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Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) On Biden's "Minor Incursion" Remarks Regarding Russia And Ukraine; Florida Bill Would Protect White People From "Guilt" About Racist Past; Investigators: Pope Benedict Knew Of Priest Abuse As Archbishop. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired January 20, 2022 - 07:30   ET

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

[07:30:00]

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's what he was referencing. But if Russian forces actually go into Ukraine and their boots cross that border, that's what's going to change the calculus for the White House.

But one of the most stark things in this grim assessment that President Biden offered was saying that all the NATO allies are not on the same page.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes.

COLLINS: But I think if you looked at his answer to David Sanger he was very blunt about what's going to happen if Russia does invade, saying that it is something that Putin will pay a dear price for -- that he will regret. That was pretty stark language from Biden.

BERMAN: You know -- and Evan, again, big picture-wise, one other thing he said about the last year that maybe projects a different approach going forward, is he said he maybe learned not to be a president-senator.

What does that mean, and what do you think that means going forward?

EVAN OSNOS, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Yes, that was a very telling moment. It was really just at the tail end of the press conference.

And this was, in effect, him, John, sort of breaking up with the Senate. This is a guy, after all, who spent 36 years in that body who kind of believed that it could be the thing that he hoped it might be -- the world's greatest deliberative body, a word that is often mentioned more with irony these days than anything else.

And he was acknowledging that he had spent, as he said, hours and hours trying to get people to do what he wanted. That's really a reference to Manchin and Sinema. It didn't work. He felt as if he had wasted some time.

He mentioned the fact that he understood that there were Black voters, especially, who felt like they wanted to see him more out in the community.

He's talked about the White House recently as a, quote, "gilded cage." I think he's feeling not only that classic sense that presidents all feel that they're being confined in Washington but really, acutely, that this is the moment now for him to say fine, if the Senate -- the placed that I loved -- isn't going to be able to do what we need and what I want, I've got to go directly to the people. And you're beginning to see more of that and I suspect you'll hear more of that in the months ahead.

BERMAN: Breaking up is hard to do.

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking up is hard to do. You are -- you are correct.

BERMAN: He could have sent them a note in class --

HUNT: Although in this case --

BERMAN: -- to say we're breaking up.

HUNT: -- it's, you know, the Senate. It's the Senate. It's not him. It's, you know --

BERMAN: Send me a few (ph).

HUNT: -- it's the Senate that's changed --

BERMAN: Yes.

HUNT: -- not Joe Biden.

All right, Kaitlan Collins and Evan Osnos. Thank you guys both very much. We really appreciate having you here.

BERMAN: All right.

Breaking overnight, the Supreme Court dealing a huge legal blow to the former president's efforts to keep White House documents secret. The January 6 Committee's got a whole bunch of new stuff in its hands right now.

HUNT: Plus, also just in, why a new CIA report says a foreign power is unlikely to blame for the Havana Syndrome attacks around the globe.

And, what investigators are now saying about Pope Benedict and what he did during his time before he was at the Vatican. Those damning allegations ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:36:59] HUNT: President Joe Biden setting off strong backlash from Ukraine for this remark about a potential Russian invasion.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And Russia will be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. But if they actually do what they're capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Joining us now, Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware. He is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator, it's always good to see you. Thank you so much for being here.

I want to pull us back to near the end of that press conference where he made an acknowledgment that hey, people want me to be a president, not a senator. That minor incursion remark -- they had to clean it up right away. In some ways, it struck me as him being the candid senator instead of the commander in chief.

How concerned are you that he made that remark that, frankly, they had to clean up right away?

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): Kasie, it's great to be back on with you and to see you back on-air this morning.

HUNT: Thank you.

COONS: I think President Biden has been very clear in person with Vladimir Putin when they've met, in public, and so has his senior leadership team in the national security and State Department agencies that any crossing of Ukraine's border by Russian troops will be responded to quickly, forcefully, decisively.

And I think President Biden has done a strong job of organizing, corralling, assembling a coalition of our NATO allies and our European partners to send a strong message to Putin and Putin's Russia that there will be high costs for any invasion of Ukraine.

HUNT: But he wasn't terribly clear yesterday.

COONS: Look, what he was saying out loud was a concern many of us have, which is Russia showed over a number of conflicts over the last couple of years a willingness and an ability to use gray zone attacks -- things like cybersecurity measures. Just in the last few weeks there have been a number of attacks on Ukrainian websites, for example.

In other areas, such as the 2014 takeover by Russia of the Crimean Peninsula. It was done in a way that was not immediately clear that they were Russian troops. It was done with troops without insignia. It was done stealthily. And so, I think that's really what he was referring to was Russia's

demonstrated in Moldova, in Georgia, in Crimea, and in other places in Eastern Europe a willingness to use covert means.

If they engage in an overt invasion of Ukraine -- a message just delivered in person by a bipartisan Senate delegation last weekend -- there will be a strong and forceful American response.

HUNT: Senator, one of the things that we've talked about often in a domestic political context and some of the polling in focus groups is this idea often pushed by right-wing media that the president is weak. That does seem to be breaking through in some ways. It's something we heard from a Democratic focus group that was reported on in "The Washington Post."

[07:40:00]

But I'm wondering how you see it in the international context because the idea that he acknowledged that there were divisions among our NATO allies on how to deal with said minor incursion really stuck out to me.

Do you think he is projecting weakness that Vladimir Putin can seize on?

COONS: I don't. I think the American people -- frankly, I think the world is tired of this pandemic. It has gone on a year longer than many of us had initially hoped or expected because of the Delta variant and now the Omicron variant. And frankly, because of widespread resistance to public health measures here in the United States -- masking, vaccination -- which would have gotten us out of this faster.

President Biden's administration distributed quickly vaccines developed under the previous administration that have now led to three-quarters of Americans having had at least one vaccine dose. That's more than 500 million shots in arms in the United States. And we've exported to the rest of the world hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. That's real leadership.

And I'll remind you Kasie, on President Biden's first trip to Europe -- to the U.K., to the E.U., to NATO -- and his confrontation in person with Vladimir Putin, he showed strength, clarity, and forward movement building on what had previously been a sharply divided relationship between the United States and some of our most important allies in Europe -- principally, Germany.

HUNT: For sure.

COONS: We are in a much stronger place with the U.S.-German relationship today, which will be critical to having a united front in pushing back on Vladimir Putin's Russia.

HUNT: Certainly, extraordinarily different than what we saw under former President Trump. Senator, quickly before I let you go, the president, yesterday in his press conference, said that without the voting rights legislation that failed last night there are questions, potentially, about the legitimacy of our elections in 2022.

Do you agree with that statement or is it a dangerous one for our democracy?

COONS: Look, I frankly think we have to do everything we can to ensure that the certification of results in 2022 is not influenced by partisan actions.

A bipartisan group of senators is meeting tomorrow to try and move forward a narrower bill than the one we were considering last night on the floor -- an urgent and an important pair of bills that would have restored the Voting Rights Act and would have set a federal standard for access to the ballot.

Federally, there are things we can and should do to prevent the subversion of election results. In a half-dozen states, changes have been made in terms of taking formerly nonpartisan election officials and replacing them with state legislatures or partisan officials. There are increasing threats --

HUNT: Yes.

COONS: -- against election workers.

I think we can make progress in reforming the election -- the Electoral Count Act and adding some provisions that will protect election workers.

That's the kind of work we need to get to now. The president also said in his press conference he's optimistic we can make some progress on that. And I do think that will contribute to addressing this vital question of whether or not our 2022 midterm elections can be made as safe and secure as possible.

HUNT: Should the president clarify his remarks about the integrity and legitimacy of our elections?

COONS: I do think that it's important for him to embrace the forward movement that's possible here and to reassure the American people that our next elections can and should be legitimate and secure.

HUNT: All right. Senator Chris Coons, thank you very much for joining us this morning. We really appreciate you being here.

COONS: Thank you.

HUNT: All right, just in here, Bob Saget's widow breaking her silence after the comedian's sudden death. What she says about their final days together.

BERMAN: And a new law in Florida, which critics say is designed to keep white people from feeling bad about America's history in regards to slavery and everything else. We'll discuss, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[07:46:05]

BERMAN: Developing overnight, a new bill pushed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which critics say is designed to ban public schools and private businesses from making people feel discomfort by teaching about discrimination in U.S. history. It got its first approval by a Senate committee.

And here's how Gov. DeSantis defended the bill.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. RON DESANTIS (R), FLORIDA: If you think about what MLK stood for, he said he didn't want people judged on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. You listen to some of these people nowadays they don't talk about that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right, joining me now, Democratic Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones. Senator, thank you so much for being with us.

Critics, including you, say this is a bill designed to somehow make it illegal to make white people feel guilty about slavery -- explain.

SHEVRIN JONES, (D) FLORIDA STATE SENATE (via Webex by Cisco): Thank you so much, John, for having me.

Well, first of all, this is part one of Gov. DeSantis' stop the vote act that he has been traveling the state of Florida and touting it on Fox News and all across the country. Governor DeSantis and his administration know full well that CRT is not taught in our K through 12 schools. And it is unfortunate that instead of running on forward- thinking ideas and the kitchen table issues that Floridians need right now, the governor is pushing a national agenda currently within the state of Florida.

And we know for a fact what this is. This is Gov. DeSantis' move to try to stop the teaching of true American Black history. Our history is a part of American history. And also, my white counterparts are a part of that very history.

BERMAN: I don't even know -- what does it mean to make someone feel uncomfortable?

JONES: Well, that's the thing that I don't understand either. If you look at -- you want to talk about uncomfortable, let's talk about my ancestors who were uncomfortable for about -- because of their children being stripped from them, or uncomfortable to watch their father or their mother being hung from a tree. Let's talk about that.

Let's also make it clear that our children -- if we think that our children are not asking about race, we think that our children are not concerned about what's happening across this country, our children see exactly through what the Republicans are doing across the state of Florida and across this country.

BERMAN: Now, supporters of the bill say to that well, what it means is that a white kid in school shouldn't be made to feel bad for what happened three generations ago.

JONES: John, I went to school with a lot of white boys and girls and during Black History Month they actually enjoyed learning more about Black history. I taught in a predominantly white school and at no time did a parent or a child come up and say, during Black History Month or any other time, that they were uncomfortable.

This is a continuation of Donald Trump and his allies, and his base, even carrying over to Ron DeSantis and his allies and his base of the big lie that the critical race theory is the biggest issue of our times, and it's just not.

BERMAN: Senator Shevrin Jones, thank you for being with us this morning.

JONES: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

HUNT: All right, this just in.

Pope Benedict knew about priests abusing children when he was Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981 despite his repeated longstanding denials. That's according to a newly-released investigation that then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was informed about abusive priests. And in two of the cases, the abuses happened under Ratzinger's watch and the offending priests remained, quote, "active" in pastoral care without being sanctioned.

The German law firm conducting the investigation says the 94-year-old former pope continues to deny the allegations.

All right, coming up next here, a member of the January 6 Committee joins us live as the panel gets their first look at the documents that Donald Trump wanted to keep secret.

[07:50:05]

BERMAN: And scientists are calling it hybrid immunity. Could it be your key to returning to normal?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HUNT: President Biden has officially spent one year in office. And he campaigned, in part, on bringing truth and honesty back to the White House after his predecessor had a notably strained relationship with the facts. Let's just say he had basically no relationship with the facts. So, how did President Biden do?

Let's bring in CNN reporter and renowned fact-checker, Daniel Dale. Daniel, you had to work extraordinarily hard keeping track of all the false claims during the last presidency. I can't imagine that this stacks up in any way in comparison, but we would like to hear what you have been able to run down from the Biden administration, so far.

[07:55:02]

DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: Yes. So it doesn't compare at all. I don't think, frankly, that there's any comparison in terms of frequency or egregiousness and dishonesty between Donald Trump and anyone, Republican or Democratic, in Washington life.

In terms of frequency, Biden's number of false claims in year one was somewhere in the dozens. You could add probably dozens more if you counted misleading or lacking in context claims. Trump was over 1,000 false claims in year one and was over 3,000 false claims in year two. So, there's no comparison.

But that said, I don't think that means we waive Biden's away and say they don't matter.

HUNT: Of course.

DALE: I think all false claims from the president matter. All these facts matter. And we can't let the previous presidency of Donald Trump set the bar so low for every subsequent president that the bar just doesn't exist anymore.

BERMAN: So, Daniel, what were some of the important ones that President Biden said?

DALE: Yes. He made false claims about a variety of important topics from Afghanistan to the economy, to the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration. He made one on ESPN in a high-profile interview about the new Georgia voting law.

I think some of the Afghanistan ones were among the most egregious. He said in an interview that he opposed that war from the beginning. He did not, although he eventually turned against it. He said that what interest does the U.S. have in Afghanistan with al Qaeda gone? Al Qaeda has certainly degraded in Afghanistan but it certainly was not gone at the time.

On the economy, he repeatedly misstated what experts had projected about his own plan. So, for example, he repeated that the firm Moody's Analytics said that passing his American jobs plan would produce 16 million additional jobs. Well, either he was misreading or misstating what Moody's said. It was actually a projection of 2.7 million additional jobs, so a big difference.

So we had a number of those. And then, again, immigration, voting laws -- sometimes, gun laws. He made false claims about a variety of things.

HUNT: So, Daniel, what would you say were his, perhaps, most memorable false claims?

DALE: To me -- I mean, this is subjective but, to me, the most memorable ones were often the most trivial ones. The ones where he would depart from his text and invent or embellish something about his own past.

And we saw that last week where, in a voting rights speech in Georgia, he claimed in passing that he had -- he had been arrested -- he suggested in the context of the civil rights movement. There is some record -- some evidence of him participating in some civil rights activities back in his youth, but no record of any arrest.

He said a couple of times that he used to drive an 18-wheeler or a big truck. He told this to -- you know, at a Mack Truck facility to students studying truck maintenance. There is no evidence he ever did that, although he did once have a part-time job driving a school bus.

And then he also made a couple to Jewish leaders in the Jewish community while trying to emphasize his connection to that community.

Listen to something he said about his relationship with the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: I have known every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir. And in the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to -- she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

DALE: So, there are two things wrong with this. One, he actually met with Meir weeks before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, not during the Six- Day War in 1967. More importantly, there was no evidence that this -- you know, this senior prime minister of Israel ever had any intention of using a 30-year-old rookie U.S. senator who had never been to Israel before and who the Israel government thought of as inexperienced as some sort of regional liaison with a key adversary.

So, yes, that's a story about something that happened decades ago. Yes, it's peripheral to policy matters. But it's fascinating to me because the president choose -- ad-libbed -- choose to bring this up and ended up hurting his reputation for accuracy. Hurting his credibility rather than achieving whatever aim he had by bringing it up in the first place.

HUNT: All right, Daniel Dale. Thanks very much for the update on that at this one-year mark in the Biden presidency.

BERMAN: We do have breaking news this morning. The CIA has released an assessment on a mysterious illness known as Havana Syndrome that has sickened U.S. officials around the globe, and most notably, who or what they believe is not behind it.

CNN's Kylie Atwood joins us this morning. And I don't know that this was expected, Kylie. Tell us what you've learned.

KYLIE ATWOOD, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes. The CIA is finding in these interim findings that in totality, right, roughly 1,000 cases of Havana Syndrome around the globe do not likely constitute a worldwide campaign carried out by Russia or another foreign actor to harm -- to attack U.S. personnel.

Now, what these findings are not counting out -- according to my colleague Katie Bo Lillis who spoke with CIA officials about this -- is that a smaller subset of these cases could constitute an attack.

Now, just to remind our viewers what Havana Syndrome is. This is when U.S. diplomats, spies, and military personnel around the globe have experienced symptoms of vertigo --