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Mark Meadows Complies with DOJ Subpoena in 1/6 Probe; DOJ Wants Special Master to Complete Review by 10/17; Line of Mourners Now Stretches 4+ Miles to See Queen's Coffin; Mortgage Rates Top 6 percent for 1st Time Since 2008; Jobless Claims at New Low of 213,000, Lover Than Expected; Patagonia Founder Gives Away Company to Fight Climate Change; NASA's Perseverance Rover Collecting Rocks, Exploring Terrain. Aired 1:30-2p ET
Aired September 15, 2022 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[13:30:00]
ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Or on the other hand, was this conversation relating to wrongdoing or criminality? If it's the latter, it won't be protected by executive privilege. DOJ may be teeing up that fight with Mark Meadows over these documents.
ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Let's pivot to the Mar-a-Lago documents. The investigation that the DOJ has asked the judge to pause her order on the special master and said they may appeal that special master ruling today, right? What happens next? What are you watching for?
HONIG: Lot of moving parts here. Let's remember, two weeks ago, the judge said we will have a special master. Meaning, we will have an outside independent person.
Looks like they settled on this senior judge, who will take all 11,000 documents to Mar-a-Lago, review the documents and take out anything that's privileged, executive privilege or another attorney-client privilege, and send the rest on to DOJ.
However, DOJ then essentially appealed. They said, Judge, with regard to 100 of the 11,000 total documents -- we're talking about 1 percent here, but the most important ones, the classified documents.
The DOJ said to the judge, we want you to stay, pause the order on the documents. We need to use them right now on our investigation. We need to make sure the Intelligence Community can use them.
And the DOJ Said to the judge, we give you until Thursday, today, to decide. If you don't decide by then or decide against us, we will appeal from the district court, where we are now, the trial-level court, up to the 11th circuit court of appeals.
So, Ana, we could see a ruling from the judge today. Maybe she'll agree to put on hold the 100 classified documents. If she was, DOJ will be potentially satisfied, may not need to appeal.
Or she may tell the DOJ, tough luck, I'm sticking with my potential order. Good luck on appeal.
CABRERA: And she doesn't have a deadline to respond to them. But they gave her this deadline for their next move. We'll have to see who moves first.
(CROSSTALK)
HONIG: Judges don't love being given deadlines by prosecutors.
(CROSSTALK)
HONIG: I would have never tried that. We'll see how she reacts.
CABRERA: OK, Elie Honig --
HONIG: Thanks.
CABRERA: -- thank you, as always.
As the world says good-bye and pays its respects to the queen, we are getting new details about her funeral, just days from now. Look at the lines, to visit the queen's coffin. We'll go live to London, next.
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[13:37:08]
CABRERA: We have details on the final days before Queen Elizabeth's funeral. The line of people waiting to pay respects now stretches 4.5 miles. People are waiting about nine hours to see the queen's coffin.
Her body lies in state at Westminster Hall. And Buckingham Palace says King Charles and his siblings will mount a vigil around her coffin tomorrow evening like they did in Scotland.
CNN's Anna Stewart is in London.
Anna, what are you learning?
ANNA STEWART, CNN REPORTER: Hi, Ana. The queue, is long, indeed, over four miles. Nearly five miles at this stage. It takes between eight or nine hours for people to get all the way up and see the queen lying in state.
I can show you were we are now. We're in east London. This is not the back of the queue. It's about a mile from here.
And let's try to chat to some of the people.
It's fast moving. We'll give it a go.
Hello, everyone. How long have you been queueing for now?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have probably been -- we had to walk about a mile and a half up there. We're walking back again to do the same track. We're probably about an hour and a half now. STEWART: It takes some time to find the beginning of the queue.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's not actually labeled up at all. And I don't think the stewards are helping. They don't know what to do, either.
STEWART: At least you're in the queue now. Tell me why it's important for you to do this.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's important because the thing is, we don't know anything different. She's our queen.
And obviously, when my grandparents came over years ago, it was someone they actually looked up on. And so, therefore, we're just following through because we lost our parents recently, as well.
STEWART: I'm so sorry.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're following everything through.
STEWART: It's nice to speak to you. Thank you.
Anna, it was important to them. And so many feel the queen was like a member of the family. She was like a grandmother to the nation -- Ana?
CABRERA: Thank you. In some cases, a grandmother to the world. She had that status.
Thank you so much, Anna Stewart.
Potential home buyers taking another hit. Mortgage rates through the roof. They're about double what they were just a year ago.
[13:39:31]
And why the billionaire founder of Patagonia just gave away his company.
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CABRERA: Home buyers beware. Mortgage rates have jumped again. They are now about 6 percent for the first time since 2008 during the Great Recession.
CNN's Rahel Solomon is here with us now.
Rahel, bring us up to speed about why this keeps happening. And could the rates keep going up?
RAHEL SOLOMON, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: It's happening because of something because of something we talk about so much, inflation. We know the Fed, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates four times.
And the Fed doesn't set mortgage rates. But they're benchmark interest rate is highly influential in mortgage rates. Which, I want to take you down memory lane and show you where mortgage
rates and the 30-year fix have been over the last year. It has been a steady climb higher. We're above 6.6 percent.
[13:45:02]
That's twice where we were a year ago, when rates were close to 2.78 percent, and twice what we were at the beginning of this year, when the average 30-year was at 3.2 percent.
To put this in perspective, Ana, let's say you want to buy a home for $390,000. You put 20 percent down. A year ago, at 2.8 percent, 6 percent interest, that would have cost you about $1,300 a month.
That same home, same price, same down payment, but at 6.02 percent interest, you're paying almost $600 more per month.
This is why affordability has become a real challenge and why we have seen activity really plummet for new homes. It has become increasingly expensive to buy a home. And there's a lack of a supply in the market.
So it's about a double whammy in the housing market.
CABRERA: OK, we'll hang tight on that.
Let's talk about better news, I guess, you could call it. Jobless claims, new lows and consumer spending looking a little more positive?
SOLOMON: Some encouraging news, certainly, right? Jobless claims is our weekly look how many Americans are looking for unemployment. And the number we got was 213,000. That's lower than economists were expecting and lower than the week prior.
So, clearly, companies holding on to those workers they fought so hard to get over the last few years, as we dealt with labor shortages.
And on the retail sales front, retail sales are on the surprise to the upside, too.
Retail sales increased three-tenths of a percent over the last month and over the last year about 9.1 percent, as we saw a strong spending for auto, cars, restaurants as people hang out in the summer and summer activity and hang out at restaurants -- Ana?
CABRERA: We know there's a lot of summer travel as well.
SOLOMON: Yes.
CABRERA: Rahel Solomon, thank you.
Listen to this. The founder of Patagonia is taking the climate crisis fight to a new level by giving away his business, essentially.
The outdoor apparel company will be largely in the hands of a nonprofit and it will make sure that the profits, about $100 million, go to protect nature and biodiversity. Let's bring in CNN chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir.
Bill, this seems very outside the box.
BILL WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT: This is a very outside- the-box CEO we're talking about. A guy by the name of Yvon Chouinard.
I'll give you a little life lesson. In 1968, he climbed into a Volkswagen van with a bunch of good friends. They called themselves the Fun Hogs.
Among them, Doug Thompsons, who founded North Face and Esprit. And he eventually sold his fortune and gave it all away in the form of creating huge national parks down in South America.
Dave Thompkins' idea was let's save as much of the planet as we can from the ravages of capitalism.
Yvon Chouinard who shares the same sentiment looks like he's going to try to design a new form of capitalism. That is where earth is the only shareholder.
And instead of extracting resources from the earth for wealthy investors, he said he wants to take the profits and put it back into the source of all of our wealth, which is our livable planet.
CABRERA: It's so interesting. And he never wanted to be a billionaire. This is a guy that has significant money that I assume could make a real impact.
However, we're talking about the climate crisis. This is a global problem. What kind of impact could $100 million a year actually have?
WEIR: You know, it's a drop in the bucket given the scale, the enormity of what needs to be done out there. It's all how you spend it, right?
He has -- Patagonia has over 1,000 different grass-roots organizations that they send grants to and support. They hope the customers will not just buy their stuff but support these, as well.
This is everything from bird watchers or people protecting parks or regenerative farmers or fishermen, trying to get a coalition of people who love the outdoors and depend on it, to think about consumption in a different way.
That can have as big an impact as, say, throwing $100 million at some carbon capture idea. You know what I mean?
CABRERA: Yes.
WEIR: So it's a buckshot instead of a silver bullet idea.
CABRERA: Maybe it will lead to a trickle-down effect with other people. Maybe it starts to snowball.
(CROSSTALK)
WEIR: At the same time, to be realistic, we're living in the age of fast fashion, where factories, garment factories in Asia, hugely polluting operations. They take enormous amounts of water to feed the demand for Instagram fashion that's in a landfill 50 minutes later.
So he's one who thinks culture has to change before you fix climate change. At least how we think about life as consumers.
But it is a bold move. And it also will give him an opportunity, some are saying, there are tax advantages. It allows him to do advocacy spending without disclosing where the donor is coming from, if he wants to get into politics and advertising that way. We'll see.
CABRERA: Thank you, Bill Weir.
WEIR: You bet.
CABRERA: So interesting to talk about walking the walk, not just talking the talk there.
[13:49:58]
One and a half years is a long time to be on Mars. What did NASA's Perseverance Rover find out there? That's next.
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CABRERA: It's been on Mars for a year and a half, so what has the Perseverance Rover found? NASA is now sharing.
Let's bring in CNN's Kirstin Fisher.
What do we know, Kirstin?
KRISTIN FISHER, CNN SPACE & DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT: Ana, the Perseverance Rover has collected 12 samples. And NASA scientists say the most recent samples that this rover collected contain the highest concentration of organic materials that this rover has seen yet. Organic materials are the building blocks of life.
[13:55:02]
And what you see here is a video that NASA just released during a press conference.
This is NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which runs this rover. What you're seeing there's the Jezero Crater Delta. You can even see some of the rover's wheel tracks right there in the distance.
That is where the rover came from. It's traveled about eight miles in 18 months. And now it's in this river delta, which is a place that scientists believe used to be a river. It's all dried up now. And ran into a lake. That's where they're trying to get the rock samples from.
Let me just read you to some of the things that these scientists are saying. They're saying these are exactly the kinds of rocks we came to investigate. The data is matching the expectations.
Right there, you can see three holes where the Perseverance Rover actually drilled into the ground of the surface of Mars and then extracted those rocks.
If we show the next photo, you can see exactly what that looks like. Right there. That is the sample inside the drill of the rover. Just an incredibly complicated thing to be able to do.
So, Ana, I just want to be clear, this is not proof of life on Mars. This is not even proof that life once existed on Mars. It is simply very good probability, high probability --
CABRERA: Fascinating stuff.
FISHER: -- that if those samples come back to earth, the proof could be in there.
CABRERA: OK, thank you so much, Kirstin.
That does it for us today. Thank you for being with us.
The news continues right after this.
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