Return to Transcripts main page

Erin Burnett Outfront

Pelosi on Security Threats: "The Enemy is Within the House"; Comes as GOP Rep's Posts Signaled Support for Executing Dems; House GOP Leader McCarthy Meets with Trump After Source Says He was Warned Against "Crawling Back to Trump"; Qanon-Aligned GOP Rep Greene Holds Town Hall Amid Uproar; Falsely Claims Election was Stolen; Sen. Chuck Hufstetler (R-GA) Discusses About the Support that Rep. Greene is Getting from Her Supporters. Aired 7-8p ET

Aired January 28, 2021 - 19:00   ET

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

[19:00:00]

ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: ... for her to be censured or even expelled, what is the Republican Party doing about her tonight?

And the GameStop frenzy, how amateur investors are trying to stick it to the mighty hedge funds. Will they succeed? Let's go OUTFRONT.

And good evening. I'm Erin Burnett.

OUTFRONT tonight, the enemy is within. The Speaker of the House pointing the finger at members of Congress when it comes to security at the Capitol.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): The enemy is within the House of Representatives.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What exactly did you mean when you said that the enemy is within? What exactly did you mean by that?

PELOSI: It means that we have members of Congress who want to bring guns on the floor and have threatened violence on other members of Congress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: It comes amid growing democratic calls to censure, even expel the QAnon-aligned Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The Republicans remain silent, even after among other things she has indicated her support for executing Democratic politicians and has supported among other truly bizarre conspiracy theories that a plane didn't fly into the Pentagon on 9/11, that the Parkland high school shooting, which 17 people were killed, kids, was engineered by left-wing anti-gun proponents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PELOSI: What I'm concerned about is the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives who was willing to overlook, ignore those statements, what could they be thinking or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: Well, the Republican leadership did not answer the question of what they were thinking, because the leader was busy. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose office has said he will talk to Greene, despite of course giving her a plum Education Committee assignment, well, he was traveling to visit the former president.

Now, that in and of itself is pretty striking. A publicly announced meeting between a party leader and a former president, just eight days after a new president has been sworn in. I mean, that in and of itself is a very significant statement.

McCarthy's goal in doing this is to ensure he's back in Trump's good graces and the reason that he needs to go kiss Trump's ring in person is because that there was a day when McCarthy with emotion spoke what he clearly believes, which happens to be the truth about the Capitol insurrection.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): The President bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: So, he said it. But then eight days past, the political winds and the deep, deep base of the GOP are still blowing Trump's way and so McCarthy just up and flip the switch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you believe that President, former President Trump provoked?

MCCARTHY: I don't believe he provoked, if you listened to what he said at the rally.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: So, the absurdity of such a flip is why a lot of people have disgust for politicians. But the truth is McCarthy got what he wanted from Trump today to go down and make his amends. Trump releasing a statement after his meeting with McCarthy.

The former president says, "President Trump's popularity has never been stronger than it is today, and his endorsement means more than perhaps any endorsement at any time. President Trump has agreed to work with Leader McCarthy on helping the Republican Party to become a majority in the House."

Not the Republican Party, let's just be clear here. The Republican Party of Trump, because it's two different parties now. McCarthy has bought all-in to the Trump part. It's clear that for him Trump is still more important than truth and McCarthy is not alone in his buy- in into this whole Trump mythology.

Just a short time ago, the Republican Congressman from Florida, Matt Gaetz, got on planes, traveled more than 1,500 miles from his district to attack his Republican colleague, Liz Cheney in Wyoming. All there to go to a rally against someone in his own party. Why? Well, because Cheney did not buy into Trump's big lie. She didn't cast doubt on the election results and she also voted to impeach the former president for inciting the insurrection.

She wrote, "The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President."

Now, this is true, and it is a fact.

[19:05:00]

Now, Liz Cheney, unlike Kevin McCarthy never flipped from that. She never wavered and the price for that now in the Trump GOP is to crush her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MATT GAETZ (D-FL): We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican Party and I intend to win it. You can help me. You can help me break a corrupt system. You can send a representative who actually represents you and you can send Liz Cheney home, back home to Washington, D.C.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: They're in the same party. So, for a party that rails against cancel culture, they sure are canceling a lot of people. They love the word cancel culture. Canceling Liz Cheney, that's the latest, she happened to speak the truth. They also, of course, Republican Party with a censure in Arizona, canceling the Republican Arizona Governor Doug Docey because he did not buy into the election fraud lie.

They also cancelled Cindy McCain for not backing Trump after Trump, of course, personally disparaged and demeaned her husband even after he died. It seems that Matt Gaetz should probably, I mean, if he's consistent, be outraged at Matt Gaetz.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GAETZ: You are canceled. That is the news of the day today. Cancel culture is in its ultimate zenith. We are living in the renaissance of cancel culture.

I'm not for the cancel culture.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BURNETT: Well, except for you are. Manu Raju is OUTFRONT live on

Capitol Hill. Manu, one day after McCarthy tells Republicans to 'cut out the crap', this nasty infighting, you've got Gaetz traveling 1,500 miles in a pandemic to tell people in Wyoming to vote against a sitting Republican member of leadership. OK. So if that's cutting out the crap - OK. And the Democrats, though, are really upping the rhetoric with some of these charges.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You. It is pretty remarkable to see. The tension is palpable on both sides, particularly from the Democrats, geared towards the Republicans in the aftermath of the violence that we saw on Capitol Hill. We've seen some Democrats suggest that some Republican members have gained inside information to these insurrectionists who came and stormed the Capitol.

We don't know who has done that and there's evidence of that. But we do know there's an investigation looking into that. We've also seen metal detectors being placed in all of the entrances to the House chambers. An extraordinary move and partly why Nancy Pelosi today said that the enemy is within the House of Representatives, noting how some members have tried to bring firearms onto the House floor.

And then this pretty remarkable tweet just earlier today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democratic progressive firebrand fired back at Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican saying, "I'm happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there's common ground, but you almost had me murdered three weeks ago so you can sit this one out." She went on to say, "Happy to work with almost any other GOP that aren't trying to get me killed. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign."

Now, Cruz responded saying that partisan anger is not healthy for this country. But it all goes back to what happened on January 6th, Cruz objected to the State of Arizona's electoral results, joined House Republicans during that debate, of course, is when their rioters came in on Capitol Hill that led to the deadly violence, ransacked this building that I'm in right now.

Later Cruz joined a handful of Republicans to vote to overturn that State's results. It also happened in Pennsylvania. They failed in that effort, but the tension from that day, still very apparent here just several weeks later here, Erin.

BURNETT: But obviously, when you look at the situation with Kevin McCarthy today, this unprecedented meeting with former president, that's what he went ahead and did as opposed to dealing with the crisis within his own party and the issue of Marjorie Taylor Greene, which his own office has said is serious and he is going to address.

RAJU: Yes, no question. McCarthy said that he would actually have a conversation with Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's no indication that has happened just yet. He actually has not addressed it himself. He's only said it through a spokesperson that he believes Greene's comments were 'deeply disturbing'.

But I can tell you, Erin, that behind the scenes there has not been much movement yet to discipline her on the Republican side of the aisle. No indication she'll be stripped from a committee assignment, certainly no indication that there's movement among Republicans to join Democrats to try to expel her from the House.

So, her actions that happened before Congress will undoubtedly be scrutinized. If she continues to press ahead on some of these pretty outrageous claims, we'll see how Republicans will respond then, Erin.

BURNETT: All right. Thank you very much, Manu. I want to go OUTFRONT tonight to Dan Eberhart. He has a longtime Republican donor and you've seen him on this program many times as we've been covering what's been happening in the party here over the past few months.

[19:10:00]

Abby Phillip also with me. So, Abby, these charges from Democrats that Manu just detailed are incredibly dramatic and incredibly serious. I mean, is Nancy Pelosi actually saying that she thinks a Republican member of Congress would shoot somebody?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, part of the problem for Republicans is that they do have members who have a documented history of endorsing violence against Democratic members and specifically Pelosi. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene as our own KFILE has reported likes comments on social media that said that it would be easier for her to be shot in the head, things like that.

So, this is not something that's made up out of whole cloth. And then on top of that, having members refusing to disarm themselves before entering the chamber, refusing to go through metal detectors, there's definitely a culture of distrust on Capitol Hill. And I think that it's very hard for Republicans to say this is an overreaction, considering that those members are still in Congress and also considering what happened on January 6th.

BURNETT: So, on the other side, Dan, you've got the Republican Party. I've been using the word it's cannibalism, Matt Gaetz travels across the country to tell people in Wyoming to vote against the third ranking Republican in the House, Liz Cheney, because she didn't say the election was rigged and she voted to impeach the president for his role in the insurrection.

You have that going on. Kevin McCarthy said stop the crap, the infighting but isn't doing anything about it because he was down meeting with Trump today and getting his endorsement.

DAN EBERHART, REPUBLICAN DONOR: Yes. So, there's a lot of different things going on. First of all, I think what's going on with Congressman Greene is absolutely crazy. I think it's kind of outside the bounds of what responsible members should be saying and I think that the party should look at doing what they did to Steve King and strip her of committee assignments to try to really just send a strong message that this is completely outside the mainstream.

What's happening with Liz Cheney, I think, is completely different. Congressman Gaetz is grandstanding in trying to come up with some kind of purity test. I don't think this is how the Republicans get back in the majority. I don't think this is how we should be wandering around the wilderness the next two years or four years.

And I think that Liz Cheney should be out if there's an additional one of John F. Kennedy's profile encourage a second book. I think she's earned yourself a chapter in that book for speaking her mind. Look, she's a clear-cut commonsense conservative with a long-term in this background. I think she voted her conscience here. I think she thought what Trump did was abominable, as I did, and she stood up for it. To remove her from a leadership position is reactive and not helpful for getting the party the majority.

Then with what's going on with McCarthy visiting Trump tonight or today, I think that just shows that McCarthy wants to be speaker and he realizes he can't be speaker if Trump supports - uses his $200 million bank account, his megaphone or what's left of it without the Twitter account to support anti-establishment people that have wronged him and to take a list of grievances and go after 20 or 30 Congressmen simultaneously and hold rallies and use his name and his money against incumbents, that is the exact opposite of what Kevin McCarthy needs if he wants to be speaker.

BURNETT: I mean, which is incredible. It's all personal political machinations going on with the exception of Liz Cheney, clearly Abby, with the examples that Dan is going through here. But what about this point, Abby, with Steve King they did, they stripped him of his assignments, they effectively neutered him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kevin McCarthy put her on committees, right?

PHILLIP: Yes.

BURNETT: Like a day ago.

PHILLIP: It's quite the opposite and what is really happening here is that Kevin McCarthy is demonstrating in multiple ways that he believes that where the wind is blowing politically for him is aligned not just with Trump, but also with the fringe that is now a part of his conference in the Republican House that he is obviously afraid of reprimanding Marjorie Taylor Greene in a real way, because he understands on some level that some percentage of the Republican base backs her up, believes some of the things that she believes whether it's QAnon or some of the other conspiracy theories.

That's the scary part about what's going on here. And it is something that I think many Republicans are not willing to acknowledge. But if you look at the poll numbers and you look at the way in which Republican voters, about 75 percent of them believe this election was stolen. That is a Republican Party that is completely outside of the realm of reality and its leaders have absolutely no ability to get things back on track.

EBERHART: If I could ...

BURNETT: Right. And it's funny - go ahead, Dan, yes.

EBERHART: ... if I could interject for a second, I agree with her, but I think it's even more simple than that. What's going on by McCarthy visiting Trump is clearly a case that Trump has unleashed his own inner demons at the expense of the Republican Party.

[19:15:05]

And like we were in Georgia with him making the call of the Secretary of State and him calling on about election fraud in Georgia and it is costing us those Senate seats, this is clearly McCarthy is on defense here.

And instead of being on offense against the Biden ministration, trying to hold the Biden administration accountable, Trump has basically chosen himself over the party and it's causing both McConnell with this impending trial in the Senate and McCarthy by visiting him and having to deal with Greene to both be on defense at a time when we should be focused on the Biden nominees as Republicans and focused on trying to hold Biden accountable for what I think are some ill-advised economic policies and the Republican leadership clearly can't do that. They are focused on defense right now.

BURNETT: Well, and their focus is still on - it also comes back to this question, the election itself. I mean, there's, I call it the Trump GOP and the other GOP, I don't know how it's all going to play out, but that's what you're dealing with, Dan.

EBERHART: It's a civil war.

BURNETT: Yes, it is. And Abby, let me ask you about this, this whole cancel culture thing and I think there's people across the political spectrum who have issues with cancel culture and what it's done to conversation. But it's very interesting, Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, he voted, of course, to impeach Trump with Liz Cheney. He responded to some of Gaetz attacks on Cheney recently saying this is GOP cancel culture. And I just played Gaetz railing on cancel culture and how terrible it is.

And you guys remember, Trump used to love this whole cancel culture beat. Remember this?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: If you disagree with them, they try to humiliate you, smear you and cancel you, cancel culture, right?

A vote for Biden is a vote to give control of government over to the globalists and the communists, socialists and wealthy liberal hypocrites who want to silence, cancel and punish you, cancel culture they call it.

The efforts to censure, cancel and blacklist our fellow citizens are wrong and they are dangerous.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: Republican Congressman said that what they're doing now is cancel culture, that's exactly what they're doing, Abby. You weren't doing exactly what we wanted, get out.

PHILLIP: This is clearly not the big tent, some kind of big tent Republican Party that President Trump specifically wants. He wants people who support him and back him up. It really has absolutely nothing to do with ideology. But that's the reality that Republicans are living in. He's concerned about being cancelled from social media, if he spreads falsehoods.

But in reality, the Republican Party of today in Trump's mind should be lockstep with him and everyone else who disagrees needs to be kicked out or pushed out. And that is what we are seeing with Liz Cheney and with the 10 other Republicans who voted for impeachment who are getting in an enormous amount of backlash back in their districts right now.

BURNETT: Well, they're going to ...

EBERHART: Trump wants a smaller Republican Party that's more loyal to him and unfortunately as a Republican, that's not what I want to see right now. We need a bigger tent and we need to be thinking about how we can win the midterms in 2022 and potentially win the White House in 2024.

BURNETT: Right.

EBERHART: And Trump's actions are coming against that and I just think a lot of Republican voters haven't quite figured that out yet.

BURNETT: No. Well, as you know, as we point out, Republicans overall 25 percent, 26 percent of the overall population, you point out, that number is going to get smaller and smaller. It's not going to help people like you. All right. Thank you both very much. I appreciate your time.

EBERHART: Thank you.

BURNETT: And next, Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene holding a town hall after more of her controversial comments are exposed, including this about Nancy Pelosi.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's guilty of treason. It's a crime punishable by death.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: Plus breaking news, the maker of one vaccine now warning the effectiveness of that vaccine plunges against the strain first identified in South Africa, a strain that has as of tonight formally been discovered here in the United States.

And amateur traders taking on Wall Street and some of them making a lot of money off GameStop at least for now. How are they doing it?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [19:22:58]

BURNETT: Breaking news, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene just wrapping up a town hall amid the growing uproar over numerous conspiracy theories she has spread. And tonight she was still spreading conspiracy theories amid calls for her to be removed from the Education Committee in Congress.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): We had been preparing very hard. Quite a few of us in the House and some of our senators to object on January 6th to election fraud and objecting in six different states. We had done a lot of work in our preparation, talk to a lot of people, look to a lot of evidence that I think still needs to be looked at and should be presented in court. I truly believe that.

You see this wasn't a conspiracy of several people that got together and created a story, this is literally thousands of people in different states and different voting precincts, different counties and they all find these affidavits.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: I just want to make a point here that this is crazy. OK. By the way, that evidence she's talking about doesn't exist. There were more than 60 court cases, whatever was out there was presented, 61 of them failed. OK. There's nothing there. I hate to have to say it again, but when someone says stuff like that, it's just the facts need to be put out there.

The people in that room inside without masks, not socially distanced listening to her are listening to these lies and she's in Congress and she's going to be put on committees. And so not only is there this conspiracy lie that she's putting out there, she's now trying to delete a dozens of old social media posts that are getting the scrutiny even Kevin McCarthy's office saying they're unacceptable.

Today, we actually found a posting where she said lasers from space caused California wildfires. And CNN's KFILE discovered these comments from Nancy Pelosi from 2018.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She's guilty of treason. It's a crime punishable by death. That's what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: Martin Savidge is OUTFRONT at the town hall. It's in Dallas, Georgia.

[19:25:04]

So Martin, what are you hearing from her constituents about her past comments, conspiracy theories? By the way, she's also said there's no evidence that a plane flew into the Pentagon on 9/11. I mean, there's some of the stuff that's just crazy.

MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. And crazy is the real word here. But the thing to point out is that for those who showed up at the town hall meeting tonight, they believe it. They believe just about all of it.

In fact, two things you could get from this meeting tonight. One, it's clear that the Congresswoman herself feels emboldened. In fact, the more that she is attacked and that's the way she describes it, the more that she feels she is in the right.

And what is obvious by about the 60 to 70 people that were in attendance, none of them were wearing masks, they all believe it too. We're only about 40 miles outside of the city of Atlanta. This is the town of Dallas. We weren't allowed inside that meeting. It was made clear by law enforcement and by the Congresswoman's office that we weren't going to be getting in. We could listen via Facebook feed.

But what you find out is that the mindset of her mind matches to many of those who listen. And I point out this conversation I had with a gentleman in downtown Dallas, just before this old town hall meeting tonight, listen in.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAVIDGE(off-camera): She was not a congresswoman at the time, but she is your congresswoman now and I just ask if that is the right way for a congresswoman to act.

TIM BELL, GEORGIA RESIDENT: Well, like you just said, she wasn't a congresswoman right then, and I've done a lot of things in my past that I ain't proud of now. But I'm not going to run for Congress and I'm not going to run for senator.

SAVIDGE: You haven't changed your mind one bit about her, have you?

BELL: Not a bit. I like her.

SAVIDGE: Is there anything that would change your mind about it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SAVIDGE: We have been talking about David Hogg at that time and about how she had been running down the street trying to accost this young man who had survived that deadly Parkland high school shooting. And that's the reaction he had, poisoned minds. That's about the only thing that you can really think of here.

People have been so inundated with the conspiracy theories and with what they believe is the truth, even though you point out fact, even though you come at them time and time again and say that that is wrong. To them it's not. It's a disturbing and troubling thing to witness. And it's clear that the Congresswoman is happy to go along with it.

BURNETT: It's really amazing. I think we've gotten to a point where you have to accept. It's an alternate reality. They're not facts. They're not alternate facts, it is an alternate reality and it is not based on facts. Thank you very much, Martin Savidge.

Just to go there, it's amazing. No one is even - press allowed in to where Marty was and had to watch on the Facebook feed, because they're not even allowing the press.

OUTFRONT now, Republican State Senator from Georgia, Chuck Hufstetler. He represents many of the same voters from North Georgia that Congresswoman Greene represents and we've had the opportunity to speak before.

Senator, let me just ask you about that constituent first, the man, the gentlemen that you just heard speaking to Martin Savidge. He defends the Congresswoman's past comments, I don't know what specifically that was about, when she went after the teen who's friends had died in the school shooting, the plane, whatever it might have been, but his thing was, oh, I had bad things in my past too. And then he said there's nothing she could do that would make him change his support, what's your reaction?

CHUCK HUFSTETLER (R), GEORGIA STATE SENATOR: It's sad. And Dallas had been my state and district, but it's sad when you see this kind of reaction from these people. The fact that they don't want to look at reality. And we don't treat this behavior the same in the Georgia legislature. We had several chair removed this year for putting debunked theories out there that were clearly not there.

We had a House member evicted for not following COVID protocol this week and his office space is taken away from. We had a member that lost his chair last year for racist comments. We had another member several years ago that was given the choice to resign or be expelled in ways Republicans need to have certain standards and ...

BURNETT: They don't have it on Capitol Hill. They don't seem to have the same ones on Capitol Hill. She just got committee assignments that you have in Georgia.

HUFSTETLER: I think there's some intimidation there.

BURNETT: So let me ask you, because the reason you and I spoke before you were on the show, you were very early to say Joe Biden beat Donald Trump and was the president, that he had won. You said it was important for you and other officials to tell the truth, but we just heard Congresswoman Greene right now, January 28th, we have a new president. She just, I don't know if you heard her, but she just said that they want to present this evidence in court.

[19:30:03]

There were thousands of people in all these states with this whole conspiracy. I mean, at this point, what do you do? There were 60 or 70 people in that room. And as Martin said, every single one of them believes this stuff and it's just a lie.

HUFSTETLER: Well, fortunately, there's a lot of people that don't. In my state Senate district, she did not get the majority vote. But it is distressing, the false lies that go on social media that travel so much faster and get believed. And you know, when you're advocating violence against congressional members, when you're having parents have to listen to you say, no, they're child didn't really die, it was staged, it's totally outrageous, it's not acceptable, and the Republican Party needs to take care of it.

BURNETT: Well, I appreciate your speaking out. I know it's not easy to do it because I know -- I know that there are people who come after you for doing it. But I hope there are people in Washington that hear you and the Republican Party that hear you and step up and do the right thing.

Senator, I appreciate your time.

HUFSTETLER: We do. Thanks. I appreciate it.

BURNETT: All right. As I said, Republican state senator from Georgia, Chuck Hufstetler.

And next, the contagious strain of coronavirus in South Africa. It is now in the United States, and there are new concerns tonight that current vaccines don't work against that variant.

Plus, we're learning alarming details about a heavily armed man was arrested near the Capitol. He allegedly had "Stop the Steal" paperwork and a list of lawmakers.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BURNETT: Breaking news: Coronavirus vaccine maker Novavax releasing new data, showing the vaccine's effectiveness plunges against the variant first identified in South Africa.

[19:35:07]

It is a highly contagious COVID mutant. Authorities in South Africa has been warning for, you know, a month and a half year that this could be the case. And it comes as the United States detects its first cases of the South African strain in South Carolina.

OUTFRONT now, Professor William Haseltine. He's the groundbreaking HIV/AIDS researcher, and Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who advised the medical team under President George W. Bush.

Professor, let me start off with Novavax. You know, they've been doing studies in South Africa on their vaccine. So they say overall against the plain old coronavirus, 89 percent effective. In the South African trial against that specific variant, that efficacy plunges to 60 percent which, of course, would be below herd immunity.

What does that tell you as these variants spread in the United States and obviously given the fact there are so many variants, there are going to continue to be more?

WILLIAM HASELTINE, GROUNDBREAKING HIV/AIDS RESEARCHER: It tells you that the variants are a serious problem. That not only does the study show that the vaccines don't fully protect against this variant. The same study shows that if you're already infected with COVID, you can be re-infected by this variant.

The take-home message for the average person is if you're vaccinated, you may not be protected against these variants, so you must continue your precautions. It also tells you if you have been infected by COVID, you are probably not resistant to these variants, and so you should take precautions.

And it's a foretaste of what may come as another dark winter unless we are able to eradicate this virus, take every possible step now to stamp it out within our borders and around the world.

BURNETT: Dr. Reiner, look, anybody watching this, this is depressing. This is not what people want to hear. It's upsetting.

Let me ask you from the policy perspective. The Biden administration has now imposed travel restrictions on anyone coming from South Africa, but that only applies to people who are not U.S. citizens, which is the same thing Trump did with his bans from Europe and elsewhere, right? U.S. citizens were allowed to go and come, and then the virus doesn't care what you're a citizen of.

So, should they be doing more at this point if it's already here and we know one person has it? Do you just throw your hands up in the air?

JONATHAN REINER, CNN MEDICAL ANALYST: No, we don't throw our hands up in the air. I think you're right, we do know it's already here in the United States. But it does make sense to limit travel from places where this variant is most endemic. And you can do that with travel restrictions, as are in place now.

You can do it by mandatory testing. I think we need to strengthen mandatory testing. We are already seeing international flights requiring testing within three days. But as we move toward maybe using rapid paper-based antigen test, maybe everyone getting on an airplane needs to be tested the day they're getting on an airplane to make sure that people who are already infected are not coming to the United States. We need to do this. And also perhaps quarantine, once people come to the United States, enforce quarantines.

These are proven policy initiatives. We're in the midst of a vicious pandemic and we need to use as Dr. Haseltine said, every possible tool available to us. These just are common sense.

BURNETT: Should we be doing, doctor, what they do in other countries. Force you to go to a hotel. They do that in the U.K., right? They force you to go there. They don't say, oh, you know, we might checkup on you if you're violating your quarantine. Should we be literally doing that if you land at JFK on South African Airways, or whatever it might be, United, you got to go to a hotel and they're going to make you sit there for 10 days?

REINER: The places that have done that have the lowest COVID rates in the world. The places that have -- places like Taiwan, where you went to a hotel 14 are days, they have the lowest COVID rates in the world. They're willing to do that.

I don't -- I don't get the sense this country is willing to do that, but we need to do as much as we can.

BURNETT: Professor Haseltine, the CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, was asked during our CNN town hall whether the United States, you know, given this problem, should we be recommending N95 masks for everyone that you both of course, are familiar with wearing. Here's what she said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: I have spent a reasonable amount of time in an N95 mask. They're hard to tolerate all day every day. And, in fact, when you really think about how well people will wear them, I worry that if we suggest or require that people wear N95s, they won't wear them all the time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BURNETT: Okay. We all get that, that makes sense, professor. Dr. Fauci was asked about double masking. The reason this is coming up, not because these variants would be vaccine resistant, but because they're much more transmissible, right? So, he said it's more effective for a double mask. Today, he backtracked, and said, well, he just wants everyone to wear a mask to begin with.

CDC hasn't recommended N95s or double masking. The point I'm making is, it's confusing. Why is it confusing right now?

HASELTINE: What we now know is the virus is far more infectious and the South African strain and even newer strains that are emerging may be much more infectious. That means very few particles that can exit a single-ply mask, one piece of paper or one piece of cloth, may be enough to infect your neighbor. So that's why they're talking about double masking or more masks.

What I personally would recommend is a triple-ply mask and a face shield. Face shields are under used. They're very effective in hospital settings of reducing infections close to zero for those who wear an N95 mask. They really are effective.

And they're not intrusive. I wear them myself, if I'm going into an area where I think there are maybe people infected, I wear an N95 mask and face shield. Face shields are a good solution to this.

BURNETT: Yeah, they are, and they don't make your breathing doubly harder for people to understand, which can be hard for everybody.

HASELTINE: Face shields with a mask.

BURNETT: With a masks, yes. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply not with a mask underneath it.

Thank you both very much. I appreciate it. And next, rookie traders taking on Wall Street, pushing one stock up

more than 1,000 percent this month, although it plunged today. So what's really going on here? How do they do it and what now?

Plus, could a permanent fence be going up around the capitol of the United States?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[19:45:10]

BURNETT: Tonight, GameStop mania. This is a story of amateur traders trying to take down the big investors, big hedge funds. And the battle has been upending Wall Street.

Now, the way we have seen this all play out first and foremost was in this company, maybe you've seen it in the strip malls. It's a video game retailer called GameStop.

So, take a look at GameStop shares since the start of the month, OK? It was trading at $17. Not very high. Part of the reason is GameStop's business prospects are really not very great, right? So, a lot of big guys were betting it was going to go down.

Okay, then the little guys get in and they want to take them out. At one point this morning -- let me give you a sense of the volatility. In premarket trading, GameStop was as high as $500 a share. Shares were up 1,000 percent, right, since that 17, the beginning of the month.

But if you want to ride a roller coaster, you have to be careful of the fall. It closed down 44 percent. After hours, it's back up. So, it's like this.

Now, if you bought it at the peak, though, this is the bottom line, thinking, OK, I'm going to get in on this train and go, well, you've lost half your money.

So it's risky. But these rookie traders have succeeded in putting a big hedge fund out of the game completely. Hedge funds have been getting GameStop shares would go lower, as I said. They thought the company's business prospects were bad. So if a stock goes up when they're betting it's going to go down, they lose a lot of money and that's what happened.

The amateur traders pushed the stock higher, higher, they made money at the hedge fund's expense. It's not just GameStop. A number of other companies whose business prospects are pitiful at the current time, AMC, Bed, Bath and Beyond, BlackBerry, remember, they used to make devices, they've seen their stocks go up because of this game, right?

Big guys betting it goes down, little guys come in, send it up. The toll on powerful hedge funds has been huge. Melvin Capital is an example. It got hit so hard according to "The Wall Street Journal" that it got a $2.75 billion bailout from two other hedge funds. Now, tonight, the rookie traders jobs are getting harder because they

were trading the stocks using online brokerages like Robinhood. But now, Robinhood and others are restricting trades of GameStop. Robinhood now says it's going to allow limited purchases of the stock starting tomorrow.

This, of course, as all of this is igniting a whole new level of outrage with the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown, and others who are all vowing to investigate what's happening here.

OUTFRONT now is James Surowiecki, former business reporter for "The New Yorker", author of "The Wisdom of Crowds". I hope you've read his work. It's always excellent.

So, let me ask you, James. First of all, how did this happen, right? You've got an internet forum that says, you know what, giddy up, let's go on GameStop. People get on, and they succeed. They get this hedge fund out of business with a nearly $3 billion bet.

How did they do it?

JAMES SUROWIECKI, FORMER BUSINESS REPORTER, THE NEW YORKER: Yeah, I think the key thing to understand and one of the reasons why the story is so interesting is that it wasn't just a case of people being sort of hysterical or delusional the way we saw you could argue, say, in the late 1990s during the Internet bubble. This was actually a pretty calculated and fairly sophisticated trading strategy that this group of traders, speculators, random people on this mainly on this internet sub-Reddit called R Wall Street bets came up with.

And the basic idea was that as you mentioned, GameStop was really heavily shorted. So you had all these big hedge funds betting against it. And the problem for shorts is as you said, as the price rises, the pain gets greater, right? Every dollar the price rises, there's a dollar they're losing.

And since shorts borrow shares when they sell them, at some point if the pain gets too great, they have to buy the shares back and just -- what they said, what Wall Street would say is close out their short. When they do that, they drive the price up because they're buying the stock. That inflicts more pain on the short sellers that are still in the market, and they maybe crack, and that drives the stock up.

And so, what these random internet guys basically said was, if we can get enough buying power together and, you know, all kind of stick to our guns, we can actually create what is called a short squeeze and basically force the shorts to lose tons of money to have to buy back the stock. That will drive it higher.

And they also used options trading in a pretty sophisticated way to do the same thing. So, you know, this was actually a pretty clever strategy that a bunch of people with no leader, no clear organization came up with --

BURNETT: Right. SUROWIECKI: -- and then executed. And that's part of what makes it an

amazing story.

BURNETT: It is. And, you know, you're an expert of wisdom of crowds. The fact you can do it on social media, it is really fascinating. One of the things, though, as you're pointing out, and I know there's a wide variety of people in this group, right?

[19:50:01]

Some of them are very sophisticated.

SUROWIECKI: Yeah.

BURNETT: But the problem is when you see a stock surge like this, it's a cheap stock at first, you can get people and you don't know how this ends, right?

SUROWIECKI: Yes.

BURNETT: They could be borrowing on margin. And then, all of a sudden, the price changes dramatically and they get crushed. Okay?

SUROWIECKI: Yes.

BURNETT: We see a stock plunge 50 percent in a day. And by the way, this is a company that the whole point is its prospects are terrible, right? So it's not going to keep going up, people.

How does this end?

SUROWIECKI: Yeah, I don't know how it ends because I would actually distinguish, say, between what happened in GameStop until maybe Tuesday when it was clearly rising higher on the basis mainly of this strategy, of kind of forcing the shorts to crack, and of using these options trading strategies to drive the price higher.

And then as you said, at some point it was up -- I can't remember, it was up 51 percent on Friday, maybe 18 percent on Monday, and then it was up 90-plus percent on Tuesday. Then Elon Musk tweeted about it after the close. That sent the stock soaring even higher.

And so, you're right. It started to get in people who are basically just retail traders who were like whoa, this thing is riding high, I'd better get on it. And that's the real danger there.

So I would say the last few days you've probably seen more trading like that. There's actually been an incredible amount of trading in the stock.

The weird question, and I think the hard question to answer is where does it end? Because the people on this board have been basically counseling each other, you know, kind of reassuring each other, encouraging each other saying hold the line, don't crack, we can still crush the shorts. And they basically had elevated the stock in some ways by a kind of collective act of will. The problem is once the stock starts falling the question is how long

that will last. I don't think we have an answer to it. We're really in pretty uncharted territory. But the danger is that, you know, the fundamentals of this stock obviously do not support anything close to $195 stock price.

So if it starts falling, wow, there's a long way for it to fall.

BURNETT: Right. And this is the thing. And then people can get hurt.

SUROWIECKI: Yeah.

BURNETT: All right. Thank you very much. James, I appreciate your time. Look forward to talking to you as this plays out. It has certainly captured the popular imagination and the attention of Capitol Hill as well. Thank you.

And next, CNN learning the man arrested near the Capitol yesterday with a gun and 20 rounds of ammunition had a list with names of lawmakers. Details are next.

Plus, tragic news tonight. We're learning another officer who responded to the Capitol Hill riot has taken his own life.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BURNETT: Tonight, disturbing news about a man who was arrested near the capitol yesterday.

[19:55:03]

He had a gun, he had 20 rounds of ammunition, and according to a police affidavit, he had a list of names and contact information of lawmakers -- U.S. senators, and representatives, along with the Stop the Steal set of documents.

Shimon Prokupecz, is OUTFRONT.

So, Shimon, look, on the face of it, these data points are disturbing. What more do you know about it?

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME & JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, they are disturbing. But the thing is, police at this point don't believe at least there was something else going on here, or that he was any kind of threat. But it does tell you what is going on around D.C. right now, and the concern that police are on the lookout for this. They stopped him, they asked him some questions, he admitted to possessing a weapon, and they found the ammunition.

He is 71 years old, from West Virginia, and, basically, his name is Dennis Westover. They interact with him, he was agitated. And they find, as you said, a list of names of lawmakers, and some contact information.

We've also learned that there was Facebook postings from him where he was supporting the former president, Donald Trump, and also, a QAnon supporter, Erin.

So, all of this, obviously, very concerning for investigators they are on the lookout for this as people come here from out of state. They are stopping them, and they are questioning them. And this is, you know, not the first incident like this out here in Washington, D.C.

BURNETT: I also wanted to ask you about Jeffrey Smith, metropolitan police officer. I mean, just a tragedy of that's come out of this riot. A capitol police officer, we just learned, has died by suicide.

PROKUPECZ: That's right.

BURNETT: What more can you tell us about it?

PROKUPECZ: And, sadly, he isn't the only one. We learned yesterday from the head of the D.C. police that -- about Jeffrey Smith, and then another individual as well, Howard Liebengood, who also died by suicide.

They didn't explain much more, but you can tell the toll this has taken on the capital police, but also, the D.C. police. They were in there, in the moments after the insurrection started, battling with many of the people there. In some cases, it was hand to hand combat. Some of them were being tortured in some ways, we learned how one officer was taser, how they were using bare spray at the police.

So, there were some very, very tough moments. And you know, we must understand, in the aftermath of seeing all of this, one can only imagine how many of these officers must feel. And, sadly, we are seeing the effects of this.

BURNETT: It is in comprehensible, and so tragic. Multiple people committing suicide, I just have no words for it. Thank you so much, Shimon.

Next, we learn, tonight, Cicely Tyson has died. Tonight, we played tribute to her, the groundbreaking legend.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BURNETT: You know, we do, just want to let you, we have learned about the death of Cicely Tyson, the icon actress. She was 96 years old. She won Emmys, Tony Award, an honorary Oscar, and she worked steadily across many decades.

She won praise from critics, fans, because she refused to play parts that she believed put down black women. In 2016, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama, and she achieved great acclaim when she was nominated for an Academy Award, in fact, for her moving role in "Sounder".

And she may be best remembered by some of you watching for "The Autobiography of Miss Jean Pittman".

May Ms. Tyson rest in peace.

Thank you for joining us.

Anderson starts now.