Aides Worry Guests or Outsiders Will Influence Trump During Holidays; Democrats And The White House Prepares For Senate Trial Despite Standoff; President Trump Signs Defense Bill Creating U.S. Space Force.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Impeach the President Immediately the next thing for us will be when we see all the process that set forth in the Senate.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How long are you willing to wait?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As long as it is.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What they're proposing is incredibly dangerous. You can't be Speaker of the House and Majority Leader of the Senate at the same time.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, this teasing whistleblower comes forward because he says the agency is putting speed over security.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What they're doing is injecting danger into the system.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Austin police said one of their tips led them to Northwest Harris County cracking the case.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We did recover an infant female child that we do believe at this time is Margo.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But outside in the trunk of her friend's car, Heidi Broussard, dead from strangulation.</s>VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST, NEW DAY: Top of the hour now, always good to be with you on a Saturday morning. I'm Victor Blackwell.</s>AMARA WALKER, CNN HOST, NEW DAY: Happy Saturday and Amara Walker in for Christi Paul.</s>BLACKWELL: President Trump is this morning at his Mara-a-Lago Resort in South Florida for a two-week holiday break.</s>WALKER: The President, First Lady and their son Barren arrived in Florida late last night.</s>BLACKWELL: And he avoided a government shutdown yesterday by signing a $1.4 trillion spending bill.</s>WALKER: The President may be officially on vacation, but his team will be prepping for the expected Senate impeachment trial during this holiday break.</s>BLACKWELL: And despite this volatile week, during which the President was impeached, President Trump did accept an invitation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to give the State of the Union address in early February.</s>WALKER: CNN White House Reporter Sarah Westwood joining us now from West Palm Beach, Florida. So Sarah, President Trump begins his holiday in impeachment limbo, but he is also preparing as we were saying for a Senate trial that could happen in January.</s>SARAH WESTWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: That's right, Amara and Victor. That is something that he and his aides will be discussing over the course of the two weeks that he'll be spending here in West Palm Beach because there are a lot of unanswered questions about what shape that defense will take heading into an impeachment trial that is expected to take place sometime in January. Still, despite the fact that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at this moment is holding on to the articles of impeachment, White House aides have to work out who exactly will be delivering the opening and closing arguments whether there is a role on that team for someone outside of the White House perhaps or some of the President's conservative allies in the House. But there are also concerns among the President's aides that the duration of this trip could affect how the President receives preparations for his Senate trial at Mar-a-Lago? As we've discussed, the President is able to talk to a lot of his friends, a lot of his informal advisers. They have an unusual amount of access to the President at his resort and some White House officials told CNN that they're concerned that some of those people might be able to influence the President's decisions about this trial. For example the President had previously expressed an interest in having a theatrical trial in the Senate. He did not just want to be acquitted, he wants to be vindicated. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had been able to convince President Trump that a shorter trial with no live witnesses could be in his best interest and in the best interests of Senate Republicans. There are some concerns among White House aides though Amara and Victor that perhaps this time at Mar-a-Lago could un-due the President's decision on that front.</s>BLACKWELL: Sarah, before you go, let's talks about this spending bill. $1.4 trillion gets the government through September but the President I mean, no one gets everything they want in these negotiations. What was left on the table?</s>WESTWOOD: Well, certainly the White House wanted to see more in terms of border wall funding that what ended up in this bill. They wanted to see more than $8 billion in funding for the construction of a boarder wall. House Democrats did allow the funding to stay at current level so the administration will get about $1.4 billion to continue building the wall. There were some progressives who saw that as too big a concession from Speaker Nancy Pelosi. There are some things that both sides are touting as a win. For example, the fact that this bill will include pay raises for military and civilian federal workers, the fact that it will provide some funding for election security grants and for gun violence research so some things that both sides can be happy about. There was also a dispute about language that House Democrats wanted to include in the bill that would force the White House to adhere to a strict timeline in terms of releasing security assistance to Ukraine. White House officials were able to successfully negotiate that out of the spending bill Victor and Amara.</s>WALKER: All right, Sarah Westwood, thank you live for us there from West Palm Beach.</s>BLACKWELL: Let's bring in CNN Political Analyst Margaret Talev, White House Editor for AXIOS. Margaret, welcome back.</s>MARGARET TALEV, POLITICS AND WHITE HOUSE EDITOR, AXIOS: Good morning, Victor. How are you?</s>BLACKWELL: I'm well. Hope you are, too. Let's start here and Leader McConnell on Thursday before the recess began said that he's not sure what leverage there is in refraining from sending the Senate something that they do not want. His play here, I mean, he ignored a Supreme Court nominee for almost a year for the rest of a term. Holidays now have come upon the country is split on impeachment. You'll turn to 2020 at some point. Is it plausible that he just holds out and that Pelosi will not get the concessions?</s>TALEV: Yes, it is plausible. But Nancy Pelosi I think is playing sort of a couple of threads at the same time. One is to try to get the Senate to make some concessions the Democrats want in terms of witnesses. But the other is to sort of let the President stew a little bit and let things settle. The Democrats, I think, have been a little bit concerned, probably, about the fact that the American public wants to move on from impeachment and that some of the President's support has been shifting back towards the President on this issue and I think they understand that this is a period of time where they have very little to lose by saying we're not going to just expedite this over to the Senate when McConnell and Graham have both said we've made up our minds, we're ready to move on very quickly. I think McConnell and Graham were doing that to try to send the President a signal to say let's move this quickly. You don't have to worry, we're going to take care of this, but they opened up a gap that forced Democrats to say, wait a second, you're supposed to be impartial. So that is kind of the holding period that we're in right now. But most people think that Nancy Pelosi is not prepared to hold this out indefinitely that what happens between now and the winter holidays, at some point they'll come back in January and move forward.</s>BLACKWELL: Is there some anxiety from those purple districts from those Trump districts Democrats who - I mean, the vote for impeachment was theirs but some anxiety that this strategy from Pelosi will hurt them?</s>TALEV: Yeah. A lot of that anxiety was dealt with before the vote. Everyone sort of cast their lot and now they own it. I think if this process dragged on for months, if it was summertime and the House was still holding up those impeachment articles, you might have a real situation like that. But if this is a matter of waiting three or four weeks instead of one or two weeks, I can't imagine that is going to have much of an impact. By the time voters are voting, they might be thinking more about the economy or who the Democratic nominee is for President.</s>BLACKWELL: So let's wait from some of those vulnerable Democrats to the vulnerable Republicans especially in the Senate. Leader Schumer, obviously, Democrats do not have the majority, but can force a vote on some of those witnesses, some of those documents. What is the potency of just getting those vulnerable Republicans who are up in 2020 to say no?</s>TALEV: Yeah. That's part of this calculation in terms of trying to get some of the Democratic terms witnesses and so on and so forth. I don't think the Democrats expect at this point, unless there are some major new revelation over the break that they're going to peel off that many Republicans who would then vote for impeachment or against acquittal. But there are questions about whether Senators like maybe Susan Collins or Cory Gardner will be bound by process questions. In other words, that their voters would want to say that they took the process seriously, that they wanted time for a deliberation rather than just to expedite this and get it over with. That is where Democrats have some of this leverage right now.</s>BLACKWELL: We know that House Democratic staff, they are working over the break. We'll see what happens when everyone comes back in January. Margaret Talev always good to have you.</s>TALEV: Thanks very much.</s>WALKER: According to AAA, a record number of Americans, more than 115 million, will take planes, trains and automobiles to get to and from their holiday destinations over the next ten days.</s>BLACKWELL: That is the highest number since AAA started tracking holiday travel almost 20 years ago. And a lot of people will be running into some terrible weather.</s>WALKER: Meteorologist Allison Chinchar joining us live from the CNN Weather Center with what you need to know if you're going to be traveling. Hey, Ally.</s>ALLISON CHINCHAR, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yeah. And we're not just talking air travel. We're also talking people that are going to be traveling on the roadways, even if it's a short trip. One to two hours, may be to your end destination. If it's in a couple portions of the country, you could be dealing with a much longer trip than you anticipated. Here is a look at the live rates, are you starting to notice this low pressure system. This is the one that is really going to develop and take shape later on today. And then it's going to start to push inland taking with it all of that moisture, meaning heavy rainfall across portions of the southeast. And here is what we're talking about notice again as we push late Saturday into Sunday, look into to a lot of those heavy rain bands because also notice the storm doesn't really move all that much in 48 hours. That allows it plenty of time to dump a tremendous amount of rain. How much rain? Widespread about 2 to 4 inches but you're going to have some spots that could pick up 5, 6 if not even as much as 8 inches of rain before this system finally does exit. We're not just talking Florida, but the Carolinas, Georgia, even across portions of Alabama and Mississippi. This is not good for travelers. Again here is a look as that progresses into late Sunday and then notice it becomes more of an issue for the Carolinas and even Virginia as we head into Monday. But another area that we're also looking at travel concerns, that's going to be on the West Coast. Look at how much rain has already fallen across portions of Washington State 7, 8, 9 inches of rain. You also have areas of Oregon that have picked up 5 to 6 inches of rain.</s>CHINCHAR: The concern, that's enough to trigger flooding alone. But we also have more rain that's going to fall. So you have flood watches in effect for both Washington and Oregon. The other concern is that system is going to start to push that moisture south as we go through the day today. So now Northern California also has the potential to pick up significant amounts of heavy rain. We're talking cities like San Francisco, even Sacramento so if you have some travel plans Victor and Amara to any one of these places here or even in the southeast, please check with your air carrier or may be just pack some patients if you're on the roadways in the next couple of days.</s>BLACKWELL: We'll do Allison Chinchar, thank you.</s>CHINCHAR: Thank you.</s>WALKER: A whistleblower claims that the TSA is focusing on speed instead of security. Is that an opening for terrorists and putting you and millions of other travelers at risk? We will ask an aviation and transportation expert.</s>BLACKWELL: Also, the Pentagon is on alert for signs North Korea may deliver that Christmas gift that they promised. They've been threatening to send the U.S. that for some time, plus their new warning, that's next.