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30 democratic lawmakers calling on Biden to quit race; Huge tech outage disrupts airlines, banks, hospitals worldwide; VP Harris makes stop as calls grow for Biden to step aside. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired July 19, 2024 - 14:00   ET

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

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[14:00:19]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: The president versus many in his own party. Biden's campaign dismissing rumors that he could step aside and says there will be no alternative nominee even as 30 democratic lawmakers are now calling for him to drop out.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Plus, a massive tech outage disrupting emergency services, hospitals, airlines, and banks worldwide. We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to CNN News Central.

KEILAR: Hello, I'm Brianna Keilar alongside Boris Sanchez, fresh back from the Republican National Convention. And what started as an effort to gently urge President Joe Biden out of the race is now threatening to turn into an all-out intraparty showdown. In just the last few hours here, eight democratic lawmakers have publicly called on Biden to drop out. And that includes, for the first time, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Another Democrat on the list is California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, she sent a letter today to Biden writing, "simply put, your candidacy is on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races down ballot. It is for these reasons that I urge you to step aside from our party's nomination to allow another democratic candidate to compete against and beat Donald Trump in the November election."

As CNN has reported, senior ranking officials in both the White House and campaign privately believe that Biden must quit the race. There's a widespread feeling that the end is near. But in a statement released just a short time ago, the President says he's looking forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week after he recovers from COVID.

CNN senior White House Correspondent MJ Lee joins us now. MJ, we're getting two vastly different messages from those close to the President. What do you make of it?

MJ LEE, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: I mean, there is a real divide right now. There is a sense within the Democratic Party that feels like the end is near, people who are completely freaked out about the fact that the president needs to go in their minds. And as you said, this includes senior people who privately think this inside the White House in the campaign as well.

And then there is the campaign's public position as of today, which is that the President is not stepping aside. And they've really been on full blast today. We saw the campaign chair going on television earlier saying the President is absolutely staying in the race. The President himself put out a statement saying he's going to hit the campaign trail later next week. And then this campaign memo that they put out which said, "there is no plan for an alternative nominee. In a few short weeks, Joe Biden will be the official nominee. It is high past time we stop fighting one another. The only person who wins when we fight is Donald Trump."

I was also told last night that the senior, most west-wing aides have had no discussion so far amongst themselves or with the President himself about preparations for the President dropping out. But the problem right now is that the panic inside the party is so deep and it is so growing, including the democratic lawmakers who are still publicly coming out, the donors who have stopped writing checks.

And meanwhile, the President has been completely sidelined. So I think at this point, we just need to make the distinction between what is actually going on and a lot of wishful thinking.

KEILAR: And we are looking at some live pictures. We can talk about Kamala Harris because she is here in Washington, DC. That is Tyra Banks, isn't it? It's kind of -- okay. So Tyra Banks, this is -- has a top -- a pop up ice cream store. And

as you know, it's normally presented by -- I feel like there's sort of some subtext to this --

SANCHEZ: Yes.

KEILAR: -- question because I feel like we've seen President Biden a lot getting ice cream. It's something you do on the campaign trail. Here, we see the Vice President Kamala Harris, out and about here in DC at this ice cream shop. And there are a lot of people, MJ, talking about. They're filthy to the Biden-Harris ticket, which is no accident that they are phrasing it like that. It seems like they're covering their bets.

LEE: Yeah, we're seeing the Vice President do the thing that the President loves to do the most, as you pointed out, going to an ice cream store. Look, she has been in an incredibly delicate position. She is the vice president and needs to be continue playing that role. And I think her aides and her team have made very clear. All we are going to do right now as the party descends into chaos is keep our heads down and continue sort of fighting for the Biden-Harris ticket. I don't know that she has any other choice. Obviously, behind the scenes within the party, there are furious discussions going on right now about a possible plan B.

I'm not saying this is some official plan that is coming together, but there are discussions about whether it should be the Vice President, whether there's any scenario where the party sort of skips over her.

[14:05:07]

That scenario is going to be incredibly chaotic. It is going to prompt a lot of anger. But the bottom line is, we don't know if there's going to be a need for a plan B because the President right now says he is staying in.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, it is an open question. I just want to quickly point out, the Vice President is there with her two nieces. And Tyra Banks has been giving a very animated description of the ice cream.

KEILAR: It sure has.

SANCHEZ: I don't know if you've been watching that. This is a pop up shop called Smize & Dream that she opened up during the pandemic. MJ, please stand by because I want to get some reporting from CNN Congressional Correspondent Lauren Fox, who has the Capitol Hill angle of all of this. And just watching the full screen grow, MJ, or rather Lauren, when it was only a few lawmakers and now it's almost 30, if not at 30 or more, I can't imagine that that pleases the President.

LAUREN FOX, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, this is a really difficult inflection part -- point for the party, in part because they are weighing right now individual members in their offices as they are on recess this week, whether or not it makes sense to join the chorus of Democrats who are calling for the President to step aside or whether it might make more political sense to let their leadership and others take that task at the moment.

Given the fact that you have to imagine a scenario where if Biden does not get out of this race, some of these Democrats running in difficult districts, running as frontliners, may be running in the same state and the same place that Biden also will be running aggressively in. And so I think there's just a lot of calculation happening behind the scenes. I will tell you that the dynamics could start to shift also when lawmakers get back to Washington next week. Let's say the weekend goes by, there isn't any substantial change in terms of Joe Biden making any announcements.

That means the lawmakers are going to come back to Washington next week and they are going to be faced by even more questions about what they think the President's future should be. That puts on additional pressure on many of these members who maybe have doubts privately about Biden's ability to win, but have so far held back in expressing any of those concerns publicly. And so that dynamic is going to be really interesting to watch next week.

And I think there's just an exhaustion that members are feeling right now. They do not like being in the spotlight at a moment when they would rather be talking about all the reasons that Donald Trump is a liability for the country. But they also understand that there's a reason that they are being asked these questions. There's a reason that Democrats are in the news cycle right now. And there's some frustration with the fact that perhaps the President does not recognize the hardship that this is putting on many members. So, you know, a lot of dynamics at play, and each of these members has to make this choice for themselves about what they think is most politically advantageous in their race right now.

KEILAR: Yeah. I would note as we look at the graphic of these lawmakers, and they're not the only democratic voices calling on Joe Biden to step aside, but we're to that point, when you start taking a tally of people saying something and the pictures of their faces start getting so small. You can't make them out because there's so many on the page. And that's really -- that says something about where we're at. We expect that there will be more faces added to that.

And, Lauren, I do want to just talk a little bit about something that Seth Moulton, congressman from Massachusetts, he's written an oped in the Boston Globe. And he's talking about how much Joe Biden -- well, he's saying why Joe Biden should exit the race? But he's talking about how -- after he had won his general election as a congressman, that Joe Biden would invite him to breakfast at the Vice President's house, that he was really someone who's been a mentor to him. And he says, more recently, I saw him in a small group at Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day. For the first time, he didn't seem to recognize me. He said, of course, that can happen as anyone age, but I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago. I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem.

It sounds, Lauren, that we're starting to hear the inside thoughts, becoming outside thoughts with so many lawmakers.

FOX: Yeah. I mean, so many of these members have had either limited interactions with the President over the course of the last several weeks or if they've had interactions over the last year, may have had concerns, but maybe had a reason why they thought that maybe it was just a bad day, bad moment, etcetera, when they were meeting with the President. But I think, yes, members are starting to get more public about those concerns.

And part of that is just a reality that they feel like maybe no one is listening, and so they're getting more specific about what those concerns are.

[14:10:01]

You know, there's also just this sense right now in the party that they are tired and they want to move on from this moment.

Now, of course, MJ brought up an excellent point. You know, what comes next is completely unknown and could be chaotic, could be messy for the party as well. But I think that's why you're starting to see people like Moulton and others be so public about those moments of pause that they may have had over the course of the last several weeks or months.

SANCHEZ: Lauren Fox, thanks so much for that reporting. Let's expand the conversation now with CNN Political Commentators Maria Cardona and Jamal Simmons. Also back with us is CNN'S Senior White House Correspondent MJ Lee. Maria, I want to start with you to pick up on something that Lauren

just said. And that is that these lawmakers are becoming more vocal because they don't feel like they're being heard. I think part of that is also sort of a permission structure or an allowance, if you will, by the leadership in the democratic party, folks like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, even Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying that this is an ongoing conversation when the White House had shut the door on the conversation. What do you make of that?

MARIA CARDONA, POLITICAL COMMENTATORS: So, clearly, the White House has got to continue to take these ideas, these, you know, pushes, what they're hearing in the media into consideration. But here's my point. Where we are right now? The President has said, he is staying in. He is the nominee of the Democratic Party. What we're not seeing on TV and on your screens are the 1,400 black women who signed a letter saying they still strongly support the President. The members of the congressional Hispanic caucus who said they strongly support the President.

The millions of grassroots voters who say he is our nominee, we voted for him, we have faith in him, he had our back, we have his. That's what the White House is hearing as well, because they have an incredible infrastructure in these states that is going door to door. And that's what they're hearing. So it's not like they're ignoring all of this. They are hearing from the voters who nominated him and who put him in office. And that I think, is an aspect that does not get reported very often. And we're hearing it from the communities that would be most in danger if Donald Trump gets into office again.

And so at some point, and I'm not telling all these lawmakers who have legitimate concerns. To be quiet, we don't do that, right? That's the other party. We don't do that. But I will say to them, at what point -- if President Biden is going to continue to stay in the race, at what point do they say, okay, we have to embrace it because if they don't, let's say that's a scenario, we know what the other scenarios are, people have been talking about them nonstop what we don't know is how they would work and how chaotic it would be if it comes to that. But what if the scenario is that President Biden stays in? At what point do these lawmakers say, okay, he's our nominee, we have to embrace him, let's go win this thing because if they don't, then what are they saying? They're going to throw up their hands and that's it. We lost. Because if they're going to do that, we might as well inaugurate Donald Trump tomorrow.

KEILAR: I have heard some Democrats say that these people should be quiet. I've heard multiple Democrats say that at this point. Well, I respect that you don't, Maria. Certainly. Jamal, I've also heard Democrats who want Joe Biden to step aside, also saying that he has a great legacy. And I wonder if you think that the President has a grasp of what he is dealing with if he is seeing accurately the poll numbers, also knowing that he is isolating right now from COVID, so it's sort of maybe hard to absorb, you know, what's going on out in the world.

JAMAL SIMMONS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I think it might actually be the reverse. You know, one thing when you're president, you don't have a lot of time to watch TV when you're going in and out of meetings and you're on the trail.

So I imagine he's at home seeing more of this. And I've heard this from people who have worked for him in the past that they think he's probably paying more attention to this than we give him credit for. You know, the danger for this is, for the party, that if you're one of these members in a marginal district or you're in a state that's a swing state, you might be thinking, I just don't know if I can run with this particular ticket. And so that's why you're speaking up. They have very legitimate concerns, as Maria just said.

So the onus is going to be on the campaign and on the President to continue to show people that he's actually -- he's up to the job, he can handle the job, he can do very well on the stump, and he's going to have to keep doing that. This isn't a question that's going away. This is going to be something for the Democrats to manage throughout the rest of the campaign.

[14:15:00]

Now, the more we talk about Project 2025 and what happened with Donald Trump last night and that rambling disaster of a convention speech that he had, I think the better off Democrats are. And when I was in Detroit last week with my family with a bunch of working class African-Americans, they were a little more skittish, maybe is the word that we use.

They would say -- they didn't actually care how the Democrats decided about this. They were supportive of President Biden, but they just wanted the Democrats to get it over with. Get it over with quickly. Let's move on and let's get back to Donald Trump. So whether it's Biden or Harris or whoever the candidate is, let's just settle it and let's move forward.

Jamal, you perfectly teed up what I was thinking of asking MJ about when you first said that the President doesn't have time to watch TV because I was wondering, was he watching the RNC last night? And Jamal pointed out the remarks from Donald Trump. While many had been touting, many Republicans there at the RNC had been touting this message of unity, it quickly went off the rails.

And he started talking about a stolen election, and he started talking about Joe Biden being the worst president ever. And these things that were not unifying at all. But hearing the analysis and even in some of our reporting, I got the sense that Democrats, when they saw that, they saw opportunity and they saw this race not being over. I'm wondering if that's what you've heard from (INAUDIBLE).

LEE: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think you can sense from the campaign this morning. You sensed it late last night after that very rambling speech from the former president. They were saying that this speech was exactly the reason that the President is going to stay in and why we think we have a path that this was a speech that was self-centered and all about him. It didn't have a vision. And it certainly was not meant to bring in more voters into the Trump tent.

I will say though, in terms of the impasse that the Democratic Party is in, the reason that people are completely freaking out right now is because they can hear the clock that is ticking. They can't debate. They've already been debating this for, you know, three weeks or whenever the CNN debate was.

SANCHEZ: Yeah.

LEE: They feel like if we continue staying in this place where the President is saying he's running, everybody else in the party is completely freaking out and there's no decision made, then what happens heading into convention week? What happens -- I mean, you know this better than anyone. When the delegates start voting, which is supposed to be the beginning of August, they just truly do not know right now where things are headed. And I think that sense of panic and unease is just something I have never experienced before.

KEILAR: I think it's interesting how when you talk to people who -- Democrats who want Biden to stay and who want Biden to go, they seem to have the same reasoning because of what they see the stakes to be. We had Congressman Glenn Ivey on. And he's firmly behind Biden. And he said he's hearing from his constituents that they feel like it's Biden being unfairly pushed out, that he's being ill-treated.

All right. So to that point, what would it take Maria, to get past that but also have Joe Biden step aside in a way that does not alienate those voters?

FOX: Well, I think that -- therein lies the question. And right now, like I said before, the White House is listening to those people who do believe that the democratic elite in Washington are not listening to them. And so there is a scenario, Brianna, where, let's say, Biden steps aside, and again, that opens up to an unknown process. And we don't know -- even Kamala, I think she would wipe the floor with Donald Trump. But there are people, as you know very well, that won't support a black, Southeast Asian daughter of immigrants woman as President, and probably even some in our own party.

I'm talking about the unknown, right? Everyone can talk about their fantasy football ticket. This is not fantasy. This is real life. And last night's speech clarified it for so many people. I can't tell you how many texts I got from my immigrant friends who were saying, oh, my God, Donald Trump just put a target on my family's back. And as an immigrant Latina myself, I feel that way, too.

I thank God I live 2in Washington, DC. But if I lived in Texas or in some other rural red area, and my kids were out speaking Spanish, I would be in fear of their life for the words that Donald Trump spoke last night. And that is what is at stake. Regardless of what happens here, I have been saying, you know, we absolutely can beat Donald Trump. The Democratic Party has got to get this telenovela off the air, and let's cancel it and focus on eyes on the prize. And that is Donald Trump Project 2025, the danger to our democracy and the danger to so many communities that today support President Biden as the nominee for the ticket.

SANCHEZ: Jamal, I want to give you the last word on the dynamic that Maria is describing where it's like the devil you know versus the devil you don't, and the potential chaos that could be unleashed by opening up Pandora's box.

[14:20:05]

SIMMONS: You know, there's no safe place for the Democrats. I mean, that's the challenge for this moment, right? There's no place where you say, okay, if we make this choice, this choice will get us to the White House again, right? So whether we stick with President Biden or we pick somebody new. Now, I support President Biden as long as he's going to run.

The question, though, becomes, is -- if not just about Joe Biden, is it about the entire party? Is it about us achieving the goals that it is we say we're going to get to? And something about the language, I think, and how the conversation is developing, it's becoming so much about Joe Biden the person. We all honor Joe Biden. I worked for him. I was honored to be there. But it's really about these families that Maria is talking about, about my family. And I think we've got to stay focused on the ultimate outcome and who's the best person to carry the democratic flag into the next election.

Right now, that's Joe Biden. And if he's the nominee at the Democratic Party, at the convention, I think more Democrats will be able to go along with it. I think the time between here and there, you're going to have more robust conversation among Democrats who've been sitting on their opinions about this for a long time. And unlike Maria, I'm actually not that worried about telenovela. I think that Americans have been watching reality TV for a generation. And they are perfectly interested, maybe even happy to get a little bit of drama.

And maybe Donald Trump is the one who's nervous that Democrats have so much drama that his entire convention was split screen instead of him dominating it. And if we come out with a unified party when this is over, we probably would have more people bought in to the end of our -- to the end of our campaign and us winning this campaign than we did before we started. We're finally having the conversation that is really the conversation about Joe Biden, that everybody in the party has been whispering about.

We're having it out loud. We're going to settle it, and then we're going to all move forward and go win together.

FOX: That'd be a great season finale (INAUDIBLE) in a way (INAUDIBLE).

KEILAR: Yeah, you don't cancel it when the drama is high. Jamal, thank you with your very fascinating countervailing opinions. We do appreciate them. Jamal Simmons, Maria Cardona, MJ, thank you so much as well. And ahead this hour on CNN News central, airports, banks, hospitals, even 911 call centers crippled by a worldwide tech outage. We have the latest on what experts say is the largest IT failure in history.

SANCHEZ: Plus, investigators believe the Internet trail of Trump's would be assassin could help them get closer to a potential motive. We'll break down the clues they're following.

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SANCHEZ: We're following breaking news on a massive cyber outage. And you are looking at the results. Today across the globe, airports, banks, hospitals, even emergency 911 services have been paralyzed by what some experts say is the largest it failure in history. UPS and FedEx are also now warning customers to expect shipping delays because of this outage.

KEILAR: It's such a mess. And cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says that the problem here was at least partly caused by a faulty software update, that it was not a cyberattack. But the company says it's gradually fixing the issue. Warning, of course, though getting back to normal could be a lengthy process. In the U.S. alone, more than 2,300 flights have been canceled today. Thousands more were delayed.

Joining us now is CNN Aviation Analyst Miles O'Brien. I mean, Miles, my goodness, what we're seeing here, how concerned should we be that one apparent faulty software update has caused so much disruption to airports and airlines?

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: It's kind of stunning to me, Brianna. When you think about aviation and why it is so safe to fly, it's all about redundancy and redundancies for the redundancy. So if you do get a failure, you're not going to have a really bad day. And yet the system all around aviation. This is not obviously mission- critical safety issue today, but the system around it where you check in, where you do your bookings, where you get on the flight, where they have the postings on the monitors. All those things can be brought to a complete crawl or a standstill by virtue of one misplaced keystroke on someone's software update. That is stunning to me.

And it shows a little bit of a blind spot, actually, a big blind spot on the part of the airlines in the sense that they're not taking that ethos of redundancy outside what is strictly mission-critical for safety. Hopefully, there is a lesson learned here because we're all kind of realizing what a house of cards this is.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. I'm wondering, Miles, so then what would a potential new approach look like? Would it be sort of a diversification of these protection software programs?

O'BRIEN: Yeah. Absolutely, Boris. I think -- and I don't think that's too much to ask of, you know, of the airlines for the flying public to ensure they have a backup system for all of this. You know, I don't want to date myself too much here, Boris, but when I used to first fly, they used to actually put stickers on a diagram. And that's how they assigned your seat. Maybe they should bring back the stickers as a fallback occasionally. I'm being somewhat facetious, but there have got to be ways to ensure that they have a go-to in these situations. The consequences of it are significant.

And admittedly, there's not going to be an airplane that falls out of the sky because of this. But there are thousands and thousands of people right now who are inconvenienced. And this will end up costing the airlines a lot of money. And ultimately, I would assume, CrowdStrike is going to have to write some big checks.

KEILAR: Yeah. People are missing weddings, you know? I think about even the --

O'BRIEN: Yeah.

KEILAR: -- critical thing. You know, if organs are flying around on these airplanes, like, what kinds of ramifications are they having here? It's going to be an incredible domino effect. Miles, great to have you. Thank you so much.

O'BRIEN: You're welcome.