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Ten Killed in Mass Shooting in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas Since July 1; Russia Says, Ukraine Attempted Terrorist Drone Attack Near Moscow; Lawsuit Questions Legacy Admissions at Harvard. Aired 7- 7:30a ET

Aired July 04, 2023 - 07:00   ET

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

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A mass shooting in Southwest Philadelphia. Police say one person is in custody.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This male was wearing a bulletproof vest with multiple magazines in the vest. He also had a scanner and an AR-style rifle and a handgun.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two children, a two-year-old and a 13-year-old injured.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: A new lawsuit takes aim at Harvard's legacy admissions policy. This is hot on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision to dismantle affirmative action.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've done a terrible job of preparing our black and brown kids to be able to go to college.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think the question is how do you continue to create a culture where education is the goal. One of the things that Harvard can do to make that even better is to eliminate any legacy programs.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hundreds of Israeli soldiers descending on Jenin.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want to break of the camp being a safe haven for terrorists.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Israel is warning that its new military operation in the occupied West Bank is not over yet after the most intense military raid in the territory in two decades.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We are unarmed people. We don't have anything in the camp to respond to this force.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He would just do stuff and say stuff with this conviction.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: To take a sort of nickname for him?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Daddy DeSantis. I mean, it's all joking.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Of course.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because we're like desperate women who had tried everything that we could do in our own power, in our own communities, and we weren't getting anywhere.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm George Motz and I approved this burger.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some of the best burgers I've ever had in my life have been with you guys.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I realized that the people who were making these burgers didn't realize themselves their own importance.

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PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: Well, good morning, everyone. It is July 4th. There, I'm sure, burgers in many of your futures. Audie Cornish is joining me now. And usually holidays are slow for news. There is a significant amount of news.

And we're following breaking news this morning across the country, including three mass shootings in just two days during a violent 4th July weekend.

Brand new overnight, police in Fort Worth, Texas, say at least two people are dead and six are wounded after a shooting following a neighborhood festival. In Philadelphia, police say a gunman wearing body armor went on a shooting rampage on the city streets. At least five people are dead. Two children are wounded, including a two-year- old toddler.

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: Investigators say the suspect had an AR-15 style rifle and a handgun, a police scanner in multiple ammo magazines packed in his body armor when police officers arrested him in an alley.

And the hunt is still on for suspects after two people were killed and 28 injured, many of them teenagers, at a block party in Baltimore.

Now, we're going to have team coverage on all the latest developments, and we start with Danny Freeman live outside the Philadelphia police headquarters. And, Danny, to start, what is the sense of a motive here? Again, this is the suspect who was walking the streets, right, in gear.

DANNY FREEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, that's right, Audie. And, really, police have not answered that question, and it's unclear if they know the answer to the question as to why this suspect, why this man opened fire in otherwise a relatively calm neighborhood the night before the 4th July. But here's what we do know about this suspect. He is in his 40s. As you said, he was taken into custody and he was carrying multiple weapons and also that body armor. But as of last night, police said to us, we just don't know why this man started firing last night.

But I will tell you a little bit about more about how exactly this came to be. It all started around 8:30 last night. Philadelphia police got a call of multiple gunshot victims in the Kingsessing area of Philadelphia. That's in the southwest from where we are right now. Officers arrived. They did find gunshot victims, but then they also heard a number of gunshots.

And the police commissioner really described this chaotic moment of officers arriving on scene, hearing gunshots and chasing the gunman by listening to the sound of his gunfire. Eventually, officers were able to apprehend him. I should say they did it without firing a shot. It's something that Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw mentioned and highlighted last night. Take a listen.

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COMMISSIONER DANIELLE OUTLAW, PHILADELPHIA POLICE: Thank God our officers were here on scene. They responded as quickly as they did. They showed up. I can't even describe the level of bravery and courage that was shown, not in addition to the restraint that was also shown here.

We, unfortunately, have six victims here, but. It could have been more had it not been for the officers.

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FREEMAN: And I'll also add, Commissioner Outlaw noted, like you said in the beginning, like you heard in the beginning, they found on this suspect a bulletproof vest, an AR-style rifle, a handgun, multiple magazines, and a police radio scanner.

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The other thing, too, is that so, as you heard, Commissioner Outlaw said, initially there were six victims, including four people who were killed and those two children who were injured. Then we learned overnight there's actually a fifth -- rather I should say a seventh victim, a fifth person who died in this shooting. He was found dead on the floor of a nearby home and police said that he is likely connected to this particular shooting.

One thing, Audie and Phil, I just want to add in this particular case is just some perspective. Homicides in the city of Philadelphia, they're actually down almost 20 percent compared to the same time last year. But that other bit of perspective is that it is still the homicide level here in Philadelphia, still much higher than the pre- pandemic levels.

So, again, heading into the actual 4th July holiday, a lot of folks on edge after this mass shooting in the city. Audie, Phil? CORNISH: Thank you for that context.

Now, joining us at the table, Joseph Pinion, Republican Strategist and Political Commentator, Natasha Alford, CNN political Analyst and Senior Correspondent at TheGrio, and Ellie Honig, CNN senior legal analyst and former Assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Welcome to all of you.

JOE PINION, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good to be here.

CORNISH: These are tough stories to open the day with. And so far, what they have in common, of course, is the connection of weapons, right, different motives, different things going on. We had the mayor of Baltimore on yesterday and he talked about illegal guns in his state, not always the issue.

But what difficulties does this pose for city leaders around the country who are trying to get a grip on these bouts of violent crime?

PINION: Well, look, I think, for me, certainly, as tragic, I think, it has become, almost a tired trope, where we have these holiday weekends that basically end in bloodshed. And so whether you're talking about what we just saw here, whether we're talking about the 28 people that were shot in Baltimore, whether we're talking about the over 30 people shot in Chicago, we know for a fact there is a small sliver of people who are committing the vast majority of these crimes all across this country.

And so the question becomes, what are the policies that we can be putting in place that keep the criminals those off the streets? What are the policies that we can be putting in place to keep guns, in particular, out of the hands of those criminals? Certainly, we can have a conversation about ghost guns, as the mayor of Baltimore was talking about, but the overwhelming majority of these issues deal with the fact that we have people that do not follow the laws anyway.

So, what are the policies that are actually going to result in us actually stopping the crimes that spur the conversation in the first place?

CORNISH: Natasha?

NATASHA ALFORD, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I think it's appropriate that today is the 4th of July, because this is America now. This is the American sort of way of being. It's a state of constant fear. It's a state of even as you go out to celebrate, you have to sort of look over your shoulder and wonder what will happen.

And so Joe mentions crime. What comes to mind for me is terrorism, this idea of domestic terrorism, and whether the United States has really grappled with this unique form of American violence that is not just about sort of petty criminals trying to get their way but it's about inflicting fear on the American people.

And so from a policy standpoint, how you legislate, how you address that, I'm not really sure, but I think it's something that we actually have to confront head on.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So, the problem with gun violence in this country, I think, is complicated and multifaceted. You can't just point to any one factor. There's a legislative piece of it, there's a gun culture, and there's also a leadership and, frankly, law enforcement aspect of this.

I was a prosecutor for a long time, and I think I have to say the D.A. in Philly in particular has been an abject failure. Larry Krasner, he's been in office since 2018, and Danny said exactly correctly, rates of shootings and homicides spiked from time he took office until now. They're down a bit this year, from last year, but nearly doubled from when he took office in 2018 up through 2019 on through 2021.

And at a certain point, you have to ask a leader in a position like that, you've been in office now five years and these rates are unacceptable. And the culture in Philadelphia, I have relatives who live in Philadelphia, right near where Danny lives.

CORNISH: Yes. I mean, correlation is not causation.

HONIG: No, it's not.

CORNISH: And we should also say, right, the state, there is also a conflict, right, at the state level about what the gun policy should be in Pennsylvania and say local ordinances cannot be passed without the state --

HONIG: Pennsylvania has -- right, exactly. There're two questions here how strict are the gun laws? And then, secondly, how are they being enforced? But you're right, Audie. I always be skeptical of any public official who says crime rates went up or down and it's solely because of A or B. But it's a factor, and I don't think it can be ignored here.

PINION: Well, look, also, I just think that we have this conversation and kind of this either/or comparison, right, where either you are for guns, either you are against guns, and what gets lost in the conversation is what are the policies that we should be putting in place to prevent the violence.

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I think, again, yes, we can talk about people being terrorized, but I don't think that we can talk about it in the sense of traditional terrorism. We have people that do not feel as if they have a reason to live. We have communities that have the --

CORNISH: Yes. Is there ever been a Republican policy that has been aimed towards the things that you're talking about? We often hear people talk about mental health. We often people talk about systemic issues. But is there any Republican agenda that addresses those factors you consider that are outside of us?

PINION: Absolutely. I think, again, there is a three-strand chord of despair in this country that starts with a lack of educational opportunity --

CORNISH: But are you hearing that from candidates?

PINION: Certainly, we hear that from candidates all the time. I think it's not necessarily the substance of the policy but how it's actually a message.

And I think if you look at, historically, the type of message that resonates with communities of color, it always starts with what is the program. And so if you're not talking about a specific program --

CORNISH: And with outside communities, that crime is the problem and those people are the problem.

PINION: Right. And so I think if you're talking about things through a program-centered view, then it's very difficult for people to necessarily receive a message about a policy view that tackles the educational inequality that we have in this country, that tackles the cycle of poverty that stems from that educational inequality --

CORNISH: Though, I mean, to be clear, that's not what we're talking about in the factor in Philadelphia and elsewhere elsewhere, right?

ALFORD: In Philadelphia, I mean, the details are still coming out, but this is some (INAUDIBLE) magazines on them.

CORNISH: I just want to make sure that we're not conflating the difference because this is what makes it such a difficult issue to intend --

PINION: I think the reality is you can focus on the magazines. The reality is what put the gun in that person's hand. What left that person with a sense of personal despair that they were willing to basically throw away their own life and take the lives of others? And those are the underlying issues that I do think Republicans, I think people across the political spectrum do talk about.

But when we have these conversations, they get neglected. They don't get actually spoken about forcefully, and I think we all suffer because of it.

MATTINGLY: Can I just ask, why don't they get spoken about forcefully? I can go through at least the Republican candidates in the primary that I covered on Capitol Hill, Tim Scott being the one that comes to mind, who has very specific policies to address a lot of the issues that you're talking about. And yet in terms of a primary, what the primary voters are talking about, what the people are talking about on the stump on a regular basis, you never hear about it. Why?

PINION: Well, look, I think the reality is that you can't help anybody from your couch. And so there is a political reality to the fact that there is not a proliferation of African-American and Hispanic primary voters --

CORNISH: No, he's talking about the voters in the primary, Republican primary voters. Is there no way to repeal -- you're saying there's no way to appeal to a predominantly white electorate or help us understand.

PINION: What I'm saying is that if you're trying to have a conversation about the issues that are overwhelmingly impacting urban America, there are not a lot of people from that section of the electorate that are participating in Republican primaries.

And so it, I think --

CORNISH: And that's the only way it matters?

PINION: Don't think that -- certainly, that's not what I said. I think the reality is that Democrats talk about the issues that are going to be impacting primary voters or Republicans talk about the issues that are going to be impacting Republican primary voters. And then, as always, we have a general election where there is a pivot, the triangulation, as it was called, during the Clinton era.

So, look, I think, certainly, we should never be trying to segment the conversation. We should be talking about the broader American people. But I also think it's dishonest for us to pretend that we don't live in the world where partisan politics does impact the primary process and the issues that get brought up during those periods.

MATTINGLY: All right. Guys, stay with us. We've got a lot more to come throughout the course of the next hour.

Also new this morning, Russia says it intercepted five Ukrainian drones near Moscow. While there are no immediate reports of casualties or damage, the Kremlin claims it thwarted a terrorist attack and said many of the targets seem fixed on civilian infrastructure.

I want to bring in retired Army Major Mike Lyons. Mike, we've seen a couple of incidents like this. They seem to be, to some degree, accelerating. What do we know about these five drones?

MAJ. MIKE LYONS (RET.), U.S. ARMY: So, Russia claims Ukraine has struck two targets. One, basically surrounding Moscow, a civilian airfield on the west side and then a special forces group on the east side of Moscow. Conveniently, it doesn't hit Moscow, had the capability to do that.

Color me skeptical on this one, and the fact that the only capability Ukraine has to do, these are the Turkish TB2 drones. And given they're counteroffensive right now, this is not worth it. This is not worth them wasting this resource here.

If you see this video that the Russian media releases, some guy pointing at the sky at something that we can really hardly see is what's out there, we could try to think that that's a TB2 Turkish drone that's in the Ukraine inventory or not.

So, again, I'm skeptical that the Ukraine military would waste this kind of resource given what they're trying to do with their counteroffensive right now.

CORNISH: At this point, is there any sign that this is actually connected to the counteroffensive? And why wouldn't it be given the vulnerabilities of Russia after the Wagner rebellion?

LYONS: Well, I think that Ukraine has got to be concerned about what's happening, what's still coming from Russia's perspective. We saw overnight also in Sumi, there was an attack from Russian drones into Ukraine and that this one had casualties.

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The Ukrainian president needs to get to the NATO summit here and get more what's called SHORAD, short range air defense platforms. This would kind of prevent this from happening inside of Ukraine right now.

But, again, the confusion that's taking place inside of Russia, Russia needs a win. So, this is what they do to try to create a win on their side, say that the Ukrainians are attacking them from a terrorist perspective. But at the end of the day, tactically, the kind of help that the Ukraine president needs is this, short range missile defenses that will help him with the defenses that are coming against the Russian drones.

CORNISH: That's Major Mike Lyons. Thank you.

MATTINGLY: All right, well, coming up next, we have a Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in higher education. What's it been going forward? Well, advocacy groups are taking aim at admissions at Harvard. How strong is their case? The panel is going to weigh in.

And live images out of Tel Aviv, Israel, where a car just rammed through pedestrians in what police are calling a terrorist attack. New details coming into CNN. Stay with us.

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MATTINGLY: Welcome back.

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Preferential treatment, it's coming under fire at one of the nation's top universities, this just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted affirmative action and the upper hand, it says, it provided.

Now, three minority advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit challenging Harvard's legacy admissions program.

CNN's Athena Jones joins us at the table. And, Athena, I felt like this was coming to some degree. What's the lawsuit actually say?

ATHENA JONES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is about two kinds of legacy applicants, so applicants who have a parent or relative who went to Harvard and applicants who are related to a donor. These groups are arguing that Harvard's admissions process, the preferential treatment that these kinds of applicants get, violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

They say that this preferential treatment goes largely to white students because they make up nearly 70 percent of these legacy applicants. And a district court has found the preferences that they're given to be sizable and significant. And this complaint includes a lot of data. They use admissions numbers to try to make their case.

And here's some of the things they found. They found that in the class of 2026, nearly 2,000 were admitted out of an applicant pool of just over 61,000. That's an admissions rate of just about 3.24 percent, so very, very low. But if you were donor related, so related to a donor, the admissions rate for you was seven times higher at 42 percent. This was for a period from 2014 to 2019. So the numbers are kind of looking historically.

And then this admissions rate for legacy applicants, so someone who had a parent or relative who went to Harvard was six times higher, so about 33.6 percent.

And as you mentioned, the timing of this is important because it's coming less than a week after the Supreme Court limited the use of race in college admissions. And so these groups are arguing that given that ruling now, it's even more imperative to make sure they eliminate any policies that disadvantage students of color. They argue that that's what this legacy admissions preferences do simply because so many of these legacies are white.

And part of this is because college admissions is a zero sum game, of course, if a legacy applicant gets a spot, that means that someone else who may not be related to someone who went to Harvard, may not be related to someone who donated to Harvard, is trying to get on their own merit, that leaves the spot not empty for them, so they can't get in if that spot is taken by a legacy applicant.

Here is one thing they said in the lawsuit. They said experts have concluded that removing legacy preferences would increase admissions for applicants of color and that approximately one quarter of white students admitted would not have been admitted if the donor and legacy preferences, among others, did not exist. And so they say if Harvard gets rid of these legacy preferences, then they're going to see admissions rates for black, Latino and Asian-American students rise by 4 to 5 percent with each of those groups, and that they would see admissions among white students fall by 4 percent.

So, they're saying, look, other schools have done this, other schools have gotten rid of this unfair treatment. It's time for Harvard to do the same.

CORNISH: In Neil Gorsuch's, I think, opinion on the affirmative action case, I see the groundwork laid for this conversation about legacy admissions. Is that right, Elie? Do you remember reading this?

HONIG: Yes. I think, look, it flows naturally, logically and legally from the opinion last week that legacy admissions are on their last legs

I guess I will say, though, two caveats, number one, the courts, including the Supreme Court, are going to apply more scrutiny to an explicit discriminatory system, affirmative action, whether one likes it or not. They explicitly say, what's the person's race? And then assign certain value to that, versus a system like this one, as Athena just laid out, which has what we call a disparate impact. It doesn't, on its face, say we're going to make differentiations based on race, but it has a disparate impact favoring white applicants. Courts are going to treat those a little bit differently.

The second thing, and let's remember, the Supreme Court does not have to any case it does not want to take. And so the question is, will they have they need four votes to take a case? Will they have those four votes? But I think reading even the majority opinion, striking down the affirmative action practice last week, I think it's clear if you sort of do the logical math, that it's hard to justify legally or logically ongoing legacy admission policies.

MATTINGLY: So this strikes me as political gold in the sense of like there's actually overlapping concentric circles between Republicans and Democrats who are looking around and trying to maybe strike a little bit more of a populist tone and saying, I'm not going to defend legacy admissions unless they went to one of these schools and want their kids to get into it. And I think you saw Republicans and Democrats come out after the Supreme Court ruling and agree from a 30,000-foot level that perhaps legacy admissions should be next. What's your sense of things?

PINION: Well, look, I think we've got our legal scholar here, but I think if you're just talking politically and I think as a human, either you're for merit or you're not. And so if you're somehow trying to say that you were opposed to affirmative action or at least a manner in which it was being implemented because it was not effectively giving merit where it was due, then you certainly have to say that if you're granting people a benefit towards admission rooted in the racial inequality that predated the need for the policy in the first place, then somehow you're doing a great disservice to the process of merit.

So, look, I think that there are Republicans that will hop on it, but I also think, again, there are always people who are willing to turn a blind eye to the policies that benefit them while hopping up and down and banging the table and talking about a policy that benefits a different type of individual.

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So, I think it's not quite as simple as we would hope it would be, but I think from my perspective, and I think the perspective of most Americans, if you're looking for merit, I think that legacy admissions, to your point, probably has seen its better days.

ALFORD: I think this goes back to what Ketanji Brown Jackson said, which is that there's the impact of race in real life, and then there's the way that you approach it in the law. For legacy admits, they've had a head-start, right, in this race, and the reality is that they are more likely to be white. The institution discriminated against African-Americans for the longest. The first three African- Americans who came in the 1850s had to be expelled because their white classmates refused to take classes with them. So, it was never necessarily about merit or whether you qualified to go to the institution. It was about whether the institution was willing to have you there.

Privilege compounds like money in a savings account, right? And so there's a population right now that has this advantage, and so you have to address it. We've seen the impact at other universities, and the truth is that admission rates do drop for legacy when you take that off the table.

CORNISH: Athena, thank you so much. Natasha, Joe and Elie, please stay with us.

MATTINGLY: All right, this just ended CNN, a car ramming through pedestrians in Tel Aviv, Israel. Police are calling it terrorist attacks. Stay with us. We'll have more details coming up next.

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