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Trump and Biden Face Off for the First Time in the Debate Tonight; Questions Mount Over Who Trump Owes Massive $300 Million Debt; Olivia Troye: White House Pressured CDC to Downplay Risks of Opening Schools; Trump and Biden to Debate for First Time Tonight; Futures Flat Ahead of Tonight's First Presidential Debate. Aired 9- 9:30a ET

Aired September 29, 2020 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:37]

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. Top of the hour. I'm Poppy Harlow.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Jim Sciutto.

Tonight round one. President Trump and Joe Biden will face off for the first of three presidential debates. This critical showdown very different than any before. Why? Well, a deadly pandemic still hangs over this nation and the entire world. More than 200,000 deaths in this country, more than a million now across the globe.

HARLOW: Biden is expected to zero in on exactly that. The president's pandemic response. This comes as "The New York Times" is reporting this morning that the administration pressured the CDC over the summer to downplay the risks of opening schools.

Now, the president also faces some serious questions about his taxes after "The New York Times" also obtained decades of his records.

Let's begin with our correspondent Jessica Dean. She joins us this morning in Cleveland.

It is here, Jess. It is debate day. A very different debate day but equally consequential. No handshakes, lots of testing, what else will we see tonight?

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, so I'm going to walk you through just how different this is and all the guidelines that are now in place. You see the stage set up behind me. They are tinkering with everything, making sure it is perfect. In the meantime, typically we would have about an average of 900 people inside tonight. Instead, we're expecting about 60 to 70 people. So that just gives you an idea of how much smaller this is going to be.

Let me walk you through some of these things. The candidates of course will be on opposite sides of the stage. You see the microphones set up behind me. We know that the moderator, Chris Wallace, will be seated at a desk, facing both of those candidates.

Poppy, as you mentioned, no handshakes allowed tonight because of the coronavirus. Also no opening statements. I talked about the smaller number of guests that will be in here. All of those guests will have been COVID tested before they get inside. So a lot of changes, not to mention the fact that we were originally supposed to be at the University of Notre Dame for this debate. They ended up having to pull out of that and now we find ourselves right here in Cleveland.

But it's certainly going to be a very interesting debate tonight. A number of topics on the table, but you cannot ignore that over 200,000 Americans are dead and this pandemic rages on and we see the consequences of that right here in this debate hall, guys.

SCIUTTO: The candidates' different preparation schedules. The president seeming to resist preparation. Joe Biden has been doing it very seriously. Tell us about those different approaches and what we know.

DEAN: Right. So let's take about the topics for a second. I know they just flashed up. I want to give everybody a chance to take a look at them. So there will be six different topics for tonight. They include the Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in our cities and integrity of the election. So those are kind of the set topics for tonight. You can bet there's going to be some questions about President Trump's taxes as well.

Let's start first with President Trump's preparation or perhaps lack thereof in the traditional sense. We know that he's not a fan of full- out debate preparation, that he's much more relaxed about it. He sees his briefings as preparation. We did see Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani with him in the briefing room over the weekend. He said that they have been helping him to prepare.

He's also telegraphed that there will be some personal attacks against former Vice President Biden. That is something the Biden campaign is prepared for as well. As for former Vice President Joe Biden and his campaign, it's been a much more traditional preparation for these debates. It started with kind of smaller briefing books, him going through all of those facts, having smaller meetings, one-on-one meetings with aides about specific policy.

It grew over the weekend to full-on debate preparation with mock debates but we're told, Poppy and Jim, he really likes those rapid fire questions as opposed to full-on mock debates. But the key thing here, too, Jim and Poppy, today for people to watch out is the expectations game. We've seen President Trump lowering the expectations for Vice President Biden.

His campaign trying to up the expectation for Vice President Biden and the Biden camp and their surrogates saying it may not be that this actually has that much influence on people's -- on the actual polling and what people ultimately decide -- Poppy and Jim.

HARLOW: Jessica Dean, thank you for that reporting. A big night ahead, just hours away.

[09:05:04]

In hours the president will confront the controversy over his debts on the debate stage. Our John Harwood is at the White House for us again this morning.

Good morning to you, John. Deny and deflect is what the president did. It's what his -- you know, his team has been doing. But I wonder about on the debate stage tonight.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's going to be a challenge and put him on defense, Poppy. Look, this is a consistent pattern with the president in response to these "New York Times" stories. They have tried to say it's fake news. They have said they're smears. They have suggested "The New York Times" is working with Democrats in order to hurt the president on the eve of the debate, cited similar stories prior to a debate with Hillary Clinton.

But this is just one of the ways in which Donald Trump is going to be walking exposed on to that debate stage. These stories cast into question the idea that he was a successful businessman. They raised the issue of whether he's under financial pressure. Whether that could compromise his performance as president. There are embarrassing things in there about taking a deduction for $700,000 to his daughter for consulting fees and $70,000 write-offs for hairstyling.

But you've also had other issues that have put the president on defense. Anthony Fauci in the last couple of days has indicated that the president is listening to Scott Atlas who is an outlier, at odds with the scientific expertise on the Coronavirus Task Force on that pandemic. That's going to be a big topic for Joe Biden. And also we've gotten significant polls showing the president trailing by a large margin in the state of Pennsylvania which is one of the tipping point states in the election.

That calls into question this idea the president has offered that only a rigged election is going to cause him to be defeated. We can expect as Jessica indicated he didn't do a lot of formal preparation. He's going to throw haymakers at Joe Biden. The real question, guys, is, is anybody still listening to Donald Trump?

SCIUTTO: John Harwood, at the White House, thanks very much.

Joining us now to discuss, David Swerdlick, he's CNN political commentator, assistant editor at the "Washington Post," David Gergen, CNN senior political analyst, adviser to just a few presidents over the years.

Both of you, you saw the list -- remember we put it up on the screen, the plan for tonight. A list of topics includes things like COVID, respecting the outcome of this election. I just wonder, David Gergen, given your experience, let's forget for a moment what you and I or other campaign analysts might be interested in. What would you expect voters are most interested in in this election year given all that's going on in this country? Key issues for them for tonight's debate. DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, the key issues

obviously for voters have a lot to do with COVID as well as health care, as well as some on the taxes. But I must say, Jim, I think in this kind of environment people are really interested in is the character of the person they're going to vote for and also the strength of the person.

Joe Biden has very, very high marks on character and -- he's empathic. His humanity comes out all the time. But Donald Trump is often seen as the stronger one. And people ask, does Joe Biden have the strength or is he weak? And I think people are going to be judging not so much within these policy lanes as in the more general question of who is this person who is about to become president?

HARLOW: David Swerdlick, good to have you as well this morning. The issue of fact checking. So I think Chris Wallace is going to fact check a bit just because of the journalist I know he is. I know the presidential debate, you know, ahead says that it's not their job to fact check. But if Biden spends all his time fact-checking the president, that's not exactly getting his message across. How does he dance that dance?

DAVID SWERDLICK, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: No, you're exactly right. If Vice President Biden spends time trying to go point by point, he's going to get his message muddled and it won't be effective. We know President Trump lies or spins or tells half-truths in many instances in speeches and debates. There's nothing that the moderator or Biden can do about that.

You know that the president is not going to play by sort of Marquis of Queensbury rules so the question is, how do you respond to that? As David Gergen said, the message for Biden is to show that he is strong and that he has a way forward for the country, and you don't do that by getting into these long debates.

You debate Senator Elizabeth Warren, you need a five-point plan to respond to hers. Here you need a pithy strong statement to counteract anything the president says. And I think that's -- hopefully for Vice President Biden what he has -- his team has prepared for him, and if you're President Trump, his team is going to prepare him for a situation where he wants to attack every little point and make Biden fall off his game.

SCIUTTO: Yes. David, to your point saying the character is the issue here for voters tonight. The taxes story becomes really a question of character, does it not?

[09:10:02]

On two fronts for the president, because, on the one, is he taking privileges, et cetera, that average Americans cannot take, right? It appears he paid far fewer taxes than working Americans. But on the flipside, somewhat pierces the idea of the massively successful businessman because to justify those tax deductions he would have to have had real losses in his businesses to the tune of many millions of dollars in each of those years. How does the taxes story play into that larger question in your view?

GERGEN: It's a very, very good point, Jim. I think both the taxes story and the pandemic story play into the question of who has a better character and its strength for Biden going into this. "The New York Times" -- the lead story, a big story, is when the president launched the premise, he came out on television and said -- proclaimed himself as a highly successful businessman. He was, you know, basically a genius at making money and doing this.

And just a few months later, he filed at the IRS a claim that he had lost $89 million in the preceding year. So this has been with us for a long, long time now and on the pandemic, of course, he told us a lot of good news and he hid the bad news. He was never straightforward with us on that. So people want someone in the Oval Office they can trust. Trust still remains the coin of the realm. As trite as that may sound, it's still vital.

HARLOW: David Swerdlick, what do you think Joe Biden's biggest Achilles heel is tonight on that stage?

SWERDLICK: So I think there's a couple of things. I think, one, I would expect his son Hunter Biden's business dealings to come up. And he knows it's going to come up in one of these debates so the question again is, how does he respond to it? I also think again for him, it's a lot about how he responds to the issues as much as he responds to the issues.

One thing Democrats, not just Vice President Biden, have been bad at that President Trump is really good at is bragging about their accomplishments, and if Vice President Biden takes the approach of saying, well, here's why we didn't do the public option, or here's why we did the Affordable Care Act, I think that'll be less effective as one of his lines from, you know, almost a decade ago where he said, you know, hey, Chevy's alive and bin Laden is dead.

I think that was a Biden line. That's the way you debate President Trump. Not with extensive, long winded policy answers. It's going to be a lot about strategy. You'd like to think that this is about the issues, but at some level it's about who projects their leadership ability.

HARLOW: Reaganesque, right? I will not exploit the youth and inexperience. '

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Although neither of them are exactly young men.

Thank you, both. We have to leave it there for time. We'll have a lot more to talk about tomorrow on this, I promise. Thanks, gentlemen.

Still to come, a former staffer for the Vice President Mike Pence tells CNN the White House pressured the CDC to downplay the risks of sending kids back to school. The dangers of taking a step like that next. Also, we're learning this. As New York City, once the nation's

epicenter of COVID-19 and home to the country's largest school district, is opening its doors for all public elementary school students today. What that looks like ahead.

SCIUTTO: And the first presidential debate, of course, just hours away. We're going to speak to a member of the Trump campaign team. Live ahead. Lots of questions.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:15:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back. A former top staffer for the Vice President Mike Pence says the CDC was pushed to try to downplay the risks for children of reopening schools in the Fall in the middle of this pandemic. In fact, Olivia Troye says the White House coronavirus taskforce tried to work around the CDC. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OLIVIA TROYE, FORMER STAFFER FOR MIKE PENCE: This was an effort, you know, at times where I would get blindsided, where there would be junior staffers being tasked to find different data for charts that would show that the virus wasn't as bad for certain populations, ages or demographics.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Troye resigned from the taskforce in August. This was happening at the same time as the president was publicly pushing for schools to reopen. Let's talk about this development and more. Dr. Ashish Jha is here, director of Harvard's Global Health Institute, good morning.

ASHISH JHA, DIRECTOR, GLOBAL HEALTH INSTITUTE, HARVARD: Good morning.

HARLOW: When you hear these numbers, what is your reaction to this allegation that in the middle of the Summer, the White House was pressuring the CDC to even put out this graphic, I think we have it, we can show to really downplay the risks of COVID to children and therefore to opening schools?

JHA: Yes, so this is really frustrating because the thing that we all want is to get our kids back to school safely. And instead of putting time and effort into figuring out how to do that, it feels like the White House was undermining the scientists who were actually working and trying to assess risks and mitigate risks. So, instead of doing the hard work, we really were just undermining the entire scientific process, and I think that's really unfortunate.

HARLOW: The White House response to it from Brian Morgenstern is that, you know, the taskforce brings together individuals who offer, quote, "different expertise and views" and a variety of issues. He went on to say the president relies on the advice of all of his top health experts who agree that it's in the public health interest to safely reopen schools.

I think the issue is now, is you have New York City reopening today its public schools after weeks of delays because of safety concerns. This matters for millions of children and potentially even more for, you know, all the folks that work in those schools and the older people those kids are going home to.

[09:20:00]

JHA: Absolutely. So getting kids back to school should have been -- should still be one of our nation's top priorities, but getting them back in safely, so safe for them, for the people who work in schools, for the families, is also incredibly important. And I have said and all the public health people have been saying that this is hard work. There's a lot to do, let's not get distracted by politics, yet unfortunately, this topic has gotten way too politicized instead of letting science really drive this decision-making.

HARLOW: Last week, you told the U.S. Joint Economic Committee that the guidance coming out at least recently from the CDC is quote, "muddled", contradictory and against all the scientific evidence we know. I know you're not talking about everything, but you're talking about a few different announcements that they've made and had to walk back about aerosols and how this spreads, et cetera. What do you assess are the public health consequences of that?

JHA: Yes, so let me be very clear. The scientists -- the great scientists who make up the CDC, they're still there and they are clearly trying to put out good guidance. What we see over and over again, is they come up with really strong scientific recommendations and then it often gets perverted in the political process.

Then we see these sort of random announcements from the CDC that feels like it's much more political than scientific, and it causes confusion. And I think the American people struggle to know whom to believe and when to believe it, and in the middle of a pandemic, very dangerous.

HARLOW: Let's talk about children, if we could. Dr. Fauci said yesterday, children account for just about 10 percent of COVID cases in this country, and he also issued a warning to all of us to quote, "be careful" about just dismissing infection in children.

Part of this is because the administration dismissed it for a long time. I remember Betsy DeVos; the Education Secretary to our Dana Bash saying, you know, children don't spread this thing -- we don't know, and we know they spread everything else like the flu and colds a lot. Do you have any advice for us as parents --

JHA: Yes --

HARLOW: And like what decisions we should make this Fall and Winter? For example, I take my children to the playground, right? Some other parents don't do that. And I don't know how much I'm gambling I guess is the point.

JHA: Yes, so a couple of things. I mean, first is I agree with Dr. Fauci that we should not be cavalier about children.

HARLOW: Right --

JHA: Now, good news is, thankfully they don't -- they die at very low rates from this disease, so that's really good news. But there's more than just -- we are worried about other things too like kids do sometimes get sick and we just have to be careful. On issues like playgrounds, I think anything that's outside is generally pretty safe for kids.

I don't worry about playgrounds so much. I think we need to get kids out and playing, outdoor activity is great. Obviously, get them to wear a mask, wash their hands or hand sanitizer. It's the indoor activities where people are not wearing masks that is higher risk, and that's what we have to be careful of.

HARLOW: You should see me with the hand sanitizer. I just run around after them. Dr. Ashish Jha, thank you and happy birthday.

JHA: Oh, thank you very much --

HARLOW: We hear it's your 30th birthday and we hope it's not --

JHA: Again, I am 30 one --

HARLOW: Again!

JHA: More time. Yes, and I'm thrilled to be 30 again. Thank you.

HARLOW: Have a great one, thank you. Jim?

JHA: Bye-bye.

SCIUTTO: I've had a few 30th birthdays too. President Trump and Joe Biden go head-to-head tonight, next, we're going to speak to Trump campaign communications director.

HARLOW: We're also moments away from the opening bell on Wall Street. Take a look at that futures, lower across the board. They were flat this morning, this is all ahead of -- it's pretty close to flat now. The first presidential debate tonight, stocks finished higher on Monday as investors focus on hopes for a stimulus deal out of Washington. Talks expected today between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Treasury Secretary. We'll keep a close eye on it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:25:00]

SCIUTTO: Welcome back. We are just hours away from the first presidential debate where we will get a first look at each campaign strategy, a little more than a month before the vote. With me now from Cleveland is President Trump's 2020 campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. Tim, welcome back to the program.

TIM MURTAUGH, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, TRUMP 2020 CAMPAIGN: Thanks for having me, Jim, good to see you.

SCIUTTO: So, first, I want to begin first, because my colleague Poppy Harlow yesterday didn't get an answer on this from the White House. Just very quickly, how much did the president pay in federal -- and I'm specifying federal income taxes in the years 2016 and 2017? Is it just $750 as "The Times" reporting shows?

MURTAUGH: Well, as you heard and as you probably read in "The New York Times" story, the president has paid tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes, and as "The New York Times" confirmed the president remains -- the president -- Jim --

SCIUTTO: Federal income taxes, I'm not asking you about payroll taxes or state taxes --

MURTAUGH: Hold on a second. If you're going to ask me the question Jim, you might as well let me answer it.

SCIUTTO: Well, because the answer doesn't --

MURTAUGH: The president -- "The New York Times" confirmed -- "The New York Times" confirmed that the president remains under audit and has been under audit for the last ten years. And he has always said that when the audit concludes, he would release his taxes. That audit is ongoing, no one wanted to believe him about that --

SCIUTTO: I would get to the audit in a moment because --

MURTAUGH: Jim --

SCIUTTO: I'll get to the audit in a moment because the audit focuses on $70 million --

MURTAUGH: Voters don't -- voters already have made this judgment --

SCIUTTO: Refund he received in a year that he didn't pay any federal taxes. Just a very simple question because we didn't get it yesterday, I'll give you an opportunity today or I'll just take it as a non- answer.

MURTAUGH: I would note --

SCIUTTO: What did he pay in federal income tax --

MURTAUGH: That refund that I told you, Jim, I told you Jim, the president will release his taxes when the audit is complete. "The Times" confirmed that it was ongoing.

SCIUTTO: OK, so I'll take that as a non-answer --

MURTAUGH: And that refund that you're referring to was made possible under a law signed by your former boss, Barack Obama, that allows people to claim losses in previous years --

SCIUTTO: Don't go personal here, Tim --

MURTAUGH: And carry them forward.