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Inside Politics

Milton Barrels Toward Florida With 150 MPH Winds; Trump Spreads False Claims About Disaster Relief; Poll: 18 Percent Of Young Voters Don't Trust Harris Or Trump On Climate Change; Book: Biden Called Putin "The Epitome Of Evil". Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired October 08, 2024 - 12:30   ET

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

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[12:34:14]

ELISA RAFFA, CNN METEOROLOGIST: I'm CNN Meteorologist Elisa Raffa in the Extreme Weather Center. We still have major Hurricane Milton on our hands. It's a category 4 storm, that eye is opening up. It's got 150 mile per hour winds, putting it just shy of that category 5 strains, sitting about 500 miles south and west of Tampa.

We still have a track that tries to wane in intensity a little bit as it gets towards the coast, but it will still carry with it all of the storm surge, the damaging winds, still all those unprecedented impacts that we're talking about. We now have hurricane warnings that stretch from coast to coast, from the west coast of Florida to the east coast, maintaining hurricane strength across the peninsula.

They are in that red area. This landfall happening sometime kind of overnight Wednesday into Thursday morning, around midnight or later.

[12:35:02]

In this purple, we're looking at destructive 110 plus mile per hour winds from Tampa down to Sarasota.

Hurricane force winds again stretching across the peninsula to the east coast. The problem with the waning in the intensity is that it will also expand the wind field. So we're looking at a fatter storm as it gets towards Florida. So we'll find tropical storm force winds engulfing the entire peninsula and the hurricane force winds again going from coast to coast.

It could mean more widespread devastation, more power outages. This is what we're worried about. This is the unsurvivable part. It is the storm surge, 10 feet to 15 feet and that Tampa Bay area would be unprecedented. It stretches down towards Sarasota, up to 10 feet of storm surge in Fort Myers. Plus the flooding from the sky, heavy rain up to a foot possible that would cause flash flooding. Dana?

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Thank you so much for that, Elisa. I want to bring in a senator whose state is no stranger to natural disasters. Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz joins me now. Thank you so much for being here. SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ (D), HAWAII: Thank you for having me.

BASH: Just over a year ago now, Maui suffered a devastating loss, losses with wildfires. FEMA was obviously a very big part of the response. The agency is now being stretched, although that they insist that they have the resources, thanks to you and your colleagues in Congress and that they can handle this. What do you believe based on your experience about FEMA's preparedness?

SCHATZ: Well, FEMA's first on the ground, and they always do an excellent job. And if you sort of pull general public opinion about all the federal agencies, FEMA is often the most popular and with good reasons because they go in there and respond on a nonpartisan basis.

Whoever needs help, any American who needs help, who's in a place where the president has determined that the local government basically can't handle this disaster anymore than FEMA is on the ground. They will be on the ground.

We're going to need to have to pass a disaster supplemental sometime in November, December to replenish the coffers so that FEMA can be on the ground for whatever happens next. And, unfortunately, in this era of climate change where we have more severe and more frequent storms, we have no doubt that there's going to be more to come. So we've got to make sure that FEMA is ready to respond and doesn't have to wait for Congress to give it the money to respond.

BASH: OK. So you talked about replenishing the coffers. There's definitely a lot of -- I was out with the FEMA Administrator, Deanne Criswell over the summer and they were already spending a lot on the tornadoes that hit across mostly the Midwest.

But there is a lot of misinformation. Donald Trump is amplifying that misinformation about the federal response saying money is going to undocumented immigrants. Not true. That FEMA is only giving people $750 in help, not true.

SCHATZ: Definitely not true.

BASH: That is a start, but that is only a start. Definitely not true. I want you to listen to what President Biden said about all of this this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Those who do it, do it to try to damage the administration. Well, that's -- we can take care of ourselves, but it misleads people, it puts people in circumstances where they panic, where they're really, really, really worried, and they think now they're not being taken care of. And it really is, it's going to sound, I'm using an old phrase, it's un-American. It really is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: It's un-American. It wasn't a month before the election, but I know that when you were trying to help your state along with FEMA and others recover after the Maui fires, there was misinformation as well that hurt the response. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SCHATZ: Yes, there was a lot of stuff flying around on the internet in particular telling people do not sign up with FEMA, it's dangerous. And what that meant is that a lot of people took a month or two before they had enough trust in their government to get access to all the care that they needed to get a rental subsidy so they could have a place to live so their family could be situated.

And so this really isn't about politics, this is about people accessing the federal resources that they're entitled to as federal taxpayers. And, you know, I do think it sort of illustrates the choice in front of the voters which is, do you want a president who is going to respond to a natural disaster on an absolutely non-partisan basis or do you want a president who is going to try to figure out, well how do they vote?

Are they blue or are they red? Are they for me or are they against me? We've never, ever had a president who treated disasters as a partisan political question and we never should. And in Kamala Harris, we have someone who's going to play it straight down the middle.

I don't know whether Western North Carolina or the Tampa area or any of those other regions are blue or red. I mean, I could overlay an electoral map. Who cares? That's absolutely not the point. When Americans need help, we help them.

BASH: One of the things that was reported back when there was misinformation about your state in Hawaii was that foreign actors in Russia and in China amplified false claims. Is that true? And how concerned are you that that is happening now in the South, in North Carolina and Florida?

[12:40:10]

SCHATZ: It is true. I have not gotten a briefing about whether or not that's happening here. I will tell you that the solution was rather elegant, which was local leaders in West Maui saying, hey, you know what? That's BS. You should sign up. This is good for you.

So, it wasn't local political leaders. It was local community leaders. And I'm seeing that happen in Western North Carolina. I'm seeing that happen to a certain extent in Florida. What you need is people on the ground whose primary responsibility is to protect their people to say, hey, I don't care about all this partisan stuff. I don't care about all these memes. Please listen to your authorities.

BASH: Which we are seeing from Republicans on the ground in --

SCHATZ: They gives you some lies (ph).

BASH: -- North Carolina and in Tennessee. It does. Before I let you go, you mentioned the climate crisis and Vice President Harris does lead the former president on the issue of climate change among young voters. But 18 percent of 18 to 29 year olds say they trust neither candidate when it comes to handling climate change.

How do you think, aside from the crisis that we are in now, seeing what's going on in Florida and North Carolina and elsewhere, the policy of the climate crisis? What should she be doing differently to change some of those views?

SCHATZ: Well, in the next 30 days, there's not much that can be done differently. But I will tell you, a lot of young people are both encouraged by the fact that we took the biggest climate action in human history and the Inflation Reduction Act. But also understandably frustrated that this is the only thing that we've done in the last 10 years.

BASH: There can't be anything necessarily done to change the climate crisis, but I'm talking about political messaging.

SCHATZ: Oh, look, I think she has to address the climate crisis dead on. And I also think it is a message of contrast, which is that you have a candidate in Donald Trump who assembled a bunch of oil barons and fossil fuel barons and said, I want you to raise me $1 billion through Super PACs for my campaign. And then we're going to undo all the climate action of the last four years.

So the choice could not be more stark. And we're going to need people, especially on campuses to get the word out.

BASH: Senator, thank you so much for being here.

SCHATZ: Thank you.

BASH: Appreciate it.

And up next, what were they talking about? Bob Woodward says Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke several times since Donald Trump left office. We've got new details from Bob Woodward's explosive new book. Jamie Gangel will be here in moments.

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[12:47:02]

BASH: The epitome of evil. That's how President Biden described Russian President Vladimir Putin. That's according to a revealing new book by legendary journalist Bob Woodward. CNN Special Correspondent Jamie Gangel obtained a copy of the book entitled, "War" ahead of its release and that will be in a couple of weeks, I believe.

Jamie is here now. This is a real look behind the scenes specifically about how leaders in the U.S., president, former president talk to each other, talk to other world leaders. There are discussions and there's reporting about personal scenes with Joe Biden's son Hunter amid, of course, illegal battles and even President Biden saying he never should have picked Merrick Garland for Attorney General because he feels that Hunter's problems are never going to go away.

JAMIE GANGEL, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: Correct, correct. I think some of the most astonishing scenes, though, Dana, are between former President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Woodward reports that a top Trump aide told him that there were as many as seven phone calls between Trump and Putin since Trump left the White House.

We do not know what was in those calls, but they have kept in touch. But there is really an astonishing conversation and in the book, Woodward has it verbatim. This is during the Trump presidency, and it's revealed that President Trump secretly shipped to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the height of COVID these very scarce Abbott COVID, test machine.

So just here's how the phone call goes between Trump and Putin. Putin says, "Please don't tell anybody you sent these to me." Trump, "I don't care. Fine." Putin, "No, no. I don't want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me. They don't care about me."

BASH: I mean, just the fact that Putin cares what people think about Donald Trump says a lot. And I can't wait for the next book when we learn what happened in those seven phone calls. It's not that typical. You know, people might think, oh, well, former president talks to a world leader. This is one of America's biggest adversaries right now.

GANGEL: Correct.

BASH: Speaking of -- talk about Joe Biden and his relationship or lack thereof with Vladimir Putin.

GANGEL: So there are some extraordinary scenes where Biden and his national security team find out that they really have what are called the crown jewels of intelligence, including a human source high up in the Kremlin. And what they're given are in effect, the battle plans for Putin going in. to Ukraine. They know it's going to happen. They can see it in front of them.

[12:50:03]

They're very detailed and you hear -- let's just say this. President Biden is known to drop the F bomb from time to time. So this book is filled with profanity, because that's the way he talks. It's always interesting to, to hear what it sounds. But this is where Biden is reacting to what Putin's going to do.

And Biden says, "That f-ing Putin. Putin is evil. We are dealing with the epitome of evil." There are also two showdowns face to face in the book between Biden and Putin.

BASH: I mean, absolutely remarkable. And yes, presidents, they're just like us. They drop the F bomb.

Jamie, extraordinary reporting that you're bringing us, of course, from Bob Woodward. I know there's a lot more to come. Thank you so much.

And the Trump campaign has responded, saying, quote, "None of these made up stories by Bob Woodward are true and are the work of a truly demented and deranged man who suffers from a debilitating case of Trump derangement syndrome."

I'm sure we will hear back from Bob Woodward on that. We'll be right back.

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[12:55:33]

BASH: And we are following the breaking news. Hurricane Milton is now a category 4 storm packing 100 miles per hour winds. It is expected to hit Florida tomorrow night. Millions are fleeing as officials warn the storm surge could reach up to 15 feet.

I want to show you an image from space. Look at that. It shows just how massive this storm is. And so many of the communities in Milton's Path are still reeling from Hurricane Helene that made landfall less than two weeks ago.

Don't go anywhere because we are going to continue our coverage of Hurricane Milton all day here at CNN. Up next, CNN News Central will begin.