Trump signals US won't punish Saudis for Khashoggi murder

Published November 20, 2018

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report with Bret Baier," November 20, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS: Your team is preparing written answers to questions --

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, no, not my team. I'm preparing written answers. I'm the one that does the answering. Yes, are they writing them out? Yes. They are writing what I tell them to write.

WALLACE: Are they going to be submitted?

TRUMP: At some point very soon, yes.

WALLACE: Not today.

TRUMP: I don't know what the timing is, but I finished them.

WALLACE: OK.

TRUMP: I completed them.

WALLACE: So you are submitting --

TRUMP: It wasn't a big deal. By the way, it wasn't a big deal. The questions were asked and answered. It wasn't a big deal. They make it like I had meetings for many, many hours. I got the questions, I responded. We wrote them out, I read them once, I read them a second time. We made some changes. That's it. They've very simple.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: Now the homework assignment is done, President Trump turning in his questions to the special counsel Robert Mueller, ending this portion of the Q and A that was submitted to the president. The president's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, issuing a statement, "It's been our position from the outset that much of what has been asked raised serious constitutional issues and was beyond the scope of a legitimate inquiry. This remains our position today. The president has nonetheless provided unprecedented cooperation. Special counsel has been provided with more than 30 witnesses, 1.4 million pages of material, and now the president's written responses to questions. It is time to bring this inquiry to a conclusion."

With that, let's start there with our panel: Byron York, chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner; A.B. Stoddard, associate editor at Real Clear Politics; John McCormack, senior writer at The Weekly Standard, and Bill Bennett, former education secretary and author of the book "The True St. Nicholas."

Bill, let's start with you, your thoughts on this. The homework is turned in.

BILL BENNETT, FORMER EDUCATION SECRETARY: "The True St. Nicholas," If you want to take a break from politics, it's a good read about somebody very much associated with Christmas who people don't know.

I hope it's almost over. I hope with Rudy Giuliani it's almost over. My guess is it is. And I think it's basically good news for Donald Trump. He got these inquiries, it was a take-home assignment, as it has been called. He answered questions and sent them back. My guess is there's not a rebuttal or another response, so that's that. But we'll wait and see. We've all been wondering if there's anything there there. And we'll soon find out.

BAIER: Byron, it seems like the clock is ticking.

BRYON YORK, WASHINGTON EXAMINER: The thing we don't know is whether this is tying things up with a bow or opening up new areas of inquiry. Mueller could have follow-up questions, some of the president's answers could raise issues that were not previously considered or that Mueller wants to go into.

Rudy Giuliani said in his statement that the White House had raised the issue of executive privilege or a lot of questions involving obstruction, all of which, if it took place, took place in the White House. So these questions apparently focused on what took place during the campaign. Was there any collusion? We know the president said a million times in public that there was no collusion. My guess is the answers are very similar to that. So the question is, is Mueller going to be satisfied by these questions, and close up, or does it open up something new?

BAIER: And A.B., I guess the other question is what does the Democratic House do if the Mueller report is not finished before the end of this year as they take control of the House of Representatives?

A.B. STODDARD, REAL CLEAR POLITICS: That is the most interesting question, Bret, because they want to tread carefully. There is a division in their party about how strenuously they should investigate the administration, and overlap with the Russia collusion probe, obstruction of justice investigation that Mueller has been tackling outside the special counsel, and of course this whole question of whether or not they would ever try to even begin a discussion of a potential impeachment without the findings of a special counsel report.

I think, and I don't have Mueller's sources because nobody does, that it's obvious that the special counsel is trying to squeeze Roger Stone because of the way he's going after the associates around Roger Stone. I don't think that a Mueller report is coming soon. And like Byron, I think it's possible with the fact that the president has only responded to questions about the campaign and nothing about obstruction of justice or impeding the investigation or abuse of power like "The New York Times" reporting on today, that it doesn't mean that it's tied up with a bow.

So it's going to be a challenge to the Democrats to not overreach, to trust in the special counsel, and to strike a balance here in what they choose to probe.

BAIER: The other big story today, John, was the Jamal Khashoggi investigation, the statement put out by the White House. The president reacting to essentially saying we've done what we are going to do with Saudi Arabia and we're going to move on. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We put out a statement on Saudi Arabia, which I guess most of you have seen. The CIA has looked at it, they've studied it a lot. They have nothing definitive. And the fact is maybe he did, maybe he didn't, it's all about America first. We're not going to give up hundreds of billions of dollars in orders and let Russia, China, and everybody else have them.

I'm not going to destroy the world economy, and I'm not going to destroy the economy for our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia. If we broke with them, I think your oil prices would go through the roof.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: John, thoughts?

JOHN MCCORMACK, WEEKLY STANDARD: I think on the specific question of whether we should cut off all arms sales to Saudi Arabia, obviously I think that that is a foolish thing to do and the president is right on that specific policy.

What I don't think that he got right is this idea that you have to lie for foreign dictators, you have to help them cover up a murder, that you should cast doubt on our own intelligence, American intelligence, which reportedly has said with a high degree of confidence that Saudi Arabia, the leadership, Mohammed bin Salman did order this. So I do think that obviously there are tough calls and strategic alliances with unsavory and even sometimes evil dictators, but you can also speak for American values, you can speak for human dignity, human rights. President Reagan did that very well. President Trump is either incapable or unwilling to do that.

I thought this was a bit reminiscent of the North Korean statements, where he said Kim Jong-un loves his people with great fervor and they love him back. This idea that you have to actively praise these brutal dictators is something that Trump believes is necessary to foreign policy.

BAIER: Bill, this is getting a lot of criticism. Senator Lindsey Graham, who is obviously an ally of the president, said "I firmly believe there will be strong bipartisan support for serious sanctions against Saudi Arabia, including appropriate members of the Royal Family, for this barbaric act which defied all civilized norms. While Saudi Arabia is a strategic ally, the behavior of the crown prince in multiple ways has shown disrespect for the relationship and made him, in my view, beyond toxic."

BENNETT: Part of the reason for the reaction is we know so much of the particulars. The particulars have been presented over and over again. It's gruesome and deserves condemnation. This is a gruesome execution, torture and execution. But as a critic of Donald Trump, James Clapper, said, we must maintain relations with Saudi Arabia. It's very important. And by the way, we have had worse enemies than Saudi Arabia. We have one now called a Iran. Churchill and Roosevelt also had allies that were much worse that Saudi Arabia.

BAIER: Byron, you think there will be pushback on Capitol Hill?

YORK: Oh, yes. Trump can be amazingly frank about his reasons for doing things, and he has clearly made a calculation that the relationship with Saudi Arabia is more valuable than inflicting any further punishment over the murder of Khashoggi.

By the way, the United States has sanctioned 17 Saudis in relation to this, one of whom was fairly close to the crown prince. But Trump comes out and he says Saudi Arabia is a vital ally in the war on terror. They spent $400 billion with us, $110 billion in military spending. That's huge, that's in our interest, I'm not going to get any further worked up about this murder. And it's an astonishingly frank, realist kind of statement, and I think even his supporters wish he could probably find more of a middle ground. I think John was suggesting that, more of a middle ground to take more into account, the humans right issues involved, at the same time still reaffirming the relationship between the U.S. and the Saudis.

BAIER: Right. I think, A.B., that his supporters say this is somebody speaking out without the filter, and that other presidents might not have said it publicly but this is what they were probably thinking. The foreign minister from Iran tweeted out, Zarif, "Mr. Trump bizarrely devotes his first paragraph of his shameful statement on Saudi atrocities to accuse Iran of every sort of malfeasance he can think of it. Perhaps we're also responsible for the California fires because we didn't help rake the forests -- just like the Fins do." So getting in a jab there from Iran's perspective.

STODDARD: The message that this sends around the world to our allies and our adversaries is one of weakness and abandonment of our values. The president fails to affirm our commitment to the values that make us great. His statement said -- it was a statement of standing with Saudi Arabia. There was no balance, there was none of the values and commitments that you discuss your commitment to and then you pivot to the importance of a relationship. If was basically if they are going to give us money, we need them. And I'm competing for contracts with the Russians and the Chinese.

And I think there is no better statement from his ally, Rand Paul, who said this is not America first, this is Saudi Arabia first. The condemnation has been swift and profound, and it's because the president is not acting in the best interests of this country when he solely makes this a business arrangement.

BAIER: Let's end with this. There's a cultural shift happening, we covered tonight. The Massachusetts legal marijuana, Bill, you had some thoughts about that before we leave.

BENNETT: I think in Massachusetts, a lot of celebration, first sale of recreational marijuana. I will predict that they will come to regret this, as they are coming to regret this in Colorado. They will make a lot of money, but if you want to invest, you should probably invest in treatment centers, because you will see a huge explosion in that.

Everyone is worrying about this terrible opioid crisis. I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis who said when in a flood, don't grab for the hoses. We are making this problem worse. There are more people in drug treatment for marijuana than all other drugs combined. And if you want to know how people get into other serious drugs, it's through marijuana. Not primarily through the mis-prescription, the overprescribing of drugs at CVS, but it's from marijuana. So be careful.

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