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Pope Francis Cancels Meetings Due to Fever; FBI Reveals 1983 Plot to Kill Queen Elizabeth; Russia Hits Medical Clinic in Ukraine; More Oath Keepers Sentenced. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired May 26, 2023 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:00]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: And a source familiar with his plans tells CNN the North Dakota Republican Governor Doug Burgum set to make an announcement on June 7. That announcement, we are told, could be a run for president. CNN previously reporting Governor Burgum seriously considering jumping into the 2024 GOP race.

Thanks for your time today on INSIDE POLITICS. Hope you have a peaceful weekend.

"CNN NEWS CENTRAL" starts right now.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Two members of a far right extremist group are being sentenced for their roles in the January 6 Capitol riot one day after the group's founder was given the steepest penalty yet among those charged in the insurrection.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: And stunning revelations from newly unearthed FBI documents revealing a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth back in the '80s while she was here in the U.S.

We are following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SANCHEZ: Two more sentences are being handed down today for members of the Oath Keepers, a far right extremist group, for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack.

One of them is Army veteran Jessica Watkins. She was just sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. Sentencing for the other member, Kenneth Harrelson, is happening this very hour. This all comes one day after the group's founder, Stewart Rhodes, was hit with the most severe sentence yet tied to the Capitol insurrection.

With a judge describing him as an ongoing threat to democracy, the unrepentant Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

CNN's Evan Perez is covering this for us. We also have former federal prosecutor Shan Wu to break down the legal aspects of this.

Evan, starting with you, how does this Watkins sentence measure up with what prosecutors were calling for? EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, the prosecutors

were asking for 18 years, and -- but it's very clear that certainly the judge believed that Jessica Watkins told a story that certainly maybe got a little bit of empathy from the judge, because of the fact that she struggled through a lot.

She identifies as a transgender person and served in the military, described how difficult that was for her and, really, at least in the end, finally said that she believed she now realizes what happened that day was wrong and that she should be punished and was willing to accept that punishment.

The prosecutors were not buying it. They're citing some of her communications, even from jail, where she was making fun of the police officer, saying, boo-hoo, and saying that they incited the riot by attacking innocent protesters. Of course, that's not what happened.

So, the judge, though, did recognize, again, that this is a person who has gone through a lot and really called out -- called out her conduct and said, you know, this is somebody who went through all of this -- all of this personal struggle and should have shown more empathy to the people who were working in the Capitol that day.

SANCHEZ: And yet, Shan, Stewart Rhodes, the ringleader of the Oath Keepers, he got 18 years. Prosecutors wanted 25. He didn't actually enter the Capitol on that day. And that's part of the argument that his lawyers were making.

These other two that are being sentenced today, including Jessica Watkins, she did enter the Capitol.

SHAN WU, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Right.

And I think this judge, Mehta, is really showing himself to be a very discerning and compassionate judge. I think federal judges often don't have as much experience sentencing people who have committed violent crimes. And he's really taking a careful look at these circumstances to distinguish.

Now, I was a little bit surprised. I thought Rhodes' sentence was a little bit light, given that the prosecutors were asking for 25 years and given Mehta's very stern rebuke to Rhodes, saying, you're still a danger and such.

A lot of times, with violent criminals, part of the point of a long sentence is having them age out, so they're less violent when they get out. But, with Rhodes, he's really a leader. It's not that he's personally violent. He's inspiring. He's talking and such. And that's the danger.

And I think the judge, appropriate -- appropriately, is recognizing the distinction between that kind of a leader, mastermind of these things, versus the people who were still more the foot soldiers in varying degrees.

PEREZ: But it's clear, though, like, the judge points out that Watkins was not just a foot soldier.

WU: Right.

PEREZ: She was definitely a leader of this Ohio group of Oath Keepers, and she was using encrypted communications. She was giving instructions on how to get rid of evidence, again, very proud of what she was doing that day.

Perhaps now she realizes what she did.

SANCHEZ: And, Shan, you mentioned that part of the judge's intent is to keep these folks behind bars for long enough so that they're not threats when they come out.

Part of it also has to do with deterrence, right?

WU: Right, yes, absolutely.

[13:05:00]

And I think, probably for the deterrence, hopefully, some people who are kind of taken up with this kind of notion and thinking, they're seeing this and realizing that it's not just like a cosplay fantasy, that they can do these things and there's no accountability for it.

And that is certainly one of the important points here, is that, even though this charge hasn't been used very often, we haven't seen this, thankfully, very often, it's sending a message out that this is real. People take this seriously. People were hurt.

PEREZ: Yes.

I mean, look, but one of the things that I think is denting that the whole idea of trying to prevent other people from doing this is the fact that you have presidential candidates who are out there saying publicly...

WU: Right.

PEREZ: ... that they're planning to pardon some of these people...

SANCHEZ: Pardon.

WU: Right.

PEREZ: ... because they don't view January 6 in the same way.

SANCHEZ: And how do you take that message, Shan, that former President Trump is speaking of people like Stewart Rhodes as if they're political prisoners, as if he's some kind of martyr?

WU: Yes, I think that's very damaging to the country. It does hurt the sort of disincentives to people, because the people most prone to falling into this...

PEREZ: Right. WU: ... are the very people that folks like Trump is speaking to, and that's definitely problematic.

SANCHEZ: While we have you both, I want to switch to another federal case, this one actually involving the former president, because, in the case about his potential mishandling of classified documents, "The Washington Post" has new reporting on these boxes that were moved the day before the FBI visited Mar-a-Lago in June.

And there allegedly had been a dress rehearsal before Trump was even served a subpoena at Mar-a-Lago by his staff moving boxes around. What's the latest on that report?

PEREZ: Well, there's a couple of really important parts of this.

One of them is this -- certainly, for prosecutors, they want evidence of the mishandling of the documents, right? "The Washington Post" says that there's examples of the former president showing these documents to people. What this case is about from the beginning, the Justice Department has said, was willful retention of national security information, the mishandling of that, right?

If you're showing it to people who are not cleared -- the former president was no longer president. He had no right to have those documents, had no right to be showing them to other people who were not cleared to see those documents. Again, we're talking about highly classified things.

The second part is obviously the obstruction part. And I think what the dress rehearsal thing that "The Post" is talking about is just the idea that, before the subpoena was issued, they were doing these discussions with NARA, with the National Archives, and that that whole episode where they were holding back documents before finally providing some boxes, that that was a dress rehearsal for what they ended up doing, again, obstructing an investigation.

SANCHEZ: Shan, what does this reporting tell you about the case that prosecutors are building revolving around the former president's intent?

Because, if we're -- if we're in a situation where I'm asking you guys to do me a favor and move some documents around before you know that federal agents are showing up, there's probably a reason for that, right?

PEREZ: Right.

WU: Exactly.

I think it shows Jack Smith's team taking a very meticulous approach. I mean, they're really using building blocks here. And to show intent, since you don't have a way to read the person's mind, you have to show it circumstantially, unless they have written out some big confession or someone took notes of your confession.

PEREZ: Right. SANCHEZ: Right.

WU: But, here, they're showing a very tight timeline, very suspicious. Boxes are being moved. Boxes, by themselves, you don't know what's in them, who told you what was in them.

But I totally agree with Evan's point that the dress rehearsal, I think, is very, very damaging for Trump and his team there, because, again, that's happening before you know that there's a request and you're kind of anticipating there's a request. Why are you anticipating? It must mean you have something and you want to practice ahead of time how you're going to avoid complying.

That's problematic.

SANCHEZ: The former president has said that he has not done anything wrong. He says he's protected under the Presidential Records Act. We will wait and see what the indictment says, if there is one.

PEREZ: All indications are that we might see something soon.

SANCHEZ: Right.

PEREZ: Like, right -- some decision is coming soon.

SANCHEZ: There's been less grand jury testimony...

PEREZ: Right.

SANCHEZ: ... and Trump's attorneys have reached out for a potential meeting as well.

WU: That's right.

SANCHEZ: Evan and Shan, thanks so much. Got to leave the conversation there and turn it over to my colleague Jim.

SCIUTTO: Overseas now, a Russian airstrike hit a medical clinic in Dnipro, this in Southern Ukraine, earlier today. The attack killed at least two people, injured 30 others, including two children.

And you can see from video from the scene showing emergency responders reacting as best they can, goodness, the buildings reduced to rubble there. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has called it an attack by terrorists.

CNN's Sam Kiley, he is in Dnipro, Ukraine.

And, Sam, I could see you there right outside. Why do officials there say this could have been even worse?

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, if you look at the building behind me, you can see the utter devastation of the building.

So, this clearly wasn't one of those rather feeble, comparatively speaking, Shahed drones that Iran has been supplying to Russia in such vast numbers. This was something a lot bigger. And the reason that the local authorities here used the word miracle for the numbers of people who were not killed here is that there was a changeover in shifts between medical staff.

[13:10:16]

So, the numbers were down. One group had left. The other hadn't quite taken up full positions and got to work yet. And, as a consequence, they believe that far fewer people were killed.

This is a psychiatric, a mental health outpatient clinic, predominantly, and it is, according to the World Health Organization -- get this statistic, Jim. Nearly 1,000 medical facilities and medical staff incidents, attacks on them by Russia in Ukraine have been recorded by the World Health Organization over the last year and a bit of this war.

Now, if this wasn't deliberately targeted, that would surprise a lot of people, because this medical facility is clearly, very clearly marked. It is known. It is marked on all Google Maps equivalents and similar. It's in a residential area.

And we saw, didn't we, in the United -- sorry -- in Syria, when the Russians were systematically exposed for their deliberate targeting of medical facilities. And now Ukrainian officials like President Zelenskyy, but also the French government, are saying what happened here amounts, Jim, to a war crime.

SCIUTTO: Do we know what kind of munition was used? In other words, would it have been a guided munition, in which case they would have had to enter the coordinates to strike this medical facility?

KILEY: We don't know yet officially from people here

As I say, a Shahed so-called drone, not really a drone, is an unguided munition only carrying about 40 kilograms of plastic explosive. That would have been bad enough, but we know, because we have been on these sorts of locations all too frequently, that something much, much bigger struck here.

In the past, Dnipro has been targeted with the S-300, Jim, which is a surface-to-air missile traditionally. It can be repurposed to attack civilian targets, and it does indeed have a guidance system, Jim.

SCIUTTO: And, as you said, this has been deliberate both in Ukraine and in Syria. Russians have a track record here.

Sam Kiley in Dnipro, thanks so much.

Joining me now to discuss the significance of all this, retired Colonel Cedric Leighton.

I called you general last time.

(LAUGHTER) SCIUTTO: But I got to stick with your actual rank this time.

(LAUGHTER)

SCIUTTO: First, let's talk about this attack in Dnipro.

I mean, sad fact is, Russia does this all the time. They deliberately attack civilian areas, in this case, a hospital, so part of a broader plan. Do you see the boldness of a strike like this perhaps at all tied to the expectations that Ukraine is about to launch a major counteroffensive?

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: I think it's definitely related, Jim.

And the reason that we see these kinds of attacks is twofold. First of all, they're responding to the possibility of a Ukrainian offensive, a counteroffensive. The other thing that's going on is, this is a deliberate Russian strategy that's been in place since the very beginning of this conflict or this phase of the conflict from February of last year.

They are targeting all kinds of civilian infrastructure. They are targeting hospitals, schools, the electric grid, the Internet service providers, all of those kinds of things, in order to make life miserable for the Ukrainians. And they're doing a pretty good job of that, unfortunately.

SCIUTTO: I mean, we should say that out loud. It's part of the Russian war plan to demoralize the civilian population. They have been doing it since the start of the invasion.

OK, so let's talk about these two presumably Ukrainian attacks, one here in Krasnodar. This in Russian territory just across the border from Ukraine. But, also, in the last 24 hours, we have an attack down here on a ship in Berdyansk.

In fact, for this one, we -- we have video of the -- the aftermath of that attack, quite significant. We have been reporting already about shaping operations, as they're known, in advance of the counteroffensive, softening up Russian defenses, striking command-and- control, communications, weapons depots, et cetera.

Do you connect attacks such as these on Russian-held territory as perhaps connected to Ukrainian plans?

LEIGHTON: Absolutely, because these kinds of attacks, which are in many cases very spectacular, they also have the purpose of demoralizing the Russians in this case.

They have the purpose of, in essence, telling the Russians that the Ukrainians are going to be coming somewhere, and they may not know exactly where. But in the case of Berdyansk right here, you have a situation where not only is this a major port, but the fact is that any type of ship that is attacked with a drone or other means...

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LEIGHTON: ... that, of course, is a big loss for the Russians.

SCIUTTO: And we saw -- we saw what appeared to be a successful unmanned naval drone attack a ship in the Black Sea.

But this is also key, it strikes me, because this is the so-called land bridge connecting Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014, and the eastern territories, really -- really the main gain for Russians since their invasion, certainly a target if -- for Ukrainian forces in any counteroffensive.

[13:15:13]

LEIGHTON: Absolutely, because what they want to do is, they want to cut this off.

Right now, the Russians, as you correctly pointed out, they can move supplies this way and this way...

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LEIGHTON: ... back and forth between Crimea and the rest of the Donbass region.

Plus, they can also move supplies into the areas that they have occupied like this. But as soon as the Ukrainians move forward and do potentially cut this land bridge off, this could cut Crimea off from the rest of Russia.

And that is a big, big deal. Of course, there's the bridge that's right about here. That's one that the Ukrainians have already attacked before.

SCIUTTO: Right, not the same as having multiple avenues to get supplies...

(CROSSTALK)

LEIGHTON: Exactly. It's much more limited that way.

So, that is a huge deal.

SCIUTTO: Cedric Leighton, thanks so much -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: Still ahead: a plot to kill the queen. The FBI unveiling a man's plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth during her visit to California in the 1980s. Some chilling details straight ahead.

Plus: closer to a deal, but still in the danger zone. The Dow soaring on reports that negotiators are near an agreement to avoid a catastrophic default. We have a live update on where things stand right now.

And some experts say it is nearly impossible, but tell that to the people aboard this flight, after a man somehow opens the plane door midair. The effort to stop him, the injuries on board and what we know about the suspect still ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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[13:20:49]

SCIUTTO: This just into CNN: A judge has temporarily blocked South Carolina's new restrictive abortion law. This comes just one day after the governor signed that bill into law, which would ban most abortions after about six weeks.

The state Supreme Court will now review the law to determine whether it violates the state's Constitution. For now, abortions are legal in the state until about 20 weeks -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: For the first time, we're learning stunning new details about an alleged assassination threat against Britain's Queen Elizabeth.

Newly released FBI documents reveal a plot to kill the queen during a U.S. visit back in 1983.

Let's go live to London now for the details with CNN's Scott McLean.

Scott, what exactly was this threat, and how seriously was it taken?

SCOTT MCLEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Boris.

So, yes, so this we know from this newly released trove of documents, which really illustrate the FBI's vigilance in responding to or keeping tabs on any even potential threats posed by groups sympathetic to the Irish Republican Army during the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Of course, during that time, they were in the midst of a three-decade- long campaign to try to terrorize the British population and the British government into reunifying Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

So, this document that we're talking about is a memo to the FBI director, and it outlines a potential threat from a patron at a well- known Republican bar in San Francisco that had some sympathies to the Irish Republican Army.

And it says that the man had a daughter who was killed, he said, with a rubber bullet in Northern Ireland and -- quote -- "claimed that he was going to attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth" and would do this either by dropping some object off the Golden Gate Bridge onto the royal yacht Britannia when it sails underneath, or would attempt to kill Queen Elizabeth when she visited Yosemite National Park.

Now, it doesn't give any more detail than that, and it's not clear what kind of follow-up there was either. It's also important to keep in mind here that this memo was marked priority, rather than the more urgent classification of immediate.

It's also, by the time it gets to the FBI, fifth-hand information. So the man allegedly launching this plot told the person who called San Francisco police, who told another police officer, who told the Secret Service, who then told the FBI.

But, of course, the fears here were not necessarily unfounded on the part of the FBI and the royal family. Of course, in 1979, Louis Mountbatten, the queen's cousin, was killed when a bomb was planted on his fishing boat. And, obviously, the IRA was out to target anything associated with the British state, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Yes, a difficult time in history.

Scott McLean from London, thank you so much -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: All right, something else we're following closely, Pope Francis has developed a fever and now canceled his meetings for today, this according to the Vatican.

You may remember he was briefly hospitalized with a respiratory infection just a few months ago, the health of the 86-year-old pontiff a concern recently.

CNN senior Vatican analyst John Allen is in Rome. He joins us now.

John, I know this is something you watch very closely here. It's always hard to tell how serious each step is. But is there serious concern in the Vatican right now about the pope's health?

JOHN ALLEN, CNN SENIOR VATICAN ANALYST: Hi, Jim.

Well, I think, at the moment, the answer to that question is no. I think the Vatican is doing everything it can to try to minimize the significance of this. I mean, as you say, the Vatican has announced that, today, the pope canceled his meetings because he has a fever.

But they have also added that that was because he had an extremely busy day yesterday. He had eight separate meetings in the morning and early afternoon. Then, in the late afternoon, he took part in a youth rally sponsored by an educational foundation that he launched when he was the cardinal of Buenos Aires, and he was simply wiped out.

They have also indicated that his upcoming public appointments, for instance, a mass he is supposed to celebrate on Monday for the Catholic feast of Pentecost and a meeting on Monday with the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, that those are all confirmed. So, what they are saying is that, right now, the pope is having some difficulty, but is fundamentally good to go.

[13:25:03]

Now, of course, we're talking about a man who spent four days at Rome's Gemelli Hospital in March with a severe bout of bronchitis, who had much of his colon removed a couple of years ago, and who suffers from sciatica.

So, obviously, even if this in itself is not that serious, one cannot help but be concerned, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Well, and perhaps cannoli -- we just showed a picture there -- will be enough to cure it. Can cure many ills.

John Allen in Rome, always good to have you on. Thank you -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: Cannoli a well-known recipe that comforts a lot of ills.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

SANCHEZ: Still to come: The House has gone home for the holiday weekend, the president heading to Camp David, all without a deal on the debt ceiling, the U.S. now dangerously close to defaulting on its debt. So,what happens next?

And later: Celine Dion canceling her entire tour because of health issues. What we're learning about her condition.

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