CNN "CNN Newsroom" - Transcript: Interview with former Governor William Weld
Interview
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SCIUTTO: Well, we'll see.
Let's discuss with former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. He is running against President Trump for the Republican nomination for president in 2020.
Governor, we appreciate you taking the time this morning.
BILL WELD (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Jim, thank you so much.
SCIUTTO: So let's get to this issue here.
You've said the president should resign, but interestingly you have not gone as far as to say he should be impeached, preferring this to be a decision at the ballot box in 2020.
Since you've made that statement, though, the president has instructed virtually the entire executive branch to ignore all subpoenas from Congress and may or may not stand in the way of the special counsel testifying.
Does that change your view?
WELD: Well, I think the president is trying to bait Congress into impeaching him because then he can have a complete circus between now and the 2020 election. But his position, you're right, it's just, they are Democrats, therefore they are partisan, therefore we're not cooperating in any way with them. He's abandoned all responsibility that should attach to his office as president. Congress is an equal branch of government under the Constitution, maybe even a superior branch of government. It's Congress in Article 1, it's not the president.
So I think the president has shown that he really has no interest in being serious about any of the great issues of the day in Washington. He has one-word slogans, wall, hoax, so he's not really doing the job, in my view.
SCIUTTO: Do you think he has the politics right here, because we've noted that Democrats running for the 2020 nomination, they don't talk about the Mueller report or investigation very much, they're not getting asked about it very much. Does the president have his finger on the pulse here in effect correctly?
WELD: Well, he certainly doesn't have the law correctly because 750 former federal prosecutors, myself included, have signed a letter saying that there were multiple examples of the president committing obstruction of justice, and it wasn't even a close call. Now, against that, we have attorney general Barr who says, oh, no, it's impossible for the president to have committed obstruction unless, you know, he was right there committing the offense, like in the Watergate hotel with G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt in the case of Nixon. So that position is completely untenable in my view.
And Bill Barr is a smart lawyer. So I can't figure out quite what's going on there.
SCIUTTO: So I wonder then, based on what you just said, but also past comparisons you've made between Trump and Nixon, including citing reasons that Nixon was impeached --
WELD: Right.
SCIUTTO: Like failing to take care of the law, it's a clause that the Constitution gets to the presidential duties here.
WELD: Right.
SCIUTTO: So why should the president not be impeached if he is exhibiting Nixonian behavior?
WELD: Oh, on the law, he's absolutely subject to impeachment right now. I mean he's making no effort to see that the laws are faithfully executed. And volume two of the Mueller report makes that very clear and makes clear that he -- if you read the end of it, pages 178 to 183 of volume two, he makes it clear that the president even acted with corrupt intent. So it's all there. And the argument against impeaching now is a purely political argument that we don't want just a circus between now and November of 2020. We want the president to be held accountable for what he's done and left undone.
SCIUTTO: On your colleagues, Republican colleagues, many of whom in previous times were very critical of the president. Lindsey Graham called him a cook (ph).
WELD: Right.
SCIUTTO: Ted Cruz called him a pathological liar.
As you watch your Republican -- fellow Republicans line up to defend the president now at every turn, what do you say to them?
[09:50:06] WELD: I find it incomprehensible. You know, I know a lot of these senators in D.C., the Republicans, and they're good people. And I just don't understand why nobody will bell the cat. It really seems to me to be a case of no one will say the emperor has no clothes except -- until the six-year-old boy says it, and then everyone says, oh, yes, we knew that all the time.
So, you know, I think that dam is going to burst at some point and the president can't continue to live in this unreality that he's concocted for himself. I mean his position is, there is no primary. There is no election.
But, let's be honest, the president wants to be reappointed president by the Republican National Committee and he doesn't want to brooke (ph) any interference with that hallowed process. You know, that's not how the world works, the real world.
SCIUTTO: How do you, talking of the real world, have a path to winning here when 90 -- well, 86 percent of Republicans, based on CNN's latest poll, approve of his job as president?
WELD: Well, you know, I'm going to play it the old fashioned way, one voter at a time in New Hampshire. I'm taking off for New Hampshire and Vermont to campaign tomorrow.
But, as I say, I think the president's approach here, I'm not going to play ball, I'm not going to exercise any of my responsibilities, I'm going to hollow out the State Department, the Defense Department, the Homeland Security Department so that all that power will revert to me, the president, individually, and I'll make all the decisions and I don't have to listen to Congress or anybody else. That's, you know, for want of a better word, that's not the American way. That's how a king or a despot would act. And the framers of our Constitution, if nothing else, they were united in their desire to make sure that we didn't have another king in the United States.
And, you know, Donald J. Trump, candidly, he looks like he would -- he would rather be a king than a president who had to work to earn and preserve the trust of the American people. And as President Lyndon Johnson once said, once you lose the trust of the American people, as Mr. Nixon did when the tapes proved that he had been lying for years to them, you'll never get it back.
SCIUTTO: Bill Weld, thanks very much.
WELD: Thanks, Jim.
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