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Police Have Confession in Athena Strand's Death; Musk Responds to Trump's Comment on Constitution; Hits to Ukraine Energy Infrastructure; NASA's Artemis Returns to Earth; Lava Creeps Closer to Hawaii Road. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired December 05, 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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[09:31:13]

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: A preliminary hearing is scheduled now for a FedEx contract driver who is charged with aggravated kidnapping and capital murder in the death of a seven-year-old girl. Authorities in Wise County, Texas, say Tanner Lynn Horner was allegedly making a delivery to Athena Strand's home -- that's Athena pictured there -- when she disappeared. The sheriff says they received a tip, which led them to Horner, who then admitted what had happened.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHERIFF LANE AKIN, WISE COUNTY, TEXAS: We do have a confession.

One of the toughest investigations that I've been involved in because it's a child.

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JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Lord, those poor parents and that little girl.

Several school districts across Texas are now encouraging students to wear pink today in honor of Athena. Extra counselors will be there for students to help them try to deal with this loss.

CNN's Ed Lavandera, he's in Texas this morning.

Ed, Jesus, what a story for you to cover. The details are just harrowing. Tell us how the family is remembering Athena.

ED LAVANDERA, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, her mother wrote -- has written in a long Facebook post, talked about all the different things that little Athena liked and enjoyed in her life and the amount of joy that she brought her family. She wrote, my princess was taken from me by a sick, cruel monster. Absolutely for no reason. Athena is innocent, beautiful, kind, intelligence and just the brightest, happiest soul you could ever meet.

You can imagine the anguish and the heartbreak that this family is dealing with. There were, for several days -- little Athena went missing last Wednesday. Her body wasn't found until Friday. Hundreds of volunteers combed through the area, trying to help the family search for her. But, obviously, this is not the ending anyone there in Wise County was praying for.

And as you mentioned, nearly two dozen school districts across Wise County are urging their students to wear pink today in honor of Athena Strand. It was her favorite color.

Investigators had said that there was a tip that led them to the FedEx delivery driver. The real specifics about who was behind that tip and how that all came to be has not been shared by investigators at this point.

The suspect is expected to make, as you mentioned, a court appearance here this morning at some point in Wise County. We hope to learn more about how this investigation played out at some point throughout - throughout the day. But, you know, right now, really the focus on this little girl and her family that is dealing with just unspeakable anguish.

Jim and Erica.

SCIUTTO: Goodness. Horrendous.

Ed Lavandera, thanks so much.

Well, on a somber anniversary, a group you may remember, The Dancing Grannies, they made their return to the streets of Waukesha, Wisconsin, overnight. Smiles, some bittersweet joy, in their first Christmas parade since last year's just deadly and horrible shooting there. A man intentionally -- sorry, attack there. A man intentionally drove an SUV onto the parade route killing six people, including four affiliated with The Dancing Grannies.

HILL: Several family members of those killed did join in this year's parade, carrying pictures of their loved ones. And CNN also spoke this weekend with one of the surviving dancers.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAN KWIATKOWSKI, DANCING GRANNIES MEMBER: There were many ups and downs, challenges, you know, trying to deal with what did happen to the group, you know, the four that we lost, the injured, are we going to keep this group going? You know, just everything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[09:35:01]

HILL: Darrell Brooks was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences last month, plus an additional 700 years in prison for that attack.

Still to come here, our colleagues on the ground in Ukraine forced into bunkers deep underground as Russian missiles target power infrastructure. We're going to bring the very latest from the capital, Kyiv, next.

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SCIUTTO: Elon Musk is responding to the former president, Trump.

[09:40:01]

In a tweet, the Twitter CEO said, quote, the Constitution is greater than any president. End of story.

HILL: So that response comes after Trump called for terminating parts of the Constitution -- stick with me because this is a little convoluted here -- following the release of these so-called Twitter files. What are the Twitter files? Well, it's a tweet thread posted by Matt Taibbi (ph) over the weekend which details internal Twitter discussions in 2020 about censorship.

CNN's Christine Romans is here with us.

I feel like I need a flow chart, Christine.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

HILL: Or a - or a -- I don't know if it's a map or a timeline or what it is because there's -

ROMANS: I actually made one.

HILL: See, this is - this is why I love it when you're here because I knew you would have that. There are a lot of steps to this. So, if we start out with -- let's start out with these so-called Twitter files -

ROMANS: Right.

HILL: That were released over the weekend, which were supposed to show what?

ROMANS: Well, they were released to a writer who then had a long tweet thread about them. So, they weren't released to the public so everyone could see exactly what this was. But this -- these are documents related to the internal discussions at Twitter in 2020 around a laptop that was found at a laptop repair shop that contained all kinds of really outrageous stuff from the president -- now president's son, right?

And inside Twitter, what you can see are all of these people who worked there saying, is this real? This feels like Russian disinformation. Maybe it is real. Real arguments about how they should treat this material in an election year.

Now, what some want you to think is that this was censorship by big tech, and that's why the president is saying you should throw out the Constitution because big tech is in cahoots with American democracy. That's what the president thinks.

But what it sort of shows is a real struggle at an important platform for how to deal with something so outrageous, so explosive, and - and what to actually do with it.

What Pointer said, which is a media watchdog group, they said, file this one under -- file the Twitter files under "m" for "meh" and "The Washington Post" said there are no smoking gun here. We've known a lot of this, that Twitter really struggled with how to handle this explosive story that was published in "The New York Post."

HILL: Also because they couldn't verify a lot of it at the time.

ROMANS: Exactly.

HILL: Which was a major issue.

ROMANS: Exactly. They couldn't verify it.

SCIUTTO: Christine, the essential argument here from Musk and Taibbi, if you read this thread, is that there was undue political influence, that folks connected to then candidate Biden were pushing Twitter to remove this for political reasons, right? To help with the 2020 election. Is there any evidence of that?

ROMANS: So, what you see in these files are Republicans and Democrats at times going to Twitter and saying, hey, we don't know if this is true. Hey, you shouldn't elevate this. Oh, this -- there were both parties, although more Democrats than Republicans from what we've seen in this thread, but both parties would go and say, hey this isn't fair, this is tilting the scale, there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation on this platform and we don't like this or we don't like that. So this, again, shows the struggle, I think, Twitter had at the time to being a real arbiter of real information.

We know that all of the social media sites have had a difficulty with that.

You know, Elon Musk is teasing, I guess, that there's going to be even more that will be coming from these so-called Twitter files via Taibbi, this writer, who has disdained, frankly, the mainstream media before. So, we'll see what comes next. but he's not releasing it sort of to the public, he's releasing it to another voice to distill it to see what was actually going on behind the scenes at Twitter at the time.

SCIUTTO: Christine Romans, thanks so much.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

SCIUTTO: This morning another following we're following, two people are dead, another two injured, this in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, following yet another wave of Russian missiles launched often towards civilian targets in Ukraine. At least two Ukrainian cities now reporting no water or electricity.

Erica, as we often note, this is deliberate.

HILL: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Russian attacks designed to inflict pain on the civilian population.

HILL: Absolutely. In the capital city of Kyiv, CNN's Will Ripley and team forced to safety this morning as more air raid sirens rang out over the report of potentially dozens of Russian missiles targeting the city. So Will is with us now.

You are -- we're happy to see you're out of that bunker now, Will, you and your team. Give us a sense of not only what happened this morning and or nighttime where you are, but also as we look at all of this, this continued effort to really go after the infrastructure. We know winter has already set in there. Is it having an impact?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, winter temperatures for sure, Erica, even though the official start of winter is still well over a week away. And you have subzero on a nightly basis and you have a large number, you're talking millions of people here in Ukraine who maybe have power for an hour or two a day. You mentioned now, after this latest Russian missile attack that set off the air raid sirens here some four hours ago, we were -- you know, had just finished a live shot.

[09:45:08]

We heard the sirens. And then got these reports of dozens of incoming Russian missiles. We went down to this underground bunker. We've been down there for the last several hours. A very safe location to broadcast from. And getting updates in real time about missiles that were reportedly intercepted, either shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets or by the air defense systems that are in place throughout the capital city here in Kyiv.

Some missiles, though, apparently did hit their targets. There are videos that are emerging of a power station in Odessa, Ukraine, that was hit. You mentioned Zaporizhzhia, where at least two people were killed, others injured. And cities -- entire cities now essentially as night falls here no electricity. In some cases that also means that their heating system is cut off.

And we've been talking to people as we've been covering this issue of the power grid and these - and these -- this race to repair the power grid. And people are - people are soldering through it as best they can. But from the Ukrainian perspective, they say this kind of Russian attack is precisely why the United States needs to make a decision on patriot missile defense systems as soon as possible because they say they need more capability to shoot these things down. They also need generators, which the U.S. is providing a lot of these power stations, Jim and Erica, that are being damaged, they rely on old Soviet era parts that are not very easy to replace.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

RIPLEY: So you can see the problem here. If they keep destroying these things and having - and they have to rebuild, they might not necessarily have the tools and the parts to rebuild them.

SCIUTTO: Yes. HILL: Yes, that's an important note.

Will, appreciate the reports, as always. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Still ahead, NASA's moon mission rocket, Artemis I, is now beginning its return to earth. The critical maneuver to watch for in the sky this morning. You could see it. It's coming up.

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[09:51:19]

HILL: Right now the Orion spacecraft getting ready for its final swing around the moon before splashing down this Sunday. So, we're expecting to see that fly by burn. That's where Orion will use the moon's gravity to assist its trip back too other. This, of course, the first leg of the Artemis mission aimed at bring people ultimately back to the moon.

SCIUTTO: Those pictures are pretty cool.

HILL: They are.

SCIUTTO: I mean you saw the spaceship there, kind of pointing back, and how small the little blue marble is in space.

Joining us now, CNN space and defense correspondent Kristin Fisher.

So, Kristin, this is all about showing that Artemis could do this safely with people, of course, with NASA's plans to bring man -- and women - missions back to the moon. So how critical is this particular maneuver we're seeing today?

KRISTIN FISHER, CNN SPACE AND DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT: It is the last critical burn of this mission. A burn being when the spacecraft fires its engines, or thrusters, to essentially move it to wherever it wants to go. And so in about an hour and a half, we're going to see the Orion spacecraft get about 80 miles off the surface of the moon. And this comes, you know, it's -- this total mission will have been about 26 days since that launch right there that you're seeing. It was a long mission. They really wanted to test out these systems on Orion, as Jim said, to make sure that it's safe for people, whenever they put them on board.

But there's still one even bigger test ahead, Jim, aside from the burn that we're going to see in about an hour and a half, and that is testing of the Orion heat shield. The heat shield, we talk about it, it's so important. That's what's going to protect the astronauts when there are astronauts on board as this spacecraft barrels back into the earth's atmosphere and protects it from those high temperatures. And that should happen on Sunday with splash down in the Pacific Ocean. And if that is a success, then this Artemis 1 test flight will have been a success across the board. They've had some very minor issues, but nothing big, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Yes. I mean it's amazing to think, all these decades later, it makes me think of Apollo 13, right? There was all the attention on the heat shield.

FISHER: Sure.

SCIUTTO: And the - always - always one of the biggest challenges.

Kristin Fisher, thanks so much.

FISHER: Thanks.

SCIUTTO: Well, experts say the risk -- down here on earth -- from the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii is low to people, but the lava flow is active and huge and just breathtaking to watch. It is threatening a major highway connecting the east and west sides of the big island. The highway is still open, but sight seers, they're coming in numbers to see Mauna Loa's first eruption in decades. And that's adding to the traffic.

HILL: Joining us now with more, CNN's David Culver, who is there on the ground for us.

Every time I see your live shot, David, these pictures behind you, it is just remarkable.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It really is, Erica and Jim, that glow. And that's exactly why thousands have been coming really in the overnight hours, here it is, you know, 4:50 in the morning or so and people are still coming in, families pulling their kids out of bed just to see this.

But to give you an even better view, let's go a little bit higher.

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CULVER (voice over): We go up in the morning dark. Paradise Helicopters Darren Hampton, our pilot and guide, giving us rare access.

CULVER (on camera): I assume we'll know when we see the volcano.

DARREN HAMPTON, PARADISE HELICOPTERS: Yes, it's just off the - kind of the eastern side there. Yes, at about the one o'clock position, that is the plume there.

CULVER (voice over): Having flown in military hot zones, Darren even admits this is fire power like no other.

CULVER (on camera): What was it like the first time you flew over lava?

HAMPTON: Oh, it was a blast.

CULVER (voice over): It can also be challenging, especially with heavy fog or volcanic smog.

CULVER (on camera): So there you can see the gases from Fissure 3.

CULVER (voice over): Those acidic gases dangerous if the concentration levels are too high.

[09:55:03]

HAMPTON: That's 2,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or about 1,000 degrees Celsius. That's molten rock, flowing like water.

CULVER: Which has already crossed one volcano road, power lines and all, a searing slice right through it.

CULVER (on camera): it's incredible the heat you fell as soon as you get close to it.

And look at this. The rushing flow. I mean the river. You see the current of lava.

CULVER (voice over): Darren estimates it's moving 30 to 40 miles per hour.

CULVER (on camera): But this, the source of it all, I mean t here's nothing like this, just spewing from the top.

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CULVER: Moving really quickly up there. That's that 30 to 40 miles per hour. Though as it comes closer to where we are, and we're near that main highway, Jim and Erica, slowing down a lot to 40 feet an hour. Still, though, it's just over two with miles away and officials are watching it really closely.

HILL: Yes, understandably. Incredible view there that you gave us. David, appreciate it. Thank you.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HILL: Still to come here, the final push in Georgia as Democrats look to keep their Senate seat. How Republican Herschel Walker is making his final pitch to voters, next.

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