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Hope Dims for Survivors as Death Toll Nears 22,000 in Quake; Tens of Thousands of Families Homeless after Devastating Quake ; Pence Subpoenaed by Special Counsel in January 6th Investigation; Biden: No Difference Between Running Against Trump or DeSantis. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired February 10, 2023 - 06:00   ET

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

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RIHANNA, SINGER: Three to 400 people, breaking the stage down and building it back up and getting it out in eight minutes. It's incredible. It's almost impossible.

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CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Rihanna says the biggest challenge has been nailing down a set list. She's trying to cram 17 years of work into a 13-minute show. We will all be watching.

Thanks for joining me. I'm Christine Romans. CNN THIS MORNING starts right now.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

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DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: That was a woman waving to the crowd, rescued after 92 hours in rubble. Her mother pulled out just a short time later.

Good morning, everyone. These are just a few miraculous earthquake stories coming out. But the truth is that hope for survivors is fading fast. Families in Syria and Turkey bracing for the inevitable. They may never be reunited with their loved ones as the death toll nears 22,000.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Also, former Vice President Mike Pence subpoenaed in the special counsel's overseeing Mr. Trump's role in the January 6th insurrection. Will he invoke executive privilege?

KAITLAN HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Also, President Biden has sat down for an interview with Telemundo. What he said about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former President Trump and 2024. LEMON: We're going to begin in Turkey and Syria. Hope is turning into

despair. The staggering death toll has now topped 21,000, and thousands more are still missing, possibly dead and dying under piles of rubble.

Rescues shifting to recovery four days after the catastrophic earthquake. Families are facing a grim reality that they will likely never see their loved ones alive again.

We've seen desperate, heartbroken family members join the search and dig through the wreckage with their own bare hands, including this man who says he lost 30 relatives in the quake.

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MALIK IMBRAHIM, LOST 30 RELATIVES IN THE EARTHQUAKE (through translator): We were talking about 30 people. Not one or two. We're still digging to retrieve them. We only retrieved ten bodies, and the other 20 remain under the rubble. We have been digging for the past two days without sleep. It's heartbreaking. It's too sad. Children, babies and women. All gone.

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LEMON: On top of all the death and destruction is the growing humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless in the freezing cold with little the food and water -- little food, water and medicine.

HARLOW: And to show you the scope, right, what this destruction looks like, what took 20,000-plus lives, you need the context what things looked like before and what normal used to be.

So let's start here. This is a mosque before the earthquake in Malatya, Turkey. It used to look like this. And this is what it looks like now. Completely decimated. And look at these side-by-side images.

Now I want to show you a street in Gaziantep from before. Here it is on a normal day. Here it is after the earthquake. And here it is side by side. Barely recognizable when you put these images side by side.

The last one I want to show you, these are satellite images of Kahramanmaras. Right? You've seen Nick Paton Walsh and our reporters there in Turkey. This is the stadium before the earthquake. This is after. That stadium is full of white aid tents. So many buildings around it completely flattened.

And here it is side by side. The magnitude of this tragedy, both from the air and on the ground. We have correspondents on the ground across this disaster zone. Let's begin with our Nick Paton Walsh, live from a field hospital, where helicopters are flying in patients.

Nick, what are you seeing?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Extraordinary sense of urgency here as the government machine wheels into action. Endless Turkish navy helicopters picking up here. Urgently injured individuals. One, a girl as young as 3 and a 2-year- old sis -- a 2-month-old sister, we believe. The whereabouts of their mother unknown.

Time increasingly running out. And here's what we saw across the vast but devastated city of Antakya yesterday and last night.

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WALSH (voice-over): Eighty hours in and in Antakya, any sign of hope will do. Rescuers rush in. These buildings' first three floors have collapsed down but left their upper floors upright.

And little Yamor (ph), aged 8, is inside, possibly alive. By the time that they get her to the ambulance, though, it's clear they were too late.

Her mother outside only able to watch her everything vanish. "My little one," she says. "Don't take her. Don't let her get lost."

Antakya's streets, a chilling patchwork of what's left standing and what's not let.

In its ruins, anxious crowds of rescuers and locals thinking they heard someone alive, demanding silence so they can listen again.

Down here is Ahmed, the the rescuers say, alert, responsive. A Syrian refugee. The building next to him barely hanging on at an angle. Their work desperately wishing it were quicker.

Across the city, hell has landed. This man guarding his neighbor's books with his father-in-law next to the body of his mother-in-law. He gestures behind him to where he once lived.

WALSH: It's kind of hard to get your head around just how inhabitable a city of this size has become so fast. Literally every street you walk down has a scene like this.

And the roads out, well, they're jammed full of people trying to get away to safety, because the buildings still could collapse.

WALSH (voice-over): And the roads in, rescuers, people even trying to get their possessions back. And those who stayed, lining every part of the green space you can find with tents to try and stay warm.

The trees, perhaps, in just enough space away from buildings that could crumble. A new world for children smiling, neither oblivious nor somehow shaken too hard.

Dusk and the smoke of fire settles with the dust to choke the streets.

But back where we were an hour earlier, there has been relief. Ahmed was saved, pulled out from the hole. His family perhaps still inside. The medics keep asking him, did you hear any signs of life from them? No, he says.

They say, we cannot wait for them. And he must be treated after 86 hours entombed. The weight of grief, even as he is saved.

His friend Jamil was pulled from the rubble. "I've been given life again," he says. "I saw death before my eyes. I saw my own grave."

The same twist of fate here. There have been noises deep inside the bottom of what was once an apartment block. First, out comes one man, Suleinan (ph), age 21. The frantic work of medics here suggesting he did not make it.

WALSH: I think the impossibility of hope here that somebody could emerge after all this time, alive from the wreckage that is driving this large crowd of rescuers. The most intense work done by hand right at the front of the rubble there.

Out comes a 4-year-old boy named Alpaslan (ph), rescuers said. Alive, seen trying even to take off his oxygen mask.

His father, Tolga (ph), who follows shortly, does not seem to move.

Eighty-nine hours in the rubble that both tore a world apart but found enough mercy to spare its youngest.

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WALSH: Now continuing here as the stream of ambulances that pull up alongside the helipad. Helicopters land and often have to delay their takeoff because yet another individual, frail, some of them just pulled from the wreckage -- they don't even know their name at times -- load onto the helicopter and then taken off to other hospitals around Turkey, we understand.

And of course, the large question here amongst medical officials, about what are they going to do with the increasing numbers of deaths to be catered for here? That number rising and the great urgency, too, of treatment and the slim number of survivors possibly being pulled out still -- Don.

LEMON: Nick Paton Walsh, Antakya, Turkey, for us this morning. Thank you, Nick. Appreciate that -- Kaitlan.

COLLINS: Yes. Also this morning, volunteers say that hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless. They have no place to go after that earthquake.

CNN's Jomana Karadsheh is live in Iskenderun, near a camp of those survivors who find themselves in this situation. Jomana, what are they saying to you? What's next for them?

JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Kaitlan, just absolutely heartbreaking wherever you turn. Just a story of so much loss and people now left in this situation where they can only think about surviving today. They don't even know what to do next.

Just to explain where we are, we're in the city of Iskenderun, which is part of Hatay province, one of the hardest hit provinces here in Turkey. And everywhere around the city you see so much destruction. So many

lives lost. People who are now starting to come to terms with the fact that they're never going to see their loved ones again.

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And then you have the survivors, people who have survived the earthquake but have been left with nothing. And they end up in places like this. These mini tent cities that the government has set up.

Hundreds of families at this one here. As you can see behind me, you've got these piles of clothes, shoes, blankets.

And we've been seeing children, mothers, fathers, coming through and just looking through these piles trying to find shoes that fit for kids. Warm clothes, blankets.

And then on the other side here, you've got the Turkish military distributing basic food, water, diapers for the kids. And indeed, the needs are enormous here.

And the -- we've seen volunteers coming in, Kaitlan, from all across the country. We spoke to a young man just a short time ago. He said he's a volunteer. He came here from Istanbul. He doesn't know what he's going to do, but he says I'm here to help.

And this is one of the government's priorities, to provide shelter, to feed people right now. But then you've also got the trauma.

I mean, we've had people walking up to us and crying. One woman just came up and said, I lost my sister. And she's like, I have no mother and father. She was everything to me. And now I've lost my sister, and she just started crying.

I mean, and you can imagine how many more stories like this are happening across this country right now. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions -- Kaitlan.

COLLINS: Yes. And just to think about how they're grappling with that -- the loss of a sister, of a loved one. And now they have nowhere go: no home, no clothes, no food.

Jomana, I appreciate you being there. Thank you.

HARLOW: So let's go to our colleague, Salma Abdelaziz. She is live in Istanbul at an aid and distribution center.

Salma, when we saw you first there yesterday, we were all stunned at the scale. Right? That is a hangar. And it's a huge aid operation.

SALMA ABDELAZIZ, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Poppy, this is a mammoth task to try to get help to those people that you heard Jomana talk about. I showed one part of the operation yesterday unpacking boxes. Let me start showing you another.

They're clapping. The reason why they are clapping is because every time they pack one of these trucks, that is a sense of accomplishment. They know they have been able to help families on the front.

And these trucks, just look inside. They're going to close the doors. It's going to drive 12 hours to the front line. Every volunteer here feels so proud. Because everything inside this truck, everything going to the front line, is from Turks to Turks.

And think about the basics here. Think about the basics that you need when you are packing this charity. They say that by two million individual donations. I'm just going to keep walking you through. I want you to see the sheer number of stuff they have.

Two million individual donations. You can see mattresses. There's boxes of water. There's diapers for babies. There's heating equipment. Hundreds of volunteers here. Hundreds of people who feel like they have to get everything as quickly as they can. Once these trucks go out, they could make a difference as early as tonight -- Poppy.

HARLOW: Salma, thank you for being there, again. And to all of those people behind you clearly working around the clock.

LEMON: It's -- The scale is unbelievable. And we have up to where it ranks as far as deadliest earthquakes. Number seven when you look at it.

But still, the death toll is still climbing. And when you think about it, when we saw the other day that it was 13,000, 15,000, and I said imagine if that was in the United States or Europe or -- we remember what happened in Haiti.

HARLOW: Entire cities.

LEMON: Yes. And it's Istanbul, Turkey, Syria. I mean, we still don't know. We still don't know.

COLLINS: And also just to look at the aid efforts. Remember yesterday when they were talking about digging through the rubble. It was entirely a volunteer aid group. It's not like there are all these officials who are able to go and help you dig through the rubble for your -- for your loved ones, for their bodies. This has become more of a recovery effort. It's volunteers who are going and searching through rubble for their peers.

LEMON: Yes. Every time -- every time those folks who are providing -- helping with the aid, they're applauding. And then a pallet goes out to help people.

HARLOW: I want to show our viewers this image. Because we haven't been able to show you a lot from Syria, obviously, given civil war there. It's so much harder to get aid, and the U.N. just finally got aid in there yesterday. Right.

So look, this is an image from Syria. This is actually an underground subterranean hospital. It's known as the Cave. And one of the doctors there told "The New York Times," Our hospital has always been filled with tragedy, of course, because of the decade long civil war. But look at it now. And he talked about a different enemy, and that enemy being -- being this earthquake.

LEMON: One of my friends alerted me to a charity that she's doing. And it's part of our Impact Your World.

HARLOW: If you're watching and wondering how you can help all of these victims in Turkey and in Syria, you can go to CNN.com/impact. We have a lot of vetted organizations there where you can help. Turkish Philanthropy Fund also raising money with targeted fundraisers for relief, including aid for women who have lost their livelihoods and their homes and their families in this earthquake. And your friend also.

LEMON: My friend, she has a fund that goes up, and she helps women. Her name is Gonze (ph). And it's focused on creating sustainable communities for the women and the families to rebuild their lives to ensure that they have a path for recovery. There it is up on your screen. Go to CNN.com/ImpactYourWorld or Turkish Philanthropy Funds and donate.

She's starting with the first $100,000.

HARLOW: Wow.

LEMON: And she's trying to raise $500,000 to help the people there but especially women and children to be able to feed their families and take care of them.

COLLINS: They need all the help they can get.

LEMON: Yes.

HARLOW: We'll stay on this.

LEMON: They certainly do. And by the way, we're going to continue to cover it. This is a story that no one can cover like CNN. Just the sheer scope of our network. This is what we do. We're going to continue to cover it and bring these stories to you.

In the meantime, we need to talk about what's happening here in the United States, because he ran for his life on January 6. And now the special counsel investigating Donald Trump wants to talk to the former vice president, Mike Pence, as his probe escalates.

COLLINS: Plus, President Biden just took a big swipe at Ron DeSantis as he was in Florida. What he said about someone who might be running against him in 2024.

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COLLINS: All right. The special counsel that's investigating former President Trump and the January 6th insurrection has just made a pretty significant move, maybe one of the most aggressive of his investigation so far. A source confirms to me that Jack Smith has subpoenaed former Vice

President Mike Pence. Smith is seeking for Pence to hand over documents to personally testify about the interactions he had with Trump leading up to the 2020 election, leading up to January 6, leading up to what happened after that.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!

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COLLINS: Of course, as we all know, Pence was hunted that day and had to run for his life from the mob of Trump supporters after he refused, in his very ceremonial role, to overturn President Biden's victory. Something he could not legally do. Something we've talked about since then.

It's still notable, though, that they've taken this big of a move to go and subpoena the former vice president. They want to talk to him about this.

It's not even just this. The special counsel is doing the documents probe and a January 6 probe.

HARLOW: Yes.

COLLINS: And on the documents front, Pence aides said recently they expect the DOJ to conduct a more thorough search of Pence's home on that front. So a lot going on.

HARLOW: Which really annoyed Pence's team. Right? That they -- that that got out there. That they were in discussions about -- further discussions about the home.

HARLOW: They've really been in discussions about he knew that they were going to want to talk to him. They've been talking about it probably since November, I think.

LEMON: Well, that's -- and it may be a bit of a contrarian view for me. I'm not surprised. I'm surprised that we're in this moment. But I'm not surprised they want to talk to Mike Pence, since he was so close. Right?

HARLOW: Isn't the subpoena surprising?

LEMON: No. I mean, no.

HARLOW: It wasn't -- they were having talks to work it out, right?

COLLINS: Sometimes people want a subpoena so then they're like, Well, I had to testify. You know, I was -- kind of forced my hand. HARLOW: Yes.

LEMON: When I saw the news I wasn't surprised that he was subpoenaed. I'm just surprised that we're in this moment as a country. And you saw in that video, and they were saying hang Mike Pence, it's still jarring to me that that moment actually happened. You know, that we actually had people going into the Capitol, trying to stop democracy.

COLLIN: But that's a good point on not being surprised. Because Pence was, like, the only person who was talking one-on-one with Trump. But will he reveal what happened? He may not. I think it's going to be a fight.

LEMON: And this morning, let's talk about President Biden now, weighing in on potential opponents in the 2024 race for the White House. He says running against former President Trump of Florida, Governor DeSantis would essentially be the same thing.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I do wonder if you think there will be a difference between running against one or the other candidate. In terms of polarization.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I don't think so. Because I think that they have a similar modus operandi, a similar way in which they work. But I really don't know. I never decided to run or not run based on who the opponent will be.

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LEMON: All right. So let's get to the place where that man right there and the president resides. That's the White House this morning.

Good morning to you, M.J. Lee, our White House correspondent. So M.J., President Biden insisting that he has not made his final decision whether to run again in 2024. Although, according to John King, folks like you and Kaitlan and everyone, it's kind of a done deal. He's just not saying it.

M.J. LEE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right.

But you know, Don, there's just not going to be an announcement until there's an announcement. But yes, every expectation is that a run for a second term is coming. It's just a matter of when that announcement is going to come.

But you know, now that we are through with the State of the Union, I think we're seeing just how quickly we are entering the 2024 cycle.

I do want to play a sound of how the president responded last night when he was asked about the fact that there are plenty of Democrats across the country who would like to see a candidate that is not him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BIDEN: Look, do you know any polling that's accurate these days? You told me that there's no way we were going to do well in this off-year election. I told you from the beginning we were going to do well. You told me I wouldn't win the general election. We did well. I feel good about where we are.

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LEE: This comment to me, Don, was incredibly telling. And I think just actually one of the clearest signs that he is, in fact, gearing up for a second term.

You know, President Biden and his top advisors have long been really sensitive to the fact that they have been underestimated, that they are treated like underdogs, and that time and time again they had to prove their skeptics and their critics wrong.

Obviously, the 2020 primary, and then the midterms that we just saw happen were two prime example. And this very much to me sounded like a President Biden who is pretty eager to try and prove critics wrong again, Don.

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LEMON: Yes. Look, I think it's first reelection speech was State of the Union. But that's just me.

Let's talk about the Brazilian president, Lula, making his first White House visit since being elected again. How can these two repair the relationship between the countries after really, both -- they've both seen their democracies threatened?

LEE: Yes, you know this is going to be a really fascinating visit and a really interesting bilateral meeting at that. You know, these two men, in so many ways, have confronted similar dynamics in their respective countries. Right?

The rise of political extremism, right-wing populism and efforts by protesters and their countries to overturn election results. I mean, we saw that on such clear display in Brazil, obviously, some weeks ago when supporters of the ex-president tried to storm government buildings. That event had such echoes to what happened here in the United States on January 6.

So U.S. officials do Say that those are the kinds of themes that the two men will certainly talk about in this meeting this afternoon.

And for President Biden, this will be sort of like a turning of a chapter moment, at least when it comes to U.S.-Brazil relations. To say the least, he did not have a close ally in the ex-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.

LEMON: All right. Thank you, M.J. Appreciate that.

HARLOW: So ahead, prosecutors building their case in the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial. How they allege he tried to use his best friend to build an alibi. That's next.

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