there are a lot of things that you can say about him. Humble is probably not one of them.

GOV. MIKE PENCE (R-IN), VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, I would tell you both men were very broad-shouldered leaders.

BASH: Yes.

PENCE: Both men had been successful not only...

BASH: But humble? The guy who has his name on every building...

(CROSSTALK)

PENCE: But also in entertainment.

Well, Ronald Reagan had his name on a lot of marquees. But I think at their very core, both men are the kind of leaders that have a core of humility.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: And, Brooke, we did sit down formally and talked about all of the hot topics, especially out of last night's forum, including what Hillary Clinton mentioned in her remarks today about the fact that Ronald Reagan went after the evil empire, and here you have Donald Trump praising Vladimir Putin, saying that he is even a better leader than our current president of the United States.

And we will have more of that on "THE LEAD" later on.

BALDWIN: We will see you on "THE LEAD."

Dana, thank you. And, A.B., and Gloria, thank you all so, so much.

Coming up next, Donald Trump revealing what shocked him from the classified intel briefings he's been getting. And Hillary Clinton has responded to that.

Sixty days to go, folks. I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN's special live coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:22:00]

BALDWIN: Welcome back. You are watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Let me take you back to another moment from that commander in chief forum just last evening with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump separately. Hillary Clinton specifically was talking about troops in the war on terror both obviously in Iraq and Syria.

She said to the host there, Matt Lauer, that she would never -- that was the word she used that sort of echoed into today. She would never put boots on the ground in those places. Here she was.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again and we're not putting ground troops into Syria.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Let me bring in Jack Murphy. He served as a Ranger and Green Beret in the U.S. Army.

And just to be clear, your politics, from what I understand, Jack, you don't really like either Clinton or Trump. Is that correct?

JACK MURPHY, FORMER GREEN BERET: That's correct.

BALDWIN: OK. OK.

So, on the sound that we just played, and later today my colleague Jeff Zeleny followed up with Hillary Clinton and said didn't you sort of box yourself in if you are elected president, and there are generals who say, it might be smart to put boots on the ground? And her answer was essentially that she supports the surveillance, the reconnaissance, the air war.

Is that a good enough answer for you?

MURPHY: Well, it's part of a methodology. It is certainly probably a white footprint option is best for Syria and Iraq.

BALDWIN: You do agree?

MURPHY: I would agree. But I thought it was an absolute statement of fiction for Hillary Clinton to say that we won't put ground troops in Syria or Iraq, when we already have them there. That's spreading a false perception to the American public.

BALDWIN: We absolutely do -- we absolutely do and in Iraq specifically. So you wish she had said what?

MURPHY: I think she should have said that we're going to go with a special forces option that's going to include airstrikes.

But she should have been honest with the American public and so that the public knows what we're getting into. Whether you support the war or you don't support the war, it is important for us as Americans to recognize we have soldiers going into harm's way.

You saw with Joshua Wheeler and Charles Keating, two special operators who were recently killed, that we do have guys in combat and it is important as a country that have both our eyes wide open to that fact before we commit to any sort of military action, even if it is a special forces-type operation.

BALDWIN: What about Donald Trump? Because he, too, was talking about war on terror. He said that he would be looking to military gels for guidance in how to defeat and destroy ISIS.

But then he said this about their leadership.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our country.

You have a force of 30,000 or so people. Nobody really knows, but probably 30,000 people. And I can just see the great, as an example, General George Patton spinning in his grave.

(END VIDEO CLIP) [15:25:02]

BALDWIN: Jack, you have served in these places. Do you think the generals, our generals, have been reduced to rubble?

MURPHY: Well, I think there is some truth to the statement that Donald Trump was making. Our generals are inherently political animals and become more politically correct as they rise up through the ranks.

But this isn't something unique to the Obama administration or any administration. I think it is a common theme that's been happening at least since the end of World War II.

BALDWIN: What about Gary Johnson and his -- we just played the clip a second ago. The Libertarian nominee for president, who's polling at like 10 percent in Pennsylvania, when a lot of Americans are listening to Clinton and Trump, they're sort of turning to him and he says this morning, what's Aleppo?

MURPHY: Yes. Yes. That was definitely an unfortunate misstatement. And Gary Johnson admitted that he was wrong, and that he made a mistake, which I think was big of him.

But we also have to keep in mind we have two presidential candidates here, in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who are advocating war against countries who have never attacked America. So I am a little bit confused of why we are so fixated on this one gaffe that Gary Johnson made, as opposed to focusing on some of the completely insane statements that these other presidential candidates make on a daily basis.

BALDWIN: OK. OK. That's a fair criticism.

What about Osama bin Laden? He is brought up so often by Hillary Clinton. She was in the room, in the Situation Room. She talks about how, how she was part of the decision-making. But then you also have Donald Trump, who cited this "Esquire" article from years -- I want to say 2004, when he said even then he said he would have caught Osama bin Laden before anyone else did.

How do you think this is resonating with American voters?

MURPHY: I was actually at that event last night, and I thought the statements both of them were making about bin Laden were frankly hilarious.

History said that we're going to focus on al-Baghdadi as a part of our counterterror strategy against ISIS, the way we focused on Osama bin Laden. But history has shown us that killing bin Laden did not eliminate al Qaeda. We still have this very real problem in Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan and also in Syria.

I'm not sure where these grand strategic visions are coming from. We need a more holistic counterterrorism policy, and I don't think either of these candidates have really vectored in on that. BALDWIN: Jack Murphy, great to have you back on. As always, thank

you so much for your service to this country.

MURPHY: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Coming up next, talking about that forum last night, Matt Lauer, he hosted. He is getting widely criticized today for how he handled both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And now we are hearing from an NBC executive telling CNN even Lauer's own network thought it was -- quote, unquote -- "a disaster."

We will talk about that and how that might change the first debate.

Folks, we are less than three weeks away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)