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New Day

Trump Refuses to Commit to Peaceful Transfer of Power; No Officer Charged in Killing of Taylor; Overriding FDA on Vaccine Standards; Political Doctored Videos and Misinformation Campaigns. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired September 24, 2020 - 06:30   ET

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


[06:30:00]

SCOTT JENNINGS, COLUMNIST, "USA TODAY": Same breath was a huge mistake yesterday. My suspicion is, this reminds me of a few weeks ago, Alisyn, when he talked about, well, maybe we should delay the election, and you had the elected leadership and the party leadership of both parties unified in saying that's not happening, and then that was quickly abandoned. So I think if he persists in this, you'll see both parties' leaders unify around a message of, that's not -- that's not going to happen, Mr. President.

I agree with Bakari, by the way. I think we will have a peaceful transition and that's what's going to happen.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: But -- why? Why do you think that, Scott, when the president of the United States is saying it's conditional?

JENNINGS: Because the president of the United States does not have the ability to just upend, you know, all the tradition and history we have in this country of a peaceful transition of power. I don't -- I just -- I don't think a single human can do that.

CAMEROTA: But he does -- Scott, but just -- I just -- I want you to help everybody feel better --

JENNINGS: I think the weight of our institutions and the weight of the momentum of our democracy would prevent it. My view.

CAMEROTA: Yes? Who's going to stop him? Who's going to stop him, Scott? I mean --

BAKARI SELLERS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: The Secret -- the Secret Service. I mean the Secret Service is going to come in --

CAMEROTA: Yes, but I'm talking about what he's doing -- but what he's doing is ginning up his supporters. He's not -- he's not saying that he's activating the military. He's ginning up his ardent supporters to go out into the streets. That's why Brian Kemp says there's rioting in the streets, and the president says, well, get rid of the ballots and then it will be peaceful. He likes the rioting in the streets is what he's saying.

SELLERS: Yes, I don't disagree --

CAMEROTA: How is anybody going to stop that?

SELLERS: I don't disagree with that. I think we're talking about two different things, though. I don't -- I don't disagree with the fact that he wants chaos. I don't disagree with the fact that he wants mayhem. I don't disagree with the fact that we may have some hint of fragility in this country after November 3rd.

You know, there -- there is a -- there is a legitimate possibility that on election night Donald Trump is leading this race. But he will not be the valid winner after all of the ballots are counted. And that will be moments of fragility in this country where he wants to gin up supporters, where he wants to have mayhem and violence in the streets. That is a fact.

There also is another fact, though, that after he loses this election, on -- at noon on January 20th, there will be Secret Service agents that escort him to a helicopter that will take him wherever in the world he wants to go. Both of those things are --

CAMEROTA: Yes. I'm -- I'm not actually talking about him staying in the White House. I think that as of yesterday there's a bigger concern. I don't think that him just establishing squatter's rights in the White House is our biggest concern anymore, Scott. I really don't. I think that it's now that he's -- he's open for business when it comes to violence. He said as much.

Scott?

JENNINGS: Yes, I -- I didn't hear him talk about violence yesterday. I heard him make a very, very poor response to a legitimate question. And so I think you're reading into something that he -- he didn't say. I would just say this, Bakari brings a good --

CAMEROTA: He certainly didn't shut it down. He didn't shut it down.

JENNINGS: Bakari raised a good -- a good -- Bakari raised a good point of about the period of time between election night and then the few weeks that persist, because it's clear, based on the voting systems in several of the states, that we are going to be counting ballots for a period of time. And so we do have to have a valid winner.

And we will have a valid winner. And that should be the point. And everybody's vote should count. Everybody who cast a legal ballot should have their votes counted. And then when we count those votes, we'll have a legal and valid winner. And that's the process we should want. And when it's over, we'll transition. That's the message and it's really no more complicated than that.

CAMEROTA: I hope you guys are right. I hope -- I like how sanguine you are. I hope that it's right.

Bakari, you have been talking about Breonna Taylor so many mornings on this program.

SELLERS: Yes.

CAMEROTA: I mean before she was a household name, you were alerting everybody and grabbing all of our attention and telling us about this case. And so what did you think about what happened yesterday?

SELLERS: I mean, I think it's pretty clear that black lives do not matter. I think it's pretty clear that justice is fleeting, that if you are a person of color, particularly a black woman in this country, you know, the quest for justice and the road to get justice is longer and harder than most. And I think that yesterday there was -- there was more concern for the walls of the apartment next door, these charges these officers face -- or that officer faces is a sham.

You know, when you have one person who's charged for just shooting a gun willy-nilly, as we say down south, with a $15,000 bond, sometimes you just have to smile at the absurdity.

You know, I -- you know, my heart goes out to Breonna Taylor's family. And when you wake up this morning, I've said on this show many times that, you know, being black is a perpetual state of grieving in this country. And here we are again.

I've come on this show and poured my heart out. I've, you know, cried. I've laughed to prevent myself from crying. It just hurts sometimes. And here we are again at another moment. You have to listen to some Gospel music and just have one of those days. And so for everybody watching, you know, just -- you know, it's tough.

[06:35:02]

It's hard. But we have to get up and keep going.

CAMEROTA: Scott, I know that you're close to the Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron. You were a strategist on his campaign. You've become close friends with him. A lot of people think that he got this one wrong. I mean that if you are a young black woman, asleep in your bed, you've done nothing wrong, in your apartment, that you shouldn't be shot six times.

JENNINGS: Well, you're right, I am close to the attorney general. And I agree with Bakari about the tragedy of this. And everybody in -- I'm in Louisville, by the way, and, you know, we've all been living this case day-to-day because we live here. It's our community. And it is a tragedy. And her life was lost and it should not have been.

There's two parts of this investigation. The attorney general was looking specifically at the shooting events of that evening. As he announced yesterday, the FBI is still looking at the warrant situation, the civil rights situation, and possible federal charges. Because a lot of people want to know, why were the police there in the first place? Why was it in the middle of the night? How did they obtain the warrant that put them in that situation?

It was tragic because she was not breaking any laws. She was unarmed. Her boyfriend was not breaking any laws. He was armed. He did fire. The police returned fire. So it was a situation where the police, as Chief Ramsey said earlier on the show, the police had been fired upon, they returned fire and that's what created the tragedy. And that's what the attorney general was investigating was, what was the truth of the events of that night?

CAMEROTA: Yes.

JENNINGS: But now, Alisyn, I think what the community wants is, what's the truth of the events that led up to the police going to that home in the first place?

CAMEROTA: Yes.

JENNINGS: And, do we need a review by the process by which these warrants are obtained, how and when they are served and so on and so forth.

CAMEROTA: Of course we do.

JENNINGS: We've got the FBI looking at that. And General Cameron also said yesterday, he's going to lead a task force reviewing how warrants are obtained and served in Kentucky. We need that. We need that here because you have somebody who's dead, and it's tragic and it's wrong. You have another person -- by the way, I sympathize with Walker. Bakari I'd love you thoughts on this.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

JENNINGS: He was put in a crazy position. He's in -- he's in an apartment. It's the middle of the night. You hear banging on the door.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

JENNINGS: I mean he legitimately -- he legitimately thought he was in danger, too. And so you've got Walker in a terrible position here.

CAMEROTA: Of course.

JENNINGS: All-around tragedy and Louisville's heart is broken.

CAMEROTA: Yes, guys, I'm sorry, Bakari, hold your thought on that. We have to go.

But, obviously, this case is far from over, actually, in terms of all the questions that still need to be answered.

Bakari, Scott, thank you both very much.

SELLERS: Thank you.

JENNINGS: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: President Trump is also threatening to intervene in the vaccine approval process. Can he do that? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:41:40]

BERMAN: We've been talking about the president's unprecedented, implicit threat of violence by refusing to commit to the peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. There was another unprecedented moment at the White House. Now, public health officials had spent all day addressing the American people, assuring us there would be no politics in the coronavirus vaccine approval process. They promised. But then, last night, the president explicitly threatened to inject politics into the vaccine approval process by threatening to overrule new approval guidelines discussed by the FDA.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It sounded to me -- it sounded extremely political. Why would they do this? And we come back with these great results. And I think you will have those great results.

QUESTION: Well, when do you expect the vaccine then?

TRUMP: Why would we -- why would we be delaying it? But we're going to look at it. we're going to take a look at it. And, ultimately, the White House has to approve it.

BERMAN: Joining us now is Dr. Ali Khan. He is the dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center's College of Public Health.

Dr. Khan, always a pleasure to see you.

Just to be clear, CNN has reported, "The Washington Post" has reported, others have reported, the FDA is discussing new guidelines for the emergency approval of a coronavirus vaccine. Those new guidelines would say, you need two months from the date when people in the trials took their final dose of the vaccine. This might delay approval past Election Day. That's the impact of these FDA's discussed guidelines.

The president told us, no matter what the FDA says, he may just overrule that.

Now, he has no medical degree. He has no medical expertise. How unprecedented, how dangerous would it be for a political veto, essentially, of an FDA guideline like this?

DR. ALI KHAN, DEAN, UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA MEDICAL CENTER'S COLLEGE OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Good morning, john.

Good morning, Alisyn.

And thank you for what looks like another chapter in the Covid fiasco.

So the president may or may not have the authority to approve the vaccine. The real question is, why would you do this, right? And I think people are forgetting that we talk about safe and effective vaccine, but it's a triad. We need a trustworthy vaccine. And we already know that 25 to 30 percent of Americans say they don't trust this administration, they're not going to get vaccinated. And if we just roll back time to last year, we had one of the largest measles outbreaks in the United States. And measles is a really good, safe and effective vaccine. But because of vaccine hesitancy, people were refusing to vaccinate their kids against measles.

So we don't need an Election Day vaccine. We need a safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccine to help Americans get vaccinated and get this country back to a new, better normal.

CAMEROTA: Well, let's just be honest, the president has never talked about being that concerned about the vaccine being safe or even working. He wants a press release. He wants to be able to say, before Election Day, I cured it! Now we have a vaccine.

And, you know, there are all -- there's all sorts of evidence that his diminishing of science and his diminishing of institutions is actually working and people, lots of Americans, do not trust what would be coming out this year, much less before Election Day.

[06:45:01]

So he can say whatever he wants. It doesn't mean that it would ever work for people this year.

KHAN: Oh, absolutely correct. And that trust is so important.

And you do need the time for the safety and efficacy studies to make sure that this is a good vaccine you're going to put in people's arms, otherwise, you know, we can just stop the studies today and go ask Mr. Putin for Sputnik V, right, which was approved after, I think, went into the arms of 40 to 70 people and it got approved as a licensed vaccine in that country. So we might as well stop and ask for Sputnik V.

Obviously, that's not an approach for America.

CAMEROTA: I feel like you're giving President Trump too good of a suggestion. I feel like we might see a tweet about this.

KHAN: Sorry, no -- this is -- this is not the approach we're going to take here in America. We're going to make sure Americans get a safe and effective vaccine.

But I want to remind people, whenever we talk about vaccines, we currently have 750 to 1,000 deaths a days. And that's preventable deaths that's unacceptable at this point in the outbreak in the United States. And we have the tools between our public health tools of, you know, test, trace, and isolate, and our personal tools of using a mask, to get these cases back down again.

BERMAN: Dr. Khan, I want to ask you, because you are in Nebraska, this vast swath of the Midwest, and we can put the map up right now so people can see it, where the number of new cases is rising. And it's a large chunk of the country. And if we look at the number of daily cases right there, you can see it on the map, everywhere in red and orange. New cases in the past week are up, in some cases up by more than 50 percent in the deep red there. And all we have to do is look at the graph, too, and we can see the case rate is rising in the United States.

This is a tough reality to be in right now. And, once again, it's a reality that runs counter to the political message we're getting, which is that somehow America's turned a corner on coronavirus.

KHAN: Yes, no, America's not turned a corner. We should technically have zero cases. At the end of June, we had 20,000 a day. And now we have 40,000 a day. There's no turning a corner when you look at what cases look like in the United States and approximately a thousand deaths a day.

But as you look at that map, what you're seeing is an inconvenient truth, which is that many states allowed schools and colleges to reopen when they had not gotten their disease under control. And so they're not just seeing these outbreaks in the colleges, it's spilling out into the communities.

And that's exactly what you're seeing happen in places like Colorado or Kentucky, Wisconsin, I believe, six of the highest counties right now in the U.S. where cases are, Wisconsin. And all six of those metropolitan areas have universities in those areas. So, again, an inconvenient truth.

BERMAN: Dr. Khan, a pleasure, as always, to have you on. Thanks so much for the reality, the dose of reality.

KHAN: Thank you.

BERMAN: The approved dose of reality. Mask on.

KHAN: And mask on!

BERMAN: Dr. Khan.

CAMEROTA: That's a good-looking one right there.

Thank you.

BERMAN: All right, thousands of people turning out to pay respects to supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Details, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:52:06]

BERMAN: President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will pay their respects this morning to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She lies in repose at the Supreme Court. A line of people stretching half a mile at times filed past her casket on Wednesday. And, tomorrow, Ginsburg will be moved to the U.S. Capitol, where she will become the first woman ever to lie in state there.

CAMEROTA: If you take one look at the social media feeds of some of President Trump's allies and campaign staffers, you will see a slew of false information and doctored videos.

John Avlon has taken a look. Here's his "Reality Check."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Hang on here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Police coming straight from the underground.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Now, do you think Joe Biden would play NWA at a campaign rally? Not a chance. But that clip was retweeted twice by President Trump. It's part of a clear pattern to push fake, doctored videos, to reinforce campaign narratives in the absence of facts.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Do you know what disinformation is?

AVLON: We sure do, Mr. President. It's what you and your staffers have been doing on overdrive lately.

Unreal! That's what Eric Trump said when retweeting this doctored video yesterday. And for once, he was right. But not in the way he wanted to be. Because it was unreal. The manipulated video falsely alleged that Joe Biden used a teleprompter in an interview with Telemundo.

Or, get this, White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino pushing a fake clip from his government account purporting to show Biden falling asleep during an interview. It was a Biden clip cut on to a 2011 interview with Harry Belafonte, with audible snoring added.

Or this, pushed by GOP rapid response director, which purported to show Biden complete botching the Pledge of Allegiance. Here's what Biden was actually saying.

BIDEN: I don't pledge allegiance to red states of America or blue states of America. I pledge allegiance to the United States of America. One nation, indivisible, under God, for real.

AVLON: You see a consistent theme here, right? It's one that just happens to perfectly amplify an ongoing Russia-backed misinformation attack on Biden. Pay attention to this next one.

ADY BARKAN: We agree that we can redirect some of the funding for police.

BIDEN: Yes, absolutely.

AVLON: That's activist and ALS sufferer Ady Barkan interviewing Joe Biden. And it's not at all what was actually said.

Here's what was.

BIDEN: I propose that kind of reform. We need significantly more help. That's why I call for significant increase in funding for mental health.

BARKAN: And we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?

BIDEN: Yes! Absolutely.

AVLON: But that first version is what the second highest-ranking Republican in the House, Steve Scalise, put out there, leading to the repetition of the lie that Joe Biden wants to defund the police.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When asked if he supports cutting police funding, Joe Biden replied, yes, absolutely.

AVLON: That's something that Biden has opposed all along. In fact, Biden has proposed giving cops $300 million more for better training.

[06:55:02]

Here's another.

The Trump campaign war room tweeted this three-second clip of Biden.

BIDEN: You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.

AVLON: And here's what Joe Biden actually said.

BIDEN: Since they have no agenda or a vision for a second term, Trump and Pence are running on this, and I find it fascinating, quote, you won't be safe in Joe Biden's America.

AVLON: This is a deliberate strategy of serial social media dishonesty, spread by the president and his campaign. Now, part of the goal is to get people not to trust what they see with their own eyes, undermining our ability to reason together at a time when the FBI is warning there will be disinformation around our election results.

And that's your "Reality Check."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Our thanks to John Avlon for that.

So the president of the United States just refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November. We discuss this statement and its implications for every American, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)