This is a rush transcript from "Special Report with Bret Baier," April 29, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

JOE BIDEN, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If I'm going to be able to be Donald Trump in 2020, it's going to happen here.

There are three basic reasons why I am running for president of the United States. The first is to restore the soul of the nation. And the second is to rebuild the backbone of this nation. And the third is to unify this nation.

(APPLAUSE)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Can you imagine sleepy Joe, crazy Bernie, or you can imagine any of these people up here doing what I'm doing? There'd be 200 people would show up if they were president. If they weren't president, nobody would show up.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: Joe Biden, his first official campaign event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a state Democrats clearly believe is going to be integral to winning the White House back. The president not holding back on the union efforts to go after union endorsements. "I'll never get the support of dues crazy union leadership, those people who rip off their membership with ridiculously high dues, medical and other expenses, while being paid a fortune. But the members love Trump. They look at our record, economy, tax and reg cuts, military, et cetera. Win!" And then goes on. "The dues sucking firefighters leadership will always support Democrats, even though the membership wants me. Some things never change!"

What about this? Let's bring in our panel: Matthew Continetti, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon; Katie Pavlich, news editor at Townhall.com, and Josh Kraushaar, political editor for National Journal. OK, Katie, it was Joe Biden's first kind of official campaign event. What did you think?

KATIE PAVLICH, TOWNHALL.COM: Look, he's campaigning in Pennsylvania and not Iowa, and he's going after a demographic that Democrats have taken for granted for a very long time. The union vote is an interesting one. He talks about getting those endorsements. But President Trump has a point in a lot of ways because, as we have seen over the past decade, we have seen a movement of right to work laws being placed all around the country, state legislatures, because people don't want to be forced into unions, and right-to-work states have actually won that argument.

And so unions actually have a lot less political capital than they used to. Now, that doesn't go to say that President Trump doesn't have to make sure that he campaigns to try to get those voters, but Joe Biden has to make the case that an 100 counties that President Trump flipped from President Obama, who Joe Biden of course served under, deserve to be back in Democratic hands. Joe Biden talks about things like bringing coal jobs back, or unions, he's going to actually have to answer for some of the policies that he stood by and watched President Obama when it came to overregulation, coal industry going out of power, 51,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, for example, manufacturing going way while the Trump administration has bought 5,000 of those jobs back. So when it comes to the unions, they have less power now than they did, but they are trying to get at the same voter when it comes to tussling for the ones that flipped from blue to red in 2016.

BAIER: Josh, listening to Brit Hume earlier saying it felt like an old- time Democrat pitch. And it really was.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR, NATIONAL JOURNAL: This is as much a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party as it is for the soul of the nation. This is Joe Biden's homefield advantage. He's in union hall, he's speaking to blue-collar union workers, but that's not where the base of the Democratic Party is right now. The base of the Democratic Party is the university faculty lounge. It's focused much more on the wealthy and the progressive elements within the Democratic Party.

So Joe Biden's strategy is to say, look, there are a lot of working-class still in the Democratic Party. And with all the other candidates running more to the left, running more to the elites, this is his chance to consolidate the 30 percent, 35 percent of white working-class Democrats while everyone else goes for the others 65 percent.

BAIER: Here's Karl Rove on where things stand right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KARL ROVE, FORMER DEPUTY WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: The polls say that he leads the Democratic primary, but the Washington Post/ABC poll had an interesting thing. They said name a candidate you could be for for the Democratic nomination for president, and 54 percent couldn't come up with a name, which means this thing is wide open. He starts the leader, but this thing is wide open.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: You look at the fundraising totals in the first 24 hours, Biden was impressive, $6.3 million, Beto O'Rourke, $6.1 million. There you see Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, obviously, going on to raise a lot more money in the first couple of weeks. Matthew?

MATTHEW CONTINETTI, WASHINGTON FREE BEACON: I think the key here is that we are a long way away from election day. And Biden has started off with a general election strategy. He's basically bypassing the primary. He is going, as Katie mentioned, straight to the swing state, and he's targeting Trump. That was with his introductory message. That was the same thing with his speech today, economic oriented. But in that year and a half, he has to defeat 20 to 22 other Democrats, and the question is, will he be able to? That I think is a question we do not have enough data to answer today.

BAIER: When you look at all of these faces, and we are probably not done filling the board up, that's a big hurdle.

PAVLICH: It's a large field. And Joe Biden is going to have to do a lot to distinguish himself as someone who doesn't just have old ideas, someone who is Washington experience is a positive and not a negative, how he can be that young and hip older statesman at the same time and compete with people like Bernie Sanders.

When it comes to the policy issues, today, he teetered toward the left on a couple of things. He sounds like President Trump on a lot of worker issues, but when he got into the details about renewable energy, for example, or Medicare for all, he talked about those kinds of issues. And the follow up questions to that are going to be do you agree with people like Kamala Harris who believe you should eliminate the private insurance market, or do you agree that there should be some kind of private sector, public sector option? And those are questions he's going to have to answer, in addition to the social issues of the day, the #MeToo movement, for example, and the socialism, really, that has popped up as mainstream on the left.

BAIER: I want to turn to a Washington issue that is very Washington. Ahead of a committee hearing on Thursday in the House, this is the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN JERROLD NADLER, D-N.Y.: There are valid reasons to wanting to be able to have counsel ask questions. We have seen any number of instances under the five-minute rule where a witness will filibuster for four-and-a-half minutes and give a unresponsive answer in the last half-minute, and you can't follow-up.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BAIER: Talking about Attorney General Barr testifying before his committee on Thursday. There is this back and forth about whether he is going to. The DOJ issuing a statement "The Attorney General agreed to appear before Congress, therefore members of Congress should be the ones doing the questioning. He remains happy to engage with member on their questions regarding the Mueller report." It's kind of in doubt whether he is going to actually show up, Josh.

KRAUSHAAR: Democrats want to have staff counsel asking a lot of the questions, and they are worried that some of the more ideological members are going to hog the questions. They want the lawyers --

BAIER: Which is what happens every time.

KRAUSHAAR: Every time. So I think the White House is playing their cards wisely. They know that they should have a committee the way the committee hearings traditionally operate. And the negotiations could mean that we don't have a hearing from Barr both in front of the House or Senate Judiciary Committees.

BAIER: Probably the Senate, run by Republicans, he'll probably testify there.

CONTINETTI: This is a fight over optics. And Nadler wants the committee hearing to look like Watergate or Iran-Contra, which is the other two times where it was the staff counsel delivering the questions. A fight over optics is something that Attorney General Barr can win.

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