Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Today, Biden Unveils New Guidance on Wearing Masks Outdoors; Homeland Security Launches Review of Violent Extremism within Agency; Political Winners and Losers, which State Gained, Lost Seats . Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired April 27, 2021 - 07:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:00:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN NEW DAY: The Angels' two-way star pitcher makes baseball history. Andy Scholes has more in the bleacher report. Andy?

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Hey, good morning, Brianna. So the Angels' Shohei Ohtani, the first player to start a game on the mound while leading the league in home runs since Babe Ruth did that 100 years ago. The Japanese star entered Monday leading baseball tied for the lead in baseball with seven home runs. And after a rocky first inning, just Ohtani dominating the Rangers, he struck out nine, getting the win, his first since 2018. Also a two for three at the plate with an RIB double, just doing it all, the Angels beat the Rangers 9-4.

To the NBA, Cavs and Raptors, bizarre play at the end of the third quarter. An official is going to throw the ball at Kevin Love to inbound it. He just bats it away. Toronto gets it, makes a three and Love casually walks around. Love didn't play the rest of the game after that, left the court before the final buzzer sounded as well. The Cavs lose that one, 112-96.

Now, Love's former teammate, LeBron James, says he's going to be back soon. He posted this video on Instagram rehabbing his injured ankle. LeBron has been out more than a month, the longest stretch of his career between game due to injury.

In the meantime, though, one of LeBron's rookie cards now shattered the record for the most valuable basketball card ever sold. The autographed 2003 upper deck card went for $5.2 million in a private auction.

All right, New Day continues right now.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN NEW DAY: I'm John Berman alongside Brianna Keilar on this New Day.

Is it time for vaccinated people to drop the masks outdoors? President Biden set to announce some much-anticipated new rules today for fully vaccinated Americans. KEILAR: And census shakeup, new population data could mean significant changes for next year's midterm elections and beyond.

BERMAN: A suspect charged in the Capitol riot arguing to be released from jail over the spelling of the B word.

KEILAR: And a high school cheerleader who was punished for -- it was a Snapchat rant, is taking her First Amendment case all the way to the Supreme Court.

BERMAN: All right. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and all around the world, it is Tuesday, April 27th. And just hours from now, we are expecting to hear from President Biden about new guidelines for vaccinated Americans on wearing masks outdoors, as well as activities you could soon be able to resume. This comes ahead of the president's first address to Congress tomorrow night.

KEILAR: Mr. Biden began his presidency by asking Americans to wear masks for 100 days. He even signed an executive order requiring their use on federal property. More than 230 million vaccine doses have now been administered in the U.S. and nearly one third of the country is fully vaccinated.

Joining us to discuss all of this, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Okay, Sanjay, what are we expecting here? We got a little bit of a tease about this from Dr. Anthony Fauci. What do you think the president is going to say?

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. I think this is going to be the most significant set of recommendations for what vaccinated people can do. You know, we've been hearing about this for some time. I think a lot of it will probably focus on masks and what people can do outdoors. And it's going to be, I think, pretty significant and I think it will be good news.

Let me show you I think the data that's driving a lot of this. We have been looking at some of this data for some time, how many of new cases what percentage of new cases, are actually driven by outdoors versus indoors, less than 10 percent happening outdoors. If you're vaccinated, obviously, much lower than that. And here is the increase in transmission if you're indoors. It's almost 19 times more likely that the virus will transmit indoors versus outdoors. So we have known that for some time.

This map, I think, is going to be one of the caveats, guys, because I think what a lot of these new recommendations will come with is dependent on where you live. If you live in an area of the country where there is lots of viral transmissions still, then some of these lifting of recommendations may not yet apply to you or may not apply as fully to you. But hopefully as the numbers of vaccinated continue to go up, the red in that map starts to go down.

But I think, you know, overall this will be good news. One of the things they've said all along is everyone talks about herd immunity, 70 to 80 percent of the country vaccinated. But it's going to be gradations along the way as we get to 25 percent close to the country fully vaccinated, new recommendations. Get to 40 percent lifting of recommendations. So, this is one step.

BERMAN: Sanjay, just on the mask wearing outdoors, is it your anticipation that it will apply only to vaccinated people?

[07:05:05]

And do you think that's appropriate?

GUPTA: I think it will be the -- basically, for vaccinated people, they really aren't going to need to wear masks outdoors. That's what it sounds like. For unvaccinated people, I think there are situations where they may not need to wear masks as long as they are still able to keep distance, if they're primarily walking within their own bubble, for example, outside on a hike or a walk or something like that.

So, again, there are some places around the country that are already sort of doing that but there are other states that have absolute mask mandates no matter what when you're outdoors. I think it will change for both in this case, John, on vaccinated and unvaccinated.

KEILAR: There's a question, Sanjay, about how far you go to encourage people to get vaccinated. And, for instance, we're seeing in West Virginia, they are giving $100 savings bonds to young adults who get vaccinated. It's important to note, young adults are big spreaders of coronavirus. How do you see this? Some people have said this is a bribe. What do you think?

GUPTA: I think that the incentives can be important and effective in these cases. I mean, West Virginia is an interesting model. I mean, this is a state that was sort of really moving quickly initially in terms of getting people vaccinated, and then they hit the wall. And the wall is a lot of hesitancy or what we call vaccine fade. It's not that I necessarily won't get one, it's just that I don't feel like I necessarily need it.

The second doses -- this is what this graph is on the screen, second doses at times outpacing first doses, which basically means in some of these places they're getting to the end. People will get their second doses but new people aren't willing to sign up. That's what the incentives do.

Yes, I think it's a tough ethical question, Brianna, but I think that in this case as we're trying to get to herd immunity doing anything we can do to get there, I think, is really helpful.

BERMAN: Maybe paid leave for workers to go and get the vaccine. People are having a hard time. Some people are having a hard time just scheduling it. Any way you can make it easier incentivizing it might help, any way you influence people to do it might help.

And CNN has got new reporting that advisers to the former president, Donald Trump, are urging him to make a PSA to encourage people who support him to get vaccinated. How do you think that will help?

GUPTA: I don't know. It's -- I've thought a lot about this, I've talked to lots of people about it. Let me show you what they're dealing with here, overall. This is a really interesting sort of partisan breakdown in terms of people who are likely to get vaccinated, people who are thinking about it. It breaks down pretty significantly. I mean, this is interesting. I mean, we've seen hesitancy before. That's not new. But this much of a partisan breakdown is pretty fascinating.

What -- if you look historically, what you find is that politicians, celebrities, people like that who do these PSAs have not actually had that significant an impact overall on vaccine hesitancy. It's typically people's own communities, their own local health care providers that seem to be the most effective at actually getting through vaccine hesitancy.

But, with this sort of partisan divide, again, it's so unusual that perhaps President Trump, he's a person that will be listened to in this regard. He got vaccinated. He's talked about the fact that he thinks people should get vaccinated. He's also said that the recent J&J pause gave him a little bit of pause in terms of making a PSA. So we will see. I think it sounds like it will probably happen and then we'll get to see the impact of it.

KEILAR: Yes. It certainly wouldn't hurt, right? And whatever you can do to help to get people healthy is so important.

So let's talk a little bit about India because they've seen more than a million new cases just this week, which is astronomical. How much worse could this get before it turns a corner?

GUPTA: Unfortunately, it could still get worse. I talk to people there quite a bit. I have a lot of family living in Delhi as well. We know that there's these lagging indicators, right? So we talk about cases and for a year, we've had these conversations where a few weeks after we see these spikes in cases and you've seen this just exponential rise in cases. A few weeks after that is when you see the hospitalizations. We're already seeing hospitalizations but they will go up even more in response to that curve there. And then a few weeks after that, you'll see the deaths. So as bad as they are now, they are, sadly, likely to get worse over the next four to six weeks. We're going to be talking about this for at least four to six weeks.

And the other thing is 300,000 people being infected on a daily basis, well, positivity rates are over 20 percent as well. And, again, these are conversations we've had over the last year, but what does that mean? It means that 300,000 is woefully undertesting.

[07:10:00]

It could be two to three times that. We could be hitting a million cases a day already in India, you know, based on what we're seeing there.

So it is really, really problematic and, again, the hospitalizations, as crowded as they are now, will continue to go up.

BERMAN: And, look, the Biden administration releasing AstraZeneca doses will help in the long-term but it's not going to do anything for that -- it's not even a curve at this point, Sanjay, that's a wall of new cases there, really alarming. Thanks so much for being with us, and our best to your family there. It's really scary.

GUPTA: Thank you.

KEILAR: The Department of Homeland Security announcing an internal review to assess the threat of violent extremism from within the agency. The review of potential insider threats comes in the wake of the January 6th Capitol riots and is part of a broader focus by the Biden administration on threats here at home.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in a department-wide memo, calls domestic extremist, quote, the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to our country today, adding, quote, violent extremism has no place at DHS and we will work with urgency and focus to address it.

This is a review that is coming after the Pentagon completed a 60-day stand-down to address extremism when a number of veterans were found to have taken part in the Capitol insurrection.

BERMAN: The man who was photographed putting his feet up on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office during the Capitol insurrection is back in court today. His lawyer is trying to get his released over a technicality over an explicit typo.

CNN's Whitney Wild live in Washington with the latest on this. I have a hard time understanding the law behind this, Whitney. Explain.

WHITNEY WILD, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, maybe it's not the law but just the urban slang. So here is basically what's going on.

So the lawyers for Mr. Barnett, this man who was seen with his feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk, the photo that encapsulate the invasiveness of that day, they are arguing that he did not write in a note to Nancy Pelosi you b-i-t-c-h, but, in fact, he wrote, you, and he meant to write, biatch but it was misspelled. So there's this whole discrepancy about what he really meant.

His lawyers are arguing -- see it's right there. So , his lawyers are arguing that he didn't actually mean it to be this fierce derogatory word. He was actually using this slang, which is less offensive and in some cases is actually term of endearment.

Here is what prosecutors have argued in court. Here is the exact quote. The government's misrepresentation is the latest deliberate attempt to mislead this court by casting Mr. Barnett in the worst possible light in order to ensure the pre-trial release is not granted, John. So, basically, his attorneys are saying, look, he's not that dangerous, he's not that mean, you should let him out of jail. We'll see if they buy-off on that argument today, John.

BERMAN: And he can't spell. It's a legal stretch there. There's several legal steps they're asking you to make there with that reasoning. Whitney, we're also learning more about the suspects charged with assaulting Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. What's the Department of Justice saying now?

WILD: Well, the Department of Justice is saying that these two men are very dangerous. This is another argument that they're making to try to keep these two men in jail, just like Mr. Barnett. And basically what they're arguing is that the moment that these two men affected spraying these three officers, including Officer Brian Sicknick, who we know later died, that was a pivotal moment, because they sprayed these officers with the bear spray. That contributed to breaking the police line. And that was the moment that allowed this mob of rioters to flow through those bike racks, flow into the Capitol and cause all of this chaos and destruction that we saw that day.

And taken together these two -- these three cases rather are another test of DOJ trying to convince the judiciary that these people are dangerous, that they should not be let out of jail, however, their defense attorneys are all arguing that they should actually be let out of custody.

I should note that all three men in both -- in these two separate cases have pleaded not guilty, John.

KEILAR: All right. Whitney, thank you so much for that.

We are learning some more about the individuals who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, namely that there were straight up Nazis in the crowd. John Avlon is here with our Reality Check. John?

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: There are still basic rules of decency and democracy, like don't call your political opponents Nazis. You've hit the limits of your logic and it's something we have seen too much of in recent decades. But what happens when your opponents actually call themselves Nazis? Well, that's when you know we've gone through the looking glass and that's where we seem to be right now.

Now, yesterday, we reported that a New York man on trial for allegedly making death threats to Democratic lawmakers is a Nazi sympathizer who wanted Trump to be like Hitler. Prosecutors say Brendan Hunt posted videos encouraging people to kill your senators and texted his father, a retired family court judge, during Hitler's first term in office, circumstances were such that it was necessary for him to override the Democratic process and become the absolute leader of his country.

[07:15:09]

Trump should probably do the same.

Normally, we just file this under crazy person says crazy thing and move on, but it occurred to me that we've heard something like this before. Because just a few weeks ago, CNN reported on the case of Navy Contractor Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a well-known white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer charged in the Capitol attack, the Hitler mustache probably should have been the tell. Now, the Justice Department said he poses a threat to Jewish residence in his native New Jersey. So that's truly disturbing but maybe another outlier, right? Unfortunately, not exactly.

We combed through stories of some of those charged in the Capitol attack and found several cases of Nazi advocacy. Here is Robert Packer who was wearing a sweatshirt that read Camp Auschwitz, referring to the death camp where more than a million people were murdered. There's Tim Gionet, also known as Baked Alaska, whose anti-Semitic content got a bounce from several social media sites before being charged in the attack.

And then there's Riley Williams, the young woman accused of stealing a laptop from Nancy Pelosi's office. Now, detailed investigation by Bellingcat uncovered a video, it says, shows Williams wearing a skull mask and giving a Nazi salute, and the voice says, Heil Hitler. Riley's lawyer did not deny it was her client in the video, telling NBC News that it was an ironic internet joke. Yes, irony and Nazis.

Now, these are just a few examples and they'll all have their day in court, and I'm not getting to the about white supremacist, right-wing paramilitary group members or folks wielding confederate flags. You go without saying that these racist paraders of hate don't represent every Trump supporter, even those who stormed our Capitol trying to overturn an election. But it should go without saying that we should not simply accept the existence of Nazis in modern America.

This evil exists and it did not emerge from a vacuum. We saw them at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and we saw them at the Capitol Hill attack. If neo-Nazis are finding common ground with your cause, then you've got a problem. It can't be minimized or rationalized because it will not disappear with deflection. It must be confronted and condemned.

There's no room for anything resembling neutrality when it comes to Nazis. That's why we all need to stand up against hate and lies and the people who stoke those fear-fueled forces for political gain.

And that's your Reality Check.

KEILAR: A much needed one, John Avlon, thank you.

Just released, the census' once in a decade impact on the political makeup of Congress, which states are gaining seats, which states are losing seats and the contentious political battles to expect in the months ahead.

BERMAN: And the Supreme Court takes up a landmark First Amendment case. This one is fascinating with huge implications over a high school cheerleader's rant on Snapchat. We're going to speak live with the teen's attorney.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:20:00]

BERMAN: So, new data released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows the country's total population has topped 331 million people. But that's the second slowest growth rate ever. It also revealed which states saw the biggest gains and losses, which means vital, crucial changes to the electoral map.

Harry Enten, CNN Senior Political Writer and Analyst, joins us now. Harry, I bet you haven't slept a wink since these new census numbers come out. They're right in your wheelhouse here. I said Democratic states losing, blue states losing, red states gaining, show us.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL WRITER AND ANALYST: Yes. By the way, it was 2:00 A.M. when I fell asleep last night. Here is the big picture, right? Remember time night Joe Biden won the 2020 election 306 to 232 in the Electoral College? That now becomes 303 to 235. So, it was, in fact, red states gaining. You can see this here, a lot of darker red, those are the states that Donald Trump won and gained a seat.

Texas, look at that, two-seat gain, Florida, one-seat gain, North Carolina, one-seat gain, Montana, one-seat gain. Where were the big losers? Most of them were up here right in the northeast into the Midwest. Michigan, a blue state, lost a seat, New York, a blue state that lost a seat, Pennsylvania, blue state that lost a seat and Illinois, a blue state lost a seat.

There were some red states that lost a seat, Ohio and West Virginia. But, overall, it was the blue states that were the losers and the red states that were large part the winners.

BERMAN: Population moving south and west largely, which could have an impact in the Electoral College. You see if everything remained the same, Joe Biden would win fewer electoral votes. He still won by a comfortable margin.

But we've had a lot of close elections and there are scenarios where you can easily see this making a difference.

ENTEN: That's exactly right. Remember when we were hanging out just before the election, I was saying one of the path that Joe Biden had to winning was winning the Clinton states, plus Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska's second congressional district vote. That would have gotten Biden a 270 to 268 win under the old lines. But under the new reapportionment, that now becomes a Trump 270 to 268.

So there are situations now where it becomes a little bit more difficult for the Democrats to win in the Electoral College.

BERMAN: Just to be clear, this scenario, Biden would have won. Now he would lose winning the same exact states. So you can see the change there, the historical trend. Talk to me about the trends here.

ENTEN: This is something that I think is very important to note. Over time, right, it's not just in this election where you see that the Democrats do worse under the new lines where it goes from 306 for Biden to 303. Go back two censuses ago, it would have been 309 under those lines. Three censuses ago, it would have been 310 under those lines. So what we're seeing is a continuation of the long-term trends of people moving from blue states to red states and southern United States becoming more and more the population center in the United States.

BERMAN: I'm going to ask you a trick question.

ENTEN: Yes.

BERMAN: How does this change the popular vote?

ENTEN: It doesn't. It doesn't change the popular vote. And this, I think, is another key nugget. That is the difference between the popular vote and the Electoral College winner becomes larger and larger.

[07:25:01]

And the Democrats have to win perhaps by a larger and larger margin in the popular vote in order to win the Electoral College or at least strengthen their odds if the current, say, demographics and polarization continue to play out the way that they are.

BERMAN: Look, it's something the country has to address, the same exact number of people can vote a certain way, it's just where they live will make a huge difference.

All right, Harry, you're a New Yorker here. What happened to New York?

ENTEN: This made me sad. This made me very, very sad. Look at this, New York just misses. If New York had 89 extra people, they would have gained an extra congressional district --

BERMAN: Or they wouldn't have lost one.

ENTEN: They wouldn't have lost one, right? From their current lines, I guess, they would not have lost one. It was just 89 people away. My goodness, I could go out probably on the street on Broadway right now and find 89 New Yorkers who didn't fill out the census. That was the closest just miss since at least 1940. So we really, really just missed and I think this is really an important reason why folks next time around you got to make sure to fill out your census because you never know that your vote may, in fact, matter.

BERMAN: 89 extra people have filled out their census would have kept an additional seat.

ENTEN: So close.

BERMAN: Harry Enten, thanks so for being with us. I appreciate it.

ENTEN: Thank you, sir.

BERMAN: Brianna?

ENTEN: I love trick questions with Harry Enten. I love what makes Harry sad even more though.

Ahead, a cheerleader goes on a Snapchat rant and her case is shedding to the Supreme Court. I'll be speaking with her lawyer.

Plus, Newt Gingrich goes on a homophobic diatribe about the pride flag, calling it anti-American. Just wait until you hear how he feels about the confederate flag though.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:30:00]