Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Newsroom
Rep. McCarthy Was For Election Challenge Before He Was Against It; WAPO: Trump Too Busy Watching TV During Riot To Take Desperate Calls; Trump Administration Announces Major Changes To Vaccine Rollout Plan. Aired 2:30-3p ET
Aired January 12, 2021 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:31:39]
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Nearly a week after the insurrection on the nation's Capitol, many Republicans are playing revisionist history or they're simply taking a stand too late.
And that includes the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, who was for overturning the democratic election before he was against it.
By all accounts, McCarthy tried unsuccessfully to get the president's attention during the attack to urge him to act quickly to defend the people's House.
And since they reportedly had tense phone conversations, including yesterday, during which McCarthy says the president accepted some responsibility for the insurrection.
Well, you should take that claim with a grain of rock salt because, in that same conversation, the president floated the B.S. conspiracy theory that Antifa proposed as Trump supporters and breached the capitol.
Yes, despite all of the Trump supporters on camera and have been identified.
Another reason to doubt McCarthy's account that the president accepts responsibility is the president has famously never accepted responsibility.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I don't take responsibility at all.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: Not to mention the president showed zero contrition today on his speech that preceded the riot.
And according to the same reports about Kevin McCarthy's conversations with the president, McCarthy is portrayed as being tough on Trump, taking a stand against the president's B.S.
Reportedly telling him, quote, "Stop it, it's over, the election is over. And it's not Antifa. It's MAGA. I know, I was there."
"It's MAGA, he said. It's Trump supporters."
McCarthy told Republican House members Monday that there is, quote, "undisputedly no evidence" of Antifa-linked activists participating in the storming of the U.S. capitol.
So sure, he was in this phone call where he was standing up to Trump. But where would Trump get this idea it was not his supporters?
Oh, I don't know, how about from Kevin McCarthy and FOX on the night of the attack?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): People came here to do some damage. I don't know who they're with, but they came here to do some damage.
LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: We knew this big crowd was coming, right? We knew they were coming. Whether Antifa was in there or not, we'll find out more.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: It's not the only lie that the House minority leader fueled the past two months. He refused to call Joe Biden the president-elect.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Now that Joe Biden won the election and is the president-elect --
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: More than 100 Republican House members voted to overturn a democratically held election that was painstakingly scrutinized and verified in a session that was interrupted by the siege.
McCarthy blessed the move. He gave them a green light. He also voted to challenge election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Here's how Congressmen Mo Brooks and Jim Jordan, two a bit louder Republicans on this, described McCarthy.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
RAJU: Kevin McCarthy is part of your team?
REP. MO BROOKS (R-AL): Yes.
RAJU: He says he supports you?
BROOKS: He has not told me that specifically. But he has told that to the president of the United States. And he has told that to Jim Jordan.
REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): Kevin's been great. Kevin's been fine. Yes, Kevin has been great on the whole -- the whole process.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
KEILAR: McCarthy cynically dished out the president's coup fantasies to millions of Americans. In December, he said, quote, "Let's wait until we see who's sworn in."
[14:35:06]
Rewind to November, just until after the election, when he was one of the first pushers of the "Stop the Steal" conspiracy theory.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCCARTHY: President Trump won this election. So everyone who's listening, do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.
Join together and let's stop it.
Republicans will not back down. We will not wait until four years from now to change this. We're going to fight this now. And we're going to change it.
For them to claim Arizona won, at the end of the day, the president will carry Arizona. He will win Pennsylvania. And that will be more than 270 electoral votes.
On my way here tonight, we're ahead in a seat in Iowa, too, by a little less than 300 votes. I don't have all of the facts.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: He doesn't have all of the facts. At least he admitted that much.
According to CNN's Manu Raju, McCarthy told his conference that there should not be a vote to impeach Trump. But he does not support censure.
Instead, he's arguing for a bipartisan commission to get all of the facts first, even though the key facts are clear, they're on tape.
He wants facts. The congressman who signed onto a baseless Texas lawsuit to overturn the election based on nothing but conspiracies and lies, a lawsuit rejected by the Supreme Court. He wants facts.
No, he doesn't want facts. He wants alternative facts.
Despite all of the evidence that there was no widespread voter fraud in the election, despite all of the Republican-appointed judges, the Republican majority U.S. Supreme Court, the Republican election officials, and the Trump administration's Republican attorney general and Trump administration's head of election security affirming the voracity of Joe Biden's win, this is what Kevin "just the facts" McCarthy said just days before the insurrection.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCCARTHY: If you want to unite this nation, you have to start with having integrities in your elections. There's questions out here.
What would be wrong with an audit? What would be wrong with being the information back so people have all of the information to make those decisions.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KEILAR: That's right, bring the, air quotes, "information to the people." Give them the, air quotes, "information to make the decisions," as McCarthy puts it. "What's wrong with that?" he says. "It will unite the nation."
Still to come, corporate backlash over the deadly insurrection. Deutsche Bank cutting ties with President Trump.
Plus, more on our breaking news. CNN reporting that lawyers are advising the president to denounce violence to reduce his legal liability.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:41:59]
KEILAR: Well, rioters were laying siege to the capitol last week, pleas for help to President Trump from some senior Republicans were not getting through.
"The Washington Post" reports House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reached out to Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, while Kellyanne Conway, Trump's former senior advisor, called an assistant to the president that she knew was with the president.
And the article says, quote, "As Senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, and they struggled to get through to the president, who, safely ensconced in the West Wing, was too busy watching fiery TV images of the crisis unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their pleas."
With me is CNN chief political analyst, Gloria Borger. And Josh Dawsey with us as well. He co-wrote that "Washington Post" article.
Gloria, is it a surprise to anyone that the president was more concerned with the TV coverage than with helping people under attack?
GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: No, it isn't.
First, let me say to Josh congratulations. That was a remarkable piece. It was remarkably reported. And it is not a surprise to anybody that the president would be
sitting in front of the TV kind of enjoying this because, of course, his supporters were doing exactly what he had told them to do only minutes before.
What he should have been doing, and what others should have been doing with him, was convening in the situation room to figure out how to deal with this insurrection at the U.S. capitol.
But I don't think he understood the depth of it and he didn't care about it. And it took all of that convincing to finally get things moving, albeit hours late.
KEILAR: And, Josh, this was a phenomenal report. You really bring us -- you and your colleagues really bring us kind of into the room.
And just I think one of the things that is most striking about it is the president really did not seem to have a handle on what was going on or the seriousness of it or to see that there was a problem with it.
Tell us more about what you learned about that day.
JOSH DAWSEY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: There was a cascade of phone calls to the president from those around him trying to take this more seriously.
Lindsey Graham told me yesterday he called Ivanka Trump and was told everyone around the president was trying to get him to speak out.
But Graham and the others say the president saw these people at allies and he didn't at first appreciate the severity of the situation, in Graham's words.
These calls came in for several hours, until the president eventually agreed to do a video to denounce the violence and tell people to go home.
But in the video, he told the rioters that he loved them and seem to sympathize with them. And then the White House staffers around him did not think the video was good either.
It's an episode, what happened in those few hours, it alienated support from the president's own aides and lawmakers that he incited the riot, and when things got out of control, that he did not move quickly enough to help the U.S. capitol.
[14:45:04]
Vice President Pence was over in the capitol in a secure location. Never heard from the president. The vice president's aides never heard from the president's top folks. There was silence. There was just silence.
KEILAR: And it seems, you know, like a reflex of any president would be to calm the violence. But in this case, it seemed that there was -- the president didn't really seem to want to.
It seemed like it was almost people around him kind of forcing him into urging for there to be peace.
DAWSEY: Well, folks in the White House describe the president's inaction as seeing so many of his supporters out fighting for him and frankly appreciating what they were doing.
All of them were not the violent anarchists but many of them clearly well and many of them broke into the capitol.
And there was a scene that plays out right after 2:00 where the vice president is being hustled away after protesters breach the capitol. Security is ticking. Mitch McConnell and other leaders are off campus.
And the president attacked the vice president via tweet about 10 minutes later with the anarchists in the building who are not happy with the vice president because he did not go along with the president objecting to the results.
So there's a scene that really infuriated so many of the people that I talked to.
The vice president, who has been deferentially loyal to the president for four years, is being hustled in a way to make sure his life is secure, his life is safe to be, frankly, getting him to a secure place. There's people in the building, folks are climbing the walls, some armed.
All of a sudden, the president tweets about the vice president, attacking him with people in the building who, later we learned, wanted to do the vice president harm.
KEILAR: I mean, Gloria, that behavior is -- the lack of empathy for people who are under threat of being killed and injured and the glee in watching it go down, even as phone calls are being fielded around the president, to make it very clear the situation this is.
I mean, that is un-American. That seems very unwell.
BORGER: It does seem unwell.
And the reporting we have now is that the only thing that the president regrets about this whole episode is that he actually did the video at the end in which he sounded the most conciliatory, in which he said, you know, we need peace, et cetera.
That was written by others for him. That is what he regrets.
What he saw was adulation, which is what he's in short supply of these days. And that is what he enjoys.
If anybody ever thought there was anything about Trump returning anyone's loyalty, just look at Mike Pence.
You have to understand that, without any doubt, that the president doesn't understand that loyalty should work both ways. But it doesn't in his case.
And it's a good thing for the country that, in fact, the president and vice president spoke for the first time yesterday.
Because for a while there, we had a situation where they were not speaking to each other and that is not good for the country.
And yet, Mike Pence has shown no indication that he's interested in invoking the 25th.
KEILAR: Gloria Borger and Josh Dawsey -- great reporting, Josh -- thank you so much to both of you.
BORGER: Thanks.
KEILAR: Coming up, the Trump administration is trying to speed up coronavirus vaccinations. The sweeping changes to get shots into more arms.
Plus, we're moments away from a press conference from the FBI and the DOJ on the riot investigation. Stand by for that.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[14:53:16]
KEILAR: Now we want to bring you up to speed on the pandemic as the U.S. sets more records, raising more alarms for health officials.
The U.S. has averaged more than 3,000 deaths per day over the last week. The U.S. has also reported more than 200,000 new infections for seven straight days.
And this comes as the country's vaccination efforts continue to lag well behind what health experts had expected.
So far, nearly nine million Americans have been vaccinated out of more than 25 million doses distributed. And that's just 35 percent of all available vaccines.
The slow pace of the vaccinations is forcing the Trump administration to change course. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announcing sweeping changes to its vaccine rollout to get more people vaccinated.
CNN's Senior Medical Correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, joins us now.
Elizabeth, they clearly need to make changes. What are they doing?
DR. ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. They are instituting several changes that they hope will get this rollout going.
The first is that they're now saying that the vaccines should be made available to anyone over age 65. So not just health care workers, not just folks who are in nursing homes, but anyone over age 65. And so that is a real difference.
Also, they are releasing these second doses immediately. Before, they were holding back the second. The federal government was holding back the second doses and was telling folks, you know, we'll send them to you when it's time. Now they are just putting it all out there.
The expectation is that when people do go back for their second doses, that there will be enough that will have been manufactured that there will be enough there waiting.
It remains to be seen whether it will work out that way -- Brianna?
KEILAR: All right. We'll be watching for that.
And I wonder, you know, at this point, is there an assessment of when a majority of Americans or a very important percentage of Americans will have been vaccinated, such that life can start -- begin getting back to normal?
[14:55:12]
COHEN: Right, Brianna. Wouldn't it be so great to have that date?
You know, back last month, before the rollout really started happening, and we saw how poorly it was going, there were some estimates, hey, maybe by late spring or early summer, anyone who wants
a vaccine can get it, and we can start heading towards herd immunity.
But I think, now, I think a lot of those observations, a lot of those estimates are on hold.
KEILAR: That is unfortunate.
Elizabeth Cohen, thank you so much for that report from Atlanta.
KEILAR: Thanks.
KEILAR: We have some breaking news. We're minutes away from the first federal news conference on the Capitol Hill insurrection. Officials with the FBI and the Justice Department are expected to speak at any moment. And we're going to bring you their comments live.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
