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CNN International: Biden and Trump to Face Off in Debate Thursday; Synagogues, Churches Targeted in Dagestan Deadly Attacks; U.S. Heat Wave Shifts to South After Scorching Northeastern U.S.; Netanyahu Discusses War in Gaza. Aired 4:00-4:30a ET

Aired June 24, 2024 - 04:00   ET

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

[04:00:00]

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: President Biden really wants to lay at Donald Trump's feet with the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You got to be tough and nasty and just say you're the worst president in history? Or should I be nice and calm?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Authorities are describing what appeared to have been a coordinated series of attacks on police posts, a synagogue, and on churches.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And that heat starts to settle in again for more than 78 percent of the lower 48. That's 250 million people with these temperatures at 90 degrees or hotter.

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ANNOUNCER: Live from London, this is CNN NEWSROOM with Max Foster.

FOSTER: Hello, a warm welcome to our viewers joining us from around the world. I'm Max Foster. It is Monday, June the 24th, 9 a.m. here in London, 4 a.m. in Atlanta, where CNN's historic presidential debate will take place in just three days' time. President Biden, he's at Camp David, hunkered down with his advisers preparing. He's looking over possible questions, holding mock debates, focusing on how best to frame his Republican rival as unfit for office.

Now, in sharp contrast, Trump shunned traditional debate prep for the campaign trail over the weekend. And after spending months describing Biden as a mentally unfit leader, Trump's surrogates are now suddenly talking him up.

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DOUG BURGUM, (R) NORTH DAKOTA GOVERNOR: There has been a real effort on the Biden team to try to lower expectations, but I think we have to look at the guy's run for office more than a dozen times. He's run for president four times. He's been campaigning since President Nixon was in office. This guy has got the ability, and we've seen it. We've seen him in debate four years ago. We've seen him in the state of the state of the union this year that when he needs to, he can step up.

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FOSTER: Well, Trump is also hedging against a stronger-than-expected debate performance by Mr. Biden by saying this.

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DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Right now, Crooked Joe's gone to a log cabin to study, prepare. No, he didn't. He's sleeping now.

Because they want to get him good and strong, so a little before debate time, he gets a shot in the (BLEEP) I say he'll come out all jacked up, right? All jacked up.

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FOSTER: Well, CNN's Kevin Liptak has more now on how President Biden is preparing.

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KEVIN LIPTAK, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: President Biden has now completed three days of debate prep out at Camp David, and we are getting some new insights into the Biden campaign's strategy heading into this week and heading into Thursday's debate in Atlanta. They've released a memo spelling out some of the things that they're doing to boost enthusiasm among their supporters ahead of this showdown. That includes 300 debate night watch parties and 1,600 events in battleground states to try and ramp up energy around President Biden's appearance on that debate stage against President Trump.

And I think this memo really lays clear the three most important items that President Biden will want to hammer home on that debate stage. One is the issue of abortion, and this is one that the Democrats really believe will be galvanizing for their supporters come November. President Biden really wants to lay at Donald Trump's feet the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

And in fact, on Monday the Biden campaign plans 50 events around the anniversary of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision that stripped the nationwide right to abortion, really trying to rally their supporters around this key issue.

The second item on the debate stage that you're going to hear from President Biden is this idea of democracy and the threats that he believes Donald Trump poses to American democracy, threats of political violence.

This, of course, has been an underpinning of the entire Biden campaign, and certainly he wants to hammer that point home on Thursday night. The third issue is the economy, the number one issue for many voters.

President Biden wants to claim that Trump's record and agenda would only benefit the wealthy.

Of course, this is a vulnerability for President Biden. Many Americans don't see the economy as improving, despite indicators that suggest the economy is doing well. It is something that he will have to talk about on the debate stage on Thursday night.

[04:05:00]

Now, the other items that I think are likely to come up and that we heard from Biden's surrogates on Sunday is this idea of Trump as a convicted felon. We did hear from one key voice, Mitch Landrieu, who's a co-chair of the campaign. He talked about this idea of which Trump would show up on the debate stage. Would it be a restrained presidential Trump? Would it be a bombastic, sort of ferocious Trump like we saw in 2020? Listen to what Mitch Landrieu said today.

MITCH LANDRIEU, NATIONAL CO-CHAIR OF BIDEN CAMPAIGN: It really doesn't matter how Donald Trump shows up. If he comes in unhinged like he is most of the time, or he sits there and is quiet, people are going to know that he's a twice impeached convicted felon who's been found to have defamed somebody, sexually abused somebody, and gone bankrupt six times.

They will always know that, and that is something that the American people have to think about.

LIPTAK: So you hear there a preview of sorts of what you might hear from President Biden on the debate stage when it comes to all of the legal issues that have been surrounding President Trump. This is certainly a major backdrop to this entire campaign and will be a major backdrop as well to this debate, this face-off on Thursday night.

Kevin Liptak, CNN, Washington.

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FOSTER: Well, earlier I spoke with Thomas Gift, director of the Center on U.S. Politics here in London, about how Biden might perform on Thursday.

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THOMAS GIFT, DIRECTOR, CENTER ON U.S. POLITICS, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF LONDON: I do think that Joe Biden is quite a good debater, or at least he has been in the past. He's very good, particularly calling out audience members and sort of showing empathy one-on-one with individuals. And so I think that Biden is going to do well in this debate simply because he's shown himself effective in previous years.

FOSTER: Is the answer here not to react too much to Trump, or is the answer to, you know, play him his own game a bit?

GIFT: Right. That's a big question. I'm not sure exactly what his strategists think is best.

I do think he wants to show himself as presidential and not kind of get caught into all of Donald Trump's give and take and back and forth, because it could really just kind of digress into something that's not helpful for Americans. He wants to show a presidential side. He said back in 2020 that he wanted to be healer-in-chief, that he wanted to be bipartisan, that he wanted to work with Republicans on the other side of the political aisle.

This is a good opportunity to show that if he's elected for four more years, he's going to continue to make overtures and try to heal some of those divides.

FOSTER: We're going through some of the issues there with Kevin Liptak. I mean, economy is always a central issue, isn't it, to any election. And it sounds like Biden's going to go in hard on Trump on that.

But Trump's actually probably in a better position, isn't he, by simply arguing that, you know, this was the economy that he'll be inheriting from Biden?

GIFT: Well, the economy is a really tricky issue for Biden, certainly, because he can't come out and say that everything is great. Because if you just look at the polls, Americans don't believe that. Fair or unfair, there's still a relatively pessimistic sense among many voters.

At the same time, you know, he can't say, I haven't done anything for the economy because that's basically just admitting defeat. So I do think that a lot of the framing around the economy is going to be important. And what he has tried to do to an extent is kind of frame the economy as being in comeback mode and saying, look, I know I can feel your pain.

I know that inflation was 10 percent to 11 percent during my presidency. But we're on an upswing. And if he can sort of make the case that the trend is upward and that Americans just give him four more years, I think that that could sort of be the most effective way to deal with the issue.

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FOSTER (on camera): Well, be sure to watch the CNN presidential debate on Thursday, 27th of June at 9 p.m. Eastern in the U.S., 9 a.m. Friday in Hong Kong. That's 2 a.m. here in London.

Authorities in Russia's Dagestan province have declared three days of mourning after a series of attacks on churches and synagogues. At least 15 police officers and a priest were killed on Sunday in what appeared to be coordinated attacks. But the total number of victims remains unclear.

Here you can see heavily armed law enforcement officers taking on gunmen at a Russian Orthodox church. A synagogue and a police traffic post were also attacked. Similar scenes in a different city, Derbent, where authorities say a priest was killed during an assault on a church. Russian news is reporting that counterterrorism operations are now over in the province.

So far, no claim of responsibility, but a terrorism investigation is underway. Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim province with a small Christian and even smaller Jewish minority.

[04:10:00]

Our senior international correspondent Ivan Watson is in Hong Kong with more on this. You've been monitoring. We didn't get much information for a while. It's come out gradually. It was a complex picture.

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It is. And what the authorities have described is a coordinated attack in these two cities on the banks of the Caspian Sea. We've just gotten an update from the investigative committee of the Russian Federation announcing a higher death toll now.

In addition to 15 law enforcement officers who were killed in Sunday's deadly violence, at least four civilians have been killed, among them a 66-year-old Russian Orthodox priest. Now, the authorities in Dagestan, they say that the attacks were launched in the afternoon, early evening on Sunday and that the gunmen attacked two Russian Orthodox churches, two synagogues and police positions in these two cities, the regional capital, Mahachkala, as well as this other coastal city of Derbent. At least six of the militants are claimed to have been killed in the attack.

We do not have any claim of responsibility thus far. There had been reports that some 19 people had barricaded themselves inside a Russian Orthodox church in Mahachkala and eventually made their way to safety. Accusations that the militants threw Molotov cocktails to set fires in these places of worship, which had had enhanced security after a violent incident in the end of October of last year when a mob overran Mahachkala Airport amid reports that a plane was landing from Israel.

This was in the first weeks of the ongoing Hamas-Israel war around Gaza, and there was a crowd there waving Palestinian flags that were angry about reports that Israelis were flying to Dagestan.

So that reveals heightened tensions in that predominantly Muslim Republic of Russia that has had restive bouts of violence for decades, really, ever since the wars in neighboring Chechnya in that Russian Republic of the 1990s.

Now, the other major terrorist attack that has recently occurred in Russia in the last couple of months was outside of Moscow in March. That's when terrorists attacked a concert hall, setting it on fire and killing more than 140 people. ISIS rather quickly claimed responsibility for that attack. Russian officials arrested a number of individual suspects who were all from Tajikistan, they later explained.

We're waiting to find out more about what the motives could have been and about the suspects involved in this deadly day of violence in Dagestan -- Max.

FOSTER: Ivan Watson in Hong Kong. Thank you.

In the U.S., millions of people are still experiencing a record- breaking heat wave, a scorching heat now moving south after baking the northeast over the weekend. High temperatures expected in much of the region this week and more heat records could be broken across parts of the southeast and the southern plains. CNN meteorologist Elisa Raffa has our latest forecast for you.

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ELISA RAFFA, CNN METEOROLOGIST: A stormy Sunday in New England and the Mid-Atlantic does come with some relief from the heat. Look at these temperatures taking a backseat with highs in the low 80s from Boston, New York, 89 degrees in Washington, D.C., after they had sweltering heat all weekend. But notice we still have a piece of the heat dome sitting back in the central plains with temperatures still in the middle and upper 90s, going for 99 degrees in Oklahoma City.

But like I mentioned, Washington, D.C., one of the places that get a little bit of a break after you guys hit 100 degrees on Saturday for the first time since 2016, more than 2,000 days. So definitely not the type of extreme heat that we see in the Mid-Atlantic, especially not in June.

Here's a look at some of that relief again kind of briefly on Monday from Richmond to Washington, D.C. temperatures upper 80s and low 90s, 83 degrees on Monday in Philadelphia, 81 in New York. But notice how these highs back in the middle and upper 90s do start to creep in again as we get back into the middle of the week because we still have this heat dome that's sitting nearby. It just kind of gets nudged a little bit while that front came through just for about a day or so. But then that heat starts to settle in again for more than 78 percent of the lower 48.

That's 250 million people again with these temperatures at 90 degrees or hotter as we get into the work week.

[04:15:00]

In fact, we're looking at more than 300 records, both daytime highs and overnight lows, falling as we go through the next couple of days as this heat just continues to swelter.

So we're looking at temperatures up in the upper 90s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in Atlanta, St. Louis, middle and upper 90s as well. Dallas temperatures at 99 degrees on Tuesday. You can see D.C. getting back in some of that heat as we get into the middle of the week, 96 degrees by Wednesday.

So that keeps the heat risk moderate, major and extreme in some locations. This means that we really need to pay close attention for those signs and symptoms on heat sickness. Check on kids, elderly and pets. Make sure everybody's trying to stay cool and hydrated.

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FOSTER: Well, the Israeli prime minister giving new details about his plans for the war in Gaza. What he's telling local media next.

And later, an indigenous community off the coast of Panama has been forced to leave their homes due to rising seawaters. Why, they say, the new homes provided by the government just aren't measuring up.

Plus, an unexpected guest at Taylor Swift's London concert will show you who her plus one was.

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FOSTER: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant is now in Washington, where he's set to discuss the war against Hamas with top U.S. officials this week. Amongst them, his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Galant spoke about U.S.- Israeli relations before departing for the U.S.

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YOAV GALANT, ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER (through translator): The United States is our most important and central ally. Our ties are important, and probably more important nowadays than ever.

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FOSTER: Well, the White House said it's looking forward to constructive consultations with Galant, whilst also saying it will not keep responding to claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. was delaying the shipment of weapons.

U.S. officials last week called those claims not accurate and disappointing.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the intense phase of the fighting in Gaza is, quote, about to end, as the country looks to possibly shift some military power to its northern border.

That's where Israel has seen an increase in cross-border attacks, as Hezbollah targets areas in northern Gaza from southern Lebanon. But the Israeli leader is making clear this doesn't mean the war against Hamas is over, and told local media he continues to work towards the goal of eliminating the group.

CNN's Nada Bashir joins us now in London with more. It's not over, but it's a changing phase. I mean, this is something the Israeli government talked about early on, three separate phases to this war.

NADA BASHIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, absolutely, and we've seen shifts in sort of the military operation on the ground with regards to both the air assault by the Israeli military and also the ground operation and offensive by the Israeli military in the past. What this appears to suggest now is perhaps a shift of focus,

particularly in the southern parts of Gaza, in Rafah and in Khan Younis, where, of course, we know tens of thousands of civilians -- hundreds of thousands of civilians, rather, have taken shelter over the last few months. Now the Israeli military may be looking to double down its military efforts in northern Israel along the border with Lebanon, where, as you mentioned, we've seen that sort of crossfire over the last eight months, the exchange of fire by both the Israeli military and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group in southern Lebanon.

But there is real concern around what this could mean, particularly from the international community. We've heard warnings that the situation on the border is at a dangerous tipping point. The EU's foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, has warned earlier this morning there is a real risk of the war in Gaza now spilling out into the region, and that that risk is growing day by day, despite efforts by members of the international community to de-escalate those tensions.

Clearly, this latest message from Netanyahu really suggests otherwise, of course, despite those efforts. Take a listen to what he said to Israeli media over the weekend.

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BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER (through translator): After the intense phase is finished, we will have the possibility to move part of the forces north, and we will do this. First and foremost, for defensive purposes, and secondly, to bring our evacuated residents home. If we can, we will do this diplomatically. If not, we will do it another way. But we will bring all the residents home, all the residents of the north, as well as the residents of the south.

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BASHIR: And we know, of course, that tens of thousands of residents in northern Israel have been forced to evacuate. In southern Lebanon, nearly 100,000 people have been forced to flee. We've seen civilians killed in those airstrikes by the Israeli military, including journalists who are reporting in the south.

The U.S. has now repeatedly warned, we've heard from U.S. officials, of the likelihood of a possible ground incursion by the Israeli military. That would be a significant development. This is a very different situation to Gaza.

Hezbollah is not the same as Hamas. They have a massive military arsenal. We've seen the use of drones, of short-range rockets. They also have longer-range missiles, which can target deeper into Israel. And U.S. officials have told CNN that Israel's air defenses, particularly its Iron Dome air defense system, could be overwhelmed by Hezbollah's arsenal.

However, the U.S. has said it will commit military assistance to Israel should Israel and Lebanon fall into an all-out war.

That is something that we've heard Hezbollah officials say they do not want to see, but that they will respond if indeed that is the case. The Lebanese government, for its part, important to remember that this is a very separate organization, Hezbollah, from the Lebanese government, they have said that while they do not want to see an all- out war, the military will not be able to stand idly by if Israel threatens to push Lebanon into a full-scale war.

So significant concerns here, particularly, of course, as ceasefire negotiations continue to stall. This could certainly scupper any sort of deal on the table right now.

FOSTER: Of course. OK, Nada, thank you.

Russia is blaming the U.S. for a Ukrainian attack on Crimea that killed at least five people, including three children. More than 100 others were wounded. Russia's Ministry of Defense says it shot down four missiles that were supplied by the U.S.

[04:25:03]

Another exploded in the sky, scattering missile fragments over a busy beach in Sevastopol on Sunday. Witnesses say air-raid sirens didn't sound to warn of the attack. CNN has reached out to the Ukrainian military for comment.

Meanwhile, Russia's continued bombardment of Ukraine's second-largest city has left another person dead and 12 others wounded. Officials say strikes on Kharkiv on Sunday hit a home and a school. Russian troops are inching closer to the city after an offensive near the border last month.

Well still to come on CNN, a look at demonstrations in Los Angeles where pro-Palestinian groups were confronted by pro-Israeli counter- protesters.

Plus, climate activists storm the 18th green of a PGA Tour event. The details just ahead.

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FOSTER: Welcome back to CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Max Foster. Here are some of today's top stories.

CNN's historic presidential debate is now just three days away. U.S. President Joe Biden will debate his predecessor, Donald Trump, for the first time since 2020.

Demonstrators turned out across Brazil on Sunday to protest against a bill that would equate abortions after 22 weeks to homicide. The legislation would also impose prison sentences of six to 20 years ...

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