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The Lead with Jake Tapper

1.4 Million New Jobs in August, Unemployment Rate Falls to 8.4 Percent; Interview with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia; 7 Rochester Officers Suspended, Video Emerges Five Months After Killing of Daniel Prude. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired September 04, 2020 - 16:30   ET

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

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: In our money lead, new job numbers today. The U.S. is adding 1.4 million jobs in August. That is a slight decrease from July.

And the overall unemployment rate fell below double digits, fell below 10 percent for the first time since March. But America is still down 11.5 million jobs since the beginning of this pandemic.

I want to be joined by Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.

Nice to see you, Secretary. Thank you for coming on.

EUGENE SCALIA, LABOR SECRETARY: Pamela, a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

BROWN: So how do you view this latest jobs report?

SCALIA: It's a very good report. It's good news to take into the Labor Day weekend, Pamela. Greatly beat expectations up for this report. As you said, 8.4 percent unemployment, much lower than virtually anybody was predicting that we would be.

The Congressional Budget Office said that in the third quarter of this year back in April, they predicted we'd be at 16 percent unemployment. We're at 8.4.

So it's very good news. You know, adding those 1.4 million jobs, we're seeing unemployment decline across all demographics. We're seeing jobs increasing in a lot of different sectors.

So, it's very good news. But there's definitely work to be done. And I think there's room to grow too. I think that the strength we saw in the economy before the virus is coming back and we'll be adding more jobs in the months ahead.

BROWN: All right. So, let's talk about that, first of all, there are still 11.5 million people who are still out of work since before the pandemic who are struggling as we speak. What is your message to them as they hear you praise the latest jobs

report?

SCALIA: My message, Pamela, is twofold. First is that we're going to get those folks back to work. We are growing the economy at a much more rapid pace than people had been projecting. This president built an extraordinarily strong economy once, and he's now back at it.

You know, in the last financial downturn, the great recession, we had unemployment above 8.5 percent for almost three years. This time around, it was above that number for just four months.

So, so, we can turn around. But the second thing is the president is determined to continue to support those who are unemployed until they do get back to work. You know, Congress couldn't get its act together and pass additional federal unemployment support back in July. The president established a program on his own using FEMA funds.

So, we want to put people back to work --

BROWN: Right --

SCALIA: -- but the president's also determined to support them while they remain unemployed.

BROWN: But the bottom line is the millions of Americans who were relying on that $600 before are not getting that money. And a lot of people are struggling as a result because of this impasse with the White House and Congress.

And you have a very optimistic view looking forward. But are you concerned that these jobs gains, this rebound in jobs will be offset by the recent jobs cuts that are coming from big industries like airlines and retail?

SCALIA: Well, there -- again, there is still progress that we need to make. We know that too many Americans remain out of work. But on the whole, the economy is clearly putting jobs back.

And take health care. We're still down 700,000 jobs in the health care sector from where we were in that extraordinary economy in February. But we can put those jobs back. We know we know those jobs. We know the health care sector will grow, and other sectors are the same way.

And, you know, the president had built this amazing economy with record-low unemployment for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans before -- and I think we really ought to be encouraged by the progress.

[16:35:03]

Pamela, if I could emphasize just one of the things as we head into the Labor Day weekend, and that's -- let's be smart and careful too.

BROWN: Yeah.

SCALIA: The virus is still there. We're making progress against the virus in the last few weeks. Good news there, too.

But let's not go wild the way happened a little bit over Memorial Day weekend.

BROWN: Well, let's talk about that because the economy and the pandemic, they are intertwined. We are in the middle of a pandemic that is still ravaging this country. Experts say one of the best ways to get the economy going again is to get the pandemic under control. The latest modeling shows 122,000 lives could be saved with universal mask wearing.

Would you like this administration to do more to encourage mask wearing?

SCALIA: I think what the administration has been doing to combat this virus has been very strong. What we're seeing right now is a decline in cases --

BROWN: Right, but I'm talking about mask wearing in particular.

SCALIA: I think masks are appropriate in many contexts. And I think that's an important message to get out. But when you look at the progress --

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: But would you like the president to be more direct on that? Because, as you know, he just mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask.

SCALIA: The president's worn a mask. He's urged masks. He's not going to issue a mandate.

(CROSSTALK)

SCALIA: But when you look at the progress -- here are the facts. Here are the facts.

Cases are declining. Hospitalizations are declining. Deaths are declining. Positivity rates are declining.

We now have an extraordinary new test.

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BROWN: They plateaued. The deaths have plateaued as have cases. And now there's a projection that around 3,000 people could die a day in December.

You know, again, it's a projection, but it's plateaued, 40,000 a day, around a thousand a day in deaths.

SCALIA: Pamela, any fair assessment of where we stand now against the virus versus where we were in July or where we were in April says we're making great progress.

Are we done? No, but the vaccine also is moving along much more quickly than had been projected with three different candidates in the third phase and promising results there too.

So, my point was the virus is out there, we do need to be disciplined and careful. That's part of how we reopen safely and effectively. But we've been doing that. And I think we can keep doing it.

BROWN: And it is an important message that we are heading into a holiday weekend. We have seen surges after other holiday weekends. And it's important for people to take those measures to protect themselves and others.

All right, Secretary Scalia, thank you for coming on. Have a nice weekend.

SCALIA: Have a good Labor Day.

BROWN: Well, we knew what it meant to get into, quote, good trouble. Up next, what late Congressman John Lewis would say to the protesters pushing for racial injustice in America right now?

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BROWN: In Minneapolis, it was George Floyd. Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake. And now, it's a demand for justice in Rochester, New York, over the killing of Daniel Prude.

Well, today, Prude's daughter told CNN suspending the seven officers involved in her father's homicide is not enough.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JUNERA PRUDE, DANIEL PRUDE'S DAUGHTER: I just want to make sure that the officers that did this are in jail or something. This was traumatizing. I have to live with this for the rest of my life.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Prude died back in March. His family's attorneys pressed for police body camera video. That is why we are now seeing the video where officers put a spit sock over Prude's head.

Police say he was spitting and told officers he had coronavirus. They had then pinned him down. And the medical examiner's report says Prude had PCP in his system. As protesters took to the streets last night in Rochester, police arrested eight people and say two officers were hurt.

I'm going to bring in CNN's Athena Jones.

And, Athena, this video evidence reveals several more details not previously known publicly.

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Pam. That's exactly right. And, look, Prude died five months ago. Without the release -- the

public release of this body camera video, we wouldn't be talking about this case. And we've seen this happen time and again where it took cell phone video from a witness or police body cam footage to bring attention to a case like this.

And now the union says they were told in late July that some sort of police body camera footage was going to be released. But they weren't told that it involved a civilian death at the hands of police. Here's more of what the union president Michael Mazzeo had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL D. MAZZEO, PRESIDENT, ROCHESTER POLICE LOCUST CLUB: Had we known at that point in time, and that's July 31st, that this was going to be released, we would have raised a concern or at least asked the question is the investigation complete? I still don't have an answer why that was done.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: Now, Mazzeo went on to say that police did exactly what they were trained to do. He also said the release of the video was reckless and prejudicial and it doesn't show the whole picture. But is often the case, the video does shows more than officials knew at first. Even Rochester's mayor was told that Prude died of an overdose.

And you can see in the video that there is more to the story. That is why people are protesting in the street -- Pam.

BROWN: All right. Athena Jones, bringing us the latest there. Thanks so much, Athena.

And I want to bring in Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who is out with a new book called "His Truth is Marching On", profiling the late Congressman John Lewis.

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Thank you so much for coming on, Jon. Good to see you.

As we were discussing with Athena, look at this video. People are marching right now in these live pictures in Kansas City, Missouri. Put what we're seeing today, right here in this live video, with racial justice protest, into historical context for us.

JON MEACHAM, AUTHOR, "HIS TRUTH IS MARCHING ON: JOHN LEWIS AND THE POWER OF HOPE": Well, the country came to its fullest moral account thus far because of marchers, because of nonviolent protesters who, in the 1950s and 1960s, believed that America had to live up to its word, that it had to make the ideal real.

And led by John Lewis and Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Diane Nash and so many others, they forced the country to reckon with this gap that we were -- folks who looked like me were far too comfortable allowing to exist in the life of the nation.

And I think what John Lewis would say to us today is, you keep marching, you keep speaking up and speaking out, if you see something that is unjust and wrong.

And that's the legacy, the living legacy, of someone like Lewis, who, as a very young man, helped bring a great and mighty nation to a place where it actually lived up to its ideals.

BROWN: And that is all detailed in your book about John Lewis.

I wanted to get your thoughts on what we heard from the president this week. He once again says he doesn't believe in systemic racism, particularly in police. Break that down for us.

MEACHAM: Well, it just means the president is speaking when he's talking. It doesn't mean it's connected to any thought. I'm afraid that's the lesson of the last four or five years.

There's clearly structural and systemic racism in this country. There is structural and systemic partisanship. There is structural and systemic inequality.

And the task of the nation has to be, are we going to enact the implications of what Thomas Jefferson wrote when he wrote what became the most important sentence ever originally rendered in English, that all men were created equal?

The story of the country, however slow, however tragic, however bloody, however painful, however provisional, has been a gradual widening of the understanding of what equality must be.

And so to have a president who denies the facts of the matter is unfortunate, but we can't let it be dispositive. We have a chance in about 60 days to change that conversation from one that is reactionary and exploits divisions to one that is hopefully constructive and tries to heal those divisions.

BROWN: And you wrote in your book -- quote -- "To Lewis, witness and determination brought the country forward, not forward to the promised land, not yet, but still forward."

What do you think John Lewis would say to those who might be exhausted and think, why do we keep speaking up, showing up to protest, nothing is changing? And what do you think he would say to those who are engaged in violence, violent protesting?

MEACHAM: Well, the people who get tired, he understood. A body gets tired, he would say. He himself had two years where he went to New York in 1966 to '68 in a kind of exile, a kind of sabbatical from the incredibly arduous work of the civil rights movement.

Remember, John Lewis was arrested 40 times. He was beaten again and again. He was willing to be martyred for an American and a Christian (AUDIO GAP). What he would say to those who are violent is, this is not the way, that history, experience, and the philosophy of love in action suggests that nonviolence is the most efficacious way forward.

That is easy for someone like me to say.

BROWN: Yes.

MEACHAM: And I'm not -- I'm not lecturing anybody. I'm just...

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: He would say, the good trouble I was talking about was not violent trouble.

MEACHAM: Absolutely.

And it was -- again, don't listen to me. Listen to John Lewis. And Diane Nash told me -- because I asked about -- nonviolence is so hard. It's counterintuitive to the entire human experience, right? Love your enemy? Who the hell wants to love your enemy? They're your enemy.

But what the civil rights movement taught us, and what John Lewis and Diane Nash and others have embodied ever since, Andy Young, have embodied, was insistence that radical change required reversal of under -- of ordinary human understandings.

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And that's what the civil rights movement was about. And I know it's exhausting. I mean, I intuitively know. I haven't experienced it. I'm a white Southern Protestant man. Things tend to work out for me in this country.

But what we have to do is buy fight, fight, fight for a country where things work out for everybody.

BROWN: All right, Jon Meacham, congratulations on your book. You also just launched a new podcast called "It Was Said."

Jon, thank you so much for coming on.

MEACHAM: Thank you.

BROWN: Well, Kanye West has a song called "No Mistakes, but, up next, why his mysterious presidential run is already making tons of mistakes and who's behind them.

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BROWN: Turning to our 2020 lead.

When Kanye West -- famously saying, who going to stop me, he may not have been expecting the answer to be judges in Arizona and Virginia. Those judges ordered the rapper's name off their state's November presidential ballot.

But, as Sara Murray reports, West's presidential bid maybe less about actually becoming president, and more about helping someone else on the ballot win.

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SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Despite his predictions, Kanye West is not going to be the next president.

So far, the rap superstar has only made the ballot in 11 states, missing so many others, he can't mathematically win. Yet, across the country, GOP operatives and lawyers have bolstering West's bid, betting his campaign will skim off support from Joe Biden and boost President Trump's chances of getting reelected.

QUENTIN JAMES, FOUNDER, COLLECTIVE PAC: Unfortunately, I think it's more of a, ploy that Republicans are kind of using Kanye to diminish Joe Biden's votes.

MURRAY: Critics like Quentin James, who works to elect black candidates, say GOP efforts to prop up West are particularly shameless, in light of West's diagnosis with bipolar disorder, which is marked by swings between mania and depression.

West has said he does not take medication for it.

JAMES: It's really sad. And we wish Kanye the best in terms of getting his mental health under control. But, again, this is not what we want to see in politics.

KANYE WEST, MUSICIAN: I'm not running for president. I'm walking.

MURRAY: Still, Republicans are turning up to help West. One source tells CNN that GOP operatives believed they had the Trump campaign's blessing to aid West's efforts.

GOP lawyer Lane Ruhland, who's also doing legal work for the Trump campaign, dropped off signatures for West's attempt to get on the ballot in Wisconsin. Mark Jacoby, an executive at Let the Voters Decide, is helping West collect signatures in multiple states. He previously pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud for his work for the California Republican Party.

A representative for the company said any focus on Jacoby's record "has nothing to do with any political campaign and is misplaced and irresponsible."

GREGG KELLER, REPUBLICAN CONSULTANT: Hello, American conservatives.

MURRAY: Half-a-dozen GOP operatives say at the heart of the effort is Gregg Keller, a Republican and former executive director of the American Conservative Union, who has been recruiting other Republicans to get involved.

Ruhland, Keller and half-a-dozen others involved in the campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

While West has polled around 2 percent with registered voters, any third-party candidate can pose a risk in a tight race.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Kanye West will not garner enough votes to become president, but he can garner enough votes to determine the outcome of this election.

MURRAY: The president and his campaign insist they have nothing to do with West's effort.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I like Kanye very much. No, I have nothing to do with him getting on the ballot.

MURRAY: West, whose campaign has failed to file a required financial disclosure and did not respond to a request for comment, also brushed aside rumors that he's in cahoots with Republicans.

QUESTION: They saying that they are paying you to do what you're doing to be a distraction.

WEST: Bro, pay -- nobody pay me.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: You got more money than Trump.

WEST: I got more money than Trump.

MURRAY: As West had set off controversy after controversy in recent years, including by supporting Trump...

WEST: But I love this guy right here. Let me give this guy a hug.

(LAUGHTER)

WEST: I love this guy right here.

TRUMP: And that's from the heart. I didn't want to put you in that position. But that's from the heart. Special guy.

MURRAY: He's also been open about his bipolar disorder in interviews and his music.

His campaign kickoff prompted concerns...

WEST: We are trapped in a loop. We are going to break that trap.

MURRAY: ... as West broke into tears talking about abortion and his relationship with his family.

After, his wife, Kim Kardashian West, asked for compassion, writing: "We, as a society, talk about giving grace to the issue of mental health as a whole. However, we should also give it to the individuals who are living with it in times when they need it the most."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MURRAY: Now, part of the reason people are skeptical about West's campaign is because he's voiced support for President Trump, and he's also close to Jared Kushner.

In fact, the two of them met up in August in Colorado, and Kushner said it was just a policy discussion -- Pam.

BROWN: Sure did.

All right, Sara Murray, thanks so much for that.

And be sure to tune in this Sunday morning to CNN's "STATE OF THE UNION." Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris sits down for a CNN exclusive. That is at 9:00 a.m. and noon Eastern.

I'm Pamela Brown, in for Jake Tapper.

Our coverage on CNN continues right now. Have a great weekend.

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