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Britain Responds to Ebola Threat; Backlash for ESPN Anchor's Comments on Domestic Violence; Will New Round of Sanctions Affect Vladimir Putin?

Aired July 30, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Ebola fears hitting closer to home with the first reported death of an American from the outbreak. Patrick Sawyer was heading to a conference when he collapsed getting off a plane in Nigeria. Sawyer had been infected with Ebola in Liberia, where he worked for its government. Sawyer was planning to return to his wife and three young daughters in Minnesota. Decontee Sawyer spoke about their kids on CNN's "New Day" this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DECONTEE SAWYER, EBOLA VICTIM'S WIDOW: They're doing OK. They're, you know, five, four and one. Ava, she's five, Mia is four and Bella is one. Ava really is the only one I had the discussion with. But then with (ph) Mia, she's one and she doesn't get it and --

MICHAELA PEREIRA, ANCHOR, CNN'S "NEW DAY": Two of them.

SAWYER: Yes. And, Bella, she - you know, Bella, I mean, Bella's one. Bella's one. And, Mia, she's four. She also has autism and so she, you know, processes things a little bit differently. And it's a little bit delayed. And so, you know, she doesn't get it. And so Ava and I had a discussion. I had to tell her that her daddy is in heaven now. And she said, well I thought he was in Liberia. See, Patrick's work kept him away a lot from us.

PEREIRA: Yes.

SAWYER: He was gone for long periods of time. And the truth is that it put a strain on our marriage.

PEREIRA: Yes.

SAWYER: And in every way because I wanted him back home.

PEREIRA: Yes.

SAWYER: I wanted him here with me and the girls. He was - he felt like Liberia needed him more.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Britain is now responding to the Ebola threat, holding a high-level government meeting today to discuss precautions. No cases have been reported in Britain yet.

Let's bring in CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta to talk more about this.

So it's kind of scary to know that Britain is holding a meeting about this.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, look, you know, the concern that people are going to get on these flights and fly from West Africa, where these cases are, to anywhere in the world is - now, look, that's a real possibility. I mean I think for a long time people didn't think that that was going to happen because Ebola was sort of relegated to very remote areas of Africa. These weren't people who would subsequently get infected and get on planes. And so things have changed with our globalized world. So, you know, it's perhaps a little scary but not surprising that people are having these discussions.

COSTELLO: So Patrick Sawyer, he got on board a plane, a plane in Nigeria, and then he collapsed. So what do you suppose the airline is doing now.

GUPTA: Well, this is -- they have some specific things they're trying to do but it's very challenging. He was on three flights from Liberia, ending up ultimately in Nigeria. Was he completely healthy when he got on the first flight? Did he develop symptoms on the first flight? You know, those are all questions they're trying to figure out.

But then they want to go back and find the passengers who were on those flights and they want to monitor them. And basically that means taking their temperature, which seems like a simple thing, but if you don't develop a temperature for 21 days, that's the longest incubation period, you're unlikely to have an infection. But that's challenging. They have to track all these people down and then begin that monitoring process.

COSTELLO: OK, so just to calm people's fears, there have been no Ebola cases here, right?

GUPTA: Correct, there has not been so far.

COSTELLO: The Ebola cases, as far as we know, have been contained to West Africa.

GUPTA: Right. There have been other cases of lab workers perhaps that have come out of West Africa, but it's always originated in West Africa.

COSTELLO: And the reason I'm asking you these questions, because there is a lot of fear out there around the Ebola virus and -- but that certainly does not mean every immigrant coming into this country might be infected with Ebola, especially those coming in from Latin America. I want to let you hear something that was said on Fox News yesterday. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL CUTLER, FORMER IHS SPECIAL AGENT: Never mind that we can't interview them, never mind there's no resources to do a proper investigation, no matter that last week was the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 Commission report and the 9/11 Commission, to which I provided testimony, was very clear about the nexus between immigration and national security.

NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS: And our porous borders.

CUTLER: And, by the way, you talked about the Ebola virus. Do we even know who's coming in? It's not that they're undocumented, Neil. These are people who are uninspected. Would you get on an airplane with uninspected passengers?

CAVUTO: Well, you know -

CUTLER: Now, let's remember why we have immigration laws, to keep out criminals, terrorists, aliens with dangerous communicable diseases. I know we're worried about the Ebola virus. These are folks who are uninspected.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: OK, so, Sanjay, how likely is it that these kids coming in from Latin America are infected with the Ebola virus?

GUPTA: That's not - that's not true. They're not infected. These cases have been in West Africa so far. There's a couple things about that that I think are worth clarifying. First of all, there's no evidence that there's Ebola in Mexico and so getting it across the border that way doesn't make sense. The other thing is that people who are sick with Ebola and likely to transmit it, to make other people sick, they are already really sick, meaning that they're not up walking around typically, shaking hands with people on an airport or coming across a border. They're usually in bed in a hospital, if they can be in a hospital, but they're just not able to get up, they're that sick, before they become contagious at all. So it's -- that didn't make sense on a lot of different levels.

But the idea again that someone could get on a plane who has been exposed and then arrive in a country, like the United States, Britain, wherever it may be, and develop symptoms later on, that's a possibility and I think that's what those high level meetings in Britain are about and what meetings here in the United States would be about as well.

COSTELLO: All right. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

GUPTA: You got it. Thank you.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, ESPN pulls Stephen A. Smith off the air for a week after outrage over his domestic abuse comment. So what forced the network to take action? We'll talk all about that next.

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COSTELLO: A small victory. ESPN, after a huge public outcry, decided to take Stephen A. Smith off the air for a week. The action comes after Smith intimated women sometimes provoke battering. Yesterday, CNN legal analyst Mel Robbins and I called for Smith's suspension and that in itself caused, well, some silliness.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: It is nice that Smith apologized, but I wonder if ESPN will do what it ought to do, suspend Smith. Look, in 2012, the management at ESPN expressed outrage when two employees used the phrase "chink in the armor" while referencing Jeremy Lin, the Asian basketball player. One employee was suspended for 30 days and the other was fired. So why is ESPN giving Smith a pass?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSH LIMBAUGH (voice-over): The feminazis, the feminazis are fried. They're really worked up over the Ray Rice suspension, the Baltimore Ravens, and the commissioner of the NFL sent a guy out to try to explain what happened. He ended up throwing gasoline on the fire, made it worse. I watched a couple of women on CNN this morning just livid. And these were elderly feminazis. They claim his apology was on a teleprompter, which means somebody wrote it and he didn't really mean it so they're after Stephen A. Smith at ESPN.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Seriously, elderly feminazis? Is that all you got, Rush? Well, I hate to tell you, honey, but you lost. Stephen A. Smith has been rightly suspended for a week. Why? Because both men and women, young and old, were outraged. Some of your comments are now scrolling at the bottom of the screen. So let's talk about this. Brian Stelter is CNN's senior media correspondent, Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst and my fellow elderly feminazi.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Carol, I do love older women.

COSTELLO: Brian.

Mel, I actually think Rush --

MEL ROBBINS, CNN COMMENTATOR: (INAUDIBLE) 45 older. Oh my gosh.

COSTELLO: Elderly, I don't know. I think he needs to come up with something new. He's been using the term feminazi since, what, 1912 or so?

ROBBINS: Well, I guess if we're elderly, Carol, that makes him the walking dead and we should start calling him a conservapig instead of a conservatist (ph). But, look, name calling aside, the bottom line is, we were right. We were right in saying that the comments that Stephen Smith said were absolutely dangerous and outrageous, and I think it just took a lot of public outcry from outside the walls of ESPN for ESPN to realize that this was really egregious and they needed to make a public statement about it by suspending him for a very short period of time.

STELTER: It's almost as if ESPN had their finger up in the air to see how people reacted to his apology on Monday, and then a day later decide to suspend him. To me that seems kind of fishy. And I haven't heard a good explanation from anybody about why it took them an extra day to suspend them. But as you all know, eventually they did.

COSTELLO: Well, you really think that ESPN was just waiting to see what would happen and it didn't make this decision in a reasoned (ph) way?

STELTER: I mean I sure hope now. I sure hope not. But that's how it seemed. I hope that didn't happen, but there hasn't been a better explanation for it. Maybe they had to negotiate this with Stephen. Maybe that's what happened.

ROBBINS: I think, Brian - Brian's exactly right because, look, this all went down on Friday. And his colleague, Michelle, went bananas on Twitter. They had the weekend to think about this and what did ESPN decide to do? They decided to keep him on the air and let him do a pre-taped apology. And then they didn't even have a discussion about it. They moved on to a really awkward conversation about LeBron James and his jersey number. So they made their decision about how to handle it, and then it was the outcry that I think had them basically say, uh-oh, we kind of screwed up here, we better reverse course and do something a little bit more serious.

STELTER: And I think it -- I think a discussion would have been worthwhile. I've been surprised by the number of people that I see on Facebook and Twitter, the number of women included saying, he was making an important point, trying to stand up for Stephen A. Smith. So to have the discussion and the push back against people who think that he was making a true point is something that actually is worthwhile. I think it's only happening online, not happening on ESPN.

COSTELLO: Well, and I find that part sad, because Mel, you and I were talking about this yesterday, that it would be nice if ESPN would have like maybe Michelle Beadle to come on and do a segment and to really talk about this issue seriously, because it is a problem in the world of athletics.

ROBBINS: You know, you're right, Carol. And it's actually also sort of a nuanced point, because if he's sitting here talking about the fact that, in any situation of violence against women, that you need to look at the provoking acts, what he's basically saying is that, if there is provocation on the part of the woman, whether, what, she spits at somebody, she talks back, she doesn't show up on time, whatever it may be, that that act by the woman somehow justifies the violence. And I think that is a conversation that we need to have in this

country, where people understand - yes, people say never put your hands on a woman, but the second you say that and then you say but let's look at what the woman did that caused the man to put his hands on her, you're saying the woman did something to justify it, and that's never the appropriate conversation. It's a very dangerous one to have.

But you're right, they should have -

(CROSSTALK)

ROBBINS: He was the one who was charged with a crime, she wasn't.

COSTELLO: He was charged with the crime and the only reason that, you know, it went no further is because he agreed to this mediation process, right? And it was a first-time offense.

ROBBINS: Correct.

COSTELLO: But she, again, was not charged with a crime.

ROBBINS: Initially, initially, she actually -- they were both charged with assault. The charges were dropped against her. They had multiple witnesses that cooperated with the police that witnessed what happened, and then -- you're right. Instead of going to trial, he entered a first time offender program and, for completion, they dismissed the charges and any probation. It's something that we see happening in the criminal courts all the time. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, by the way; it means they figured out a way other than trial for this to get resolved.

COSTELLO: So, Brian, do you think that the NFL will come out and say any more about this issue?

STELTER: I doubt it. I would like for them to, but I doubt it. I think they've defended themselves a couple of different times and would like to see it go away now. In some ways the Stephen A. Smith suspension is a distraction from the Ray Rice news, which allows them to move on.

Not surprising the smartest thing said on ESPN about this was from the only woman who is on the show with Stephen A. Smith, "First Take." It was Cari Champion who said it was the word "provoke". It's a trigger word. And once you hear that word, you don't hear anything else he was trying to say.

I think that might be one of the lessons for Stephen A. Smith in all of this, is the language he was using, the way he tried to make his points, even if his points were -- shouldn't have been said in the first place, it was the language he was using that people couldn't hear anything beyond that.

COSTELLO: Gotcha. Brian Stelter, Mel Robbins, thanks for playing. I appreciate it. I want to know what --

ROBBINS: Bye, old lady (ph) feminista.

(LAUGHTER)

COSTELLO: Feminazi.

ROBBINS: Feminazi, whatever the hell it is.

COSTELLO: Whatever. Thanks a lot, Mel.

I want to know what you think about all of this. You can tweet me @CarolCNN; you might see your response at the bottom of the screen in our next hour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: The White House and the European Union have announced a new round of economic sanctions against Russia, accusing Moscow of backing the pro-Russian rebels in neighboring Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin denies those claims or any role in the shooting down of Flight 17, but what effect, if any, will the sanctions have? And how do you solve the problem of Putin?

Jake Tapper has more for you.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Global exasperation with Russian president Vladimir Putin is growing. And as investigators struggle to find out what exactly happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in an area controlled by Russian separatists, the U.S. government has been sharpening its focus on Putin.

JOHN KERRY, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: President Putin can make a huge difference here if he chooses to.

TAPPER: Secretary of State John Kerry issued this warning to Putin just hours after the State Department said that Russia violated a decades-old missile treaty by testing intermediate range cruise missiles. That determination came on Monday, the same day the White House announced a new round of economic sanctions against Russia. The E.U. announced that it was joining in with economic sanctions of its own against Russian companies and so-called Putin cronies who are said to have benefited from a destabilized Urakine.

And Russia's hosting of the next World Cup in 2018 could be the next target. The U.K.'s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg told "The Sunday Times of London" that FIFA should pull the plug on the games, saying Putin, quote. "Can't have his cake and eat it."

It wasn't so long ago, of course, that the United States and Russia were enjoying a much cozier relationship.

GEORGE W. BUSH, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.

TAPPER: But now even former President Bush says that he has a different view.

BUSH: And then the price of oil went up and Vladimir Putin changed. It emboldened him to follow an instinct that is pretty much zero sum.

TAPPER: For the past decade, the Russian propaganda machine has been churning out tough guy images of Putin shirtless fishing, shirtless horseback riding, judo flipping. But it's not a joke. With Putin refusing to give up political power, the annexation of Crimea, and Russia's potential role in shooting down this flight, the image of a strong man has changed into a geopolitical reality.

DAVID REMNICK, THE NEW YORKER: He put himself in this box.

TAPPER: It's a metamorphosis that is finally catching up with him, as "The New Yorker's" David Remnick told Anderson Cooper.

REMNICK: I see Vladimir Putin becoming isolated. And even at home, despite his popularity rating, I don't see that lasting forever unless he finds a way out of this.

TAPPER: International pressure may be working. Last week, Putin's tone seemed to have changed a bit about the crash.

VLADIMIR PUTIN, RUSSIAN PRESIDENT (via translator): Russia will do everything it can for a thorough, comprehensive, deep, and transparent investigation.

TAPPER: But access to that crime scene is a continuing issue and there's little evidence to back-up Putin's claim that they're really truly doing everything they can.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: That was Jake Tapper reporting. With this latest round of sanctions, the E.U. says Russia will, quote, "find itself increasingly isolated by its own actions." We'll see.

The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM after a break.

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