White House Threatens to Block Release of Trump's Tax Returns; Boeing Acknowledges MCAS Role in Crashes; Trump to Nominate Herman Cain to Fed Board
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: House Democrats versus the White House. Neither side giving any ground on how much to reveal of the Mueller report or the president's taxes.</s>BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: And breaking overnight, not one but two major software flaws on the Boeing 737. Boeing's CEO says the company owns the responsibility to fix these issues.</s>ROMANS: Does a former pizza executive belong on the board of the powerful Federal Reserve? The president looking to install loyalists as he battles his Fed chair.</s>SANCHEZ: And MacKenzie Bezos is now the world's fourth richest woman. What he got and what she lost in the divorce from the Amazon founder. Good morning, and welcome to EARLY START. I'm Boris Sanchez, in for Dave Briggs.</s>ROMANS: A $35 billion divorce. Unbelievable. I'm Christine Romans. It is Friday. Nice to see you. April 5th.</s>SANCHEZ: Great to see you.</s>ROMANS: It is 4:00 a.m. in the East. So let's get started here with the White House and House Democrats gearing up to fight each over on two fronts -- the Mueller report and President Trump's tax returns. First on Mueller, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler demanding communications between the Justice Department and Robert Mueller's office about the special counsel's report.</s>SANCHEZ: Yes. Nadler wants to clear up a purported discrepancy between two different summaries of the 400-page report. Attorney General Bill Barr's widely discussed four-page summary and the still secret summaries actually written by Mueller's team.</s>REP. JERRY NADLER (D-NY): I can say I think it's inevitable that Mr. Mueller is going to testify at some point. But the first thing we need is all -- is the release of the report and the documents.</s>MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You think it's inevitable that Mueller is going to come before your committee?</s>NADLER: At some point, yes.</s>ROMANS: Sources tell us several of Mueller's investigators are expressing frustration with the way Barr summarized the special counsel's findings, in particular on obstruction of justice. The DOJ not commenting on Nadler's demand but it is defending the attorney general's deliberate pace in releasing some version of the report. The Justice Department saying every page of the report was marked as possibly containing information that should not be publicly released.</s>SANCHEZ: The president you may recall had encouraged the release of the report. He changed his tune. He tweeted, quote, "There is nothing we can ever give to the Democrats that will make them happy. This is the highest level of presidential harassment in the history of our country." Meantime the White House is threatening to block Democrats' demand for the release of the president's tax returns. And the president himself is suggesting that the Justice Department could become involved. For more, let's turn to White House correspondent Abby Phillip.</s>ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Boris, President Trump is now facing the full brunt of this new reality in Washington as Democrats who now control the House of Representatives are using their oversight power to ask for a number of things. One of them being the full Mueller report to be released to the public and to the relevant committees, and also now the president's tax returns. They are asking for six years of tax returns, personal and from his businesses, and the president is responding to all of that by essentially dismissing it saying that he's not inclined to allow them to have access to those returns. The problem for President Trump may be that this request was not made to him personally, but rather was made to the IRS using an obscure part of the U.S. code that allows select committees on Capitol Hill to gain access to certain people's tax returns. Now it's clear that the White House and the president's allies on Capitol Hill are going to be pushing back on both of these requests.</s>UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Are you asking the commissioner of the IRS not to disclose to the House Ways and Means Committee your tax bill?</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They'll speak to my lawyers. They'll speak to the attorney general.</s>PHILLIP: It's not clear what exactly he meant by that and what role he believes Bill Barr will have in this. But either way, the White House continues to insist that President Trump is still under audit and that those tax returns won't be released until those audits are completed -- Christine and Boris.</s>ROMANS: All right, Abby Phillip. Thanks for that. Breaking overnight, Boeing acknowledging a second -- a second software issue in the 737 MAX flight control system. The new issue separate from the anti-stall system under investigation in those two recent crashes. Boeing tells "The Washington Post" the new problem involves software that affects flaps and other hardware. Now Boeing calls this issue relatively minor, but regulators have ordered Boeing to fix it. Its discovery delayed the planned software update last week.</s>SANCHEZ: All of this coming a day after the release of the preliminary report on the Ethiopian Airlines crash that was obtained first by CNN. Boeing CEO acknowledges the company has a major issue to fix.</s>DENNIS MUILENBURG, BOEING CEO: It's apparent that in both flights, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, known as MCAS, activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information. It's our responsibility to eliminate this risk. We own it and we know how to do it.</s>SANCHEZ: Dennis Muilenburg also extended his sympathies for the 346 people who died. The back-to-back disaster is raising questions of whether years of looser oversight at the FAA was a factor. CNN's Tom Foreman has more.</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The report says the trouble starts right after takeoff with airspeed and altitude readings from the left side of the 737 MAX 8 that don't match the readings from the right side, and two sensors on the front disagreeing about the angle of the aircraft's nose. A sensor on the right shows steady readings around 15 degrees, but the one on the left swings wildly from 11 to nearly 75 degrees steep, as if the plane is rocketing upward.</s>ALASTAIR ROSENSCHEIN, AVIATION CONSULTANT: What stands out and is significant is the difference in angle attack indication between the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the aircraft. There was a 60-degree difference. And this feeds directly into the MCAS computer system, the system which forces the nose down in the event of a perceived stall. This is the same as the Lion Air accident.</s>FOREMAN: The report does name MCAS, but Boeing has now acknowledged it was involved. The captain asked the first officer to pitch up together, to pull back on their controls simultaneously. It does not work. Instead, the flight data recorder shows the plane diving. In all four times without pilots' input. An impact warning sounds in the cockpit, "Don't sink, don't sink." The report says the cockpit crew even figures out what is wrong and disables the MCAS system. Then the captain asks his first officer about a key part of the plane needed to regain control. The trim. The reply, "It is not working." (</s>On camera): Still, only a couple of years ago, Boeing was talking about how much it appreciated the government's new streamlined approach to regulation, particularly in regard to the MAX line of planes. And now these planes are surrounded by investigations into how they were developed, how they were tested, how they were certified, and whether people should ever really trust them again.</s>ROMANS: All right, Tom Foreman, thank you for that. A controversial choice for President Trump on who he wants to fill the last seat on the Fed's powerful seven-member policy-making board.</s>TRUMP: I recommended Herman Cain. He's a very terrific man, a terrific person. He's a friend of mine. I would think he would do very well there.</s>ROMANS: This president, if Herman Cain and Stephen Moore are confirmed by the Senate, would be reshaping the most powerful central bank in the world, reshaping it to his liking, away from peer reviewed, academic PhD economists and toward men who know less about monetary policy but want the Fed to support this president. So what is the Fed? It is an independent body meant to be the shock absorber for the U.S. economy. It's basically in charge of America's printing press. It has two goals, maximum employment and price stability. That means supporting the jobs market and making sure inflation is not too high or not too low. That's very destabilizing. It's about making the economy good for American workers and American families. Now Cain has some experience with the central bank. He once served as a director on one of the 12 regional Fed bank boards, the Kansas City Fed. That's not an uncommon role for a business executive. That's typically where you see that kind of a background. Trump also appointed Jerome Powell, of course, and he's been complaining about it ever since.</s>TRUMP: I think we have much more of a Fed problem than we have a problem with anyone else. My biggest threat is the Fed because the Fed is raising rates too fast. I think the Fed is far too stringent and they're making a mistake.</s>ROMANS: This is why the Fed is meant to be an independent body because every president would like loose money, right?</s>SANCHEZ: Right.</s>ROMANS: Heading into an election, make the economy artificially pumped up, you know, to make them look good. So that's why the Fed has to be so independent and why there are so many concerns about the president trying to put two insiders.</s>SANCHEZ: Yes.</s>ROMANS: People close to him right there on a powerful board.</s>SANCHEZ: This is yet another way that the president breaks with tradition.</s>ROMANS: Absolutely.</s>SANCHEZ: The kind of unorthodox. The way that --</s>ROMANS: Absolutely.</s>SANCHEZ: There were reports about him potentially firing Jerome Powell because he didn't like the way he was operating the Fed. Speaking of President Trump, he's set to Calexico, California, near the U.S.-Mexico border today. Ahead of his trip, President Trump seemed to flip-flop on his threat to close the border. Early Thursday, he said this.</s>TRUMP: We're going to give them a one-year warning and if the drugs don't stop or largely stop, we're going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular cars. And if that doesn't stop the drugs, we close the border.</s>SANCHEZ: Just a few hours later, Trump back-pedaled on ever closing the border. Listen.</s>TRUMP: I don't think we'll ever have to close the border because the penalty of tariffs on cars coming into the United States from Mexico at 25 percent will be massive.</s>SANCHEZ: Last week Trump had said he would give Mexico one week to increase apprehensions of migrants headed toward the U.S. from Central America. He threatened to close the border if that didn't happen. He also tried to shift the burden of fixing the border crisis on to Democrats.</s>ROMANS: All right. Hopes raised then shattered for the family of Timmothy Pitzen. DNA tests reveal the person who told police he had escaped kidnappers and claimed to be Pitzen is not. The news another blow for the family of the boy who vanished in 2011 at age 6.</s>KARA JACOBS, TIMMOTHY PITZEN'S AUNT: It's devastating.</s>ALANA ANDERSON, TIMMOTHY PITZEN'S GRANDMOTHER: Yes.</s>JACOBS: It's like reliving that day all over again, and Timothy's father is devastated once again.</s>ANDERSON: He's a wonderful little boy and I hope he has strength of personality to do whatever he needs to do to find us. My prayer has always been that when he was old enough he would find us if we couldn't find him.</s>ROMANS: Police say the young man found in Kentucky who identified himself as Pitzen is actually 23-year-old Brian Michael Rini from Medina, Ohio.</s>SANCHEZ: He has a criminal history, including prison time for burglary. He was released last month and was on supervised parole. Rini's brother says that Brian has mental issues and it's not the first time that he's assumed a false identity.</s>JONATHAN RINI, BROTHER OF BRIAN RINI: He's been doing stupid stuff, not this serious, but he's been doing stupid stuff for as long as I can remember. He used my name in a traffic stop in Norton, and then skipped court, and I received a traffic warning for it.</s>SANCHEZ: Timmothy Pitzen's family has searched for him ever since his mother's reported suicide on a road trip with him nearly eight years. She left behind a note saying her son was with people who loved him and that, quote, "You will never find him."</s>ROMANS: Yes. She went to school, pulled him out of school, went on a three-day road trip to Wisconsin Dells, and then he's never been seen again.</s>SANCHEZ: Confounding, sad story. Jussie Smollett refusing to re-pay the city of Chicago for investigating a purported hate crime. So now the city will take him back to court.