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Coronavirus Cases Continue to Rise in States Across U.S.; Reporting Indicates White House Economic Advisers Provided Different Information Privately to Republican Donors than Provided Publicly about Coronavirus Pandemic; Interview with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D- RI) About Judge Amy Coney Barrett Confirmation Hearing. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 15, 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]

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don't know is the answer.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DIANNE GALLAGHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And the state and the county board say, look, voting by mail is trustworthy. It is safe. It is secure. But it's confusing. And to add to that confusion, late last night a federal judge issued three different rulings on election- related laws. They said -- the judge said basically, look, the witness signature has to be there. But if there's other witness information that's deficient, that can be cured or fixed.

Now, that has not been sent down to the counties yet, John and Alisyn, so they're still in limbo at this point. But voters may get some kind of information soon on the status of their ballots, although I've been watching this for a while, and I can tell you that we thought that was going to happen several times in the past month.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Dianne Gallagher, thank you very much for all of that reporting.

And NEW DAY continues right now.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world. Don't do Thanksgiving. It's not a warning that most people want to hear, but this morning Dr. Anthony Fauci is making it clear Thanksgiving gatherings will be dangerous.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: That is a risk. You may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So we can't have Thanksgiving this year because of the quickly deteriorating situation around the country. Five states seeing more hospitalizations than at any point during this pandemic. Nearly 60,000 new coronavirus cases were reported overnight, that's the highest daily total in the U.S. since early August, 985 deaths also reported. Each one matters. You can look at the map, all the orange and red here, that's the rising cases across the country.

So remember, Dr. Fauci says we really can't have a big Thanksgiving this year, but President Trump is still holding giant rallies. This is Des Moines, Iowa. The Coronavirus Task Force, the White House coronavirus task force calls Des Moines a yellow zone, meaning no gatherings of more than 25 people. This rally is much closer to 2,500, and most of the people there are unmasked, and this is in a state where hospitalizations are accelerating -- that's the chart right there -- and one in five people who are tested are testing positive for the virus.

CAMEROTA: Of course, coronavirus plays into the election. More than 14 million Americans have already cast their ballots. Voter enthusiasm is at record highs. Yesterday we saw another day of very long lines for early voting across the country.

And former President Barack Obama speaking out last night in a new interview. President Obama is expected to hit the campaign trail for Biden next week. We'll get to all of that.

But we want to begin with the pandemic. Joining us now is Dr. Paul Casey, he is the emergency medical doctor at Berlin Hospital in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Lina Tucker Reinders, she is the executive director for the Iowa Public Health Association. Great to have both of you with us this morning.

Dr. Casey, I want to start with you because of what's happening in Wisconsin. We can put up a couple of graphs. The hospitalization there has spiked in the past few weeks. So give us a status report of what's happening at the hospitals and why we're seeing this -- what looks like this Mount Everest type curve.

DR. PAUL CASEY, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT AT BERLIN HOSPITAL: Good morning, thank you for having me. So we're facing a crisis in our community in terms of health care. Over the course of the past three weeks we have seen an alarming spike in COVID patients who require admission. And it's a very steep limb on this curve. What that has done has placed entire wards full of COVID patients on top of all the other patients we have to take care of. Under normal circumstances hospital capacity is typically 70 percent to 80 percent. So you throw on top of that an entire ward of patients with COVID-19, it stretches us to the limit.

BERMAN: I was reading, Dr. Casey, that you've been working at hospitals where they are just flat out running out of beds.

CASEY: That's correct. So yesterday I did a 12-hour shift at one of our critical access hospitals 40 miles away. Critical access hospitals typically don't have more than 25 beds. That particular hospital was full. I had four patients who had COVID-19 pneumonia who needed to be admitted. We were able to open up one bed in the hospital later in the day. I ended up transferring one 40 miles away. And then that filled up most of the other beds in the surrounding communities, so the next available option was a hospital 80 miles away. Those two patients chose to go home on oxygen rather than being transferred 80 miles away.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Casey, one more question. What's going to happen? What's the plan?

CASEY: Well, it's going to get worse. We are on the upper limb this curve. We predict it will peak mid-November. So unfortunately, what's probably going to happen is we're going to have to reduce essential nonemergency services like we did in the spring.

[08:05:00]

We had not yet eliminated needed but nonemergency surgery. So, for example, if you need a hip replacement, that's not an emergency, but you need it. Those kinds of surgeries will have to be delayed until the pandemic is over. We have not gotten there yet, but we're very, very close.

BERMAN: So Dr. Reinders, you're seeing record hospitalizations in Iowa as well. I know Des Moines and the surrounding area is a yellow zone, which means there aren't supposed to be gatherings of more than 25 people, yet the president was there with a gathering of thousands of people, most of them unmasked, which is flouting the White House Coronavirus Task Force, their own guidelines. So as someone who is trying to help people, what is this picture? How does this picture make you feel?

LINA REINDERS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, IOWA PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION: Thank you for having me this morning. And I have to say that we are experiencing very much what Dr. Casey described in Wisconsin. Just yesterday we, again, set a record high for hospitalizations and we are very concerned about the spread that is happening here in Iowa. We will have to wait to see what in the next two weeks, what the results of the president's visit was yesterday. But what we do know is that the pandemic has made it clear that everyone's health is intertwined. We know what works to limit the spread, and it's not about politics. It's about public health and those mitigation strategies that we know that work.

CAMEROTA: Ms. Reinders, you pointed out something interesting that we've noticed. Obviously, the president has a big rally and then we have to wait several weeks to find out what the medical results, the health results of those rallies are, if we ever find out. Not all states contact trace after something like that. But Minnesota does. And so every day we learn more about what happened after one of his September 18th rallies in Minnesota. The new number is it turns out that 24 cases have been linked to that Trump rally, 16 of them people got sick after attending this outdoor -- it was an outdoor rally at an airport. Four of those people were at a counter rally, so they went to counter what they were hearing at the Trump rally and they got sick. And then there was another rally where people got sick on September 30th, another one on September 24th.

And so, in Iowa when you see a rally like that, what happens at hospitals? Do you just -- are you preparing for a spike? Are you preparing for an outbreak? What action is taken after you see what happened last night?

REINDERS: Well, we are very concerned anytime we see mass gatherings. As you said in the opening, we are -- the White House task force has recommended no gatherings above 25. Our own emergency proclamation in Iowa says that mass gatherings should not occur and that if they do that social distancing should be adhered to. We did not see that last night and we are not seeing that in other events that are happening around Iowa.

I do have to say that our public health professionals across the state are doing their very best job to follow up with contact tracing and make sure that individuals who have been exposed are given the correct advice to quarantine, to isolate, to get tested. What we know works is masks in combination with social distancing in combination with testing and contract tracing and quarantining, isolation. None of these mitigation strategies alone is a silver bullet, but they all work in concert together, which is why we need to adhere to all of them.

BERMAN: So Dr. Casey, we know from talking to doctors here in New York city and in New Jersey and in Florida and in Texas and in Arizona that this can be overwhelming. What you're going through already and what you acknowledge will only get worse over the next month can be overwhelming for people in your situation. So how are you doing now, and what do you need?

CASEY: The thing we need the most is for the spread of this virus to stop. We currently are doing fine. We are able to take care of all patients that come in, but we're going to soon be overwhelmed if the continued climb of this virus continues. We have enough PPE, we have enough hospital beds, but that's soon going to be different. The thing we learned very early in this pandemic was that these patients actually don't need ventilators. I think some of the high death rate we saw early on was due to the fact that we treated these patients like we treated other people with pneumonia who had an oxygen requirement, put them on the ventilator. It turns out that was the wrong strategy. So we don't really need thousands of ventilators. We need space, and we need this virus to stop.

CAMEROTA: Yes. On that note, Dr. Paul Casey, Lina Reinders, thank you both very much for giving us status reports on your very hard hit states right now.

BERMAN: And thank you both for what you're doing. You have your work cut out for you in the next few weeks. Thank you.

CASEY: Thank you.

REINDERS: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: OK, big story in the "New York Times" this morning, President Trump's top economic advisers were privately telling high- end donors something very different about the pandemic than they told the public. Details next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:13:32]

BERMAN: Developing overnight, a new report in the "New York Times" reveals what White House economic advisers were privately telling Republican donors in the early days of the pandemic, while at the same time publicly downplaying the pandemic to the American people. This is what the "Times" reports, quote, "The president's aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent. Elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering."

Joining us now is Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. He is a member of the Judiciary Committee who has been involved in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Senator Whitehouse, first on this story from "The New York Times," a lot of your focus overall has been about the intersection of money and politics. Here is the White House reportedly saying something differently publicly than what economic advisers are saying behind closed doors. Your take?

SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, (D-RI): Yes, absolutely. Every voter in America needs to understand that while President Trump was telling all of us that they had the coronavirus under control, his administration was meeting secretly with big investors and letting them know that it was much worse. In effect the public was being lied to directly by the president while big Republican donors were being given the straight scoop. If that's not enough to get people to the voting booth, I don't know what is.

[08:15:02]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Any thought of investigating this? What should be the ramifications?

WHITEHOUSE: Well, I think there's going to be some looking into this, but not on the Senate side because on the Senate side, the gavels are all controlled by Republicans who don't dare cross with Trump on anything, never have, they just roll over for the Trump administration every single time. It's -- I call it the spines of foam moment for the Republican Party.

BERMAN: You obviously have been deeply involved with the confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett. One of the things that has been the major focus for Democrats, I think, we can agree, has been health care and the future of Obamacare.

WHITEHOUSE: Correct, correct.

BERMAN: We got a sense I think yesterday from Senator Graham and also Judge Barrett, trying to make the case that maybe, maybe the Supreme Court won't rule to overturn Obamacare in a month because of this issue of severability, the idea that you can take certain parts out of the law out without throwing the whole thing out.

Let me just play a little bit of sound there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUDGE AMY CONEY BARRETT, SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: If there's one provision within the statute that's unconstitutional, the question is whether that one section can simply be rendered null and excised from the statute, severed, or whether that provision is so central to the statute that its unconstitutionality, once it's pulled out the whole house of cards collapses and the presumption is always in favor of severability.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Would it be further true that if you can preserve a statute, you try to, to the extent possible?

BARRETT: That is true.

GRAHAM: Okay. That's the law, folks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: (AUDIO GAP) he has filed a brief to overturn the whole thing. So the Trump administration wants to throw out the whole thing.

However, Senator Graham and Judge Barrett both seem to be giving body language to suggest that they don't support such a thing.

Your take?

WHITEHOUSE: Yeah, I think they would love to get out of the predicament that they're in. The Republican Party platform says that it wants to reverse the Obamacare cases, the president has tweeted that he wants to terminate health coverage under Obamacare. All of the signals out of the administration and the big donors behind this process are that she is intended to be a judicial torpedo aimed at people's health care.

But at the same time, a lot of Republicans, four of them on the Senate Judiciary Committee, are facing voters right now who think that that's a terrible idea. So they are torn between what their party's policy is and what their voters want to hear and I think that was Chairman Graham trying to create a little daylight so that Senator Tillis and Senator Ernst and himself and Senator Cornyn can go home to their states and try to create some impression with voters that there's not such a risk here.

BERMAN: By all signs, the committee will vote out this confirmation over in a week and then the full Senate will vote on it, and Judge Barrett will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. My question to you is -- look, that's what it looks like is going to happen. I know nothing is done until it's done. But, Senator Whitehouse, what consideration have you done to how you think you should govern and legislate going forward with a court that looks like it will be a 6-3 conservative court? How will that affect the way that you do your job?

WHITEHOUSE: Well, I think what we need to do is take a good look at some of the mischief that is going on at and around the Supreme Court. All of the three last nominees have had very significant procedural peculiarities about their appointments. This has all the signals of a political power grab.

There is a record of the court's decisions in partisan 5-4 cases, 80-0 favoring big Republican donor interests. This is a court that doesn't operate under a code of ethics and that is the worst discloser of gifts (ph) and hospitality and travel of any of the major offices, worse than the circuit courts, worse than Congress, worse than the cabinet.

I think we need to understand really what the problem is at the court. I think we are in for a long set of issues related to the Supreme Court.

The Republicans basically have compromised the integrity of the court in order to fashion a court that will rule for their big donor interests. We need to look into that and figure out how to respond.

BERMAN: I would settle for cameras inside so we can see with our own eyes --

WHITEHOUSE: That would be an easy one.

BERMAN: -- how one branch of government does --

WHITEHOUSE: It's even more important to know, for instance, when somebody comes in to file an amicus brief who is paying for them.

BERMAN: Senator Whitehouse, Mitch McConnell says he is going to put on the floor -- this is a targeted relief bill, it is not anything close to the bill that the House and House Democrats passed five months ago, but it's $500 billion in relief to the American people, and Mitch McConnell is going to put it on the floor. It may be the last chance to get any relief money to the American people over the next week -- or next few weeks I should say before Election Day.

[08:20:15]

How do you explain to Rhode Island voters who may need money your vote on this?

WHITEHOUSE: Well, I think this is probably a cynical political strategy by Mitch McConnell to give his troubled senators who are facing the voters now something to say that they voted for. There is a chance that if it clears the Senate, then real negotiations will begin to take place with the House and a serious bill can emerge. But I cannot go to my Rhode Island voters and say to them we helped this group of people but we didn't help these people and we didn't help you and we didn't help the state with its terrible cruel budget problems brought on by this coronavirus.

This is the ultimate picking winners and losers which is what Mitch McConnell usually says he's against.

So, it looks like a ploy to me. If it turns into something real, then we'll be very interested.

BERMAN: Senator Whitehouse, I appreciate you being with us this morning. Thank you very much.

WHITEHOUSE: Thank you. Good to be with you.

BERMAN: Former President Barack Obama getting ready to hit the campaign trail for Joe Biden. And there is a brand-new interview with a lot of talking overnight. We'll play some of the clips, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:25:34]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Former President Barack Obama is hitting the campaign trail for Joe Biden. In a new interview last night, Obama said this about voter suppression.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT: If you have one major party, perhaps the only major party that I know of in any advanced democracy in the world who explicitly says we're trying to keep fellow -- certain fellow citizens from voting and we're trying to make it as hard on them as possible, even the far right in Europe does not say that. I think that we should welcome the argument that making it easier to people to vote and eliminating the last vestiges of Jim Crow and poll taxes and all that stuff is not a partisan issue.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: OK. Joining us now is CNN's senior political commentator, David Axelrod.

Axe, great to see.

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Great to see you.

CAMEROTA: Is there something that President Obama can do on the campaign trail that Joe Biden cannot do himself?

AXELROD: Well, I thought it was interesting that this is really his sort of coming out for the fall campaign. He's been relatively quiet and the first thing he did was to appear on "Pod Save America" which is not just -- it's not just a podcast, but it's really an organizing hub for young active activist Democrats. I think that is very important.

That was symbolic because his role is going to be to motivate young voters, to motivate people of color. We are in a mobilization phase of this campaign. Almost everyone in America has made up their minds if you look at these polls, very few persuadable voters.

So, now, it's a mobilization fight and I think that's what he's going to be doing and he has great value, particularly with those constituencies in terms of mobilizing vote.

BERMAN: I'm glad you brought that up because that hadn't occurred to me by going on "Pod Save America", "Pod Save America" isn't just like a regular radio show, they are spending money, raising money, trying to get people out there. You know Barack Obama, former President Obama, as well as anybody.

What are his strengths but also, David, his weaknesses in terms of campaigning for others?

AXELROD: Look, I heard because I'm a listener of your show, I heard you speaking about this earlier. You know, you say, well, he is more effective for himself than he is for others -- well, he is like a politician of his generation, right? I mean, he is the politician of his generation.

So it's easier to campaign for Barack Obama than it is for other candidates because Barack Obama is sort of sui generis. But in terms of this, the thing I just spoke about, I think his strength is very clear. I don't really think -- I don't think you can assign to him the defeats of others because he campaigned for them and they still lost, but he demonstrably has the ability to excite younger voters, to bring minority voters out.

But, you know, on that question, John, in 2016 he went out and campaigned for Hillary Clinton, the minority turnout was low. I don't think that's going to be the case here. I think communities of color are very motivated.

BERMAN: I got in trouble with David.

CAMEROTA: I don't think Axe likes your analysis.

BERMAN: I know, I got in -- I got in trouble with David, but that's okay. That's okay.

CAMEROTA: OK. Let's talk money since you brought up Hillary Clinton. Let's compare what Joe Biden has made in September to what Hillary Clinton had.

AXELROD: Yeah.

CAMEROTA: Joe Biden just brought in $383 million. That was in September alone. Cash on hand $432 million.

Compare that to what Hillary Clinton had in September of that year and it was half of that. I think it was 154, I think, million.

So, I mean, I'm no mathematician, but that seems like Joe Biden's is better.

AXELROD: Yeah. Well, I think more than the sort of gaudy nature of it, it is -- it's meaningful because what you see now is Joe Biden expanding the map and competing in places like Georgia and Ohio and even Texas and, you know, it is -- I've been at this a long time. It is unimaginable to me that you have an incumbent Republican president who is at such a deficit in terms of resources, because we've seen Donald Trump.