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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Democrats Storm New Hampshire; American with Coronavirus Speaks to CNN; Deadly Weather Hits Southeast. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired February 07, 2020 - 05:00   ET

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


[05:00:00]

LAURA JARRETT, CNN ANCHOR: And just four days until the New Hampshire primary and candidates are finally looking forward. They can do that because four days after Iowa we finally have the results in.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Pete Buttigieg holds a razor thin lead of 0.10 percentage point over Bernie Sanders. That's in the state delegate count, a yardstick used to determine a winner. Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar rounding out the top five.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Sanders still has reasons to celebrate, narrowly topping Buttigieg in the popular vote. Bottom line: Buttigieg and Sanders are heading to New Hampshire effectively tied.

This was the reaction from Buttigieg live at a CNN town hall hearing he held onto that small lead.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS CUOMO, HOST, CNN TOWN HALL: What is your reaction?

PETE BUTTIGIEG (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, it's fantastic news to hear that we won. That win for us in Iowa is fantastic, but I also know that we're in New Hampshire now and we've got to look ahead. New Hampshire is a state that has never been told what to do.

CUOMO: Right.

BUTTIGIEG: And we've got to earn every vote and earn a win on Tuesday night right here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Sanders also had a CNN town hall. He has faced repeated questions whether he did enough to help the 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton. Last night, he tried to put similar worries about 2020 to bed.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And no matter who wins the nomination -- needless to say, I hope it's me -- but no matter who wins the nomination, we're all going to work together to defeat Donald Trump. That, I think, you could take to the bank.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: Senator Amy Klobuchar with a surprisingly strong showing in Iowa. She's sharing the moderate lane with Buttigieg and Biden, but in her CNN town hall, she told a voter she's not going anywhere.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

AMY KLOBUCHAR (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Every single time, I have exceeded expectations. We came very close, in terms of the number of people that turned out, to Vice President Biden. Look at the numbers, yourself. So, we actually left Iowa with a lot of enthusiasm.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: There will be seven candidates on stage tonight for the final Democratic debate before the first primary in New Hampshire. And a special big night for Joe Biden who's trying to overcome a weaker than expected showing in Iowa. He was actually back home in Delaware on Thursday with advisers plotting a reset.

ROMANS: The campaign trying to look past the Iowa debacle but that's hard to do. A CNN analysis shows a variety of errors in the count reported by the state Democratic Party.

Iowa Democratic officials also now say President Trump's supporters made matters worse. They say prank callers flooded the phone hot line used for reporting results when the app failed.

Now, the National Democratic Party wants to step in and straighten out the voting errors, but state party officials are pushing back.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny has more from Des Moines.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEFF ZELENY, SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Laura, four days after the Iowa caucuses, still counting the votes here in Des Moines.

Interesting developments here going on inside the Democratic Party. Iowa Democratic leaders, I'm told, were blindsided by Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, calling for a recanvass.

As it turns out, he does not have the authority to do that. A recanvass has to be requested by a candidate or a campaign.

So, what, you ask, is a recanvass? Essentially, it's going through the numbers. It is, essentially, reconciling the numbers on those spreadsheets that we saw with the numbers that were called into the state party.

Would that change things, unclear. But the reason for it is this, so many inconsistencies in the numbers. That's not necessarily uncommon in close elections. Elections are run by people, always human error.

But the difference about this, of course, is the satellite caucuses, which Bernie Sanders pushed for four years ago. That allows people to come in and vote early on Monday night.

So, as we head into today, the last day of the week, a couple of questions. A, will the Buttigieg campaign or the Sanders come forward before the noon deadline and request a recanvass? The Iowa Democratic Party said look, we are not going to do it unless they do.

One thing that's clear from this, Democratic voters in Iowa sent a very mixed signal, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders. That means as this primary goes on down the road, two very different candidates as the party reconciles who the strongest one is to take on President Trump -- Laura and Christine.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JARRETT: All right. Jeff Zeleny, thanks so much.

Well, emboldened and certainly not sorry. President Trump took a venomous victory lap to celebrate his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial. It all started at the yearly National Prayer Breakfast with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi looking on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, I pray for you, when they know that that's not so.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: You might recall, House Speaker Pelosi has repeatedly told reporters she prays for the president and Senator Mitt Romney says it was his faith that drove him to convict the president.

[05:05:06]

ROMANS: Later at the White House, the president heaped praise on everyone in the room. It didn't take long before the president turned the heat up a notch going scorched earth on his opponents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We, first, went through Russia, Russia, Russia. It was all bull (EXPLETIVE DELETED). It was evil, it was corrupt, it was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars.

Say hello to the people of Utah and tell them I'm sorry about Mitt Romney -- I'm sorry, OK?

(APPLAUSE)

And if I didn't fire James Comey, we would have never found this stuff because when I fired that sleazebag, all hell broke out.

Adam Schiff is a vicious, horrible person. Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person. She doesn't pray -- she may pray, but she prays for the opposite -- but I doubt she prays at all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: The president is scheduled to get back to governing today. He will be in Charlotte for the North Carolina Opportunity Now Summit. It's designed to facilitate investments in low income areas.

ROMANS: A key witness in President Trump's impeachment hearings is leaving his post at the National Security Council in the coming weeks. A source tells CNN, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman is expected to return to the Defense Department. Vindman was originally asked to work at the White House for two years. That would take him to July. No official word on whether his departure from the NSC was voluntary, but sources were telling CNN, as far back as November, the Trump aides were exploring moving witnesses including Vindman out of their White House posts.

JARRETT: Breaking overnight, an alarming example of just how quickly the coronavirus can spread in close quarters. A quarantined cruise ship docked off the coast of Japan reporting 41 additional cases on Friday. That brings the grand total to 61, and it's only going to get worse the longer people are trapped on that ship.

CNN was the first TV network to speak with one of the 11 Americans on the ship diagnosed with the virus.

Matt Rivers live in Yokohama, Japan.

Matt, what is the latest there? I mean, just this woman is trapped and she hasn't had symptoms yet but stuck.

MATT RIVERS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and her situation is just repeated over and over again on that ship behind me. There's around 3,700 people on that ship, about a thousand of whom are staff members, the rest are people who are trying to enjoy a vacation on a luxury cross liner and instead, they're dealing with some onboard have described as kind of a floating prison.

People on that ship are quarantined for the next 14 days. They're only allowed to leave their rooms for roughly an hour or so per day. And there's a lot of rooms on that ship that don't even have windows. You can imagine what people are going through.

Yesterday, there was 20 cases of confirmed coronavirus. That jumped up by 41 cases and stands at 61 now. Now that number could go up higher.

There was 428 Americans on board that ship. Some of whom have been among those diagnosed with coronavirus. And as you mentioned, we managed to speak with one of the people diagnosed. It was a woman onboard who actually filmed the moment when nurses came and gave her diagnosis.

Here's what she told us shortly thereafter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REBECCA FRAYSURE, CRUISE SHIP PASSENGER DIAGNOSED WITH CORONAVIRUS: Kind of disbelief and shock, a little bit -- a little bit scared. And it's hard to know what the future holds since I don't really feel sick right now. Like, is it going to get worse? I'm trying not to freak out with all of this, so take it in stride and yes, see what goes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RIVERS: So, as people have been diagnosed, what they've done is brought ambulances up to the ship and taken those patients off the ship, put them in local hospitals where they'll receive further treatment. That's what we can expect from the woman you just heard from. Remarkable stoicism, in my opinion there, in the face of a very difficult situation.

JARRETT: Yes, she's taken it all on in stride, but you got to imagine. This is a really tough situation.

Matt Rivers, thanks so much for being there for us.

ROMANS: Two flights carrying Americans out of Wuhan, China, en route now to the U.S. this morning. One stopping over in Vancouver before heading to the Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, near San Diego. The other will land first at Travis Air Force Base in California, then head to San Antonio and onto to Omaha.

Meantime, China's top anti-corruption agency is sending a team of investigators to Wuhan following the death of a doctor who warned of the coronavirus months ago but was silenced by the government.

JARRETT: The January jobs report is due in about three hours. Christine Romans is ready. Why the weather may have helped the numbers.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:13:51]

ROMANS: A decade of economic recovery and the jobs machine has remained mightily. We'll get a look at the first look at the election year at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time today.

A strong job market is key in the president's re-election message. Economists estimate employers added 160,000 new jobs in January. The numbers could be even stronger because warmer temperatures for construction and other outdoor work at a normally cold time of the year.

The president has tried to rebrand the economic recovery as a 10-year expansion as his alone. He takes credit for the strong job market. Unemployment at 49-year low, rising wages for low income workers, those trends began, of course, after the Great Recession, and ten years into the recovery the rate of job creation is bound to slow. So far under the Trump economy, the economy has added on average

191,000 jobs a month. For Obama, it was 227,000 jobs a month during the last 35 months of his term.

History will also be made in this report today. For the first time, same sex couples will be included in the count of married workers. The LGBQ community has pushed to be recognized in official government statistics. The change will not affect the numbers, the unemployment rate or number of jobs added, but it will show up in a few categories in underlying tables.

[05:15:07]

JARRETT: Attorney General Bill Barr handing down orders to avoid ensnaring the Justice Department in the 2020 elections the way it was in 2016. Under the new rules, no investigation of a presidential candidate can begin without Barr's sign-off. The FBI wants to involve top justice officials before investigating any congressional campaigns. A memo obtained by CNN says the aim is to ensure the November elections are free from improper activity or influences. The move is a response to criticism of the FBI's handling of the Russia probe and the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private e-mail servers.

ROMANS: All right. Fifteen minutes past the hour. The Globetrotters are famous for putting smiles on fans faces but see what happens when they help a military mom reunite with her family. Grab the tissue box.

Coy Wire has the "Bleacher Report", next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:20:25]

JARRETT: More than 130,000 customers in the dark as deadly weather hits the Southeast. In St. Petersburg, Florida, high winds brought down a crane in the middle of the interstate. The storms now killing three people.

In North Carolina, a man died after his vehicle hydroplaned and landed in a creek. A similar acceded killed a man in Tennessee. And in western Alabama, a tornado touchdown killing one person and injuring another.

In Georgia, look at the right side of your screen there. That's a tree toppling onto a car speeding down a busy highway. Amazingly, police say no one was seriously hurt.

More than 100 million Americans are still under winter weather alerts, flood watches and wind ad advisories this morning.

ROMANS: Be careful out there.

A public memorial for Kobe Bryant and the eight other helicopter victims is set to be held February 24th. Tributes to Kobe will be part of an all-star weekend and line up for that game are now set. Coy Wire has more in this morning's "Bleacher Report".

Hey, Coy.

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Christine.

Next weekend's all-star game will be special. It will also be tough. The team captain Giannis Antetokounmpo will wear Kobe's number 24 while the other captain LeBron James will wear number 2 for Kobe's daughter Gigi.

The captains got to choose their teammates for that game live on our sister network TNT last night. LeBron taking his teammate Anthony Davis with the first overall pick, while Giannis went with the Sixers Joel Embiid.

Here is the rest of it starting five, and it's interesting that all the guys voted as west starters ended up with the western captain LeBron and the east starters ended up with Giannis. The game is next Sunday on TNT.

Now, LeBron and the Lakers hosting the small ball Rockets in L.A. last night. Houston's tallest starter, 6'6". No wonder though that the Lakers would be the ones to come up short. Not King James, though, highlight of the night here, a big windmill dunk there.

But it was Houston who gets the "W." Russell Westbrook playing inspired in more ways than one. He drops 41 points in his hometown to surpass the 20,000 career points mark. It's the rockets 121-111 win.

And after the game, Westbrook dedicated his performance to Kobe.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSSELL WESTBROOK, HOUSTON ROCKETS GUARD: Kobe was a mentor, a friend, a brother to me. And every time I step on this court it's definitely going to out to him and every night I step on the floor, man, I just keep my thoughts and prayers with him and his family and got out to compete.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WIRE: In Milwaukee, Bucks star Giannis has just picked 76ers big man Joe Embiid to be on his all star team, but, boy, did he take Embiid to school last night. Thirty-six points, 20 rebounds for the Greek Freak. To put an exclamation point on this win, check out this nasty one hander off the miss. The Sixers lose their fourth straight while the Bucks extend their NBA best record to 44-7.

Finally, a sweet moment for a family who got to take their picture with the Harlem Globetrotters turned unforgettable. The Air Force Sergeant Deandrea Proctor had been deployed in Kuwait for seven months. Her 3-year-old daughter and boyfriend weren't sure when they would get to see her.

They certainly didn't know she was going to sneak into that photo-op there with the Globetrotters.

Yes, Christine, check this out, her daughter and boyfriend don't realize mom's there until they see the photo and it's like, wait, mommy's here? Oh, my goodness.

Her boyfriend can't believe it. He's in shock, and watch this moment here. The hug, the smile, the tears. It's all too sweet. Had to share that one with us this Friday morning.

ROMANS: You are killing me, Coy. You're killing me. That is really sweet. Really sweet.

Oh, love it.

All right, thank you, Coy.

WIRE: Have a happy weekend.

ROMANS: Bye.

JARRETT: I love how the boyfriend walks away. He can't even take it. He's in shock.

ROMANS: He's in shock.

JARRETT: Oh, man.

Well, coming up next Iowa's results, well, they're finally in. Democrats fanning out across New Hampshire. One candidate notably absent.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:29:16]

JARRETT: Gayle King had some sharp words for her employer CBS News for sharing a clip from her recent interview with former WNBA star Lisa Leslie. The morning star questioned Leslie about a 2003 sexual assault allegation against Kobe Bryant and whether it complicated his legacy during a wide-ranging interview. CBS posted the clip on social media, and the morning show host says she was blind-sided by all the blowback.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GAYLE KING, "CBS THIS MORNING" ANCHOR: I am mortified. I am embarrassed. And I am very angry. For the network to take the most salacious part when taken out of context and put it up online for people who didn't see the whole interview is very upsetting to me, and that's something I'm going to have to deal with with them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: CBS says it's currently addressing its internal process.

END