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Texas Mayors Fed Up with Abbott-Biden Bickering Over Border; Georgia DA in Trump Election Case Seeks to Quash Subpoena in Her Colleague's Divorce Case; Lawmakers Obtain New Info on Early Stages of Pandemic. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired January 19, 2024 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Texas authorities have arrested more migrants along the southern U.S. border at Eagle Pass. About 10 people taken into custody early this morning.

CNN obtaining video showing the latest detentions here and the migrants were apparently able to navigate barriers put up by Texas authorities along the Rio Grande as part of the state's takeover of a public park next to the river.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: In Washington, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is holding meetings on the migrant crisis with officials from Mexico. Texas border town mayors say they are fed up with the politics and they want the partisan bickering between state and federal authorities to stop.

CNN's Rosa Flores is in Eagle Pass for us. And Rosa, you're in the area that's been taken over by Texas police. What are you seeing?

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, I want to show you, Boris, ride with me because it's not just Shelby Park that was taken over by the state of Texas. It's about 2.5 miles of the Rio Grande and if you look right here to my left, you'll see this first fencing just went up. That's new.

Then there are several layers of razor wire and it keeps on going and going. That's why we wanted to do this driving to really give you a perspective of what is going on here in this area.

Now, every now and then you'll see that there are either pieces of clothing or shoes or things in between this razor wire. That's what migrants use to squeeze in between the wire to get across to the United States. All of this wire is not stopping the illegal immigration.

As a matter of fact, we just learned that there's about 19 people crossing just behind us and we have video of what's happening once they arrive here to the United States. And it's actually state authorities who are arresting the individuals because I want you to take a look around. There is no border patrol in this area again because the state of Texas took over the area last week and that is the issue here that the state of Texas took over and Border Patrol doesn't have access and that's the tussle between the federal government and the state right now. And with the state government digging in their heels saying that they are not going to surrender. As you can see, this goes on for miles and miles.

Now, the number of migrant apprehensions has plummeted. It was about 10,000 per day in mid-December. Now, it's about 4,000 per day. It's still high that there's still illegal immigration but it's not at that level.

And I want to stop here because this will give you a sense of what migrants do to get in. Those are some blankets and some other items that are used to cross into the United States.

But Boris and Brianna, there are no signs here that the state of Texas is going to give this up or in the words of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas does not plan to surrender to the Biden administration.

KEILAR: So in the end is what the mayors are asking for just falls on deaf ears.

[15:35:00]

FLORES: You know, what we see on the ground is that a lot of the times it's the municipalities that end up filling the gaps for the failures of the federal government. And even when the state government intervenes, like in this case, right, the state of Texas has taken over.

But that doesn't solve the problem. I'm going to continue driving because you'll just get a sense what smugglers are doing, Boris and Brianna, is they are simply going beyond this razor wire. It eventually ends. I mean, I could go on for miles and miles and you'll continue to see this fencing and multiple layers of razor wire, but it eventually ends. And that's where we have learned from law enforcement sources that smugglers are taking migrants to those areas.

It ends up in residential areas. And I've talked to individuals who live in those residential areas, and that's exactly what they tell me that they're seeing. They're starting to see that that migrants are ending up there in large groups and that buses are driving into these neighborhoods to transport those migrants to processing facilities.

And so, again, it is the municipalities and the individuals, the citizens, residents of these communities that end up paying the price. Back to you, guys.

KEILAR: Rosa, thank you so much for taking us along on that ride with you. We do appreciate it.

Still to come, more details involving former President Trump's Georgia election subversion case. Could the D.A. be disqualified over an alleged romance?

[15:40:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) SANCHEZ: There's a new legal twist involving the district attorney prosecuting the Georgia election interference case against Donald Trump and some of his supporters. Fulton County DA Fani Willis is now trying to quash a subpoena seeking her testimony in the divorce proceedings of Nathan Wade, the man you see there to the right of her.

KEILAR: Wade is a special prosecutor that Willis hired to help manage the Trump case and the two are accused of being involved in a romantic relationship.

CNN justice correspondent Jessica Schneider is following all of the developments here. So Jess, Willis is seeking to avoid testifying on what grounds?

JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, she's just saying that she shouldn't have to testify that what she has as any information isn't even relevant. And this has really become a messy legal battle that's threatening, you know, to derail the case that's moving forward against Trump and the more than dozen co-defendants he has in Georgia.

So first of all, she's trying to avoid being deposed in this divorce case between her lead prosecutor and his wife. It's But what's interesting in just filed papers in court, the wife is now producing credit card receipts that she says prove that Fani Willis and her husband, that lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade, she says that these credit card statements show that Nathan Wade actually bought tickets for Willis to accompany him on at least two out of state trips. They do show that he purchased airline tickets for the two of them to Miami in October 2022, San Francisco in April 2023. Wade's wife is now saying this is proof of a romantic relationship.

All of this has been swirling and a judge has scheduled a February 15th hearing to consider whether Willis should actually be disqualified for this case because of these allegations of this relationship.

And, you know, all of this, guys, began earlier this month when one of the defendants in this election subversion case in Georgia, Mike Roman, he's a former Trump campaign official. He moved to disqualify Willis because of these allegations that she had an improper relationship with Wade.

And on top of that, you know, this co-defendant of Trump's is alleging that this special prosecutor, Wade, actually used the money he billed to work in this case, which adds up so far to $650,000 to actually take Willis on those romantic and lavish vacations.

Now, we haven't really seen any exact public proof of these accusations, but this latest filing from Wade's wife today shows these credit card statements that seem to show that Willis and Wade did travel together on at least two occasions per these credit card statements.

So it has really gotten very messy, guys, on two different legal fronts. You have the divorce proceedings where Willis is being -- where she's trying to avoid being deposed. And then this could potentially all, you know, mess with the Trump legal case and his co- defendants because that judge has scheduled that February 15th hearing to see if Willis should be disqualified. So very messy right now with a lot of these accusations flying in court.

KEILAR: Yes. If true, this is raising a whole lot of potentially very consequential questions here. Jessica Schneider, thank you for that.

A new wrinkle in the investigation of coronavirus and its origins. How did a scientist put its genetic sequence in a database two weeks before most of us even knew it existed?

[15:45:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: We're learning some critical new details about the early stages of the pandemic and how gaps in communication between China and the rest of the world may have slowed down efforts to develop a vaccine.

According to new documents shared with U.S. lawmakers this week, the genetic sequence of the coronavirus was submitted to an NIH database two weeks before the Chinese government disclosed its findings. According to those documents, a submission was first entered by a virologist from China on December 28th, 2019. But a U.S. government health official says the file was incomplete.

And three days later, the virologist was asked for a resubmission, which the NIH never received. It was January 11, 2020, that the World Health Organization then received its findings from China.

Now, to be clear, the sequence doesn't indicate the origins of the virus, but it does undermine the Chinese government's claims about its knowledge of the pathogen.

With us now is Jeremy Kamil. He's a virologist and associate professor of microbiology and immunity at LSU Health Shreveport. Dr. Kamil, thank you so much for being with us

[15:50:00]

Help us understand the significance of this genetic sequence being submitted two weeks before it was released by China. What does that imply to you?

JEREMY KAMIL, VIROLOGIST: Well, I think -- thank you for having me, Boris. I think it's important that people understand that it's actually not new news that China had genetic sequence of the virus as early as December 26. So that part of the story isn't as shocking as people are making it out to be.

However, what is interesting is it shows you that people in China were trying to do the right thing. They were trying to share this data on the genetic sequence of the virus, which, if we had been able to successfully process that on the U.S. side at NCBI Gen Bank, the database that the scientists uploaded it to, if we had gotten that out faster, it would have been two weeks faster at coming up with PCR tests, antigen tests, diagnostics, therapeutics, and of course, vaccines.

So it's really important that we acknowledge that we could do better at perhaps automating how we prioritize what sequences get out, because this was treated like a routine research sequence. And of course, hindsight 2020, it's clear now that that was a really important sequence. At the time, it was treated just like any other entry in the database, which could have been a fly genome or anything else. So the database was built for research.

SANCHEZ: Yes, I'm curious to get your thoughts on one specific thing that you mentioned. You said that it shows that some people in China were trying to do the right thing. Does that imply that in your mind, the Chinese government was purposely withholding information?

KAMIL: Absolutely not. It doesn't say that the government was trying to withhold anything necessarily. But if you're a scientist in a country like China, even in the country like the U.S., there is some prestige associated with being first. So if a small lab had the sequence and was to ask, mother, may I, can I can I share this publicly? They might have encountered a, well, wait a minute, let the prestigious top lab in our system do it. You wait.

But instead, this lab went and they probably recognized that this might be a concern. It was a new coronavirus. They didn't know if it was causing the pneumonia, but they thought it was important to get the data out and they tried their best to do so. So they weren't trying to cover it up or hide it. It was just maybe a time of chaos. And individual scientists were trying to do their best to make this data available to as many eyeballs around the world as possible.

And indeed, it would have been would have made a quite a big difference if that first attempt had had gone through smoothly.

SANCHEZ: And can you explain why this genetic sequence and this sort of development doesn't give us insight into the origin of the virus, whether it came from a lab or just occurred in nature?

KAMIL: Well, to be clear, there's no evidence, no good scientific evidence that this is an engineered virus at all. It looks a lot like almost identical to coronaviruses that have been found since in bats.

So we already know this is almost certainly a virus from nature that was brought into the market by wildlife trade. It's a multibillion dollar industry in China where they bring animals from all over that region to markets to be sold as food and they bring them as live animals. So it really looks like a bat virus that got into some intermediate host and made it to the market that way.

And this sequence doesn't give you any anything new in terms of seeing that it might have been engineered or not. It's almost identical to sequences that were released later on January 12th.

Dr. Jeremy Kamil, we have to leave the conversation there. Thanks so much for your time.

KAMIL: Thank you, Boris. Have a great day.

SANCHEZ: Thanks.

Sending a text to the wrong person can be super embarrassing. Just ask Rob Lowe, because the Hollywood star says he sent an awkward text to Bradley Cooper.

We're going to tell you what it says after a quick break.

[15:55:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: Have you ever sent a text to the wrong person? It's usually followed by this rush of blood to your head, this awful sense of regret, maybe even panic. Rob Lowe can empathize. He sent Bradley Cooper a congratulatory text for winning a Golden Globe.

KEILAR: There's a problem here, though, and that's that Cooper didn't win. Oops. Lowe explained his gaffe on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROB LOWE, ACTOR: So Downey does this amazing acceptance speech at the Golden Globes.

JIMMY KIMMEL, HOST JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE:

Yes.

LOWE: And I'm so excited for him. So I text him.

So glad you won. That is the most beautiful acceptance speech I have heard in a long time. Boy, do you deserve it.

I hit it and I realized, oh, I just sent that to Bradley Cooper.

KIMMEL: Who did not win at the Golden Globe.

LOWE: Who did not win.

KIMMEL: Oh, boy. Yes.

LOWE: So then I was like, oh, I got to make it better. And I said, no, no, I meant that for Robert Downey Jr. But no, that's even worse.

KIMMEL: Yes.

LOWE: It's got to be even worse.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Well, Cooper was nominated for a Best Actor Golden Globe for Maestro, but he lost to Cillian Murphy from Oppenheimer. You ever do that, Boris? Ever?

SANCHEZ: I have, actually. I was joking around with a friend one time on FaceTime and he was in the bathtub for some reason. I took a screenshot to harass him with it later when he was giving a speech. I was going to send him a screenshot in the middle of a speech. I accidentally sent it to my family group text. I had my mom asking me all kinds of questions. Has it ever happened to you?

[16:00:00]

KEILAR: I've been on the receiving end of it where I ended up responding to something saying, you do realize you were texting me about me, right?

I wish it had just been a bathtub picture.

SANCHEZ: They were they were gossiping about you and they sent it to you?

KEILAR: Yes.

SANCHEZ: Not a good feeling. Not a good feeling.

KEILAR: No, it wasn't a good feeling.

SANCHEZ: Brianna, it's a great feeling that it's Friday and we get a weekend and it's great to anchor with you, too.

Thanks so much for joining us on CNN NEWS CENTRAL. "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.