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January 6 Committee Prepares Next Hearing; Bannon Trial Ramps Up; New COVID Variant Rising; Extreme Heat Wave. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired July 19, 2022 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:03]

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN HOST: Thanks for joining us, and thanks for spending your morning with us.

Ana Cabrera is picking up our coverage right now.

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Hello, and thank you so much for being with us. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York.

Right now, the usual inconveniences of sweltering summer have ignited into a battle for survival. Hundreds of millions of people all across the globe are contending with deadly heat, droughts and wildfires. Officials are calling it a heat apocalypse. And it has already caused more than 1,100 deaths in Europe.

Take a look at this jaw-dropping video. You can see a man there sprinting from this wildfire in Spain. His clothes are on fire. Five straight days of extreme heat have fueled 24 active wildfires there in Spain. Thousands of lives are being upended, people traveling on trains, as flames roar near the tracks.

In France, the fires have forced at least 37,000 people to evacuate. And, in the U.K., today was the hottest day ever, 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat is triggering fires around London now as well.

Back here in the U.S., 60 million people will experience triple-digit temperatures in the next week. There is no bigger story right now, no issue affecting more people, billions of people. The U.N. secretary- general says half of humanity is in the climate danger zone. And he had this warning:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTONIO GUTERRES, UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL: We have a choice, collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.

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CABRERA: We have team coverage all across the globe.

Let's start with Nina dos Santos in London.

And, Nina, London fire officials, we're seeing, are facing major strains. What are you seeing?

NINA DOS SANTOS, CNN EUROPE EDITOR: Yes, that's right.

We have seen the specter of those wildfires that are raging across Southern Europe, Ana, hit here on the fringes of the British capital. About three miles away from where I am in Central London, there is a wildfire burning.

And there's a major incident that's been declared, this on a day when the U.K. reached the hottest day ever recorded, 40.2 degrees Celsius -- that's over 104 in Fahrenheit -- at Heathrow Airport. And people are saying that this is something that the U.K., which is normally used to rainy, mild summers, is just going to have to get more and more used to.

On the streets of London, there's some anger that the government hasn't prepared well enough.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The government is doing nothing. And, in fact, the world is doing nothing. I mean, the world is burning, and we are doing nothing about it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have never had this kind of heat. So why would we be prepared?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think we just have to adapt, don't we? Our homes have to change. Our way of life has to change.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DOS SANTOS: Well, there's concerns that the creaking infrastructure just isn't able to cope.

I'm outside King's Cross station, one of the biggest rail commuter hubs in the capital. There are no trains going from here today because there's so concerned that the lines could actually buckle under the heat. Also, one of the London airports to the north of the capital saw its tarmac start to melt.

So, real concerns here among people, people told to stay home, take care of your elderly loved ones, make sure that they're well-hydrated, and just try and get through the heat, which will soon pass in a day's time -- Ana.

CABRERA: Let's turn to Ben Wedeman in Northern Italy.

And, Ben, massive droughts in that region. How are people there coping?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're having a very hard time coping at the moment, Ana.

This is -- we're in the Po River Delta, normally a very lush and productive agricultural area. But what we see is that, for instance, the River Po, which is normally quite high at this time of year full of melting water from melting snow in the Alps, is at a historic low. In some parts, you can almost walk all the way across that river.

We spoke to one farmer yesterday, who told us that she was afraid she would lose 70 percent of her crops. And there's a problem in this area, this part of Northern Italy, because there's competition between farmers, between industry, between power plants that depend on water for hydroelectric power plants, and just ordinary people trying to get enough water to continue with work, to go on with their lives, to continue manufacturing.

And all of that is now in doubt, with all the water resources really dwindling. We heard from one official in the Lombardy region, which is upriver from here, saying that that area, which is a major food- producing area in Italy, is going to run out of water resources for agriculture by the 30th of July -- Ana.

CABRERA: Ben Wedeman, it looks so dry there. Thank you for that reporting.

[13:05:00]

Nina, thank you for your reporting from London as well.

To give you some more perspective on just how extreme this heat wave is in Europe, these temperatures are nearly 30 years ahead of schedule. Back in 2020, the U.K.'s official weather forecast agency put together a hypothetical 2050 forecast. That's the image on the top.

The image on the bottom is the actual forecast from just a few days ago. As pointed out by atmospheric scientist Simon Lee, large parts of that map are almost identical to that 2050 estimate. It's happening now.

Let's bring in meteorologist Tom Sater and "New York Times Magazine" columnist David Wallace-Wells. He's the author of "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming."

Tom, let's start with you.

I think people might be actually surprised to hear that heat is the number one killer when it comes to all natural disasters here in the U.S.

TOM SATER, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes.

CABRERA: Explain just how extreme these temperatures are and the danger.

SATER: It's a silent killer. It'll kill thousands this week. And that's not overestimating it.

Back in 2013, I think it was estimated 60,000 people in Europe lost because of heat. The direct correlation, this white line, is the CO2 output since we started burning coal in the 1850s. Look at the temperatures in blue. It's a direct correlation. What was average temperatures across our globe have shifted.

If you want to look at the U.S., everybody talks about 1936 and the Dust Bowl days. Yes, we had a little bit of red there. Of course, it was hot in the Western U.S., but notice all of the blue, when the globe was cooler in many spots, compared to where we are now.

The globe is just incredibly on fire now in the Northern Hemisphere. The drought is not only in the U.S. and, as Ben mentioned there, Northern Italy, the worst in 50 years. It is spread across Europe. Half of China right now has been in a heat wave for over 30 days, 82 cities, warnings, almost all of Europe.

And our numbers here, it's just hard to kind of recuperate at night, when the nighttime lows do not drop down, Ana. So people need that regulator in their body to try to revive themselves for the next day. But it's the nighttime lows that are really a killer here.

And we're going to continue to see these, well above 75 to 80, 85 degrees for the nights to come. So it's relentless, not only in the U.S., in China, but in Europe as well. It's going to continue for a while.

CABRERA: And, again, so many people all around the world, but particularly there in Europe, don't have air conditioning.

SATER: That's correct.

CABRERA: So, they don't really have a place to escape the heat.

David, we showed that map of the U.K. in 2050 and what it is today. Is climate change happening more rapidly than predicted?

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS, AUTHOR, "THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: LIFE AFTER WARMING": We're seeing some extremes that were not expected at -- in these years. But they're not that far off. We're talking about weather events that we probably would have expected to see a decade or two down the line.

But what's more striking than that, I think is, how poorly we're preparing and adapting, because we knew these temperatures were coming. We might not have known 2022, but we knew they were coming.

And yet, when you look at the U.K., when you look at Italy, when you look at China, none of these places are doing what is necessary to really protect their citizens. And that's critically important, because you can make a huge difference there.

I wrote a piece last week about the startlingly low death toll across South Asia in India and Pakistan over the last few months, where they have had much higher temperatures than we're seeing now in the U.K. or across Europe or in the U.S. or in China. And yet the official death toll is under three digits. It's about 90 right now.

That's probably an undercount. The data is too early, and they don't have great collection there. But because of a climatization, because they're used to living with heat, they're much more able to endure these temperatures.

It's a strange perversion of the basic rule of climate injustice that governs a lot of climate change that, today, it may be the wealthier countries of the world in the global north who are used to dealing with more temperate temperatures who are actually going to suffer more from these extreme heat events.

And that may be one reason why people like us are talking more about it, unfortunately.

CABRERA: Tom, tell us about just how unusual these temps are, and not just the temperatures, but, again, there are the floods, plus the drought.

SATER: Right.

CABRERA: There are other aspects that are causing fires that are causing huge threats.

SATER: Yes, I mean, look at Europe right now. I mean, they're on fire from areas of Portugal. Over 74 fires, they are battling there, and France and Germany. It continues into Siberia.

I want to show this graphic. So there's one graphic I want anyone to see when it comes to the global climate change if you're a denier. We have got scientist, climate scientist Ed Hawkins, and what he did is plotted each month across the globe since the 1850s.

This is true data, putting it on this pinwheel so we can see. The colors of blue, Ana, are darker months. And, obviously, we had some darker decades. But what you do not want, as this circle expands, the temperatures get much warmer.

And we do not want to get to a point where we get to this threshold that there is no point of -- a point of no return, where the Earth is just heating up too much that, of course, we can't do anything more about, the ice melting, the rivers, sea level rise.

Notice now that we're getting into the 1990s now, notice the color of red. The globe continues to warm up. And when this continues in its animation, it actually becomes much redder.

[13:10:03]

So, yes, there were times of cool periods. But when you look at some of these animations around the world, you got present day. If we get to what could be an extreme and those water levels rise, you have got -- you can see right now, we're looking at San Francisco, all inundated with water.

Now, this is an extreme, but we have got to do something now. Even if we were to stop polluting the atmosphere with all these greenhouse gases, we have done so much damage that we're still going to warm up for several years.

So we have got to take action now, because, obviously, nobody wants to see anything like this when you even get into Philadelphia. But it's not just that. In the last couple of weeks, we have had video coming in from glaciers that are collapsing around Europe as well. Those are all signs that the climate is reaching an extreme.

And we don't want to get to a point of no return.

CABRERA: David, when we look at what is happening, the videos and then these graphics or animations of what could come, still, just how unprepared are we from an infrastructure standpoint? What could fail first?

WALLACE-WELLS: Well, the thing I worry most about is the human infrastructure, which is to say the people who are most at risk, especially the vulnerable elderly, who are not taking precautions in extreme heat, especially like the heat waves that we're seeing right now.

And we have been talking a lot about Europe. We mentioned China and South Asia. But, in fact, much of the U.S. is in an intense heat wave right now as well, not quite as crazy as we're seeing in Europe. We need those people to take precautions. That means mainly hydrating and trying to stay cool, but doing everything they can to protect themselves.

Practically, on a concrete level, everything that we have built in the built environment in the U.S. was built under climate conditions that we have already left behind. That's what it means when the planet is now warmer than it has ever been in the entire history of human civilization.

So, almost all of that will have to be at least remodeled, if not rebuilt entirely, to prepare for the world we're heading for in just a decade or two. That is possible. We can do it. We can make it more resilient. We also have to make our agriculture more resilient so that we can feed as many people as we do now with the same amount of acreage.

And we have to do a lot more to protect against sea level rise and flooding too, sometimes with tech solutions like seawalls, like we're contemplating in places like Houston and New York, and in other places using what are called natural solutions, with, say, mangroves and forest planting.

But it's really an all-hands-on-deck, kitchen-sink kind of approach. We need to redo everything, because this is an all-encompassing problem, which is going to touch all of our lives.

CABRERA: You did tell me before we went on air that it's almost too late to change what's going to happen in the next couple of decades. It's already baked in, so to speak.

But if we take action now, you can change the trajectory in the back half of the century. And so that is reason to continue to work toward improvement here.

And human infrastructure -- just let me leave everybody with this note. I read today a Harvard researcher and pediatrician said, according to his research, that a child born today will experience 35 times more life-threatening heat events than a child born in 1961. So think about the impact on you, your family and future generations.

Thank you both, David Wallace-Wells and Tom Sater, a really important conversation.

Now to the pandemic. Cases are up, hospitalizations are climbing, and now it is clear why.

CNN senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins us.

Elizabeth, this new variant is brutal.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Right.

It's called BA.5. And it's brutal, Ana, not because it causes more severe disease. That doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be similar to other Omicron variants we have seen over the past few months. But it is extraordinarily transmissible, the most transmissible that we have seen, the one that can sort of defy vaccines and defy previous infection more than others.

It doesn't mean that vaccines are useless. On the contrary, they still help, but still not as good against BA.5 as against other variants. So let's take a look at BA.5 and what it's been doing over the past couple of months.

So, over the past two months, look at the yellow. That's BA.5 as a proportion of all COVID-19 variants. The yellow is BA.5. And you can just see, over two months, it has grown. It is now about 78 percent of all the variants out there. And hospitalizations are on the rise. It's not a coincidence. It's because this is so transmissible.

The more people who get it, the more people who are going to end up in the hospital. So there is concern that people need to do the right thing. And the right thing here is get vaccinated, get boosted. It's not going to keep you from getting sick with BA.5, but it is going to do a very good job at keeping you out of the hospital or out of the morgue -- Ana.

CABRERA: And, meantime, next hour the CDC's vaccine advisers will vote on a new vaccine, this one from Novavax.

Elizabeth, this one's different from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. What's the thinking around authorizing yet another vaccine?

COHEN: You know, it's good to have more than one tool in the toolkit.

Moderna and Pfizer are both mRNA. They both work in almost the exact same way. And Novavax works differently. It's called a protein-based vaccine.

[13:15:00]

The hope is that, because it does work differently, maybe it'll be more durable. The mRNA vaccine has been amazing, but the immunity does wane. Clinical trials show that Novavax is 90 percent effective at keeping people from getting sick with COVID-19.

Now, important to note, they didn't do those clinical trials during Omicron. They did it in previous variants. But when they look at people's blood, they can show that it does elicit a broad immune response to Omicron. The company has just said that they are working on an Omicron-specific vaccine that hopefully will be even better.

So, right now, CDC advisers are thinking about whether or not to recommend this. During the pandemic, we have seen the CDC advisers usually go with the FDA, who has already given a thumbs up. So we expect the CDC to give a thumbs up too -- Ana.

CABRERA: Elizabeth Cohen, thank you for all those updates.

COHEN: Thanks.

CABRERA: Opening statements are expected today in the contempt trial of Steve Bannon. The Trump loyalist refuses to answer questions from Congress over the January 6 Capitol attack. We have a live report coming up.

Plus, a brand-new CNN poll is a mixed bag for both Dems and Republicans. By and large, most Americans say neither party has its priorities straight.

And, later, the House is set to vote on a bill to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, but will it pass the Senate?

Stay with us.

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[13:20:39]

CABRERA: Just into CNN, the date is now set for a trial pitting Twitter against the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. A judge has ordered an October trial for the civil suit.

Twitter sued Musk days after he backed out of a $44 billion deal to acquire the social media platform. Now, today's ruling is seen as an early victory for Twitter. The company is seeking a swift resolution for what has become a messy litigation to limit uncertainty for shareholders and users. The trial will last five days.

And the contempt of Congress trial for former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is ramping up today. Bannon is charged with two counts related to defying a subpoena from Congress.

CNN's Sara Murray joins us from outside the courthouse.

I understand the trial resumed just a few moments ago after a brief recess. There was some talk about a possible delay. What can you tell us?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right.

It was a little bit of Iraqi morning. I think everyone sort of hoped we would be further along than we were right now. At one point, Bannon's attorneys asked the judge if we could delay the trial for a month. The judge shot that down pretty quickly. He held out the possibility of delaying for maybe 24 hours.

It no longer looks like that is going to be the case. They have resolved some of their issues. They were fighting about admissible evidence. And they have moved on now to breaking down this pool of 22 potential jurors, whittling it down to 12 jurors and two alternates, so the various sides are able to strike jurors.

The DOJ and Bannon are going through that process right now. And then, hopefully, we will move on to these opening statements that we were ideally hoping to get to earlier this morning. But, for now, things seem to be back on track, moving ahead.

CABRERA: OK, Sara Murray, thank you for the update.

Let's bring in federal and white-collar criminal defense attorney Caroline Polisi. She's also a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. And CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, he was House Judiciary special counsel in President Trump's first impeachment trial and the former White House ethics czar in the Obama administration.

Thank you both for being here.

Caroline, this trial was expected to go quick, possibly over before the end of the week. Why do you think Bannon's team is still trying to delay this? Do they have a case?

CAROLINE POLISI, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: That's right, Ana.

They have been trying to delay without success time and time again. Just today, they tried to delay it again. But the judge denied it. This is going to be an open and closed case for the government. I do think that the nature of this case and the fact that Bannon did not take a plea deal, notwithstanding the fact that all signs point to that he should, the judge even sort of nudging him in that direction, we're going to see that in the sentencing.

His exposure here is up to two years for each count. And judges don't like it when criminal defendants go to trial when they don't have to. It's known as the trial tax. I think we may see it end up on his sentence. He will get a heavier sentence than he would have otherwise if he had just pleaded guilty.

CABRERA: Do you share that confidence, Norm? All it takes is one juror. How hard could it be to get a conviction and how big of a deal is the outcome of this trial?

NORMAN EISEN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Ana, I do believe that this is a very strong case, as strong a case as you're going to get.

I say that as somebody who's been in that courthouse for over 30 years. But there are no guarantees. Anything can happen in a criminal case. The morning was another tough one for Bannon. He didn't get the 30 days he wanted. He didn't get some of the evidentiary rulings. He's being jammed into a corner on his defenses.

It's probably going to be bad for him.

CABRERA: OK, Norm and Caroline, stand by, as we look ahead now to Thursday.

As first reported here on CNN, former Trump National Security Council adviser Matthew Pottinger will testify publicly before the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. And so we will deputy -- or former Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews. Both of them quit in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The committee has set its focus on what then-President Trump was doing in the 187 minutes from when Trump wrapped up that speech encouraging his supporters to go to the Capitol to when he finally put out the video telling the rioters to leave the Capitol.

And Caroline and Norm are back with us.

Caroline, Republican Adam Kinzinger, who's going to lead this hearing along with Elaine Luria, says that they will show that Trump was gleefully watching TV as the Capitol attack was unfolding, and that he didn't do anything.

[13:25:03]

How important is it to fill in the blanks about what the president was doing from the time he gave his speech to when he eventually put out that video addressing the rioters?

POLISI: So, so important, Ana.

It's 187 crucial minutes. We really only know bits and pieces within that time frame. And the committee has promised -- I hope that they can deliver -- basically a full timetable of what transpired.

I do fear that this type of information could fall into the sort of lawful, but awful category, meaning inaction, in and of itself, is not going to be an element of a crime, per se. It could go to his state of mind on several potential charges.

However, there is a distinction between what's criminal vs. what's just reprehensible deprivation of duty, really.

CABRERA: Norm, we expect to hear from Sarah Matthews and Matthew Pottinger during this hearing. We already heard from Matthews in the last hearing, at least some from her, saying Trump was in a very good mood as he was listening to his supporters who were actually already gathering at the Ellipse the night before January 6.

And she says, that evening, so the evening of January 5, the former president asked his staff to help make a plan. Listen. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SARAH MATTHEWS, FORMER TRUMP AIDE: He did look to the staff and ask for ideas of how, if I recall, he said, that we could make the RINOs do the right thing, is the way he phrased it.

And no one spoke up initially, because I think everyone was trying to process what that -- he meant by that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Norm, what more will you be listening for in her testimony, as well as Pottinger's, on Thursday?

EISEN: Well, to carry forward Caroline's point, I don't think that this 187 minutes by itself is legally actionable.

But we know a federal judge, Ana, has already found multiple crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding in Congress to be likely.

The committee has already documented those crimes. This is the last little piece of those existing crimes, Trump's corrupt intent. We know he had murderous intent towards Mike Pence. We heard that from Cassidy Hutchinson. So this is the last little piece of the puzzle.

I will be listening whether those two crimes, already well- established, has the committee carried them across the goal line, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and then pass to prosecutors to actually in the state of Georgia and the U.S. Department of Justice prosecute those cases?

CABRERA: I imagine we will be hearing more from White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump's White House counsel as well, since we know he had testified with the committee for about eight hours.

Norm Eisen and Caroline Polisi, thank you both. Good to see you.

EISEN: Thank you, Ana.

CABRERA: Grieving parents confront the school board in Uvalde.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But you all do not give a damn about our children or us.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: They want people fired, and they are seeking aggressive new school security measures.

That's next.

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