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Kamala Harris Holding Campaign Event in Texas about Reproductive Rights with Beyonce; Former "Sports Illustrated" Model Accuses Donald Trump of Groping Her in Front of Jeffrey Epstein in 1993; Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) Interviewed on His Ads Ridiculing Trump as in Cognitive Decline; Trump and Harris Hitting Campaign Trail Hard With 11 Days to Go; Election Workers Concerned About "Disruptive" Poll Watchers; Musk's Super PAC Defies DOJ Warning, Awards $1M Prize. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired October 25, 2024 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

JACQUELINE HOWARD, CNN HEALTH REPORTER: Emergency department visits where the bacterium that causes walking pneumonia, excuse me, it's called mycoplasma pneumonia, the percentage of emergency department visits where this bacterium has been tested positive for has risen from around one to three percent of visits among kids in late March, early April, to now, earlier this month, been about more than seven percent of emergency department visits. So we are seeing an increase in the prevalence of this mycoplasma pneumonia.

And symptoms to look out for include fever, cough, a slowly increasing cough that gradually becomes more and more constant. And that's what you want to look out for. if you do have respiratory the illness symptoms like this, see your doctor, get tested for what's causing those symptoms, and then seek treatment, because mycoplasma pneumonia, it's treated differently in a way because it's resistant to some common antibiotics like penicillin. It's treated with other types of antibiotics depending on your age, like macrolides, which we know commonly as a Z-pak, for instance. So that's why it's important to get tested for this. And it is becoming more prevalent, John.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Yes, make sure you get checked out. Take it very seriously. Jacqueline Howard, thank you very much.

Got a lot of news to come in. Brand new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts now.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Eleven days to go, and Kamala Harris is talking reproductive rights with a Texas sized backdrop and Beyonce by her side.

Donald Trump is facing a new sexual assault allegation from a former "Sports Illustrated" model. What she said happened with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the room.

A grieving mother is suing a tech company right now. She says an A.I. chatbot drove her son to suicide. I'm Kate Bolduan with John Berman and Sara Sidner. This is CNN NEWS

CENTRAL.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overnight, this presidential race pulling tighter than ever. It is neck-to-neck. And the candidates have just 11 days left to make their case to voters. A new, "New York Times"-Siena College poll shows Kamala Harris and Donald Trump deadlocked at exactly 48 percent each. So clearly, no clear winner in this race from people who are polled. The new numbers again, putting the spotlight on those all-important battleground states.

But today, both Harris and Trump are headed to a reliably red state, Texas. Trump will be in Austin focusing on immigration and migrant crime as he tries to use fear to motivate voters.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We're a dumping ground. We're like, we're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. Thats what's happened to us. We're like a garbage can. It's the first time I've ever said. And every time I come up and talk about what they've done to our country, I get angrier and angrier. First time I've ever said "garbage can," but you know what, it's a very accurate description.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: His rhetoric getting angrier and angrier there, he admitting that himself.

The vice president, meanwhile, emphasizing to voters that a second Trump presidency will bring brutally serious consequences.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KAMALA HARRIS, (D) VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher because over the last years, and particularly the last eight years, Donald Trump has become more confused, more unstable, and more angry.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Today, Harris will be in Houston where her campaign says she'll be delivering a major address on reproductive freedom, and by her side, the one and only Beyonce.

CNN senior political analyst Mark Preston is joining us now. All right, what is one big thing for the Harris campaign this morning? And I have a feeling I know what you're going to say.

MARK PRESTON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Oh, just the queen, right? I mean, that is -- I mean, look, do you remember, Sara -- Sara, for viewers out there, Sara and I were together out in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention on that last day. Look, there are no surprises in politics anymore. On that last day, every major news organization, every major player in politics was trying to figure out whether or not Beyonce was going to show up and do a surprise endorsement or performance. That happened all day. The anticipation was so very high.

Why, why is it important? It's important because she has such an influence, an outsized influence right now in American culture, and can her support be enough to get some women. Look, it's directed at women. Let's be very clear. Is it enough to get some women off the coaches in some of these states that are important, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia.

SIDNER: All right. Let's go to this. "The New York Times" is out with this new polling this morning showing the race is in a literal dead heat, not plus or minus, but in a dead heat less than two weeks to go.

[08:05:04]

What would you warn voters about what to expect knowing how tight this may be on election night?

PRESTON: Let's be very clear. If we go back to the 2020 election, nearly 160 million people voted, OK. The likelihood this is going to be called on election night is 0.0. Now if you're a betting person, like I think Berman is, but if you are a betting person, Sara, you would take the over. Don't bet on, you know, don't bet on the players in the game because we don't know. It's such a toss-up.

But what we do know, or at least we're led to believe because of what we know from past history, we know how difficult it is to count all these numbers, it's going to be a few days before we really know who is going to be the next president of the United States.

SIDNER: It is hard to be patient for most of us, but we need to heed the warnings.

All right, Harris is set to speak about reproductive rights, you mentioned, today in Texas. Trump pounding away on Harris when it comes to immigration.

PRESTON: Right.

SIDNER: Which issue is most important to voters and will resonate? Because obviously, in talking to those around Harris, this message from Texas isn't just for Texas.

PRESTON: Oh, my gosh, it's happening in Texas, but it's really being something that's to be broadcast throughout to these very important states. Again, I mentioned some of them earlier. You could add a couple to them such as Arizona in Nevada. But the idea, let's talk about Harrison and abortion first. I will tell you this anecdotal evidence now is that when Taylor Swift got involved in the election, there was a movement among young women to try to go and get their ballots. Now, I know that from what I've heard, friends, and they were either getting their ballots from states where they live that were important, such as Pennsylvania, or they were registering to vote in the state where they go to college, such as Wisconsin and North Carolina. So when they're talking about reproductive rights tonight, it's

directed at all of those women who really believe that this is the number one issue for them.

When it gets to Donald Trump, though, look, he's trying to get out the last bit of his base right now. He is staying true to what he thinks is a winning message. And I think you've noted it earlier, it's fear, it's fear, it's fear.

SIDNER: Mark Preston, it is always a pleasure, pleasure, pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for being here this morning early.

All right, Kate?

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, the Trump campaign is lashing out at a former "Sports Illustrated' swimsuit model as the candidate is facing a new allegation of sexual assault. Stacey Williams says that Donald Trump groped her in front of Jeffrey Epstein back in the 90s. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STACEY WILLIAMS, ACCUSES TRUMP OF GROPING HER IN 1993: The hands started moving, and they were on the, you know, on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt, back up, sort of then, you know, they were just on me the whole time. And I -- sorry -- I froze.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: CNN's Sunlen Serfaty here with us. Sunlen got the sit-down interview there with Stacey Williams. And walk us through, if you can, Sunlen, what Stacey Williams says happened.

SUNLEN SERFATY, CNN WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Well, this goes back, Kate, to 1993. Stacey Williams says at the time that she was dating Jeffrey Epstein. It was kind of a casual situation. They're walking down Fifth Avenue and Epstein says, lets pop up into Trump Tower and visit Trump. They go up, and she says almost immediately, Trump is outside the elevators to greet them. And she says, the second Trump was in front of her that's when he started putting her his hands on her. She says that he put her hands on her breasts, on her butt, and it lasted for over a minute.

And notably, she says that while Trump was groping her, that Epstein and Trump or there talking, smiling with each other as this was allegedly happening. She was frozen, she says, and she was shocked in that moment, and she felt like she was part of this game between the two men. Here's more of what she told me.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STACEY WILLIAMS, ACCUSES TRUMP OF GROPING HER IN 1993: I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated, that somehow the whole thing was -- I was rolled in there like a piece of meat for some kind of weird twisted game.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SERFATY: And after this happened, Williams says that they went down, her and Epstein were out on the sidewalk, and Epstein then berated her for not trying to stop it. That really, Kate, set off what she says is a cycle of shame for her, and she really locked in keyed it, kept it really inside of her for many, many years. She didn't tell someone, she says, until over a decade later. And CNN has talked to three friends of Williams. They said that they told her of this incident in 2006, 2015, and 2016. The Trump campaign, meantime, is denying these allegations.

BOLDUAN: And while she, you talk about when she even first spoke about it at all was a decade after it happened, and she really just spoke of it publicly for the first time this week.

[08:10:03]

And it was during an event in support of Kamala Harris. The Donald Trump campaign saw that and said, this, calling this politically motivated in what she's saying and the timing of when she's coming out. How is she responding to that?

SERFATY: Yes, it's a valid question. It's something that I talked to her about in this interview. She said that before she was not ready to talk about it. She is now. Largely she said that was family considerations over the last 30 years or so. But as far as this particular moment, she decided to do that Zoom call with the Survivors for Kamala because of this other documentary she had alluded to. That documentary aired this past weekend, and she said it's out there. I want to give context to it.

BOLDUAN: Sunlen, thank you so much. It's good to see you. John?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, with us now is Congressman Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California. Congressman, thanks so much for being with us. I was just looking at the brand-new "New York Times"- Siena College poll, and it found that 15 percent of people they pulled say they are not fully decided, 15 percent. I wonder what impact on them you think this story that Sunlen just reported on might have? Because accusations like this against Donald Trump, they're not new. People have heard these types of things before.

REP. ERIC SWALWELL (D-CA): The new accusation, John, against Donald Trump of sexual assault sounds a lot like the one that he was recently judged in a court to have committed. And that has been held up on appeal. And so we're not hearing something that is wildly out of the ordinary. And I think that's going to be quite concerning to folks who are undecided.

My experience, also, in undecided races is that when you have a candidate who is so well-known, let's just give Donald Trump 100 percent name identification, and folks are still undecided near the end, they're going to break toward the person that is new. And so they're still learning about Kamala Harris. This is a time for her to make the case that she's going to restore decency to the office, that it's not going to be a presidency about her. It's going to be a presidency about you and what your needs are, and that we don't have to deal with Donald Trump's personal criminal, civil issues that would make a mess of his next presidency.

BERMAN: So Congressman, you are in what I think is considered a pretty safe seat in California, yet you've been running ads about Donald Trump, including this new one, which we got to look at. I want to play a little bit of it right now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We were so worried.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They're eating the dogs.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He wasn't making any sense.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The people come in, they're eating the cats.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And he just kept getting worse.

Then a friend told us there was somewhere he could get the help he so desperately needed called A Place for Trump.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Person, woman, man, camera, TV.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So this November, let's vote to put him in "A Place for Trump", because we all know he belongs in a home, just not this one.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right, so what's the goal here? And I ask that because there seems to be a little bit of a mixed message in this case. You are, I think, making fun of Donald Trump it is safe to say in this case. Yet there is a message from some Democrats, including the candidate, that he is an existential threat to democracy.

SWALWELL: John, he's also in cognitive decline. In that ad, Donald Trump makes it a little too on the nose, the way that he's acted in the last week, standing almost completely frozen on stage for nearly 30 minutes. He's almost 80-years-old. He continues to talk about completely irrelevant material when he's talking to his supporters.

And so the argument is, you may like Donald Trump. He may appeal to you in some ways with his policies, but the last place we want to put him is at the White House where he can make decisions about our lives. He's just not ready for primetime. And yes, humor, I think, sometimes is the best way to land a point.

But his default, and if you do believe that folks will regress to the mean, his default of course is a fascist like tendency during the time that he can have a cognitive ability. And that's not an accusation that I'm making. That's an accusation that comes from people who have worked for him at the most senior level.

BERMAN: But do you see what I'm saying, that there may be some cognitive dissonance between making a joke about Donald Trump like that and saying he is a fascist? The two things seem a little bit separate.

And I do want to note, there's this new poll from ABC News and Ipsos today which found that 49 percent, about half of the population, see Donald Trump as a fascist.

[08:15:00]

SWALWELL: And those folks want to move on with their lives. I meet Independents and Republicans and many of them are my family members who tell me they just want to get back to their lives. They don't want to wake up every morning and check Twitter and see what he's tweeting from the toilet.

They want to get back to their own lives and that's part of the case that Kamala Harris is making. She's going to focus on what you need in your life and this is not going to be another me, me, me presidency.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Okay, you need in your life, so, she's giving a speech on Tuesday on the Ellipse, clearly to mark the location where Donald Trump delivered that speech on January 6th. Again, focused on the threat to democracy and whatnot.

Do you think that people, the voters really, the undecided voters, see that as something that affects their daily lives, more or less then prices and health care?

SWALWELL: Undecided voters want and America that has free market capitalism, not free for all capitalism. They want a rule of law where all of us are treated the same, not one set of rules for a president who thinks that he's above the law. And another set of rules for those who are deemed his enemy. They want a land where women have reproductive rights. That's why she's going to Houston today to really animate that issue.

So, they're concerned about all of these issues and yes, of course, they want to know that if they work hard, they can buy their first home, which is why Kamala Harris, has a $25,000.00 down-payment plan for first-time homebuyers. This these are all factors and I think in these closing days, she's hitting on all of them.

BERMAN: All right, Congressman Eric Swalwell, appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

SWALWELL: My pleasure.

BERMAN: Sara --

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, this morning, the Menendez brothers could be one step closer to getting out of prison more than three decades after being convicted of murdering both of their parents, why the case is coming back to court.

Plus, is Elon Musk's super PAC defying the DOJ, the group giving out two more big money prices despite warnings that what they're doing might be illegal.

And election workers across the country are bracing themselves for unrest and disruptions, their stories ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:21:51]

SIDNER: New this morning, election workers across the country are becoming increasingly concerned that some groups of poll watchers may disrupt and cause problems for voters and poll workers on election day.

The RNC and several other conservative groups have been working to recruit what they say will be an army of election observers, including many who doubted the 2020 election results.

CNN's Sara Murray is joining us now. What are you hearing from these election workers?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think there's just some uncertainty about how this is actually going to play out this year, you know, over the summer in Wisconsin, there was an incident or poll watchers showed up and were very disruptive. They had to be removed by police.

As we're looking ahead to again, election day in just a couple of weeks, we see that in Georgia, there are a number of these folks on a state-wide poll watcher's list put forward by the Republican Party, who are people who have spread conspiracies about the election or served as fake electors in Georgia in 2020.

And we see from the public versions of these RNC election worker trainings that they are very attracted to people who are skeptical of the 2020 results. Take a listen to someone who attended one of these poll-watcher trainings in Wisconsin.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT KRONCE, TRAINING TO BE A POLL WATCHER: I want to protect the vote from the last time we had the election and I believe it was wrong. And I want to make sure that we can get the right amount of ballots in the boxes that are supposed to be where they're supposed to be.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MURRAY: So, what election officials want to do is they want to make sure that if someone shows up who, as a poll-watcher, who is an election skeptic that they don't disrupt the process. And we talked to a number of election officials who believe there won't be disruptions.

They think that people will not want to get kicked out of a polling site or a counting place so that they will actually be on their best behavior even if they have their own thoughts about things that might be going wrong. But officials have taken just so many more steps than they had and

really any previous election to prepare for any possible disturbance, anything that may need to be escalated to law enforcement and essentially to prepare to remove people from the premises if they do try to interfere with the voters ability to cast a ballot and we've also heard some shade, frankly, Sara, from some of the folks on the left who say, they just don't think that thousands of people, the RNC is promising are actually going to manifest at these polling places and vote counting sites. So, we will see who actually shows up in November.

SIDNER: I remember well in Detroit where people were banging on the window as the votes were being counted. So, a lot of concern on the part of election workers, especially because of what happened to Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, a lot going on, Sara Murray and we will be there on the ground and all of the different important states to talk all about it on election day.

MURRAY: All the places.

SIDNER: All the places, all right, thank you so much, Sara -- John.

BERMAN: All right, so, is Elon Musk poking the legal bear, his super PAC hands out more million dollars prizes, even after a Justice Department warning.

And the owners of the cargo ship responsible for the deadly Baltimore Bridge collapse agree to pay big,

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:29:09]

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: New this morning, Elon Musk's super PAC has awarded two more $1 million prizes to registered voters, despite the Justice Department warning that those payments may be illegal. The new checks are the first since CNN had learned that DOJ sent a letter saying the sweepstakes may be violating election laws.

CNN's Marshall Cohen has the very latest.

Marshall, what are you learning about this?

MARSHALL COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good morning, Kate. Well, we've got a standoff now with the Justice Department on one side warning that this might be illegal and Elon Musk's super PAC on the other side moving full speed ahead.

So, it's been a wild week. Let's remember how we got here. Go back to Saturday. Elon Musk campaigning in support of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. He announced that he was going to give away a million dollars each day to people who sign his petition in support of the Constitution. But if you look at the fine print on his super PAC's website, only registered voters in swing states are eligible to sign.

That is the problem because you cannot, according to federal law, connect the act of registration to cash incentives or prizes and legal experts and apparently the folks at the Justice Department as well immediately drew some concerns, raised some objections.

We reported on Wednesday that the Justice Department had sent that warning letter to the Musk super PAC, Musk's group did not name a winner on Wednesday and that sort of raised a lot of eyebrows. Maybe they were shutting it down, but late last night they announced two more winners, a million dollars to registered voters in Michigan and Wisconsin.

So, it looks like they are moving forward with this program, even though they have been warned by federal law enforcement that it might be illegal.

[08:31:00]