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Gates Divorce Revelations; Pipeline Hacked; Biden Set to Hold Bipartisan Meetings. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired May 10, 2021 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:01]

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: They say that Melinda Gates had been discussing divorce with her lawyers since the past two years.

"The Journal" reports that Melinda Gates was concerned about her husband's relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and that may have been a reason she took steps towards this divorce.

Now, in 2019, "The New York Times" reported that, beginning in 2011, Bill Gates held several meetings with Epstein and stayed at his Manhattan home until the early morning hours on one occasion. Around that same time of the report, Melinda Gates held several calls with her advisers, according to documents viewed by "The Wall Street Journal."

One source told "The Journal" she was uncomfortable with Epstein since meeting in 2013 and her husband's continued relationship with him.

Now, in a 2019 interview with "The Wall Street Journal" about Epstein, Mr. Gates said -- quote -- "I have -- I met him. I didn't have any business relationship or friendship with him" -- end quote.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said Friday he stands by his 2019 statement to "The Journal" and declined to comment any further. Now, CNN hasn't independently been able to verify "The Journal"'s reporting of why Ms. Gates was seeking a divorce. And the couple hasn't commented publicly beyond their initial Twitter announcement.

According to "The Journal"'s sources and documents it reviewed, Melinda Gates said their marriage was irretrievably broken and a spokeswoman for Ms. Gates didn't respond to "The Journal"'s requests and questions about her reason for seeking this divorce -- Alisyn, Victor.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: All right, Vanessa Yurkevich, thank you so much.

Top of the hour. Thank you for staying with us. I'm Victor Blackwell.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: And I'm Alisyn Camerota. President Joe Biden promised to work with Republicans on many big ticket items. And, this week, that promise will be tested. Last hour, President Biden laid out another piece of his COVID recovery plan, and pushed back against Republican claims that he is sending the economy into a -- quote -- "tailspin."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So, some months, we will exceed expectations. Others, we will fall short. The question is, what is the trend line? Are we headed in the right direction? Are we taking the right steps to keep it going?

And the answer clearly is yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: On Wednesday, the president hosts his first meeting with Republican and Democratic leadership since taking office.

Now Thursday, he will meet with six Republican senators on infrastructure. Now, we have to remember the context here, because these crucial negotiations are happening as the Republican Party is confronting its identity crisis, and the vote to oust Liz Cheney from her post is just a couple of days away.

CNN senior White House correspondent Phil Mattingly with us now.

Phil, this is an important week, because if there is some bipartisanship on the forefront, we will learn that this week, if it's going to happen between the White House and Congress, will we not?

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Victor, I think, if there's going to be any type of pathway forward on any type of bipartisan infrastructure deal, it's going to have to start to come to the forefront this week.

I think, when you talk to White House officials, they recognize that, obviously, the meeting with the top four leaders, certainly the meeting with the six Republican senators on Thursday -- keep in mind also there are two meetings today with key Democratic senators, including Senator Joe Manchin at the White House, in about 90 minutes.

This is kind of laying the groundwork for whether or not there is an opportunity to do something on a bipartisan basis on infrastructure. And, look, there's a tension here. And it's not just between Republicans and Democrats. It's also with Democrats. There are progressive Democrats in both the House and the Senate who have made clear to the White House they don't believe Republicans want to deal.

They certainly don't think Republicans want to deal at this scale that Democrats want to deal, and, therefore, they are urging the president to just move forward.

But, guys, White House officials tell me the president is genuine in his effort right now. He believes not only is there a possibility to do kind of a smaller-scale physical infrastructure deal on a bipartisan basis, but also that, to some degree, that's his preference.

He believes that the country needs to see that Congress and the White House can do things on a bipartisan basis. But whether that actually comes to fruition, look, they -- on the spending side of bridges and roads and tunnels and ports, there's agreement from Republicans and Democrats, certainly within the $600 billion to $800 billion range on the spending.

The real issue -- and I asked about this today at the White House briefing -- there's no real clear answer right now -- is how to pay for it. Obviously, the president has been very clear, his pay-for on physical infrastructure is increasing corporate taxes, the corporate rate, also closing loopholes as well.

And he's not for different fees, user fees, that Republicans are for. Republicans also aren't for any increases in corporate taxes. So, how they kind of square that over the course of the next couple of days, or if they can, or if there's any kind of path forward, that's what everyone's going to be searching for. If they can find it, maybe there's something they can do in the weeks ahead.

If they can't, I think Democrats are going to be saying, it's time to go it alone, guys.

CAMEROTA: OK, Phil Mattingly, thank you very much for all of that reporting.

With us now is CNN political commentator Van Jones.

Van, great to see you.

(CROSSTALK)

[15:05:01]

CAMEROTA: So, let's talk about the opportunities for some bipartisan work to be done, OK, beyond infrastructure. One of the pressing issues, of course, is police reform. And President Biden had set his goal, his deadline of getting something done on May 25, which is the one-year mark after George Floyd's death.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn said something really interesting this weekend on "STATE OF THE UNION." He basically -- it sounded like he was willing to compromise beyond the point that many other Democrats are willing to. And that's in terms of that qualified immunity, which holds cops accountable.

So, let me just play for you what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JAMES CLYBURN (D-SC): We have got to root out the bad apples, and let's go forward with a good, solid program. If we don't get qualified immunity now, then we will come back and try

to get it later. But I don't want to see us throw out a good bill because we can't get a perfect bill.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: But, for many people, the qualified immunity is the heart of the matter. What did you think when you heard that, Van?

VAN JONES, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I know that the progressive wing is very concerned about his statement.

If you take a step back, when a police officer violates law and policy, you want three things to happen if you're a family member. You want the officer disciplined, demoted or fired. That's an administrative thing. You want the officer criminally prosecuted if that's possible, and you also want compensation. You want somebody to write a check.

And people who are concerned about qualified immunity say, listen, if the city is writing the check, it doesn't ever hurt the individual officer. And so they want the individual officer to be financially on the hook for his or her conduct. That's really what this is all about.

Now, the reality is, if you had -- if you took away qualified immunity, most cops would just buy insurance. And so maybe it doesn't become that much of a deterrent in practice.

But at the level of philosophy, at the level of commitment from the movement, the idea that police are immune in civil court from paying anything out of their own pocket has just been a thorn in the side of this movement.

And so we know that Tim Scott, who's a Republican senator on the -- in the Senate who's trying to make this happen, we know he is not open to very much on qualified immunity. So, it could be that you have a signal here that -- from the Democrats that they understand the box that Tim Scott is in, and they have got enough other stuff in the box that they're happy with.

But this is going to be -- going to take some real leadership to get progressives to either come on board with this or for progressive to hold the line and for Tim Scott to have to move.

BLACKWELL: Do you think progressives will make that move? I mean, when we think about some of the statements we have heard from members of the House, I mean, they have passed this, but it's got to go to conference, that they're going to get behind something without qualified immunity?

And from our reporting, this was the first they heard about this potential compromise.

JONES: I think that what you have here is Tim Scott -- that, really, we're talking about, in some ways, the wrong lawmaker. Tim Scott, who is -- again, he's a Republican, he's African-American, he's been leading the charge on this on the Senate side -- has a bill called the JUSTICE Act, which has a lot of stuff in there that Democrats like, banning the choke hold, the registry, a bunch of stuff the Democrats like.

Tim Scott doesn't have in his package qualified immunity. So what you may have is Clyburn trying to signal to Tim Scott that we like your package, don't back from the package, we will figure something out. We may be talking about the wrong lawmaker, in other words. I think that we know the Clyburn wants qualified immunity. He already fought for it. It could be that it's Tim Scott is the holdup here.

So, this is a big -- it's a big change in the conversation, which is why you're seeing so much concern about it.

CAMEROTA: And so, Van, then there's Senator Bernie Sanders, who doesn't sound that optimistic that he's going to be able to see something truly bipartisan, because he basically says, we have seen this movie before during the Obama years. So listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): So the real issue is, are Republicans serious about doing anything significant in addressing the enormous crises facing this country?

If a Republican is serious about addressing crises, bring them in. They got a better way to do it, we should listen carefully. But there is a lesson to be learned. During the Obama years, they talked and talked and negotiated and negotiated. They never came aboard.

I think Biden has learned that lesson.

QUESTION: So, how long is too long?

SANDERS: The Senate is a very slow-moving process. I would begin starting this work immediately. If the Republicans want to come on board seriously, great. If not, we're going to do it alone.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Van, I think he was referring to just bipartisanship in general or infrastructure there.

But what do you think of those comments?

JONES: Look, I mean, I think Bernie speaks for most people in the Democratic Party, not just the left wing.

[15:10:03]

I think the entire party felt that, during the Obama years Obama, a man of such high integrity, he ran for office saying, I don't believe in red states and blue states, it's just the United States, and he really put his entire presidency on the line over and over again trying to get to bipartisan agreements.

And, at the end of the day, it -- in hindsight, it looked like the Republicans were just running the clock out on the guy and never planned to play fair. And so, from the Biden right to the Bernie Sanders left in this party, the idea that this kind of Lucy and the football that we went through over and over again, where they would say, well, just keep talking to us and eventually we're going to do something, we couldn't even get a vote.

And don't forget, during the Obama years, we were trying to pass Republican legislation. Obamacare was Romneycare, and they wouldn't even vote for their own bill. So I think he's speaking for a lot of people.

BLACKWELL: Yes. Well, we heard from Mitch McConnell when he said that his goal is 100 percent focused on stopping this administration.

The context of what we heard from Senator Sanders, there are a lot of people who agree with the senator, also chair of the Budget Committee. Can't forget about that.

Van Jones, thanks so much.

All right, so one of the country's critical pipelines is shut down after being attacked with ransomware. The longer this pipeline is down, the potential for the prices of gas and diesel and jet fuel increasing, that grows. More on how this affects you next.

CAMEROTA: And later in the hour, the winner of the Kentucky Derby could lose the title after a failed drug test. The trainer says that there's something going on with sabotage here.

What does that mean?

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[15:16:11]

CAMEROTA: President Biden committing to a global effort to fight ransomware attacks after one of the nation's essential pipelines had to be shut down.

The Colonial Pipeline took down its system this weekend as a precaution after the massive hack, the FBI confirming that this is the work of a criminal group from Russia called DarkSide.

BLACKWELL: Well, the White House is now working on an interagency response.

DarkSide says it attacked Colonial for financial reasons, not political reasons. But President Biden is putting some pressure on Moscow to address the problem.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: Do you think Russia is involved at all implicitly with that attack?

BIDEN: I'm going to have -- I'm going to be meeting with President Putin. And, so far, there is no evidence, based on from our intelligence people, that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that the actors' ransomware is in Russia.

They have some responsibility to deal with this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us now is Matt Egan, CNN business lead writer.

So, Matt, let's talk about how this is going to affect all of us the impact. The national average for regular gas right now is $2.97 a gallon. Is that about to change?

MATT EGAN, CNN BUSINESS LEAD WRITER: Yes, Alisyn, it might be.

The big question, of course, is how long all of this lasts, because, while the Colonial Pipeline is not a household name, it might just be America's most important pipeline. It delivers nearly half of the diesel and gasoline to the East Coast. And it's been effectively paralyzed for days by hackers.

I mean, it's sort of unthinkable that we're even saying that, but here we are. Now, the Colonial Pipeline said today that they hope to be mostly operational by the end of the week. And the good news is, the White House says they're not seeing any signs of shortages of fuel just yet.

Financial markets, they're not freaking out yet either. But inventories of energy products in the New York area, they're pretty low. And some Wall Street analysts are warning that, if this supply shock lasts long enough, it will indeed cause widespread fuel shortages.

So, all of this is raising the specter of $3 gasoline, which is something that the United States hasn't experienced since 2014. It also really raises some serious questions about the cyber-defenses of the U.S. energy infrastructure.

Today, I talked to Neil Chatterjee. He's a commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. And he said, listen, this is a wakeup call. And he urged all energy CEOs, especially pipeline CEOs, to step up their defenses. He also weighed in on the responsibility that Russia has here.

Let's listen to what he had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NEIL CHATTERJEE, FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION: It's a reality now -- and I'm not being hyperbolic -- that private companies like pipelines today are in many ways at the forefront of our national defenses. And so that means the United States government, at its highest levels,

needs to be firm and clear that we will not tolerate nation states like Russia that harbor ransomware teams, and we will defend our national interests.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

EGAN: So, Alisyn And Victor, this is clearly another reminder of how our critical infrastructure is vulnerable to external threats, everything from terrorism and extreme weather to cyber.

CAMEROTA: There are just so many ramifications, as you point out.

Matt Egan, thank you very much for that reporting.

EGAN: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Joining us now, we have CNN senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe, who was deputy director of the FBI. He wrote the book "The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump." And Garrett Graff, CNN contributor and director of the Cyber Initiative at the Aspen Institute. He's also contributing editor at "Wired."

[15:20:00]

OK, gentlemen.

Garrett, just start -- can we just start at the beginning, that -- what we just heard from Matt, 50 percent of the East Coast's gas, et cetera. How did this happen? How could this happen? Is this something that Colonial should have seen coming?

GARRETT GRAFF, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes and no.

This -- the fact that this attack has occurred surprises almost no one who follows this field. This has been what U.S. officials, corporate officials, cybersecurity professionals have been warning about for more than a decade now.

We have also simultaneously, since the beginning of the pandemic, seen an epidemic of ransomware, particularly from sophisticated transnational criminal groups like DarkSide, that basically operate with the capabilities and the sophistication equal to a nation state adversary like Russia or China itself.

So, this is -- it is potentially particularly interesting that this happened on a major pipeline. It is not in any way surprising that this type of incident is beginning to affect U.S. critical infrastructure in a major way.

BLACKWELL: Well, here's what I found surprising.

Look, you two are the experts. We are not. But this hack happened on Friday. It's midday on Monday. And what we heard from the administration is that Colonial Pipeline has not asked for any cyber support, but the administration is standing by in case they ask for it.

Are you surprised by that, Andrew, that, thus far, there's been no request of support from federal regulators, from the administration, from anyone in the government?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, not particularly surprised by it, Victor, and here's why.

Large corporations typically reach out to private sector cybersecurity companies to help them manage a cyber-crisis like this. We know that's happened in this case. Colonial has enlisted the support of Mandiant, FireEye, very capable company, and I should say a company that's very, very familiar with being inserted into these situations and then serving as kind of the liaison or the connection between the victim company and those government entities like the FBI and DHS who get involved in responding to the incident.

So, it doesn't mean that they're not working on it. It also doesn't mean that there aren't large sections of our government, specifically the FBI, DHS National Security Council, who are actively involved in tracking this and conducting the investigation, trying to figure out who's behind it.

CAMEROTA: Andy, speaking about who's behind it, I mean, what we have been told as a criminal gang out of Russia. Is it plausible that there's a criminal gang operating in Russia outside of the purview of the Kremlin?

Is this something that would be countenanced somehow by Vladimir Putin?

MCCABE: It's not plausible that there would be a -- such a substantial group like this operating in Russia without having come onto the radar of the Russian law enforcement and intelligence services.

This is not something we have -- this is something we have seen before. In places like Russia and places like North Korea, there are criminal hacking groups that are sometimes -- and I can't say that this is happening in this instance -- but, sometimes, these criminal groups are used by governments to conduct operations that governments don't want their own fingerprints on.

And, sometimes, they're given safe harbor just for an agreement that those groups won't target entities within their country. So, all that remains to be seen in this one. DarkSide is a group that the FBI has been investigating since last fall.

That tells me that, if they are -- if they have been on this group for a number of months, they're very concerned about it. There are literally thousands of these groups. So, you really have to pick and choose the ones you go after with significant resources.

But this one is certainly in the crosshairs now.

BLACKWELL: So, Garrett, considering the scope of what Andrew laid out there and how long the administration or the government has been looking into DarkSide, the president says the FBI is working to disrupt and prosecute criminal enterprises like this one.

The prospect -- and I guess this could be for both of you, but let's start with Garrett -- the prospect of that being successful?

GRAFF: Short term, very low. Longer term, this is a major part of the U.S. government's efforts to effectively reshape Russia's behavior in cyberspace.

And this is something that we are seeing the U.S. government push year after year, going all the way back to the initial sanctions against Russia in the final weeks of the Obama administration for their election interference efforts.

I mean, one of the things that most people forget is that you have Evgeniy Bogachev was one of the hackers, part of those sanctions, the force behind a botnet known as Gameover Zeus that stole more than $100 million from American businesses.

So, as Andy said, this is something that we're seeing a lot of with Russia, where they're allowing criminal groups to operate under the protection of the state, oftentimes working in conjunction with foreign intelligence, Russian foreign intelligence.

[15:25:11]

And so one of the things that we have actually seen Russia do before is that the U.S. will move to indict a hacker within Russia, and the Russian FSB, GRU, SVR will go out and recruit that criminal hacker to join its foreign intelligence efforts, as it did with Alexsey Belan in the effort leading up to the Yahoo data breach.

CAMEROTA: Andy, just -- we only have a few seconds, but will the U.S. be able to successfully prosecute these Russian bad actors?

MCCABE: I think they will absolutely be able to attribute the actors to this -- to this attack. I think they will probably pursue charges and an indictment.

But it is very tough to get those folks over here on American soil to actually put them on trial and put them in jail.

CAMEROTA: Andrew McCabe, Garrett Graff, thank you both very much for all the expertise.

And when we come back: Dr. Fauci says it may be time for the CDC to pull back on indoor mask mandates, as nearly 60 percent of Americans have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine. What's the latest with masks?

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