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Biden Remarks on Foreign Policy Legacy; Winds Threaten to Make Fires Harder to Contain; White House: "Distinct Possibility" of Gaza Deal This Week. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired January 13, 2025 - 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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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Any moment now, President Biden will be speaking at the State Department. He's going to address his legacy after four years in the White House. He leaves office with two wars on the global stage and a new president who sees the world very differently than he does.

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN HOST: And bracing for the worst, firefighters race to contain the fires that have burned through LA neighborhoods as new winds now threaten to make it even harder to contain them. We're following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here, the CNN News Central.

KEILAR: It is the top of the hour. I'm Brianna Keilar in Washington and Omar Jimenez is in for Boris. Great to have you.

JIMENEZ: Always good to see you.

KEILAR: Always good to have you. Any moment now, President Biden will be delivering one of the final speeches of his presidency from the State Department, where he's expected to tout his foreign policy legacy.

JIMENEZ: Now at the same time, there could be signs of progress when it comes to one of President Biden's biggest foreign policy challenges. White House officials are signaling a cease fire and hostage deal in Gaza could be finalized before the President leaves office. I want to bring in CNN's MJ Lee, who joins us now from the White House. So can you just tell us a little bit more on what we should expect from the President's speech here?

MJ LEE, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. No question that we are about to hear a major Joe Biden legacy speech as the President is preparing to leave office in exactly one week. You know, at the end of Donald Trump's first administration and term in office, there were a lot of questions from global leaders about America's place in the world.

And when President Biden came into office, keep in mind that he really made this big promise that he was going to change the way that America was perceived and America's role on the global stage. And when he takes that podium in just a few minutes or so at the State Department, we do expect that he is going to try to make the case that he has sort of lived up to that promise, that he has done everything he can to try to restore America's leadership on the global stage.

Of course, pointed to -- pointing to things like supporting Israel as it has come under attack from Hamas following October 7th, protecting Ukraine and doing everything it can to support Ukraine's fight against Russia. And also just the rebuilding of America's many alliances across the world, whether they are Western alliances or alliances in the Indo-Pacific, pointing to all of these things as having kept the word that he made -- the promise that he made when he was first coming into office.

U.S. officials previewing the speech, they are also saying that he'll make the simple case that the incoming administration, in other words, incoming President Donald Trump, thanks to President Biden, is going to be inheriting a much better hand than what President Biden inherited four years ago.

We should also just point out that in just two days, on Wednesday, President Biden is going to be delivering a big farewell speech to the nation. So it is notable that he is taking time and making space to deliver a whole separate foreign policy focused speech. And this should come as no surprise if you have been following sort of the arc of Joe Biden's career.

Foreign policy has played such an important role for so many decades. So it is not surprising that he would want to make a separate speech altogether that is just focus on what he wants to cement as his foreign policy legacy.

[14:05:07]

KEILAR: And if you could just stand by for a moment, MJ.

We are getting news of Hamas expected to release 33 hostages in the first phase of an emerging deal. This is according to an Israeli official -- this is according to two Israeli officials, actually. This is during the first phase of an emerging cease fire agreement that is being finalized right now in Qatar.

Israel believes that most of those 33 hostages are alive, according to one senior Israeli official. But the bodies of deceased hostages are also expected to be among those 33 released during an initial 42 day cease fire.

Some of the contours being described here by Israeli officials as they're on the brink of an agreement, as they are describing it, that Israeli forces would maintain a presence along the Philadelphia courier -- corridor, I should say, which has obviously been something of contention in these discussions, and that Israel would maintain a buffer zone inside Gaza along the border with Israel.

There would also be unspecified security arrangements in place in certainly at least part of Gaza, as residents of northern Gaza would be allowed to return freely to the north of the strip. That's pretty vague though, unspecified security arrangements. So we'll have to see what details come of that.

Palestinian prisoners deemed responsible for killing Israelis would not be released into the west bank, according to an official, but rather to the Gaza Strip or abroad following agreements with foreign countries.

So, MJ, this is the deal that Israeli officials are describing as coming together from these negotiations in Qatar. Oftentimes we do feel as if we have been here before, but there's a lot of optimism, I think, from the Biden administration about a cease fire and hostage deal being finalized before Biden leaves. How important would that be to his legacy? And how should we be reading this?

LEE: Yeah, you know, I have to tell you, even the fact that we are seeing some of those concrete details coming out from the Israeli side, that really gives you a sense of how potentially real this is and how potentially close we are to a deal being finalized. As we have been reporting all day, U.S. Officials do feel this new level of optimism that a deal is within reach and that in fact a deal can be reached in the coming days and basically President Biden's final week in office.

But something, Brianna, that you read just now that I think should be really sobering to so many people listening is the fact that some of these bodies that are going to be returned, not all of them are going to be hostages that are alive that we are talking about the return potentially of bodies of hostages that have been killed.

And among those, of course, are hopefully Americans, there are a handful of American-Israeli hostages whose bodies have yet to be returned. A couple of them, of course, have been declared deceased. There are American families that have been waiting for so long for the return of the bodies of their loved ones. And then hopefully we are waiting to learn if any American hostages are alive and will be returned to their families alive.

So this, as we were talking about before about the President's speech is going to be a huge part of what he talks about, sort of that commitment that he made so long ago to try to do everything he can to get these Americans back and of course, end this war that really has cost him so much politically. Guys.

JIMENEZ: And we are continuing to monitor when President Biden steps up and makes some of those significant comments again in the last week of his tenure as President. MJ Lee, really appreciate the reporting. We'll bring you those remarks as soon as the President steps up and starts speaking.

But we want to get to our other breaking news that we're following as well. And the battle to contain the devastating wildfires raging across L.A. County. Now, strong winds have returned to Southern California today as firefighters enter really a critical stage in their weeklong battle against these fast moving blazes.

KEILAR: At this hour, there are three wildfires continuing to burn. You see them there on your screen. They've already scorched more than 60 square miles. This is an area larger than Paris that they have taken out.

Nearly 100,000 people are under evacuation orders and county officials are now warning residents who have not yet been impacted that they need to get their evacuation plan ready now. And this is happening as the death toll continues to rise. At least 24 people now have been killed, we have learned. And officials warn that that number is likely to climb.

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SHERIFF ROBERT G. LUNA, LOS ANGELES COUNTY: Now, for the Altadena area, we are in the third day of grid searching. It is a very grim task and we unfortunately, every day we're doing this, we're running across the remains of individual community members.

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That is not easy work. Very sad to report.

I believe we'll continue to find remains. So please be patient with those -- people are saying, I just want to go look at my house and I want to see what's left. We know that, but we have people literally looking for the remains of your neighbors.

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KEILAR: Let's go now to Stephanie Elam, who is live in Malibu. Stephanie, tell us about what you're seeing there.

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Brianna. We are along the Pacific Coast Highway. Now that the sun is up, you can actually see more of the devastation. This is a wine bar that really popular live music they would have here and people would come out here and enjoy being next to the ocean. And I was walking up behind it and I didn't even recognize it because it is so demolished until I got to the front and I saw these blue chairs and this big yellow chair.

Look at these former barrels. All that's left are the metal casings around the barrels just completely burned out. And this is up and down this stretch of the Pacific coast highway where you can see the devastation of these smaller businesses here, as well as some homes up in the hills. Think about how hard those flames had to be burning, how high they had to be burning for this kind of destruction here.

And if you look through Palisades, if you look through Altadena, it's the same story where you see businesses that are lost, big corporations lost, where you also see homes and infrastructure like post offices, all of that destroyed in these blazes.

And this is what they're trying to stop further progression of. And we saw some great work over the weekend. They were fighting this fire from the sky, but with these winds expected to pick back up, that could impact their ability to get to the sky again. So they've been pre-positioning resources to be out here to help stop these blazes as they move forward. And keep in mind, it may not just be these blazes that we know about. Another fire could be started during this time. And so they're out here. And now with daylight hours coming in, we see a little few hotspots around. And this is one of the things that they want to do, is to tamp those down, stop those fires because they don't want it to blow up as the winds start to pick up here now that the sun is up.

But when you look around and you see this kind of devastation, it's just absolutely heartbreaking. And it's widespread. I've never seen any devastation as widespread as what we're seeing here now.

JIMENEZ: And Stephanie, I know you've been out there from the beginning and you know, one of the things from last week we saw wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour. Not expecting that severe of wind gusts this time around, but still very, very severe. I just wonder what your sense is from people there from last week to sort of today, knowing that maybe the elements ahead are not going to be working in their favor.

ELAM: People are skittish, Omar. Like people have been packing up and leaving. People are afraid of everything coming around close to them, even if they're not near them. I don't know anyone who's not impacted in some way by these fires.

A lot of kids who are, you know, going to school, they know people who are impacted. A lot of schools opening back up for LAUSD today. You also have Malibu, though, and Pasadena School districts staying closed for the week because so many of their people are impacted. So there's a lot of fear. There's also the air quality that has that's keeping a lot of people inside as well.

But this is something that is going to change LA forever. This is so widespread and we've never seen a fire do this much damage. I mean, you think about this fire and the Eaton fire, they're two of the most destructive fires in our history here. So when you look at it that way, there's no way around it for people. And for a lot of people, they want to get back into these evacuation zones.

The good news, the evacuation numbers are now back below 100,000. But they're expecting that they could go back up as we see these winds pick up. So people want to get back into these areas, but really there's a lot of things that they have to make sure that they're safe.

You know, there's toxic ash when fires burn through buildings, there's all kinds of chemicals, there's the metals and you can smell it in the air. And that's just not good for families to be in. So that's part of the reason why they don't want to rush people back to these areas until they're sure that they are safe so that no one is impacted by that.

And then also keep in mind the infrastructure. A lot of these fires burn down and so piping underneath the ground is all destroyed. So even if your house is standing in one of these fire zones, will you have the resources around you to keep living there? It's not something that's going to be an easy or quick fix and that is devastating for so many people. JIMENEZ: Stephanie Elam, really appreciate all the reporting on what has been a very active and ongoing situation. Thank you for being here.

As we've been talking about, we are standing by for the President of the United States in what we are expecting to be a foreign policy focused speech in the final days of his presidency, leading up to, of course, the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.

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We've gotten many clues over what he could potentially focus on. But he has had no shortage of foreign policy issues at the top of the fray, whether it's Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, of course, combating Chinese aggression with Taiwan as well.

And we have Kim Dozier, CNN Global Affairs Analyst, and Cedric Leighton with us as well, as we await the President here. I wonder just for you all, what is top of mind for you? Who, Cedric, I'll start with you for what the President should focus on based on the severity and impact of what you have seen over his administration.

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yeah, I think in terms of, Omar, in terms of legacy, you can talk about NATO and talk about the expansion of NATO, which I think is a substantial achievement that he and his administration were able to actually complete.

But when it comes to the future and the types of things that really need to be looked at in the future, one areas, and you alluded to it, was China and what China is planning to do with Taiwan. It's pretty clear that the Chinese have some very aggressive intentions vis-a-vis Taiwan. And that's going to, I think, really change the way in which we posture our military force structure in, not only in the Pacific, but really globally as well.

KEILAR: Kim, what are you looking for?

KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, on China, I think he can really hammer home how he has strengthened alliances there too. Remember, at the start of the Biden administration, Japan and South Korea, there was a lot of friction there. There's been a lot of restoration of that relationship and a strengthening of relationships between Australia, Japan, South Korea and some of the island nations to help them feel like they're not going to get bullied by China.

So one of the things that Jake Sullivan said when he first became national security adviser is they wanted to use alliances in a unique way and combine Europeans, NATO allies with Asia to try to make a new, more powerful set of countries to drive forward U.S. policy. And when you look at Ukraine, that's really what happened.

JIMENEZ: And you know, I want to also talk about Israel and Gaza because obviously we're getting news over -- we're getting updates from a potential cease fire deal that could come out. The headline that we have is Hamas is expected to release 33 hostages in the first phase of an emerging deal, according to two Israeli officials.

I mean, this particular issue, war, human rights, all caught up in the middle of it with President Biden at the center of it, no doubt had an impact election wise, but also when you look at the diplomacy of it all, do you see his actions there as a success to this point? What would this deal do sort of in the waning days of the Biden administration?

LEIGHTON: Oh, I think that if he is successful --

JIMENEZ: Cedric Leighton, I'm so sorry. We're seeing Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President of the United States Joe Biden making their way to the podium. This, of course, is happening at the State Department as it appears Secretary of State Antony Blinken may be welcoming the President, but at the very least, standing up there with him again, in the final days of the Biden administration.

We were talking about, again, all of these foreign policy issues that have been at points at the center of the administration here. But of course, this speech gives him, the President, the chance to sort of set the tone for what he wants his legacy to be. Let's just listen in to a little bit of what's happening right now.

ANTONY BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE: Good afternoon. If I didn't say anything, this would go on all afternoon for good reason. Mr. President, it is an honor to welcome you back to the State Department.

On day one of this administration. You shared a few things with me. You told me something that we long discussed, reminded me that American engagement, American leadership is essential. If we're not engaged, if we're not leading, you said someone else is likely to be doing it, and probably not in a way that advances our interest or values, or maybe no one is doing it, and then we're likely to have a vacuum filled with bad things before it's filled with good things.

[14:20:97]

But the other thing you told me, Mr. President, was that there's a greater premium than ever before on finding ways to cooperate, to coordinate, to work with other countries if we're going to get done what we need to get done for the American people. And so you instructed me, you instructed all of us to get out there, to rebuild, to rejuvenate, even to reimagine our alliances and partnerships.

And I remember what you told me then. You said, we don't know when this is going to make a difference, when we're going to need these friendships, these partnerships. But someday, some way, somewhere, they're going to be critical for advancing the national interest. And that's exactly what the men and women of this department have done.

And we've been able to carry out that charge for two reasons. First, the people you see before you and so many others who are out in the field or embassies and consulates. You said when you came here four years ago that the leadership of diplomats of every stripe, doing the daily work of government is essential, and they proved it. That daily work has become nightly work, 24/7 seven days a week. Hammering out agreements, jumping into action in crisis, creating opportunities for our citizens around the world, producing expert advice for you and your team at the White House. Everyone here knows this work can be tough. It's often not very glamorous. But it makes us stronger. It makes the world a better place.

And we simply couldn't do it without the extraordinary men and women that you have before us, as well as our remarkable partners in government. Starting with the great White House team led by Jake Sullivan, my friends and colleagues from across the administration, Secretary of Defense Samantha Power at USAID, the Secretary of the Treasury, Commerce, and so on. All of these partnerships that we built and built with their teams have made a difference. So to all of my colleagues, thank you. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your partnership.

There's one other reason that we've been able to re-engage and rejuvenate our diplomacy. Mr. President, that's you. You have never wavered in the conviction that when America leads, when America engages, there is little we cannot accomplish, and that this country remains a force for good, a force for progress around the world.

Your unshakable belief in the promise of America has inspired me for more than 20 years. It's inspired so many people in this department and around the world simply put. It's been the privilege of my lifetime to work for you, to work with you, to work with this extraordinary team that you've assembled. And it's the honor of a lifetime to be able to introduce one more time the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden.

JOE BIDEN, 46TH U.S. PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Please. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's good to be back at the State Department. Tony, if I may start by saying this. You're one of the finest men I've ever known in any undertaking, for one important reason (inaudible).

You're not only brilliant, you have incredible character. You have character. You have more integrity than almost anybody I know. Thank you for always sticking with me. Appreciate it. Folks, I'm grateful for his counsel and his friendship as well. But I also want to thank the members of my cabinet and the members of the Congress that are here today. And to all, all our diplomats, development experts, service members, intelligence professionals.

Many of the achievements we're going to discuss today are the result of your hard work. And that's not hyperbole. It's true.

[14:25:02]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your extraordinary service. I come here to the State Department report to the American people on the progress we've made in the last four years in our foreign policy and our presidency.

I've said many times we're at an inflection point. The post-Cold War period is over. A new era has begun. In these four years we face crises that we've been tested, we've come through those tests stronger in my view than we entered those tests. This is a fierce competition underway.

The future of the global economy, technology, human values and so much else, right now, in my view, thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition. Compared to four years ago, America is stronger. Our alliances are stronger. Our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We have not gone to war to make these things happen.

During my presidency, I have increased America's power at every dimension. We've increased our diplomatic power, creating more allies the United States has ever had in the history of our nation. We've increased our military power, making the most significant investments in the defense industrial base in decades. We've increased the technology power, taking the lead in artificial intelligence and other technologies of the future.

And we've increased the economic power, building the most dynamic economy in the world from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In short, Kamala and I took office, our nation had become stronger at home, are stronger in the world. And now America is more capable and I would argue better prepared than we've been in a long, long time.

All our competitors and adversaries are facing stiff headwinds. We have the wind at our back because of all of you. This is what we're heading into and over the next administration that's we're handing it to. Today, I want to lay out what we've done, the opportunities we've created for America and those opportunities going forward.

Today, I can report to the American people, our sources of national power are far stronger than were than we took office. Our economy is booming, although there's more work to do. Our technologies, from artificial intelligence to biotech quantum and to advanced semiconductors, they're the envy of the world.

And we have made the most significant investments in American the American workers since the New Deal to rebuild our roads and bridges, our ports and airports, clean water systems, affordable high speed internet and so much more. To build American manufacturing, to make advanced semiconductors which we invented here at home. We made the largest investment in climate and clean energy ever anywhere on earth in the history of the world, spurring nearly $500 billion in private sector investment.

We've also significantly strengthened the defense industrial base, investing almost $1.3 trillion procurement and research and development. In real dollars that's more than America did in any four year period during the Cold War. This is going to ensure that we're fully equipped to fight and win wars, which is also the best way to deter wars in the first place.

Today, I can report to the American people our alliances are stronger than they've been in decades. NATO is more capable than it's ever been, and many more of our allies are paying their fair share. Before I took office, nine NATO allies are spending 2% of their GDP on defense. Now, 23 are spending 2%.

Look at the Indo-Pacific. We made partnerships stronger and created new partnerships to challenge China's aggressive behavior and to rebalance power in the region. We did it, what few thought was possible to build the first ever trilateral partnership between the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Then another among the United States, Japan and the Philippines, drawing close to our Pacific allies to defend our shared security and prosperity. We brokered a defense pact known as AUKUS among the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific allies as only America is able to do.

I've taken the quad to the next level. United States, Japan, Austria -- Australia and India. When we had that first meeting, I was dumbfounded when they all --

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