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Special Counsel Subpoenas Former VP Mike Pence About January 6th Attack; More Than 22,000 Dead as Workers Continue to Find Survivors; 2 Dead, including a Child, After Car Rams People at Jerusalem Bus Stop; U.S. Officials Believe Chinese President Unaware of Order to Send Spy Balloon. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired February 10, 2023 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:40]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Very good Friday morning to you. I'm Jim Sciutto.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Friday, not a day too soon. I'm Erica Hill. Good to have you with us this morning.

A significant milestone to tell you about in the Justice Department's two-year criminal investigation into the January 6th insurrection. Former vice president Mike Pence subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating former president Donald Trump and his role in the attack on the Capitol. Just ahead, we'll take a closer look at what kind of information the special counsel and what to get from the former VP.

SCIUTTO: Plus, in the midst of so much devastation there are at least a few miraculous stories of survival in Turkey after that massive earthquake. A family of six, two parents and their four children, together, lifted from the rubble after being buried for nearly 102 hours. Hope for finding more people alive dwindling, though. The death toll has climbed above 22,000 people. Those who have survived are now facing what officials call a, quote, "secondary disaster." The humanitarian crisis growing, the weather is extremely cold there, CNN is right in the midst of it.

We do begin this morning with the special counsel investigating Donald Trump now issuing a subpoena to former vice president Mike Pence. CNN senior legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid is here with more.

Paula, was this expected?

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: It was.

SCIUTTO: How significant?

REID: Yes, we knew this was likely coming because we know they've been in negotiations for months, the Pence team and the Justice Department, and these negotiations began before Jack Smith was even appointed. And we knew that Pence had signaled a willingness to at least provide some information and the fact that there's a subpoena doesn't necessarily mean that there is an impasse. We've seen a lot of witnesses who would prefer to be subpoenaed so it does not appear that they are voluntarily testifying against the former president.

But I do expect there will be some limits on what he is willing to provide. There are some legitimate questions, Jim, about executive privilege when it comes to conversations between a vice president and a president. But he did make it a little more difficult because he wrote about a lot of the things they're going to want to ask him about in his memoir, right? Conversations he had with Trump. The pressure campaign that he was facing leading up to January 6th and the events of January 6th itself.

Now, the former president has signaled that at this point his team does not intend to get involved in this, but it's a great reminder the investigation, the special counsel probes, these are active and ongoing. We've learned that special counsel Jack Smith also recently subpoenaed Trump's former National Security adviser, Robert O'Brien. Investigators also spoke with his former acting Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.

If you talked to former President Trump's lawyers they would really like you to believe that this investigation is all wrapped up, it's over, there will be a press conference any day, but clearly we see from our reporting and these subpoenas that that's not the case.

SCIUTTO: Well, it's a Washington phenomenon, isn't it, to write about something in your book but refuse to testify without a subpoena.

(LAUGHTER)

REID: So Washington, right?

SCIUTTO: Yes. Paula Reid, thanks so much.

HILL: Joining us now to discuss CNN chief political correspondent and anchor of CNN's "STATE OF THE UNION" Dana Bash and former federal prosecutor Shan Wu.

Good to have both of you with us this morning. You know, as we look at this, there's not only a subpoena that we've learned about, of course, Shan, for the former vice president but also as of course Paula just pointed out Robert O'Brien, Chad Wolf. When you look at what we do know publicly, what has increased in terms of the knowledge that we have publicly, does this give you an indication of where things may be headed?

SHAN WU, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Well, only in the sense that it's probably more towards the end of the investigation stage than the middle, let's say, because these are folks who are higher up and you want to kind of work your way up the ladder towards them. So I don't know that we can say whether it's headed for indictment or not. I mean, from the public reporting it seems like there's plenty of evidence for indictment.

But these are the sorts of folks you would want to subpoena towards the end of the investigation for a couple of reasons. One, offensively for the prosecutors they could provide incriminating evidence against Trump because they are close to him and presumably talking to him about these subjects. Two, you also want to do it from a defensive posture because you want to lock them in so they can't change their stories later to be more helpful towards the target.

And also you want to preview whatever they want to say in case it is defensive. I know Pence had previously made some statements along the lines of maybe Trump just got bad legal advice. So that sort of thing you want to know that ahead of time if they're going to say that and lock in the version of it so it doesn't get worse for you as a prosecutor later.

[09:05:03]

SCIUTTO: Dana, Paula Reid was telling me that the Trump camp's view of this is, yes, it may be moving along and getting closer to the end here. Their expectation, there's going to be a press conference at some point saying that Trump behaved badly, but there is no evidence to indict. Is that the view you hear from Trump camp as well?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: That's the wishful thinking from Trump camp, no question about it, because it is so unprecedented that their hope is that he will fall on, frankly, some good luck like he has in so many of these horrible situations that he has put himself in.

What is interesting about what Paula said with regard to the immediate question about his former vice president, Mike Pence, and getting the subpoena in that there had been negotiations for a very long time between Pence and his legal team and the special counsel, that they clearly just hit a wall. And I'm told that this is something that the former vice president did not invite when it comes to a subpoena with eagerness.

Yes, they understood because they understand how this works, that a subpoena would likely happen, if, in fact, these negotiations broke down, but the notion of sort of putting out there that Mike Pence is not eager to comply with the subpoena is very important politically because this is a man who is very, very actively considering another run in a Republican Party where they -- there is still a lot of support for his former boss who, of course, is also running.

HILL: And it provides some sort of political cover to a certain extent, right, for the former vice president to say, well, you know, they subpoenaed me, I didn't go forth willingly. To Dana's point there about hitting a wall, Shan -- sorry, Dana, go ahead.

BASH: I just want to say, and in this case I think both things can be true.

HILL: Yes.

BASH: They hit a wall and it's better for him politically.

HILL: Absolutely. So when you look at that, though, Shan, if the former vice president decides he does not want to comply with this subpoena and then we end up in the courts, how long could that drag out? WU: That could drag out for a while. I think legally he is on the

losing end of that argument if he is trying to invoke executive privilege which seems to be the only thing he could invoke other than perhaps a Fifth Amendment issue, but it could drag out for a while.

And to Dana's point as well, I would say that not only is it politically smart for him to do this but legally I can see why as a former vice president and as a perhaps future presidential contender they want to stop this precedent from having a vice president actually subpoenaed. They would have rather have arranged, perhaps, a voluntary submission, but holding that aside, they don't want to look like he is to too eager to cooperate. But legally speaking it would be better if they could have arranged something voluntarily and avoided the subpoena, I think.

SCIUTTO: Shan, in your experience, you've handled your share of politically sensitive cases but it's hard to think of a precedent for this. You have a former president now running for office who is under investigation here, they subpoenaed his former vice president who may also soon announce his own campaign for that office. How does the special counsel, how does an attorney general handle those political sensitivities going forward?

WU: Honestly they shouldn't. They should just do as Merrick Garland always says he's going to, which is just to follow the facts and the law. And the best way for them to be apolitical in a situation like this is to not try to balance the political sensitivities. I think sometimes looking in from the outside I think Garland has tried too hard to balance that, ends up making the Justice Department look political.

He's given themselves some distance from it by appointing a special counsel, and really for Jack Smith and for Garland the best thing to do is to proceed as though this is any other case and not try to weigh those political sensitivities.

SCIUTTO: Boy, it's a lot. No question. Dana Bash, Shan Wu, thanks so much to both of you.

BASH: Thank you.

HILL: Let's bring you to Turkey now for an update there. The country's president now calling the aftermath of that massive earthquake the disaster of the century. This morning he visited the provinces which have been hardest hit, speaking with survivors at makeshift refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless. They are of course facing bitter cold, lack of proper sanitation, medical resources. The list goes on.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Genuine questions about the Turkish president's leadership.

[09:10:00]

Syria's president Bashar al-Assad took his own trip to a hospital in Aleppo today visiting some of the wounded. Nearly 80,000 people in both countries injured in the quake.

CNN's Nick Paton Walsh went to a field hospital in Turkey to see how medical staff are treating patients in just desperate circumstances.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: Jim, Erica, the machinery of government really here much more in evidence as we saw in the helipad outside one of the major hospitals here in Antakya. The cleanup, you can see behind me, continuing, but it is so often now dead bodies they're retrieving, but at that helipad, we saw the fact there are still it seems some extraordinary moments of relief here through all the desperation.

A 3-year-old girl on a stretcher along with her 2-month-old sister we understood from rescuers being put on to a helicopter there, flown away from hospitals here that are overstretched, also some of them intensely damaged and lacking in power, to other parts of Turkey for treatment. And then another series of ambulances. At times the helicopters having to stop taking off, wait a bit longer so another ambulance could deliver its load on board.

One helicopter we saw two infants, one stretcher brought up, we thought it's extraordinary how small the individual on it seemed to be, and we realized in fact there were two infants on board being put on to the helicopter. But the desperation here beginning, I think, to mount as those living here look around and realize this rubble, the acrid smoke from fires burned to keep themselves warm, often burning whatever they can find, laid with chemicals, to try and keep themselves warm in this lack of heat is where their lives will be over the weeks and months ahead.

And that's the enormous challenge from government here amid the extraordinarily high and fast-rising death toll. The number of injured, the utter devastation around to provide some vague sense of direction or future in the weeks ahead. But for now I think people coming to terms with how the window for survival is likely closing. There are still startling moments in which people are pulled from that wreckage, but how the load ahead is utterly dark and irredeemable -- Jim, Erica.

HILL: That's just awful in that scene behind Nick, right? We've been seeing it for days and yet it still is almost unbelievable.

Well, if you would like to help those impacted by the earthquake, just log on to CNN.com/impact. You will find there a list of vetted organizations working on the ground in both Turkey and in Syria.

SCIUTTO: And new this morning, at least two people are dead including a child, another child in critical condition after a car rammed into people at a bus stop in Jerusalem.

HILL: CNN's Hadas Gold is in Jerusalem live this hour.

Police initially I know said that it was a ramming terror attack. Is that still the way they're describing it at this hour, Hadas?

HADAS GOLD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Erica. They are saying that this is a terror attack. This happened in a neighborhood northeast Jerusalem called Ramot. We know that a 6-year-old child was killed as well as a 20-year-old man in this attack and at least five others are injured including, as you noted, a child in critical condition.

The suspect was actually killed pretty soon after he ran into this bus stop by what police say was an off-duty police officer. Police are telling me that the suspect is a man in his early 30s from East Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already called on the suspect's home to be sealed and demolished. This is something Israeli authorities often do in response to these types of attacks.

Now no group, no militant group has claimed responsibility, although Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, has praised the attack. Already of course, Israeli police, authorities, have been on high alert. This has been a very deadly cycle of violence for both Israeli and Palestinians and this actually took place not far from that attack on the synagogue exactly two weeks ago. So people already on high alert and we're just not even a week out of Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visit to this region. He kept senior staff on here to try to continue dialogue, but clearly a lot of work left to do -- Jim, Erica.

SCIUTTO: No question. The tensions there, the violence, alarmingly high.

Hadas Gold, thanks so much.

Coming up next, the FBI has begun its investigation into the contents, the technology on that Chinese surveillance balloon. U.S. officials now believe it may have been launched without the signoff from the Chinese President Xi Jinping. That's at least a working theory.

HILL: Plus President Biden and Florida Senator Rick Scott continue to spar over Medicare and Social Security. We will do a little fact check of the -- accusations, rather, they're hurling at one another.

And a bit later no crypto ads this year, but there are plenty of other Super Bowl commercials getting some buzz. We'll take a look at some of the best and the worst of these early releases and maybe a few trends to watch for.

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[09:19:12]

HILL: This morning we are learning Pentagon and State Department officials believe Chinese President Xi Jinping may not have known about Beijing's suspected spy balloon and its mission. President Biden now saying that balloon was a violation of international law, but not a major security breach.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The total amount of intelligence gathering that's going on by every country around the world is overwhelming, and the idea that a balloon could traverse great American air space is -- anyway, it's not a major breach.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Joining us now CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand.

And Natasha, those words from the president there, not a major breach, it's consistent with what the Pentagon was saying earlier on, saying that this balloon had surveillance capabilities but not significantly greater than, say, satellites that are flying over.

[09:20:06]

And yet we're learning new details about its capabilities. What are officials telling you about how seriously they're taking this?

NATASHA BERTRAND, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Exactly, right, Jim. So essentially what we're learning is that the balloon was capable of intercepting communications, right. It had the signals collection capability, but officials also don't believe that that was all that sophisticated, especially because the United States actually did take steps to try to prevent the balloon from being able to intercept any communications by, for example, avoiding any unencrypted coms in the vicinity of the balloon, covering up certain sensitive areas that the balloon would fly over.

So they believe that this balloon even though it had the ability to take photos in the form of 360-degree view that it was not able to see or hear very much. Now we are also learning that the U-2 spy planes that were sent up were able to gather quite a bit of intelligence about what this balloon was capable of. And so that has informed a lot of what we've heard over the last day or so about what the spy balloon actually was able to do.

The FBI, which actually has the physical object, they have not been able to glean all that much because half a of it is actually still underwater. The payload, where those -- the mass of the electronic equipment is, that is still being recovered. So it remains to be seen what they can learn from the physical object, but what they know about the balloon and the fact that it's part of this massive fleet that's, you know, covered over 40 countries across five continents, they are very confident that this was used for surveillance and not for weather.

SCIUTTO: And picking that thing up off the ocean floor, that's going to be a big step for investigators.

Natasha Bertrand, thanks so much.

Joining us now "Washington Post" columnist Josh Rogin. He's the author of "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century."

So, first, Josh, if I can, to the significance of this. I mean, you do have two fundamentally different views here, right, that this is an escalation both in terms of China's capabilities but also its willingness to challenge the U.S. on its soil, and the other view as you heard from President Biden that this is not a significant jump beyond what it and other countries already do. What's your view?

JOSH ROGIN, COLUMNIST, WASHINGTON POST: Right, well, it's very clear, Jim, that the Biden administration is working hard to downplay this incident because they want to resume their previously pursued path of warming U.S.-China relations and they want to get the visit back on track and they want to minimize the impact of this crisis, but their statements deserve some scrutiny. I mean, for example, how can they say that Xi Jinping may have known.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

ROGIN: The other way to say that is that he may have not known. In other words, they don't know. OK.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

ROGIN: So we have to admit that we just don't know. And in the end it doesn't matter because he is responsible for what his military does. And the second thing that I find a little bit troubling with the Biden administration's message on this frankly is that the message that, oh, we're pretty sure they didn't get anything good. But as Natasha just expertly pointed out, most of the thing is still at the bottom of the ocean. So how can they say that?

And the third thing that I think is really a little problematic, and this is where they're getting a lot of flak on the Hill is that they say they waited 10 days to shoot it down so they could aid recovery efforts. So, again, the things at the bottom of the ocean, most of it, they got the nylon but not the electronics. So there is one part of this where you have to just have a heavy grain of salt. The other part is that, you know --

SCIUTTO: But before we -- a lot to digest there. I mean, one thing they did say is they didn't want this thing falling on people's homes, you know, on the soil and they were able to jam some of these capabilities but still an open question.

I do want to ask you about this initial assessment as described of Xi's knowledge of this. Xi has exercised more control over the People's Liberation Army as he's consolidated power in China, extended his term, president for life, et cetera. Is it plausible to you that the PLA would in effect defy the Chinese president and do this as something of a freelance operation?

ROGIN: No, it's much less likely that somebody went rogue in the Chinese military. In that system that would mean jail or death or worse. Now of course it's possible that Xi Jinping is not tracking every balloon from his presidential conclave.

SCIUTTO: Right.

ROGIN: But the bottom line is that he initiated this program, it's an expansive program. It's not just one balloon, it's dozens of balloons covering dozens of countries and five continents. And there is a reason that he's doing that, it's because he is weaponizing near space. This is the important part. This is the part that we have to focus on after the crisis. It's above where the planes go but below where the satellites go.

And that's a vulnerable space for us. Because as we saw, we don't really have a lot of good capabilities to deal with it. So even if they're doing the same thing as the satellites, they're doing it in a different area. And while we have a lot of stuff to deal with satellites, we don't have a lot of stuff to deal with balloons as we just found out and that's part of Xi's plan to expand Chinese military capabilities and spy on us.

SCIUTTO: OK.

ROGIN: And prepare for an invasion of Taiwan that we can't thwart because if we put down all the satellites they'll have a bunch of balloons flying around.

SCIUTTO: Yes. That's a genuine risk. Now, it does appear that the Biden administration does not want to blow up U.S.-China relations over this, but it was also our understanding that China wanted this summit with Antony Blinken, that they want to revive their economy post-COVID.

[09:25:05]

What happens to that meeting? Does it come to be?

ROGIN: Right. Well, it just shows you how fragile this reset is. I mean, the Chinese have an interest in a reset, we have an interest in a reset, but nobody wants to blink, nobody wants to back down. So any little thing can have a dangerous dilatory effect. Now of course this meeting will be rescheduled and they'll make another attempt. But again if the relationship is so fragile that a balloon can fracture it, you have to ask yourself, well, are there bigger problems in the U.S.-China relationship than balloons?

And, you know, we can have a meeting, the meetings are fine, diplomacy is good necessarily, but there is no willingness on the Chinese side to address the real concerns of the international community about its behavior. We're talking about the military expansion, the genocide, the internal repression, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, the Uyghurs, all of it. So yes, I'm sure the Chinese want a meeting, but they haven't shown any willingness to actually do the things that they would need to do to improve the atmosphere so that we could actually avoid the cold war and have peace and harmony in the 21st century.

SCIUTTO: Yes. They've got far bigger fish to fry from their perspective. Josh Rogin, thanks so much.

ROGIN: Anytime.

HILL: Just ahead, a CNN fact check. You've been hearing this week from President Biden talking about some Republicans who want Social Security and Medicare cuts. Just how many? Who are they? And you've heard the pushback from Republican Senator Rick Scott who says the president is lying. We will take a look at what's real. The facts next.

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