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President Trump May Sign Peace Agreement with Taliban in Seven Days; Nevada Caucus Process Switched to Google Forms After Iowa; Interview with Andy Parker. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired February 21, 2020 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

SHAWN TURNER, FORMER COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR, U.S. NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: -- but if they're not open to getting that information, then we are all going to be in the dark in terms of the threats we face.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR, NEWSROOM: Finally, Shawn, how do you believe Russia views all of this in terms of the president's reaction and the infighting on the Intel Committee to getting this information?

TURNER: Look, this is exactly what Russia set out to do. We knew that back in 2016, 2015, when we began to see this -- this activity. What we didn't know, what we could not have anticipated, however, was that our behavior, the behavior of the current administration, would actually facilitate and accommodate Russia as they sought to not only sow discord in this country, but also to impact our election.

Look, Russia is not only doing this for the impact that it has here in the United States, but they're doing this because of the way it makes them appear on the international stage. Other countries are looking at Russia and they're going, wow, you know, Russia may have the ability to impact who the next leader of the free world is.

And for Russia, that kind of influence, that kind of bravado on the international stage is exactly what they've been trying to recapture for a long time.

HARLOW: There you go, there you go. Look at what their actions in Georgia, in just the -- you know, in just the last week.

TURNER: Yes.

HARLOW: Shawn, thank you. Appreciate it this morning.

Ahead for us, the U.S. and the Taliban on the verge of a possible peace deal. This is significant. What does it mean for America's longest-running war?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:35:56] HARLOW: So the Trump administration is moving closer to bringing thousands of U.S. troops home from Afghanistan. A seven-day reduction in violence is set to begin in the region, just a few hours from now. This would pave the way for the U.S. to sign a peace agreement with the Taliban. Let's go to the Pentagon. Barbara Starr is there with us from Washington.

Hugely significant, Barbara, if it works though, if the Taliban can be trusted.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, that is -- in Afghanistan, that is one of the questions that continues to endure. Look, what is going to happen, several hours from now, is this reduction in violence agreement will go into effect for seven days. If it works, then this will be followed by a more formalized peace agreement, to be signed next Saturday, February 29th.

But in this seven-day period that is so critical to getting to that peace agreement, the view is that both sides have agreed to this reduction in violence. And if there are any attacks, any IEDs, suicide bombers, that sort of thing, the U.S. military will try to quickly verify whether the Taliban were responsible for it or other elements in Afghanistan.

And there's plenty of them. There's al-Qaida remnants, there's ISIS, there's any number of insurgent affiliations in that country. So this is -- first part is still going to be very challenging. Getting to a peace agreement, that as well because the Taliban keeps saying they want all foreign forces out of the country.

The U.S., determined to have that reduction in force to be able -- for President Trump to say it, that he's bringing troops home, but still planning to leave about 8,600 troops there for the time being, to fight counterterrorism.

TEXT: Impact of potential peace deal with the Taliban: Current troop levels, 12,000 to 13,000 -> 8,600

STARR: The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, issuing a statement about all of this -- and let me read it in part. He's very hopeful, as you would expect. And he says, "After decades of conflict, we have come to an understanding with the Taliban on a significant reduction in violence across #Afghanistan. This is an important step on a long road to peace, and I call on all Afghans to seize this opportunity."

No question, this is the best outcome possible for the Afghan people if it works. But there -- as we all know, this has been a very long road and there's any number of insurgent elements in that country, not at all clear that this will work -- Poppy.

HARLOW: Yes. It's not, let's hope it does. Barbara, thank you very much.

More than 2,200 people -- that is the latest count -- around the world who have died from the novel coronavirus. But all but 11 of those deaths were in mainland China. The total number of people infected around the world now stands at more than 76,000 as this virus does continue to spread.

White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow just said, in a White House gaggle, that the virus is having, quote, "barely any impact" on the U.S. economy, he said that just last hour. This, as 11 Americans evacuated from that quarantined cruise ship in Japan, earlier this week, tested positive for the coronavirus at a hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Hospital officials say all the patients are quarantined, most of them at this point not showing symptoms.

Well, listen to this story. A new mom, like three days after giving birth, runs toward fire after a truck carrying jet fuel just bursts into flames. The flames were intense. Look at this, this is what it looked like when Holly McNally, who had just had her fourth child, a few days earlier, ran over to help the driver.

The driver was on fire, after this tanker carrying 4,000 gallons of jet fuel overturned in Indianapolis just yesterday afternoon. McNally and another driver managed to get that truck driver out of the burning truck.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HOLLY MCNALLY, NEW MOM WHO RESCUED TRUCK DRIVER: I'm scanning, and people are videotaping and watching, but nobody's running over there. Smoke was hitting us and I was like, you know, just praying, like, God, please let me get out of here so I can go see my baby.

[10:40:00]

I thought, what if that's my son, what if that were Connor (ph), you know, when he's 30, would you want somebody to just leave him there?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: She's amazing. Holly McNally, I think she's the definition of a supermom. So glad to hear everyone's OK.

Coming up, Iowa repeat? I hope not. Nevada Democratic leaders say not on their watch: how the party plans to run a smooth caucus, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: This morning, Nevada's Democratic Party chair has a clear message for voters gearing up for the caucuses tomorrow. Here it is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM MCCURDY, CHAIRMAN, NEVADA DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Number one, what happened in Iowa will not happen in Nevada. We know that, come tomorrow, we will execute a successful caucus and folks will feel very confident, what we've been able to show.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[10:45:11]

HARLOW: OK, be confident, that's his message. Let's talk to someone who's going to run a precinct. Kevin Standlee, thanks for joining me.

KEVIN STANDLEE, PRECINCT CHAIRMAN, NEVADA CAUCUS: Hi, thanks for having me on.

HARLOW: Hi. All right, so in the wake of Iowa, you guys have even more attention on how this whole process runs tomorrow. You were originally, up to Iowa, you know, going to use the same app that they used that was such a disaster.

Obviously, in light of what happened there, that has changed. You're now using a, quote-unquote, "calculator." I believe it's something called Google Forms. Is plan B 100 percent ready and error-proof?

STANDLEE: Well, it certainly seems that way to me. And I do want to make sure everyone understands, I don't speak officially for the party, I'm just one of the --

HARLOW: Sure.

STANDLEE: -- thousands of volunteers who have been through the training to see how it works. And I'm pretty confident in how we're going to get it done.

HARLOW: Can you talk to us about it? Because as I understand it, you get these iPads, and the instructions are so detailed, they even tell you, take it out of the box, turn it on, go to the home screen. Then what do you guys do?

STANDLEE: Well, then we ask the people in our local precinct to form up into the groups of the candidate that they prefer. And we'll kind of bind (ph) the votes that are taken there in person, with those that were done in advance, over four days.

And then, if necessary, if groups are not big enough to count as viable, then we'll redistribute the nonviable groups, including those people who voted in advance. And once we have viable groups, we will write all that information down on pieces of paper that will be witnesses by representatives of all the people in the caucus, who will sign off on it.

Every step in the process is done on human-readable pieces of paper, multiply backed up so that in case of any problems with the assistive technology, we always can go back to the paper.

HARLOW: There's the paper, and then there's Google Forms. And as I understand it, Google's actually sending a bunch of folks to Nevada to help out if you need it. How does the technology part of it work? Is it just like Google doc where you enter in the numbers?

STANDLEE: It does appear to be that sort of thing. And -- but if necessary, you could do it by hand, although long division is a hassle. It's mainly just a calculator for dividing up the information that way.

HARLOW: OK.

STANDLEE: It's an assistive technology.

HARLOW: With all of this -- well, the debacle in Iowa around the caucuses and now, you know, the change of plans for you guys because of that technology, do you think that caucuses should still be a form (ph) here in the primary season? Or is a primary vote the better way to go?

STANDLEE: Well, that's up to the individual states and their parties to work out. In Nevada, the party has chosen to go with the caucus system. It does have a really great advantage of -- that it allows people to, if their own first choice isn't accepted, they can find their next-highest choice, or even their third.

HARLOW: That's key.

STANDLEE: That's something that's not possible in a single-person vote.

HARLOW: That's right, it's not. And that's a key difference, so I think the question becomes, at what cost. We wish you luck tomorrow. We wish you no snafus. We hope to have some answers by tomorrow night --

STANDLEE: Well, thank you. We're going to try and do our best to have an open, accessible and inclusive caucus.

HARLOW: There you go. And I know this is a volunteer position for you, so thanks for doing the hard work. Kevin Standlee, we appreciate it.

STANDLEE: Thank you.

[10:48:49]

HARLOW: Still ahead, a father's fight: Andy Parker's daughter Alison was murdered while reporting on live television, more than four years ago. He is now taking on YouTube and its parent company Google over graphic video showing his daughter's death. He's going to join me, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: Four years ago, 24-year-old Alison Parker went to work, and she went to do the job that she loved. She was conducting a live television interview when a former colleague shot and killed her and her cameraman Adam Ward. There they are.

Since then, her father Andy has been fighting for gun reform in honor of his daughter. Well, now, Parker, along with Georgetown Law's Civil Rights Clinic, has filed a complaint against YouTube and its parent company, Google. The complaint alleges that YouTube is violating its terms of service by hosting graphic videos of his own daughter's murder. And Andy is with me now.

Andy, thank you so much for being here. I've known you for years, through this entire struggle. You know, I know you haven't watched these videos of your daughter, of course. But you have gotten direct threats and seen conspiracy theories about her murder because of these videos. Tell me about your fight.

ANDY PARKER, AUTHOR, "FOR ALISON": Well, Poppy, again, thanks for allowing me the opportunity and it's great to be with you again, to report some positive news. And yes, I've had threats, I pretty much ignore them.

[10:55:00]

But what bothers me the most through this whole ordeal is that Google and YouTube continue to violate their own terms of service. They say that they prohibit graphic content and yet even though it's been flagged over and over and over again, it's still up there. And they profit from it. They monetize my daughter's murder, and I can't tolerate that.

HARLOW: YouTube said to us -- we spoke with them yesterday, and they said, look, you know, we don't allow ads to run on videos like this, you know, we're certainly not trying to make money off of it. And then they also gave us this statement, Andy.

"We specifically prohibit videos that aim to shock with violence, or accuse victims of public violent events of being part of a hoax. We rigorously enforce these policies using a combination of machine learning technology and human review and over the last few years, we've removed thousands of copies of this video for violating our policies. We will continue to stay vigilant and improve our policy enforcement."

I know that doesn't cut it for you. They say they're trying. I guess my question to you is, what do you hope that this FTC filing can do?

PARKER: Well, yes. And their response has been their standard response for the last four years. Oh, we're changing our terms of service, we're doing this, we're doing that. And, you know, it's just a lie. I mean, they lie like you breathe.

So that's why we've taken this action, and we feel like -- that this is just the first step. If we can cost them millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, that's great. Unfortunately, it's just chump change to these guys. But I think the real -- the end goal and the brass ring is for us to use this to help kickstart legislation to either revoke or amend Section 230 --

HARLOW: Right.

PARKER: -- which gives Google and these social media platforms complete immunity.

HARLOW: A lot of people don't understand that the law of the land right now is Section 230, which essentially says that internet platforms are not responsible for the content that they host, like CNN's responsible for what is on our air, you know, internet --

PARKER: Yes. HARLOW: -- these companies, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera are not

because of the law. And I know you have advocates on both sides of the aisle in Congress in that fight with you.

I do want to note, Andy, I sat down for a long interview back in June with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. And obviously, I brought this bigger issue up to him, and here's what he said to me.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SUNDAR PICHAI, CEO, GOOGLE: At YouTube, we are very focused on removing harmful content and reducing the spread of what we think of as borderline content. Just last quarter, we removed over 9 million videos. And -- and so it's an ongoing process. But there's more we need to do, and we acknowledge that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: You know, he said to me, we've got to do more. What would you say if you were sitting with him or with YouTube's CEO, Susan Wojcicki?

PARKER: I would say, why are videos of my daughter still up that have been flagged for years? You're tell me you remove, you know, thousands of bits of content there, and yet the content, that -- you know, it's easy enough to find, you can do it right now. It's still up. Why?

And the other piece of it is, oh, we don't run ads on this stuff. Well, if you can pull ads from it, why can't you take that down? I -- anything that they say is just -- it's just bogus. And that's why we filed the complaint. And we think that the FTC will come down hard on these guys.

HARLOW: What -- because this is sort of the nature of what has happened, because the essence of platforms like this are that they allow people to post things really any time and they have so many people monitoring this, and so much money poured into this, and it's still happening. What do you think the solution is? Should the platforms exist?

PARKER: Well, we know that Facebook at least has north of 30,000 human, you know, eyeballs, human moderators on this. Google has -- has been so opaque, they refused to tell Congress, they refused to tell anyone just how many human moderators they have. They won't say. And it's because they don't have that many, and they're relying on algorithms to do their work for them.

You know, if it were -- if they had actually people looking at the videos of Alison's murder that are up right now, they could -- they could remove these. But they don't because they profit. It's really insidious, it's pernicious behavior and that's why.

And real quick, I'll give you -- here's an example. In a meeting with some congressional staff, Lance Kavanaugh, who is YouTube's legal counsel, told them, you know, when they said, well, you know, why is this one up? And they showed him a screenshot of, you know, the video of --

[11:00:00]