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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Interview With Biden Campaign Senior Adviser Symone Sanders; Biden, Trump Set For First Presidential Debate; NYC Reopens Elementary Schools Today for In-Person Learning; Former Pence Adviser: White House Pressured CDC to Put Out Data Backing Trump's Push to Reopen Schools. Aired 4-4:30p ET

Aired September 29, 2020 - 16:00   ET

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

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JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Plus, the new details of President Trump's tax avoidance, as reported by "The New York Times," will almost assuredly come up.

And we just got some breaking news this afternoon. In an effort to draw clear contrast with Donald Trump, just hours before the debate, the Biden campaign released the 2019 tax returns of Joe and Jill Biden and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff.

The Bidens paid nearly $300,000 in federal income taxes last year, compared to Trump's reported $750 in 2016 and 2017.

Let's go straight to CNN's Kaitlan Collins, live in Cleveland.

Kaitlan, Biden trying to send a clear message to President Trump here with this stunt.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's a pretty clear message of what it is that he's going to hit President Trump over in this debate tonight, revealing that he did pay those $300,000 in federal income taxes last year.

Jake, that is nearly 400 times the amount that the president paid his first time in office. And a senior campaign official who flew with the president here to Cleveland, where they landed just a few moments ago, said they do expect taxes to be the first question out of the gate.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS (voice-over): Tonight, President Trump and Joe Biden will square off on the debate stage for the first time.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I am looking very forward to the debate.

COLLINS: With no handshakes and a limited audience, the two will go head to head for 90 minutes in Cleveland on the coronavirus pandemic, nationwide racial tensions, the economy, and a newly vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

Trump will also face questions about a major "New York Times" investigation revealing that he paid little or no federal income taxes for decades, leaving his advisers scrambling to put together a response.

FMR. GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R-NJ): Joe Biden was part of making those tax laws over all the years that he was in the Congress. And so I think that the president should answer it that way.

COLLINS: Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is among those helping Trump prepare for tonight's debate, though sources tell CNN Trump spent little time formally preparing and resisted doing mock sessions with staff standing in for Biden, instead relying on sporadic question-and-answer sessions.

KAYLEIGH MCENANY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president has had a few prep sessions with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Governor Chris Christie.

RUDY GIULIANI, ATTORNEY FOR PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The president has every right take his head off, if he wants.

JOSEPH BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Good afternoon, everyone.

COLLINS: Sources say Biden is planning to hit Trump on his handling of the pandemic that's killed over 200,000 Americans.

TRUMP: We're rounding the corner regardless.

COLLINS: In turn, Trump is expected to argue that voters trust him more than Biden on the economy.

A top campaign aide also hinting that Trump may bring guests, echoing the stunt he pulled in 2016 after the "Access Hollywood" tape was released, and Trump invited three Bill Clinton accusers to the debate.

For months Trump has sought to portray Biden as unfit for office. But, lately, aides have tried to raise the low bar they set for Biden, out of fear it'll backfire on stage tonight.

TIM MURTAUGH, TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Both things can be true. There are some times where Joe Biden is absolutely befuddled. But we also saw that 11 times during the Democratic primaries he did very well.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COLLINS: Now, Jake, we do know that both sides got 20 tickets to the debate tonight. We know that the president has invited his adult children to be in attendance, but the rest of his guests remain to be seen. We will find out in a few hours.

TAPPER: All right, Kaitlan Collins, thank you so much.

While President Trump has spent less than two hours, we're told, preparing for tonight's debate, about 100 miles north, in Wilmington, Delaware, Joe Biden has taken a more traditional approach. He has participated in mock debates, with an adviser playing the role of President Trump, strategizing how to put the president on defense.

Here now to discuss, senior adviser to the Biden campaign Symone Sanders.

Symone, thanks so much for joining us.

Let me just start with the obvious question. Dana Bash and others are reporting that the president is planning on bringing up Hunter Biden and going at Joe Biden for all sorts of controversies from his past.

How will Joe Biden respond?

SYMONE SANDERS, BIDEN CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: Well, Jake, thanks for having me here today to talk about the debate.

Look, we expect that the American people actually don't want to hear President Trump attack Vice President Biden and his family. Frankly, these attacks have also been debunked, I think it's important for me to say.

What the American people are interested in hearing our the candidates' plans for their families. Jake, more than 200,000 people have lost their lives to COVID-19, as you all have been reporting over the last couple of weeks; 30 million people have filed for unemployment.

This is really about how Joe Biden and, frankly, President Trump, what their plans are for the American people's families. So, Joe Biden is going to speak directly to those folks at home tonight about the kitchen table issues that they care most about.

And what President Trump decides to do with this time, that's on him. But Joe Biden is going to be speaking to those folks at home.

TAPPER: So he's going to ignore when he or his family is attacked in any personal way, whether it's talking about the plagiarism allegations from 1987, or Hunter Biden, or Tara Reade's allegations or whatever?

[16:05:07]

The strategy for Joe Biden is just ignore and talk to the American people?

SANDERS: Well, that's not what I said, Jake.

I said, Vice President Biden is going to speak directly to the American people, to the folks at home. He's not going to spend his time on the debate stage attacking President Trump's family.

Now, if President Trump decides to do that, Joe Biden obviously is going to defend himself.

Look, many of these attacks, if you will, all have been debunked. Credible news outlet after credible news outlet, your network, CNN included, have debunked these attacks about the vice president's son.

This is not about the vice president's son. This is about Joe Biden and Donald Trump. These are the two men who are on the ballot for president of the United States of America.

And in President Trump's case, he is coming to this debate not as an outsider. When he flew in today, he flew in on Air Force One. He is the president of the United States in the midst of a global pandemic. He has failed to put a plan together to successfully mitigate this virus. He has failed to lead in this moment.

Joe Biden is going to use his time on the debate stage to make a forceful case about why he should be the next president of the United States, he and Senator Harris' plan to Build Back Better, as we like to say, and really just speak to these issues that folks are really, really dealing with all over this country.

TAPPER: It seems obvious that Joe Biden is going to bring up, if Chris Wallace doesn't do it ahead of him, President Trump only paying $750 in personal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, hence the release of Joe Biden's tax returns, Joe and Jill Biden's tax returns today, showing that they paid $300,000 in taxes in 2019, personal income taxes.

I want to play for you some sound from Donald Trump four years ago addressing the issue of how little he may pay in taxes and get your response on the other side. Let's play that clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Did you use that $916 million loss to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for...

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Of course I do. Of course I do. And so do all of her donors or most of her donors. I know many of our donors. Her donors took massive tax write-offs.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: A lot of my write-off was depreciation and other things that Hillary, as a senator, allowed, and she will always allow, because the people that give her all this money, they want it.

That's why. See, I understand the tax code better than anybody that's ever run for president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: We heard a similar argument being made by Chris Christie, President Trump's surrogate, saying, Joe Biden helped write the tax code.

What would be their response to that, because I think it's likely that President Trump will make that same argument tonight? SANDERS: Well, Jake, I think it's unfortunate that, when faced with the question about taxes and the wealthiest folks in this country paying their fair share, Donald Trump immediately goes to defend the wealthiest folks in this country.

It's no surprise, given what he said on the debate stage four years ago, that, once he was in office, he and folks in the Republican Party pushed through a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.

Meanwhile, hardworking people all over this country, folks that maybe President Trump doesn't understand, are paying more than they are -- are just being saddled with so much debt, the burden of trying to put food on the table to feed their families.

So, tonight, Joe Biden's going to make that case that this is really about Scranton vs. Park Avenue. And perhaps President Trump doesn't understand folks in Scranton, folks here in Cleveland, Ohio, folks in Omaha, Nebraska, folks down in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Senator Harris just was yesterday, but Joe Biden does.

And he is going to talk about those people and squarely put the focus on those folks, and how, if Joe Biden is elected president, he's going to hold the wealthiest folks in this country accountable, and they're finally going to pay their fair share.

TAPPER: How important do you think tonight's debate is? The race has been fairly steady nationwide, with Joe Biden up about 7 or 8 percentage points.

It's a little closer in some important states, such as the one you're in, Ohio, as well as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, et cetera. How important is it that Joe Biden emerge from this debate having been perceived as having acquitted himself well?

SANDERS: Well, Jake, actually, I really believe that this debate -- nothing tonight is going to fundamentally change the course of this race.

But what tonight is, is an opportunity to finally see Joe Biden and Donald Trump face to face and hear them each articulate their vision for the American people. We have seen town halls. We have seen social -- on our end, socially distant events, and, on the president's end, these packed rallies that are not safe and not adhering to COVID protocols.

But we have not seen two folks together. And, tonight, I really believe voters are going to get a snapshot of -- there are people voting right now, right? And there are people who may wait to vote until Election Day.

But voters will get to see a snapshot of a tale of two potential presidents, one in Joe Biden who is empathetic, who listens to the experts, who has a plan, who is ready to lead, ready to take on the pressing issues, and then Donald Trump, who, at every turn, has pushed his -- the responsibility that he has, as the president of the United States, off on to other people, who has yet to put a plan together to mitigate this virus, although he knew the threat, and we are now more than seven months into it, and is wishing it away.

[16:10:18]

So, we're looking forward to this debate. I think Joe Biden is excited to get up there, talk to the American people, and really articulate his vision. And that's exactly what he plans to do.

TAPPER: All right, Symone Sanders, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Tomorrow, we're going to be talking to President Trump's campaign communications director, Tim Murtaugh.

With the pandemic front and center in tonight's debate, a new report raises questions about the president's claims on coronavirus and children.

Plus, the desperate attempt to save lives and property, as new wildfires erupt and, this time, close in on California's Wine Country.

Stay with us.

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[16:15:10]

TAPPER: In our health lead today, the largest school district in the United States reopened its doors today for thousands of elementary school students. But there have already been some hiccups for New York City public schools, including two delays of the start date and staffers in at least 150 school buildings testing positive for coronavirus.

As CNN's Nick Watt reports, this comes as a "New York Times" report raises new questions about how much pressure the Trump administration put on the CDC to back up a political idea the President Trump's desiring schools to reopen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NICK WATT, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): New York City, biggest district in the nation, reopened elementary schools this morning.

ANAHI BENITEZ, MOTHER OF NYC ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENT: One hundred percent safe and 100 percent excited about coming to school today.

WATT: But nearly half of students have chosen to stay home for now to learn online-only. Staff in 150 school buildings have tested positive. The NYPD now handing out masks hoping to staunch flare-ups in parts of the city.

The mayor mulling reintroducing restrictions in nine zip codes.

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D), NEW YORK CITY: Which would be the closing of businesses on some scale and a broader closing of community institutions. We do not want to do that if there's any way to avoid that.

WATT: Meanwhile, the "New York Times" reports the White House put pressure on the CDC to downplay the risk of sending kids back to school.

OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER TO VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: What I saw first hand was a lot of manipulation of the data trying to figure out how to tell a story that was less grim than the reality really was.

ERIN REID, HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER: It's infuriating, honestly. It begs the question, what's true? Who do we listen to?

WATT: Here's some truth: right now, new case counts are rising in nearly half of states. These seven states seeing all-time record high seven-day averages of new cases.

MAYOR PAUL TENHAKEN (R), SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA: Schools are all open in South Dakota. Colleges are back meeting in person. We're having events, we're having sporting events, things like that. We are a state that values personal freedoms.

WATT: More than 1 million lives now lost worldwide to COVID-19, and a wildly disproportionate number of them are here in the United States, the richest country on earth. Just over 4 percent of the world's population, more than 20 percent of those reported deaths.

More than 5,000 people are now dying in America from COVID-19 every week.

ANTONIO GUTERRES, U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL: We can overcome this challenge, but we must learn from the mistakes. Responsible leadership matters. Science matters. Corporation matters, and misinformation kills.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WATT: So, science matters. So this is interesting. A new Pew study finds that 62 percent of Americans on the left trust scientists a lot to do the right thing for the country. When you poll Americans on the right, that number falls staggeringly to just 20 percent.

And this is what we heard from Olivia Troye today, that former adviser to Mike Pence. She says: I think there are still people walking around the White House today who don't actually believe this virus is real -- Jake.

TAPPER: Wow. All right, Nick Watt, thank you so much for that report.

We've also got some breaking news in our health lead. One of the companies working on an antibody cocktail, which could theoretically prevent or treat coronavirus infections, has just released some promising new results from some of its human trials.

CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, joins me now.

Sanjay, tell us more about this.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. So this is Regeneron, a company that you may have heard of. We've been keeping an eye on for some time. And the type of product that we're talking about here is something known as a monoclonal antibody. It's basically a couple of antibodies that are found to help neutralize this virus. They create a cocktail of these two antibodies, and they've been giving it to people in these very early trials, Jake. And let me emphasize that.

What I'm sharing with you has not been peer-reviewed. It's only come to us through a press release. So we got to give these caveats. We wouldn't normally be talking about studies so early were we not in the middle of a pandemic.

But what they showed, Jake, was that in people who had symptoms but were not hospitalized, they don't to be hospitalized, in this study, it seemed to decrease the length of time that they had symptoms. And also importantly, it seemed to decrease the amount of virus in their nose and their mouth, and that's really important because that would likely make them less contagious as well.

I should point out the average age of people in this trial, 45 years old. So, 45 years old, they're not brining up that because they're not considered a vulnerable population. So if you're 45 years old and you're getting sick, would you go get this antibody therapy?

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Maybe, maybe not. You know, if you're getting really sick, maybe. If you're an older person who was vulnerable, maybe, and that's where the study needs to head next, to find out if this is working for people who are, you know, at risk of becoming more critically ill.

But just as you frame it, Jake, early results, promising, a lot of people have talked about antibody therapy as sort of a bridge to a vaccine, and this does nothing to sort of, you know, change the opinion on that.

TAPPER: All right, some cautious optimism there though, obviously, much more needs to be done.

GUPTA: Yeah.

TAPPER: Let's talk about some other coronavirus headlines. New York City public schools say that they have masks and hand sanitizer, temperature checks for everyone, socially distanced classrooms, improved ventilation systems. On the other hand, staffers in 150 of the school buildings have already tested positive for coronavirus.

What do you make of New York City sending elementary school kids back to class?

GUPTA: I think I would be cautious, but think that there is a plan potentially to do this. There's a few things that, you know, I think about this a lot, Jake. We both have kids. Everyone's become an amateur epidemiologist. I follow this closely.

You want to see, you know, these gating criteria met? Fourteen-day downward trend or numbers that are below one in 100,000 cases per day.

You want to have all those things that you mentioned in the schools -- masks, physical distancing, hand hygiene, but also a positivity rate in the community of, you know, below 5 percent preferably but certainly below 10 percent. If you have those things, Jake, I think it's reasonable to send kids back to school.

The key is what are you going to do about it if you start to get significant numbers of either kids or faculty who come back positive? Do you have the testing in place? So that's going to be the big question.

Those other things make sense. New York probably more so than most other places around the country in better shape to do this. But how are they going to handle what will undoubtedly be new cases? The question is can you handle them as they arise?

TAPPER: So, Sanjay, I have to say like I really do question whether -- because kids generally don't get seriously sick. They certainly can get sick. And they certainly can spread it.

But I do question whether or not the decision to have so few places have in-person education make sense when you take in the entire health situation for kids that we're talking about in terms of the increased emotional stress, it the lack of education, the lack of socialization going on. I mean, I'm very ambivalent about this.

GUPTA: Well, yeah, I can understand why. We're dealing with this for real. I'm teaching my kids Zoom classes in between live shots with you.

But the reality is that if we had had testing in this country, regular testing that could have been done at a point of location, even at schools, which is quite possible, I'm not describing some utopian fantasy here. If that had been done and we had emergency use authorization of some of these rapid tests going back as early as May if we had ramped up that production, some of these issues that you're talking about would be more obviated I think as a result of that, because we would just know, test your kid, test yourself in the morning. If you're positive you stay home. If you're negative you're able to go out that day.

And, you know, you do this with a degree of regularity and it's not forever but it's a nice sort of pathway until we get people vaccinated. So, yeah, it's -- we're trying to -- I get the sense I think as you're alluding to. We're trying to do the best with a very bad situation. And the very bad situation is we're sort of making it up as we go along because we don't have the testing, we don't have the data and there's no national strategy.

TAPPER: Such a disaster.

Olivia Troye, a former top adviser to Vice President Pence, and a member of the coronavirus task force says that the White House looked for ways to go around the CDC, to find data to bolster the president's political push to reopen the schools.

Take a listen to her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TROYE: It was, people within the White House specifically tasking more junior-level staff to try to find alternate data, data that fit the narrative that they wanted, which was it only affects, you know, people above the age of 75 and it doesn't affect younger schoolchildren. It was all part of the narrative of we need to open up these schools, we need to open them up now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: What's your reaction when you hear about the process being so politicized like that?

GUPTA: It fits -- it fits exactly with what we've heard from our sources within the CDC, Jake. I'll take it a step further. You know, these two documents that we reported on a lot over the past several weeks, one was that asymptomatic people who've been exposed don't need to be tested. That guidance was dropped into the CDC's website, Jake, without vetting by the CDC. That wasn't just political. That was forced down the -- into the CDC's website.

There was another document back in July 23rd, and you remember, it was called -- it was titled "The importance of re-opening schools in the fall." As soon as that document again was placed on the CDC's website without the typical vetting process, I was getting calls from some of my sources at the CDC, can you believe this? The importance of re- opening schools, it was an editorial headline which made many people at the CDC scratch their heads. It's not the type of headline you see at the CDC.

You know, factors that go into school re-opening, that would be a more typical headline. The importance of it made it sound like this is where we're headed and here's how the CDC is going to be on board.

So, I -- what Olivia has said and other people echo this, fits very much with the pattern that we've been seeing for months now.

TAPPER: It's very sad how politicized the CDC and FDA have become.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time as always.

Millions of new reasons why President Trump's claim that he has mastered the art of the deal just does not ring true. That's next.

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