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Gov. Dan McKee (D-RI) Discusses Rhode Island's Indoor Mask Mandates Being Lifted Friday, Against CDC Advice; Trump Supporter Now Calls "Stop The Steal" Movement A Cult; Russian Figure Skater Who Failed Drug Test Is a Minor. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired February 10, 2022 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

GOV. DAN MCKEE (D-RI): So we think that, with the state, we're the second-most vaccinated state in the country. Right now, we're the third most-boosted in the state in the country.

Although, we still have a lot of work to do there. I think, in Rhode Island, you know, we need to do work there.

But all the data shows, bringing up Department of Health in, along with our -- the leaders in our unions for the education, our Department of Education, as well as school committee chairs and as well as our superintendents.

We felt it was on the school side, was the -- we have a winter break that comes up. And we think that extending it one week after the winter break should put us in a really good spot in the state of Rhode Island.

And then we're providing local districts the authority to choose what's going to happen in their districts. As you know, every district is different.

(CROSSTALK)

MCKEE: So we're doing the right thing for Rhode Island right now.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Let me give you the flip side. And that is the criterion that director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, is using, is transmission. So she wants to see transmission rates come down in states.

Here's what she said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: At this time, we continue to recommend masking in areas of high and substantial transmission. That's much of the country right now in public indoor settings.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: OK, now, here's the level of community transmission in Rhode Island right now.

Let me pull up the graphic for you.

It's red. It's bright red, which means high. So, what about that?

MCKEE: Well, we know that the trends are really moving very sharply in the other direction. That's why we pushed the school out to March 4th, which is several weeks from now.

We always have the ability to step in. As I've always said, the health is the top condition, if somehow that reverses in a way that is, you know, unhealthy for our state.

But we believe that, through the Department of Health, through all the data that we have, that we're trending in an area that's going to be very safe for our local districts to make up their decision.

You know, urban communities may feel differently than suburban communities or communities that have more vaccination rates in that school population than others.

We're going to give that flexibility. And our Department of Health is going to provide the recommendations based on the science and based on the data that we have available in the state.

As I said, I think we've done the right thing for Rhode Island.

We're also doing the same thing -- as you said earlier, we were one of the few states that had some form of mask protocol in place. Put that in place December 15th.

We're going to let that sunset well because of the reduction in terms of hospitalization rates. We're down almost 60 percent since the peak on the hospitalization rates as well.

CAMEROTA: Yes. I mean, you make a compelling case for your state. Do you think the CDC is out of touch?

MCKEE: Well, I think that -- I think you made the right point. Every state has got its own metrics that it needs to work with.

And I know that we're providing the guidance based on the data, just like I just told you, in terms of our vaccination rate, booster rate, third in the country.

We need to get better at that. And we're going to use this time frame to really work with everybody to talk about how we can get voluntarily the residents in the state of Rhode Island to get more boosters.

The other thing that we're doing, too, Alisyn, is that we're the most- tested state in the country.

So, when our numbers were being identified, it was because we were doing twice as much testing as any state in the country during that time frame. State of Rhode Island, a little over a million people, 175,000 tests in a week. We were doing right by the residents because we were helping them

identify if, in fact, they had symptomatic or non-symptomatic cases of the Omicron.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

MCKEE: And so we've really -- we know the data. We feel very comfortable where we are.

But I think every state's going to make its decision.

But I have been in conversation with Governor Baker, our two bordering states, Connecticut and Massachusetts, who have done really well as well in terms of the vaccination rate.

So we have been talking through this. And our Departments of Health, our health counterparts in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in particular, have been talking together.

So we're making the decision based on the data and based on the trends that are happening here in Rhode Island.

CAMEROTA: Well, Governor Dan McKee, it sounds like you have given it a lot of thought. Thanks for sharing that thought process with us.

Great to talk to you.

MCKEE: Thank you, Alisyn. Come join us in Rhode Island any time.

CAMEROTA: I love Rhode Island. I'll be there soon.

Thank you so much.

MCKEE: Excellent. Thank you.

CAMEROTA: All right. This next story, he says he was addicted to Stop the Steal rallies. Now, the Trump supporter is speaking with CNN and calling the movement something very different.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[14:34:41]

KEITH SCOTT, TRUMP SUPPORTER: So, after January 6th, I came here. And I kept mumbling, I feel like I just got out of a cult.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Keith Scott once thought that January 6, 2021, was, quote, "the greatest day ever." He says being part of the capitol insurrection made him feel like a patriot. But now, he calls it all a cult.

CNN's Elle Reeve has his story. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(CHANTING)

SCOTT: January 6, 2021, was the greatest day of my life.

ELLE REEVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Why?

SCOTT: I felt like a patriot that was standing beside our founding fathers, speaking up against King George. I felt like "Braveheart."

REEVE (voice-over): We first met Keith Scott at a small rally on the anniversary of January 6th. He told us he had spent months after the 2020 election living in his car and going to every Stop the Steal rally.

Now he's carrying a huge flag calling the movement a cult. Believing a cult, whether real or metaphorical, is messy.

SCOTT: If something was posted saying that there was a rally, like, I was not in control. I was going no matter what.

(CHANTING)

SCOTT: How did I get caught up in this? I had never been to a Trump rally. You know, I wasn't one of those people.

REEVE: The whole crew for this interview was also at Jan 6th. So we had the same question, how did so many people get to the place where they were willing to commit crimes to stop a democratic election, all while calling themselves patriot?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They maced me.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They pushed me out and they maced me.

REEVE: So we spent four hours listening to every detail of Keith's political journey.

SCOTT: At the time I lived in Georgia. I get there on Election Day and there were only a couple of cars in the parking lot.

[14:40:04]

The record turnout that they say that there was in Fulton County, Georgia, which is the county that I voted in, it didn't happen.

REEVE (on camera): Wasn't there a significant amount of early voting, though?

SCOTT: In that demographic, it's a poorer area, a predominantly black area.

You'll never be able to convince me that they were sitting around watching CNN and Fox News and all these things and that's what they were most concerned about was the election and getting that ballot and mailing it in.

If you asked people, is Joe Biden going to get more of the black vote than Barack Obama, people would say no. And Biden supposedly did. It doesn't make any sense.

REEVE: Right. But the bigger picture here --

(CROSSTALK)

REEVE: -- is actually what I'm really interested in, because it is a recurring theme, which is that you have skepticism about the black vote in this election.

Part of it, it seems to me, you know, you said you lived and voted in a black area, and how did those people have the time to pay attention to the election.

Why do you think you would be able to pay attention to that and black people wouldn't?

SCOTT: I don't think that everyone is interested in politics like I am. It's not necessarily about racial lines.

REEVE (voice-over): Trump himself has repeated this same trope. It's a quip, not a fact.

In 2008, an estimated 95 percent of black voters voted for Obama. In 2020, 92 percent voted for Biden.

But lies like this one were repeated until they seemed like cold-hard truth as Keith drove from protest to protest and Stop the Steal grew.

REEVE (on camera): I'm not like trying to say like you're a bad person or, like, you would use a racial slur.

What I'm just trying to get at is that you might not be sensitive to the big picture about what it looks like disputing votes only in places where most of the voters are people of color, and that people of color might take some offense to that.

SCOTT: That's not what Stop the Steal was about and --

REEVE: Stop the Steal was about those votes don't count. Somebody's votes don't count. Not your vote, but someone else's.

SCOTT: I'm not going to be painted into this narrative that you're trying to -- trying to go down this rabbit hole. I'm kind of done with the racial part of this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the party of Trump.

SCOTT: I got introduced to all these other people that I had never heard of that week in Georgia.

(CHANTING)

SCOTT: I remember Nick Fuentes being there. Alex Jones being there. Ali Alexander, the founder of Stop the Steal.

I actually met the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. He was just really nice. He's not a really big guy. He's a little bit bigger than me.

REEVE: The reason this interests me is that like these small groups who have always been on the fringe seized a mass movement and they --

SCOTT: Yes, 100 percent.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the crowd was going wild.

SCOTT: The movement was growing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's mountains of evidence. This election was a fraud on America.

SCOTT: Sidney Powell is going to come up.

(CHANTING)

SCOTT: Everybody felt like she is the one that is going to unveil all the evidence of election fraud.

But the people that were giving evidence of election fraud, it was the same message that we had heard a day before, or weeks before. But it was, like, it's coming. It's going to be revealed.

Like just keeping us -- keeping us holding on for the next breath.

REEVE (voice-over): All that energy was released on Jan 6th. Keith saw what we saw, but he didn't take the same lesson.

SCOTT: I felt like a proud patriot on that day. And I know that's not popular to say, but that's what I felt like.

(SHOUTING)

SCOTT: Then just some crazy fight scenes started happening.

REEVE (on camera): Did you think, are we the bad guys?

SCOTT: I thought, this doesn't end well.

REEVE: What made you realize this was a cult? This is like deeply immoral behavior.

SCOTT: So --

REEVE: It is not patriotic either.

SCOTT: So after January the 6th, I came here. And I kept mumbling, I feel like I just got out of a cult. REEVE (voice-over): What makes Keith a frustrating interview is that,

though he calls it a cult, he still believes much of the cult's propaganda and he still excuses its actions.

Because our crew was in the middle of the violence, it's hard not to want Keith to say it was wrong and he's sorry, which isn't really fair because no one with any power has said they're sorry.

SCOTT: It was a lot of self-analysis to get over the trauma of January 6th itself and the things that I saw on both sides.

REEVE (on camera): Yes, I don't understand, though, how you cannot pick sides after what happened. Like, this seems like a really clear side.

SCOTT: The things that I saw were bad. Regardless of which side you're on is what I'm saying. There's nothing illegal about watching a fight that's happening. That's not -- that's not illegal.

REEVE: Well, when you are part of a mob that's storming the Capitol.

SCOTT: I was -- I was singing --

REEVE: And setting aside illegal, what about moral?

[14:45:01]

SCOTT: But I wasn't doing anything wrong. Like, I --

REEVE: You were part of the crowd. Your very presence was giving them support.

SCOTT: You were proud of the crowd as well.

REEVE: I was a journalist. They were screaming in my face.

SCOTT: I'm -- I'm just a citizen just standing there yelling.

But like I feel like we're getting sidetracked.

REEVE: I mean, I -- I think, actually, this is really at the heart of the question is, this is the problem of a mob. It absolves people of their moral culpability. You're like, I was just one person.

SCOTT: Oh, I want to be clear, the people that actually, you know, had physical confrontations with police officers, they should be held accountable for that. There was --

REEVE: Do you think the leaders who made these promises that they couldn't keep, that there would be evidence that would change the results of the election, do you think they bear responsibility for the mob that stormed the capitol?

SCOTT: No, I don't. They created a grassroots movement that was Stop the Steal. I realize that I had been addicted to politics. I had created this

reverence for the leaders of Stop the Steal. I felt like I was -- which is more than ironic looking back -- helping prevent a second civil war.

And this is just --

REEVE (voice-over): He's writing a book that he says will help people who got addicted to Trump the way he did.

So we followed him around a Trump rally to see if he could get through.

SCOTT: How you doing, patriot?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How's it going?

SCOTT: Good. I know you don't remember me. I saw you several times last year.

Right now, it's like a drug because I'm going to get one of these patriotic T-shirts.

REEVE: Keith was nervous that he'd get yelled at and rejected by the people who were once his allies. And that is what happened.

SCOTT: I was at the Capitol on January the 6th. And my book is about all the stuff that I saw at all the Stop the Steal rallies. And then how -- how --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Have you been contacted by the FBI?

SCOTT: Not yet.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's a Fed.

SCOTT: That's -- I get that a lot. You know some --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because it's true.

(LAUGHTER)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is that CNN?

SCOTT: Yes. Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh. No, I have nothing -- I mean that is the definition of fake news. I don't care about your book and I prefer you just go away.

REEVE (on camera): How'd that go?

SCOTT: Wow.

REEVE: Are they in the cult?

SCOTT: So, first of all, just, their demeanor.

REEVE: Yes.

SCOTT: And the way that by my flag and by CNN how they were just completely triggered.

I guess I feel like I'm going to take incoming fire from both sides as the marketing continues.

REEVE: Maybe you just switched from the cult to being a grifter.

SCOTT: I'm losing money by doing this. Honestly, I could have a great business career doing something else.

I don't have this big political message that I'm trying to promote. I'm not out here trying to make a bunch of money. I mean if I make money, that's -- you know, that's cool.

I've taken a year of my life writing this book.

REEVE: But if you're not here to make a political point, what's your -- what's the point at all?

SCOTT: My point is, I'm doing this to look out for people.

I met people on the Stop the Steal journey that lost their jobs because they -- they were going to go to the rally no matter what. People that were estranged from their family.

Whether it's politics or something else, don't get so caught up that you're not making your own decisions anymore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

REEVE: One of the things that really stood out in my conversations with Keith was the way Antifa was such a powerful boogeyman to this crowd.

He mentioned over and over being afraid that they'd be attacked at rallies.

And then on January 6th, he described seeing a police officer being beat up and other people objecting to it in the crowd and saying, stop it, we're not Antifa. We don't do that.

So, even as they're in the middle of this riot, they're conceiving of somebody else as the bad guy.

CAMEROTA: Wow.

Elle, it's so fascinating when you go out and talk to these folks. And it's so illuminating and helpful, I think.

And it's really helpful -- I mean, it's brave of Keith. It's brave of him to talk to you and to go to one of these rallies with you and a CNN camera in tow. And so, I mean, I hear what you're saying. He's not -- his thought

process is still sort of all over the place. But still, I appreciate that the spell has broken on some level for him and that he's sharing it with all of us.

REEVE: Yes.

CAMEROTA: Really great work. Thank you so much for being here.

OK, a doping scandal is again hanging over the Olympics. A member of the Russian figure skating team tested positive for a banned substance. The latest details next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:52:48]

CAMEROTA: A doping scandal hits the Beijing Winter Olympics and, once again, a Russian athlete is at the center of the controversy.

Sources tell CNN sports analyst, Christine Brennan, that a Russian figure skater, who is a minor, has tested positive for a banned substance.

And 15-year-old Kamila Valieva is the only minor on Russia's six- person team.

They won the gold, but that medal ceremony is now on hold.

The drug in question is used to treat heart patients. It's banned from the Olympics because it can increase endurance in healthy young people.

CNN contributor, Patrick McEnroe, is the host of ESPN's "Holding Court" podcast. He coached the U.S. men's Olympic tennis team in 2004.

Patrick, this is so head scratching because she's considered the best figure skating in the world. To watch her is like watching a prima ballerina. It's so beautiful.

Why would she need to take this drug? And what would this drug have done for her?

PATRICK MCENROE, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, apparently, Alisyn, she trained as a ballet dancer when she was quite young.

So as we watched the other night at the Olympic Games, telephones just mesmerizing what she was able to do on the ice. The first female skater to ever complete a quad. And she did it twice within her program, which was phenomenal to watch.

So I guess when it comes to the Russians and doping, Alisyn, we shouldn't be that surprised because the athlete from Russia not able to compete under their own flag but under this ROC, Russian Olympic Committee.

Of course, going back to 2014 in Sochi when they had all sorts of doping allegations that were systemic.

Not just the individual athletes. Of course, that's a problem in and of itself. But being done by the government and by the system there from the Russian team.

So that's really what makes this problematic and why many have questioned why they have even allowed these Russian athletes to participate now in two straight winter games despite having all these issues with doping, and this is just the latest.

And of course, the IOC has been pretty tightlipped. Christine Brennan with CNN and "USA Today" has been all over this story.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, not only how it affects the medal ceremony.

[14:55:05]

Remember, the U.S. team finished in second place, so they would move up and get the gold medal.

But how it would affect the individual events coming forward because Valieva is a huge favorite to win gold in multiple events.

CAMEROTA: Yes, we'll get to that in a second.

But have you ever heard of this drug, do you know this drug, Trimetazidine?

MCENROE: I have not heard of it. I've heard of Meldonian, a drug Maria Sharapova, remember, from my sport, in tennis, used. And I'm told it's a similar type of drug.

Of course, Sharapova was banned from tennis for using it for similar reasons, that she had a heart issue, but she couldn't prove that. Apparently, this drug is something similar.

And if it's true that it's the minor taking the drug, I'm guessing -- and of course, I'm just guessing -- she likely didn't even know that she was taking it.

Because obviously, it does improve endurance and your ability to train and compete and come back stronger.

It's not surprising something like this has been used. A lot of Russian athletes were using Meldonian in years past.

The athletes, Alisyn, always looking to be one step ahead of the testing protocols.

CAMEROTA: And so what does this mean for any medals Russia would have taken home? What does this mean for the next days ahead?

MCENROE: That's the $64,000 question. You don't know if they will be kicked out of the Olympics, particular athletes, how will this affect the team medals. Maybe, as I said, the U.S. can move up and get the gold in figure

skating, as Nathan Chen did last night in his individual program, which was one of the positives in the Olympic Games.

Chloe Kim as well winning in the half pipe for the second straight time, winning Olympic gold.

So I like to focus on those stories, too, the positive stories coming out of the Olympic Games.

This one is a serious problem for the IOC and for Russia as well.

CAMEROTA: I'm so glad you pointed out the positive questions. But this is a big question about what the Olympic committee wants to do about Rusia moving forward in this particular case.

Patrick McEnroe, great to see you. Thank you.

MCENROE: Nice to see you. Thanks, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Sources close to the investigation by the January 6th committee say there are significant gaps in the records turned over to the National Archives. For instance, the president's phone calls on the day of the riot. We have all the new details ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)