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White House Doctor Facing Scrutiny; November Jobs Numbers; White House to Speak about Jobs Numbers; Sinema Won't Commit to Spending Bill. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired December 03, 2021 - 08:30   ET

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


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[08:31:36]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: We're learning some brand-new details about former President Trump's reaction to Mark Meadows' stunning disclosure that Trump tested positive for coronavirus three days before the first presidential debate.

Joining us now with her new reporting is CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger.

So, what have you learned here?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, not surprisingly, the president is furious about Mark Meadows' book and, according to a source familiar with the president's thinking, that he told a bunch of people how angry he was.

Now, one source said to me, look, the president was never that close to Mark Meadows anyway, but other sources have told CNN, yes, you know, they were pretty close, Meadows got on the Trump 2024 CNN -- I mean Trump 2024 presidential train pretty early. So the president kind of liked him. But now he's in the doghouse, which is why you see Mark Meadows coming out there and saying, oh, what I wrote, that's fake news, because Donald Trump said it was fake news. Remarkable.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Gloria, you know, Sean Conley, who was the White House physician, is coming under scrutiny --

BORGER: Yes, absolutely.

BERMAN: Understandable scrutiny because of what Mark Meadows wrote in his book, that there was a positive Covid test that the world never knew about, that people inside the White House who came close to the president never knew about, that, you know, gold star families never knew about.

BORGER: Yes, it's a dereliction of duty if you ask me. I mean we all understand that the president's doctor works for the president, but he also works for the people. And if the president had a positive test and was going to rallies, I mean according to Mark Meadows Conley said, you know, you have to get him off the plane. But he didn't get off the plane. He continued to go to these rallies. Meadows says, OK, he got another test that was negative, or another reading that was negative, so they just went on.

And then, you know, Meadows said to people close to the president, in the inner circle, treat him as if he's positive for Covid. What does that mean? Who's the inner circle? What about the people he was meeting with? And was he positive for Covid? And what is the doctor doing about this? What about contact tracing? Has the White House ever heard about that?

KEILAR: Yes, his -- you know, Alyssa Farah, the former communications director --

BORGER: Right.

KEILAR: Says that Meadows never said that to senior advisers. I mean if he said it to somebody, it wasn't -- it wasn't to her.

BORGER: He said he did. Yes.

KEILAR: He said that -- he said that he said it, but she said she never heard anything like that, and the people around her never heard anything like that.

But I also think it's interesting, you know, Sean Conley was there whitewashing what was going on in that, you know, we see that appearance there at Walter Reed.

BORGER: Right.

KEILAR: But Mark Meadows, even at the time, he was actually caught on the pool camera telling reporters what was kind of really going on, that this was actually, you know, this is pretty bad. So, you kind of have this track record with Mark Meadows of him being pretty honest about stuff not being great.

BORGER: Right. And so you had --

KEILAR: (INAUDIBLE) being accurate about it.

BORGER: I mean I remember that -- that day. You had Sean Conley out there saying everything's great with the president. He's doing really well. Kind of doing the Baghdad Bob routine and then you had Mark Meadows going over and talking to a gaggle of reporters off the record he said at that time while it was being recorded so it had to be on the record saying, you know, the president is really sick.

The public has a right to know the president's physical condition.

[08:35:03]

And that should come from his doctor, and not from his chief of staff.

KEILAR: Yes, the doctor has an obligation to his patient, the president --

BORGER: But the patient --

KEILAR: But he's also a naval officer with an obligation to his country.

BORGER: And to his boss, who is the commander in chief. And I think that complicates things just a little bit.

KEILAR: It does.

All right, Gloria, thank you so much.

BORGER: Sure.

BERMAN: All right, we do have breaking news. Minutes ago, the Labor Department released the November jobs report. Man, is this one confusing?

CNN chief business correspondent Christine Romans here with the numbers.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: It's a riddle to match the dynamism we're seeing in the American job market now, to be honest. You see 210,000 jobs added back. That's less than half of what economists were expecting and it's half of what we saw last month. But the jobless rate fell to 4.2 percent.

This is a low number. This is a good number. That's the best we've seen of the pandemic, since before. I mean you can almost argue that's -- looks like a full employment number, but why didn't you add more jobs?

When you look at the jobs and how it is here, September and October are both revised higher, remember. But then this disappointment in November. And I looked through these numbers, John, and I see a lot of customer-facing jobs had very little job growth, if at all. So, customer-facing jobs, that could be that it's not the job problem, it's the worker problem. Workers aren't going back to those customer- facing jobs.

We also know there's been something like 400,000 new businesses started this year. Those are new businesses people who left their employer and started working for themselves. So that's a big number to watch here as well.

The jobless rate, John, 4.2 percent. So this is last month. Now you're looking at 4.2 percent from the jobless rate in November. That is a really good number.

We got to tease a part a lot of this. You're going to have economists arguing about why the numbers look like this, why they weren't bigger than this. Again, this is pre the new variant and post the summer of the delta variant. A lot going on here.

BERMAN: What are the futures doing right now?

ROMANS: Futures right now, interestingly enough, are a little bit higher here. So --

BERMAN: They don't know what to do. They're confused by this because, Romans, you were just saying to me that the labor participation rate, a lot more people actually got in to the workforce.

ROMANS: About almost 600,000 people who were not looking for a job and were not counted as unemployed, those people are now looking. They're now back in the labor market, counted as in the labor market. That's a lot of people. Almost 600,000. So that suggests that there is more willingness to go back to work, but go back to what work. That's kind of the interesting part of it.

BERMAN: And that, in theory, is terrific news. If more people start looking for work, especially if the unemployment rate is at 4.2 percent. But it doesn't match the not phenomenal job growth.

ROMANS: What is phenomenal in this number is another wage growth number of 4.8 percent. And 4.8 percent is wage growth we really haven't seen in a generation, right? And so you can see that the people who are going back to work, they're being lured back by higher wages. We can also see in numbers, in other data from the Labor Department, the job hoppers, the quitters who are then getting new jobs, they're seeing wage increases of well over 5 percent.

So, again, I said it was dynamic. There is so much going on in the jobs market right now. People are thinking differently about their job and what they want out of their job, and these numbers every month are just almost a riddle.

BERMAN: One of the things you and I have talked about a lot is that the pandemic broke our measurements. It made it very hard for us to measure anything because it changed some of the fundamental assumptions that people have about the economy.

One of the things that's come from that is we've had to revise past numbers.

ROMANS: Yes.

BERMAN: So, you know, you see 210,000 jobs added, what's the likelihood there could be a huge revision here.

ROMANS: Yes. And we know the last four or five months there have been upside revisions to every one of those months. We had thought that this summer there was this lull in hiring in the summer. There wasn't a lull in hiring in the summer. The summer, June, July, very strong months, August, September, were better than expected. October was revised higher as well. So, you can see more than, John, 5.8 (INAUDIBLE). So now you're talking about 6 million jobs created so far this year are added back. That is an unbelievable number. In normal times, that would be record-breaking.

BERMAN: These aren't normal times.

ROMANS: These are not normal times. BERMAN: And we're trying to understand much more about these new

numbers we're seeing, where the jobs added, much lower than was anticipated. The unemployment rate, though, also much lower than anticipated. We're going to have much more on this, including reaction from the White House. I bet you can guess how they're going to spin it, next.

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[08:43:10]

KEILAR: Back now to our breaking news. U.S. employers adding 210,000 jobs in November. The unemployment rate falling to 4.2 percent.

Joining us now is White House correspondent John Harwood.

Of course, this is welcome news for the Biden administration. How are they responding?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, they're -- we're going to hear from the president later and we'll hear from the administration economists beginning at 9:30.

I think there's -- there are disappointments and there are positive things in this report. Of course, the positive things are the decline in the unemployment rate and the increase in the labor participation rate. All that is good. That's from the household survey.

There's a separate survey, of course, of businesses, which shows only 210,000 jobs created. But we have to look at that little skeptically because saw, just in this report, positive revisions from past months up 82,000 and we've seen that in previous reports. So, the pandemic has created some real problems engaging at the particular time in a month how many jobs were added. So we're going to have to watch and see how that goes.

But I think, overall, the administration, despite the headline disappointment, you know, people had talked about, well, we'll half a million new jobs, just like we had in October. So it's 210,000 now. Provisionally, that's what it is, but they're going to focus on the fall in the unemployment rate, 4.2 percent, and the rise in labor participation.

BERMAN: We talked with Romans a little while ago, but more of the glass half full interpretation of that, which you just referred to, John. The glass half empty view of it would be, well, only 210,000 jobs added. That shows that companies were slowing down adding new jobs, even before the omicron variant became a thing, because these measurements were pre-omicron.

So if you are have -- if you are, you know, predisposed to be concerned here, what you would do is look at this and say, well, wait a second, omicron could make this even worse.

[08:45:04] HARWOOD: Well, there's no question about it. And certainly we saw that number seemed to get worse when the delta variant was surging. Then we had a period of time, certainly in October, when delta was receding, and things felt a little bit brighter.

But, of course, in the latter part of November, and this survey is -- takes place in the middle of the month, we saw an uptick in cases. And we've been dealing with that.

So, the pandemic -- the case rate is very bumpy from month to month. We've seen that this pandemic is very unpredictable. We don't know what omicron is going to do. But until we're past this pandemic, there's going to be a lot of churn and up and down and uncertainty in the economy that's going to make any sort of prediction or singular assessment. You know, is this a good economy or a bad economy? It's sort of both in different ways and in different places in the country.

KEILAR: John, great to have you here breaking this down for us.

HARWOOD: You bet.

KEILAR: Thank you, John Harwood.

Coming up, a key vote for the fate of the Biden economic agenda. CNN's rare and fascinating interview with Senator Kyrsten Sinema, next.

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KEILAR: President Biden needs her vote to get his sweeping social safety net bill passed. But Arizona Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema is still a holdout. In a sit-down interview with CNN, we get some insight into where Sinema stands on the Biden agenda and why she still won't commit to it.

CNN's Lauren Fox with us now.

You know, she's a mystery to so many people, but we did learn something here.

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, that's right, I mean she's a mystery to people who she doesn't feel like she has to negotiate directly with, with the president, with the majority leader. She's pretty direct about what her concerns are, but she's not a senator who does hallway interviews. She's not a senator who's accessible in the same way that Senator Joe Manchin, another moderate holdout, is.

[08:50:03]

And she still isn't quite ready to vote yes on the president's Build Back Better plan.

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FOX (voice over): With President Joe Biden's social safety net bill in jeopardy, Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema won't commit to vote for the nearly $2 trillion bill.

FOX (on camera): Schumer has said he wants to vote on Build Back Better, that broader social safety net bill, before Christmas break, are you prepared to vote yes when that comes to the floor?

SEN. KYRSTEN SINEMA (D-AZ): I personally believe that the best way to create legislation is to be thoughtful, and careful, so that we're crafting legislation that truly represents the interests that we want to achieve and that creates a benefit and helps people all across Arizona and the country. So that's what I'm working on right now.

FOX: So it doesn't sound like you're quite a yes yet on the version that just passed the House of Representatives. What changes do you want to make?

SINEMA: Well, folks know I don't negotiate in the press. So I'm not going to do that with you.

And the reason is pretty simple, I think that we've seen, from the work that I did on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is now law, that when you negotiate directly in good faith with your colleagues, and don't negotiate publicly, you're actually much more likely to find that agreement.

FOX: Sinema's hedging comes as Senator Joe Manchin also tells his Democratic colleagues he's skeptical the bill will pass by the end of the year.

SEN. JOE MANCHIN (D-WV): Inflation is a big concern.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

FOX: Manchin does not want paid family leave included in the bill. Something Sinema indicates she supports.

SINEMA: Well, I have long said that I support paid family leave because it allows both moms and dads throughout Arizona and the country to have the opportunity to take care of a new baby or to take care of a loved one who is sick and not lose their jobs.

FOX: The Arizona senator shares Manchin's concerns about inflation.

SINEMA: When I'm home in Arizona, I hear, number one, about the price of gas and, number two, about the price of food. People are very concerned about the amount they're spending just to survive every day. And inflation is real. So I want to make sure that if we are crafting legislation, we're doing it in a lean and efficient way that's fiscally responsible and doesn't impact things like inflation or make our businesses less competitive.

FOX: Sinema, who negotiated with Biden and Republicans extensively to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, suggests Democratic leaders aren't being realistic as to what's achievable.

FOX (on camera): Why do you think it is that your leadership sometimes overpromises? Do you think that that's a problem for voters and for the Democratic Party?

SINEMA: I would never promise something to the American people that I can't deliver. But I also believe that when elected leaders, on either side of the political aisle, promise things that cannot be delivered, it actually exacerbates the political problems we face in our country. And people become more angry or even apathetic and want to turn away from the political process.

FOX (voice over): Sinema has been a wildcard in an evenly split Senate, that has no room for any Democrats to break from the party line. That leverage has left many senators on her side of the aisle questioning her negotiating style.

FOX (on camera): Some of your colleagues, some of them, progressives, think that you're kind of an enigma, that they're not sure where you stand on any one issue while you're in the middle of a negotiation. Do you think that that's a fair criticism of you?

SINEMA: I think I'm very direct. And I'm very up front when I talk to folks about what I believe in, what I can support and what I can't support. So, I think there is some people who just don't like what they're hearing. And maybe they use other terms to describe it. But folks in Arizona know that I've always been a straight shooter and always will be.

FOX: When you first got into politics, you were more progressive. What changed?

SINEMA: Well, one of the things that changed was I learned a lot. You know, I was serving over the years in the state legislature and now in the United States Congress, and I had an opportunity to learn from so many people across my district, and then later now the whole state of Arizona.

FOX (voice over): In October, Sinema was teaching a class at Arizona State University when she was confronted by a group of immigration activists in a public restroom about her criticisms of the Build Back Better plan.

SINEMA: When individuals choose to engage in illegal activity, and most importantly in this instance violate the privacy rights of the students that I'm working with at Arizona State University, that's not appropriate. My students are working hard to earn their degrees so they can serve their community in Arizona. They did not sign up to be harassed in a restroom or have their privacy violated on the Internet. And that's what I think is inappropriate.

So, I voiced that concern and appropriate authorities are taking action.

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FOX: And, Brianna, a key takeaway from this interview is that Sinema is not in a hurry. She's not in a hurry necessarily to pass the Build Back Better plan, she is not somebody who is going to be bullied or coerced by leadership to get to yes until she's ready. [08:55:06]

So we're going to have to wait and see whether she and Manchin are going to be ready before Christmas.

KEILAR: She doesn't seem flustered by all the conversation around her. I mean she might even seem energized by it.

FOX: Absolutely. She does not care what people think.

KEILAR: Yes, she doesn't.

Lauren, great interview. I mean we just never see that. It was great to.

Lauren Fox, thank you.

FOX: Thank you.

BERMAN: Alec Baldwin breaks his silence. Why he says he doesn't feel responsible for the death of his cinematographer.

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BERMAN: It is the last week to vote for CNN Hero. Dr. Patricia Gordon left her Beverly Hills practice to begin her mission to eradicate cervical cancer globally.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Free cervical cancer screening. Screen and treat for free of charge.

DR. PATRICIA GORDON, CNN HERO: There are 350,000 women dying a painful undignified death globally and it's almost 100 percent preventable.

So this is everything you need to screen and treat a patient.

We bring in these big suitcases. We teach local healthcare professionals the see and treat technique.

At the end of the week of training, we pack up that suitcase and give it to the nurses that are going back to their clinics. Within a day, we can literally save 20, 30 lives depending on the number of women we screen.

There are 8,000 women who are alive and well and able to provide for their families is honestly the most rewarding thing that I could have ever imagined in my life.

[09:00:00]

I think I'm the luckiest doctor that ever lived.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: Go to cnnheroes.com to vote for the CNN Hero of the year or any of your favorite top ten heroes.