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Key U.S. Inflation Measure Hits 7.5 Percent; Staff Says Trump Flushed Papers; Michael Moore is Interviewed about Navarro's Subpoena; Russian Figure Skater Failed Drug Test; DHS Warns of U.S. Trucks Blocking Roads. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired February 10, 2022 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: A very good Thursday morning to you. I'm Jim Sciutto.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Bianna Golodryga.

We are following several major stories this morning.

First, breaking news on the U.S. economy. Inflation has reached a near 40-year high of 7.5 percent. We'll break down all of the numbers in just a moment.

Plus, this, the National Archives asking the DOJ to investigate former President Trump's handling of White House records. This after boxes of documents were recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Did they contain classified information? We'll discuss coming up.

SCIUTTO: And once again Russia at the center of an Olympic doping scandal after someone on their figure skating team failed a drug test. We're going to discuss the major implications, what it could mean as well for Team USA.

We do begin, though, with news on inflation.

CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans covering, as well as White House correspondent Arlette Saenz.

Christine, I do want to begin with you.

It's a 40-year high, consistent with the numbers we saw last year. So basically saying inflation is staying above the 7 percent level?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: It is still running hot. And 7.5 percent is the year over year level. And when I look into the month to month, a bit of a disappointment there, 0.6 percent increase .We had seen that moderating, but not in the most recent month. Driving this, food, electricity, and shelter. Those are things that you can't really skimp on in many cases.

The trend, Jim, when you look at the trend here, you can see a big spike in the last four or five months on this chart. So, you have the highest inflation since February 1982. We're talking four decades here.

Let me dig inside those numbers. Gas, up 40 percent. These, again, are year over year numbers. A little bit of moderation month to month. I don't expect that to continue.

Used cars, up more than 40 percent. Imagine if you have to buy a used car right now, how much more you're paying this year than last year. And certainly compared with the pandemic. Food at home, up 7.4 percent. Electricity up 11 percent. That spike really driving a lot of this overall number.

Rents up. Apparel up. Just about everything you can imagine is up here.

And this has been the trend we've seen. It is the Fed that is the inflation fighter, right? And the Fed is going to have to step in here and start to raise interest rates to cool off this red hot demand for all these things to try to cool this inflation.

So here's kind of the two sides of that coin, right? You're going to have to raise interest rates and raise borrowing costs to try to tamp down some of the pain of higher inflation. Either way consumers feel it.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GOLODRYGA: And we were just talking about this off camera. It was just a few years ago where this was sort of inside baseball talk and inflation was not part of the daily vernacular, right, for Americans. Here we are completely different story, and Americans really feeling it.

ROMANS: Absolutely.

GOLODRYGA: And this brings us to the White House and their views on this. John Harwood is there.

And the White House, John, previously said that they wouldn't be surprised if this number was around 7 percent. This is clearly higher than estimates had called for.

What is the state within the White House in terms of their response to this, and, of course, what they can't control, whatever the Fed decides?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Bianna. And I think the most disappointing number that was in this report is the month to month figure that Christine made a reference to. Everybody knows, and we have been running for a couple of months, 7 percent inflation, highest in 40 years. But what they've been counting on is a deceleration. And that had gone on for a couple of months. It did not happen in January. That's disappointing.

Now, you still have economists predicting that inflation will temper over the course of the year. But any month where it does -- that does not happen, the more the confidence in those predictions get shaky.

I think it's important to note that there's still many workers who are coming out ahead of inflation, especially at the bottom end of the wage scale. But there are a significant number in the middle who are not. And that's fueling the political problems for the Biden administration.

Now, the president's going to be talking today about drug prices and about how his political agenda would rein in prices for drugs, like insulin, and provide some other practical assistance with costs for ordinary Americans, but he doesn't have the votes as of yet to pass his program in Congress. And the longer that inflation remains a top of mind concern for Americans, the more troublesome that is politically for the Biden administration.

SCIUTTO: No question. And you're right, John, that we had Jared Bernstein on a short time ago, who is -- who is predicting or at least hoping for a deceleration.

By the way, I called you Arlette Saenz. You are not. You're John Harwood at the White House. Christine Romans in New York.

Thanks very much.

[09:05:02]

HARWOOD: Thank you for that.

SCIUTTO: New overnight, the National Archives found what it believed were possible classified documents in boxes of documents returned by former President Trump. This according to "The New York Times." This is material that Trump would have taken from the White House as he left office.

GOLODRYGA: We're also learning this morning that White House staff believed former President Trump was at one point actually trying to flush ripped up pages of paper in a white House toilet. You cannot make this up. Those allegations in a new book from "The New York Times" Maggie Haberman.

CNN law enforcement correspondent Whitney Wild is following this story.

And, Whitney, it's becoming more and more convoluted and, you know, hard to decipher here, but the National Archives has asked the DOJ to look at the former president's handling of records.

Has the DOJ now responded? WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: The Justice

Department has declined to comment, but what is important to remember here is to just kind of understand the landscape. So the National Archives has requested that the DOJ look into this. Basically what they want is for a federal prosecutor to decide, was this just casual, was it just sloppy, or was this into criminal space?

Again, trying to push that responsibility off on to federal prosecutors. But the reality is, not all referrals that go to the Justice Department end up as prosecutions. Sometimes they don't even take it.

So, this is still an extremely opaque territory, but it is an example of something that the National Archives finds so troubling that they're trying, again, to have somebody, you know, a professional figure out whether or not this is criminal.

Meanwhile, as you pointed out, we have this new reporting from our colleague Maggie Haberman that -- no one can explain this story better than Maggie Haberman herself.

She explained it on "NEW DAY" this morning. Here she is.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I learned that staff in the White House residence would periodically find the toilet clogged. The engineer would have to come and fix it. And what the engineer would find would be wads of, you know, clumped up printed -- wet, printed paper, you know, meaning it was not toilet paper, this was -- this was either notes or some other piece of paper that, you know, he -- they believe that he had thrown down the toilet.

It certainly does add, as you said, another dimension to what we know about how he handled material in the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WILD: And in addition to the already long list of investigations that are centered on the former president, the breaking news this morning is that the House Oversight Committee is too going to investigate Trump's handling of those records.

Jim and Bianna.

SCIUTTO: Requires an active decision, if true, right, to rip it up and flush it down the toilet.

On Wednesday, the January 6th committee issued a subpoena to Peter Navarro. This, of course, President Trump's former one time trade adviser, related to questions, I mean, Whitney, where he spoke openly about specific plans to overturn the election.

WILD: Right. What's so striking in covering this -- this -- you know, really since January -- you know, I've been covering this for like 14 months now and it doesn't seem to be that anybody actually disputes the fact, it's just the intention.

And so Peter Navarro, an example of that, not disputing that there was an effort to try to overturn the election. Here's what he said, though, about that subpoena in a statement. He said, President Trump has invoked executive privilege and it is not my privilege to waive. They should negotiate any waiver of the privilege with the president and his attorneys directly, not through me.

We've heard this refrain before. Others are using a similar argument to try to deflect the responsibility to have to answer questions. This is the -- this is basically like the company line now for not cooperating with the committee. In some cases it has led to a criminal contempt charge, most notably in the case of Steve Bannon.

Back to you.

SCIUTTO: Whitney Wild. An expanding investigation. Thanks so much.

We are joined now by former U.S. attorney for the middle district of Georgia, Michael Moore. Michael, good to have you this morning.

MICHAEL MOORE, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY, MIDDLE DISTRICT OF GEORGIA: Good to be with you. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: So can you describe the law to us and what would be required to prove that the former president broke the law, one, by taking documents, any documents that need to be preserved by law as presidential records out of the White House, but, two, if those documents he took contain classified materials? What is the law here?

MOORE: Well, he -- he's supposed to, as the executive, to maintain his records. And that's to go to the public archives, the National Archives. And so that's a fairly clear obligation on his part.

It's the destruction of the records that would be more troublesome, I think, to a prosecutor. And certainly if there are classified documents in there, I -- it -- I listened to the prior segment and had to stop myself from laughing, you know, what I'm hearing about his papers in the toilet. You know, some would argue that's probably the best place for them to be. But it's a clear indication to me of an effort, an intentional effort, to destruct documents that he didn't want somebody else to see. I mean what else do you do but flush them down the toilet, you know?

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MOORE: So that -- that, to me, may give the prosecution (ph) -- whether or not the department is going to have the appetite for this prosecution or to even make an investigation inquiry is something else. You remember that there was a lot of flak caught over the Hillary Clinton email scandal and whether or not there were classified things on it and then criticism on whether or not the efforts to open an investigation, we all remember the famous Comey discussions, you know, influenced the election in some way.

[09:10:14] And so we're coming up close now on the congressional elections. We're coming -- we're not far from the ongoing, you know, presidential election season. And that's going to be -- that's going to be something they'll have to put into the calculus.

GOLODRYGA: But is an appetite for opening an investigation sort of the litmus, the bar for the DOJ to do just that, if, in fact, laws may have indeed been broken?

MOORE: Well, the problem with the past administration is that there are no more norms. Things that should be normal and should be a matter of coerce don't exist anymore. And so while I -- it should not be the bar, whether or not they have an appetite for it, they will have to calculate into whether or not they think that their efforts may influence an election. There's a long-standing Department of Justice policy not to do something that appears to influence an election in one way or the other, to tip the scale, to put your fingers on the scales for one side or the other. That's why we don't charge elected officials, even on a local level, right before an election cycle.

So, you know, again, it's tough to -- it's tough to charge a president. We don't know actually too if he may have declassified the documents. I think the latest reporting is we don't know whether or not as he left the White House.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MOORE: We know that they found these boxes there at Mar-a-Lago.

SCIUTTO: Well, I mean, the timing is different. The Comey announcement was within a couple of weeks of the election. This is more than two and a half years out.

MOORE: It was (INAUDIBLE).

SCIUTTO: I do want to talk about the January 6th committee investigation here because this gets beyond January 6th to the broad efforts to overturn the election. Peter Navarro, latest target of a subpoena. This is what he said publicly about efforts post-November 3rd, and I want to get your reaction here.

Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETER NAVARRO, FORMER TRUMP ADVISER: The plan was simply this, we had over 100 congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill ready to implement the sweep. We were going to challenge the results of the election in six battleground states. These were the places where we believed that if the votes were sent back to those battleground states and looked at again, that there would be enough concern among the legislatures that most or all of those states would decertify the election.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: I mean the fact is, as we know, there was no evidence of widespread fraud here.

MOORE: Correct.

SCIUTTO: Did he just describe, in public, an illegal effort to overturn the election? Does he face legal consequences for that?

MOORE: I think he does describe it in public. And I think that's one of the things that happens, you're seeing with former administration officials of confidence, that they can't withhold themselves from getting on social media, podcasts, broadcasts, writing books, this kind of thing, actually outlining the conduct. That's why his comments about executive privilege or whether or not he'll testify before the January 6th committee are laughable. I mean he's essentially -- he's essentially taking the executive privilege or any claim for it and throwing it down the -- down the toilet again.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MOORE: And he need to do little more than read the recent Supreme Court opinion about the records from the National Archives and upholding the appellate court decision, eight of the nine justices, excluding Clarence Thomas, you know, they -- they allowed these records to go forth to the committee, finding that this investigation was a legitimate legislative purpose.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MOORE: You can't invoke executive privilege. This sort of allows the co-equal branches to function.

GOLODRYGA: Michael Moore, thank you. And hopefully this will bring an end to our toilet references, at least for this hour.

Thank you. We appreciate you coming on.

MOORE: I'm glad -- glad to be with you (INAUDIBLE).

SCIUTTO: Unfortunately, literally and figuratively.

GOLODRYGA: Yes. Exactly.

SCIUTTO: Well, coming up next, the Olympic medals ceremony has been delayed for team figure skating after a Russian athlete tested positive for a banned substance. What we know about who it was, what their accused of taking.

Plus, we're live at the U.S.-Canada border as protests over Covid vaccine mandates are now clogging traffic for miles, threatening the supply chain. There are new concerns a similar protest could break out here in the U.S.

GOLODRYGA: Also ahead, I'll be joined live by the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., who has confronted Russian officials head on for their aggressions at the Ukraine border. What she makes of the Russian military drills that kicked off today.

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[09:18:48]

GOLODRYGA: Russia once again at the center of an Olympic doping scandal. CNN has learned that a Russian figure skater who is a minor has tested positive for a banned substance. The IOC has delayed the medal ceremony for the team figure skating event due to what they're describing as, quote, legal consultations.

SCIUTTO: CNN sports analyst and national sports columnist for "USA Today," Christine Brennan, has been following this story, reporting on this story, and she joins us now with more.

Christine, as you know better than us, Russia is not competing in this Olympics under the country name due to the revelation of a broad national doping program for its athletes in the past. So, this latest reporting is not happening in a vacuum.

Tell us what you know and how that background factors in.

CHRISTINE BRENNAN, CNN SPORTS ANALYST: Absolutely, Jim. I mean, Russia has been -- really been called into the principal's office for four straight Olympics in terms of they should have been kicked out. They shouldn't have even been allowed to be here because of state-sponsored doping, as you referred to. But they keep coming back, without their flag, without their anthem, without their real name and they're allowed to compete. You know, there's a lot of questions why.

[09:20:00]

Certainly they're a great rival. The TV interest in Russia versus the U.S., what have you. But it is astounding that Russia keeps getting these passes to come back again.

And then, now, of course, the positive drug test among the Russian, six-person Russian figure -- team figure skating team. And the 15- year-old, the minor, is the one who was tested positive, according to my sources, and that's the great star, the gold medal favorite of the women's competition, Kamila Valieva.

So, that's where the story stands. It is astounding. It's really focusing that spotlight once again on Russia and their behavior. And of all teams, the team that is really, you know, kind of on probation for doping, has this doping positive really just to start off the games. It's truly astounding and more questions certainly, Jim, than answers at this point.

GOLODRYGA: Yes. And Russia, in the past, showing no remorse, really, for being punished and making light of being called the ROC by playing the Queen song, "We Will Rock You." So, clearly, they may have not learned their lesson.

But what more can you tell us about this drug in question right now?

BRENNAN: Yes, exactly. Well, this is a drug that is used often for angina. It's a heart medicine. So, a 15-year-old taking that drug certainly, you can obviously ask yourself why would that happen? Well, this drug is also known for increasing stamina, and endurance, increasing red blood cells. It was the same family of drugs that Maria Sharapova, the tennis star, also was caught using and suspended a few years ago. Goes all the way back to the old Soviet army in Afghanistan, wanting the soldiers to stay awake, wanting the soldiers to be alert, and they would be using these same kinds of drugs. So, it is in the Russian system, sadly, that they are using these.

Big question here, the adults in Valieva's life, who made this decision to give the 15-year-old this drug? Is it her decision or was it the adults? And that's one of the things that all the governing bodies now are looking at.

SCIUTTO: Goodness, the idea has a history of use in the Soviet army. It's just -- just remarkable.

Christine Brennan, great to have you on the story.

GOLODRYGA: Well, in more uplifting Olympic news, the U.S. has added two more gold medals to its tally at the Beijing winter games. Figure skater Nathan Chen can finally say he is an Olympic champion after a dominant performance in men's figure skating. The 22-year-old won gold in the men's single skating competition giving a nearly flawless performance to Elton John's "Rocket Man." The win avenges his fifth place finish in the 2018 winter games.

SCIUTTO: I think he stuck four quadruples. I mean, it's amazing.

Also snowboarder Chloe Kim snagged the halfpipe gold medal after pulling far into the lead on her very first run. It is the 21-year- old's second gold medal after becoming the youngest female to win a gold medal in snowboarding back in 2018. It is nice, Bianna, to see some of those golds come through for Team USA.

GOLODRYGA: And it's so nice to see them celebrating with smiles ear to ear.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Yes.

GOLODRYGA: Well, now to the ongoing trucker protest in Canada over Covid mandates. The Department of Homeland Security is warning that similar protests could soon begin across the U.S. And, most notably, in Los Angeles, possibly affecting this Sunday's Super Bowl.

SCIUTTO: CNN's Miguel Marquez, he's in Canada following this.

So, Miguel, we've talked a lot about this and I spoke with Secretary Buttigieg about this yesterday, that this has supply chain implications where you are specifically with the auto industry.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and it is starting to bite. We are moving into day four of this lockdown on this major transportation bridge for goods of all sorts. And you read the press, and the reports from both sides of the border, Honda, Toyota, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Fiat, all the way from Lansing in Michigan, to Toronto in Canada, and then all the parts suppliers as well, all of them starting to slow down, cancel shifts, or beginning to just shut down for the week until this is over because of this.

This side of the road, this should be choked with trucks and traffic coming in from the U.S. in -- or, I'm sorry, going out of Canada into the U.S. And on this side of the road, this should be all the traffic coming in from the U.S. and into Canada. It has been blocked now for four days.

Protesters here say that they, look, they want all of the mandates, not just vaccines, but all of the mandates to go away. And they want it done at a national level. They say that they will not leave until that is done.

Police are very concerned because they can't get them to move. They want to treat this diplomatically, get them to move on their own. But I've spoken to several people here today that say they are willing to take -- to risk their lives in order to continue with this protest, to stay on the streets.

[09:25:03]

They believe that the people of Canada generally are with them. That may be tested at some point in the not too distant future. The mayor of Windsor here saying that they have requested resources from the state, from the province, and the national government, and they're not going to stand for it for much longer.

Back to you guys.

GOLODRYGA: It is remarkable. These protests are now into week two, and clearly have international implications at this point.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

GOLODRYGA: Miguel Marquez, thank you.

And still ahead, Russia begins joint military training exercises with Belarus. Up next, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas- Greenfield, joins us live to talk about what must be done to de- escalate.

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