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Uvalde School District Suspends Its Police Department; Superintendent Says He Intends To Retire; White House Biden's "Armageddon" Remark About Putin Not Based On New Intel, Claims It's Consistent Messaging; CNN: Herschel Walker Fires Political Director. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired October 07, 2022 - 15:00   ET

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

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Stunning developments four months after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, first the school district suspending its police force today and now news about the school superintendent.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: CNN's Shimon Prokupecz is back with us now. What's the update?

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME & JUSTICE REPORTER: Yes. So we're getting worried now that the Superintendent, the school superintendent, Hal Harrell, has announced his plans to begin the process of retiring. That on Monday, there will be a school board meeting. And in that meeting, in a closed door session, they will begin to discuss his retirement.

Of course, this all coming after the announcement of the Police Department being suspended, the firing of that other officer, all of this happening really in the span of 24 hours. The superintendent is certainly someone that the families have been very upset with. He very early on was not very responsive to their concerns, their questions. It took him a really long time to fire the former chief, Arredondo, and sort of set up this investigation of the police force and their response, the school police force.

So they have been very unhappy for him, at times calling for him to resign for his resignation as well. So finally, now word coming that he does intend to start the process of his retirement there in Uvalde. He has been someone who has been part of this community his whole life. He was fairly well liked before all this happened. He's been with the community. He's been with the school for 31 years. His father was the superintendent before that, so people thought there was an unfair process in terms of how he got the job.

But certainly, he could never imagine what he's faced in the last several months and just the handling of all of this, how poor the school district has handled this. How they've disrespected these families. Again, this is something families wanted. They were protesting outside that school all week. And now finally, word comes that he is going to retire, though it will be a process so it's not going to happen immediately.

I just want to point something else, I have been talking to family members since the last hour that we were on together. I spoke to Brett Cross. And he is one of the family members who has been protesting outside the school, the whole week. This is what he's wanted. He's wanted this accountability and he said all he could do today after getting all this news is cry.

He said he had not been home all week. He's been sitting out there, finally was able to go home. He got what he wanted and he went home just so he could take a shower and he said the fight continues. He's not stopping. He knows there's more. But the fact just the emotion in that community, this is major for this community.

I mean, this is - the administration - a school administration like this is so vital to this community now ripped apart, took too long, but for the family members, this is a long day coming and we're finally starting to see that.

CAMEROTA: It's been such a long road for them of feeling powerless.

PROKUPECZ: Yes.

CAMEROTA: So right, Shimon, thank you very much for all of that record.

BLACKWELL: Thank you, Shimon.

The White House is clarifying President Biden stark warning about the nuclear threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The President ominously told the crowd at a fundraiser last night that his Russian counterpart's military losses in Ukraine could push him to follow through on his nuclear threats.

CAMEROTA: The President reportedly said, "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don't think any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon."

The White House Press Secretary says the comments were not based on new intel, but the President's way of underscoring Putin's threat.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The President's comments has been a very consistent. He was reinforcing what we have been saying which is how seriously we take these threats about nuclear weapons as we have done when the Russians have made these spreads throughout the conflict. So the kind of irresponsible rhetoric we have seen is no way for the leader of a nuclear armed state to speak and that's what the President was making very clear about."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: Let's go to our correspondents now, Fred Pleitgen is in Kyiv. But let's start with MJ Lee at the White House. So we heard a bit from Karine Jean-Pierre there. What else is the White House saying about these comments? MJ LEE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, this was such a remarkable warning that we heard directly from the President that he sees the direct threat of a nuclear war really for the first time in 60 years. And we know that these comments were unplanned, they were unscripted and they actually ended up catching some in the administration by surprise, because that tone and the message from the President was actually pretty different from the more measured tone a message that we've heard consistently from others in the administration.

Now, what we have learned since the President made these remarks at a fundraiser last night is that really there was no sort of piece of intelligence or new development that he was aware of that prompted him to say these grim warnings. It really was, according to one official just him being pretty frank about what he sees as a general threat.

Now, we are also told that as of today, the U.S.'s general posture on this issue remains unchanged.

[15:04:59]

But it is just worth pointing out just in covering this president, this is not the first time or the first example that we've seen of the president sort of taking a different tone or saying a different kind of message compared to others in the administration. And obviously, needless to say, the stakes are so incredibly high, because the issue that we're talking about is so serious. We're talking about the threat of a nuclear war.

CAMEROTA: Fred, will the - will President Biden's comments have an impact in Russia with Putin or in Ukraine?

FRED PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I'll tell you what, it's been a really interesting day, as far as that's concerned. What I've tried to do today is I've reached out to both the Kremlin and to the Russian Foreign Ministry and both went to great pains to not comment on the remarks that President Biden made.

Instead, what they did is they both ripped into the Ukrainians, which is something that we've seen in the past as well. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he made some remarks where he called for tougher action against Russia by NATO. And the Russians are interpreting that as the Ukrainian president calling for a preventive nuclear strike by NATO against the Russians. Now, that's by no means what the Ukrainian president said and certainly the Ukrainians have clarified those remarks.

But you can tell that the rhetoric on the part of the Russians is certainly one that is becoming more heated. If we look back just a couple of weeks when the Russians announced their mobilization, Vladimir Putin made those nuclear threats, again, and he said there, specifically, that he was not bluffing.

And I can tell you guys from the ground here in Ukraine, the Ukrainians certainly don't believe that he's bluffing. I have been speaking to some very senior Ukrainian officials and they tell me that they do believe that right now the threat of nuclear weapons, possibly tactical nuclear weapons being used at some point is a lot higher than it was before, simply because the Russians are having such trouble on the battlefield.

Now, for the Ukrainians, that's not going to mean that they're going to back down on the battlefield. In fact, they are saying that they're keeping those offensives that they have going on, especially in the east of the country and in the southeast of the country. Those are going on at full pace. They want to take back as much territory as they can as fast as possible, because they also know that the Russians are trying to bring more troops in, but they certainly don't believe that Vladimir Putin is bluffing at all, guys.

CAMEROTA: Okay. Fred Pleitgen, MJ Lee, thank you both for all the reporting there. Let's bring in retired Army Brigadier General Steven Anderson along with Evelyn Farkas. She's a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. She's now the executive director of the McCain Institute.

Evelyn, I do want to start with you. What do you think of the President's comments? I mean, maybe he was just telling the truth. Should he have used less apocalyptic language?

EVELYN FARKAS, FORMER U.S. DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR RUSSIA/UKRAINE/EURASIA: Well, probably. I think, Alisyn, what he was trying to signal to Americans and the world is that Vladimir Putin is a leader who was really out of bounds. The fact that he would threatened to use nuclear force is something that is inconceivable in the last time we heard - the last time we were in danger of having some kind of a standoff on a nuclear front between the United States and Moscow was in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, although that was completely different, because there the Russians were putting missiles into Cuba, those missiles could reach U.S. territory, so that was regarded as a potential threat to us.

In this case, Vladimir Putin, certainly hasn't said he's going to use a nuclear weapon against the United States. He knows what that would mean, because we have nuclear deterrence. That would mean we would use ours back. So I think it's not as dire as the President made it sound. But I think what he's trying to signal is this is not a normal leadership.

And we are hearing people in Russia now speaking out and saying, wait a minute, we shouldn't be talking about nuclear weapons and use of nuclear weapons, people in the - in one of the daily newspapers, for example.

BLACKWELL: General, do you think this resonates inside the walls of the Kremlin? The President says essentially, there will be held to pay if the Putin deploys these tactical weapons.

BRIG. GEN. STEVEN ANDERSON, U.S. ARMY (RET.): Well, thank you, Victor. I do believe that it probably resonates with a lot of the hawkish supporters that Vladimir Putin has surrounded himself with and I'd be very concerned, and that's why I really don't think that the President's statement was particularly helpful. I mean, we should be not be escalating the rhetoric, but we should escalate our support for the Ukraine.

I mean, we need to sharpen our intelligence. We need to strengthen the Ukrainians with the logistics that they're going to need in the coming months and perhaps even years in order to push the Russians all the way out. And we've got to do everything we can to help them win this fight. And that would include, as I've said, on your program before, the use of American and NATO contractors on the ground in Ukraine, providing the logistics expertise, the repair parts and the training that they so desperately need.

[15:09:56]

So we've got to make sure that we ensure that Vladimir Putin and the people he surrounds him with knows that we're very, very serious about this and we will not take any kind of the use of a nuclear weapon. It will not - it will be responded to extremely strongly, don't say what we're going to do, don't say what we're not going to do, but just say we're going to view it as a major escalation and we will not take it lightly.

CAMEROTA: Evelyn, I want to get your thoughts about these two Russian apparent asylum seekers who travelled across the Bering Strait from Russia, they just landed in Alaska. They are fleeing, it sounds like, the forced mobilization of Putin calling up men to serve in this war against Ukraine. So many of them we've seen who don't want to go or aren't prepared.

They're supposedly going to be having talks with the Russian embassy, does the Russian embassy protect them here as asylum seekers or want to send them back?

FARKAS: I'm sure that the Russian embassy will send them back if they're men of military fighting age, because they would be - consider them as draft dodgers. Although, right now, the Russian government is saying they're only picking people who are reservists, people who have prior military experience. So I'd be curious to know whether that would be the case here as well.

But I mean, what it shows you, Alisyn, is obviously that this idea of going to war with Ukraine is not popular in Russia. They don't want to die for Vladimir Putin's campaign. Many of the people that the media has gotten on the record have said, "This is President Putin's war, not my war."

It's not a popular idea and so Vladimir Putin is still in a tricky position. And that's why his nuclear threats also really should be regarded as the General was sort of hinting at really dissuading the West from continuing our robust ongoing support for Ukraine. This is more about that, although you can't rule out the nuclear thing.

But President Putin is not in a good place right now and that's why we need to press forward. Everything we can do to take advantage of his weakness politically and militarily.

BLACKWELL: General, we have discussed many times the low morale of Ukrainian force - Russian forces in Ukraine, I should say. And now the Ukrainian defense minister has released this video directed at frontline troops, asking them to lay down their weapons and promises life safety and justice, a novel idea, you think it's convincing?

ANDERSON: Not at all. I mean, it's another act of desperation by an administration that knows it's a losing. Vladimir Putin knows that he's in - his back is against the wall and for that reason, he's particularly dangerous.

BLACKWELL: No, no, this is the Ukrainian Defense Minister urging Russian troops to lay down their arms and essentially surrender.

ANDERSON: Well, my apologies. I misunderstood.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

ANDERSON: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you've seen the impact of the morale. I mean, we know that the Russian soldiers are leaving their weapons. They're running out of fuel. They're running out of ammunition, food and water. We know the Ukraine has been incredibly effective attacking the logistics pipelines. We know that their morale is low. We've seen all the acts and the atrocities they have committed, which was a sign of how undisciplined they are.

I mean, absolutely, I think that would be a great move on the part of the Ukrainians to try to get the Russians to come over to their side.

BLACKWELL: All right. Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, Evelyn Farkas, thank you.

CAMEROTA: So President Biden touted his administration's efforts to get Americans working again today and held the release of a strong jobs report. He also took a dig at Republicans.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Many of my Republican friends are basically arguing that good news for the economy is bad news for America. As if they're rooting for fewer jobs and lower wages. It's all part of this trickle down mentality that says it doesn't matter what's happening in the mainstream, what really matters is what's happening on Wall Street. If Wall Street is doing well, everybody's doing well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: The U.S. economy added 263,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, hitting 3.5 percent. Hiring is slowing a bit but likely not enough to stave off another rate hike to cool inflation.

Joining us now is Robert Reich. He was the labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. Secretary Reich, thanks so much for being here. How do you see the jobs report today?

ROBERT REICH, FORMER U.S. LABOR SECRETARY UNDER CLINTON: Alisyn, it's a very strong report, but it is slowing. The economy is slowing. There's no question about it. The Federal Reserve's rate hikes, there been five of them so far and they are beginning to have an effect.

CAMEROTA: So in other words, they're doing the right thing. I mean, you think that it's working, what the Fed is doing, and do you think that they will throttle back now a little bit?

REICH: I hope so. Because you see there's a lag time between when the Fed raises interest rates and what the economy actually does.

[15:14:59]

And if the Fed raises interest rates too far too fast, that lag time means we could find ourselves in a recession rather than what the Fed is aiming for, which is a so called soft landing. Now, that is we bring down inflation, but don't risk a recession.

CAMEROTA: You've been on this program before and you've been talking about how there's that going on, but there's basically a sort of an untapped solution. I think it's fair to say that you think that the administration should be tackling more, and that's going after these monolithic, as I think you've said, greedy corporations. How would that bring down inflation?

REICH: Well, what we'd see, Alisyn, it's very difficult to tell from the jobs report, because we don't really have a monthly report on profits. But the information we do have on profits shows that they are still extraordinarily high and a lot of big corporations have been using the cover of inflation to raise prices faster and higher than their costs.

And so what I've been saying, and I'm not the only one saying this, is that rather than rely solely on the Fed to raise interest rates and stop or cool the economy and hurt a lot of people along the way, we also ought to be considering other measures, such as windfall profits tax or, for example, much more antitrust enforcement. One of the reasons that these companies can raise their prices is because they have so much monopoly power or maybe a consumption tax.

So we go after and it's progressive, so we go after the wealthiest members of our society in terms of how much they spend. That would also be helpful in terms of taming inflation without hurting the middle class and the poor.

CAMEROTA: Are these things that President Biden can do unilaterally or does this involve Congress?

REICH: It's some of the things President Biden can do, that is antitrust enforcement, more rigorous, bolder antitrust enforcement through the antitrust division of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, that can be done starting now. Even the threat of antitrust enforcement can make some companies think twice before raising their prices over their costs.

Some of the other things that I've mentioned - well, it would require Congress, that's right, and that's always a big, big barrier. CAMEROTA: Indeed. Secretary Robert Reich, great to talk to you. Thanks for your time.

REICH: Thanks, Alisyn.

BLACKWELL: Embattled Georgia Senate nominee Herschel Walker just fired his political director, of course, after the allegations he paid for a woman's abortion. We have that story next.

CAMEROTA: And federal prosecutors are weighing charges against Hunter Biden. We have all the details just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:22:15]

BLACKWELL: New CNN reporting now, Georgia's Senate candidate Herschel Walker has fired his political director. Now, this is just days after the allegation that he paid for a woman's abortion. Context: Walker supports a national ban on abortion with no exceptions. He has repeatedly denied the allegation.

CAMEROTA: Of course, we're just weeks away from the midterms that could tilt the balance in the Senate. CNN's Gabby Orr joins us now. So Gabby, is this all being blamed on his political director?

GABBY ORR, CNN REPORTER: Well, Alisyn and Victor, the entire situation with the allegation around abortion and Herschel Walker paying for one is not being put on his political director. His political director, Taylor Crowe, however, was let go from the campaign on Wednesday of this week for suspected leaking to members of the media.

The campaign cut ties with Crowe who previously had held the same role as political director on the failed gubernatorial bid of David Perdue running against Brian Kemp earlier this year in a primary, of course. But they are - this shakeup on the campaign comes just weeks out from Election Day.

This is a major loss for the campaign's political director, weeks away from the election but also one week from the debate that Herschel Walker is planning to participate in against incumbent Democratic senator, Raphael Warnock. That will take place next Friday in Savannah, Georgia between the two men.

The campaign is said to be preparing for it. Herschel Walker said during a campaign stop in Georgia yesterday that he planned to be here - planned to be at the debate and was wondering whether his opponent plan to show up still. But letting go of your political director this close to Election Day probably isn't going to be welcome news for Republicans who are very closely watching the Senate race, seeing it as one of the necessary seats they must flip in order to retake control of the upper chamber in November.

BLACKWELL: Crucial race. Gabby Orr, thank you.

CAMEROTA: So in Arizona, candidates Mark Kelly and Blake Masters went head to head in this fiery Senate debate last night in both making plays for independent voters in this extremely tight race.

BLACKWELL: New CNN poll shows the incumbent Democrat and narrowly leading his Republican opponent. CNN's Kyung Lah is in Phoenix. Kyung, good to see you. What are the takeaways from the debate?

KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR U.S. CORRESPONDENT: I feel I've said this so many times, Victor and Alisyn, but it remains true and we really saw it play out in this debate. It is the independence, especially in the State of Arizona, in the battleground of Arizona who will determine this race and you really saw that play happening in the debate.

Incumbent senator, Mark Kelly, the Democrat, really tried to distance himself from his own party, the Democrats, as well as President Biden.

[15:25:06]

And then you saw Republican challenger, Blake Masters, truly on the attack about the economy as well as immigration, take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BLAKE MASTERS, (R) ARIZONA SENATE CANDIDATE: Joe Biden is spending like a drunken sailor and at every single opportunity. Mark Kelly just says yes.

SEN. MARK KELLY (D-AZ): I've been strong on border security and I've stood up to Democrats when they're wrong on this issue ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It sounds like ...

KELLY: ... including, by the way ...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... yes.

KELLY: ... including the President. When the President decided he was going to do something dumb on this and change the rules that would create a bigger crisis, I told him he was wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAH: It's not just Sen. Kelly talking to those moderates. We've really seen Masters morphing to the middle. I mean, this is a candidate who after the primary, erased extreme abortion language right off of his website. And when the moderator asked him directly about it, he simply dodged and did not answer.

And then during his campaign in the Republican primary, Blake Masters put out an ad that said, "I believe Trump won in 2020." But when the moderator last night asked him was the vote stolen in regards to vote count or the election process, we heard Masters say, "I haven't seen evidence of that." So talking to the middle right there. Victor? Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: The expression that you just use down morphing to the middle I think is a very apt one, really interesting to see that shift. Kyung Lah, thank you very much for all of the reporting. So the Department of Justice does not believe Donald Trump has returned all the classified documents that he took when he left the White House. Their latest message to the former president just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)