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U.S. Reports More Than 100k COVID Cases for 15th Day in a Row; FDA Authorizes First At-Home Coronavirus Self-Test Kit; U.S. Announces Further Drawdown of Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired November 18, 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]

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, we're right back in that same position again. We've got to flatten the curve or we're going to overwhelm hospitals in parts of the country. And then, you can't take care of people no matter how good your care is.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Sanjay, as someone who has taken her kids to get several COVID tests over the past six months, I know that sometimes they're hard to find, sometimes you wait in a long line, sometimes you're in a waiting room with other people who are sick and exhibiting symptoms. And so we need an at-home test. Is that --

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes --

CAMEROTA: On the horizon?

GUPTA: Yes, that is on the horizon. Thank you for maybe letting me finish this on a bit of an upbeat note, because these tests are improving as well. You know, a disease that didn't even exist a year ago, developing tests for it, making sure they can get to the point where they're at home, it's a big deal.

And there's another one that is coming on the market. This is an at- home molecular test. You've heard a lot about the antigen tests. This is an actual molecular test that is looking for the genetic material. And basically, the way this works is again, all at home. You would swab yourself. You would take that swab. You would put it in a vial of fluid.

You see the machine there. And once you have that vial of fluid, you put that on the machine and you wait about 30 minutes, and it basically just tells you, positive or negative. Do you have presence of the virus or not? This could be done at home. My understanding is, we'll confirm this, but it would be around $50 and, you know, this is the type of thing that people could do at home and then make decisions.

If it comes back positive, you stay home. If it's negative, you're able to go out with a mask on, all the public health practices. But you're absolutely right, Alisyn, I mean, we think -- we talked about this in our house all the time. We would love to have this actionable data on a daily basis, even or certainly a regular basis to be able to make decisions about, you know, how we're going to conduct our lives that day.

CAMEROTA: For sure, Sanjay, thank you very much for all of the breaking news. Developments are coming fast and furious on all of this, so, thank you. All right, meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham is defending his call to the Georgia Secretary of State, saying this is all a big sort of misinterpretation. Our next guest was on that phone call. What does he say really happened?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:35:00]

CAMEROTA: Developing overnight. "ProPublica" reporting an effort to pressure Georgia's Secretary of State, Raffensperger to throw out legally cast ballots. That possibly was retaliation for Raffensperger's refusal to endorse President Trump. Georgia is set to wrap up its hand-count of ballots today.

Joining us now is Gabriel Sterling; he's a Georgia election staffer who has first-hand knowledge of some of this pressure campaign. Mr. Sterling, thank you very much for being here. Before we get to the controversial phone call that you heard between Senator Graham and the Secretary of State, what do you know about how the Trump campaign was trying to pressure Secretary Raffensperger for an endorsement?

GABRIEL STERLING, GEORGIA ELECTION IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER: Well, I mean, we're all Republican elected officials in this state and they asked and we said, given the role the secretary holds over the election, that we wouldn't be endorsing at this time. The secretary donated to the president in '16, donated to the president in '20, but he was not going to endorse. And they've had that discussion, they weren't necessarily happy about it, but that was -- that was the extent of it.

CAMEROTA: Did you feel after that, that you had a bull's-eye on your office somehow?

STERLING: Not in particular. We were just doing our jobs. Just to go back and quote the earlier -- I think I'll quote the Mandalorian, "this is the way. We follow the law and we execute our duties".

CAMEROTA: You've just made John Berman so happy. He's just blissfully happy right now, that you're re-quoting his quote -- his re-quote. OK, let's talk about this phone call between Senator Graham and Secretary Raffensperger. They have different interpretations, what did you hear on that phone call?

STERLING: Frankly, it is what I said last night on Anderson Cooper on your network. I can see where the secretary has his interpretation, because they were asking about some specific things about how our absentee ballot law worked, in terms of, is there a way to go back and look, and we said in our office, we do not have the legal authority to go back and then second-guess what the county election officials have already done with signature matching. And our signature matching has been following along the same percentages it has ever seen in a year, about 0.5 percent get tossed, for either missing a signature or having a mismatched signature.

And we said if there's somebody who wanted to go that route, and he has said this repeatedly, everybody has due process in this country. If they think they have evidence of that, they can go to a court of law, at the same time, we also discuss things about the United States Senate runoffs that are coming up, where we were saying, you know, there are people from outside of the state, and we see Democrats trying to encourage people to come to our state, using a federal loophole to allow people to vote in two states for U.S. Senate, and how we have those off.

So, those were the kind of conversations that were had. So I think both interpretations could be seen that way. But like I said last night, if Senator Warren called, we would take her call and answer her questions about our process. Senator Graham call, he's got questions about our process, we will answer questions about that process.

CAMEROTA: Yes, I understand and I hear you, and I think that that's really judicious of you, but I'm just wondering, since it was an interpretation of the secretary that Senator Graham was suggesting, well, then, you might want to just throw out all of those absentee ballots. Did you hear that?

STERLING: I didn't hear those words in quite that way. But I think there was a question of, is there power within the law if you see an abnormality of a very high acceptance rate compared to what probably ought to be versus if you have an inspection of those ballots -- of those signatures. That was the question that was asked. So that did probably raise the hairs on the back of the secretary's neck, and I understand that.

And the senator was probably just trying to figure out, what do I do to help defend the president who I support. And the president has many legal routes. There's 73 million people who voted for him, and I'm sure they're trying to say, I want to defend the rights of all those people and make sure those votes were counted properly, and that's what we're doing in our hand audit in this state to ensure that every single ballot is counted accurately --

CAMEROTA: Yes --

STERLING: And reported accurately, and the will of the people of Georgia is done.

[07:40:00]

CAMEROTA: Did it raise the hairs on the back of your neck when you heard him say that?

STERLING: I've been doing this for over 30 years now, so very little raises the hair on the back of my neck. But the situation was, we were answering questions, I knew what the law was, so I was really unconcerned. And we said, if you want to go that route or somebody else wants to go that route, you go to the court of law. And that's just -- that's just the route people can go and they can do that on any number of things. They can have good lawsuits, they can have bad lawsuits, but it's up to judges to make those decisions, not me or the secretary.

CAMEROTA: OK, as far as the recount, is this going to be completed by midnight tonight?

STERLING: Yes, it's not exactly a recount, declared it's a hand audit to verify the outcomes that came out after election day. We are well on track. Our largest counties finished up the first round of the physical recounting of the ballots, now we're doing the quality control to make sure that we -- you know, everything lines up.

That we -- data entry errors, so nobody transpose numbers, they got all the batches counted. And through this process, we already found that there was a little over 5,000 ballots that were just not uploaded properly into our system and that closed the president's gap down to -- from 14,156 when we started down to 12,753.

That said, we've seen nothing of central widespread fraud, there were always going to be some illegal votes, and we're trying to track those down and investigate them, but there's nothing to say the outcome will be different based on what we're seeing so far from this audit.

CAMEROTA: Gabriel Sterling, thank you very much for all of the information.

STERLING: Thank you, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, they were the governors who went it alone, stuck with President Trump, did not mandate masks or public health restrictions. They were praised in right-wing media for it. So how is that working out today for the people of their states? We have a must-see reality check for you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:45:00]

BERMAN: This morning, it's the virus that's dictating the story, no matter what certain politicians think, there were a number of governors who chose to walk in lockstep with the president, and now we're seeing the impact on their states. John Avlon here with a reality check.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. It's one of the key quotes of our times, and it's painfully relevant, as the COVID crisis escalates across our nation ten months after it arrived. The public health shouldn't be partisan and science is not really a matter of opinion.

But it's been made to seem that way. Turning masks into culture wars with cause to resist restrictions that are designed to save lives. Well, now we know that Americans are paying the price for all this foolishness, with more than 140,000 new cases a day, hospitalizations doubling month over month, with one state reportedly hitting the highest COVID mortality rate in the world.

Back in June, Vice President Pence wrote that the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a second wave of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown, not so much, unfortunately. Because now we're in a third surge, worse than ever before. Cases are up across the country, but the governors who back the Trump party line are the ones really reaping the whirlwind, because no states have seen more new COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths over the past week per capita than North and South Dakota.

And take a look at the top 15 states with the most cases per capita, with just two exceptions, Wisconsin and Illinois, they're all deep in Donald Trump's base. This is what happens when ideology elbows out science. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem was lionized in June by the "National Review" as the governor who stayed the course. The course being resistance to public health measures like wearing masks. At that time, South Dakota had just over 5,400 cases and 65 deaths.

Today, they've had over 67,000 cases and 644 deaths. Its seven-day positivity rate, a stunning 58 percent and still no mask mandate. The tragedy's compounded by the fact that some people who are being hospitalized still are in denial about COVID, because they bought into President Trump's bluster.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JODI DOERING, SOUTH DAKOTA NURSE: And they don't want to believe that COVID is real. Their last dying words are, this can't be happening, it's not real.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: Disinformation can be deadly, but this is what happens when the Trump White House advisors like Scott Atlas push herd immunity, more people die. And the president has been MIA. He hasn't attended a meeting of his COVID taskforce in months.

Since the election, he's found time to play four rounds of golf and tweet more than 400 times, but almost nothing about COVID. He's refusing to allow the COVID taskforce to brief President-elect Biden, while an updated model estimates U.S. COVID deaths will reach 439,000 by March 1st if we don't change course now. This will affect everyone.

And the need for leadership crosses party lines as California Governor Gavin Newsom, when he got caught attending a restaurant party contrary to his own guidelines. We're on a tough road for the next few months, and it's a path that mindless politicization of the virus has put us on. So, let's learn the right lessons and take this advice to heart from the president of the American Medical Association.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SUSAN BAILEY, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION: Never again can we allow a campaign of misinformation and disinformation to co-opt conversations around public health and sow divisions that only serve to prolong the suffering of so many.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: And that's your reality check.

CAMEROTA: God-willing, that statement from the AMA is right, but it doesn't show any signs of slowing down.

AVLON: It's just common sense and common decency at this point.

CAMEROTA: John, thank you.

BERMAN: All right, this morning, a top official of Homeland Security fired for telling the truth. Refusing to say there's widespread voter fraud, now he's out of a job. What will Republicans do about this? Next.

[07:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: Developing overnight, President Trump fired a top official in the Department of Homeland Security Chris Krebs who had said the election was the most secure in U.S. history. Joining me now is Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. Why --

REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-IL): Good to --

BERMAN: Do you think -- why do you think President Trump fired Chris Krebs?

KINZINGER: Yes, it's a loyalty thing. And so two things. Number one, there's this guy in the administration named John Macatee(ph) that for whatever reason has been granted authority, and for the last year or so, he has overruled the desires of secretaries of leaders of their organizations, all they tried to find took place, both his friends in government, let's be honest, just let his buddies, but also people seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump. That's why we heard about the story about a week ago, I can almost guarantee, he is the one that put the story out there.

And what happened is, you know, Chris Krebs said, the election was secured. That's his job to say that. His job is to make sure that they're defending the elections and of course, that is counter to what the president is trying to say. So, I think that all feeds into why he's out there, and you know, there's like a loyalty perch going on in the last month in the White House.

BERMAN: What's the impact of that?

[07:55:00]

KINZINGER: Well, it's bad. I mean, look, you know, yes, over the next couple of months, there's only a limited amount, you know, bad actors can do, but I think it's really important for somebody like Chris Krebs to be there to talk about what we've done right, in essence post-game this election. Where did we have attacks from foreign governments?

What is -- you know, what are lessons learned especially as we go to a handover to the next administration? So -- again, I mean, we're in the last month or two where somebody is not seen as sufficiently loyal to Trump or somebody like John Macatee(ph) to get pay back or the president to get pay back, and you know, it's a weird time for sure.

BERMAN: Look, you're going out on a limb by saying this which you've done consistently over the last few years. You know, you're taking issue with the president and the administration where you think it's appropriate. Where are your colleagues, congressman, at this point? This is going on. Where are they? Where are your colleagues saying, maybe it's time to ascertain the election? Where are your colleagues who say it's time to coordinate with the transition on coronavirus?

KINZINGER: So, you know, it's a tough one to answer because everybody has got, I guess, their own reason, but here is my general thing, is I think too many people look at Twitter. I think you read too many -- even congressmen read too much of Twitter, too much of your internet comments in the blogs, they know that if they go out against some of these Twitter mobs, whether it's on the right or left, I've been mobbed by both sides, trust me. And if you look at that and you say, gee, I don't want to face the Twitter mob, which by the way, isn't even a real thing, it's not a real reflection of reality.

And I think it's just a matter of a lot of people waiting out until, you know, the president comes to terms with this. Look, we all believe that every vote should count, and we all believe that in this election, every lawsuit that's legitimate could be, you know, gone through. But we have a tradition in this country of looking at the results, congratulating the president-elect, starting the transition process and going forward, and that's like -- that is essential to the passage and the strength and the survival of democracy.

BERMAN: You are lieutenant colonel in the Air Force National Guard, I think I got the rank right, and I don't want to stiff you there if you've been promoted --

KINZINGER: Yes, that's right --

BERMAN: Without me knowing. And you know, look, you served in Iraq, Afghanistan, fly missions regularly. The president moving to draw down troops in Afghanistan and Iraq soon. Your reaction to that.

KINZINGER: It's pointless and I don't know the reason except to try to follow through on some campaign promise that he made, except his biggest campaign promise was the defeat of ISIS. And you have to totally overlook that ISIS is in Afghanistan or in Iraq or in Syria, in order to think that this is somehow, you know, following through on his Rand Paul version of a promise to withdraw from, quote/unquote, "endless wars". Even the president himself said that Afghanistan isn't a war, it's a peace-keeping mission, and so this idea of this war is silly. Look, with 2,500 troops, all you really have left is enough troops to

defend the remaining troops who are just there to defend those troops. At 2,500 troops, you really can just do a force protection and you really can't extend power or train or advise the Afghanistan military.

I think that's part of his desire, again, to say he did it but also maybe an attempt to hobble the next administration because now President-elect Biden is going to have to make a decision to either keep it at that risky level or go back and add troops, which is a whole new story.

BERMAN: Hobble the incoming administration, what do you mean? Expand on that, please.

KINZINGER: Well, I think it's going to -- it's going to be a very tough decision now for the president-elect to make. So, typically in this country, and if you see like George W. Bush when he negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement to 2011, he could have kept that Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq for a long term, but he made the decision that the next administration should have a say on foreign policy.

This should be the case now. This should be President-elect Biden's decision on the future of Afghanistan, and I think the president is trying to force his hand. When you go down to 2,500 troops, the vice president -- or president-elect either has to say I'm going to double the troops which of course is a whole new story in January or he's got to continue to pull out.

BERMAN: I've got to let you run, but very quickly, how concerned are you, what else the outgoing president will do in the next 60 days?

KINZINGER: I'm concerned, but not overly frightened. I mean, I think, you know, I think this kind of stuff is concerning, I don't expect him to start a war or anything like that, but you know, look, let's just -- let's just be adults here and let's just move on and let's take a deep breath, and there is an election around the corner, trust me.

BERMAN: Well, good luck with that, good luck with the let's be the adults thing. Meanwhile, I'll let you monitor nap time in a long way --

KINZINGER: That's right --

BERMAN: Building. Congressman Kinzinger, thank you for being with us this morning --

KINZINGER: You bet, see you --

BERMAN: I always appreciate you. Bye-bye.

KINZINGER: Thank you.

BERMAN: NEW DAY continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president fired one of the most senior officials involved with keeping our elections safe.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Chris Krebs was telling the president what he did not want to hear about the election.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There is no evidence of irregularities, no evidence of widespread fraud presented today to the Wayne Board of Canvassers.