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President Trump Announces Visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, Despite Continued Unrest in Wake of Shooting of Jacob Blake; Director of National Intelligence States His Office Will No Longer Provide In Person Briefings to Congressional Intelligence Committees on Election Security. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired August 31, 2020 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump is trying to use, it seems, trying to use all that to eclipse what else is going on with coronavirus, the outbreaks, the unemployment, exactly. Put that aside. If you were in the Homeland Security Department today, what would you do about these pockets of unrest in Kenosha and Portland?

LISA MONACO, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: So, Alisyn, just to kind of level-set for people, my job was in the White House. I was the Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser to President Obama. In that role, my job was so provide him information, to coordinate the government's response to crises of all times, from pandemics to terrorism to cyber-attacks, and indeed sometimes unrest that occurred domestically.

And so what I would have been doing, or what I would be doing if I were still in the White House, would be to provide information to the president so he can do what presidents do in situations like this, which is, one, to calm things, two, to try and unify and bring people together, and three, to provide support to state and local officials and their communities. That's the job of a president in any type of crisis regardless of the nature of it and regardless of what caused it.

And so that's the kind of thing I'd be doing. In fact, it's the kind of thing I did do for President Obama and Vice President Biden in relation to all sorts of crises, including protests regarding operations by the police and police violence and domestic unrest.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: As I said before, to me, the only questions that matter this morning is what's going to help and what's actually hurting. And to that end, some of the things that the president has done, I'm curious if you think it helps or if it hurts. He has liked a tweet, which praised Kyle Rittenhouse. He is the 17-year-old who is charged in two deaths in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has called the caravan of Trump supporters who were heading into Portland great patriots as they were heading in. One of them, apparently, was shot and killed during an exchange of fire, which also is tragic, but that kind of language and rhetoric from the president of the United States surrounding this, what's the impact? MONACO: Of course, John, it doesn't help. Again, tweeting is not an

answer, right, and in some cases, potentially now as we're seeing, it could enflame things, right? Tweeting does not do any of the things I just said. It doesn't calm things, it doesn't unite people to come together, and it doesn't support the state and local officials. In fact, what we're seeing in some of the reporting is the state and local officials saying that's not helpful. You're not supporting us. You're not calming things. You're not providing any sorts of unification. So no, bottom line, John, I don't see how in any way that that helps.

CAMEROTA: How about President Trump's visit, planned visit tomorrow to Kenosha? The governor of Wisconsin has said please, don't come. What can President Trump or any president do going into something that is a hotbed of unrest at the moment?

MONACO: So first and foremost, Alisyn, the kind of, the ethos and the kind of guiding principle in the White House in response to any type of crisis and issue that is really challenging local officials, first responders, police, community officials, is to defer to them, right? So let's take the current unrest out of it. Say it is a hurricane or a big storm that's really taxing local officials and challenging their resources. The first thing the White House would do is defer to those local officials and say we're not going to come in if it's going to distract you, right, if it's going to take you off your game and what you're trying to do for the community.

So that is just a basic guiding principle when you're working in the White House and you're trying to support the president and the president is talking about going into a community. Now, here it's far from kind of a neutral issue. And so, yes, going in, first and foremost, getting into a community that is really rife with this type of unrest and where the officials and the local law enforcement is taxed already, the last thing you want to do is have a massive motorcade come in there and distract the officials, leaving aside the, clearly, big tensions and great tensions that his presence is likely to generate.

BERMAN: So Lisa, you've worn many hats, as you say, or you've worn one big hat that let you focus on many different things inside the White House. It's interesting that the Director of National Intelligence said over the weekend, and CNN was the first to report this, that he is not going to brief members of Congress in person and not have his office do it anymore on issues surrounding election security.

[08:05:06]

And this follows the reports that Russia is trying to help reelect President Trump, also on the activities of China and Iran. They're not going to do any more in-person briefings. The big question I have is, why? Why would you give less, 60 days before an election rather than more? We just talked to Senator Angus King of Maine who is on the intelligence committee, and he said it looks to him like a pre- coverup. MONACO: John, it is utterly baffling. It is utterly baffling why the

Director of National Intelligence would say they're not going to give in-person briefings. Now, some people might be saying, what's the big deal if they're going to give written briefings? So you reference I've worn many hats. One of them was assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. That's the Justice Department's top national security lawyer. In that role appeared before the House Intelligence Committees, the Senate Intelligence Committee, many, many, many times.

And let me tell you, those are very useful, I think, for those types of briefings, they're very useful for the members, and in turn, for their oversight function. It provides for a lot of question and answer for the members to really probe the witnesses in front of them. And look, it's not always comfortable for the witnesses in front of them, but that's not the point. The point is the intelligence committees have a duty to get those individuals before them, the members of the intelligence community, who also in turn have a duty to keep the committees fully and currently informed about threats that are facing the nation.

And here, we know, we know from the department of -- from the DNI's own statement issued at the beginning of August that our adversaries, including Russia, are trying to interfere in the election. So why in the world you would curtail information going to the committees and therefore to the American public is absolutely beyond me. And it doesn't sit right. It doesn't make any sense. And the asserted justification, to prevent, quote, leaks, also doesn't make any sense. Written material can leak just as well as an oral briefing. So it's utterly baffling to me.

CAMEROTA: Such a great point, Lisa. It's already happening. It's happening. This isn't theoretical. It isn't like we hope the Kremlin isn't going to interfere. They already have the intel that they're setting up the fake social media accounts and they're sowing discord just as we saw in 2016. Quickly, Lisa.

MONACO: And Alisyn, I would also say, look, the failure to provide more information, to really wrestle with it and to work in unison on this issue as a government, that just provides more running room for Putin. And that's the last thing we need.

BERMAN: Who does it help? Ask yourself who benefits from this? Lisa Monaco, thanks so much for being with us this morning, thank you.

MONACO: Thanks very much.

BERMAN: The Democrat nominee Joe Biden, he speaks just hours from now in Pittsburgh on the issues surrounding racial injustice, and also the violence in Kenosha and Portland. The president goes to Kenosha, Wisconsin, tomorrow. The two men going head to head on issues of racial justice and violence with just 64 days left until the election.

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood joins us now. And John, I'm struck by how Joe Biden is going to address this today, first of all. In a statement yesterday, he said of the president he may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong, but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is. It seems that the Biden campaign is now trying to paint the president as weak, and I feel like that's very intentional use of language.

And I'm also struck by the president's very first comments. He has said nothing about Jacob Blake and how he was shot seven times by place until this weekend when he was asked about it, and then he said he didn't like the video, and then he also said this of police shootings. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What you don't see is the thousands and thousands of great decisions that are made, where people are saved. So we have to understand that. People can make a mistake. It doesn't make them bad. They choked. Bad things happen, and it can happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: We have the president saying mistakes happen to explain the police shootings of black men over the weekend. What do you make of the dueling messages this morning?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: First of all, think about all the terms that Lisa Monaco used in that segment you just had about the responsibility of the president to calm, to unify, to defer to local officials to try to solve problems. All of those things presume a president, which is what we've had in the past, with a healthy, normal sense of responsibility about his job, a healthy sense of the difference between right and wrong, and an actual concern for the country.

What we have seen for the last four years, and we've heard in the testimony from his closest aides, people like Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, is that President Trump is not such a person. President Trump is consumed with himself. He is not concerned about the welfare of others.

[08:10:08]

And so what he's going to do is to try to react to these situations in a way to magnify some perceived advantage to himself. Kellyanne Conway said it openly on television the other day. The more violence and disorder there is, the better it is for our campaign because of our message.

So the president is going to do the minimum he feels he needs to do to acknowledge what everyone could see on tape, but he does not want to quell the passion of his supporters who believe that they have been somehow victimized in this situation.

Joe Biden, his campaign and his career have been built around the opposite impulses. Joe Biden does want to calm this situation. That is core to his message. He also happens to be leading in the race, and so the less the table is turned over on this political campaign, the better it is for Joe Biden. He continues to lead nationally and in battleground states after the conventions, but we don't know what the effect of those events will have been, the two conventions, and the effect of disorder if it continues to escalate.

BERMAN: Everyone who is wired like you and me, John, of course wants to see a million polls out from after both of these conventions to see exactly how the messages have fallen. And there isn't a lot of polling. There's some early polls which indicate the president may have had a minimal bounce. There's also polling out from ABC News and Ipsos which talks about the president's favorability, I can just put this up on the screen so people see. And it shows that the president's favorability is at 31 percent now. It was 35 percent before the election, and the opposite is true for Joe Biden, that his favorability is higher than it was before. And so there's some conflicting polling right now. We may just have to wait to see exactly what impact these conventions have had.

HARWOOD: There's no question we're going to have to wait. There are a couple of points to make about this. Given how stable views about President Trump have been for a very long time, throughout his presidency -- and remember, he was trailing Joe Biden by a significant margin before COVID, before George Floyd. This is a -- you have to approach that with the presumption that it's going to be difficult for him to move numbers even with a successful convention.

On the other hand, the size of Joe Biden's advantage, eight to 10 points in polling averages, is a very large advantage in a country that has been typically very evenly divided. We haven't had a double- digit blowout in the popular vote since Ronald Reagan in 1984. So you presume that the natural balance of power or balance of partisan division in the country would assert itself, and that would tend to make things closer.

But this is an extraordinary situation, an extraordinary set of characteristics around this president, and you're right, we are going to have to wait for high-quality polls both nationally and in the battleground states, although what we do know is in the averages, Joe Biden is leading in almost all of them.

BERMAN: My friends who are in mathematics tell me we should expect a regression to the mean, which means that you imagine the polls would tighten at least some. John Harwood this morning, thanks. Always great to have you on. Appreciate it.

HARWOOD: You bet.

BERMAN: So this is worth paying attention to. The head of the FDA is talking about approving a coronavirus vaccine before human trials are done. Why would you give something that millions of people might take approval before all the trials are completed? One of the nation's leading infectious disease doctors joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:17:10]

CAMEROTA: The FDA's Commissioner considering approving a coronavirus vaccine for emergency use before Phase 3 trials are complete. Is that safe?

Joining us now is Dr. Ashish Jha. He is the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. So, Dr. Jha, great to have you here. I know ideally, of course, you would want to complete Phase 3 of the trials, but it sounds like Dr. Hahn, the head of the F.D.A. is saying that the benefit of getting it out on emergency use outweighs the complete safety of completing Phase 3. What do you think of that?

DR. ASHISH JHA, DIRECTOR, HARVARD GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE: Yes, good morning, and thank you for having me on. So, I think first and foremost, we all want a vaccine out as quickly as possible.

The issue really is how to weigh the benefits and the risks and emergency use authorization is allowed when the benefits outweigh the risks and you can understand that when you're taking care of sick people, you might have a therapy that's not fully proven, but the benefits seem to be stronger, that makes sense.

If you're going to give it to millions of people who are otherwise healthy, you have to have a much higher bar, and so what I would like to see is really robust data, ideally a full review before we go ahead and authorize any kind of a vaccine.

BERMAN: As we sit here this morning, Dr. Jha, what questions do you have about the possible political influence at play with the F.D.A., based on what we saw with the convalescent plasma and based on what we're seeing now with this data?

JHA: Yes, so the good news is that the scientists at the F.D.A. really are some of the leading scientists in the world and if we let them drive the decision-making, I will feel much more comfortable with whatever conclusion they come up with, as long as it's transparent and open.

The problem is both with hydroxychloroquine and the convalescent plasma, we saw a real politicization of that scientific debate in a way that I think has all of us concerned.

So, what I'd like is for the scientists to drive this decision, for it to be very transparent and for political leaders to not get involved in deciding when a medicine or a vaccine is safe or not.

CAMEROTA: Let's just take a look at where the new cases are in the country right now. It is just interesting to get a status report, as we begin this week.

So as you can see, in terms of new cases, we have a graphic, it peaked at the end of June there or I guess mid-July, and now the arc is coming down, but slowly. What do you see here?

JHA: Yes, so as a nation, we are clearly doing better now on the last day of August than we were on the first day of August. The cases have come down. Deaths are starting to decline. Hospitalizations are down.

This is good news, and it's largely because of smart policies in Texas and Arizona, and Florida, around masking and closing bars, so I see that as good news, but there's still parts of the country where things are both bad and even getting worse.

In the Dakotas, in Kansas and other states, we still see a lot of cases and as a nation, we're still seeing a lot of cases of coronavirus. So progress, but we have a long way to go.

[08:20:22]

BERMAN: I'm very interested in what's going on in college campuses right now, because I think, it's what? Eighty seven hundred cases in 36 states now at colleges that have opened up, 1,200 cases in the University of Alabama alone.

My question, Dr. Jha is, there is part of this which to me is reminiscent of what we saw in June with younger people, and by that I mean people in their 20s and 30s, going out to bars.

Now you have people even a little bit younger than that, but basically young people in their late teens or early 20s congregating at schools and they're getting coronavirus. So what's to keep this from being the next spark that causes a wider outbreak?

JHA: Yes, now, it is a very good question and I have a couple of thoughts. I mean, first of all, I am concerned about what we are seeing across the country and we need to have young people behave a bit more responsibly and we need less misinformation directed towards them that somehow this is safe or not an important disease.

But the second part which I think is even more important is that a lot of colleges are not taking this seriously. They've brought kids back, they brought students back. They haven't done entry testing. They haven't done quarantine. They don't have a surveillance program and they are just sort of crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, and that's not a strategy.

So I really put a lot of the responsibility here on college and university leaders. They have to do better.

BERMAN: And they are not islands. I mean these colleges aren't islands. And oftentimes, they are in cities, they are in towns with a lot of people near them. All right, Dr. Jha, we appreciate it. Thank you very much.

JHA: Thank you.

BERMAN: So a former pool attendant at the center of a sex scandal involving evangelical leader, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife, the former pool attendant joins us with his version of events, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:26:03]

CAMEROTA: The young man at the center of a scandal involving evangelical leader, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife is speaking out about what he calls a pattern of predatory behavior from the Falwells. Giancarlo Granda was a pool attendant at a Miami hotel when he met

Jerry Falwell and his life, Becki. The Falwells have acknowledged that Granda and Becki had an affair, but they deny that Jerry Falwell, Jr. was involved.

They accuse Granda of blackmail. Granda is now demanding an investigation into Liberty University where Falwell, Jr. served as President until he resigned last week.

And Giancarlo Granda joins us now. Giancarlo, thanks so much for being here.

GIANCARLO GRANDA, FORMER POOL BOY ATTENDANT AT CENTER OF FALWELL SEX SCANDAL: Yes, thank you for having me on.

CAMEROTA: So there's the salacious side obviously of this story and then there's the cultural significance side of this story, of this leading so-called conservative Christian being exposed as a charlatan basically, and I think that both of those things are interesting.

So let's just start at the beginning. You say that they approached you. Becki Falwell approached you in, I believe, 2012, you were working at a hotel. She approached you to come back to her hotel room. You were 20 years old. You were intrigued. She was flirtatious.

And at some point, she mentions, oh, and by the way, my husband is going to be involved. He likes to watch. Would you say that that --

GRANDA: Right.

CAMEROTA: I mean, you then had a relationship basically with them over the next seven years. Was that always the dynamic? Did that dynamic play out through the next seven years as well?

GRANDA: Right. He was aware from day one and we already know the nature of this relationship. He did watch from the beginning, and again, let's emphasize, I was 20 years old, the age of a Liberty University student.

And now fast forward, what's really important is, there's a lawsuit that happened. That explains why I was tied -- I've been trying to cut ties from this family for a very long time.

CAMEROTA: Since when?

GRANDA: But the excuse was --

CAMEROTA: And when did you start trying to cut ties? Because we do see all of these pictures of you with the family. You were clearly close to them, and you went on vacation with them. You met them in different places.

And so how would you describe the nature of your relationship with Jerry Falwell, Jr., the family, and when did you want out?

GRANDA: So we caught wind of this lawsuit that was coming at the end of 2014, and in 2015, I kept trying to pull away from them, but Jerry reminded me that he secretly recorded me in our sexual encounters and he would threaten to release it to my girlfriend at the time and to my family and to everyone around me.

So he always held that over my head, and he said, look, listen, just be a good soldier and just hang in there and once the lawsuit is settled, I'll buy your equity stake.

And there's even a text message where he is saying how much money I would get from the equity.

CAMEROTA: Right, and I've seen that, and so in other words, not only were you kind of tied to them in this sexual relationship, you were tied to them financially, because you all had gone in as partners on these youth hostels.

And so he promised you, and I have seen the texts, a certain cut. What do you want now? What exactly -- how much money are you looking for in order to stop this and end these and completely sever the ties with them?

GRANDA: Again, all I've ever wanted is just to cut ties, you know, just some equity stake out and I can guarantee you that any offer that's been thrown out there, any settlement negotiation came from Jerry first and I would remind everyone, when I tried to pull away, he held the videos over my head. He would spread it to my girlfriend at the time and people around me.

And again, he would make me feel guilty for trying to back away from Becki or the LLC. There was this, you know, this constant pattern of making me feel guilty and making subtle threats.

[08:30:09]