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Tensions Flare at State of the Union; Pelosi Rips up Trump's Speech; Trump to Protect Coverage; Initial Iowa Results for Democrats; Democratic Reporting Problems in Iowa; Flights Land with American Evacuees from China; Thousands Quarantined on Cruise Ship. Aired 9:30- 10a

Aired February 05, 2020 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: In this country's history, just hours away. It's only Wednesday.

Joining me now to discuss, Errol Louis, political anchor for Spectrum News, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, congressional editor for "The New York Times.

Julie, you've covered Washington a long time. The spin going into this was that the president was going to deliver a unifying speech, really anything but that. I mean more of a campaign rally speech. What was the strategy here?

JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, CONGRESSIONAL EDITOR, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Well, I think, yes, I mean going in, I think he himself said it was going to be a low-key speech and maybe by his own standards it was. He didn't mention impeachment, but he certainly did have a lot of lines in there that were clearly sort of fodder for his campaign message to come.

He talked about the sort of great American comeback that he says that he is responsible for. He talked in very divisive terms about immigration and his immigration policies. He, you know, talked about health care and what he wants to do on health care, even though he has blocked many of the initiatives that he talked about wanting to see come to fruition.

So I think there was a lot for Republicans to love in this speech, but certainly a lot for Democrats to take offense at. And I think that's what you saw last night.

SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, we fact-checked the speech earlier on in this broadcast and there were several misleading statements.

Let's talk about the Democratic response there, even the moment of Pelosi ripping up the speech. I have to wonder, she's a very studied politician, that maybe there was some planning that went into that. I mean do you see Democrats, and you had others who boycotted or who walked out early, do you see them trying to throw some Trump politics back in his direction here? Was that the strategy?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, it is -- it is part of the Trump effect. You can't watch somebody perform the way he does, the calculated snubs, the insults, the tweeting and so forth and just pretend that it didn't happen and try and be the bigger person. Lots of people have tried that and Donald Trump has beaten all of them.

So, you know, in some ways, Nancy Pelosi had nothing to lose. I mean she went through all of the procedures for impeachment and so forth and we're going to see it come to a conclusion today that is far from what she was looking for.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

LOUIS: The frustration among Democrats is palpable.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LOUIS: And I think that's really what that act, the tearing up of the speech, really represents.

SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, you hear them speaking in grand terms about that. We had Senator Jeff Merkley on before, just about damage to the institution.

Julie, I want to zero in on one particular misleading statement by the president last night regarding health care. Have a listen, and then I want to hear your comment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I have also made an ironclad pledge to American families, we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: I mean, the fact is, he's been fighting in court the law that protects pre-existing conditions. I just wonder, I mean health care was a big voting issue in 2018, helped Democrats. I mean can the president lie his way to a win on this?

DAVIS: Well, I guess we're going to see. I mean another thing he talked about in the speech was lowering the cost of prescription drugs, and then you saw Democrats chanting HR-3 back at him, basically making the point that they've passed legislation that would do that. And it's right now languishing in the Senate, controlled by Republicans, because they don't want to take it up.

Listen, I think that both the president and Democrats are going to make a pretty strong case on health care in this campaign. And people will just have to look at the facts and see, you know, whether they can actually swallow what the president is saying on this given that he has -- his actions have not really matched his rhetoric.

SCIUTTO: Yes. DAVIS: And this wasn't really outrage given that all the initiatives that he talked about are things that Democrats have tried and failed to get to his desk.

SCIUTTO: Right.

OK, 2020, really set aside the voting delay, if we can, for a moment here, Errol Louis. I mean the big story here is Pete Buttigieg, you know, small town mayor, came out of nowhere really. He won, it seems, the first race there and a big under performance by Joe Biden. Tell us the effects of this.

LOUIS: That's right. Well, one effect is that Pete Buttigieg, you know, gave the victory speech that he wasn't quite entitled to on the facts, but he got a bounce out of it. He's going to say that this was the start of something huge. We'll see if that really pans out when he gets to South Carolina. We'll see how he performs in New Hampshire and so forth.

But, look, he's on his way. He clearly did something that hasn't been done before. There is a history making aspect to it, the fact that someone who's openly gay actually won some delegates to a national convention.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LOUIS: That's serious stuff. That's real stuff. He's got a few tricks up his sleeve and we can expect to see more.

I think for Joe Biden, he's going to have to come out of these first four contests with something substantially better than what happened in Iowa.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LOUIS: And there's a lot of history behind candidates who have done exactly that. Biden is going to have to figure that out. He's going to have to figure it out in a hurry.

SCIUTTO: Well, and then, also, Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Pete Buttigieg is going to have to figure out how he fixes what is a glaring omission so far from his support, and that's support from African-American voters. I mean that's a necessary part of a Democratic coalition to win the White House.

And, of course, after these early races, you go to South Carolina. That's going to be a deciding factor. And Biden, to date at least, has had a big lead there.

[09:35:04]

DAVIS: Right, and that's, I think, the hope at the Biden campaign is that he will be able to sort of pick up this momentum in Nevada and South Carolina because Iowa and New Hampshire both are older and whiter than the rest of the country and so this will be a challenge for Buttigieg to keep that momentum going and potentially an opportunity for Biden to stop it.

But I think that, you know, no question that having a bump coming out of Iowa for Buttigieg, not having been expected to come in as high as he did, is going to be helpful to him. And the question is whether he can really capitalize on that and keep it going.

SCIUTTO: Indeed.

Well, we'll have another test in just a few days.

Errol Louis, Julie Hirschfield Davis, thanks to both of you.

Nevada Democrats, of course that's coming up too, they do not want a repeat of the disaster we saw in Iowa, so they are ditching their plans to use that same vote-counting app used in the Iowa caucuses. What are the vulnerabilities, though, moving forward? Do they go beyond just a faulty app?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:40:18]

SCIUTTO: Democrats in Nevada say they will not use the same counting app behind the meltdown at the Iowa caucuses. Perhaps no surprise there. But the confusion in the nation's first Democratic contest did not just delay results. It may have added to the already growing distrust that some voters have in elections. Some of it stoked, frankly, by politicians.

Joining me now, Theresa Payton. She was the former White House CIO overseeing the operations -- IT operations for President George W. Bush and his staff. She's also the founder and CEO of a leading global cybersecurity company.

Theresa, nice to have you on this morning.

THERESA PAYTON, CYBERSECURITY EXPERT: Thanks for having me on.

SCIUTTO: So, first, the app was part of a Democratic Party push to level the playing field with Republicans' digital advantage, particularly Trump. And we've seen some benefit of that with his fundraising. How bad a sign is this debacle for that effort?

PAYTON: Yes, I think this is a real shame. And regardless of party affiliation, this was a bad day for democracy in America because people already have a distrust that the process and the systems are working on their behalf. And so we really need to get the lessons learned out of this and pull those forward into sort of the bigger election picture.

SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, you -- listen, you saw Don Junior, Eric Trump, Brad Parscale, all deliberately stoking that, saying, oh, the vote was rigged, although there's certainly no evidence of that.

I want to ask you this, though, because the Iowa Democratic Party says, listen, we screwed up, but the underlying data is sound here. And that's what they're basing these delayed results on. I mean for voters at home, do they have any reason to doubt the ultimate result here?

PAYTON: I hope they don't have a reason to doubt. I think the fact that they have said this is going to take longer than we anticipated because we need to get it right. They know what's at stake here. And what I did hear is they did have a manual process to collect the votes. So the key to getting it right may actually come down to meeting with them individually on a conference call and validating the vote before they released the final count.

SCIUTTO: Fair enough. And they -- so they did have a backup. I suppose the trouble is that backup kind of stumbled, right, and it -- you know, ideally, you'd want the backup to work that night. And I just wonder what broader message there is here. 2016, we had Russia systematically interfere in the election.

There's concern about attacking actual vote tabulation systems, et cetera, coming into 2020. As you look at this, you see a major state that did not have -- it didn't have all its t's crossed and i's dotted here. How worrisome is that a sign in terms of openings for foreign interference?

PAYTON: Yes, it is incredibly worrisome. There's been a lot of great work done, but it does show that we continue to have systemic failures that occur when we try to change too much around process and when we try to introduce technology too fast, too soon without some basic building blocks in place of training, doing a mock caucus to make sure the app really works in the field as it was designed, all of those things, practicing a digital disaster and saying, if our primary goes down as in the app, the technology, what's the backup plan? Well, if it's the phone, can the phone system and the process handle it? And clearly -- that step must have been skipped, as we saw as the count is still ongoing.

SCIUTTO: Is a possible lesson here, and I don't want to overreact, but is a possible lesson here is that, listen, there are a lot of reasons not to feel confident in the technology. Let's go old school. Let's write it down on pieces of paper and count it the old-fashioned way. I mean is that where we are? I mean I have a lot of friends asking me this question, I'm sure you do as well, you know, how can I trust the voting machine in my precinct?

PAYTON: I think the key -- you're really spot on here. The key here is to have a multiple process where perhaps you're counting things manually. Make sure that there's some type of an audit where you do a statistically sound sampling of how are votes cast, how are they counted?

I am concerned that this did set us back tremendously in integrating technology into the ecosystem of elections because we need it for security, we need it to make voting more accessible to all citizens. And this really was a step backwards for us.

But, don't forget, I live in the great state of North Carolina, and we had to rerun one of our elections. And why was that? SCIUTTO: Yes.

PAYTON: That was the paper absentee ballot count was off.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

PAYTON: And there was potential fraud there.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

PAYTON: So we really want to make sure we don't knee-jerk and remove technology from the process, but I do fear this set us back.

SCIUTTO: It's a fair point, because that case in that North Carolina district there, was really the one confirmed case of, you know, abject fraud in the election.

[09:45:04]

Lots to watch out for.

Theresa Payton, thanks very much.

PAYTON: Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Hundreds of American citizens are now back on U.S. soil, this after being trapped right at the center of the coronavirus outbreak. More on the precautions now being taken to keep people safe to stop the spread. That's coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Thousands of people are now being held on cruise ships to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Imagine that. While hundreds of American citizens are back in the U.S. after being trapped in Wuhan, China, that the ground zero for the outbreak.

[09:50:02]

They came in this morning on two flights chartered by the U.S. government.

CNN's Lucy Kafanov joins me now from Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego, where one of those planes will soon be headed. David Culver, he's in Beijing.

Lucy, let's begin with you.

What are we learning as these flights land? And were people screened before they got on? Are they being screened when they got off? How are they handling it?

LUCY KAFANOV, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Jim.

We know that there's about 350 people in total on both of those flights. We know that they were screened at the airport in Wuhan and that they are expected to be screened at Travis Air Base, where both of those planes landed. We are now waiting for that second plane to land at the Miramar Air Base behind me in just about three hours. So that is the situation.

We know that the folks who have deplaned at Travis will be there for 14 days. The folks here will be here 14 days under quarantine as well.

But I just want to emphasize how difficult this process has been for the hundreds of Americans trapped in Wuhan. I spoke with one man, his name is Ken Burnett. He's a San Diego resident. His wife and his two young children, one year old and three years old, were trapped in Wuhan for weeks. He says they spent nine days trying to call the State Department, trying to get clarity on whether they could be evacuated, what the process for that would be.

They kept getting the run-around. They couldn't get any clarity, no kind of information. Finally, at the last minute, they secured three seats on this evacuation flight. But even then he wasn't sure when his wife would come home, which air base she would land at, what the situation was. They've been really frustrated with the experience. It's been an emotional time.

Take a listen to what he had to say yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEN BURNETT, AWAITING FAMILY'S ARRIVAL FROM WUHAN: You know, for us, this will be over soon. Sorry.

For the people of Wuhan, those are people --

KAFANOV: They don't get flights out.

BURNETT: They don't get flights out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KAFANOV: A lot of emotion there. And, Jim, in some ways the foreign nationals are the lucky ones, they get to get out of Wuhan. The local residents, they don't get those flights.

Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes, they're being confined there. Just imagine your family split up the same way.

And, David, you're in Beijing. Cruise ships now being held as kind of like, I don't know, floating quarantine stations.

DAVID CULVER, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right.

SCIUTTO: How long and how are they handling things there?

CULVER: Well, I think if there's a number to stand out from this crisis altogether, Jim, it may just be the number 14, the number of days that folks are going to be in quarantine, because it seems as though both of these ships could be held for that period of time.

The first one is the one with some 3,700 passengers. It's off the coast of Japan. And what we know about this situation is that it started with a man who was in Hong Kong, who tested positive for the coronavirus, and he was on that ship 12 days earlier. So they began to then check everyone on there, do health screenings to see where folks stand as far as their situation, and do they perhaps have the coronavirus. Ten people tested positive.

SCIUTTO: Wow.

CULVER: That's the first phase of health screenings. Of those ten, we know nine were passengers, one was a crew member, one was an American, and they've been taken off the boat. They are now ashore in Japan getting treated in hospitals.

The other one has some 1,800 passengers. That's off the coast of Hong Kong. And that started when three people who were on that ship, on a previous voyage, tested positive. So it's folks who were already off these ships who are testing positive.

What does that say? Well, authorities are able to track where people were and that's what they're doing. People who test positive, they're going back through -- big data too. We know that's happening here in China. And they're trying to figure out where they were, who they came in contact with and do those folks potentially have the virus and could they then transmit it to others, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Listen, you imagine on a ship there are lots of ways and opportunities to transmit the virus among people there.

CULVER: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Just, David, before we go, inside China, what's happening in these cities that people are being confined in?

CULVER: The lockdown zones are expanding. We're learning about more and more cities that are enacting their own lockdown measures. And some of them are pretty extreme. And you've heard about Wongong (ph) and they have essentially folks leaving every other day. One person designated in a household. So they're continuing forward with that.

But here's the other thing, Jim, that stands out to me is, we talked about the two new hospitals that are coming online, rapid construction, impressive no doubt. But that's in addition to the hospitals that are already in existence. And now we're learning about three new field hospitals. And when you see the images of these, they're desperate looking. It's rather unfortunate to see bed after bed that's lined up in these stadiums and exhibition halls, folks in really tight quarters.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

[09:55:04]

CULVER: It just shows you where they're getting to, to try to just get folks confined and contained and treated.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes, I mean they look like relief centers during a storm or something and they're going to be there a long time.

CULVER: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Lucy Kafanov, David Culver, thanks for being on top of the story. We're going to stay on top of it.

With results still coming in, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg leading the pack in Iowa. Can he carry that momentum into Senator Bernie Sanders' backyard in New Hampshire for the nation's first primary?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: You've got to listen to this next story. A dramatic rescue in the Florida Everglades after a kayaker who went missing last month was actually found alive still floating in the water. Sixty-seven-year-old Mark Meiel (ph) left for a kayaking trip in late January. He never returned. Days later, park rangers found his belongings, including his wallet and phone on the bank of the Lopez River.

[10:00:06]