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Reporting Indicates Former President Trump Intends to Run Again for U.S. President in 2024; President Biden's Nomination of Neera Tanden for OMB Director May Lack Sufficient Support in Senate; Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) is Interviewed About the Growing Threat of Domestic Terrorism in the U.S.; Researchers: New Coronavirus Variant Spreading in New York City. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired February 25, 2021 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Trump is also reportedly plotting revenge against his critics as he prepares to return to the national spotlight this weekend with a big speech at CPAC, the annual conservative conference. The majority of the GOP appears to be all in on Donald Trump despite his role in inciting the deadly insurrection at the Capitol that put their lives in danger.

But not all Republicans are on the bandwagon. Case in point, this interesting moment yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you believe President Trump should be speaking -- or former President Trump should be speaking at CPAC this weekend?

KEVIN MCCARTHY (R-CA): Yes, he should.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Congresswoman Cheney?

REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY): That's up to CPAC. I've been clear on my views about President Trump. I don't think that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country.

MCCARTHY: On that high note, thank you all very much.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: We also have a brand-new CNN KFILE investigation, video that shows an ally and friend of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene participated in the Capitol insurrection. Now, Greene has suggested it was Antifa disguised as Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol. But maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene should have asked the friend of Marjorie Taylor Greene about who was really there, because he says on the video it was Trump supporters that did it, I'm the first to admit it, being one myself. Nothing subtle about that. Let's

begin with CNN's Kate Bennett live in Washington with her new reporting on the former president's 2024 plans. Kate?

KATE BENNETT, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, John. It seems the president is enjoying his time in Florida playing golf, talking on his phone, and plotting some plans for 2024, which could include reentering the presidential race. He's told friends, he's told family, he's told those close to him that this is his intention. Whether or not it comes to fruition considering the investigations, considering the release of tax returns, et cetera, we'll have to see. It's a long way off. But he is certainly in the mindset of running again in 2024.

He's going to enlist his son, Donald Trump Jr., to help him in this path and take part in midterms. I've been told for this piece that Donald Trump Jr. will be extremely active come midterm time to rally the Trump base and get those Trump supportive candidates elected, or reelected should that be the case. But certainly, John, this is a president who has been laying low, who has time to think about what he wants for his future. He has seen the Republican Party, as we just saw in that clip, cave inward. It's divided between multiple factions. He's going to take advantage of that, as he likes to do, and make sure that his voice is still heard. Whether he's a presence in our faces every day or on Twitter, he is certainly plotting to be a part of the next generation of political landscape and take that turn for the White House again in 2024, John.

BERMAN: Kate Bennett, very interesting. Thanks so much for that reporting.

Joining us now, CNN White House correspondent John Harwood and CNN political analyst David Gregory. John, Kristen Holmes also has some new reporting about the former president's plans for this CPAC speech on Sunday, and apparently there's a discussion inside his orbit about whether to say anything about Republican unity or just go out there guns blazing. There's a line in this piece that says, quote, "We're going to war, but not physically." The source described the sentiment, it's primary season and it's open season. If that's the discussion, if that's the attitude going in, and if they're floating this notion that the stated goal is to run in 2024, this puts the Republican Party, I don't know if a bind is the right word, but it creates the situation that they all are going to live in every day for some time.

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And the thing to remember about Donald Trump is he doesn't care a whit about the Republican Party. Donald Trump, he has one brand. His brand is himself. It's not an issue or a cause per se. And the Republican Party has been his vehicle for that cause. It would be surprising if Donald Trump did anything other than signal that he wants to run again because that's the way to preserve his influence as long as possible. Very high return on investment. All you have to do is put that word out. You don't have to do anything else. You can play golf every day, say you're going to run, and that's going to freeze political activity to some degree within the Republican Party, even as, on a day-to-day basis, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, lawmakers in Washington, are dealing with one issue after the other with respect to Joe Biden.

But Donald Trump has got a firm eye on the bottom line. The bottom line is himself, and as Kate indicated, he's got a whole lot of things potentially coming his way, certainly in the way of both civil action and potential criminal prosecution in New York, New Jersey.

[08:05:09]

So he can't say anything definitive about what he's going to do in the future, but this is a way to preserve his influence in this moment.

CAMEROTA: Oh, to be a fly at the breakfast table this morning of Nikki Haley or Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton, David, all of the people who are waiting to see what Donald Trump's fortunes are so they know what to do with their presidential ambitions. So that's one way that this announcement could have an impact, obviously, on the Republican Party. And then also from Kristen Holmes' reporting, while Trump continues to flirt with a 2024 run, his focus is now on payback. Trump is hellbent on primarying those in the Republican Party who he feels wronged him. And that's sooner.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes, this isn't about the future of the country and about making America better, right? It's getting those who he thinks went after him. This is why I'm skeptical about Donald Trump's future. He lost. He was a one-term president. Under his time in office, the Republican Party experienced setbacks at the national level. That has to be remembered. Not just his entire four years but, of course, his actions after the election and particularly his role in the riot of January 6th, I think broke his back politically in a lot of the Republican Party.

It doesn't mean he doesn't have a base of support, and those other potential candidates you mentioned are sitting back thinking like they've been thinking since 2015, which is, oh, geez, how do we somehow preserve and attract Donald Trump supporters without having to fully embrace him, because that's what they've been doing up until now is embracing him as president. And that's going to be the difficulty for them.

I think we're going to see various data points here, right. We're going to look at polling, we're going to look at the 2022 midterms. We're going to look at how the Biden administration progresses. But Republicans are going to fight this out. And just as you played in that moment between Kevin McCarthy, who desperately wants to be speaker. He'll do anything to kowtow to Donald Trump, and Liz Cheney, who represents a return to the conservative values of the party but also recognizing, as I'm sure she does, there's still a party for the future that has to somehow make room for at least some of these Trump supporters in order to be successful.

BERMAN: John Harwood, the $1.9 trillion relief plan. As of now, how many Republicans does the White House think it will get to vote for this in Congress? And what does it mean if the answer is zero for both the Republicans and the White House?

HARWOOD: I think the expectation right now, John, is zero. Zero in the House, zero in the Senate. We could be surprised. But both of these parties, we focus on divisions within parties. You played the clip of McCarthy and Liz Cheney. We focus on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin among the Democrats. But these are remarkably cohesive parties. And the test is going to be, can with majorities this narrow, can Joe Biden pass this plan through the House and through the Senate? It looks like he can.

And we can sometimes forget the historical context about how unified these parties are. The Voting Rights Act in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson was president was very hard to pass. Democrats had 66 votes in the Senate. Why was it hard to pass? Because many of those Democrats in the Senate were segregationists, were ideologically remarkably different from Democrats in the northern and west coast states who were proponents of this.

That doesn't exist anymore. We have parties that ideologically are quite close to one another, and so Joe Manchin gets attention because he's such an outlier. Nevertheless, I think the White House continues to think that both Sinema and Manchin will vote for this package. We're about to find out.

CAMEROTA: So David, here's where the country is in terms of the COVID relief and the price tag of it. This is a Quinnipiac University poll -- 68 percent of Americans approve of Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus relief package. In terms of those $1,400 stimulus payments for Americans, 64 percent of Republicans approve of those. So what's the political calculation for Republicans who don't vote for this?

GREGORY: Well, it's John's point about how cohesive the Republican Party is in opposition to a new Democratic administration, right? There's almost no time politically for working across the aisle. They did some of that on previous corona packages, COVID-19 packages of relief.

[08:10:09]

But here, this is a way to take a stand against what they'll perceive as the excesses of the Biden administration. But that polling underscores two things to me. This is basically the calculation of the Biden administration. Sure, they'd love to come out and have bipartisan unity around this, but they think the country wants this, and the time is now and you've got to go big. And there will only be upside to this. The economy improves. The virus diminishes as the vaccine continues to rollout. And by the way, people generally don't tend to look unkindly when you give them money, when the government gives them money for support. That doesn't get less popular. So I think that's the pretty simple calculation that they are operating under.

BERMAN: John Harwood, whither Neera Tanden this morning? What is the status of that nomination? How much longer will the White House hold out? And do they think all their other nominees are safe?

HARWOOD: I can't imagine that they would hold out beyond this week. You have to look at the facts of the current situation and say it's unlikely that she's going to make it, but not impossible. We've not heard from Lisa Murkowski. Again, this point about the cohesiveness of the parties, you lose one Democrat, and any initiative of Joe Biden's is in trouble. So we now focus on whether he can get one Republican, which is again, remarkable as well. Can you get even one of the 50 Republicans. Lisa Murkowski has not ruled out supporting Neera Tanden. She made some comments last night. I hope we can get past this divisiveness. She was looking over the tweets, that sort of thing. You can read the remarks either way about her intention, but margins this narrow mean they're going to depend on the idiosyncratic decisions of individuals.

I think the White House believes that if Lisa Murkowski steps forward and says she's going to support Tanden, so will Kyrsten Sinema, which would be the decisive vote to put her over the top. Bernie Sanders as well, the chairman of the Budget Committee. But again, we wait to hear from Lisa Murkowski. She had said before that she was going to wait for the committee process. But the committee process can't go because Sinema is withholding her support for now. But I think in terms of other nominees, Xavier Becerra, Deb Haaland for HHS and Interior respectively, I think the White House remains confident that they can get both of those through. Tough questions, absolutely. But I think they haven't had a high-profile defection yet. We will watch and see.

CAMEROTA: John Harwood, David Gregory, thank you.

So the Capitol insurrection was a wake-up call about the growing threat of white supremacists in America. What's being done about it? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:16:38]

BERMAN: Just hours from now, the House holds its first hearing on the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Lawmakers will hear testimony from the acting chief of Capitol police and the acting House sergeant at arms.

Joining us now is Democratic Senator Chris Coons, who serves on the Judiciary Committee.

And, Senator, I know you've been watching the hearings in the Senate. You'll no doubt see some of the House today. And you're focused on next week, a hearing in your own committee that deals with this, another different aspect of this. And it has to do with the rise of white supremacy.

And you and your some of your colleagues have written a letter to the FBI Director Christopher Wray who will testify about your serious concerns about whether the FBI is allocating law enforcement and intelligence resources in a manner that reflects the scale of the threat posed by violent white supremacists whom DHS has called the most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland.

Specifically, what's your concern here?

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): Well, FBI Director Chris Wray will be in front of the Judiciary Committee next week. He's someone who was appointed under the previous administration and who did come and testified to us about the threat that domestic violent extremism poses.

After the tragic incidents of January 6th, after an armed and angry mob stormed the Capitol of the United States, we should have a clearer focus on just how much this is a priority for law enforcement, for domestic engagement and part of what we're looking for, the FBI director to tell us, is, are they dedicating enough resources to understanding this threat, to responding to this threat? Do they need any additional authorities or not? Do they need additional resources or not?

So that was essentially the point of the letter but it's also the point of the hearings. The hearings that you just referred to that were, I believe yesterday, talking about how do we secure the Capitol? What happened here at the Capitol?

Next week, we'll be talking about our entire country and the real challenge of the rise of white supremacists and domestic violent extremism.

BERMAN: I think part of the concern is that there are leaders who say there is no problem. There is no rise.

Look, you know, Tucker Carlson holds no elective office but he might as well with the authority and reach he has over some of your colleagues in the Congress. And he went on TV and said there's no evidence that white supremacists were involved in the insurrection of the U.S. Capitol.

Well, all these law enforcement officials testified yesterday said absolutely yes, they were involved and behind it. But how do you deal with the revisionism?

COONS: Well, John, one of our real challenges is the disagreement about basic facts. Tens of millions of Americans in recent polls have said that they think the assault on the Capitol was carried out by leftists, by Antifa, by folks who were merely dressed up as Trump supporters.

I'll tell you, everything that I've seen and heard strongly proves that the folks who were carrying Confederate battle flags, the folks who were wearing signs and shirts and flags that supported both Donald Trump and much more extremist views were -- many of them white supremacists and nationalists, folks who held extreme political views, were central to the events at the Capitol.

They are also among the most threatening folks in terms of our domestic security. I'll remind you: the governor of Michigan was nearly kidnapped and killed by a group of a dozen folks who were members of some of these extremist organizations.

[08:20:05]

The FBI has briefed many of us on that incident. That's a well-known public fact but is not well and widely accepted, as you put it, by Tucker Carlson and others that there is a real threat from domestic violent extremists who are white supremacists.

BERMAN: You know, you brought it up, this idea of the false flag thing. Marjorie Taylor Greene, congresswoman from Georgia, was one of the people suggesting that there was a game of dress-up happening on the insurrection where Antifa was dressed as MAGA supporters there.

Well, CNN did an investigation published overnight. KFILE which actually found a friend of Marjorie Taylor Greene -- and I'll just play that video if you haven't heard it yet -- who says, no, no, this wasn't Antifa. This was me, and I'm a Trump supporter. Listen.

COONS: Right.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTHONY AGUERO, CONSERVATIVE LIVESTREAMER & ALLY OF REP. GREENE: We were all there. It was not Antifa and it was not BLM. It was Trump supporters that did that yesterday. I'm the first to admit it, being one myself.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So given that and leave Marjorie Taylor Greene aside where she belongs but Senator Ron Johnson, how do you explain why he has been reading into the congressional record these conspiracy theories? Why do you think he's doing it? What's driving him?

COONS: Well, we have tens of millions of Americans who believe these conspiracy theories and who are engaging with and supporting members of Congress who will advance them. One of our real challenges, John, is the last four years, we had a president who daily tweeted and pronounced things that just weren't true. That was an assault on science and that's had tragic consequences for us in terms of our national pandemic response.

But it was also an assault on the news media and on truth itself. And one of the consequences is we've now got a significant portion of our country that just doesn't believe anything that they hear from the so- called mainstream media or from folks who are centrists.

I will long remember the moment when Senator Mitt Romney stood up in the chamber on January 6th and said to those of his own party who were challenging the election that what they needed to do was to not continue to indulge their constituents in baseless conspiracy theories that Trump won but to tell them the truth.

BERMAN: Part of getting the truth out there would be a 9/11-style commission to investigate the insurrection which I know you support. How bipartisan should it be? Because the proposal right now that Nancy Pelosi, House speaker, is floating would be uneven, right? It would be -- there would be seven appointees from Democrats, including congressional leaders in the White House, and four from Republicans. The 9/11 Commission itself was split 50/50.

So, why not 50/50, Senator?

COONS: Well, John, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission have said that part of why it was so successful was that it was even, it was balanced, and it was led by folks who were well-respected and well- regarded, who had a reputation for working across the aisle.

I think it's important that we have a balanced January 6th commission. A commission that looks into all the events that led up to the riot at the Capitol and this baseless theory that Trump won the election. But it's going to have to be done by folks who are not currently serving or seeking office, folks who are not politically motivated in how they get to the bottom of this.

This is important. It's one of the key ways, John, of how we come together as a country. Joe Biden ran on unifying our nation and to unify our nation, we have to lay bare the ways we haven't believed each other. Joe Biden was legitimately elected president of the United States, and we need to help the American people accept that fact.

BERMAN: So, you think the commission should be 50/50?

COONS: Yes.

BERMAN: Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, thanks for being with us this morning.

COONS: Thank you, John.

BERMAN: A new coronavirus variant is spreading in New York City as a variant in California is becoming more dominant. Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:28:06]

CAMEROTA: A new coronavirus variant is spreading in New York City. Now two teams of researchers say this strain could weaken the effectiveness of vaccines.

Joining us now, CNN chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

What does that mean, Sanjay?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, so it's early to know this. But you always have to anticipate these things. This is a strain first identified actually a few months ago. It was unclear at that point how much it would start to spread and become a variant of concern. But what they are finding is that the mutations, you know, these variants are basically a series of mutations. Some of the mutations are occurring in areas where the current antibodies that people have may not be as protective.

Again, we don't know that for sure but it's going to be important data. That's why you sequence, that's why you're looking for these variants. If you're starting to see these mutations clustered around areas not as protected, that's when you may start thinking about creating new vaccines and things like that.

So it's early what's happening out of New York. We have a lot more data on the variant circulating in the U.K. and Brazil and South Africa. And those are still the ones of larger concern right now. But this is another one that we're going to have to keep our eye on.

BERMAN: So, Sanjay, you've had a chance to look at the data from Johnson & Johnson with their vaccine and the panel will hear and go through that tomorrow. It will be very interesting to hear what they see and whether it gets emergency use authorization.

One of the big questions was not, is it effective in preventing serious illness but is it effective at stopping transmission of it completely. Keep people from getting infected at all? And there is some data, I understand, on that.

GUPTA: Yeah, there is. You asked me about this yesterday, and we were just getting the data at that point. Sort of buried in the addendum, but there is some data around this. I don't know if we have the numbers. But basically, I can talk you through it.

What they did was, they give the vaccine and they are swabbing people as well. And they swabbed, you know, over 2,000 people. They didn't swab everybody.