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Trump and Biden Clash in Final Presidential Debate; U.S. Says, Russian Hackers Have Stolen Data From State and Local Governments; 71,000+ Coronavirus Cases Reported in U.S. Thursday. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired October 23, 2020 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: A very good Friday morning to you. It's Friday. I'm Jim Sciutto.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: What a week it has been. I'm Poppy Harlow. We're so glad you're here.

So we do have breaking news this morning. More than 50 million of you have voted already. And today, both candidates are on the trail. They are trying to win over any holdouts and undecided voters. This just hours after Americans saw two different versions of what these men see as the future of the country. On the debate stage last night, the president said we are rounding the corner on coronavirus.

SCIUTTO: The numbers belie that. They prove otherwise. The president's own task force even warning that several regions of the country are showing, quote, early signs of deterioration heading into winter, six states seeing their most new infections ever on Thursday. Those are the states there.

HARLOW: Yes. And those are the facts.

With us now, our political experts. Good morning to you guys, Seung Min Kim, Errol Louis. Thank you for being here after everyone was up very late last night watching the debate.

Errol, if I can begin with you on -- I mean, the president knows what the numbers are, every person who interviews him says it, Kristen Welker did a great presenting him with the facts again last night. Does he actually believe that Americans think that all the data out there is false and that he is the only one who is telling them the truth?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, the president's view of reality is that the case numbers are only going up because we test so much and test more than anywhere else in the world. Now, those things are not true, but that is what he believes, or at least that's what he repeats over and over again. He says it on the stump, he said it in that 60 Minutes interview that he walked out of, he said it last night during the debate. He seems to think that if he repeats these things enough and he has enough of an echo chamber both inside the White House, inside his campaign and also, of course, from Fox News, that he'll convince a lot of people to believe it.

As I said before, he is running not just against Joe Biden but against reality. I think most people understand that these numbers are real, that their local public health authorities are not scheming politicians who are trying to make the president look bad. They're just telling the truth. They're just reflecting the science. They're just trying to warn the public about a very serious problem. The president is running up solidly against that this.

And, look, there's a natural human tendency to want to avoid bad news beyond a certain point. And the inconveniences, the serious inconveniences that come with trying living with COVID, he is trying to, I guess, politicize that and use that to his benefit.

It's a shocking tactic. I don't know why he thinks it's going to succeed. My guess is that it probably won't, but that is what the president is doing.

SCIUTTO: Seung Min, another focus, the president and his team going into this debate was drawing attention to the business dealings of Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Biden's pushback on this, when the president without foundation accused him of taking $3.5 million from Russia, listen to his and I want to get your reaction.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: That's a typical political statement, let's get off this China thing and then he looks the family, around the table, everything, just a typical politician when I see that.

KRISTEN WELKER, MSNBC HOST: Let's talk about North Korea then/

TRUMP: I'm not a typical politician. That's why I got elected. That was -- let's get off the subject of China, let's talk around sitting around the table. Come on, Joe, you could do better than that.

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: You have not released a single solitary (ph) year of your tax return. What are you hiding? Why are you unwilling?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Seung Min, the president, again, hiding behind this, they're under audit, which, of course, does not prevent him from releasing them, as the vice president has. Does the Trump team view that as a missed opportunity here? They were looking to strike a blow. Did they?

SEUNG MIN KIM, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I mean, certainly, they tried, but then you heard the former vice president come back with his questions about his own business dealings and his own refusal over the last several years to release his tax returns. And we heard some actually new excuses from the president last night when it comes to the issue of his taxes, saying the $750 that have been reported as the number, as the amount of the federal income tax he had paid back in 2016 and 2017, he called that a filing fee. But tax experts say there's no such filing fee. And it just leaves us with more questions about his actual financial picture, the financial situation of his properties.

And I thought the vice president was able to kind of effectively turn that argument against him. If you're -- if the president is trying to paint the Biden family as engaged in some sort of corrupt dealings, I think that was a way for -- to turn it back on the -- turn it back on President Trump with his tax returns. That was the way the Biden campaign hoped that he would respond and he certainly did.

HARLOW: You know, Errol, I'm glad we actually ran that sound bite before the one on taxes, because I wanted you to address that.

[10:05:01]

And that is, you know, the key question, especially in the closing days of an election to folks in so many polls is, do you think the candidate cares about people like you. And the president's flip response to kitchen table issues last night, I wonder how important you thought that was?

LOUIS: I thought it was extremely important. My jaw dropped. I couldn't believe the president said that. In part because of that question you just said, the reality is you want to connect with voters, you want to make sure that they know that you understand their lives and so forth. Not only did President Trump, candidate Trump, show that he doesn't understand it, he was scornful of the idea of even trying to connect with it.

He seemed to be so disgusted with the idea that somebody like Joe Biden would actually care about the fact that people don't have the money to replace their tires on their car or to pay the tuition for somebody to go to community college or to handle the basic needs that so many people are grappling with. This president not only doesn't know about it, doesn't want to hear about it but he's disgusted at the very thought that somebody would try and make that the subject of a political conversation. He could not be more out of touch with where people are coming from.

Does that mean his followers are going to walk away from him? Not necessarily. But to the extent there are still undecided voters out there, and more importantly to the extent that there are working people out there who maybe necessarily going to vote or didn't know if this election was all that important to them, I think he solidified in that exchange why if they want any kind real attention to their issues. They're going to have a really clear choice between two candidates this time.

SCIUTTO: Seung Min, I had to admit, I had a little bit of deja vu last night with this final debate, it reminded me of the final debate in 2016 where there was a calmer Trump, and he got kudos for that. But the majority of people said that Hillary Clinton won the debate, as CNN's polling showed and other polling has showed, scientific polling, not online polling. And yet, of course, Trump won the election.

I just wonder, do -- who won or who's perceived to have won these debates matter in the minds of voters? I mean, is it fair to compare to 2016.

KIM: It's a hard comparison, because also the kind of the electoral dynamics are different now. And in terms of talking about more than 47 million voters actually having voted already in this election because of the availability of mail-in balloting, of the early voting sites, obviously, pandemic playing a huge factor here. But we can't forget that Republican voters tend to be the ones who come out on Election Day and vote.

And so the Trump campaign is really not only trying to drive out those voters with get out the voter campaigns, obviously, and try to get his base to energize by campaigning, having large, not socially distanced rallies all over the place. But if you are someone who is inclined to vote Republican but the president has given you pause, maybe this debate performance was a way for you to kind of get off your couch and say like maybe this guy can, you know, behave for a bit. And I do like his policies and he was able to tone down a bit.

So maybe in that respect, it may have been effective. But, look, the -- like you said, how much does the last debate performance change matters, especially when so much of the population has already voted. It will be a really fascinating question that we won't be able to answer, at least for the next several days.

HARLOW: Thank you both, Errol Louis, Seung Min Kim. We appreciate you. Get a lot of rest this weekend, okay, because there's a big two weeks coming up for everyone here. Thank you so much.

All right, let's go ahead and bring in our Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. By the way, Dr. Gupta, is it your birthday today?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It is, Poppy, a birthday that I will never forget.

HARLOW: Oh, yes. It must feel good to be 30. Sanjay, thank you for being here.

In all seriousness, there's so many important things that happened about COVID last night on the debate stage. So let's take a listen to the president again claiming that the virus is just going to go away while Joe Biden warns of a very tough next few months.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It will go away. And as I say, we're rounding the turn, we're rounding the corner. It's going away.

BIDEN: This is the same fellow who told you it was going to end by Easter last time. This is the same fellow who told you that, don't worry we're going to end this by the summer. We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter and he has no clear plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Is there any piece of data that says we're rounding the corner?

GUPTA: Unfortunately, no, Poppy. You know, we will get through this ultimately, but I think it's pretty clear when you look at the data, not only in terms of the numbers going up but the pace at which they're increasing, I mean, there's real concern here.

We can show sort of what the trajectory of this pandemic has been in the United States over the last several months.

[10:10:02]

And it's had these intermittent peaks. And we know sort of middle of July, we had the significant peak after July 4th weekend, people were really tired back then, they started getting together in large numbers. But even then, you could still be outside mostly.

We're sort of having the same issue now but we're starting with a lot more viral transmission. People are still -- there's COVID fatigue and yet people are still getting together and that's really driving the numbers up and at a faster pace.

So the number of people who are becoming infected is going up, the number of people who are hospitalized is going up. And that's probably the biggest concern, Poppy. I mean, there's hospital systems all over the country right now where planners are looking around their communities saying, could that building be a surge capacity building, do we need to put up field hospitals like they're doing in Wisconsin. Hopefully, we don't need that. But I think there's no question that things are going to get worse for a while before they get better.

SCIUTTO: Sanjay, Joe Biden, he made that point last night, specifically on the number of U.S. deaths going forward. Have a listen. I want to get your reaction.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We have a vaccine that's coming. It's ready. It's going to be announced within weeks and it's going to be delivered. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is the military is going to distribute the vaccine.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Actually, that's not the bite. Let me just quote it myself. JOE Biden said the expectation is we'll have another 200,000 Americans dead the time between now and the end of the year. Where does that data come from? And a putative president, either a president-elect Donald Trump in a second term or a new president-elect Joe Biden, if you had ten minutes with him after Election Day to say, what do you need to do to stop that from happening, what would you tell them? GUPTA: Yes. Well, first of all, the data comes from these various models, as you know. And the models, as we have said for months now, models are all wrong but some of them are useful. But this IHME model does predict that there was going to be -- either by the end of the year or certainly by end of January, perhaps a couple hundred thousand more deaths.

I think the good news, if there is any such thing here, Jim, is that --

SCIUTTO: Well --

HARLOW: It looks like we lost the feed.

SCIUTTO: We lost Sanjay Gupta. We'll get back to him and get an answer on the good news there. Always good to have Sanjay on.

Still to come this hour, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, he is going to join us. Lots of questions on all these coronavirus developments.

HARLOW: Yes. That will be a great interview in just a few minutes, folks.

Also, all signs point to Russia again, as the Kremlin prepares to cast doubt on the election results in favor of the president. That is now how the president sees it. We'll get into that critical issue.

And how did each candidate do in the final debate? We ask you, the voter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Joe Biden is talking a lot of trash and lies. He's not being truthful with the American people.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When he talked about the families who have died because of coronavirus, it shows his humanity. And that's one thing that you never hear President Trump mention.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:15:00]

HARLOW: Welcome back. There is more information this morning on foreign election interference. CNN had learned overnight that Russian hackers have stolen U.S. election data, this is now just 11 days until Election Day. This on top of The New York Times reporting that the Russians are preparing to sow chaos around any certainty over U.S. election results. It's unclear what the Kremlin exactly plans to do, but officials believe its operations would be intended to help the president a conclusion he disputed on the debate stage last night. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: John Ratcliffe, who is fantastic, DNI, he said the one thing common to both of them, they both want you to lose because there has been nobody tougher to Russia between the sanctions, nobody tougher than me on Russia between the sanctions, between all of what I've done with NATO.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: So he says -- Miles Taylor, who is with me, and is a former Trump administration official who served as chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Miles, it's good to have you.

So he is saying that, you know, the DNI, whom he put in that position, told me that they, Russia and Iran, both want me to lose. This flies directly in the face of what just a few months ago senior officials said Russia is actively meddling in the election to hurt Joe Biden and it goes in the face of William Evanina said in August that Russians are trying to discredit Biden and his family. What are Americans supposed to believe this morning?

MILES TAYLOR, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, they're not supposed to believe the president had because he told a couple of pretty big whoppers in that, Poppy, one being the Russians are trying to hurt him.

Look, I used to see the most sensitive intelligence on this in my 2.5 years at the Department of Homeland Security. Now, I can't get into that information, but a lot of it has been declassified, as you know. And it's very clear, that the Russians see Trump as being to their benefit. And they want to try to help Donald Trump win re-election.

We saw it in 2016. We saw it again in the midterm election with them trying to boost Donald Trump and Republicans. And we're seeing it now.

But I also think there is second whopper that the president told, and he said no one has been tougher on Russia. I could tell you, from the inside of that administration, we thought the president was way too soft on Russia.

[10:20:00]

We went to the president with bold recommendations to punish the Russians for their interference so they wouldn't do it again. Donald Trump didn't want to hear it, he didn't want to get aggressive on Russia. And what he told us is that he wanted a good relationship with Putin.

And we've just seen the president days ago on the campaign trail brag about having a warm relationship with Moscow and with Vladimir Putin. He said, that's not such a bad thing, is it? Well, Mr. President, right now, the Russians are actively interfering in our democracy. We are hearing about operations meant to undermine the 2020 U.S. election.

HARLOW: So, Miles, then why did the U.S. treasury not sanction Russia this week? They just sanctioned -- yesterday -- they sanctioned Iran because of what Iran did. But remember, the DNI and the FBI chief in this announcement on Wednesday night said that both Iran and Russia, quote, obtained some voter information, end quote, have taken specific actions to influence public opinion in relation to our elections. Why not sanction Russia on this?

TAYLOR: I'm really concerned about that, Poppy. And I think we have to look into exactly that question. What did the president know? When did he know it? And what did aides recommend that he do and did he accept those recommendations?

I've been in this position before where we've seen bad behavior on the part of the Russians, we recommend that the White House do something and the president says, I don't want to, or he tones it way down. I would be very curious to find out whether aides did recommend to him that punitive actions be taken towards the Russians and whether or not the president accepted those recommendations.

What I can tell you is happening right now is that the law enforcement and intelligence community is devising plans on how to deter and disrupt this Russian activity. Some of those are probably very bold plans potentially in cyber space and it will be interesting to see whether the commander in chief listens to those recommendations.

HARLOW: I want to end on this. We only have a minute left, but on the separation of children from their parents it was brought up last night in the debate, the fact that 545 children are still separated from their parents, we don't know where their parents are. You were working as chief of staff for Kirstjen Nielsen at DHS. She is the one who led the zero tolerance policy. And the president said last night, we're working on it, we're working very hard. Is it possible that they do not know where any of these parents are? Is it possible they never get reunited?

TAYLOR: Well, it's very possible they never get reunited, and that's because the president refused to devote his political capital to solving the underlying immigration challenges that resulted in this crisis. Behind the scenes, we pushed back tooth and nail against the White House and Justice Department, which were hell bent on implementing this policy, which we could see was going to be an unmitigated train wreck.

But the White House wanted to go forward with it anyway and it ended up with a predictable result, a backlog of children without their families, and here we are still talking about it years later. This is a result of the president focusing on the wrong things and not solving the immigration crisis. It's one of the biggest travesties of the Trump administration.

HARLOW: And tragedy for all these families and all those kids. Miles Taylor, I appreciate the time this morning. Thanks very much.

SCIUTTO: Great to hear from him.

Coronavirus cases are spiking in more than half of the country today, yet the president says we, as a country, are rounding the turn. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar joins me next to discuss. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:25:00]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: it will go away, and as I say, we're rounding the turn, we're rounding the corner. It's going away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Well, the unfortunate reality today is that the facts, the numbers they prove otherwise. Yesterday, there were more than 71,000 new confirmed infections making it the fourth worst day in this country since the pandemic started, cases increasing now in 32 states across the country. And an influential model projects that an additional 160,000 Americans or possibly more could die over the next three months.

Joining me now to discuss the big picture here, the United States secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar. Mr. Azar, thanks so much for joining me this morning.

ALEX AZAR, HHS SECRETARY: Glad to be with you, Jim. Thanks for joining me.

SCIUTTO: So, you know the numbers here better than we do here. The facts belie the claim that we are rounding the corner. I just wonder, as someone who is helping to lead the country's response to this, why does the president keep saying that? What health function does it serve to say that when the numbers say otherwise?

AZAR: Well, I know the president is trying to give people hope given the vaccines and therapeutics that are coming and around the corner but we do need to acknowledge, and he does acknowledge we're in a very serious right now, we're seeing increases cases. And what we're seeing is through the Midwest, upper Midwest and the plains, a lot of cases occurring, hospitalizations and we'll see results from that.

This is being driven by individual behaviors at this point. Community spread is happening because we've got to keep focused on washing our hands, watching our distance and wearing our face coverings when we can't watch our distance and in particular being careful in household gatherings.

[10:30:05]