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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Two U.S. Members Killed in Afghanistan; Boeing Jets Allegedly Lacked Two Safety Features; Trump Backs Israeli Sovereignty Over Golan Heights; Historic Flooding Ravages Midwest; E.U. and U.K. Leaders Set Plan to Avoid Brexit Crash. Aired 4-4:30a ET
Aired March 22, 2019 - 04:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[04:00:20] DAVE BRIGGS, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overnight, two U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan as efforts to wrap up to bring that 17- year war to a close.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Do family tours and staff departures mean the special counsel is done? New indications the Mueller report could go to the attorney general at any moment.
BRIGGS: Jared Kushner using WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders. Why his attorney says it's not a problem.
ROMANS: And for the second time in a year, Mississippi is trying to ban abortions before some women even know they have a baby on the way.
Good morning, and welcome to EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
BRIGGS: I'm Dave Briggs. It is finally Friday, March 22nd. It's 4:00 a.m. in the East.
We start with some breaking news overnight. Two U.S. service members killed while conducting an operation in Afghanistan. Information still coming in at this hour.
Let's get straight to senior international correspondent Matthew Chance live from Moscow.
Matthew, what are we learning?
MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we don't know very much at this stage, Dave, but there's been a press statement reached by the NATO Military Alliance, NATO Resolute Support, which is the ongoing military operation involving U.S. forces in Afghanistan, saying that two U.S. service members were killed while conducting an operation on this day, March 22nd, inside Afghanistan.
Now the statement says -- it's very short but it says, "In accordance with the U.S. Department of Defense policy, the name of the service names killed in action are being withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified." So it may well be tomorrow until we learn the actual identities of these individuals. But it does bring to fore the number of U.S. service personnel that had been killed in Afghanistan just this year alone, more than 2300 have been killed since the war began. What is it? More than 17 years ago now.
And that's underlined concerns and the urgency that's being felt in the United States to try and bring America's longest running conflict ever to an end. The United States President Donald Trump has said he's accelerating diplomatic efforts to try and achieve that. U.S. diplomats have been meeting with negotiators from the Taliban, the militant group that was toppled back in 2001 but which has been resurgent in recent months. They've been meeting to try and get some sort of peace proposal together.
The Afghan government, which has been a strong ally of the U.S. and others, is very concerned about that because they have been kind of cut out of the process and they feel they may be abandoned to the Taliban if the United States and its allies should leave. But the fact that another two U.S. service personnel have been killed today underlines the urgency and the need to bring that conflict to an end there.
BRIGGS: Yes. Could further complicate things.
Matthew Chance live for us in Moscow this morning. Thank you.
ROMANS: All right, the Mueller watch in full swing here. Robert Mueller has the White House and the world on edge this morning. The special counsel appears close to delivering his final Russia report. Beltway insiders and the president's lawyers are on high alert and here is why.
CNN's Katelyn Polantz pointing out that members of Mueller's team are bringing family members to the office for visits with some staff members carrying out boxes. The top prosecutor is leaving for another assignment now. Plus the special counsel's grand jury has not been seen in two months.
BRIGGS: When Mueller does file his report it could take weeks for most Americans to find out what he learned. The special counsel is required to hand over his report to Attorney General Bill Barr. The Justice Department would then share portions with the White House.
CNN reported this week the White House wants to review it before lawmakers do to claim executive privilege where it sees necessary.
ROMANS: White House special counsel Emmet Flood and his team have already prepared responses to whatever becomes public based on several potential scenarios. Sources tell CNN there appears to be a sense of relief within this White House that they managed to navigate the entire Mueller episode without this president ever sitting down for a face-to-face interview.
From the White House point of view that is a big win.
BRIGGS: The wait continues.
Meanwhile, House Oversight chairman Elijah Cummings claims several senior White House officials have used personal e-mail and messaging accounts to conduct government business. In a letter to the White House, the Maryland Democrat alleges Jared Kushner has been using WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders. According to Cummings, Kushner's attorney insists his client is complying with the Presidential Records Act because he takes screen shots of the WhatsApp messages and sends them to his White House account or the National Security Council.
ROMANS: So why not just use the official e-mail for that?
BRIGGS: Begs that question.
[04:05:02] ROMANS: It is not clear whether Kushner communicated classified information. Cummings also claims former Deputy National Security adviser KT McFarland and Steve Bannon received e-mails on their personal accounts about the transfer of sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
These new revelations come as President Trump continues to attack Hillary Clinton for using a private e-mail server when she was secretary of State. He built a campaign around that. And now his own administration questioned about complying with Presidential Records Act.
BRIGGS: His signature attack line. They're still chanting "lock her up" at the rallies because of that.
Boeing meanwhile paying a heavy price for two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max 8. Indonesian carrier Garuda says it wants to cancel an order for 49 of the jets. Boeing stock down 11.7 percent since the most recent disaster.
In Ethiopia, that is over $27 billion in market cap gone. In the face of the crisis at his company, a new filing reveals Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg made $23.5 million last year, a raise of 27 percent. And now the "New York Times" reports the pilots of both doomed jet liners lacked two notable safety features that could have helped them. It seems Boeing only offered them as extras.
CNN's Tom Foreman has more on these safety features and what the company is doing now.
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Christine. Hey, Dave. The heat around Boeing is just getting hotter. These were considered add-ons by Boeing, according to this "New York Times" article, and they would tell you, the pilots inside the plane, it would tell them if these sensors on the front of the plane were reading that the plane was headed more up or if it was headed more down, or if they disagreed with each other.
Readouts in the plane and also a warning light, these are two separate systems. Boeing now says they're going to make one of these things no longer something that they charge for, no longer an add-on but a standard part of the plane. But this is really ratcheting up the tension around Boeing because people are saying if these are safety measures, to make this plane safer, why weren't they free all along? Why weren't they considered a standard part of the plane? One of the answers is these types of add-ons are a big market for
companies like Boeing out there. Nonetheless, this will make the investigations of Boeing which we know about now from the FBI, Justice Department, just go even more energetic at this point.
What are they looking at in all of this? Any sign that Boeing was taking steps that effectively by omission or co-mission allowed a dangerous circumstance to come into play, a dangerous circumstance, which has taken hundreds of lives -- Dave, Christine.
ROMANS: Tom Foreman, thank you for that.
Another "we're sorry" from Facebook. This time for mishandling the passwords of hundreds of millions of you. Facebook said it did not properly masked the passwords and stored them in an internal database that staff had access to. Facebook vice president said the passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and there's no evidence anyone abused the passwords.
It's been a year of constant issues for Facebook. Cyber security concerns, regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe and a lengthy outage last week. At the same time misinformation about vaccines is appearing on Facebook and Instagram weeks after both sites said they would minimize that content.
Earlier this month Facebook said it would reduce the rankings of groups and pages that spread misinformation about vaccines by not including them in recommendations or in predictions when users type a search. But two weeks later, this is still an issue. A CNN Business review showed Facebook recommending content in the search bar that links vaccines with autism. Of course that's not borne out by science.
A spokesperson for Instagram and Facebook called the effort to curb the misinformation a long-term commitment.
BRIGGS: Well, this weekend Trump world will be remembered for the president's incessant attacks on the Senator John McCain. In an interview Thursday with FOX Business, he yet again slammed the deceased war hero calling McCain horrible for his 2017 vote against a measure to repeal Obamacare and claiming the Arizona Republican gave the FBI an explosive dossier on alleged Trump ties to Russia for, quote, "very evil purposes."
The president also said this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARIA BARTIROMO, FOX NEWS HOST: But, Mr. President, he's dead. He can't punch back. I know you punch back.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Uh, no.
BARTIROMO: But he's dead.
TRUMP: I don't talk about it. People ask me the question. I didn't bring this up, you just brought it up. You asked the question.
BARTIROMO: Well, you talked about it this week.
TRUMP: You asked me the question.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: Fact check, that is not true. President Trump went after McCain unsolicited twice on Twitter last weekend and did it again this week during a speech intended to focus on the economy in Ohio.
[04:10:02] ROMANS: Yes, what you're looking at right now, no one asked the president right there about John McCain. He went on a lengthy tirade about John McCain the late senator and are war hero.
All right. President Trump overturning five decades of policy in a single tweet announcing it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights. A single declaration handing embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a significant foreign policy victory just weeks before Israelis head to the polls.
Want to go to the Golan Heights and bring in CNN's Oren Liebermann.
Politically for Netanyahu, this was important.
OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. Netanyahu is facing a very difficult re-election campaign. He had been sliding in the polls a little bit and this could easily reverse that trend because it's such a momentous announcement from the U.S. for Israel. Israeli -- rather U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty where I'm standing now in the Golan Heights.
For more than half a century, this has been considered by the international community as occupied territory. No country ever recognized Israel's annexation in 1981 until now. There didn't seem to be any pressing reason to make this announcement even if the international community was opposed to it. There wasn't anybody pushing back against this.
So why now? And that answer perhaps the elections. Just a couple of weeks away at this point. Trump handing Netanyahu such a big victory, certain to give him an election boost.
Now when asked about it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who was visiting here didn't mention the election, Netanyahu never mentioned the elections, and Trump said it wasn't really a consideration, but that's hard to believe. Here's what he said to FOX.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARTIROMO: It's not about Netanyahu's re-election?
TRUMP: No. I don't -- I wouldn't even know about that. I wouldn't even know about that. I have no idea. He was doing OK. I don't know if he's doing great right now but I hear he is doing OK. But I would imagine the other side, whoever is against him, is also in favor of what I just did.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LIEBERMANN: Though it's certainly true that all Israelis will support this move, that's not likely to sway anybody in the international community. We've seen already condemnation from Syria, their state news agency, saying this is the U.S. being blindly biased towards Israel. Russia condemned it as well, saying the U.S. can't simply overturn international consensus and U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Now as part of what appears to be blatantly the Trump administration campaigning for Netanyahu, part of that Netanyahu heads to AIPAC, to Washington, where he'll meet with Trump. He's stay in the Blair House, the official guesthouse of the White House.
So, Christine, this may be just a part of the Trump administration lobbying for Netanyahu to win.
ROMANS: Sure. All right, Oren Liebermann, in the Golan Heights. Thank you for that, sir.
BRIGGS: All right. Ahead, 25 states at risk of serious flooding this spring. Some of them already saturated. Farmers are getting desperate after the latest blow. We are on the ground in Iowa next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[04:16:57] ROMANS: Epic flooding in the Midwest is not only changing the physical landscape, it's threatening to end a way of life. Government forecasters say widespread flooding will continue through May.
This is planting season, folks, we're talking here. Twenty-five states are at risk of serious flooding including states already under water. Now coming off two years of bad weather, tariffs, crippling tariffs, and banks withholding loans, farmers are starting to wonder if they will ever recover.
Vanessa Yurkevich reports from Iowa.
VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Christine and Dave. This is just some of the flooded farmland here in Percival, Iowa. And we're standing about 6 1/2 miles from where the Missouri River line should be according to the Department of Agricultural, about 100,000 acres of farmland are flooded here in the state of Iowa. And many of the farmers in this area can't even get to their farms to assess the damage. And some don't think they'll even be able to plant a crop this year. We spoke to some of them.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DUSTIN SHELDON, IOWA FARMER: There is a lot of pain and uncertainty of your future, what you're going to have to go back to, the amount of money that it's going to take to even possibly try to put your life back together as far as your family goes.
JEFF JORGENSON, IOWA FARMER: I need to be able to farm this ground, I need to be able to do my job, I need to be able to do what I do. I work hard at it and to not be able to have that even just one piece of the pie, it's going to be detrimental. It's real tough to see.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
YURKEVICH: And according to the American Farm Bureau, farm bankruptcies were up almost 20 percent in 2018. That's the highest level in about 10 years.
And, Christine and Dave, it's not over yet. Farmers here are expecting more flooding as record snowfall in the north is expected to melt and head down the river this way -- Christine, Dave.
BRIGGS: Vanessa, thanks.
Tyson Foods recalling over 69,000 pounds of chicken strip products this morning. They could contain pieces of metal. Their frozen ready-to-eat chicken strips were produced on November 30, 2018. There are three varieties involved including 25 ounce bags of fully cooked buffalo style chicken strips and chicken breast strip fritters with rib meat and buffalo styled sauce. Twenty pound cases of fully cooked buffalo style chicken strips may also be contaminated. All have a best if used by date of November 30, 2019.
More information at CNN.com.
ROMANS: Mississippi is now the latest state to try to ban abortions before some women even realized they're pregnant. Governor Phil Bryant signing a bill barring the procedure once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. That's as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The only exceptions are for a woman's life or a serious risk of impairment. Abortion rights groups have already promised a court fight.
BRIGGS: Not one state has managed to put a heartbeat bill into lasting practice.
[04:20:05] Earlier this week a judge stopped Kentucky's version from being enforced. Iowa's law was declared unconstitutional in January. Last November a federal judge struck down a different Mississippi law banning abortion at 15 weeks.
ROMANS: All right, 20 minutes past the hour. A reprieve for Theresa May and the U.K. The Brexit deadline has been extended. How long do they have and what do they need to do. We're going to go live to London.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROMANS: All right. A temporary reprieve for the U.K., a government in political chaos. [04:25:03] The European Union has extended the Brexit deadline to
overt the prospect of Britain crashing out of the E.U. without a deal next Friday. But there are conditions.
International diplomatic editor Nic Robertson is standing by at 10 Downing Street in London this morning.
And, Nic, is this any sign of progress or is this just more uncertainty and moving the ball down the road?
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Kicking the can down the road, that's what it is.
ROMANS: Yes.
ROBERTSON: And what we're seeing I think here is the European Union in a way trying to take a little bit of control. They were very concerned that with the deadline at the end of the week on the 29th, that Theresa May would come back to them at the end of next week at the last moment and say I've failed to get my deal through, now you've got to do this for me. And in a way what we've seen the European Union do is sort of try to get around that.
They've set two deadliness. They've said look, you can have until May 22nd provided you get the agreement signed off on, the withdrawal agreement, the Brexit agreement signed off on. But if you don't get it signed off, then you only have until the 12th of April. And the simple reason for that is European elections are coming up and they say that if Britain was going to take part in those European elections, it must do that and make it clear before the 12th of April.
What the European Union here is doing is saying that, you know, everything is still on the table, a deal, a Brexit deal, a no-deal scenario, a very longer extension, a much longer extension that is on the table right now is still an option, and of course Britain can reverse Brexit -- you know, those Brexit plans completely.
Theresa May seems to be ruling all of that out. She's saying that people in Britain are not going to vote in the European elections so she is really going back to watch the position she was in already, my deal or no deal. So really it does nothing, it changes nothing. None of the substance of the agreement, nothing at all other than that deadline moving it forward in two weeks.
We could be back in this place again very soon.
ROMANS: A place we've really never been. I mean, there's no roadmap for this really. And just fascinating.
All right. We're so glad to have you there. Nic Robertson, watching all of it for us at 10 Downing Street.
BRIGGS: You just can't help but wonder if at what point another referendum becomes at least something they discuss.
ROMANS: But there is also the view that another referendum is basically undoing democracy because there was a vote, the people voted to leave the E.U.
BRIGGS: A very uninformed vote.
ROMANS: You don't get a mulligan. You don't get a re-do. I mean, that's what they did.
BRIGGS: It is true. I think a lot of people do want it, according to polling.
ROMANS: Yes.
BRIGGS: Ahead, breaking overnight, two U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan. Another devastating blow as the U.S. struggles to close out its longest war.
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