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Early Start with John Berman and Zoraida Sambolin

Today: Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to Speak with Special Counsel's January 6 Investigators; Russian Strike on Kramatorsk Kills 9, Injures 56; Air Travel Misery Mounts in Northeast; Trump, DeSantis Trade Jabs at Dueling New Hampshire Events. Aired 5- 5:30a ET

Aired June 28, 2023 - 05:00   ET

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

[05:00:29]

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Right now on EARLY START, there are new developments in the Trump election interference probe. Who we now know is talking to investigators.

The death toll rising overnight after Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.

And another dangerously hot and hazy day ahead, millions of people across the country under heat or air quality alerts.

Good morning, welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Christine Romans.

We begin with new developments in the investigation of Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Later today, special counsel Jack Smith's team will speak to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as part of their January 6th investigation. You may remember then president Trump called Raffensperger in January of 2021 to press him to, quote, find the votes needed to win Georgia, which Joe Biden won by nearly 12,000 votes.

Here is part of that now infamous call.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT: So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

ROMANS: We are also learning that Trump's former attorney Rudy Giuliani has been interviewed as part of that probe. The meeting between Giuliani, his attorney, and investigators took place in recent weeks.

CNN senior legal correspondent Paula Reid explains. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PAULA REID, CNN SENIOR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: He was accompanied by his lawyer, Robert Costello, for this sit-down with special counsel prosecutors. But, we have some idea of what they might want to talk to him about. We know that late last year, he was subpoenaed for documents related to payments that he received around the time that he was filing legal challenges on behalf of former President Trump, trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

That subpoena came when it was still a Justice Department investigation before special counsel Jack Smith was appointed. Once Smith was appointed, Giuliani did not hear anything for over six months and there were questions being raised about whether that meant that he was possibly a target and not just a potential witness in this investigation.

So the fact that he is now sat down with prosecutors, talk to them, presumably answered questions, that is notable.

Now, we just got a statement from the spokesman, Ted Goodman, who said, quote, the appearance was entirely voluntary and conducted in a professional manner.

From all of our reporting on this side of the special counsel probe, you know, looking at efforts to overturn the 2020 election, we always knew that this was going to have a longer timeline than the Mar-a-Lago documents probe because, look, there are more people, right, with potential criminal exposure, more potential crimes. It is just a broader, more diverse array of criminal activity.

But it does appear that in the past few weeks, we have seen a flurry of witnesses going before the grand jury, we have seen other activity that suggests strongly that the special counsel could be nearing a charging decision. So far, he is not brought any charges related to January 6th, but it appears that could be coming. It is completely unclear if Rudy Giuliani or former President Trump or anyone at all will definitely be charged. We have definitely seen an uptick in the activity.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS: All right. Paula, thank you so much for that.

Now to the rising death toll from a strike on Ukraine. At least nine people were killed and dozens injured after Russian missiles hit the center of Kramatorsk Tuesday in a popular area packed with civilians. Officials say a restaurant, a shopping area, apartment buildings, and a nearby village were hit in the strike. This, as Ukraine says its counteroffensive has advanced on all fronts.

And amid fallout from the rebellion in Russia, Vladimir Putin trying to reassert his power. Belarus's president claims the mercenary group leader who led that revolt last week and has now arrived in Minsk.

CNN's Clare Sebastian following all of these threats for us from London.

Clare, are there still questions about whether Prigozhin is actually in Belarus?

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We have not actually seen him on the ground in Belarus, Christine, we just have what Lukashenko is telling us and we also have a satellite image that we managed to obtain on Tuesday that shows two planes, we know from the tail numbers linked to Wagner at an airbase just outside of Minsk, the capital of Belarus. You see it there, but we do not know for sure that Prigozhin was on one of those planes.

What is, I think, increasingly clear from the comments that we got from President Putin of Russia yesterday is that Belarus will not be a safe haven for Prigozhin.

[05:05:04]

Putin is not over this, as far as Prigozhin is concerned despite the fact that charges against the Wagner group over their insurrection have now been dropped.

He talked about him as the owner of Concord, which is his catering company. He did not mention him by name. They talked about the amount of money that the concord group has made off the Russian state over the past year and noted that he hopes that none of it has been stolen, or at least not much. He followed up by saying that he will of course deal with, it a strong signal that perhaps he is not done trying to seek some kind of revenge over Prigozhin's disloyalty.

So, that's one thing. The other big question at the moment is where the Wagner fighters, Prigozhin suggests there are 25 thousands of them. He says very few have opted to join with the Russian ministry of defense, so they turn up in Belarus, what does that mean? Are we going to get some kind of Wagner 2.0?

Lukashenko, the head of Belarus, says they are not building camps there, but if they want some abandoned land, they can have it. Either way, I think with this, you know, battle hardened group, many of them criminals, still in limbo it is a volatile situation for all concerned.

ROMANS: All right. Clare Sebastian, thank you so much for following that up with us.

Okay. Let's bring in George Beebe, the director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute and former Russian analysis chief at the CIA.

Good morning.

GEORGE BEEBE, DIRECTOR OF GRAND STRATEGY, QUINCY INSTITUTE: Good morning.

ROMANS: So, I'm wondering what you think about this new revelation in "The New York Times" that a senior Russian general may have advanced knowledge of Prigozhin's plans to protest, as Prigozhin would say, in Russia. What does that say about Putin's control of his top military leadership?

BEEBE: Well, as far as I understand, this intelligence information is still very uncertain and quite preliminary. So I think that we need to be careful about drawing firm conclusions from it at this point. But, this suggestion that Prigozhin was in communication with one of Putin's top generals, if not more, and that they had advanced knowledge of what was coming is a very serious development and it is serious for a couple of reasons.

One, it suggests that the cracks in Putin's regime, the divisions over how this war has been conducted are a lot deeper than what it might appear on the surface. But it is also serious because Putin has been very suspicious that the United States somehow backed Prigozhin's coup, and the idea that American government officials are leaking information about one of Putin's top generals to the media, I think it is only going to feed Putin's concerns that the United States has been deeply involved in this and wants to see his regime fall.

ROMANS: According to the state emergency service of Ukraine, at least nine people have been killed, and 56 injured on this Russian strike in Kramatorsk.

Do you think we are seeing a more aggressive Russian military strategy as a result of this insurrection?

BEEBE: Yes, I do. Putin has been wounded politically by this Wagner uprising. He managed to avert the worst-case scenarios, his own overthrow, or a situation where the Russian military would be diverted from Ukraine to try to deal with internal unrest.

But there is no question that a lot of Russians are scratching their heads and asking how Putin could have allowed the situation to get this far out of control. So, he is under pressure to show strength and resolve, particularly in Ukraine. So I expect that he is going to be a lot more aggressive there.

ROMANS: Prigozhin, meanwhile, has not been seen since the insurrection. Two planes are linked to him were seen at an airbase in Belarus yesterday. What do you think is happening with him and what he does next and with his whole Wagner, I guess, you know, regime?

BEEBE: Well, Prigozhin has been dealt an enormous blow by this whole affair. He clearly miscalculated in launching this uprising inside of Russia. He is trying to recover whatever he can from that affair, that includes trying to keep his Wagner operation viable, it has been a quite profitable thing for him.

So I think a lot of his commanders are not going to integrate into the Russian military. He is going to try to continue to use them in some way, almost certainly not at Russia, probably not in Ukraine, but elsewhere in the world where you can find people willing to pay mercenaries to fight.

Where the rank and file of Wagner goes is another question. I think a lot of them do not have personal loyalty to Prigozhin. They are probably open to signing contracts with the regular Russian military. We will have to see how that unfolds.

ROMANS: Yeah, mercenaries have been paid out of vans full of cash, we will see how loyal they are and where they go next.

[05:10:01]

George Beebe, thank you so much. It's nice to see you this morning.

BEEBE: Thank you.

ROMANS: All right. This could be another frustration day for air travelers, folks. Bad weather and a lack of air traffic controllers are blamed for thousands of flight delays and cancellations Tuesday.

The New York area is seeing some of the worst of it. Already this morning, more than 1,200 flights in the U.S. are delayed or canceled. Meantime, more than 60 million people from Arizona to Florida are under heat alerts. It could feel like 115 degrees in some places and more than 80 million people from the Midwest to the East Coast are under air quality alerts because of the smoke from those Canadian wildfires. It's going to be hazy in Chicago today, guys.

CNN meteorologist Jennifer Gray joins us.

It's going to be miserable outside for so many people. How long will all this last?

JENNIFER GRAY, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yeah, it is just going to be a big day as far as the heat, storms, smoke, you name it, we have got it going on across the country.

So, we'll start with the storms because I do think we will see some improvement, that's the good news with all of this. We've had pretty nasty storms across the Eastern Seaboard over the past couple of days, that front is finally advanced. So, we do think they'll be improvement, we do have that domino effect, the flights canceled. And so it will take a while to catch up, but at least the weather should be a little bit better.

We could see scattered showers and storms, especially outside of Boston, as we see the overnight hours. We could see storms around New York City, but it is not going to be anywhere like we have seen over the last couple of days.

So, damaging winds, large hail, potential tornado threat across the Midwest in the northern plains. You can see Lacrosse, Minneapolis included in that, Rapid City also could see some storms.

And we have a lot of smoke we are dealing with, you can see from the satellite image that smoke from the Canadian wildfires is thinking down to the south. We have incredibly poor air quality alerts, no surprise here if you live in the Chicago area, Detroit, you can see very on at hazardous levels.

In fact, Chicago had the worst air quality in the world at points throughout the last 24 hours. So, poor air quality alerts are up all across the Midwest, you can see in the Ohio valley up into portions of the northeast as well, we are looking at patients in western New York, having those air quality alerts.

But this smoke will start to dissipate over the next 24 to 48 hours, you can see those bright oranges and yellows a start to die out a little bit by the time we get into tomorrow morning. So while there will be smoke around today, you should to see major improvements by this time tomorrow, excessive heat alerts across the south.

This is the third thing we are talking about, where we could see heat index values as high as 115 to 120 across some locations, it feels like a temperature 105 in San Antonio, Shreveport 108, Dallas at 110, high temperatures reached the triple digits for many cities across the south into the Midwest.

And so, this heat is going to last and even expand Christine as we get into the next couple of days. A dangerous heat across millions of people in the south.

ROMANS: All right. Jen, thank you so much for that.

All right. Still ahead on EARLY START, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis trading barbs during campaign stops in New Hampshire.

And, right now, Kevin Spacey is standing trial on sex assault charges. We'll take you live to London.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:17:16]

ROMANS: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, the 2024 GOP front runner and his closest challenger, both hitting the crucial primary state in New Hampshire for a preview over the months ahead.

For Trump, both gloves are off, but DeSantis seems to be wearing at least one.

CNN's Kristen Holmes explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Former President Donald Trump, the current GOP front runner, speaking at a luncheon with the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women.

TRUMP: Thanks as well to all of the Republican women of the great state of New Hampshire.

HOLMES: And attacking his chief rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

TRUMP: Somebody said, how come you only attack him? I said because he's in second place. Why don't you attack others? Because they're not in second place, but soon, I don't think it'll be in second place, so I will be attacking somebody else.

HOLMES: DeSantis taking a less direct approach during his town hall about 40 miles away.

GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: So, the question is, and I remember these rallies in 2016, it was exciting. Drain the swamp. I also remember, lock her up, lock her up, right? And then two weeks after the election, forget about that, forget I ever said it. No, no, no.

One thing you get for me, if I tell you I'm going to do something I'm not just saying it for an election.

HOLMES: As he seeks to make inroads in the crucial first GOP primary state, DeSantis urging voters to look forward, not backwards and declining to criticize the former president when asked.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Some people think that Trump's actions on January 6th and beyond violated the key principles of America and the Constitution set forth by our founding fathers. Do you believe that Trump violated at the peaceful transfer of power?

DESANTIS: So, here is what I know -- if this election is about Biden's failures and our vision for the future, we are going to win. If it's relitigating things that happen two or three years ago, we're going to lose.

HOLMES: DeSantis taking questions from the audience, a tradition of the primary process after not doing so on his first wing through the state.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What's your administration going to do to protect the Second Amendment rights, showing that gun laws really don't seem to keep guns out of criminals' hands?

DESANTIS: Great question. Thank you.

HOLMES: Te competing event prompting the Republican women's group to criticize DeSantis for drawing attention away from the luncheon with Trump, though some members of the group objected to the statement.

TRUMP: He's not really nice, but he is holding an event right now to compete with us.

HOLMES: As the Republican primary heats up, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy not saying whether he believes Trump is the strongest candidate for the party to nominate in 2024.

REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Can Trump beat Biden? Yeah, he can beat Biden.

HOST: It makes it complicated if got all these trials and all of this stuff overhanging --

[05:20:03]

MCCARTHY: It makes it complicated, it also helps them. The question is he the strongest in the election? I don't know that answer. HOLMES: Those comments sparking outrage from Trump allies and

advisers who believe the former president helped McCarthy claimed the speakership after lobbying GOP hard-liners in the house to back him.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HOLMES (on camera): Now, Just after this interview on CNBC, McCarthy appearing to play cleanup, talking to a conservative news outlets saying that Trump was stronger now than he was in 2016 and implying that the media was just trying to drive a wedge between the speaker and former president. Of course, as you heard there, that was McCarthy in his own words saying that he did not know that Trump was the strongest candidate in 2024.

Kristen Holmes, CNN, Concord, New Hampshire.

ROMANS: All right. Let's bring in Jess Bidgood, senior national political reporter at "The Boston Globe".

Jess, you know, look, McCarthy backtracking those comments to CNBC as you just heard in that piece. What do you make of this tightrope, I guess, the GOP establishment is trying to walk here with Trump clearly the front runner?

JESS BIDGOOD, SENIOR NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, THE BOSTON GLOBE: Absolutely. Good morning.

What we saw --

ROMANS: I think we've lost that Jess Bidgood. We're going to try -- we're going to spend two seconds and tried to get her back. She has been covering DeSantis and former President Trump in New Hampshire, so she's on the ground doing reporting. We're going to try to get back up.

In the meantime, we're going to pay some bills here and take a break.

Coming up, the Supreme Court rejected a bid to give state lawmakers unchecked powers over elections and why some cities want to ban new drive-thrus.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[05:25:58]

ROMANS: All right. Let's bring back Jess Bidgood, senior national political reporter at 'The Boston Globe".

We'll try this again, Jess. We were talking about Kevin McCarthy backtracking on his comments to CNBC about Donald Trump and whether he is the strongest candidate. He told Breitbart that Trump is stronger today than he was in 2016.

Talk to us about the tight rope that the GOP establishment is walking here with as Trump as the front runner.

BIDGOOD: Good morning.

And, absolutely, I think yesterday's kind of split screen in New Hampshire really embodied and made that tightrope quite clearly. You saw Trump take a direct shots at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, making fun of him for slipping in the polls, you know, hitting him on -- even occasionally hitting on some policy positions, while DeSantis took more oblique swipes at Trump.

Trump's rivals really struggled to land blows on the former president for fear of angering his most loyal supporters. And even when you saw DeSantis take these oblique swipes at Trump, he was often echoing Trump's ideas, he was saying that I do not want to drain the swamp, a Trump tag line, I want to break the swamp. He was saying, I actually will build the wall.

So, you could really see how, you know, DeSantis is very much competing on Trump's turf, in Trump's world, and is simply not as unbridled in his ability to go after Trump, to land those blows, to land those political hits because he is afraid of angering the same supporters that he would need to consolidate if he wants to win the nomination.

ROMANS: You know, there's a lot of energy and enthusiasm around the former president in New Hampshire, you can see it. Is it -- is it fair to say that Ron DeSantis just needs to establish a beachhead here? That's what he's trying to do?

BIDGOOD: Absolutely, DeSantis is trying to establish a beachhead in New Hampshire and Trump is trying to draw a tidal wave out to wash it away.

ROMANS: You also wrote an article recently that got our attention with this headline, "How politics changed education in the Milwaukee suburbs". Now school is about the politics and fear, you wrote that classrooms all over had been turned into ideological battlegrounds.

Walk us through your reporting. I mean, this is just not Milwaukee or a few different places. These are school boards that have really been transformed by this movement towards, quote/unquote, parental rights.

BIDGOOD: Absolutely, and parental rights I think is a rallying cry that we are going to hear in the 2024 presidential race from candidates like DeSantis and Mike Pence and others, and I want to understand how this is playing out in the lives of students and teachers, and in the lives of communities where we have already seen this be successful at a local level.

And so in the Milwaukee suburbs, in Waukesha County, we have seen Republicans get involved in school board races over the past few years following the 2020 elections, in ways they had not before. Republicans in that county used to leave those races alone, they viewed them as nonpartisan races, and then they realized that if they run (ph) on those races, they could really win. They could recruit very conservative candidates and they could win those seats, and those -- picking up issues around the rights of transgender to students to go by the names they want, they have taken up the question of whether or not Pride flags or stickers that say "safe space" should be on the wall.

And what I came to understand was that for students, this has made school feel more dangerous for LGBTQ students. They have -- they have come to feel targeted and for teachers, they have come to kind of confront this climate of scrutiny where they are constantly rethinking, can I put this book on my syllabus? Can I teach this constant history? And it's really changed, it's changed.