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Anxiety Rising at Pentagon over What Trump will Do Next; Official says, 1 in every 64 L.A. County Residents has COVID-19; Russia Says, FSB Agents Taped Admission to Poisoning a Fake. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired December 22, 2020 - 11:30   ET

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

[11:30:00]

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Nobody knows what he really means, but it takes that kind of talk right into the Oval Office because Flynn, of course, now meeting with the president, discussions of martial law, call it what you will. What this has led to is at least some retired generals who have much more freedom to speak out, speaking out incredibly bluntly.

I want to, quote, a tweet from retired General Tony Thomas, the recently retired head of Special Operations, very respected, retired General Thomas says to General Flynn, Mike, stop. Just stop. You are a former soldier. You know leveraging the military to rerun elections is a totally inappropriate role for the profession. You are also undercutting the extraordinary trust and confidence America has in their military.

You can take to the bank that General Thomas knows that message not going just to Flynn but to troops, commanders and the American people.

Now, the top U.S. military official, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who functions as the president's chief military adviser, has said in the past, there is no role for the U.S. military in the elections. He has not addressed these specific concerns because that would draw him into politics. But he recently did talk in very blunt terms about what the U.S. military does and what it does not do.

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GEN. MARK MILLEY, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or a religion. We take an oath to the Constitution.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STARR: And in just the last few days, the head of the army, the chief of staff, the military general in charge in the top civilian, the army secretary also issuing statements saying that the military has no role in the outcome of the election.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Great reporting, Barbara, thank you.

So, President Trump, he is now plotting with a group of House Republicans as well on his next effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. And it's not just President Trump actually. CNN is learning Vice President Mike Pence attended these meeting as well.

And it all comes to January 6th when the Electoral College vote count is announced before a joint session of Congress.

Manu Raju, he's on Capitol Hill, he has this reporting. He is joining us now. Manu, you've been digging into this. What are these meetings about and what is the plan?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. It's all about January 6th. These House conservatives who I spoke with yesterday, they met with President Trump and you mentioned that Vice President Mike Pence too, which is significant, because he will oversee what will occur on January 6th on the House floor, a joint session of Congress to formally count the electoral votes.

Now, what these House Republicans are planning on doing is objecting to the state's electoral votes, I'm told by one of the leaders of this effort, Mo Brooks, that they plan to object to six of the state's election results.

Now, in order for this to have any success, first of all, it has virtually no chances of succeeding in overturning the result but it could prolong the debate and lead to a messy debate. In order to prolong the debate, House conservatives need support from at least one senator.

And according to Mo Brooks, he told them that several senators have told him privately that they're willing to do that. Some incoming senators have suggested they have the willingness to do it too publicly. But, privately, he told me they have a number of assurances.

So if they do get the support from a senator, then each chamber would have to debate separately for two hours the merits of that objection to a specific state's results and then there would be a vote in the House and Senate about whether to uphold that objection.

And that vote is certain to fail in both chambers, including in the Republican-led Senate, in which the Republican leaders are urging senators not to get behind this. One of those senators, the number two Republican, John Thune, told me yesterday Republicans should not join this effort on the Senate side. He told me, I think they have got to remember is it's not going anywhere. He said, in the Senate, it would go down like a shot dog.

Now that is pretty clear sign there are virtually no support among the Senate Republican leaders but House Republican leaders have been quiet on this so far, including the number two Republican, Steve Scalise, who told me yesterday, if the Republicans do it, it happened in the past, he didn't seem to have an issue with them going forward with it on January 6th, Kate.

BOLDUAN: It sounds like a really great use of their time right now. Manu, thank you very much for digging into it, I really appreciate it.

Still ahead for us, we are getting crushed. That's from a doctor in Los Angeles who said his hospital could soon run out of beds. He's our guest, next.

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[11:35:00]

BOLDUAN: California is crippling under the weight of COVID-19 right now. The numbers in the state's most populous county tell you the story. A health official in Los Angeles County now estimates that one in every 64 residents there has COVID-19 and is actively infecting others and it's pushing the county's health system to the brink.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What's it like right now for your staff?

NANCY BLAKE, CHIEF NURSING OFFICER, HARBOR UCLA MEDICAL CENTER: It's a disaster right now for our staff. The patients are extremely sick. This is a horrible disease. I hope I won't cry because it's been ten months of this and we are inundated.

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[11:40:02]

BOLDUAN: Inundated. On Monday, L.A. County officials reported there were only 30 adult ICU beds available. And take a look at this video. This is some of that sobering video. This is one of dozens of refrigerated storage units brought to L.A. and across the state as they fear and prepare for a wave of COVID-19 deaths now.

So let's get the latest on the ground there on what is happening and what is needed. Joining me right now is Dr. Brad Spellberg, he is the chief medical officer for the Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center. Thank you for coming in.

That number, that estimate of 1 in 64 people in the county infected, can you give us some perspective on what that means on the ground?

DR. BRAD SPELLBERG, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, L.A. COUNTY USC MEDICAL CENTER: Well, what it means on the ground is we don't have ICU beds. We are -- the water is now running over the levies here. And we are bailing out the water as fast as we can to expand the levy higher. But if the surge continues to increase, there's no amount of bailing that's going to keep us from sinking.

BOLDUAN: Doctor, the way you've put it, I've just read it in an interview, is that you are getting crushed, your hospital. Can you describe what it is like in a typical day right now with, of course, we know that California has been going through this for ten months now, as so many states have been. How is your staff doing?

SPELLBERG: We're exhausted. We're frustrated. Our staff work in the safety net. They know why they come to work. We're holding strong by our finger nails but we're tired and we need the public to really respect public health guidelines.

In the hospital, we can only react to what comes to us and we're doing our best to keep up with the surge of patients coming. The public has the ability to slow the spread, to keep the safety net and the county health system afloat so that the pace of patients coming to us doesn't result in getting overwhelmed.

And I just would emphasize, if you think this is just about COVID-19, you're wrong. If you get into a car accident or you have a heart attack or a stroke or fall off a ladder, you're going to want us to have a bed for you and staff trained to take care of you. If they're full of COVID patients, who is going to be left to care for you?

BOLDUAN: Is that happening right now? This is the fear and it's a term that is painful even to say always, but it comes down to having to make very tough choices like rationing care. Who has the most urgent need which patient that has to have the focus over another patient that also deserves attention, but you just are stretched too thin to be able to offer that. Is that happening?

SPELLBERG: So I mentioned we're bailing water as it spills over the levy. The way we do that is that we scale back so you don't have clinic appointments through your doctor anymore and we don't do elective surgeries and we don't do elective procedures, like colonoscopies, so we can redeploy the staff away from the not sick people who really do need care into critical parts of the hospital to open up new beds to handle the flood of sick patients. This is what we call contingency care.

We are not at crisis care where we're actually saying, yes, you're going to live and you're going to die, sorry. We don't want to get to that point. There is going to be a point at which no matter how fast we bail and how much internal redistribution of staff we do and how much we try to hire extra staff we can't continue to bail. And if we reach that point, that is where you start delivering crisis care and start triaging patients.

BOLDUAN: Doctor, can I also ask you about the vaccine effort? How many doses of the vaccine have you all received? How many shots have been administered?

SPELLBERG: Well, so we're the largest of the four county hospitals in L.A. County. And so we're part of a four-hospital system with 19 clinic, the Department of Health Services, as a system we expect to be administering approximately 11,000 vaccines -- I think, actually, it's still -- sorry, 1,000 plus 6,000. So I think 17,000 vaccines by the end of the month.

Thus far, multiple thousands have already been given. We anticipate we will be increasing that in the coming two weeks and hit approximately 17,000 by the end of the month. BOLDUAN: I'm curious about that, because we have heard from the Trump administration that nearly 5 million doses have been shipped. But if you look at the tracking numbers in the first after seven or eight days, there're still only about 614,000 shots that have been administered across the country. Do you understand why there is a disconnect? Is it taking more time to get people vaccinated than maybe the administration was anticipating?

SPELLBERG: We had an unbelievably efficient vaccine effort. People were just in and in and in.

[11:45:00]

So that's not the issue. I don't know what the issue is. We're surviving minute by minute here. I don't have time to keep track of what's going on at the national level. I really hope other people are keeping an eye on it.

BOLDUAN: I understand that. Doctor, thank you for coming on.

SPELLBERG: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: Coming up next, the Russian government is responding to CNN reporting that a Russia agent admitted to poisoning the country's top opposition leader.

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[11:50:00]

BOLDUAN: Russia's security service is now speaking out after CNN's investigation in conjunction with Bellingcat into the poisoning of top opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The Russian government now saying that the recorded phone conversation where an agent admitted to helping poison Navalny was a fake conversation. And now there's more.

CNN's Clarissa Ward, she had this exclusive report, she's joining once again. Clarissa, walk us through what you're learning now.

CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, the spokesperson for President Putin has come out with a slew of insults against Navalny, saying he has a Jesus complex, saying he has a Freudian obsession with his crotch, of course, because that's where the Novichok was put, in his underwear. But one thing he didn't say was refuting any of the facts of our reporting on this extraordinary story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WARD (voice over): it is an extraordinary scene. Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny on the phone with one of the FSB unit who believes poisoned him in August. Navalny is pretending to be a senior figure from Russia's National Security Council investigating the attempted assassination.

The operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, is hesitant at first, but then reveals the poison was placed on Navalny's underpants.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: , Well, imagine underpants, and in what place?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The insides, the groin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The crotch in the underpants?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, the so-called flap, there are such seams there, so, across the seams.

WARD: The explosive admission punches a gaping hole in the Kremlin's repeated denials that the Russian government played any role in Navalny's poisoning. Kudryavtsev was one of an elite team who trailed Navalny for years, as CNN and online investigative outlet, Bellingcat, reported last week.

The unit was headquartered in this building unassuming building in a Moscow suburb. Most of its members were doctors or scientists. Kudryavtsev graduated from the Russian Academy of Chemical Defense.

When Navalny was poisoned back in August, his flight was diverted to Omsk. Flight records show that just five days later, Kudryavtsev flew to that same city, taking possession of Navalny's clothes.

On the 45-minute call with Navalny, he offers assurance that no trace of Novichok would be found on them.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, it was clean.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Visually, it will not be visible. They did not remove, there are no stains on them, nothing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, no, no nothing. They're in good condition and clean.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Pants?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's the same inside area, perhaps something was left on it too. We washed it off there also. But this is presumably because there's contact with the pants. Perhaps there was something on there too.

WARD: The FSB toxins team trailed Navalny on more than 30 trips around Russia. Five of its members flew to Siberia around the same time as Navalny during the fateful August trip when he was poisoned. Toxicologists have told CNN that Navalny is lucky to be alive and that the intention was almost certainly to kill him, a point Kudryavtsev appears to acknowledge.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If it flew a little longer and perhaps would not have landed so quickly and all, perhaps it would have all gone differently. That is if it had not been prompt assistance of doctors and ambulances on the landing strip and so on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The plane landed after 40 minutes. Basically, this should have been taken into account while planning the operation. It wasn't that the plane landed instantly. They calculated the wrong dose, the probability. Why?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, I can't say why. As I understand it, we added a bit extra. So --

WARD: At the end of the call, Navalny and his team are elated that their sting operation has worked and despite everything he has discovered, he's still determined to return to Russia as soon as possible.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He told the whole story.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

WARD (on camera): Now, the Russian government has also hit back today against E.U. sanctions that were leveled at senior officials by announcing its own sanctions against several E.U. representatives, ambassadors from three countries were hauled into Moscow today. Those countries were Sweden, France and Germany.

[11:55:02]

No accident, Kate, that those three countries were chosen because it was in those three countries that independent laboratories confirmed the presence of Novichok in Alexey Navalny's underwear. So this is very much still an ongoing story, Kate.

BOLDUAN: It's amazing to hear the story when you first broke it, Clarissa. And then to see Alexey Navalny hearing it for the first time itself, it is remarkable. It's great to see you. Thank you for bringing the reporting.

Coming up for us, a new study was just released on face coverings. Why even the most effective face coverings may not be effective alone.

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