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McCarthy Backs Cheney Challenger In Wyoming GOP Primary; Fractured Senate GOP Primary In Missouri Gives Controversial Candidate An Opening; CA Gov. Newsom Lays Out New COVID Response Plan. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired February 18, 2022 - 12:30   ET

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

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ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: The top Republican in the House wants his fellow Republican Liz Cheney out of Congress. Kevin McCarthy is pulling -- putting his support behind Cheney's Trump back rival for Wyoming's congressional seat. And it's definitely not common for leadership to get involved in primary races against sitting members. But McCarthy is taking a gamble, he hopes the move will win Trump's favor and win him the speakership if Republicans take back the House. Here's how the house majority leader is defending his endorsement.

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REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): Wyoming deserves to have a representative who will deliver the accountability against this Biden administration. None a representative that they have today that works closely with Nancy Pelosi going after Republicans instead of stopping these radical Democrats for what they're doing to this country.

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PHILLIP: And we have our panel with us here, Manu Raju, Alex Burns and MJ Lee. So Manu, you know, this probably doesn't come as a surprise to many people on the Hill. Kevin McCarthy has not stood up for Liz Cheney in any way. But still, he's stepping into a what's going to be a pretty bloody primary for Trump effectively.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look. He's been pushed very hard by the very conservative House Freedom Caucus that is very close to Donald Trump, as we've seen since January 6th, and after in the aftermath when McCarthy criticized Donald Trump, he has moved -- he's walked away from that criticism completely and moved closer and closer to the Trump wing of that party because that is what dominates the House Republican Conference, Trump supporters. That is what's different than the Senate Republican Conference, which has a much more diverse set of members when it comes to fealty towards Donald Trump.

I mean, look at just Mitch McConnell. He said last year in a statement about Liz Cheney called the leader of deep convictions in the courage to act on them, calling her an important leader in our party. Now that was before she joined the Select Committee. That was after she voted to impeach Donald Trump won 10 Republicans to do that. But this clearly shows the debate over which direction this party should go.

PHILLIP: And here's the thing that might actually make this pretty interesting. So Trump is lobbying to try to make it harder for or to make it not impossible for Liz Cheney to use the support of Democrats in the state to win the nomination. He is getting into the weeds here to try to make sure that she only has Republicans accessible to her when it comes to going on the ballot.

MJ LEE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It's a very specific political strategy that Donald Trump is engaging in. And look, I think Liz Cheney has been perhaps the most vivid illustration of what can happen to a Republican elected official if you choose to speak out against Donald Trump or Trumpism, Trump's ideals in such a clear way.

[12:35:14]

You know, the problem for her is that in a lot of ways, Liz Cheney has, you know, become almost this Republican national heroic figure for the Republicans who do not support Trumpism and some of Trumps ideals. But it is not Republicans across the country who are voting for her, it is the Republicans in her Wyoming district. And at this point, she is facing Donald Trump's wrath in her next reelection.

PHILLIP: Right. I want to turn to Mike Pence, though, because he's been out, he's been speaking, he denounced Trump trying to get him to overturn the election fine. But listen to what he said about legitimate political discourse.

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MIKE PENCE, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I just don't know too many people around the country, including my friends at the RNC and the chairman of the Republican National Committee who have any different view than it was a tragic day, then the people that ransacked the Capitol were wrong should be held account in the law. They were not talking about people that engaged in violence against persons or property that day, that they were speaking about a whole range of people that have been set upon by this Committee. And I believe them.

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PHILLIP: So the Republican National Committee belongs to Trump at this point, but Pence still is hoping -- holding out hope that maybe he can have a political future, or is this genuinely what he believes.

ALEX BURNS, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Look, I think this is an extension of what we've seen from Mike Pence since he became a Donald Trump's running mate, right, which, how many times have we seen him stand next to Trump literally or figuratively, while Trump says something completely outrageous? And then the camera turns depends, and he pretends that Trump said something completely different than what we all just heard him say, right?

That he's very, very skilled at sort of sanitizing, sanding down doing simultaneous translation of whatever Trump and his cohorts say into something that sounds a little bit more mainstream, right? I think that it is not a strategy, obviously, that has worked well for pence since leaving office, right? But if your whole political future is premised on the idea that there's no substantive space between you and Donald Trump, that's just obviously not true of the former Vice President. It's not a sustainable act.

RAJU: And just on the legitimate political discourse that Republicans have been trying to redefine what exactly that resolution said, nothing in there talked about the violence that happened on January 6th, it referred to legitimate political discourse, the citizens who are engaging in that are being persecuted by the January 6th Select Committee. Now since then, they have said, well, we're talking about other people. And it turns out to be people who are being investigated for this so-called fake elector issue. So this is part of the investigation that's going forward, but obviously trying to clean up this mess.

PHILLIP: And look, I mean, we all know, Pence came this close to hang Mike Pence, to being pushed and prodded into trying to overturn the election. And we are learning this week from a former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, who has an extraordinary story about how a few of his tweets gave Pence the justification to not overturn the election, just listen to this. It's extraordinary.

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J. MICHAEL LUTTIG, FORMER FEDERAL JUDGE: Richard, then said, well, you don't know, do you? And I said, know what? He said, John's advising the President and the Vice President that the Vice President has this authority on January 6th, two days hence. And I said, wow, no, I did not know that. I think I said that and I said, well, look, you can tell the Vice President that I said that he has no such authority at all.

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PHILLIP: He went on to write a few tweets that gave Pence the justification to reject Trump's logic here. And that's as close as we came to this being a total disaster it seems.

LEE: It's pretty fascinating to get this little picture and insight into the actions that the former Vice President took on what ended up being one of the most fateful days of his entire political career that he felt it was so important to get an opinion from a legal scholar to justify saying something and giving an opinion that pre-Trump should not have been at all controversial. I think what's also fascinating though is that at the end of the day, it didn't matter that Pence was able to cite this person. It didn't matter in Trump's view, because at the end of the day in Trump's view, Mike Pence wasn't on his side.

PHILLIP: It was just about Mike Pence not being tough enough, Mike Pence not being willing to do what Trump wanted him to do, never mind what the Constitution says. Thanks, guys.

[12:39:43] But coming up ahead for us, a new report is finding that a fractured Senate Republican primary gives a controversial Trump loyalist an opening in misery.

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PHILLIP: New reporting today on CNN about the Missouri Senate race. Republicans are worried that they could lose a Senate seat there because the apparent front runner has some heavy personal baggage. That candidate Eric Greitens had to resign as governor in 2018 because a woman he admitted he was having an affair with accused him of coercion, sexual violence, and blackmail, all of which he denied. Greitens has hired a couple of Trump allies to advise him in that race. But the former president hasn't endorsed anyone, yet my panel is back with me today including Manu Raju, who has the story. So Manu, you know, president -- former President Trump always likes to be the kingmaker. Eric Greitens would love his endorsement, but it's not happening yet.

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RAJU: Not yet, and it's still unclear what Donald Trump would do. Republicans have gone to him try to counsel him, urge him not to in their concern about Greitens emerging from this and being vulnerable in the general election, urging him not to get behind Greitens, people like Senator Josh Hawley.

Now Hawley has not said that don't endorse Greitens. But he has made clear what he views as the most electable candidate in the race. He got behind one of the candidates, Vicky Hartzler, Congresswoman last week. But Ted Cruz got behind another candidate Eric Schmidt, the State Attorney General, showing how this field is splintered. This is a crowded field that the concern among Republicans is that because the support will be fractured, Greitens could emerge in this primary and become the nominee and be vulnerable in a general election in just talking to Republican leaders, they are watching this very closely.

Mitch McConnell told me that he is watching this closely. I asked him will you engage in this race try to defeat Greitens in this primary, if he does catch steam, he would not rule that possibility out and Democrats too believe that Greitens emerges, they could see a repeat of 2012 when of course, Claire McCaskill, the Democrat, won there, when Todd Akin, a controversial Republican, won that nomination.

PHILLIP: And obviously, candidates always matter. But they matter particularly this cycle for Republicans. I mean, if you look at the map, 34 seats are up for grabs, 14 Democrats are holding, 20 Republicans are holding. So they've got to hold on to their people, but they have some pickup opportunities. The problem, though, is that there are some candidates in the states that are problematic. Eric Greitens is one of them, but in in other places, and on top of that, you've got a case of Arizona where Trump is pushing out a potentially good candidate. So they're in a bit of a tough spot.

BURNS: They are. And, you know, Missouri is a state that is so conservative overall, that if they just nominated a cardboard cutout of a Republican, they'd have no problem at all in that state, right? And if it were just an issue of a messy primary, the way you have in a state like Pennsylvania or state like Arizona, Republicans probably still end up winning that seat and pretty comfortably.

But if it's a long, messy, brutal, expensive primary after which you nominated guy who was forced out of the top job in the state, because he was accused of sexual assault, well, that's a whole other story. And the riskier for Republicans also, by the way, and I think some of them will admit this off the record is the risk is also that he -- you nominate him any wins. And then he's a member of the Senate, and he's an embarrassment to the party every day.

LEE: And it's just worth pointing out. This is obvious at this point. But for President Trump, a political endorsement really has nothing to do with whether it is seen as being good for his party, the Republican Party, it has everything to do with whether he sees that candidate as being on his side or not.

PHILLIP: I mean, there could be a scenario in which you have a Senate that is actually more Trumpian than the one that we have right now. And Mitch McConnell may not love that. But, you know, I mean, that might be the reality come next year.

[12:48:10]

Coming up next for us, the California Governor Gavin Newsom rolls out his state -- his state's new plan to shift from a pandemic to an endemic approach to COVID. Will other states follow this strategy?

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PHILLIP: California is shifting its COVID strategy in moving from a pandemic to an endemic phase of learning to live with the virus and they're not alone. States across the country are rolling back mask and vaccination mandates as cases decline. CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is here with me in Washington. So Elizabeth, is California just formalizing what all these other states are doing more informally?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: I certainly hope so because they've actually put it together into this nice rubric that really makes sense, Abby. These are things actually that should have been done. We hope they were done all along. It's things like encouraging people to get vaccinating -- vaccinated, rather having more vaccination sites at schools, or, for example, getting COVID treatments to the patients who need it. These, again, are things that should have been done all along. Let's hope the California is really going to make all of this happen. Let's hope that other states make this happen. I think some ways this pandemic, endemic thing, it's not really important what we call it, what's important is that we take the right steps.

PHILLIP: And public health officials have a definition for endemic but people are still moving forward, I would ask you about this Omicron sub variant that people are talking about. How worried should we be about yet another variant popping up on the scene? COHEN: I feel like just hearing that question, I'm probably like the least popular person on television today, because we're talking about another variant. So this one's called BA.2, it is actually a sub variant of the Omicron variant. Let's take a look at what we know about it. So what we know so far is that it's actually even more communicable than Omicron, which seems impossible, but it really is. It's been found in 74 countries and in 47 U.S. states, it's become dominant. It's become the predominant variants in 10 countries, most of them in Asia.

So that sounds really scary. But here's what we don't know. We don't know that it's any more severe. If it's not any more severe than Omicron, it might not be that big of a deal. Here's another thing that we know that makes -- can make us feel better. If we take a look at the week of February 5th, this new BA strain, it was 3.9 percent of cases in the United States. The week before, it was 1.6 percent of cases.

[12:55:11]

That's a pretty slow increase. Omicron at that stage was going gangbusters. It was growing much more quickly. This is kind of like puttering around, there's this chance this thing could just kind of like fizzle out.

PHILLIP: And of course, a large portion of the country may have gotten infected by Omicron. And we don't know yet, right, how that factors in.

COHEN: Right. We don't know if that will give people immunity to this one because actually this new Omicron, it's pretty different than the original Omicron. It's unclear how much immunity it will give.

PHILLIP: Well, thanks for being with us, Elizabeth.

COHEN: My pleasure. Thanks Abby.

PHILLIP: We love having you here.

And thanks for joining us for Inside Politics today. Ana Cabrera picks up our coverage right after this break.

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