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Democrats Gear up for Debate; Royals Hold High-Stakes Summit; Attack on Al-Assad Air Base. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired January 13, 2020 - 09:30   ET

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

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[09:30:10]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: All right, one day out from the final debate before the first vote with the Iowa caucuses just three weeks away. Six presidential helpfuls will fight it out on a debate stage in Des Moines tomorrow night. The latest CNN polling shows a tight four-way race. Bernie Sanders holding the top spot there.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: The Sanders campaign is now doing something it hadn't done so far so aggressively, taking on rivals, particularly Elizabeth Warren, but also Joe Biden, targeting Biden's vote for the Iraq War back in 2002, 2003 and pegging Warren as a candidate of the elite. Interesting repetition of rhetoric there.

Let's bring in CNN correspondent Ryan Nobles and Alex Burns, national political correspondent for "The New York Times."

Alex, to begin with you.

You know, we're really in the meaty part of this race now, right, because people are about to vote and these votes are going to matter. You look at the CNN/"Des Moines Register"/Media Com poll as we get closer here. Sanders at 20 percent, Warren, 17, Buttigieg with 16, Biden at 15. The margin of error almost four points there. So really there's no distinction between those top four. It's going to be a brutal month, is it not, as those top four try to come out a winner?

ALEX BURNS, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Absolutely. I think the debate tomorrow is likely to be the spiciest yet and not just because we're so close to actual voting. There -- we have the smallest number of candidates on stage and you really are starting to see these long, simmering rivalries come to the surface.

I think I and a lot of other reporters, if we think back to that first debate in June, were expecting Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders to go at it, or Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to really fight it out in public for the soul of the left wing of the Democratic Party, and we really have not seen either of those things happen so far. So if it's going to happen before Iowa, it's going to happen now.

I think what you've seen in the last couple weeks from Sanders is especially an appetite for clashing with Joe Biden. His campaign is definitely targeting Warren in certain ways as well. But when you hear Bernie Sanders himself, in his own voice, taking aim at another candidate, it's almost always Joe Biden.

HARLOW: Yes.

That's a good point.

Ryan, let's talk about Sanders on the attack and how his competition is responding. We heard a little bit earlier from Elizabeth Warren, not so happy.

RYAN NOBLES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, you know, I think Alex is exactly right, that there's a distinction that the Sanders campaign definitively wants to draw on the debate stage. And it's not so much with Elizabeth Warren, but it is definitely with Joe Biden.

HARLOW: Yes.

NOBLES: I talked with campaign manager Faiz Shakir last week and he actually expressed a level of frustration that even though Bernie Sanders has essentially baited Joe Biden, has tried to draw him into a conversation about his vote on the Iraq War, his stance on Social Security over the past few decades, that for the most part Biden has just ignored him and brushed it off or made some sort of a coy comment instead of really engaging in a substantive conversation about these big policy issues. That could change tomorrow night. I think the Biden campaign recognizes now that Sanders is a force to be reckoned here with in Iowa and that they can no longer just act that -- like he is, you know, a protest candidate that doesn't have a realistic shot at winning the nomination. He could win the nomination and Biden ignores him at his own peril.

So I do think that the back and forth between those two candidates may be the most interesting on the debate stage because there is kind of a concern among these Democratic candidates about really going after Bernie Sanders because even if he isn't your first choice, most of these polls show that the average Democratic voter likes Sanders and they might not necessarily want to see him roughed up.

So this is a, you know, kind of the tightrope that these candidates have been walking since the very beginning.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And we've seen that when candidates in the past have tried to take aim at Joe Biden, for instance, whether it's Julian Castro or Kamala Harris, going back, you know, there's some backlash.

But, Alex, you said that Biden may have the absolute most at stake. Tell us why.

BURNS: Look, when you look at the very top tier of this race, Joe Biden is the one person on that stage who, if you look at national polling, if you look at polling in all of the early states, in the super Tuesday states, if he were to win Iowa, most Democrats believe he's going to be a very tough person to stop going forward. His campaign knows that he is not currently leading in the state right now, as your polling reflected, but they have started to tell people they think he can win the state.

And if you sort of draw a line through Iowa, New Hampshire, where he may have a slight lead or maybe tied with Bernie at this point, then onto Nevada and South Carolina where Biden has consistently been leading, this is an opportunity they think for him to kind of put it away.

The same, however, is true for Bernie Sanders and to a much lesser extent Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, that if they come out of Iowa with that much momentum, it really complicates Biden's status as a frontrunner.

HARLOW: Yes.

[09:35:01]

BURNS: And I think to Ryan's point, there are all these issues in Biden's record, whether it's the Iraq War, on the bankruptcy bill in 2005 and the years before that, that have not really been aired out publicly because other candidates have looked at the Kamala Harris experience, looked at the Julian Castro experience and just sort of shied away from going after somebody who is as well liked as Joe Biden. If they're going to do it, this is the time.

HARLOW: Yes, except everyone should take the time before they cast their vote to actually read and just get the facts on those records, right? I mean hopefully it comes out, you know, on all sides in debate, but people should read about it, too.

Before we go, how much of a benefit, Ryan, do you know does the Biden camp think it may be for him that he doesn't have to go back and be a juror in a Senate impeachment trial and others do?

NOBLES: Well, there's two sides to this coin, though, right, Poppy, because even though Joe Biden will have the opportunity to be here on the ground and interact with voters in Iowa, his name is still going to be in the backdrop of this conversation of the Senate impeachment trial.

HARLOW: Yes.

NOBLES: You can expect Republicans to continue to bring up his son and bring up his loose connection to all of this, even though there's no evidence of any wrongdoing by the vice president.

So, you know, this is a double-edged sword for all these campaigns. Maybe, perhaps, it's Mayor Pete Buttigieg who has the biggest advantage with a Senate impeachment trial because he can just campaign and he's not involved in it at all.

I do have to tell you, though, Poppy, when you talk to the Democratic campaigns themselves or these senators, there's not a ton of anxiety over the fact that they can't be here in Iowa. They feel with technology and other aspects, you know, planes that can get them back and forth in rapid order, that it's not going to have that big of an impact on the actual votes here on the ground. But that's a question we're not going to know the answer to until we actually see a calendar for this impeachment trial.

HARLOW: Fair enough. Good points. Great reporting.

Thank you both, Ryan Nobles and Alex Burns.

So, tomorrow night, CNN presidential debate in partnership with "The Des Moines Register" begins 9:00 Eastern only right here on CNN.

SCIUTTO: At any moment now what they're calling a royal summit over the future of Prince Harry and Meghan will begin just outside of London. We're going to be there and tell you what's going to happen.

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[09:41:25]

SCIUTTO: Any moment now Queen Elizabeth will sit down with Prince Harry to try to end what's being described as a crisis that erupted when he and Meghan announced that they are stepping back from their royal roles. Apparently, Poppy, without checking with the queen first.

HARLOW: Yes. You want to ask the queen, right? Prince Charles and William will also be at this high-stakes summit. Meghan Markle expected to dial in from Canada.

CNN royal correspondent Max Foster joins us now from the queen's estate north of London.

Max, this is uncharted territory. How is this going to play out?

MAX FOSTER, CNN ROYAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they basically have got a set of scenarios and roles effectively that advisers for the royal family, but also the government, have put together, not just the British government, but their Canadian government, we understand, because what the Duke and Duchess of Sussex proposed last week is their new future is actually a lot more complex than they seem to realize. That's the message we're getting from official authorities here.

They're talking about splitting their time between Canada and the U.K., for example, that requires residency procedures, but also tax procedures as well. How are they going to finance themselves? Then there's the whole wider question about what sort of official duties they'll be carrying out and how the taxes work on that. So there's lots of different things to consider here.

So, as I understand it, a set of different roles have been set out. They're going to try to find one, which everyone can agree on. The difficulty is, of course, that the Sussexs have said exactly what they want already.

SCIUTTO: Max, tell us what led up to this, because Harry and Meghan, they described this in some of their public comments, that they felt kind of set upon by the British tabloids, criticism of her and that, of course, it seems, bringing back bad memories for Prince Harry who still says, and his brother, too, right, that they blame the media and the media coverage in part for their mother's death.

Tell us what led up to this.

FOSTER: Well, I think there is that external pressure. They absolutely believe they have a right to a private life and a lot of the tabloids feel that as publicly funded figures they don't have as much of a right to a private life as other people and they should opening up their christening, for example, which was a real stress point between the tabloids and the Sussexs. So that's one thing.

But there's also undoubtedly pressure within the family. The two brothers, it's pretty clear now, are not necessarily at war, but there's a huge rift between them. They're coming together for the first time, face-to-face, in quite a long time today.

I also think the Sussexs, what I've been told privately, that the Sussexs don't feel supported by the wider system. Their office was set up to fail. And I think, frankly, that Harry and Meghan are very ambitious people. They want to change the world and they can't do so in this current position.

They could have just left, though, that's one option, and given it all up, but they're not saying that.

HARLOW: Yes.

FOSTER: They say they want some parts and not the other. So that's where the debate comes in.

HARLOW: Max Foster, thank you for all your reporting on this. We'll see what plays out today.

Up next, a CNN exclusive, we get firsthand an account of the Iranian missile attack on Al-Assad Air Base where, of course, U.S. troops were housed from the U.S. troops that survived it. Our Arwa Damon is there.

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[09:49:10]

HARLOW: Welcome back.

Now to a CNN exclusive.

We are hearing from the U.S. troops who were hunkered town as Iranian missiles fell on Al-Assad Air Base in Iraq. They knew the attack was coming and had two and a half hours to take shelter. They tell us what it was like in those moments that those Iranian missiles actually hit the air base.

SCIUTTO: Yes, those warnings in advance were unusual.

We should warn you that some of the language you'll hear may be offensive, but it does capture those terrifying moments for U.S. service members as those missiles came down. And look at the destruction they caused. HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Arwa Damon was the first journalist to tour the base, got an exclusive glimpse into what it was like to be on the receiving end of the attack.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Holy (EXPLETIVE DELETED). God damn. Oh, shit bro. (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

[09:50:01]

ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): American forces are not used to being on the receiving end of this kind of fire power.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (EXPLETIVE DELETED) another one. Another one.

DAMON: They are usually the ones delivering it.

SENIOR AIRMAN ROLAND SWEETING, U.S. AIR FORCE: I mean, I'm not going to lie, I was scared at the moment. But it happened and it's something that we were ready for. Ready as can be.

DAMON: Ready for some sort of ground attack by Iran's proxies. Ready for mortars and rockets. But this base is not equipped to defend against ballistic missiles.

On any other night, some of the 2,500 troops and contractors would have been in the areas hit.

LT. COL. TIM GARLAND, U.S. MILITARY: The ballistic missile reporting started to come in a couple hours before the event. And so at that point we were -- we were really scrambling on, you know, how to protect against that. And so it really came down to dispersion, you know, putting space between people and then also getting them into hardened bunkers just to -- just to provide that protection.

DAMON: At 11:00 p.m., those who could started to hunker down in bunkers built by their former enemy.

DAMON (on camera): This is a Saddam Hussein era bunker.

LT. COL. STACI COLEMAN, U.S. AIR FORCE: It is. So we felt it would be somewhat safe in here because it was designed to take, you know, some kind of hit or it was built for, you know, ballistic missiles.

DAMON (voice over): At 1:34 a.m., the first missiles hit.

COLEMAN: And these doors, every time one of the missiles hit, the doors would kind of sink in.

DAMON: Dozens of troops were still out in the open, holding their positions to protect the base. There was still the threat of incoming rockets, mortars and a ground assault. Pilots were still at their stations operating drones.

CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER MIKE PRIDGEON, U.S. ARMY: As I was running -- going across the gravel, I could -- looked out to like the eastern sky and I see this just orange streak. So start sprinting and yelling incoming, getting everybody, kind of a warning. And then it hit. So, yes.

DAMON: Flames swallowed up the drone team's living quarters. Some 30 troops would have been sleeping here had they not been ready. Others rushed around the base as missiles came down, looking for anyone who may have been injured, checking on the base's defenses.

Along the base perimeter, young soldiers on their first tour fought the instinct to flee and stayed, manning the guard towers.

SPEC. ERIC KNOWLES, U.S. ARMY: It was definitely scary at first, but we both knew we had a job to do, manning the tower and keeping eyes front. So we had to do that more than anything, focused on that, try not to focus on everything behind us.

DAMON: When one strike hit too close, they vaulted into the back of a truck and held their position there.

It was a night unlike any here had experienced, hunkered down for about two hours, unable to fight back. Some crammed into bunkers that weren't built to withstand missiles like these.

DAMON (on camera): These kinds of small bunkers exist throughout the base, but they're meant to protect against rockets and mortars. The ballistic missiles that were fired are about 3,000 times more powerful than that. The blast from this one knocked over a four ton t-wall. But if that hadn't happened, those who were sheltering here probably would not have survived.

DAMON (voice over): Come daybreak, fear of finding out who was killed or wounded was eclipsed by the joyous shock that no one was.

DAMON (on camera): It's like what are those reunions like when you kind of see someone who you're close to and you realize that you're both OK?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a warm feeling deep in the heart that all your friends, your family here is OK.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It just felt like forever since I'd seen my guys. And, you know, there's a lot of hugging and a lot of tears and a lot of -- it's just -- it's just a great feeling knowing that all your people are OK.

DAMON (on camera): And this is where you used to --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, thus is my room. A little bit more open floor plan now. But, yes, my bunk was right in the corner right there. And this is my neighbor up here. Everything's obviously gone. It's -- just happy no one was inside, you know?

DAMON: It's kind of freaky looking at it like this, isn't it?

PRIDGEON: Yes. It's surreal. I'm not bothered looking at it, it's just, you know, it's a reminder the threat still exists.

SPECIALIST KIMO KELTZ, U.S. ARMY: That, you know, we have each other. We had each other that night and we'll always. It's a brotherhood that will never break because of it.

DAMON: Does it change your perspective on life?

COLEMAN: It does. It does. It could -- you know, it could be over in a, you know, in an instant. It really does. And it really makes me value -- value mostly my team.

DAMON (voice over): The base is still on high alert.

[09:55:03]

The dining facility is open, but people eat elsewhere to avoid a large crowd gathering.

The military says they are ready for what may come next. Iran's proxies on the ground continue to vow revenge. Even for those who have seen war before, this was unlike any other battlefield experience. The overwhelming feeling of helplessness that comes with being under ballistic missile attack, to be at the mercy of the enemy, one that could strike again even if it's not like this.

Arwa Damon, CNN, Al-Assad Air Base, Iraq.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HARLOW: Wow, just incredible, Jim, to see those images and hear from those service members.

SCIUTTO: Sure. I mean it makes you -- you look at how close those strikes were, particularly on those bunkers that were not designed for missile strikes --

HARLOW: Right.

SCIUTTO: And you wonder if it is so clear that killing Americans wasn't part of the plan.

HARLOW: Yes, that's a good point.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: OK, ahead for us, the impeachment of President Trump takes a step forward this week as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares, we believe, to send over those impeachment articles to the Senate. What, if anything, did that delay accomplish?

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