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U.S. Falls Below 100,000 Hospitalizations For First Time Since December 1st; Dr. Anthony Fauci: Getting People Vaccinated Will Stop Coronavirus Variants; Biden's Unity Push Faces Major Test In COVID Relief Debate; Joe Biden To Meet With 10 GOP Senators On COVID-19 Relief; Trump Announces New Attorneys For Impeachment Defense Team. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired February 01, 2021 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00]

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JOHN KING, CNN HOST: Hello, everybody. Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King in Washington. Thank you so much for sharing a very busy news day with us. A critical Coronavirus medical briefing last hour from the new Biden team and the president himself leads an important meeting tonight to test whether there is a chance for a new bipartisan deal on a big COVID relief package.

The details and the politics of that conversation in just a moment first though to the science and a COVID testing effort, the Biden team view now a central to stopping the spread. Just announce the defense department and HHS will now bankroll production of a new at-home Coronavirus test that promises the administration says, 95 percent accurate results in just 15 minutes delivered to your Smartphone.

The country emerging right now from its deadliest month, 95,000 Americans killed by the virus in January and we are at another pandemic turning point. Cases in hospitalizations are down. I'll show you the numbers in just a second. Scientists agree the improvement is real, but the risk is the same as it ever was relaxing too soon.

The more transmissible and potentially more deadly variants are gaining more of a foothold here in the United States, and doctors warn those numbers could very well turn for the worse again. Vaccines, we know will end this pandemic. But the question is how long will it take, and can the Biden Administration speed up the distribution plan enough to outrun the virus.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NIAID: You need to get vaccinated when it becomes available as quickly and as expeditiously as possible. Not only are you going to protect individuals from getting disease, not only are you going to protect them from getting infected, but you are going to prevent the emergence of variants here in our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: Let's walk through some of the latest numbers, and again, some of them are encouraging, although from a high baseline, if you will. If you look at this map right here, 37 states in green. That means 37 of the 50 states reporting fewer infections now compared to a week ago. That's trending in the right direction only two trending up and 11 holding steady.

So states holding steady are going down on the large part again from a high baseline, but the numbers are improving. Here's how you can see that. This is hospitalizations. You see the blue line, starting to come down starting to come down from that horrific peak of more than 130,000 Americans in the hospital, coming down.

The seven-day moving out of cases now dipping down below 150,000. Look at here, approaching 250,000 on some days and coming down there up close to 300,000 in the peak of the winter surge, so the case situation is coming down as well.

However, we're just coming out of - we're beginning February if you look back on January, by far 77,000 here, and 95,000 here. You have to go back to the beginning, 61,000, by far the deadliest month from the Coronavirus which tells you it's very important that the progress that is beginning to be recorded be continued.

If you look at the positivity map, you're still looking at 19 states across the country with a positivity rate above 10 percent or higher. All the public health experts, we've been at this for months, say get it to 5 percent and then try to shove it down obviously with the winter surge, and it is gone up still 19 states dealing with 10 percent or higher.

And this is the map that matters most right now to the new Biden team, trying to get the percentage of Americans who receive the vaccine up as quickly as possible, especially as the new variant spread. This is the percent of the population with the first dose administered. You see Alaska at 13 percent, West Virginia at 11 percent.

Most states though still in the single digit, some in the mid-single digits. This is the challenge. 49 million, 50 million if you round up distributed, 31 million administered, meaning a shot in the arm, there's been a controversy.

If you're a state and you get your doses, do you hold a second dose for somebody for 21 or 28 days down the road or do you put it in an arm now and count on the resupply coming? Dr. Anthony Fauci says states are beginning to do a better job; they need to do even more.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. FAUCI: The first priority will always be to get the people who've gotten their first doses to get their second doses. And then additional doses will be given to the next group of people who will get their first doses. In this way, there are no doses that are hanging around.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: With us to share his insights and his expertise is Dr. Tom Inglesby. He's Director of the Center for Health Security at John's Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Doctor Inglesby, it's good to see you.

Explain why this is so important that the new briefing just moments ago from the Biden team, they say they are somewhat encouraged, if you go back in time back to when they took over on January 20th, they said 46 percent of the doses that had been distributed that actually been administered, meaning half of the supply was still on the shelf.

Now they say they are up to about 62 percent. Essentially what they're telling Governors is, trust us. Put those shots in people's arms and you will get the second dose. Why is that so important?

DR. TOM INGLESBY, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR HEALTH SECURITY, JOHNS HOPKINS BLOOMBERG SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Well, I think it's important because the more that we're using the vaccine that states already have in hand, the faster we're going to get people vaccinated. And it's understandable why early on states were cautious about using vaccine and wondering about whether the second dose would arrive on time.

[12:05:00]

DR. INGLESBY: But I think what we're seeing the last few days is much more stability being predicted over a three-week period looking ahead. And so, I think what we heard in the briefing today was please have confidence that the doses are going to be stable in delivery and please use the doses that you have to get people vaccinated, and that's a really good thing.

KING: And you had a very extensive twitter thread yesterday going through some of the challenges you see at the moment, and this was part of it. One of the things you tweeted is discovery of the variants and clear evolution of this virus around the world means that there will continue to be the major thread post by this virus until there is successful global vaccination effort everywhere.

You continued very important - the U.S. population given the terrible illness and mortality from this disease in our country. But we have to be a big donor and part of the global vaccination effort, too. There you can see, I am not going to - maybe it's not controversies along, but some tension, right?

So how fast does the United States have to develop more vaccines so that it can both meet the need here at home and be a good global citizen?

DR. INGLESBY: Yes, the U.S. obviously had suffered - we have more cases and more deaths than any country in the world for a whole number of reasons. So we have to rapidly vaccinate the United States and do it equitably and around the country. But we have to talk and chew gum at the same time, or walk and chew gum at the same time.

We have to be a big part of the international effort. I think what the administration has been saying in the last ten days is that everything is on the table. They are in conversations with every vaccine manufacturer. They are talking to the ones who are already making vaccine to others who could help, and so we should be looking at all the international efforts that are going on.

It may be that we are a financial contributor, it may be that at some point we are a vaccine contributor. But we need to be having those conversations just as we're vaccinating our own people now.

KING: And obviously vaccinations is the most immediate challenge, because especially with the variance spreading, if you have fewer infections and if there's less disease out there, the disease can't mutate and change as much. But one of the conversations you and I've had, going back sadly, almost a year ago now is the whole testing - across the United States.

I want you to listen here. This is Andy Slavitt who's the co- coordinator at the White House now saying, he believes they have a new big break through, because it is new deal the department of defense and the department of health and human services are going to help speed up development of an at-home test. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDY SLAVITT, SENIOR ADVISER, WHITE HOUSE COVID-19 RESPONSE TEAM: These are over the counter, self-performed test kits that can detect COVID with roughly 95 percent accuracy within 15 minutes. They can be used if you feel symptoms of COVID-19 and also for screening for people without symptoms.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: So help us walk through the sequence here. Obviously priority 1, get the vaccination rollout accelerated so you get the rate of infection down, you get the rate of bad disease down in the country. You try to stop the development of new variants. But how important is this and where does it become a big deal to have this over-the- counter, at-home testing capacity?

DR. INGLESBY: I think it's a huge deal. This is the kind of thing that people can use around the country to make sure they're not infectious on the way to school or to work to help protect big organizations from having outbreaks go on within them they don't know about.

It could allow people to do it from their own homes or will allow people to do it from their own homes in high numbers, so that not everyone is relying on these larger testing centers or pharmacies which may or may not have testing available near them. So it really distributes testing to people in their own homes is rapid, it's 95 percent sensitive.

I think it's the kind of thing that we need to be driving to, and hopefully it will be the first of additional developments in terms of home testing, but it's a huge one. The announcement today was that the new grant was scaling up the availability of this test from 100,000 a month to 8.5 million a month in the coming months, and that's just great news. KING: And we'll watch as that one plays out as always, Dr. Inglesby,

grateful for your help and your insights to walk us through all this a lot of new developments. We'll stay in touch. Thank you, sir.

DR. INGLESBY: Thanks so much, John.

KING: Thank you. It is day 13 now of the young administration, and tonight brings an early test for the new president. And his belief, he can do business with Republicans. President Biden and Vice President Harris will meet at the White House with ten Republican Senators.

The ten are offering a counterproposal to the White House COVID relief bill. The key difference, the Republicans want to spend a lot less money. The Senators are looking to spend about a third of what President Biden is proposing. They would limit stimulus payments and they would give no funding to state and local governments.

The White House has signaled its willingness to scale down stimulus checks, but a bipartisan solution may not be easy to come by. Just listen to President Biden last week.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: There is a legitimate reason for people to say do you have the lines drawn the exact right way? Should it go to anybody making over x number of dollars and why, I'm open to negotiate those things.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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KING: With us to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Manu Raju and Julie Pace of the Associated Press. So Julie Pace, here you go, everybody in Washington is saying, this is a test. Joe Biden ran saying I'm a creature of the Senate, I remember the Senate, and I can do business with these Republicans.

Their proposal even White House say it's a very clear saying, it is way too small. The question is, can in one meeting President Biden figure out is there room to do business here, or is this just a - all right, I am having the courtesy to bring you in, that's not enough, we're moving on.

JULIE PACE, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, ASSOCIATED PRESS: And I think that's the exact right way to look at this meeting John. I think this is a bit of a testing ground on whether there is room to negotiate between the Republican package and the Biden package or whether that's just going to be impossible.

And I think that's what Biden is hoping to get out of this meeting, a sense of whether this is an opening offer from these moderate Republicans and they're willing to have a bit of a dance here, or if they're going to say this is all we've got and we're going to vote against anything that is beyond the scope of this. I think the thing that the Biden Administration is really focused on right now is speed. They do not want to waste a lot of time in a negotiation that ultimately goes nowhere. So they're going to make that determination pretty quickly, whether these Republicans are really on board for deep negotiations or whether this is just a bit of a face - measure to say they put something on the table.

KING: Right. And we've all been through this before Manu, you from the Capitol Hill perspective more than us and more recently than us in the sense that so, I don't mean this as any offense to these Republican Senators, I take them at their word, they want to go to the White House and try to kind of deal, but you can't believe everything you read.

These are some of the tweets from the Senators this morning, looking forward to meeting with - Rob Portman says, let's get this done. A bipartisan agreement that provides targeted relief to families and small businesses. Mitt Romney from Utah, my colleagues and I look forward to meeting with the president.

Todd Yung of Indiana, I am hopeful President Biden will make good. It's a good thing; it should always be a good thing that presidents and law makers of the other parties sit down together. But again, the question is going to be - we're asking the question in the context of how much would Biden go down. Let's ask it the way the new president is going to ask it, how much are you willing to come up?

MANU RAJU, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and if they go up, expect that those ten Republican Senators are on board with the $618 billion package, some of them will peel off, some of them will not support going up to say, a trillion dollars, and that will still be far less than the Democrats want, which is really the problem here for Joe Biden as he tries to court Republican support.

The more the Republicans go up, the less Republicans will come on board. They still have a problem with the left of their parties. So can they find some sort of middle ground consensus to get the votes out of the House, get the votes out of the Senate?

It seems doubtful, which is why it is pretty clear the direction they're going. They're going to have these discussions, they'll see what happens, but the Democratic leadership is making it abundantly clear. They are prepared to move forward to get this passed by just Democratic votes, moving with the budget process that will start this week.

But there's still a few more weeks before they ultimately put the final legislative package on the floor of the House and the Senate. So there will be a little bit of time, a couple weeks to see if there will be some sort of bipartisan consensus.

But it seems too doubtful that as the road they're going, because they are just in two different universes right now about the scope of the package. And Democrats clearly would be furious at Joe Biden if he kind of went down all the way to what the Republicans are talking about. KING: I wouldn't bet anything - I was going to say I wouldn't bet more

than a nickel on him, going down a lot. I wouldn't bet anything on it right now. And Julie Pace, I think that's one of the dilemmas we sometimes focus legitimately, because Joe Biden was in the Senate for nearly four decades on his experience in the Senate. On President Biden now his own words, that he thinks he can try to recreate some of the spirit of bipartisanship that did exist in those days.

But he also was Barack Obama's vice president for eight years. And you see in the headlines, memories of that experience, 2009 experience played by GOP in the Obama era where Democrats and Biden go big on their own. A ghost of 2009 drive Democrats push for robust crisis response.

Deal or no deal, virus say test Biden work together. So I think we need to remember, yes, he was in the Senate, yes, he genuinely would like to cut a deal with Republicans, but he also served in the Obama White House and he's been around town long enough to know this Washington is different.

PACE: And this is one of those moments for Biden almost as to prove to some members of his own party that he is willing to deal in reality. He has faced a lot of questions about whether he's naive about the realities of Washington, about whether he is overstating both his own negotiating skills and also the willingness of Republicans to actually work with his administration.

That's why this issue of speed, I think, is going to be so important. He wants to make it appear as though he is putting forth a good faith effort to talk with these Republicans to see what their willingness is. But he doesn't want to hang around too long there.

If it looks like these Republicans are not willing to move significantly toward his position on this, he has to show his own party that he's willing to go it alone, that he's willing to do a deal that would only largely have Democratic votes because if he doesn't do that, then he risks losing some of his own party from the left.

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KING: And if he does that, and that is everyone's expectation, that that is what will ultimately happen, he can only lose a few votes, three or four votes in the House Nancy Pelosi as a tiny majority. He can lose no votes Manu in the Senate, its 50-50, Vice President Harris would have to break a tie, which is why it was a hot conversation last week when we saw Senate, now Vice President Harris, excuse me, doing interviews in Arizona and West Virginia.

Two Democratic Senators, Cinema and Manchin, viewed as the moderates, viewed as those were more likely to want to maybe a smaller package. Viewed as more likely to say, hey, let's talk to the Republicans more. Listen here Joe Manchin didn't like it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOE MANCHIN (D-WV): We need to work together. That's not the way of working together, what was done. If a person is making $250 or $300,000, I don't think they're in much as need as a person making 40 or 50.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: If you need to keep all 50 Democrats, there he is right there in the end on the policy trying to negotiate the president office position, some which President Biden said, I'm flexible there, I'm willing to talk about that. But then the other part about not liking that the vice president is doing television in your state essentially saying, hello, Senator Manchin.

RAJU: Yes, this was a miscalculation clearly by the White House to think that they could pressure a key Senate Democratic vote by going on television and saying one thing. Joe Manchin is not going to be persuaded by that. And I'm told that there is actually a conversation that came from the White House calling Joe Manchin after that interview, clearly an effort to try to mend fences.

But he was not happy with that. We'll see if he decides to hold a grudge going forward. But the policy wise, he does believe those checks in particular need to be scaled down. The White House is not clear if they're going to do what he's asking for, but they may have to, and then we'll see how the left reacts if they go towards Joe Manchin's direction.

KING: All right. Manu and Julie, you're going to stay with us. Up next for us he's no longer president. But Donald Trump's impeachment and his presence hang over the GOP.

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KING: He is gone from the White House, but Trump chaos and disruption is still very much a thing. The second Trump impeachment trial is a week away. And the president just hired new lawyers because his previous legal team quit rather than keep repeating Trump's lies about election fraud.

And the former president also looms large now in a big family feud among House Republicans. They meet on Wednesday. Trump allies in the House GOP want to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her leadership post, because she voted to impeach the former president.

Plus there is debate about Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a lawmaker whose beliefs simply don't belong in congress, but whose status with the former president gets her staying power. Still with us Julie Pace of the AP, Manu Raju of CNN. Julie, let's start with the president's impeachment trial. It starts a week from now, a former president's impeachment trial, starts a week from now.

And five of his lawyers quit over the weekend because we're told he wanted them to go to the floor of the United States Senate and keep saying the election was stolen. Not argue he's a former president now, not raise constitutional questions about whether you can impeach a former president, but to go to the floor of the Senate and argue the lies, that the election was stolen. Are they ready for this on team Trump?

PACE: It's hard to see how they would be given that they now have just a week with a new legal team to get arguments in place here. But I think it really shows the mindset that the president has as we go into this trial. We have seen Republicans try to coalesce around a procedural argument.

They don't want to defend Trump on the substance of his election lies and his encouragement of the rioters. On the 6th, they want to focus on the idea that he's a former president that they don't feel like there's a constitutional ground here, but trump wants people on the floor to defend what he did and said.

He does not want to walk away from this argument, false and disproven as it may be that he actually may have won this election. And that is going to create a real tension between his legal team and the Republican Senators that he needs to go out there and vote to acquit.

KING: And we will see, Manu, the specifics of the argument put forward by David Schoen, as one of the new Trump Attorneys. He represented Roger Stone on his appeal. He says he met with Jeffrey Epstein before Epstein suicide and does not believe he killed himself.

Bruce Castor Jr. was a former District Attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; most notably he declined to prosecute Bill Cosby back in 2005. So we'll see what arguments they present on the floor. I guess there are two questions. One is that, what strategy did they come to the floor of the United States Senate with?

But is there, to Julie's point, we do not expect Republicans to stand up and support the president's election lies anymore. But even if they put on what I'll call off truth defense, is that going to change the math, the Senate math much?

RAJU: I have a hard time seeing it changing the Senate math. If they were to go down and exclusively argue just conspiracy theories and lies and say things about the dominion voting system, changing votes to Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump, maybe that will - that could change the calculus. I would be surprised that's what these two attorneys are going to do.

They probably have some level of personal integrity in going to the floor of the United States Senate and saying - telling the Senators, at least make that constitutional argument and not rely on these lies that are completely debunked.

Look, if they make the case that, at least in part, that this is not constitutional, this would set a dangerous precedent, in the words of Republican Senators that would be enough for them to acquit.

That's all the Senators I've been talking to for last couple of weeks, want to hear, an argument about this being a way you should not go down, arguing that the former and another Senate majority or House majority could go after another president in the future if they were to go this route because it will set this precedent. That's what they're going to argue.

The Democrats are going to have to make the case of why this is absolutely constitutional in their view, and why the Senate has actually done this before for other former federal official to go after someone who is not more in office anymore. But that's still likely not going to be enough for most Republican Senators.

[12:25:00]

KING: And a more immediate challenge for Republicans, House Republicans, anyway, Julie Pace, is this effort by loyalists of the former president, Trumpie House Republicans who want to get rid of Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she's one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach.

There is more of an effort, more fervor to punish Liz Cheney than there is to punish Marjorie Taylor Greene who has set things that are anti-Semitic, who has like post on social media saying the speaker of the House should be harmed, who has called false flag events, these deadly horrific shootings at schools. Listen to Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She is a freshmen Republican, a conservative, who says, we have a problem in the family.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY MACE (R-SC): We do have two factions within the party right now. It feels like it feels much divided. We've seen that in the Democratic Party, too. I've been very strong than very strong, even against members of my own party, because I just feel like we don't have the moral authority to point out fingers to the left if we don't take accountability and responsibility for ourselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Why is it that there seems more fervor in the House Republican conference to punish a conservative Liz Cheney for a vote that she thought was a vote of conscience than to go after somebody who's views frankly are reprehensible?

PACE: It's a great question. I think that it says a lot about where Republicans, certainly in the House are right now, that they feel more concern politically in condemning somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene than they do in allowing Liz Cheney from a storied, conservative, Republican family to remain in a leadership post.

And I think that Republicans have to really grapple with what that says right now. Greene is a conspiracy theorist. She has said things that are just really outside the bounds of I think what most Americans would accept from their members of congress. But a lot of Americans in some of these districts that some of these Republicans want to hold onto seem at least open to allowing this to continue.

And I think - Republicans, to Mace's point, you have to grapple with what that says about them and their ability to point a finger anywhere else if you're willing to allow that type of conspiracy and those types of statements to exist within the mainstream of your party. KING: Yes, they need to - they have a woman in their midst to just

basic common courtesy decency doesn't belong in any civilized club, sorry. And so, she just played Kevin McCarthy, the leader, Congresswomen Taylor Greene did in the sense that he went down to have to kiss the ring meaning to make up with the former President Trump.

And then she gets in a phone call with Trump and tweets out over the weekend about how great it was and how much he supports her. Bill Kristol, a veteran Republican commentator used to work for Dan Quayle back in the day.

Kevin McCarthy has been more critical of Liz Cheney than he has been to Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's pretty astonishing. That's the bottom line. It's one thing to have party unity, but at some point there have to be boundaries. Does leader McCarthy understand the mess that is in some ways of his own making?

RAJU: Yes, I mean, he's trying to please all factions within his conference, which has been the problem with McCarthy and his handling of this all along. He criticized Donald Trump said he bore responsibility for what happened on January 6. And then he walked that back, then he went back down to Florida, kissed the ring there, tried to get back in Donald Trump's good graces.

He has said Liz Cheney, he supports for staying in that position, but he also says he has concerns, that she have - this is going to be a discussion that they're going to have to talk about. He has not come out publicly and criticizes what Marjorie Taylor Greene has said; he said through a spokesperson that there are some concerns that they'll have a conversation.

So you can see how he's trying to navigate himself without taking a strong position one way or the other. In the large part John, a majority of this conference supports Donald Trump very much so. The majority then still voted to overturn the election results even after the rioters stormed the capitol, so it's clear where his conference is going which is why he's kind of trying to play the middle here.

KING: There is no middle on that question, there's no middle. Manu Raju, Julie Pace, grateful for the reporting and the insights. Up next for us, we're waiting for White House briefing, the daily White House briefing by the Press Secretary Jen Psaki. Plus, a closer look at the new president's novel definition of bipartisan.

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