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DOJ Ramping up Investigations; Subway Overpass Collapses in Mexico City; India Crosses 20 Million Cases; Giuliani Court Battle to Block Materials; Durbin Asks for Explanation of Failures. Aired 9:30- 10a ET.

Aired May 04, 2021 - 09:30   ET

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

[09:30:00]

CHRISTY E. LOPEZ, FORMER DEPUTY CHIEF IN CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION, DOJ AND PROFESSOR, : To make sure that police are abiding by the Constitution. And the fact that the previous administration was refusing to undertake that responsibility was an embarrassment to our country and it was dangerous because these investigations really can reign in unlawful policing, they can improve police culture in the agency and in doing so they can save lives.

And I think one thing to really understand about these investigations and the consent decrees and the findings reports that flow from them is that they not only can be used to change the jurisdiction that's being investigated, but they can have a much broader impact.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Right.

LOPEZ: You know, for example, in New Orleans, there is one line in the consent decree about the need to train officers to intervene, to prevent other officers from doing harm, right? And we've taken that and we've -- now that has gone national through the ABLE Project. And so I think that that's a really important thing to understand about these agreements, that they impact not only that agency, but also policing writ large.

SCIUTTO: They can be models for others. Of course that issue about intervention central to the George Floyd case and the other officers involved.

I should note that even you, though, have cautioned that such probes, they take months to complete, they take years for the changes to be instituted. So I wonder, other than these investigations and what follows, what else, in your view, needs to be done to get more immediate change?

LOPEZ: That's a really great question. And, absolutely, sometimes I -- it would be frustrating when I was at the Department of Justice and people would say, well, consent decrees don't work. And I would say, well, that depends on what you expect them to do. No, they don't create a social safety net in this country. No, they don't make us think of drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a criminal problem. There's only so much these agreements can do. They're really important but we absolutely need to be doing more.

For example, there's a lot of policing that's perfectly lawful, but it's really harmful. And I'll take the example of traffic enforcement. We make 20 million stops every year and a lot of those, as we showed in Ferguson, are not focused on traffic safety, they're focused on raising revenue. And every one of those interactions is a potential cause of conflict. So that's just one example of many ways that we could change policing to make things that are currently lawful, unlawful, or shift things to other people besides police.

SCIUTTO: OK.

Question, though, and you know, the Justice Department works with police departments in these consent decrees. Police in many communities feel under assault to some degree, right? They say, I do my job under the law. I follow my training. I'm not Derek Chauvin, right, and yet I feel I'm being targeted here.

How does the Justice Department maintain those relationships with police departments and individual police officers, as well as communities who want to, you know, continue to have good policing in their communities?

LOPEZ: Yes, I think your question really underscores both the need to have consent decree investigations and pattern and practice investigations because when communities are telling a government our rights are being violated by the people who are sworn to protect us, there's an obligation for others state actors to step in and make that stop. So that's really key.

But at the same time you're really pointing out the need for DOJ to be expansive and creative and how it comes up with remedies. And I've been really encouraged with what we're seeing so far out of Louisville and out of Minneapolis. They are focusing on the need to improve the response to people with behavior health disabilities. Those are people who are in mental health crisis. Those are people like Elijah McClain in Aurora, who might be autistic.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LOPEZ: And they really need a response other than police a lot of the time and DOJ seems to be recognizing that, seems to be recognizing that sometimes we need other people besides police to respond to those situations if we're going to serve communities appropriately.

SCIUTTO: Just quickly, you've noted as well that some forms of policing, regardless of what a commission may find or an investigation, they remain legal under local or federal law. Is there one element of the current police reform proposals now before Congress that you think is essential to change today to make a difference in terms of the way the law sees this?

LOPEZ: That's a great question and a difficult question to answer, in part because so much of what needs to change in policing is best done at the state or local level.

But I do think that at the federal level, one of the things that we can do is to make -- hold officers accountable and to hold jurisdictions, cities and states and counties accountable for what their officers do.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

LOPEZ: And that, I think, will incentivize doing the policing that is -- what some people call harm efficient (ph), that does more good than harm, rather than focusing entirely on whether something is technically legal.

SCIUTTO: Well, I guess that issue, qualified immunity, central to the debate.

Christy Lopez, thanks so much for taking the time this morning.

LOPEZ: Thanks so much, Jim.

HARLOW: That was a great, great interview.

All right, so tragedy in Mexico City. Investigators this morning are trying to figure out what caused a subway overpass to collapse there killing nearly two dozen people, including children. We'll take you live to Mexico City, ahead.

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[09:39:12]

SCIUTTO: Well, just an alarming story developing this morning. At least 23 people are dead, dozens more injured. This after an overpass carrying a subway train collapsed in Mexico City.

HARLOW: It's very hard to watch. A horrific moment right there captured on surveillance footage. Through a cloud of dust and debris, you can see the train car still dangling over the road.

Matt Rivers is live at the scene of this disaster where a search and rescue operation has tragically turned into really a cleanup effort.

Matt, good morning to you. What happened? How did this happen?

MATT RIVERS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I mean, it's startling video, isn't it, Jim and Poppy. I mean it just happened so suddenly. Unfortunately, we have seen officials, responders here over the last couple of hours take three or four bodies out of the debris.

[09:40:01]

At least 23 people killed as a result of this accident so far. Nearly 80 people overall hospitalized.

We know that children are among those injured. We are not sure if they are among the dead. But, clearly, this is just a horrific incident in Mexico City.

As of right now, what's happening behind me at the scene a few hundred meters behind me is that officials are trying to figure out how to get those two trains, which are basically like this against the ground and still hanging from the overpass, how they get them off and continue with their investigation.

But it's going to be the investigation that really is going to take center stage over the coming days and weeks. People in this neighborhood will tell you that there have been problems with this subway line in Mexico City basically since it was inaugurated back in 2012. There were structural problems found in 2014. There was damage to the subway line during an earthquake in 2017. And neighbors in this area will tell you that they have almost been waiting for something like this to happen.

The government clearly knows that. The mayor of Mexico City has already come out and says that she will contract a respected international company yet to be named to conduct an overall assessment of the stability of this line, which is used by hundreds of thousands of working class people here in Mexico every day. But you have to wonder why that assessment wasn't done earlier.

Jim and Poppy.

HARLOW: Of course, of course you would.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Matt Rivers, thank you very much for that reporting from Mexico City.

In India, there are lockdowns implemented now across the country as coronavirus rages there. Cases, new cases, now topping 20 million. Right now India is reporting the world's highest number of new cases every day. The country's capital has asked for military help to help deal with all of it.

SCIUTTO: Our senior international correspondent Sam Kiley is in New Delhi, really one of the epicenters of this.

Sam, the Indian government said this morning nearly 4 million aid items have been distributed across the country. But you also hear of a lot of those items sitting at the airport, right, just trying to get them out to the people who need them most.

What's happening? How are they getting to the people who need it most?

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I have to say, Jim, the whole process is opaque, to say the least. Officially what's supposed to happen is that aid, and a lot of it has come in, not least $100 million worth from the United States. Not all here yet, but coming in almost every day.

It comes in. It is then handed to the Indian Red Cross for processing, who then are in alliance with a complex committee of central government officials, then a logistics company is supposed to distribute it.

Now, the Indian government is saying it's doing well with this 4 million items. It doesn't itemize what those millions are, so we don't know if they're gloves and masks or the oxygen cylinder and, more importantly, the oxygen production plants that have been donated that really are so desperately needed. We've been in touch with both the British embassy, which was -- the United Kingdom was the first out with oxygen to India and the United States, which is among the biggest donor, if not the biggest donors. In both cases we've been simply referred back to the Indian authorities.

So accountability for this emergency response is pretty hard to find, as hard indeed it is to find where this stuff has gone. Now, it doesn't mean it's not going out. We don't have any evidence that it's not being distributed. We certainly haven't seen any evidence that it is. And I can tell you, Jim, here in Delhi, things remain as dire as they have been over the last few days, and that is catastrophic.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: Just, you know, adding insult to injury there, Sam, the fact that you've got the biggest creator, maker, manufacturer of vaccine in the world with only 2 percent of its 1.3 billion person population fully vaccinated. Why?

KILEY: Well, the issue there is largely logistics and also because the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems, and he's been criticized for this, he was at the time indeed, for prioritizing what's known as sort of vaccine diplomacy over local vaccinations. He was confident that India could get a grip on the COVID pandemic without a mass vaccination campaign.

So India was a very generous donor indeed to the COVAX Program to vaccinate developing nations around the world, the poorer nations, to avoid the vaccine apartheid that some critics have -- the terms used against the west for prioritizing their own people because they're simply wealthier. That has backfired, though, clearly because the victory he declared over the COVID pandemic back in January has clearly turned into a rout of India.

SCIUTTO: Yes, goodness, vaccine apartheid. Such a powerful way to describe it.

Other big issue, right, with India was that the Modi government declared victory over the pandemic.

[09:45:01]

Obviously, too early. But we're learning now that it was warned of a surge of more than 100,000 new infections a day back in early April. What did the prime minister do with these warnings?

KILEY: Well, this came from a committee of scientists, of experts spread around India. And we know that India is a great producer of scientists and technicians, doctors and epidemiologists. Now their analysis indicated very powerfully, their estimations, it turns out, were woefully inadequate. But if they would -- had been taken at their own estimations, they were talking about -- the danger of 100,000 new infections per day. We're well over 350,000 new infections per day, as we're now into May.

But this was apparently ignored by the central government, which has prioritized two things, economic activity and politics. At that time, that was when the BJP Party of Narendra Modi was contesting state elections, state elections, and these are big states with many, many tens of millions of people in each one, in essentially a test of the success or otherwise of the BJP Party.

They did OK. They hung on to the states that they already held. But the results of that have been a surge in this pandemic.

Jim and Poppy.

SCIUTTO: A deadly surge. The scale just alarming.

Sam Kiley, good to have you on the ground there.

A prominent Trump ally is calling on the former president to now wade into the legal battle over his former personal, Rudy Giuliani, in a federal raid of his office and home. We're going to have a live update, next.

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[09:51:13]

SCIUTTO: This morning, President Trump's one time personal lawyer is now expanding his own team of attorneys as he prepares to fight in court. It comes after the FBI executed search warrants last week on Rudy Giuliani's Manhattan home and office. A difficult warrant to obtain. You need evidence of a potential crime to get it. They seized several electronic devices during those raids.

HARLOW: Alan Dershowitz, who is serving as legal adviser to Giuliani, says he hopes that the former president, Trump, will join the fight to block access to those seized materials.

Paula Reid joins us live from Washington with the latest.

I suppose -- you're a lawyer, what would the legal bar be to achieve that, to actually block what they got in those raids?

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: It's going to be difficult. It's such an unusual situation. The closest comparison we have is another former personal attorney to former President Trump, Michael Cohen.

He went to court after his home office and hotel rooms were raided in 2018, trying to protect some of the material, arguing privilege. Eventually his lawyers were successful in getting an independent body appointed to sift through all the material. But in the end, it turned out only a fraction of the material was actually protected. So it is going to be -- it's going to be a high bar for Mayor Giuliani and his attorneys.

HARLOW: Paula Reid, thank you very much.

Well, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin is demanding an explanation from the FBI. He wants to know why that agency failed to uncover the threat from the far right extremist group, the Proud Boys, ahead of the insurrection on the sixth of January.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Whitney Wild is here.

Whitney, this is an essential question, right, because early on the claim was there was no intelligence warning of that January 6th assault on the Capitol. Since then we've learned, in fact, there was some. The question was how it was handled, how far it went.

So what specifically is the senator looking from here from the FBI?

WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's looking for answers about what the mindset was of law enforcement and the intelligence community as they were assessing these groups, like the Oath Keepers, like the Proud Boys.

Senator Dick Durbin heads the Judiciary Committee. That is one of the committees overseeing the FBI. He wrote this very direct letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for answers about a report that alleges the FBI had sources within the extremist group the Proud Boys but didn't use those sources well enough to gain what could have been crucial intelligence about their intentions for January 6th.

In this letter Durbin reports that starting as early as 2019, at least four Proud Boys reportedly provided information to the FBI, including a self-described Proud Boys organization and thought leader, and in the letter Durbin adds that he feels these reports raise further concerns about the FBI's failure to detect and develop intelligence concerning the threat that the Proud Boys and other violent right-wing extremists posed to the Capitol on January 6th.

Federal authorities have charged more than two dozen members of the Proud Boys and others associated with the group in cases related to the Capitol riot. More than a dozen of those defendants face conspiracy charges.

We have reached out to the FBI who said the bureau received letter but, Jim and Poppy, had no additional comment.

HARLOW: So Durbin clearly wants answers.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HARLOW: The media also wants transparency. CNN's part of a group of media companies that are requesting access to video evidence in the Capitol riot criminal cases. Where does that stand?

WILD: Well, right now, again, we've gone to a judge to say, look, we really think that these pieces of video are important for the public to understand the administration of justice. HARLOW: Right.

WILD: So they're with the judge now. The judge has given DOJ a day and a half or so to answer. So that -- that motion was filed Monday. We could hear back as soon as today, possibly tomorrow, Jim and Poppy.

HARLOW: OK. Whitney, we'll wait for that. Thank you.

There were, at one point, some of -- they were at one point some of the hardest hit states in the country from COVID.

[09:55:05]

But soon New York, New Jersey, Connecticut will ease restrictions. What does that mean for you, next?

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SCIUTTO: A very good Tuesday morning to you. I'm Jim Sciutto.

And I'm Poppy Harlow. As we wait to hear from the president and his coronavirus task force, a major development in America's push to normalcy. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, three of the states once hit hardest by COVID, are now announcing more plans to reopen. They plan to lift most capacity limits at stores and restaurants by the middle of this month.

SCIUTTO: Listen, it's good news. It's good to see.

There's also major news in the push to vaccinate our children. Keep on top of this because there are a lot of developments in a short span of time.

[10:00:00]

But a federal government official told CNN the FDA is poised to give Emergency Use Authorization, that's what we have now for adults, for the Pfizer vaccine in children.