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Tennessee Health Official Claims She Was Fired for Providing Information on Teenagers Asking for COVID-19 Vaccination; President Biden to Give Speech Criticizing Republican Led State Laws Restricting Voting; Interview with Texas State Representative Jasmine Crockett. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired July 13, 2021 - 08:00   ET

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

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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Brianna Keilar alongside John Berman. On this NEW DAY, Tennessee's top vaccine official says she was fired over an argument about vaccinating teens, and she is standing by to talk to us right now.

Plus, President Biden's speech in Philadelphia. How he'll lay out the case for voting rights and call out Donald Trump's big lie.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Dozens of Democrats in Texas taking a dramatic stand against restrictive voting bills. They've left the state. One of those lawmakers joins us live.

And the new book blowing off the lid of the last days of the Trump White House, author Michael Bender joins us with stories from insiders, including the former president himself.

KEILAR: A very good morning to viewers here in the United States and around the world. It is Tuesday, July 13th. And we are beginning with the firing of Tennessee's top vaccine official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus says she lost her job over an argument about vaccinating teenagers against coronavirus. Now she says she's worried about the people of her state.

BERMAN: Dr. Fiscus claims all of this stems from a memo she sent in May to medical providers citing Tennessee's law about minors getting medical care without their parents' permission. CNN has reached out to the Tennessee Health Department for a statement. They responded, quote, "We cannot comment on HR or personnel matters.

KEILAR: Dr. Michelle Fiscus joining us now to talk about this. She is a pediatrician who served as the medical director of the Vaccine Preventable Diseases and Immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health. Doctor, thanks so much for being with us. First, can you just tell us about this memo, what it said, and why you drafted it?

DR. MICHELLE FISCUS, FIRED TENNESSEE TOP VACCINATION OFFICIAL: Sure. Good morning, and thank you for having me on this morning. I wrote the memo to COVID-19 vaccine providers in the state of Tennessee after I received several questions about what people should do if minors showed up to request a COVID-19 vaccine, because we were right on the cusp of the Pfizer vaccine being available for 12-years-old and older.

So I asked our Office of General Counsel to provide some language to explain the minor doctrine which has been in place since the Supreme Court ruling in 1987, and sent that out in a memo to vaccine providers, and received some backlash as a result of that. And so our legislators felt that the memo was meant to undermine parental authority rather than providing factual information to vaccine providers in the state on how to care for minors.

KEILAR: Are you, in your view, being villainized for following science? How do you see this?

FISCUS: Well, I think, in general, our state is not among the most progressive when it comes to listening to scientists. Our vaccination rate is at 38 percent, it's one of the worst in the country, although we had one of the fastest rollouts of the COVID-19 vaccine in the country. And so there is a significant contingent of people here, and many of our lawmakers, unfortunately, who choose to buy into antivaccine rhetoric and conspiracy theory instead of listening to actual science and listening to CDC recommendations.

KEILAR: Have you been told why you were fired?

FISCUS: I was not. When you're in an executive service position in the Department of Health, you serve at the pleasure of the governor. You can be terminated without cause, and so that's what happened yesterday. I was given a choice to resign or be terminated, and I chose to be terminated because I've not done anything wrong except inform our physicians of what the guidelines were around vaccinating minors. My job is to protect, promote, and improve the health and prosperity of Tennesseans, and that includes getting them vaccinated against COVID-19 and helping them understand the science around these vaccines and the importance of choosing to get vaccinated.

KEILAR: In your statement you write that you are the 25th of 64 state and territorial immunization program directors to actually leave their position during this pandemic. What has it been like to be a public health official in Tennessee?

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FISCUS: This is a job that I absolutely love. It's work that I love. The people that I work with, the on the ground people in the Tennessee Department of Health are amazing. And they have worked themselves to exhaustion to try to help people of Tennessee. But our leadership has been toxic to work under, and morale within the department is poor. There are state workers all over the state who fear for their jobs because they want to do the right thing, and the administration is much more interested in politics.

And what really concerns me is that in order to appease the legislators that were upset about this memo, our leadership of the Department of Health has instructed the Department of Health to no longer do outreach around immunizations for children of any kind. That's infant immunizations, HPV immunizations in a state that has one of the highest HPV cancer rates in the country. Flu vaccine outreach in schools is being canceled for the fall. Back to school immunizations can't be messaged -- I'm sorry, the National Immunization Awareness month is in August, and we were told we're not allowed to message that.

That is the travesty. That is where the people of Tennessee have been sold out for politics. And that is, frankly, why I am here, is because of my 24 colleagues who have also endured this and other issues along the course of dealing with this pandemic. And someone needs to speak out about it, and so I guess that will be me.

KEILAR: So, that isn't just -- we're not just talking about anti- COVID vaccinations. We're talking about witnessing a movement of anti- vaccinations, period.

FISCUS: That's right.

KEILAR: And what is that going to mean?

FISCUS: Well, we already have districts in our schools that have below standard immunization rates. We already have counties in Tennessee that are prime sites for outbreaks of highly infectious diseases, like measles, because we're 30,000 doses behind in MMR vaccines because parents felt like they couldn't go get vaccinated or their pediatricians or the Department of Health weren't available during the pandemic. We have been told we can't even go remind those parents that they need to bring their children in to get vaccinated.

So if folks think that COVID-19 is highly transmissible, measles outbreaks are nine times more transmissible than COVID-19, and this is what we're trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent diseases that can be prevented. And at this point, there is no reason for anyone to die from COVID-19 or any other vaccine preventable disease.

KEILAR: You cannot message to parents to get their children routinely vaccinated -- it is really a stunning development. Dr. Michelle Fiscus, thank you for being with us.

FISCUS: Thanks for your time.

KEILAR: John?

BERMAN: Wow.

KEILAR: I know. Can you imagine?

BERMAN: No.

KEILAR: It makes no sense.

BERMAN: It makes no sense at all. It seems as if the people in Tennessee, that their health is being deliberately compromised somehow. KEILAR: Yes. And that it's not just -- we're not just talking about

the COVID vaccine. Now we're hearing something incredibly alarming from Dr. Fiscus, that all vaccines are somehow being politicized when they have just been routine and have been responsible for keeping so many Americans and so many kids safe.

BERMAN: It has come to this, I have to say. Again, the optional portion of the pandemic and much more beyond.

KEILAR: Yes.

BERMAN: All right, President Biden wades knee deep into the voting rights debate when he delivers a speech in Philadelphia. He is expected to launch a pressure campaign to fight back against Republican led state legislatures that are trying to restrict access to the ballot box. CNN White House correspondent John Harwood joins us now. So, he's going to talk about the morality behind this, John, but is he going to have a plan to actually change it?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's got a plan to try to change it, but he doesn't now have the votes to change it in terms of action by the Congress. And so what he's going to do with this moral case, as White House officials say, is there is merit to it, and that's the tool that he has, in addition to some executive actions that he's taking. The Justice Department, for example, is filing suit against some of the state laws to constrain voting access. There are laws in 17 states where Republicans are trying to curb voting access.

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But because of the close division within the United States Senate, 50- 50, and the existence of the filibuster, which Democrats do not have the votes right now to get rid of, Joe Biden has got to use the bully pulpit as his best tool to try to make change.

Now, Democrats don't think that the situation today necessarily will be the situation later in the year. There is a sequencing by the White House. Their current priority, as you know, John, is to enact an infrastructure proposal on a bipartisan basis, then enact a larger piece of legislation with Democratic votes alone to help struggling families. They don't want a partisan message to interfere with that at the moment. So what they're going to do is go to Philadelphia, to the National Constitution Center, and make the argument that the American Constitution enshrined a democratic system in which the right to vote was paramount. It has been expanded, of course, over the years. And now what has happened is the Republican Party, seeing power moving in the opposite direction, is trying to take changes to stop that.

And we've seen that in the wake of the 2020 election, which, of course, was scrutinized heavily and the courts affirmed the validity of it. You were talking to author Michael Wolff, the author, in the last hour. And he says, well, it's not like American politics are going in the same direction. It's been captured by absurdity. But that absurdity has been married with the fear of declining clout by the Republican Party and its constituents. And Joe Biden has got to try to make a public argument to his party, hoping that they'll get action later to stop it.

BERMAN: A, thanks for being a loyal viewer of the 7:00 hour. B, John, we just did get a little bit of breaking news. The White House has confirmed that the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, will travel to the Olympics in Japan. There had been some question because of the state of emergency that will be imposed there during the games.

HARWOOD: Right. There are not going to be spectators at the games. But the United States, the White House wanted to have a presence. There is no indication President Biden is going to join his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, at the Olympics, but she is going to plant the flag, in effect, for the United States, for the United States team. And that's a significant development.

BERMAN: John Harwood, great to see you. Thanks for watching.

HARWOOD: You bet.

BERMAN: Up next, the governor of Texas threatening to arrest Democratic lawmakers for leaving the state. One of those lawmakers responds live next.

KEILAR: Plus, former President Trump wanted to execute who for what? The leak that rattled him more than any other.

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KEILAR: The Texas statehouse's Democratic Caucus is in Washington this morning after fleeing their home state in protest. They want to block a controversial voting bill that Texas Republicans are trying to pass in a special legislative session.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott had this to say.

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GOV. GREG ABBOTT (R), TEXAS: What the House of Representatives can do, what the speaker can do is issue a call to have these members arrested. In addition to that, however, I can and I will continue to call special session after special session after special session, all the way up until election next year. As soon as they come back in the state of Texas, they will be arrested, they will be cabined inside the Texas Capitol until they get their job done.

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KEILAR: All right. Joining me now, one of the state legislators that Governor Abbott was talking about there, Texas State Representative Jasmine Crockett.

Representative, thank you for joining us in studio this morning. I do appreciate it.

Two threats there from the governor. Let's talk about the first one. He's threatening that you and your Democratic colleagues will be arrested. Do you worry about that?

JASMINE CROCKETT (D), TEXAS STATE REPRESENTATIVE; FLED STATE: I don't.

KEILAR: Why not?

CROCKETT: I mean, I don't worry probably because I know the law, and the governor knows the law as well. I'm a criminal defense attorney. And so, I understand -- I haven't committed a crime so I can't get arrested. The most that can happen is I could be detained.

And it's not the governor that gets to make that decision. It's the speaker of the House, the speaker of the House that was elected by both Democrats and Republicans. He is the one that has to make that an issue.

The governor can do special session after special session. I'm sure that's kind of your next question.

KEILAR: Yeah.

CROCKETT: But I'm not worried about the threat of being arrested. The most that could happen is we could be detained, which is why we got out of the state. The governor of Texas has no jurisdiction outside of the state of Texas along with DPS.

KEILAR: So if he's threatening that the special session going for 30 days, you have to stay out of Texas for all 30 days, right?

CROCKETT: Absolutely.

KEILAR: So if he's threatening special session after special session, I mean, eventually don't you just have to go to work and deal with this?

CROCKETT: So, yes and no. Here's the interesting part. The governor got so frustrated that he vetoed the legislative branch. With that, that means that we can't function anyway. There is no money after September 1, so he can call as many special sessions as he wants to, but there's no funding.

We need parliamentarians. We need those that work in our committees. We need those that actually draft the bills. We don't draft the bills ourselves.

Guess what? He defunded them when he got upset because we didn't pass his funding bill last time. So, that funding ends on September 1. If he calls us back, there is no one to go back. The work can't get done after September 1.

KEILAR: Let's talk about what's in the bill that you oppose because the bill last time is different from this one. They dropped the Sunday voting prohibition and they dropped the process that would have made it easier to overturn election results.

So what is still in the bill that is worth doing this for? CROCKETT: Yeah, absolutely. So, there is a voter ID for vote by mail,

which is very interesting, you know. Texas got slammed before for voter ID. We still have it, but the court decided, hey, you need to make some provisions for those that maybe can't get an ID. So there is a voter ID issue when it comes to vote by mail.

Twenty-four-hour voting, that became a huge sticking point. What we saw in Harris County, which is the most populous county in the state of Texas, and one of the most populous counties in the country, was that we heard testimony on Saturday from first responders, those that have been on the front lines of COVID-19 saying, hey, 24-hour voting was a deal changer for us.

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We could go on shift, work for 24 hours, and know that we could still participate in democracy. We were able to go ahead and vote whenever we were available.

We also had an opportunity to sit in our cars, you know. So these medical providers that are sitting here trying to save us from a pandemic, they had that option, and they used that option. But more importantly, what we saw is the people that took advantage of actually drive-thru voting, the vast majority were minorities.

KEILAR: Right.

CROCKETT: That's the problem. That was the target.

KEILAR: They did use those voting abilities in a larger proportion than white voters.

I want to ask you about how you got here. A couple charter planes. You know, what the -- the governor is saying essentially, this is a junket that is paid for by taxpayers. You say?

CROCKETT: No.

KEILAR: What?

CROCKETT: I say that the only person that's wasting taxpayer money --

KEILAR: Is this paid for by taxpayers?

CROCKETT: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

KEILAR: Who is paying for it? Who's paying for the planes?

CROCKETT: I paid for my own ticket, let me be clear. I flew Southwest. So, let me --

KEILAR: But the charter flight, you have about 50 Democrats?

CROCKETT: The charter flights were not -- they were not paid for by taxpayer money. We have people that are supporting us such as Beto O'Rourke. We have people that are interested in seeing that democracy actually prevails.

And so, we had help, but that wasn't taxpayer dollars. We would not do that. We don't even have access to that.

I mean, to be honest, we make $600 a month as it is. So I don't know how we're just going to grab a load of money, taxpayer money and say, hey, we're going to use this to go to D.C.

So, no, it's not funded by taxpayers.

KEILAR: And lastly, you're here in Washington.

CROCKETT: Yes.

KEILAR: But it seems like this debate -- I mean, we're going to hear the president talk about it. But what are Democrats really doing about it in Washington at this point? I mean, are -- what you're saying, is it just falling on deaf ears?

CROCKETT: You know, the last time we were here, sadly enough I have to say the last time, right? I was elected to stay in --

KEILAR: When we spoke, yeah.

CROCKETT: Yeah. I was elected to stay in Austin, not in D.C.

But we moved the needle the last time we were here. You and I and Trey Martinez Fischer talked about our conversations. We were able to move Manchin in some way.

We didn't have an opportunity to talk to Senator Sinema last time, and so, we want to move the needle a little bit more. We want to impress upon them how serious this is.

We're not with our families right now. We're not able to go back to our state. It's just that serious.

We're not asking for anything that we're not entitled to. All we need is oversight, and I think that, you know, carving out a special exception on the filibuster specifically for this, nothing else, I think that's not too much to ask.

KEILAR: Representative Jasmine Crockett, thank you so much for being with us.

CROCKETT: Thanks. Good to see you.

KEILAR: And next, the explosive revelations about Donald Trump's comments about Hitler and African-Americans.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Plus, the leaked story that had former president Trump calling for executions. The author of a brand-new book joins us with that and more.

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BERMAN: A new book out today gives an inside look into the chaos and struggles of former President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign. "Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost" by author Michael Bender chronicles the aftermath of Trump's election defeat, including this. This is from Mike Pompeo, former secretary of state.

Quote: The crazies have taken over, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned a colleague. He conveyed concern to others that Mr. Trump might be more willing to engage in an international conflict to strengthen his political argument for remaining in office.

Joining us now, Michael Bender, who is also the senior White House reporter for "The Wall Street Journal".

Michael, great to have you here. Congratulations on the new book.

MICHAEL BENDER, AUTHOR, "FRANKLY, WE DID WIN THIS ELECTION": Thank you.

BERMAN: I started with the Pompeo quote, because from a 30,000 foot view, I think this is the thrust of what your book gets into, which is that so many people inside the White House and in Trump world felt that the president was dangerous.

BENDER: Yeah.

BERMAN: Felt that he was dangerous, yet didn't take it public.

BENDER: That's right. I think we are all pretty familiar with the story of the chaos of Trump's four years, whether it's the administration or the president himself. What this book lays out pretty methodically and for the first time is how dangerous people close closest to Trump thought he was dangerous for the country. And there's example after example about this book.

And you bring up a good one. Secretary Mike Pompeo becomes concerned about the national security of the country, the domestic unrest and what that could mean internationally. Privately he sets of a call, daily call with the chief of staff, and Mark Milley, the nation's top general in order to try to keep temperatures down. Publicly, what does he say? He says that there is going to be a smooth transition to a second Trump term.

BERMAN: That's a problem. If so many people in this world felt that the president was a threat to democracy, yet weren't willing to tell the American people?

BENDER: People have different reasons for being around Trump. There's a lot of short-hands in the media. Enablers, grifters who are attracted to the center of power as in any administration. What was striking to me in this book, was how people kind of told themselves that they were the truth tellers to the president. They were the ones who were there as the guardrails. But when you talk to other people in those meetings and no one was

really telling Trump no or being clear to him from minor things, the size of rallies, no one told him that Tulsa was going to be half empty until he was in the arena and he learned it from TV. That story is in the book. Bigger issues here, all the way to January 6th where Mike Pence tells Trump he'll look at any legal analysis he has, any legal analysis his lawyers can come up with he'll take a look at, although he doesn't think he has the authority to overturn the election results.

The president hears the first part and here's the vice president's openness, which brings him to an interview I had with him where he tells me, Mike Pence never told me that he wasn't going to do this. Mike Pence never told me no.

BERMAN: Again and again and again, you bring up that pence thing because Pence, you know?