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GOP Furious with Trump; Woman Live Streams Standoff with Police; Zika Outbreak; Driving While Distracted. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired August 03, 2016 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:33:25] CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: We've been reporting about disunity within the Republican Party all morning long. Our sources revealing now that Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, is incredibly upset with Donald Trump for refusing to endorse the House speaker, Paul Ryan, in his primary race in Wisconsin. Dana Bash has more insider information to share with us now.

Dana, what can you tell us?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (via telephone): Well, just as you said, that the Republican Party chair, Reince Priebus, is upset. And it's not just because he is the chair of this party and Paul Ryan is the speaker of the House and he feels that as the -- one of the (INAUDIBLE) heads of the party now, Donald Trump should be, you know, supporting fellow leaders. It's not just that, Carol, I'm told, it's very personal.

For those who might not know, Reince Priebus is from Wisconsin. He is very good friends, very dear friends with Paul Ryan. He even ran Paul Ryan's -- excuse me, chaired Paul Ryan's very first congressional race. So, as it was described to me, Paul Ryan is like family. So he's taking this very personally. He has made that clear to people inside the Trump campaign.

And, you know, as a source described to me, Reince Priebus feels like he's taken on a lot of water to be there for Donald Trump, even as a lot of people within the Republican Party were not so sure that this is the right thing to do. Reince Priebus has said, look, he was elected by the vast majority of Republican voters, and now he just feels like Donald Trump, it's a personal front to him, that Trump has not decided to endorse Paul Ryan, again, because, for Reince Priebus, it's not just as a party chair, it's personal.

[09:35:14] COSTELLO: So there are all sorts of rumors out there, Dana, and one rumor that we keep hearing is that Donald Trump may drop out of the race. Is that true?

BASH: Well, we have absolutely no reporting to suggest that that's true. What I can tell you, Carol, is that there is a lot of speculation as to what Donald Trump is trying to do, if anything. Basically people trying to crawl into his brain and his decision- making process or his actions. Meaning this, people are having a lot of discussions within the Republican Party about whether, when Donald Trump talks about the system being rigged, whether the fact that he is even stepped up his attacks on the media, whether that is all a way to lay the groundwork for saying, I'm not being treated fairly, I'm out of here, before the election, or whether he is laying the groundwork for the scenario of him potentially losing the election in November, and laying the blame elsewhere.

COSTELLO: All right, Dana.

BASH: It's unclear if either of those are true, or none of them is true. But what I can tell you is, there's a lot of discussion among, you know, sort of high levels of the Republican Party trying to figure out if either of those is actually something that's going on inside Donald Trump's brain right now.

COSTELLO: All right, Dana Bash, thanks, as always, for digging for us this morning. We always appreciate it. Dana Bash reporting.

I'll be right back.

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[09:40:43] COSTELLO: A stunning and bizarre story out of Baltimore this morning. An African-American woman is killed and her five-year- old son injured after a seven hour standoff with police. Now, much of the encounter was streamed live on FaceBook. It started when cops showed up to serve a warrant at the home. They say that's when 23- year-old Korryn Gaines pointed a shotgun at them multiple times and threatened to kill them if they didn't leave. It only gets more complicated from there. CNN Sara Ganim is following the story. She joins us now.

SARA GANIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good morning, Carol.

You know, one of the interesting thing that this case highlights is that police are catching up with the technology on FaceBook live. They actually requested during the seven hour standoff that FaceBook take down, deactivate the FaceBook live. One of the reasons police said in Baltimore was that the people who -- some of the people who were commenting on her FaceBook page, Korryn --

COSTELLO: So she was streaming this whole hostage situation live on FaceBook? She was attempting to?

GANIM: She was attempting to. She was trying to. And some of the people who were commenting on her FaceBook page, and you can see some of the stream here, they were encouraging her not to cooperate with police. You know, a lot of this is about cooperation. There was another man inside the home who also police were trying to serve a search warrant on him. He exited the home peacefully and was taken into custody without incident. That's when the stand -- when the standoff occurred is when she refused to leave the house. You can see that her five-year-old son was in there with her.

A lot of the reason people are talking about this today is because there's a part of the video that was posted to Instagram in which the five-year-old is heard talking to his mother. She says, what are they trying to do? And he says, they trying to kill us. Now, it's -- the boy hesitates when he answers. He's talking very softly. It's hard to hear. And you can see we've blurred his face. And so that's why we're not playing the sound.

But, you know, there's a lot of different facets to this story. Clearly, she did not cooperate with police. There were shots that were fired, first by police, then she fired back at them. She had been threatening them. Shots were exchanged between the both. The police are continuing to investigate this morning. But the really interesting thing here, how police have now begun to request that these FaceBook lives come down so it doesn't compromise their negotiations, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right, Sara Ganim, thank you so much.

I want to bring in our CNN senior law enforcement analyst and former FBI assistant director Tom Fuentes.

This is such a strange case. So this hostage situation is ongoing. The woman, and a five-year-old. Was it her son, Sara?

GANIM: It was.

COSTELLO: It was her son. She's attempting to stream this whole episode on FaceBook live and in real time. She even interviews her five-year-old during the situation. What do you make of this?

TOM FUENTES, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, the worst thing about this, Carol, is the police are actually trying to save her life. They're trying to take her into custody, peacefully, which would then guarantee the survival of the son as well in the room with her. They even bring her parents to the scene to try to talk her into complying and surrendering to save her own life. But she insists that she's not going to and if they try to she's going to kill them and she's pointing a shotgun out the door at them when they open the door to look in.

In the meantime, because she's streaming live, people are encouraging her to not comply. Encouraging her to resist the arrest. And, interestingly, the warrant that they were trying to serve included the charge of resisting arrest on a prior occasion. So she's being encouraged by people and followers of her FaceBook to not comply with the police. And this goes on for seven or eight hours.

Now, what exactly causes the shots to be fired, we're not exactly sure. But the mere fact originally when she pointed that gun out the door at a police officer trying to serve a warrant, they had the right to take her life right then and there. I think the hesitation would have been if they saw the child to no try to have gunfire in that situation that would endanger the child.

COSTELLO: Well, here's something that might surprise some people. Gaines' -- the suspect in question, the woman who was killed, her FaceBook account was deactivated. Some might say that that's actually not a good thing because there, you know, everybody has a right to film anything and she had a right to live stream what was happening on FaceBook so everybody would know exactly what happened.

[09:45:06] FUENTES: Well, the problem with that is that she's then being told to not comply with the police. So there is an obstruction there, which is actually going to affect her life, whether she likes it or not. And that's the situation they're faced in. They don't want that streamed out any more if it's causing people to be on her side or take the wrong side in this case, which is noncompliance, which is ultimately going to cost her, her life if she continues it, or if she gets encouraged to actually shoot at the police. And we don't know who shoot first or what.

But, you know, it's not going to end well. The other person that had -- they had a warrant for, he complies, he's arrested, he's alive today. The child -- the one-year-old he was carrying is alive today. But Gaines chose to not comply, to resist and to point a shotgun at police officers and threaten to kill them if they attempted to serve the warrant. Now, in that situation, if you have a barricaded subject, you can put teargas into that room and gas her out or something. But because she had the little boy in there and they knew it, that complicated everything. Essentially, she's holding her own son hostage, whether she wanted to say so or not. The police look at it as, there's an innocent second party in that apartment who has nothing to do with causing this and could get harmed, you know, in the operation. So that causes them to delay, to try to negotiate, to talk her into surrendering and goes so far as to bring her parents there. Her parents are trying to talk her into surrendering, and people on FaceBook are trying to talk her into not surrendering and not complying.

COSTELLO: Tom Fuentes, thanks, as always, for your insight.

I'll be right back.

FUENTES: Thank you, Carol.

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[09:50:09] COSTELLO: The number of locally spread Zika cases in south Florida hits 15. This morning, state health officials on the ground and in the air are spraying a ten-mile area near Miami in an effort to contain the virus. Adding to local cases in Florida alone, 336 others have Zika because of travel, 55 people are pregnant, they're women. That's included within those cases. Despite this, new polling finds only 23 percent of Americans worry they or someone in their family could become infected. Those U.S. fears coming as disease detectives in Brazil zero in on the epidemic. More now from Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

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DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When trying to solve a medical mystery, it helps to start at the beginning. And that is why Anna Lara (ph), this adorable little girl with the eyeglasses and the too small head, may be so important. At ten months old, she is the first, the first known child to be born with microcephaly here in Salvador, Brazil, near the epicenter of the Zika epidemic. GUPTA (on camera): One of the things --

GUPTA (voice-over): Every day, her head circumference is measured. It's a frightening new ritual for thousands of parents all over Brazil. Their hope, that their child's head will suddenly start to grow. But why Anna Lara, why Brazil and why has the northeastern coast of this country been hit so terribly hard?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because they're perfect setup for an epidemic to occur.

GUPTA: For the past two years, neurologist Dr. Jean-Marie Olaveria Heu (ph) has walked the favelas, the slums of Salvador, searching for clues.

GUPTA (on camera): In many ways, this has been an epicenter.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here.

GUPTA: Why is it so bad in northeast Brazil?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the social economic conditions are worse in this part of the country and they're more closely packed demographically, so they have less -- less access to care, sanitary conditions are worse in this part of the country.

GUPTA (voice-over): And the nutrition is poor as well, which he believes could be a factor in microcephaly. For the mosquito that can breed in even a bottle cap's worth of water, a favela is a Zika paradise. The disease spreads quickly here, with terrible consequences.

GUPTA (on camera): And as bad as the conditions are around here, take a look down there. When it rains, all the way goes down into the valley. And, of course, that means more mosquitoes.

Any of you guys have Zika?

GUPTA (voice-over): Everyone knows about Zika here. No surprise that as hard as we looked, we saw lots and lots of kids, but not a single pregnant woman. This boy tells me that his aunt is pregnant, but she stays inside all day using repellent.

GUPTA (on camera): Did you pray?

GUPTA (voice-over): This woman was lucky. Her baby is fine.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, so she prayed to God and so the mosquitoes wouldn't bite her and not affect the children.

GUPTA: Many of the unlucky children never make it to the clinic set up to help those with microcephaly, their parents ashamed to be out in public with them, never receiving the type of therapy these children are getting to stimulate their growth.

GUPTA (on camera): So like the suck reflex is there. GUPTA (voice-over): This is Julia. Notice her eyes. In addition to the problems with her gaze, she also has significant sensitivity to the light and clearly diminished vision. A clue as to where the infection is most likely to strike.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You see the brain is severely distorted.

GUPTA: Peering deep inside her brain, Doctor Jean-Marie looks for clues as well. The hope, that what they learn here will help similar babies being born throughout the Americas.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And I think with stimulation that these children are getting from the group, we see actually better outcomes than we expect from looking at the scans.

GUPTA (on camera): That's a good grip. Oh.

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GUPTA: So they're getting all sorts of clues here, Carol. You know, we know a lot about Zika. We know what is happening in Florida. We know that it's not likely to spread widely or quickly in the United States. That's obvious now. But some of those clues came from Brazil. We also know that people who are younger when they get pregnant, people who get the infection earlier in their pregnancy, tend to be more affected. Again, common knowledge for people who have been following this story, but those clues came from those favelas, those slum-like areas here in Brazil.

COSTELLO: All right, Dr. Sanjay Gupta reporting live for us this morning. Thank you.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, the deadly dangers of distracted driving. Is phone addiction to blame?

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[09:57:31] COSTELLO: Most people will admit texting while driving is bad, yet an alarming number of people still do it. One psychiatrist argues our phones have power over us, an addiction that most people behind the wheel are unaware of. More now from Kelly Wallace.

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LAURA MAURER, DISTRACTED DRIVER: It's not like I got in my car and thought, I'm going to drive distracted and hit somebody today. That's not what I was out to do.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN DIGITAL CORRESPONDENT: Looking at that text would cause her to crash into a tractor here in rural Iowa, taking the life of a 75-year-old man.

DAVID GREENFIELD, PH.D., FOUNDER, CENTER FOR INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY ADDICTION: The reason why she answered that ping is because she felt compulsed or felt a compulsion in order to answer it. WALLACE: Dr. David Greenfield is the founder of the Center for

Internet and Technology Addiction. He says most of us would probably have done the same thing and looked at that text.

GREENFIELD: I think that conservatively 60 to 70 percent of people are probably doing it at -- with some frequency. What does that mean? That means that it's just Russian roulette. That some of those people are going to have accidents. Some of those people are going to be killed. And some of those people are going to kill or hurt somebody else. So, is that a huge problem? I think it is. Do I think it's a public health issue? Yes, I do.

WALLACE: Our smart phones are affected our brains without us even knowing it. When we hear the ping of an incoming text, social media update or e-mail, our brains get a hit of dopamine, a chemical that leads to an increase in arousal, energizing the reward circuitry in our brains.

GREENFIELD: The dopamine reward centers are the same centers that have to do with pleasure from eating, pleasure from sex and procreation, pleasure from drugs and alcohol. This reward circuitry is old as time, and if we didn't have it, we probably wouldn't exist as a species.

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WALLACE: And when our brains get that hit of dopamine, something else also happens. It overrides access to the part of the brain that controls reasoning and judgment. So the part of the brain, Carol, that would say, is this text or social media update worth killing someone? Well, if you don't have access to that part of the brain, you're not really having access to judgment and henceforth you make some dangerous decisions.

COSTELLO: No, I can understand that because every time my phone dings, I want -- I mean I want to look at it. I'm compelled to look at it.

WALLACE: You are. It's like the cocktail party effect, right? If you're at a cocktail party, it's rude if I'm talking to you. If someone taps me on the shoulder, I can't help but turn around. The same is the case with that phone pings, you can't help but check it out.

[10:00:06] COSTELLO: Well, I can't wait to see your special, because I think it's an important topic.

WALLACE: Thank you, Carol. It is. Thank you so much.

COSTELLO: Thank you, Kelly.