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Biden; Looking Forward To Getting Back On Campaign Trail "Next Week"; 31 Democratic Lawmakers Calling On Biden To Quit Race; Trump, Vance To Campaign Together Tomorrow In Michigan; Global Tech Outage Disrupts Airlines, Banks, Hospitals, 911 Services. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired July 19, 2024 - 15:00   ET

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

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[15:00:33]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Pushing back while trying to be pushed out. I'm Brianna Keilar alongside Boris Sanchez here in Washington. And today, a growing number of Democrats are calling for President Biden to drop his reelection bid. The total is now over 30. It has gone up from the beginning of our show, in fact. And we are learning that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his team are not discouraging members from continuing to speak out against Joe Biden's candidacy.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Yes, but it appears his campaign is not listening to doubters. We're told that Vice President Kamala Harris will join a call with donors this afternoon. This is actually video from a short time ago where she was visiting an ice cream shop in Washington, D.C. with her nieces.

This all comes not long after President Biden released his own statement saying he's looking forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week once he recovers from COVID. Let's bring in CNN Senior White House Correspondent MJ Lee.

Because MJ, you have some new reporting on how the Biden campaign is now trying to rally the troops. Walk us through it.

MJ LEE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, we're told that there was an all campaign staff call earlier today. Those happen with some regularity, so that's not unusual. But campaign chair, Jen O'Malley Dillon, said on this call that they are focused on voter contact right now.

Obviously, the President has made clear that he's staying in the race and the campaign is really telling their staff what we are doing is reaching out to voters. She said at one point, when you give me polls, I'm going to give you direct voter contact. I'm also told that she said people in our country are not watching cable news just on the voter contact part.

The reason that this is significant is because this is sort of the central argument that we are starting to see from the campaign on the reason for the President staying in. They're essentially saying what is more important to us right now than what the polls are telling us is what the voters are telling us. And O'Malley Dillon did talk about this a little bit on the air earlier today. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNIFER O'MALLEY DILLON, BIDEN-HARRIS CAMPAIGN CHAIR: We go out and we're door knocking just this week. So this isn't in the past. This is this week. Did about a hundred door knocks, 76 percent of those people we knocked on doors and we talked to are with Joe Biden, about 16 percent or so. That's undecided. They have questions, you know, is he in this race, what's going to happen. And then a small percentage that are not available to us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LEE: Yes. So this argument that they are just going to be listening to voters, I mean, that is going to be so central as the campaign continues getting more and more pushback from members saying he needs to drop out. I think it's not a coincidence that we've heard the President himself repeatedly saying since the debate, I can't just discount the millions of people that participated in the process and voted for me.

I think the problem is that, you know, who else is listening to voters are members of Congress. They're going home and hearing from a lot of people that are concerned and think that the President needs to get out.

KEILAR: They're also noting that people cast those ballots before the debate.

LEE: Yes, that's true.

KEILAR: So that's something else. MJ, thank you so much.

Joining us now, we have Ron Brownstein, CNN Senior Political Analyst and Senior Editor for The Atlantic, and Chuck Rocha, Democratic Strategist and former senior adviser to Bernie Sanders and 2016 and - Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

All right, Chuck. Tell us this moment that we are at right now in this race. How would you describe where we're at on the Democratic side of things?

CHUCK ROCHA, FMR. SENIOR ADVISER, BERNIE SANDERS' 2016 & 2020 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS: I'd say control chaos. I think that there's trying to be controlled with the party. Now, I've run a presidential campaign and one of the few people who has. And what you saw Jennifer O'Malley doing is trying to get a handle on it. When you talk about having an all staff call, those don't happen all the time, but they happen at times of tragedy.

I was running a presidential campaign when a guy had a heart attack one time in Nevada. I was in the office, Bernie's office, when that went down. We had to control things and get control over emotions. And that's what you see now. The hardest part of this is what you're reporting on now is all these members of Congress, though, people that he's worked with. He's an animal of the Senate like this is really hard when you start hearing rumors about Nancy Pelosi. But right now, the campaign wants to control this and keep people focused on thousands of doors that they're knocking, the infrastructure that they're building, their fundraising. This is where they want to - you're talking about.

SANCHEZ: Yes, they're certainly focused on that when they try to justify him staying in the race compared to some of the polling and some of these concerns from lawmakers. I'm wondering what you make of the sort of discrepancy in some of the reporting where we're hearing the campaign publicly say he's staying in, he's not getting out.

[15:05:01]

And yet privately, from sources close to the President, he's asking questions about whether the folks around him believe that Kamala Harris would be a better candidate to beat Donald Trump.

ROCHA: I think part of that is folks that you get to see on camera. They're actually speaking and putting their name and their faces to things and then folks who are being unnamed sources. I'll tell you this about presidential campaigns, there's only a small group of people. Everybody likes to claim that they know about running campaigns, but they never really run a campaign or been in the room, as they say in Hamilton, where it happens. There's only a small group of people actually talking to the President. And the ones that you're seeing are the ones you see on TV while there's other folks who are unnamed.

KEILAR: Ron, what are you listening to? I mean, let's just point out Biden ally, Sen. Chris Coons, is saying that he thinks he believes Biden is weighing who the best candidate is to beat Trump. You have Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of Democrats in the House, skirting questions of whether Biden's the strongest candidate and not discouraging his caucus members from saying they think Biden should step aside. And you also have Congressman Seth Moulton writing an op- ed for The Boston Globe saying that for the first time at Normandy, Biden did not recognize - seemed to recognize who he was.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

KEILAR: What are - what data points are you looking at?

BROWNSTEIN: Look, I think the - as Chuck puts it, the people who have been in the room at the senior levels of Democratic presidential campaigns, I've talked to almost all of them in the last two weeks. Overwhelmingly, they do not believe that Joe Biden can recover to win. I think donors overwhelmingly do not believe that he can recover to win. And that has a real bite on, you know, self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent.

And I think elected officials who were very hesitant to challenge him publicly because they have great respect for Biden. And the phrase I heard a week ago often was we have to give him the grace and the space to do this. They are growing more and more impatient. I mean, you know, if you look at the - at the alternative, which is most likely rallying around Vice President Kamala Harris, I think Democrats believe she may have a lower floor, but she almost certainly has a higher ceiling, you know, that - with Biden, you are kind of locked in concrete at this point, where the President's approval rating has been stuck at 40 percent or below since the summer of '23, 70 percent saying he's too old.

Most people who have been in the room, to use Chuck's phrase, do not believe you can recover from that despite all the resistance to Trump. And with Harris, it could go badly. But at least there's more fluidity in the situation and the opportunity to reignite some excitement in the Democratic coalition.

SANCHEZ: I want to go back to Chuck, because there is this question of what happens if Biden decides that he's stepping out of the race. And just before we went on air, you were sort of describing the scenario at the convention. I'm wondering if you could share that with our viewers and then sort of give us your perspective on how it works out with candidate dynamics, who could wind up at the top of the ticket.

ROCHA: I've been to every convention since 1996, when I still had hair and was skinny. A long time have I seen these conventions. And what I'm getting at there is that every convention is the same, and you see all those great signs like you saw at the Republican convention, and the delegates literally get to nominate who they are.

But there is a provision, as you both know and have reported on, where you don't have to be with who's with you in case something like this happens, which opens up the floor for nominations like they used to do in the old days in smoke-filled back rooms when the party actually decided who the nominee would be. And so that's what you would see if - big if ...

SANCHEZ: Right.

ROCHA: ... somebody didn't run, and if the President didn't run, they would have to open up that nomination, and lots of folks - I think lots of people would get into the race, and I think lots of people right now are trying to position themselves through unnamed sources and other things to be on top of those tickets.

KEILAR: What - Ron, what would that look like in this race ...

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

KEILAR: ... if you saw that happening? And also, can you speak to something that we've heard some Democrats who are standing behind Biden say, which is, once you get into that chaos with the money that's been raised, you could see legal challenges from Republicans, and then it's a - who knows what's going to happen.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes, you know, Brianna, the analogy I often hear from top Democratic strategists is that if you are in a car that is speeding toward a cliff, there is a risk of jumping out of the door while the car is still moving. There's probably a bigger risk of staying in the car as it goes over the cliff, Thelma and Louise notwithstanding.

And I think that's what Democrats view. I mean, there are obviously lots of problems with switching at this late date, but, you know, I think by and large, Democrats feel that it would be relatively seamless in terms of the money and the organizational structure to move from Biden to Harris, and I am less sure than Chuck that there would be a full-throated process.

I think that, you know, obviously it would be open technically, but the candidates who a large number of delegates might think would be a stronger option than Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, have already said they would not challenge her, and I question whether anyone, you know, who is a full-scale, top-tier challenger would want to, you know, put their hat in the ring against the first female vice president of color at this moment.

[15:10:07]

I think the party could coalesce around her pretty quickly, and there could be excitement for a ticket that would either be Harris-Shapiro, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, or Harris-Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, who would be a real roll of the dice and potentially a lot of excitement as the first all-female ticket.

So I actually think if Biden steps aside, there would not be anything approaching civil war. I think climbing that first mountain of nudging him out, I'm not sure how many people have the stomach for the climbing a second mountain of bypassing her. And the party, I think, would feel by and large a sense of relief. Not everybody.

There are a lot of people who want to stick with Biden, but I think that the consensus in the party is clearly moving toward the position that he cannot win, and therefore, if we want to save not only him, but potentially, last point, eight Democratic Senate seats in states where he is now trailing, that could be a deficit that could last in the Senate all the way to 2030, which would leave Republicans plenty of time to confirm successors to Alito and Thomas, and thus control the Supreme Court until 2050. So the stakes are really high here in what Democrats decide in the next few days.

KEILAR: Very interesting. Well, gentlemen, you leave us with a range of options. A range of outcomes, I should say, for what a convention, if Joe Biden is not at the top of the ticket, could be.

Chuck, Ron, thank you so much to both of you, we appreciate it.

BROWNSTEIN: Thank you.

KEILAR: And on the GOP side of the race, the full Republican ticket will hit the trail for the first time tomorrow. Former President Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, will be in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That's of course one of the swing states that the Biden campaign says is crucial in Biden's blue wall strategy.

SANCHEZ: Yes, but Trump is confident he's going to be a metaphorical wrecking ball infused by some major post-convention energy. Let's go to Grand Rapids now with CNN's Kristen Holmes.

Kristen, Trump's Republican National Convention speech started off about unity, and then I could actually see from my vantage point last night when he started veering off the teleprompter, and that's when it went into the territory that we're more often used to seeing Donald Trump go, talking about a stolen election, essentially usual partisan rhetoric. Do you think we're going to see a repeat of that on Saturday?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Boris. I could also see the teleprompter. There was one period of time where I'm fairly certain it didn't move for roughly 10 minutes at all. So I think that was probably the point where some of his allies were holding themselves really tight, the same allies who were telling us that he was going to deliver a full hour long speech on unity and ending political divisiveness.

Now what we think we're going to see on Saturday, what we learned from yesterday is that Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He is going to continue to campaign on the same exact things that he thinks make him popular and really is red meat to his conservative base. Talking about immigration, as you said, talking about a stolen election.

But what we're looking for tomorrow is not necessarily that speech. We already saw him kind of go off topic and get away from this idea of unity. What we're looking for now is how he interacts with J.D. Vance. This is his vice presidential candidate.

The thing to keep in mind is that so many people around us told us that part of the reason he chose J.D. Vance as his running mate was because of the chemistry they had, because of the connection they had. We're going to possibly be able to see that for the first time on stage tomorrow. So far, we've really just seen them kind of sitting next to each other. We've seen some reaction shots of each other, looking at each other while they speak, but not actually seeing how they run a campaign together. And this is going to be our first opportunity for that.

Boris, the other thing to keep in mind is that this is the first rally since that assassination attempt last Saturday. So what we're also watching for, what have they done to change the kind of atmosphere and security to make it better protected for both President Trump, for the crowd, and for now the vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance.

We are hearing that this is going to be incredibly secure, that it's going to have more security than they've ever had at a rally because they've had to rethink protocols, et cetera. But what that looks like, we'll wait and see. One thing to note, this rally tomorrow is inside.

Notable, given that the Secret Service had expressed some trepidation about having these outdoor rallies, though it wasn't an express concern about the one that we saw last weekend, as far as our reporting indicates.

Kristen Holmes, thanks so much for the reporting. Still ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL, school shooters and bomb building instructions, two things that investigators say the man who shot Donald Trump was researching in the days and weeks before the attack.

KEILAR: Plus, chaos and confusion around the world as a huge tech outage is hitting everything from airports and cell towers to banks and hospitals. Those stories and much more coming up.

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[15:19:05]

KEILAR: All right. It has been a nightmare day for air travelers, this one can attest to that. Also just for airlines and folks all over the globe because of a huge cyber outage that has caused widespread gridlock, cancellations, delays at all of these American airports and also airports around the world.

SANCHEZ: Yes, I was fortunate to only have a delay, others have it much worse. And even besides air travel, companies like FedEx and UPS are also affected, along with hospitals, government agencies, even some 911 systems. Cyber security firm CrowdStrike is blaming a routine software update for the chaos and not a cyber attack. The company says the problem is slowly but surely being fixed.

Let's go now to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport with CNN's Isabel Rosales. She's been tracking this chaos all day. What's the situation like now, Isabel?

[15:20:01]

ISABEL ROSALES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Boris and Brianna. It's looking quite a bit different. You might remember all those crowds that we saw just hours ago, a lot of that has thinned out. Certainly because a lot of them have been rebooked for tomorrow, so who knows if that's sort of kicking the can down the road, if more headaches are to be expected tomorrow.

But I have also noticed this, it appears that some of the systems on these airlines have come back into order. I'm seeing people now working the kiosks. Before that was not possible. We were actually seeing airline staff having to check people in manually, calling out flights by city, by flight number and order, prioritizing them by their departure time, so a huge headache.

We saw those huge lines of people just waiting for answers, hoping and praying that they could in fact make their flight. This is the world's busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson, but it is also the airport with the most cancellations in the U.S. so far, over 600 delays or cancellations at this airport today alone.

Let me now introduce you to Kaia (ph), a passenger.

You actually slept here overnight yesterday because you had issues yesterday getting a flight. What happened with this outage? KAIA: Basically, my flight got canceled because we didn't have enough flight attendants. We boarded the plane, they made us deboard, come out the plane, wait two more hours just so they can cancel the flight and tell us that we didn't have any flight attendants for the flight.

ROSALES: And then you wake up in the airport, I'm sure uncomfortable, to this madness. What happened then in trying to get another flight, get this resolved? Obviously it didn't work.

KAIA: I couldn't get another flight rebooked because the system is down, so I couldn't get any voucher for food, hotel, nothing. They can't give me anything. I asked them, what is the protocol for this, because I'm just sitting here sleeping on the floor and they're not providing me with any information. They don't know. They're just saying, they don't know. You just have to wait.

I've been waiting here for 19 hours.

ROSALES: Nineteen hours. Are you sleeping here again tonight?

KAIA: It seems that, it seems like I am going to have to sleep here tonight because all of the flights for today are booked, so I can't even get nothing for today. I would have to get something for tomorrow. So I guess I'm on the floor again.

ROSALES: Yes. And my gosh, you're trying to go back home to Los Angeles, back to work. How would you describe what you've been feeling like dealing with this madness?

KAIA: Hurt.

ROSALES: Hurt.

KAIA: Sad. I feel like I'm in the short end of the stick like ...

ROSALES: You don't know what to do.

KAIA: I don't know what to do. And I'm just stuck and I have to get to work. I have bills to pay. There are a lot of inconveniencing my life. And I'm not fortunate enough to have money to just go get a hotel room and then they pay me back. I'm not fortunate like that. They don't know what my pockets look like.

ROSALES: Kaia, thank you so much and wishing you the best of luck in getting this resolved.

Boris, Brianna, obviously, you know, this has been a huge headache with real life consequences to passengers, many of whom I've spoken with today trying to make funerals, weddings, family reunions, important life moments, important events and still no answers.

SANCHEZ: Yes, that is a pain to say the least. Isabel Rosales, live from Atlanta. Thank you so much.

We're joined now by Jordan Rae Kelly. She served as the director for Cyber Incident Response on the National Security Council. She's now the Head of Cybersecurity for the Americas at FTI Consulting.

Thanks so much for being with us. Just overall, what do you make of this issue? How does this happen to someone who doesn't really understand cybersecurity?

JORDAN RAE KELLY, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF, FBI CYBER DIVISION: Well, I think there's going to be a lot of discussions to figure out exactly what happened and how it happened. But I think at a broad level, what we can tell is that this is a real indicator of the global connectivity of all of our systems being reliant on similar software, similar infrastructure.

And so I really think that this is a wakeup call for people to have a better understanding of what their plans are for business continuity, disaster recovery. Those are the questions we should be asking while people really look at how this happened and what could have been done differently.

KEILAR: I also wonder what this reveals about vulnerabilities. And, I mean, this is something, this was accidental, it sounds like, but it's having the same impact as something that was nefarious and what this could reveal about that going forward.

KELLY: You know, I think if you're a bad guy, you're certainly looking at these headlines today and saying, gosh, this would be an easy way to really cause a lot of damage or wreak havoc. And that is scary. I think those of us that live and breathe cybersecurity every day are not surprised by that. But for others, they may be realizing this today as they're sleeping on the airport floor in Atlanta.

I think that it may be unavoidable in some ways, but it's certainly a wakeup call to recognize how much of our day to day lives are really reliant on this type of infrastructure.

SANCHEZ: What can be done now to mitigate the problem? Is there, I know they were working on a quick patch. There were some signs that Isabel pointed to that some things were back online, but then you have like UPS and FedEx saying it's actually going to take a couple of days before we can get your stuff.

[15:25:01]

Is there any simple fix?

KELLY: It's never easy when it comes to correcting issues like this, even if they're very small. So everyone's going to have to have a lot of patience and calm as they navigate, even though there was obviously, as you mentioned, kind of a quick fix that came out. It's definitely still going to take some time to get back up and running. And this is also a time to be extra vigilant about the risks that you might be facing as an organization when you're offline, to make sure that your employees are aware of your processes to get back up and running. It's definitely going to be a really sensitive time.

KEILAR: When it comes to American industry and government, culturally, do you think that we have the right approach to this kind of thing of being proactive rather than reactive?

KELLY: Well, I'll tell you, we're never more proactive than when an incident like this happens. Everyone starts making decisions about making investments and making fixes. And then once you get back up and running, it's easy to say, well, I think we've got it under control.

So I think that our culture has shifted in the right way, particularly in the last 10 years. But these incidents, when they do happen and they're so chaotic, I think they really should be an indicator to businesses that they need to take a very proactive stance when it comes to cybersecurity, make investments and make the right choices that are going to make it easy to recover.

SANCHEZ: Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a huge part of the problem is that a lot of these businesses relied on just CrowdStrike to handle their cybersecurity. Why did they all go that direction? Because I know there are a lot of different organizations that offer that sort of cybersecurity.

KELLY: They're a very reputable company. They've made lots of investments in cybersecurity, a lot of friends and colleagues that work there. So they're a great organization. I don't think that this should be thought of as something that we would just really pin on them. There's going to have to be some discussions. These types of things do happen, when you're making updates to programs and codes.

SANCHEZ: Okay. Well, Jordan Rae Kelly, we appreciate the perspective. Thanks for being with us.

KELLY: Thanks for having me.

SANCHEZ: So we're getting new details about what's being described as a rah-rah pep talk that President Biden's campaign chair gave to his staff this afternoon. On the call, Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon insisted that President Biden has been hearing from voters who are on his side and want him to keep going and that those voices count for more than anything else. He's going to speak with a Democratic lawmaker - we're going to be speaking with a Democratic lawmaker about what he's hearing from his constituents next.

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