Another Government Shutdown Looms as Border Talks Break Down; Leaked Schedules Show Extent of Trump's 'Executive Time'; Top Generals: 'Tens of Thousands' of ISIS Fighters Remain in Syria & Iraq.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Called to stall. We've got some problems with the Democrats dealing with ICE.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don't want to shut down. There's a very, very clear path to get this done.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We'll take as much money as you can give us. The president is going to build the wall.</s>GOV. RALPH NORTHAM (D), VIRGINIA: I'm not going anywhere. I have learned from this. We're in a unique opportunity now.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have now more than one credible allegation. He has to resign.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I hope that the legislature starts impeachment for all three of these folks.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It is Monday, February 11, 6 a.m. here in New York.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: It's you!</s>CAMEROTA: I'm back.</s>BERMAN: Hi.</s>CAMEROTA: Hi, how are you?</s>BERMAN: I'm so much better now. All the plants were dying. I didn't know how to behave anymore.</s>CAMEROTA: Wow. Well, I'm back, and I have forgotten now how to behave, so this is going to be an interesting show.</s>BERMAN: Fantastic.</s>CAMEROTA: All right. So the possibility of a second government shutdown on Friday is starting to feel very real after bipartisan border talks broke down. Negotiators on both sides thought they were on a path to resolving their outstanding issues, but sources tell CNN there is now a growing concern that lawmakers may not be able to make a deal. The talks have stalled over Democratic demands to limit the number of undocumented immigrants who can be detained. President Trump is laying the blame for this impasse on Democrats.</s>BERMAN: Tonight, the president travels to El Paso, Texas, to make his case where, in a sense, he's going to share the border spotlight with a potential 2020 challenger, Beto O'Rourke. They will hold dueling rallies there. The president has said wildly inaccurate things about El Paso, a relatively safe city before and after a wall was built there. The president falsely claimed that before a wall was built there, crime was rampant. It wasn't. Also new this morning, a fresh leak of the president's private schedules, this time schedules from just last week. And these schedules show that nearly half of his hours were spent in executive time, unstructured stretches where we really don't know what he does. There is now a hunt for the leaker of these schedules, and the White House chief of staff claims they're closing in.</s>CAMEROTA: All right. So joining us now to talk about all this, we have our panel here to discuss this David Gregory, CNN political analyst. We have Margaret Talev, senior White House correspondent at Bloomberg News; and Seung Min Kim, White House reporter at "The Washington Post." Great to have all of you. happy Monday. Seung Min, so tell us what -- what happened over the weekend? There was a feeling that things were going to work, and then on Sunday morning, things broke down.</s>SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, all through the last couple of weeks since this 17-member conference committee began negotiating. There was a lot a optimism that these people could get it done. These are appropriators. They are naturally deal makers. But what sources tell us is that around Saturday evening, the staff members of the top appropriators were talking, and talks really broke down. And they began to go out on Sunday and tell the public what the problem was. And that problem is over the number of people that ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement can detain. Democrats want to cap a daily number of the people that can be detained at 16,500. Now for context purposes, the daily rate right now is about 40,000 people. And Democrats say this is a way of reining in what they call aggressive enforcement tactics by the Trump administration. But Republicans say this is an absolute deal breaker, because by setting the cap so low, they're effectively eliminating ICE's ability to do their job and effectively abolishing</s>ICE BERMAN: Yes, and it's interesting. Because there's a technical distinction. Democrats want to cap the number of beds used to detain people caught in the interior. This isn't people crossing the border. This is people that ICE goes and gets who are already here. And the Democrats say by capping the number, it will force ICE to go after people who have committed crimes here, violent crimes and whatnot, not just border crossings. But that's a complicated argument to make, David, at this point, and it's distinctly, for people who haven't been paying close attention, not about a border wall.</s>DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It's not about a border wall, but that's also a problem, right, is how much money, ultimately, Democrats are willing to foot for the bill for a border wall. I've talked to top Democrats who thought they were closer to a deal who want to respond to what the demands are by border agents for more reinforcements. And we should remember, there's lots of border barriers in different spots. Now the Democrats have paid for it. But this ICE issue is something else. Let's remember the context in which this is happening. The whole question of abolishing ICE has become a huge argument point for Democrats who think that they've gone out of control, that the administration is so overly broad in their sweep of illegal immigrants in the U.S. That they want it to be more focused for those in violent records. And for Trump, every day there's a new 2020 candidate opposing him. So he's digging in. They're digging in. It's so easy for ICE to become a central pillar of a presidential argument. And you know, in these negotiations, you always have to wonder. Do they want a deal more than they want the issue? Or do they want the issue more than a deal? And that's what could ultimately destroy this.</s>CAMEROTA: Well, there you go, Margaret. I mean, this is a new variable, right, being introduced by the Democrats. This isn't something that back during the last shutdown, two weeks ago, whenever that was, that we had heard that was an impasse that they were stuck on. And so, you know, in order to avoid whatever might happen this Friday, why introduce this new variable?</s>TALEV: Well, it's new in the context of the last, you know, since the last 35-day shutdown, but it's certainly not new in the context of the overall debate that has been swirling for the last two years since President Trump took office. And, you know, we haven't talked, Alisyn, about the one other thing that, I think, is on everyone's mind, which is whether the president's going to declare a national emergency.</s>BERMAN: Yes.</s>TALEV: Or an executive action of some kind. That is all wrapped up in the same thing. So in the first kind of shutdown, the 35-day shutdown, these two things got interlinked. Right? The continuing operations of the government and the wall debate. These things are probably about to be separated. It's entirely possible -- possible that Republicans and Democrats will agree to just continue spending through the end of the fall and let the president decide whether or not to put trigger on this emergency.</s>BERMAN: And Seung Min, you can help fill in the blanks here, because there is something else happening here; and this time it is from the president's side, where he is sending more troops to the border or near the border. And also, as Margaret was just pointing out, sending all kinds of signals that, no matter what is agreed to by this conference, if in fact, they do reach an agreement, he may still take emergency action that he feels he can take to spend money above that for the border wall. So there are sort of forces on both sides here that are drawing questions about this whole process.</s>MIN: Exactly. I mean, the president hasn't shown that much public faith, or any public faith at all, in the work of this conference committee. I think he signaled, ever since he set out in the Rose Garden a couple weeks ago, and said he would -- he would sign a bill to reopen the government that this was -- this wall is going to get built, one way or the other. And now, with the national emergency declaration very fresh in our minds or potential other executive action, the president really has to be looking at the backlash that a potential national emergency declaration could cause. I mean, certainly among Democrats, who have already said they will explore legal challenges, should he do so, but also among Republicans. I mean, just the way that the procedure is structured in Congress. A resolution of disapproval that can basically negate the emergency declaration could easily pass the Senate, because there's that much Republican opposition to it. Now the president will almost certainly veto that, but it would be a very sharp rebuke of the administration and of the president, should it come to that point.</s>CAMEROTA: I mean, and also, David --</s>GREGORY: Yes.</s>CAMEROTA: -- just the backlash of another government shutdown on Friday.</s>GREGORY: Right.</s>CAMEROTA: After all the -- we've had -- we had so many federal workers on here who talked about the impact on their lives and the pain that it was causing them; and the idea that they are on the cusp of this again.</s>GREGORY: Yes. Look, a government shutdown is just stupid. And I think everybody knows that. And I think Trump got spooked by what happened, not only the potential impact on economic growth, flights being delayed in LaGuardia, but I think Democrats are worried about this, too. I mean, if it happens again, they're going to start to feel some of that weight, as well. So I keep coming back to who, ultimately, wants a deal on this? Because you do have some appropriators who know how to make a deal on these issues. But what's fighting them are their respective bases, who want to fight on this issue, you know? And that's what gets in the way. So we had this -- all this movement toward getting close on a deal, getting close. And this could just be a lot of screaming and yelling before they arrive at some deal, or not. I mean, it's very hard to know with this administration, since we've gotten close to the line before. Maybe we just have to hold out hope for infrastructure week again.</s>BERMAN: Margaret, you wanted to jump in?</s>TALEV: I think -- I think David's exactly right. I think we'll know more in the next couple of days, but if President Trump really wants to have either the emergency declaration that he's been contemplating or some kind of executive action to show that he's the president, he's in charge, he doesn't have to get jammed by Congress, if that's going to happen anyway, there's not that much insensitive for Democrats to go along with concessions they don't want. There's more incentive for them to fight back if the whole thing's going to get blown up anyway. So I think we do see a lot of posturing. And the imagery that we're going to see tonight of these two dueling rallies at the border just increases kind of the argument for how much politics has injected itself in this debate with 800,000 people's jobs on the line and a lot of real-world implications for -- for families and children at the border.</s>BERMAN: It's a great point. More politics will be injected into this over the next 24 hours rather than less, given that there are rallies tonight at the border. And what David was saying, you know, shutdowns are stupid. You sit here being, like, "There's no way they could shut down the government again," but then you remember who we're dealing with here, Democrats and Republicans and members of Congress and politicians, and sure, it could happen again. We shouldn't rule it out. Axios publishing new schedules from last week over four days. Four days' worth of schedules from last week. This is after their giant month of months' worth, year's worth of schedules showing just how much executive time the president has on his daily calendar. The four days last week, 50 percent of his time spent in executive time. Seung Min, what's the issue here? Is it, again, that people are still leaking these schedules? Or is it that the president uses so much executive time or that we don't understand what he's doing during those hours?</s>KIM: There's a couple of issues here. I mean, first of all, the -- how easily these are being leaked to the press should definitely concern White House officials. And senior White House officials, including the acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have indicated they are on the hunt for leakers, that they feel that they are close to finding the perpetrator in this case. But also, it really does give a window to how this president operates. And, you know, these large stretches of executive time with a lot of senators, especially Republican senators I've talked to, they tell me all the time just how frequently he is calling them and how much he is gauging their feedback, their advice on what he should do about this nominee or on this policy. There are meetings that he has held that we have found out after the fact that doesn't ever get advised on his public schedule. So he is doing something here in this, what is structured as executive time. But I also think that, particularly with important meetings, there's an issue of transparency here. I mean, if you look on his public schedule that gets sent out to the press, they can be sparse. But oftentimes, they are -- he's holding meetings with people as powerful as Mitch McConnell. He held a meeting with the Senate majority leader a couple of weeks ago where the leader warned him about the perils of taking steps to declare a national emergency that we did not find out about until three days later. So there's a leak issue, and there's also a transparency issue on the part of the White House.</s>CAMEROTA: We have to wrap, but I'll just read his side. Here's what the president tweeted about it. "The media was able to get my work schedule, something very easy to do. But it should have been reported as a positive not negative. When the term Executive Time is used, I am generally working --"</s>BERMAN: Generally.</s>CAMEROTA: Generally. "Not relaxing," John Berman.</s>BERMAN: Generally.</s>CAMEROTA: "In fact, I probably work more hours than any past president."</s>BERMAN: Generally.</s>CAMEROTA: All right. Thank you all very much. Great to talk to you. So listen to this story. Virginia's top Democrats, as you know, are embroiled in scandals, but can they weather these controversies; and will they remain in office despite them?