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Trump Stuns Washington With Contentious Cabinet Picks; Republicans Divided Over Gaetz Confirmation; Trump Taps Tulsi Gabbard as America's Top Intelligence Officer; Just Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired November 14, 2024 - 14:00   ET

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

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BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Confirmation chaos. President Elect Trump's pick for Attorney General has Republicans divided. One Republican Senator now appearing to walk back his promise to allow recess appointments, something that would have allowed Trump's Cabinet nominees to easily get around the usual Senate confirmation process. We'll discuss that.

Plus, new details about what went down during President Biden and President Elect Trump's meeting in the Oval Office, including the one issue Biden asked Trump to join forces on.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: And getting priced out of property. A new report reveals the six figure salary that's needed to buy a home. We're following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here to CNN News Central.

SANCHEZ: Right now, President Elect Donald Trump is huddled with aides at his Mar-a-Lago resort as we wait to hear who else he may pick to be part of his new administration. This latest round of choices is raising eyebrows and concerns, especially his bombshell selection for the nation's top prosecutor, Matt Gaetz. If confirmed, the Florida Republican would lead the Justice Department, an agency that he has spent years criticizing.

One employee at the department said, quote, "The shock is intense". This announcement also stunned Congress, leaving Republicans divided. And this now sets up a potential showdown in the Senate and a predicament for Republican senators.

CNN's Kristen Holmes is live force in West Palm Beach, Florida, tracking the Trump team. Kristen, how concerned is Trump and his backers about the potential for this nomination to go nowhere?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Boris and Brianna, I'm told that they're not that concerned. Now, it's not just about the fact that they are sure in any way that he could get confirmed, is that they understand that this is going to be a process and they're going to do everything that they can to get him confirmed. But there is obviously always a possibility with these controversial picks that they're not going to get confirmed. And one thing I'll tell you is that they were not surprised by the pushback. They were not surprised by the blowback. And one person described it to me as, we knew people were going to have a meltdown when he announced that Matt Gaetz was going to be Attorney General.

But what they are telling me is that they don't believe that Matt Gaetz himself is going to be necessarily the only implementer, if he does get approved and they plan on making this point through this process, or if he does get confirmed, excuse me, not approved, that he wouldn't be the only implementer at the Department of Justice. Essentially my point being that they're talking about how they're going to have a series of these deputy attorneys general who will serve underneath Gaetz, who would be the people who do the day to day work.

And that would be part of what they do when they're explaining what Gaetz is going to do, trying to get him confirmed, is to show that there are all these other lawyers underneath Gaetz who are going to be the people actually implementing some of these policies, while Gaetz himself will be the effective communicator at the top.

Obviously, as we know, one of the things that Donald Trump was looking for an attorney general, but not just that all of his cabinet positions is somebody who could go on television and talk about his talking points, who could go on and talk about what they were doing, could be a firebrand and a bomb thrower, obviously. And Matt Gaetz, he saw that.

SANCHEZ: Kristen Holmes live for us in West Palm Beach, Florida. Thank you so much for the update. Brianna.

KEILAR: The accusations surrounding Matt Gaetz are something Republicans have talked about openly. Here is Senator Markwayne Mullin discussing Gaetz last year.

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SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN, (R) OKLAHOMA: He was accused of sleeping with an underage girl. And there's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him. Because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away of the girls that he had slept with. He'd brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.

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KEILAR: Mullin was House colleagues with Gaetz previously.

Now fast forward to last night. Mullin told CNN he completely trusts President Elect Trump's decision to choose Gaetz. We have CNN Congressional Correspondent Lauren Fox live for us on the Hill. Lauren, what are Republicans saying about Gaetz confirmation privately and publicly?

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of concern and a lot of Republicans are still withholding their support. You know, I talked to Senator Joni Ernst last night at Votes and she reiterated he's going to have to work really hard to get confirmed.

[14:05:06]

Just a couple of minutes ago, I was talking with Senator Chuck Grassley. He is the incoming senator of the Judiciary Committee. He is going to be overseeing this nomination process. And we repeatedly asked him whether or not he wanted to see that House Ethics reports and he didn't really give a clear answer. He just kept repeating that his committee will continue doing vetting.

But there is another avenue here that senators could take and that is obviously this question of whether they would allow for recess appointments. Now, this is a little bit in the weeds, but essentially it would give the President a lot more leeway to get exactly who he wanted in the Cabinet. And there's a real divide right now in the Republican Party over whether they would accept that.

I talked to Senator Todd Young this morning and he said that he would be open to it. Here's what he said.

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SEN. TODD YOUNG, (R) INDIANA: It's our obligation to try and confirm these nominees quicker than we've seen in recent history. If there's extensive foot dragging and obstructionism, that's not going to be well received by the American people.

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FOX: Then you have other Republicans, including Senator John Cornyn, who when he was running for majority leader over the weekend expressed an openness to accepting recess appointments. He told our colleague Manu Raju this.

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SEN. JOHN CORNYN, (R) TEXAS: Well, that's another whole issue. Obviously, I don't think we should be circumventing the Senate's responsibilities. But I think it's premature to be talking about recess --

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FOX: And one thing to keep in mind, Brianna, is while Democrats would not have very many options to block Republicans from moving ahead with recessing the Senate and moving forward with those recess appointments, you still do need a simple majority of the United States Senate. That means some of those Republicans who might have concerns about someone like Matt Gaetz. It really does beg the question, would they be willing to agree to recess the Senate if they knew what could happen if they did? Brianna.

KEILAR: Really interesting stuff. Lauren Fox, thank you for the reporting. Let's talk about this now. CNN Senior Political Analyst Gloria Borger and Ron Brownstein, too premature to talk about recess appointments, for Cornyn, was despite like a day ago when, you know, he's running for Republican leader in the Senate, it's not too premature. What do you make of this?

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, there is not a lot of history of the Republicans in Congress standing up to Donald Trump. Trump, I think, has pushed to the boundary to the outer limit of what might be acceptable. I think very deliberately. I mean, it is a consistent strategy of kind of strongmen rulers to force their allies to defend the indefensible and to keep moving that boundary a little further to see how much further they would go.

And if virtually all Republican senators are willing to say Matt Gaetz should be Attorney General with all the charges against him, if they're willing to say Tulsi Gabbard, with no experience and questionable ties to Russia, should be in charge of, you know, the U.S. National Intelligence that tells Trump, I can take it further next time. I can deport U.S. citizen kids, I can purge the civil service.

This is a test that he is very clearly setting up. And it almost doesn't matter, you know, how many of them -- how many of them break. The fact that the vast majority of them are going to accept it is going to tell them what he needs to know.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yeah. This is about retribution, first of all. This is about putting somebody like Matt Gaetz in who will do his bidding whatever he wants. You know, Matt Gaetz has already tweeted he wanted to get rid of the FBI and the ATF and all the rest of it. And then, you know, it's a loyalty test, plain and simple, on the Hill.

If you do what I want, you're loyal to me and that -- and that matters. And, you know, the question is, this puts the Senate in a real box because what do they do? If it were -- if it were a secret vote, we know exactly what they would do. They would say no to these people.

But since it's a public vote and Donald Trump is watching. What he's done, what Donald Trump has done is given the middle finger to the establishment and to institutions in Washington, particularly the Senate, saying, I don't care. You're going to do what I want.

SANCHEZ: And you've already seen some Trump loyalists, including Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, saying that if you go against his wishes, you're going to get premaried (ph). So I wonder, do you see anyone on the Republican side that might come out against the nomination of Gaetz?

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, certainly you would think Murkowski and Collins at least will say no to Gaetz s and probably to Gabbard. The question is, what else? How many others?

And look, as I say, this is, you know, this is a signal in multiple ways. As I said, it's a -- he is taking the measure of how far he can push Republican senators beyond their comfort zone.

14:10:01]

And if the answer is pretty far, then the next time it just goes a little further.

But the other signal is that, you know, I think everything, all the appointments that he has made, including some that will probably sail through, basically say he is going to pursue the maximalist version of what he ran on, right?

I mean, which shouldn't be a shock, but there were certainly a lot of voters that thought, well, he's going to, you know, bring the price of gas and groceries under control. I'm not sure --

BORGER: And they didn't vote for this. They didn't vote for this.

BROWNSTEIN: But they knew they were -- you know, presidential vote is not like ordering from column A and column B on the menu. You get everything, you get the whole package. You ride the bus to the last stop. And Trump, I think, is making very clear that all that's going to happen.

KEILAR: What does it say to you that, you know, his retribution, right? Matt Gaetz, that's what you're seeing him construct first. You're seeing the priorities take shape. But if the American people told him anything, it was, hey, we hate how much things cost, right? It was an economic message. Ron's written about this a lot. Are you surprised then that we haven't seen him go first with some of the positions of --

BORGER: Like Treasury?

KEILAR: Treasury Trade Rep, right? --

BORGER: No, no --

KEILAR: or even how, you know --

BORGER: Well, we kind of know Lighthizer will be Trade Rep. But no, first of all, Donald Trump is about himself. And this is about -- this is personal to him.

These are appointments that, first and foremost, are loyal. He's not going to make the same mistakes he believed he made in 2016 when he appointed people that other people told him to appoint and he didn't like them. So now he's appointing people he knows, he knows will do his bidding.

And in terms of Treasury, I think you make a very good point. Where's the economic plan? Why isn't he talking about what he's going to do about grocery prices? Instead, what he's talking about is installing these loyalists. And he knows it's provocative, but it is reckless, actually.

Because when you look at the doubts about Matt Gaetz, you know, charges of sexual misconduct and using illegal drugs, etcetera, you know, and you look at Tulsi Gabbard, who said there weren't chemical weapons used by Assad in Syria, these are serious questions. She has never dealt with intelligence before. You know, you expect people with this --

KEILAR: Intel Committee, right?

BROWNSTEIN: Right.

BORGER: with a certain amount of experience here.

BROWNSTEIN: I mean, that's the point. The point is to make your allies defend the indefensible and each surrender paves the path to the next surrender, because you're basically pulling them out further and further beyond where they thought they would ever go.

I mean, there are a lot of Republican senators who, you know, two or three days ago could not have ever imagined supporting Matt Gaetz for Attorney General or Tulsi Gabbard to be the Lead Intelligence official who will now find themselves doing exactly that. And I think once you get that signal as Donald Trump, it tells you, you can take them a little further.

When Tom Homan, you know, the Sunday before the election talks about how do you avoid family separation and mass deportation, will you deport the U.S. citizen kids? There are four million U.S. citizen kids, Latino kids, with at least one undocumented parent. I think Trump is systematically measuring whether the Senate is going to draw any lines against him.

BORGER: This is the test for the Senate and it is a test for these individuals. You know, are they loyal to Donald Trump above all else, or do they do what they believe is right for the country?

And they may disagree with Donald Trump. You know, there are a lot of Trump loyalists in the Senate, but he's pushing the case to such an extent that the question is, where is the line? And does the line move and continue to move further and further? Or is there one line that they won't cross? And is that Matt Gaetz or Tulsi Gabbard?

And we were talking before in the Green Room. This is probably good for Pete Hegseth because, you know, maybe they'll --

BROWNSTEIN: If he was on his own, he would be getting a lot more heat.

SANCHEZ: Quickly, before we go, we started off with somewhat conventional picks, what you would say are conventional picks. And then we saw this sort of turn yesterday.

BROWNSTEIN: We've --

BORGER: We've --

SANCHEZ: Yes, precisely. Ron, who are you expecting will come next? Like who will he name as his Treasury Secretary nominee? BROWNSTEIN: You got to think these. That will be back in a little more conventional, you know, someone who raised a lot of money for him with Wall Street --

BORGER: The head of its transition --

BROWNSTEIN: You have Doug Burgum still out there for some kind of energy job. You know, various oil executives being touted for energy as well as the Alaska Governor for Interior.

So, you know, you could get but it is revealing, though. That for someone who talked about the enemy from within, two of his first appointments are a Defense Secretary, on the military side and an Attorney General on the legal side, who would not put a lot of barriers in the way of him going -- using those very sharp edged tools against people he identifies as the enemy from within.

BORGER: And we know that Donald Trump was aware that this, as Kristen said, that this was going to cause a meltdown.

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He was totally aware of it, and he wanted it.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

BORGER: He understood it, and he wanted to cause the meltdown because he wanted to test people. And that's exactly what he's doing.

KEILAR: Objective achieved. Gloria, Ron, thanks to both of you.

And a programming note today on the lead, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will be joining Jake Tapper to talk about the Democrats losses in the election and offer his take on Donald Trump's Cabinet picks. We'll have that today at 4:00 p.m. Eastern.

Ahead this hour on CNN News Central, President Elect Trump's former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, joining those criticizing his latest Cabinet picks. Hear why he thinks the FBI should investigate some of them.

And we're learning more about the Oval Office meeting between President Biden and Mr. Trump, including a favor that President Biden asked for.

SANCHEZ: Plus, we all know that home prices have shot up. But wait until you learn just how much money the average American has to make in order to become a homeowner. Those important stories and much more coming your way in just moments. Stay with us.

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KEILAR: So some members of the Intel community are raising national security concerns about one of President Elect Trump's cabinet picks, which is former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who's been tapped as the Director of National Intelligence.

SANCHEZ: But Gabbard has a history of spreading Russian conspiracy theories and cozying up to some of America's adversaries, including Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whom she met with in 2017 during a civil war that had already left more than half a million people dead. And here is just some of what she said.

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KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Do you think Assad is our enemy?

TULSI GABBARD, FORMER UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE: Assad is not the enemy of the United States because the united -- Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.

Now, here's something you are not going to hear on the mainstream media. What you do hear is warmongers arguing that we must protect Ukraine because it is a quote, unquote "Democracy". But they're lying. Ukraine isn't actually a democracy.

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SANCHEZ: Joining us now, Columnist for the Washington Post and Author of Chaos Under Heaven, Josh Rogin. Josh, thanks so much for sharing part of your afternoon with us. What would this mean for Gabbard to be DNI and what kind of power she would have and how she could wield it, considering what you've heard her say?

JOSH ROGIN, COLUMNIST, WASHINGTON POST: Right. Well, as you pointed out, Boris, intelligence community members across the board are shocked and worried, concerned, because Tulsi Gabbard has a long history of siding with the analysis of Russian state propaganda, Syrian state propaganda, above the U.S. Intelligence Committee.

When the U.S. Intelligence Committee said that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, she said she didn't believe it. And when the Russian propaganda outlet said that the U.S. was funding bio labs -- bioweapons labs in Ukraine and that was a good reason for Putin to invade Ukraine, she parroted that propaganda. And to have someone like that who trusts Russian government more than the U.S. government in control of 18 intelligence agencies, you could just imagine the possibilities of for things to go wrong.

And then again, to have someone like that briefing the President of the United States about the daily intelligence briefing, giving him information that is supposed to be reflective of the intelligence community, it's just a disaster from the intelligence community's perspective. I happen to agree with them.

KEILAR: So, Josh, Russia was notably very supportive on its covert social media outlets of Gabbard's run for president back in 2019. How is Russia now reacting to her being Trump's DNI pick?

ROGIN: Oh, the Russian state media is popping champagne corks all over all day. You know, they couldn't be happier. Now, again, there's a difference between having a policy view that is more Russia friendly, which is a sort of a legitimate policy view, one that I happen to disagree with. There's a difference between that and believing Russian propaganda over the U.S. Intelligence community's own analysis. And she's guilty of both of these things. I think that the Russians are happy because of both of these things.

And what it could mean is that essentially it'll be a lot easier for the Russian state media, the Russian intelligence community, to have its narratives affect the highest levels of U.S. government, because Tulsi Gabbard will be in charge of 18 intelligence agencies. And she's inclined to take their word for it, which is really, you know, kind of bizarre when you think about it. But that's where we are.

SANCHEZ: Josh, what about Beijing in China? Because one of the crucial relationships over the next four years of this administration is going to be that of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping and the way that that relationship between the U.S. And China moves forward. What kind of role could Tulsi Gabbard being DNI, play in all of that?

ROGIN: Right. Well, on China, Tulsi has taken a more dovish position than some other Trump incoming nominees like Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio. So that should be an interesting discussion in the Situation Room where Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio say that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat to American security.

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Again, something I believe is true.

And Tulsi, who says, maybe not so much. That's one thing. But more broadly, I think what you're getting at here, Boris, is that the intelligence community is really busy and they have a lot of hard jobs to do and it's not perfect, don't get me wrong. They've made -- mistakes have been made, but, you know, they have a lot of responsibility to help keep us safe and to have someone to top that community -- that's at war with that community or at least is trying to purge the deep state, you know, neocons from rather than, you know, empowering them to do their job, which is to protect America.

That's just chaos. That's just a recipe for disaster internally. And so I think that, you know, hopefully four GOP senators will understand that and stand up for the intelligence community and for the country and the integrity of our intelligence system and our information environment. But I'm not just not sure that that's going to happen, to be honest.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. An information environment that's already under attack by China literally as we speak. Josh Rogin, thank you so much for the analysis. Appreciate you.

ROGIN: Anytime.

SANCHEZ: Still ahead, we turn to the Fox & Friends host pick to serve as President Elect Trump's Defense Secretary, who has said that women should not be serving in combat roles. Our next guest, Combat Veteran and Senator Tammy Duckworth, will respond. Stay with us.

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