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Presumed Human Remains Found At Titan Wreckage Site; Second Night Of Unrest Near Paris After Teen Killed By Police. Madonna Recovering After Stay In ICU, Postpones World Tour. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired June 29, 2023 - 08:00   ET

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

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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: And just like that, two hours down, one to go. It's 8:00 a.m. here on the east coast. We are so happy you are with us. There is a lot of news --

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I'm having fun this morning, by the way.

HARLOW: I know, because of the baseball.

MATTINGLY: Yes. You are pretty cool, too.

HARLOW: Oh, thanks. Perfect game, perfect pitch for the Yankees. We're going to tell you about it in a little bit.

But we are just two hours away from the Supreme Court expected to hand down major decisions that will affect the entire nation. The justices have saved some of the biggest and most consequential opinions for last. We're going to break down what is left from affirmative action to student loan relief for millions of Americans.

MATTINGLY: We are hearing this morning presumed human remains. They were discovered inside the wreckage of the doomed Titan submersible. Medical experts are now set to analyze those potential remains. We'll have the latest on that investigation into the catastrophic implosion.

Plus --

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MELINDA FRENCH GATES: I believe women should be every place the decisions are being made, and that's just -- we are just not there yet as a country.

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HARLOW: We're going to have more of that interview, our conversation with Melinda French Gates, as she vows to get more women elected to public office. This hour of CNN THIS MORNING starts right now. It is decision day. Take a look. We will pull up live pictures. There

you go. Sun rising over the Supreme Court this morning where huge decisions will come down just two hours from now. The justices have left some of their most consequential cases for last. Here are some of the big opinions we're still waiting for. Can a person's race be used as factor in college admissions? Will the court allow President Biden's student loan forgiveness program to go forward for more than 40 million Americans? And there's the case of a web designer who refused to create a gay wedding website. All of these critical issues at stake.

CNN Supreme Court analyst Joan Biskupic tracking it all for us. So many big decisions. Like they always do, they leave them until the end. But what I find so interesting about all three of those cases is just how many people they directly affect immediately.

JOAN BISKUPIC, CNN SUPREME COURT ANALYST: It's so true, Poppy. And we will know within the next 48 hours likely just what the justices say and do that will affect so many people.

And I'd like to pick up first with the important racial affirmative action on campus, because that's going to have so many practical consequences in classrooms across the country. But it also goes to a very big, large question about American identity. And let me just play that out, given that in some ways it goes all the way back to Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The question is whether admissions officers on campuses can take into account an applicant's race with a lot of other factors in deciding who gets coveted seats on campus.

And since 1978, in a decision by the name of Bakke, Regents of the University of California versus Bakke, the Supreme Court said that admissions officials can look at race, but they can't do quotas. That decision has always been controversial, but yet it's the model for what our higher education system has done. And the justices appear to have a majority to roll that back.

But it wouldn't be just rolling back the 1978 Bakke decision and the 2003 decision that really robustly affirmed the idea that race- conscious admissions are important for campus diversity. It could also be undercutting in some ways the promise of Brown v. Board of Education from 1954 and integration.

But let me just sketch a bit of the counter idea. And it comes from Chief Justice John Roberts who has said in the education context the way to stop discriminating on basis of race is to actually stop discriminating on basis of race, stop racial discrimination by stop looking at applicants' race.

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He has been strong about this principle, that we have to move away from considering race because that will actually help America move forward. The other idea, the one that's prevailed since then, is the idea that you have to take into account race to actually end racism and to fulfill this very important ideal of campus diversity that will then play out, Poppy, in businesses, the military, and education across the country.

MATTINGLY: Joan, I think Poppy makes a great point when she talks about just the wide scale of people that these decisions could affect. And one of those issues is religious liberty as well. What's your sense of kind of how that's going to play out?

BISKUPIC: That's another one where we've seen a pattern wrong the justices, Phil, where they have been more open to claims from religious conservatives. And in these cases we have a Christian website designer who does not want to make wedding websites for same- sex couples, and then we have a former postal worker who was disciplined after he refused to work on Sundays. And I think in both those cases the justices are going to be sympathetic to those claims. The question, Phil, will be how wide will they sweep?

MATTINGLY: All right, Joan Biskupic, as always, big day, days ahead, thanks so much.

We want to bring in Astead Herndon, CNN political analyst, national politics reporter for "The New York Times," Jessica Dean, CNN Congressional correspondent, Elie Honig, CNN senior legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, and Natasha Alford, CNN political analyst, senior correspondent at "The Grio."

And Natasha, I want to start with you, because we ended our last segment with you talking about -- we were talking about the issue of equity in the Biden administration, and one of the things that I think they point to regularly is they put the first black woman on the Supreme Court, and that is progress, or that's them saying they are delivering on that agenda promise. This is a Supreme Court which they don't control, but I think the idea of affirmative action being front and center right now, everything that Joan just said, and you made the point of the issues the administration may not be getting at are the ones that touch people's day-to-day lives and really kind of connect. This is one of those issues that will connect whether you are for it or against it. What's your sense of how this plays out?

NATASHA ALFORD, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: It's a huge issue. We have seen the experiments of this before in California in 1996, Affirmative Action was taken away from public universities, and within a year you saw 50 percent drop in black and Hispanic students going to these selective public universities.

And so there is sort of this obsession with, if you take race out, then everything will be about merit, and that's not the reality in college admissions. We have policies around legacy admission. If someone who is in your family went to a university, you get a bump that process. So even if you take race away, there's still a possibility that there may be complaints or lawsuits as universities try to implement race-neutral policies. So again, it's far from over even if you take race out of the decision-making and admissions.

HARLOW: Astead, we heard Joan talking about the precedent that was set by Bakke a long time ago and then affirmed really powerfully in 2003. But it was justice O'Connor in 2003 who wrote that opinion in Greta versus Bollinger which was about the University of Michigan Law School. In that opinion, she said, yes, race is important. There is a diversity, there is a compelling state interest to preserve it, so the court has a role here, et cetera.

But at the end of that opinion she said there needs to be a sunset, say 25 years, when we have to come to terms with the fact, and she pointed to the 14th Amendment, that said that we have to do away with government imposed discrimination. We are very close to that 25 years that she was pointing to. The question now is what does this court do, because it's a completely different court than when she wrote this?

ASTEAD HERNDON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Absolutely. I think that change in 25 years has come up with this court significant. When you think about voting rights and the Roberts court on voting rights, too, there was a question around whether that kind of imposed formula was necessary to make sure that the kind of government way of eliminating discrimination was still needed, right.

So I think this court is wrestling with the continued question of how to -- how to deal with continued discrimination, and I think for folks who really prioritize this as a way to kind of feel equity in the country, this is the court that has kind of stepped away from those values. And so when we think about the conservative court largely, there is a question of legitimacy, too, right, like they have seen the public sentiment really shift on this court. But I think in the last couple of week when you have the voting rights decisions specifically kind of shift that, I think it opened up a new space. To Natasha's point, there's a couple of questions that really affect folks like lives in a tangible way.

HARLOW: Like right away.

HERNDON: Right. And those are the things that really color how people view the court --

HARLOW: I should also --

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HERNDON: So when we think of student loans, we think of college admissions, those can completely undo or upend that kind of legitimacy or kind of confidence question in the court even as we have had these decisions that may have gone different than folks expected over the last couple of weeks.

HARLOW: I didn't mean to jump on you there, but I think it's interest that Justice O'Connor told her biographer 11 years after she wrote this, that that may have been a misjudgment. This is three years after Michael Brown was killed. She said, essentially, maybe it needs to be more than 25 years. Maybe we haven't progressed as much as we've hoped.

ALFORD: You think? How long was slavery? I don't know, 25 years seems like such an arbitrary number when my father is still alive and he desegregated a school in Syracuse, New York, and that was in upstate New York. So our sense of what it takes to create equity, to sort of have this starting line that is equal is just not reality for so many people. And this idea that somehow there is not merit in considering race and considering the whole story, again, just doesn't reflect the reality of people's lives.

ELIE HONIG, SENIOR CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Let me just also say, whenever you get into these question how long do we leave these programs and provisions in place, should there be a sunset, you have this natural tension. Astead mentioned the voting rights case. That's a case where basically the Supreme Court said we no longer need to have certain areas of the south run their voting rights plans --

HARLOW: You're talking about Shelby?

HONIG: Yes. And Justice Ginsburg had the famous line in her dissent. She basically said getting rid of these protections because everything is OK now, I'm paraphrasing, is like getting rid of an umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet. So I think we're going to see some of that play today as well.

MATTINGLY: I'm just going to ask you, I think what's important from a political perspective is we have seen in the last -- ask Wisconsin Supreme Court voters whether or not these cases have a tangible effect on voters. The Supreme Court has been a central issue since 2016, no question about it. But I think individual decisions have had a major effect on voters, and we have seen it play out. These are cases where it could.

We had Chris Christie on last night. The Republican kind of primary field is kind of working through itself, and the reality remains Donald Trump is still the frontrunner by a significant margin, and I want to play something that Chris Christie said to our colleague Kaitlan Collins last night and get your reaction to it.

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CHRIS CHRISTIE, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We didn't go after Trump early enough, and we allowed a certain narrative to set in about Donald Trump that then became impossible for us to change or overcome. And so, look, he has been a major world figure for the last eight years. And so we're not going to be able to knock down his numbers or shake some of his support -- I have been in the race for three weeks -- in three weeks. But we have seven months until the first people vote, and my message will be heard by then.

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JESSICA SCHNEIDER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That interview was so interesting, and Kaitlan did such a great job with it. I invite everybody to go watch it because I think it really lays out so many that's kind of swirling around the 2024 GOP presidential field right now and where these tension points are, right. So you have something like Ron DeSantis that isn't going to directly go after Trump as much as he -- as much as Chris Christie, who every answer, right, this is what he is building the whole thing on. I was there at Faith and Freedom which was in D.C., evangelical voters. It's a cattle call. It was the first one that we've really seen where all of them come through. MATTINGLY: That's not a pejorative term, by the way. It's campaign

speak.

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DEAN: No, not a pejorative term. There are no cows. But yes, everybody parades through. And Chris Christie spoke, and it was a very Trump-friendly crowd. And they booed him, as I know you guys talked about. But it was worth noting that a couple of people were like, yes, yes. So there are sprinkles of that throughout. It is telling to see Chris Christie now talking about this, here we are in 2023, coming up on 2024. He was in the 2016 cohort. And for him to say we didn't go after him soon enough, remember, everyone thought everyone else was going to take Trump out.

HARLOW: And then no one did.

DEAN: And then no one did, and here we are. And is it too late? I think that's the question. And I think that's what Chris Christie's getting at. He hopes it's not, right? He is pinning the whole candidacy on it. But is it?

HARLOW: Astead, it was a fabulous interview. At one point, Kaitlan asked about what specifically on this was what about people like Asa Hutchinson or Will Hurd who have gotten in the race who are not going directly after him? Do you think Chris Christie can convince candidates like that?

HERNDON: He has to if it he is trying to create that type of permission structure that he is talking about in order for folks to talk about Donald Trump in a more explicit way. But he has an electorate problem. There are not enough Republicans who are anti- Trump because the Republican Party remains a kind of pro-Trump electorate. And so there are not simply enough Republicans -- those folks have left. They have become independents. They've been voting for Democrats.

The party has shifted so in the last 10 years where it is actually forcing those candidates -- there are certainly those pockets that exist within the party.

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And it's not up folks here I'd be -- to be able to win the nomination, you know.

I was talking to Nate Cohn, The Times's chief polling advisor about this. And he was saying, really specifically. He was like, you have to combine anti-Trump wings to be able to overtake his coalition. And that requires some folks who are in the more moderate camp that may speak to an Asa Hutchinson or Chris Christie. That also requires the folks who are voting for a Ted Cruz in 2016 --

DEAN: That's right.

HERNDON: -- who are now voting for Ron DeSantis, this time around, or maybe anti-Trump for different reasons that aren't ideological. And so, you have to combine those wings to be able to cobble together a coalition that overtakes him. And so that means being anti-Trump by itself is not frankly enough. Yes. Because they simply don't have enough of those people in the Republican Party.

And so -- and I think we can kind of overcomplicated a little bit. The Republican Party is not anti-Trump. And for top down, they know that. And so, when you're at the RNC, when you're talking to Republican leadership, they're frankly saying that fairly openly, the version of them that goes forward has to include some part of Donald Trump because frankly, the voters want that to exist.

HARLOW: Thus, the loyalty pledge?

DEAN: Right.

HERNDON: Exactly. That's the inability to be able to talk about him directly. That's his ability to skip out of the debates. All of that are based off of the fact that he has an electorate that's still largely with him.

MATTINGLY: Dude, you should have a podcast.

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MATTINGLY: He does have a podcast. We should listen to it.

NATASHA ALFORD, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: And it's a great one.

MATTINGLY: All right, everybody, stay with us. We've got a lot more coming up. We also have this. The Titan submersible wreckage recovered from the sea floor. What officials are looking at? We'll dig into that coming up next.

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HARLOW: So, a week after Coast Guard Officials determined a Titanic- bound vessel had suffered a catastrophic implosion killing all five people on board, crews have now recovered what appears to be human remains. And large portions of that Titan submersible. Those remains will now be examined by medical professionals here in the United States.

Paula Newton joins us live again this morning from Ottawa. Paula, good morning to you. Tragic day. I mean they knew what was coming. But to actually discover human remains, what more can you tell us?

PAULA NEWTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Absolutely, Poppy. And so many significant developments. But as you highlight, very tough for the families. And yet a measure and comfort of knowing that those remains were found and that will also help in the investigation.

I also want to point out that there are several investigations here. Late last night we got a statement from the Transportation Safety Board headquartered here in Ottawa. They too gave us more details on the investigation.

They said investigators have finished collecting relevant documents and completed the preliminary interviews with those onboard the support vessel, Polar Prince. Poppy, remember that is the mothership to the Titan. The investigation team has taken possession of the vessel's voyage data recorder, which has been sent to the TSB engineering laboratory here in Ottawa for further analysis.

They add that given those large pieces of wreckage that the Coast Guard has, that they have also reviewed those, they catalog them, and that they now are in the possession of the U.S. Coast Guard. Poppy, this is going to be a very complicated investigation nonetheless, but the fact that they have such large pieces of wreckage.

They have the data recorder. They also have human remains which will be very important to the family so that they actually understand a tick-tock, right, a minute-by-minute of what happened. And hopefully that their family members didn't suffer any pain. All of that's so important.

I want to highlight several investigations and not the least of which may be criminal investigations which are yet to come. Although that is not a sure thing. Most of the U.S. -- what the U.S. Coast Guard is doing and the Transportation Safety Board here in Canada is to make sure that submersibles like this are safe. And whether or not more regulation is needed, Poppy.

HARLOW: And regulated. Paula, thank you for the reporting and the update.

MATTINGLY: All right. Well, parts of Paris are burning for a second night after a 17-year-old was shot and killed by police. How the French government is reacting to the protests and violent clashes? We're live in Paris. Next.

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MATTINGLY: Well, happening overnight. For a second straight night, police in France clashing with protesters after an officer shot and killed a 17-year-old driver during a traffic stop. Police arresting 150 protesters for setting cars, town halls, schools, and police stations on fire across the country. They also threw stones and shot fireworks at police. Now, French officials say they're deploying 40,000 officers as more unrest is expected -- is expected.

CNN's Melissa Bell is live with us in Paris with more. Melissa, they're clearly expecting more. What are you hearing right now about how this goes forward?

MELISSA BELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, even now, Phil, what we're seeing in Nanterre, which is the neighborhood to the northwest of Paris where first of all, this tragic killing took place on Tuesday morning. Young Nael was just 17 years old. And what's emerged is video evidence showing the moment the police stop happened, and showing the contradiction with the police's version of the initial version of events.

And that really has fueled that anger that you've seen. The young boy was killed, really instantly, pronounced an hour after that stop.

That has fueled that anger that you're seeing even now beginning to bubble up. There is a march going on in that suburb of Nanterre. There was called for by young Nael's mother on this just a few days after the killing and after two very violent nights where you're quite right, Phil, the violence has only increased.

That March really an expression of the anger. You have to understand that here in France, the system -- the way the state has made, it chooses not to look at questions of race or ethnicity. And it becomes very difficult and has been traditionally over the years to investigate any of these incidents.

And I'm afraid that here, the French police have had a form of traffic stops and identity checks that go wrong. That is what you're seeing even now in that suburb of Paris that pent-up anger that authorities fear will spill into tonight for yet another angry night of rage and destruction, Phil.

MATTINGLY: All right. Melissa Bell, great reporting. Keep us posted. Thanks so much.

HARLOW: Well, music icon Madonna forced to postpone her world tour because of a health scare. Her manager revealed on social media that she spent several days in the ICU with a serious bacterial infection. But he says she's expected to make a full recovery, so that is good news.

A source says that she's now out of the ICU. Her celebration tour was scheduled to kick off July 15 in Canada before heading to the United States and Europe. Her manager says they will announce a new start date and reschedule shows as soon as they have them.

MATTINGLY: Well, any moment now, we'll have the new weekly jobless claims. I was so excited. Economic data, what they show, and its impact on the economy? Plus.

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MELINDA FRENCH GATES, PHILANTHROPIST: I vote in any election on both sides of the aisle. Sometimes I vote Republican. sometimes Democratic.

I'm a very independent voter. And I don't want to be pegged as one or the other. I think that the best policy is made when we reach across the aisle.

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HARLOW: Philanthropist Melinda French Gates on her shift towards politics and who she is focusing on getting elected to public office.

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