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Zelenskyy Agrees to Pause on Attacks on Energy Targets; Amanda Litman is Interviewed about Democrats Struggling to Find a Message; Dr. Gail Hansen is Interviewed about Bird Flu; Judge Wants Answers about Deportation Flights; Pentagon Website Purge. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired March 20, 2025 - 06:30   ET

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

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[06:31:02]

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The chainsaw and the wrecking ball is coming after the 50 million students that go to our public schools. Ninety percent of America's children go to public schools, and 95 percent of students with disabilities go to public schools.

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AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump expected to start dismantling the Department of Education today.

Good morning, everybody. I'm Audie Cornish. I want to thank you for waking up with us here on CNN THIS MORNING.

Here's what's happening right now.

Today, the president plans to sign an executive order that will begin the process of shutting down the Education Department. It will direct the secretary to take the necessary steps to make that happen. To be clear, an act of Congress will also be needed to completely close it down.

And the Justice Department has until today at noon eastern to give a judge more information about the deportations that the Trump administration carried out last weekend. They can also decide to invoke the state secret privilege to avoid turning over that information.

And there's no shortage of anger and frustration as lawmakers go home to face voters. And that continues today.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm a veteran and you don't give a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) about me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We want you to show fight. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm not going to get my way when my people are

being slaughtered!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, if you -

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CORNISH: Democratic Congressman Sean Casten of Illinois faced pro- Palestinian demonstrators during his town hall last night. Eventually, police sent everybody home after multiple people were escorted out.

Also, Ukraine's President Zelenskyy says he believes a lasting peace with Russia can be achieved after what he calls a positive phone call with President Trump.

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VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): I believe it was substantive. Over the recent period, this is probably the most substantive conversation. The mood was right. Sufficiently detailed. We discussed our next steps, the demands for a partial ceasefire.

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CORNISH: Both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to stop striking energy targets, but the details of that agreement aren't quite clear. President Trump also floated the idea of the U.S. taking control of Ukraine's power plants.

OK, group chat is back. I'm going to lean on Stephen Collinson, who's been writing about this a lot, because you're describing it at this point as spinning a fiction, what the White House is doing.

STEPHEN COLLINSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right. There are times in a peace negotiation where you have to create the illusion of progress just to keep people at the table, to try and get things moving. It's not clear that there is any progress at all here. And it seems that what's happening is the White House is saying, everything's going great because the president came in and said, I'm going to fix this in 24 hours and it's proving a lot more difficult.

What we saw in the call between President Trump and President Putin is, the Russian president hasn't changed any of his goals that he had at the start of the invasion, which is -

CORNISH: Yes. And also, why should he, right? If the president turned to Zelenskyy in the Oval office and said -

COLLINSON: True.

CORNISH: You don't hold the cards and you're the other person who comes to the table -

COLLINSON: That's true.

CORNISH: What reason do you have to make decisions?

COLLINSON: But - but the question is, if there's going to be a peace at some point, the president of the United States is going to have to lean on the president of Russia, because it's pretty clear that right now Putin doesn't want peace. He wants to keep on fighting because he's trying to get rid of the Ukrainian forces in Kursk, a part of Russia -

CORNISH: Yes.

COLLINSON: Which is one of the few bargaining chips that Ukraine has in these talks.

CORNISH: And he wants us to end with him having more land, Ukraine having no military -

COLLINSON: That's right.

CORNISH: And NATO out of the way.

COLLINSON: Right. So, the question is, can there be a peace?

What's interesting, in the last few weeks is that after that disastrous meltdown in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy has worked out a little bit how to deal with the Trump administration.

CORNISH: Yes.

COLLINSON: He's showing more gratitude. He is -

CORNISH: Playing nice.

COLLINSON: He's pretty much agreeing to whatever the president wants at this point because he knows he has to do that to try and keep Ukraine in the game. But the - the fault line here is that the president seems to be aligning himself with Russia's positions and not the positions of the country that was invaded in the first - first point.

[06:35:04]

CORNISH: OK, I'm going to keep the group chat here. There's a lot more to talk about, but we're going to bring in a few more people to add to the conversation.

So, one question that I've been hearing about in domestic politics, should Democrats play dead or should they fight back? The party's really divided when it comes to challenging President Trump and his agenda. And now we're seeing these town halls across the country. Voters saying what they want them to do.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do the Democrats have a game plan? Do they? Can they get together the - the House and the Senate and do something? UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE) people have been viciously targeted by this administration. What are you and other Democrats doing to protect them?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I hear Democrats talk about strategies for taking back Congress in the midterms. Will we even have a midterm? Will we even have future elections? So, what is the plan to stop this?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: OK, so our next guest is somebody who thinks she has some answers to those questions. The founder and president of Run For Something, Amanda Litman. She's also the author of, "When We're in Charge," which comes out in May.

Amanda, welcome to CNN THIS MORNING. Thanks for being here.

AMANDA LITMAN, AUTHOR, "WHEN WE'RE IN CHARGE" AND FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, RUN FOR SOMETHING: Thanks for having me.

CORNISH: You've called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to make this their last term so that we can break the cycle of, quote, "bad boomer leadership."

How do you propose that should happen? And I ask because there are calls right now against Senator Chuck Schumer to at least step down from his position as minority leader.

LITMAN: You know, I am looking at the generation of leaders on the Democratic side who got us to this point. People like Senator Schumer, people like Nancy Pelosi, who have done incredible work through their leadership over the last 10, 20, 30 years. But that's part of the problem. They have been in charge for decades in some cases, and they have neither the skills nor the stomach to meet the moment that we're in.

And it seems like Senator Schumer doesn't even realize the crisis of this moment. There is this incredible bench of talent. Run For Something has helped elect more than 1,500 millennials and gen z to local office in nearly every state. They are ready to rise up and to run, but we got to make space for them at the top.

CORNISH: Can we talk about that recruitment? It's very clear from the last election that this generation is not default leaning Democrat, right? There is a mix on the political spectrum. The other thing I see at the town halls is, people sound helpless. It sounds like they're saying to the lawmakers, why aren't you doing something? Because it sounds like they're afraid to do something. Am I misreading this? Tell me I'm wrong.

LITMAN: I think you are sort of right. You know, we have seen - Run For Something recruits young people to run for local office. We have seen, just since the election, more than 32,000 people raise their hands and say they want to run. That's more than we had sign up with us in the entire first two years of Trump's first administration. The day that Schumer announced he was going to vote for the continuing

resolution was one of our biggest days of candidate recruitment yet. So, I think, in particular, young people across the country, who do share our values, and a majority of them do, even if they weren't for us in the last election, for reasons through Trump and media and Biden and all of that, they do generally share our values. They are saying, if you're not going to fight for me, I'm going to fight for me. And I find that at least a little bit hopeful.

CORNISH: That's Amanda Litman, founder of Run For Something.

Thank you so much for being with us.

LITMAN: Any time.

CORNISH: Also her book, "When We're in Charge," is out in May.

Now I want to talk about something that impacts your health and your wallet, bird flu. There's no sign that this outbreak is slowing down. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. recently posed an idea on how to curb the spread. It has some public health experts raising alarms.

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ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: They should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flocks so that we can identify the birds and preserve the birds that are immune to it.

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CORNISH: Joining me now, public health veterinarian Doctor Gail Hansen.

OK, right now the way we deal with this is to cull, kill, the birds that are sick. What is the science behind what he's saying, which is, let it run free and the ones that live are immune and, like, we've solved the problem?

DR. GAIL HANSEN, FORMER STATE VETERINARIAN FOR KANSAS: There's not a lot of science behind that. And that's the reason why we kill or cull those birds is that those - the avian flu, the bird flu, kills those birds, but it doesn't kill them quickly, necessarily. And that's a nasty death. So, it's not humane to do that. It also doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of the virus mutating. So, the virus can then potentially get into people.

[06:40:01]

It puts people much more at risk. And it puts the farmers at a large economic risk as well.

CORNISH: Right, because the farmers are able to look abroad and say, look, we've culled the birds that are sick. You can still buy from us. And under this system, Europe or whoever can look and be like, what, you're just letting it run wild. We don't need to buy from you.

HANSEN: Right. And we've - you have then the birds that are sick, that are potentially getting the virus, then into the food that we're eating. That, obviously, we don't want to have. We want to make sure that the birds are as healthy as they can be if you - if they're going to get the disease. Once it gets into a flock, almost all the birds are going to die anyway. So, to cull them means that you depopulate them, you kill them fairly quickly and much more humanely than having them die from the disease, which they're going to do anyway.

CORNISH: You said something fascinating to me, which is that genetically, at this point, so many birds on American farms are kind of the same. Like, the idea that there's some super bird that's immune, that you let that one live. Like, it sounds science fictiony, but you - like you tell me, how is this work or doesn't work the way he's thinking?

HANSEN: Well, most of the birds that are either laying eggs or that we have as chickens and we eat chicken are pretty much from the same kind of stock. So, they've - they're the same breed. They're the same type of bird. They're not quite clones, but they're pretty close.

So, if you've got disease that's going to kill them, which it does, it's going to kill all of them. You're not going to have that - that one. And even if you have one in a million, you've got, you know, the rest of them that are going to die a horrible death.

CORNISH: What should we do instead? People talk about what's happening in Europe, that there's some vaccination system. Help me understand what's an alternative to killing or letting it run free?

HANSEN: Well, I think that's the - where people get a little confused, because there is a - it isn't just a one or other. It really needs to be - and USDA has talked about having a five-pronged approach, but I think a multi-pronged approach certainly makes sense.

So, culling the birds when you have it in the flock, you have to do that for humane reasons. You can't let those birds suffer. You also don't want to make - you want to make sure that the - the farmers and the farm workers aren't exposed to the - to the disease.

CORNISH: Right. So even just hygiene, keeping things sterilized, et cetera.

HANSEN: Right. Right. If you - what they do in a lot of Europe and what they do in Canada is the flocks are a little bit smaller, they're a little less dense, so the birds aren't quite connected so closely together so you have a little less chance for them to get the disease. So doing that. Vaccination, which is - we have a vaccine that's available, that's being used in some parts of the world. Just looking for other ways we can do - they call it biosecurity. So, making sure that the disease has less of a chance of getting into the flock.

CORNISH: Yes. Yes.

So, right now, our health experts, veterinarians like yourselves, is it just an eyebrow raise to what he's saying or is there genuinely worry?

HANSEN: There's a lot of worry that that might come to fruition, that nobody really wants that to happen, to have the birds just get sick and have all of them die. This is - and die, like I said, a terrible death. So, we're not just saying, oh, maybe we should think about this. No, this is not something we want to think about doing.

CORNISH: OK.

Doctor Gail Hansen, thank you so much for coming on set. Thanks for joining us.

HANSEN: Thank you.

CORNISH: All right, still ahead on CNN THIS MORNING, the Trump administration versus the courts. Why mounting losses in lower courts could actually be setting up a long-term strategy.

Plus, why a selfie taken a few hours after the stabbing deaths of four Idaho college students has become a key piece of evidence. We're going to bring back our group after this.

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[06:47:37]

KAROLINE LEAVITT: We have judges who are acting as partisan activists from the bench. They are trying to dictate policy from the president of the United States. They are trying to clearly slow walk this administration's agenda. And it's unacceptable.

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CORNISH: Today, the Trump administration is facing a federal judge's deadline. He's demanding more information about those deportation flights to El Salvador. The Justice Department claims they didn't ignore his written orders to turn the planes around, and now they are questioning whether the judge even has jurisdiction.

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PAM BONDI, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: We will answer appropriately. But what I will tell you is this judge has no right to ask those questions. You have one unelected federal judge trying to control foreign policies.

He came in on an emergency basis on a Saturday with very, very short notice, if any, to our attorney to run in the courtroom. This judge had no right to do that.

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CORNISH: Joining me now to discuss, Elie Honig, CNN's senior legal analyst and former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

So, Elie, we've seen this deadline pushed back a couple times now.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes.

CORNISH: What is it that he's looking for?

HONIG: He wants all the details on those flights. And the thing that's remarkable to me, Audie, is, the judge has now given DOJ three chances. He said, here's a list that I want from you. When did those flights take off? When did they leave U.S. airspace? When did they land? Who was on them? And all three times the response has been essentially what we just saw from the attorney general, you're not entitled to this, judge. We'll tell you a little bit, but not everything. Today he said, I want everything or I want your specific excuse for why you don't think you have to give me everything.

CORNISH: I want to talk about this more. But I think one thing I've noticed as I've been like looking at these court, kind of, transcripts is that the Trump administration attorneys are often saying, I don't have that information.

HONIG: Yes.

CORNISH: Or they're saying, we are complying, even though it hasn't happened yet, or they are saying, like, well, I'm not sure. Let me, like, are there other tactics here other than the public bullying that you're seeing in court?

HONIG: So - no comment and I don't know are not acceptable answers if you are the United States Justice Department in front of a court.

CORNISH: Yes.

HONIG: Occasionally you do get asked a question that you don't know. But you say, your honor, I don't know, but I will get that to you immediately. And we just heard Pam Bondi say, he, the judge, he has no right to ask for that.

CORNISH: Yes.

HONIG: Yes, he does. He's the judge. That's his job. That's what they do. And the tack that DOJ has taken of, how dare you ask us that and we shall not answer you, that is new.

[06:50:04]

CORNISH: OK. So, to that point, I want to play this moment from Trump's speech at the Justice Department. He actually was referencing the Indiana basketball coach, Bobby Knight, as one is want to do in front of your federal prosecutors, and he accuses others of working the refs.

Here's that moment.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He would play the ref and he would scream at them. He knew exactly what he was doing. They're doing the same thing. He said, no, he's not going to change now, but he's going to change for the next one. That's what he wanted to do. He wanted to scare the hell - they wanted to scare the hell out of the judges, and they do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Can you talk about this characterization?

HONIG: Yes, first of all, I'm not sure who the "they" is there. I mean this is something Donald Trump certainly does all the time.

Judges are not refs. They don't wear striped shirts. They wear black robes.

CORNISH: Yes.

HONIG: But it will never work to your advantage, in my experience, to try to browbeat a judge or guilt a judge into giving you the next call the way, I don't know, maybe it does work in basketball.

CORNISH: Yes, but it doesn't work in court. But in the court of public opinion, which we talk about a lot.

HONIG: Well, that's - yes.

CORNISH: When you refer to them as refs, activists, radicals, lunatics, over time you're trying to change the public's sense of who they are and what they do.

HONIG: You're right. There is an interesting messaging effort underway here. And, by the way, how many times have you heard Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller or any other Trump administration spokesperson, Tom Homan, say, one - a single, unelected district court judge cannot overrule the will of the president. That has become a very effective theme. And I will say -

CORNISH: Yes, because people have talked about unelected judges in the past.

HONIG: Exactly.

CORNISH: Even though Elon Musk is unelected as well, right?

HONIG: Right. Right.

CORNISH: Yes.

HONIG: But this issue of, can one district court judge issue a ruling that impacts the entire country? This goes back to - really it started under Barack Obama. Now, Trump has had way more of those rulings. But it's a common complaint. But the Trump administration, certainly more so than prior administrations, has really, I think, done an effective job, for better or worse, of messaging that.

CORNISH: Right. Which may be why you finally had the chief justice speaking out this week. So, we'll see if there's more of that.

HONIG: He chooses his words very - three times in 20 years he has said something. So, yes.

CORNISH: He - he does.

Elie Honig, CNN's senior legal analyst, thank you for joining us this morning.

HONIG: Thanks. Good to see you.

CORNISH: Now it is 51 minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup. Some of the stories you need to know to get going.

Overnight, people at Tel Aviv's airport heard sirens as the Israeli military intercepted a missile targeting that airport. Yemen's Houthi rebels say that they launched it in support of Palestinians after the collapse of the Gaza ceasefire.

And prosecutors say the man accused of killing four Idaho college students brought a knife, a sheath and a knife sharpener in the months before the crime. Detectives say they found that sheath next to one of the victims. And other newly released court documents include a selfie that investigators say Bryan Kohberger allegedly took on the morning of the killings, making a thumbs up gesture.

A jury is ordering the environmental group Greenpeace to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a pipeline company over protests from nearly ten years ago. The company had sued, accusing Greenpeace of defamation and trespassing. Greenpeace says the case threatens free speech and the organizations very future.

Now we want to talk about the massive purge of Pentagon websites, because CNN has obtained a database that reveals more than 24,000 articles have been, or could be, scrubbed, all of them in the name of the new anti-DEI era at the Defense Department. Of course, a closer examination shows that some of them have little connection to diversity, equity or inclusion. For example, an online feature about Jackie Robinson's military service, pulled down. Restored, of course, after a lot of backlash.

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REP. JAMES CLYBURN (D-SC): What does DEI have to do with Jackie Robinson and Medgar Evers? This is the establishment of Jim Crow 2.0. I said that before we ever had the election. And it's coming true. And so I would hope that we would stop running around chasing these shiny objects and begin to focus the American people on exactly what this administration is doing.

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CORNISH: Group chat is back.

I want to start with you, Sabrina, because the - the other article scrubbed about the Holocaust, about 9/11, cancer awareness, sexual assault, suicide prevention.

What's going on here? What's the sense of how it got to this point?

SABRINA RODRIGUEZ, NATIONAL POLITICS REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I mean this is something that Donald Trump talked a lot about on the campaign trail. I think now we're seeing it sort of put into effect. But so much is getting caught up in it. I mean part of it they've said is, oh, there's filters. Oh, things have gotten caught up in the filters. But things are -

CORNISH: The umbrella of woke has gotten wide, like way bigger.

RODRIGUEZ: But - exactly. But the filter - you have to set a filter for something to get caught up in it. And I think there's a question right now of everything - you know, we're hearing from the Pentagon spokespeople saying, well, diversity is not our strength, it's unity. Well, diversity is just a reality in the United States. And I think there's a question right now of, OK, why is this such a toxic word?

[06:55:04]

Why is it that this scrubbing is happening?

CORNISH: Yes. Yes. Also, it's a key part of the history of the Defense Department, the integration of forces, which also contributed to the integration of the country more widely.

Cari, I was thinking about how, if there's one person you shouldn't scrub, it's Jackie Robinson.

CARI CHAMPION, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Of all of the people. She - well, she just said the filter. When you were saying that, and I'm like, the filter. I understand. How wide is this filter? Is it just black people, white people, white women? I don't - what is this situation where you say they start really wide and then they go back and correct the mistakes? And to me that was, I mean, extremely disgusting.

CORNISH: What's the goal of this, Stephen?

COLLINSON: I think you have to ask the question, after all of these incidences, do they actually want a diverse military? Because these stories keep coming up. And I think there's certainly an attempt to impose conservative thought and values on what many conservatives see as a very liberal government.

CORNISH: Yes. I mean what we're - what I hear from like Republican lawmakers is, look, the woke thing went too far. Military leadership was too focused on things that were not about battle readiness, because they were busy trying to, like, protect all of these groups within.

So, is it, as the historians look around and say, you're scrubbing history, but is there a nugget of truth there, and can this be, I guess, message massaged in a different way?

COLLINSON: Often the backlash to the backlash is bigger than the backlash to start with. The argument that a lot of people in the Pentagon were putting about, the political people, was, this hurts recruitment, the overly woke sense in the Pentagon. But what happens to the recruitment of more diverse future members of the military? Could that - I think we have to look at that now and see whether this is a disincentive to people to enlist.

CORNISH: It's interesting. We also heard from a NASA watcher, an astrophysicist, who was telling us that they, on their websites, they saw like images of black and brown astronauts being removed. It feels like a reimagining of the project of telling America's story.

CHAMPION: Diversity, equity and inclusion, when you say it out loud, who's not in on that? Who's not in on -

CORNISH: For lots of people.

CHAMPION: Yes, but listen to it.

CORNISH: The governor of Florida. Right. Yes.

CHAMPION: I'm just, like, why, though?

CORNISH: Yes.

CHAMPION: Listen to what they're saying. In any space it makes people better and different. And so I'm always just so - I don't know why this word "woke" has become so poisonous and toxic and used to describe other people, black and brown people, or people who are not aligned. You almost feel like we - how did we get here? I keep asking that question.

CORNISH: Yes.

CHAMPION: And I'm looking at you for the answer.

RODRIGUEZ: And this is a good example, though, of just the slippery slope.

CORNISH: Yes.

RODRIGUEZ: I think one thing is, you know, we saw when the defense secretary went in, one of the first actions in the Pentagon was to say, OK, well, people aren't going to use time that they're on work to do, you know, cultural month celebrations. OK, that, you know, moves from the mission.

CHAMPION: Right.

RODRIGUEZ: That's one thing. And another thing is to scrub websites of just historic events in U.S. history.

CORNISH: Yes. And so much of our content online is our history right now.

I want to talk about what you guys are keeping an eye on in the next day or two. What are you watching, Stephen, that you think other people should pay attention to?

COLLINSON: I'm looking out for the first big story that captures the public imagination that's not about Donald Trump. He's - he's -

CORNISH: That's all for Stephen Collinson.

COLLINSON: Yes.

CORNISH: Oh, no. Yes.

COLLINSON: He's - he's - he's inflicted or imposed himself on the - the nation's psyche.

CORNISH: Yes.

COLLINSON: He's in the middle of every single issue.

CORNISH: Like Super Bowl, everything, yes.

COLLINSON: Popular culture. Politics. International stories. That's not going to last forever. Perhaps it's going to be part of these demonstrations that we're seeing at these town halls.

CORNISH: And we know people get tired, right?

COLLINSON: Yes. Yes.

CORNISH: That's what happened in 2020.

CHAMPION: Well, let's hope. I don't know. Good luck with that.

I'm keeping an eye on my bracket. If, in fact - if, in fact -

CORNISH: Cari's bracket.

CHAMPION: If, in fact, I win, it will be the first time ever in the history of - of college basketball, at least to my reporting. But I don't think that's going to happen because the chances are one in 9.2 quintillion or some number, right?

CORNISH: Yes.

CHAMPION: Something outrageous in which I know that's not going to happen. But -

CORNISH: Chyron, your brackets don't matter.

CHAMPION: Done. Done.

CORNISH: Sabrina Rodriguez, last word to you.

RODRIGUEZ: OK, on a light note, I've - I've filled out my first bracket, so I'm excited. It's my first time.

CHAMPION: Oh, really?

CORNISH: Oh, welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the chat.

RODRIGUEZ: But on a serious note, I mean, in politics, the thing that I'm paying attention to right now is, we've talked so much about the fallout from this case, specifically over the weekend of Trump sending over all these mostly Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. I think one of the open questions, what happens to these migrants?

CORNISH: Yes.

RODRIGUEZ: They're in a notorious mega prison. Are we going to see legal challenges? Are they just stuck in El Salvador? And I think there's just a lot of questions of what happens to these people while, yes, we debate the constitutional piece of this.

CORNISH: Yes. Yes. Right now it's like we've sort of lost them in the shuffle of this conversation. But one of the things I'm compelled by is it's easy to have a conversation about people you see as gang members, right?

[07:00:06]

That's the easy - it's going to get harder when this starts to move to other communities of people.

I want to thank you guys for joining me this morning. It was a lot of fun. I want to thank all of you for waking up with us.

I'm Audie Cornish. Stick with us for the headlines. "CNN NEWS CENTRAL" starts right now.