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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

No Movement On Border Wall Talks; Border Battle; Dueling Rallies At Mexico Border; Fairfax Facing Impossible Impeachment; Trump, Executive Time Is A Positive; Governor Walter Jones Dead At 76. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired February 11, 2019 - 04:30   ET

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


[04:30:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

DAVE BRIGGS, CNN HOST: Border wall talks break down just four days from the deadline for a new government shutdown.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN HOST: Virginia's governor digs in during his first TV interview still refusing to quit over that racist yearbook picture.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: On this snowy day on this island, we say enough is enough.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Sixteen degrees in snow, the latest Democrat to join the 2020 race uses cold weather to try to get a hot start. Welcome back to "Early Start" everybody. I'm Dave Briggs.

ROMANS: Good morning. Good Monday morning.

BRIGGS: Good morning.

ROMANS: I'm Christine Romans. It is 4:31 in the East with just four days to go now until government funding runs out. Negotiations to avert another partial shutdown stalled. Friday's optimism among lawmakers, now giving way to deep concern.

Sources tell CNN talks broke down over two points. Democrats want a cap on the number of people ICE can hold in detention in the interior of the country. Without that cap they say they won't give in on more spending for border barriers.

CNN's Boris Sanchez has more for us this morning from the White House.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Dave and Christine, sources familiar with ongoing negotiations between Democrats and Republicans to try to keep the government open past Friday's deadline indicate that there is an impasse in negotiations, specifically over a proposed cap that Democrats brought up that would limit funding for a specific number of beds inside ICE Detention Centers.

Democrats are arguing that that would keep immigration and customs enforcement from detaining too many people, specifically people that are not criminals or felons. Republicans have argued that Democrats are trying to limit the ability of ICE agents to do their work.

The president weighed in on this on Twitter several times on Sunday, accusing Democrats of acting irrationally and suggesting that congressional leadership on the Democratic side was holding back the Democrats that are actually in the committee negotiating. Meantime, the acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney weighed in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHUCK TODD, MSNBC HOST: We cannot definitively rule out a government shutdown at the end of this week?

MICK MULVANEY, ACTING WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: You absolutely cannot and here's why.

TODD: OK.

MULVANEY: Let's say for the sake of this discussion that the Democrats prevail and the hard core left wing Democrats prevail, it was a Democrat congresswoman who put out a tweet yesterday about zero dollars for DHS. So let's say the hard core left wing of the Democratic Party prevails in this negotiation and they put a bill on the president's desk, what say zero money for the wall or 800 million, some absurdly low number. How does he sign that? He cannot, in good faith, sign that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Now, if talks continue to stall, a Democratic aide told CNN that Democrats in the House were prepared to offer up a bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security at least through September and keep the federal government open past Friday's deadlines, but it's still unclear if the Republican-led Senate would actually take up that bill. And if they did and passed it, there's no certainty that President Trump would actually sign-off on it. Dave and Christine?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRIGGS: Oh, boy. Boris Sanchez, thank you. Dueling rallies at the Mexican border tonight at El Paso, President Trump and rising Democratic star Beto O'Rourke both in the West Texas city tonight. O'Rourke plans to lead a one mile march celebrating the culture, history, and the diversity of the region.

His speech afterward timed to coincide with the president's rally at the El Paso County Colosseum. Mr. Trump will once again be arguing there is a national security crisis at the border. On Saturday, dozens of Trump supporters waving American flags and wearing MAGA hats created a human wall at the border to show their support for fencing. [04:34:57] ROMANS: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is refusing to resign. He tells CBS' Gayle King, he considers stepping down when a racist photo in his medical school yearbook went public. But now he claims he has to stay in office for the good of his state.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. RALPH NORTHAM (D), VIRGINIA: Right now, Virginia needs someone that can heal. There's no better person to do that than a doctor. Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass. And that is why I'm not going anywhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Northam also sparked anger on social media with the comment he made about the first Africans who came to Virginia four centuries ago, a comment Gayle King felt the need to correct.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NORTHAM: If you look at Virginia's history, we're now at the 400-year anniversary. Just 90 miles from here in 1619 the first indentured servants from Africa landed on our shores and O-Point Comfort what we call now Fort Monroe and while --

GAYLE KING, CBS NEWS HOST: Also known as slavery.

NORTHAM: Yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Yes, slavery. Northam says his Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax must resign if sexual assault allegations against him prove to be true. Today, Virginia Delegate Patrick Hope plans to introduce articles of impeachment against Fairfax. If the resolution passes the House, the Senate will conduct a trial that could lead to his removal. Fairfax claims his interactions with two female accusers where consensual. He's calling on the FBI to thoroughly investigate the women's claims.

ROMANS: All right. Two new candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination declared over the weekend, Senator Amy Klobuchar launching her bid in the teeth of a Minnesota blizzard. Just a regular February day in Minnesota. The Minnesota Democrats highlighting her working class personal stories as the daughter of a teacher and the newspaper man, and vowed to, quote, "heal the heart of our democracy."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: I am running for every American. I am running for you. And I promise you this, as your president I will look you in the eye. I will tell you what I think. I will focus on getting things done. That's what I've done my whole life, and no matter what, I'll lead from the heart. (END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: During and after her speech Klobuchar appointment to the rally and a heavy snowstorm as a measure of her toughness and determination.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KLOBUCHAR: What makes me unique is I did this announcement speech in the middle of a blizzard, and I think we need people with grit. I have that grit.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: See promised to take on issues including money and politics and climate change. That gave President Trump an opening to tweet mock her campaign launch.

BRIGGS: Yes.

ROMANS: He wrote, "talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard. Bad timing. By the end she looked like a snow woman."

BRIGGS: Weather does not equal climate. Klobuchar did not let the insult pass. She tweeted back, "science is on my side, Donald Trump, and I wonder how your hair would fair in a blizzard."

Elizabeth Warren also kicked off her campaign over the weekend in Iowa on Sunday for her first full day of campaigning. The Massachusetts senator said that by Election Day next year President Trump may be in jail.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, (D), MASSACHUSETTS: By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be president. In fact, he may not even be a free person.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Can you explain on that a little bit more?

WARREN: Oh, come on, how many investigations are there now into him? It's no longer just the Mueller investigation. They're everywhere, and these our serious investigations. So we'll see what happens.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Warren said that every day the president posts what she called racist, hateful tweets, something really dark and ugly. It was a notable shift for Warren who until recently was reluctant to take the president on by name, but she said candidates, activist and the media should avoid the trap of engaging with everything the president does.

ROMANS: All right. Chipotle is in the middle of a turn around and a tech revolution. The burrito chain has added a second line to its stores that filled only digital orders. It offers delivery through its app and web site. It's opening drive-thru lanes for digital orders. Sales are up. Chipotle posted impressive earnings last week. Wall Street calling it a comeback. But the CEO Brian Niccol tells me his biggest concern, labor costs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN NICCOL, CEO CHIPOTLE: The cost of labor is going up, and the way we think about it is we need to make sure we're recruiting and retaining the right people because, you know, the cost of turnover is just going up.

If you're not worried about attracting top talent and retaining top talent at all levels, you're probably not worried about everything. You know, any corporation is only as good as the people you're able to attract, so it's always top of mind. It's one of the top things I'm always concerned with.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[04:40:02] ROMANS: Labor retention, labor costs. He's been CEO for a year tasked with turning Chipotle around during a difficult time including E. Coli outbreak. In addition to focusing on digital improvements, he's highlighting Chipotle's real ingredients and pushing out many new innovations like diet friendly bowls, keto bowls, and a lot of demand for that. In the last three months of last year, Chipotle's digital sales grew 66 percent, its stock, by the way, up 35 percent over the past year.

BRIGGS: That is incredible.

ROMANS: Yes.

BRIGGS: My Chipotle went away. I'm a little devastated in my own little hometown. I'm still -- picking up the pieces.

The lawyer for the boss of the National Enquirer fires back, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and allegations of extortion.

ROMANS: And what President Trump wants you to know about his workday in that executive time.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:45:00] BRIGGS: President Trump wants everyone to know executive time is not down time. He is responding to last week's Axios report that featured leaked copies of his private schedule. It found roughly 60 percent of the president's day was unstructured executive time.

The president putting his own unique spin on this tweeting, "the media was able to get my work schedule, something very easy to do, but it should have been reported as a positive not negative. When the term executive time is used I am generally working not relaxing. In fact, I probably worked more hours than almost any president."

Right after that tweet Axios obtained the president's schedules from the last four days, 50 percent of it was unstructured executive time. Here's acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney explaining why that is good.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MULVANEY: That executive time is on there is to allow the president to prep for the next meeting, to debrief from the previous meeting. The phone calls start at 6:30 in the mornings and they go until 11 o'clock at night. So I can assure that the gentleman is working more than what's on that calendar.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRIGGS: Mulvaney said the administration is close to identifying the person who leaked the president's schedules with a possible resolution this week.

ROMANS: The lawyer for the National Enquirer CEO denies the tabloid extorted Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos. In his blog entry for the website Medium, Bezos posted e-mails from a lawyer for AMI which owns the Enquirer.

The lawyers said Bezos should say publicly he had no evidence that Enquirer coverage is politically motivated. AMI Chief Executive David Pecker, is a confidant of President Trump. In return the AMI lawyer said the Enquirer would not publish lewd pictures and text to and from Bezos in its possession. Bezos called that blackmail and extortion. On Sunday, speaking on ABC's this week, Pecker's attorney rejected the extortion claim and the so-called Saudi angle advanced by Bezos.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ELKAN ABRAMOWITZ, ATTORNYE FOR AMI CEO DAVID PECKER: It absolutely is not extortion and not blackmail. What happened was the story was given to the National Enquirer by a reliable source that had given information to the National Enquirer for seven years prior to this story. It was a source that was well-known to both Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez.

That is not extortion, because all of AMI wanted was the truth? Bezos and Ms. Sanchez knew who the source was. Any investigator that was going to investigate this, knew who the source was. It was not the White House. It was not Saudi Arabia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Pecker's attorney said he could not confirm or deny if Sanchez's brother was the tipster who provided the texts and the photos. After the Enquirer asked Bezos for comments last month about his alleged affair with Sanchez, Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced they were divorcing in the next day. That was flash on the front of the National Enquirer, as well.

BRIGGS: Amazon maybe having second thoughts about opening a new campus in the shadow of Manhattan. According to the Washington Post, Amazon executives are considering alternatives after a major backlash from some New York politicians and from residents of Long Island City where HQ2 is supposed to be built.

In November, the company selected New York and Northern Virginia to share duties as second headquarters. The New York Times reports, Amazon officials are frustrated by the cold reception, but no decision has been made to back out.

ROMANS: Republican Congressman, Walter Jones, of North Carolina has died. A statement on the congressman's website confirming his death yesterday saying after faithfully representing the people of East and North Carolina in Congress in the state legislator for over 34 years, Jones passed way. His office says he was placed in hospice when his health declined after breaking a hip last month. Jones died on his 76th birthday according to "The Washington Post."

BRIGGS: Thousands of public schoolteachers in Denver are set to walk off the job today. Negotiators for the Teachers Union in Denver schools met for six hours on Saturday, after which Union leaders announced they would go through with the strike as planned. The two sides have been negotiating for 14 months on how to improve the current pay skill for teachers which the Union says it tied to the city's teacher turnover rate.

ROMANS: All right. U.S. back Kurdish forces wave started their assault on the last ISIS enclave in Syria and Iraq. The top U.S. commander in the war against ISIS agreeing with the U.S. Intelligence community's assessment that there are, quote, tens of thousands of ISIS fighters there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GENERAL JOSEPH VOTEL, COMMANDER, U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND: I'm on the line where the intelligence community is on this. They've talked about tens of thousands who have been dispersed and disaggregated from the area. So they're spread from, you know, kind of in areas in Iraq to other areas in Syria. And they're dispersed and disaggregated, but there is leadership there. There are fighters there, there are facilitators there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: CNN's Ben Wedeman live near the front lines in Eastern Syria. And, you know, land is one thing. Their land has been shrinking. Their grip on land has been shrinking, but the ideology, if you listen to the U.S. Intel Community, and General Votel, it's still there.

[04:50:06] BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. The ideology is still there. Sleeper cells, we've seen them attacked in various places in Syria and Iraq in the last few months. And we know that they -- many of the ISIS fighters have managed to escape, blend back into the local population or go to remote parts of the deserts or the mountains and continue to operate.

As a geographical entity, there's not much left to it. Just about one square mile, but what we saw this morning is they are launching a serious counter attack. The reason why we're here and I'm not wearing a flack-jacket and a helmet is that in the morning we were woken up by heavy machine gunfire. We went up on the roof where we've been doing lives from for the last two days. Bullets started to zing over our heads and a mortar round landed right next to the building we were in. So we had to get out of there very quickly as rounds were coming down the street.

And so, and we saw some of the Syrian Democratic forces running in the opposite direction from the front, even though there have been intense air strikes on the town since the morning, but it appears the ISIS fighters have taken advantage of the heavy mist in the morning. And therefore when this town is going to fall is not at all clear.

Last night we were speaking to their commanders who were saying that they expected that perhaps today maybe tomorrow they'd be able to take complete control of this town, Bahouzle Folkani (ph) and announce the final victory over ISIS as a geographical entity, but now it appears that this battle is going to take a few more days.

ROMANS: Longer than anticipated. Ben Wedeman is there for us in Eastern Syria. Be careful. Thank you for being our eyes and ears on that as the ISIS caliphate nears collapse. We'd hope. Thank you so much.

BRIGGS: The Trump administration deserves a lot of credit for the gains against ISIS, but the ideology clearly will live on long after those gains.

ROMANS: All right, 53 minutes past the hour. For the first time in years, Coca-Cola introducing a new flavor in hopes of keeping customers around. CNN Business next.

BRIGGS: I'm in, man.

ROMANS: Are you?

BRIGGS: (Inaudible).

[04:55:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BRIGGS: Four fifty-six a.m. Eastern Time. It's the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution. For many Iranians it is cause for celebration, but in the U.S. it's a reminder of events including a 15- month hostage crisis that sparked decades of hostility between the U.S. and the Islamic regime in Tehran. For the latest, let's bring in Senior International Correspondent, Fred Pleitgen, live in Tehran this morning. Fred, good to see you.

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, good to see you as well, Dave. And certainly what we're seeing today on this 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution is that the Iranians or at least their leadership are even more combative than I've seen them in the past. That speech by Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, just a couple of minutes ago it's finished. And he was talking all about Iran's ballistic missile program. He also said that Iran would never as he said allow the United States to win.

Obviously a lot of what he is talking about is President Trump's hard line against Iran. Those crippling sanctions that have certainly been very tough on Iran's economy, but speaking to folks here in the crowd at the celebrations, they're saying they haven't been impressed at all with President Trump's new hard line. They say that Iran is going to continue to stand firm.

I was actually able to speak to the head of Iran's elite revolutionary guard that said most elite part for their village areas, he says, that he believes that President Trump and the United States are well aware of how strong Iran is militarily. At the same time of course, as we've been saying, this country really suffering under the sanctions, a lot of people really, really doing badly economically.

BRIGGS: Yes. OK, Fred Pleitgen, live for us in Tehran this morning. Thank you, Fred.

ROMANS: We are just at the top of the hour, the news and check for CNN's Business this Monday morning. Global stock markets are mostly higher here to start the week. On Wall Street, the future moving higher as well here. About 0.5 percent for the DOW industrials here. The DOW fell 64 points on Friday. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, both closed up a little bit. So, mixed performance to end the week.

But let's take a kind of a bigger picture here. After the worse December since the great depression, stocks and stage to 2019 recovery that is impressive, the DOW is up 7.5 percent year to date, the S&P 500 up 8 percent, the NASDAQ doing even better up almost 10 percent.

All right. For the first time in years Coca-Cola introducing a new coke flavor, orange vanilla. Coke's brand director says the new flavor is its way to encourage customers who are looking for more variety to stick with Coke rather than pick up a different soda.

Coca-Cola has experienced a lot of flavors for diet coke. But this is the first new flavor for Coke since 2007. Orange Vanilla Coke was first available for a limited time in Canada last summer. Coke then tested the flavor in the U.S. Market where guess what, the Americans liked it. And the new flavor will hit shelves later this month.

BRIGGS: Nobody loves a creamsicle more than I, but does it taste like Coke?

ROMANS: I don't know. I haven't tried it.

BRIGGS: If it's strictly Orange Vanilla, I'm in.

ROMANS: OK.

BRIGGS: But it's Orange Vanilla Coke.

ROMANS: I'll let you do that investigation.

BRIGGS: OK, Early Start continues right now with the latest. And are we headed for another shutdown?

ROMANS: Border wall talks break down just four days from the deadline for the new government shutdown. BRIGGS: Virginia's governor digs in during his first TV interview

still refusing to quit over that racist yearbook photo.

END