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President Trump Lashing Out At Biden And At Unions As A War Of Words Erupts On Twitter; President Has Instructed Current And Former Aides Not To Comply With Subpoenas Or Information Requests; ISIS Leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi Appearing For The First Time In Five Years. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired April 29, 2019 - 14:00   ET

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

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Hi there. I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN. Thank you for being with me. In just a couple of hours, Joe Biden will take to the stage in his home state of Pennsylvania in his first official event of his 2020 campaign.

Live pictures from Pittsburgh, Biden is set to make his pitch to the middle class, as the International Association of Firefighters throws its support behind the former Vice President. And that endorsement isn't sitting well with the current occupant of the White House. President Trump is lashing out at Biden and also at unions as a war of words erupts on Twitter.

CNN's Arlette Saenz is on ground for us in Pittsburgh and Arlette, we know that President Trump kicked things off this morning. But the former Vice President certainly isn't backing down. What's going on?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, Joe Biden won't even take the stage here at this Union Hall in Pittsburgh for a few more hours. But you've already seen this back and forth playing out on Twitter between President Trump and the former Vice President. Take a look at a few of those tweets that have come up.

One of the issues that President Trump is highlighting as the fact that the International Association of Firefighters has endorsed Joe Biden today, the first major labor group to get involved in this presidential primary contest. And the President was tweeting, saying that, "The leadership of those unions will always support Democrats even though the membership wants me. Some things never change."

Now, Biden fired back himself in a tweet saying, "I'm sick of this President bad mouthing unions. We need a President who honors them and their work." This back and forth going on between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden comes as we are learning -- our colleagues over at the White House are learning that Trump's political advisers have warned him not to get sucked into a one-on-one fight with any of the top Democrats running for President including Joe Biden.

But since Biden entered this race on Thursday, he has really made his campaign and framed it as a rebuke of President Trump, specifically highlighting those comments that he made after the clashes in Charlottesville. Now today in Pittsburgh, Biden's event is focused on the middle class,

ways that he will strengthen the lives of working class voters. I'm also told he will likely address that shooting at the California synagogue over the weekend, which could give him another chance to press and reiterate that theme of this campaign being a battle for the soul of the country -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: Before we hear from the former Vice President, I want -- take me back to the IAFF, the union endorsement that started this whole spat. This is from the International Association of Firefighters. What happened?

SAENZ: So this morning, the International Association of Firefighters released a video saying that they are going to support Joe Biden in this 2020 contest. Take a listen to what they had to say.

BALDWIN: We don't have, Arlette.

SAENZ: Oh, sorry. Well, they said that Joe Biden is like many of the firefighters and that he is working to address the problems of this country. This is the first major labor group to jump into the 2020 race.

Right now, it's unclear whether other unions are going to be involved with, but President Trump has often tried to appeal to those working class, union type voters. And Joe Biden is also someone who tries to attract from that same crowd. He has long had ties with the labor community saying that they are the ones who "brung him to the dance" is the phrase that he uses.

He is going to be here in Pittsburgh talking to that group, talking to working class voters, as he is trying to make his pitch heading into 2020.

BALDWIN: We will listen for him in the next little bit. For now, Arlette Saenz, thank you so much in Biden Land there in Pittsburgh.

And while President Trump is clearly enjoying taking the fight directly to Joe Biden, sources tells CNN, that's one thing Trump's political advisers have warned him not to do. Arlette hit on this a second ago, but let's go straight to our White House correspondent, Abby Phillip for more of the detail. She is at the White House for us and tell me specifically what folks at the White House have been, I guess, fearing perhaps that Trump might say or tweet.

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, the President is always the person really setting the agenda for his aides and for his staff. But his political aides have been advising him, "Don't elevate Joe Biden any more than he already is."

Biden is of course, the front runner in the Democratic field. He has almost universal name ID in that field. But this is a campaign that wants to run against a Democrat who they can easily label as a socialist, they want to put whoever they go up against in a category as a far-left candidate in the socialist mold, and they're concerned that by the President giving Biden all of this credence so early in the campaign, that they are going to end up at the end of the day with a candidate who was closer to the centrist side, as someone who can actually take the fight to the President in some of the Places where the President needs to remain strong, in places like Pennsylvania, and in the industrial Midwest.

But at the same time, we're also hearing from some aides that this is the President of the United States. He is going to set the agenda. He is going to do what he wants to in this race. And he clearly has decided at this stage that he wants to take the fight to Biden.

[14:05:04] PHILLIP: He doesn't want to give any ground on this, but some aides just simply worry that he is undermining himself here, that they should be spending their time elevating people like Warren and Bernie Sanders who easily fit into the socialist mold, something that they really, really want to run on as they go into 2020.

BALDWIN: Let me ask you also, Abby, just about another member of Trump's inner circle, Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, who said this last February when his name was first mentioned, as a possible replacement to John Kelly, take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICK MULVANEY, ACTING WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: I hear that I'm being considered in the media, at least for replacing the Chief of Staff, and you think that maybe someone would have mentioned it to me. No one's talked to me at all. Not a single time about that job.

JOHN DICKERSON, CBS HOST: How badly do you don't want that job?

MULVANEY: I don't want that job. I love job - jobs that I have now. And more importantly, I think the Chief of Staff is doing a really good job. And most importantly, I think the President thinks he's doing a great job as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: But Abby, you've learned that Mulvaney lobbied hard, right, for this gig. Tell me more.

PHILLIP: He did. Many sources have told us that Mulvaney knew pretty early on that he wanted this Chief of Staff gig, so much so that he actually talked to the President directly about it. And he laid out the way that he told the President that he would lead in this job.

And I think the most important of the points that he pointed out, was that he wanted to leave the President alone, not overly schedule him or structure his time as his predecessors did. And that's actually exactly how our sources are telling us Mulvaney has been running the White House in the last several months since he has been acting Chief of Staff.

And furthermore, you know, in that clip, he says he thinks the Chief of Staff John Kelly is doing a great job. Just in the last week, Mulvaney has been out there strongly criticizing John Kelly, for his leadership as Chief of Staff. Kelly had tried to create more structure around President Trump, tried to put people in the White House in more narrowly defined lanes.

And what Mulvaney has done in addition to criticizing that strategy is do the exact opposite. He has been trying to free up the White House in many ways, freeing up the President, and also getting out of the way of people close to the President like the President's children, Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

So as we've been trying to sort out how is Mulvaney really leading in this role that he wanted so badly in the last year, we found that he's been trying to do what his predecessors didn't do, which is leaving the President to do what he wants to do more often than not, that has led to a lot of criticism, though, from the outside as people say, that's not the job of people working in the White House. They are not just serving a President. They're also serving their country. So that is the criticism of Mulvaney.

But in the meantime, President Trump seems pretty happy with his new acting Chief of Staff. And I think a lot of people in the White House now wonder maybe Mulvaney for that very reason might last and have -- and maintain a stronger relationship than his predecessors, just simply because he's not getting in the President's way as much -- Brooke.

BALDWIN: Seems like the MO or the messaging is just let Trump be Trump. Abby Phillip with the great reporting. Thank you, Abby, very much.

Just down the street up on Capitol Hill, House Democrats are back in Washington today eager to resume their oversight of the Trump administration. There's just one little problem standing in their way, and that is the President himself who has instructed a number of current and former aides, not to comply with subpoenas or information requests, and now the Attorney General Bill Barr may be joining that list.

Barr is set to testify before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees later this week, but he is now threatening to skip the House grilling because Barr doesn't like the format that Chairman Jerry Nadler has established, one that would allow counsels for the committee to ask questions of that Attorney General. So here's what Chairman Nadler thinks of Barr's threat.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JERROLD NADLER (D), NEW YORK: The witness is not going to tell the committee how to conduct its hearing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What does it say if AG Barr doesn't back down on his objection?

NADLER: Then we will have to subpoena him, and we'll have to use whatever means we can to enforce the subpoena.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: CNN Chief Legal Analyst, Jeffrey Toobin is here and so hello, sir.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Hi.

BALDWIN: He is the, you know, top lawyer in the land and why do you think he's so -- there is sort of trepidation over sitting in front of those other lawyers, members of Congress on the House side?

TOOBIN: Because lawyers as opposed to Congressmen know how to ask questions and know how to dig in on in consistencies. And, you know, they do this sort of thing for a living. Congressmen and women, they give speeches for a living. They don't ask questions and they're not very good at it.

Lawyers who appear in court are generally good at it. But the point about all of this is, is it's actually fairly common for counsel, for staff members to ask questions at committee hearings. So it's not like the Democrats here are making some outrageous demand. But --

BALDWIN: But what kind of signal is that going to send if he says no, after all the stonewalling that we've been reporting.

[14:10:05] TOOBIN: I think it would please his boss, the President a great deal. I mean, I think we have to understand the perspective here, which is that the President wants no cooperation of any kind, no oversight. And if Barr winds up backing out of this hearing, I don't think he -- the President -- would be upset. I don't think the President's base would be upset.

And you know, the threat of a subpoena means litigation and time passes. And so --

BALDWIN: Run down the clock.

TOOBIN: Oh, yes, I mean, what we have to remember is the distinction here between being right on the merits, and being able to actually get witnesses in the witness chair. They are very different things.

BALDWIN: Let's talk about another lawyer. I wanted to talk to you about your "New Yorker" piece that just posted earlier this morning because beyond -- and this will be for later, I want to hear about your family vacation to the Grand Canyon and having you know, Michael Cohen yelling at you as you're taking your kid.

TOOBIN: In the backseat.

BALDWIN: You know, you write about -- so it's one week from today that he goes to prison in Otisville --

TOOBIN: Correct.

BALDWIN: And one of the quotes you got, "How come I'm the only one? I didn't work for the campaign. I worked for him. How come I'm the only one is going to prison? I'm not the one that slept with the porn star."

TOOBIN: Well, I mean, you know, one of the things I didn't realize is when you look at what Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to. They are basically four categories of crimes. Two involving campaign contributions, you know, illegal campaign contributions to the Trump campaign. There's bank fraud, which is raising money to give money to Stormy Daniels, there is making a false statement to Congress about the President's relationship with Russia. All of them benefit Trump, not Cohen. I mean, he's going to prison for things he did for Donald Trump.

BALDWIN: He was the fall guy.

TOOBIN: He is convicted -- pleaded guilty to a tax evasion conspiracy. So that is on him. But you can understand why he is so wildly resentful and unhappy for taking the fall for his former boss.

BALDWIN: Sure, but you also point out that members of Congress have asked him for more information and he won't offer anything else up. He said, you know, his words, without knowing what benefit there is now to me.

TOOBIN: Right.

BALDWIN: What would the benefit look like?

TOOBIN: Well, I mean, you know, most -- he made a tremendous miscalculation, when he didn't fully cooperate with the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, because he got no real benefit out of cooperation. So he got a very heavy sentence, he's going to serve three years and in Federal prison, that means you serve 85 percent of the three years, so he's going to go away for a pretty long time. Now, sort of belatedly, he's trying to cooperate, but the train has left.

BALDWIN: The ship has sailed. The train has left the station.

TOOBIN: Yes, indeed, he is, you know, look, he committed these crimes. He is not a terribly sympathetic figure. Many people remember -- I certainly remember, I talk about it in the piece of when he yelled at me and he yelled at a lot of reporters on behalf of Trump -- well, in the big picture, when you think that he alone, of the people around Trump is going to prison for a substantial period of time, you could see why he is grieving.

BALDWIN: A little frustrated.

TOOBIN: Yes, a little unhappy.

BALDWIN: Yes, Jeffrey Toobin, thank you very much.

TOOBIN: Nice to see you, Brooke Baldwin.

BALDWIN: We are following breaking news, ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi appearing for the first time in five years and it just released ISIS video, what the terror leader has to say in this new video. Plus, funeral services will soon get underway for Lori Kaye, the woman who died protecting her Rabbi in the synagogue shooting. Are social media forums fueling the mounting number of attacks on religious groups?

And new numbers from the CDC show measles cases are on the rise. Why some say a "Brady Bunch" episode is helping fuel that increase. You're watching CNN, I'm Brooke Baldwin.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:18:25] BALDWIN: We are following Breaking News this afternoon. ISIS has released a video claiming to be of its leader Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi. He has not been seen on video since 2014. Our Chief International Correspondent, Clarissa Ward is with me now live from London. And so Clarissa it has been five years. What is he saying?

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Brooke. I mean, to be honest, in terms of the substance of the video, in terms of what he actually says, there's very little that is shocking or revealing about this.

Essentially, he concedes that the Caliphate has been destroyed and ISIS in Iraq. He congratulates his followers across the world for all the retaliatory attacks that they have participated in -- revenge attacks. He calls for more of those. And he also says to his followers, "Listen, this is a long battle. This is a war of attrition."

What's interesting, though, Brooke, I think in the broader picture is just the impact for people who support ISIS, a small minority, though it might be of seeing his physical presence on video alive and well.

He does appear to have gained quite a bit of weight, his beard has also changed. It is whiter with henna at the tips. But other than that, he appears to be in fairly good health and of course, the symbolism of that, the fact that notwithstanding this blistering campaign from the U.S. and the coalition that he has somehow survived that he appears to be sitting around, at least pretending to conduct business as usual. That is significant.

The other thing that's significant is the fact that he mentions the Sri Lanka attacks. These took place not long ago at all, just over a week ago.

[14:20:04] WARD: So clearly, at least parts of the video were made recently. And I think he is trying to basically signal what ISIS' tactic is going forward from now on, which is more of these kinds of atrocious, horrendous, seemingly shocking, unexpected attacks all over the world, not in the places that you might predict. He did call for more attacks in France and other countries.

But as for what this really means going forward in terms of how much power he still wields and how much influence, that remains to be determined.

BALDWIN: Clarissa Ward, thank you so much for the update. They are frightening. As the Poway, California community members gather to mourn the woman who died protecting her Rabbi in that synagogue attack over the weekend. There are renewed questions about the role of social media in those attacks. Are online forums giving would-be killers the reassurance they need to carry out these deadly attacks?

And a construction crane plummets to the ground killing for people. The terrifying moments captured there on camera. How safe is that equipment just dangling above us? We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:25:43] BALDWIN: Funeral services will be held today in Southern California for Lori Kaye. She is the brave parishioner who was shot and killed Saturday at a synagogue after she jumped in front of her Rabbi to protect him from the suspected gunman after the Rabbi had been shot in his hand. The shooting happened on the last day of past over in the San Diego suburb of Poway and unfolded exactly six months after that deadly synagogue attack in Pittsburgh.

The 19-year-old suspect is booked on one count of murder and three counts of attempted murder. Investigators say he acted alone.

And friends mourning Lori Kaye's death say her husband who was a physician rushed to that synagogue to help after he had heard that there had been a shooting only to find out the person to whom he was giving CPR was his own wife.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RONEET LEV, FRIEND OF SHOOTING VICTIM LORI KAYE: He did run to the scene when he heard a very loud that's the biggest description I hear about what happened there and how loud the gunfire was. So he was told that we need your help.

Dr. Kaye, he ran to the scene and it was after they put the stickers -- it was later that he saw that it was Lori and he fainted.

RABBI YISROEL GOLDS, SAVED FROM GUNMAN BY SHOOTING VICTIM LORI KAYE: Lori took the bullet for all of us. She died to protect all of us. She didn't deserve to die. She's such a kind, sweet-hearted, just a good human being.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Three other people were injured in the shooting including an eight-year-old girl. They have all been treated and released from the hospital and the mayor in the city of Poway described the suspected shooter as sick and twisted.

Authorities say he posted an open letter to the anonymous message board 8chan before the shooting. He reportedly talked about the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and the massacre in New Zealand.

So what role does social media and these online forums play in these attacks? Charlie Warzel is writer-at-large for "The New York Times" opinion desk and he joins me now.

And Charlie, I read your piece. And so I just -- I wanted to have you on to talk me through it because when you look at that this pattern you pointed out, right, in Sunnyvale, California, the person crashing into Muslims, at Poway targeting Jews, the New Zealand mosques, and of course, we remember Pittsburgh, you know, you say that the pattern is eerie. What is the pattern among these attacks?

CHARLIE WARZEL, WRITER-AT-LARGE, "THE NEW YORK TIMES" OPINION DESK: Well, the pattern is the way in which these shooters or you know, terrorists essentially are using the internet to sort of not only disseminate their ideologies and broadcasts, you know, all these sort of hateful messages, but the way in which a lot of these message boards especially 8chan, which you mentioned earlier, the way that they they've become a theater for these hate crimes. They've become a captive audience for people. And there's this game of one-upsmanship that is going on and it seems to only be increasing each attack.

BALDWIN: To your point about the main link, this theater, you know, you point out that as much as they're meant to terrorize, these attacks also seemed designed to embolden the most unstable members in the online community. You tell me how these people are emboldened? You mentioned the one-upping, and how does this sort of space even exist?

WARZEL: Well, the space exists sort of as an experiment in maximalist free speech on the internet and it started out, you know, with a lot of means, and a lot of, sort of, you know, trolling and more of like a prankster-ish element that, you know, soon evolved into harassment and pushing the bounds of acceptable speech into completely unacceptable territory. And now it has sort of evolved into this other form, which is going through the membrane of the internet into real life, and it exists because this evolution has been somewhat slow, but is now accelerating rapidly.

BALDWIN: You write, "The Internet, it seems, has imprinted itself on modern hate crimes, giving its most unstable residents a theater for unspeakable acts, and an amplification system for an ideology of white supremacy that only recently was relegated to the shadows."

So, Charlie, if these platforms exist for these kinds of people to post and then ultimately in some cases, carry out these attacks, what should be done? What is being done for these platforms to self- regulate?

WARZEL: Well, not a lot is being done at all. In fact 8chan in the past sort of deflected blame, especially for the Poway shooting, in fact, turning it on the quote unquote "fake news" media, which is just you know --

[14:30:10]