Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is Interviewed About Trump Impeachment Probe
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.</s>ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning, everyone. Welcome to your New Day. It is Friday, November, 1st, 8:00 now in the east. John Berman is off. John Avlon joins me. Great to have you here. Happy Friday.</s>JOHN AVLON, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Happy Friday.</s>CAMEROTA: The impeachment inquiry into President Trump enters a new phase with public hearings beginning soon. This historic House vote to initiate impeachment proceedings passed largely along party lines. President Trump is defiant in an interview with the "Washington Examiner," saying he will not cooperate with this impeachment probe, and again insisting that his conversation with Ukraine's president was, quote, a good call. The president even suggesting that he may do a dramatic reading of the transcript. He's clearly been watching our show since we like those.</s>CAMEROTA: He wants to do a live televised fireside chat a la</s>FDR. AVLON: Meantime, the impeachment investigation continues full steam ahead with a full slate of depositions scheduled for next week. Witnesses include some key names, including central figures in the whistleblower complaint and current White House officials. It's unclear, though, how many, if any, will actually appear or be blocked by the White House.</s>CAMEROTA: Joining us now, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, CNN political commentator Joe Lockhart -- he was President Clinton's press secretary -- and CNN political analyst Rachael Bade, she's "The Washington Post" congressional reporter. Great to have all of you. Joe, yesterday it was historic. It's only the fourth time, obviously, in American history. Nancy Pelosi and others have said it was a somber day. Nobody goes into Congress to impeach a president. Something has gone wrong if that's what's happening. That's one side. Then we just had Matt Schlapp, a big champion of the president, big supporter, who said it was a good day for Republicans because none broke on this vote. It was not bipartisan. No Republicans voted to begin the impeachment inquiry. And the polls show in battleground states they are very good for the president. So was it a good day for Democrats or Republicans or neither?</s>JOE LOCKHART, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: It's indicative of how perverse the political conversation goes that when a president is -- takes a step towards impeachment, his supporters say it's a good day. But having said that, I think we can overread the importance of yesterday's vote. It was a procedural vote. It was about the process. Republicans have a legitimate complaint that they're not even -- the power is not even in setting the rules. So in some sense, in one sense it was easy for them to say we don't like this process. We're voting no. It's much harder when they start dealing with the underlying actions, the corruption, the abuse of power. I think that's a much tougher vote for Republicans.</s>CAMEROTA: The next vote will be harder.</s>LOCKHART: Whether they move on the articles of impeachment, yes.</s>AVLON: And that is really the key question, the voting counting, this partisan divide. Rachael, you've done some phenomenal reporting for "The Washington Post" on this. Nancy Pelosi had set out a bar saying that some degree of bipartisanship was key to her moving forward. It was something Stephen Colbert called her on that last night. We've got tape of that.</s>STEPHEN COLBERT, HOST, "THE LATE SHOW": Back in March you said you would go forward if it was bipartisan. Kevin McCarthy said why, what's changed.</s>REP. NANCY PELOSI, (D-CA): I didn't say I would go forward if it's bipartisan. I said I would hope that it would be bipartisan. But if they're not going to honor their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, I cannot be held up by that, whether it's in the House or in the Senate.</s>AVLON: Rachel, 18 Republicans are retiring. Many of them have been critics about Donald Trump, certainly in private if not in public. What stopped them from crossing the lines yesterday?</s>RACHAEL BADE, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: They're getting pressure right now, not just from the White House, White House legislative affairs, they've been making call to a lot of moderate members, GOP leaders, ever since Pelosi announced this vote. They were meeting with them to try to keep them on board. And it's particularly interesting because there are retiring Republicans like Francis Rooney, a Republican from Florida, who have been in these depositions, and they have said that this testimony is damning, and they are concerned about it. And the fact that he has said this should be investigated but still did not feel the need to even vote for this investigation is significant. And I do think that they are going to face more pressure on the next vote here, and if they're feeling the pressure now, just imagine Trump putting this pressure on them when they're actually voting to impeach him. So if they're not willing to make a stand now to say this should be investigated despite all the damaging information in this testimony we have seen over the past four weeks, I don't know that they're going to break on the actual impeachment question.</s>JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: But isn't this really part of the story of the evolution of the Republican Party? There used to be 10 moderate Republicans in the United States Senate. You had people like Robert Packwood and Mark Hatfield and Chuck Percy and Robert Stafford. They're all gone.</s>AVLON: Going way back.</s>TOOBIN: But they're all gone. You have arguably Susan Collins and that's it. And in the House of Representatives in 1974, when Richard Nixon was under investigation, you had moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives. You had them on the Supreme Court. You had Anthony Kennedy, you had John Paul Stevens. They're all gone. They're gone everywhere. And that's really the story of American politics right now.</s>CAMEROTA: Yes, and so, obviously, as we pointed out, times have changed. We're in a particularly hyper-partisan moment. What I've heard shift, Jeffrey, is that what Republicans had been arguing up until yesterday was the process. This process is all wrong. This process isn't working. There's been no vote, no vote, no vote. Now there's been a vote. So now what I hear them saying was, well, the president didn't do anything wrong anyway.</s>TOOBIN: Well, sort of. Some of them are saying that.</s>CAMEROTA: The most -- that's what the White House is saying. That's what Matt Schlapp just said. There was nothing wrong anyway.</s>TOOBIN: That you haven't heard, I don't think from -- Rachael, you tell me -- I haven't heard that from that many members of Congress defending the president's conduct. The president has said a million times this was a perfect phone call. He said yesterday it was good. He demoted himself, I guess. But the question that I have is how are they going to defend the underlying conduct. What do you hear?</s>BADE: Increasingly, we are hearing people say bad but not impeachable. There's nothing impeachable on this call. It was the process very much for the past few weeks, but I can tell you Senate Republicans had a conversation just about this a couple of days ago. If there is proof of a quid pro quo, what are they going to do? How are they going to defend that? And it seems to be that they're going to make some sort of argument that it wasn't just about the investigation. It was broader than that. He wanted to root out corruption in Ukraine. And so I do think there is going to be a move very quickly over the next couple of days to focus on this call and somehow say that there was nothing unusual but it's not impeachable.</s>AVLON: Follow the talking points. Joe, you have unique historical memory for a presidency in this kind of a position. And you see a lot of Republicans who flipped their position on impeachment, quite notably particularly with regard to obstruction. The White House has said, though, they're not going to form a war room. You all did. The White House has said they're not going to cooperate with congress. My understanding is that you all did. Is this wise? And are they in fact following precedent, or is this a descent to a different arrangement with impeachment?</s>LOCKHART: I'll take the second one first. Is it politically wise not to cooperate? They may be able to run the clock out. So it may be part of a survival strategy. Is it a great strategy to go into the 2020 election having stiffed the Constitution and, in court during an election year, losing these battles? I don't think so. On the war room question, I think it's so different than 1998. The strategy that President Clinton employed was to stay out of it, was to get off the impeachment field, and to tell the American people every day, I'm focused on you, not on me.</s>AVLON: Get back to work.</s>LOCKHART: Trump's strategy is to focus on himself. Everything he does is about how he's a victim, how he's being taken advantage of. And so I don't know that a war room fixes that. And a war room certainly doesn't fix the president's mercurial tweeting and changing his position and changing his strategy. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if the president of the United States wakes up every morning and has a new one, it's --</s>TOOBIN: I covered the story. I was on the opposite side from Joe. And there were like two White Houses. There was the impeachment White House, and that was with Paul Begala and Lanny Davis, and that's all they did. And everyone else had absolutely nothing to do with it. And Bill Clinton from the day that the story broke, he said I'm going to go back to work for the American people. He never talked about it. And that was -- but Donald Trump is incapable of doing that. That's not how he operates.</s>CAMEROTA: No, of course. Obviously, he's taking a totally different tact. But I would just say that in terms of battleground state polls, it's working for him right now. Battleground state polls show that voters there, respondents, don't want the president impeached.</s>TOOBIN: By small margins.</s>BADE: Which direction are they moving right now? The more -- these hearings are going to become public. Right now they're all behind closed doors.</s>CAMEROTA: Yes. If we assume the public wants more information. Who knows?</s>AVLON: But speaking of playing the victim, let's segue to the other top story about Donald Trump today, which is Mr. New York, Donald Trump, now Florida man, officially changing his residency. This is pretty extraordinary. We've never had a president change residencies. This might be done with an eye towards 2020 politics, maybe with an eye towards avoiding taxes, ironic because taxes may have been raised locally because of a bill signed. Rachel, what's the deal with this kind of a move? Is this just about politics and taxes, or is the president right in saying, look, I'm not get any love from New Yorkers, so?</s>BADE: We know this president, he wants good headlines, he wants praise. People know the best way to reach him is to compliment him. He's not getting that here. Clearly, he would have a more receptive crowd in Florida, which went for him in 2016. It's a battleground state, as you mentioned. But taxes, for how many years he's been here -- forever -- we've always heard accusations about him evading taxes from local politicians. You've heard the same thing from his attorney who testified to Congress that he did the same thing. And so the argument that they are moving to Florida for tax reasons, that seems to be a legitimate one, because he would have a lower tax rate.</s>TOOBIN: It's almost like it be interesting to see his tax returns.</s>TOOBIN: Does anyone ever ask for them? That would just be just, I don't know --</s>LOCKHART: They're under audit, Jeffrey.</s>TOOBIN: They're under audit, so.</s>CAMEROTA: That's a long audit, right. That's been really long. Thank you all for covering all these stories with us.</s>AVLON: Amazing. Breaking news. We've got another wildfire raging in southern California, this one exploding overnight to 8,000 acres. And it's burning out of control in Ventura County. But conditions are improving for fire crews. Officials say winds have subsided a bit and temperatures have cooled. At least 7,500 people in Santa Paula, northwest of L.A., have been forced to evacuate. Fire officials say at least two structures have been destroyed, 1,800 more are threatened.</s>CAMEROTA: A new national poll shows how divided Americans are about impeaching and removing President Trump. So how will Democrats make the case against the president in public hearings, the next phase? We're going to speak to a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee about that, next.