Weak jobs report and record trade deficit renew concerns
President Trump accentuate the positive in Friday's jobs report, which showed fewer jobs created last month than projected but a strong increase in wages; reaction and analysis from the 'Special Report' All-Star panel.
This is a rush transcript from "Special Report," March 8, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: We'll probably find out the answer is yes, the unemployment rate just went lower.
We're down now 3.8 percent. So we had very good news on that. I think the big news really was that wages went up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: President Trump accentuating the positive in today's jobs report which showed fewer jobs created last month than projected, but a strong increase in wages.
So let's bring in our panel, Jason Riley, "Wall Street Journal" columnist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Charles Lane from "The Washington Post," and Ben Domenech, of "The Federalist."
So let's start with the bad news on the economy today -- 20,000 jobs created. Projections it had been 180,000 jobs. Plus a discouraging report from Beijing about prospects for a trade deal with China. Jason, add that all up to the report earlier this week about a record trade deficit, what do you make of it?
JASON RILEY, "WALL STREET JOURNAL" COLUMNIST: Well, it's one report. We don't know if it's a statistical blip or a sign of something more problematic in terms of the economy. We do know that China and Europe in particular, their economies are slowing down. We do live in a globalized economy. So what is happening there is going to affect us personally, specifically in terms of our export markets and so forth.
But there was a lot of good news in here. Labor force participation rates continue to be steady and strong. Wages are up. Labor markets are tight. Unemployment continues to be low. It's been 4 percent or lower for 12 states months. So there is some good news here.
But we had furloughs. We had bad weather. So it's hard to, again, draw too broad a conclusion based on one report. We're probably going to need to see a couple more jobs reports.
WALLACE: Just to follow up on the China part of it, the report in the "New York Times" today says that the Chinese are afraid of sending President Xi to Mar-a-Lago because they are worried that you will see the same thing that happened with Kim and Trump, that the president will end up walking away from a deal.
RILEY: Perhaps. But we should know better than to try and predict what President Trump is going to do in these situations. He seems to just do whatever is on his mind that day. But that is not to say that we should be playing down how these trade negotiations and how the tariff fights are affecting the economy. That clearly is part of what is going on in these job reports that we are seeing. So we can't discount that entirely.
WALLACE: It's certainly part of what we are seeing in the stock market today, too.
President Trump also weighed in today on two of his former associates who are facing prison, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. And he had very different takes on them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: I feel very sorry for Paul Manafort. I think it's been a very, very tough time for him.
Michael Cohen lied about the pardon. That was a stone-cold lie. And he's liked about a lot of things, but when he lied about the pardon, that was really a lie.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: I think he thinks that he lied.
(LAUGHTER)
WALLACE: Chuck, probably not a coincidence that Manafort has not turned on the president and Cohen has turned on the president.
CHARLES LANE, OPINION WRITER, "WASHINGTON POST": Yes. I suppose Paul Manafort maybe holding out the hope that someday he will still be considered for a pardon. He has just been sentenced to four years and he has another sentencing ahead of him, and so he is not turning on the president.
In this swearing contest now over the pardon between the president and Michael Cohen, frankly I don't know what to make of it because I could see it either way. I think there's also the possibility, and I think this has been talked about, that Cohen went through intermediaries, his lawyers seeking a pardon from Trump. But I can assure you of one thing, he is not going to get one now because of the way he talked about the president on the Hill the other day.
BEN DOMENECH, "THE FEDERALIST": The president really enjoys, I think, dunking on people when he has the opportunity to do so. In this instance he is taking every opportunity, I think, to criticize Michael Cohen. He resents him and what he's done after all the years that he spent paying his salary beforehand. And I think that you're completely correct. This is a situation where your attitude towards the president dictates his attitude towards you.
RILEY: President Trump also said, I believe back in November, that he hadn't taken a pardon for Manafort off the table yet. So there is that hope for Manafort, too. We have had a lot of complaints about the length of the sentence that Manafort received. But as Chuck said, he is not out of woods here completely. He has got another sentencing coming up. And that could run concurrent, or it could be added to this current sentence he just received.
WALLACE: I want to drill down a little bit on this pardon, Ben, because the president said today not only that Cohen asked for a pardon but he tweeted out that Cohen had specifically asked, personally asked him for a pardon. Let's put that up on the screen. "He directly asked me for a pardon. I said no. He lied again," when he told the committee that no he had never asked for a pardon. How do you think the issue with the pardon plays for both Cohen and President Trump?
DOMENECH: Well, I think that the president obviously wants to play this as a situation where you can't trust anything that Cohen says. It's the same sort of script that he used against him, you know, immediately after his testimony on Capitol Hill and that his associates did as well. In this instance I think he is making a claim that might have to reach a point where it is justified, particularly if some kind of perjury pursuit against Cohen continues, which I think it will. It's in the interest of House Republicans to do that, to continue to paint him as someone who is an opportunist who cannot be trusted on anything.
WALLACE: But the flipside of that, Chuck, is that it raises the question as to whether or not people in the Trump camp, whether it was the president himself or some of his lawyers, were dangling pardons at earlier points in this investigation.
LANE: It certainly does. And I would personally like to know what the real story is about this pardon. I want to know was it dangled? I want to know was it sought. The problem is, of course, we have these two guys who aren't exactly on very good terms with the truth who are our best witnesses to it.
And there is also a risk, it's kind of a subtle risk, I think, in this for Trump, is the more he talks about what a liar Cohen is, the more he devalues the things Cohen said at his hearing that are beneficial to Trump.
WALLACE: Such as if there was no collusion.
LANE: Such as there was no collusion and so on and so forth.
WALLACE: All right, panel, we have to take a break here. But when we come back, the Friday lightning round.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., HOUSE SPEAKER: HR-1 restores the people's faith that government works for the public interest, the people's interest, not the special interests.
REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY, R-CALIF., HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: They want to take more taxpayer money. They want to give you less freedom. Those who vote for it today, I guess they walk away with the raise in their campaign.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: Speaker Nancy Pelosi and GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy with very different reactions to the house passing HR-1 today, the Election Reform for the People Act, which faces certain defeat in the Senate.
And we are back now with our panel. All right, let's look at some of the key elements in HR-1. Here they are. Expand registration and voting rules. Public financing of campaigns in which $6 in taxpayer money would be provided for every $1 raised from small donors. Make tax returns for presidential candidates public. And independent redistricting of Congressional districts. Ben, good legislation or bad?
DOMENECH: It's ridiculous. It's not a piece of legislation that's really meant to be legislation. It's a piece of legislation that's designed to stake out a position. One thing that you didn't mention in terms of just an assessment of how unfair it is, is that it changes the makeup of the FEC, the Federal Election Commission, from having six people, an evenly balanced situation, to five where it would be always skewed in favor of one party over the other. I just think that this is not a responsible piece of legislation. It has no chance of becoming law.
WALLACE: Let me remind everybody this is the lightning round. I used to say that to Krauthammer all the time.
LANE: It's a mixed bag. There is some really off-the-wall stuff that probably wouldn't pass Constitutional muster. But there's some good policy in it, too. For example, independent redistricting commissions. But I do agree with Ben, it's mainly about staking out a position for the Democratic Party, something for them to rally around after a bad week. I think it was something they needed to do.
WALLACE: Jason, it would often toughen disclosure requirements so much that even the ACLU is against it.
RILEY: That was my point. It's not Republicans alone who are opposed to this. The ACLU says it's unconstitutional infringement on free speech. I think it also, getting back to Ben's point, it federalizes a voting process that is typically been left to the states in terms of who is qualified to vote, election rules, and so forth that are on a state-by-state basis now. It federalizes that. And I think that is a nonstarter for a lot of people as well.
WALLACE: All right, let's turn to Venezuela and the surprising news, at least surprising to me, that the firebrand Democratic freshman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar are actually criticizing President Trump's get tough policy on Maduro in Venezuela, talking about maybe he was dialing back the possibility of military sanction -- military action and the fact of economic sanctions. Your reaction to that?
RILEY: I think it tells you that Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the House in name only, frankly. I think that she has lost control of this caucus. And it also shows a sort of ignorance of the region. Ocasio-Cortez also already said she doesn't know of much about the Middle East, and I think she's showcasing her ignorance when it comes to South America as well. People are starving. They are eating their pets, literally. Zoos are killing animals to feed the public. This is ridiculous. And she thinks the bad guy is Donald Trump.
WALLACE: Chuck?
LANE: This was a rare moment of bipartisanship in Washington of late where both Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi supported the president's policy. They did it in part to help Democrats like Donna Shalala in south Florida. And I kind of agree with Jason, the party discipline is not holding, at least for this small group.
WALLACE: And let me just pick up on this, Ben, because one other area where they are disagreeing with the leaders is recognizing Juan Guaido as the interim president. Schumer went for it. Pelosi went for it. The two freshmen say not so fast.
DOMENECH: The broader narrative of what's going on in the past few weeks is an indication that Nancy Pelosi, long hailed as someone who had an iron grip on her conference, has lost control of a significant part of that narrative. Maybe it's the difference between social media now versus not having it before when she was in charge. But this is part of that story.
WALLACE: All right, we have got a couple of minutes left. Real quickly, winner, loser, Jason?
ROBERTS: My winner is Ocasio-Cortez who defended Omar's anti-Semitic remarks, then got a resolution trying to denounce those watered down to basically nothing, and I think in the process shows that Nancy Pelosi is not really running things in the House of Representatives. There she is.
My loser is Tom Perez and the head of the Democratic Committee which is afraid to let Fox News host a primary debate. It's remarkable cowardice, I think. And if the Democratic candidates can't handle tough questions from Fox News hosts, they don't deserve to be president.
WALLACE: Chuck?
LANE: My winner this week is Joe Biden because he is leading in the polls, though not announced for the Democratic nomination, and two of his strongest potential competitors in the so-called moderate lane of the race have gotten out, Mike Bloomberg and Sherrod Brown. John Hickenlooper and Beto O'Rourke are still in the picture there, but they're both weaker, and I think it's good for Biden.
My loser, Robert Mueller who only got four years of a sentence for Paul Manafort. He had recommended at least 19, although he does have another crack at it. And that judge, Judge Ellis over there in Virginia, did not like the special counsel.
WALLACE: Less than a minute. Winner?
DOMENECH: The biggest winner of the week was the nerds at Critical Role Critters, a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that became the largest, most successful film Kickstarter of all time. They asked for $750,000. They raised $6 million in four days.
My loser is the poor teacher who did not recognize the cross on that poor kid's forehead and made him wipe it off in elementary school in Utah. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for those of us who perhaps needed to spend more time studying religion in America.
WALLACE: And what's the name of the group that's the winner?
DOMENECH: Critical Role Critters. They are the best.
(LAUGHTER)
WALLACE: All right, anybody who knew them raise your hand.
(LAUGHTER)
WALLACE: OK, obviously Ben. Good on you. Thank you, panel.
When we come back, "Notable Quotables."
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WALLACE: Finally tonight, "Notable Quotables."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not good?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not good. Not good at all.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT: And what they have been through is incredible. One woman lost 10 people in her family.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was told to study because, apparently, I am allowed back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: She should rot in Syrian dessert somewhere where she belongs.
SARAH SANDERS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We are continuing to have ongoing conversations with North Korea.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Most of my friends didn't even understand that they could get vaccinated despite their parents' wishes.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY, MAJORITY LEADER: The support for Israel isn't about the Benjamins.
PELOSI: I do not believe that she understood the full weight of her words.
TRUMP: We appreciate it very much Tim Apple.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The Democratic National Committee will not allow FOX News to moderate one of the Democratic presidential debates.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is not a manufactured crisis. This is truly an emergency.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was preyed upon and then raped by a superior officer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I didn't do this stuff. This was not me. I'm fighting for my -- life.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michael Cohen lied like a dog.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A total sentence for all of those charges, 47 months.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably about the percent of people who think Nickelback is their favorite band.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why would you criticize one of the greatest bands of the 90's?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Chair, I would ask for unanimous consent to sound an air horn.
TRUMP: This is how I got elected, by being off script.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: And that's “Special Report” for tonight. I'm Chris Wallace in Washington.
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