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Manhunt Underway in North Carolina after Power Grid Deliberately Targeted and Attacked; Police Still Have No Suspect in Murders of Four University of Idaho Students; Georgia Resident Describes Difficulties He Had Voting in Senate Runoff Election. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired December 05, 2022 - 08:00   ET

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

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: The idea that one of them said people will see you as a person who can't be around children, can't be around the vulnerable. And I think there are implications for that in this era when there's so much sexual content online generated by us, the users.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, it was a great listen. Thank you, Audie.

You can listen to this latest episode of "The Assignment with Audie Cornish" wherever you get your podcasts.

CNN this morning continues right now.

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Wow. My, how the time flies. I just don't mean minutes --

HARLOW: It is now the 8:00 a.m. hour.

LEMON: I know. It's now the 8:00 a.m. hour. Good morning, everyone. What I'm saying, it's December 5th already. The holidays are upon us. By the way, Kaitlan is on assignment, and there's a whole lot to get to. Good morning to you. Good to be here with you.

HARLOW: Good morning.

LEMON: So let's catch you up on the big five stories that's happening this morning. A manhunt underway in North Carolina after a power grid is deliberately targeted and attacked. That's according to police. Right now, more than 35,000 remain without power after gunfire left two substations damaged.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM MCINNIS, (R) NORTH CAROLINA STATE SENATE: This was a terrible act. It appears to be an intentional, willful, and malicious act. And the perpetrator will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

(END VIDEO CLIP) HARLOW: And last night Paul Pelosi making his first public appearance since he was brutally attacked with a hammer in his home in San Francisco this fall. He attended the Kennedy Center Honors last night with his wife, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

LEMON: The final push as Georgians head to the polls tomorrow for the Senate runoff election. More than 1.8 million people have already cast their ballots in early voting as the Warnock and Walker campaigns work to sway those who are undecided.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAPHAEL WARNOCK (D-GA): We are on the verge of victory. But I don't want us to do the victory dance before we actually get into the end zone.

HERSCHEL WALKER, (R-GA) U.S. SENATE CANDIDATE: We've just got to get out and vote. It's time to have our voices heard and our votes counted. So quit making a complaint. Now, what we need to do, get to the polls. We've got to vote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Also, Iran's Attorney General says the country's mandatory hijab law is now under review. But I should note, the Islamic Republic law requires women wear one. He also said that Iran's morality police who are in charge of enforcing that had been dismantled, but many state media sites deny those comments.

LEMON: Several explosions have been reported in the city of Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, this morning. Two people have been killed and multiple injured. This as Ukrainian air force officials say Russia launched a missile attack towards Ukraine. No strikes have been confirmed yet, but CNN teams in Kyiv have reported hearing air raid sirens.

So when we get back now, we're going to begin with the North Carolina power outages. Let's go straight to CNN's Whitney Wild live for us in Moore County, North Carolina. Whitney, family members. We know the power, there's been issues with the power, you couldn't get your report online earlier. So what is the latest there right now?

WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: Right now, there's still very little power. If you look at the Duke Energy power map, it looks like most of the power outages are concentrated right here where I am in Aberdeen, North Carolina. More than 10,000 people without power here. And then as you spread out between Aberdeen and Carthage, North Carolina, if your familiar with this area, it's around, at this point, around 35,000 people who are out of power.

Don, it's cold here. The temperatures were below 30 overnight. There's frost on the ground. So this is a severe situation here. This investigation continuing to unfold in earnest. Law enforcement saying that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. The FBI is involved as well as the state bureau of investigations. Right now, the big questions that we don't have answers to are what type of firearm was used, how many rounds were fired, if the two attacks are connected by ballistic evidence Those are the major questions investigation-wise we just don't have answers for right now.

Here is the weird thing, though. When you look at what happened, at one of the substations there's a gate that was taken off the hinges. So presumably someone was able to take that gate off and then get close to the substation. A lot more questions about how they actually pulled off this crime. Back to you.

LEMON: Whitney Wild, thank you very much.

HARLOW: Also this morning, we are hearing for the first time from the surviving roommates from the home where four University of Idaho students were murdered. Those roommates have written letters remembering their friends, sharing their sadness. It has been more than three weeks since this attack and police still have not made any arrest or released a motive.

Our colleague Natasha Chen joins us now this morning. What did the roommates say? As I understand, I believe it was their pastor who read them to the public.

NATASHA CHEN, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Poppy, this is the first time that the two surviving roommates were publicly identified. And that was during this church service on Friday where the pass center read two letters, one each from these two surviving roommates.

[08:05:06]

And what one of them said really stood out to me. She was talking about her love for Madison Mogen that you see there on the screen. And she said Madison always told her that everything happens for a reason, but that she's really struggling to understand the reason for this. Here is the pastor reading more from those letters.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know somewhere Xana and Ethan are together, keeping each other company, watching us and telling each other that it's OK and that we have each other. Madi and Kaylee, the inseparable duo, the two best friends that were like sisters. Madi and Kaylee were like second moms to me. They taught me a lot on how to be a responsible adult but also how to live life happy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHEN: Just heartbreaking messages to their deeply loved friends that they lost, Poppy.

HARLOW: And the father of one of those murdered is speaking out. What more did we learn?

CHEN: The father of Kaylee Goncalves and her mother spoke to FOX News over the weekend and talked about some of the details that we have so far not heard from police. So I did try to reach out to police to confirm some of this. So to recap, he said their family, the Goncalves family has been asked to sign a waiver so that investigators can look into mail that was perhaps sent -- and then that also he said the death injuries in his daughter Kaylee and in Madison, her roommate, did not match. And it's his belief that because of that, it could be that only one of them was targeted.

But of course, we've heard very little from police about that. At this point the Goncalveses say that they're also lacking a bit of confidence in the investigation even though they truly support law enforcement here and they are now trying to raise money for a third party private investigator, Poppy.

HARLOW: You can understand, right? Parents want and deserve answers. And there have been a lot of different messages from authorities in this case, to say the least. Natasha, thank you for staying on it.

LEMON: In less than 24 hours polls will open in Georgia in the final undecided Senate contest of 2022 between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker. Voters on Friday were met with long lines and long wait times as the early voting period ended. Jason Coupet was one of those voters and described his difficulties in a tweet thread that went viral. You have to see this tweet. We're going to go through it for you.

Noting that voting was much harder in Atlanta than when he lived in Chicago. He tweeted that he had to drive downtown because all the closest polling places had 90-minute wait times. He also had to pay $10 for parking. When he got to the polling place, he still had to wait 80 minutes. Once he got inside, he had to have his I.D. ready and fill out forms and wait in a room for 15 to 20 minutes. And once he finally voted, he noted about half the machines were not working. And the last tweet he posts a picture with his wife writing "If you are poor or disabled or whatever, good luck. That should have been easier."

Jason Coupet joins us now. He is an associate professor at Georgia University. I'm so happy that you're here. Thank you very much for this, because I thought what you tweeted just epitomized the difficulty of what people had to go through. Talk to us about how surprised you were, how long it took. But were you furious? How did you feel about this?

JASON COUPET, PROFESSOR WHO POSTED TWEET THREAD ABOUT GEORGIA VOTING CHALLENGES: Good morning, you all. Thanks for having me on.

So first of all, shoutout to all the poll workers who helped that process. Those folks are really the salt of the earth. So we started out in the morning, we had been looking all week, knowing that the lines had been long all week. We have three young kids, and so we were trying to go at a time when we didn't have them to manage.

Friday came, was the last day of early voting. But we sort of expected there to be long lines. We looked at the app. Everywhere that was within an hour drive of us had waiting times of greater than the hour. So we went to the line that was shortest. When we got there, we're in downtown, downtown Atlanta. We paid to park. We stayed in line for about 70 to 80 minutes. And when we got there, we got a form that we had to fill out. I'm

still not 100 percent sure what the form was. It was the first time I'd ever had to do that. We waited for about 20 minutes. Someone checked over that form. We showed our I.D. We were given a card to go to a machine. We then voted electronically. We went through about five or six prompts that printed out another piece of paper that we fed into a machine. So overall door-to-door the process took about two hours, which was certainly surprising, even considering that we thought the lines might be a little long.

[08:10:00]

LEMON: That's crazy. Poppy and I are looking at each other --

HARLOW: Shaking our heads.

LEMON: That is a lot. Before Poppy gets in here, I just want to ask you one more question. Almost 2 million people have voted already, and some might say that that is a success, that so many people were able to cast their ballot in this early voting period. Do you think they're wrong about that?

COUPET: No. What's great about Atlanta, and I'm new here, is the energy around democracy. I think the challenge is, it's always hard to know what would have happened if those costs were lower. And so we've got almost 2 million now. But in the city of Atlanta, we have got folks who are housing insecure, lots of folks who maybe work a job that is paid hourly where getting that time off to stand in line for two hours may be difficult. Even if you can get it, it's costing you income. And so it's great to see almost 2 million people voting. But it also makes you wonder how many people are not because of the cost involved.

LEMON: And you have two kids. Imagine if you had to -- do you know what I mean.

HARLOW: Look, I can afford to hire a babysitter for a few hours. No one should have to do that, and that's not the reality for most people. This is why to do to the argument of a national holiday for Election Day so people can vote.

And Jason, your tweet thread got so much attention. Gabe Sterling, who is one of the top election officials in Georgia, responded. And I want to just go through his response and see what you think. So to your argument, he said -- first of all, he said about voting, quote, "It isn't complex. Cook County had 53 locations, Fulton reduced the number of locations to 24, cutting their sites by 13." What is your response to him saying, no, it's not as hard as you just described?

COUPET: I can only speak from my personal experience, and again, not as an employee or in any other aspect of my work in the state of Georgia. Really my experience in Cook County had been easier -- not just Cook County. I voted in Michigan. Go Blue. I voted in North Carolina. I voted in Georgia, too. And this is the first time I've had this long a wait. And so I don't know why that is or what can be changed. Just in our mind, my wife and I were just thinking, wow, if we could not afford to do this, making our voice heard would be harder.

LEMON: So Jason, let me ask you. I lived in Chicago, and I've lived in Georgia. And there is a difference in voting. I've lived in New York. I've lived in a bunch of places. And you see the difference. So I think it's great that we have you on because you're speaking for a lot of Americans, right? Offer some suggestions about what you think could improve and how they could improve it.

COUPET: Yes, so I'm not an elections expert. So from my personal experience, the big thing that made my experience different on Friday was signing that form. For whatever reason, it felt a little bit like I was at the DMV getting a driver's license. That's where the bottleneck seemed to be. Folks waited in line. But once you got to that form, you went in another room. There was some typing on the computer. I imagine they were looking us up. The information on the form was the same information that was on my driver's license and also my voter's registration. So I'm unclear about what role that part of the process had. It looked like, again, not speaking as an expert. It looked like from my eyes personally that's where the bottleneck seemed to be, because there were unused machines that may well have been used had folks not been bottlenecked through that form.

HARLOW: I was thinking how it's so different than what I've experienced here in New York. It's so different, where we don't have voter I.D. --

LEMON: I voted early here.

HARLOW: And fast. And it's like just what's your address, and they look on the paper. It's so different.

LEMON: And then you're on. If I can, we talk a lot about, maybe, I don't know if it's intentional or not intentional. That's not for me to decide. But there are people who are trying to improve the voting process, especially in Georgia. And they say that even if it's not obvious, there are suppressive efforts -- even if a lot of people are voting, that doesn't mean that there aren't suppressive efforts or suppressive tactics that are going on. Do you think this at all speaks to that, Jason?

COUPET: I'm new here. So when we say suppression, it starts to get into intent and I don't know. I just would say experiencing that line, it looks like there are folks -- any time we make rules about a process, it selects certain folks in and certain folks out of that process. And so the big thing that stood out to us when we were in line is that if you are disabled, if you are poor, if you have lots of kids, it seemed to me like I would have a harder time justifying sort of paying the cost to vote. And so in a democracy, the benefit is supposed to be all the same. These are rights. These are not supposed to be alienable, right. And so if the benefit is the same, then focusing on the cost should also be the same, too.

[08:15:00]

And we should -- we should pay generally the same kind of cost of our time, of our effort to vote, right? It's sort of what democracy in my mind is supposed to be.

And so whether the intent is there or not, let's hope -- hoping we can get those costs out.

HARLOW: Yes, it's at the core of democracy. It shouldn't cost anyone anything by the way to vote and there are so many roadblocks.

Thank you for bringing them to light, Jason.

LEMON: That was really good.

COUPET: Thank you for the time.

LEMON: Thank you, Jason. We really appreciate you appearing.

And straight ahead, the former President who swore an oath and wants to take it again is calling to terminate the Constitution.

Plus --

HARLOW: Our David Culver is live near the erupting volcano in Hawaii.

DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Poppy. You can see the morning lava glow behind me, it might be a bit hazy. So, we've got a solution for you. We're going to give you a view like no other at the other end of this break. We'll see you.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: So CNN is getting a bird's eye view of Hawaii's erupting Mauna Loa volcano and the spectacular lava show that you are seeing right now. This is live, right? Yes. This is live.

And it is closing in on a major highway there. Let's go straight to CNN's David Culver live for us at Hawaii's Big Island.

So, why don't you tell us what you're seeing there? Sir, good morning to you.

[08:20:06]

CULVER: Well, good morning, Don.

Yes, you have that live picture, that is pretty incredible to see. Fissure 3 is what it is called. That's the only active and stable flow of lava right now, and it's just behind us. It's that glow up there.

But yes, you mentioned that bird's eye view. So, let's show you a view like no other. It is pretty incredible what we got to see.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CULVER (voice over): We are on the road before sunrise, quickly realizing we can already spot our destination some 30 miles out.

There you see it, that red orange glow, Mauna Loa erupting. To give you a better view, though, we go up in the morning dark.

Paradise Helicopters, Darren Hamilton, our pilot and guide giving us rare access.

I assume we'll know when we see the volcano.

DARREN HAMILTON, HELICOPTER PILOT: Yes, it's just off the kind of, the eastern side there. At about one o'clock position, that is the plume there.

CULVER (on camera): Having flown in military hot zones, Darren even admits this is firepower like no other.

What was it like the first time you flew over lava?

HAMILTON: Oh, it was a blast.

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

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

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

On the ground, officials closely watching the lava's potential impact on Saddle Road, the main highway that connects the East and West of the island.

Erupting last Sunday for the first time in 38 years, Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano is one of five that make up Hawaii's Big Island. And it's not the only one currently erupting. Neighboring Kilauea also active though no longer shooting lava to the surface like it did in 2018.

DOROTHY THRALL, HAWAII RESIDENT: We are Kapili Street, which is where my house was at and it is that away on the opposite side of the subdivision.

CULVER (voice over): Dorothy Thrall (ph) invited us to where her home now sits buried under 60 feet of lava. You can see a metal streetlight fused into the rock, four years after Kilauea did this to her Leilani Estates community, she still walks it as though she is on her old street with her old neighbors.

CULVER (on camera): When you have something like this, I assume you're all dispersed after that.

THRALL: Yes. We lost that sense of community and it is what we lost, in addition to the homes.

CULVER (voice over): Manau Loa's eruption, an emotional trigger for Dorothy and others forcing the trauma from Kilauea back to the surface. The 2018 lava flow wiped out more than 600 homes here, some untouched but left lava locked, an island within the island. Dorothy showed us this video she captured a few weeks back, trekking

over lava rock helping friends gather the last of their belongings from their home. The reminders of devastation here, hard to miss.

THRALL: This was a home. They evacuated the second night and I believe it went under the third night.

CULVER (on camera): And just took their home.

THRALL: Just took their home.

CULVER: And four years later, it's still steaming.

THRALL: It's still steaming. Yes.

CULVER: And how long will it steam like that?

THRALL: Probably 30 to 40 years.

CULVER: How is it that you can still see beauty after so much loss?

THRALL: Because lava is beautiful. It's Pele's creation. That's how the island was formed. That's how the island was built.

CULVER (voice over): An appreciation shared by Native Hawaiians leaving offerings on Mauna Loa, and thousands of tourists and locals arriving past sunset just to witness the lava glow.

Nighttime traffic backs up for miles. To avoid the congestion, let's get back to the skies.

HAMILTON: That's two to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit or about a thousand degrees Celsius. That's molten rock, flowing like water.

CULVER (voice over): 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 feel as soon as you get close to it.

And look at this, the rushing flow, the river. You see the current of lava.

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

CULVER (on camera): But this, the source of it all. I mean, there's nothing like this, just spewing from the top.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CULVER: That's 30 to 40 miles per hour happening about 15 miles from us way up there.

Down here, Don and Poppy, it is moving at about 40 feet per hour. So much slower because it's fanning out, but still inching closer to the roadway. It's now just over two miles from that main highway.

But it was interesting overnight, they had to actually shut down this portion of the viewing area because out here on the lava rock from past eruptions. There was an unexploded ordinance that was found, they think a possible grenade, this is a military training ground usually. So, they're asking folks just pull over, don't walk onto the lava rocks, it is for that reason we're keeping a bit closer to the roadway this morning.

HARLOW: Wow. Leave it to David Culver to give us the most remarkable view of the volcano.

[08:25:09]

LEMON: Poppy commenting on your story, live commenting on your story as it was running.

HARLOW: Yes, I was saying during the piece that he is such a good writer, it is a great piece, David, thank you.

LEMON: Thanks, David. Be safe and we'll see you soon.

CULVER: Thanks, guys. Good team here. Thank you.

LEMON: So attacks underway this morning in Ukraine and now two major cities are without power this morning.

HARLOW: Plus, after weeks of protest, Foxconn is restoring production at the world's largest iPhone factory in China. But this comes as "The Wall Street Journal" reports Apple is accelerating plans to move some of that production out of China.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LEMON: Welcome back to CNN THIS MORNING.

Coming up: Ukraine says Russia is currently launching missile attacks towards several cities as the winter begins in the war.

Plus, why Elon Musk has emerged as a hero to conservative Republicans? Our numbers guy, Harry Enten will break it down for you.

And a beloved figure on "Sesame Street" has died. Bob McGrath was an original cast member. Ahead we're going to speak to his longtime co- star and friend who played Gordon on "Sesame Street," Roscoe Orman.

[08:30:14]