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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
President Called Out for Racist Ad as Midterm Approaches; One Black Box Recovered from Doomed Lion Air Flight; New Gruesome Details Released in Khashoggi Case. Aired 4-4:30a ET
Aired November 01, 2018 - 04:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[04:00:13] LUIS BRACAMONTES, CONVICTED OF KILLING TWO CALIFORNIA DEPUTIES: Break out soon, and I will kill more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DAVE BRIGGS, CNN ANCHOR: A new campaign ad portrays Hispanics as criminals, part of the president's eleventh hour pitch to rally Republicans around immigration.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Three more funerals today for victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. The suspect faces dozens of death penalty counts.
BRIGGS: One of the black boxes has been recovered from the downed Lion Air jet off Indonesia. Will it help determine what brought down this new model plane with 189 on board?
ROMANS: And the University of Maryland fires football coach D.J. Durkin. The school president defying a recommendation to let him stay after a player died on his watch.
Good morning and welcome to EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
BRIGGS: I'm Dave Briggs. Hope you had a great Halloween, everyone. It is Thursday, November 1st. It is 4:00 a.m. in the East. Hope you're happy with all your Halloween candy. But if you're not, Reese's put a machine out last night, a so-called candy converter. Put lame candy in, peanut butter cups come out. So if you don't like your Kit-Kat, your Skittles, your Sour Patch Kids, you can trade them all in. Baby Ruth. I would trade them all in. I'm a Reese's guy. Are you?
ROMANS: We have so much candy at my house right now. I'm going to start secretly taking it away today.
BRIGGS: Not enough Reese's, though. Never enough.
All right. Let's get to politics now. One rally down. Ten to go. President Trump in Florida for the first event in his week-long eleventh hour push to the midterms. But it's the Web ad he tweeted out before the rally that is really drawing attention in being called out for blatantly portraying Hispanics as criminals. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He says he wants to apply for a pardon for the felony he committed. Attempted murder.
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ROMANS: The ad echoes the notorious 1988 Willie Horton campaign ad for Bush 41 targeting Michael Dukakis. The Trump ad features a California cop killer in the U.S. illegally bragging about his crimes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRACAMONTES: I will break out soon, and I will kill more.
GRAPHICS: Democrats let him into our country.
BRACAMONTES: The only thing that I (EXPLETIVE DELETED) regret is that (EXPLETIVE DELETED) just killed two. I wish I had (EXPLETIVE DELETED) killed more of those (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
GRAPHICS: Democrats let him stay.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: The cop killer had actually been deported twice, once under Clinton, once under George W. Bush. Democratic party chairman Tom Perez says it's just another immigration dog whistle.
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TOM PEREZ, CHAIRMAN, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE: This is distracting, divisive Donald at his worst. This is fear-mongering.
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BRIGGS: The White House not exactly disagreeing. A source there telling CNN the ad and the president's immigration push are, quote, "clearly working. We are talking about it and not health care."
The president also claims as many as 15,000 troops could be sent to the border to stop the 3500 or so migrants heading toward the U.S. That caravan that is now more than 800 miles away and several weeks away from the border.
Chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta in Florida with more on the president's midterm push.
JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Dave, President Trump appears to have found his closing argument for the upcoming midterm election. It is the subject of immigration. Using some of his most inflammatory rhetoric to date on the issue at a rally here in Fort Myers, Florida. The president demonized repeatedly the caravan of migrants heading toward the U.S. border with Mexico. And he also vowed once again to end birthright citizenship that is baked into the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Here is more of what the president had to say.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Democrat Party is openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders -- you see what's happening right now. A vote for Democrats is a vote to liquidate America's borders and is a vote to meth, Fentanyl, heroin, and other deadly drugs pour across our borders.
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ACOSTA: The president also vented his frustrations over the media coverage over his recent trip to Pittsburgh to honor the people who died at the Tree of Life Synagogue. The president referred to the press as the enemy of the people less than one week after package bombs were delivered to CNN -- Christine and Dave.
ROMANS: All right. Jim Acosta, thank you.
If you asked the president, the migrant caravan from Central America is bigger than the media is reporting it. This is how he put it to ABC News.
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TRUMP: You have caravans coming up that look a lot larger than is reported actually. I mean, I'm pretty good at estimating crowd size. And I will tell you, they look a lot bigger than people would think.
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ROMANS: "I'm pretty good at estimating crowd size." The president is also going after Paul Ryan tweeting the House speaker should be focusing on holding the majority rather than giving his opinions on birthright citizenship, something he knows nothing about.
[04:04:06] In an interview with the Kentucky radio station, Ryan made it clear he believes you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.
ROMANS: Today the president's midterm blitz takes him to Missouri. That's where Senator Claire McCaskill is in a tight race with her Republican challenger Josh Hawley. She got some help yesterday from former vice president and possible 2020 contender Joe Biden.
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JOE BIDEN, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: You have a guy running against Claire who says that he supports pre-existing conditions being able to be covered. Yet he joins the lawsuit in Texas to make sure that they -- these guys are either not telling the truth or they're really, really stupid or both.
(END VIDEO CLIP) BRIGGS: The latest CNN forecast has Senator McCaskill ahead by just one point, a statistically tie.
ROMANS: An injection of star power today for the Georgia governor's race. Oprah Winfrey hitting the trial to campaign for Democrat Stacey Abrams. She will participate in two town halls with Abrams and plans to do door-to-door knocking in Atlanta to get out the vote. Vice President Mike Pence will also be campaigning in Georgia for Abrams' rival, Republican Brian Kemp. He will be three rallies across the state. The final debate of the race is now off. Kemp backed off the Sunday time slot to attend a rally with the president.
BRIGGS: The suspect in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre set to appear in court this morning. On Wednesday a federal grand jury indicted Robert Bowers on 44 counts. Many of them carry the death penalty.
Today's services will be held for 65-year-old dentist Richard Gottfried and married couple Bernice and Sylvan Simon, ages 84 and 86. Yesterday three other members of the congregation were laid to rest, 75-year-old Joyce Fienberg, Melvin Wax aged 87 and Irving Younger aged 69. Several hundred University of Pittsburgh students and supporters also rallied on campus in favor of tighter gun regulations.
ROMANS: Police in Irving, California, are hoping this surveillance video will help them find a vandal who defaced a synagogue with anti- Semitic graffiti just days after the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The vandal spray painting F-Jews on the synagogue. Workers spotted it Wednesday morning. The Orange County Human Relations Council says the number of hate crimes in the area jumped last year continuing a trend that began in 2015.
The Federal Reserve unveiled a new proposal Wednesday for regulating more than a dozen U.S. banks and marks a step back from the tight controls imposed after the financial crisis. In a statement, Fed chair Jerome Powell said, "Congress and the American people rightly expect us to achieve an effective and efficient regulatory regime that keeps our financial system strong and protects our economy while imposing no more burden than is necessary."
Earlier this year, Congress passed a bill raising the level which banks are considered too big to fail all the way up to $250 billion. Under the proposal the Fed would have more discretion to review how complex a firm may be or how connected it is to the broader financial system, while no changes will be applied to big banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Goldman. Under the new proposal banks under $250 billion in assets will now see softer rules.
According to estimates by the Fed the new proposed changes would decrease the amount of required capital banks have to old by $8 billion or change for about less than 1 percent.
BRIGGS: The National Archives has just released the so-called Watergate roadmap. The documents from the Watergate scandal include a would-be indictment against then President Richard Nixon that has never been seen before. It reveals how a grand jury plan to charge Mr. Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation. The president was never formally charged, but was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The group that petitioned for the release of the documents believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller should use them as a roadmap if he decides to issue a report to Congress.
ROMANS: All right. Google employees planning to stage a walkout today its offices around the world to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment. It comes after a "New York Times" investigation that detailed years of sexual harassment allegations, multimillion- dollar severance packages for accused executives, a lack of transparency.
Google CEO Sundar Pitchai voicing his support for employees who wish to participate in the protest. "Times" reports organizers expect more than 1500 people to take part across nearly two dozen Google offices worldwide. I think 10:00 a.m. Eastern is the time when those Google employees this morning are going to walk out.
BRIGGS: I'm sure we'll bring that to you live.
OK. Ahead, the body of the murdered "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi may never be found. Now Turkish authorities are pursuing a gruesome new theory about what happened to him. We're live in Istanbul with the latest.
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[04:13:54] ROMANS: Indonesia's search and rescue agency says it has located one of the black boxes from the doomed Lion Air flight that crashed in the Java Sea earlier this week.
CNN's Ivan Watson live in Jakarta, Indonesia with the details.
Good morning, Ivan.
IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. That's right. The black box, the flight data recorder located now after Monday's crash where the divers with the help of a submersible remote operated vehicle and its tools were able to home in on the locater beacon which was pinging under water at a depth of about 100 feet on the sea bed covered by mud, a diver says. They were able to home in on it and retrieve it. And it's now been handed over to the National Transportation Safety Committee here which is overseeing the investigation into this terrible disaster, Christine, which has left 189 passengers and crew dead.
Now the chief of that agency tells CNN it will take two to three weeks to retrieve all the information from the flight data recorder and possibly two to three months to then analyze it.
[04:15:02] He says that will be done in Indonesia. The transportation minister says that international agencies could be involved in safety regulations. Meanwhile, I spoke to a top executive in the company itself. Lion
Group which operates this low budget airline, who is, of course, grieving because he says he personally knows the pilot and co-pilot of the plane that went down, says he has no idea how a brand new Boeing 737 Max 8 could have crashed minutes after takeoff. And says he wants to fly to Boeing to talk to the manufacturers to try to get to the bottom of this terrible tragedy and mystery -- Christine.
ROMANS: It's just awful. All right. Thank you so much for that.
BRIGGS: Turkey's chief prosecutor says Saudi agents strangled "Washington Post" journalist Jamal Khashoggi almost immediately after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and then dismembered the body. The Turkish government demanding Saudi Arabia extradite all 18 suspects in the Khashoggi case. And now officials have a gruesome new theory about what may have happened to Khashoggi's remains.
Let's bring in CNN's Jomana Karadsheh live in Istanbul with the latest.
Jomana, good morning. What are we learning?
JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Dave. So after weeks of speculation, leaks that we've had from unnamed Turkish officials here, this was the first statement from the chief prosecutor here in Istanbul who is overseeing the criminal investigation. And in this statement, they say their investigation has so far concluded that Jamal Khashoggi was strangled to death immediately after entering this building behind me the Saudi consulate on October 2nd. They say his body was dismembered and destroyed.
Now it's unclear what they mean by destroyed. But the "Washington Post" is reporting according to senior Turkish official who is telling them they are pursuing the theory that his body was destroyed using acid either at the consulate or the consul-general's residence close by. They say that evidence -- by logical evidence collected from the consulate garden supports the theory that his body was destroyed close to where the killing took place.
Now despite these revelations, this latest information, Turkish authorities say they are still pushing the Saudis for answers on where are the remains of Jamal Khashoggi and who issued the orders to that hit squad that carried out the killing. They were hoping to get those answers from the Saudi chief prosecutor who was in Istanbul as you mentioned, and he left yesterday after a three-day visit, but they don't seem to have the answers.
According to the senior Turkish official telling CNN, he says it seems to them that the Saudis were more interested in finding out what evidence Turkey had than real genuine cooperation in this investigation -- Dave.
BRIGGS: Just despicable. Jomana Karadsheh with the latest in Istanbul. Thank you.
ROMANS: All right. $80,000, 20 guns and crack. Just some of what was swept up in raids in Chicago, more than 50 arrested.
BRIGGS: And they are priceless, historic and missing. Several NASA artifacts are lost. You may not believe why.
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[04:22:37] ROMANS: Fifty-two people, including seven convicted felons, have been arrested in Chicago on drug and weapons charges. Police say the suspects were swept up in a series of raids dating back to Saturday night. They were carried out by a Chicago police and the city's FBI and ATF teams. Search warrants turned up 20 illegal guns, two cars, and $80,000 in cash, along with heroin and crack. The latest weekend of violence left 41 people shot, five of them fatally.
BRIGGS: The University of Maryland firing head football coach D.J. Durkin one day after allowing him to return to his job. That initial decision led to outrage and pressure from state lawmakers, students, and the community. Coach Durkin was placed on administrative leave in August after the heatstroke death of 19-year-old lineman Jordan McNair. On Tuesday, Maryland's Board of Regents recommended the coach be reinstated. But yesterday university president Wallace Loh defied that recommendation and fired Durkin, who has not yet commented publicly.
ROMANS: A federal law enforcement official tells CNN the inmates who killed notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger tried to cut out his tongue. It's a well-known punishment for snitches in the world of organized crime. CNN has learned Bulger was in the general prison population at the West Virginia prison at the time of the attack, giving his killers easy access to him. Investigators believe there was more than one attacker and Bulger was beaten beyond recognition. At least one of the inmates involved is believed to have ties to organized crime in Massachusetts.
BRIGGS: Health officials confirming a tenth child has died from a virus outbreak at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell, New Jersey. Twenty-seven pediatric cases have now been linked to the virus and one staff member was also sickened. The center is not admitting new residents until the outbreak is over. The CDC is assisting with lab testing to make sure there are no other cases. A team of infection control experts will visit four pediatric long-term care facilities including the Wanaque Center later this month to conduct training.
ROMANS: An inspector general's report says priceless NASA artifacts were lost because of poor recordkeeping and follow-through. The report found that NASA, quote, "does not have adequate processes in place to identify or manage its heritage assets." Among the relics of space history lost, an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag containing lunar dust particles. Also, a prototype lunar rover that was sold to a scrap yard.
[04:25:04] NASA told the inspector general's office it would develop better ways for dealing with historical items by the spring of 2020.
BRIGGS: Baseball this morning, the loss of one of its all-time Hall of Fame grates. San Francisco Giants legend Willie McCovey. Stretch McCovey as he was known for what he did with those long arms as a fearsome hitter during his heyday in the 1960s and '70s teaming with Willie Mays to form one of baseball's greatest duos. The Giants paying tribute to McCovey flying the flags at AT&T Park over McCovey cove at half staff. The team says he died after battling ongoing health issues. Willie McCovey was 80 years old.
ROMANS: One of the greats, huh?
BRIGGS: One of the all-time greats. He will be dearly missed.
Ahead, Hispanics are criminals. The blatant fear message in the campaign ad the president of the United States tweeted. Will the immigration message work for the midterms?
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