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Philadelphia D.A. Blames Trump for Seeking to Provoke Unrest; Family of Walter Wallace Jr. Does Not Want Officers to Face Murder Charges; Trump, Biden Hold Campaign Events in Wisconsin Today. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired October 30, 2020 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us now is that Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. Mr. Krasner, great to have you. What does that mean, "I've got something for you".

LARRY KRASNER, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, PHILADELPHIA: That means I've got a jail cell, and I got criminal charges, and you can stand in front of a Philadelphia jury, which by the way, is a diverse jury, and you can explain why you thought it was OK to come to Philly and steal our votes. This is the birthplace of democracy. We are not doing this. Wannabe fascists, stay home. And if your idea of how to have a democratic election is to steal it, then I've got something for you.

CAMEROTA: Are you seeing signs of voter intimidation already?

KRASNER: Not really. And you know, that's some of the really important and good news. What we are seeing is long lines that are moving very efficiently, with early voting. I actually voted early, and when I did, it took me only 21 minutes to go through a line of 300 people to place my ballot.

We're seeing huge turnouts, so far, it's going very well. We run an election taskforce to protect the vote. And of the 24 complaints we've gotten so far on our hotline, none have been serious. But we understand what's in the air and we are going to be vigilant on election day with our criminal justice partners, including the FBI and the local police.

CAMEROTA: So you are dispatching detectives or prosecutors to try to make sure that there's no voter intimidation?

KRASNER: We are dispatching both. And the Philadelphia Police Department has a very good plan for election day. We have a bigger bunch than ever. They are extremely well trained, and we're looking for new things.

We've never really had to be concerned that a bunch of knuckleheads were going to show up at the polls with guns. If they do it this time, they're going to have a problem. Because the fact is, the Second Amendment does not protect people who claim to be a militia and have not been summoned by the governor.

Militia is not something you just get to be by saying it. It's something you get to be when governmental authority summons you. So, if you want to dress up line G.I. Joe and claim you are protecting the polls, when we all know what you're really doing is intimidating votes, you're getting locked up. That's how it's going to go.

Do I think it's going to happen? No, because I think the truth is, the president is a lot of talk. These guys with the little skinny gray beards are a lot of talk. Even when the Proud Boys tried to do a march in Philly, they had to import people from Indiana. They couldn't find enough to do a small march in Philly. So, I think this is a lot of talk. But we're not taking any chances, we're going to be very vigilant and we expect to have a very successful voting day.

CAMEROTA: And so just to be clear, any reports that we've seen of the Trump campaign dispatching their own officials to be poll watchers, you've not seen that in any large numbers?

KRASNER: Not in large numbers. We know that there was an effort to do that earlier. I don't know if they just don't know the law or they're deliberately just trying to be provocative. But the law is very clear, you must to be certified.

You have to meet certain qualifications like living in a county, be certified, have a certificate, and you have to show it. You cannot just show up and say, I'm a poll watcher anymore than you can just show up with a gun and say, I'm a militia. That's not how this works. And if people want to violate the law, then there are consequences.

CAMEROTA: I want to ask you what's happening with that police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. I know that, we've been told that body- cam video will be released next week. Have you seen that? And what's the status of the investigation?

KRASNER: So the D.A.'s office has an obligation to investigate any officer-involved shooting. We are doing that. On occasions, we do charge police officers in shootings of civilians and have done so in two homicides actually in the last couple of years, which has not happened basically forever in Philadelphia. But we also clear officers at times, when we believe the law does not justify any kind of a charge.

We have to be fair, that's what we do. So, yes, we have collected a lot of evidence, I have personally seen much, but not all of the body cam video. We expect along with the police department and with the mayor's office to be releasing body cam video, probably by the end of next week, but that will be done.

There are always wrinkles in details, and there are important details when you're dealing with video of a man who has been killed. We expect that to be done in close consultation with the family of the gentlemen who was killed by the end of next week.

CAMEROTA: And just prepare us. I mean, what will we see or did seeing it change your viewpoint on what happened? KRASNER: You know, I really -- I think it's inappropriate for me to

say what our judgment is when we only have maybe half of the information that we need. Some of this information won't even be available for ten weeks. And I think it's extremely important that people understand the D.A.'s office is going to be even-handed. So, I don't want to prejudge it based on part of the evidence, I want to make sure I have all the evidence before I say more.

CAMEROTA: The family, through their attorney says that they don't want these officers charged with murder. Here's their rationale. They say they were improperly trained and did not have the proper equipment by which to effectuate their job. Do you agree?

[07:35:00]

KRASNER: I agree that there are some pretty obvious issues around equipment and training. That does not answer the question within my lane, though. The question within my lane is whether the actions taken by the police officers in light of all of that rose to the level of criminal conduct or not. You know, I think it's fair to understand that the lawyers who represent the family are plaintiff's lawyers. They are going to be seeking money in civil court.

And as a consequence of that, their incentives to express certain viewpoints, especially if those viewpoints are better for a lawsuit, do not necessarily represent some kind of even-handed look at criminal justice. I have a very different obligation, which is frankly to ignore who's making money or in the case of the city, who could be losing money over such a situation. I have to look at it from the perspective of criminal justice and we're just not going to pre-judge that.

CAMEROTA: District Attorney Larry Krasner, thank you, we really appreciate you giving us a status report of where everything is right now. The number of coronavirus cases reaching critical levels in Wisconsin, and now some doctors are sounding the alarm about being able to handle this surge in patients. We're going to speak to a Wisconsin ER doctor, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:40:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The clock is ticking, just five days left to cast your vote. More than 81 million Americans already have. That number is staggering. In Wisconsin, one of the pivotal states in the country, 1.6 million people have already cast their votes.

President Trump and Joe Biden, they will both be in Wisconsin today, this as the coronavirus there is just running rampant. Cases are surging to new record levels. CNN's Bill Weir live in Madison. Bill, this is like a pilgrimage or a homecoming getting to go to Wisconsin for you. What are you seeing?

BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: Well, there have been better days to touch mother soil, John, unfortunately, it's always great to be back here in the dairy land, but such grim times, as you say. As far as the vote goes, a record turnout, we're seeing especially among youth vote.

The black vote in Milwaukee is not as robust as it was in '08 when Obama came to power, may be one reason Joe Biden is going back there today. The president will be up in Green Bay, where his support has soften a little bit in sort of a blue-collar town there. His daughter also in the state, Ivanka coming to Wisconsin today. About another 250,000 absentee ballots still outstanding.

People could change their mind and show up on election day, but only a couple more days of in-person voting in this state, but the numbers on the coronavirus are just staggering. Another 4,870 yesterday new cases, nearly 5,000 new cases and 51 deaths in a single day.

I mean, as a boy in this state, if you had said, 51 Wisconsinites could die in a single day, it would have shut down the state for weeks in mourning. Contact tracers are back-logged, now Milwaukee are still trying to contact people, other counties have simply given up.

The demand for testing has grown so great that Wisconsin is expanding its community testing centers from 3 to 74 around the state. Sixteen members of the Wisconsin Badger football team are among those infected right now. It's touching every corner of the state. And of course, the president coming here with those largely maskless rallies that's being seen really as a health hazard by folks in a last straw for Biden voters getting out there.

And then another finally bizarre story, despite so many warnings about cyber attacks this election season. The Wisconsin Republican Party announced yesterday that they are victims of a fishing scam. These are very common. The Democrats say they've had hundreds of these attacks unsuccessfully since the campaign began. But apparently somebody got through into the Wisconsin GOP war chest and took $2.3 million, John?

BERMAN: Wow. All right, Bill. A lot going on there. We should note, besides Ritchie Cunningham, you are our favorite child of Wisconsin. Thanks so much for being with us. Glad you're there.

WEIR: My pleasure.

BERMAN: So, the number of hospitalizations there, people who are actually sick in Wisconsin, at record levels. So, you can see the sharp spike since Labor Day. Just look at that. Some hospitals are warning they're now running out of ICU beds. Joining me now is Dr. Paul Casey; he is the medical director at Bellin Health Emergency Department in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Green Bay has had its troubles, doctor.

Let me just put that chart up on the TV so people can see it one more time, just how steep the curve is in hospitalizations. How quickly the number of hospitalizations are rising. Deaths also rising sharply in Wisconsin now. Give us a sense of what you're seeing and how bad it is.

PAUL CASEY, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, BELLIN HEALTH EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT: Good morning. Thanks again for having me. What you're saying is exactly right. Over the past week, we've seen an amazing rise in COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin and in particular, our area.

We did break 5,000 earlier in the week. On Tuesday, we had over 5,200 patients test positive. So what that means is 7 to 10 days down the road, somewhere between 4 percent and 6 percent of those patients will need to be in the hospital. That's from a single day.

We don't see those numbers slowing down. So, we're seeing a steady stream of patients needing to be admitted to the hospital. So far, we've been able to keep up, but that is more than likely going to change fairly quickly.

BERMAN: What do you mean? You say, so far, we've been able to keep up, but if it does increase at the rate that you just warned us about, what happens?

CASEY: So, what I mean by that is we're trying to do what we call coexist with COVID, which means take care of every other patient who needs healthcare. People have heart attacks, trauma patients and people who need elective surgeries such as hip replacements.

So, in our coexist with COVID model, we have it planned out that we're continuing normal operations in addition to taking care of the COVID patients. So currently, we have an entire ward set aside for COVID patients, 20 percent of our hospital capacity is currently filled with COVID patients.

[07:45:00]

And in my 34-year career, that's unprecedented. I have never, ever seen a time where we had a single ward devoted to a single disease. You know, it takes back memories of the foregone times when we saw things like small pox, that kind of thing, where we had a single disease overrunning the hospital.

BERMAN: If the numbers do increase like you are concerned about, do you think you will be able to handle it?

CASEY: We will be able to handle it at the expense of other operations, such as surgery. We have 160-some-bed hospital. We can take care of 160 patients, but we don't want all those patients to be COVID patients.

BERMAN: Talk me about the pressure this is putting on medical professionals already, particularly the nurses.

CASEY: So we're all tired. The nurses are tired. They work 12-hour shifts. The ICU nurses have to wear something called a PAPR, which is a little self-contained breathing device that filters out the virus particles. It's hard to work in that environment for 12 hours. It's also extremely hard to see patients without family members in the last days of their life, having to comfort them. It takes a human toll on the nursing staff.

BERMAN: President Trump is due to visit Green Bay today. Our Dr. Sanjay Gupta and our team did a deep data dive into counties where the president has visited and held rallies. And that we found that in 82 percent of the counties where the president has held rallies, there has been a spike in the number of new cases within a month, including Winnebago, Wisconsin and Marathon. As a medical professional -- leave the politics out of it, but as a doctor who is treating patients in the emergency room, when you see a mass gathering like this down the street, how does that make you feel?

CASEY: It simply boggles my mind. We're in the midst of a global pandemic, the likes of which we haven't seen in over a hundred years, and our governor this week said, if you don't need to go out of your home, stay home. Because there are so many people who have this virus, the chance of catching it is very high. So anytime we see a mass gathering of any kind, whether it'd be a wedding, a funeral, a large gathering in a bar, it is very concerning. And it's particularly mind- boggling when we have leadership setting a bad example.

BERMAN: Dr. Paul Casey, you're setting a terrific example. We're so glad you're with us. Thank you for your strength, thank you for the work that you're doing.

CASEY: You're welcome.

BERMAN: Appreciate it. Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: OK, John, we want to remember now some of the nearly 229,000 Americans lost to coronavirus. Eighty four-year-old Rice Tilley was for decades one of Fort Worth's leading legal, civic and political figures. He was chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and the Fort Worth opera.

He was also a GOP leader at a time when as a friend told the local press, quote, "it wasn't cool or even respectable to be a Republican in Texas." Seventy one-year-old Leslie Antoine Kucera worked for the same Minneapolis remodeling firm from his teens to his retirement. The "Star Tribune" reports he raised six children with his high school sweetheart. He loved helping neighbors with carpentry projects as well as hunting, fishing and the outdoors.

Austin Tanner was only 18 years old. The autistic teenager was beloved at his high school in Melvindale, Michigan, for his bright, optimistic attitude, writing about COVID on his blog back in May. He told his classmates, quote, "we will get through this together, just don't ever give up." And we'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:50:00]

BERMAN: U.S. stock futures down ahead of the market open as the prospects of a stimulus deal seem to be fading. CNN's chief business correspondent Christine Romans with the very latest on that. Romans?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: You know, and John, COVID cases are surging, that's a challenge to the economic recovery, and then there's this no help from Washington for families and business, that reality has stocks on track for the worst week since March. Wall Street concerned among other things about stalled stimulus talks, the speaker -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that even if there were a Biden victory, she wants a deal before inauguration.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): Why would we be talking to them if we didn't want a bill? First and foremost, the American people need help.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: But the Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, that's the White House's top negotiator here, he turned around and criticized Pelosi in a letter he sent to her Thursday, telling her that her -- all or none approach is hurting Americans who need help now.

So while D.C. lawmakers squabble, there is no money coming to families and businesses that need it. The economy is at a tipping point despite record growth over the Summer. You know, the economy is still not back to pre-pandemic levels and the U.S. has only added back about half of the jobs lost since March. And without aid, more small businesses will close.

Industries like travel and hospitality, they will shed thousands more jobs, and renters, we know, face eviction. According to the Census Bureau, 9.9 million Americans right now are behind on their rent or mortgages. And Moody's estimates outstanding rent payments alone could reach about $70 billion by the end of the year. Alisyn, that's thousands of dollars per person, John, who are frankly, are going to have a bill to pay, and there is no money coming in.

BERMAN: Exactly. November 3rd doesn't mean anything for the people suffering right now.

ROMANS: That's right.

BERMAN: This just needs to happen fast. All right, Romans, thanks so much. Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: OK, John, as you know, President Trump does not like mail- in ballots, unless they're his, of course. But a lot of those ballots also belong to members of the military. And John Avlon has our reality check. Hi, John.

JOHN AVLON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Hey, guys. Look, every vote matters, especially in Florida, and that's why both candidates were barn storming there yesterday, but there's one key constituency that Republicans could take for granted, and I'm talking about the military vote. Get this, one in five military absentee ballots were cast in Florida four years ago. That's more than any other state.

[07:55:00]

Now, in 2016, exit polls showed that Trump won 60 percent of the military vote, but they've had a bit of a rocky relationship ever since. Trump's streams of insults at American military leaders and reported disrespect over fallen soldiers' graves overseas which he denies, obviously don't help, neither does his abandonment of American allies, his repeated praise of autocrats around the world, his threats to use troops against protesters or retweeting baseless conspiracy theories about the Bin Laden raid.

Now, it's also notable that two of Trump's favorite lies have to do with the military. He's tried to take credit for the Veterans Choice Program more than 160 times. In fact, the deal was sponsored by John McCain and Bernie Sanders and signed by President Obama. And here is the other.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: One of the world's most overrated generals told me, sir, we don't have ammunition. I said, that should never be said to another president again. And now, we have so much ammunition we don't know what to do with it. So, we have totally rebuilt our military.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: Of course, the military was not out of ammunition when Trump came into office, and, no, he didn't totally rebuild our military. But all of this may be why Joe Biden has received the endorsement of nearly 800 retired top military and national security officials who slammed President Trump in an unprecedented letter writing, "he is not equal to the enormous responsibilities of his office, our allies no longer trust or respect us, and our enemies no longer fear us." But it's Trump's war on counting eligible ballots that arrive after election day that might really burn him here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after November 3rd to count ballots, that won't be allowed by the various courts.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: You see, it's more than likely that military ballots will get caught in the president's attempted purge. The military has voted safely by mail since the civil war, folks, and many states allow military ballots to be counted well after polls close.

Now, Trump tried this trick two years ago and got serious blow back in Florida. Tweeting, "the Florida election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis and a large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote-count is no longer possible.

Ballots massively effective must go with election night." Sound familiar? But many of those new ballots that showed up out of nowhere were military ballots. Trump's claims of fraud were baseless. The votes were counted, and in that case Republicans won. But it was all a red flag that highlighted Trump's undemocratic impulses again on full display this election.

But whether it's military votes in Florida or in other states with high military absentee ballot rates like hotly-contested North Carolina or Texas, the principle should remain the same, count every eligible vote. The do anything less is an insult to the freedom and democracy that generations of American soldiers have fought and died to give to us. And that's your reality check.

CAMEROTA: John, such a good reminder. Thank you very much for bringing that to light. And NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is by far the highest number of cases we have ever seen. The virus is raging.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. will probably climb past 100,000 infections per day within the next couple of weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the hardest point in this pandemic right now. We can't give up our guard.

TRUMP: We lock down, we understood the disease and now we're open for business.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I mean, he is about turning out your voters, and if that's what's going to turn out Trump voters, then he is welcome to make that argument. It's not going to help us get past the pandemic.

JOE BIDEN, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR 2020: Donald Trump has surrendered to the virus. I'm not going to shut down the country, but I'm going to shut down the virus.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Good morning everyone, welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world, this is NEW DAY. And there is no place to hide. That's what the governor of Ohio says.

So, obviously we are in the closing days of the election, but there is a stark reality that will last well beyond November 3rd, maybe one of the most difficult periods in our nation's history. The U.S. has just recorded the highest number of new coronavirus cases since the outbreak began, nearly 90,000 new cases. That's more than one new case per second.

Think about that. Forty three states, 43 are seeing cases rise. Look at that map. That includes the most competitive states, by the way, in the election. Nine hundred and seventy one new deaths reported overnight, three states with a record number of death, 17 states are seeing more hospitalizations than ever before. That includes Minnesota where President Trump is complaining that he can't have more people at a rally there today.

CAMEROTA: Joe Biden will also be in Minnesota today, although his rally will look much different than President Trump's, Biden's will be a socially distant drive-in like the kind he's done throughout the pandemic.

Both candidates will also be in Wisconsin, Biden is visiting Iowa as well, which is a rare sight for a Democrat in the final week of a campaign. President Trump plans to visit Michigan where Biden and former President Barack Obama will appear together tomorrow.