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How Right-Wing Media is Encouraging Election Denialism; Top U.S. Allies Extend Congratulations to Biden; Military Spouses Falsely Identified as Fraudulent Voters; Supreme Court Signals Law Could Mostly Stay Intact; Tropical Storm Eta Strengthens as It Heads Towards Florida. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired November 11, 2020 - 04:30   ET

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

[04:30:00]

KIM BRUNHUBER, CNN ANCHOR: More than a week after the election and days after the race was called, President Trump and his allies and the right wing media still aren't willing to accept the facts that he lost the election.

CNN's Brian Stelter reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LOU DOBBS, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK: Many are trying to steal this election from President Trump.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the 2020 form of birtherism, its election denialism. Delegitimizing a Democratic leader. And it's happening everywhere. From Fox News to Facebook, from talk radio to Twitter. On Tuesday, 8 of the 10 top performing link posts on U.S. Facebook page were from President Trump, his evangelist supporter Franklin Graham, and right-wing commentator Dan Bongino.

DAN BONGINO, NRATV CONTRIBUTOR: The election oddity is keep adding up.

STELTER: Unproven claims and innuendo about mass voter fraud are fueling right-wing talkers like Bongino.

BONGINO: There are way too many questions here.

STELTER: And he's telling his fans not to give up.

BONGINO: I'm not going anywhere. You're not going anywhere.

STELTER: Conspiracy theories about mass voter fraud are spreading widely on social media. This genie left the bottle days ago.

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): Trump still has a path to victory.

STELTER: Trump's friends on Fox are telling millions of viewers that Democrats are cheaters. That big cities are voter fraud factories, and that Trumps lawsuits are serious. DOBBS: You have courts defying appellate courts within the state without any consequence. It's outrageous.

STELTER: And this content is racking up big audiences on Facebook and on Twitter. Some of it is hard to fact check because it is sort short on details, heavy on innuendo. But these toxic claims are reaching Trump, misinforming Trump and his fan base, and garnering retweets from the President. Trump dead-enders are digging in.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've not conceded anything.

STELTER: Stoking grievances and swearing that Trump could still be a winner.

GREG GUTFELD, HOST FOX NEWS: All of the weirdness went in one direction, so I think I have proved that this election is fraudulent.

STELTER (on camera): Now that was Fox's Greg Gutfeld. He'll say he was just joking, but the fact that the matter is the five stages of grief are very evident in right wing media right now. There's a lot of denial, a lot of anger. There is some bargaining, a little bit of depression. But so far, I am not seeing the final stage that would be acceptance. I'm not seeing acceptance in pro Trump, right-wing media, at least not yet. Back to you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: Now despite the Trump administration doing its best to sew doubt about the results of the election, a new Reuters/IPSOS poll shows where America stands when asked who they believe won the election. Seventy-nine percent said Joe Biden. And that included more than half of Republicans. Three percent said Donald Trump, 13 percent said too early to call, and 5 percent said they don't know.

America's closest allies seem to be ignoring President Trump's refusal to concede the election. Many have already been on the phone to congratulate Joe Biden. The President-elect took calls from the leaders of France, Germany, Ireland and United Kingdom. We're going to get the latest now with Nic Robertson in London. Nic, more U.S. foreign allies are congratulating Biden than Republican Senators. I mean, that's astounding. It's quite a list of countries. So, tell us about that and what it means for U.S. foreign relations going forward.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, isn't it just. The people furthest away from the White House have already accepted that there's going to be a change and the situation moves on. Whereas those closest to it can't really seem to get their heads around it. And of course, that part of what's happening is being closely watched overseas, but these governments -- as you mentioned there -- Germany, France, Britain, Ireland, they're all moving forward and they're all in conversation with team Biden, President-elect.

[04:35:00]

Interestingly, at a diplomatic level it really matters to these countries who he spoke to first and the assessment here in London was that Boris Johnson got the first call. There is a thorny issue between the two men. They see eye to eye pretty much on climate change, on the strength of NATO, on a strong transatlantic partnership, on rebuilding the economy out of COVID, of tackling the global pandemic together. All of these issues they see eye to eye on.

But Joe Biden has made it clear to Boris Johnson, that if Boris Johnson wants to get the biggest thing on his agenda which is a good trade deal with the United States, then while he negotiates his way out of the European Union and a new trade deal with the you, he can't damage something that's very important to Joe Biden -- particularly noting that he's got strong Irish roots -- and that's the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland.

And both sides when they were reporting out conversations yesterday didn't mention that. And again, I come back to this point, diplomatically kind of important who Biden spoke to first. The assessment in Downing Street here, that Johnson got the first call. But it does appear perhaps it was the Irish Prime Minister who got the call first. He tweeted out at 3:30 that he had gotten a call. Boris Johnson got his call at 4:00. The Irish later deleted their tweet. Interestingly, the Biden camp hasn't cleared that up. They've been asked and we've asked him, and they haven't said who he called first.

BRUNHUBER: First international diplomatic incident and he still hasn't taken the White House. Nic Robertson in London, thank you very much, appreciate it.

Well the Trump campaign and top Republicans have seized on claims of alleged voter fraud to push the false narrative of a stolen election. Now managed to CNN track down two people who are identified as fraudulent voters in Nevada. It turns out, they're anything but. Dan Simon reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR, THE SITUATION ROOM: In Nevada, right now ...

DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When the election results first came in and the race grew tight in Nevada, Trump officials made wild accusations that thousands of people who had moved out of the state had fraudulently cast their votes, potentially swinging the race to Biden.

ADAM LAXALT, CO-CHAIR, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: We are also confident that there are thousands of people whose votes have been counted that have moved out of Clark County in the -- during the pandemic.

SIMON: The alleged proof from Nevada Republicans, a change of address database that publicly lists zip codes of where 3,000 or so voters currently and previously lived.

For instance, vote cast record 337 shows a voter who previously lived in Henderson, Nevada but is now in Davis, California. By the GOP's logic, that person would be ineligible to vote. The problem is this woman says she's that voter 337.

AMY ROSE, NEVADA VOTER: When I first saw that we were on the list, frankly, I was just very shocked.

SIMON: And she's far from a fraudulent voter.

(on camera): If the Trump campaign officials are listening, anything you want to say to them?

ROSE: I think that they should understand that the actions that they are taking are harmful to America. This is harmful to our democratic process. I think that these types of accusations made without any basis in fact are really just shocking and appalling.

SIMON: Amy Rose is a military spouse. Her husband is active duty in the Air Force stationed at Travis Air Force Base in California. But under federal and state laws they're still permanent Nevada residents, making them eligible to vote there in the 2020 election. She says she easily found herself on the list.

ROSE: I just searched for where we live now, and I found our city and it matched our zip code. It matched our four code, which is the four code indicates a very small, like one block or so radius, and that matched up with where we moved from in Nevada. So I put two and two together and realized it was myself and my husband.

SIMON: Even a cursory glance at the list, you can see hundreds of other entries using APO, meaning Army Post Office, AFB for Air Force Base, or JB for Joint Base.

STEPHANIE, NEVADA VOTER: My home of record is in Nevada. I still own a house in Nevada, my license plates are Nevada. I pay property tax.

SIMON: Stephanie, who does not want her last name used, says she's also on the list, number 464. She and her husband, who has spent 12 years in the military, live in the Washington, D.C. area. He's a major and pilot in the Air Force although Las Vegas is their permanent home.

STEPHANIE: My husband fights for his country. He has offered to pay the ultimate sacrifice and I stand alongside him. And now, my own vote is called into question without any sort of legitimacy.

SIMON (on camera): Anything you want to say to these Nevada GOP officials who put this list together?

STEPHANIE: You guys have got to do better. You've got to do better.

SIMON: Now again, there appear to be hundreds of zip codes on that list that correlate to military bases. Other people could be students away at college but still eligible to vote in Nevada.

We did get a statement from the Trump campaign. It reads, in part.

[04:40:00]

We have referred a list of people who voted in Nevada's election, yet have moved out of the state, to the Department of Justice and the local election authorities. We have no way to confirm whether a small number of these voters fall under an exemption, which is why we referred it to the authorities for further investigation.

We should also point out that right now, Joe Biden's lead in Nevada stands at approximately 37,000 votes, so this list of 3,000 or so people is a moot point anyway. But the fact that there are so many military families on that list just highlights the utter recklessness of those allegations.

Dan Simon, CNN, San Francisco.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BRUNHUBER: Yes, great reporting there.

The U.S. President could be making his final push to kill the Affordable Care Act. What signals from Supreme Court Justices could mean for Obamacare's future? We'll bring you that coming up. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BRUNHUBER: Encouraging news about Pfizer's vaccine raised hopes across the country this week, but new statistics show this pandemic, well, it's far from over. Hospitalizations in the U.S. have reached a new high. Nearly 62,000 Americans are in the hospital with the virus. That's according to the coronavirus tracking project. Medical experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci say hopes for a vaccine don't mean we can ease up on public health measures even during the upcoming holidays?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Gatherings are a bad idea. There are some cases where, you know, maybe there's no choice. By and large, gatherings don't need to happen. If one Thanksgiving out of hundreds of years that we've had them, if one Thanksgiving doesn't happen, you will survive. But if you get COVID, you may not. So just this one time, maybe this one year, especially if the vaccine really does pan out, just skipping one year of holidays, I know it sucks, but it's better than getting sick and better than infecting others.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[04:45:00]

BRUNHUBER: During a pandemic Americans are understandably concerned about health care coverage and it looks like the Affordable Care Act could survive its latest Republican challenge. Oral arguments remain before the Supreme Court. Two conservative justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts signaled much of the law could remain intact even if the controversial mandate requiring most Americans to obtain insurance gets struck down.

Let's talk about this with Jill Horwitz. She's a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA. Thank you so much for joining us. The signals we're getting from some of the Justices seem to suggest Obamacare might live to see another day. So take us through why Democrats have to be, you know, perhaps hopeful about what they heard from the court yesterday.

JILL HORWITZ, LAW PROFESSOR, UCLA SCHOOL OF LAW: It was a surprising court argument. The justices did not seem particularly interested in getting to the merits of the case. Instead they spent a lot of time focusing on whether the case should be before them at all and whether if it should be there and the bad part of the statute could just be cut out and we could all go about our business.

BRUNHUBER: The doctrine of no severability, is that it? Can you explain sort of what they were talking about there?

HORWITZ: Throwing out a big, complicated statute undermines our system of government because it means the courts rather than the legislature is deciding what the law is. So, we've got this doctrine of severability and it says if some part of the statute is rotten, you don't throw the whole thing out, you cut out the bad part of it and leave the rest of it standing.

BRUNHUBER: So, they were arguing whether they should do that. Many of them said, well, it doesn't seem that we need to throw out the baby with the bath water so to speak. A key part of the argument is always the fact that Republicans in Congress had years to repeal it and they didn't. Which is why chief justice Roberts said I think frankly they wanted the court to do that but that's not our job. So, Roberts was the swing vote last time Republicans tried to kill Obamacare but now the balance of power is 6-3. So what role might new Justice Amy Coney Barrett play given her history of opposition to Obamacare?

HORWITZ: The argument that the justices have to throw the whole thing out because that's what Congress would have wanted is really ludicrous. Had Congress wanted the entire Affordable Care Act to be repealed, they would have done it. So we don't have to guess. The new Justice doesn't have to guess. And none of the others can guess. They can just look at what Congress did and conclude that Congress meant what it did.

BRUNHUBER: Joe Biden says as President he plans to expand the ACA. He talked about that today saying the pandemic proves yet again how important having health care is. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: This doesn't need to be a partisan issue. It's a human issue. It affects every single American family. We can't subvert the growing consensus to the American people based on an argument put forward in the briefs seeking to invalidate the law.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BRUNHUBER: All right. So he said there it's not a partisan issue which may be wishful thinking. Assuming Democrats don't regain the Senate, will he be able to do anything actually to beef it up?

HORWITZ: I think there's a lot he could do in the same -- using some of the same tools that President Trump has used over the past four years. So there are lots -- there's a lot of room for action with executive orders, administrative rulings. But to fix some of the gaps in the Affordable Care Act and make sure that all-Americans have access to care, Congress is going to have to be active. And so, we can hope that we'll have a truly bipartisan moment.

BRUNHUBER: All right. Many people won't count on that, but we shall see. Thank you so much, Professor Jill Horwitz. Appreciate you joining us.

HORWITZ: Thank you.

BRUNHUBER: That was a CNN NEWSROOM. Still to come, it's been a record- setting season for hurricanes. The latest tropical storm is heading for Florida with warnings for the state's west coast. We'll have the latest from our weather team. Stay with us.

[04:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BRUNHUBER: Right now tropical storm Eta is strengthening as it heads towards Florida. The 2020 season has been the most active hurricane season ever with 29 storms so far. Tyler Mauldin is here with more on Eta. What can you tell us?

TYLER MAULDIN, CNN METEOROLOGIST: So, Kim, I can tell you that it is strengthening. It's now a 70-mile-per-hour storm. And we have hurricane watches up now across portions of the west coast of Florida because Eta is expected to become a category 1 hurricane in the next 12 to 24 hours.

So let's get to the maps here. You can see who is under the watches and who is under the warnings here. The hurricane watches in effect from just about Bradenton Beach and areas north. And that again is because this 70 mile per hour storm is going to strengthen as it heads to the north. You can see it becomes a category 1 hurricane once we get to late Wednesday afternoon and then models at the moment want to weaken it slightly just before it comes on shore near, I would say, Ocala.

But just because models are saying it may weaken, doesn't mean you need to take this lightly. We could absolutely see a category 1 hurricane come ashore. That is not out of the realm of possibility. But I can tell you that models are finally in much better agreement on the track of this system. If you remember when we were showing you these spaghetti models over the last week, these models have been everywhere across the Gulf. But no, finally they're tightly packed together, and they do show a landfall near the big bend of Florida.

[04:55:00]

You can see that we already have the outer bands of Eta beginning to come into the southern peninsula of Florida. And this is something that we don't really want to see right now because we already dealt with so much rainfall from Eta across southern Florida. And that's why we have flood watches up for portions of the peninsula. We're going to add to those totals and that could lead to flooding.

What you're seeing here is the water vapor imagery. The brown shading indicates the dry air. The blue shading indicates the really moist air. And you can see a lot of moisture will be pushing right up the peninsula of Florida. That is going to lead to really heavy rainfall, some gusty winds and you can't rule out the possibility for some isolated tornadoes.

And what's amazing about this is that moisture will actually get pulled all the way up to New York City. And we could see 4 inches of rain, a large swath of 4 inches of rain from the panhandle of Florida all the way up and to the mid-Atlantic. So many of us will be feeling the impacts, Kim, from Eta over the next several days.

BRUNHUBER: Unbelievable. All right, thank you so much, Tyler Mauldin. Appreciate it.

MAULDIN: Absolutely.

BRUNHUBER: Well, Ring is recalling more than 350,000 of its video doorbells after reports that some of them caught fire. It impacts doorbells bought between June and October in the United States and Canada. Ring has reportedly received 2,300 reports of doorbells catching fire and causing property damage with 8 reports of minor burns.

I do appreciate you watching. I'm Kim Brunhuber. "EARLY START" is up next. And of course, you are watching CNN.

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