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Floridians Prepare for Hurricane Ian; Operative Behind Plans to Seize Voting Machines Briefed Meadows; Zelenskyy on Putin's Nuclear Threat: 'I Don't Think He's Bluffing'; NASA Crashes Spacecraft into Asteroid as Defense Test; Vicious Week for Investors to Continue; Worker Shortages Put New Spotlight on Immigration. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired September 26, 2022 - 06:00   ET

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

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: The world is bracing for Ian reaching hurricane strength here just moments ago. It is Monday, September 26, and I'm Brianna Keilar. John Berman is off, and Erica Hill is with us this morning.

[06:00:05]

Hurricane Ian now churning in the Caribbean with 75-mile-an-hour winds. The storm's path is uncertain, and that has all of Florida preparing for a major hurricane.

People are waiting in long lines outside of stores. They're looking to stock up on supplies while they still can. Essential items like bottled water flying off store shelves.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Residents are filling sandbags, prepping their homes and business for the heavy rain, strong winds and storm surge expected to come their way.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis already declaring an emergency for the entire state, activating the National Guard and a hurricane watch has been issued along the West Coast of Florida, including the Tampa Bay area.

CNN's Carlos Suarez is watching storm preparations in Tampa. We have Chad Myers standing by in the CNN Weather Center in Atlanta.

Let's start, though, with Carlos, who is live for us near a sandbag distribution center. Carlos, tell us about some of these preparations.

CARLOS SUAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Brianna and Erica, good morning.

The storm preparations in the city of Tampa are well underway. Schools across Hillsborough County have been closed through at least Thursday, and as you mentioned, several sandbag distribution sites have opened across the city of Tampa.

At this one location here, they're going to go ahead and have to bring out more sand just because of the number of folks that came out here yesterday to get ahold of one of their bags. City officials today, they want folks here in this part of Florida to

go ahead and finish all of their shopping. They want them to take a close look at their evacuation orders, their routes.

An order, rather, hasn't gone out yet, but they wanted to get a good look at where their route might be. And they also want them to take a look at flood maps if they make the decision to go ahead and stay put.

The last time that Tampa was hit directly by a hurricane was 1921. And so the concern in this part of the state of Florida is that, even if Ian -- even if Ian doesn't necessarily hit Tampa directly.

If it just stays parallel to the coast, we could see some serious storm damage, with all of that water being pushed up along -- against the coastline and into the bay.

In neighboring Pinellas County, they're all but surrounded by water. They've got the Gulf of Mexico on one side, and they've got the bay on the other. And so they don't -- they're worried, rather, that even if the storm ends up tracking just off the coast, parallel to the city of Tampa, we're still going to see some pretty significant flooding.

The mayor of Tampa is expected to get a briefing later this morning. So we could get some more information from her. She was on CNN yesterday and told us that a decision on an evacuation hadn't been made just yet.

But if there's any indication coming from at least the fact that the schools have been closed, because a lot of those buildings will be used as storm shelters, then we might be getting a better indication of if and when an evacuation order might be issued -- Brianna.

KEILAR: So tricky with that cone of uncertainty as uncertain as it is. Carlos, thank you for that report.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Chad Myers is, of course, in the CNN Weather Center tracking Ian's path this morning, as Brianna mentioned. Upgraded there to a hurricane. What more do we know at this hour, Chad?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: We know it's going to be a very large, major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Very few Floridians will have no impact at all.

Even if you're in Miami, the water could be coming up into Biscayne Bay, even up into Miami itself, because of the wind that's going to be on shore for so long.

Right now, it's a 75 mile-per-hour-storm, but it's forecast to become a major Category 3, making landfall in about 20 hours or so in Western Cuba.

And then it tries to parallel the Florida coast. And if you remember from last week, the models were just a mess. The GFS over here, the European over here. Now they have really come together in the middle. And that's what we would expect. As it gets closer, we'll have a better idea of really which line is correct.

Regardless, there's the GFS. Big storm out there. Here's the European, the latest here. Still offshore, but very, very close. And even with a brushing blow, we could certainly see the storm surge.

Up here into Tampa, 5 to 8 feet. The irony is here. When the storm is South, down here, wind may blow the water out of Tampa Bay. And then when the storm goes by, it will blow it back in. All the way down here to Port Charlotte. Three to five, four to seven.

And those are big storm surges. And the waves, with a storm that is going to be blowing at 140 miles per hour, will be 25, 30 feet. And there's not much of a reef on the West Coast of Florida. Those waves will be crashing on shore.

A lot of rainfall, too, with this. It's a big event. Could be a foot of rain in places that aren't even near -- near the center.

So a lot of things to go right. Some things to go wrong. We'll keep watching it. We're still a couple of days away. But the prep day is today.

HILL: Time to make those preparations. Chad, appreciate it. Thank you.

MYERS: Sure.

HILL: This morning, growing questions about what to expect from the House January 6th Committee hearing this week. Panel members pretty tight-lipped about it, although Congresswoman Liz Cheney has revealed the committee has a lot of new information from the nearly 800,000 pages of Secret Service communications it received.

[06:05:12]

This, of course, comes after the Secret Service said text messages from the day before and during the Capital attack were missing.

Meantime, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren says she's pessimistic about possible interviews with former President Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ZOE LOFGREN (D-CA): I think the former president has made clear that he has no intention of coming in. So while we'd like to hear from both of them, I'm not expecting that we necessarily will.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: The hearing, which is expected to be the final one, is set to get underway Wednesday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

KEILAR: New this morning, text messages obtained by CNN reveal that in late December of 2020, a key figure in the scheme to overturn the election briefed then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about his attempts to gain access to voting systems in battleground states. Let's bring in national security reporter Zachary Cohen to tell us

more about this. What did you learn about these texts to Mark Meadows? Who are they from?

ZACHARY COHEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Brianna. We're talking about texts between Meadows and a guy named Phil Waldron. Right? And they seem to be talking about efforts to gain access to voting machines in certain states, including Arizona and Georgia.

Now, if you look at these messages, it's clear that Waldron has a direct line to Meadows at a time when the Trump White House was looking for any evidence, any example of legitimate voter fraud that they could hold up as proof that the election was stolen.

Now, it's important to note here that what they're discussing is not illegal. They're talking about going to the courts and trying to get access to voting machines that way. Now ultimately, they were unsuccessful in doing so, but these messages shed new light on really the dynamic between the White House -- the Trump White House at this key time and a known conspiracy theorist.

KEILAR: This is the White House chief of staff talking to Mr. "Hey, Pentagon and DHS, you should seize voting machines." I mean, he was the architect of the effort to do that.

Why did Meadows think that it would be OK for him to have his hand in this?

COHEN: Brianna, this was at a time in late December 2020 when the Trump White House really was grasping at straws here. They were looking for evidence of foreign interference in the election, specifically. And that's something Waldron had really been pushing for months and even years before.

So Waldron had been leaned on by people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and some of these, you know, members of the Trump legal team, who have since been criticized as being a little bit out there. But to see Waldron talking directly with Meadows via text is pretty remarkable.

KEILAR: So we've heard recently about these criminal investigations, both at the state and federal level into these efforts to obtain voting machines, perhaps illegally. Is this connected to that at all?

COHEN: There's no evidence that this is directly related, but you're right. There are several incidents where, you know, similar efforts to gain access to voting machines happened in places like Colorado, in places like Michigan, places like Georgia. Now that is being investigated by prosecutors, both at the state and federal level. And it involves some of same people that Waldron was working with at the time.

So there's no direct link that we know of at this point, but it is interesting the overlap there between what was happening in December 2020 and what was happening months later. KEILAR: Waldron is really the through line, right, when it comes to

the White House and these efforts to obtain voting machines.

COHEN: He is. And look, he was -- like we were talking about later, he was working with Rudy Giuliani and working with the Trump legal team in the weeks that preceded these text messages, trying to find any sort of evidence that could hold up their frivolous legal challenges of the election.

And ultimately, he made his way into the highest levels of the White House. He was texting with the chief of staff at the time. But, you know, he proposed draft executive orders for seizing voting machines, for example. That would have had the military go into states and take voting machines from there, which would really have been unprecedented.

He was the guy who was -- put together that PowerPoint for Mark Meadows and for other Republican lawmakers about how to overturn the election, "Options for Jan. 6" was the title of it.

So he really is behind some of these more extreme proposals. And we see here that he had direct contact with the White House chief of staff.

KEILAR: Zach, as always, great reporting. Thank you so much for being with us this morning.

COHEN: Thank you, Brianna.

HILL: This morning, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. has privately warned Russia to tone down its threatening rhetoric on nuclear weapons. This as the Kremlin has been told the consequences would be dire.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTONY BLINKEN, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: We're focused on making sure that we're all acting responsibly, especially when it comes to this kind of loose rhetoric. We have been very clear with the Russians publicly, and as well as privately, to stop the loose talk about nuclear weapons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Privately, the United States has been in communication with the Kremlin about these threats of nuclear war?

BLINKEN: Yes. It's very important that Moscow hear from us and know from us that the consequences would be horrific, and we've made that very clear.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[06:10:04]

HILL: CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is live for us this morning in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, with more -- Nick. NICK PATON WALSH, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY EDITOR: Certainly, a stark

change in tone from the White House, about their messaging around the possibility of nuclear conflict, essentially provoked by Vladimir Putin's stark comments last week threatening that.

But very different from cast your mind back a few months ago where, essentially, most Western officials would say the idea of nuclear conflict was something that was simply not going to happen.

Over the weekend, the Russian foreign minister, well, he said any areas that have been formalized as part of Russian territory would get, quote, "full protection" from Russia.

Part of this bid by Moscow suggests that, in the middle of of next week, when they'd likely declare occupied areas of Ukraine to be part of Russia. There's the possibility they might go deeper into the unconventional parts of their arsenal to protect it.

There is also the possibility this is all about trying to force Ukraine to get into a diplomatic solution over Russia keeping these areas. That's something that both Kyiv and Washington have said they're simply not interested in.

And so we're into an exceptionally dicey week ahead. All that to one side, inside Russia, the moves for partial mobilization, well, to find (ph) a better word, they've been utterly catastrophic so far.

Over 2,000 detained protests since this began, according to one monitoring group. One particular province in the South. Dagestan, a republic that's notable for its policy but also for a number of people it's sent towards the war.

A lot of protests there, too. And frankly, analysts suggesting the police are struggling at times to have the usual presence on the streets.

But so many riot cops (ph) have been sent to the front line. An unprecedented challenge we're seeing here. Vladimir Putin also probably noting that crossings of Russians into Finland were 62 percent up this past Saturday, as opposed to the previous one. People simply trying to get out.

And even if they are getting thousands towards the front, they're not going to be equipped and not going to be adequately full of the morale their Ukrainian counterparts are. So conventional force that's struggling, but a lot of rhetoric from the Kremlin that's going to come to the front in the middle of this week.

Back to you.

HILL: Nick Paton Walsh, appreciate it. Thank you.

KEILAR: Happening tonight, NASA endeavors to save the planet with its latest mission. Its aim: to find out if deliberately crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid could help deflect any kind of threat to Earth in the future.

CNN's space and defense correspondent Kristin Fisher has all of the details.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This comet is what we call a planet killer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's what we call a global killer.

KRISTIN FISHER, CNN SPACE AND DEFENSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Hollywood has been scheming up ways to save the world from killer comets or asteroids for decades.

BRUCE WILLIS, ACTOR: The United States government just asked us to save the world. Anybody want to say no?

FISHER (voice-over): But instead of bringing in Bruce Willis, NASA has a different idea, and it's about to test it for the very first time.

ELENA ADAMS, DART MISSION SYSTEMS ENGINEER: It's kind of what we all fear. What if there was an asteroid that was coming toward Earth. Can you really stop it? Can you really do something about it? And for the first time, our technology allows us to actually do something about it.

FISHER (voice-over): NASA's planning to ram a refrigerator-sized spacecraft called DART into an asteroid named Dimorphos, which is roughly the size of the Pyramid of Giza and poses no threat to planet Earth.

The goal is to see if the impact will push Dimorphos slightly off- course. If it works, it means that this technique could be used to deflect a future killer asteroid that is headed for Earth.

BOBBY BRAUN, JOHNS HOPKINS APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY: This inaugural planetary defense test mission marks a major moment in human history. For the first time ever, we will measurably change the orbit of a celestial body in the universe.

FISHER (voice-over): Mission control is inside the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

FISHER: What is this place going to be like on impact day? Or impact night, I should say?

ADAMS: Oh, my goodness. It's going to be filled to the brink with people. There's going to be people in every single seat in the whole operations center. About 44 people in here alone.

FISHER (voice-over): And they'll be able to watch the impact live, as will everyone on Earth, thanks to a camera that's mounted on the spacecraft.

ADAMS: These are live images from DART right now. FISHER (voice-over): One of the most tense moments for the team will

happen at 50 minutes to impact, when the spacecraft will switch its sights from a bigger asteroid it's pointed out now to a smaller second asteroid, which is the real target.

EVAN SMITH, DART DEPUTY MISSION SYSTEMS ENGINEER: It's a very, very sweaty time for us. So we have a lot of contingencies built around that 50-minute transition. We'll be watching it like hawks, very scared but excited.

ADAMS: We're going to have it get closer and closer. And we'll fill the field of view of our imager, and then we're going to hit.

FISHER (voice-over): It's a moment this team has been training for for months. But even the rehearsals have been tense.

ADAMS: We just all one by one stood up, and all of us were intensely watching the screens, just watching the screen, just watching asteroid get bigger and bigger. And my heart was actually palpitating. Because I was like, this is not normal. Right? It's just the rehearsal, but yet, you really felt like you were about to hit that asteroid for the first time.

[06:15:12]

FISHER: You're really testing this technology that could potentially save all of humankind down the road.

ADAMS: Down the road, right.

FISHER: Now, we should note almost immediately on Monday night, if the DART spacecraft successfully hit its target, but NASA says it's going to take a few weeks to determine if DART was successfully able to move that asteroid just a little bit off its current orbit.

Kristin Fisher, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Our thanks to Kristin for that. Look, this is just a classic example of life imitating art, which is really -- that's the only way to describe the movie "Armageddon," is art. So --

HILL: Obviously, there you go. I'm also just fascinated by this whole idea of it all and that we'll have to wait to see if it really pushed it in the right way.

KEILAR: Yes, this idea of, like, a killer asteroid I almost have to put out of my mind. I have too many other things to worry about.

HILL: Let's not think about that one.

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: No. So the CIA has unveiled a model of Ayman al-Zawahiri's hideout that was used to brief President Biden on the mission to take the al Qaeda leader out.

Plus, more financial pain is in store this week for Wall Street and Main Street.

And a nationwide shortage of workers putting a new spotlight on immigration.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:20:37]

HILL: This morning Wall Street is bracing for the markets to open after a volatile week for the economy. Mortgage rates rose to 6.3 percent. That's the highest level since 2008.

The Federal Reserve sharply increased interest rates and signaled more is to come. The Dow, for its part, dropping 500 points on Friday to close at its lowest level since November of 2020.

Investors are expecting more pain. Looks like no one is going to be spared here. Let's bring in CNN chief business correspondent, Christine Romans.

OK, so we may not be spared, but is there -- is there anything that could be a glimmer of hope?

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT/ANCHOR: I'm calling it a take no prisoners economy. And the investors, home buyers, car buyers, companies, maybe even workers, no one is spared here for now.

And this is in the global fight against inflation, right? Central banks are jacking up interest rates. No end in sight there until high inflation is vanquished. The Fed has done it now five times.

The Fed chief himself acknowledging the Fed's medicine will be painful, Erica, for everyday Americans, for consumers, for borrowers, even workers.

He says, I wish there was a painless way to do that. There simply isn't.

Wall Street finally seems to believe him here, that more pain is coming. Wall Street fretting this could eventually invite a recession. Brutal stock market losses this year. Bear markets for the S&P 500 and for the NASDAQ.

The Dow on Friday closing at the lowest level since November 2020. For the Dow, that's two years of gains wiped away. And there's a worry that more could be coming, frankly.

Goldman Sachs analysts last week cut the bank's yearend S&P 500 target by 16 percent, all the day way down to 3,600. That's the fourth time, I think, this year. They have cut that -- that target.

And look, you're already seeing stock investors reeling, home buyers reeling, too. Mortgage rates have more than doubled since the beginning of the year. They're reaching out almost 6.3 percent. That adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of buying.

The same mortgage a year ago for the same house a year ago, if you bought it now, it would be, like, $700 more a month.

So life more expensive for anyone who borrows money for a home, a student loan, credit card or car. No one is spared there. And not even maybe workers here.

This headline, when you dig into the Fed projections that we saw last week. It makes it clear the Fed will tolerate maybe even desire a higher jobless rate to cool inflation.

You know, 3.6 million jobs have been added this year in the U.S. job market. That's strong. That's a lot of jobs. The Fed's medicine could take back 1.2 million of those jobs.

Now the final week of September here, it is going to be busy. It's going to be dramatic. We're going to be able to gauge the housing market, damage to the housing market. We're going to be able to see the Fed's favorite inflation gauge on Friday for signs of how that medicine is working.

Is it starting to work? Are you starting -- going to get some relief in inflation? All right. So now I'm terrified, everybody. So if you're scared, here's this from economist Ian Shepherdson. He says this is: "If recession comes, it will be brief and mild without severe imbalances. Recessions can't be severe either.

We don't have severe imbalances right now in this economy. And consumers are in better shape today than they were before the 2008 financial crisis and recession there.

And from Oppenheimer's (UNINTELLIGIBLE), major market bottoms have occurred in October more than any other month since 1932. So have faith. This could be maybe for investors, at least, things are not going to look that bad for too much longer.

HILL: I'm going to focus on that positive and hope that we just maybe race through October. Christine, thank you.

ROMANS: You're welcome.

HILL: A nationwide shortage of workers is exposing a huge hole in the economy, the need for legal foreign workers. Industries like agriculture and hospitality, in particular, are hurting.

In the meantime, asylum seekers are being sent away from places where they possibly could make a difference. CNN's Vanessa Yurkevich is joining us now with more on this -- Vanessa.

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, earlier this month, Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, flew legal asylum seekers from Texas through Florida to Martha's Vineyard, because he said that they were making their way to this home state.

So we traveled to Florida to speak to business owners there to see how they felt about this move amidst the U.S. struggling to fill more than 11 million open jobs.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JESSICA COOPER, OWNER, SUGAR TOP FARMS: It didn't make any sense.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why are they sending them there when we need the people here?

[06:25:04]

MARCELA RESTREPO, OWNER, SKY BUILDERS USA: Help us to help the economy grow.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Dozens of asylum seekers were sent on flights from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, lured with the promise of a job. While Ron DeSantis arranged the flights, business owners in his own state are struggling to find anyone to fill their open jobs.

COOPER: We know that we have a massive labor shortage in Florida.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): There are at least 670,000 asylum seekers in the U.S. awaiting their cases to be heard. The average wait time, four and a half years.

In the meantime, they can apply to legally work, a process that can take several months. DeSantis said he believes these asylum seekers were coming to Florida from Texas, so he used funds allocated to move migrants out of Florida, where the planes made a stopover.

COOPER: It's hard to watch willing workers leave your state with tax dollars.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Jessica Cooper owns a small farm outside of Orlando. She sells to restaurants at major attractions like Disney World. It's a year-round operation.

COOPER: We're finding that it's hard to keep domestic labor. This is a hard job. Right? This is not for everyone.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): It's a problem throughout the agriculture industry, the second largest industry in Florida. Cooper says she's advertised everywhere to find help with no luck. Whether these asylum seekers were intending to come to Florida on their own --

COOPER: I absolutely would have welcomed them. Why not lift up the small businesses in a way that they're also being helped on their labor?

YURKEVICH (voice-over): The construction industry is facing an aging workforce. The average age of asylum seekers is 35. The industry is short 650,000 workers, but has an average wage of $35 an hour.

MICHELLE DAUGHERTY, PRESIDENT, FLORIDA ASSOCIATED BUSINESS AND CONTRACTORS: If they are able to legally work here, we have jobs for them. We have opportunities for them to not just take care of themselves, but their families. YURKEVICH (voice-over): There are major construction projects underway

in Florida like Universal Epic in Orlando, aimed at attracting tourists to the state. And billions of dollars more allocated to state projects, but not enough people to do the work.

And it's not just in Florida. There are 11.2 million open jobs in the U.S., more than last year.

RESTREPO: You just see Orlando, the way that it's growing, the way the construction is growing, the job is there. And there is quality people coming from other countries.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): The hospitality industry has been slow to recover from the pandemic. There are still 1.5 million open hospitality jobs in the U.S. and about 1,800 at Jan Gotten's (ph) hotel management company.

JAN GOTTEN (ph): Sixty percent of the employees, they decide to go back and work from home.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): Leaving Gotten (ph) with very few people to run nearly 50 of his Florida hotels.

GOTTEN (ph): It's really tough to find those employees. I mean, I was making beds a couple of days ago.

YURKEVICH: You as the president were making beds?

GOTTEN (ph): Yes.

YURKEVICH: Because you couldn't find anyone to do it.

YURKEVICH (voice-over): As an immigrant from India who arrived to the U.S. with just $6, he says he understands the value of a job and the chance to work to achieve a dream. He says if he were DeSantis, he would have done things differently.

GOTTEN (ph): I would have kept them here. I mean, I'd utilize them in my hotels. Trust me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

YURKEVICH: Now, the business owners that we spoke to say they are hopeful and adamant that it's the federal government that takes up some sort of work on immigration reform.

But Brianna, as we know, for decades now, both Republicans and democrats have been trying to pass some sort of immigration reform legislation to very little success.

But one new study out from Texas A&M University reveals that increased immigration to the country actually helps to reduce inflation. That's also a big issue for these business owners -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Such an interesting story, Vanessa, that goes behind the politics. Thank you. So ahead, the deadly protests in Iran over the death of a young woman

spreading to other cities around the world, despite Iran's security crackdown.

Plus --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I never suffered from headaches before. The amount of ringing in my ears was just astounding. And things are getting worse and worse and worse.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HILL: A CIA doctor investigating the mysterious Havana Syndrome tells CNN how he discovered, he, too, was suffering from it.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:30:00]