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CNN This Morning

Today, Biden to Announce Sanctions Against Putin; Today, Trump, Haley Blitz South Carolina on Eve of Primary; Ex-Informant Charged With Lying About Bidens Arrests. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired February 23, 2024 - 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: We are just one day away until Republican primary voters in South Carolina head to the polls.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Nikki Haley is losing to me. People don't like her too much. She's hurting the party.

NIKKI HALEY, REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Do we want more of the same or do we want something different? More of the same isn't just Joe Biden. More of the same as Donald Trump.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Biden embracing Alexei Navalny's widow and warning Putin more sanctions are coming.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. PRESIDENT: He's a man of incredible courage and it's amazing how his wife and daughter are emulating that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Navalny's mother says that Putin's thugs are blackmailing her.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Kremlin wants Navalny's body to be transported to Moscow on a special plane, followed by a secret funeral.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And welcome to the moon.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We are still waiting to get the very first pictures of the first American spacecraft to land on the moon in more than 50 years.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is the first privately built vehicle to make the mission.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This feat is a giant leap forward for all of humanity.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Houston, Odysseus has found its new home.

(END VIDEOTAPE) PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. It's Friday. You made it. I'm Phil Mattingly with Poppy Harlow in New York.

We begin this morning with President Biden set to announce U.S. plans to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin directly accountable for the death of Alexei Navalny.

Now, Navalny is the latest and probably best known Putin critic to die under mysterious circumstances. Navalny's spokesperson says the medical report cites natural causes, but Biden is placing the blame directly on the Russian leader.

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BIDEN: To state the obvious, he was a man of incredible courage and it's amazing how his wife and daughter are emulating that. And we're going to be announcing the sanctions against Putin who is responsible for his death

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POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: And those will be directly against Putin. A treasury official says the Biden administration will impose those new sanctions on Putin in more than 500 targets today. This comes nearly two years since the day that Russia invaded Ukraine.

Biden says it is clear from his meeting with the Navalny family that his widow will continue to fight against the Kremlin.

Let's start our coverage this hour with Priscilla Alvarez. She joins us from the White House. I know they haven't been unveiled yet, but what can you tell us? That is a lot of sanctions all the way up to Putin. What do we know this morning?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: It is. It's actually the largest set of sanctions since Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, this is a forceful response by President Biden to the death of Alexei Navalny and, again, ahead of that two-year mark of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And this fresh slate of sanctions is on over 500 targets. That includes on the military-industrial complex, as well as companies that are helping Russia access certain goods, the idea here being slowing down Russia's ability to get certain goods and also their ability to build weapons.

Now, as you heard there earlier, President Biden teased these sanctions yesterday after his meeting with the widow of Alexei Navalny and his daughter while in California in a fundraising swing this morning. The president releasing a statement saying the following, quote, these sanctions will target individuals connected to Navalny's imprisonment, as well as Russia's financial sector, defense and industrial base, procurement networks and sanction evaders across multiple continents. They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home. Now, U.S. officials had already been working on a sanctions package ahead of the two-year mark of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They supplemented that after the death of Alexei Navalny. But all the same, while U.S. officials are citing this as a consequence to Russia, they're also continuing the steady drumbeat and the pressure on Congress to pass the $60 billion to Ukraine. Without that, they said this is only one tool in the toolbox. They still need Ukraine to get those funds, so they still have a chance in this war against Russia.

MATTINGLY: All right. Priscilla Alvarez live for us from the North Lawn and from the White House, the two people who want to be in the White House.

Right now, Donald Trump and Nikki Haley get ready to blitz South Carolina on the final day before the state's pivotal Republican primary. This could be the final nail in the coffin for Haley's campaign. She faces a likely defeat in her home state. She's out of it about staying in the race until the end.

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HALEY: I don't care about a political future. If I did, I would have been out by now.

But if Donald Trump is the nominee, you can mark my words, he will not win a general election. And what I say to everybody is don't complain about what happens in a general election if you don't really think about that in this primary.

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HARLOW: Meanwhile, Trump is getting more agitated over Haley's refusal to drop out. Listen to what he told radio station in South Carolina just yesterday.

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TRUMP: Well, I guess she's got an ego or something.

I'm not a big fan of hers. She's doing very bad things for the Republican Party. I don't care at this point. If she stays in, she's getting very few votes.

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HARLOW: We have team coverage this morning. Alayna Treene is in Washington. Let's start with our Kylie Atwood. She is in Charleston.

Her messaging right now, talk about that and how she plans to try to beat Trump in her home state. But regardless, she's going on.

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right. Nikki Haley's message here in South Carolina has been incredibly consistent over the last few weeks. She has talked about the fact that she believes Americans deserve better than an 80-year-old president. She has gone after former President Trump for playing the victim card when it comes to his legal cases. She has called out the fact that he is using campaign contributions to pay for his legal bills.

And she's also encouraging voters here in South Carolina, who typically only vote in a general election, that they need to show up at the primary this year. Listen to what she said to her supporters last night in Myrtle Beach.

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HALEY: I need you to make sure that you let your voices be heard. Tell your friends, tell your family, email everybody, text them, all of that. This is the time South Carolina can really step up and show the direction that we want our country to go in. I believe in you. I've always trusted you.

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ATWOOD: Now, when it comes to Nikki Haley's goals here in South Carolina, her campaign isn't saying that they expect to win her home state. What Nikki Haley said after New Hampshire, after she lost there to former President Trump by 11 points, is that she wanted to close the gap with him. But that certainly seems like a lofty goal right now because recent polls have shown her behind former President Trump in this state by 30 or 35 points.

One thing I do want to note is that at many of her events, I have talked to voters who are supporting her, who have recently moved to South Carolina. They're from places like Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey. And that is a portion of the electorate here that her campaign is hoping will compel her, will boost her in the polls. We'll just have to watch and see how that plays out.

But earlier this week, she was very clear in saying that come Sunday, no matter what happens here in the South Carolina primary, that she is still going to be campaigning for president. We'll just have to watch and see how the results here on Saturday impact her path.

MATTINGLY: Alayna, that insistence from Nikki Haley from her campaign about continuing on no matter what, it kind of gets at what we heard from the former president in the clip we played at the top here, where his concerns about what she's doing to the Republican Party or she's doing damage, why she's staying in, it's an ego thing.

I think the concern you hear from Republicans is not that Trump is going to lose South Carolina if they support him. It's that Haley staying in continues to ding him up on a regular basis, continues to force them to spend money. What's the campaign saying about that?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN REPORTER: Yes, well, it's definitely a concern. And you can tell that Donald Trump is increasingly annoyed with Nikki Haley. He's frustrated with Nikki Haley for refusing to drop out like the other challengers that were in the primary before. He really does want the infrastructure of the Republican Party behind him. He is eager to start this general election fight against Joe Biden as soon as possible.

I think that's also compounded by the fact that Donald Trump is facing some financial troubles right now. I mean, he has a lot of these trials coming up that are going to continue to add to the increasing, mounting legal bills that he is facing. And he really just wants the entire party to unite behind him.

But I will say in that speech that he gave last night, he was speaking to religious black pastors in Nashville, Tennessee, he really spent little time attacking Nikki Haley. He spent the majority of his speech going after Joe Biden. And, again, it just contributes to the fact that they really see Joe Biden as the true rival this year as they are pivoting toward a general election.

Donald Trump argued that Joe Biden and Democrats are persecuting Christians. Again, this was a message geared toward a very Christian audience. He said that the threat to the United States does not come necessarily from foreign adversaries, but from within.

He also, notably, Phil and Poppy, spent a lot of time talking about abortion, which I think is just very notable given Donald Trump has refrained from doing so on the campaign trail thus far. And that really is because both the former president but also his team do not see that issue as a particularly in November.

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Take a listen to that message.

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TRUMP: And I was able to bring this issue for the first time in 54 years back to the states where everybody agrees on both sides, everybody agrees that's where it should be, back in the states. It was so important.

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TREENE: Now, Phil and Poppy, notably, Donald Trump did not address the controversial ruling from the Alabama Supreme Court that declared that frozen embryos are children and that those who destroy them could be liable for wrongful death. It's something that the former president and his campaign have really refused to weigh in so far, I think, which just further emphasizes the point that they view this issue as a loser, a political loser, I should say, heading into November.

MATTINGLY: Yes, not sure how long they're going to be able to hold on to that position of not saying anything voters voting. We like that.

Kylie Atwood, Alayna Treene, thanks, guys.

Well, AT &T says the massive outage that affected tens of thousands of people in the U.S. for about 12 hours yesterday was not caused by a cyber attack. The company saying in a statement late Thursday, based on our initial review, we believe that today's outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.

HARLOW: Regardless of the cause, this outage caused problems for thousands of people, including law enforcement, also first responders.

With us now, CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst John Miller. You were so helpful yesterday helping us try to understand all the things that could be good news, preliminary assessment, it's not nefarious, but also, how do we know it's not going to happen again with a different carrier?

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, we learned big lessons yesterday. But we also got big surprises. I mean, we have seen outages before. We've seen regional outages, short outages. We haven't seen a major carrier crash for more than half a day, almost 12 hours, with this kind of interruption of service.

And so the two things we have to look at here are, one, the size of the failure and, two, how long it took them to fix it. And I'll throw in three, which is their complete failure to communicate clearly during the crisis. It was -- if you went to their website, at some point, they put up a banner saying, we're experiencing technical difficulties. If you went to their Twitter site, it was all kinds of videos about ways to have fun with your phone. You know, their company motto is live true, do the right thing, no compromise, not run silent, run deep.

So, AT&T has got to be kind of tacking back today to say, A, how did we suffer a system-wide technical failure? B, how can we better communicate about that the next time? And, C, how do we fix this faster?

HARLOW: Yes.

MATTINGLY: I mean, the ways to have fun with your phone was honestly probably a good tip because you couldn't make any calls on it, so you needed to keep yourself busy. So, I appreciate that some degree.

I think the question, and we got at this yesterday, I think this is one of the concerns especially at the very beginning yesterday critical infrastructure. Everybody in cyber, every corporate leader knows that this is a huge risk, a huge problem a huge issue that they've been trying to figure out a public-private way to get some assurances on. Does this underscore that risk? Does this have -- provide any lessons for that risk?

MILLER: I mean, it really does on a number of levels. First of all, let's talk about context. Yesterday, we were here talking about, we haven't seen a failure like this. Is this a cyber attack? Why was that front of message yesterday? Because two weeks before, the top U.S. intelligence officials released a very unusual document talking about Bolt Typhoon, Vanguard Panda, Cozy Bear, one is a Russian program, two are a Chinese program, apparently they have a thing with bears, that are meant to infiltrate critical infrastructure, including cell phone companies, water, power, everything, to hide at the bottom of their Windows operating systems disguised as normal tools for an end point user to discover something that is moving through a system that -- and executing commands that looks like part of the machinery is different from having some rogue element come in through an open port and start to make commands that sets off alarms.

So, they're really going to have to go back through all the logs and see what caused this to go sideways. Experts I talked to yesterday said this is probably a BGP issue, which is basically internet speak for how routes are set for data to travel in the most efficient, fastest way, billions of commands that come over a company this size that pick the cheapest, fastest, most efficient route, and that when they did their reconfiguration, the BGP was off and all the routes weren't working.

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And imagine if we went to sleep and somebody changed all the highway signs and then rush hour started.

So, they're still sorting through that, as they say in their statement. But our adversaries looked at this yesterday. Russia looked at it, China looked at it, others looked at it, and they said, so that's what happens in a catastrophic failure of a cell phone company. So, that just went into their intelligence files about critical infrastructure and potential failure.

HARLOW: That's a great point I hadn't thought about. John Miller, thank you for getting us through it yesterday and for all the answers this morning.

MILLER: Thanks.

HARLOW: The former FBI informant accused of lying about the Biden family, he's been arrested again. Our Elie Honig here in studio to explain it all.

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MATTINGLY: Well, welcome back. The former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens has been re-arrested. Alexander Smirnov was arrested last week in Nevada on charges of lying to the FBI, but he was released despite objections from the Justice Department. Well, he was taken back into custody yesterday on the same charges, according to his lawyers.

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HARLOW: Prosecutors claim that Smirnov made the false allegation that both Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, accepted $5 million bribes from the owner of Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. That false accusation forms the basis of the House Republicans' ongoing efforts to impeach the president.

For more, let's bring in our Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig. Elie, good morning to you. This is rare. I'm not sure if it's unprecedented, but super rare to go and re-arrest when a court has already said no, DOJ, you can't keep them.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Here's how unprecedented it is, Poppy. I've never seen it happen this way. And I just asked John Miller, who's seen everything, said, have you ever seen this? He said, no, he hasn't.

So, here's the deal. Ordinarily, when you get arrested on a case like this, you have to bring the defendant to the closest judge, or in this case, magistrate, which is a sort of lower level federal judge. That's what they did. They brought this defendant to a magistrate in Nevada.

Prosecutor said, you have to lock him up pending trial. He's too much of a flight risk. And the magistrate disagreed, said, I'm going to release him with conditions, but I'm okay releasing him, take his passports, put him on electronic monitoring.

Ordinarily, the next step then, as a prosecutor, is you wait for the person to arrive at their assigned district judge, in this case in California. That usually takes a week or so. Prosecutors were not willing to wait that long. Instead, they went to the judge. They said, we need a new warrant. They re-arrested him on the same charge. And now he's in custody.

This tells me that prosecutors are absolutely terrified that this guy may take off. This is a very extreme measure of designed to try to get him in custody.

MATTINGLY: There's been so much talk about, and rightfully so, the politics and impeachment and what this all -- what kind of legal liabilities he have? What's he facing?

HONIG: So, technically, the max sentences facing adds up to 25 years based on a series of false statements and creation of false documents, but nobody gets anything near 20, 25 years. But this is very serious. I mean, look, it happens sometimes, not making an excuse, I mean, it's a reality of life that confidential informants like this guy go off the rails.

It's the FBI's responsibility to try to make sure that doesn't happen. But when it happens, you have to make a decision, are we charging this guy? And the fact that they're charging this guy shows me that they believe, A, he lied, B, in a clear-proof of a way, and see about an event of enormous consequences.

HARLOW: Can I ask you about some of the Republicans that are skeptical of this arrest, of this indictment, all of it? This is Republican Congressman William Timmons. Here's what he said.

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REP. WILLIAM TIMMONS (R-SC): You know, I think it's interesting that the FBI didn't investigate the allegations made years ago, and now they've indicted the confidential source that they trusted for years and paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, you know, there's a lot of questions I have regarding that.

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HARLOW: Are those questions worth asking?

HONIG: There are questions worth asking about how the FBI got burned so badly, for sure. But, I mean, the allegations are pretty clear. They'll have to prove them in court now. But if you look at the documents around the case, it's clear that this guy lied to the FBI about.

He said he was in meetings with people at times and places when he could not have possibly been in meetings with those people. They disproved what he said by looking at documentary evidence. But, yes, it's a black eye for the FBI. Again, it happens, but it's an embarrassment. And especially when you have a high profile -- not high profile, but a CIA who's giving you very high profile information like this, you have to be extra careful. So, I do think it's fair to ask the FBI, how did you let this go so far off the rails?

MATTINGLY: The former president's legal team had several filings last night related to the classified documents case, I think at least one of them citing federal immunity, which is also another case that people are paying attention to right now. What did you make of this?

HONIG: So, this is the sort of ordinary time when the defendant would file motions. A lot of these are motions that were expected. The immunity motion, I share your sort of quizzical approach to this, like how could he be immune in the documents case? Because the documents case, if you look in the indictment, that starts at 12:01 P.M. on January 20th, 2021, because it's not a crime for Donald Trump to have those documents until he leaves office. So, how could he possibly be immune for crimes that happened after he left office?

Now Trump's team tries to thread a needle here. They get a little creative. They say, well, the whole decision-making process about whether to take documents, that happened while he was there. That is -- I mean, look, I think the immunity argument on the January 6th case is already a stretch and like we doomed, we may learn today if the Supreme Court is taking that or not, but at least there's a colorable argument there. This one is a stretch beyond stretches and has no chance of success.

HARLOW: Elie Honig, thank you, friend. We appreciate it.

No, you're not seeing a mirage. A lake has formed in America's hottest place, Death Valley, why the water has many amazed and concerned.

MATTINGLY: And overnight, Georgia police are investigating foul play after a nursing student was found dead on campus. The latest on that investigation, that's next.

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[07:25:00] MATTINGLY: Well, a homicide investigation underway this morning at the University of Georgia. This morning in Athens, Georgia, police say a nursing student who'd gone for a jog near the University of Georgia's athletic fields was reported missing. Her body was found Thursday in a wooded area, reportedly with visible injuries.

CNN's Ryan Young joins us live from Athens, Georgia. Ryan, what more do we know about this investigation at this point?

RYAN YOUNG, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Phil, this is quite concerning. We know three agencies are working on this all at the same time right now. And you think about this greater campus area, more than 20,000 students attend this beautiful university.

And this is the intramural fields that a lot of people use a jog on a day-to-day basis. What we know is someone called 911, a friend yesterday, saying their friend was missing. By 12:38, police had already found this body with visible marks on the outside. In fact, listen to the police chief talk about the early parts of this investigation.

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JEFF CLARK, CHIEF OF POLICE FOR UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA: Our officers responded to that area and immediately began a search of the area to attempt to locate the individual. Officers located the individuals in the area behind Lake Herrick at approximately 12:38. The individual was unconscious and not breathing and had visible injuries.

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YOUNG: This woman attended Augusta University College of Nursing. That school has put out a statement that says, police have said they suspect foul play.

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We received this news this afternoon was shocking to all of us.

And as you can understand, this has sent shockwaves through this entire campus area.