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CNN This Morning

Today: VP Harris To Speak At Pro-Choice Rally In Arizona; Biden: U.S. Commitment To Japan & Philippines Is "Ironclad"; 30M+ Under Wind Advisories Across Parts Of U.S. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired April 12, 2024 - 05:00   ET

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

[05:00:39]

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: It's Friday, April 12th.

Right now on CNN THIS MORNING:

The White House sending Vice President Kamala Harris to Arizona to front their fight for reproductive rights.

The challenge facing potential jurors in Donald Trump's hush money the trial next week.

And House Speaker Mike Johnson at Mar-a-Lago today for a joint news conference with Donald Trump. More on what they plan to talk about.

(MUSIC)

HUNT: All right. Five a.m. here in Washington. So live. Look at Chicago so brightly lit up on this Friday morning. Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt.

It's Friday. We made it. It's wonderful to have you with us.

Donald Trump did this -- that's the message that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to take to Tucson, Arizona, today where she headlines a rally focused on abortion rights just days after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a law from 1864, bringing a near total ban on abortion there. Democrats will be linking Donald Trump to that ruling by highlighting his role in overturning Roe versus Wade.

The Biden campaign also launching a seven-figure ad buy in Arizona that argues Republicans are out of step.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Because of Donald Trump, millions of women loss for fundamental freedom to control their own bodies. The question is, if Donald Trump gets back in power, what freedom will you lose next? Your body and your decisions belong to you. Not the government, not Donald Trump.

I will fight like hell to get your freedom back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: All right. Joining me now is Mariana Alfaro. She's breaking news -- political breaking news reporter for "The Washington Post".

Mariana, good morning to you. Thank you for being here on this Friday.

So this is a situation where the administration is putting Kamala Harris front and center in this fight over abortion rights. She obviously has had a tricky time in some ways in the vice presidency, especially early on. But this is becoming the place that she is carved out for herself.

What do we expect? And that the administration has carved out for her, what do we expect to hear from her today? And how do you expect her to be received?

MARIANA ALFARO, POLITICS BREAKING NEWS REPORTER, WASHINGTON POST: Yeah, you're right. She's seeing a lot of ownership over this and they kind of move really quickly on this. I mean, specifically today's campaign events, so she could go off and criticize other former president or doing this basically to America, which is the Biden campaigns messaging.

They keep saying "Donald Trump did this", so that's what I expect to hear from her today. And just like really nailing down further (INAUDIBLE).

HUNT: So, lets listen to what Donald Trump had to say recently about Arizona and this abortion law and whether or not it went too far. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Did Arizona go too far?

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT & 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Yeah, they did.

I'm sure that the governor and everybody else will bring it back into reason.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: So there you go. He says, I'm sure that the governor and everybody else will bring it back into reason. Of course, worth noting, the governor is a Democrat here, but the reaction in the about-face from Kari Lake, the Senate candidate, from knowing exactly the name of this law in the wake of the Dobbs decision and saying it would be a great idea to put that in place to where she is now quite literally lobbying legislators seems to tell you everything you need to know about how people feel about the politics of this.

ALFARO: Yeah, the pivot was quite incredible, especially because it was such an archaic law is so, so, so deep into the logs of Arizona law and she knew it directly when she was asked about in 2022. And now, she's going around saying, you know, no, we want Democrats in

the House and the governors mansion and the legislature to fix this. Very fascinating thing about that too, is that when this campaign cycle began, Republicans behind the scenes were telling their candidates do not say, you're pro-life, you know, you should start talking about exceptions and how you support them. So the message has really, really changed after the 2022 midterms.

HUNT: You mentioned immigration as well. The border is kind of the flip side of this issue, and I guess my question here is the thing that I think about when I think about Arizona is in some ways it's going to be about what issue is the primary issue at the moment that we are -- that the country is voting in terms of how people look at this.

[05:05:01]

Arizona is a border state. I think it's worth noting that people who actually live on the border often think about it differently than people who don't because obviously immigration has become an issue in states that are very far from the border, but it's often talked about in a different way.

How do you see immigration competing with abortion in terms of what voters care about and are focused on?

ALFARO: Definitely, right now, if you look at the plague, it is abortion first for a lot of Democrats especially in states like Arizona swing states like this. But when you talk about immigration, you see the border difference in Arizona. You have a lot of folks looking for a moderate middle ground solution, someone who they want to see the right laws passed so that people can come in legally and do work and maybe go back over if they want to be able to come here and do the labor that is needed.

But they're also tired of that constant flux of people that were seeing on CNN all the time. And so I think that there's more of a moderate, you know, centrist position in Arizona, but then you have a lot of Republicans, you know, kind of shutting down, deals like the one they had in the Senate, which is earlier this year. And I think that a lot of people over the border are getting frustrated with things like that when they see no action being taken.

HUNT: One thing that hangs over Arizona is the legacy of John McCain, who, of course, that was the senator there, became famous as a maverick, right? Someone who was willing to break the mold. Obviously, his brand of Republican politics has really gone by the wayside in the years since he passed away. He obviously saw a Trump come to power, but its snowball has continued to build.

Kari Lake, the Senate candidate there, had previously told McCain Republicans to quite literally get out of her events. She kind of went to war with the McCain family. She seems to be trying to reinvent herself around that as well.

I mean, do you see that as something that has the possibility to be successful and voters going to buy the idea that she potentially is capable of, quote/unquote, big tent Republican Party or not? Is a bridge too far?

ALFARO: Yeah. I actually just spoke to former McCain strategist and he told me that it feels like it's a little too late. And you know, that it's already a little bit too much on the record and that Democrats are definitely going to pull the tapes if she starts moving this way and say these things, they're going to say actually she just said this two years ago, which is you don't have what we saw this week with that abortion law.

So again, she could continue pivoting and she couldn't continue really changing her record, but there's tapes, there's a lot of quotes out there and it's really hard to pay. But from like that hard right to life, a little bit of a center when you've spent the last two years offending Donald Trump you know, as she has been.

HUNT: Right. And she tried to reach out to Meghan McCain, John McCain's daughter, and suffice to say, the response from Meghan was not something we can put on a family networks this early in the morning, but the answer was yeah, we're not -- we're not going to have that right now.

All right. Mariana Alfaro, thank you very much for starting out today. I appreciate it.

All right. Coming up next here, the challenge facing prosecutors and the defense when jury selection starts in the Trump hush money trial.

Plus, Pulitzer Prize winner David Hume Kennerly is here. Were going to ask him why he just resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation?

Plus, the U.S. and Japan coming with a new plan to try to counter China.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:12:37]

HUNT: Welcome back.

President Biden trying to send a strong warning to China that the U.S. stands firmly with Japan and the Philippines.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: And I wanted to be clear, the United States -- the United States defense commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are iron- clad. They're iron-clad. As I've said before, any attack on Philippine aircraft, vessels or armed forces, in South China Sea would invoke our mutual defense treaty.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: President Biden hosted the first ever trilateral summit with the leaders of those two countries on Thursday.

CNN's Max Foster joins me now, live from London.

Max, good morning. Always good to see you.

What is the context here for what the president did here? It's a pretty unusual thing to do and it seems to be a clear attempt to display this unity between the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines. How -- what is the message that they're trying to send to China

MAX FOSTER, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It was interesting. Almost exact -- same wording, wasn't it, that they were playing out yesterday when he was referring to Iran potentially attacking Israel. Israel, a key ally and saying that basically would step in to defend Israel if it was attacked doing the same for these two countries in Asia, of course, a completely different region and completely different threats.

So, it does speak to China and seeing that as a threat because when you're talking about attacks on this, on these areas of sea and these islands, it can only be China that he's, of course, referring to. And arguably, it's a more exist -- existential question than the one in the Middle East right now, because when we were talking about what's happening in the Middle East, he was really trying to prevent that conflict escalating in the Middle East.

When we're talking about in the Indo-Pacific area is potentially the U.S. coming up against China, which is what everyone fears more than anything. So it was a very clear statement from the U.S. They would defend these countries in Asia if there was any threat coming from China.

HUNT: Well, and, Max, this, of course, comes as the Chinese military has the Fil -- Filipino government is upset about harassment of their ships in the South China Sea.

[05:15:00]

The U.S. says that that's in violation of international law.

And, of course, hovering also over all of this is the question of Taiwan and what China might do there.

Can you give me a little bit of the global perspective in terms of how, you know, the countries that the allies, that the U.S. has kind of across the world? How do they think about the threat from China and competition from China?

I mean, we've seen it show up in different places. Huawei, it is a great example, right? The Chinese telecom company and whether they should be allowed to install and build some of these major telecom networks. The U.S. says no, but I know it hasn't always been kind of agreed upon in this way with the Europeans.

Where does that all stand? FOSTER: Well, it's the territorial disputes. So the U.S. is standing

by countries like the Philippines and Japan when it comes to territorial disputes with China is claiming parts of their land effectively. So it's defending territorially.

But it's the much bigger question about economic dominance lets in the world as well, who gets that? Is that the U.S. or China? The stronger China can grow, the more -- the less dominant U.S. is, less power has around the world. I think it's as simple as that.

So if China does overtake the us in terms of economic dominance, then with that comes political power well, and political leadership. So the whole world would be affected. You'd start looking towards China for making big decisions that affect the world more than America. So it really does affect everyone and it's really vital that everyone really understands that tension, what's so important about it.

But now, we also know that was a pretty clear response from the U.S., that militarily, at least, they will try to restrict China's ambitions

HUNT: Really interesting.

All right. Max Foster for us on this Friday in London -- Max, thank you very much. Have a good weekend.

FOSTER: Happy weekend.

HUNT: See you soon.

All right. Coming up here, why conservatives who sank the foreign spying bill may now be warming up to it after some changes.

Plus, Taylor Swift's music back on TikTok, just in time for her new album.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:21:34]

HUNT: All right. Twenty-one minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup.

Manuel Rocha, the former U.S. ambassador accused of spying for Cuba, in court for a plea hearing today. He is expected to plead guilty to conspiring to act as an agent foreign governments. The Biden administration announcing this morning that they are canceling another $7.4 billion of student loan debt. In total, the administration has canceled $153 billion in student debt for nearly 4.3 million people.

Georgia's Republican Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones under investigation for his role as a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. He is one of 16 people who tried to subvert the states electoral college, allegedly.

(MUSIC) HUNT: Taylor Swift's music back on TikTok following an ongoing dispute between the platform and her music distributor Universal Music Group. This comes ahead of her new albums set to release on April 19th.

All right. Time now for weather. Storms that ravaged parts of the South now moving off the East Coast, leaving thousands without power. More than 30 million people also under wind advisories this morning from the Great Lakes all the way to the East Coast.

Our weatherman Derek Van Dam is back with us and he's tracking all of this.

Derek, you've had a banner week with the eclipse and all the rest of it, but I'm thrilled to have you back in the morning. What do we have today?

DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Nice to be back.

Yeah. You know, it's the storm that just never wants to end. I mean, this is the same storm I was chasing tornadoes with yesterday in Louisiana and Mississippi, now moving along the East Coast, and it's bringing heavy rainfall to the western suburbs of Pittsburgh.

This is Oakdale, check this out. This is just some of the footage that were finding overnight. There were swift water emergencies and rescue is taking place overnight in this western suburb of Pittsburgh, where, by the way, they broke a daily record of rainfall, 2.77 inches of rain yesterday.

In fact, that was the 25th wettest day in Pittsburgh's history. And that is going back 100 years. So that's really saying something. And you can see that swath of heavier rainfall over western sections of Pennsylvania. Right now, the flash flood warnings have been lifted it did, but they're still flood warnings in place across this area.

So we do have swollen rivers from the recent rainfall. This is the storm system again that's got a large cold front that extends all the way to the south and east that brought the tornadoes to Florida and into Mississippi and Alabama yesterday.

Now, look at the excessive rainfall today. This time were focusing our attention across ports -- parts of New Hampshire and into Maine. Upstate New York could see some snowfall out of the system as well into the mountainous regions, Adirondacks for instance.

But a widespread one to two inches of precipitation is still coming across the northern sections of New England.

And then I want to focus our attention on Monday. This is a serious concern. We're several days out, but we're giving you as much of a heads-up as possible.

The planes specifically throughout central Oklahoma extending into Texas there is already a 30 percent risk of severe weather that doesn't happen that often this far in advance. So, we're going to keep a very close side of this weather pattern heading into the weekend.

And then Monday, that's the big day if you're in Oklahoma City, you want to be prepared.

HUNT: All right. Very good to know.

Our weatherman Van Dam, Derek, thank you. I'll see you next hour.

VAN DAM: All right. Take care. All right.

HUNT: Coming up next here, no more delays.

[05:25:01]

Donald Trump, just three days away from standing trial.

Plus, he just resigned from the board of the Gerald Ford Foundation in defense of Liz Cheney. David Hume Kennerly explains his move, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUNT: A live look at Capitol Hill on this Friday morning here in Washington.

Good morning to you. Thank you for being up with us. I'm Kasie Hunt.

Republican holdouts in the House appear to be warming up to newly modified legislation that reauthorizes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.