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Divided, Sick Nation On Edge For Whiplash Of Power Transfer; Trump Remains In Seclusion For Sixth Straight Day; Biden Reveals Day One Actions To Turn Page On Trump. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired January 18, 2021 - 13:00   ET

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

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: That's it for us on this day. I hope to see you back at this hour tomorrow. A very busy news day in Washington, stay with us. Brianna Keilar picks up our coverage right now. Have a good day.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Hello. I'm Brianna Keilar, and I want to welcome our viewers here in the United States and around the world.

In 48 hours, a divided and ailing nation on edge will feel the whiplash from the end of a disgraced president's chaotic tenure to the beginning of a new administration, a transfer of power but lacking the peace and dignity that usually makes America a model for transition between leaders.

On this Martin Luther King's Jr. Holiday, the spot where Dr. King delivered his iconic, I have a dream speech, is completely empty. The National Mall and much of D.C. has locked down ahead of President- elect Joe Biden's inauguration because of ongoing threats following the deadly insurrection. The FBI is vetting thousands of National Guardsmen deployed to ensure against an insider threat.

Now, some of the insurrectionist arrested were veterans, some even were military. Among the latest charge, Army reservist -- an Army reservist who was described by a federal informant in court documents as a Nazi sympathizer and a white supremacist.

Silence has blanketed the White House. The president hasn't been seen publicly in almost a week. And with less than 48 hours left in office, sources tell CNN the president's term will end with him issuing 100 pardons and commutations.

Trump will also leave office with the lowest approval rating in presidency. His rating among Republicans has also dropped since the election. Even so, Trump has orchestrated a flashy sendoff that belies his disgrace for exit from office. Sources, say invitations have gone out for a farewell at joint base Andrews, but a big White House event is unlikely because of the intense security around D.C., which is, of course, a consequence of the insurrection that he incited.

And this is where we are going to begin, D.C. on edge, transformed into a fortress to secure a presidential transfer of power.

Shimon Prokupecz is near the Capitol. Shimon, tell us what you're hearing about these ongoing threats. SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Right. So we are just right outside the Capitol, Brianna, and much of the Capitol looking like a military compound. You see the National Guard troops outside, but also this fencing with the added layer of razor wiring encircling the entire Capitol and dozens of National Guard troops standing outside, patrolling.

More National Guard troops arriving just this morning, we've been out here for the last few hours and troops arriving by the bus-loads, about a dozen buses or so coming to through this area.

And to deal with one of the issues concerning the insider threat, what we have been seeing out here this morning, is bomb-sniffing dogs. As these buses past through, the Capitol police and the Secret Service standing guard out here, bringing these bomb-sniffing dogs over to smell the buses to make sure they're not carrying any bombs, also military vehicles. We've actually seen the bomb dogs sniffing these military vehicles as they were entering the compound.

There are several layers of security from the perimeter, from the outer perimeter into the inside of the capitol and at every entrance, and at every intersection, military vehicles. And now Secret Service agents as well who are checking I.D's, checking vehicles. The Secret Service running the security operation here, so that is why they are at every intersection.

And, really, it's kind of striking to see these bomb-sniffing dogs as they are checking the military vehicles. So that's been certainly interesting to watch here this morning and this afternoon. And as you said, the insider threat is of concern. And so the Secret Service and the FBI is vetting the National Guard troops that are coming here from really all over the country. They are still arriving, and as I've said, we've seen several buses still arriving here this afternoon, Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Shimon, we know that things are going to be moving quite a bit here, so we'll be checking in with you. Thank you.

Prosecutors have been issuing a flurry of charges. They revealed some bizarre details about some people who infiltrated the capitol almost two weeks ago. A person who said they are the former romantic partner of Riley June Williams of Pennsylvania identified Williams to the FBI in video inside the Capitol building directing people upstairs to Nancy Pelosi's office, which is, according to an affidavit that was filed Sunday, supporting Williams' arrest.

The tipster also claimed to have spoken to friends of Williams' who showed the tipster a video of Williams taking a laptop, computer, or hard drive from Speaker Pelosi's office, though there is no evidence that a computer was taken from Pelosi's office. The FBI said it appears Williams fled and has deleted his social media accounts.

[13:05:00]

Riley has not yet been arrested. There's also Jon Schaffer of Columbus, Indiana. He is a member of heavy metal band called Iced Earth. And the FBI says he was wearing a hat from the far-right anti-government group, the Oath Keepers. An arrest affidavit says he sprayed Capitol police with bear spray during the siege. And Schaffer faces six charges related to the attack.

The FBI is also charging an Army reservist to have security level clearance. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli of Colts Neck, New Jersey, was described by one informant as an avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. He allegedly encouraged people in the mob to advance through the Capitol and gave directions with voice and hand signals. It is unclear if he has been arrested.

And there's Robert Gieswein of Colorado, decked out in tactical gear during the riot. Prosecutors say he's a member of a far-right militia, the Three Percenters. And Gieswein apparently runs his own private paramilitary training group. The FBI says photo show him carrying a baseball bat as he climbs through a shattered window there on the Capitol.

It's one thing, of course, to hear those stories, but to see the chaos that they caused is something wholly different. There is a stunning new video from The New Yorker and it shows the mob relishing in their rebellion. We do want to warn you, some of the video that you are about to see is disturbing and it contains vulgar language.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's a fucking million of us out there. And we are listening to Trump, your boss.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, get out of that chair.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, this is our chair.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I agree with you, brother, but it's not ours. It belongs to the vice president of the United States. He's in here. It's not our chair. Look, I love you guys, we're brothers, but we can't be disrespectful.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, don't be disrespectful.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They can steal an election, we can't sit in their chair?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, I'm not putting up with that either. Look, it's a P.R. war, okay? You have to understand it's an I.O. war. We can't lose the I.O. war.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're better than that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're better than that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Okay, information, information operation. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We can't do it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I want to film it. Let's get a snap of that.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I took a picture.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, how did you guys get down there?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go down the stairs.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And look here. Look.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ted Cruz's objection to the Arizona.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is objection, he was going to sell us out all along.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Really?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Objection to counting electoral votes of the state of Arizona.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can I get a photo of that?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, wait, that's a good thing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right, all right --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's with us. He's with us.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's got to be something here we can fucking use against these scumbags.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Quit acting a fool man.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America's republic -- oh, no, this is good stuff.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, quit acting a fool.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is a good one, (INAUDIBLE) or whatever, Hawley and Cruz.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think Cruz would want us to do this, so I think we're good.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes absolutely.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Now, it's truly terrifying to see this firsthand account. It is worth noting that the reporter behind the camera, Luke Mogelson, is a veteran war correspondent.

I want to bring in now Peter Strzok to talk about this. He's a former FBI Chief for a Counter Espionage Section, and for the Counter Espionage Section. And he's also an Author of a book called, Compromised, Counter Intelligence and Threat of Donald J. Trump. Peter, thanks so much for being with us.

And I wonder when you see this, does it tell you anything that you didn't already know?

PETER STRZOK, FORMER FBI CHIEF: Well, it tells me a lot of things. That's a great question. I mean, first is the scope of the activity that what was going on. This wasn't a small number of people. You had a variety of actors, some peaceful, some very, very violent all engaged at the same time. And what particularly bothers me, both as a former Army officer as well as a career law enforcement officer, are the number of people that I see demonstrating behavior that indicates a certain level of tactical training.

And so as the FBI and others go about investigating this, not only are they looking at the past, these past violations of law, by these -- let's call them what they are, these seditionists, they've also got to be looking forward to what remaining threats are out there and what we need to be prepared to protect against.

KEILAR: And the FBI says that there were several far-right extremist groups involved. You can kind of see paraphernalia, you can see tattoos, you can see markings, badges of a lot of them, and that includes the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. What should we know about these groups and how dangerous could they be?

STRZOK: Well, they can be quite dangerous. What you see in these groups that, certainly, they have a history of engaging not only of rhetoric but, in some cases, in acts of violence that is motivated by, in many cases, a white supremacist ideology.

[13:10:06]

You see an organization of activity, bringing people together and planning not one-off individual acts of violence but engaging in a conspiracy to act together, and that certainly is a concern. One, what did they do back on the 6th with regard to the Capitol, but as importantly, or probably even more importantly, what are their intentions moving forward? What sort of threat do they impose moving forward? Is there an ongoing conspiracy?

And those are the key questions that law enforcement is digging to right now, and part of the reason you see such a massive response of the security on the Capitol right now.

KEILAR: Right now, as we're watching the National Guard secure this city here, they're actually being vetted by the FBI ahead of Biden's inauguration to make sure they don't have any extremist connections, because there were a number of veterans and even active duty or reservists who were current participating in the siege. What should disqualify someone from service, in your opinion?

STRZOK: Well, I think absolutely there is -- any time you engage in what is an insurrection, when you are interrupting the peaceful operation of our government to certify the next president of the United States, they should be disqualified. There is a form called an SF 86 that every person who gets security clearance in the U.S. government fills out, there is a question on there saying, have you ever been engaged in an effort to overthrow the government by force?

And we all used to chuckle, all of us did, a little bit at that question saying, if somebody is answering yes, we've got a lot bigger problem other than whether to grant them a security clearance. But the fact of the matter is now, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who, if they are going to answer that question honestly, they're going to have to check, yes.

And so that -- this sort of behavior absolutely is a disqualifier for security clearance, it should absolutely be a disqualifier for government service, and that's something that the government is going to have to get its arms around and figure out the scope of the problem that may exist right now.

KEILAR: In this video that we saw from The New Yorker, we actually hear several of the rioters say that they were sent to the Capitol by President Trump. And we also hear one of them saying that Senator Ted Cruz would approve of what they are doing. He said that, I believe, as he was going through Cruz's desk.

When there is potential legal liability for officials whose rhetoric contributed to the riot, one of the questions that will be asked, certainly one of the questions that will be considered is if a reasonable person would have interpreted their words as a call to action, does this inform that?

STRZOK: I think, absolutely, it does. And there are a couple issues there. One is whether or not somebody has incited, that doesn't mean that they were acting in a way that was legal. So, you know, the commonality of all these folks who stormed the Capitol, many of them came directly from a speech by President Trump, where he encouraged them to go to the Capitol and incited them to violence in many ways.

So whether or not they're going to claim that as a defense, that doesn't mean that by entering into the Capitol but, again, interrupting the exercise of our constitutional government that that's some sort of justification. But I think certainly when you look at Trump, people who absolutely should have known better, Senator Cruz, Senator Hawley, these are people with law degrees from Harvard and Yale. In Senator Hawley's case, he was a clerk for the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. They know better.

And when he gives a now blood-stained fist pump when he walks into the Senate that morning to people who are insurrectionists, to people who are cop killers, that's absolutely inexcusable and that's something that they need to answer for.

KEILAR: Peter Strzok, thank you so much for coming on.

STRZOK: Thanks for having me.

KEILAR: There are some new details on the unprecedented transfer of power that President Trump refuses to be a part of. Hear what he is planning to do in his final hours of presidency.

Plus, news on how many pardons the president is expected to grant in the next 24 hours.

And President-elect Joe Biden reveals what he intends to do on his first day, including major reversals of Trump policies.

This is CNN special live coverage.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:15:00]

KEILAR: As Joe Biden prepares to take his oath of office on Wednesday here in the nation's capitol, CNN has learned that President Trump is planning a splashy sendoff at Joint Base Andrews. The outgoing president has asked for a major farewell on Biden's inauguration day as he and the first lady depart for Mar-a-Lago.

Let's bring in Jim Acosta at the White House. Jim, what more do we know about the president's farewell plans?

JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Brianna, we are less than 48 hours until Joe Biden is sworn in as the next president. And President Trump, the outgoing president, already has plans for his own sendoff. He is going to break that tradition that we haven't seen broken in over a century, a president not attending the inauguration of his successor in a transfer of power, like the one we're going to see on Wednesday. The bunting over here at the White House says Biden and Harris, that's in front of the White House and so on at this point.

But President Trump has his own plans over at Joint Base Andrews. You're familiar with that place, Brianna, just outside Washington, D.C. Air Force One will be taking President Trump off to Mar-a-Lago and he's planning on sort of a departure ceremony that is akin to what you would see from a foreign head of state who leaves town. You're going to see, we're told, a military band, a color guard, potentially a 21-gun salute, close family members, friends, allies of the president, outgoing president, will be there. The invitations have been going out over the last 24 hours.

And our understanding is -- I talked to a Trump adviser about this earlier this morning, outgoing President Trump wants a big sendoff.

[13:20:01]

He wants a big turnout over there. Whether or not he gets it remains to be seen, but it is going to be a very memorable image, an infamous image, I think, to some extent, Brianna, because this is a president who is largely not wanted in the nation's Capitol anymore and he's going to be leaving office with some measure of disgrace, no question about it.

KEILAR: And we're also learning, Jim, that the president is planning to issue many, many pardons and commutations tomorrow. Tell us about this, and do we know who this might include?

ACOSTA: Yes. I mean, I think the names may surprise us, perhaps shock us, maybe not so surprising knowing this president. There are going to be people who are close allies, potentially, of the president. There are going to be white collar criminals in there. There are going to be some clemency actions in there, I think, that will follow under the category of criminal justice reform.

Talking to our sources, the president wants to go out with that being highlighted as part of his legacy, and so I think you'll see that in the category of clemency and pardons that you'll see on this day before inauguration day.

The question, Brianna, that everybody has been asking is whether or not the president will pardon himself, whether there will be a self- pardon. We're talking to our sources. We're hearing at this point that that is not expected, that the likelihood that he will pardon his adult children, that the likelihood of that is going down. But, again, Brianna, you know all too well with this president, you don't take anything to the bank until he is done with being president of the United States.

And so before he leaves power, I suppose anything is possible. He could write on a piece of paper in the Oval Office, I hereby pardon myself. I mean, I suppose that is a potential around here, though at this point we're being told not to expect that the president -- the his advisers around the president would try to talk him out of doing something like that. But they could be in the neighborhood of some, 100 or pardons and other acts of clemency. And we'll be going through that list very carefully to see who is in there and who is not, Brianna.

KEILAR: Yes, it will be a big day. Jim Acosta live for us from the White House, thank you.

President-elect Biden reveals the executive orders that he'll sign on day one. And that includes several that are reversing Trump policies, and we'll discuss them.

Plus, the National Security Agency installing a Trump loyalist in a key position that makes it hard for Biden to remove him, one historian calls it corrupt.

And are the new strains of the coronavirus resistant to vaccines? We have new details as the U.S. approaches the haunting milestone of 400,000 American lives lost.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:25:00]

KEILAR: When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Wednesday, look for him to immediately get to work, casting aside much of what the Trump administration brought the country. On day one of his presidency, Biden plans to sign about a dozen executive orders, many of them dealing with what his team calls the four crises that are facing the U.S., COVID-19, the economy, racial injustice and climate change.

CNN Political Director David Chalian is joining us now. David, tell us what is on Biden's day one to-do list.

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Yes, Brianna. The incoming White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, put out a memo to senior staff for the incoming Biden administration, this weekend sort of detailing what some of these initial just out of the gate actions will be. And I would sort of look at them in two different buckets. There is the things that are related to COVID-19 and the economic fallout and then some other priorities that the president-elect made clear throughout the campaign.

So let's start with the COVID-19 day one priorities. You're going to see that mask mandate on federal property and on interstate travel that Joe Biden has talked so much about, that challenge to mask up for the first 100 days.

The $1.9 trillion rescue package and economic relief package that Biden talked about to the country last week, this is going to be the first big legislative push for the Biden team, and it deals with all of that economic fallout, also helping in the vaccine administration, delivering on that promise for 100 million shots in those first 100 days.

Biden is going to extend the limits on evictions and student loan payments all related to COVID and how people are experiencing that and reopening schools, which we know is a key Biden priority and a key path back to some sense of normalcy for America.

The non-COVID-related items that are still going to be prioritized as day one items out of the gate, an immigration overhaul bill. A comprehensive immigration bill is going to be sent up to Capitol Hill on day one, it's going to include a pathway to citizenship for roughly 11 million undocumented folks who are here. And the goal there is try to get that passed in the first 100 days.

You're going to see that Biden is going to revoke that travel ban from majority Muslim nations that Donald Trump had put in place. Another Trump reversal, rejoining the Paris climate accord that America had joined during the Obama administration, and then Trump reversed course there. So, Joe Biden is going to bring the country back into that, and then halting any of the Mexico border construction that is under way. Those are some other non-directly COVID-related items on Biden's agenda for the first day and the first couple of days there after that, Brianna.

KEILAR: Those are some big changes that we will be looking for. David Chalian, thank you for walking us through that.

And coming up, as we are rolling the tape on President Trump -- we're going to roll the tape on President Trump's presidency then versus now.

[13:30:07]