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3 Killed, About 100 Injured From Texas Tornado; Millions Of Americans' Personal Data Exposed in Cyberattack; Officials: Russian Hackers Hit U.S. Govt Agencies; Secy. Of State Blinken Heads To China Amid Tensions; Putin: Tactical Nukes In Belarus Could Be Used; Teamsters Vote To Authorize UPS Strike. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired June 16, 2023 - 13:30   ET

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

[13:30:00]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Watch this. This video taken in Perryton shows just how quickly this tornado formed, one of seven reports across three states of tornados yesterday.

Let's take you now to Perryton with CNN's Lucy Kafanov, who's there for us right there by the border with Oklahoma.

Lucy, you're hearing from neighbors who have some incredible stories of survival.

LUCY KAFANOV, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Boris. You mentioned how quickly this tornado formed. And that is what really took folks off guard here. This is part of a country where people are used to experiencing things like tornadoes. There are tornado shelters here.

But one resident I spoke to said she was driving in the evening, it was raining, it started to hail. She was not expecting the tornado to hit so quickly.

Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED TORNADO SURVIVOR: It started raining a little bit, and it had a little bit of hail, like five or six little pelts of hail every thousand raindrops. It was just barely sprinkling.

And all of a sudden, the tornado formed, and it just dropped on us. It came out of nowhere. There was no sirens, no time to get to shelter.

There was a time where I thought that I was going to die, and I was going to leave a lot of things undone. I know there's people here who died today serving our community.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAFANOV: You can hear the emotion in her voice. This is a close-knit community of over 8,000 people. People know one another. And I want to give you a sense of what's happening on the ground right

now. The scale of the devastation is vast. This is downtown Perryton. This area took a direct hit.

This morning, it was eerily quiet. Now we are seeing construction crews, cleanup crews, residents coming back.

If look behind me, that's Main Street. That mangled mass of metal, the red and white structure, was a cell phone tower. I believe we have the photos comparing the image of what it used to look like before this tornado hit, nearly twice the size. It looks like it was snapped in half by a child, but it's not. This is a facility.

The power is still out. A lot of people are injured, dozens of people are injured. And people are left homeless trying to pick up the pieces from this devastating aftermath.

SANCHEZ: A tough road to recovery for that community.

Lucy Kafanov, in Perryton, Texas, thank you so much for that.

Brianna?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Boris, we have new details on that global cyberattack that has impacted the U.S. government. This thing is huge. CNN has now learned that the personal data of millions of Americans has been exposed.

Officials in Oregon say the breach affected 3.5 million people there with driver's licenses or I.D. cards. And also anyone with that documentation in Louisiana.

The sweeping attack has compromised multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy.

CNN's Natasha Bertrand has more on this for us today.

I think the real issue is that's just maybe the tip of the iceberg here.

NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER: Exactly, right. We still don't know the full extent of this cyberattack, which has affected hundreds of companies across the U.S., federal agencies, major universities, including Johns Hopkins and Georgia's state-wide university system, and companies around the world.

And what we are told by federal officials is that it doesn't appear right now like these hackers have been able to take anything from U.S. government agencies that is significant. But they're still investigating here.

So, what seems to have happened, just to take a step back, is that there is a file transfer software that many, many companies and entities in the U.S. and around the world use to transfer files.

And what happened was hackers actually found a vulnerability in that software. So, that allowed them to kind of burrow in and take advantage and hack all of these different entities and companies.

In terms of who's responsible, we're told that it is a Russian cybercriminal group, which specializes in ransomware.

They are apparently trying to extort their victims. They have posted on their Web site that they have demanded money and they have continued when they've not gotten that money to post more victims and threaten them.

And, you know, it's unclear whether that is the extent of it because now that this software vulnerability is out there, other criminal hackers can also take advantage of it. That's what U.S. officials say.

So, still trying to figure out really the scope of this. The Department of Energy so far is the only federal agency that's come out and said we were targeted in this.

But at the same time, you know, the Russian cyber criminals, they have said, interestingly on their Web site, we don't want federal government data. We've erased it all. Don't bother contacting us.

It seems like they're only focusing on the private sector -- Brianna?

KEILAR: So, anyone, any of these entities, private or public, who downloaded this software also downloaded this vulnerability.

BERTRAND: That is essentially what they're saying. The company that owns this software, they have actually found a second vulnerability --

[13:35:03]

KEILAR: Wow.

BERTRAND: -- that they are now trying to patch.

So, they've issued this warning to consumers saying, look, you need to update your systems now because we're trying to fix this but we still don't know whether you might have these hackers or attackers already in your system.

KEILAR: Wow. That is amazing.

Natasha, thank you for taking us through that.

Boris?

SANCHEZ: Secretary of State Antony Blinken heading for a high-stakes trip to China. So can both nations move forward after years of escalating tensions? We're going to discuss next on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:39:59]

SANCHEZ: So, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Beijing this weekend. He becomes the first cabinet official under the Biden administration to travel to China and the first U.S. cabinet member to do so since 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Remember, Blinken was originally set to travel to China in early February, but he postponed his trip because of that Chinese spy balloon that violated U.S. airspace before it was eventually shot down.

Now, the State Department says that Blinken is going to raise some serious concerns about China's role in the fentanyl crisis, in the war in Ukraine, and a major sticking point between the two nations, the issue of Taiwan.

An especially heated topic when you consider that there have been not one, but two, military-related incident in recent weeks around the hotly contested South China Sea.

The latest incident happening just earlier this month while the U.S. was conducting a joint military exercise with Canada. This video shows a Chinese warship cutting dangerously close to a U.S. Navy destroyer. The ships coming within 150 yards of each other.

The U.S. says the Chinese were acting recklessly, while China is blaming the United States. You see how close the two were right there.

And in the air over the South China Sea last month, a Chinese fighter jet cutting directly in front of a U.S. joint reconnaissance aircraft, forcing it to fly through the aircraft's wake turbulence.

In this video, released by the U.S. military, you can see how the turbulence affects the flight, with the cockpit visually shaking, this disrupting the aircraft.

Obviously dangerous, dangerous moments that could lead to potential escalation.

Brianna?

KEILAR: Very concerning stuff.

Joining us now is David Sanger. He is a CNN political and national security analyst and a White House and national security correspondent for "The New York Times." We're also joined by CNN military analyst and retired U.S. Army General James "Spider" Marks.

David, last month, in Japan, we heard from President Biden. He was predicting a thaw in these fraught U.S./China relations. Are we seeing that yet? Is that the goal here? And is that possible at this point?

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL & NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, that's certainly the goal. The effort is to try to rebuild some sort of sense of communication.

As Spider will tell you, the military to military communications have been non-existent here. The diplomatic communications have been pretty well frozen, in part, because of the spy balloon.

But, in part, because it's just a fundamental disagreement about what the future of the relationship would look like.

With the U.S. saying, look, we can compete in a whole number of ranges, technology, trade, even some security issues, but there are areas where we can go cooperate.

And the Chinese saying, you can't really have a bifurcated kind of relationship like that.

KEILAR: How concerning is it to you, General, when you look at how much those relationships between the military side of things have deteriorated?

GEN. JAMES "SPIDER" MARKS, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: It's really troubling. It's really troubling.

Look, we have scar tissue that's been acquired over the years, where if there's an incident, if there's a challenge at the very highest levels, there will be open, there will be very honest and calm communications.

As David indicated those don't exist anymore. And that's the biggest concern.

I mean, you can mix into this the conventional challenges that we see across the services, like we just saw these incidents that occur. Then you can escalate those up to the nuclear side.

And it's very, very troubling. You have to be able to have open and transparent coms.

And we've got to be able to get around the fact that there are two sides to the coin. You can de-risk, but there is codependency. We have to learn to coexist.

KEILAR: Because when you don't have those communications, that's where a misunderstanding can snowball.

SANGER: Accidents occur. Like this one right here. Very, very unprofessional and very troubling.

KEILAR: So, at this meeting that we're going to see, you know -- it's funny, having covered the White House in the past myself and obviously you have covered it extensively.

These meetings, these diplomatic meetings between -- whether it's the White House level or it's the State Department, they can be kind of -- for lack of a better term -- boring. They can be very predictable between America and China.

And I wonder, how do they really address these thorny issues? These videos that we see that are almost eyepopping? How do they really get at what we're seeing here?

MARKS: I think the first thing they try to do is establish what some of the rules of the road are. During the balloon incident, there were two really interesting factors

that came out of this. The first was, when the U.S. tried to pick up the phone and say, hey, what's going on with this, they basically got no answers.

The second is, there was some indication that the Chinese leadership may have believed parts of the official explanation that this was a weather balloon. It wasn't, right?

[13:45:01]

So, there's a question of, what was the discussion going on inside the Chinese hierarchy?

And I think part of what Secretary Blinken's trying to do here is to make sure that the intel the U.S. has is made clear to the hierarchy.

And I think the second question is, as suggested, was that if you can't talk about this stuff openly and instantly, then you have the possibility of a big problem.

You may remember that the first big foreign policy crisis that hit George W. Bush was a collision with an EP-3. And then at that time, they tried to establish some means of communication. They are not working 22 years later.

KEILAR: How does the economic situation internally in China play into their relations right now with the U.S.?

SANGER: Well, you know, Brianna, this is a really fascinating question. Every time we've been dealing with China through the past number of years, they've been at 6 percent or 7 percent growth.

And so the security side could easily out voice the economic side because they didn't have a whole lot to lose.

Right now, they're down at 1 percent or 2 percent growth. So there is a big split inside China with some officials saying we've got to get back on track with the U.S., you can't risk decoupling because we need the growth back.

KEILAR: Really tough situation there right now.

I do want to talk about Russia with you, General, because, earlier today, you had Vladimir Putin saying that this first tactical nuclear weapon that we knew was heading for Belarus, that it has, indeed, arrived there.

And he's also said that it could be used if there's an existential threat to Russia. That's the line we always get from Russia.

But you have Tony Blinken responding to this.

So, let's listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ANTONY BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE: We'll continue to monitor the situation very closely and very carefully. We have no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture. We don't see any indications that Russia's preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

The president said again this week that we remain committed to the defense of NATO, every inch of its territory.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: What do you make of this situation that we are in with this nuclear weapon and with Russia?

MARKS: Serious. Any time -- whether it's bluster or not, you never really know -- we take this extremely seriously. So, we have to pay attention to it.

The challenge is the Russians have different rules of engagement in terms of when and how they would release their nuclear weapons.

In this particular case, it's a tactical nuclear weapon. In my mind, it's a distinction without a difference here. It's a nuke.

And obviously our approach toward that is much more controlled. It comes from the commander-in-chief down to an engagement platform.

What is happening in the Russian sense is that's delegated down to the theater commander, when he decides he wants to use it to solve a tactical problem.

So, there is a difference here between what Putin's saying, existential threat, and a tactical commander on the ground saying, hey, we have to take out a particular target to improve my position.

We're worlds apart, but at least we communicate. Again, we had those communications in place. We have to use them.

KEILAR: Do you see an end game right now in Ukraine?

SANGER: I don't. I see the end game being some form -- sadly, some form of a negotiated settlement. We have to see how this offensive take place. So, we're all praying, hoping, for the best. We have to be cautious and clear eyed about it.

KEILAR: All right, we'll be watching that.

David Sanger, General Marks, really appreciate your time.

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: Boris?

[13:48:41]

SANCHEZ: Coming up, it could be an epic curveball for the economy. The Teamsters Union just voting to approve a strike at UPS. I'll tell you what they want when we come back on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:53:38]

SANCHEZ: This just into CNN. Members of the Teamsters Union overwhelmingly voted to approve a massive strike at UPS. Now, if a strike does happen, it would be the largest against a single employer in U.S. history.

A prolonged work stoppage could severely damage the economy as UPS is the nation's biggest delivery service.

Let's bring in CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich.

Vanessa, what does this vote mean and how soon could a strike happen?

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS & POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: This vote result was largely expected both by the union and UPS. And 97 percent of members who voted, voted "yes" to authorize a strike on August 1st, if the union and UPS do not come up with a new agreement.

And these Teamsters represent 340,000 people who work in UPS warehouses and who do package deliveries by truck every single day.

UPS says they believe they can come to an agreement before that August 1st deadline. They talk, and reaching deals on certain key issues, like getting air conditioning into trucks. They were able to come up with an agreement on that.

But for the union, there's still outstanding issues, like wages. They point to record profits that UPS has seen over the last five years of their current contract. In 2018, UPS pulled in $6.3 billion, up almost 80 percent last year to $11.3 million.

[13:55:07]

But this would have impact on millions of people if -- big if -- this strike were to take place. And 6 percent of the U.S. GDP moves by UPS trucks. And UPS handles about 18 to 20 million packages every single day.

Now there are still seven weeks to go in the negotiations. The two sides are still negotiating.

The last strike happened more than 25 years ago in 1997. That strike went on for about 15 days, Boris.

But what this vote does is really put pressure on both sides to come up with a deal. And it really signals to the union that members are serious about walking away with everything that they're asking for.

Seven weeks to go. That's a long time to negotiate. But oftentimes, Boris, these deals come down to the last 24 hours -- Boris?

SANCHEZ: Yes. That looming deadline and potential ramifications that often has consequences for those involved.

Vanessa Yurkevich, thank you so much.

Brianna?

KEILAR: Ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL, the gunman who killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue was convicted on all charges against him. We are live outside the courthouse next, on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)