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The Lead with Jake Tapper

NYC Reopens Elementary Schools Today for In-Person Learning; Former Pence Adviser Says White House Pressured CDC to Put Out Data Backing Trump's Push to Reopen Schools; Trump Campaign Denies Reporting from UK Channel 4 News Calling It Fake News; Sources Say Trump And Biden Finding Ways to Get Under Each Other's Skin. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired September 29, 2020 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Is that enough to guarantee that it will be relatively safe?

DR. PETER HOTEZ, CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR VACCINE DEVELOPMENT AT TEXAS CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL: You know, Jake, in my opinion, it all depends on the level of virus transmission in the community.

So for instance, over the summer, and here in Texas, I was meeting regularly with teachers, school boards, staff, administrators, and, you know, what I said to them was -- and like they're doing in New York, the teachers were trying to follow CDC guidelines, doing incredibly creative innovative things with plexiglass and social distancing.

And what I said to them is, look, if you were doing this in a part of the country such as in northern New England where transmission is way down, I think there's a good chance you'll get through the semester without a lot of transmission. And without teachers and staff getting sick.

But if you're trying to do this in an area where there's -- back then, it was still a pretty scream high level of transmission -- it's not going to work. And it all really comes down to that.

I think, you know, what's clear talking to teachers across the country and school boards is everyone is working extra hard and doing everything they can. I'm a little more hopeful about New York City, because transmission is still down. But as you know, it's starting to creep back up. So, we'll have to see. We don't really know. But if that's really what it comes down to, is level of transmission in the community.

TAPPER: Give me -- what's the cutoff for you? What level of transmission does it need to be under in order for it to be safe enough to have kids go back to school and teachers go back to classrooms? HOTEZ: You know, I don't think that number really exists other than

true containment mode which is one new case per million residents per day. Or one new case per 100,000 residents per day.

And we really don't have that going on in much of the country. Anything above that, you know, people throw out numbers, you know, they say under 5 percent positivity, under 1 percent positivity, but, you know, we don't really know that. They're kind of rough guidelines, the lower you can get community transmission, the better.

And that's why I was pretty tough on the White House over the summer. I said, guys, you've got to bring down community transmission to containment mode. Do all you can, so then you know you can open up schools safely, as well as colleges and other events. But if you're not willing to do the hard work, you can't balance it on the backs of teachers. It's unfair. They're our national treasure and you can't expect them to fix the things that you were unwilling to fix.

And unfortunately, I could never get the White House, or the White House Coronavirus Task Force to buy into that approach and plan. They just wanted to open up schools and let it rip, no matter what, which was really very foolish and very inconsiderate and dangerous for teachers.

TAPPER: And speaking of which, former Pence Adviser and Coronavirus Task Force member Olivia Troye is backing up a "The New York Times" report claiming that the White House pressured the CDC to release more information specifically to support a political goal. President Trump's push to reopen schools. Olivia Troye said this, take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER PENCE ADVISER: It was people within the White House specifically tasking more junior-level staff to try to find alternate data. Data that fit the narrative that they wanted, which was it only affects, you know, people above the age of 75. And it doesn't affect younger school children. It was all part of the narrative, that we need to open up these schools, we need to open them up now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: What's your reaction when you hear that?

HOTEZ: That's right. So, the health of the nation, the health of teachers and students was always secondary to political expediency and political consideration. It wasn't just schools. It was about herd immunity.

We heard it all summer, right, we heard 99 percent harmless. And the hospitalizations are going up because they're catching up with elective surgeries. There was a disinformation, anti-science disinformation campaign going out of the White House and the President would rifle through advisers until he found one that said what he wanted to say and it was particularly egregious because of the schools. Again, teachers are our national treasures and, you know, the White

House was willing to put them at risk to say we can safely open up schools when the evidence did not support that, especially in these areas of high transmission.

So, it's going to be a very tough fall. I think there are still some areas of the country where we can open up schools, but there's still a lot of areas. And right now, the transmission is going way up, in the upper Midwest, in Wisconsin, the Dakotas and on the middle portion of Missouri. And that's what I'm really worried about.

TAPPER: All right, Dr. Peter Hotez, thank you as always for your expertise. Appreciate it.

The Trump campaign reportedly targeting African-American voters to dissuade them from voting. This is back in 2016. We'll talk about that next.

[15:35:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: In our POLITICS LEAD, a new report by Channel 4 News in the U.K. says that in 2016, the Trump campaign used data on voters to pinpoint who might be unlikely to vote for then candidate Donald Trump with the express purpose of then making efforts to dissuade those individuals from voting at all. Those targets, Channel 4 reports, were disproportionately black Americans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Donald Trump has long been accused of ignoring the voices of millions of black Americans.

[15:40:00]

Now, we can reveal how he has actively tried to silence them.

We've obtained the database used by Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. A vast collection of files on almost 200 million U.S. citizens. It shows what they knew and what they did. The secret tactics that helped turn Donald Trump into the president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: CNN has not seen this data obtained by Channel 4 News and we cannot verify their findings. The Trump campaign has responded to the report saying that the Channel 4 report is, quote, fake news.

Joining me to discuss is Channel 4's, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who worked on the story. Thanks for joining us, so let's dive in. According your report, 3.5 million black Americans in 2016 were targeted as voters in order to discourage them from voting. Now, the Trump campaign says it did not target black voters, is that true?

KRISHNAN GURU-MURTHY, ANCHOR, CHANNEL 4 NEWS UK: Well, it's certainly not fake news, Jake. Our analysis of this database shows as you say that these voters were analyzed and categorized into a group called

"deterrents."

Now what they could then do with this group that was disproportionately black, over 3.5 million voters, is feed that data into Facebook and other social media and target them with the kind of advertising that I'm sure you remember that suggested that Hillary Clinton was no friend of the black community.

That she regarded young black men as super predators. That Michelle Obama didn't think that Hillary Clinton would make a good president and try and turn people off, voting at all because they knew they couldn't swing them for Trump.

TAPPER: Now, just to be clear, what you're describing is not a crime. It might be sleazy, it may be even conceptually cheating, but legally, what your describing sounds perfectly OK.

GURU-MURTHY: It's not illegal. The question is, is it in the spirit of democracy to try and deter people from voting? Is it in the spirit of the Constitution of this country?

And above all, I think it's important for people to understand that this is what was going on. That's why we're bringing this information to light. Not trying to influence anything in a particular way but just say, you should know how modern campaigns have been fought and are likely to be being fought right now, as we head into this election.

TAPPER: Now Democratic voters in many key states, namely, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin did not turn out for Hillary Clinton. Now, one of the people that you showed these findings to was a Wisconsin State Senator. Let's run some of that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GURU-MURTHY: We can look here for example at ward number 160.

LENA TAYLOR (D-WI) STATE SENATOR: Yes.

GURU-MURTHY: And what we have here is the names. And addresses. Of all of those people. And how they were segmented. But what's really interesting is that a huge number of these names were marked down for deterrence.

TAYLOR: So, they specifically looked at those individuals and said, we are going to do everything to try to deter them and create ads that would do that. That is a strategic level that by no means that I know was existing. That is mind-boggling. I'm like, shocked that they had in 2016, all the way down to we need to deter that one.

Somebody who has worked this hard to strategically disenfranchise you, to discourage you. What it should tell someone is the power, right, of their vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP) TAPPER: Tell me about the response you got from people in the black community, in the United States, when they learned about this from you?

GURU-MURTHY: We all have the sense, don't we, that someone's gathering data on us. But when you get it together and present it to people, and you show them how detailed it is, how it profiles their personality. It describes the most optimist thinkers, it knows the kinds of interests they have. The kinds of issues that they might be concerned by, they're really shocked.

But what really upset the people who we took the Trump campaign data to, was the idea that they could simply be categorized. You know, they were saying, they don't know us. How can they say that about us? They've never met us. They don't know what we think.

So people were really upset not only the idea that there was this large amount of analyzed data on them but that a political party could effectively write them off, stick them in a dust bin and say we've got to deter them from voting. And a lot of them said this makes me very determined to vote in November 2020.

TAPPER: And we should just point out, I know the word deterrence is not yours. It comes from the data that you got. I believe it's the campaign's word. It's really more discouragement than actually stopping them from voting. But you also note that this was not just black voters. You found that the campaign targeted other demographic groups.

[15:45:00]

GURU-MURTHY: Yes, I mean, there's also some evidence that similar sort of deterrence campaigns may have been run in the state of Florida targeting Hispanic groups. But there's a lot of work for us to do on this data. And so, I don't want to speak before we've got everything nailed down. There's a huge amount of analysis to do. And, obviously, there were huge number of white people who were also in this deterrence category.

The point is that black voters were vastly disproportionately represented in this group. And I think the really important thing about this Jake is that this may help to explain how you can get confusing situations where you can lose the popular vote. But win the electoral college by swinging a particular state to the great shock of everyone like Wisconsin. By just micro targeting a particular audience and getting enough of them, just 23,000 in Wisconsin's case, you can change the story of the

election.

TAPPER: And we should note that we do not know that this is going on again in 2020. But if it worked in 2016, I don't know any campaign that wouldn't do it again if it already worked for them?

GURU-MURTHY: You would assume that all campaigns are using big data and are categorizing people in different ways. The NAACP who are very shocked by these findings said that they used data themselves to target people to encourage them to vote.

The question is, the motives, what they do with this data. Everybody uses data but it's what you do with it and what are your motives and what's the morality of what you're doing in that respect.

TAPPER: Right, are you encouraging people to vote for your candidate? Or are you spreading rumors that your opponent is part a demonic pedophile ring, as an example.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy -- go ahead, I'm sorry.

GURU-MURTHY: No, I mean what I was going to say, was what we also showed today was that in another group, the "persuadable" group which is overwhelmingly white, if you pump messages to them about law and order in the wake of months of anti-racist protests some of which also led to riots, you can really pull them around to the Trump message as well. So, how you use this data is really interesting.

TAPPER: Yes, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

President Trump keeps saying mail-in ballots lead to fraud. Next, we're going to take a look at what's really happening with some of your votes.

[15:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: In our 2020 LEAD with the pandemic raging, millions of Americans are expected to vote by mail this election season with election integrity slated as a topic for tonight's debate. We're likely to hear strong opinions from both candidates on the subject. CNN's Pamela Brown has more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAMELA BROWN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At tonight's first Presidential debate, President Trump is expected to continue his attacks on the election itself.

JOE BIDEN, DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: It's really a recipe for chaos. You can forget about November 3rd.

BROWN: It's one of six topics he and Joe Biden are expected to be asked about tonight. A source close to campaign tells CNN Trump plans to amplify cases of alleged voter fraud, arguing that even one case is too much, which he's already started hammering.

TRUMP: We have a big problem, and you see it every day. You see it happening every day with ballots.

BROWN: But there's no proof of that so-called big problem. Instead, Trump's rhetoric equates minor voting issues to massive voter fraud where isolated incidents are exploited. KATE HOBBS (D) ARIZONA SECRETARY OF STATE: These are baseless attacks

and they're part of the national playbook that we've been seeing around the country.

BROWN: In Brooklyn, some voters reported receiving the wrong return envelopes for their ballots. The envelopes had personal information for other voters. The New York City Board of Elections says it was a printing error made by the vendor, and new corrected ballots will be sent out.

MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO (D) NEW YORK CITY: They have to fix this immediately. This is appalling. It is so easy to avoid this mistake, and it is very easy to fix this mistake.

BROWN: And Pennsylvania Republicans are going to the U.S. Supreme Court over absentee ballots after a lower court ruled ballots could be counted up to three days after the election, as long as they're postmarked by election day. And Trump has seized on that too.

TRUMP: The only way they can win Pennsylvania, frankly, is to cheat on the ballots.

BROWN: The GOP lawyers say the extended deadline opens the door for people to cast ballots after election day, saying it would, quote, inject chaos into the system.

And in North Carolina, minorities are having their ballots rejected at an alarmingly high rate. Hispanic and black voters have had more than 3 and 4 percent of their ballots discarded compared to a little over 1 percent for white voters.

In many cases voters can still fix the errors like missing witness signatures. But rejected ballots can sway a close election.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And President Trump continues to wage his war against mail-in voting as we have seen in recent weeks. He'll be going against this warning and these bipartisan Senate intel reports that warn sitting officials to use the greatest amount of restraint in questioning the validity of the election because it could have grave national security and electoral consequences -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Pamela, thank you so much for that report.

Moments ago, President Trump landed in Cleveland, Ohio, where he will face off with Joe Biden in a couple hours in the very first Presidential debate of 2020. We'll have more on that right after we squeeze in this quick break. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:55:00]

TAPPER: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. We are continuing this hour with the 2020 LEAD. President Trump just

arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, where in just a few hours we will see history made. President Trump and Joe Biden in their first presidential debate against each other. And sources tell CNN it could very well get nasty with both men preparing ways to get under each other's skin, and that's of course just the beginning. The debate is happening during a time of crisis in this nation with so much at stake.

The U.S. still struggling to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. It has killed 205,000 people in this country, infected more than 7 million. Plus, of course, there is a suffering economy, a reckoning on racism, a Supreme Court nomination battle, all topics tonight.

Plus, the new details of President Trump's tax avoidance as reported by "The New York Times" will almost assuredly come up.