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January 6th Report Focuses on Issues Beyond Trump; Schiff Downplays Tensions with Cheney; Gen X and Baby Boomers Living Along as they Age; Emily Rogalski is Interviewed about the Secrets of Superagers. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired November 28, 2022 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00]

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Documents and is clearly going to be impossible to include everything. So, we're seeing some tensions behind the scenes about this spill out into public view. This also happened with the public hearings when some people thought the committee was focusing too much on Trump. And yesterday, Representative Adam Schiff, he was on with our Dana Bash, and he says he wants the report to be as broad and as inclusive as possible. He was also clearly trying to project a unified front and tamp down reports of tensions and divisions within the committee saying that kind of thing is just not helpful.

So, this report, whatever it ends up being, it's expected by the end of the year.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Are we going to learn more about the involvement of lawmakers on Wednesday?

REID: That's a big question, Don. Representative Cheney previously said it will include information about members who ultimately refused to cooperate with investigators. You may remember that earlier this year the committee took an extraordinary step of sending subpoenas to the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and four other Republicans after they refused to cooperate voluntarily. Now, investigators never got to talk to them. But the committee did include some evidence about those lawmakers in the public hearings.

Now, these unprecedented moves will likely reverberate as Republicans take over the House shortly. And asked whether he would comply with a GOP subpoena in the new Congress, Schiff said he will have to consider the validity of that subpoena. Validity doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Don.

LEMON: OK. All right, Paula, thank you very much.

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: The current chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, he's disputing the report from "The Washington Post" that staffers on the committee are angry with Republican Liz Cheney for focusing so much of the report on Trump. They're worried, according to "The Post," that findings unrelated to Trump won't become public in the final report. This is what Schiff told our colleague Dana Bash yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA): I would like to see our report be as broad and inclusive as possible. We are discussing, as a committee, among the members what belongs in the body of the report, what belongs in the appendices of the report, what is beyond the scope of our investigation And we'll reach those decisions, you know, in a collaborative manner.

I think her role on the committee has been indispensable. I have tremendous respect for her and for Adam Kinzinger. They've shown a lot of courage and backbone. Something in very short supply in the GOP these days.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: Joining us now is Dana Bash.

So, Dana, obviously it's not helpful to Adam Schiff, to Liz Cheney, to the committee overall, to see these tensions spilling out into the public. But I wonder what you made of his answer and the concerns that they have about whether or not this is going to be too much focused on Trump and not the other findings that they've done with their investigative work.

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, can we just take a step back and note that the story and the discussion, it was a remarkable "Washington Post" story over the - over the weekend. But it's about whether Democrats are concerned that a January 6th report will be too focused on Donald Trump. I mean that just kind of gives you a sense of where this committee is, particularly when it comes to the two -- the only two Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

And - and what it says is that this is not something we've seen from this committee. Usually when there are committees investigating, or even frankly commissions, they are done in an evenly balanced bipartisan way, or at least close to it. That's not the case for various reasons, the most important reason is that Kevin McCarthy didn't want to put more Republicans on this - on this -- actually any Republicans on this committee. But because of that, what we have seen throughout the public hearings and even beforehand in the investigation is a pretty united front. Now that they're getting towards the end and they want the report to be sort of reflective and fulsome, at least a lot of committee staffers, that's why you're seeing the tensions play out. But it's pretty remarkable.

And, you're right, Adam Schiff definitely was trying to tamp that down, trying to present a unified front.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Dana, since we have you, I want to talk to you about the interview you did yesterday on "State of the Union" with Governor Asa -- of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, likely a 2024 presidential contender, a Republican, because Kaitlan was noting rightly so earlier the real silence from current Republican leadership in Congress right now to the dinner that former President Trump had with Kanye West and white nationalist and anti-Semite Nick Fuentes. You asked Governor Hutchinson about it. This is what he said. Let's play it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. ASA HUTCHINSON (R-AR): But, no, I don't think it's a good idea for a leader that's setting an example for the country or the party to meet with an avowed racist or anti-Semite. And so it's very troubling and it shouldn't happen and we need to avoid those kind of empowering the extremes. And when you meet with people, you empower. And that's what you have to avoid. You want to diminish their strength, not empower them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Good for them.

[08:35:01]

Will Kevin McCarthy echo that? Will other Republican leaders in Congress echo that?

BASH: That's a great question. So far, and it's really important to note, that that has not happened. Representative Comer was on "Meet the Press" yesterday. He was asked about it. He did denounce the notion of meeting with - with characters like - like these two, but that's it. And the fact that this is unique - I mean we saw -- you heard Asa Hutchinson, he was very strong yesterday. Chris Christie, another potential 2024 contender and a couple of others. The governor of the state of Florida, who is probably the most talked about for president in 2024, he's not said anything. Florida is where Mar-a-Lago is. And so the sound of silence, it largely is deafening, which was why it was remarkable and it shouldn't have been remarkable to hear Asa Hutchinson lean into the fact that this was absolutely wrong, absolutely wrong and kind of noting the fact that it's unfortunate that it has to be commented on, but yet he wanted to comment on it because it is important to tamp down on meeting with anybody and empowering people who are so vehemently full of hate, anti-Semitic, and also full of conspiracy theories in the fact that they were meeting with a former president and a contender for the next time is -- it's pretty unfortunate. And, again, the fact that no -- most other people who are leaders in the GOP are not saying so is very telling.

LEMON: Don't we do it every time, though, Dana? We sit back and say, well, when is this person or let's see what they say and then -

BASH: Yes.

LEMON: Usually they don't say anything. They wait for the next news cycle, you know?

BASH: Well, yes. Yes. Yes, it's true. I mean let's just -- let's just sort of talk turkey here, to go back to Thanksgiving. LEMON: Pun intended.

BASH: Kevin - pun intended. Kevin McCarthy, right now, we know where he is with his political situation. He is in about as tenuous a situation as he can be when it comes to getting enough votes to be speaker of the House. And he needs the former president to be in his corner. So, if he comes out and says something and makes him mad, there is a very good chance that Kevin McCarthy will lose the votes he needs to be speaker of the House. That is a reality right now.

LEMON: Sad.

COLLINS: Yes, he might not even have those votes as it stands now.

BASH: Yes.

COLLINS: We'll see the political calculations in all of this.

HARLOW: Yes. And what matters more? Doing what's right or not.

LEMON: Hope you had a great Thanksgiving, Dana.

BASH: Thanks. You too.

COLLINS: Thanks.

HARLOW: Thanks for the -- thanks for the turkey talk.

LEMON: Yes.

HARLOW: Thanks, Dana.

LEMON: Making us hungry here.

HARLOW: Thank you, Dana, and great interviews yesterday.

All right, coming up, the secrets of superagers. These are people at least 80 years old with the -

LEMON: Like me.

HARLOW: With memories as sharp as those who are decades younger. We'll talk to an expert about what's going right and wrong with our aging process.

LEMON: What about us? People -

HARLOW: This is a Don special.

LEMON: What about young people who, like me - well, not so young, who can't remember anything?

HARLOW: And it happens -

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[08:42:15]

HARLOW: All right, so as more gen-xers and baby boomers age, there are more Americans living alone. Why is that?

Let's ask our CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten.

Is this about being lonely?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: I do think it's partially about being lonely. So, you know, if essentially we look at the data, what do we see at this particular point? So, let's take a look at one- person households. This is a newly released Census Bureau report and it finds that 29 percent of households are now one-person households in 2022. Look how much higher that is from 1960 when it was just 13 percent.

Now, the question is, are there any bad side effects from that potentially? And I think that we can get an idea from this. You know, you mentioned, Poppy, loneliness. Always or often lonely in the last year. I've broken this down by age and by whether you live alone or with somebody. Because it turns out that both of these factors play a role in loneliness. When you live alone and you're younger, under the age of 50, look at this, 39 percent of those had a feeling of feeling lonely, either always or often last year. Compare that to living with somebody, it was just 25 percent.

Now, look at age 50 and older. If you live alone, 21 percent of those folks either always or often felt lonely. Living with someone, it was 11 percent.

So, look, living alone doesn't necessarily mean you're more lonely, it just exacerbates the risk. If you live alone, you're more likely to feel lonely.

Now, here's another key factor, you know, as we're talking about age and we're obviously an aging society, with gen-xers and boomers aging up into senior citizenship. What do we find? Older Americans by their living pattern. When they live alone, they're less likely to feel financially comfortable. When they live alone, they're less likely to do community work. When they live alone, they're less likely to talk with grandkids weekly.

So, as we're an aging society and more and more of us are living alone, these risks, they tend to go up when you do, in fact, live alone.

HARLOW: What about our friendships? How are we doing on that front?

ENTEN: Yes, so, you know, you could, of course, live alone and not necessarily, you know, be lonely because you have a lot of friends. But how many close friends do you have, not including relatives? In 2021, zero, 12 percent. That's way up from 3 percent in 1990. Five or more, look at this, now it's just 38 percent in 2021. Look at 1990, it was 63 percent. So, we're not only living alone in larger numbers, in fact, we have fewer friends, perhaps because we're all looking down at our phones more often instead of actually, you know, talking with people.

COLLINS: I think the lesson here is to call your grandparents.

HARLOW: And your friends!

ENTEN: And your friends.

COLLINS: As someone who's -

HARLOW: Why do people think it's weird -

COLLINS: I saw my nana this weekend.

HARLOW: Do - why do people think it's weird when I call them? They're like, hello?

LEMON: Because it's weird, Poppy.

COLLINS: Uh -

HARLOW: Like I'm not -

COLLINS: Don't call me.

HARLOW: I just called to call you. I call people.

LEMON: Yes. Because when someone calls, Poppy, you think it's bad news, right?

[08:45:02]

HARLOW: No, it's better than texting.

LEMON: Yes.

HARLOW: It's more personal. It takes more time.

ENTEN: You can call me any time you want, Poppy.

LEMON: I'm the opposite of that study, by the way. I loved - look, I loved living with someone but I love living alone. It doesn't mean that you're lonely.

HARLOW: Yes, Tim. Calling Tim.

LEMON: So I said I loved living with someone but I do before -

ENTEN: They're probabilities, Don. There are always outliers. And you my friend, are an outlier in many ways.

LEMON: That is the truest thing you have ever said.

HARLOW: That is the line of the morning.

LEMON: Thank you. That's right.

HARLOW: Bye.

LEMON: I have no comeback for it because you're exactly right about that.

ENTEN: Bye.

HARLOW: Thanks, Harry.

LEMON: Thanks, Harry, appreciate it.

The fight against Alzheimer's has shown that many factors can contribute to cognitive decline and other types of dementia. But one study is focused on learning more about how some people stay gracefully and stay sharp past their '80s. A new CNN digital report details the work researchers at Northwestern are doing to understand more about superagers, those are people - they're elderly people with brains as sharp as 20s and 30s. People - well, I should say 20 or 30 years younger than them.

So, joining me now, Emily Rogalski is a - she's a cognitive neuro scientist who developed the Superager Project. She's also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine.

We're so happy that you could join us. Thank you very much. Good morning to you.

The big question here, do these people do anything, I want to know, to keep sharp, to keep young, to help their memories, or is it just kind of who they are?

EMILY ROGALSKI, SUPERAGER PROJECT DEVELOPER: Good morning. Thanks for having me today. That's the million-dollar question is, what are the factors that allow superagers to maintain this great memory performance? And we look at this from multiple perspectives. One thing we do see, kind of related to your last segment, is that superagers tend to endorse stronger relationships with others. So, they like to stay connected. So, they're trying to avoid that social isolation and loneliness that you were just speaking of.

COLLINS: And, Emily, a big part of this, when I was looking at your project and what it actually looks like, is, the difference is not just in intelligence here. It's not just if you're a smarter person, you have a higher IQ, that you are more likely to be a superager. It's really about those other factors.

ROGALSKI: That's right. So, we're looking at multiple factors here to understand what might contribute to the superaging phenotype. How is it that they are socially active? What do their brains look like? Can we measure their biological age from different perspectives in addition to already knowing their chronologic age. And, in general, we see that the superagers tend to be more youthful. They look younger. Their brains look a little bit more like 50 to 60-year-olds than they do like their 80-plus-year-old peers.

HARLOW: OK, so one of the other traits I saw here that was interesting to me is they are - they tend to be positive, right? So, optimists, and social butterfly, not homebodies. True?

ROGALSKI: The superagers in general tend to be very busy. Some of them are still working. Others have picked up a second career later in life and then still others are volunteering. So, they're busy folks, and we're really appreciative that they take time out of their day to come and spend time with us so that we can learn more about their secrets.

LEMON: But you say it's only 10 percent. And so there are no curmudgeons among the group?

ROGALSKI: There's all kinds of personalities that walk through our doors. But we see that, you know, really less than 10 percent of people who think that they have outstanding memory performance end up meeting criteria. So, we really think of this as a relatively rare group, but that's important because it can teach us about specialized factors and features that might be helpful for avoiding disease and disability and extending health span.

HARLOW: Yes.

LEMON: Can you make yourself -

ROGALSKI: So, we want to live long and well.

LEMON: Can you make yourself one of these people? Like, naturally, these people were naturally that way. Can you like, you know, say I'm going to do all of these things and all of a sudden turn into a superager?

ROGALSKI: Yes, so the goal is that we're starting to think about risk factors for superagers instead of risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. How do we set ourselves up so that we're stacking up our protective factors and minimizing our risk factors. And so this study is going to help us identify -- this program is going to help us identify those factors that are really important. Some of them may be modifiable, where others may be the things that we're born with. So, we don't have any choice over the parents and the genetics that we have, but we do have a lot of other choice in our biologic aging.

COLLINS: Absolutely fascinating, Emily. Thank you for your work on this and thanks for bringing it to our audience this morning.

LEMON: Thanks, Emily.

ROGALSKI: Thanks.

COLLINS: You can read more about superagers on cnn.com, if you're as interested as we were on that.

LEMON: Great.

COLLINS: And this just in, air travel for Thanksgiving hit a new pandemic-era record. According to the TSA, more than 2.5 million people, including yours truly, passed through the nation's airports yesterday, surpassing the previous high watermark since air travel had cratered during the pandemic. [08:50:05]

Poor weather conditions in the northeast yesterday caused over 1,000 flight delays. There were just a few dozen actual cancellations, though, as airlines were trying to avoid the problems that have been plaguing them over the summer travel rush.

COLLINS: Also for the first time in the 180 year history, the women in the New York Philharmonic just made history against the men. We're going to break down what that historic milestone looks like. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HARLOW: That is the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S. And for the first time women outnumber men in the group 45 to 44. It's a big leap forward from its founding in 1842 when women were not allowed to join at all. "The New York Times" reports that, quote, the orchestra's new female majority could prove fleeting, though, as it still has 16 vacancies because of a hold on auditions during the pandemic.

[08:55:09]

It's also important to note that the New York Philharmonic is still lacking when it comes to women holding leadership positions. Quote, the orchestra has never had a female musical director and there is a glaring lack of black and Latino members.

LEMON: That was good. Does the conductor have the tie-breaking vote, like the Congress?

HARLOW: I have no idea.

COLLINS: Don's filibustering because he doesn't want to talk about what we're talking about next.

LEMON: Why? What are you talking about?

COLLINS: It was rivalry weekend in college football. There were several shakeups over the weekend that will shape eventually what the college football playoffs look like. If you weren't watching on Saturday, like I was, Michigan beat Ohio State to score a second straight win over the Buckeyes. It was a huge win for Michigan. Of course, South Carolina beating in state rival Clemson, ending the Tiger's chances at a spot in the college bowl playoff. And LSU, much to Don's sadness -

LEMON: I don't know about that.

COLLINS: Will not be playing for the national championship either after they ended their regular season with a loss to Texas A&M.

LEMON: I can't believe that.

COLLINS: I don't know about this next part. There is still a slim chance some say that Alabama might make the playoff after they beat Auburn in the Iron Bowl on Saturday. I was there. You know, I was having breakfast before I left Alabama yesterday and I was overhearing some of the old guys in the diner say, do you think - do you think we got a chance? And I was like, I don't - I don't think so.

HARLOW: Come on.

LEMON: No. No.

HARLOW: Hold out hope.

COLLINS: We'll see.

LEMON: I think LSU still has a chance, but who am I?

COLLINS: LSU definitely does not have a chance. Maybe next season, Don. You won't be in L.A.

All right, "CNN NEWSROOM" starts right after this break.

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