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90+ Million Under Alerts As Winter Storm Threatens Holiday Travel; January 6 Committee To Release Full Report Today; Interview With Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-.VI), House Ways & Means Committee Votes To Release Trump's Tax Returns; Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired December 21, 2022 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: A powerful and potentially dangerous winter storm is threatening millions of Americans and it could disrupt travel during this busy holiday week. Windchill alerts stretch from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. Look at this map. CNN's Lucy Kafanov is live in Denver. Which could see temperatures plummet by as much as 60 degrees by tomorrow morning. So, I see the hat. I see the vest. It's not too cold yet, but how are folks there keeping warm?

LUCY KAFANOV, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, that's right, Victor. We're not feeling it yet. It's about 50 degrees as we speak, but that bitterly cold arctic blast is quickly approaching. The winds are already picking up, and in just a few hours, temperatures are expected to plummet. Now Denver is predicting its coldest day in 32 years. By tomorrow, the low expected to be around negative 10. The high, not expected to go above zero. But it's going to feel significantly colder because of those wind gusts with the windchill predicted at negative 25 degrees.

Now Colorado's Governor Jared Polis has activated more than a hundred National Guard members to help with cold weather preparations.

[15:35:00]

Libraries, recreation centers staying open for the warmth, and then the Denver coliseum which you're now able to see behind me, is also going to be converted into a 24-hour warming center. And keep in mind, Victor, because the immigration crisis is also playing out here, we've had an influx of migrants here in Denver. The city is under emergency order right now, and so, the shelter capacity is strained. A lot of the migrant families in addition to anyone who needs to get out of the cold will be taken to the coliseum behind me -- Victor.

BLACKWELL: All right. Lucy Kafanov off in Denver Thank you, Lucy.

CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam is tracking the storm. So, what's the big concern for the next few days?

DEREK VAN DAM, CNN METEOROLOGIST Definitely the Arctic blast that's coming. Look, Victor, this might be a moot point, but winter officially begins in just over an hour across the United States, and across the northern hemisphere in fact. How But we have to look upstream from where Lucy is in Denver, and I'm

going to bring you into Montana to show you exactly how cold it has been. We're talking about temperatures dropping a whopping 26 degrees in three minutes' time as this arctic cold front moved through just moments ago. That is incredible. That's coming out of Dylan, Montana, and that's basically where the cold front is located.

So, we'll give you a perspective of what it looks like in Jackson, Wyoming for instance. Cold front just about to reach this location, and Denver, you heard Lucy mention it a moment ago. Could be the coldest in over 30 years. National Weather Service coming out of Denver, talking about how this will bring life threatening windchills. Well, here's the proof -- 50 degrees right now. It'll be 15 below zero by tomorrow morning. We're expecting temperatures to drop rapidly in the coming hours -- Victor.

BLACKWELL: 26 degrees in three minutes is unbelievable.

VAN DAM: Three minutes.

BLACKWELL: Derek Van Dam, watching the storm for us. Thank you.

In just a few days, the public will have access to former President Donald Trump's tax returns. A House committee decided to release six years of records. A member of that committee joins me next.

[15:40:00]

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BLACKWELL: The January 6th committee is expected to publish its final text today. The culmination of more than 1,000 interviews about the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2020 -- 2021 I should say. And why they believe the former president should be criminally liable for his role in the riots. CNN CNN's senior crime reporter Katelyn Polantz joins me now. So, what will you be paying attention to most?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, Victor, we had the summary on Monday that set us up to what we're looking for today. And in that summary that the House Select Committee released, they basically wrote a grand finale about their concerns and the witnesses they were paying closest attention to, and the testimony that was really most important to them.

One of the areas that they said was most important was everything that they were told about president Donald Trump's desire to travel to the Capitol on January 6th because they say that all of that testimony bears on Trump's intent around what was happening in the riot that day. So that's what they're identifying as important. That seems to be an area we should be looking for.

And they also point out the specific witnesses who spoke to Trump wanting to go to the White House and making that very known among White House staff and even security around them. The people that they identify as people who would have spoken about this would be Cassidy Hutchinson, Kayleigh McEnany, the Press Secretary of the White House at the time, secret service agents, other White House staff, Metropolitan Police, at least one person from that police force. But they also contrast that with what others told them, and they point out that the White House chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows wrote in a book downplaying Trump's wish to go to the White House saying it wasn't a real thing.

And they do point out that there was a transcript that they have that could be released at some time from Tony Ornato who worked for Meadows at the time that Ornato was one of the people who also downplayed Trump's wish.

So, they do want the public to be able to look at these transcripts and compare them. We're not exactly sure when each transcript will become available to us, but we will be looking for that. And as we're waiting for this hundreds of pages, the House Republicans are also releasing their report that is coming out now. It's largely about security failures at the Capitol around January 6th -- Victor.

BLACKWELL: I know you'll be looking through that. Katelyn Polantz, thank you very much.

Well, just days from now the American public is expected to have a clearer picture of former President Trump's tax liabilities. The Democratic led House Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years of his federal tax returns. Its report revealed that Trump did not pay any federal taxes during his last year in office. Even more notable, the committee said the IRS failed to properly audit the former president's tax while he was in office. Trump was audited one year between 2015 and 2020, and committee declared the presidential audit program failed to work as intended.

Stacy Plaskett is Democratic House delegate and member of the Ways and Means Committee. She joins me now. It is good to have you back. Let me start here with -- I've read kind of a headline from this summary report. What happens now? What's next?

REP. STACY PLASKETT (D-VI): Well, as you see, we will see later today the Ways and Means Committee members having released the joint report, the joint tax committees report as well as our own report. Right now, our staff is working fiercely on the redactions of those taxes and those will be released in several days. We've done our job.

[15:45:00]

We are also of course, looking forward to see what should be done moving forward. Know that the mandatory audit of presidential records is by regulation, not by law. So just yesterday it was introduced into the House and it will be marked up and we believe hopefully going to the floor. A bill which makes it mandatory for a president and vice president to have their taxes audited. You know, this mandatory audit we saw was absolutely broken, and the one audit that they decided to do has still not been completed, and that was only begun at the time that the chairman Neal put in the request to have inspection of this audit program.

BLACKWELL: Do you think there's any cooperation, are you seeing any cooperation from your Republican counterparts on the committee that if it doesn't get done, this Congress, that they'll pick up any of this as it relates to the presidential audit program in the next Congress?

PLASKETT: Well, Republicans -- some are signaling that they are, in fact, concerned about this. But what we are also have concern with is the fact that for almost a decade, Republicans when they were in power, gutted the funding for the IRS, and have said that they planned to do the same when they take control of the House. That is why the primary reasons we believe that this audit program was in fact broken. Because there are specialist auditors which are needed to audit tax returns of really complex individuals.

One of my colleagues, Stephen Horsford talked about the fact -- and staff brought this to our attention on a number of occasions we've seen this. That regular citizens, everyday Americans get audited at a much higher rate than those millionaires and billionaires in our country. Why? Because it's easier to audit an individual who's doing a simple tax return as compared to those who use aggressive tax strategies as well as have complex taxes to review.

BLACKWELL: So, you do believe that this was about not having the specialist, not having the resources. This was not intentionally slow walk during the Trump administration, an audit of the Trump tax returns.

PLASKETT: We don't know. I can tell you what factors were already there that caused -- there might have been some difficulty. But listen, you know, they did not even attempt to begin doing this until they knew that there was scrutiny by the Ways and Means Committee four years ago to begin looking at this. That is kind of spurious and makes one wonder what was the intention of those individuals in charge of this?

BLACKWELL: Listen here to Kevin Brady, ranking Republican on House Ways and Means.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KEVIN BRADY (R-TX): Going forward, the majority chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee will have nearly unlimited power to target and make public the tax returns of private citizens, political enemies, business and labor leaders, or even the returns of Supreme Court justices themselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLACKWELL: So, lest the slippery slope argument from Congressman Brady, what do you think about the idea of seeing the tax returns of Supreme Court justices? Is that some degree of transparency that you think the American people deserve?

PLASKETT: I don't know, and you know, I was very reticent to releasing this individual President Trump's tax returns. However, seeing the amount of discrepancies, the amount of issues that we were able to find that the Joint Committee on Taxation was able to find from just a review of the audit process, really made me believe that the report that we put forward would not have been believed unless it was attached to the underlying documents, the underlying evidence, which, in fact, were the tax returns. To show what an absolute -- the fact that this program was dead.

But I think it's kind of interesting that the Republicans would say that we're setting precedent when we know that they went after individuals like Lois Lerner and others to release their taxes in the past.

You just have people know that this was not about any particular individual. This is about the president who has enormous power. Who has the ability to direct branches of government to do things, to direct foreign leaders. It's important that we know that he has not had conflict of interest, nor is he getting pecuniary gain from the work that he's doing as president. Unlike any other individual in our country, or in fact, in the world. And up until president Trump, all of our presidents have, in fact, from Ford moving forward, released their tax returns, and they were subject to enormous scrutiny from government groups, from the media, from nonprofits as well as from special interest groups which we'll not see from this president.

[15:50:40]

BLACKWELL: And former President Trump said for a long time, he was under audit, we know now, at least through the IRS, that program that was not happening. Delegate Stacey Plaskett, thank you so much for being with me.

All right, in just minutes, President Biden and Zelenskyy they will hold a joint press conference from the White House. All ahead of Zelenskyy's address to a joint meeting of Congress. We have much more on the historic visit ahead.

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BLACKWELL: Dionne Warwick is a music icon with 56 worldwide hits, six Grammy awards and one extraordinary legacy.

[15:55:00]

She brings her exclusive story to CNN in the new film "DON'T MAKE ME OVER" premiering New Year's Day at 9:00 p.m.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Dionne Warwick, one of the great female singers of all time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Dionne was the first African American woman to win a Grammy in the pop category.

DIONNE WARWICK, SINGER: The music I was singing, there's nothing like anything that any of them were singing.

The legacy in my family, music, pure and simple, music.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: "DIONNE WARWICK, DON'T MAKE ME OVER," premieres New Year's Day at 9:00 on CNN.

BLACKWELL: Looking forward to that. "THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER" starts after a short break.

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