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CNN NEWSROOM

Clinton Clashes with Black Lives Matter; LGBT Discrimination; Pope Francis Urges Tolerance for Marriages and Families; GE CEO Fires Back at Sanders. Aired 9:30-10a ET

Aired April 8, 2016 - 09:30   ET

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


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[09:31:22] CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Bill Clinton versus Black Lives Matter protestors. Things got a little bit tense on the trail of Pennsylvania where the former president is stumping for his wife.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL CLINTON, FROMER U.S. PRESIDENT: I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out on to the street to murder other African- American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn't. She didn't. You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Wow. He's talking about a big crime bill that was passed when he was president of the United states that sent a lot of African- Americans to prison, frankly. But some say that exchange calls to mind the campaign trail in South Carolina. Remember back in 2008, when Bill Clinton made a series of comments about the presidential campaign and then Senator Barack Obama that some called racially insensitive? That along with a string of recent comments prompting Slate, that's a liberal blog, to declare that it's time to, quote, "fire Bill Clinton" because no one is doing more damage to Hillary's campaign then her husband.

So, let's talk about that with CNN political commentator and political anchor from New York 1, Errol Lewis. Is slate right?

ERROL LEWIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Slate is probably wrong. When it comes to political - the political skills, the ins and out, the strategizing, whipping up a crowd, I suppose anybody can have a bad day, but I think we should all acknowledge that Bill Clinton is one of the best in the business. He is a very, very talented man. He has been - he has been so for a couple of decades now. So if they've got somebody better that they think, you know, can draw a crowd, rile up a crowd and move people in favor's Hillary Clinton, who's better than her husband, then let us know who that person is.

COSTELLO: Yes, exactly.

LEWIS: Yes, who that - who that person is?

COSTELLO: But, still, in talking about this crime bill, like he embraced it, right? He said the Black Lives protestors were wrong about, you know, the damage that the crime bill did to the black community because it put a lot of criminals behind bars and kind of solved the gang problem. Hillary Clinton has been trying to distance herself from that crime bill. So in standing up so strongly for it, does he, in the end, hurt her? Because - and I ask that because during the whole ramp up to Bill Clinton signing that bill into law, Hillary Clinton, as first lady -

LEWIS: She fought for it. She testified in front of Congress. She gave speeches. She - she's part of that bill. I mean this is not one of the ones -

COSTELLO: And she used the term super predator, right?

LEWIS: That's right. That seems to have set off a lot of protestors. Look, this is an important policy decision and I don't know, you know, we can't see kind of what the mood was in the room or who was there and that might have led Bill Clinton to make the choice to defend that piece of his legacy at that moment.

But this is an important policy debate and Bill Clinton does have a point. I mean the Black Lives Matter protestors, especially the younger ones who maybe weren't around in the mid and early 1990s, they should get an education and they should, you know, sort of think hard about this because there was an important segment of the black community, of the liberal community, the cities were - I mean I was living in Brooklyn at the time in the (INAUDIBLE) as we were ticking up to 2,000 murders a year and it was not a good time to be in any city and there were roving packs of people and there were people who were destroying communities, black communities, white communities, you know, in downtown, you know, in the neighborhoods. It was a really chaotic time. It was a really important time to do something. And there was a lot of pressure from these communities for the government to do something. And that includes Bill Clinton. And so I think that's where you saw some of his frustration saying, look, I didn't just, you know, sit in the Oval Office and decide, hey, let's crack down on crack. I mean, you know, anybody who was alive at the time knows that it was - it was an important and it was a scary time.

[09:35:11] COSTELLO: It was a bad time. I can attest that that as well.

So should Hillary Clinton change her tactic? Because listen to how she answered a question from Don Lemon in one of the recent Democratic debates about that term "super predator" and whether she regretted it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DON LEMON, CNN ANCHOR: Secretary Clinton, in 1996 you used the term "super predators" to describe some young kids. Some feel like it was racial code. Was it? And were you wrong to use that term? HILLARY CLINTON (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, I was speaking

about drug cartels and criminal activity that was very concerning to folks across the country. I think it was a poor choice of words. I never used it before. I haven't used it since. I would not use it again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: So maybe she should embrace the crime bill as well and just dispense with the politics?

LEWIS: Well, I don't know about that. I mean they - they should probably, I think, move beyond it. I mean this is a place, like I said, for a serious policy discussion if you want to go back 20 years and look at that bill and where it went and could it all have gone different. I think for - for both Clintons, frankly, you're not going to win having a televised argument with children, right? I mean that's just not going to work. And some of them I know are young adults, but I - I mean, I think of them as kids. I think I'm old enough to say that.

COSTELLO: They're not going to like you, Errol.

LEWIS: I think I'm old enough to say that. But, I mean, the point is, the only fights I've ever gotten into in public with people is when they try to say something to my kid while I'm standing there. And so, like, no, we're going to have a big discussion here, but you don't get to chastise my kid. The optics are terrible. It's not going to really educate them. In some ways it's not particularly relevant to this. You know, I mean, what price do you want Hillary Clinton to pay for a bill that was passed 20 years ago? That's not the important question.

The important question is, what do we do going forward? What are the policing policies that she's advocating now? What have we learned from, what was, in fact, a disastrous aftermath of these very punitive laws that were put in place. That's the discussion that needs to have. If the Clinton aren't ready to have that discussion, I think they're going to see a lot more protestors between now and election day.

COSTELLO: Errol Lewis, thanks, as always.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Pope Francis signaling a major shift in attitude toward divorce and homosexuality in the catholic church.

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[09:41:31] COSTELLO: Outrage growing against states adopting anti-gay laws. Big city majors, major corporations and even Ellen DeGeneres speaking out against laws that have been okayed in North Carolina and Mississippi.

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ELLEN DEGENERES, TALK SHOW HOST: I'm not a political person. I'm really not. But this is not politics. This is human rights. I grew up in the south right next door in Louisiana. I used to go to Mississippi as a kid all the time. My Aunt Helen lived there. So if you're in Mississippi or North Carolina or you're anywhere and you're saddened by the fact that people are judging you based on who you love, don't lose hope. I was fired for being gay and I know what it feels like. I lost everything. But look at me now.

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COSTELLO: Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf just signed two executive orders to make sure state agencies and contractors do not discriminate against the gay community. Governor Wolf joins me now.

Welcome, sir.

GOV. TOM WOLF (D), PENNSYLVANIA: Thank you very much. Good to be with you.

COSTELLO: Nice to have you here. You signed executive orders to make sure discrimination does not happen in your state. Why didn't you go through the state legislature?

WOLF: Well, what I did yesterday was eliminated - it was - it was an executive order to say that in my jurisdiction, the employees of the state and the employees of people and companies doing work with the state contracts, that there will be no discrimination. That's what I can do. I'm just governor. We have a democracy. And to get what I - we need in Pennsylvania is broad anti-discrimination legislation that will take an act of the legislature. And I was just trying to say, this is a first step to show that Pennsylvania's very serious about being an open and welcoming state.

COSTELLO: There is legislation in the general assembly in the state of Pennsylvania right now, right?

WOLF: There is, yes, non-discrimination.

COSTELLO: And do you think it has a chance of passing?

WOLF: I think it enjoys broad support among the people of Pennsylvania, and it enjoys a majority of support in both the Senate and the House, bipartisan support. So I'm confident that if the legislation is allowed to come up for a vote, that it will pass. And I will sign it.

COSTELLO: And why was it so important to you to sign these executive orders, instead of waiting it - waiting for it to go through the legislature?

WOLF: Well, that's a great question. I - you know, what we'd all like is to have the legislation that applies to all the people in Pennsylvania. But I was getting a little frustrated with the pace. I wanted to go on record to say, you know, this is what I can do and it's a first step. But it shows that Pennsylvania's serious about non- discrimination. We want to be open and welcome. I ran a business, and I wanted to make sure that the pool of talent that I was drawing from when I was in business was as broad and wide and big as it could possibly be. Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn on the basis of being welcome and open and tolerant, and I want to make the case that we are still that same commonwealth that he founded back in the 1600s.

COSTELLO: Do you think ultimately it will be the business community that forces states like North Carolina and Mississippi to change its minds about these kind of laws?

[09:44:58] WOLF: I - I sure hope so. I mean, PayPal, for example, immediately said we're not going to bring 500 new jobs to North Carolina as a result of the bad legislation -- the discriminatory legislation that North Carolina passed. So I think that that is something that should be important to every chief executive officer in every state of the country. You want jobs. You want economic development. You don't want to position yourself as a state that is not welcoming to companies that want to have access to every possible talent in the country, in the world.

And so businesses, I think, can have a big voice in this, and certainly, you know, it's something that, a point that I wanted to make to businesses. Listen, we are open. We are a state that is welcoming and we want everybody to come here and get a good job.

COSTELLO: All right. Governor Tom Wolf, thank you for joining me this morning. I appreciate it.

Coming up in the NEWSROOM, less judgment, more acceptance. Pope Francis' major announcement this morning.

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[09:50:32] COSTELLO: Pope Francis today ushered in a new era of tolerance toward Catholics who are divorced, gay or otherwise at odds with church doctrine. In a massive papal document on marriage and families, the Pope urged church leaders to be tolerant and nonjudgmental toward those whose personal lives are, quote, "irregular."

Our Vatican correspondent Delia Gallagher joins us now from Rome with more on this. Good morning.

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN VATICAN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Carol. It is a lengthy document. It still upholds much of the traditional teaching on the family, but it does allow for greater leniency, greater tolerance. As you mentioned, the major change being one of emphasis that Pope Francis is now saying to local priests and bishops that they can sit down with people in those irregular situations, as the Vatican calls it, that is, Catholics who are divorced and remarried, Catholics who are living together, and so on, and they can discuss the particulars of their case on an individual case by case basis because Pope Francis says I cannot issue one rule from Rome to apply to the myriad of complex family situations that we have around the world.

So the biggest change in this document is putting -- shifting the emphasis, putting the responsibility on local churches, on local regions, on countries to decide based on the particular situation of the couple involved. He does kind of satisfy the traditionalist by continuing to say no to abortion, no to contraception, gay unions are not to be equated with marriage, the Pope says. So people might have been hoping for more from Pope Francis.

But he does open the door just to allow his priests and bishops to make judgments based on the individual case. Keeping in mind, of course, that mercy for Pope Francis has to be the overriding theme -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. The American election is also making its way to the Vatican in the form of Bernie Sanders. Tell us about that.

GALLAGHER: Yes. Well, Bernie Sanders campaign announced that he had been invited to a conference at the Vatican next Friday. This conference is to celebrate the 25th anniversary of John Paul II encyclical, which was a social encyclical looking at some of the political situations and Catholic social teaching of that time 25 years ago.

I just spoke to the Vatican official in charge of the conference because it seemed somewhat unusual that a presidential candidate would be invited to a Vatican conference, and the official told me that it's not their intention of course to lend any particular support to the campaign, but that Bernie Sanders had expressed an interest many times, the official said, in the Pope's teaching within this particular encyclical, and they thought therefore that it would be appropriate to invite him to study it -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Interesting. All right. Delia Gallagher reporting live from the Vatican this morning. Thank you.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, one of the most iconic brands in America fires back after Bernie Sanders accuses the company of destroying America.

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[09:58:05] COSTELLO: You can count General Electric as one of the large corporations not feeling the Bern. That's because of an ongoing feud between Bernie Sanders and General Electric. The Democratic presidential candidate flat-out accuses GE of, quote, "destroying the fabric of America." GE is firing back.

CNN business correspondent Alison Kosik is following that for us. Good morning.

ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And now we know why Bernie Sanders gets that no BS Bernie title because he gave it to the "New York Daily News" straight. So he did this interview earlier in the week actually on Monday. And the newspaper pressed Bernie Sanders to come up with an actual corporation that's destroying the fabric of America, and Bernie Sanders said General Electric and he proceeded to rattle off why. He said General Electric is closing down major manufacturing plants in the U.S., shipping off U.S. jobs overseas, to lower-paying jobs. and that GE is avoiding paying taxes.

Look, the reality is, when you look at the numbers, GE's work force has fluctuated over the years. You see in the '90s, it was at 150,000 American workers. It went up right before the recession, and then after the recession the number of American workers went down. That's the reality for GE, it's the reality for many companies.

Also the manufacturing industry has certainly shrunk here in the U.S. Well, after this first salvo came the second salvo in the way of an op-ed. Jeff Immelt, the CEO of GE, in the -- in the "Washington Post" saying this, "GE has been in business for 124 years. We've never been a big hit with socialists. We create wealth and jobs instead of just calling them in -- calling for them in speeches."

Well, guess what, then came a third salvo, and this time it got personal. This time from a Bernie Sanders staff member coming on CNN and saying this, "If the CEO of General Electric wants to know how his company is destroying the fabric of America, he should take a good look in the mirror." And Immelt says, you know what, U.S. companies, they have to deliver to their employees, they have to deliver to their customers and to their shareholders, saying they have to do this every day, and that GE like many other companies lives in the real world."

COSTELLO: Alison Kosik, many thanks.

KOSIK: You got it.

COSTELLO: The next hour of CNN NEWSROOM starts now.