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Insurrection Probe; Joe Manchin Stalls Build Back Better Bill; Omicron Infections Rising. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired December 16, 2021 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:17]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: It's the top of the hour. I'm Alisyn Camerota. Victor is off today.

So, this hour, President Biden will huddle with his COVID advisers at the White House about the Omicron variant. New infections and hospitalizations are rising, forcing some colleges and universities to go virtual again.

Meanwhile, CDC advisers are set to vote on the future of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. A new analysis shows the rates of a rare blood clotting condition linked to that vaccine were higher than previously thought.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny has us covered at the White House, and Polo Sandoval has been talking with college students who will be spending the rest of this semester online because of COVID.

So, Jeff, what do we know?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, we do know that President Biden will be meeting with his COVID-19 advisers in the coming hour in the Roosevelt room here at the White House, really making clear that they are taking very seriously the Omicron variant threat.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, of course, the chief medical adviser to the president, has said that this is going to be the dominant variant as early as next month. They are bracing for another winter surge, and the White House clearly trying to, if not get ahead of this, again try to be on top of it as much as they can, nine days before Christmas here.

This is not something that -- how President Biden wanted to end the year. COVID has bedeviled them really for months throughout the year, but he is sending a message that getting vaccinated and that booster shot is the only thing to sort of ward off the serious infections and hospitalizations.

So the president is getting a briefing, not necessarily any new information expected to come from that, but just trying to highlight the fact that the Omicron variant is here, it is going to be the dominant strain next month, and again bracing for a potential tough winter for the unvaccinated, so much different than a year ago, of course.

It sounds familiar. It sounds like deja vu, but we are in a very different place because of the vaccinations. So the White House once again trying to push vaccinations and those booster shots -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, Polo, tell us what students are saying about all this.

POLO SANDOVAL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it was that considerable acceleration in new COVID cases here on the NYU campus at first actually triggered this.

NYU officials basically now urging the faculty staff members here to take a more remote approach when it comes to finals. As you can imagine, the school here has definitely been having to walk sort of a tough line here between trying to restore some normalcy for students, many of which, almost all of which are vaccinated, with a very high vaccination percentage among students, but at the same time also recognizing that this does continue to remain a threat, at least for illness here.

Now, when you hear from students -- I have heard from many of them today, Alisyn -- they are largely supportive of this. For one, of course, there is the convenience factor here. But, in all seriousness, at the end of the day, many of the students that I spoken to are genuinely concerned that they could potentially become infected, even though they may be asymptomatic carriers.

This is something they don't want to take home to their families come this holiday season during the holiday break.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's not an overreaction. That's the kind of attitude that caused a surge last year in the first place. And I really, really appreciate that NYU leadership took this initiative.

Like, I know that it's really hard to change it an person exam into an online format. And the teachers had to pull all-nighters to do this because I know my lab professor had to. Really appreciate that as well. This is really important. This should be taken seriously.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANDOVAL: Now, again, get a reminder for viewers, this is simply urging faculty members.

I spoke to some students that are still taking their finals in class here. But, at the end of the day, you also have school officials looking ahead to the spring semester. They will be requiring many of these students, actually all students, to have proof of their booster come the spring semester.

And that is something that is a certainly relief for many students, including one who I talked to you that will have a lot of interaction with students after the holiday -- Alisyn.

[15:05:03]

CAMEROTA: OK, Jeff Zeleny, Polo Sandoval, thank you both for the reporting.

So, because of all of this, the editor at large of the "New York Magazine" thinks that Omicron is about to overwhelm us.

He writes: "Right now, we don't need models to tell us that the pandemic is taking a bad turn. And we won't need to wait to see the projections validated either. The speed of spread with Omicron is so fast that, when it comes to case growth, at least the warnings are being validated already."

And the author of that article, David Wallace-Wells, joins me now.

So, David, you say Omicron is about to overwhelm us. How do you know that, I mean, since the CDC is not sort of sounding that kind of alarm?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, EDITOR AT LARGE, "NEW YORK MAGAZINE": Look, if you just look at the rate of growth in the places where we are tracking the Omicron variant most carefully, notably, Washington state and New York City, we're seeing rapid rise that matches the same rapid rise that we saw in South Africa, that we have seen in the U.K., that we have seen in Denmark and Norway, where at the beginning of the wave, we have a doubling in spread every other day.

Which, when you track that out over the course of a week or so, takes you from a very small number of cases to a place where some experts are expecting as many as a million new COVID cases a day in relatively short order.

So, I think, given what's happening everywhere else in the world, and what we're seeing in the places in the U.S. where we're actually measuring this closely, it's -- and everything we know about the variant itself, that we know it's much more transmissible, at least two to three times as transmissible as Delta, which was very transmissible, I think we have to assume that this is going to be a tsunami of cases.

We don't yet know exactly how severe the illness produced by that will be. But we know, at least in terms of caseload, we are facing a dramatic growth rate that is almost certain to surpass the peaks that we saw in the U.S. last winter.

CAMEROTA: And so do you think, knowing what you -- or seeing the evidence that you're looking at, do you think the CDC and NIH should be sounding a stronger alarm?

WALLACE-WELLS: I think they're sounding a relatively strong alarm. I'm just not sure exactly what can be done when the pace of growth is so fast.

I mean, one of the reasons that they're emphasizing vaccinations, which are -- that's a hard sell. Most people who are not vaccinated are not about to run out and get vaccinated now -- but that they are emphasizing boosters, I think is because people can actually go out and do that in relatively short order.

Much of the other measures that have to be taken will be rolled out over the course of several weeks. And I think, by that time, Omicron is likely to be really quite pervasive throughout the country, and we will have lost the opportunity we had to blunt the spread.

Most epidemiologists I have talked to and read say there's very little that can be done to stop that spread. The question is managing the severity of the disease. And a lot of that has to do with how vaccinated we are. And some of it has to do with the inherent virulence of the variant, about which we only know a bit at the moment.

CAMEROTA: Because Europe is taking more drastic measures. Norway is in partial lockdown. France is closing schools.

Do you think it's time for the U.S. to revert to some of those stronger measures again?

WALLACE-WELLS: Well, personally, I'm not sure how much that they will help, to be entirely honest.

I think that this variant is spreading so quickly. If we manage to take 10 or 20 percent off of its spread, that will make a difference, but it's not going to stop us from having to deal with it over the next month or so. I think those schools that are closing down a bit early for Christmas break and going to think over the holiday how to recalibrate their standards for closure in January, I think that's a wise decision.

Personally, I'm not sure how I would plan out the next six weeks, except to say that we should be doing whatever we can to provide hospitals with the resources they need, because even if the variant proves out to be much milder than earlier ones, and there are indications that that may be the case, given the case numbers that we're likely to see, we will still see a total number of hospitalizations and deaths that is likely quite large, and which may indeed strain our hospital systems once again.

CAMEROTA: But, David, can you explain that, because, if it's more transmissible, but less severe, why are we going to see more hospitalizations and deaths?

WALLACE-WELLS: Well, if you have a disease that is, say, one-third as severe, but it travels three times as fast and is transmitted three times as fast, you end up ultimately with the same number of severe cases.

You have many more mild cases. But the ultimate number of people who need to be put in the hospital and those who ultimately die will be the same. And those are just hypothetical numbers. But there are indications that, even though this variant may be somewhat less severe than previous ones, it may not even be that beneficial.

So if you have a variant like this one, where the pandemic spread is doubling every two or three days, even if it's half as virulent, that means, in two or three days time, you're going to end up with as many severe cases as you would have had on day one, because the spread is so rapid.

Now, we don't expect that this -- that Omicron will spread this rapidly forever, indefinitely. It will slow, and we're seeing signs already that, in the epicenter, in South Africa, the spread is already slowing, the wave is already peaking, which is a good sign. It may mean that this wave is relatively short.

[15:10:08]

But as we saw with Delta, it is ultimately the transmissibility of this disease, not the virulence, that matters. And, in fact, that's the case with COVID generally. This is, all told, given all the diseases we know about in the world, not an especially lethal disease.

What is really awful about it is that it spread very quickly, and nobody had any immune protection against it to begin with. And given what we know about immune escape with Omicron, that is a concern too, that even those people who are vaccinated, if you're double vaccinated and with the booster, you are protected to some degree against severe disease, pretty substantially, but not as well as you had been against Delta.

And especially if you don't have that booster, you're relatively vulnerable, not so much that you should be counted as an unvaccinated person, but much less protected than you would have thought you were just a few weeks ago, when you felt pretty confident with your two shots.

Going forward with Omicron, I think we need a third shot at least protect people, especially the vulnerable old.

CAMEROTA: OK, well, we will end on that note.

Everybody, get your booster.

David Wallace-Wells, thanks for this perspective.

WALLACE-WELLS: Thanks so much.

CAMEROTA: OK, there's one thing on President Biden's Christmas list that may not get delivered, his Build Back Better bill. It's held up by members of his own party, so we're going to go live to Capitol Hill for where it stands next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:15:55]

CAMEROTA: On Capitol Hill, talks between President Biden and Senator Joe Manchin have stalled, meaning the president's Build Back Better plan is unlikely to pass the Senate by Christmas.

CNN's Manu Raju is live on Capitol Hill.

So, Manu, what are you hearing about what's happened up there?

MANU RAJU, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Manchin has made very clear to the president that he needs significant changes to the structure of the bill, as well as concerns about the price tag.

He indicated to me that $1.75 trillion is the most amount he would be willing to spend in this massive bill. And he simply does not believe that the bill that passed the House last month would be that, would fall under that price tag.

And one of the things that he has conveyed to the president, he reiterated in our conversations as well his concerns over the scope of the child tax credit. That is an expansion of which would expire at the end of this year. He is concerned about including that for just one year. He believes that to give a true cost to taxpayers, it should be considered for about 10 years' time.

But if they were to do it for 10 years, that would essentially blow up the entire price of this bill and go much higher than what Joe Manchin wants, and could force other programs to be pulled out in order to meet that $1.75 trillion dollar target, essentially meaning they would have to rewrite a bill that has been negotiated in a painstaking manner for months and months and months.

And as Democrats had hoped to get this bill passed by Christmas, which is simply not going to happen at this point, they are now expressing criticism and concern about Manchin's role.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MAZIE HIRONO (D-HI): That's where he's at. And this is why, if you have a 50/50 split Senate, you can have one person or two people just stop everything.

And that is why people in our country should know that a 50/50 Senate sucks, and we can't get things done.

RAJU: Manchin wants significant changes to this bill at this point. What is your message to him?

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): Look, we need to get this done. We have talked, we have talked, we have talked. It's time to put it on the floor and vote.

SEN. RON WYDEN (D-OR): Our country would not tolerate a missed Social Security payment for senior citizens. And it's not acceptable to have a missed child tax credit payment that youngsters and their parents rely on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Now, Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has not explicitly said that it will not pass by Christmas, as he had been expecting and hoping and pushing for.

They are expecting Joe Biden, the Democratic senators are, to make an explicit statement that the Christmas deadline simply will not be met. But, Alisyn, when can this bill be passed? Can they get it done in January? Will it slip into February? And then they get into the thick of the midterm election season, all raising questions on if and when this will ever get done, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Well, I mean, and, Manu, a lot of people also think that they have bigger fish to fry in terms of voting rights, in terms of what's going on in local election boards around the country.

And so just yesterday, President Biden called that, OK, the voting rights, the single most important domestic issue. So does that mean that that's where he's going to start putting his energy?

RAJU: Well, he did have a call with Democratic senators earlier today, including the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, as well as Joe Manchin, about the way forward.

There have been a lot of discussions among the Senate Democrats about trying to figure out a proposal that could get them on the same page. But there's a big problem here, Alisyn. In order to get the bill through, they need 60 votes in the U.S. Senate. That means 50 Democrats, 10 Republicans, but the two parties are at sharp odds about how to deal with this issue.

So the other option is perhaps changing the Senate filibuster rules and allow a simple majority, just 50 Democrats, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie, in order to advance such legislation.

But Joe Manchin, as well as Kyrsten Sinema, among some others, are just flatly opposed to changing the Senate filibuster rules to allow things to happen on a simple majority basis. They warned that it could come back to haunt them if and when the day comes that they are in the minority with a Republican president.

So they have been holding firm for months and months and months. They have reiterated their position, despite this last push in these final months here. So, ultimately, very likely this is once again going to stall in Congress, and then the Democrats will have to take it to the voters in next year's midterms -- Alisyn.

[15:20:07]

CAMEROTA: OK, Manu Raju, thanks for laying all that out.

RAJU: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: So, in the investigation into the January 6 insurrection, we now know that one of the people advising the president's chief of staff on how to overturn the election results is a sitting member of Congress.

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan forwarded a text message to Mark Meadows outlining a legal strategy.

Here is part of what it said -- quote -- "On January 6 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all."

CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger is here, along with CNN political analyst Margaret Talev. She's the managing editor of Axios.

Great to see you, ladies,

Margaret, just can we go down memory lane for a second? Remember when Congressman Jim Jordan really wanted to be on the January 6 Committee, and how disappointed he was when he wasn't allowed to be?

I just want to play for you some sound reminding you of what he said was going to be wrong with the committee.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): This has always been about politics. And today's actions of the speaker just confirm that.

But, frankly -- and I have said this before -- what else are they going to talk about? I mean, they have been so focused on the January 6 Committee?

What else are they going to -- are they going to talk about crime, the fact the crime is up in every major urban area in this country? They going to talk about the border crisis?

As the leader said, and as Mr. Banks said, I don't think they're going to address the fundamental question, the fundamental question of, why wasn't there a proper security presence at the Capitol that day?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Margaret, can you imagine if he were on the committee now, as these text messages came out?

MARGARET TALEV, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, Alisyn, I think that flashback was actually an approximation of what the role he would have played on the committee, talking about crime, talking about immigration, not talking about the texts, and probably not encouraging the turning over of the texts.

The text that have been turned over so far and, again, I think what has been put into the sort of public arena is the tip of the iceberg of what this committee is looking at, does show a lot of front-end coordination now among members of Congress, as well as Meadows and the White House, and some of the organizers.

It's noteworthy how much you might follow the legal reasoning or the constitutional reasoning here to see that these particular texts were talking about how to read the law or the Constitution and try to make that argument through a constitutional challenge or legal channels.

And I think what we're going to perhaps see more of as the investigation continues is the sort of extralegal channels once the insurrection began, is what the communications that investigators will be looking at. CAMEROTA: Gloria, I mean, Congressman Jordan did have a point, I think. His last sentence, I take to heart, the fundamental question of why wasn't there a proper security presence at the Capitol that day.

I don't know. Why didn't President Trump call for backup? Why didn't he jump in when there were all of those texts beseeching him to call off the mob?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Right, and calling the National Guard, and, as we know from that text from Meadows, was talking about the National Guard will be there to protect the Trump people, as you will recall, in that text.

Look, I think if you take a step back, what this shows us is that Mark Meadows is so central to all of this. He was almost a clearinghouse for all of these ridiculous ideas somehow interpreting the Constitution in the wrong way, and that all of this landed in his text messages or on his desk, or he heard it from the president, et cetera, et cetera.

He was involved, as was Congressman Jordan, with a key group of members of Congress to try and figure out a way to overturn a free and fair election. And to go back to your original question, if Jordan were on the committee right now, he'd have to recuse himself because of a conflict of interests here.

I mean, here was somebody forwarding an e-mail to Meadows saying, hey -- which says, hey, maybe we could do this. Maybe we could do that. And yet he pushed himself to be a member of this committee, knowing full well what he had done and what he had sent to the White House chief of staff.

I mean, one wonders how he could have even gone into Kevin McCarthy and said, I really ought to be on this committee, if he knew he had this kind of a conflict.

CAMEROTA: On a separate topic, Eric Trump, the president's son, said something really illuminating yesterday on a podcast about whether there could have been Russian collusion. Here it is.

[15:25:05]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIC TRUMP, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: We weren't smart enough to collude with Russia.

We didn't know what the hell we were doing. We didn't know what a delegate was. We didn't -- Jay, I remember walking up to a caucus in Iowa saying -- I looked at this little young staffer. And I go, hey, can you tell me what a caucus this is? Because I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to be doing here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: From the mouth of babes. That was so interesting to hear. He basically said, we weren't smart enough to collude with Russia.

And, by the way, at the time, there were many pundits and strategists who agreed and who felt that way. They thought that perhaps they unwittingly were being duped into something. But I just thought, Margaret, it was so interesting to hear him say, I didn't -- we didn't know what a delegate was. We didn't know what a caucus was.

TALEV: Yes, I mean, the comments were to speak for themselves.

I think I'm just struck by, as partly through this investigation, as well as the clip you just showed, we have been hearing a little bit more, understanding a little bit better how the former president's family and sons interacted with him and with the campaign behind the scenes both in 2016 and all the way through the end of the first term into those days and right up until January 6.

We have seen Don Jr.'s texts now to Mark Meadows imploring him to reason with his father in a way that apparently he could not. Why does all of that matter? Well, it matters if the former president runs for another term in 2024.

Surrounding all of this is a big question about how Americans are perceiving the news around January the 6th. And I think, there we do have a really bifurcated media atmosphere. So a lot of the voters who could really use the information about what actually happened may not be getting it. And I think that's just a reality that we have to deal with and talk about.

(CROSSTALK)

CAMEROTA: Absolutely, yes.

Go ahead, Gloria.

BORGER: Can I just hit something about those Iowa caucuses?

As I'm sure you both remember, Donald Trump accused Ted Cruz of cheating during the Iowa caucuses, saying that he beat him by cheating. I mean, does that sound like a familiar refrain, all -- going all the way back to the Iowa caucuses, that this is something we heard then?

And this is something we heard in the 2020 election and continue to hear from the president of the United States. Nobody can beat him unless they're cheating.

CAMEROTA: I actually had forgotten about that.

BORGER: Yes.

CAMEROTA: But that is the go-to excuse. Thank you for that trip down memory lane.

BORGER: Sure.

(LAUGHTER)

CAMEROTA: Gloria Borger, Margaret Talev, thanks.

TALEV: Thanks, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, so the NYPD is breaking a glass ceiling by appointing its first female police commissioner.

I will speak to two former law enforcement officers about what they think about this nomination and what it means for women behind the badges.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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