Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Lion Kills intern in North Carolina; Reevaluating Syria Exit; Rainy New Year's Eve. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired December 31, 2018 - 06:30   ET

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

[06:30:00] KAROUN DEMIRJIAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Is possible to get through because it's going to have to be in spite of the president. He doesn't seem to be the type that is actually going to try to find that solution and push it through.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Karoun, A.B., Nia, thank you very much for all of those insights.

There was tragedy at this wildlife preserve in North Carolina. A young worker was mauled to death by a lion who had escaped its locked enclosure. So we have the latest in how this happened in a live report for you, next.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: And disgraced comedian Louis CK mocking students who survived the Parkland massacre. Leaked audio of his controversial comments sparking outrage. That's ahead. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Breaking news.

Russia says it has detained a U.S. citizen on suspicion of spying. Paul Whelan was taken into custody on Friday. The Kremlin has not released any details on what they claim he did. CNN has contacted the U.S. embassy in Moscow for comment but has not yet heard back.

HILL: An investigation is underway at a wildlife preserve in North Carolina after a 22-year-old intern was fatally attacked by a lion that somehow escaped its enclosure.

CNN's Kaylee Hartung is live now in Burlington, North Carolina, with more.

Kaylee.

KAYLEE HARTUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Erica.

Yesterday a professionally trained animal keeper led a group of workers into the lion's enclosure here at the Conservators Center for a routine cleaning. Now, at that time, the lions are typically moved from their habitat into a locked space. But yesterday something went horribly wrong as one of these lions somehow managed to escape. As the lion entered that area where the humans were, he quickly killed 22- year-old Alexandra Black. That lion was then killed in order to retrieve her body.

[06:35:01] The staff here at the Conservators Center is in shock, as is Alex's family. They released a statement saying in part, Alex loved animals. She was a beautiful young woman who had just started her career. There was a terrible accident and we are mourning. But she died following her passion.

Now, this was the 22-year-old's fourth internship, but the first outside of her home state of Indiana. She had only been on the job here a little less than two weeks, though she wanted to make a career out of spending her life with the animals. As I said, folks here are in shock. The Conservators Center is assessing the situation, wanting to, of course, ensure future safety.

But, in the meantime, they will be closed until further notice.

Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Oh, my gosh, Kaylee, just horrifying. Thank you very much for the live report for us.

Well, disgraced comedian Louis CK is under fire again after audio of standup material has leaked in which he attacks the Parkland massacre survivors. In it he first trashes the younger generation. He cracked some jokes about gender identity. And then he attacks the Parkland teenagers who are now gun control advocates. Here's a portion.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LOUIS CK: They testified in front of Congress, these kids? Like, what the (EXPLETIVE DELETED? What are you doing? You're young. You should be crazy. You should be unhinged, not in a suit saying I'm here to tell (EXPLETIVE DELETED) you. You're not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that make I have to listen to you? How does that make you interesting? You didn't get shot. You pushed some fat kid in the way and now I gotta listen to you talking?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: In a longer clip that surfaced on Twitter, he rants about people with disabilities, he uses the "r" word more than a dozen times. Last year, Louis CK pledged to, quote, step back and take a long time to listen, end quote, after admitting to inappropriate sexual conduct towards a number of women.

HILL: I don't know how that listening is going.

CAMEROTA: Well, I mean, what it sounds like to me is that he feels as though he was the victim in some ways of PC, the PC police.

HILL: I would say yes.

CAMEROTA: And so he's going after things that he now considers to be overly PC. And, look, I understand he -- his comedy. He goes after sacred cows. Nothing is off limits. Not even the Parkland teenagers. But I -- you know, again, with comedy, sometimes it just has to be funny, I would say.

HILL: Right. It doesn't always have to be offensive and it doesn't always have to be so far beyond the line that it makes -- I don't know.

CAMEROTA: And his old stuff really was funny. Like he did a lot of stuff about his own kids and about his own parenting, and it was hilarious.

HILL: And relatable.

CAMEROTA: And relatable. And, listen, I mean, you know, what do I know, the people in the audience were cracking up at everything that he was saying.

HILL: They were laughing.

CAMEROTA: But it does sound like he's back with more anger than his previous standup routines.

HILL: It think it definitely sounds angry.

President Trump promising a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. Now a key Republican ally, however, says the president could actually slow that timeline. Where did that sudden change come from? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:41:18] HILL: President Trump is reevaluating his plan to withdrawal all U.S. troops from Syria. This according to Republican Senator Lindsay Graham. And it comes on the very day that outgoing Defense Secretary James Mattis will leave the Pentagon. That happens at midnight tonight.

CNN's Barbara Starr is live at the Pentagon with more for us this morning.

Barbara, good morning.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Erica.

This is James Mattis' last day on the job. At midnight tonight, there will be a phone call initiated by the Pentagon communications team. There will be Mr. Mattis on the line and Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary, who will become the acting secretary of defense at midnight. There will be that transfer of power because the secretary of defense is essentially a command position. It is a mark of respect. It's a little bit of a ceremony, but it is necessary. They will then notify the White House at midnight that Mr. Shanahan has all the authorities of the secretary of defense.

Now, Shanahan is a former Boeing executive who has been here for many months as deputy, handling a number of matters. But now he comes to the job when Syria is front and center. Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the president's allies, but an opponent of withdrawing forces quickly from Syria, went to the White House, had lunch with Mr. Trump, came out and made a statement that caught everyone's attention.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: He promised to destroy ISIS. He's going to keep that promise. We're not there yet. But as I said today, we're inside the 10 yard line and the president understands the need to finish the job. So I think we're in a pause situation where we're reevaluating what's the best way to achieve the president's objective of having people pay more and do more.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STARR: Senator Graham seeming to suggest that the president is now rethinking a rapid withdrawal of 2,000 forces from Syria, but Mr. Shanahan comes to the job now. He will weigh in. And it's really not very clear what will happen next.

Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: You're right, Barbara, that is a truism. It is not clear, on many levels, what will happen next. But thank you very much for all of that background.

Here with us now to discuss it, we have CNN global affairs analyst and senior national security correspondent at "The Daily Beast," Kimberly Dozier, and former Army commanding general in Europe and the Seventh Army, as well as a CNN military analyst, Lieutenant General Mark Hertling.

Great to see both of you. Happy New Year to both of you.

General Hertling, Lindsay Graham's impression seems to be that he had gotten through to the president, that he had gotten through to the president in their lunch and that he had opened the president's eyes to pause a troop withdrawal from Syria, though the president had said he wanted to do it rapidly. Is this a process that can be turned on and turned off? Can we hit pause on this?

LT. GEN. MARK HERTLING (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: It's very difficult. Yes, it's very difficult, Alisyn. The term "pause" in military lingo has very specific definitions. You can have a strategic pause, an operational pause. But in this -- in this particular situation, it sounds like Senator Graham is basically saying, hey, I got to the president and I'm hoping he rethinks his decision.

The problem is, the president already announced it to the world, and there are both friends and foes alike who are taking his last announcement of over a week ago thinking that's what we're going to do to include those military forces on the ground, U.S. military forces, who are -- who may be a little bit confused about what a pause means because you're either all in or all out when you're in these kinds of operations. And there are people leaning forward in terms of redeployments or potentially leaving their partners in northern Syria.

[06:45:05] So, again, this is more confusion, more chaos in a situation that's already very complex in northern Syria. CAMEROTA: I mean as Barbara Starr just said, Kimberly, there's a big lack of clarity. But something else interested happened with Senator Graham's meeting with President Trump. He said that President Trump told him that he -- because he had gone to Iraq on that surprise visit for Christmas, that when he was there, the people on the ground, commanders on the ground, informed President Trump that ISIS has not been completely destroyed, which Mr. Trump found eye-opening.

Why wouldn't the commander in chief have had that information?

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, it depends on how much attention he was paying to his presidential daily briefs from his intelligence community. Look, for a long time his top officials have been saying, we almost got them all defeated but there are pockets. And you've had Iraq saying that they have indigenous groups that are helping support ISIS. So this battle was at least another year to run just in the actual battle zones.

You also had people like Bret McGurk, the ISIS envoy, who has now resigned, who wanted to see more of a social and security infrastructure in eastern Syria before you pulled out the small numbers of U.S. troops who were serving sort of like training wheels and also a security umbrella for the other forms of aid, not all aid that the U.S. was paying for, but aid that the U.S. was enabling that now is going to be harder to deliver.

But back to Mark's point, can you really turn this off? My understanding is that Mattis signed an execution order and they were moving out on pulling out U.S. troops and replacing some of their mission with French and British forces.

CAMEROTA: You know, I have a question about that, general. If General Mattis felt so strongly that he would resign over this, that he thought that the decision to pull troops out of Syria was such a bad one that he decided to release that letter and resign, why would he sign that execution order?

HERTLING: It's the civilian control of the military, Alisyn. You know, he's still the secretary of defense. He takes orders from the president. It is in his chain of command. If the president says do it, you have to sign the order. At the same time you may be saying, I'm going to resign. But he is still in the chain of command until the 20th of December, 31st of December, and he has to do the bidding of what the president tells him to do. That's just the way a cabinet official, especially the secretary of defense, works.

CAMEROTA: Kimberly, if history teaches us anything, it's that the president often agrees with the last person that he spoke to. That's just , part of his style. He is very persuadable by whoever he spoke to. So, Senator Lindsay Graham went in, made his case, and the president seemed to understand and to agree with it. We'll hit pause. If today he speaks to Senator Rand Paul or he speaks to, I don't know, President Erdogan, as he had before he made the decision, it could be a completely different decision. And so what does that mean? I mean what will the troops in Syria, what will the commanders be acting on? DOZIER: Well, and that is what our allies are watching right now, how fickle the decision-making process seems to be. The hope is that the U.S. commanders on the ground convince the president and that their word will carry, and that at least this will, in a sense, back up the Pentagon's goal to mitigate the withdrawal by giving them at least perhaps air cover over Syria, to enable allies like the French and the British forces there to keep this from completely falling apart as we pull out.

CAMEROTA: So General Stanley McChrystal was on ABC this weekend and he didn't pull his punches when he talked about his feelings about President Trump and President Trump as a commander in chief. So let's listen for a second of what General McChrystal said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC NEWS: If you were asked to join the Trump administration, what would you say?

GEN. STANLEY MCCHRYSTAL (RETIRED): I would say no.

I think it's important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it.

RADDATZ: You think he's a liar?

MCCHRYSTAL: I don't think he tells the truth.

RADDATZ: Is Trump immoral in your view?

MCCHRYSTAL: I think he is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: General, what did you think about what Stanley McChrystal said?

HERTLING: Alisyn, I know Stan McChrystal very well. We were in combat together. I also know John Kelly very well. We were in combat together. I know Bill McRaven. We were in combat together. You can't just take Stan McChrystal by himself. He's certainly talking about his book on leadership and that's what he was having this interview about and it got off on this subject. But he made the point that leadership is not present in the White House because you have the requirement to have integrity, you have to build trust, you have to develop others, you have to take action, you have to be intellectually curious when you're a leader.

[06:50:08] So you combine not only Stan McChrystal but Bill McRaven, Secretary Mattis, John Kelly and you say, well, a lot of people are saying not only is there a leadership void, but there's also a lack of understanding of the intellectual requirements of the job and the management processes, like what we were just discussing with Senator Graham coming out and changing the whole approach to Syria. These things are starting to add up. And Stan McChrystal is very precise in his language. He doesn't speak that way off the cuff. He is a quiet professional, and he and Bill McRaven were both the special operations command commander. Those guys are quiet and they get the mission done. For both of them to be speaking up within the last month about what they see as a leadership void tells me an awful lot.

CAMEROTA: General Hertling, Kimberly Dozier, thank you very much.

Erica.

HILL: A bald eagle goes rogue, steals the show at the Cotton Bowl. We'll tell you what happened, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HILL: Much of the northeast will see a soggy and rather mild end to 2018.

CNN meteorologist Chad Myers here now with your New Year's Eve forecast.

So a little wet out there in New York today.

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes, very much. Everyone in Times Square is going to look like John Berman in a hurricane. It is just going to rain from 6:00 all the way on. It's already raining now across a lot of the Ohio Valley. We will see severe weather with a potential for tornadoes in that yellow area later on today.

[06:55:14] Now, here's what the rain looks like by 4:30 in the afternoon, rain into New York already, but thunderstorms moving into Birmingham and Montgomery and even into Atlanta, Georgia, by 9:00 or 10:00. Now, that's a lot of people outside with lightning in the air.

Now, it won't be lightning for New York, but there are no holes in this radar. There will be very few breaks out there for rain. It will be wet. But it will be warm. Fifty degrees in New York City. Over 65 in Atlanta at the ball drop or the peach drop that we have here in Atlanta. But it feels like -- in New York City it's going to feel like 46. Last New Year's it felt like 5 below. Fifty degrees warmer this year than last.

Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: You can't dampen my spirits, Chad. Nope. I am so excited for the ball drop and I would take rain any day over freezing.

MYERS: That's right.

CAMEROTA: It is sometimes bone-chilling out there.

Thank you very much for the forecast.

MYERS: You're welcome.

CAMEROTA: So the national spotlight may have been too exciting for one bald eagle who failed to return to its handler after the national anthem was sung at the Cotton Bowl on Saturday. You'll see the rouge eagle landing on not one but two Notre Dame fans. That's uncomfortable because those talons are pointy, all right. The eagle hung out on one fan until its trainer came to pick him up. What's he doing here? He's just taking a lap, basically, around --

HILL: He just wants to see what happening.

CAMEROTA: The excitement -- that was where the excitement ended, though, Erica, for Notre Dame fans. They were crushed by Clemson 30-3 in the college football playoff semi-final game.

HILL: A rough end for them.

The shutdown, meantime, now entering day ten. No end in sight. New CNN reporting this morning on why President Trump is unwilling compromise. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)