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Push For Pennsylvania; Allies Plead With Trump To Stay On Message; High Profile Hire. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired August 14, 2024 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: This is in, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz announcing a bus tour across battleground Pennsylvania just a day before the Democratic National Convention begins. Plus, news CNN reporting, Ukraine has conducted its biggest attack on Russian airfields since the war started, it's the latest move to take the war to Russia. And binge drinking out, key totaling in. Why more young people are saying no thanks to alcohol. I'm Sara Sidner with John Berman and Kate Bolduan. This is "CNN News Central."

KARE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: New this morning, the new push for Pennsylvania. CNN now learning Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are planning a bus tour through the Commonwealth, also known as a key battleground for anyone hoping to win the White House Pennsylvania. Sunday's bus tour is planned just before they kick off the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The push for Pennsylvania coming as the Harris campaign is trying to make inroads and win back some of the lead that Donald Trump has held for quite some time on the economy and his economic -- the economic agenda, saying he has long waged a war on workers, is the position and pitch from the Harris campaign.

At the center of that message, a question about whether or not Donald Trump could make a McFlurry.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. TIM WALZ (D-MN), VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Can you simply picture Donald Trump working in a McDonald's trying to make a McFlurry or something? He couldn't run that damn flurry -- McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: CNN's Eva McKend has much more on this. Eva, you have this new reporting about this bus tour, what are you learning?

EVA MCKEND, CNN NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER: Yes, Kate. I'll get to that in just a bit. But I just also want to note, which was significant yesterday when he was addressing the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union, he addressed these attacks for the first time against his military career. Talking about that career and really standing up for himself, saying that he is proud of his service. And that was the first time that he really took on JD Vance's attacks head on. Let's listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALZ: I'm going to say it again as clearly as I can, I am proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record. Anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words, thank you for your service and sacrifice.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MCKEND: And, Kate, new this morning, we are learning that the governor and the vice president going to make a last minute stop in Pennsylvania ahead of the Democratic National Convention. They've held these big rallies but the goal of the bus tour, Sunday, is to have more intimate events, so they'll stop in on canvassers and retail shops in order to get that critical face time in this battleground state. And they'll start this bus tour in Pittsburgh, so everyone will have to scramble their travel plans ahead of the DNC now, but they are doing this in Pennsylvania.

And it just really illustrates, Kate, how important this state is to the campaign. It's 19 electoral votes. They, of course, had the big rollout of the ticket in Philadelphia. Kate?

BOLDUAN: That's right. Eva, thank you so much for your reporting. John?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, that combined with the news that Harris and Walz are doing a big rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday at the convention. You can see how they're trying to program in battleground states even during a convention, which is in Illinois.

This morning, Nikki Haley has some blunt advice for Donald Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NIKKI HALEY (R), FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Quit complaining that she's not giving an interview, quit whining about her. The campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So Haley is not the first or the second, or the third Republican, or even third Trump ally to say this in the last 48 hours that Donald Trump is focused on all the wrong things. CNN's Steve Contorno is with us this morning. Steve, with some new reporting on kind of alarm in conservative circles?

[09:05:00]

STEVE CONTORNO, CNN REPORTER: Absolutely, John. The concern is that Donald Trump has not only squandered the opportunity to define Harris during these critical past three weeks, but that he is risking reminding voters why they decided to turn away from him in 2020. And if you want a window into what the Trump campaign would prefer he talk about, take a look at this post to X on Monday ahead of his interview with Elon Musk.

In it, Trump asked the question, are you better off now than you were when I was president? That is certainly the ground that his campaign and his advisors want this race to be fought on. But when it actually came time to have the interview with Musk, Trump didn't ask that question or bring up that topic until the very end of his two hour interview with Musk. Instead, he spent time talking about the 2020 election, comparing the beauty of Vice President Harris to the former first lady and his wife.

And these concerns are not just being made in private to Donald Trump anymore. They are coming into the public. His allies are trying to speak to him through the television. Look at what a couple of them said earlier this week.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN MCCARTHY (R), FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER: You've got to make this race not on personalities. Stop questioning the size of her crowds and start questioning her position.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, FORMER TRUMP CAMPAIGN MANAGER: The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see. It's fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CONTORNO: Now, we will see Trump later today in North Carolina. It's a speech that is supposed to be focused on the economy, comparing and contrasting the records of the Trump administration versus the Biden- Harris administration. Of course, John, we'll be closely watching how closely he sticks to that script.

And it's also interesting, because this is a state that several weeks ago, we thought Donald Trump had tilted it in his advantage, but now is reemerging as one of those critical battlegrounds heading into the fall.

BERMAN: Kevin McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, going on TV, trying to reach Trump in a place that they think he will see them, which, of course, is on conservative television. Steve, thank you very much for that. Sara?

SIDNER: All right. I want to bring in CNN political commentators, SE Cupp and Ashley Allison. Thank you ladies for joining us.

Economy, of course, the biggest issue for voters, Harris is expected to release her first major economic plan. Axios is saying something really interesting about what she is going to do. And a big part of the Harris plan is to, as they put it, unapologetically change some of her more liberal positions and say that her White House experience has changed her mind.

Ashley, what do you make of this? And can she do this successfully? Because, of course, Republicans are already saying, this is a flip- flop. This is -- she's flip-flopping. ASHLEY ALLISON, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Yes. Well, I'm excited to hear that she's going to be rolling out her economic policy. It's been less than a month since she's been at the top of the ticket, and really wanted to kick the tires on some of the issues that she knows Americans and voters really care about.

I think she most certainly -- look, the things I believed in 2016 most are true, but there are some things because of lived experience that over eight years I've changed my mind on. And I think that that is the courage of a leader to say, OK, maybe I didn't have that exactly right, but I'm going to adjust it, or the country is different now than it was pre -COVID. I want to adjust some topics.

So the vice president has a great opportunity with the bus tour that Eva just mentioned, going through Pennsylvania, a really important state, and talk about her election. But also she'll have those four days of the convention. And you won't just hear her talk about it in her speech, but I would imagine all of her surrogates, all the big headliners that are going to be during the convention, also teasing out some of the policies that the vice president stands on, whether they are different from her original position or not.

SIDNER: SE, I want to ask you about Donald Trump's comments to Elon Musk. There's a lot of conversation around this, partly because of how the unions are responding. He sort of suggested that striking workers should be summarily fired, or at least was praising Elon Musk for summarily firing workers that may strike.

We've now seen the United Auto Workers president come out and say he's suing over that, and we've now seen another head of a huge union saying, this is economic terrorism for firing workers for organizing strike. This is the same person who was at the RNC. How do you see this playing out?

SE CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Not well. I mean, this was a sloppy interview in that it didn't seem like Trump had any sort of idea of what he wanted to gain from it, other than sitting down with a friendly audience to billionaires in sort of a, let's say our grievances interview. So stuff like this, delighting and firing striking workers just kind of came out.

And the timing couldn't be worse, Sara. JD Vance today is in Michigan speaking at a family-owned truck company in the state where UAW is headquartered and a state which employs the most auto workers of any in the union, and also, by the way, a state, a swing state that they'll need to win.

[09:10:10]

So the sloppiness of the, you know, Trump 2.0 campaign keeps hitting these ugly roadblocks everywhere it goes because Trump can't stay on message.

SIDNER: I want to ask you, Ashley, about a couple of things. One, you've got Harris who, in 2019, talked about closing some of the things on the border, making -- decriminalizing really illegal immigration, the migrant crisis that was happening at the time. Donald Trump is responding to some of this.

He went on Univision, which is Spanish language television that is highly popular, and he said this about immigration.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (R) AND CURRENT U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Yes, we have people coming into our country from all over the world, not just from South America. Everyone thinks South America, it's really from all over the world. They're coming from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asians, we're being attacked. It's a new form of crime in the US. It's called migrant crime.

And it's caused because of Harris, Kamala, you know? Nobody knows her last name, it's Harris. Nobody -- everyone thinks of her as Kamala. So it's Kamala Harris.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: I'm curious what you made of that. Because there is an issue here in New York people talking about some of the incidents that have happened with crime. What do you make of his response, and whether or not you think Kamala Harris should be changing her tact?

ALLISON: Well, we do know her last name. It is Harris, and her first name is Kamala, as you pronounce correctly, Sara, but he continues to intentionally mispronounce, or maybe just not smart enough to remember how to say her name. Nonetheless, look, we know immigration is an important issue, and it is something that the Democrats are going to have to address, but we also know border crossings are down under the Biden-Harris administration, lower than they were on when Trump left office.

We also know that there was a bipartisan bill that, but for Donald Trump, would have been signed to deal with some of these issues. But I want to address something else is that, I'm not sure if you showed the picture, but Donald Trump recently released a meme that had pictures of African immigrants, black and African immigrants in this country.

SIDNER: Allison, hold on one second. Let's put that up while you're talking about it. This is what he put out here. Take a look at that picture. It really gives you a sense of where his head is at. Talk about that, his campaign and him pushing that out.

ALLISON: It's not that immigration is not an important issue, but it's the way that Donald Trump talks about it. He talks about them being as whole countries, or he talks about them being immigrants, being rapists and murderers, and it's othering. It's trying to make voters and Americans feel scared of immigrants coming to our country, when in reality most of the folks who are in America are because they have an immigrant story, their families coming from Europe.

And so, Donald Trump has a tactic right now that is not surprising, because it's a part of his tactic. But he's doing these things with racial undertones and saying, like in a Kamala Harris presidency, all these black immigrants and African immigrants, and Haitian immigrants are going to come into your country. And do you want that? And you should be afraid.

And so, it doesn't appear that scare tactics really work in elections, but it is right out of the Trump playbook. And I would hope that their campaign would behave better. If he want to talk about the issues, great, but using imagery to try and invoke fear is pretty ruthless politics.

SIDNER: SE, does it work? Because we see a lot of ads that do just exactly what Allison is saying, use scare tactics.

CUPP: I wish it didn't, but fear works real well, actually, as a motivator. And that's on both sides, have sort of fear-mongered traditionally and historically. But I've always said there's a good way to bad way to say anything, and there are good ways to talk about immigration, the migrant crisis, crime in our cities. This isn't one of them.

But let me just add a note to this. It's also what the Trump campaign is not talking about. There are some real low lying fruit, low hanging fruit over on the Harris-Walz campaign that they're just ignoring. Minnesota, for example, Tim Walz's state, has a no leak restriction on abortion. That places it well outside where a majority of Americans are.

Minnesota also has one of the highest income taxes of any state in the union. Go after that. Let's have -- can we have a riff or a meme on that once in a while? But they just seem to want to stay with litigating Harris' race, calling out Walz's military service record, calling her dumb and stupid, and mispronouncing her name. This is not a campaign, that's a crisis of confidence. That's not knowing where to go or what to do.

[09:15:12]

SIDNER: SE Cupp joining the chorus of Republicans trying to get Trump to change tact. Ashley Allison, thank you so much, both of you, for coming on this morning. John?

BERMAN: All right. Hundreds of thousands are without power this morning as Tropical Storm Ernesto expected to strengthen to a hurricane today. We've got new reporting on the high profile lawyer Hunter Biden is hoping will land him a plea deal. And watch your language, a man is sentenced to jail for cursing at a judge. We've got new video from this courtroom meltdown.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:20:19]

BOLDUAN: Hunter Biden has a new lawyer this morning ahead of his upcoming federal tax evasion trial in California. Mark Geragos, whose clients have included Diddy, Winona Ryder, Jussie Smollett. They might -- he might be Hunter Biden's ticket to negotiating a plea deal now.

CNN's Katelyn Polantz says much more on this. Katelyn, what are you learning about it? What does it mean?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, Kate a plea would avoid a second trial for Hunter Biden in federal court. He's already been convicted of gun crimes in Delaware, and he is headed in just three weeks to a trial on tax evasion charges.

What our resources are telling us is that, Hunter Biden has been open to a plea deal with the Special Counsel's Office for some time. He had one before it fell apart before the judge. It was a deal that would have minimized his potential prison time, and even after he was convicted by a jury in Delaware's Federal Court on those gun charges, there were some nominal sort of preliminary feeling out talks of the possibility of a plea deal.

He does seem to be possibly open to this, to not have this second trial in California, but the Special Counsel's Office hasn't given him anything concrete that he would want. And so, it's full steam ahead to trial, that's where Mark Geragos, this lawyer based out of Los Angeles, comes in. He is going to be stepping into this case, taking more of a lead as it goes to trial.

He's based out there in Los Angeles. He's also has more time on his hands and is a little bit cheaper, or doesn't have as much of an infrastructure around him as the people that took Hunter Biden to trial in Delaware would, that is Abbe Lowell, another very high profile lawyer.

So there's a shift here happening for Hunter Biden as he heads into this trial, the second trial, where he could risk a conviction that would be quite significant on top of the gun charges that he's also convicted of already. Kate?

BOLDUAN: And, Katelyn, there's also this new reporting coming from the New York Times that Hunter Biden asked the State Department for help on behalf of Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. And this was at a time when his father, Joe Biden, was vice president. What are you learning?

POLANTZ: Yes. We're learning all of this now that his father is no longer running for a second term in office. The State Department is releasing some information obtained by the New York Times that Hunter Biden back in 2016, when he was a board member at this Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, he reached out to folks in the US Embassy in Italy and wanted some help.

He wanted some networking for Burisma, and they balked pretty quickly. The internal information that The Times was able to obtain through the State Department, it was a Commerce Department official saying, you know, the US government should not be advocating with the government of Italy on behalf of this Ukrainian company. We're not going to do anything here.

But this is just another bullet point on the history of Hunter Biden trying to capitalize when his father was the Vice President, on his family connection, something we know he's done many times. But, of course, we have no evidence that shows that Joe Biden did anything to help the business interests of Hunter Biden at that time, and Hunter Biden has been investigated for some time, obviously facing federal charges on multiple things that he's done in his past, but nothing related to foreign lobbying. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Katelyn, thank you so much for your reporting. John?

BERMAN: All right. This morning, Tropical Storm Ernesto, just short of hurricane strength right now, is powering its way across the Caribbean, leaving flooding and hundreds of thousands of people in its path without electricity. Torrential rain and wind in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands so far, Ernesto is expected to get stronger as it heads out over the Atlantic. Largely, I think I'm going to play the roll of Derek Van Dam, away from land as it moves into the Atlantic. Sara?

SIDNER: Only Bermuda looks like it's in --

BERMAN: Yes, Bermuda. Don't forget Bermuda.

SIDNER: Bermuda, all right. A state of emergency issued in a second region of Russia as Ukrainian forces claim control of hundreds of square miles of Russian territory. And all eyes are on the market as new CPI numbers show a slowdown in inflation. We're minutes away from the opening bell. All that ahead.

[09:24:52]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SIDNER: TikTok, in just a few seconds here, the markets will open, and investors will be reacting to brand new inflation data. The closely watched Consumer Price Index indicating the Fed could be on track, could be on track for a rate cut. CNN business anchor Julia Chatterley is here.

JULIA CHATTERLEY, CNN BUSINESS ANCHOR: Fingers crossed. This is consistent with that, by the way, and that really is the breaking news I think today.

SIDNER: Yes.

CHATTERLEY: It's a win for the economists as well, because it was absolutely bang in line, encouraging news for consumers as well. You can see on the chart the trend is what's important.

And I know it feels painful for everybody out there, but consumer prices rises continue to slow. And 2.9 percent for the yearly number, that's the rise overall. The month on month was all about housing costs. And that's a problem, because that was double the price rises that we saw the last month, so the Fed would definitely focus on that.