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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Donald Trump Criticized For Tweet Portraying Hispanics As Criminals; Trump Uses Immigration As Closing Argument For The Upcoming Midterm Election At Rallies Using Some Of His Most Inflammatory Rhetoric To Date. Aired 5-5:30a ET
Aired November 01, 2018 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[05:00:00]
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN HOST: Good morning, everyone, welcome to Early Start this morning. I'm Christine Romans.
DAVE BRIGGS, CNN HOST: I'm Dave Briggs. It is Thursday, November 1, 5:00 am in the East. I hope you had a great Halloween.
ROMANS: Yes, hide the folks. Hide the candy.
BRIGGS: A late night.
ROMANS: All right, one rally down, 10 to go. President Trump in Florida, the first even in his week long, 11th hour push to the midterms, but it is the web ad he tweeted out before the rally that is drawing attention and being called out for blatantly portraying Hispanics as criminals.
The ad echoes the notorious 1988 Willie Horton campaign ad for Bush 41, targeting Michael Dukakis.
BRIGGS: The Trump ad features a California cop killer, in the U.S. illegally, bragging about his crimes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LUIS BRACAMONTES, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT: I will break out soon and I will kill more.
The only thing that I (expletive) regret is that I (expletive) killed two. I wish I (expletive) killed more of those (expletive). (Inaudible) kill more cops soon.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: The cop killer had actually been deported twice, once under Clinton and once under George W. Bush. Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez says it's just another immigration dog whistle.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TOM PEREZ, CHAIRMAN DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE: This is distracting, divisive Donald at his worst. This is fear mongering.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: So, the White House not exactly disagreeing. A source there telling CNN the ad and the president's immigration push are, "clearly working, we're talking about it and not healthcare."
The president also now claims as many as 15,000 troops could be sent to the border to stop the 3,500 or so migrants heading toward the U.S. A caravan that is now more than 800 miles away, weeks away from the border on foot here.
Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, is in Florida. He's got more on the president's midterm pitch.
JIM ACOSTA, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Dave, President Trump appears to have found his closing argument for the upcoming midterm election.
It is the subject of immigration, using some of his most inflammatory rhetoric to date on the issue at a rally here in Fort Myers, Florida.
The president demonized, repeatedly, the caravan of migrants heading towards the U.S. border with Mexico and he also vowed once again to end birthright citizenship that is baked into the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Here is more of what the president had to say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Democrat Party is openly encouraging millions of illegal aliens to break our laws, violate our borders, you see what's happening right now. A vote for Democrats is a vote to liquidate America's borders and it's a vote to let meth, Fentanyl, heroine and other deadly drugs pour across our borders.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ACOSTA: The president also vented his frustrations over the media coverage of his recent trip to Pittsburgh to honor the people who died at the Tree of Life Synagogue. The president referred to the press as the enemy of the people less than one week after package bombs were delivered to CNN. Christine and Dave.
BRIGGS: Jim Acosta, thanks. I mentioned Axl Rose last hour. That's the music playing there at that Trump rally. He tweeted just last month, we don't have a president. That's why I find it a tad ironic that Guns and Roses plays there.
Meanwhile, if you ask the president, the migrant caravan from Central America is bigger than the media is reporting. This is how he put it to Jonathan Karl of ABC.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) TRUMP: You have a caravans coming up that look a lot larger than it's reported actually. I mean, I'm pretty good at estimating crowd size and I will tell you, they look a lot bigger than people would think.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRIGGS: Pretty good at estimating crowd size. The president is also going after Paul Ryan, tweeting the House Speaker should be focusing on holding the majority rather than giving his opinions on birthright citizenship, something he knows nothing about.
In an interview with a Kentucky radio station, Ryan made it clear he believes you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order. Ted Cruz, last night on Fox News, said he is not seeing any constitutional argument that would say you can do that with executive order. So, no one really stepping up among Republicans saying, yes, that's the right path.
ROMANS: All right, today the president's midterm blitz taking him to Missouri folks. That's where Senator Claire McCaskill is in a very tight race with her Republican challenger, Josh Hawley. She got some help yesterday from former vice president and possible 2020 contender, Joe Biden.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You have a guy running against Claire who says that he supports preexisting conditions being able to be covered, yet he joins the lawsuit in Texas to make sure that they can't -- these guys are either not telling the truth or they're really, really stupid, or both.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: The latest CNN forecast has Senator McCaskill ahead by just one point, a statistical tie.
BRIGGS: An injection of star power today for the Georgia governor's race, Oprah Winfrey hitting the trail to campaign for Democrat Stacey Abrams. She'll participate in two town halls with Abrams and plans to do some door to door knocking in Atlanta to get out the vote. Imagine people's surprise when that happens. Vice President Mike Pence will also be campaigning in Georgia for Abrams rival Republican Brian Kemp.
[05:05:00] He'll be attending three rallies across the state. The final debate of the race is now canceled. Kemp backed off the Sunday time slot to attend a rally with the president.
ROMANS: All right, the suspect in the Pittsburgh Synagogue massacre set to appear in court this morning. On Wednesday a Federal Grand Jury indicted Robert Bowers on 44 counts, many of them carry the death penalty.
Today, services will be held for 65-year-old dentist Richard Gottfried and for a married couple, Bernice and Sylvan Simon, the 84 and 86. Yesterday three other members of that congregation were laid to rest. Seventy five year old Joyce Feinberg, Melvin Wax, age 87 and Irving Younger, he was 69.
Several hundred University of Pittsburgh students and supporters also rallied on campus in favor of tighter gun regulations.
BRIGGS: Police in Invine, California, are hoping this surveillance video will help them find a vandal who defaced a synagogue with anti- Semitic graffiti just days after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh.
The vandal spay painting "F" Jews on the synagogue. Workers spotted it Wednesday morning. The Orange County Human Relations Council says the number of hate crimes in the area jumped last year, continuing a trend that began in 2015.
ROMANS: All right, American workers, your wages are finally rising. Over the past year the largest wage increase in a decade up 3.1 percent. The increases reflecting the strength in the economy and the super low unemployment rate. The jobless rate fell to 3.7 percent in September, that's a 49 year low.
You know, wage increases have been the missing link in the economy since the recovery began in mid-2008.
BRIGGS: The National Archives has just released the so-called Watergate road map. The documents from the Watergate scandal include a would-be indictment against then president, Richard Nixon, that's never been seen before. It reveals how a grand jury planned to charge Mr. Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and obstruction of a criminal investigation.
The president was never formally charged by was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The group that petitioned for the release of the documents believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller should use them as a road map if he decides to issue a report to Congress.
ROMANS: Google employees planning to stage a walk-out today at offices around the world to protest the company's handling of sexual harassment. It comes after a "New York Times" investigation that detailed years of sexual harassment allegations, multi-million dollar severance packages for accused executives and a lack of transparency.
Google CEO, Sunda Pichai, voicing his support for employees who wish to participate in the protest. The "Times" reports, organizers expect more than 1,500 people to take part across nearly two dozen Google offices worldwide.
BRIGGS: Ahead, the body of murdered "Washington Post" journalist, Jamal Khashoggi may never be found. Now, Turkish authorities pursuing a gruesome new theory about what happened to him. We're live in Istanbul.
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[05:10:00]
BRIGGS: Indonesia's search and rescue agency said it's located the flight data recorder from the doomed Lion Air Flight with 189 on board, the crash in the Java Sea earlier this week just thirteen minutes after take off.
Ivan Watson live in Jakarta, Indonesia with latest. Ivan, good morning.
IVAN WATSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. It was not easy to find this device. The rescue workers they had to hone in on the pings that were ringing out from the underwater location beacon of the flight data recorder for days.
They were finally able to get through fast underwater currents, reach a depth of the sea bed of around 100 feet with the help of a submersible remote operated vehicle, and then dig through the mud to pull up this device.
The so called black box, which is actually colored orange so the people can find it in the murk of the ocean and then it's probably going to take weeks if not months to both extract the data and then analyze it according to the head of the investigation here in Indonesia.
But it is potentially a breakthrough to explain why this brand new Boeing 737 max 8 Airplane went down roughly 13 minutes after takeoff on Monday morning with 189 passengers and crew on board.
Could a contributing factor be that the same aircraft was reported to have some kind of an instrument malfunction the night before on a proceeding flight and that is something that the investigators say they're also looking at.
It's little consolation though to the relatives of the victims of this disaster. Some of whom have told us they are desperate to retrieve the bodies of their missing loved ones, Dave.
BRIGGS: Hopefully some answers ahead. Ivan Watson live for us this morning, thank you.
ROMANS: Speaking of answers, Turkey's chief prosecutor says Saudi agents strangled Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi almost immediately after we entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and then dismembered the body.
Turkish government is demanding Saudi Arabia extradite all 18 suspects in the Khashoggi case and now officials have a gruesome new theory about what happened to his remains.
I'm bringing in (ph) CNN's Jomana Karadsheh live in Istanbul and from this reporting, Jomana, it just seems as though he didn't have a chance.
JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It does, Christine. The latest information that we're getting, this is the first time we're hearing from the chief prosecutor in Istanbul who is heading the investigation that has been going on now for nearly a month into the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. [05:15:00]
In this statement the chief prosecutor says that this was premeditated murder. Something that Turkish officials have been saying for a few weeks now and the details they are giving, according to their investigation, they say that Jamal Khashoggi was killed almost immediately after entering the consulate.
That he was strangled to death that his body was dismembered, and then it was destroyed. Now they don't really clarify in that statement what they mean by destroyed. We have been trying to get clarification from Turkish officials.
But in the meantime, the Washington Post quoting a senior Turkish official say that they are pursing a theory that acid was used to destroy the body and that happened either here or the consulate or at the consul generals residence not far from this location.
They say what supports this theory is biological evidence that they had gathered from the consulate garden. Now despite this latest information coming from the Turkish authorities they still say that there are many questions that remain unanswered. They are extremely frustrated by the lack of cooperation from the Saudi's.
They're trying to get answers on where are the remains of Jamal Khashoggi and who issued the orders to that hit squad that carried out the killing. They were hoping to get those answers the Saudi chief prosecutor who is here for a visit and left yesterday, but that did not happen.
They say it seemed he was more interested in finding out what evidence Turkey had, Christine.
ROMANS: Jomana, thank you so much for that in Istanbul for us this morning.
BRIGGS: All right ahead, one day after getting his job back, the University of Maryland's head football coach is fired. Coy Wire has more in the Bleacher Report, next.
[05:20:00]
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ROMANS: More than 50 people suspected of fueling violence in Chicago have been arrested. Police say the suspects were swept up in a series of precision overnight carried out by Chicago police and the city's FBI and ATF teams.
Authorities collected 20 guns, two cars, 80 grand in cash. This comes after a weekend of violence where 41 people were shot in Chicago, five of them fatally.
BRIGGS: Health officials confirming a 10th child has died from a virus outbreak at the Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell, New Jersey. Twenty-seven pediatric cases have now been linked to the virus, and one staff member was also sickened.
The center is not admitting new residents until the outbreak is over. The CDC is assisting with lab testing to make sure there are no other cases. A team of infection control experts will visit four pediatric long-term care facilities, including the Wanaque Center later this month to conduct training.
ROMANS: An intoxicated American Airlines baggage handler fell asleep on the job and ended up flying from Kansas City to Chicago in the belly of a Boeing 737. The unidentified employee apparently took a nap inside the forward cargo just before the flight took off last weekend.
He wasn't discovered until they landed in Chicago. He told law enforcement he was intoxicated and fell asleep. He was not charged with a crime. America says the airline is investigation, and the employee, Dave, has been suspended.
BRIGGS: Baseball is mourning the loss of one of its all-time hall of fame greats, San Francisco Giants legend Willie McCovey - Stretch McCovey as he was known, was a fearsome hitter during his hay-day in the 60s and 70s teaming with Willie Mays to form one of baseball's great duos.
The Giants paying tribute to McCovey, flying flags at AT&T Park over McCovey Cove at half staff. The team says he died after battling ongoing health issues. Willie McCovey was 80 years old. What a legend.
The University of Maryland fires football coach D.J. Durkin one day after he was allowed to return to the sidelines. Coy Wire has more on this in the Bleacher Report. Coy, this did not go over well initially, Coy. They audibled and got it right.
(SPORTS)
[05:25:00]
BRIGGS: Romans, over to you.
ROMANS: All right. Thanks, Dave. Twenty-six minutes past the hour. Hispanics are criminals is (ph) the blatantly clear message in a campaign ad the President tweeted. Will the immigration message work for him for the midterms?
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[05:30:00]
