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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin
Colonial Pipeline Launches Restart, Return to Normal Will Take Days; GOP Lawmakers Downplay, Deflect at Capitol Riot Hearing; CDC: Vaccine For Ages 12-15 Means Students Can Return to Class; Biden Asserts Israel's Right to Defend Itself Amid Gaza Conflict. Aired 5- 5:30a ET
Aired May 13, 2021 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[05:00:25]
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: As motorists in the Southeast scramble to fill their tanks, Colonial Pipeline has a plan to get back on line this weekend.
LAURA JARRETT, CNN ANCHOR: A vital Memphis bridge shut down after officials found a major crack. Why a week of infrastructure talks at the White House more crucial than ever.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OFFICER FANONE: Come on, MPD, dig in! Push back! Dig in!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Does this look like a normal tourist visit to you? A total disconnect between Republicans and police who survived the Capitol riots.
Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is EARLY START. I'm Christine Romans.
JARRETT: Hey, good morning, Christine. I'm Laura Jarrett. It's Thursday, May 13th. It's 5:00 a.m. here in New York.
Getting back on line, Colonial Pipeline initiating a restart of operations last night after a six-day shutdown caused by a cyberattack. Pipeline officials warn it will take several days for service to return to normal and normal can not come soon enough for millions of drivers along the East Coast trying to fill up their tanks.
ROMANS: Yeah, gas stations throughout the Southeast still running on empty. Three quarters of North Carolina stations totally dry, half the stations in Georgia are out of gas including 70 percent in and around Atlanta. Serious shortages also in South Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Maryland.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MICHAEL BREWER, FRUSTRATED GAS BUYER: My daughter called, she said, dad, they have gas down the street. This pump right here is not working. The pump on the other side is working fine. I just need some gas, man. This is -- this is terrible.
JENNIFER NAVARRO, FRUSTRATED GAS BUYER: But I think it's probably a partial mixture of people who actually just need gas and people panicking. I don't know to what degree it's panic, probably 50/50.
REPORTER: How hard is it to find gas around here right now?
NAVARRO: Very difficult.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
JARRETT: The head of FEMA says the agency is in frequent communication with states affected by the pipeline shutdown. President Biden will address the situation this morning.
And new CNN reporting last night, Colonial appears to have what it needs to get through this crisis without paying those hackers a penny.
Our senior justice correspondent Evan Perez reports now from Washington.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Christine and Laura, the ransomware group that carried out the cyber attack on the Colonial Pipeline has demanded payment of nearly $5 million worth of bitcoin cryptocurrency. People briefed on the investigation of the cyberattack say that the company has not paid the ransom and it's possible that Colonial won't have to pay up as the company works with security experts and with the U.S. government to retrieve data that the hackers tried to steal.
Now, the move appears to have made it possible for Colonial to take steps to restore its computer systems from backup systems. Colonial says that it's been able to restart operations of the crucial pipeline though it could take days for fuel to resolve shortages at gas stations in the southern United States.
Meanwhile, new details are emerging about Colonial's decision to proactively shut down the pipeline last week. The company halted operations because its billing system was compromised according to three people briefed on the investigations. Sources tell us that the company was concerned that they wouldn't be able to figure out how much to bill customers for fuel that they received. Now, asked about this a company spokesperson said, quote, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat which temporarily halted all pipeline operations and affected some of our IT systems -- Christine, Laura.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROMANS: All right. Thanks so much for that, Evan. A CNN exclusive this morning that pits Trumpism against reality, a
painful reality. Newly obtained body cam footage from the capitol riots shows the moment a D.C. metro police officer was attacked by a pro-Trump mob.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OFFICER FANONE: Let's get some fresh guys up front. Let's get some fresh guys up front. Come on. Who needs a break? Let's get some fresh guys un front.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: That's Officer Michael Fanone brutally assaulted during the January 6th insurrection. He was used -- someone used a stun gun against him several times, he was beaten with a flagpole.
In this video, you could hear him pleading for his life. We warn you this video is difficult to watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I got one.
(INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I've got you.
(SCREAMING)
(INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him. Don't hurt him.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I got you. I got you. I got you. I got him.
FANONE: I've got kids.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
JARRETT: Pleading with the mob that he has kids, the footage offering yet another stark remainder of what really happened that day during the riot. And it came out the same day Republican lawmakers spent several hours denying basic facts during a hearing held inside the very building under attack on January 6th.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. ANDREW CLYDE (R-GA): There was no insurrection and to call it an insurrection in my opinion is a bold-faced lie. Watching the TV footage of those who entered the capitol and walked through statuary hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes taking videos and pictures. You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit. REP. RALPH NORMAN (R-SC): OK. At 2:07 a mob of Trump supporters
breached the steps. I don't know who did a poll that it's Trump supporters.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: You know, that video that that first Congress member is talking about, Laura, actually shows people inside statuary hall with Confederate flags.
JARRETT: Oh, yes, I remember.
ROMANS: It's not your average day of a tourist tour of statuary hall by any stretch of the imagination.
And this, I mean -- there was no one there doing scientific polling because it was an insurrection, congressmembers. That's the bottom line here.
Separate hearings Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers, quote, I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the U.S. Capitol, where the former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen refused to say under oath if Trump asked him to overturn the election.
JARRETT: As that had been reported.
So there's finally a consensus a building about what school will like this fall, many districts have reopened, but a lot of students are remote or not showing up at all. The CDC chief now says high vaccination rates among teachers combined with the now expanded vaccines for kids 12 and up means students should be back in classrooms full-time this fall.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR: I think we should be five days a week, everybody present in school in the fall. That is -- I think our guidance has reflected that, I think we will be at a police in this pandemic that we will be able to do that, I think we should all be leaning in, we have over 80 percent of our teachers and educators vaccinated at this point, we now have this incredible news today that 12 to 15 year olds can also be vaccinated.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: America is reopening all over.
In Las Vegas, Caesars says all nine of its casinos on the strip have been cleared for 100 percent capacity, joining MGM Resorts, Wynn and the Cosmopolitan.
In Maryland, the state has lifted all remaining restrictions on businesses allowing for 100 percent reopening.
And California Governor Gavin Newsom says the state will effectively end its mask mandate next month after more than a year.
JARRETT: Staying on COVID here, a new study finds there are no additional risks to mixing and matching different kinds of COVID vaccines. Researchers in the U.K. reporting that people who got one type of vaccine for a first dose and a different one for their second were more likely to experience mild side effects, but they say fever, chills, fatigue or headache were short lived and there were no other safety concerns.
The finding is important as vaccine availability is limited, especially outside of the United States.
ROMANS: All right. To Wall Street now where the worst day in months happened on revived inflation fears. It was the biggest loss for the Dow since January. Why? Key U.S. data showed a big jump in consumer prices. What Americans paid in April rose 4.2 percent from a year ago. That's the fastest inflation since the financial crisis.
Investors worried that these rising prices will force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to cool down a red hot economy. But for consumers, it means higher costs for everything from gas to car rentals to lodging, to airfares. The price of used car surged at a record rate, Americans are buying up used cars as a computer chip shortage curbs new inventory.
The stimulus fueled -- the stimulus fueled economy is rebounding here, and consumers are flush with cash, they are spending, but pent-up demand is clashing with pandemic supply chain bottlenecks, including the Suez Canal traffic jam in March, still dealing with that and soaring raw material cost. The White House downplayed inflation concerns on Wednesday and Fed officials say inflation pressures are temporary.
[05:10:01]
These bottlenecks, these kinks will get work out. But any price spike poses a real hardship for low income earners already hardest hit by the pandemic.
The only inflation that I like to see is a little bit of wage inflation and we have been seeing that where businesses are having to pay a little bit more to keep their workers and to bring workers back. That's the kind of inflation that can be sticky, right, if you are talking about in economic speak, but that's the kind of inflation that most people like to see.
JARRETT: A living wage, yeah.
ROMANS: Right.
JARRETT: All right. President Biden weighing in on the growing tensions between Israel and Gaza. How the fighting poses the first major foreign policy challenge of his presidency.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My expectation and hope is that this will be closing down sooner than later.
[05:15:05]
But Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: President Biden weighing in for the first time on violent escalations between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza. The death toll rising on both sides. In Israel, a six-year-old boy killed when a rocket fired by Gaza militants hit a residential building.
Smoke was seen billowing after an Israeli strike on Gaza on the first day of Eid.
CNN's Hadas Gold live in Tel Aviv with more.
Hadas, how did this escalate so quickly from a fight over evictions in East Jerusalem to bombardment by rockets by Gaza in the South?
HADAS GOLD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Christine, I am in northern Tel Aviv in a suburb of Tel Aviv, in front of a house that was directly hit by one of the more than 1,600 rockets that Israel says has been fired from Gaza into Israel.
And I want to show you the size this have hole here. This rocket actually did not fully explode and so you can just see how wide it is. There is that hole in that wall. This family behind me says that they heard the sirens, went into their basement and heard some very loud booms including one that happened to hit their wall and hit their yard. They say they are lucky it did not hit their actual house.
But how did we get there? How did we get to the point that rockets are falling in as far north as northern Tel Aviv?
Well, tensions have been rising in Jerusalem for quite a few weeks, there have been tensions over limiting gatherings outside of the Damascus gate entrance to the old city of Jerusalem. The beginning of Ramadan, there have been ongoing tensions over what have been happening in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood which we note there were several Palestine families, some of whom have been living there for generations are facing evictions as part of a long running legal battle.
And we've also seen some very, very intense clashes at the Al-Aqsa compound, Al-Aqsa mosque between Palestinians and Israeli police. We have seen everything from stun grenades fired into the Al-Aqsa mosque, Palestinians throwing rocks back at the police. Hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians have been injured as well as several police officers.
And those tensions spread then to Gaza where militants started firing rockets they said in retaliation for what has been happening in Jerusalem. And although there are split factions amongst Palestinians politically especially between Hamas and Gaza and Fatah elsewhere and in the West Bank, they have all sort of come together behind what's been happening in Jerusalem, what's been happening -- of course, not everybody agrees with rockets being fired from Gaza, but you have seen solidarity on behalf of the Palestinians especially with what's been happening in East Jerusalem.
At the same time as you're seeing solidarity amongst Israelis when they're coming under rocket fire.
But where do we go from here? Does it seem as though things are calming down anytime soon?
Especially worrying is the rise of communal violence in some of these mixed cities where Jews and Arabs live together. We are seeing some really horrifying scenes of people being beaten up, both Jews and Arabs. There have been a state of emergencies placed on several cities, police forces called up to try and keep the calm in some of these cities.
But that is where a lot of Israelis -- a lot of Israelis and Palestinians are incredibly worried about where this is headed, this violence we're seeing on the street between resident and resident, at the same time as these rockets are being fired, at the same time as Israel is striking hundreds upon hundreds of targets in Gaza, as you said. The death toll is rising on both sides and despite many people here, many regular everyday residents on both sides just wanting to live in peace, we don't seem to be heading that way anytime soon.
ROMANS: All right. Thanks so much for that, and the death toll rises. Hadas, thanks.
JARRETT: Still ahead, fully vaccinated and full of COVID. The Yankees dealing with a growing number of new coronavirus cases. Can the team stay on the field?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[05:23:21]
JARRETT: The New York Yankees now dealing with a COVID-19 outbreak on their coaching and support staff.
Andy Scholes has more in this morning's "Bleacher Report".
Hey, Andy.
So, these breakthrough vaccine -- breakthrough, I should say, infections in vaccinated people are pretty rare. What do they think happened here?
ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, they're still investigating. So the New York State Department of Health is looking into this to see if these are breakthrough cases because these Yankees members, seven of them, were fully vaccinated, three of them on the coaching staff. So, you know, this is a pretty big surprise to the team.
Manager Aaron Boone said six of the seven are asymptomatic, all seven had received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Shortstop Torres who tested positive for COVID in December was held out of the lineup for last night's game against the Rays out of an abundance of caution. The Yankees one of several teams to exceed 85 percent vaccination of their tier one personnel which had let them ease their COVID health and safety protocols. They were still able to beat the Rays 1-0 last night behind a great game from Gerrit Cole.
All right. Nearly eight months after winning the NBA title, the Lakers finally raising their championship banner to the rafters of Staples Center. The team waiting until their last home game of the season for the celebration. About 4,000 fans in the stands for it.
LeBron James still out of the lineup with an ankle sprain but he spoke to the crowd.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEBRON JAMES, LOS ANGELES LAKERS FORWARD: It would not send this banner to the rafters without you, guys. And I know we are missing a lot of our Laker faithful, but this is absolutely for you, guys, we said we would not reveal this banner until we had some of you guys in the seats.
[05:25:01]
So this is you guys' moment, we had our ring night, we wanted you, guys, there, but we made sure we saved the banner for y'all. So, we love you, guys, and on the road to back to back starts in about a week. So, let's get going.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHOLES: As for the game, the Lakers keeping their slim hopes of avoiding that playing tournament alive. Kyle Kuzma's driving layup with 6.9 seconds remaining giving the shorthanded Lakers 124-122 win over Rockets.
All right. The NFL releasing its schedule last night, Tom Brady and the Super Bowl champion Buccaneers going to get things started with a prime time kickoff against the Dallas Cowboys. That's going to be Thursday, September 9th, in Tampa.
But mark you calendars for October 3rd. That's when Brady and Rob Gronkowski are going to make their highly anticipated first trip back to New England to face their old team, the Patriots and head coach Bill Belichick.
Christine, the patriots are the only team that Brady has not beaten in his career. So, you know, he's going to be pretty pumped up for that one, especially with all of the, you know, things we hear between Brady, Belichick.
ROMANS: Sure, sure.
SCHOLES: That's going to be a great one.
ROMANS: Sure will.
All right. Thanks so much, Andy Scholes.
SCHOLES: All right.
ROMANS: All right. So, there's free beer, baseball tickets, Uber rides, how about $1 million if you get vaccinated?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
