Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Continued 24/7 Search For Survivors in the FL Condo Building Collapse; Former A.G. Barr Says He Suspected Former President Donald Trump's Claims Of Widespread Election Fraud Were "All B.S."; Interview with Larisa Svechin, Acting Mayor of Sunny Isles Beach, FL. Aired 6- 6:30a ET

Aired June 28, 2021 - 06:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:00:10]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning to our viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Monday, June 28. I'm John Berman in Surfside, Florida along with Erica Hill in New York this morning.

Here in Surfside the desperate search for survivors in the condo building collapse has been going on 24/7. At least nine people are dead, 152 still unaccounted for, 152. Families of the missing still clinging to hope even though no one has been found alive in the rubble since the collapse five days ago.

Over the weekend rescue crews dug a deep trench to help in the search effort and special equipment was brought in to try to detect signs of life through the concrete. One fire official had a grim assessment of what they have found so far.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALAN COMINSKY, MIAMI-DADE FIRE CHIEF: I mean it's horrific. You know, if that can be the one word that I'll say. I mean it's, again, (inaudible) collapse are one of the most difficult collapses to deal with. The operation of what we're seeing, it's just an extremely difficult situation.

They type of debris unfortunately that we're coming across, it's just extremely -- it's tough to describe, because it's just -- you know, we don't have the voids that we would be hoping for, things that we're looking for. You know, not that the -- you know, we're still looking, you know. And so, that's what I mean by horrific. It's just -- it's a very, very difficult kind of situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So this morning that we're learning that a 2018 report detailed significant damage to the Champlain Towers building, including cracks and breaks in the concrete. Experts are trying to zero in on where the building might have failed. Engineers tell "The New York Times" a possible failure point near the bottom of the tower could have triggered a structural avalanche.

The husband of a woman who is still missing tells "The Miami Herald" that his wife frantically called him saying the building was shaking and that she saw the deck of the swimming pool cave in shortly before the line went dead.

The collapse has created high rise anxiety in Florida and across the country over the safety of these buildings. The city of Miami is urging immediate inspections for buildings more than six stories tall and older than 40 years.

Let's get to CNN's Nick Valencia. He's live at the family reunification center. You know, and Nick, for the first time six bus loads of family members came here to the site so the families could see it for themselves.

NICK VALENCIA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and it was an emotional turning point, John, for some of those family members who arrived at the site. Some who have been feeling as though they have been mislead or given a false sense of hope by these first responders as to exactly what they're doing to try to find their loved ones.

The briefings, some have said, have been sparse. There's been two briefings a day from local officials and sometimes even the Governor Ron DeSantis has been there at these briefings. But it's not enough for these family members who are looking for answers and looking for any glimmer of hope that they're loved ones are still alive.

Adding to this outrage is this information that has emerged over the course of the last five days specifically about this building and the structural integrity. The big question, of course, is whether or not those in power, those who have could made a difference of evacuating perhaps these residents deliberately mislead them about the safety of the building.

And over the weekend we saw that boil over, that anger boil over as the meeting between the local officials and some of the family and friends of those unaccounted were confrontational with those local officials.

Some however are holding onto hope and they are not willing to accept that their loved ones have perished until they are given official confirmation.

One of those family members spoke about the hope they still have as we enter day five.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BETTINA OBIAS, FAMILY MEMBER OF SURFSIDE CONDO VICTIMS: When I heard it I was really hoping, I started bargaining. I said, lord please let them -- let them be alive because I want to spend more time with her. I promise -- I promise to spend more time with her and take care of her. You know, she was my mother here. She took care of all of us.

She was the most -- my own grandson's (ph) woman (ph). She played piano professionally. She painted, she drew. She was a member of the Feed the Hungry. She was a matriarch that any family should really have. I think it would only take a miracle for somebody to really survive that kind. But, you know, I still believe in miracles.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VALENCIA: Emotions are high not just among the family and friends but also among those that are trying to recover any sign of life. I've spoken to Miami Dade Fire and Rescue who say it has been demoralizing over the weekend and these last five days for them to continue to dig through these piles of debris without any signs of life, coming up empty handed.

We are still very much so in a rescue mode. Fire and rescue telling us that they have not officially yet entered a recovery process. John?

[06:05:00]

BERMAN: All right, Nick Valencia. Meanwhile a loud clap of thunder right there. The conditions here at the site on and off have been very hard for the workers to go through. So, we could get some serious rain to complicate efforts going forward.

Developing overnight new details about past warnings of possible structural damage to Champlain Towers South and the response from local officials.

NPR reports that November 2018, a Surfside town inspector assured residents the building was in, quote, "very good shape," just one month after an engineering report said there was major structural damage to the property.

One of the reporters who broke that story is joining me now, NPR Correspondent Brian Mann. Brian, thanks so much for being with us.

BRIAN MANN, NPR CORRESPONDENT: Thanks for having me John.

BERMAN: We're talking about 2018, there was a structural report that said underneath the tower, which I should tell people is behind the one standing up right here, structural damage underneath. Yet, officials in the town told people who lived in the building what?

MANN: So there was this meeting that happened in November, just a month after this report was created and according to minutes of that meeting that NPR acquired a town building inspector comes to that meeting and tells residents that the building is in good shape.

And we interviewed one of the residents who was at that meeting. She said that she walked away feeling reassured, feeling that she was living in a safe building. They knew there were cosmetic problems, there were maintenance issues, but this building inspector, according to the minutes of that meeting, assured people that they were living in safe conditions.

BERMAN: Based on your reporting, the 2018 engineering report, should it have raised alarm bells? Is it the type of thing that at that time would have stuck out to people?

MANN: So, it's important to say that this report was not a smoking gun. This does not tell us for sure why this building collapsed. These investigations are now underway. What all the experts I talked to do say that is it should have raised real red flags. It should have caused people to go in and do deep forensic digging on the concrete and steel holding this structure up.

And, in fact, the consultant who compiled this report issued a statement this week saying that it did raise, their report did raise safety concerns. Concerns for the safety of people in that building. This happened three years ago and again it's clear that the town of Surfside did not immediately say we need repairs done, we need more inspections done.

Speaking last night the mayor of Surfside said he has real questions about that and they're going to put more information out in the public in the days ahead about that process.

BERMAN: The residents that you talked to, the people who were at this meeting, did they feel pretty safe from 2018 going forward? Did they think there was anything wrong with their building?

MANN: They knew that there were cosmetic issues. Everybody talks about the fact that this building was an older building and it was decaying in some ways. But, they say they had no idea that they were in any way unsafe. And especially, you know, once this report came out people had questions. But then they went to this meeting and they came away saying we felt reassured.

We knew we were going to spend some money, we were going to do some things to sure up the building over time. But the idea that they were living in a structure that could fail in this progressive way, collapsing, pan caking as this did, furthest thing from anyone's mind.

BERMAN: Look, I think it's important to reiterate that. No one has every seen anything quite like this, because buildings aren't supposed to fall down quite like this. Nevertheless, we're all searching for some kind of answers, for some kind of signs that could have been missed. That's why your reporting is so important.

Brian, thanks so much for joining us this morning.

MANN: Thanks for having me.

BERMAN: Keep up the good work.

BERMAN: Obviously again, the crews here are working around the clock. It is still a search and rescue operation. We have heard from officials about how the search is going and what their concerns are with the structures that do remain in place in the area.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLES BURKETT, MAYOR SURFSIDE, FLORIDA: We don't know why that building fell down and given that we need to get in and understand what's going on with the sister building.

We're going to make alternative housing available for any resident that really doesn't want to be in that building. I don't know if I'd be comfortable staying in that building until I knew for sure that they had done a comprehensive, top to bottom study on what's going on with the systems in that building.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: That is the mayor of Surfside, Florida, expressing concern about the buildings that are standing here. The buildings all along the coast of Florida. One person described it as a necklace of these giant condos that ring, you know, half of the entire state.

I'm joined now by the acting mayor of a community just north of here, right? Larissa Svechin, thank you so much for being with us right now. I appreciate it.

What are your concerns about -- and I should tell people, your just north of here and you have all these buildings like the one we're looking at right now. You have dozens and dozens and dozens of these condo towers. What are your concerns for the towers in your city?

LARISA SVECHIN, ACTING MAYOR OF SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FLORIDA: Well fist of all our concern is obviously the safety of our residents.

[06:10:00]

And so, we are immediately putting in plans to check 59 buildings that are either at the 40-year mark or have just went through the 40- year recertification, because ultimately we need to understand if there was anything that was missed, anything that we can do, how we can help, how we can mitigate for something.

And so starting this morning, actually, we're taking out teams that are going out for our city, which is a pretty small city but has over 20,000 condo units, and start checking those buildings, the 20 that are going through recertification right now.

BERMAN: Based on what we are learning, and we still don't know much from this collapse, what are you looking for or what do you want to engineers to look for in these buildings?

SVECHIN: Well, only the engineers know that obviously. But, they -- the point is that they already have a list of items that they look into. So, they look both at the plans and then they're visually going out to see any of these things that might concern people, the spalling, the deterioration, things like that.

BERMAN: Spalling is the -- is the metal rebar is in there expanding because they're corroding. Crack cement and the like. The people who live in your community (inaudible) each of them about how safe they should feel this morning?

SVECHIN: They should feel incredibly safe because we're on it. We have a (inaudible) that (inaudible) so that we have (inaudible) that brand new on the beach side that go up to 50 stories, that our state of the art engineering just put in.

And we have west side buildings that are much older that (inaudible) were obviously very scared and we're going to be out there to make sure that they know that they're going to be safe.

BERMAN: Now, what services are you providing? What do you want the people here in Surfside to know?

SVECHIN: We -- anything that they need we will provide for them. We've already been helping them. but for us right now the safety of our residents is number one.

BERMAN: Acting Mayor Larisa Svechin I appreciate you being with us this morning.

SVECHIN: Thank you.

BERMAN: Thank you so much for your time. And again, you know, let us know what the inspectors find as they go through these buildings, because I do think there's an enormous amount of curiosity whether there might be something that people have missed over the years.

SVECHIN: And that's our goal. We want to be able to show anyone that is interested exactly what we're going to find, because ultimately everything has to be transparent right now. Everyone needs to know what is happening in every single community here, especially on the coast of Florida.

BERMAN: Acting Mayor, appreciate your time.

SVECHIN: Thank you.

BERMAN: Thanks so much for being with us.

SVENCHIN: Thank you.

BERMAN: Again, it is now raining here, which is something that the search crews have had to deal with for five days now. The fires that they had had in the search area not so much of a problem now, but clearly the rain not a welcome sight here. Not one bit.

The search does continue. They've dug a trench through the site. They're having more success moving some of the pieces. We're going to speak to the fire marshal yet to get an exact sense of what's going on.

ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Plus just a short time from now lawyers from the Trump Organization will meet with prosecutors to try to convince them not to pursue charges.

And former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr says the election fraud claims are all B.S. He knew it from the beginning. My next guest says don't fall for Barr's rehab tour.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:17:20]

HILL: New this morning former Attorney General William Barr says he suspected former President Donald Trump's claims of widespread election fraud were, quote, "All B.S."

But he launched an official inquiry into some of them to appease his boss. Those comments were published in "The Atlantic" as part of an excerpt from "Betrayal" a book on the final days of the Trump White House by ABC's Jonathan Karl.

Joining me now CNN Political Analyst Maggie Haberman. She's a Washington correspondent for "The New York Times." And CNN Senior Legal Analyst and former Federal Prosecutor Elie Honig. Good to see both of you in person this morning.

So when we look at this, I just want to start with one excerpt for folks who have maybe not read the piece yet, which -- in which Barr lays out his mindset in the final days of the administration.

So Karl writes, "Barr told me he already concluded that it was highly unlikely that evidence existed that would tip the scales on the election. He had expected Trump to lose and therefore wasn't surprised by the outcome.

He also knew that at some point Trump was going to confront him about the allegations and he wanted to be able to say that he had looked into them and that they were unfounded."

That he says in another point, "We realized from the beginning it was all B.S.," Maggie?

I mean it's certainly and interesting take and interesting to go inside those final days, but it seems a little bit different from what we had learned prior to this.

MAGGIE HABERMAN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: So actually I have a slightly different take on this. Jonathan Swan at Axios reported about this meeting that John Karl writes about. He reported on it many months ago, so we know that there was this exchange.

I understand that there are going to be people who are arguing that Barr is doing some clean-up on his own rep and I think you might hear from some of them momentarily, but I -- but I do think that actually hearing the former attorney general on the record saying this is important, especially at a moment where former President Trump is still pushing these false claims of election fraud.

I do think having voices like Bill Barr saying this is not true, this is B.S., however he put it, does actually matter. And I do think for the historical record him describing this is important.

It is absolutely legitimate to raise questions about what he was saying publicly before that. But I still think that having him on the record in this interview is significant.

HILL: I think you -- go ahead. I see you inching right next to Maggie.

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL CORRESPONDENT: I am going to start by agreeing with Bill Barr, that the election fraud story is, to use Bill Barr's term, utter B.S. The utter is mine, but B.S. I do not give Bill Barr credit. I don't give credit to a person who fanned the flames, who started to light this fire and then months later, you know, poured a lukewarm cup of water on it. It's too late.

You already helped to do the damage because the reality is, and this is not in the article, Bill Barr lied to the public over and over about the threat of election fraud before the election in those crucial months when the big lie was taking hold, when it was spreading. He said it to NPR. He said it to CNN. He said it to Congress and it was simply not true. So, he bears responsibility for starting the big lie.

[06:20:05]

HILL: So, I do want to play one -- at least one of those moments when he did -- when he was speaking with our own Wolf Blitzer in September talking about that. Let's just play that moment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL BARR, FORMER U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and corrosion.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: As far as widespread fraud, we haven't seen that since --

BARR: Well we haven't had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed.

BLITZER: You've said you were worried that a foreign country could send thousands of fake ballots, thousands of fake ballots to people and it might be impossible to detect. What are you basing that on?

BARR: I'm basing that -- as I've said repeatedly, I'm basing that on logic.

BLITZER: Pardon?

BARR: Logic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: So the issue with that at the time was this was being based on logic, which didn't seem to mean a whole heck of a lot and not based on facts and on evidence. And that here we found ourselves.

HABERMAN: And it's actually -- it's an interesting clip in part because of the use of foreign ballots, which Barr is talking about, which became the basis for this theory that Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff was pushing DOJ after Barr had left to look at.

So, I'm going to think this goes to Elie's points about what he had said previously. I still think that it is important to have this out there, that he is pushing back on what Trump is doing now.

But again, there are legitimate reasons to go back and look at what Barr said and look at whether there is any kind of responsibility that he had in terms of pushing this idea that voters couldn't trust the election, which is what led up for months up to November 3.

HONIG: It's a perfect example, because that interview was in September. So about two months before the election. In another point of that interview Bill Barr told Wolf Blitzer we, DOJ, indicted a case involving 1,700 fraudulent ballots in Texas.

You know what DOJ had to do the next day? Issue a correction because it was not we, it was state prosecutor. It was not 1,700 fraudulent ballots, it was one. That's the kind of nonsense that he was spreading before the election.

HILL: So there's also, we learn in this article, there's -- we're learning about his interactions with Mitch McConnell, right? And what was happening behind the scenes. And again, as you said Maggie, you know we're really looking at, especially in the months since the election it's the public versus the private in terms of all of these comments.

So, in terms of these exchanges with Mitch McConnell and this is P108, Karl writes, "It was revealed Barr was being pushed to tell lies from the election by Mitch McConnell. Oh now, sorry. That was the -- pardon me -- that -- I'm misquoting that one. That was the -- that was the former president weighing it.

But what this gets at is Mitch McConnell begging Bill Barr at one point to push back on Trump's fraud and to do it because they're concerned about what's happening in Georgia, right? With the Senate race in Georgia. And that is fascinating because Bill Barr says well when it's appropriate, at the appropriate time then I'll come out and say something.

HABERMAN: Right. So, this was -- and I have similar reporting on this actually. That McConnell and Barr were working in tandem for a while. McConnell was calling Barr repeatedly. McConnell was very worried about those two Georgia runoffs, obviously with good reason as we ended up seeing.

And he was worried about the impact that what Trump was saying was going to have on those seats. I think that what -- critics will point to the fact that McConnell could have also spoken out and could have also said something before December 14, and make the case that what the former president was pushing at the time was just simply not true.

McConnell saw that as potentially dangerous to his own caucus and I think you saw him make decisions that way accordingly. I think that is typically how Mitch McConnell has led his caucus.

It's not a surprise, but it is interesting to look at what alliances of government officials were going on and what strategic decisions they were making that who could be effective in being forward-leaning with the former president. Because remember, McConnell and Trump were barely speaking at that point.

HILL: But it's also fascinating too, and just real quickly on this because I know we have another topic Elie. The fact that he says I'll say something when it's appropriate at the time.

He had also told Jonathan Karl one of the reasons he's doing this interview is because he felt he had been painted as politicizing the DOJ. But if you're saying you're going to speak out when it's convenient and appropriate for one party, I mean --

HONIG: How does Bill Barr think this is good for him? I mean, Bill Barr told Jonathan Karl I did this in part because Mitch McConnell had appealed to me. That's the opposite of what any attorney general should do. You don't make decisions, you don't base your timing on what's going to help the Republicans or either party win a Senate race in Georgia, that's politicizing DOJ.

HILL: Second topic that we do want to get to is that CNN has learned that lawyers for the Trump Organization are expected to meet today with prosecutors and the goal here is to try to convince them not to purse charges. What is this? How is this landing? I mean, have you had any reaction to that from folks in the Trump camp at this point?

HABERMAN: Well it's not -- it's not landing well, to put it mildly, Erica. I mean look, there is a lot of concern in and around the Trump Organization about this indictment, about whether there could be future indictments.

Id o think -- I have no idea what is going to be in this indictment, none of us does. And I think it is really important to wait and see what is actually there. I think there a lot of reacts that are getting ahead of the actual facts.

[06:25:00]

That includes, on the Trump side, they are extremely, extremely concerned about this. Donald Trump has spent decades trying to avoid prosecution in one form or another. And I think that he may still, but this could be very harmful to his company depending on what comes forward.

HILL: Yes. And that's what we'll be watching for. You get 15 seconds.

HONIG: If they indict the Trump Organization, that's a big deal. As Maggie says, it could spell even the end of the Trump Org., but it -- that is not an indictment of Donald J. Trump the individual.

HABERMAN: That's right.

HONIG: Nobody goes to jail on a corporate indictment.

HILL: Elie, Maggie good to see you both. Thank you.

President Biden ordering a new round of airstrikes against Iranian backed militia groups. We're going to bring you all of those breaking details. And coming up, we are live on the ground near the scene of that

Florida building collapse. We'll speak with a local fire marshal about the desperate effort to find survivors.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:30:05]