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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

At Least 4 People Killed in Tulsa Hospital Campus Shooting; Biden "Not Aware" of Severity of Baby Formula Shortage Until Early April; Britain's Queen Elizabeth Marks 70 Years on the Throne; Depp Awarded More Than $10 Million in Defamation Case Against Heard. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired June 02, 2022 - 05:00   ET

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


[05:00:27]

LAURA JARRETT, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, everyone. It is Thursday, June 2nd, 5:00 a.m. here in New York. Thanks for getting an EARLY START with us. I'm Laura Jarrett.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Christine Romans. Welcome to our viewers here in the United States and around the world.

We begin with this, a grocery store, elementary school and now a hospital campus. At least four people killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in what has become all-too familiar, another mass shooting. The shooter also dead apparently from a self inflicted gunshot wound.

Several people were also wounded. None of their injuries life- threatening. Police received reports of an active shooter of a physician's office building on the St. Francis Hospital campus. This is just before 5:00 p.m. yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SGT. RICHARD MEULENBERG, TULSA POLICE DEPARTMENT: This is not a random event. It is not as if he went to a hospital and was indiscriminately shooting at people. He very purposefully went to this location, went to a very specific floor and shot with very specific purpose.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It is so sad. I was coming to the doctor and I got my grandkids with me and this terrible scene. It's awful. It's sad. My daughter-in-law is from Buffalo. So, now, it is so slow to home. It is not even safe if you come outside anymore, you know?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This really does happen. You see it on TV but you don't think that it will happen in front of your eyes. This is a wake-up call that it can happen anywhere. You can't even go to a school, can't go to school, now you can't go to the doctor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: Now, police say that they are getting close to identifying the suspect. We know he had one rifle and one handgun with him. He used both of those weapons. Authorities were notifying the victims' families late last night.

JARRETT: Let's bring in national security analyst Juliette Kayyem. She's a former assistant secretary at DHS and a professor at Harvard.

Juliette, nice to have you this morning.

Wednesday, it's Tulsa. It's a hospital, but it really -- it could be anywhere. And while we've all been so focused on Uvalde for good reason, there have been over a dozen other mass shootings in the last week.

And so I wonder while Washington debates what do and figures that out, you say that we are beyond risk elimination at this point. At this point, we're in risk reduction mode.

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: I think that's right. We tend to think, okay, how can we be safe in a country like ours? Why don't we just start at safer, right? Let's get the baby steps here, which is to try to minimize the risk at this stage.

And we look at sort of all the circumstances. The hospital, the school, the market, the synagogue, the church, wherever, right? And we parse each of them, was this assailant or murderer alone or a loser? Was he radicalized? Did he have a grievance, as the case being in Tulsa?

And we look at the response, right? Was it good? As it seems to have been in Tulsa, or bad, as it was in Texas. And we sort of ignoring or we're struggling with what is so obvious which is what I call the connective tissue. The thing that links them is weaponry that kills quickly.

I'm not going to be saying that it is easy to get the weapons off the streets, but we can certainly begin to really lawful regulations that do things like have a national red flag law which would allow people around the assailant to notify law enforcement officials. You could have an age change from 18 to 21, which we're looking at these numbers and seeing that it is 18 to 21-year-olds who are not a majority but are significant factor in these killings.

So there are solutions that can minimize the risk. Not eliminate it. But at least get us closer to safer. You just interviewed someone and I heard it in my ear and she said it is not safe to go outside anymore. I thought, oh, that's an exaggerations, and then I'm thinking, she's kind of right.

ROMANS: You know, in Uvalde, it was an 18-year-old, speaking of 18 years old, who was the shooter there. And the official response to that shooting is getting a lot of attention. This fog of war, we call it fog of war when we're trying to find the details. We have a fog of war in a school, in an elementary school where we have fog of war, it is shocking to me that that is what America is.

The shifting story is continuing. And CNN's Shimon Prokupecz, he caught up with the school district police chief Pete Arredondo.

[05:05:04]

I want to listen to what he said.

KAYYEM: Yeah.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETE ARREDONDO, UVALDE SCHOOL POLICE CHIEF: Whenever this is done, the families quit grieving, we'll do that obviously. Just so everybody knows, we've been in contact with DPS every day, just so you all know, every day.

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: They say you're not -- they said that you're not cooperating.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: So why is it so hard to get straight information in this case?

KAYYEM: I've never seen anything like this. Not just in the breakdown of the public safety response, but now in the days later, there is no structure of what we know in disaster management which is that you have a formalized public information structure, you are notifying the press of valid information, you are notifying them when you don't know something.

But you don't have a structure in which random people are sort of saying, I heard this and I heard that or I'm not going to speak until the families are whole again, as if that is -- first of all, as if that is an achievable standard, but that is not your choice. We have to figure out what, in fact, happened to these kids. And what is interesting in just the horrible way that these things are interesting is now we have in Tulsa, right, both what looks like a reliable active shooter protocols, that they went in and that left the shooter no option but -- or the option of killing himself at least described by the police yesterday.

And you have a very, very structured, well-trained process of which we're getting information out in the appropriate time, they have to notify the families, so we can see at least through Tulsa that these investments in preparedness and risk minutization, in protecting people in that moment of where you don't have time to make deliberation, that they can work. And I think the juxtaposition of the two in this horrible world that we're judging, you know, is 21 dead better -- 21 dead is worse than four dead, right? This is the standard we're at now.

But I've come to accept it and I just want to get to safer, right? I'm not going to get (INAUDIBLE) right now.

JARRETT: That's the set point. That's where we are, and that's the reality of it.

ROMANS: Juliette Kayyem, so nice to see you bright and early this morning. Thank you, Juliette. KAYYEM: Thank you.

JARRETT: Thanks so much.

All right. Now to this ongoing crisis over baby formula. It has not gotten any better as the president now claims that he did not understand the full scope of the shortage problem until April. The president met Wednesday with formula manufacturers who told him that they knew as soon as the Abbott plant in Sturgis, Michigan, closed back in February it was going to create supply chain issues.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Shouldn't the FDA have been more aware of that when they took months to conduct the inspection, to interview people at this plant, after the complaints were made and then only shuttered it in February?

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, the real problem occurred when it started -- when it got shuttered. And so you are saying that they should have anticipated that it would be shuttered. The answer is --

COLLINS: (INAUDIBLE), Mr. President.

BIDEN: Well, here is the deal. I became aware of this problem sometime in after April -- in early April about how intense it was. And so we did everything in our power from that point on. And that is all that I can tell you right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JARRETT: Meantime, more formula is on the way to U.S. shelves including shipments next week from the UK and Australia.

ROMANS: Big question for regulators, why the FDA, why regulators weren't able to see this coming? It's a very concentrated American manufacturing, you know, process for --

JARRETT: Only a handful of them.

ROMANS: Is there a weakness there that needs to be fixed? I mean, this is -- this is really a crisis for families.

All right. A gathering fit for a queen. Tens of thousands out in London this morning to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's platinum jubilee. The country's longest reigning monarch has spent 70 years on the throne.

CNN's Anna Stewart joins us live from the Mall in London.

Good morning.

Will we be seeing members of the royal family shortly?

ANNA STEWART, CNN REPORTER: You surely will. But before I even get to that, let's me show you what we've got here. It is about half an hour away from the royal procession down the mile and already we're seeing military bands. I think that you can see some troops from the household division.

And this is day one of the platinum jubilee celebrations. It is a four day extravaganza. And the first big item on the agenda is trooping the color. And this is a really old ceremony that takes place every year for the queen's birthday, but takes on special significance for a jubilee.

And it involves all the regiments of the household division, including some of the ones you see here, and troop of color is essentially showing off the flag. It has its roots in all battles, ranks and soldiers know and recognize their flag. And it is really symbolic now and it is really an opportunity I suppose to show their commitment, their respect to the queen.

And I'd say all of the big events in the royal calendar, this has the most pomp and pageantry of any I think apart from a coronation.

[05:10:05]

So, it will kick off with a royal procession, coming down the mall, heading to Horse Guards, where that ceremony will take place. Now, in the royal procession today, you will not see her majesty the queen this year. So, that is a big change. Normally she'd be there in a carriage or years gone past actually riding on horse back.

We will see Prince Charles. We will see Prince William. We will see Princess Ann. They're likely to be wearing the regimental uniforms because they are ceremonial colonels of some of those regiments. Prince William is, of course, colonel of the Irish Guards and that regiment is trooping the color today.

Her majesty, the queen, will be a part of the ceremony because we will see all of the military traveling back down the mile towards Buckingham Palace just out of sight over there and her majesty will take the salute on the balcony this year. That is due to her comfort due to her episodic mobility issues, of course, which have seen her cancel several events of late.

Now, after this, she will be joined by other members of the royal family, Prince Charles, Prince William, their families as well for a huge fly pass. And wave off the balcony.

Some members missing this year, Prince Andrew, of course, also Prince Harry and Meghan, the duchess of Sussex, because they are no longer working members of the royal family.

But plenty more to come, Christine, in terms of military bands, pomp, pageant. Get your party hats ready.

ROMANS: All right. We certainly will, and the queen, of course, is a very young 95. So, of course, she's going to take it easy and just show off on the balcony. We wish her well, of course.

All right. Thank you so much.

JARRETT: All right. Just ahead for you, Amber Heard not giving up after losing in court to Johnny Depp.

ROMANS: Plus, a dire new money warning from a big time American banker. Jamie Dimon becomes a meteorologist.

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[05:16:04]

ROMANS: Welcome back.

A hurricane warning for your money, here is JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMIE DIMON, JPMORGAN CHASE CEO: Right now, it is kind of sunny, things are doing fine. Everyone thinks that the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there down the road coming our way. We just don't know if it is a minor one or super storm Sandy or -- yeah, Sandy or Andrew or something like that. So, you better brace yourself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ROMANS: That is him at an investment conference yesterday. Let's unpack his meteorological metaphor.

First, that things right now are sunny and fine. Well, he's right. American workers are in a strong position. Jobless rate is near a 50 year low at 3.6 percent. There are 11.4 million open jobs in the country. People who are job hopping are getting good raises.

Also near a record. Now, despite higher prices, consumers are still spending like crazy. They are in a better position today than after the financial crisis of '08 and '09. Jamie Dimon says they have another 6 or 9 months of pocket spending because of all the COVID aid.

But Dimon says the economy is being distorted by inflation. Inflation is running hot, the fastest price increases in 40 years. Inflation, of course, is the result of the economy roaring back after the COVID crash. Supply lines are still tangled.

Energy prices are surging. Putin's invasion of Ukraine, one of the factors Dimon is so concerned about, Dimon warned this, that wars go bad, he said. They go south and he predicted oil prices could go as high as $150 or $175 a barrel. Brace yourself, he said also, for disruptions in the grain and wheat markets, too. Putin's war means higher, shortages, potentially suffering around the world.

And then there is the Federal Reserve, already raising interest rates to try to cool that inflation. And he is worried about unwinding the huge bond portfolio.

Here's what happened, during the COVID crisis, the Fed bought up securities to cushion the financial system called quantitative easing, QE in Wall Street speak. Now it is selling them. Tightening QT in Wall Street speak. It's something that we've never done before.

Dimon said that people will be writing about this in the history books for 50 years. In May, he warned about big storm clouds. Now he is downgrading his forecast and warning about a hurricane.

And overnight, we saw gas prices a record, up another 3 cents, $4.72 a gallon. There is really no relief in sight here especially because of all of these factors that we've talked about.

JARRETT: Just keep creeping up and up and up.

ROMANS: Yeah.

JARRETT: All right. Just ahead for you, she told women to lean in. One of the most powerful women in corporate America now says she is bowing out.

ROMANS: And crowds gathering near Buckingham Palace for an unprecedented celebration.

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JARRETT: Welcome back.

Actress Amber Heard is now planning to appeal Wednesday's verdict giving her ex-husband Johnny Depp a big legal victory. A jury in Virginia found both Depp and ex-wife Amber Heard libel for defamation in their lawsuit, but Depp was awarded significantly more money in damages.

CNN's Jean Casarez has more on the trial and the outcome.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A jury ruling in favor of Johnny Depp and his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard, finding her liable on all three counts.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you find that Mr. Depp has proven all the elements of defamation? Answer, yes.

CASAREZ: The jury also ruling in favor of Heard on just one claim of her counter-suit.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you find that Ms. Heard has proven all the elements of defamation? Answer, yes.

CASAREZ: This decision coming after six weeks of a dramatic testimony, with the former couple facing off.

AMBER HEARD, ACTRESS: Nothing I did made him stop hitting me. Nothing. JOHNNY DEPP, ACTOR: I have never, in my life, committed sexual

battery, physical abuse.

CASAREZ: At the center of the trial, abuse allegations Heard made in a 2018 "Washington Post" op-ed. Though she never named Depp in the article, he sued his ex-wife for defamation, claiming in a $50 million suit that his career suffered as a result. Heard countersued Depp for $100 million.

The former couple met in 2009 while filming the movie, "Rum Diary".

[05:25:04]

DEPP: He wrote that when he was 25 years old.

CASAREZ: Both testified the relationship became violent and abusive overtime, including two incidents which took place in Australia, where the actor was filming the fifth "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie.

DEPP: I'm so sorry, were you still talking?

CASAREZ: Leading Heard to file a temporary restraining order against Depp in 2016.

DEPP: She threw the large bottle and it made contact and shattered everywhere. And then I looked down and realized that the tip of my finger had been severed.

HEARD: I felt this pressure, I felt this pressure. On my (INAUDIBLE) he was punching me.

CASAREZ: That testimony was not all he said/she said. With recordings of fights and photos of alleged injuries introduced as evidence.

HEARD: By this point in our relationship, we are both saying awful things to each other, screaming at each other.

CASAREZ: On the stand, Depp denied abusing Heard.

DEPP: I would never -- did I myself reach the point of striking Ms. Heard in any way. Nor have I ever struck any woman in my life.

CASAREZ: Witnesses for both Depp and Heard gave sometimes emotional testimony about what they saw and the former couple's counselor testified about their relationship.

LAUREL ANDERSON, DEPP AND HEARD'S CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST: They engaged in what I saw as mutual abuse.

CASAREZ: Depp was not in court to hear the verdict. Instead, he was seen performing in London Monday night.

Jean Casarez, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JARRETT: Jean, thank you for that.

Also this morning, Sheryl Sandberg is stepping down from her rule as chief operating officer at Meta, Facebook's parent company. Sandberg first joined Facebook back in 2008 as Mark Zuckerberg's number two and later became something of a household name for her controversial 2013 book "Lean In". She plans to leave in the fall and focus on her philanthropic work. Sandberg will still serve on Meta's board of directors.

ROMANS: She's had that job for, what, 14 years, right?

JARRETT: Yeah, she thought she'd it for five.

ROMANS: Thought that she would do it for five, had 14. I wonder, she leaves a gaping hole really in corporate America, right? Rattle off the big household name brand women in business. So we'll see what she does next.

JARRETT: Yeah, it will be interesting.

ROMANS: All right. Still to come, the president admitting his hands are tied on inflation.

JARRETT: And next, the pomp, the circumstances, the hats, the four day celebration, seven decades in the making. It is all now getting away at Buckingham palace. We will take you there.

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