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Georgia Ad Spending Crosses $300 Million, Most in Senate Race History; Attorney General Bill Barr Finds No Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud; Brownstein: GOP Silence on Trump's Fraud Claims Echoes McCarthyism; Cornyn Is Latest Republican with Trump Amnesia; Coronavirus Throws NFL into Chaos. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired December 01, 2020 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[14:30:00]
RYAN YOUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, you think about this. In terms of ads placed, if you live in this state and turn on your television, you cannot get through a commercial break without getting hit by double ads. Two, three, four ads.
They're really sort of crisscrossing the state.
In terms of money spending, you're talking about $300 million spent. Two Senate races going on at the same time that will define the majority of the Senate in the next few weeks.
Take a look at these two ads that are kind of on airwaves at this point.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RAPHAEL WARNOCK, (D), GEORGIA CANDIDATE FOR U.S. SENATE: Nobody can serve God and the military!
SEN. KELLY LOEFFLER (R-GA): Raphael Warnock attacks our military.
WARNOCK: Police power. The kind of gangster and thug mentality.
LOEFFLER: Warnock attacks our police.
WARNOCK: Somebody's got to open up the jails.
LOEFFLER: Raphael Warnock is dangerous.
WARNOCK: I think that Kelly Loeffler might have something good to say about herself if she really wants to represent Georgia.
Instead, she's trying to scare people by taking things I've said out of context from over 25 years of being a pastor.
But I think Georgians will see her ads for what they are. Don't you?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
YOUNG: Brianna, we've been talking to voters throughout the state and, in fact, the last few days. They've been saying they've been surprised by the amount of ads hitting them, because it's constant, the barrage is.
Of course, you have the president and vice president coming here.
And then the president constantly attacking the governor here.
In fact, about two weeks ago, there were several rallies held outside the state capitol with people pro-Trump basically saying they're going to abandon the Republican Party because they're upset with the administration.
You have all of this circling around. And of course, early voting starts December 14th.
Some folks can't wait for these ads to end. It's been very hectic. It's been an all-out fight here in the state of Georgia.
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Georgia is getting a taste of being a swing state.
Ryan, thank you so much.
YOUNG: Absolutely.
KEILAR: It's going on for a while longer.
Next, Republican Senator John Cornyn goes after President-Elect Biden's pick to lead the budget office. Why? Because of her mean tweets. We're going to roll the tape.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:36:08]
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
KEILAR: We have some breaking news. The attorney general of the United States, William Barr, has just debunked President Trump's claims of widespread election fraud.
In an interview with the Associated Press, he said, quote, "To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election."
I want to bring in CNN legal analyst, Anne Milgram, and CNN senior political analyst, Ron Brownstein, to be with us here.
Anne, a significant statement coming from the attorney general and from one of the president's loyalists.
ANNE MILGRAM, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: It is. A really important statement. I've followed the civil cases that the campaign filed. They've lost 39 of those cases. I think they've won one and lost 39.
And courts continue to dismiss them with the Third Circuit recently saying it's not enough to allege fraud. You have to come to court and prove it and they haven't done it.
Another piece of the puzzle, which is criminal investigations. We know, earlier, Attorney General Barr told lawyers and FBI agents that they could investigate if they wanted to. That's in contradiction to longstanding DOJ policy.
But now we have him coming out and saying they've looked at some systemic allegations of fraud and haven't found anything.
And this really I think pushes it a lot closer to all the litigation between done.
He said to date. But we're a month after the election, and I think if anything was going to come to be investigated, he would have seen it by now.
KEILAR: Ron, inherent in what Bill Barr is saying here is that Joe Biden won the election.
What is your reaction?
RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Right. The fact that even Bill Barr is saying this, who has been the most loyalist to the president, who has repeatedly kind of twisted the law and the facts to try to benefit the president from the way he characterized the Mueller report initially, all the way through, the fact even he is reaching this conclusion, Brianna.
It's even more astonishing and egregious how few Republicans in Congress haven't been willing to say the same. In effect to acknowledge that the sky is blue or that gravy exists.
And there could not have been fraud on a scale to tilt an election that's going to finish somewhere around a 6.5 million or a seven million vote margin.
The fact that even Bill Barr got here, I think makes it even -- it underscores just how exposed these Republicans in Congress are.
And just how cynical and corrosive their behavior has been in terms of allowing Trump to undermine faith in the election, which is happening among Republican voters.
KEILAR: Ron, you have a fascinating piece on CNN.com today that's about how the GOP's silence right now has echoes of McCarthyism.
BROWNSTEIN: Yes.
KEILAR: Tell us about that.
BROWNSTEIN: Look, if anything, Republicans in Congress today are surrendering to Trump's conspiracy claims even more about abjectly than Republicans did to McCarthy in the early 1950s.
If you go back to the early 1950s, you see Robert Taft, who was Mr. Republicans, the Senate Republican leader, the Mitch McConnell of his day, privately expressed doubts from the beginning about the wild accusations McCarthy was making about Communist infiltration in the government.
But in public, he always supported him. It was a combination of expediency and fear. Expediency in that they thought he was a useful weapon against the Truman administration. And fear as he got more powerful Republicans worried about he would turn his fire on them.
Ultimately, they lost control, as McCarthy continued to make the charges once Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, became president. Eventually it destroyed him.
But for years, Republicans went along despite knowing that these theories, these conspiracy theories were wild and implausible.
I think you're seeing much of the same behavior. I think Mitch McConnell will stand in history right next to Robert Taft for enabling a conspiracy theory that he knows deep down is both unfounded and extremely damaging to kind of the social stability of the country.
[14:40:09]
KEILAR: An important read.
Ron, thank you for talking to us about it.
Anne, thank you so much as well for discussing all of this with us.
Trump amnesia is sweeping through Washington. Republicans who selectively ignored all kinds of transgressions by President Trump have suddenly regained their moral and ethical standards now that Democrats have taken control of the White House.
And they're acting like the last five years never happened.
The person most recently afflicted with Trump amnesia is Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn.
Here he is slamming President-Elect Biden's pick to head of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX) (voice-over): I think, in light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path.
I've noted that she's apparently deleted a lot of her previous tweets in the last couple of weeks, which is -- seems pretty juvenile, and I mean, as if people don't have access to them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Now, he is right that Neera Tanden is a mean tweeter. She has reportedly been deleting some of those tweets, noticeably about Republican Senators whose votes she needs for confirmation.
Just like everyone else, she should be held accountable for what she puts on social media.
But perhaps Senator Cornyn is an imperfect messenger here, clutching his pearls in Donald Trump's oyster bar.
In fact, let's roll his pearl clumping one more time.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CORNYN (voice-over): I think in light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Combative and insulting comments about Senators.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I call him Lyin' Ted Cruz. He's Lyin' Ted Cruz.
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: We're not going to destroy the American dream for -
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: for stupid people like Cory Booker.
Crying Chuck Schumer. I used to be a big contributor to him. He used to kiss my ass, Chuck Schumer.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: Blumenthal who is a fraudster when it came to Vietnam.
That stiff, Mitt Romney. A total stiff running. By the way, he's a dope.
(voice-over): This monster that was onstage with Mike Pence, who destroyed her last night, by the way, but this monster --
(on camera): Rand Paul shouldn't even be on the stage.
Pocahontas, Elizabeth Warren, she's a total failure.
Crazy Bernie. He is so crazy.
Don't fall asleep, as we talk about Sleeping Bob. I think Lindsey Graham is a disgrace.
The guy is a nut job. I mean what --
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: Honestly, honestly --
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Honestly, I don't want his endorsement. I don't want anything to do with him.
He's not a war hero.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's a war hero.
TRUMP: He's a war hero because he was captured.
Little Marco, they hate him in Florida.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: The other ironic part of Cornyn's Trump amnesia is his sudden attention to Twitter because this comes on the heels of his pretty noteworthy ignorance of what's said on the platform.
Like many Republicans, he often dodges questions about President Trump's tweets by pretending he hasn't seen them or dismissing them with ambivalence, sometimes not so subtly.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Senator Cornyn, can you stop at the mics for a second?
What do you make of the president's tweet this morning? Does the president need to be more cautious about what he tweets?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: But now his sudden intense interest in the Twittersphere. Tweets from the president, Cornyn doesn't want to talk about them or know about them, he told one reporter.
He said, quote, it's "not his job to provide running commentary on the president's behavior."
But tweets from a perspective budget director, he would like to provide running commentary on her behavior.
Wait. There's more Trump amnesia. Cornyn suddenly very concerned about the business dealings of Biden's nominees.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) CORNYN (on camera): The truth of the matter is we have simply no idea what kind of business or financial relationships these individuals have with foreign powers that could influence their actions as high- ranking government officials.
This goes way beyond compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This is an ethical issue. It's a conflict of interests issue.
When it comes to the business dealings of those who could serve in high-ranking government positions, full transparency is the only option.
In fact, I will make a pledge here today. I will not support any nominee who doesn't provide full transparency into their work on behalf of a foreign government.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
[14:45:01]
KEILAR: Cornyn's pledge wasn't one that he was interested in taking when he voted for President Trump twice.
Cornyn details reasonable concerns but the forgot to ask those same questions of the once-most powerful man in America.
A president who delivers taxpayer dollars to his own businesses, domestic and foreign, by almost exclusively staying at Trump properties during his travels as president, who hosted foreign dignitaries at his properties.
Who has continued business dealings in foreign countries while in the White House, who hid his phone calls with foreign leaders, and on and on. I mean, I only have several minutes here.
But Trump also refused to release his tax returns. That was a big one, of course. He never, to this day, revealed what foreign entanglements he had.
"The New York Times" got the closest. They reported that Trump still gets tens of millions in revenue and income from overseas, whether through properties or licensing deals.
But concerns over that kind of thing just slipped Cornyn's mind until about a month before Election Day as his re-election bid was shaping up to be uncomfortably competitive.
He suddenly caught the courage to call the president out just a little saying that he should have released his taxes.
But last year, Cornyn didn't seem to think it was an issue for Congress.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CORNYN: This is not about trying to look at the president's tax returns. That's really not a legitimate scope of oversight.
This is all for show.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Trump amnesia may strike the Senate, but tape doesn't forget.
Ahead, we have more on our breaking news. Attorney General Bill Barr saying there's no evidence of widespread fraud to change the election, which refutes the president. Stand by for that.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:51:07]
KEILAR: The NFL's game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers has been delayed because of coronavirus for the third time. Tonight's rescheduled game is now going to be played tomorrow.
As cases are surging nationwide, many are now wondering if it's a matter of time before the NFL accepts what some say is the inevitable.
CNN's Martin Savidge is live outside of Atlanta at the Mercedes Benz Football Stadium -- Martin?
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Brianna. Just like the nation is seeing a dramatic and dangerous rise in COVID cases, so is the NFL. And it could threaten the most important part of the season.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SAVIDGE (voice-over): Coronavirus is throwing the NFL into chaos. Things might have looked normal Monday night. They're not.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: For this latest NFL season, it takes the entire NFL season doing their part.
SAVIDGE: COVID-19 has forced a match-up between the Baltimore Ravens and the unbeaten Pittsburgh Steelers to be rescheduled three times.
According to the Ravens' Web site, about 20 team members have been placed on the reserve coronavirus list this week.
(on camera): Have you ever seen anything like that?
JARRETT BELL, NFL COLUMNIST, "USA TODAY SPORTS": No, of course not. I think so many things about this season we've never seen before.
SAVIDGE (voice-over): How about those Broncos? When quarterback, Jeff Driscoll, tested positive, the teams other quarterbacks were all placed into quarantine after they violated the rules and held group meetings about masks.
Sunday, the Broncos were forced to use an undrafted rookie wide receiver as quarterback. They got crushed by the Saints. MALCOLM JENKINS, NEW ORLEANS SAINTS FOOTBALL PLAYER: I mean, I've
never -- I've been playing football since I was in second grade and I don't think I've ever played against a team that didn't have a quarterback on their roster.
KEILAR: And the San Francisco 49ers were forced to move their home games 750 miles away to Arizona after Santa Clara County put new anti- COVID restrictions in place, including banning contact sports.
Critics say it all shows how impossible it is to play football out in the open without a bubble environment.
The NBA played about 10 percent of its regular season games and all of its playoffs in Orlando under strict quarantine and health guidelines. Not a single game was impacted by coronavirus.
The NFL passed on the bubble. Instead, focusing on identification, isolation and containment.
But players say the responsibility is on them.
JENKINS: We are not immune to COVID. Our testing, our protocols will not stop a player from contracting COVID outside of the building.
SAVIDGE: Sports columnist, Jarrett Bell, says the NFL's COVID problems aren't due to a lack of strict guidelines but a lack of compliance by certain teams and players like Denver.
BELL: You know, for the life of me, I don't understand why those Broncos quarterbacks refuse to really stick to the protocols. They put their team at a great risk.
SAVIDGE: But Sunday night's Tampa Bay-Kansas City game suggests even the league's star still doesn't get it.
There was Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady after the game, midfield, no social distancing and no masks.
JENKINS: Obviously, that's not what we want to see, especially from the two biggest stars.
BELL: It was error, to tell the truth. I mean, Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady are the faces of the NFL. And for them not to show the example, it just really speaks to someone thinking they are bigger than the problem.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SAVIDGE: Some have argued, of course, that these are pro athletes, that COVID is no threat to them, they're in great physical health. Maybe, maybe not.
But there's no saying what kind of impact it could have of those who come in contact with NFL players.
It's cliche but it's true. Unlike football, COVID is no game -- Brianna?
KEILAR: It is no game.
Martin Savidge, thank you so much, live for us from Atlanta.
[14:54:52]
And next, the attorney general of the United States is now publicly disputing the president's claims of widespread election fraud. We're going to have the breaking details about what the Justice Department found in its investigation.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: Hi, there. You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.
[14:59:52]
We begin with this breaking news. None, zero, zilch, nada, nil, nothing. No evidence of widespread voter fraud. The word just in from Trump's own Department of Justice.
