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CNN This Morning

Israel Publishes Names for Prisoner Exchange; Israel and Hamas Agree to Deal; Altman Rehired at OpenAI; Iowa Evangelical Endorses DeSantis. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired November 22, 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]

ALLISON CHINCHAR, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Kansas and Missouri.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Allison, appreciate it. Thank you.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: Coming up, what CNN has uncovered about the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his call to challenge some landmark Supreme Court rulings.

HILL: And right now the pope meeting with family members of hostages being held in Gaza, now speaking out saying about this conflict, in the pope's words, "this is not war, this is terrorism." More on those meetings ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HILL: Breaking this morning, a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas has been reached. This after weeks of painstaking negotiations.

HARLOW: So, here's what we know so far this morning about the agreement. Hamas has agreed to release at least 50 women and children who were abducted during the October 7th terror attack. In exchange Israel has agreed to release 150 Palestinian prisoners from jail and also agreed to a four day pause in fighting. This deal was approved by Israel's cabinet in the early hours Wednesday morning following a six- hour meeting an Israeli official described as tense and emotional.

[06:35:09]

The Israeli government also published the names of 300 Palestinian prisoners that could be released if the agreement continues. Qatar, which was central to negotiating the deal, said the start of the pause would be announced within 24 hours.

This morning, though, we are still seeing large explosions in Gaza.

Our Ben Wedeman joins us now from Beirut.

Ben, good morning to you.

I think there are a lot of questions. Obviously, who is on the list of the 50 Israelis and Americans that will be released, but what about this list of 300 Palestinian prisoners.

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: OK, this list was published this morning by the Israeli ministry of justice at 8:00. And the public has 24 hours to raise any objections to the names on this list. Obviously, this is double the number that is part of the announced agreement yesterday. That is because the Israelis are hoping that if perhaps this deal works, that maybe it can be extended, more captives in Gaza can be released in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners.

Now, we know on this list there is nobody convicted of murder. We understand that there is somewhere in excess of 280 Palestinian males under the age of 18, some of them as young as 14. Some of them are affiliated with the various factions of the Palestinians, Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Now, the remainder are women. But as I said, none of these people have been convicted of murder. So, they're basically teenagers who, many of them, have taken part in the sort of clashes that are ordinary for - ordinary - part of the ordinary daily life in the West Bank and also in east Jerusalem, both of which are under Israeli military occupation. And what you've had since 1967 is a low level uprising against that occupation. And it appears that most of the young men on this list are probably participants in this sort of thing. So, this - for the first -- it should be -- we understand it -- that the releases will begin tomorrow morning, Thursday morning, but as I said, the list is larger than is on the agreement because the Israelis are hoping that somehow this will be the beginning of a broader agreement from - the release of more of the captives in Gaza.

HARLOW: Ben Wedeman reporting from Beirut. Thank you very much, Ben. We'll get back to you soon.

HILL: And joining us now, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Cedric Leighton. He's also, of course, a CNN military analyst, former member of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon.

Always good to have you with us and to get your insight here.

What do you make of this, this morning? Just walk us through how you see this playing out.

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Yes, good morning, Erica.

There are going to be a lot of different factors here. But as Ben was pointing out, the fact that the Israelis have released more names than is actually called for in the agreement is actually a sign that these groups believes that there is perhaps a way forward in the negotiation - on the negotiation front. And if that happens, then we can perhaps see a longer pause in the fighting. Right now, you know, as the pictures from Gaza indicate, you know, this morning, we are seeing some fighting continuing. That fighting is really part of the positioning that occurs when these kinds of truce agreements go into effect because what each side is doing is they're moving themselves into positions of greater advantage or at least trying to do that.

So you're seeing those movements, you're seeing that kind of activity on the part of both the Israelis and, to some extent, probably Hamas as well. Each side though is, I think, hoping for a bit of a breather in this particular case. And that breather is going to - they're going to try to take advantage of that breather as well.

HARLOW: A pause in fighting for four day. Maybe it gets extended longer if Hamas will release more hostages. That coupled with Israel agreeing to stop that drone surveillance of Hamas' operations for six hours a day. Those two things together, does that help Hamas and does it hurt Israel in terms of intelligence during that period of time?

LEIGHTON: It can certainly hurt Israel in the sense that they won't have that persistent surveillance that you get with continual drone coverage of a certain area. Now, the Israelis will have as many sources as they possibly can to kind of fill that intelligence gap. But that's going to be a - kind of a risk/reward benefit analysis that they've gone through to try to make sure that they at least have enough info so that they can conduct force protection operations for their forces. In other words, they want to make sure that they can still protect their army elements that are on the ground there.

[06:40:06]

As far as, you know, the other parts of this agreement are concerned, Poppy, you know, it is one of those things where you've got all the different pieces coming into play here and the Israelis can also take advantage of this. They - they have some disadvantages, but they can also regroup, just like we're pretty sure Hamas is going to regroup. And that's going to be, I think, the key factor here.

HILL: There has been - and we talked about this a little bit earlier with Dan Senor (ph) -- there is some concern about, if this drags on too long what that could mean. When you're looking at it from a military perspective, is there a window beyond four or five days to perhaps get more hostages out that is still within range in your view? The Israelis say this is not going to end things. Benjamin Netanyahu very clear this morning, we are going to restart. Do you see that definitely playing out, or do you share some of the concern?

LEIGHTON: I definitely share some of the concerns because on the one hand, Erica, you've got these goals that the Israelis have established for themselves to include the destruction of Hamas. And it's kind of hard to destroy an entity that you're negotiating with if, you know, if that's, you know, one of the things that you're - you're trying to do is get the hostages back, then you have the problem of, you know, do I get the hostages back or do I go for a military operation. And that's the kind of thing that - that they have to look at.

But, yes, there's some concern there, but I think it can be extended.

HARLOW: Colonel, the White house has declassified some intelligence suggesting the Russian paramilitary organization, the Wagner Group, is helping and is preparing to provide air defense capability to Hezbollah or Iran. What would that mean for this fight? LEIGHTON: So that will complicate things. And it opens up the

possibility, Poppy, of a second front developing. And the reason that becomes more likely with air defense improvements for Hezbollah, that will allow Hezbollah to act more or less with the impunity or with a greater degree of impunity against Israeli military installations and other Israeli targets.

So, what I mean by that is this, if the air defenses are strengthened in -- for Hezbollah, they will be more likely to engage in activities and face less risk of being attacked by Israeli air assets. So, it's a very important development and it's something that should concern the Israelis a great deal.

HARLOW: Colonel Cedric Leighton, thank you.

LEIGHTON: You bet.

HILL: Breaking overnight, a big, new development in this drama surrounding the artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The company's ousted CEO, Sam Altman, as of this morning he's going back to the top of the company. How did that happen? Stick with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:46:33]

HARLOW: This breaking overnight. It is not yet a Hollywood movie, but I think we can guarantee it will be.

HILL: I think it's very close, right?

HARLOW: Yes. Here is what happened. Another twist in the saga at OpenAI. Sam Altman is back at the top of the company just days after the board fired him, allowing him and some key deputies to be hired by the competition at Microsoft. But they're also a huge investor in OpenAI. Well, he's been welcomed back to the company.

HILL: A little bit of whiplash this morning. The company says it reached an agreement in principle to rehire Altman. It has also met demands to give him a new board of directors. And that is key there.

CNN's Anna Stewart is live this morning in London.

So, what more can you tell us about all of this back and forth?

ANNA STEWART, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, four CEOs in four days. It's been the most surprising turn of events really, though I would say this morning perhaps the least surprising development of it all, that Sam Altman is now back as CEO. And that's because nearly the entire workforce of OpenAI had signed an open letter to the board saying if they didn't reinstate Sam Altman, they would move to Microsoft, where he had been given a new job, and that will leave really no OpenAI left.

Now, we've had a tweet from Greg Brockman, who was also fired at the end of last week with Sam Altman. He's another co-founder. And I think you'll appreciate the photo that he has posted on X, saying, "we are back." And you can see a crowd there of employees clearly very happy with the result they have.

But Altman's going to return as CEO but not quite to the same OpenAI as we know it in a sense because the board, of course, had to change. One of the biggest changes is two board members have gone. One who actually oversaw his firing, Adam D'Angelo, will remain on there, which I think is quite interesting. One of the replacements is former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers as well. Who else is on the board? That remains to be seen. So, we're still waiting for that.

What is very interesting is what all of this means, both for Sam Altman but also for Microsoft. As you mentioned there, one of the biggest investors in OpenAI offered Sam Altman and Greg Brockman a job, that was only yesterday, or Monday, I think, and also offered 700 plus employee as job if they wanted to leave OpenAI. This has strengthened that partnership at this stage and I think it's highly likely that Microsoft will have some sort of governance position at OpenAI. Whether that's a seat on the board, we'll have to wait and see.

Guys.

HILL: That will be the next chapter in this saga.

HARLOW: Anna Stewart, thanks very much.

HILL: Governor Ron DeSantis scoring a big endorsement in Iowa. We'll take a look at the impact on the race there.

HARLOW: We are continuing this morning to follow the breaking news of the hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas, when these exchanges could begin and who could be released. That's ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:53:02]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOB VANDER PLAATS, PRESIDENT, THE FAMILY LEADER: I am -- I'm thrilled to throw my personal endorsement and support behind Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: Governor Ron DeSantis in need of a little boost there. And he's picking one up. The key endorsement, evangelical endorsement, in Iowa. Fifty-four days to go, by the way, until those Iowa caucuses. Bob Vander Plaats is, of course, the president and CEO of the conservative Christian group The Family Leader, which is incredibly influential for Republicans in the Hawkeye state.

HARLOW: He has endorsed the winner of the last three contested Iowa caucuses, Mike Huckabee, that was 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, Ted Cruz in 2016, though none of them went on to win the nomination.

Joining us now, Maura Gillespie, who served as the deputy chief of staff for Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, Basil Smikle, the Democratic strategist and former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party. Also at the table, Ron Brownstein, CNN political analyst and senior editor at "The Atlantic."

Ron, you do such a great job of reminding us how history informs us going forward.

RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

HARLOW: So, we just mentioned how important Vander Plaats has been in the Iowa caucuses, but none of those folks went on to win the nomination. What does his endorsement mean after, by the way, the governor of Iowa also getting behind DeSantis?

BROWNSTEIN: Yes. Yes, Vander Plaats is going to be useful for Ron DeSantis in Iowa, without question, but there is a very clear pattern in those last three races that you note, Mike Huckabee in '08, Santorum in '12, Cruz in '16, they all won Iowa basically with the same strategy that DeSantis is following of really burrowing in, visiting all 99 counties, the full Grassley, and focusing on consolidating support for evangelical Christians.

The problem is, once they were defined that way, once they were painted into that corner, essentially they had a lot of trouble reaching out to voters beyond - beyond those - beyond that group. They all immediately cratered in New Hampshire. None of them won even 12 percent of the vote. DeSantis looks like he's on that same road where he's polling in single digits in New Hampshire and he faces, unless he can broaden, you know, do better than them at broadening his appeal, he faces the exact same risk that Nikki Haley is positioned in New Hampshire and South Carolina to eclipse him as the principle alternative to Trump, whatever happens in Iowa.

[06:55:06]

And there's an opportunity (INAUDIBLE) real quick. Those - you know, the Iowa Republican leadership does not want Trump, but they have chosen to put their chips on DeSantis despite all the problems that he's faced as a candidate and kind of lost the opportunity perhaps to boost someone else, particularly Haley.

HILL: You know it's interesting too because Vander Plaats also said, if President Trump wins Iowa, I think it's going to awfully hard to make the case that you can beat President Trump. So, there's that as well. He's recognizing, he wants this to work. It hasn't worked, as Poppy pointed out, those last few times, and yet he's all in.

MAURA GILLESPIE, DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF, FORMER GOP REP. ADAM KINZINGER: And it makes sense, though, right, especially on the topic of abortion. They're looking at it from that angle. And, as you mentioned, the evangelical poll there in Iowa. So, being able to reach across for a generational election is pretty near possible for Republicans if they're going to that angle. And we're seeing that play out. As far as the country goes, the rest of the country is not where that portion of the Republican Party is. And until they get a handle on how to talk about it, not from a moral standpoint but what is the federal government's role, they're going to continue to lose.

HARLOW: Can we turn to this reporting by CNN's K-File that talks about what Speaker Mike Johnson, now speaker of the House, has said about the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs last year overturning Roe v. Wade, and talking specifically about part of Clarence Thomas' concurrence where he talked about sort of the broader issue of rights in this country, Basil, specifically substantive due process rights and how the court had grounded Roe and where this court said, no, no, no, you don't have that right.

Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-L): There's been some really bad law made. They've made a mess of our jurisprudence in this country for the last, you know, several decades. And maybe some of that needs to be cleaned up. And what -- what Justice Thomas is calling for is not radical. In fact, it's the opposite of that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Well, let me read what Thomas actually wrote because many people would see it as radical and life-changing for millions and millions of Americans. Quote, this was in his Dobbs concurrence, "for that reason, in future cases, we," meaning the court, "should reconsider all of this court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell." And those are key decisions when it comes to contraception and same-sex marriage in this country.

BASIL SMIKLE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: No, it's -- to me it's very scary stuff. It harkens back to some of his interpretation, that is the speaker's interpretation of some of this goes back to some of the original thinking in this country which is incredibly scary. But what he's done bringing it forward is criminalized doctors, criminalized women.

And when you tie it to some of the conversation that we just had in terms of being able to stretch across to Democrats in a general election, there are many Republicans that are trying to find a way to be better general election candidates. When you have someone like a - like the speaker with these kinds of comments and the fact that if not the leadership but the grass roots Republicans are sticking with Donald Trump, there seems to be this larger inability to be able to shed a lot of this - a lot of this rhetoric and a lot of these policies.

HARLOW: I just want to be clear, just so people know, that was Johnson right after the Dobbs decision.

BROWNSTEIN: Yes.

HARLOW: That was June of '22. Just to be clear.

BROWNSTEIN: Look, it's naive to believe that those kind of views would not eventually find some expression in policy if Republicans had unified control in Washington and the ability to do it. You know, what we've seen since 2020 is an extraordinary rollback of rights in red states, on voting rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, book bans. There are proposals from Republican in the House or Senate to nationalize all of those red state initiatives, to basically impose those red state laws on blue states. He's -- the speaker has sponsored some of them. The national don't say gay law, national personhood (ph) law. With the ability do this, if they have the ability to do this, you will see, at least on some of those fronts, him, I believe, leading an effort to impose on blue states the rights rollback that has unfolded in red states.

HILL: We should point out, Johnson's office told CNN he views the cases as settled law. But to you point, it's clear that he disagrees with a lot of these decisions.

What else stood out to me that the K-file uncovered is in an interview in 2008 he said of the ACLU, and I'm quoting, they have convinced an entire generation of Americans that there is this, his words, so- called separation of church and state, which speaks to the point that you where making earlier about where the country may be -

GILLESPIE: Right.

HILL: And where Johnson and those he is with, and their thinking, where they are.

GILLESPIE: So, as a conservative, I was - to put this very plainly, I am a conservative because I believe in a smaller more accountable government. And what this faction of the Republican Party has been doing is saying that half of the population doesn't have medical freedom, that's big government. They're not following the conservative values that I signed up for when I became a Republican. So, I haven't changed. The Republican Party is changing. And I really think they need to be called out for the hypocrisy there, the contradictions they're kind of putting forth by imposing their will on the people.

[07:00:07]

HARLOW: The real question is where is the court on this one. I mean that.