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DHS Warns of Trucker Protest; Watching for Signals of Russian Invasion; Los Angeles under Wintertime Heat Advisory; Supporter of Trump Now Calls Movement a Cult. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired February 10, 2022 - 06:30   ET

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

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[06:30:37]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, a stark warning from the Department of Homeland Security that a trucker protest, similar to those in Canada over vaccine mandates, could happen here in the United States and impact everything from the Super Bowl to the State of the Union Address.

CNN's Miguel Marquez in live in Windsor, Ontario, with the latest on where we are this morning.

Miguel.

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, this is what they are concerned with in the U.S., starting with the Super Bowl and then possibly moving on to D.C. Protests like we are seeing right here.

This is the main artery that -- of where traffic, a massive amount of traffic, would be flowing in from the United States into Canada. Tens of thousands of cars and trucks every day would come this way. Hundreds of millions of dollars in goods would come back and forth on this route to the -- but right now it is completely blocked. You can see some trucks, mostly personal cars, some camper vans out here.

Then if you go around on this side of the street, these guys have been out here for several days here. They say their bottom line is all the mandates. Not just vaccine mandates, but all the mandates have to go.

Interestingly enough, in Saskatchewan, that province, they are about to drop all their mandates in the next couple of days. But look on this side of the street, they have couches set up, they have chairs set up right in the middle of the street. This is blocked for about a mile from the bridge all the way up to the next light all the way up there. So just about a mile of blockage.

There was one way that trucks were able to get from Canada to the U.S. side, but protesters here say they've blocked that route overnight as well.

The mayor of Windsor, yesterday, said that they had about 100 -- only about 100 people out here in 50 to 75 cars. I'll tell you, there's far more cars out here at this point. And, overnight, there were a ton of people who showed up out here to show their support as well. Basically, this entire area, about a mile up, was a complete party last night because people wanted to come out and show their support.

So, it is not clear how they are going to deescalate this. Police here in Windsor say that that's what they want to do, they want to treat this diplomatically and get people to leave on their own. But it's hard to see how that's going to happen. They've asked for more resources from the province, from the federal government. And now we will see where it goes. The people that I'm talking to here say until all those mandates are gone, they will not leave.

Back to you guys.

BERMAN: Still a mess.

Miguel Marquez, thank you very much.

So, it might be a cyber-attack on Ukraine's energy grid or tanks along the border. We have new CNN reporting on the signs of a Russian invasion.

Plus, he bought into the January 6th lie that Trump won the election. Now he believes Stop the Steal is a cult. So, what changed his mind?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: And, Dolly Parton's big announcement for her theme park employees.

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[06:37:41]

KEILAR: We have new CNN reporting this morning on how the U.S. and European allies are monitoring potential signals that Russia is launching an invasion of Ukraine.

CNN's Barbara Starr is live for us at the Pentagon with details here.

Barbara, what are you learning?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Brianna.

CNN has spoken to a number of officials in various governments. And, look, here's what they're looking at. It could start as a cyber-attack against Ukraine's energy grid. It could be a major movement of Russian troops, battalion tanks. They have more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border.

So how is everyone trying to figure out what may come next if, in fact, diplomacy doesn't work? There are aircraft overhead, spy planes, satellites, communications intercepts that they're looking at, public statements by Russian officials almost every day. And western intelligence officials, however, are offering, at least one is, a fairly dire view when this all adds up. And let me read to you what one official said to CNN. And I quote, if you look at the lower end options, all of which are executable immediately with little to no warning with the forces that are already deployed, those forces are already in position and in the right number with the right capability. So that tells you what they are looking at is that, indeed, Putin can make a decision and order the move at any time.

Now, in the latest, there are a number of Russian exercises that we're learning about. The Russians have blocked off a large portion of the Black Sea to the south for maritime exercises. Not clear how that may impact commercial shipping traffic coming into the region. And to the north, they are now starting those exercises with Belarus, just to the north of Ukraine. And those Russian-Belarus exercises, the Russians are saying will run through February 20th. That just happens to be the day the Olympics end in China. And there's a lot of thinking that Putin may be waiting on his own decision to have the Olympics end and then he will proceed with whatever he decides to do.

Brianna.

KEILAR: We'll be watching.

Barbara, thank you.

So, more on the news just in, as the National Archives demands an investigation into Donald Trump's handling of records, Maggie Haberman reports that Trump flushed papers down the toilet at the White House.

[06:40:06]

She's going to join us live on her story.

BERMAN: Plus, Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Bob Saget's surprising cause of death. What you need to know about head injuries.

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BERMAN: A record heat wave this time of year in southern California means it could be the hottest Super Bowl kickoff ever, at least outside. Not where the game is actually taking place inside, because that's climate controlled.

Let's get to CNN meteorologist Chad Myers.

Chad, though, it's going to be hot in the rest of southern California.

[06:45:00]

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: It is. It's going to be 85 to 87. And that's a normal July or August temperature. Certainly not where we are this time of the year. Thirty record highs are possible across California over the next few days.

This weather is brought to you by Safelite. Your vehicle glass and recalibration experts.

So, let's get to it here. Yes, it's going to be warm. I have a feeling this is more for the

Bengals fans that are out there saying, hey, just leave the parka in the rental car. It is going to be warm but not reasonable out there. Eighty-five sounds actually pretty good if you're coming from Cincinnati to go to a football game.

Here you go, temperatures going to be in the 80s the entire weekend. A lot of outdoor activities. A lot of parties and things like that. So just keep that in mind. It's going to be dry air too. Eighty-eight for the high today.

Cooler across the east but most of the U.S. right now is above normal for certain. Temperatures here, other than the Great Lakes, are above normal. The cold air is coming, though, for you, Great Lakes, Cincinnati, Cleveland, all the way down toward Detroit. Arctic air coming in for the next few days. This will be the story as we work our way through the weekend.

Enjoy the game, John, if I don't talk to you before then.

BERMAN: I appreciate it, Chad. You too.

So, this man marched on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Now he says Stop the Steal is a cult. Why is he changing his tune?

KEILAR: And we're also following the breaking news, flushed papers found clogged in the White House toilet during the Trump administration. The culprit, the former president himself. Why did he do this? What was he trying to hide?

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[06:50:10]

KEILAR: Keith Scott once thought that January 6, 2021 was the greatest day ever. The 49-year-old man traveled to the nation's capital that day, a proud member of the Stop the Steal movement. Well, now he calls the movement a cult.

Elle Reeve is here with a CNN special report.

So interesting to hear this change of heart. What did you find?

ELLE REEVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, not a lot of people are willing to speak so openly about why they were there as Keith. But I think our conversation shows that these beliefs that brought people to the capital are really deeply rooted, and it's going to take a while for that to change.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KEITH SCOTT: January 6, 2021, was the greatest day of my life.

REEVE: Why?

SCOTT: I felt like a patriot that was standing beside our founding fathers, speaking up against King George. I felt like Braveheart.

REEVE (voice over): We first met Keith Scott at a small rally on the anniversary of January 6th. He told us he had spent months after the 2020 election living in his car and going to every Stop the Steal rally. Now he's carrying a huge flag calling the movement a cult. Believing a cult, whether real or metaphorical, is messy.

SCOTT: If something was posted saying that there was a rally, like, I was not in control. I was going no matter what.

How did I get caught up in this? I had never been to a Trump rally. You know, I wasn't one of those people.

REEVE: The whole crew for this interview was also at Jan 6th. So we had the same question, how did so many people get to the place where they were willing to commit crimes to stop a democratic election, all while calling themselves patriot?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They maced me (INAUDIBLE). They pushed me out and they maced me.

REEVE: So we spent four hours listening to every detail of Keith's political journey.

SCOTT: At the time I lived in Georgia. I get there on Election Day and there were only a couple of cars in the parking lot. The record turnout that they say that there was in Fulton County, Georgia, which is the county that I voted in, it didn't happen.

REEVE (on camera): Wasn't there a significant amount of early voting, though?

SCOTT: In that demographic, it's a poorer area, a predominantly black area. You'll never be able to convince me that they were sitting around watching CNN and Fox News and all these things and that's what they were most concerned about was the election and getting that ballot and mailing it in. If you asked people, is Joe Biden going to get more of the black vote than Barack Obama, people would say no. And Biden supposedly did. It didn't make any sense.

REEVE: Right. But the bigger picture here is actually what I'm really interested in, because it is a recurring theme, which is that, you have skepticism about the black vote in this election. Part of it, it seems to me, you know, you said you lived and voted in a black area and how did those people have the time to pay attention to the election. Why do you think you would be able to pay attention to that and black people wouldn't?

SCOTT: I don't think that everyone is interested in politics like I am. It's not necessarily about racial lines.

REEVE (voice over): Trump himself has repeated this same trope. It's a quip, not a fact.

In 2008, an estimated 95 percent of black voters voted for Obama. In 2020, 93 percent voted for Biden. But lies like this one were repeated until they seemed like cold-hard truth as Keith drove from protest to protest and Stop the Steal grew.

REEVE (on camera): I'm not like trying to say like you're a bad person or, like, you would use a racial slur. What I'm just trying to get at is that you might not be sensitive to the big picture about what it looks like disputing votes only in places where most of the voters are people of color, and that people of color might take some offense to that.

SCOTT: That's not what Stop the Steal was about and --

REEVE: Stop the Steal was about those votes don't count. Somebody's votes don't count. Not your vote, but someone else's.

SCOTT: I'm not going to be painted into this narrative that you're trying to -- trying to go down this rabbit hole. I'm kind of done with the racial part of this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the party of Trump.

SCOTT: I got introduced to all these other people that I had never heard of that week in Georgia. I remember Nick Fuentes being there. Alex Jones being there. Ali Alexander, the founder of Stop the Steal. I actually met the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. He was just really nice. He's not a really big guy. He's a little bit bigger than me.

REEVE: The reason this interests me is that like these small groups who have always been on the fringe seized a mass movement and they --

SCOTT: Yes, 100 percent.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And the crowd was going wild.

[06:55:01]

SCOTT: The movement was growing.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There's mountains of evidence. This election was a fraud on America.

SCOTT: Sidney Powell is going to come up. Everybody felt like she is the one that is going to unveil all the evidence of election fraud. But the people that were giving evidence of election fraud, it was the same message that we had heard a day before, or weeks before. But it was, like, it's coming. It's going to be revealed. Like just keeping us -- keeping us holding on for the next breath.

REEVE (voice over): All that energy was released on Jan 6th. Keith saw what we saw, but he didn't take the same lesson.

SCOTT: I felt like a proud patriot on that day. And I know that's not popular to say, but that's what I felt like. Then just some crazy fight scenes started happening.

REEVE (on camera): Did you think, are we the bad guys?

SCOTT: I thought, this doesn't end well.

REEVE: What made you realize this was a cult? This is like deeply immoral behavior.

SCOTT: So --

REEVE: It is not patriotic either.

SCOTT: So after January the 6th, I came here. And I kept mumbling, I feel like I just got out of a cult.

REEVE (voice over): What makes Keith a frustrating interview is that though he calls it a cult, he still believes much of the cult's propaganda and he still excuses its actions.

Because our crew was in the middle of the violence, it's hard not to want Keith to say it was wrong and he's sorry, which isn't really fair because no one with any power has said they're sorry.

SCOTT: It was a lot of self-analysis to get over the trauma of January 6th itself and the things that I saw on both sides.

REEVE (on camera): Yes, I don't understand, though, how you cannot pick sides after what happened. Like, this seems like a really clear side.

SCOTT: The things that I saw were bad. Regardless of which side you're on is what I'm saying. There's nothing illegal about watching a fight that's happening. That's not -- that's not illegal.

REEVE: Well, when you're part of a mob that's storming the Capitol.

SCOTT: I was -- I was singing --

REEVE: And setting aside illegal, what about moral?

SCOTT: But I wasn't doing anything wrong. Like, I --

REEVE: You were part of the crowd. Your very presence was giving them support.

SCOTT: You were proud of the crowd as well.

REEVE: I was a journalist. They were screaming in my face.

SCOTT: I'm -- I'm just a citizen just standing there yelling. But like I feel like we're getting sidetracked.

REEVE: I mean I -- I think, actually, this is really at the heart of the question is, this is the problem of a mob, it absolves people of their moral culpability. You're like, I was just one person.

SCOTT: Oh, I want to be clear, the people that actually, you know, had physical confrontations with police officers, they should be held accountable for that. There was --

REEVE: Do you think the leaders who made these promises that they couldn't keep, that there would be evidence that would change the results of the election, do you think they bear responsibility for the mob that stormed the Capitol?

SCOTT: No, I don't. They created a grassroots movement that was Stop the Steal. I realize that I had been addicted to politics. I had created this reverence for the leaders of Stop the Steal. I felt like I was -- which is more than ironic looking back -- helping prevent a second civil war. And this is just --

REEVE (voice over): He's writing a book that he says will help people who got addicted to Trump the way he did. So we followed him around a Trump rally to see if he could get through.

SCOTT: How you doing, patriot?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How's it going?

SCOTT: Good. I know you don't remember me. I saw you several times last year.

Right now it's like a drug because I'm going to get one of these patriotic t-shirts.

REEVE: Keith was nervous that he'd get yelled at and rejected by the people who were once his allies. And that is what happened.

SCOTT: I was at t he Capitol on January the 6th. And my book is about all the stuff that I saw at all the Stop the Steal rallies. And then how -- how --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Have you been contacted by the FBI?

SCOTT: Not yet.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's a fed.

SCOTT: That's -- I get that a lot. You know some --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Because it's true.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: CNN?

SCOTT: Yes. Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh. No, I have nothing -- I mean that is the definition of fake news. I don't care about your book and I prefer you just go away.

REEVE (on camera): How'd that go?

SCOTT: Wow.

REEVE: Are they in the cult? SCOTT: So, first of all, just, their demeanor.

REEVE: Yes.

SCOTT: And the way that by my flag and by CNN how they were just completely triggered. I guess I feel like I'm going to take incoming fire from both sides as the marketing continues.

REEVE: Maybe you just switched from the cult to being a grifter.

SCOTT: I'm losing money by doing this, honestly I could have a great business career doing something else. I don't have this big political message that I'm trying to promote. I'm not out here trying to make a bunch of money. I mean if I make money, that's -- you know, that's cool.

I've taken a year of my life writing this book.

REEVE: But if you're not here to make a political point, what's your -- what's the point at all?

SCOTT: My point is, I'm doing this to look out for people. I met people on the Stop the Steal journey that lost their jobs because they -- they were going to go to the rally no matter what. People that were estranged from their family. Whether it's politics or something else, don't get so caught up that you're not making your own decisions anymore.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

REEVE (on camera): So, the realest moment I had with Keith was when we were at that Trump rally. It felt like we had a mutual understanding that whatever our differences, things have gotten really intense out there.

[07:00:08]