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Lance Ulanoff is Interviewed about the Major Tech Malfunction Grounding Flights; Growing Campaign Crisis for Biden; Fact Checking Trump's Speech. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired July 19, 2024 - 08:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:33:20]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, the breaking news this morning, all morning long we have been watching as this huge tech outage has grounded flights all around the world, stranding millions of frustrated passengers. This is just one of the scenes that we've seen.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Geez.

BERMAN: That was in France.

SIDNER: Oy (ph).

BERMAN: Long lines. More than 2,000 flights delayed. More than 1,100 canceled. That's in the U.S. alone. One family at Chicago O'Hare said they are now going to have to drive ten and a half hours to Baltimore, but they don't have their bags. They already checked their bags.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We got the notification after we got through security that it was delayed. And in less than five, 10 minutes, it was canceled. And they were having issues with the system already. They took our luggage. And now we can't get our luggage.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Oof.

BERMAN: All right. With us now, Lance Ulanoff, editor at large at "TechRadar."

Lance, great to see you.

Explain to us this tech outage. What's happened here with CrowdStrike? Is it fixed? And if it's really fixed, how long will it take for everything to be OK again?

LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR AT LARGE, "TECHRADAR": Well, I'm glad you said CrowdStrike and not a Microsoft outage, because a lot of people have said that. And they are connected. CrowdStrike is a major cybersecurity - a global cybersecurity firm that works on - basically works on most Windows system at infrastructure level and enterprise level systems. CrowdStrike was doing an upgrade and seems like they were doing a software upgrade overnight, which is not uncommon. That's kind of what you do when not a lot of people are using the system.

They did it. Maybe they didn't regression test it enough, and it brought systems down.

[08:35:03]

And it brought systems down around the world because CrowdStrike is used all over the world. I mean it has 3,300 customers. They're like with 82 percent of U.S. state governments. Like, many major cities. And, of course, all of these infrastructure level things.

When that went down, because it works with Windows, Windows is the most popular operating system in the world, that cascaded, that went down. You saw the blue screen of death all over the place. Microsoft Office 365, which is a super popular cloud-based Office suite that everyone uses, connected, went down. XBox live went down. So, all of these things went down.

CrowdStrike did recognize the issue. They issued - the updated with a rapid updates probably a few hours ago. But, you know, and they also offered some manual updates that people could do. Again, only IT level people are going to do that. Most people did not. You know, they tried rebooting.

But now things are coming back. But it takes time because it's a global system. Everything's interconnected. You can't just flip a switch. It doesn't all just come back. They have to get the systems running again. I have seen some signs that things are coming back. But it's going to probably take at least a few more hours for us to get back to normal.

SIDNER: Lance, when you say everything's connected, and this one company has 3,300 clients, if you will, including - these are no small - these are no small companies. These are banks. These are airlines. These are government agencies.

ULANOFF: Yes.

SIDNER: Do we need to be concerned about this? Should there be a real thought of a shift from having one company have that much power? This was just an update.

ULANOFF: Yes. Yes, I mean, there's definitely been some discussions about diversification of software. You know, this tends to happen. You get, you know, a company that does well and then becomes the sole provider for many of these things. It's easier - you know, also because of the interconnection, when you're working with other companies, if you find that it's a software that your partners are working with, you tend to choose that thing.

But it is kind of funny because Kaspersky (ph), which is a software - a security software company said, you know, our software would never do this, which is kind of silly to say. But the truth of the matter is, it has to be, you know, if you have this much control, this much power, which CrowdStrike ends up having, then they have to be extra careful.

I will say that it's not the first time we've seen something like this in the year. You know, we had the AT&T outage, which was ultimately caused by a software update. So, people are not double checking these things. I understand the systems are incredibly complex. The complexity grows every day.

By the way, they have - you know, CrowdStrike has like an AI system they could have tested this against. That might have helped them.

SIDNER: I feel like your system just went down.

BERMAN: I feel like there is a tech god out there and he made your shot drop.

Lance Ulanoff, we appreciate -

ULANOFF: Oh, did I - did I just freeze?

BERMAN: You just - you just - your screen just disappeared.

SIDNER: It dropped completely.

BERMAN: That is because, as I said, karma works in television.

Lance Ulanoff, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

SIDNER: Thank you so much.

BERMAN: There it is. (INAUDIBLE).

SIDNER: Hey, bye, Lance.

ULANOFF: I am so sorry.

SIDNER: No, we can hear you, we just can't see you.

BERMAN: We can't see you.

SIDNER: This is all because of this problem. That's what we think.

BERMAN: Right.

SIDNER: All right. Well, Democrats saw an opening for them to remind voters of the dark and angry Donald Trump that they've come to know. They are scrambling this morning instead with calls for Joe Biden to step aside growing louder each day, including donors making a big, big, push. We're checking the numbers on the Democratic Party's top choices to possibly, if it happens, take over the ticket.

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[08:43:07] KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: CNN's Isaac Dovere has new reporting this morning. Here it is. "Multiple leading Democrats tells CNN that they feel caught in what one described as a 'doom loop' with every move to keep President Joe Biden in or push him out further destroying their chances against Donald Trump."

This is just as sources also say that top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, have told Joe Biden that the polling shows that he cannot defeat Donald Trump at this point.

Biden has questioned that read on polling publicly before all of this. And one source says that he has been defensive about the polling privately since all of this.

So, what do the polls say? Let me bring in CNN's Harry Enten for more on this.

Harry, lay the groundwork. Where is Biden polling right now? What is everyone - what are they looking at?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: So, you know, there have been a lot of ways that we've sort of looked at the polling. You know, we know he's down in the swing states. We know - we know he's down nationally.

But I want to just compare this to the 2020 campaign and just give you an idea of the consistency of Joe Biden's deficit to Donald Trump.

So, what we have here is, every single day of the 2024 calendar year, Joe Biden has been trailing Donald Trump. One hundred percent of the days. On any day you take a national average, Joe Biden has been trailing Donald Trump.

Compare that to where we were back in the 2020 campaign, where every single day up to this point in the campaign Joe Biden was ahead of Donald Trump on 100 percent of the days.

BOLDUAN: Oh, really?

ENTEN: Exactly. So, it's the complete and polar opposite of where we were four years ago. The fact is Joe Biden's very well-known. Donald Trump is very well-known. And the voters have been very consistent on how they feel about this race. They may not be - love either one of the candidates. But the fact is, at this particular point, they have consistently said that they would prefer Donald Trump to be the next president as opposed to Joe Biden, which is the total and complete opposite of what we saw four years ago.

[08:45:04]

BOLDUAN: So, that speaks to the polling that Nancy Pelosi is said to have likely shown Joe Biden.

ENTEN: Yes.

BOLDUAN: When he was - some of it, when they were in private and she was speaking to him about it.

If, again, we don't know where things are going to go.

ENTEN: We don't know.

BOLDUAN: It is up to Joe Biden, what he decides.

ENTEN: Yes.

BOLDUAN: If he would step aside, what is the precedent, especially when you're looking at the timing here?

ENTEN: There is no precedent.

BOLDUAN: Right, there's none.

ENTEN: There is no precedent. You know, the two examples of incumbent presidents in the modern era who could have run for reelection and decided not to were Harry S. Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Baines Johnson back in 1968. But remember, they got out at the beginning of the primary process after the New Hampshire primary. If you look right now, there's just a month to go until the Democratic National Convention. There is no precedent -

BOLDUAN: And even less depending on when - when the (INAUDIBLE) will happen.

ENTEN: Exactly. Exactly. Depending on when they do that roll call.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

ENTEN: When Johnson and Truman got out, there was over 100 days to go until the Democratic National Convention. Now we're a month to go. If they're going to act - it seems like they should do it fast. But the fact is, every single day that we wait, it just seems that the chance of Biden being the nominee increases because the fact is time is running out.

BOLDUAN: It - I mean I - there also - I mean its unprecedent, right, so you can't say. But you've got to make an argument that the time has run out. Like, that's - I mean - because when you look at what - we're just looking at the past and the present and that you just talked about.

So, there's been a lot of talk, if Joe Biden would step aside, who would then be best to replace him. What - where do - what's the read on that according to voters?

ENTEN: Yes. So, you know, there has been actually very limited data on who Democratic voters would prefer. There's been a lot of data on, if you match up these potentially other Democrats against Donald Trump.

BOLDUAN: Donald Trump.

ENTEN: But we haven't seen who Democratic voters prefer. And I think that's rather important because, keep in mind, the Democratic voters selected Joe Biden to be their nominee. And so we have limited data, but, in fact, there was a recent poll that just came out in the last 48 hours from the state of New Hampshire, and you would have expected that that state would not necessarily be one of Harris's best state given I think there's a lot of people who think her base would be black voters within the Democratic Party. And if you know anything about New Hampshire, it's a very white state.

BOLDUAN: Right. Yes.

ENTEN: But, in fact -

BOLDUAN: Older, whiter.

ENTEN: Older, whiter. But, in fact, she blows away the field. She gets 50 percent of registered Democrats in the state of New Hampshire, a state that wouldn't necessarily be too friendly to her. Pete Buttigieg is second, and he is way back of the pack.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

ENTEN: So, at this particular point, when you figure that she's the vice president, you figure that she has easy access to the money for the Biden-Harris campaign and the other candidates don't.

BOLDUAN: OK.

ENTEN: And the fact that voters do, in fact, prefer her, I think it's going to be very difficult to take the nomination away from her if Joe Biden does, in fact, step down.

BOLDUAN: That is very interesting.

It's great to see you, Harry.

ENTEN: Great to see you.

BOLDUAN: Thank you so much.

ENTEN: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: John. Sara.

BERMAN: All right, with us now, Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton and the former communications director for Vice President Harris, Jamal Simmons.

Jamal, I want to start with you. I kind of have one and a half questions.

SIDNER: Why?

JAMAL SIMMONS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I wonder why.

BERMAN: And then I'm going to ask you the half question first and you're not going to like me for it.

SIMMONS: Sure.

BERMAN: Has Harris world reached out to you in the last week? Has there been any outreach to people about the possibility of a presidential campaign?

SIMMONS: Listen, they are doing absolutely zero inside the White House, in Harris land, to focus on this because Kamala Harris' position the entire time I was there, and I think since, is that she wants to be the best partner to Joe Biden possible. And the truth is, this is one of these places where your personal values about being loyal and being a good partner actually go very well with your political needs, which is that, if she's going to be successful, it's going to be because the president views her as a partner and decides to help endorse her, and all of his people follow his succession (ph).

BERMAN: OK, I had to ask. I had to ask. So, no, or at least not really or not that you're going to tell me and I get - I -

SIDNER: Basically -

SIMMONS: But, of course, everybody's buzzing. All the alumni are buzzing. And there are a lot of alumni, right?

BERMAN: OK, so all the alumni.

SIMMONS: We're all like buzzing about what it might mean.

BERMAN: I kind of - I kind of - my hope, because I do think this is a serious -

SHERMICHAEL SINGLETON, CNN : Yes.

SIMMONS: Yes.

BERMAN: Everyone can agree this is being discussed.

SIDNER: Yes.

BERMAN: This isn't made up at this point.

SINGLETON: Oh, of course.

BERMAN: I want to know, Jamal, not whether it should or shouldn't happen, but if it is going to happen, how. How does it happen at this point?

SIMMONS: So, if it was going to happen, I think if the president got - gets out and he then says, I would like my - I would like my delegates to endorse - to go with Kamala Harris. They go with Kamala Harris. And then they have to have - we'll still have to have a vote, right? They'll have to still be all the same voting mechanisms that existed before you have a vote. Even if someone else wants to run, you've got to assume she's going to get a big chunk of those.

I also would expect people - there's a great need in the Democratic Party, a desire people are talking about, to end this quickly. So, what I would call the super friends. You probably - probably would see some cohort of the super friends come together. That would be like a Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, maybe even Barack Obama or Bill and Hillary Clinton. You would start to see those people move pretty quickly to endorse whoever the nominee is going to be. That would pretty much shut down the debate about who it's going to be.

And then you start to get into the conversation about who the vice president would be. And I think that is probably going to be a much more contested process than picking the top of the ticket.

[08:50:05]

SIDNER: I thought John was going to ask to see your phone and see your texts. I was - I was a little concerned he was going to go too far -

SIMMONS: Right.

SIDNER: As he has done so many morning with me.

But anyway, Shermichael, I want to talk to you about what we saw on the stage from Donald Trump.

SINGLETON: Yes.

SIDNER: I mean it was like a WWE matchup.

SINGLETON: It was. Yes.

SIDNER: I mean you saw - literally you had Hulk Hogan there. But which Trump do we get? Which Trump does the country get? Because you saw the principled, reading the prompter. And then you saw the other Trump -

SINGLETON: Yes. Yes. I mean -

SIDNER: Which was dark and attacks and he went back to what he has always done.

SINGLETON: I mean, look, the first part of the speech I thought came off very well, strong. I thought the speech was a bit long. I was telling Jamal, I probably would have capped it at around 30 minutes.

I think the good news, though, Sara, is attention spans are short. So, most people probably saw the first 15, 20 minutes of that. It was late. I even eventually said, all right, I'm going to follow this up tomorrow, because it was long.

SIDNER: That's fair, but social media has a long media. The cutting of what happened.

SINGLETON: It does. And you'll see little clips here and there. But I'll say this, Republican voters, after this convention, I would say, generally speaking, are excited and energized. Democratic voters are demoralized by President Biden. Trump is coming off as politically strong. President Biden is coming off as politically week. He's being abandoned by Democratic donors. He's being abandoned by Democratic leadership on The Hill. And at least half of Democratic voters are saying it's time for the president to step away and go with someone else.

And so if you're Republicans right now, you're looking at the next three-and-a-half months as being very positive, not only in terms of winning the White House, potentially winning the Senate, and also winning the House.

And for my Democratic friends, this is complete chaos. The house is on fire and they have to figure out how they can extinguish it as quickly as possible.

SIMMONS: So, I have a little bit - I have a little bit of an alternate vision of how this might be working.

SIDNER: I'm sure you do.

SINGLETON: Of course.

SIMMONS: Not that it's great. I'm not saying - I will stipulate all the facts here. But I will say, I imagine Donald Trump is - looked at this and he's not very happy right now because what - what I saw earlier, you've got a split-screen happening. Here's Donald Trump's speech. What's happening with Joe Biden?

Donald Trump likes to control the media narrative. And one thing that could be true is that the Democrats are having a lot of chaotic drama right now, but people are attached to this drama. It's riveting. Like, what's going to happen. Is the president going to say -

SIDNER: It's a soap opera.

SIMMONS: It's a soap opera.

SIDNER: Yes.

SIMMON: We're in a reality TV nation. What happens if we get - if the Democrats get a candidate that's pretty decent out of this process? That's a big payoff for people who stuck with the saga.

Donald Trump understands the reality of modern television. The rest of us keep trying to go back to some previous era of normalcy. We don't live in an era anymore. Donald Trump knows that. I've got to believe he's looking at this and he's worried about the amount of attention the Democrats are (INAUDIBLE).

SINGLETON: But one contrasting view here I would say, you're looking at 81,000 votes across four states that made the difference in 2020. The benefits to President Biden were the Covid pandemic. You had completely high vote by mail. That's something that was unheard of, unprecedented in the history of our country. Those factors will not be the case this November.

What you really saw during the convention this week was that Republicans were really focused on voters who typically don't vote. They don't really turn out in most elections. They're eligible. Maybe they're even registered. Specifically, younger men. I think if you're looking at places like Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, you're talking about differences of 11,000 votes, 22,000 votes. Those numbers will absolutely matter.

And so I agree with you in terms of the intrigue, in terms of the television spectacle here. But at the end of the day, you still have to have that operations in place to turn out those voters. And we're seeing a much more disciplined campaign from Donald Trump this time compared to the last two times.

SIMMONS: Well, the difference here is also that Democrats have been running a lot of disciplined campaigns for a lot of years. And so, while the Biden campaign has offices all over the country, has got volunteers all over the country, has got paid staff all over the country, and there are people who are actually good at turning out voters are registering them, the Republicans are not good at putting together vote by mail programs because you've been running against him for so long.

SIDNER: Jamal Simmons, Shermichael Singleton, thank you for that.

SINGLETON: Thanks, guys.

SIDNER: Very kind and unified conversation this morning.

SIMMONS: It's the morning. We've got to be -

SIDNER: It was - it was nice.

SINGLETON: A little energy this morning.

SIMMONS: And it's Friday morning.

SIDNER: I'm proud of you.

SIMMONS: So - and we're not stuck in an airport in Milwaukee. So, we're happy about that.

SIDNER: I'm proud of you.

Yes, true.

All right, this morning, CNN Heroes is helping hundreds of girls in the African country of Togo attend school. Payton McGriff turned her college project into a non-profit that provides uniforms and supplies to girls whose family simply can't afford them.

Here's more on her unique way to stretch her resources.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PAYTON MCGRIFF, CNN HERO: When a girl enters our program, she not only receives a new school uniform, but she receives a full tuition scholarship, full year of school supplies, a reusable menstrual kit and a year-round tutoring from our local staff.

After we provided our first round of uniforms, we realized our students were outgrowing them very quickly. So, that was where the uniform that grows was born. It grows six sizes and up to 12 inches in length.

[08:55:02]

It adjusts in various parts of the body to provide a well-tailored fit.

To put their uniform on for the first time, that's one of the most joyous experiences that we see.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: It's amazing. One of my favorite things that we do here at CNN.

To learn more about her work, you can go to cnnheroes.com right now. And while you're there, you can nominate your own CNN Hero.

BERMAN: All right, airport sending a message to anyone thinking they are going to fly today, do not go to the airport at all unless you have confirmed your flight with the airline. This tech outage causing huge delays all around the world.

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BOLDUAN: Donald Trump taking center stage at the Republican Convention here in Milwaukee. It all led up to the big moment last night when he accepted, officially, his party's presidential nomination.

And there's a lot of talk about that speech. A lot of talk about the speech today, and even leading up to it, was the shift, even temporarily, to a more unifying message that he did deliver at times.

Trump spoke for more than 90 minutes, a historically long convention speech. And with it, making more than 20 false statements to voters.

CNN's Daniel Dale tracking all of it for us. And he's back with us now.

Daniel, let's start with what Donald Trump said last night about times of war and times of peace. Let's - let's play this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The world was at peace.

Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war. We're in a planet of war.

The whole world was at peace. And now the world is blowing up around us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: What did your fact check find, Daniel? DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: This was one of the easier fact

checks I've done in my nine years of fact checking former President Trump. He did not leave Joe Biden a world at peace. There was an ongoing civil war in Syria, an ongoing civil war in Yemen. Of course, a very much unresolved Israeli Palestinian conflict, Israeli Iranian conflict. There was a war in Ethiopia. I could go on at length. One research institution found that there were 51 nation states in which there were active armed conflicts in 2020. And again, 51 nation states in which there were active armed conflicts in 2021. So, this claim that there was world peace under Trump, or when he left office in January 2021, just clearly not true.

BOLDUAN: And on one of the topics that the former president hits on quite a lot on crime, let's play some of what he said last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Our crime rate is going up while crime statistics all over the world are going down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: How does that check out?

DALE: Absolutely false. Our crime rate is not going up. In fact, it is declining sharply. Violent crime declined approximately 6 percent in 2023, according to preliminary national FBI figures.

[09:00:03]

And then another 15 percent in the first quarter of 2024. So, we're talking steep declines. Even steeper decline