Return to Transcripts main page

EARLY START

Travel Ban Headaches; First Charges For Leaking; London Mayor Trump: Stay Home; London Terror Attack Investigation. Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired June 6, 2017 - 05:30   ET

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


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:32:15] (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEBASTIAN GORKA, DEPUTY ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT: It's social media. Please understand the difference.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: I think that you need to have a little bit of an understanding here. When the president says this is what I want, what are you saying? We shouldn't listen to what the president says?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DAVE BRIGGS, CNN ANCHOR: Good stuff. The White House sidetracked after the president repeatedly tweets about a travel ban. Now the agenda overshadowed and the ban's chances of surviving in court are in jeopardy.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump's crackdown on leaks yields its first arrest. A federal contractor is accused of sharing a classified document on Russia's election hacking.

BRIGGS: And, London's mayor renewing calls for President Trump to cancel his state visit to the U.K. More on the growing divide stemming from Saturday's terror attack.

Welcome everybody to EARLY START, I'm Dave Briggs. Jackie Kucinich, David Drucker political analysis in just a few minutes.

ROMANS: Oh, yes. I'm Christine Romans. It is 33 minutes past the hour right now. A White House desperate to focus on policy is being forced to answer for a new tweetstorm from President Trump. The president now hardening his stance on the travel ban despite aides protesting for months that it isn't a travel ban, and he kept it up into the night, posting this after 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time. "That's right. We need a travel ban for certain dangerous countries, not some politically correct term that won't help us protect our people."

BRIGGS: And this comes after a series of earlier tweets where the president slammed his own Justice Department for watering down the original ban -- to make it politically correct. Top aides then scrambled to explain how presidential tweets are not an expression of White House policy. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRINCIPAL DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY: Look, I don't think the president cares what you call it. Whether you call it a ban, whether you call it a restriction. He cares that we call it national security and that we take steps to protect the people of this country. It's real simple.

GORKA: It's not policy.

CUOMO: Of course, it is.

GORKA: It's social media, Chris. It's social media.

CUOMO: It's not social media. It's his words, his thoughts.

GORKA: It's not policy. It's not an executive order. It's social media. Please understand the difference.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, COUNSELOR TO THE PRESIDENT: This obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president --

CRAIG MELVIN, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: No, but that's his preferred method of communication with the American people.

CONWAY: That's not true.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Really, it's his only method of communication with the American people right now.

ROMANS: I know. I haven't -- all this as his administration asks the Supreme Court to let the travel ban go into effect. Lower courts have blocked that ban citing the president's rhetoric as a candidate and as president, online and off.

BRIGGS: And court Justice Department lawyers have bent over backwards to avoid that phrase "travel ban." They've, instead, called it a "temporary pause" or just "the executive order."

ROMANS: All right. A federal contractor with top-secret clearance is the first person to face charges for leaking classified documents under the Trump administration.

BRIGGS: The Justice Department charging Reality Leigh Winner with leaking information to an online media outlet. Sources tell CNN the document that Winner allegedly leaked was the basis for a story Monday published by the "Intercept."

[05:35:10] ROMANS: The article includes details of a 2016 Russian military cyberattack on a U.S. voting software supplier. An internal audit revealed Winner was one of six people who printed that document, but the only person who had email contact with the "Intercept." She is due in court on Thursday. BRIGGS: All right. Let's bring in our political panel this morning, two heavyweights. David Drucker, senior congressional correspondent with the "Washington Examiner" and Jackie Kucinich, Washington bureau chief of "The Daily Beast." Good morning to both of you.

JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning.

BRIGGS: I want to read to you a big of an op-ed -- an opinion piece in "The Wall Street Journal" talking about the president's recent tweetstorm -- the one yesterday, in particular, that blew through the White House. "In 140 character increments, Mr. Trump diminished his own standing by causing a minor international incident, demonstrated that the loyalty he demands of the people who work for him isn't reciprocal, set back his policy goals, wasted time that he could have devoted to health care, tax reform, infrastructure. Mark it all down as" -- here's the most important point -- "evidence that the most effective opponent of the Trump presidency is Donald J. Trump."

David, it's clear that the 35 to 40 percent, they are with this president no matter what he does. What about Republicans on Capitol Hill? You wrote about this yesterday. What could make them abandon their support of this president, or could anything?

DAVID DRUCKER, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, I was going to say, you know, in Washington we just call that Monday. (Laughter) And Tuesday, for that matter. Look, I think that is really the point so what I want people to understand is we get the fact that a lot of what Trump does in terms of his Twitter communications and his fighting with institutions and the media, it's very cathartic for a lot of Americans who feel like they've been ignored and left behind and they think that we just make a bunch of stuff up, and I get that as somebody who wasn't always a reporter.

But if you care about elements of Trump's agenda that include repealing and replacing Obamacare, at least partially. That include infrastructure reform, that include cutting taxes or tax reform, and so on down the line, this kind of behavior is actually going to make it harder for those things to become reality.

Why is that? Because for Republicans on Capitol Hill, not all of whom are in perfectly safe districts, every time you add a layer of political difficulty to their lives it makes it that much harder for them to take tough votes on health care and taxes, which to some Americans may seem like easy votes, but there are a lot of tough choices they have to make about who's going to have health care coverage, and where money is going to go, and how they're going to reform the tax code that are not easy political votes --

ROMANS: No.

DRUCKER: -- looking ahead to 2018 and 2020. And so, if you add this extra layer of difficulty, at some point they might just say I can't take anything else, that's tough, that's going to make my job that much harder. These are human beings that want to keep their jobs just like other Americans. And so that's why what the president is doing is problematic because he's not just doing it here and there, and Jackie and I have talked about this. This is sometimes every couple of days, at least every couple of weeks after he's had a good moment, and that's why it's a problem.

ROMANS: Well, you know, we say he's -- he gets sidetracked. He goes on this -- you know, these Twitterstorms and he gets sidetracked. You heard Seb Gorka there say, no, no, we're sidetracked by him. There is real work being done, Jackie. Which is it? Are we sidetracked by the president's tweets or is the president sidetracking everyone from his own agenda?

KUCINICH: Gosh, Seb Gorka tried his best yesterday but Trump does have a habit of putting his staff in a really terrible position. You almost feel like they're being pushed out there as tribute when they have to answer for some of the things that he does. David's absolutely right. At the end of the day when these members of Congress go home and they're getting yelled at by constituents because it doesn't look like anything is getting done in Washington, it's because nothing is getting done in Washington right now. There's no tax bill. There's no health care bill in the Senate to speak of.

ROMANS: You have a Republican president, you have --

KUCINICH: Yes.

ROMANS: You have a Republican Congress, so --

KUCINICH: They have every opportunity to do this and when you -- when you see these members at their town halls not being able to answer the question without saying, you know, this president is making it harder for us to do their job when they've been promising for years and years that Obama was the problem and was the person who was standing in the way, or Harry Reid, who was the majority leader of the Senate, that's who was standing in the way of them getting everything they've ever wanted, that's not the case anymore. They control everything. There are no excuses at this point.

BRIGGS: And on Monday we had a press conference about veterans' affairs. We had the privatizing of the air traffic control. But the president, David, was solely focused on this -- in his words, not ours -- travel ban. Several tweets throughout the day and the coup de grace came late at night. "That's right. We need a travel ban for certain dangerous countries, not some politically correct term that won't help us protect our people." Is he undercutting his own travel ban in this case -- his own signature executive order?

[05:40:05] DRUCKER: Well look, he may be undercutting it legally and George Conway, Kellyanne Conway's husband and who is a very accomplished lawyer and considered for a post in the Trump administration a while back, spoke to that on Twitter.

However, what's interesting to me about this is that the president campaigned on this. It was the first thing he tried to do once he took office and part of the selling point -- and a lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill agreed with the broad policy, just not how Trump chose to go about it -- was we need to slow things down. We need to revamp our vetting procedures because there are people from parts of the world where we can't properly and normally vet because it's not possible to gain access to the information. And after we have put these procedures into place we are going to be able to smooth things out again and this ban or whatever he wanted to call it won't last forever.

Well, we're four months into his administration so either they've done nothing to fix the problem and still need the ban because they need time to fix the problem, or they've done a lot. And I think the question we can ask is so what have you done and based on that, why is this ban that you started with four months still so necessary? There may be an answer to that question, but this argument the president's having --

ROMANS: Right.

DRUCKER: -- is totally beside the point.

ROMANS: Jackie, let me ask you. He's having an argument about the travel ban, he's having an argument with the mayor of London, he's having an argument with the media. I mean, he's arguing with everybody. Does that play to his base? I mean, how does that benefit him as the leader of the free world -- as the leader of the "me" world, as it seems like this week?

KUCINICH: It seems like there's nothing he can do that his base won't love. To them, it's looking like he's shaking up Washington. He's afflicting the people that they think were comfortable and that's why he was sent to Washington. Here's the thing. When it comes down to Election Day and no one's lives are better or they don't feel like -- Obama talked about the economy and how it was improving constantly. Well, when the people didn't feel it that's, you know, one of the reasons Republicans control everything now.

If people aren't feeling that Trump is making their lives better they're going to change. Elections do have consequences and these things swing back and he has to be -- and these series of special elections that Republicans are pointing to, saying you know, we're fine, they're all Republican seats --

ROMANS: Right.

KUCINICH: -- so it's going to be a different ballgame come 2018. It's a long time away. Maybe they'll right the course, but right now it's not looking good.

ROMANS: Jackie Kucinich, David Drucker, nice to see both of you guys this morning, on Tuesday morning. Washington, it's Tuesday.

DRUCKER: Thank you.

BRIGGS: Thank you both.

ROMANS: Thanks, guys.

BRIGGS: All right. The mayor of London wants no part of President Trump's state visit to the U.K. Why Sadiq Khan is renewing calls to cancel the president's trip. We're live from London, next on EARLY START.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:47:00] ROMANS: Britain's top diplomat pushing back against a call from London's mayor to cancel President Trump's state visit. The foreign minister, Boris Johnson, says he sees no reason to change the invitation. This comes after London Mayor Sadiq Khan renewed his calls for President Trump to just stay home.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SADIQ KHAN, MAYOR OF LONDON: I don't think we should roll out the red carpet to the President of the USA and the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for. I think one of the things when you have a special relationship is not different -- no different to when you've got a close mate. You stand with them in times of adversity but you call them out when they're wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: The first Muslim mayor of a major western capital, Trump has repeatedly criticized Khan on Twitter for his handling of the London terror attack. Meantime, we're learning more about the men behind that attack. Two of the three attackers have now been publicly identified. We know police decided to back off an investigation of one of the attackers back in 2015. CNN's Samuel Burke live at Scotland Yard in London. Good morning, Samuel.

SAMUEL BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Dave and Christine. In fact, we've just had confirmation that that 2015 investigation into one of the attackers was actually downgraded by U.K. authorities. Let's just put up the photos of the two attackers who have been named publicly so you can understand clearly who we're talking about. On the right-hand side, you have Rachid Redouane, 30 years old and claimed to be of Moroccan and Libyan origin. He's the man on the right that you're seeing. And on the left, you have Khuram Shazad Butt, 27 years old, a British citizen born in Pakistan, and that was the man who was on the radar of both the police and the equivalent of the FBI here in the U.K., MI5.

And on top of that, we've actually seen him in a documentary that was broadcast nationwide here called "The Jihadist Next Door." (Video playing) You see images of this man that were broadcast where he takes out a flag in one of the best-known parts in London, and it's a flag that looks awfully similar to the ISIS flag, though it's not the exact ISIS flag.

Now, Dave, you were just talking a few seconds ago about Boris Johnson -- what he was saying about Donald Trump visiting. Well, just a few minute ago we had Boris Johnson -- he's the foreign minister of this country -- say on radio that, in fact, he thinks that the intelligence services will have questions to answer -- serious questions. How could this guy have been in a documentary and then this investigation was closed? So a lot of questions into what type of resources the police and counterterrorist intelligence have here and how those resources are being used. ROMANS: You have that documentary, "The Jihadist Next Door." Remarkable.

BRIGGS: Hard to imagine.

ROMANS: All right, Samuel Burke. Nice to see you, Samuel. Thank you.

Apple unveiling a new home speaker to compete with Amazon. How are the devices different? CNN Money Stream, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:54:03] ROMANS: The U.S. trying to diffuse a growing diplomatic crisis in the Persian Gulf after neighboring countries cut off ties with Qatar. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates among the nations accusing Qatar of supporting terrorist groups. The Qatari government rejects the terror claim, calling the measures unjustified.

BRIGGS: A country strategically important for the United States and a diplomatic feud like this could impact efforts to fight ISIS and counter Iran. CNN's Ian Lee following the developments for us. He joins us live from Istanbul. Good morning to you, Ian. There is some sentiment that the president's trip abroad had some impact on this. Is there any merit to it, the theory that they emboldened the Saudis?

IAN LEE, CNN REPORTER: Good morning, Dave. That is one of the running theories right now, that President Trump's visit last month emboldened the Saudis. But with this latest development there is some concern that this could affect the war against ISIS, especially since Doha, Qatar is home to the Al Udeid Air Base which is the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Thousands of troops there. Some airstrikes take off from there against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Also, you have the combined air operation command which coordinates the airstrikes and air power over Iraq and Syria.

[05:55:18] And this comes as the battle for Mosul looks about to be wrapping up. They're on the verge of liberating the entire city. And you also have Raqqa in neighboring Syria, which is the de facto capital of ISIS. That operation is about to begin. You know, this crisis has been brewing for quite some time, Dave, but it really came to head over the past few days with these countries accusing Qatar of supporting terror like ISIS and al Qaeda. Qatar denies it. The United States, though, says that they are going to work with all the countries involved to try to resolve this diplomatic crisis, Dave.

BRIGGS: And much further down the road, the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, as well. Ian Lee, thank you.

ROMANS: All right, let's get a check on CNN Money Stream this Tuesday morning for you. Global stocks and futures are down after Wall Street started the week lower. Stocks are not from all-time highs though, thanks largely to techs' breakout year. One-third of the gains for the S&P 500 are from these five tech stocks. In fact, Google parent Alphabet hit $1,000 a share just a week after Amazon did the same thing.

But Apple fell one percent after releasing several new products at its annual Developers Conference. And at that conference, Apple unveiled its answer to the Amazon Echo, called HomePod. It's a seven-inch-tall speaker that works as a home assistant. It uses Siri to play music, check the news, and control other connected devices. We are told it will not babysit your children. The product has supposedly been in the works for years. It seems inspired by existing smart speakers from Amazon and Google. The difference, Apple's version costs about $200 more. Apple says that's because of better sound quality. I know --

BRIGGS: It won't babysit them but it will entertain them.

ROMANS: I know, I know.

BRIGGS: I can always yell, "Alexa, play "Hamilton" all day long -- that's it.

ROMANS: Do they really?

BRIGGS: That's it, that's all we hear.

ROMANS: Oh, that's cool -- that's cool. All right, thanks for joining us. I'm Christine Romans.

BRIGGS: I'm Dave Briggs. Cuomo, Camerota right now on "NEW DAY." We'll see you tomorrow.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This young lady is in trouble. They're sending a clear message to leakers here.

BRIGGS: The leaker of a classified NSA memo now facing charges.

REP. JASON CHAFFETZ, (R) UTAH: Just because you see something that is classified, you can't just hand that out like it's candy.

HUCKABEE SANDERS: President Trump will not assert executive privilege regarding James Comey's testimony.

SEN. RICHARD BURR, (R) NORTH CAROLINA, SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: I haven't gotten any indication that he is constrained in any way, shape or form as a public citizen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president's made that clear. It is a travel ban.

GORKA: One hundred characters is not policy, it's social media.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president could be more disciplined about staying on his agenda.

KHAN: I certainly don't have time to respond to tweets from Donald Trump. There are many things about which Donald Trump is wrong. (END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It's Tuesday, June 6th, 6:00 here in New York.

And we begin with several major developments on the starting line. The Justice Department charging an NSA contractor with leaking a classified report on Russia's election interference to an online news outlet. This is the first arrest in President Trump's crackdown on leakers. The White House says President Trump also will not invoke executive privilege to block fired FBI director James Comey from testifying before the Senate on Thursday in what is the most anticipated congressional testimony in decades.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump has blown away all the spin around his executive order on travel. In a series of statements on Twitter, the president said it is a ban and that he wants the original version of the ban that target Muslims as courts and common sense indicate. And, the White House is defending other tweets by the president, picking a fight with London's mayor after the attacks. Now, London's mayor says Britain should refuse to roll out the red carpet to Mr. Trump. There is no indication that a state visit would be denied. We have it all covered.

Let's begin with CNN justice reporter Laura Jarrett, live in Washington -- Laura.

LAURA JARRETT, CNN JUSTICE REPORTER: Chris, the Justice Department is making good on President Trump's pledge to crack down on leakers, announcing its first criminal case against a 25-year-old named Reality Winner, a federal contractor who prosecutors say admitted to mailing classified intelligence information to a news outlet. These charges came about an hour after the "Intercept" published a story about a classified report from the National Security Agency that it received from an anonymous source, and sources confirm to CNN that the document Winner allegedly leaked is the same one detailed in the "Intercept's" article.

Now, this document at issue describes an attempted cyber hack by Russian military intelligence on a U.S. voting supply software supplier last year, and while there's no evidence that any votes were affected by the hack, the document does provide new details into potential vulnerabilities in voting systems.