White House May Claim Executive Privilege On Documents
BLITZER: The breaking news tonight, the White House is rejecting the House Oversight Committee's demand for security clearance documents, with one White House official telling CNN that the Chairman, Elijah Cummings, is asking for things he's not entitled to get under the law. They include documents pertaining to the president's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, who was reportedly given top-secret security clearance on the orders from the president, despite deep concerns among intelligence officials and the top White House lawyer Let's dig deeper with our correspondents and our analysts. And, Kaitlan Collins, you have been doing a lot of reporting on this, the White House refusing to provide basically any documents to Elijah Cummings and his House Oversight Committee. Is this a sign of what's to come?</s>KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It is. We're going to have this fight play out over the next few years. And it's going to be a fight where Cummings has implied that the next step in this, if the White House did reject that request, which they did today, could be a subpoena. Now, if the White House tries to defy that subpoena, then it is going to be something that ends up in the court. And this is really the overall strategy we're looking at coming from the White House. We reported today that after that trove of requests yesterday of 80 people and entities that they wanted documents from, the White House is ready to push back against that, even though publicly they're saying they're going to cooperate, because they say they feel the right -- the president has a right to confidentiality, and that some of those documents are off-limits, especially the ones pertaining to the president's time in the White House.</s>BLITZER: Jeffrey Toobin, what do you make of this strategy?</s>JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: To paraphrase Charlton Heston, the Democrats are going to have to pry these documents out of their cold dead hands. I mean, this is just not happening. The whole mind-set of Emmet Flood, who is the former Williams & Connolly partner, is that you don't give anything to your adversaries unless you have to. So, as Kaitlan said, the next step is a subpoena. After that is a court fight, then perhaps finding some people in contempt of Congress. They are going to get nothing. I don't think there's going to be tremendous political pressure on the White House to surrender these documents. So I think Democrats ought to not get their hopes up that they're going to see a lot of these documents any time soon.</s>BLITZER: And if there's a court fight, that could drag on for months. Right?</s>TOOBIN: Exactly. And the clock is ticking on the Trump administration. I mean, there are 20 months left or so. And that's to the White House's advantage. I mean, court fights drag on. And they're just not going to get their documents, as far as I can tell.</s>BLITZER: David Swerdlick, there's a new poll out today from Quinnipiac. It shows only 35 percent of Americans support the Democrats launching impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives right now. So are long investigations a smarter political strategy for the Democrats?</s>DAVID SWERDLICK, CNN COMMENTATOR: I think, if safer is smarter, then, yes, it's smarter, because right now Democrats can try and do this sort of drip, drip, drip, where, with each investigation of each different allegation, both in terms of the president's conduct vis-a- vis Russia, or the president's advisers vis-a-vis Russia, or whether it's the investigations in the Southern District of New York, they can continue to drag this out and try to bring down the president that way, vs. the risk of having egg on their faces if they go for impeachment in the House, don't even get it in the House. Or if they get it in the House and can't convict in the Senate, it would give the president an ability to turn the tables that they don't want.</s>BLITZER: Two Democratic members of the House, Sabrina, Ted Lieu and Don Beyer, they have now written to the Justice Department asking for a criminal, criminal investigation into Jared Kushner's security clearance, how he got top-secret security clearances. Their logic is that it's a crime to like on the security clearance application. You think that effort is going anywhere?</s>SABRINA SIDDIQUI, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, "THE GUARDIAN": Well, I think it's highly unlikely that the Justice Department is going to take up this issue. In fact, I reached out to a spokesperson for William Barr. Not surprisingly, no response. We already knew that Jared Kushner had omitted more than 100 foreign contacts on those security clearance forums. And his lawyers argue that those omissions were inadvertent. They included, of course, the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June of 2016, as well as another meeting with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time during the course of the campaign. And Democrats are sort of looking at those omissions in a new light after reports that the president overruled officials and demanded that Kushner be granted a security clearance. But it is going to be difficult to prove that Kushner intentionally lied, especially if they can't get their hands on documents that the White House is going to, of course, as Kaitlan pointed out, use executive privilege to try and withhold. Where it will get interesting, though, is if Democrats subpoena John Kelly, who was the chief of staff at the time, who wrote a contemporaneous memo outlining his concerns over the security clearance process, and whether anything would come out of that potential testimony.</s>BLITZER: Go ahead, Jeffrey. Go ahead.</s>TOOBIN: Well, just for example, the executive privilege does not cover absolutely everything in the White House. It covers advice that the president is giving -- is given. For example, I don't know why a memo that John Kelly wrote about Jared Kushner's security clearance would be covered by executive privilege. That is not a matter of the president getting -- getting unfettered advice from his advisers. So the idea that absolutely everything that goes on in the White House is covered by executive privilege has been rejected by the Supreme Court. And I don't know why Democrats should be intimidated by that, even though the process to get those documents may be very slow.</s>BLITZER: Let me ask you this, Jeffrey. If Kelly, John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, he did write a memo -- if he did write a memo like this, could he hand it over on his own without going through the White House?</s>TOOBIN: Well, that's an interesting question. I assume he would honor. And since he wrote it as White House chief of staff, he would honor the request of the White House counsel. I don't know if he even has the document, if he took it with him when he left the White House. But, I mean, you're pointing to an interesting point there, that as a private citizen, he is in at least a somewhat different position than the people who are still employed at the White House.</s>BLITZER: Yesterday, Kaitlan, the president said he always cooperates, he's going to cooperate with Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. But, today, he and his team, they're sounding an extremely different note.</s>COLLINS: Well, and you saw a very different -- two statements come out of the White House yesterday. First, when they received this first letter, as I said, we've gotten this letter from Chairman Nadler that we're going to interview, and so as the Counsel's Office. That was it, short and simple. Then later on, you got the statement from Sarah Sanders going after -- a blistering statement from Sarah Sanders that essentially ended with the democrats don't want the truth, they just want go after the President. And that was something the President echoed on Twitter today. So, likely, he directed Sarah to put out a statement of that nature going after it. So you're really seeing a different tactic behind the scenes as their preparing for what to do, because they think the democrats have overstepped their boundaries here. They've cast way too far -- too wide of a net, and that they're going to end up failing, because instead of targeting certain lines of inquiry, they're going after everything, and that's not going to help them be successful in the end. So the White House thinks they can fight this successfully.</s>BLITZER: As you know, Jeffrey, the House Intelligence Committee is dramatically beefing up its staff as these investigations unfold. The Chairman, Adam Schiff, he announced five new hires today. You've written an important article about one of the new lead investigators, former Federal Prosecutor Daniel Goldman. He has a background in prosecuting Russian organized crime. Tell our viewers what this all means as far as this House Intelligence Committee investigation unfolds.</s>TOOBIN: Well, remember the division of labor among the committees that is at least holding for now. The turf fights are at least on hold. The Intelligence Committee is very much responsible for the Russia investigation, the investigation of Trump Tower, President Trump, candidate Trump's relationship financially with Russia. This is precisely in Goldman's wheelhouse. I mean this is the kind of thing he investigated when when he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern district of New York. And Adam Schiff has said many times, he is concerned about where President Trump's ultimate loyalties lie. Is he someone who is so fixated on trying to make money in Russia that he put his commercial interests ahead of the national interests? And these former prosecutors seem like the right people to try to find that out, at least that's what they're going to try to do. And we'll see how far they get.</s>BLITZER: Well, it's a pretty impressive staff, David. You've got to admit the new people that are coming in backed up by all the other staffers who are investigating.</s>SWERDLICK: Yes. I mean, clearly, the Mueller team has got the right people in place from the beginning. The question, to Jeffrey's point, is whether or not they will ultimately find something that unravels the whole case, so to speak, or if mostly what we find out from the Mueller report ultimately is along the lines of some of the stuff that we already know.</s>BLITZER: What do you think, Sabrina? Where is this heading?</s>SIDDIQUI: Well, just for the question of the President's business interests, because this is sort of have been his red line. I think that's why this conversation of these negotiations right around a potential Trump Tower in Moscow is, really, at the heart of where the Russian investigation goes, at least in the eyes of democrats in Congress. Because if you was, in fact, as Michael Cohen testified, pursuing this potential deal well into the course of the campaign, at the same time that he was vowing as President to pursue renewed relations between the U.S. and Moscow, it calls into question what was really driving his motivation.</s>TOOBIN: I assume White House officials are nervous about what Michael Cohen will tell the House Intelligence Committee tomorrow when he testifies behind closed doors and what Felix Sater testifies in open session next week.</s>COLLINS: Well, and they're irritated by Michael Cohen. The President has said repeatedly, this is someone who lied in front of Congress before. Why is everyone trusting him now? But the thing that the White House and officials I've talk to you behind the scenes can't deny is Michael Cohen knows a lot about the President. Maybe he is not always truthful. He's certainly not the most reliable person given his history. But he knows a lot about the President, how he ran Trump Organization, about the President's children. So that's the fear for the President. So that's why you saw him so annoyed after Michael Cohen testified while he was in Vietnam meeting with Kim Jong-un, because Michael Cohen is out there essentially laying out all the President's dirty secrets from how he ran his business, whether or not they're illegal, unethical, whatever, he knows a lot about the President.</s>BLITZER: And the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, says, at some point, sooner or rather than later, they are going to release the transcripts of all of the closed door hearings, which will be important reading for all of us. Standby, we have more breaking news coming up. We're learning of yet another investigation into the Trump Organization.