Reporting Indicates Ivanka Trump Used Private Emails for Government Business; Judge Strikes Down President Trump's Executive Order on Immigrants Seeking Asylum.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: -- of the rules, which does beg the question, how could someone who was alive in 2016 and someone who likely heard the chants of "lock her up" not be aware of the rules surrounding e-mails? For more on that let's bring in Josh Dawsey, "Washington Post" reporter, part of the team that first broke this story overnight. Josh, thanks for being with us. How many e-mails are we talking about? And about what exactly?</s>JOSH DAWSEY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: So we're talking about hundreds of e-mails, John, to cabinet officials, to West Wing aides, to others in the government about business, about initiatives, about scheduling issues on her private e-mail for many months in 2017. Eventually, as you said in the lead-in, that was curbed when White House Counsel's office, others in the White House grew troubled about the number of e- mails that she was sending and had a conversation with her. Initially she pleaded ignorance, that she did not know the rules that she was not allowed to use personal emails for government business, and was rebuked. Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, and his spokesman say that she has since stopped doing that and it is no longer a problem, and we're still continuing to look into the issue.</s>BERMAN: Your story cites White House sources as being surprised her excuse was she didn't know the rules. And we had Marc Short, who was the director of legislative affairs a short while ago, and he said that everyone should have known the rules coming in.</s>DAWSEY: Right. Well, there was a campaign where the central chant, as you mentioned, was "lock her up" about Hillary Clinton's careless use of e-mails. And there were a few differences here between Ivanka Trump and Hillary Clinton's e-mails, to be fair. Hillary Clinton sent a lot more. There was a private server in her basement. Some of hers had classified material. Defenders of Ivanka Trump would certainly say that the scope of what Hillary Clinton did was far worse. That said, as Marc Short said on television, a lot of her critics are seizing on this as rank hypocrisy after the 2016 campaign that was and the criticism that her father gave toward Hillary Clinton.</s>BERMAN: And some of the e-mails were scheduling, forwarding on to some of her own personal staff. But some of the e-mails apparently were exchanges with cabinet secretaries, correct?</s>DAWSEY: Right, which is also an interesting role for her to play in the government. You have the daughter of the president, the senior adviser role, for the first few months she wasn't even official in the government and she was e-mailing cabinet secretaries and giving input, advice, getting involved. Then she became an unpaid adviser, obviously, in the government, and was mainly given more. So there were lots of exchanges between her and Linda McMahon at small business services, Treasury Department officials, folks who can go across a vast apparatus of the government were getting correspondence from Ivanka Trump's personal email account.</s>BERMAN: And there are plenty of differences between the Ivanka Trump situation and the Hillary Clinton situation, but one similarity is the role of the private attorney here. In this case, Abbe Lowell, a well- known attorney, he is the one, or his office is the one that went through the e-mails and chose which ones should be considered personal and which ones should be considered government e-mail. I remember during the campaign that Republicans had a big problem with the fact it was Hillary Clinton's own e-mails which sort of filtered the process.</s>DAWSEY: As you said, Abbe Lowell is one of the most respected white collar attorneys in D.C. And he actually came in an filtered the emails. And why that drew criticism is because is it really up to her private attorney to decide which e-mails should be analyzed and preserved or not? Should a White House official not be involved in that? What her defenders say, John, is that there are lots of personal e- mail in her correspondence, maybe some private things, maybe things that are not related to the White House and are sensitive, and she needed someone who she could trust and who had client-attorney privilege to do that. But certainly, it did draw criticism because he's not representing the White House. He's not representing the government. He's representing the taxpayers. He's representing Ivanka Trump.</s>BERMAN: So Josh, I always read your articles very, very carefully because they are so rich. But one of the things I was trying to detect inside this article was whether or not there were people inside or close to the administration being critical of Ivanka Trump. In other words, whether there was a feeling that the daughter of the president, who is an assistant to the president, is operating under a different set of rules.</s>DAWSEY: I think that's fair to say, that there are a lot of former and current officials who would be concerned about her e-mail use. As we quoted in the story, one former U.S. senior government official said to us she was the worst offender in the White House. There certainly was real frustration when advisers to the president approached her and said, hey, this isn't OK, and she kind of pleaded ignorance. It was a sense of, how could she be ignorant of these e- mail rules? We just ran a campaign on this.</s>BERMAN: Josh Dawsey, scoop machine, let me also ask you about another story you wrote overnight, which gets to the idea is president is said to be planning at some point soon perhaps, a trip to the war zone, whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan, which he has resisted to this point. And in your article you note one of the reasons he's resisted is because he had opposed to different extents the military action in those two countries. And you quoted a senior official who said he was afraid to go.</s>DAWSEY: Right. Well, there's several reasons he hasn't gone. He has told White House aides, John Kelly, Mattis, the defense secretary, others that he just detests both the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. He thinks these are horrible mistakes. He doesn't want his name associated with them. He doesn't want to be there. He's also expressed some safety concerns, John, and some frustrations with the long flight that it would take overseas. This is a president in the first two years who has not gone into a war zone. You know, George W. Bush did it. Barack Obama did it. Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, really presidents for decades and decades have typically gone in when active duty service members are overseas, often around the holidays, often around Thanksgiving. You remember George W. Bush going in 2003 and served turkey during the first year of the war. It's typically done. This president has not done it and has not shown much interest in doing it. We talked to a number of officials in the White House who said in recent days, when there's been more criticism of him skipping the ceremony in Paris, not going to Arlington National Cemetery for Veterans Day, for his fight in the last couple of days with a Navy Seal in the Usama bin Laden raid, there's been more and more sense that he needs to do this two years into the presidency, and we'll see if he actually follows through or not.</s>BERMAN: Josh Dawsey, great reporting on several fronts. Thanks so much for being with us.</s>DAWSEY: Thanks for having me.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us now to discuss the overnight court ruling and so much more, we have Jeffrey Toobin, we have "Politico's" Rachael Bade, and Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group and the editor at large of "Time." Great to have all of you here in studio with us for this conversation. Jeffrey, let's start with the federal judge knocking down President Trump's executive order. Here's what the judge said about asylum seekers. "The rule barring asylum for immigrants who enter the country outside of port of entry irreconcilably conflicts with the immigration and naturalization act and the express intent of Congress. Whatever the scope of the president's authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden." Why does the president keep getting executive orders wrong? If he believes that the border is being overrun, as he has convinced his supporters, and they do feel that way, why aren't there people around the president who can have an executive order written that passes muster if he wants to change something?</s>JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: One principle that all presidents run up against is what is the scope of presidential authority, and it's not necessarily clear in every case. And they always want to push it as much as possible. Here, obviously immigration is a tremendous priority of his. He has not been able to persuade Congress to change the immigration laws, so he's trying to use his power under the law to the maximum extent possible. He failed in the first two versions of the Muslim ban. He succeeded on the third version. He failed here, at least so far. And it's just indicative of his priorities as president to crack down on immigrants in various different ways, but that presses up against his authority that at some point Congress's laws are always going to Trump presidential authority.</s>BERMAN: It's not that I don't think he wanted the executive order to not go through. I think he wanted the executive order to be enforced. However, Ian, I also don't think he minds the fight here. He doesn't mind battling with the courts over this. He doesn't mind highlights the fact that Congress hasn't taken action here on this.</s>IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT, EURASIA GROUP: Sure. We do need to recognize that even know president Trump has authoritarian impulses, he's governing in a democratic state. And he was enormously constrained domestically even when the Republicans ran the table in Congress. Now that the Democrats actually control the House, divided president is not meant to empower a president. It is meant to stop things from happening. So as a consequences, if you want to see where Trump really matters, it is on the international stage where the stroke of a pen really does lead to military action or pulling out of an international agreement. Domestically, what he can do is posture. He can posture significantly on a bunch of issues that matter politically to his base. Immigration has clearly been one of the most significant examples of that.</s>CAMEROTA: And so let's just talk about, Rachael, for a second, where the so-called caravan really is. Let's give our viewers an update, because things have happened. So now 3,000 migrants have reached the border. They are in Mexicali applying for asylum. And 2,200 have reached Tijuana at the border. They are going to apply for asylum. And they want to make it into the U.S. What Marc Short, former legislation director of the White House, just told us is that in the past 10 years, according to him, the asylum application for 5,000, he said in the past year, it's 100,000. So a 20-fold advance growth. So Congress does have to deal with this. So the president can keep passing executive orders that get shot down. Is there any appetite in Congress after the midterms and after all the hue and cry about the caravan to deal with this?</s>RACHAEL BADE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: The caravan, not per se, and even the president has brought troops home. There was a story posting overnight that he was bringing military people from there.</s>CAMEROTA: In "Politico."</s>BADE: Yes, exactly, in our publication. And I think that stands to show that the whole caravan issue was very political for him. We talk about the asylum ban that he instituted. That might have been signed after the election. But that was actually set in motion before the election. So again political, he's trying to rev up the base and trying to get Republicans out to vote. But when it comes to Congress, they have been talking about immigration reform for years, at least since I've been up there, and they have never been able to do anything. If it's something bipartisan, the conservatives strike it down. If it doesn't go far enough for Democrats, they are not going to just give the president his wall. There is a deadline, though. There's one other thing we should mention, and that is the government runs out of money for Homeland Security on December 7th. And the president has said, as we explained this weekend, that now is the time for a shutdown. And GOP leaders have promised him after the election we will give you that fight. So we'll have to see. It is going to be a game of chicken. Will Democrats give him $5 billion of wall money that he's talking about right now. He's probably going to ask for more changes to asylum, all these other immigration policies. But again, I'm just very skeptical that we're going to see anything.</s>TOOBIN: But remember, it's worth remembering that asylum is different from economic migrants. You are not allowed to come to this country just because you want a better life. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, but the law is -- but asylum is for people who have a well- founded fear of persecution.</s>CAMEROTA: But the president has conflated them, because what he says, and this may be true, is that the 5,000 people who are now waiting at the border use asylum, though they are really escaping abject poverty, they use asylum, and he claims it overwhelms the system.</s>TOOBIN: The numbers are not that different from what they have been. The numbers of people who are being admitted into this country are not that different. So I don't think the system is necessarily overwhelmed.</s>BERMAN: It is what types of people and how they are coming here that's different. There are more people seeking asylum. There aren't more people necessarily historically crossing the border, and you can argue which is a bigger tax on the system or not. Ian, to you, you are among the people who felt that Hillary Clinton's e-mails was an issue that was being blown out of proportion during the campaign. Now you think Ivanka Trump's e-mails, you think it is a giant deal and they should hold weeks and weeks of hearing on Capitol Hill.</s>BREMMER: Absolutely, because it is Ivanka, so it's the other side. That's the whole point, right, is that we know that the reason that Hillary was seen as vulnerable on this issue is because of the sense that when it comes to the Clintons, the rules don't apply to them. They are somehow, whether it is about Monica Lewinsky or whether it's about the e-mails or it's about the foundation, somehow they're going to lawyer up and they're going to have the inside track. Now, to be clear, President Trump's entire administration is about the rules not applying to them, whether it's about conflicts of interest in the Trump Organization and the ability to work inside while you're also making money on the back of your brand. And while I think objectively what we're talking about with Ivanka, there is no implication that we're talking about classified e-mails that were handed out. She was not serving as secretary of state at the time. She probably would have reason to not pay as much attention to the rules as someone who had been a senator and secretary of state and wife of the president, all of these things. And, yet, the staggering hypocrisy on this issue is of course going to bring out the Democrats like nobody's business. And yet we also know that it's kind of non- issue.</s>BADE: I would say that I wouldn't think House Democrats are going to go after this in a way that perhaps Republicans went after Clinton for this issue. And the reason is there is already talk about what are they going to prioritize next year in terms of investigations. Clearly Russia, obstruction of justice, or potential obstruction of justice. There's a number of policies that they're going to go after, potential hush money payments. That is what they're going to focus on next year. And I know there has been even a debate about whether they should even look at Brett Kavanaugh. Should they look at him for potential perjury when he testified before Congress. That was something some Democrats were talking about doing. And they're being told, let's not go that far. We don't want to overreach. This, I think, some Democrats will argue, including probably all the way up in House Democratic leadership, that this is not a key priority for them, I would suspect.</s>CAMEROTA: And yet, oh, to be a fly on the wall in Hillary Clinton's house this morning.</s>BADE: Right.</s>CAMEROTA: I mean, the staggering hypocrisy as Ian just said, as Marc Short has called it hypocritical, as Anthony Scaramucci has called it hypocritical. So the next time we hear "lock her up" chants at a Trump rally, which we will --</s>TOOBIN: Who will they be talking about?</s>BADE: Crooked Ivanka.</s>TOOBIN: Crooked Ivanka, no. I mean, it also underlines what a bogus issue the e-mails were from the beginning. And it chose the Trump's don't even care about the e-mails because they recognize that people mix their personal and their business e-mails. They probably shouldn't do it, but they did it any way. Hillary Clinton did it. Ivanka Trump did it. Jared Kushner did it. And it's not that big a deal. It was turned into a big deal in the 2016 campaign.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: It possibly settled her campaign for presidential --</s>TOOBIN: I don't think there is any doubt that it was a major, major factor in her loss. And that is what makes this so maddening, that, you know, we all know it's sort of bogus. You know, I said this before. I spent time as a journalist talking about e-mails in 2016, and I think I spent too much time on it.</s>TOOBIN: I think it's important that we take some responsibility for our behavior.</s>CAMEROTA: We all feel some culpability. Certainly, if we're going to turn away tomorrow and not cover Ivanka, because we all think feel some culpability. But I'm sure that is cold comfort this morning for Hillary Clinton.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Ian, you wanted in?</s>IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT OF EURASIA GROUP: I was going to say you are turn on the caravan and turn off the caravan on a dime after the elections are over for midterms. The thing that was interesting here, they didn't turn off Hillary Clinton and the e-mails. They just kept playing it over and over, despite the fact they won the election two years ago. So, maybe they'll play a little --</s>BERMAN: I think that's the interesting thing. I think it will be if the Republicans continue to try to use it or they realize the loss of it.</s>BREMMER: And that's why it's hard for the Democrats to let this go.</s>BADE: No, I think they will seek out against --</s>BREMMER: I think it will be hard for them to do.</s>BERMAN: Jeff, Rachael, Ian, great to have you here.</s>CAMEROTA: Thank you, guys.</s>BERMAN: Thank you very much. Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Democrats found a path to take back the House, but will the lessons learned the midterms lead to votes in 270 electoral votes in 2020? Harry Enten breaks down the numbers, next.