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CNN This Morning
Harris Delivers Closing Argument Of 2024 Election; White House Clarifies Biden's "Garbage" Comments; Source: China-Linked Hackers Targeted Dems And GOP; Severe Storm Threat To Central U.S. Aired 5- 5:30a ET
Aired October 30, 2024 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[05:00:31]
KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: It's Wednesday, October 30th.
Right now on CNN THIS MORNING:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES & 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I don't believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. I'll give them a seat at the table.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: A symbolic stage standing in the same place, Trump spoke on January 6th, Kamala Harris lays out her plan for the next four years.
Plus, walking it back. The White House, trying to clean up comments from former -- from President Biden about Donald Trump's supporters.
And --
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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT & 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And I've done more for Puerto Rico than any president by far, nobody close.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Facing the fallout. Donald Trump plays clean up after the backlash from a so-called joke told at his Madison Square Garden rally.
(MUSIC)
HUNT: All right, 5:00 a.m. here on the East Coast, a live look at Capitol Hill on this Wednesday morning.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kasie Hunt. It's wonderful to have you with us.
In just a week, we might be waking up knowing who the next president is going to be. We might.
Kamala Harris, though, making a final appeal at a symbolic venue to voters who still may be making up their minds with now less than a week to go until Election Day. The vice president choosing the ellipse for this moment. It's the same place that Donald Trump spoke on January 6, nearly four years ago.
Harris trying to strike a balance, laying out her vision for America on the one hand, while also showing voters the stark choice they face in this election.
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HARRIS: America for too long, we have been consumed with too much division, chaos, and mutual distrust and it can be easy then to forget a simple truth. It doesn't have to be this way, it doesn't have to be this way.
It is time to stop pointing fingers. We have to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms. It is time to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division. It is time for a new generation of leadership in America.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: But distracting from their message of turning the page on the division the current occupant of the White House, the Biden administration now trying to walk back the comments that President Biden made when he was talking about Trump's Madison Square Garden rally.
Watch.
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JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. Well, let me tell you something. I don't -- I don't know the Puerto Rican that I know or Puerto Rican where I'm in my home state of Delaware, they're good, decent, honorable people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters, his -- his demonization of citizen unconscionable and its un-America. It's totally contrary to everything we've done, everything we've been.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: Biden later trying to clarify that remark. The president tweeting that he was referring to, quote, the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by a Trump supporter the White House, releasing a transcript claiming that what Biden was calling garbage was the supporter, apostrophe S, so singular supporter with an apostrophe and an S. Quote, that person's singular demonization of Latinos.
The damage may already be done. Trump's campaign immediately seized on the moment during his rally.
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SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R-FL): It's just moments ago, Joe Biden stated that our supporters are garbage.
TRUMP: That's terrible. That's what it says.
Remember Hillary, she said deplorable. And then she said irredeemable, right? But she said deplorable that didn't work out. Garbage, I think is worse, right? But he doesn't know, you have to please forgive him. Please forgive him for he not knoweth what he said.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: All right. Joining us now and talk about all this, Jackie Kucinich, Washington bureau chief for "The Boston Globe".
Jackie, good morning. Looking forward to see you.
JACKIE KUCINICH, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Good morning.
HUNT: So this obviously harkens back to Hillary Clinton's comment when she said -- talked about Trumps supporters being deplorables, that's something that they seized on, obviously they immediately fundraising off of this.
[05:05:03]
The Biden team trying to explain it away.
I think it's important to point out, Biden is not actually the candidate, a top of the ticket, but this does again, were in the final stretch here where fully brightness was on set with us yesterday they basically saying there are people who think that there's nothing matters, but that nothing matters. But in this stretch everything matters.
KUCINICH: Right. This is unhelpful because step on her message, you that she was trying to make last night, which is every one has a seat at the table. She's going to listen to people that disagree with her.
What the intent was sadly, nuance does not matter at this stage of the game and so in that way, I mean, it really, its kind of I think the only question is whether it breaks through enough that Harris feels like she needs to say something and break from Biden publicly.
HUNT: When you talk about how the two of them interact -- I mean and who she is trying to appeal to right now, right. The way that the campaign, the Harris campaign is oriented itself is to try to convince Republicans to give them a permission structure is the phrase that a lot of strategists are using for them to vote for her. This seems contrary to that.
KUCINICH: All right. I mean, you even had videos. I think the lesson night at the before she took the stage of, you know, Republicans saying that they support Vice President Harris. So yes, again, this steps on that effort. How much it breaks through is the only question at this point because anything that allows the Trump campaign to paper over what was said at that rally, which we should say insulted a lot more people than Puerto Ricans. It kind of ran the gamut in that regard is really counterproductive at this stage of the game.
HUNT: So, Jackie, let's talk a little bit more about the rally that we did see last night from Harris at the ellipse because the imagery kind of what she had to say was really very, very sharply pointed to remind people of what happened on January 6.
Let's -- let's watch the portion of her speech where she talks about Donald Trump and that day, watch.
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HARRIS: He is the person who stood at this very spot, nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election -- an election that he knew he lost. Americans died as a result of that attack.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HUNT: So she picked this place and, you know, let's -- let's keep some of the B-roll from that speech playing because she picked this place because that's where Trump was standing on January 6 when he urged his mob to go to the Capitol and fight. You can see the flags next to her the White House behind her, or showing what's at stake.
I mean this is the kind of thing where every choice especially this close to an election is absolutely deliberate, trying to show that she is someone who could step into the role and be commander in chief because that is also part of the test for her, right? She needs to convince voters that she can be that person for them, did they succeed in that last night?
KUCINICH: I mean, this has been a campaign of late that has really relied on this political stage craft. I mean, look at the rally in Houston just a few days ago where is they're not going to win Texas and but it was used as a symbol of what the abortion laws have done in the wake of the fall of Roe.
She's going to win the District of Columbia, particularly northwest District of Columbia, I mean, all of District of Columbia. This is about the stagecraft. It's about that spot. The question is whether this democracy message is something that's going to get her over the line because there is some disagreement within the Republican Party that that should be the closing argument here and not just some of the other things.
And this was a very policy laden speech. She did hit a lot of policy notes here, but its very clear given the spot given what we just saw.
HUNT: There's that kind of wider shot --
KUCINICH: Exactly, that that democracy is front and center right here. HUNT: Yeah. All right. Jackie Kucinich, thanks for starting us off.
KUCINICH: Thanks, Kasie.
HUNT: Let's go less than a week. Here we go.
All right. Coming up here, a bipartisan breach, Chinese cyber is targeting Trump and his family and the Harris-Walz campaign.
Plus, evangelicals supporting Trump. But there's a notable exception. We're going to talk to the granddaughter of the Reverend Billy Graham about that.
And we're also joined by the mayor of a heavily Latino Pennsylvania city as Trump tries to clean up after the offensive joke about Puerto Rico at his rally.
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TRUMP: I've had really great relationship with Puerto Rico and people from Puerto Rico, they love -- every time I go outside, I see somebody from Puerto Rico. They give me a hug and a kiss.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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[05:14:18]
HUNT: All right. Welcome back.
U.S. officials are calling it one of the most serious national security breaches in recent memory. Hackers linked to the Chinese government are getting the calls and text data of former President Trump, his son Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. It's part of a sweeping cyber-espionage campaign against top figures in the Republican, but also the Democratic Party's.
According to three sources familiar with the matter, Trump running mate J.D. Vance, people affiliated with the Harris-Walz campaign, and the staff of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were also hacked.
One source familiar with the intelligence tells CNN that the scope of the hack is, quote, way worse than the public knows.
Officials are still sifting through the breaches to determine the impact.
[05:15:04]
In some cases, the hackers may have had access to the call data of their targets for months. The FBI now notifying the victims.
Max Foster joins us live now from London with more on this.
Max, good morning. Always good to see you. So intelligence officials say that China is not trying to interfere in
the U.S. election.
I mean, what do we know about what they are trying to do?
MAX FOSTER, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Well, it's not entirely clear. All we know is that they appear to have been listening into calls and watching tax. This is old school spying. They are literally listening in to calls. It's wiretapping.
And it's in real time. So that's what's so frightening about this because they are getting in effectively getting intelligence as its emerging, so very senior politicians on both sides having their conversations listening to and it just seems to be that they're listening out for anything that might be useful to their intelligence services.
HUNT: So, Max, we're told that these hacks came in the form of intrusions to some of these cell phone companies that, you know, have this data, telecom firms, AT&T, Lumen, and Verizon.
What does that say about out the security that we need from those companies?
FOSTER: What's interesting, isn't it, a big debate, particularly in this country. And I know the as well about whether or not to let companies like Huawei access to the telecom system. And that was decided that wasn't safe because perhaps a Chinese authorities kick get access to that information.
But they've clearly found a way of getting access into the systems of Western telecoms companies as well. And what's frightening about this is that they just don't know how they're doing it and it's deeply embedded. They don't even know which accounts within the telecom systems some are doing the spying or how they're doing it.
So they're warning people who've been hacked, but what they hadn't managed to do is go into the system and clean it out. So whatever system the Chinese are using, if indeed they are the Chinese embassy, for example, in Washington denying this it's completely new, but it's very old system, isn't it really to just try to listen to phone calls? It's not much more complicated than that.
HUNT: All right. Max Foster for us this morning -- Max, thanks very much for that.
All right. So coming up after the break, why RFK Jr. is concerned he could still be a spoiler candidate even after dropping out. We'll explain in our morning roundup.
Plus, how Donald Trump appears just to be laying the groundwork for potential legal challenges to the election results.
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[05:22:14] HUNT: All right, 21 minutes past the hour. Here's your morning roundup.
A 70-year-old suspect now in custody after firing at least 15 gunshots from his balcony at the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta. The man barricaded himself in his room after police responded to a report of a mental health crisis. During the hours-long standoff, officials believe he fired shots with several different weapons.
The Supreme Court ruling Robert F. Kennedy will remain on the ballot in battleground Michigan and Wisconsin. He left the race in August and filed an emergency appeal to remove his name from those ballots. But if election officials say he was too late because voting is underway. RFK Jr. expressing concern that he will divert votes from Trump whom he has endorsed.
The man who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband gets life behind bars, according to the "Associated Press". David Depape was already serving 30 years in federal prison but was just sentenced to life without parole in a state trial. He attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer in his home in 2022.
Several storms at the Central U.S. today as a cold front is moving through.
Let's get to our meteorologist, the weatherman, Derek Van Dam.
Derek, good morning.
DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yeah. This is the second severe weather season. We typically look towards the fall months for the change in weather patterns -- that fight against cold and warm and the battleground right now occurring and across the nation's midsection, right here where you see that shading of red.
We've highlighted the area. This is from the Storm Prediction Center of the shading of yellow, that's a slight risk. We have an enhanced risk here across parts of Missouri, eastern Kansas, and northern Oklahoma, large hail, damaging winds and the potential for stronger tornadoes as well, especially across this hatched area. So we're going to monitor this very closely, Interstate 35 from Kansas City to Wichita.
We know it's been a very active year for tornadoes since January 1. We've already had over 1,700 to date average is about 1,200. So you can see that we've seen an uptick in tornado activity.
Here's the radar, no current storm threat at the moment, but there is snowflakes its flying from the sky across the western U.S. Wyoming, Colorado, to Utah, you have winter weather alerts. You can see the snow progressing there, but this is the line of storms that will form later this evening and into the overnight hours, it will march eastward, more discrete supercell thunderstorms on the southern tail end of this. And again, this has all along a cold front that is dividing the country in terms of temperatures from the warmth on the east and the cool on the west. You can see it on our temperature map for today, quite a difference from Denver, 41, all the way to the nation's capital at 80.
And I'll end with this again -- yeah, that cold front will not advance. So we stay dry through the entire month of October for much of eastern seaboard, including Halloween night -- Kasie.
[05:25:04]
HUNT: All right. News you can use, Derek Van Dam, thank you. As always, great to see you.
VAN DAM: OK.
HUNT: All right. Still ahead here on CNN THIS MORNING, how could the controversial remarks about Puerto Rico at Trump's rally impact the campaign? We're going to talk to the mayor of Reading, Pennsylvania. It's home to one of the largest Latino populations in that key battleground state.
Plus, six days to Election Day, Trump are already casting doubt on the election results.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: They cheat like hell and it's a damn disgrace, and we've got to get it straightened out. We got to get it straighten out.
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