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Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant Reconnected; Fed Chair Speaks Amid Inflation and Recession Fears; Biden's Student Loan Relief Plan; Growing Questions over Rebound Covid. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired August 26, 2022 - 09:30   ET

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

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[09:31:54]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Ukrainian officials say the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was reconnected this morning to the country's power grid, avoiding a potential nuclear disaster. They need that power to help cool the reactors. Ukrainian officials blamed Russian forces for a fire yesterday that damaged the last remaining power line out of the plant.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: The Ukrainian workers who have remained at the plant throughout Russia's occupation were able to reconnect the plant to the power grid. This has been such a tenuous situation to say the least.

Sam Kiley joins us from Dnipro, Ukraine.

There were just huge, huge concerns that this could have become a complete disaster.

SAM KILEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, there were. This is the potential doomsday scenario indeed that Ukrainian and international officials have been warning of for some time. So, essentially what happened yesterday is that a fire, or the Russians say a short circuit, destroyed the last remaining one of four power lines actually into the nuclear power station that powered the cooling system for the two active reactors, forcing, in the words of President Zelenskyy, the emergency systems to kick in, those are diesel generators that run electricity to keep the cooling system going. Clearly very vulnerable and not long-term.

At the same time, the transmission of electricity into the Ukrainian grid was severed. Now, at its height, that is a power station that produces one fifth of Ukraine's electricity. And there was concern that the Russians were going to try and steal it. That itself is fraught with technical difficulties that can could threaten the longevity of the nuclear power station because it would need to be shut down effectively while they change the frequency of their electricity.

Now, in the last few hours, the Ukrainians have announced that it is now sending electricity back into the power grid, but it still remains under military threat because it is on the front line and is being used as a fire base by Russian forces to fire on civilian targets, including civilians on the other side of the Dnipro River.

Poppy. Jim.

SCIUTTO: Sam Kiley, good to have you there. Please keep you and your team safe.

Let's speak now to retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, CNN military analyst, former commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe and the Seventh Army.

General, always good to have you on.

I know you've been watching the situation around Zaporizhzhia closely for weeks. Ukraine's accuse the Russian military of launching attacks from it. And we've seen video of Russian vehicles inside, plus a lot of live fire around it.

In your view, is Russia holding the power plant, in effect, hostage?

LT. GENERAL MARK HERTLING (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Absolutely, Jim. I was thinking as I was watching Sam's report that, you know, we're talking the way top issue of whether or not this power plant goes online or goes offline or if there's transferring of energy to Ukraine or Russia.

The thing that struck me, knowing what goes on in those kinds of facilities, think about the chaos that's being induced toward those Ukrainian workers. The couple of hundred or thousands of Ukrainian workers who every day have to face continued dangers of -- and try and fix it.

[09:35:07]

I mean this is a crisis situation at the worker level because they have to keep that power plant running, they have to keep the rods cooled. This is not something that they're probably used to on a continuous basis. And this has been going on now for weeks.

You know, Russia is really playing with fire, in both a literal and a figurative sense, when they're playing with six nuclear reactors that have nuclear rods.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HERTLING: And it doesn't matter if it's shelled or not, it just has to do with the potential for causing chaos in this kind of energy source.

HARLOW: Could you -- to that point, General Hertling, could you speak to that military threat that Sam Kiley just laid out to this plant and those nuclear reactors, given its location on the front lines? I mean --

HERTLING: Yes, it --

HARLOW: Go ahead.

HERTLING: Poppy, you know, I'm certainly not a nuclear engineer. I don't claim to be. But I've got to tell you, I have been around soldiers a lot. And when you put a lot of soldiers, especially the undisciplined type of soldiers that Russia has in its armed forces in a facility that requires this level of care, you're asking for disaster. You know, it doesn't take necessarily a bomb going through the nuclear rods to cause this kind of thing. You've got literally thousands of Russian soldiers in and around this plant that in and of themselves their behavior could cause catastrophe either, you know, not knowingly, or just by accident.

So, yes, it concerns me greatly. And, again, as I said, I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I certainly wouldn't want my troops wandering around and parking trucks inside of a nuclear facility.

SCIUTTO: No question. First time war has shut down a nuclear power plant, I believe.

I do want to show you some video out of the Baltic state of Latvia. Just yesterday, the capital Riga, where they took down this monument, decades old monument, to Soviet forces, victory over Nazi Germany. I mean a remarkable scene there. And I wonder, given other steps, for instance, Finland joining NATO after years of neutrality, this as a sign of the further severing of ties between those former Soviet republics and Russia.

How does that fit into your broader picture of Putin's losses here in effect, right, from the invasion of Ukraine?

HERTLING: They're huge, Jim. I mean it's uncalculable. What I'll tell you, having commanded forces in Europe, and having the honor to have visited all of the NATO forces and beyond. There are 49 countries in Europe. I've been to most of them. In the ones that were part of the former Warsaw Pact or the former Soviet Union, they all have these kinds of monuments. And, truthfully, most of the - you know, we're looking at Latvia right now. But all of the former Soviet Pact and Warsaw Pact countries have these kinds of monuments to the greater Russia because they were occupied by Russia and Russia put them up.

So, you're seeing across the board Estonia, Poland, all of -- Romania, all of the former Soviet Union republics taking down these monuments because they know what happens when Russia comes in and occupies your land.

So, yes, this is just an indicator of how much hatred is being pushed not only because of Ukraine, but because of past experiences by these countries.

HARLOW: Seeing that video was remarkable. And as Jim said, just such a sign.

General Hertling, thanks very, very much.

HERTLING: A pleasure. Thank you.

HARLOW: Well, still ahead - of course.

Still ahead, the White House firing back at Republicans criticizing President Biden's student debt cancellation, calling out members of Congress who had their own loans forgiven.

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[09:43:31]

HARLOW: So next hour investors, economists will all be focused on a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. That is where Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell will speak at an economic symposium as fears of a recession linger. This speech comes just after the release last hour of a key report on inflation.

SCIUTTO: Yes, there will be lots of parsing of words from that speech.

Joining us now, CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans.

Christine, wonder how the markets are responding to this inflation report, showing still an increase, but a slowing rate of increase, I suppose, is the way to describe it.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Sure. So let's talk about that report. It's called the PCE price index, Personal Consumption Expenditures. And why does it matter? It's the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. It captures a lot more of what the typical household is spending, the prices that they're paying.

And you can see deflation month over month -- I haven't said that word in a long time -- down 0.1 percent. And, overall, up 6.3 percent year over year. That's high, but it's cooling from the 40-year high the month before.

So, this is a really important number that feeds into that conversation about whether we're seeing peaking in the inflation story.

We also learned this week, guys, that we probably had two back-to-back quarters of contracting growth. Contraction, not growth. That's one of those things that feeds into this worry about a recession overall. And it's something to be watching as the Fed is raising interest rates. We'll be listening to the Fed chief today to try to figure out, will they be raising rates even more sharply, will they go maybe 50 basis points this September meeting, 75 basis points.

[09:45:05]

Would it have to be more?

I think that, you know, parsing Fed speak is always, you know, treacherous, especially when every single one of these reports we're getting, even minor reports, are changing expectations day by day.

This was the meeting, you guys, I think this is really important context, this was the meeting a year ago when the Fed chief said that there were narrow categories that were showing inflation. And that was because of reopening. And that it would be transitory.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

ROMANS: So, a year on now, they were wrong last year, they've got to regain the confidence of the public and of the markets and really convince us that they're doing the right thing here.

SCIUTTO: Yes, that word transitory is a word that will live in infamy, right, given what followed it.

HARLOW: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Christine Romans, we know you'll be following it today. Thanks so much.

ROMANS: Yes. Sure.

SCIUTTO: There are still a lot of questions about President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, such as when borrowers will start to see that relief and how the country, and this is notable as well, plans to pay for it. The White House press secretary estimates it will cost some $24 billion a year, had this to say on CNN last night.

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KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Assuming that 75 percent of folks who take us on, the president's student loan cancellation plan, and you look at the average monetary -- the average cash flow on that, it's going to be about $24 billion per year.

Now, just to give you a little bit of context. That $24 billion a year, that is about 3 percent of what we spend on the military. That's just a tiny, tiny fraction.

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HARLOW: Let's go to our White House correspondent Arlette Saenz. She joins us now.

So, there's that, the price hikes important here. There's also concern that this will add, I mean, this -- what economists say it will add to inflation even albeit slightly. What's the White House saying?

ARLETTE SAENZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, that issue of inflation, Poppy, is something that the White House took seriously in their deliberations, but ultimately decided to move forward with this plan, even as you've had some Democratic economists, people who worked under President Obama, who have warned that it will add -- increase inflationary pressures.

But one thing that the White House has insisted is that this plan will be paid for, but they've also struggled to offer some of the details. Yes, last night in that interview with Don Lemon, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, offered that $24 billion estimate, but the White House has yet to release or say when they will release a more detailed cost estimate. They are also facing questions about when exactly Americans will begin to feel the relief from this student loan forgiveness. And this is what White House Press Secretary Karine Jean- Pierre had to say yesterday on that topic.

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KARINE JEAN PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I don't have a timeline for you. That is something that the Department of Education is going to work on.

We will see who takes advantage of this, but this is supposed to - going to help 43 million people. And, just think about it, if people are saving a little bit of money, right, they are going to go buy that house. They are going to start a family. This matters in so many ways.

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SAENZ: And so there are still many questions about how exactly this will all play out. In the meantime, the White House has been facing some criticism, including from Republicans, about the student loan forgiveness program, but the White House is pushing back on some of those Republicans.

Yesterday, their Twitter account, which is normally a very quiet account, went after and put -- called out some Republicans who had received PPP loans during the coronavirus pandemic, saying they had their loans forgiven. Singling out people like Matt Gaetz and also Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. So, this is a willingness that we're seeing from the White House to call out some of their critics on an issue that they ultimately believe will be helping millions of Americans.

HARLOW: Arlette, thanks so much for that reporting from Washington.

Well, First Lady Jill Biden is the latest high profile person experiencing a rebound of Covid after being treated with Paxlovid. You'll remember the same with the president. So, just how common are these rebound cases? We'll talk about the data.

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[09:53;32]

SCIUTTO: This morning, there are growing questions about just how frequently patients experience what's known as rebound cases of Covid- 19 after taking the antiviral medication Paxlovid. New data suggests it may be more common, probably, in fact, than previously thought.

HARLOW: Our senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen, joins us now.

I mean this comes after several very -- as high profile as you can get - cases, like the president, like the first lady, after taking Paxlovid, have these - have these rebounds. So, anecdotally, it feels like a lot of folks who take it get the rebound. Is that true?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: It certainly does. I mean I - you know, all of us know people who have had rebound, including people who weren't even famous, just people in our families.

So, Pfizer says officially that 2 percent of people who take Paxlovid get Covid-19 rebound, but, again, it just feels like it must be so much higher than that. And, in fact, the National Institutes of Health, they did a very big study, very well-done, that showed that the -- it was actually more like 5.4 percent. So, much higher than 2 percent, but, still, it seems like, just anecdotally, like it's even higher than that.

I mean just among high profile people. We have the president had rebound after taking Paxlovid. His wife, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, had it. Dr. Anthony Fauci had rebound. Stephen Colbert had rebound. Our own Dr. Peter Hotez, the CNN medical contributor, he had rebound.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

COHEN: It seems like the list goes on and on. One thing that might be going on is you only take this drug for five days. There's some thinking that maybe people need to take it for longer and the FDA is looking into that.

[09:55:04]

SCIUTTO: So the data shows, even if it's 5 percent, the higher number, that's still one in 20. I mean, is it still worth taking it given that chance for a rebound case, and does it come down to who, perhaps, actually -- should actually take it?

COHEN: Jim, that's exactly it, it depends on who you are. Paxlovid is really recommended for people who are at high risk for getting very sick and ending up in the hospital with Covid-19. So, people over 65, people who are immune compromised, you have an underlying condition like diabetes or heart disease, where you could land in the hospital.

There was an Israeli study that looked at people over age 65 and what they found is that folks who did not take Paxlovid, they were four times more likely to end up in the hospital. So that right there tells you, you know what, maybe the rebound is worth it because it keeps you out of the hospital.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And particularly for folks in those categories there.

COHEN: Right.

SCIUTTO: Elizabeth Cohen, thanks for helping clear it all up.

COHEN: Thanks. Thanks.

SCIUTTO: Coming up next, we are still standing by, awaiting the release of a redacted version of the affidavit backing the Mar-a-Lago search warrant that could come at any moment. Of course, we're going to bring it to you as soon as it does. We have live team coverage just ahead.

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