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House of Representatives Passes Bill to Increase Direct Payments to Americans from $600 to $2,000; Biden to Call Out Trump Administration's Slow Pace of Vaccines; Investigators Searching for Motive in Nashville Bombing Case. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 29, 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]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: A few dozen Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the increase, which President Trump demanded after he delayed signing the relief bill. At the same time, a big rebuke to the president in his final weeks in office, more than 100 Republicans joining House Democrats to override President Trump's veto of the defense spending bill. Now both issues are in Mitch McConnell's court. One big question this morning, is President Trump losing his grip on the GOP?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: At the same time President-elect Joe Biden is blasting the White House, accusing President Trump and his appointees of obstructing the transition of power. Biden specifically calling out the Defense Department and Budget Office as agencies where his team has encountered what he has called political roadblocks.

CNN has just learned the president-elect will call out the Trump administration's slower than expected pace of vaccine distributions. Just moments ago, we heard from Dr. Anthony Fauci here on NEW DAY accepting that vaccinations are behind schedule. He also warned that the worse could be yet to come in this country as people congregate for the holidays.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: And that's what we're concerned about, that in addition to the surge, we're going to have an increased superimposed upon that surge, which could make January even worse than December. I hope not. I hope that doesn't happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Surge on top of a surge. December is already the deadliest month of the pandemic so far here in the U.S.

CAMEROTA: OK, but we begin with the big developments in Washington. Joining us now, CNN White House correspondent John Harwood as well as national politics reporter for Yahoo! News Brittany Shepherd. Great to see both of you. So John, let's talk about what's happening at the White House or Mar-a-Lago. So last night Democrats and Republicans, some Republicans in the House, gave President Trump what he was demanding, which was the bump up from $600 for the hardest hit Americans in relief to $2,000. Now it's in Mitch McConnell's court. Is there any suggestion that President Trump is engaging on this? Is he working the phones? Is he trying to cajole Mitch McConnell into bringing this to a vote?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, the White House has taken to putting on his schedule that while he is in Mar-a-Lago the president is working tirelessly on behalf of the American people, many meetings and phone calls. But there's no evidence of that. The evidence we have is that he's spending most of his days playing golf.

I don't believe this is going to be a difficult piece of legislation for Mitch McConnell to shove aside. He does not want to pass $2,000 checks, and most of his caucus do not want to pass $2,000 checks even if the Georgia Republican Senate candidates might find some marginal benefit in that. I think this is something that's going to be pretty easy for Mitch McConnell to table in some parliamentary means, to set aside. It's not going to happen. They just passed a $900 billion COVID relief plan. That's a very substantial piece of legislation, the president finally signed it, and I think Mitch McConnell is going to be able to stand pat with that.

SCIUTTO: Listen, the price tag on increasing those payments $464 billion. That's a lot of money for a Republican-led Senate that didn't want to spend anything close to that early on. Brittany Shepherd, I wonder, you have the Senate races, of course, coming up, the runoff races in Georgia, and McConnell concerned about a no vote from Loeffler and Perdue. Is the scenario where McConnell allows it to go to the floor so they can vote yes, but he doesn't have the Republicans sufficient to pass it, in other words, get the benefit in those races without actually passing the legislation or the increase in these stimulus checks?

BRITTANY SHEPHERD, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, YAHOO NEWS: Well, forcing that issue is exactly what progressives in the Senate are thinking. That's some of the calculations that we are hearing from Bernie Sanders, was that he feels like he was going to filibuster today in order to force the issue and keep Loeffler and Perdue in D.C. so that they are out of Georgia and that these $2,000 checks become critical to the race in these last couple of days and it completely overshadows everything they've been running on up until now, and of course, give the Democrats on the ground in Georgia some time.

I also think that the Democrats are believing that there's going to be some time with these filibusters, first from Sanders, also we're hearing Markey, I think we could expect some other progressives, maybe Senator Elizabeth Warren to join hands just to push this vote to the new year, which gives them some time to work on these Republicans, like John said. It's easy for the Republican caucus now to say we don't want to support this $2,000 spending even though they would be turning against their own president, but with enough time there might be some time from the court of public opinion and, of course, for Democrats to do some back alley dealing with Joe Biden, with supporting them to kind of help them push the issue.

[08:05:08]

CAMEROTA: Speaking of Joe Biden, John Harwood, the president-elect yesterday gave a speech in which he forcefully announced basically that he and his team are not getting the cooperation from the Trump administration that they desperately need, particularly in vital areas such as Department of Defense. So he talked about roadblocks. Do we know what the impediments are?

HARWOOD: Well, we know that the briefings by the Department of Defense were interrupted a couple of weeks ago. The Trump administration claimed there was a mutually agreed upon pause. The Biden team says that's not the case. It's a pretty concerning development.

Here's what we know. We know that a few weeks ago Donald Trump after the election fired his defense secretary and installed a set of political minions at the Pentagon to try to do his bidding in some fashion, don't know exactly what. There were some issues related to declassification of materials related to the Trump-Russia investigation.

We also know that Russia has engaged in a massive hack of the United States government and U.S. business. The chief of staff that the president installed at the Pentagon, Kash Patel, is someone who was a top aide to Devin Nunes when he was fighting the Trump-Russia investigation trying to discredit it. We don't know if there is a Russia connection to all this, but there's reason to be concerned, and Joe Biden was pretty aggressive at calling it out yesterday.

SCIUTTO: Looking ahead here, we have this vote this week as well on the NDAA, basically the massive military spending bill, and it looks like the president's veto will be overridden on this, first time of his presidency. And I wonder, as you look at that, as you look at Mitch McConnell possibly standing in the way of the president's desired increase to $2,000 stimulus checks, do you begin to see, Brittany, a turn within the Republican Party, that they are ready to move on to some degree from the president, not fearful to cast votes against his wishes?

SHEPHERD: Jim, there was some thought after the election that Republicans were being so quiet about saying that Joe Biden was the rightful winner that Donald Trump is still going to be a kingmaker in the party even though he won't be occupying the throne. I think that thought in D.C. is becoming less and less relevant with the coming days. We're hearing folks like Marco Rubio, who was a virulent supporter of the president, be more aggressive in what he and his colleagues want in Congress.

You have to wonder if Republicans are seeing Trump legislate from Mar- a-Lago as a weaker position, that they're willing to work with Joe Biden. Joe Biden has a decades-long friendship with Republicans, namely Mitch McConnell, and even though publicly Mitch McConnell might not be cosigning a lot of that Biden-Harris progressive policies, I think that they have a congenial relationship that frankly McConnell doesn't have with Donald Trump. And as we see Trump even fighting with Pence and more rightwing members of the Republican Party suing pence and the administration to get the election certified back against the facts. It's just a kind of ridiculousness that more classical Republicans just don't want to deal with anymore.

And there are some assurances from the Biden world that they're willing to meet Republicans halfway and where they want to be heard, which allows them to loosen their gripe from Trump-mania just a little bit, just to get them back into the realm of reality. So I think that's hopeful for them.

CAMEROTA: About that lawsuit, John, that Brittany is referring to, that's Congressman Louie Gohmert who is suing Vice President Pence to overturn the will of the American people, and it's going to go before a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas. Will this be dismissed out of hand, or is there any way that this gums up the works somehow?

HARWOOD: This lawsuit is a crackpot lawsuit filed by a crackpot member of Congress, and it's going straight in the trash can. I don't know how fast. Maybe there's some preliminary step in which a Trump sympathetic judge moves it say long. But there is no scenario in which the vice president of the United States of the sitting administration can on his own steam reverse the electoral votes of states that voted somewhere else. It's simply not the American system.

But this indicates the lengths to which some members of the Republican Party are willing to go to try to either performatively demonstrate to Trump supporters that they're with them and willing to fight, to raise money from them, to gain a profile, or maybe some of them are actually crazy enough to believe that these things are possible. But they're not possible and that's why Joe Biden is going to become president on January 20th.

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SCIUTTO: And we should note that judges for the dozens of cases that the Trump campaign already filed, whether appointed by Trump or Democratic predecessors, almost universally with one procedural exception, rejected these cases. I wonder, though, on January 6th, Brittany, all the president needs is for one Republican senator to join with a congressmen like Louie Gohmert to gum up the works and require some challenges as those electoral votes are procedurally counted. What's the betting on that right now? Is there a viable Republican willing to stand up?

SHEPHERD: I think we've seen over the past couple of weeks Republicans like Mitt Romney willing to step against the president. Of course, not the president's favorite Republican, but I think for every Romney you're going to see one or two other Republicans in Congress feel that they are valued in standing up against the president. Just like John said, as more crackpot people come out, I think the reasonableness will have more of a voice and more of a coalition to say we just really don't care. We want to just get on with legislating.

I think it's important to note this is all happening in the backdrop of the coronavirus in these folks' constituencies. People are not just getting infected. People are dying. And frankly, Congress, even though their histrionics can be wild, they do just want to get back to work at times, at least that's what we're overhearing.

It just takes one Republican senator to continue those histrionics for one more day on the floor. Brittany, John, thanks so much to both of you.

Nashville police have released bodycam video that captures the Christmas day bombing and the chaos after the blast.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you guys OK? Where is your car?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. Go to your car.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Lord, it's amazing more people weren't hurt. Federal agents are sifting through every piece of debris as they search for clues and a motive. The extent of the damage left in downtown Nashville just difficult to put into words. CNN's Shimon Prokupecz is there. Shimon, I've covered bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have to tell you, when I look at pictures of the street there, it looks like something from another world.

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: It really does, Jim. When you think about the size of this explosion on an American street, right, we just don't see this. It's almost never that something like this happened.

And to see the devastation, I got a chance to look at some of that yesterday, and it's really just stunning. The buildings that collapsed, the cars, there were several cars that were damaged, paint melted off the cars. And all you see is debris everywhere, bricks, steel beams that fell from buildings because of the force of this explosion.

And as you said, it's really -- when you think about the fact that this was such a big explosion and people were in these buildings and they were able to get out, a lot of it because of the work of the police here getting people out quickly and then just the size and the sound of this explosion which was heard for miles outside of downtown Nashville, the fire alarms are still going off here this morning. The FBI and ATF are back out here this morning still sifting through this debris. They were out here yesterday on hands and knees going through the debris, trying to find the chemicals, the bomb making materials that were used here so they can figure out how this person put this bomb together.

The other thing on everyone's mind here is motive, why. And that is still a very big question, even for authorities. They are still trying to figure that out. There was a lot going on in this man's life. He's 63 years old. He was living a tough life they say. That's according to authorities I've talked to. So they are look at the months and weeks and days before this happened, how he was feeling, what was going on. And it could be a while before we even learn the motive. And there is

that chance, Jim, that we may never really know the motive here. It has happened in other situations, and the FBI says it could happen here as well, but they're going to continue to try to unravel that, Jim.

SCIUTTO: The Las Vegas shooter, still don't know the motive there. Shimon Prokupecz, we know you'll stay on top of the story.

CNN has just learned that President-elect Joe Biden will call out Trump administration's slow pace of vaccinations, not meeting its own goal. Dr. Anthony Fauci also weighed in on the issue with us. We're going to discuss next.

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[08:16:42]

SCIUTTO: Developing this morning, CNN has just learned that President-elect Joe Biden plans to call out Trump administration's slower than expected pace of vaccinations when he speaks this afternoon about his planned response to the worsening pandemic.

Just moments ago here on NEW DAY, Dr. Anthony Fauci conceded that vaccinations are behind schedule.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: We certainly are not at the numbers that we wanted to be at the end of December. You heard talking about 40 million doses for 20 million people. I mean, even if you undercount 2 million as an undercount, how much undercount could it be? So, we are below where we want to be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Joining us now Dr. Carlos del Rio, he is the executive associate dean at Emory University School of Medicine at Grady Health System and a contributor to the NIH Moderna trial. Also, Celine Gounder, she's an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist and member of the Biden/Harris transition coronavirus advisory board.

Thanks to both of you.

Dr. Gounder, I wonder if I could begin with you. The numbers just don't add up, right? The administration is not going to meet its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of this month, only two days to go here.

I'm curious if you think that is a systemic problem, right? That we haven't figured out how to do this quickly and broadly enough and the plan needs to be revamped?

DR. CELINE GOUNDER, MEMBER, BIDEN-HARRIS TRANSITION CORONAVIRUS ADVISORY BOARD: Jim, we've basically vaccinated 2 million people in two weeks, so that's a million people a week. At that pace, it would take us over a decade to vaccinate all Americans with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine. So that's clearly not an acceptable pace.

The president-elect has aimed to vaccinate 100 million people with 100 million doses in the first 100 days. So that's in total because it's two doses of vaccine per person, that's going to be really 50 million people vaccinated. That's still a dent in the over 300 million Americans. And so, we really do need to figure out creative strategies for how to roll out the vaccine. I think hospital systems, big hospital systems, are pretty well-equipped to vaccinate their staff and their patients. You have the retail pharmacy chains, but that's frankly not going to be enough.

You have all of those general practitioners, family doctors, primary care providers who are really left out of the planning, out of the equation here and they need to be an important part of the solution. Unfortunately, the United States our health care is very decentralized, very fragmented, it's not like, say, the NHS in the U.K., in the United Kingdom, where they have really one system that they can roll this out smoothly to, we have many, many different small systems in this country.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Del Rio, I want to get your opinion on all of that. First, I want to remind our viewers of what our leaders in the -- from President Trump on down promised and believed, I guess, was going to happen this month of December. So listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We will deliver 100 million doses of a safe vaccine before the end of the year and maybe quite a bit sooner than that.

ALEX AZAR, HHS SECRETARY: We expect to have approximately 40 million doses by the end of this year, so that would allow us to vaccinate 20 million people in December.

[08:20:01]

DR. MONCEF SLAOUI, CHIEF ADVISOR, OPERATION WARP SPEED: Overall in the month of December, between the two vaccines the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine, we expect to have immunized 20 million of our American people and keeping 20 million doses for their second immunization a few weeks later.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Dr. Del Rio, it's not 20 million. As far as we know, the latest numbers at least that we can get from Johns Hopkins is 2.1 million. So what's gone wrong?

DR. CARLOS DEL RIO, EXECUTIVE DEAN, EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: Well, I think, Alisyn, that 20 million actually are available, but, remember, those are vaccines not vaccinations. The 2 million is the vaccination and vaccines need to be administered to people and that's logistically complicated. And we should have been prepared to do this. It is not going to be something that you're going to be able to do the way we're doing it because we're never going to be done.

You have to be vaccinating about a million people a day and in order to get to a million people a day to really make a dent on this pandemic you really need to have an all out effort. What we have not seen is an all out effort. We have seen really vaccines get to the states, states get it to health care systems and each health care system is doing their only thing.

There is really not coordination, there is really not somebody saying we're going to be here this week, we're going to be here that way. We need a calculated and coordinated approach in order to reach a number of people you need to reach. Remember, we do have 20 million vaccines, we just don't have 20 million people vaccinated.

CAMEROTA: Right, but they did promise 20 million people vaccinated. That's the language that they were using and I'm not trying to point fingers I'm trying to say clearly something is wrong. I mean, it's not going according to plan.

DEL RIO: Well, clearly, something was wrong and, you know, a lot of -- we've seen throughout this administration a lot of promises that simply don't materialize. So what I would say is the vaccines, the 20 million vaccines were available. Funding was necessary to go to states, it's finally starting to go out to states, but funding was necessary to go to states, planning was necessary.

A lot of things were needed in order to build the infrastructure to deliver the vaccines. In some places, that is working, in other places that is not working. Part of the problem is a lot of people also have COVID right now and with the surge vaccinating becomes incredibly difficult because you want to be sure that you're not bringing -- as you bring a lot of people to be vaccinated you're not creating super- spreader events.

SCIUTTO: I'm curious, Dr. Gounder, if there are holes in the plan here. Dr. Fauci said, listen, slow start but he expects to see greater momentum as we get into January so that you could begin to catch up to some of these goals. The goal is 100 million people vaccinated by the end of March, but I wonder are we seeing holes here?

I mean, for instance, the dependence on private pharmacy chains, right? It's not the same thing as having a hospital system do this for hospital staff. You need resources and organization and logistics. What does the Biden administration have to do to make sure this happens quickly enough?

GOUNDER: I think this is the reflection unfortunately of really decades of underfunding of public health systems and this is why we now have finding ourselves flat-footed in our capacity to do this kind of thing. The logistics you're talking about, that is the work of state and local public health departments and because they have been underfunded, because they've suffered tremendous budget cuts following the 2008/2009 recession they've lost 50,000 public health workers across the country now. That's very difficult, frankly, to scale up at the last minute in the midst of an emergency.

So I do think we have some important lessons to be learned here. We really do need to be investing in public health. It is for public good. And I think, you know, another example of this kind of underinvestment was our being so slow to pick up on these new variants, for example, in the U.K. and South Africa.

We have the technology, we choose not to spend our money in this country on what we call genomic surveillance, that testing for these variants. We choose not to. And I think that I hope is a lesson that is learned from this pandemic.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Del Rio, what needs to change today? What can we change today to get a million people vaccinated a day?

DEL RIO: I think we need to create a national plan, a national strategy. I think involving health care systems, involving pharmacy chains, involving the private sector, the public health sector. We really need an all hands on effort to get people vaccinated. And I would love to see a plan in which literally every health district has the possibility of getting somebody vaccinated.

I know, for example, some people have said to me I live in northern Michigan and there is no CVS close to us, there is no hospital system close to us, how do we get our vaccine? And I have yet to have an answer to that question.

So, I really think it's very important that we make sure that every American has immediate access to the vaccine. One of the things we need to do, for example, is through Medicare. Medicare has data on every single American over 65. We need to make sure that Medicare links every single American to a place to get vaccinated and quite frankly by now they should have been told this is where you're going to go get your vaccine.

[08:25:01]

SCIUTTO: Yeah. Listen, it should have happened by now. I asked Dr. Fauci what needs to happen now. Here was his answer. Have a listen and I'll get your response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: Put aside this nonsense of making masks be a political statement or not. We know it works, we know social distancing works, we know avoiding congregate setting works. For goodness sakes, let's all do it and you will see that that curve will come down and we will get better control. There is no doubt about it if we do it, so let's just do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Know that works to control the surge. Dr. Gounder, will a new president change the minds of those who are still reluctant to do it? GOUNDER: I think unfortunately in a lot of these attitudes are pretty

intransigent now. We are, however, seeing some promising signs even before the president-elect taking office. So we have seen an improvement in mask wearing. The percentage of Americans who are wearing masks has increased over the course of the pandemic.

No, they're not doing it perfectly, they're not doing it all the time, but more and more Americans are doing it. So, I do think that is a ray of light. And the president-elect has called upon all Americans to really double down on our efforts by wearing masks, by social distancing, by trying to keep as much as possible to our household bubbles, at least for the first 100 days so we can get a handle on what is frankly now a surge upon a surge upon after this most recent holiday yet another surge.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Del Rio, Dr. Gounder, thank you both very much.

All right. So dozens of House Republicans siding with Democrats on those $2,000 checks for struggling Americans. A house Democrat joins us with what happens next.

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