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Winter Storm Brings Ice, Sleet and Snow to South and Central U.S.; Rep. George Santos (R-NY) Says He Wants Off Committees Until Issues Are Resolved; New York Times Reports, Videos Contradict Initial Police Reporter in Nichols' Case. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired January 31, 2023 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:04]

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Schools are closed along with major roads in some areas. And officials are urging people to stay home. As of this hour, more than 1,000 flights already canceled, the number of delays as well. We are going to take you to some of the most impacted areas ahead.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Plus, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in the West Bank this morning as he finishes up a three-day visit to the Middle East during separate meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Blinken called on both sides to ease tensions after an outbreak of deadly violence over the weekend not seen in years.

Back here in the U.S., two more Memphis police officers have been relieved of duty, this as part of the ongoing investigation into the killing of Tyre Nichols. New details this morning about how the initial police report contradicts so clearly all we saw in those videos, it is alarming.

We do begin, though, with the dangerous weather which has turned deadly now in Texas, one person dead after a ten-car pile-up in Austin.

HILL: CNN Senior National Correspondent Ed Lavandera joining us now live from Dallas. Well, the weather has turned, my friend, in the last hour. Emergency officials must be warning folks definitely not the time to go outside now.

ED LAVANDERA, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Things have gotten real now, guys. We are just getting -- I feel like I'm getting pelted by an onslaught of snow cone machine ice just getting thrown at you, and it is starting to hurt. So, if I stumble through the live shot, it is because every one of these pellets of ice is actually starting to sting on my ears.

But you can see the roads that have changed dramatically here in the last hour as the sleet and the freezing rain is now starting to fall at a more steady pace here in the Dallas area. And this is what the forecasters have been warning people about for the last 12 hours or so, and really urging people the stay off of the roadways, which because of the office closings, and the school cancelations across the region, you are not seeing that many people on the roadway.

But it is treacherous. You can see here on this pass up to the highway interchange here, there are several cars there struggling to make their way up to the hill as the icy conditions continue to worsen, and it has become deadly. In Austin, we are hearing reports of one fatality and the winter weather warnings, and the advisory stretching from San Antonio all of the way up to Oklahoma and Arkansas as well.

And these are the kinds of conditions that we are going to continue to see throughout the day and well into tomorrow as well. In fact, some forecasters are saying that the worst of this might not be over until Thursday morning. So, that is what people here in the North Texas area are dealing with as these conditions continue to worsen, and we are seeing the brunt of it now, guys.

HILL: That is really something. All right, Ed, good luck out there, my friend. I think we need to get you a hat.

LAVANDERA: Yes. I'm going to get one, actually.

HILL: Okay, good. Ed is going to get his hat. We are going to bring in CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers. It is dangerous, as we're seeing, it's turning, as Ed said. And we know it's that one death in Austin, but that is just a concern, obviously, what it could mean leading throughout the rest of the day.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: And I have news for Ed, it gets worse, probably three times worse about three miles to your west and it is heading your way. So, an umbrella or inside of the truck, Ed, because it is about to get really, really real here, at least a half inch of ice.

Now, the good news for Ed and in the area around that, it's kind of North Dallas, almost toward Richardson, is that a lot of it is sleet. Sleet has a little bit more traction than the wet ice, that freezing rain. Freezing rain is rain that comes down as liquid, hits the ground and freezes. Sleet freezes on the way down. The farther you get to the north, the more likely you are to get to that sleet.

Now, this is not a snowstorm. This is an ice storm, ice storm warnings here, and why? Why would it sleet or why would it rain at 26? Because it isn't 26 at 2,000 feet in the sky. It is 33 up there. It is liquid. And then it falls down into this very shallow layer of cold air and then you get the ice, the ice into Dallas, the ice causing the accidents. This was freezing rain.

You can see it looks like black ice. Now, the roads are turning white, especially where Ed is. This is the swath, though, and hours and hours more of this. Not only that. I am going to change colors and get you to what the real radar looks like. There is convection in here. Not only is it sleeting but it is lightning as well. Thunder sleet out there at this point in time, and that starts to pile up very, very quickly. That entire system moves to the northeast.

This is the one that came through yesterday. This is the one that came -- will come through today, coming through Dallas right now. [10:05:01]

But it will move on up into Arkansas and into places like Kentucky, Paducah, Evansville, you are about to get into middle of it, also into Arkansas, right through Hot Springs, all the way up across the Ozarks, very difficult travel today.

Then there is the break, but then look what happens to the west of Dallas. Another batch of this is comes in for tomorrow, right on top of the same places. And I just looked. There is really not very many power outages out there, like less than 1,000 in Texas. I think that number is going to go up significantly if we get this freezing rain that sticks to the power lines, sticks to the branches and does not just bounce off like it was bouncing off of Ed.

SCIUTTO: Wow. I mean, this is Texas. We are in Washington. We have not gotten any snow this year, way up here in northeast. Chad Myers, thanks for watching all of it for us.

MYERS: You bet.

SCIUTTO: All right. To Capitol Hill now, and this just into CNN, embattled Congressman George Santos, a Republican from New York, is now saying that he himself wants off all of his committees until his issues, among them, many lies on his resume about his experience, are resolved. The New York Republican has been under fire for those lies about his work and education history, also hard questions about exactly how his campaign was funded.

HILL: CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju joining us now from Capitol Hill. It is interesting, too, that this revelation comes after that meeting he had with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy yesterday. What more do we know more about this plan moving forward and the decision?

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. This is first sign that George Santos has recognized that he could be in some trouble here. And remember, he has been defiant all along, saying that he has done nothing wrong, he has got nothing to hide, saying he would not resign moving forward as a normal member of Congress despite admitting to a number of lies, facing investigations, questions about his campaign finance.

New revelations have seem to come out almost daily that have hurt this embattled Congressman and threatened his career here in Congress, now telling his conference behind closed doors that he will not going to serve on two key committees, committee assignments that were actually given to him by the speaker of the House along with his top allies despite the pushback and concerns that he would sit on these committees.

He made very clear just moments ago to his conference that he would step aside until these legal issues are resolved. That's the House Small Committee, as well as the House Science Committee. Neither of those committees he plans to participate in until these matters have resolved to his satisfaction. And he told the speaker of the speaker about this decision last night, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I just caught up with, indicated how Santos' message was received.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): He just felt like that there was so much drama really over the situation, and especially what we are doing to work to remove Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee. He said that this was a decision that he made on his own.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Now, that was in reference to the effort by the House Republicans to try to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from the House foreign Affairs Committee, the Democrat from Minnesota, over past remarks. There have been criticism from the Democrats that they are allowing Santos to serve on these committees and trying to remove Omar from hers, but Santos making clear to his members that he doesn't want to undercut their efforts to try to remove Omar. That requires a vote of the full House.

But, nevertheless, movement here from Santos stepping, I mean, all these swirling questions about his past, even as members from his own district, voters from his own district want him out, according to a new poll that was released today, Santos says he will to continue to serve just not on those committee assignments that he was awarded from the speaker just a couple of weeks ago. Guys?

HILL: Certainly an interesting development. Manu, I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Joining us now to discuss, Errol Louis, Political Anchor for Spectrum News, Kirsten Powers, Columnist for USA Today. Great to see you both this morning.

Errol, as we look at what transpired and apparently what happened in this meeting, one would guess that some of those came out of that meeting Kevin McCarthy, what does it change that it's George Santos making the decision versus Kevin McCarthy publicly making the decision?

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good morning, Erica. It says among other things that Congressman Santos realizes he is in more of a pickle than he could necessarily talk his way out of. The reports continue to multiply. The reports are getting more serious. They're going away from things that -- sort of personal items, like when you lived in Brazil or whether or not you went to this or that college.

And now, it's getting into territory, like did you have fake donors, did you assign contributions to people who have never heard of you and did not want to contribute to your campaign, federal records, real, serious problems. And though the federal probe is serious, as is the state probe going on here in New York, not something he can continue to just kind of run from reporters about. So, I think he is trying to clear his schedule a little bit. He's going to have to talk a lot with his lawyers, accountants and possibly with investigators in the near future.

[10:10:00]

SCIUTTO: Kirsten Powers, a tale of two different political strategies. You have President Biden in New York touting infrastructure gains from that bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in the last term. You have Republicans on the economics issues, pushing or at least holding the threat of defaulting on debt to get some budget cuts going forward. Given the results of the midterm election, so which is the smart political strategy?

KIRSTEN POWERS, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think you know the ideal would be if we could return to the old days of raising debt limit just being a kind of nonevent, right? It is for money that has already been spent, and we have to always explain this over and over again, we keep going through this. It is for money that has already spent. So, it is not really supposed to be a negotiating tactic. It is just the job of the Congress to raise the debt limit. And we need to get back to doing that.

And I think that, you know, Biden has said that he won't negotiate with them, though he has asked for them to basically send over what they are thinking. But I think that, you know, the people who ultimately will be held responsible for this if it is not lifted will be Congress because it is their job. At the same time, Joe Biden as the president and what happens to the economy matters very much in terms of what people think of the president.

So, he is in a very difficult situation, especially because Kevin McCarthy made it as part of negotiations to become speaker, he said that he would not take up the debt limit without essentially having cuts going along with it and having some sort of negotiation with the White House to make cuts in the budget. So, I think that it has to be handled very delicately and to the extent that Biden can keep the focus on the fact that this is their job, I think that that is important.

HILL: And that focus really seems to be, Errol, too, a push for a list, right? So, give me the list of what you want to cut. Kevin McCarthy have that list at the meeting. Is that working for the Democrats as a messaging standpoint that, okay, maybe if you something you want to actively discuss, we can do that, but without those line items, Errol, we can't. Is it effective?

LOUIS: Well, look, it is a reasonable thing to say. But, of course, the Democrats, President Biden chief among them, they are making that offer with a great big smile, Erica, because they know, as anybody who looks at this issue knows, that you cannot move the needle on the federal budget without touching entitlements like Medicaid or Medicare or the defense budget. And all of those are third rails for the Republicans who claim that they want these deep cuts.

So, you take those three off the table, it gets to be very difficult to see how can you really cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget. And I don't think they have a list of cuts. They don't. We'll see how this works.

If they fall into the trap of saying that they want to tamper with Medicare or Social Security in any way, shape, form, it will be the biggest gift they could have given to the Democrats going into 2024. President Biden knows that. I assume that Speaker McCarthy knows that. We will see who blinks first.

SCIUTTO: So, Kirsten Powers, as our M.J. Lee reported last hour, part of President Biden's intention with highlighting infrastructure wins is laying the groundwork for potential 2024 announcement of a run. Trump has already announced his intentions. Who is more likely to be their party's nominee, Trump or Biden or both of them?

POWERS: I mean, I would probably say Biden has a better chance of being the nominee if he chooses to run again since he is the president. I just think it is too early to say who is going to be the nominee on the Republican side. Donald Trump has had these events that have been in smaller venues. It seems sort of underwhelming, but nobody else has declared so we don't really have a race going on, right? We don't really have anything to prepare to and it is so early that I think that people just are not engaged enough.

HILL: Kristen Powers and Errol Louis, great to see you both this morning. Thank you.

LOUIS: Thanks.

POWERS: Thank you.

HILL: Still to come here, new details from The New York Times about the initial police report filed in Tyre Nichols' arrest. How the videos that have since been released of that violent encounter, how those videos directly contradict what the officers originally reported.

SCIUTTO: Yes, and what the video seems to show as well.

Plus, more developments in the hush money cases against former President Trump. Prosecutors are set to meet with the former publisher of the National Enquirer, what that means for the state and the future of that investigation.

And dangers of too much screen time for your infants, a new study highlighting the negative impact on your littlest one.

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[10:15:00]

HILL: New details this morning about what happened in Memphis, new details about the police report which was initially filed after the arrest and beating of Tyre Nichols, a police report that is seemingly easily contradicted by the video which has since been released. There is also new reporting from The New York Times, which saw a photo of the police report about what was filed.

SCIUTTO: Now, if you have seen the video, it shows the officers kicking, beating, shouting at Nichols, but that report reflects none of that, in the initial police report, instead casting Nichols as a violent suspect, claiming things like he reached for the officer's gun.

CNN's Nick Valencia joins us now. And, Nick, so many contradictions in that report, I mean, directly contracted by what we've seen on those videos.

[10:20:01]

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And that's right, Jim. And I was just messaging with the district attorney's office in Shelby County, and they verified what The New York Times is reporting is accurate. So, we here at CNN are also learning this that this new initial police report was directly contradicting what we all saw happened on the video.

It was written in the hours after the Tyre Nichols stop and makes no mention of these officers kicking or punching Tyre Nichols, had actually list him as violent and as the aggressor. And this initial police report says that Tyre Nichols, at one point, reached for an officer's gun. None of these things we saw transpire on the videos that were all released last week. It goes on to say that Tyre Nichols was violent was actually a suspect in an aggravated assault and lists one of these five former officers now charged with second-degree murder as a victim.

What we still don't know is who authored the police report in the police department. That is something that we are trying to figure out this morning. But we can verify from the district attorney's office that this New York Times report is correct.

All of this happening, meanwhile, as the fallout over Tyre Nichols' death continues. Three personnel with the Memphis Fire Department have now been terminated. They include those two EMTs that were put on administrative leave last week because of their inadequate assessment of Tyre Nichols when they got to the scene.

The fire department claims in their investigation that this personnel, we're told, that they were responding to a pepper spraying incident. We know it was much, much worse than that. But they said that the expectations of a fire department official were not met that day on January 7th, the day of Tyre Nichols' incident with police.

This as we're also learning of two other officers who were put on administrative leave at the same time as everyone else that we are learning about this week's later. It is a question that we directly asked the Memphis Police Department. They did not respond, but did point us to statement saying that they are committed to transparency and that we should all expect more personnel actions in the coming days. Jim, Erica?

SCIUTTO: Thanks. HILL: Wow. It does raise a lot of questions, though, that statement alone. Nick, I appreciate it.

Joining me now to discuss, Memphis Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas and Justin Hansford, Executive Director of the Thurgood Marshall Human Rights Center.

Councilwoman, I'd like to begin with you. Based on what we have just learned overnight here, not only these contradictions in that report that was initially filed, which has clearly contradicted by that very difficult video, which shows the beating of Mr. Nichols, but also the fact that there were seven officers initially placed on leave. And we were told, and the transparency has been touted, and we have discussed it over and over again that initial transparency, we were told it was five officers. What does this doing in terms of trust, in your view, of the transparency that has or has not been there from the police department?

MICHALYN EASTER-THOMAS, MEMPHIS CITY COUNCIL: Yes, Erica. We on the council experienced the same thing. We were told the same thing to the public before the release of the video, and even though council did get to view the footage before it was released. We have the same exact questions. And so we all are surprised and also discouraged that we were not given this information from the sea on how it will really play out in the true conception of justice throughout this case. And is there more that we don't know that is still unraveling from what we see in that footage?

HILL: Right. It absolutely leads to more questions. And just when we look at the fact that we've learned that these other two other officers who we now know about, making for a total of seven officers put who were on put leave at the same time, what was interesting is in the chief's interview with Don Lemon here on CNN live last Friday morning, she was clear in noting that the fact that the five officers who had been fired, who ultimately were later charged, the fact that they were also black, in her words, that meant that race is off the table. We now know that one of the two officers who, again, were put on leave at the exact same time, one of them we know is white. I wonder, Justin, do the chief's comments still hold up this morning?

PROF. JUSTIN HANSFORD, HOWARD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW: Well, thanks for inviting me. So, those comments never held up even on its face. We understood that it is very unlikely that a white young man would have received that sort of attack, and so race was a factor. But, of course, now with this added element of this seeming process of hiding the one police officer who was not black from the public in the beginning, it is a very problematic situation.

And this goes back to what we saw with the Derek Chauvin case. Once again, we had a huge gap between what was in the police report and it's the facts that later came out. So, this issue of believing police reports on their face has there immediately released is something we also need to reconsider.

HILL: And do we also just need to reconsider when we looking at each of the events? I mean, in some way, that was a much more convenient narrative, was it not, for people who wanted to take race out of the equation, the fact that, to your point, never was really out of the equation, but it did make it easier on its face, and I think that you know what I mean by that.

[10:25:04]

This does change all of that.

Why are we still at this point in this country? I know it's a tough question to answer, but we are still at this place where it is so uncomfortable to simply call out what is seen and what has a marked record here. It is still so uncomfortable to have that conversation that now we're raising questions about why didn't we know about those two other officers. And should part of that questioning be about one of those officer's race, because that then distorted an initial narrative? Justin, I mean, how do you begin that conversation?

HANSFORD: You know, one thing that I took away from this entire experience is that we know that police officers make an average of 50,000 stops a day, 18 million traffic stops per year. Stanford Policing Project proved that black drivers are 40 percent more often stopped than white drivers. So, race was always part of the conversation. And the idea that we could look at first the police officer who was sort of at the end of the trail and point of interaction, and look at the race of the individuals involved and think that tells the whole racial story is a misunderstanding. We have to look at the structures in the systems and not necessarily at the players in tone to understand how racial injustice is working in our country.

HILL: Part of the system, part of the structure that is unfortunately a part of all of this, too, is the repeated trauma, not just on the family, although that is a major part of it, understandably, but also on the broader community, I would say specifically on the -- and I recognize this is coming from a white woman, but I would think that specifically on the black community, Councilwoman, where there is this repeated trauma of the videos shown.

And I can't help but think back to Mrs. Wells. I was listening in the car, that there was a press conference on Friday afternoon before the video was released. And her words struck me because she said, I haven't even began -- didn't have the chance to grieve.

We ask so much of these families and we highlight their strength and their grace in this moment. I would think that the answer is no, but are giving them the space and the grace that they deserve to grieve, to mourn the fact that their loved one was brutality beaten and murdered, to allow them to be angry? How do we change that conversation so that we are also acknowledging that hurt and that pain, Councilwoman?

EASTER-THOMAS: Erica, I think you hit it right on the head with that. That answer is no, we have not given them the space, the privacy, the intimacy, anything, to be able to do anything with themselves, their families. We also learned that Tyre also had a small child. So, this is something that will forever be horribly etched in their minds as we think about, and as they think about policing, as they think about policing in Memphis, and as they think about justices and elected leaders.

I think that, moving forward, what we can do is when we are talking about how to go about legislation, how to go about moving forward. We can always, first and foremost, give our utmost respect and condolences and thank yous and apologies to the family and friends of Tyre Nichols. I think that if we make sure that we keep in the forefront, we can make sure that our efforts and actions are on line and that they are all going towards the same mission, even though we cannot Mr. Nichols back, even though we cannot even begin to fathom the hurt and the horror that they've experienced since January 7th. We can show them that we remember and that we are mourning and empathizing with them, and that, as community leaders, and speaking for myself as an elected official, our actions will only just follow that.

HILL: Councilwoman Michalyn Easter-Thomas, Justin Hansford, thank you both.

SCIUTTO: Such an important conversation.

Still ahead, former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker is set to meet with Manhattan prosecutors who are investigating former President Donald Trump, one of several signs the probe on that front and of the former president is escalating. The latest on that investigation, coming up.

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