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Several Lawmakers Demand Release of House Ethics Report on Gaetz; Trump Taps Vaccine Skeptic RFK Jr. For Health and Human Services Secretary. Aired 2:00-2:30p ET

Aired November 15, 2024 - 14:00   ET

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

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[14:00:45]

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN HOST: New reporting on how the President Elect may reshape the FBI. Donald Trump weighing whether to nominate what's described as a hard right loyalist who openly talks about going after Trump's self-perceived enemies.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Plus, happening now the trial of the undocumented migrant charged with murdering a Georgia college student. Prosecutors detailing how Laken Riley's smartwatch will show her long, fierce fight with her accused murderer and how DNA evidence will link the suspect to his victim.

And the FAA is investigating a close call in Hawaii. An air traffic controller's quick instructions may have saved an American Airlines flight from crashing into mountains near Honolulu Airport. We're following these major developing stories and more all coming in right here to CNN News Central.

JIMENEZ: President Elect Donald Trump is wrapping up a week of what has been in some cases controversial cabinet picks while considering another possible addition to his administration that would also undoubtedly be contentious. Sources tell CNN Trump is weighing a major change at the FBI as his allies lobby him to replace current FBI Director Chris Wray with MAGA Fire Brandon, Trump loyalist, Kash Patel.

Now, Trump also just announced that Steven Cheung, his campaign spokesman, has been named as Assistant to the President and Director of Communications. And new details are surfacing about Trump's defense secretary pick. Officials in California confirming former Fox host and veteran Pete Hegseth was involved in a police investigation of a sexual assault allegation back in 2017.

Now, all of this as Trump's pick for Attorney General is also facing growing skepticism and doubts he can get confirmed. Lawmakers in both parties are demanding to see findings of a House ethics investigation of former Congressman Matt Gaetz for allegations of sexual misconduct and illegal drug use.

There's a lot there, but that's why we've got CNN's Kristen Holmes, who's joining us now. So, Kristen, in addition to Steven Cheung, Trump just brought on Sergio Gor as assistant to the president. I mean, we're throwing a lot of names out for people that may just be hearing them for the first time. So can you just give us a sense of what these additions actually mean for the shaping of this incoming administration?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. And Omar, I really want to focus on that last one you just noticed. That you just brought up Sergio Gor, who's going to be in charge of the Office of Personnel. There is a reason why this job is so critical and the reason why Donald Trump chose somebody who is a complete loyalist to him. He is somebody who started a publishing company with Don Jr.

This is Sergio Gor, where he published three of the President's books, among other books by prominent Republicans, especially in the MAGA sphere. He is also somebody who started a Super PAC with Donald Trump -- for Donald Trump this last campaign cycle with Ike Perlmutter raised over $80 million. And he also officiated a wedding of Matt Gaetz.

This job is going to be one of the most critical jobs in the administration, and here's why. What we saw in Donald Trump's last- term, the last year of his first tenure in office or his first-term in office, was that he had appointed Johnny McEntee, a Trump loyalist, to be in charge of the Office of Personnel. That is when you started to see the purge of government jobs.

You started to see McEntee create a loyalty test for people coming into the administration. Gor is likely to be, and that's going to be underneath a Deputy Chief of Staff, Taylor Budowich, who is in charge of personnel. The two of them are going to implement Donald Trump's policies or ideas to completely revamp the administration.

Remember, there are thousands of jobs across the administration. It's not just these high powered cabinet positions. It's also the people who do the day to day. And Donald Trump has pledged to get rid of career officials and replace them with loyalists. Well, the people in charge of finding those loyalists and weeding through that is going to be Sergio Gor and Taylor Budowich. So this is actually a very critical job.

Now, just to give you the overarching here, because you've obviously named all of those people and all of the controversies, whether it's Matt Gaetz or RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard and obviously Pete Hegseth. Now, after we learned about these allegations, Donald Trump clearly is under -- not under the impression that he has to worry about people getting confirmed, whether or not it's that he believes he can get it through or whether or not it's that he doesn't care, whether or not they can get confirmed.

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What he is doing right now is he is fulfilling the promises he made on the campaign trail. He is picking the most high profile pieces, people for these cabinet positions that have propagated his messaging, who have gone on TV and said exactly what it is that he has said on the campaign trail he wants to do in this current administration. And I am told to watch some of these kind of lower level, or at least not as sexy positions because those are the people who are actually going to be doing the day to day. But what Trump wants from these cabinet heads is to go out there and to fight for him, whether it's on television or on any form of media, to go out there and be a bomb thrower. And that's something you're going to find in some of these names.

But of course, the question is whether or not they can get confirmed. And I talked to a number of people who said, look, we don't know that all these people can get confirmed, but what he's going to do is he's going to name the people that he wants in the position and then we're going to see what happens from there. We're going to do everything we can to get them confirmed.

But we're -- we understand that there's a lot of blowback here. We understand there's a lot of pushback. We expected it. But let's just see what happens.

JIMENEZ: And you know, one of those picks, as we know, I think it's fair to say one of the more controversial ones for Attorney General and Matt Gaetz.

A lot of eyes were, of course, on the House, House Ethics investigation. And we heard from the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson that they were not going to release this report into a lot of allegations, into potentially an underage woman there. Lawmakers of both parties are demanding to sort of see the findings. Do you -- do you have a sense of sort of how that effort is reverberating within the Trump world right now?

HOLMES: Well, we heard from Secretary Mike Johnson is that he thinks that it should not be published.

Now, that's absolutely no surprise. There is no one who needs Donald Trump more than Speaker Mike Johnson. He has been nothing but a loyalist. And Donald Trump has saved his speakership on multiple occasions. So protecting Matt Gaetz is part of being loyal to Donald Trump, here's what he said today when asked about that ethics report.

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REP. MIKE JOHNSON, HOUSE SPEAKER: I do not. No, I think it's a terrible breach of protocol. The rules of the House have always been that a former member is beyond the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee. And so I don't think that's relevant.

I'm going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report. That is not the way we do things in the House, and I think that would be a terrible precedent.

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HOLMES: Now, to be clear, Mike Johnson is not the only Republican in the House and Senate, and there are quite a few Republicans who want to see the findings of this ethics report. So we'll obviously be keeping close tabs on that. Omar.

JIMENEZ: Kristen Holmes, really appreciate it. Brianna.

KEILAR: President Elect Trump is bucking norms when it comes to vetting some of his Cabinet picks. Instead of using the usual FBI background checks for some of the most highly sensitive roles in his administration, Trump's team is using private companies to do critical background checks. We have seen as Evan Perez with us now on this story. Evan, this is a big change and a concerning one.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Right. By this stage, you normally have the president -- the President Elect is submitting names, he's making them public. By this point, what you have typically is the FBI is already starting to dig in some of these background checks.

What you want is an incoming administration to be ready to hit the ground running, right? If there is a crisis that erupts, you want people in these jobs who already have the clearances, who already know everything that the current administration knows so that they can make the right decisions. And so there's vulnerabilities here that are built in if you don't do this.

And so what we understand is happening is that behind the scenes, you know, they are -- the incoming transition has some doubts about how they're going to handle this. They haven't submitted some of these names. They haven't signed up -- signed these memorandums of understanding that would lead the way for the FBI to start doing this.

Now, yes, a private company can do a lot of these checks. There's a lot of public information databases that they have access to. The FBI has more information that is not public, that they may not have access to. That's the reason why you would want this. There's a couple of reasons, right? There's national security risks about someone's contacts, certainly foreign contacts, their businesses that they might have that could potentially cause conflicts of interest. And you want to protect the country and the President, the President from embarrassment.

And so we expect at least from two people we've talked to in the transition that they will submit names to the FBI eventually. They haven't done so yet, but there are some names that they are considering just bypassing the system entirely. Now the question is, will the Senate require background checks from the FBI for people who come for nominations? That's where this could change, right? The FBI could still end up doing it because the Senate requires it. That is, if the Senate Republicans agree to do it.

KEILAR: Let's do a little experiment here real quick.

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Like a Matt Gaetz, for instance, if he gets a private background check versus an FBI one, he was investigated by the DOJ, but they didn't proceed ultimately, something by the FBI, would that reveal a lot more information than private? PEREZ: Absolutely. There's a lot more information that is in those files. They know what the witnesses says. There are other -- there are plenty of reasons why people don't get charged for crimes. And what you would want if you're the incoming administration is you want all of that information to make sure that this person that you're putting in charge, right? He needs to have the highest level clearance that you know all of that information, you want to be protected. And it's almost in this case, it appears they don't want to know.

KEILAR: Let's you get surprised by the Senate who has the information. Evan, great reporting. Thank you so much. Omar.

JIMENEZ: Well, Brianna, President Elect Trump's promise to let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. go wild on food, health and medicines as the new Health Secretary is prompting some pretty deep concerns among public health experts. Now, Kennedy has a long history of promoting anti-vaccine views. Take a listen to some of what he had to say about the safety of vaccines last year.

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LEX FRIDMAN, RESEARCH SCIENTIST: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., TRUMP'S PICK FOR HHS SECRETARY: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

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JIMENEZ: Which obviously the vast majority of the medical field disagrees with. But now, take a listen to Kennedy's answer just days ago on whether he will ban any current vaccines.

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KENNEDY: I'm not going to take away anybody's vaccines. I've never been an anti-vaccine --

VAUGHN HILLYARD, NBC REPORTER: You will not take any vaccine that is currently on the market.

KENNEDY: I'm not. If somebody -- if vaccines are working for somebody, I'm not going to take them away.

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JIMENEZ: So joining me now to discuss is emergency physician and former Baltimore Health Commissioner, Dr. Leana Wen. Great to see you. Dr. All right, look, you heard there, RFK Jr. says he's not going to take away anyone's vaccines. But he also does have some anti-vaccine history in his past. I mean, how concerned are you about him actually leading the Department of Health and Human Services here?

LEANA WEN, EMERGENCY PHYSICIAN: I'm very concerned. He doesn't just have a history of saying some anti-vaccine things. He's actually one of the most prominent and loudest anti-vaccine voices in the U.S. if not in the world. And he has a long history of peddling things that aren't true and that have been disproven completely. Debunked by the science. And that to me is the most concerning part.

I think it's fine if you want to raise questions. That's part of the scientific method is you ask question, you challenge scientific dogma and you say, is this still the case? Should we be doing more research? Those are fine questions to ask. But in the case of something like, are vaccines safe and effective? Are childhood vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella that have been around for dozens of years, are they safe and effective? I mean, that answer has been settled.

And it's extremely concerning to have someone overseeing health of the country who does not believe that. And that makes you wonder, what else is he going to do? What else does he not believe? How can we have someone who is insurance charge of science and health who doesn't actually understand or willingly disregards the scientific process?

JIMENEZ: To your point, challenging and questioning very different than denying what's been worked through at this point. One of the things he has talked about too, though, is removing fluoride from public water, which for those who don't know, was mineral added to a lot of water systems way back in the 40s to help prevent tooth decay.

And this is actually something you wrote about in the Washington Post this week where you said, quote, not every proposal from Trump and Kennedy is a five alarm fire. Stopping fluoridation does not rise to the same level of concern as, for example, defunding schools that require childhood vaccines. Medical experts and the American public need to save their outrage for when it's really warranted.

So I just want you to expand on that a little bit. What is your take on that particular aspect of what Kennedy Jr. said?

WEN: So I had heard and I really believed that fluoridation is a great public health success. And it was. The question, though is now that we have widespread availability of toothpaste that contains fluoride, do we still also have to add fluoride to water? And that's a question that I think is a legitimate question to be asking.

Many prominent scientists and mainstream health care voices have been asking this question about what is the benefit when it comes to dental health versus how do you weigh that versus the potential of having too much fluoride and having that be a cause of some negative health consequences. So I think reexamining our water fluoridation policy and at what level is appropriate. I think that's totally seem a good question to be asking.

And so not everything that Kennedy says is wrong. But that does not mean that this is an appropriate choice. I think somebody who doesn't understand and neglects science, cannot be in charge of an agency.

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I mean, you wonder what's going to happen if we have another pandemic. What happens if bird flu, which is already infecting more and more humans and is looking like a very serious health threat, what if that becomes the next pandemic? Is he going to allow vaccines to be developed? Is he going to allow treatments? Or is he going to be pushing conspiracy theories and, quote, alternative therapies, as he did during COVID-19? Is he going to allow testing?

I mean, all these are very real questions that should be asked. And I think I, and really everyone in the medical and public health community that I've spoken to were deeply concerned about someone like Kennedy overseeing something that impacts virtually every aspect of people's lives.

JIMENEZ: I mean, another aspect that impacts a lot of people's lives here is the FDA. And he's also talked about wanting to purge there. And he has advocated for things like regulating chemicals in food and limiting access to soda, processed foods.

But he also posted on X last month, the FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, collating compounds, Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, and exercise.

Didn't quite know about sunshine, but bottom line, what would stripping the FDA's regulation, power and those types of things actually look like outside of being a brighter day? If we're talking sunshine, of course.

WEN: Well, the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of public health functions, including making sure that the food that we eat, the medicines that we take are tested, that they're safe. People need to be able to trust that the medications that are prescribed have gone through rigorous scientific studies as they are. Someone who is seeding doubt into that process, someone who questions the scientific process that is very well established, that's a really big problem.

I think if he said, look, we want to make regulations or we want to decrease the administrative burden to get some of these newer therapies on board, no one would have a problem with that. Or if he's said, look, let's talk about the ultra-processed food and how that's contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic, no one would have a problem with that.

The issue, though, is questioning the very foundation of how people can trust the information that they receive. And I would say that that would make my job as a physician and our jobs as public health communicators much more challenging. If we now cannot trust what is coming from our federal health agencies.

JIMENEZ: Something tells me that when we get to any sort of confirmation questioning, a lot of these questions will be coming from those in the Senate as well. But hey, I got them from you. Dr. Leana Wen, appreciate you being here.

All right. Coming up, mass detention and deportation how Trump's transition team is preparing to put some of his immigration plans into action.

Also, we're live from Athens, Georgia, where an undocumented migrant is now on trial in a murder case that became a political flashpoint in the fight over immigration. This is CNN News Central. Stay with us.

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KEILAR: Sources say right now President Elect Trump's aides are laying the groundwork for his promise to mass deport illegal immigrants.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT ELECT: On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.

We are going to have to do a very large deportation because you can't -- you can't live like that.

On day one of my new administration, the invasion ends and the deportation begins.

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KEILAR: CNN's Priscilla Alvarez is here with details on this story that she has been following for a very long time. Priscilla, this will be expensive, arduous, in some cases heartbreaking, and certainly politically fraught. How would he pull this off?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, in many ways what's old is new again. I've been talking to sources who say the preparations underway include setting up a ton of executive actions that are similar to what he did the first time around. Think, for example, the remain in Mexico policy that's going to make a comeback. Asylum restrictions, more of those. Mandatory detention, ending the release of migrants.

It's those types of executive actions that sources say will lay the groundwork for this mass attention to mass deportation. And we mentioned detention because you cannot deport if you're not detaining someone who you have arrested. And on that front, sources tell me that they have been looking at their regional capabilities. They have been looking at metropolitan areas to see where they can expand their facilities.

That's not new, though. Homeland Security officials have done that before. And that's where, if you look at the bottom line of this, these ideas are not novel. There are ways to do it. Homeland Security officials have looked at these ways before when anticipating border surges or in the thick of border surges. But they want to build all of it to scale. And that's where it is different. And that is where there have been concerns and controversy over how exactly this would unfold.

Now, one of the other things they're looking at is a national emergency declaration. Remember, they did that the first time around to unlock those Pentagon funds for the border wall. Well, they want to do that again, but this time to use military assets for this type of operation.

Now, that face lawsuits the first time. They're prepared for that this time. But certainly all indicators are that they are looking at what they've done before, brushing it off, bringing it back and just doing it in what they see as a more effective way and at scale.

KEILAR: All right. Very interesting. We know that you'll continue to follow this. Priscilla Alvarez, thank you very much.

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Omar?

JIMENEZ: I want to take you all to Georgia. Now, in the high profile murder of an undocumented -- the high profile murder trial, excuse me, of an undocumented migrant from Venezuela. He's accused of killing 22- year-old nursing student Laken Riley. She was attacked while jogging at the University of Georgia back in February and her death turned into a lightning rod for crime and illegal immigration. The suspect waived his right to a jury trial, which means up to a judge to decide his fate.

CNN's Rafael Romo is outside the courthouse in Athens, Georgia for us. So, Rafael, what is the latest from inside the courtroom right now?

RAFAEL ROMO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Omar. Well, we have heard very powerful testimony today here at the Athens Clark County Courthouse, including body camera video of the moment the police sergeant found the victim's body. This is the first day of the trial against Jose Antonio Ibarra, Omar, the sole suspect in the death of nursing student Laken Riley, who was 22 at the time of her death.

In her opening statements, we heard from special prosecutor Sheila Ross, who said that the suspect had every intention of going after female victims the day he went out looking for somebody to attack. This is how she explained it in court earlier today. Let's take a listen.

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SHEILA ROSS, PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: He went hunting for females on the University of Georgia's campus. And in his hunt, he encountered 22- year-old Laken Riley on her morning jog. And when Laken Riley refused to be his rape victim, he bashed her skull in with a rock repeatedly. That is what this case is all about.

The evidence will show that Laken fought. She fought for her life. She fought for her dignity. And in that fight, she caused this defendant to leave forensic evidence behind.

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ROMO: And Omar, we also heard from the defense earlier today. Defense Attorney John Donnelly said that any evidence that Jose Ibarra killed is -- killed Laken Riley is circumstantial. If the presumption of innocent is respected, he said there should not be enough evidence to convince the judge beyond the reasonable doubt that Mr. Ibarra is guilty of the crimes charged. The trial will continue today until 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. and then resume on Monday. Omar, back to you.

JIMENEZ: And we'll continue to follow those updates. We'll bring them to you as we have them. Rafael Romo, really appreciate it.

All right. Still to come for us, the quick actions the FAA says kept an American flight from hitting a mountain just after takeoff. We'll explain coming up.

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