[Cooper:] Republicans are gearing up for night two of their national convention. Tonight's headline speakers include First Lady Melania Trump, two of the president's children, Eric and Tiffany, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. If it's anything like last night's opener, their message is this. The economy is surging back, despite millions of job losses, the coronavirus is being beaten back despite the without much mention of the 177,000 dead Americans, and with the message is, without President Trump in charge, the nation will descend into chaos, violence and anarchy.
[Patricia Mccloskey, Brandished Guns At St. Louis Protesters:] They're not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether.
[Rep. Matt Gaetz:] It's a horror film, really. They'll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.
[Kimberly Guilfoyle, National Chair, Trump Victory Finance Committee:] They want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.
[Cooper:] The president's son, Donald Trump Jr., making that case loud and clear.
[Donald Trump Jr., President Trump's Son:] This time, the other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law.
[Cooper:] The rule of law. Donald Trump Jr. is saying that the Trump administration stands for the rule of law. Of course, this is just days after the president's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is just the latest ex-Trump associate to find himself in big legal trouble. I want to bring in former FBI Director James Comey. He's speaking at the convention on Founding Principles tonight as a group of conservatives who support Joe Biden. Director Comey, thanks for being with us. Just Steve Bannon, his arrest recently charged with defrauding donors to a private group that was supposed to raise money to build a section of border wall, how serious do you think the charges are against him?
[James Comey, Former Fbi Director:] Very serious, both because it includes fraud charge that looks on the face of the indictment to be incredibly detailed and strongly supported by text and emails but also, the amount of money stolen, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars is going to jack the punishment up. So he's looking at a very difficult road. And if I'm him and his lawyers, I think I'm going down.
[Cooper:] The president has been railing against mail-in voting. He's called it a disaster. He says it's an easy way for foreign countries to meddle in the election. I have spoken to a number of secretaries of state, including a Republican one from Washington, and said their mail-in voting systems are completely safe. They have never seen any hint of foreign interference and though there is out of millions of votes cast as statistically insignificant number of people who try to vote twice or commit some sort of fraud and those people are prosecuted. In your years working the FBI, have you ever seen widespread voter fraud, widespread mail-in voter fraud?
[Comey:] Never. And I'm used to operating in an evidence-based world and so I've not seen any evidence nor ever heard anybody on Trump's team offering evidence. Instead they say, well, there's no evidence that there is not. There was no evidence that there's not an invisible asteroid is about to hit the earth. We shouldn't all run for the hills. They haven't come forward with any evidence and I saw Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina saying mail-in voting is safe.
[Cooper:] The president also threatened to send law enforcement personnel or talked about sending law enforcement personnel to polling places in order to prevent voter fraud. A number of critics obviously jumped on that, saying it's reviving an old tactic of voter intimidation. Is that kind of thing first of all, does the president have the power to send local law enforcement to a place and is it needed?
[Comey:] He has no power over state and local law enforcement. And so, they should and they will ignore a suggestion like that, which, as you said, does brings us back to some awful days when we used cops to try and scare people of color from voting. So they will and they should ignore him. I suppose he could try something at the federal level. I can't imagine how a federal agency would abide such a direction. But, look, it sends a chill through all of us because that's a reminder of some days we in America thought we've left behind.
[Cooper:] Just last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was passing along information to a Russian intelligence officer in 2016. Do you think Robert I mean, their report was very damning and had was very focused. It was a bipartisan report. I'm wondering how you think it compares to the report put out by Robert Mueller? Did the Mueller team, you think, missed something?
[Comey:] No. I think Mueller's mission was very different and much more narrow than the Senate Intelligence Committee. His job was to figure out so what evidence is there that you could bring into a court of law that would establish that a crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury 12? That's a very high bar and it narrows the focus. He was a prosecutor. What the Intelligence Committee was doing was looking at all the reliable information that was out there, whether or not it could be marched into a courtroom, and that's what led them to the stunning conclusion that the head of the president's campaign was a grave counterintelligence risk to the United States of America. Folks ought to let that sink in and think about it the next time you hear our attorney general say there was nothing to investigate here or the president say it's just a hoax.
[Cooper:] We have learned more details about the FBI's application case for FISA warrant on Carter Page, a number of indiscrepancies, a number of inaccuracies. And now, there's an attorney who has, I guess, lied about what was on one of the applications, or lied about what his role was in this. Does that make you or should it make people look at this entire investigation differently? It seems like given this was the most important thing or one of the most important things the FBI was working on, that there were so many inaccuracies and an attorney lied, that's not good.
[Comey:] Yes, I agree. So, my first reaction is that's the result of Bill Barr's worldwide dragnet but I don't want to downplay it.