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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Capitol Riot Warning Signs Missed?; America's Gun Violence Epidemic; Interview With North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein; Capitol Tightens Security for Biden's Joint Address Tonight; Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) is Interviewed About the Insurrection, Capitol Security and the Police Reform Bill. Aired 4:30-5p ET

Aired April 28, 2021 - 16:30   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: I mean, beyond not releasing the video, this opaqueness, this lack of transparency, even if nobody, no police officer, no deputy did anything wrong, they are hurting themselves by being so -- refusing to share this information, by being so nontransparent.

[16:30:19]

JOSH STEIN (D), NORTH CAROLINA ATTORNEY GENERAL: Police cannot succeed without the trust of the people they serve and protect.

I mean, it's axiomatic. It has to be. And the way we create that trust is transparency. Nobody expects anyone to be perfect. But if somebody is not willing to put whatever happened up to public review and rigor, and be willing to examine what happened and ask themselves, did we do everything right, is there anything we could have done differently or better, then we're not going to gain that trust.

And that has to be our driving force.

TAPPER: North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, thank you so much. Good to see you.

STEIN: Thanks, Jake.

TAPPER: President Biden is set to give his first speech to Congress, with painful reminders of the insurrection all around him, as we find out another warning was ignored before that MAGA mob attacked the Capitol.

Then: In America, you're at least 20 times more likely to die from this than if you live in another developed country -- the growing urgency to treat a different epidemic as a public health crisis.

Stay with us.

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[16:35:55]

TAPPER: Practically every day, we report on a shooting death somewhere in the U.S. You have seen it this hour. We pay attention to mass shootings if the death toll is especially horrific.

In his speech this evening, President Biden is expected to yet again push Congress for some action when it comes to guns.

CNN national correspondent Erica Hill has been looking into how we, as a society, got to this place, where too many Americans have practically become numb to the number of shootings and all the blood and the mass deaths.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ERICA HILL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tragedy on a near daily basis.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Three shootings in Atlanta area spas where at least seven people have been killed.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN HOST: Breaking overnight, another mass shooting in the U.S.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At least eight people were killed at a FedEx warehouse near the airport in Indianapolis.

DR. MEGAN RANNEY, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: I think it's difficult to not be numb. The numbers are so huge, it's almost unimaginable.

HILL: Almost unimaginable, and yet increasingly predictable.

DAVID HEMENWAY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY T.H. CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: ON average, there is probably by at least 20 times the likelihood that someone in the United States will die of a gun death than people in other developed countries.

HILL: It's not just mass shooting events, which are only a small fraction of gun-related deaths in the U.S. In 2019, more than 60 percent were suicides. And every day, an average of over 300 people are injured by a firearm, according to researchers at Penn and Columbia.

RANNEY: Our gun violence epidemic is a uniquely American problem. But the firearm holds a different place in our American mythology and history than it does in any other country. And we have to be able to hold both of those things as true.

HILL: Which is why, in a nation that now has more guns than people, there's a renewed push to address this violence as a public health crisis. The American Medical Association began using the term in 2016.

Yet recent polling from Quinnipiac finds most Americans don't agree.

(on camera): Forty-five percent of people say this is a public health crisis; 41 percent say it's a problem, but not a crisis. What do you make of that?

RANNEY: I think those who say it's not a crisis just haven't been touched by it yet. HILL (voice-over): Dr. Megan Ranney believes a public health approach

rooted in science, not politics, has proven results.

RANNEY: Back in the '70s, our rate of deaths from car crashes was at its highest ever, and we addressed it like a public health crisis. We did research. We reengineered cars. We educated people.

And by taking that approach, we reduced the number of car crash deaths by more than two-thirds.

HILL: One hurdle with this public health crisis, that critically important data.

Federal research funding for firearm-related violence nearly dried up in the mid-'90s, when the Republican-led Congress, with backing from the NRA, threatened to cut CDC funding if the agency continued to study gun injuries and deaths, accusing the CDC of promoting gun control, and effectively halting that public health research.

HEMENWAY: A big thing is, we really don't know what we don't know. There's open carry. Is that a good or a bad thing? We know that a lot of guns are stolen. What happens to these guns? We know almost nothing. We know just a little about gun training. Does gun training really matter?

HILL: What we do no, gun violence has a broad, lasting impact.

RANNEY: No one wants to see themselves, their loved one or someone in their community get hurt or killed with a gun. And when we start with that, then we can start to have discussions about, how do you make guns safer, and how do you make the people behind them safer?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HILL: Jake, Dr. Ranney believes you have to treat both the object, the gun here, and the person.

As you noted, we are expecting President Biden to push Congress when it comes to addressing guns, but the reality is, despite overwhelming public support, for example, on background checks, a recent Quinnipiac poll found 89 percent of respondents support background checks for all buyers, and 85 percent of gun owners do.

[16:40:00]

But much of that, as we know, is stalled in Congress. Where there is movement, though, Jake, is at the state level. And we're going to take a closer look at that for you tomorrow.

TAPPER: All right, Erica Hill, with the very first installment of our series on guns in America, thank you so much.

More troubling details on that MAGA insurrection of January 6, even as President Biden prepares to give his speech to Congress tonight at the scene of the crime.

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TAPPER: In our politics lead today: Just hours from now, President Biden will deliver his first joint address to Congress in the room that turned to a crime scene on January 6, the insurrection now a symbol of how divided our country has become.

And now we're learning more about blatant warning signals that were missed by officials leading up to the siege on the Capitol, as CNN's Jessica Schneider reports.

[16:45:04]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The Capitol is still fortified with fencing protecting entry points and tonight, President Biden will be there for his first address to Congress, the most high-profile event inside the Capitol since the January insurrection. And it will happen as the court is releasing new videos of the assault on three capitol police officers including Brian Sicknick who died a day later after several strokes which the medical examiner attributed to natural causes.

This new video shows one of the men accused in the assault, Julian Khater, with his arm stretch out seeming to spray officers with what prosecutors have simply described as a chemical spray. You can see at least one officer recoiling from the irritant.

OFC. MICHAEL FANONE, D.C. METROPOLITAN POLICE DEPARTMENT: How we managed to make it out of that day without more significant loss of life is a miracle.

SCHNEIDER: D.C. Police Officer Michael Fanone ran to the Capitol as soon as he heard radio calls and was almost immediately caught in the middle of a violent mob.

FANONE: I felt like they were trying to kill me. I thought that that was a distinct possibility.

SCHNEIDER: In this exclusive interview with CNN, Officer Fanone said months since January 6th have been an emotional rollercoaster especially in the efforts to downplay the violence coming from Republicans and a former president.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT: Some of them went in there and they were hugging and kiss the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships.

FANONE: Some of the terminology that was used like hugs and kisses and, you know, very fine people, like very different from what I experienced. I experienced the most brutal savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life, let alone my policing career.

SCHNEIDER: An experience that may not have been so traumatic if repeated warnings on the eve of January 6th had not been ignored by Capitol security officials. Internal e-mails obtained by CNN document how several troubling social media posts were flagged to officials. One said, we will storm government buildings, kill cops, kill security guards, kill federal employees and agents.

Despite the warnings, the email show the chief security officer for the architect of the Capitol seemed to dismiss the chatter and asked her security team to update her when there was evidence of credible threats to which an off-duty officer responded there weren't any. Officials at the Capitol have not responded to requests for comment.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCHNEIDER (on camera): And those seemingly ignored email warnings will be a crucial line of inquiry for congressional investigators who are examining the wide-range security failures leading up to and on January 6th. You know, Jake, Senate sources are telling our team that even after these months of interviews and hearings and reviewing documents, it's really still not clear why the Capitol officials were so unwilling to regard all of these social media posts as really credible and legitimate intelligence. That's a big question.

TAPPER: Yeah. I mean, a lot of us here in the bureau in D.C. thought it was going to be an ugly, violent day.

SCHNEIDER: It was.

TAPPER: Thank you so much, Jessica Schneider.

Joining us now Democratic congresswoman and former chief of police in Orlando, Florida, Val Demings.

Thanks so much for joining us, Congresswoman.

You were hiding on the floor of the House chamber where President Biden is going to speak this evening during the insurrection. What do you want to hear from President Biden tonight in reference to that deadly day?

REP. VAL DEMINGS (D-FL): Well, Jake, it's good to be with you.

And I have to say just watching the footage again and hearing the interview from the officer just brings it all back. It makes it very, very fresh. As you well know, I was in the gallery in a most unusual place for someone who spent a lot of years in law enforcement, you know, being told by the sergeant-at-arms to get down on the floor and put on our gas masks.

That's why it is so critical that we do a very thorough and complete investigation so we can know exactly what went wrong that day. We know that there were a lot of failures and the sharing of information. Preparation clearly was not planning in a proactive sense.

So, you know, I am excited about the president's address tonight and I know he's going to address that very vicious attack on our democracy, the persons who lost their lives trying to defend it and what the path looks like moving forward.

TAPPER: Take a listen to more of that emotional interview with the D.C. police officer responding to the insurrection.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FANONE: It's been very difficult seeing elected officials and other individuals kind of whitewash the events of that day or downplay what happened. A lot of us are still experiencing the emotional trauma and some are still grappling with physical injuries as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[16:50:06]

TAPPER: Your colleague Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted out that interview that that officer gave with CNN, and said he wonders if House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has an opinion on it.

What do you think of Kevin McCarthy and how he's been handling this?

DEMINGS: Well, it's very disappointing, Jake, but certainly not surprising. Look, you know, courage rises to the top, and obviously, the minority leader who started off that day pleading with the White House to do something and -- and reminding the then-president that he had incited this vicious attack on the Capitol somehow lost his way and made his way down to south Florida to basically kiss the president's ring.

Look, the U.S. Capitol police risked their lives on that day. Some of them lost their lives, and so the safety of the members of Congress, our staff, those who work in the buildings and the protection of our democracy, the U.S. Capitol police, metropolitan police and others who dropped everything and came to help us that day deserve all of the credit and gratitude for what they did on that day.

Maybe if the minority leader has -- does not get it, maybe he should listen to that interview and be reminded of the pain and trauma not just that they went through, not just on that day, but are still going through.

TAPPER: Do you think the Capitol is secure enough for this event tonight, the president speaking to a joint session of Congress? It was just a few weeks ago that a knife-wielding attacker rammed through security and killed a different Capitol police officer.

DEMINGS: I think that the leadership working in conjunction with local and federal agencies have done everything within their power to make sure that tonight is secure. I'm sure it will be.

We cannot be weary about this issue. We cannot sleep. We cannot rest. We have to remember every day the potential for attacks is always there, and we have to do everything within our power to protect the Capitol and secure the Capitol, and its grounds not just tonight, but for the days moving ahead.

That's why having this bipartisan commission to really study what went wrong so we can be properly prepared is so very important. TAPPER: You're pushing for the Senate to pass the George Floyd

policing bill which passed the House. If the only way to get something passed in the Senate under the rubric, under the label of policing reform is for Democrats to make some concessions such as having to do with qualified immunity, allowing police to continue to have qualified immunity.

Do you think that bill is worth passing?

DEMINGS: Jake, look, our country has gone through a very tough period. People are grieving, are hurting.

We're exhausted. We're talking about a profession that I did for a lot of years, law enforcement, a profession that --

TAPPER: We seem to have lost the congresswoman. I regret. I real wanted to hear what she had to say, but such is the nature -- oh, she --

DEMINGS: It will not solve all of those problems but it is a major step. It is a major step in the right direction.

And so I'm hoping under the guidance and leadership of Senator Tim Scott that we're able to protect or pass this legislation and then begin the critical work of the next step in the process.

TAPPER: We lost you during some of your answer, but just -- just a yes or no, compromising is okay with you as long as most of the bill passes?

DEMINGS: I think we've gotten to a good place right now, Jake, and I think we need to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in the Senate in its current form.

TAPPER: All right. Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida, thank you so much. Good to see you again. Sorry about that glitch.

Breaking day, Rudy raided. The former president's lawyer now responding after the feds searched his apartment.

Mass cremations and hospitals running out of oxygen. CNN is reporting from inside India during this horrific COVID catastrophe.

Stay with us.

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[16:59:15]

TAPPER: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

This hour, CNN live on the ground in India. The devastation of COVID, the desperate search for oxygen and vaccine supplies and a call for more firewood for all the cremations.

Plus, Rudy raided. Federal agents this afternoon executing a search warrant on the home and office of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. What Giuliani is saying about the raid, that's ahead.

And leading this hour, President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress just a couple hours away. The president is set to detail his attempt to massively remake the American economy trillions of dollars for elder care, child care, paid family leave, infrastructure and much more.

Earlier today, President Biden spoke at length off the record with a number of TV news anchors including me. One of the points Biden made on the record was that beyond the initial challenges of stemming the tied of the pandemic and helping those.