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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

GSA Chief Finally Okays Biden Transition Process; Vaccines Move Toward Approval As COVID Crisis Worsens; How Will Israeli-Saudi Relations Impact Biden's Mideast Policy? Aired 5:30-6a ET

Aired November 24, 2020 - 05:30   ET

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

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[05:31:03]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, this is EARLY START. I'm Boris Sanchez in for Christine Romans.

LAURA JARRETT, CNN ANCHOR: Great to have you, Boris. I'm Laura Jarrett.

SANCHEZ: Thanks, Laura.

JARRETT: About 30 minutes past the hour here in New York.

And the Trump administration is finally recognizing what has been crystal clear for weeks now, Joe Biden won the election. Without ever actually saying that Biden won, the head of the General Services Administration finally greenlighting the formal transition process to begin late Monday. GSA head Emily Murphy goes out of her way to say she came to her decision independently while the president says on Twitter he recommended the move.

SANCHEZ: The upshot of her decision is that the Biden team is now allowed to work with current agency officials and tap into millions of dollars in government funding for the transition.

And this is really a fitting ending for a president who never promised a peaceful transition of power. It comes as the president's losses in court are piling up, his legal team faces intense scrutiny, more Republicans start to abandon him, and as Michigan certified its election results leaving Trump no path to hold back the Biden transition.

JARRETT: For the very latest this half-hour let's bring in CNN's Arlette Saenz who is live in Wilmington for us. Arlette, what is the Biden team saying now that the doors are finally open and they can begin this transition at long last? They had already started the transition, effectively, but what are they saying now?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, Laura, 16 days after President-elect Joe Biden was declared the winner of this election, Biden's transition team now has that official green light that allows them to officially formally begin this transition process. Biden's team had already been working and developing their own workarounds for the fact that they haven't been able to access key administration transition resources. But now with this letter from the GSA administrator Emily Murphy, they are able to plow ahead with their planning.

And the executive director of Biden's transition team released a statement last night where he said that "In the days ahead, transition officials will begin meeting with federal officials to discuss the pandemic response, have a full accounting of our national security interests, and gain complete understanding of the Trump administration's efforts to hollow out government agencies."

There is now a host of resources that the Biden transition team has access to. That includes over $6 million in funding to operate these transition plans.

Also, having access to all of the key agencies. We know that the Department of Defense has already started talking with the Biden transition team.

And then also, access to coronavirus data. That is a key component of this that the Biden team really wants access to as they are trying to craft their own plans for the pandemic as well as distribution of a vaccine. They have been pressing their case on this for quite a few weeks.

But now they're basically breathing a sigh of relief that this transition can formally begin and they can move forward with all of their work.

JARRETT: So, Arlette, while this fight with the GSA was going on the president-elect, meanwhile, was putting together his cabinet, choosing expertise and really choosing people he already knows pretty well.

He's also making an interesting move with John Kerry. He will be a special envoy on climate issues, they've announced. Kerry was obviously the secretary of state who played a key role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement, the agreement which Trump pulled out of.

What do you think Biden is hoping to accomplish with these moves and an announcement like Kerry?

SAENZ: Well, what we're seeing from Joe Biden is he is putting climate issues front and center in his administration. And by picking someone like the former secretary of state John Kerry to be this climate envoy to the international community shows just how important he values the issue of climate change.

[05:35:00]

Biden has warned that climate change is one of the greatest national security threats facing this country right now and that he wants to take steps to try to alleviate some of that, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, which is something that John Kerry was also involved in. And in addition to this announcement, John Kerry is also now going to have a seat on the National Security Council, just showing how much of an issue climate change will be.

I've also learned that there will be a domestic counterpart in the White House -- a White House climate director who will be on equal footing with Kerry. So it shows just how much emphasis Biden will be placing on this issue, including at a time when progressives have pushed for a special office regarding the climate in his White House.

Now, while we have a good idea of how these early appointments are shaping out, two key posts that we still do not have names for is the Defense secretary and also the attorney general. Both of those positions will be critically important to Joe Biden moving forward and they are expected to come in the coming weeks.

JARRETT: Yes, certainly looking forward to seeing who he picks as A.G. Given everything that the Justice Department has been through under this past administration, that one will be key.

All right, Arlette, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

All right, 57 days until Joe Biden's inauguration as president. It's time for three questions in three minutes.

Let's bring in CNN senior political analyst, Margaret Talev. Margaret, thank you so much for coming on this morning.

SANCHEZ: Good morning, Margaret.

JARRETT: OK, so --

MARGARET TALEV, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST, POLITICS AND WHITE HOUSE EDITOR, AXIOS (via Cisco Webex): Good morning.

JARRETT: So, Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, she finally did her job last night. She didn't actually say that Biden won in her letter to the president-elect but she didn't have to.

The Biden team now gets money, it now gets resources, and critically, it now gets access to these federal agencies. And this is going to really help out with the coronavirus vaccine rollout, something that the president-elect has been really highlighting in recent days.

Do you think, Margaret, that this, in history, will be seen as a blip or something that signals perhaps something more corrosive about what happened to civil service roles -- people in positions of power during the Trump administration?

TALEV: Well, I hope it's going to be a blip in terms of practical terms. But I do think one of the things in that letter yesterday was a call for congressional reforms, right, and her contention that this isn't a role that the administrator for the GSA should have.

I think there's two ways to look at this. One way is that right and should Congress change and be more explicit in legislation. But the other is does there need to be, culturally, kind of a resorting of reminding people who serve in roles like that there needs to be a separation of politics from the basic duties of their job.

And I think both parties are going to look at what's happened here and various pressure points that she faces, as well as her own experience, and maybe bake this a little bit more into the process.

SANCHEZ: Yes.

Let's talk the Biden cabinet. These picks seem to have a common thread and it's sort of a fundamental rejection of Trumpism. They're not really flashy names but they have valuable experience in previous administrations and many of them have experience with policies that Trump has used to rile up his voters -- things that Trump rejects.

What is your takeaway from the names that you've seen?

TALEV: Boris, this first wave is really aimed at Biden's whole theme of restoring a sort of version of American policymaking that people have seen before. So I think intentionally, this is not the shakeup list, right? This is not the -- any lightning rods and I don't know if we're going to see any.

But in the first wave, a real deliberate to put forth people who are more in the civil service mode, less in the political figure or lightning rod mode. People who can be consensus, who the progressives can live with, who Republicans most likely can live with.

And the rollout allows him to keep like Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, John Kerry -- white men who the vice president -- former vice president -- the president-elect has worked closely with over the years, while still demonstrating that diversity, right? First for women, first for Latino members of his cabinet.

But I do think it does beg the question of what we're going to see in the next round. Defense and A.G. are two of the big ones we'll be watching. Are these going to be folks who the president-elect is willing to fight with his progressives or fight with the Republicans on?

JARRETT: Yes, and what the confirmation battles look like are largely going to be shaped by what the Senate looks like --

SANCHEZ: Right.

JARRETT: -- this coming January, which we still don't know because of those two runoff races in Georgia.

Margaret, one of the court issues, it seems, of this election was character and part of that is trust, something that's obviously so important right now with this virus just raging all over the country. People need to trust through a pandemic.

Axios has some really interesting new reporting where you're, obviously, the politics and White House editor. And the new information is about how Americans are changing their plans for the holidays. How it relates to their political climate.

[05:40:05]

What did you find?

TALEV: This comes from our coronavirus index, which we do weekly with Ipsos. It measures how people are perceiving the virus. And what we learned is that six out of 10 Americans are, in fact, going to change their Thanksgiving plans -- dial them back one way or another because they want to avoid the pandemic.

And one of the interesting kind of sub-reasons we found is that people also are increasingly optimistic, both that there's going to be a vaccine they can take in the next few months and that it will be effective. That public health officials, in particular -- and this is important -- will say that it is safe and effective. If they do, broad swaths of the American public now saying they will take it.

And our pollsters that we work with say one thing to watch is that this isn't just President Trump talking without evidence about a vaccine or assurances. This is both assurances from the pharmaceutical industry and most importantly, from public health officials. We're beginning to even now see trust in the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control) tick up just in the last couple of weeks.

JARRETT: Yes. Obviously, the vaccine news is great but people have to take it.

SANCHEZ: Right.

JARRETT: So having that trust is key.

SANCHEZ: Yes.

All right, Margaret Talev, Axios politics and White House editor, thank you so much for getting up early for us this morning. We appreciate it.

TALEV: Thanks, guys.

SANCHEZ: The FDA is working overtime to make sure a COVID vaccine can be rolled out in record time. The agency is now asking its vaccine advisory panel to meet twice in December. A second meeting being added, presumably to discuss Moderna's vaccine, in addition to Pfizer's. Both vaccines showed promise in late-stage trials.

And to put it moderately, it is becoming an increasingly desperate situation. That vaccine is badly needed.

The average number of new cases over the last week is now an astonishing 172,000 a day. Remember the chaos that we faced in the spring? That is just the small bump you see on the left.

JARRETT: There are currently more than 85,000 people hospitalized with COVID. Thanksgiving travel and Thanksgiving gatherings could make that worse. The situation is so serious health officials in Pennsylvania,

Minnesota, and other states are warning they could start to run out of ICU beds soon.

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DR. MATTHEW KLEE, MAPLE GROVE, MINNESOTA: It is getting worse daily. We are now in full hurricane COVID and this is not the time to be out and about. Nobody thinks that they're the ones that are going to get COVID. All the people in my ICU and all the people who have died, they didn't think they were going to get COVID.

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JARRETT: This holiday will be difficult for millions of Americans -- Americans who have lost jobs and homes and security this year. To date, YMCA Meadowlands, in New Jersey, has hosted 42 food distributions, giving out 627,000 meals to almost 40,000 families.

Just yesterday, distribution lines at St. Mary's Food Bank in Phoenix, Arizona were more than two miles long.

We'll be right back.

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[05:47:41]

SANCHEZ: Most of us are going to be staying close to home for the holiday weekend, so how will the weather look on Thanksgiving? Here's meteorologist Pedram Javaheri.

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PEDRAM JAVAHERI, AMS METEOROLOGIST (on camera): Good morning, guys. This weather is brought to you by Ninja Foodi, Be Proud of What You Make.

And we've got to talk about what's happening here as we get ready for Thanksgiving Day, of course. And yes, severe weather -- the elements in place here. We've got the warm humid air coming right off of the Gulf. A disturbance on approach across areas of the Four Corners region. And put it together -- the second season, as it's known, typically in October and November -- you get a little bit of the resurgence of severe weather.

And that is going to be the case for about three million Americans going into this afternoon there across portions of Oklahoma City -- around, say, Norman, Oklahoma, around Tulsa as well. You could see some strong storms pop up in this region.

And then the system very quickly skirts off towards the east and brings with it widespread coverage of wet weather over the next couple of days -- generally, one to two inches. But you'll notice once you get across the Upper Midwestern region there you could see even some wintry weather from Tuesday into Wednesday across that area. Maybe even some on Thanksgiving Day as well.

But notice back towards the west it is all quiet around the southwest. Could some windy weather, some fire weather across the areas of western Texas. But if you're traveling into the Rockies or into the Cascades, get ready for some wintry weather, especially above 4,000 feet -- guys.

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JARRETT: Pedram, thank you so much for that.

Well, parts of Europe are making plans for a pandemic Christmas. CNN is covering the pandemic around the world.

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MELISSA BELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): I'm Melissa Bell in Paris.

The French president is to address the nation tonight on T.V. and we expect him to announce a gradual lifting over the course of several weeks of the partial lockdown that's currently in place. Those restrictions continue to bear their fruit. The number of new cases on Monday under 5,000 for the first time since late-September.

SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN REPORTER (on camera): I'm Salma Abdelaziz in London where the prime minister has laid out the country's winter coronavirus plan. Now, we have a nationwide lockdown here in England set to expire next week and that will be replaced with a three-tier regional restriction system.

The other matter being worked on -- and it's not official yet -- we expect an announcement later today -- is a special Christmastime dispensation. Essentially, the government wants to ease social restrictions at Christmastime for a few days -- maybe five days -- to allow up to three households to mix together. The prime minister saying tis the season to be jolly but tis the season to be jolly careful.

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ANGUS WATSON, CNN PRODUCER (on camera): I'm Angus Watson in Sydney, Australia where national carrier Qantas says it will require future international travelers to prove that they've had a coronavirus vaccine before they're allowed onto flights. Company CEO Alan Joyce says that move will be a necessity once the coronavirus vaccine is widely available.

Qantas says it is already looking at its terms and conditions to update them with their request that passengers get vaccinated before they fly. Alan Joyce believes that other airlines will follow suit.

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SANCHEZ: Thanks to all of our reporters for those updates. With the Biden transition officially underway, the president-elect's team will now have access to resources across all levels of government. And one area of great interest is the Mideast where top- level meetings between Israel and Saudi Arabia could dramatically alter the political landscape.

Nic Robertson joins us now live from Riyadh. And, Nic, for years, we've heard that there has been some off-the-record sort of secret diplomacy between Saudi Arabia and Israel. This meeting a huge deal, but officials in Riyadh are denying that it took place.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes. Look, there's been huge pressure from the Trump administration on the Saudis to reopen relations with Israel or open relations with Israel.

The Saudis believe that Israel has to commit to a two-state solution with the Palestinians if that -- if they're going to take that huge step. And it's a huge step because the population here of Saudi Arabia, 33 million people, would have to be prepared for it. At one point, eight billion Muslims around the world would have to be prepared for it as well. It's a big issue for the Saudis to take on.

Perhaps no surprise that they deny any meeting took place with the Israeli prime minister in Saudi Arabia on Sunday night when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was there.

So yes, when President-elect Biden gets into the Oval Office, the Mideast is going to be front and center on the foreign policy agenda, and a lot of other things on there as well. But what he comes into and what I understand from Saudi sources I've been talking to here is they don't want to do some kind of deal at the moment with the Trump administration or perhaps Bibi Netanyahu because he's on the way out of office. If they're going to do something -- if they're going to do something, it's going to be with a new administration.

Of course, there will be springs attached because the Saudis have national security interests -- Iran and plenty of other things in this region they're going to want to see the Biden administration address in their favor.

SANCHEZ: Yes. And Nic, while we have you, a separate question about the transition.

James Mattis, the former secretary of Defense for President Trump, said something yesterday. I want to read a part of it now.

He said, quote, "In practice, 'America first' has meant 'America alone.'" He says he hopes the Biden team will restore America's commitment to cooperative security.

Obviously, on a global scale, do you feel that countries want the United States to reengage? I mean, obviously, the Trump administration has had some recent success in the Mideast but there's a feeling across the world -- specifically, in Europe, for example -- that the United States has really sort of abandoned its leadership role. What's your take? ROBERTSON: Absolutely. There's a sense that Trump has been a disruptor as he has been at home. He has been overseas. That's problematic because it's not addressing the pressing global issues. So yes, generally speaking, leaders around the world -- even Xi Jinping in China -- want the sort of steady consistency in U.S. policy -- foreign policy -- that they would expect from a President Biden.

But obviously, he's going to have his hands absolutely full with the economy and coronavirus domestically. But the list is as long as your arm in the expectations overseas.

I mean, for example, who remembers that President Biden -- or President-elect Biden went to Bosnia during the civil war there? He was there in Sarajevo in the heart of the -- in the heart of the city that was being shelled -- a very dangerous time.

Now they look in the Western Balkans to President-elect Biden to help reduce growing Russian influences to sort out the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that came in under President Clinton.

So yes, the plate is piled high reducing trade tensions and overall tensions with China. What to do about Iran's growing nuclear capability -- how to deal with that. And it's not clear that President-elect Biden is going to have the time or the energy or the capacity to do all of this. But they're pressing -- let's be clear about that -- and the world is ready for it.

SANCHEZ: Yes, terrific insight from Nic Robertson.

I do have to confirm, though, the list for President-elect Biden is definitely much longer than my arm.

[05:55:02]

Thanks so much, Nic.

JARRETT: Sad news overnight. David Dinkins, the first African- American mayor of New York City, has passed away. Police say he died at his home in Manhattan apparently of natural causes.

His death comes just a month after this wife, Joyce, passed away. David Dinkins was 93 years old.

SANCHEZ: Yes, he called New York City a gorgeous mosaic.

Thanks so much for joining us this morning. I'm Boris Sanchez in for Christine Romans.

JARRETT: I'm Laura Jarrett. "NEW DAY" is next.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: TSA administrator Emily Murphy has sent a letter to Joe Biden ascertaining that he is the winner of the 2020 election. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It is about time.

JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: As one adviser put it, it's the end of the road for the president.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some history-making choices. All of these nominees think they can get confirmed in the Senate.

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You're seeing a team develop that I have great confidence in.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Clear signs Americans are not heeding the CDC's warning to stay home.

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: You will see.