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Instagram Still Promoting Misinformation; Gas Demand Spikes in Several States; Consumer Inflation Rising; Ransomware Threats Growing; GOP Infrastructure Hypocrisy; Rachel Vindman is Interviewed about Cheney Vote. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired May 12, 2021 - 08:30   ET

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

[08:30:00]

DONIE O'SULLIVAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You type in vaccines this morning.

Why does this all matter, you might say? You know, should people be getting their vaccine information or misinformation from Instagram in the first place? Well, realistically, that's where many people now go to get information. And earlier, just a few months ago, we spoke to a mother in Texas who got really pulled down the anti-vax rabbit hole on FaceBook.

Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HEATHER SIMPSON, FORMER ANTI-VACCINE ADVOCATE: The vaccine goes into our child, she'll just die. That's all there is to it.

O'SULLIVAN: You thought if your daughter took the vaccine, she might die?

SIMPSON: That she would die. Not might. Just like would. I feel like a lot of the anti-vax moms all found each other all at once. I was getting like a friend request per minute. We were all just friending each other. It was -- it was weird.

O'SULLIVAN: You said your intent was to inspire some parent to stop their child from getting vaccinated. Do you think you did that?

SIMPSON: Yes, like I -- I know I did. I've had people tell me that they're not vaccinating because of my post.

O'SULLIVAN: How does that make you feel now?

SIMPSON: Really bad.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'SULLIVAN: So, John, you can see there that, you know, it can start just with a simple search on FaceBook, on Instagram and you get pulled into these communities, as that woman did. Thankfully, she's now come out of it. But, you know, it does start with something as simple as a search on Instagram.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Like for "vaccine," we're not talking about like some complicated, multi-variable search here. You search for "vaccine," you get back anti-vax content.

O'SULLIVAN: And this is an issue Instagram has known about for years.

BERMAN: All right. Donie O'Sullivan, you have to take what they promise, I think, with a grain of salt, and this is what we're still getting here. Appreciate your reporting on this.

Brianna.

KEILAR: So, this morning, gas prices are rising across the country and folks are flocking to the pumps to grab gas before the price tag soars or fuel runs out. This demand has been sparked by the Colonial Pipeline shutdown after a massive ransomware attack.

CNN's Nick Valencia is outside of Atlanta with more.

Nick, what are you seeing?

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, this looks like the definition behind me here of panic buying, Brianna. It was sometime yesterday that residents of Atlanta started to realize that their neighborhood gas station was either out of gas or very soon could be out of gas. And here in suburban Atlanta, we're seeing that manifest into a steady stream of cars at the gas pump.

I want to step out of the way here so you get a little bit of sense. It is kind of deceiving. We are seeing lines. But, you know, there's not really a good direction of flow of traffic here. Some pumps are open, as you can see, but people just don't realize it so they're sort of stalling behind the line of cars.

We did talk to the gas station owner here and people working inside. They say they're going through about a thousand gallons of gas per hour. And if you do the math, I just did, that's -- you can have a car, about 14 gallons worth, that's 71 cars per hour. They say they're only going to get one tank of gas or they have one tank of gas since the Colonial Pipeline was interrupted. And they're expecting to run out of gas here by 9:00 a.m. So you see a lot of people here, as I mentioned, you know, sort of panicked at the thought -- the idea that they may not be able to fill their gas tanks in the coming days.

We're going to keep an eye on this throughout the morning, but, again, this racetrack here is certainly seeing a steady stream of cars and they're expecting to run out of gas here in just a matter of minutes.

Brianna.

KEILAR: Wow. All right, Nick, we know you'll keep an eye on that for us.

Nick Valencia outside of Atlanta.

VALENCIA: You got it.

KEILAR: John.

BERMAN: All right, just in, new data showing just how much prices have gone up as the economy reopens. Our chief business correspondent Christine Romans has the details here.

What are we talking about, Romans/

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: We're talking about fast price growth. It's what we expected. This is inflation, 4.9 percent growth for consumer prices over the past 12 months on an annualized basis. And when you go from month to month, from March to April, 0.8 percent increase. You don't see a monthly move like that. And we know what it is, right? It's energy. It's food prices. It's plane tickets. It's building materials. It's chicken. It's just about everything you can think of that has been disrupted by the changes in consumer behavior and then the reopenings coming out of the -- reopenings coming out of the pandemic. You have a lot of bottlenecks and shortages around there that are really driving these prices up.

So this is a pretty big number here. And when you think back to 2008, what was happening? We were in the midst of a financial crisis. Also trying to come out of a recession there. In a recession. You saw prices going up. So this is what we've been telling you, prices are going up.

Now, the big question is, how long does it last? Is it temporary as the Fed has meant -- has thought, or is this the byproduct of a really strong, red hot economy and the Fed, John, will have to go in there and raise interest rates to cool it down and that could, you know, tamp down the recovery and that can hurt main street actually before main street really starts to feel it all together, the recovery that is.

BERMAN: It's the fastest rise since 2008. But you hear people around throwing sayings like, it's like the 1970s, runaway inflation.

ROMANS: No. No, no, no, this is not the 1970s. I mean we -- we -- you and I have been talking about that. That was 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, inflation, 15 percent consumer inflation in 1980. It's nothing like this.

There are reasons why these shortages, these bottlenecks have caused prices to rise.

[08:35:03]

And of course you know the story about gas prices. That's pretty clear here. You've got a pirate -- pipeline pirates on top of opening demand for the summer. So that's a unique situation there. But even when you take out food and energy, it's still a 3 percent increase in inflation. So that means, you're right, your dollar, every dollar you have is buying a little bit less right here.

BERMAN: And much more inflation than we are certainly used to over the last few years.

Christine Romans, terrific report, thank you very much.

Just ahead, the hacking attack that Romans was talking about on this crucial American gas pipeline. An ex-cyber warrior tells us why it should be a big wake-up call.

KEILAR: And Republicans balking at the huge price tag for fixing America's infrastructure. How come they didn't have a problem with Trump's trillion-dollar plans?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: This threat is not imminent. It is upon us. The Colonial Pipe ransomware attack is a stark example of what we have been saying for some time now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[08:40:03]

BERMAN: Yes, it's well past imminent. It's now. Sobering words from the Homeland Security chief after the ransomware attack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline, or all but shut it down. The attack has left a growing number of gas stations along the East Coast without fuel. On Tuesday, a different ransomware group followed through on its threat to release the personnel files of D.C. police officers after negotiators failed to meet their demands.

Joining us now is a former hacker, David Kennedy. He's the founder of TrustedSec and Binary Defense.

So you say this is a huge wake-up call, David, why?

DAVID KENNEDY, FORMER NSA HACKER AND FOUNDER, TRUSTEDSEC AND BINARY DEFENSE: When you look at what's going on with these ransomware groups, they're getting fed a ton of money because of all these ransoms. And with that, their capabilities continue to increase, which means that they're getting into larger and larger companies, organizations, and obviously what we saw with Colonial, the ability to impact our pipelines.

And so it's a major threat that we face and there's a lot of companies now that are just being hit by these groups and they're just getting millions and millions and millions of dollars, which, thus, they're turning into -- they're full-fledged businesses, they're turning into even better capabilities in the future.

So, you know, you think of -- you think of large organizations are all susceptible to this now. Small to medium size business are susceptible to this now. And our critical infrastructure, most importantly, which, you know, produces our energy, our water treatment facilities, all of these things are in play now when it comes to these types of groups.

KEILAR: So tell us how these happen. If you can talk about the phishing attacks and these drive-by download attacks.

KENNEDY: Yes, you know, when you look at how these types of attacks occur, you know, they start very targeted. And this is very different than the ransomware we saw maybe five or ten years ago where they would try targeting, you know, 50 companies at a time or 100 companies at a time.

You know, these folks have dedicated resources that go and build essentially dossiers on organizations and they start targeting key employees or, you know, creating websites that have, you know, code on them that once executed give access to those systems. And they're focusing on targeting these individual companies.

And what happens is, is that when one person gets hacked, let's just say one employee in the sales department gets hacked, it opens up the entire flood gates because they start moving to different systems, to different systems, to different systems and then they maximize the amount of damage. They go after their backups. They go after their, you know, finance systems, they go after their HR systems, their manufacturing processes. They go after everything within that organization. And then they steal all that data and then they encrypt that data.

So you're getting a double whammy where all of your data is now taken by hackers and now your entire business and your backups are completely gone. And usually the only way that you have to recover is paying these ransoms.

KEILAR: Well, and to that point, that is what many companies are choosing to do.

KENNEDY: Unfortunately (ph).

KEILAR: Do you think the company, in this case, pays the ransom?

KENNEDY: We see this all the time. And, unfortunately, we don't deal specifically with paying the ransoms. We basically have to, you know, make contact with a third party that then does the negotiations with these ransomware groups. But we deal with these incident response cases all the time.

And the specific group DarkSide, from the Colonial one, we've had a number of customers that have been hit by this. Their entire organization completely brought to a standstill and literally they have two decisions, one, rebuild from scratch, which can take months, you know, completely destroy their entire business, or pay the ransom, which, you know, they're paying $3 million, $4 million or $5 million at times to recover and to actually, you know, keep their businesses alive and running. It's a really dark situation that we're in right now and these companies really need to focus on strengthening their defenses from a cybersecurity perspective because it's coming for everybody. It's not just, you know, a specific industry vertical, it's literally any type of company, any type of organization of size and nature.

KEILAR: Should be a wake-up call so that there isn't an incredibly expensive wake-up call for companies.

KENNEDY: Right.

KEILAR: David, thank you so much for being with us this morning.

KENNEDY: Absolutely. Thank you.

KEILAR: Infrastructure week was a punchline under President Trump. Can Joe Biden actually change that? We'll have a "Reality Check" next.

BERMAN: Republicans gathering now to banish Liz Cheney by secret ballot. She is calling them out publicly. Our live coverage continues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:48:06]

KEILAR: Soon, President Biden will hold his first bipartisan meeting with the top leaders of the House and Senate to discuss his infrastructure plan. This is a meeting that will include Democratic leaders, as well as Republicans Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy in their first White House meeting with President Biden.

BERMAN: The question is, how far will Republicans be willing to go here? And is history really any guide?

John Avlon with a "Reality Check."

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: We've been conditioned to think of infrastructure week as a phrase accompanied by sad trombones. But just because it got turned into a punchline during the Trump years doesn't mean it's not a good idea because it could be the last best chance to get something really big done in the name of bipartisanship. That's Joe Biden's hope as he meets with Republicans at the White House.

The president's proposing a once in a generation $2 trillion plan to rebuild our bridges and roads and railways, provide all Americans with high-speed broadband, remove all lead pipes, rebuild water infrastructure, improve America's aging schools, boost manufacturing and factories, build new housing and more.

Now, it's not surprising that Republicans are pushing back, especially on the price tag. They also point out that some of what Biden's proposing, like helping the elderly with home health care workers, isn't traditionally considered infrastructure. Fair enough.

But given that their party can't quit Trump on the big lie, maybe they'll be swayed if they remember this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: In our politics lead today, they appeared all smiles today outside the White House, proudly announcing they have reached the broad outlines of a deal with President Trump.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AVLON: That's right, Trump agreed to a $2 trillion infrastructure plan with Democrats just over two years ago. Now, nothing actually happened because Trump held the deal hostage unless the Democrats stopped investigating. Yes, you can't make this stuff up.

And then just last year, Trump proposed a trillion dollar infrastructure plan, then upped the ante back up to $2 trillion.

[08:50:02]

So there's a precedent here.

Now, the American Society of Civil Engineers currently gives U.S. infrastructure a c-minus, which is good for Jeff Specoli (ph), but bad for American bridges. They say we should be spending actually around $2.6 trillion to get our needs up to speed.

This is a compeditivist (ph) issue, a security issue, an economic issue. And if you're into the whole government for the people thing, it's also really popular. A Reuters IPSOS poll last month found that 79 percent of Americans supported repairing or replacing railways, bridges and highways. That includes 78 percent of Republicans. Even incentives for clean and renewable energy manufacturing got 66 percent support, and 47 percent from Republicans.

Look, majority support doesn't mean much to congressional Republicans these days. Here's what might. A lot of the benefit will be felt in rural areas in so-called red states. In the past, some Republicans said they couldn't back infrastructure plans unless they were paid for. Fair enough. But Trump said we could just borrow the money. Biden's proposing raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to between 25 percent and 28 percent, which would still be lower than it was under Bush and Obama.

Now, speaking of Obama, Senate Republicans voted down his comparatively modest $60 billion infrastructure plan and then complained that America's crumbling infrastructure was part of Obama's legacy. So, mindful of not falling for that particular Lucy and the football routine again, Democrats are prepared to pass this by reconciliation if they have to. But that shouldn't be plan a or b. There should be some negotiation. Now, the cost could come down. Maybe something like the $1.5 trillion Trump once backed, because, after all, partisan posturing on infrastructure will get us nowhere. The recipe for success in addressing America's infrastructure needs is through partnership. At least that's what it says on the congressional republican infrastructure principles page.

And that's your "Reality Check."

KEILAR: We need one today for sure.

John Avlon, thank you.

House Republicans are on the verge of voting to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership post. GOP members gathering for that meeting that is now just minutes away.

BERMAN: And, next, reaction from someone who knows the perils of publicly standing up for truth, just like Liz Cheney has done.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:55:26]

KEILAR: We are just moments away from a critical meeting of House Republicans. The conference will be voting on whether to oust Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership role. And sources say despite it being a secret ballot, the vote against Cheney will be, quote, pretty overwhelming.

Joining me now is Rachel Vindman. Her husband, Alex Vindman, testified during Trump's first impeachment trial. She is also the host of a new podcast called "The Suburban Women Problem," which debuts today.

Rachel, it is great to see you again. Thank you for coming on.

RACHEL VINDMAN, ALEXANDER VINDMAN'S WIFE, RECENTLY LEFT REPUBLICAN PARTY: Thank you so much, Brianna. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

KEILAR: So, look, I think a lot of people know you through what happened to your husband with his testimony in the first impeachment trial of former President Trump. This is you out on your own with your effort where you are joining up with other women, former Republicans, in this podcast. And one of the things you are talking about is sort of this movement away from the Republican Party as we are seeing it right now.

What is your reaction, as you are watching what is expected to be this ousting of Liz Cheney from House leadership?

VINDMAN: Well, I'm very sad, Brianna. I think the Republican Party is showing us today that they have no space for people of integrity, for women whose message or whose message is truth, who don't toe the party line, who are unwilling to go along with the male leadership. And it's really sad to me.

I believe I told you before that Liz Cheney, on the day of Alex's testimony, his closed door testimony, she did a little press conference. And what she pointed out that, you know, that the statements against my husband, against his service, against his patriotism, how wrong and shameful it was.

And I called her office to say thank you on a very scary day for me. It meant a lot that she said that. And I just talked to whoever answered the phone. And a few hours later she personally called me. She didn't have to do that. And it meant so much to me on that day.

So when I see losing her and losing her leadership, I feel like the Republican Party is really losing an important voice, and it makes me very sad.

KEILAR: What did she say to you when she called?

VINDMAN: She just said, thank you, you know, that she was sorry that it was happening, that people were questioning his service and his integrity. And she, you know, said it was -- it was a horrible thing. And she offered her support. And, you know, it meant a lot as someone, you know, who has faced a lot of criticism, not anything compared to what she has in the past several months. But she was no stranger to it and certainly her family wasn't.

You know, Brianna --

KEILAR: So the -- sorry, go on.

VINDMAN: You know, this -- this is what we're trying to do with, you know, our podcast, with "The Suburban Women Problem," is really reach women. You know, women don't discuss, you know, talking points when we're sitting around hanging out with our friends, you know, at the bus stop or having coffee or, you know, wine after school. We talk about how to make things better for ourself and for our families.

So we don't necessarily talk about, you know, the rise of authoritarianism, but we do talk about how important it is for everyone's voice to be heard, which doesn't happen in authoritarianism. So we want our children to have a seat at the table. All of our children. And we want everyone to have an equal shot.

So it doesn't matter the words we use, it matters the actions. And that's what this podcast is about, about sharing stories and giving people a space to hear stories and tell their stories.

KEILAR: And, really quickly, before I let you go here, Rachel, this has become the party of Trump. You know more than anyone about being chewed up and spit out by that. What is your warning to people? And I only have about 25 seconds here, just so you know.

VINDMAN: My warning is, as it always has been, what happened to us can happen to anyone. Anyone whose loyalty is to the truth. And it's very, very simple. And Trump, it's either loyalty to him, that's what Trumpism is, loyalty to him or loyalty to the truth.

[09:00:05]

And if your loyalty is to the truth, you will be chewed up and spit out and discarded.