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California Hit With Historic Rain, Floods, Mudslide And A Quake; Trump To Surrender; Devastation On Maui; Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired August 21, 2023 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:26]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Heavy rains, severe wind, flooding and an earthquake, California can't catch a break. This morning about 25 million people are under flood warnings across the Western US. The damage Storm Hilary has left in its wake and where it's headed now.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: This is the week, Donald Trump and 18 others now charged in Georgia will have to surrender turning themselves in to Atlanta's Fulton County Jail just as one of the accused makes a big move to try to get his charges dropped.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: President Biden on his way to Maui with more than 800 people still unaccounted for after the deadly wildfires. I'm John Berman with Kate Baldwin and Sara Sidner, this is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SIDNER: This morning, Storm Hilary is now moving north as a post tropical cyclone after shattering rainfall records in Southern California and leaving behind life threatening flooding. Flood watches remain in place for 25 million people up and down the West Coast.

Look at those pictures out of Cathedral City California. This is video overnight showing part of the California desert, yes, underwater. That's right. That's near Palm Springs where there have been three swift water rescues, and officials have declared a local emergency as 911 lines are still down. Palm Springs received half a year's worth of rain in just six hours yesterday, turning golf courses into lakes.

Meanwhile, a treacherous scene playing out in the San Bernardino mountains.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Holy (inaudible). Go.

SIDNER (voice-over): You hear him saying go because a huge flood of debris has just come barreling down. That's a mudslide there. And these -- firefighters are forced to run as it buried roads on both sides of their fire station.

(Inaudible)

(END VIDEO CLIP) SIDNER: Now seeing this in-person, they are incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous. Now, just as Hilary slammed the region of magnitude 5.1 earthquake also shook parts of Southern California.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER (voice-over): You can see those bottles shaking there and then people running around. No injuries, thankfully, reported in that earthquake. But just north of Los Angeles, a portion of a road broke off as traffic moved right next to it. CNN's Stephanie Elam has been there all night long. She joins us now from Cathedral City just east of Palm Springs.

Stephanie, it's finally light out. We are finally getting to see this in the daylight. What have you seen and have been experiencing with you and your crew as you've been there for the past several dozen hours?

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's a mess. Now that the sun is coming up, we're getting a better idea of it. And I want to add to those stats that you were just giving us, Sara, because this actually was the rainiest day ever in the summer in 100 years of data in Palm Springs. And almost a year's worth of rain fell in a 24 hour period.

So what -- that's going to cause a mess and just to put into perspective, how much of a mess, take a listen to what the mayor, Grace Garner, of Palm Springs is saying about current conditions here in this area. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GRACE GARNER, PALM SPRINGS MAYOR: Right now we have flooding on all of our roads. There's no way in or out of Palm Springs, and that's the case for the majority of the Coachella Valley. We're all stuck. Our major freeway, the I-10, is also closed in both directions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ELAM: So now just to show you what the mayor was talking about, take a look at this. Now that the sun is out you can really tell. There are two cars there that are completely inundated in mud. And this is a way that would be a thoroughfare to get to the Interstate 10, but the interstate 10 has been inundated with mud. So it is also shut down in both directions right now because of all of this thick mud.

[09:05:02]

We can see the waters getting pulled out through here just took out this road.

Let me show you how thick this mud is. I'm going to come down here and hold on to this pole here so I don't fall. But this is what cars we're trying to get through. This is why, and it's such a foot in. And you have to pull it back out. This is why they don't want people coming down here, why they're closing off roads. And this is throughout, like you heard the mayor say, throughout the Coachella Valley. And if you look just over here, you can also see water is still moving out that the sun is up, moving through this mud. It is a mess out here.

This is why schools are closed. This is also why you're seeing a lot of people are still going to have trouble getting around today, Sara

SIDNER: Watching you put your boot in there, I just was sure you were going to lose that boot. Tell you and your crew, I know you're photog standing there with a heavy camera, be safe out there. I don't want to hear you guys getting stuck in all that muck. But thankfully you guys are OK. And so far that area is a mess, but people are safe at this hour. Stephanie Elam, thank you so much. Appreciate you. Kate?

ELAM: Yes.

BOLDUAN: So right now, Post-Tropical Cyclone Hilary is now pushing north and bringing big rains and continued high winds with it. Rainfall totals are stacking up quickly. We're just seeing from Stephanie Elam what it looks like in Cathedral City.

Parts of the Southern California have already seen upwards of 10 inches of rain in the past 24 hours. CNN's Derek Van Dam, he's tracking the path for us. And we're seeing where -- what's left behind, Derek. But now, what is the flooding situation look like going forward?

DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Well, this is the result of that 10 inches plus of rain, right? Debris flows, mudslides, you saw it in Stephanie's live shot a moment ago. They are so dangerous. I mean, just zoom in to what's -- some of the best video that we've had come in to CNN. And look at the debris that is caught up in this. There are boulders, there are rocks, there are literally entire tree trunks. Sometimes even homes and vehicles can get swept away in this torrent of mud and debris that can travel over 30 to 40 miles per hour.

So we talked about burn scars quite often and they are so dangerous for the mountainous terrains of Southern California These burns, the forest fires can occur several years prior to this event. But when we see the burn scars lasting effect on the landscape, it's when we get these heavy rain events in the middle of summer when it's this dry as that we have the biggest impacts.

Now the forest canopy that normally absorbs the rain, that organic material that's typically on the surface of the earth, well, that's no longer there and a burn scar, because it's literally been charged. So it creates a layer that is hydrophobic, meaning that it literally repels water. So it doesn't take much rain, in this case over a half a foot. That's a lot of rain in a short period of time to create that loosening of the dirt, loosening of the debris and that slides downhill.

Again, traveling speeds well, well faster than anyone can outrun. That is why it is so dangerous in the mountainous terrain of Southern California. Kate? BOLDUAN: That's what we're looking at right now. You can see it all throughout that video behind you. Thank you so much, Derek. We're checking in with you throughout the day. John?

BERMAN: The vocabulary lesson. I never knew the phrase hydrophobic.

SIDNER: 100% agree.

BERMAN: That's kind of cool, all right. This morning, jailhouse countdown. Donald Trump and his accused 18 co-conspirators have until noon on Friday to surrender at Atlanta jail. This to face charges related to the efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

Trump can really show up at any moment, it's staffed 24 hours a day. But a senior law enforcement source tells CNN the former president is expected to surrender on Thursday or Friday where he could be fingerprinted and have a mugshot taken. CNN's Katelyn Polantz live outside the courthouse in Atlanta where some of the action will also take place later this week. Katelyn, what's the latest?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, John, whenever you arrested here in the state of Georgia as a criminal defendant, you've got to be processed, but before you're processed at the jail, there's a process before that. And the process before that is that there's a negotiation and we've highly expect there to be a negotiation with Donald Trump and his lawyers, or his lawyers acting on his behalf., talking to the district attorney's office as soon as today about trying to make the arrest of Donald Trump in Georgia for these charges related to the 2020 election go as smoothly as possible.

So they will very likely want to meet with the DA's Office. They will very likely want to set up a plan to have Trump out on bail, some sort of terms of his release, and then he has to be arrested. He's been arrested three other times for three other cases, but this is a little bit different in that he will have to go to the physical jail, which is at a different location from the courthouse, and wait in jail to go through the arrest process, even if he has secret service and others around him.

[09:10:05]

Charles Rambo, a retired lieutenant from the Fulton County Sheriff's Office was on CNN earlier today, speaking about how this might differ a little bit for Trump than the thousands of other people that are booked in this jail in Fulton County, Georgia.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES RAMBO, RETIRED LIEUTENANT, FULTON COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE: Just from my own experiences in dealing with dignitaries and high profile persons who come into jail, it's best to just get those persons booked in as rapidly as possible and get them released, because you don't want the jail to become more of an international theatre than it has become here recently.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POLANTZ: So they're making clear that Donald Trump is not going to want to sit around in that jail for a long time waiting for his arrest to be fully processed before he can be arraigned, enter his pleading of not guilty here. The same process or something very similar to it may also be playing out with those other 18 defendants in this criminal case brought by the DA's Office.

BERMAN: One of those defendants is the President's former president's former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who just filed a motion to have his case, the charges against him, dismissed. On what grounds, Katelyn?

POLANTZ: Right. John, Mark Meadows is really doing something very quick here, and he's clearly a person to watch among these 19 defendants, including Trump. Maybe the most -- second most important person to watch here than Trump himself. Mark Meadows was Chief of Staff under Trump, and so he's already gone to federal court and said, please take my case out of state court, put it into federal court.

There's going to be a hearing on that next week, John. But he's also saying these charges should be dismissed against me because everything I did after the election was of service to my job as Chief of Staff to Donald Trump. So we're going to have to watch and see exactly how Meadows moves forward with that and how much he distances himself from Trump.

BERMAN: Sort of the Henny Youngman defense for the feds. Take my case, please. Katelyn Polantz, Poland outside the courthouse in Atlanta, thank you very much. Sara?

SIDNER: All right. Joining us now is former federal and state prosecutor David Weinstein.

I want to ask you about what John and Katelyn were just talking about, which is Meadows asking for a federal court to dismiss all of the charges against him by Georgia. Totally normal for defendants to ask for cases to be dismissed. It's one of the things we see all the time. But this is happening really quickly. Does he have a footing here?

DAVID WEINSTEIN, FORMER FEDERAL AND STATE PROSECUTOR: Well, he needs to get his case into federal district court first, and that's the first motion that he's filed. And that's pending right now. That's set for a hearing next Monday the 28th. He has footing here because of the job he performed and the fact that he was a federal officer, and he claims performing duties that were consistent with his job. So he has footing.

Whether or not that footing is going to slip or whether it's going to take hold and result in dismissal, that's an entirely different question.

SIDNER: All right. I want to ask you about the Mar-a-Lago documents case because we have two people that we've learned who have talked about this. Mike Pence says he was unaware of any broad based efforts by Donald Trump to declassified documents before Donald Trump left office. And we know we've heard from Donald Trump over and over again that he says he declassified them. He said he did it mentally. He said he's done it in other ways.

Let's listen to what Mike Pence has to say about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE PENCE (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: In my case, I was never made aware of any broad based effort to declassified documents. There is a process that the White House goes through to declassify materials. I'm aware of that occurring on several occasions over the course of our four years. But I don't have any knowledge of any broad based directive from the president, but that doesn't mean it didn't occur. I just -- it's not something that I ever heard about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Well, here's someone else who says that he is not aware of it as well. The White House former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, who was also as you know, charged in the other case in Georgia. Who says, look, I didn't ever hear him talking about declassifying these documents either. So this seems like a nice piece of evidence for the prosecution in the documents case, how can it be used?

WEINSTEIN: So it is a nice piece of evidence. It's certainly one of the defenses that the former president has put forward. The problem here is that you can't just snap your fingers and declassified document as the former vice president said, there's a process. And it's not one that's across the board. It's individualized as to documents.

And now there are two witnesses potentially for the government who say, we never saw or heard anything about any of these documents being declassified. And so, the government's cases that they still aren't classified. So these certainly are going to be too helpful witnesses for the government.

[09:15:02]

SIDNER: And they're not just any witnesses, we're talking about the vice president, a former vice president and a former White House Chief of Staff. They are knowledgeable people as to what was going on you would think. David Weinstein, thank you so much for giving us that analysis. Appreciate you. Kate?

BOLDUAN: The big announcements and the big wait, Donald Trump says what he is going to be doing instead of participating in the first Republican primary debate just before he must show up to surrender himself to the Fulton County Jail. Plus, a woman is shot and killed, why? Police believe it had to do with the flag outside of her business. And President Biden headed to Hawaii today to see the devastation caused by the deadly wildfires there, just as Maui officials announced that there are still 850 people missing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JOSH GREEN, HAWAII GOVERNOR: Because of the temperature of the fire, the remains of those who have died, in some cases, may be impossible to recover meaningfully. So there are going to be people that are lost forever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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[09:20:11]

BOLDUAN: President Biden and the First Lady are traveling to Hawaii today to see the devastation left behind from the Maui wildfires. It has now been nearly two weeks since the flames turn parts of that beautiful island of Maui into a hellscape. With 114 people now confirmed dead and the latest update includes 850 People still missing, there is also a new threat facing everyone there, Post- Tropical Cyclone Fernanda.

The storm is expected to bring heavy rain which could potentially trigger flash floods and mudslides in the aftermath of the fires, the last thing folks there need. And big rain could also complicate the already difficult and delicate task of finding and identifying the remains of the wildfire victims.

Let's get to the White House right now. Jeremy Diamond is standing by. Jeremy, the President had faced some criticism for his initial reaction to the wildfires when asked about it. What does the President, and the First Lady, what do they want to accomplish when they're there today?

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kate. And there's actually been two forms of criticism not only the President's own response, those nearly five days of silence to those wildfires earlier last week, but also some residents of Maui have said that they have felt that the federal response has been too slow. And so today, Kate, will be an opportunity for the President to really address both of those forms of criticism by demonstrating the robustness of the federal response where more than a thousand federal personnel, including military, members of the Coast Guard, members of the US Army Corps of Engineer, have been on the ground, billions of dollars already being dispersed to help residents there.

But it also be an opportunity for the President to display that signature empathy, that role of consoler in chief that has been a critical part of his political life and, of course, of his presidency. And today, the President will be able to tour some of the damage both from the air as he gets a helicopter tour of the island as he arrives in Hawaii later today, but also on the ground in Lahaina, where some of the worst devastation from these wildfires has been.

The President is going to meet there with first responders, with local officials. He's also going to deliver remarks about the enduring federal response the plans to stay there for the long term. And he will also meet privately with victims' families, with survivors, and with volunteers of this rescue effort. The President saying in a statement, "I will do everything in my power to help Maui recover and rebuild from this tragedy. We will be here for as long as it takes for Maui." And that will ultimately be the message that the President delivers today, as he also announces that Bob Fenton, the regional FEMA administrator, is going to be named the chief federal response coordinator for this effort, something that White House officials is intended to signal that the White House, the federal government's is here for the long haul. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Yes. And it's going to be very long to try to get these -- make this community whole once again and recover. Jeremy, thank you very much. We're watching for the President today. John?

BERMAN: All right. A memorial outside a clothing store in Southern California after a gunman shot and killed the owner, and it may have been connected to a pride flag hanging outside her shop. The Sheriff's Department says the suspect made several disparaging remarks about the flag before shooting 66-year-old Laura Carleton. The deputy shot and killed the gunman after finding him still armed about a mile away.

Health officials are warning about a deadly Listeria outbreak linked to a restaurant ice cream machine. Three people died and three more were hospitalized between February and July. Two survivors say they drank milkshakes from Frugals into coma before getting sick. CNN has reached out to Frugals but has not heard back.

So if you use Facebook pretty much anytime in the last 16 years, you have until the end of the week to file to get your share of a data privacy settlement. Facebook's parent company Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a host of class action lawsuits. The amount you get depends on your usage and how many people actually filed for claims. You can find a link to the forum at cnn.com. Sara?

BOLDUAN: All right. Just ahead, new polling that can be real depressing for all but one of the cornucopia of Republican candidates vying to be president. What are voters in Iowa telling us, that is ahead.

[09:24:30]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SIDNER: Right now we are giving you a live look at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta where at any time Donald Trump and his 18 accused co- conspirators could show up and surrender on criminal charges in the Georgia election probe. They are facing a Friday deadline to voluntarily turn themselves in.

And while we wait for that, we are just two days away from the first Republican presidential debates and Donald Trump says, nah, I'm not going to be there. The GOP front runner told his followers over the weekend that he plans to skip Wednesday's debate in Milwaukee and possibly all of the debates.

Inside Trump is rumored to be planning to sit down for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson instead. CNN's Kristen Holmes is following the story for us from Washington, DC.

Trump says he's not interested in doing the debate, not going to do it. But this does give the other candidates a little chance at some limelight, doesn't it? What are we expecting?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Sara. That's exactly right. So when it comes to Trump, I spoke to a Trump advisor today and, you know, we knew that this was expected, that he wasn't going to attend this debate. And they point to the fact that they believe that the risk of him attending the debate is actually more than him skipping the debate.

And he talk about his poll numbers is something we know that --