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CNN This Morning

New Video of Philadelphia Shooting; Anna Bower is Interviewed about the Fulton County Case; Jennifer Breheny Wallace is Interviewed about the Pressure to Succeed; GOP Candidates hit Battleground Wisconsin. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired August 23, 2023 - 06:30   ET

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


[06:30:00]

DANNY FREEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: But an attorney for the family of Eddie released new video, surveillance video they found from the scene. That's what I'm going to show you. And I'll just warn you, this is disturbing video.

Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(INAUDIBLE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) shoot you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 415 (ph), shots fired. Shots fired.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FREEMAN: So, you can see right there, Irizarry was sitting in the car, in the driver's seat side, not outside of the vehicle, not lunging at the officer. Obviously very, very different than what that initial report said.

At this point, the district attorney's office, they are investigating. The family said that they released this video specifically because they want transparency and they want some answers of course.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.

FREEMAN: The mayor and the police commissioner, again, now less than 24 hours after that video was released, they're planning on holding a press conference at 1:00 p.m. today.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, a clear discrepancy there. Obviously some questions to answer. But as we were talking about during the break, they know they're wearing cameras. They know that there is record of this.

HARLOW: Yes.

BLACKWELL: Why the initial report? Hopefully we'll get the answer to that.

Danny Freeman, thanks so much.

HARLOW: Appreciate it.

BLACKWELL: Tears of relief in Pakistan after an extraordinary rescue. Look, eight people, including six children, they're recovering this morning after they were saved from that cable car dangling about 900 feet above a remote valley that we brought you yesterday. Footage shows the moment when one child, look closely here, appeared to jump while clinging to a rope attached to a military helicopter. Rescuers used zip lines to bring the others down. The drama lasted 14 hours.

HARLOW: Wow.

BLACKWELL: But everybody is safe there.

HARLOW: So glad to see that.

BLACKWELL: Wow.

HARLOW: We have more on the breaking news overnight. Two more of Donald Trump's alleged co-conspirators have turned themselves into jail in Georgia. When the others, including former President Trump, are expected to surrender.

BLACKWELL: And right now Tropical Storm Franklin is threatening Haiti and the Dominican Republic with heavy rain and potentially life- threatening floods. Tropical storm conditions are also possible in the Turks and Caicos, the islands right by there, maybe by tonight.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:35:36]

BLACKWELL: Breaking overnight, two more alleged co-conspirators in the Georgia election subversion case have surrendered at the Fulton County Jail. Fake elector and former Coffee County GOP Chair Cathy Latham and former Georgia Republican chairman David Shafer, they have turned themselves in. And they join right-wing lawyer John Eastman and bail bondsman Scott Hall as some of the first defendants to surrender.

Donald Trump says that he will surrender to authorities tomorrow, one day before the deadline for surrender.

Anna Bower is the Fulton County correspondent for "Lawfare."

Anna, thanks for being with us.

Let's take these two who turned themselves in overnight. Latham and Shafer. Fit them into - their pieces into the puzzle.

ANNA BOWER, FULTON COUNTY CORRESPONDENT, "LAWFARE": Right.

So, David Shafer is the former GOP chairman in the state of Georgia. Cathy Latham is also the former GOP chairwoman in Coffee County, Georgia. And the two of them had -- both had a role as fake electors or so-called alternate electors in that scheme to submit votes for former President Trump after he lost the election to Joe Biden. Buz lost the election to joe Biden. And Cathy Latham also had a role - or an alleged role in the breach of voting systems and copying of voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia. So they've both been indicted for conduct related to that.

HARLOW: There's a push by Mark Meadows' lawyers and also Jeffrey Clark, who's a former DOJ official, to not even - not only do they want this thing moved to federal court out of state court, they want to not even have to go through this process that everyone has to go through of being arrested, et cetera, posting bond.

Is there any world in which those efforts would be successful? What's the argument to make because Fani Willis emailed Meadows' attorney and basically said no -- no way.

BOWER: Right. I'm very skeptical that these arguments are going to work to prevent Clark and Meadows from going through the booking process, or if they don't, from arrest warrants potentially issuing.

It's an extraordinary request. Judges will be very skeptical to grant a request to prohibit the arrest of someone who's been indicted by a state grand jury. But it's not just that. Keep in mind that Meadows and Clark have made these bids to move their state criminal prosecution to federal court. And as a part of that, they've - they've done this under the removal statute, which permits a federal official or a former federal official to move state prosecution to federal court if they've done something within the scope of their official duties. But that statute explicitly says that until the judge has decided that whether removal is appropriate, then the state proceedings can continue. And so these motions are just contrary to the plain words of the statute, which says, you know, the judge can -- until it's decided, these proceedings can continue.

And Judge Jones, who's overseeing the removal matter, has not yet decided that.

HARLOW: Right.

BOWER: So, I think it will be very unlikely that these emergency motions will succeed.

BLACKWELL: So, let's turn to Rudy Giuliani now. We know that there will be an attorney whose license in Georgia there, a member of the bar, to negotiate his bond agreement. Not someone who necessarily will be a part of the case beyond that.

What -- how should we understand that? And what's the impact on the larger case that he's bringing someone in just to negotiate this portion and may not be with him much longer?

BOWER: Right. Well, I don't think that there's going to be a huge impact on Giuliani's defense in the future. This is a pretty common, standard, you know, negotiation in terms -- when it comes to so-called white-collar crimes. This negotiation involves, you know, terms of bail conditions and the bail amount. So, I don't think that this is going to have a large impact in the future.

But I will say, you know, it's not uncommon or unusual for defendants in big RICO cases in Georgia to have problems finding counsel.

[06:40:01]

You know, these are - these are long trials. There's lots of litigation. It's very, very expensive. And there's only a few people who are experienced in this kind of trial and with the RICO law.

So, I think Giuliani, you know, it's not unusual to have some trouble finding someone who can handle this type of matter. And, you know, complicating the matter as well is the fact that Giuliani reportedly has had some financial troubles. So, I think that, you know, he will hopefully secure counsel, but I think that it won't be an issue that he has not done so yet.

BLACKWELL: All right, some important context for us there.

Anna Bower, thank you so much.

BOWER: Thank you.

BLACKWELL: We've got new video just into CNN. It shows what appears to be a drone crashing into a building that's under construction. This is in Moscow. Russia claims it downed three drones overnight. And we're not hearing about any injuries yet.

HARLOW: Also hear from Wisconsin voters as they size up the Republican field ahead of the debate tonight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAROLINE QUINLAN, WISCONSIN VOTER: I think the next 15 months is going to be like a Lifetime movie. It's -- there's going to be -- so much going to happen on both sides.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:45:22]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We all tell ourselves that our GPA doesn't define us, but it really does here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The end goal isn't to learn, it's to -

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Get a number.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To get a number.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How much of kind of what you guys have been working towards is about getting into a top school? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A lot of it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All - all of it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: That might sound like one of your teenagers. Those were high school students talking to CBS in 2021, and they talked about the toll of the pressure to succeed, including physical tears, mental breakdowns from failure and the fear of failure and friends with thoughts of suicide. Well, there's a new book and it pushes back on what it's calling toxic achievement culture -- that's what the author calls it - that is overtaking our kids' lives. Jennifer Breheny Wallace joins me now to talk about this drive to optimize performance. It has only led to higher rates of anxiety, depression, even self-harm in America's highest achieving school.

She writes that children's lives, quote, "become high-budget productions meant to attract the attention of admissions officers, scholarship committees and football recruiters, not unique and imperfect stories just beginning to unfold."

Wallace, in her book, offers practical solutions for how to teach kids to strive and to strive for excellence without crushing them. She also acknowledges it can feel awkward to worrying about the hardships of kids in the top 20 percent of American families. But this is what she writes. "As the researcher Suniya Luthar put it, no one is putting pain on a scale. A child in pain is a child in pain, and neither chooses their circumstance."

So, she joins us now. She's the author of "Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It."

Thank you for joining us.

JENNIFER BREHENY WALLACE, AUTHOR, "NEVER ENOUGH": Thanks, Poppy.

HARLOW: The book made me think a lot about how I parent and how I'm going to hopefully parent. Thank you for writing it for all the parents out there.

You call this a national crisis. And you say, our children are living under a tyranny of metrics. What's that?

WALLACE: It - well, you know, as a parent of three teens myself, I've been noticing how different my children's childhood was from my own. You know, I had space in my life to make mistakes, to pivot and today kids feel very much trapped on this narrow path to success. So, the metrics are the GPA, how many social media followers they have, how many likes they get, and - and how much they weigh on the scales. So, there's a -- there's a constant goal-setting, strategic life that these kids are feeling like they have to live. HARLOW: But haven't we done that to them?

WALLACE: Yes.

HARLOW: Our society? Us as parents?

WALLACE: We have. So, I - this book does not blame parents. I am right there in the trenches with parents.

What I think is happening is that parents are feeling these macroeconomic forces in our environment. They are seeing the crush of the middle class. They are seeing this steep in equity and they are absorbing these fears. And there is a real fear for our kids' future. It used to be believed in America that kids could do as well as - as their parents.

HARLOW: Or they're supposed to do better.

WALLACE: But we're now seeing the first generation that isn't.

HARLOW: One thing that I think is going to catch a lot of people's attention is that you choose to write about sort of the richest kids, the top 20 percent. And many people would say, well, they -- they have it all. They have all the resources to solve for these problems. There are so many more children in desperate need, underprivileged children.

You call this a gilded pressure cooker, shiny on the outside, punishing on the inside.

Why did you focus on them and not those who have so many fewer resources?

WALLACE: Yes, so this book really came out of a 2019 article I wrote for "The Washington Post" about how students attending these schools are now officially an at-risk group, meaning they are two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety, depression, substance abuse disorder than the average American teen. So we're talking as much as one in three teens. So -- and these were my kids that I was researching. And I wanted to know what I could do in my own home to prevent the pressure.

I mean pain is not a zero sum game.

HARLOW: Yes.

WALLACE: You can have sympathy and empathy for these kids and also be concerned about those in the lower third of our economic.

HARLOW: You went through this. I wonder what it was like to be raising teenagers as you're writing this and reporting it out and speaking to people liken Molly, who you introduce in the first chapter, who is a varsity athlete who is so stressed out that she's barely sleeping and is tells you she is running laps in practice with her eyes closed to get some rest.

WALLACE: Yes. And she didn't think there was anything wrong with that.

HARLOW: She thought that was normal.

WALLACE: She thought that was normal.

[06:50:01]

So, as a parent of three teens, I feel so grateful that I was able to research this -

HARLOW: Yes.

WALLACE: And able to implement the findings into my own parenting at home.

HARLOW: I love the story, though, there's sort of a good story near the end where you talk about visiting an all-boys catholic school in Cleveland.

WALLACE: Yes.

HARLOW: What did that teach you?

WALLACE: Right. Their motto, which is the Jesuit model - motto, is, not better than others, but better for others. So, giving kids the context, the reason why they should work so hard, not just for their own advancement, but for -- to be able to contribute to the greater society. I think we have lost some of that in the way we're parenting today.

HARLOW: You also write about mattering. And this is the topic of a new book that you're writing. But that we, as parents, have to make our children feel as they matter for them, not for what they achieve, and the importance of love and affection, which seems like we would know that -

WALLACE: Obvious.

HARLOW: But when we ask them, how was school, how did you do on your test, did you finish your homework, that's not clear to them.

WALLACE: Right. We love our kids unconditionally. I have yet to meet a parent that doesn't. That love doesn't always feel unconditional to the kids. And I heard that time and time again from the teens, that they thought their parents loved and cared about them more when they were doing well.

HARLOW: So, affection to our kids. What's your final piece of advice to parents?

WALLACE: To make home a haven from the pressure. They get it from everywhere. Let them recover at home. Let them know that their worth is never on the line at home. They are worth who they are, whether they're successful or they're not. We love them no matter.

HARLOW: And when they walk in the door, say what?

WALLACE: Lead with lunch.

HARLOW: Lead with lunch.

WALLACE: Instead of how did that Spanish quiz go. HARLOW: There you go.

Jennifer, congratulations on the book. I think a lot of parents will gain a lot from it. I did.

WALLACE: Thanks so much, Poppy.

HARLOW: Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Victor.

BLACKWELL: All right, next, we'll take you back live to the Fulton County Jail where four of Donald Trump's alleged co-conspirators have turned themselves in. When the others, including the former president, are expected to surrender.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:56:14]

BLACKWELL: Tonight's debate is in a key battleground state, that's Wisconsin. Joe Biden narrowly won the state in 2020. And Republicans hope to pick it up in 2024.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny spoke to voters in Milwaukee about what they want.

Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CAROLINE QUINLAN, WISCONSIN VOTER: I think the next 15 months is going to be like a Lifetime movie. It's - there's going to be so much going to happen on both sides.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (voice over): That is how Caroline Quinlan sees the 2024 presidential race. Hopeful for the possibility of change, but bracing for a year of drama.

QUINLAN: I could go for a fresh start on both sides of the aisle. Both for the Republicans and the Democrats. Is that going to happen? I don't know.

ZELENY: Quinlan has a ring-side seat. Here in the sprawling suburbs of Milwaukee, where Republicans will not only gather tonight for their first primary debate, but also convene next summer in the same arena to crown the party's nominee at the GOP convention.

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hello, Milwaukee.

ZELENY: Wisconsin has long been a vital stop on the road to the White House. A battleground and bellwether that went for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2016. Eight candidates will be on stage for the debate, but not Trump.

Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a one-time Trump rival, believes that's a mistake. SCOTT WALKER (R), FORMER WISCONSIN GOVERNOR: When I stood next to him at that first debate eight years ago in Cleveland, this was a guy who was commanding, who took charge, who took over the debate. And I think it's a missed opportunity for him not to come here to Milwaukee and try and take charge again.

ZELENY: As Walker sees it, Trump is not only competing in the primary, he also could start trying to win over some of the voters who once supported him.

WALKER: If they see him fighting not for the sake of fighting but fighting for them, fighting for their families, fighting for their schools, fighting for their economic survivability, then I think he starts to pull some of those voters back.

ZELENY: Quinlan, an independent, would be in that camp.

When we first met during the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, she was torn.

QUINLAN: I get it why people don't like Trump.

ZELENY: She ultimately voted for Trump. Now she's intent on sizing up the field.

ZELENY (on camera): Is there anyone who stands out to you at this point, or a few people?

QUINLAN: Well, I'm still learning about all of them. I've been really interested in DeSantis, Haley. I'm interested in her.

ZELENY (voice over): She wants to hear the candidates talk about education, the economy and crime. She fears Biden is too old. And, for now, is withholding judgement on Trump.

QUINLAN: Yes, he's not my first choice, but, yes, let's see what my choices are.

ZELENY: Democrats are also laser focused on Wisconsin -

BIDEN: Good to see you, man.

ZELENY: With the Biden campaign on the air with a new TV ad.

BRIAN SCHIMMING, CHAIRMAN, WISCONSIN REPUBLICAN PARTY: What this debate is about is one of us versus Joe Biden.

ZELENY: Brian Schimming, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said the attention makes clear, his state will help settle a larger debate, whether it's a rematch between Biden and Trump or not.

SCHIMMING: I don't think anything's inevitable. History is full of folks who, you know, were ahead early and then didn't end up the nominee in both parties.

ZELENY: Jeff Zeleny, CNN, Milwaukee. (END VIDEOTAPE)

HARLOW: That's so interesting. And those are the voters that the candidates on stage tonight need to talk to.

BLACKWELL: Yes, when Ms. Quinlan says that Trump's not her first choice -

HARLOW: Right.

BLACKWELL: That she now needs to see what her choices are. There's an opportunity tonight to speak to those voters.

HARLOW: There is.

BLACKWELL: Some who may prefer Trump but still can be persuaded.

HARLOW: That's right. There's some time.

All right, CNN THIS MORNING continues right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: It has been a revolving door of lawyers and defendants at the Fulton County Jail in one of the most closely watched cases in the nation.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Giuliani is scheduled to meet with the district attorney here in Fulton County with Bernie Kerik. He is not a lawyer. He is also an unindicted co-conspirator.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: If you really are out of money, you can get a court-appointed lawyer. If this is a stall tactic, it's not going to work.

[07:00:03]

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mark Meadows is trying a new last-ditch legal maneuver to try to avoid his own surrender.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It targets.