than there were in february 2020 before the pandemic. 1.8 million fewer and that fits with a mckenzie study which found more than one in four women are considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce entirely post-pandemic. much more needs to be done to help the women who have been hurt most by this economic downturn. thanks for watching. it's time for anderson. good evening. 150 days since the worst single act of political violence since the civil war and the man who incited it is crying about being kept off of social media. before we get to that, there was a reminder today of why facebook told him he's not welcome on the platform until 2023. the justice department came up with updated figures on cases connected to the insurrection. approximately 465 defendants now from all 50 states. more than 130 defendants charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees.

more than 40 charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. again, 40 people charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon. keep that in mind as you listen to senator ron johnson say this. >> this didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me. >> now, he may say he was talking about firearms. but if he was, he also knows he was being too cute by half because he's always known this about a video of an officer being beaten within inches of his life by a flag pole used as a weapon or the images of people carrying baseball bats. he might have heard a capitol police sergeant tell the story of how his hand was sliced open, was soaked with chemical spray and was in hand-to-hand combat to points he thought he might die. >> when the president tweeted

this or that and they continued to say, well, he don't mean that. well, this is not what he meant to say, take his word for it. his tweet speak for itself. or he was just joking. okay, how are these people who are deranged that listen to every single thing that he commands, if he tells them the sky is blue and there's a storm outside, they believe that crap? i mean when, when is it going to stop? is it going to take your own family to be murdered by these people? this time it's against this president. next time it might be you. >> today with that in mind and stories like his even now coming to light, facebook said it's bar get 45th president from the platform until january 2023. and at that time the company says facebook will look to experts to assess whether the

risk to public safety has receded. think about that for a moment. facebook's decision on reinstating a former chief executive in the most powerful nation the world has ever seen will hinge on whether he is in the company's judgment literally a threat to the public. how did the man who was bounced for inciting violence respond? well, with more of the same. he couldn't do it on the blog which he shut down for lack of interest so he sent his reply via email. facebook's ruling is an insult to the record-setting 75 million people plus many others who voted for us in the 2020 rigged presidential election. the president adding our country can't take this abuse anymore. separately, he also attacked facebook's founders. quote, next time i'm in the white house there will be no more dinners at his request with mark zuckerberg and his wife. it will be all business. i don't know what that means. today white house press secretary jen psaki was asked for her reaction to facebook's decision.

she said it feels, quote, pretty unlikely that the zebra is going to change his stripes over the next two years, end quote. of course we are not talking about a zebra, we're talking about the former leader of the free world. cnn's doniel sullivan joins us along with jim acosta. donie, the lies the president is spreading, now it's not possible on facebook at least until after the 2022 midterm elections. how damaging is this to his influence? >> the lies, the big lie, the conspiracy theory about the 2020 election not possible from trump on facebook, but remember trump has plenty of proxies on facebook. his son is still on there. marjorie taylor greene is still on there. facebook is not changing its policy when it comes to fact checking politicians so many people will be able to lie and run ads with lies about the election. but how this damages trump specifically, he does have tens of millions of followers on facebook and he is most known for his twitter account.

but really the real engine of his campaign in 2016 and in 2020, which his former campaign manager brad parscale used to brag about was their effective use of facebook targeting voters with ads and fund-raising. fund-raising is the big part of facebook and what he'll be missing out on here. >> jim, we heard some of his reaction to today's news. i wonder what some of your sources are telling you about what's happening behind scenes. last night we were talking about his hope of being reinstated to the presidency by august, which is not going to happen. >> yeah, he can't even get reinstated on facebook so forget about being reinstated to the presidency. donald trump has big problems. this is one of them. i talked to a close advisor who said this was not all that surprising, they expected this. anderson, keep in mind. look at what donald trump was doing earlier this week. he was floating this idea that he could reassume the presidency. obviously if he's allowed back on facebook and allowed back on

he's going to right back to lying the way he used to and lying in dangerous ways. i recently spoke with a facebook oversight representative and asked if donald trump is allowed back on these platforms and he incites another -- i could not get a straight answer from this person because that is the issue. if they let donald trump back on these platforms, he will likely lie to the point where people might die. >> donie, we talk a lot about the former president's influence, and yet his blog which he called a platform, it wasn't a platform, it was like a -- you know, a little hunting perch. the blog was taken down for lack of interest. what does that say about his influence, that he cannot sustain a blog? >> well, look, i think it points to the importance of these platforms. it underlines how powerful really facebook and twitter is in all of this.

remember, anderson, twitter has just kicked trump off and said your never again coming back. i think the most important thing in all of this is that trump did not get suspended for all the election lies. he did not get suspended for everything that led up to january 6th. he got suspended from facebook because he was essentially facebook said praising what was happening on that day. so, you know, if he is allowed back, facebook will say, well, he's not allowed to directly incite violence but they're still going to allow all the election lies, all the pieces that will lead to potentially more violence and i think that is the fundamental flaw in this new facebook policy. >> jim, there is some reporting from axios and jonathan swan when facebook's oversight board recommended the ban on the president's account continue, swan's report said the trump team were blindsided that they thought trump would be reinstated in the platform. in the trump orbit, just how critical is facebook to the

former president's messaging and fund-raising still? does it matter whether he himself is on it? there's plenty of people who support him who are on it who will fund raise. >> yeah, i talked to a close ally to trump earlier today about this. this person described what facebook did today as terrible. terrible because he cannot fund-raise moving forward on facebook. and if he were to try to run for president again, obviously his campaign, the people around him, would want to start putting that message out on facebook, other social media platforms between now and 2023. this is awful for donald trump if he wants to run in 2024. you know, anderson, getting back to what you were just saying a few moments ago about the president's website being taken down, one of the reasons we were given for why that is not a big deal, we were told by advisers, he's working on these other platforms that may come down the road where he'll be back on social media. if that were the case and this were some big endeavor coming down the pike, why did he

respond the way he did to facebook banning him for another couple of years? obviously there's nothing significant coming, it's just another one of these empty trump promises that never come to fruition. donald trump's idea of free speech in this country, anderson, is setting the world on fire. what facebook did today is deny trump the gasoline and the matches to set the world on fire again. and so the question becomes for the republican party, you know, why can't they dump trump? their standard bearer, the leader of their party, can't get on facebook, can't get on twitter. how is he supposed to lead the republican party? i don't think there's a good answer for that question. we're joined by presidential historian doris kearns goodwin, the author of too many wonder of books on too many wonderful books, too many to count. doris, it's great to have you on. as a presidential historian, what is it like for you to hear that a former president of the united states is such a threat that he's not allowed to use their platform for two more years and even then their

so-called experts will assess whether the risk to public safety has receded? it's stunning. >> it is stunning indeed. i mean even to me, who have lived with my guys through the civil war, through the turn of the 20th century, through the great depression, through the early days of world war ii, through a whole series of unprecedented events, probably more in the last five years than all those 50 years i studied my guys. just think of the 2016 election nld athe outcome we never expected, the pandemic we've all lived through, the economic fallout, the attack on the capitol. i don't know how historians of the future will talk about unprecedented anymore because it just seems we're living in those times day after day after day and this is just another example. who could have expected there would be a platform with such power that could take a former president not to be able to be on because he's a risk for public safety. both sides of that are incredible. >> has there been a president or former president who, i don't

even know how to say this, who can't control their words or -- you know, their advisers wish they did not speak because -- it seems like he can't stop doing this. he can't stop spreading election lies even when he's responding today in an email about being banned on facebook. he's spreading -- he's lying about the election. >> you know, it's interesting. we often talk about a president being right for the moment. and in a certain sense, president trump when he was president, was right for social media in some ways, but the very thing you're saying is what's made it so hard for him and i think the country. when lincoln was a politician and debating steven douglass, he was great at extemporaneous language. he could be anybody in that. once he became president, he knew that he was speaking for the country and that his words mattered so he almost never spoke unprepared. today it's much harder to do that, given social media. and president trump has

certainly made it harder on himself by never letting himself other than what he wanted to say. but you've got that combination of immediate response and a president trump and a former president trump and here we all are talking about him. >> i think i know the answer to this question, but has there ever been a former president who so quickly out of the white house has ended up living in a country club and sort of showing up at people's weddings and random dinners and relitigating an election that he lost over and over and over again? >> well, the last part of what you said is the most important. i mean what we've really had mostly in our history is presidents accepting their losses and moving on and telling their supporters that this is democracy. that's been a real strength of our system, that we've been allowed to have somebody lose. the next person comes in and that person then becomes president. >> and also that the former president then engages in some sort of public endeavor that has

some value to society. that's usually a tradition. you're joining us tonight in part because it's the 56th anniversary of a commencement speech that then president lindl lyndon b. johnson gave. your late husband drafted that speech. i want to play about a minute of it. let's listen. >> no act of my entire administration will give me greater satisfaction than the day when my signature makes this bill to the law of this land. the voting rights bill will be the latest and among the most important in a long series of victories. but this victory, as winston

churchill said of another triumph for freedom, is not the end. it is not even the beginning of the end. but it is perhaps the end of the beginning. that beginning is freedom. and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. >> that line, the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. here we are in 2021 and in many states, barriers to vote are being rebuilt or attempting to rebuild them. >> i know. it's heartbreaking in a way. when i think about my emotions, i was a young 22-year-old. i was in the capitol the day that he signed that voting rights act. he signed it in the capitol himself. and i'm just a lowly intern in the house of representatives. but it turns out that i will end up working for lyndon johnson, the man who signed that act and

marrying the man, richard goodwin, that helped to draft the speech that was so important to that voting rights being secured. but the incredible thing he does at howard university is he takes it the next step. he goes to my husband and says i've got to make another speech. civil rights is there, voting rights is on its way. we have to talk about economic and social justice. that speech is where we are today. he said everybody is born with a range of abilities, but those abilities are either stunted or stretched by the house you live in, the family you grow up in, the neighborhood you have, the poverty or richness of your surroundings. you can't take a person to a starting line and expect them to compete if they have had a history of bondage and racism. it's the exact climate of what we're talking about today. he was talking about it then. those are the presidents we look for that care about their legacy and the arc of justice and how they're expanding it forward. >> doris kearns goodwin, i appreciate it. thank you. >> thank you for having me. coming up next, escalating the legal battle against the

kind of hacks that have recently dried up gas pumps and shut down the meat supply. also ahead, there's breaking news. new reporting of what appears to be the first top trump organization executive to go before a new york grand jury. we'll talk about it with our legal analyst and a former of top trump analyst who knew him. plus we'll hear from smt military pilots who saw unidentified objects in the sky as well as others who know something is out there and it's not from this world. big ink tanks. lots of ink. print about... this many pages. the epson ecotank. just fill and chill.

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with terrorism after 9/11. that urgent message from the head of the fbi, chris wray. today adding his voice to the alarm being sounded by the biden administration over the growing ransomware attacks here and around the world. there are a lot of parallels, wray told "the wall street journal." the scale of this problem is one that i think the country has to come to terms with. >> before long we are worried that some people will get hurt, especially when we consider all these incidents that are affecting health care. >> reporter: health care, schools and most recently the colonial pipeline and jbs foods, which is the biggest meat producer in the world. those two recent attacks caused gas shortages and beef plants to shut down. >> i think this is going to be an ongoing struggle. increasing threat, increasing defenses. and to the extent again that this counterterrorism analogy works, that's another way in which this will be a long-term fight. >> reporter: the justice department announced thursday it will implement practices used

for terrorism cases, telling prosecutors to share more information and coordinate efforts on ransomware attacks, which is when hackers take control of a network and hold it hostage, demanding money. the attacks and the amounts paid have skyrocketed. the justice department says ransom payments, often in cryptocurrency, last year went up 300%. the white house on thursday released a rare open letter pleading with companies to strengthen their online defenses, saying they can't fight the threat alone. but experts say the government also needs to find a better way to take down the attackers and deter them from even trying. >> it really requires the government to take additional actions. they have got to work collaboratively with foreign law enforcement agencies to take these people off the field, to use law enforcement efforts, intelligence agency efforts, economic sanctions, to disrupt and deter these actors. >> reporter: most of the recent major attacks have come from russia. government hackers in the case of a breach like solarwinds and

criminal hackers striking the pipeline and food companies. today's comparison of cyberattacks to other terrorist threats is one that has been made for years, including in 2018 by the country's head of intelligence. >> i'm here to say the warning lights are blinking red again. the day the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack. >> reporter: those warning lights are now doing more than just blinking, they are on. i'm told this is going to be a significant part of president biden's upcoming trip to europe, both at the g-7 and then on that one-on-one summit in geneva with president putin. president biden will make clear to russia that they have to take action to crack down on these groups and tell putin they are fundamentally destabilizing to the u.s./russia relationship. biden has said he wants a stable and predictable relationship with russia. perspective now from christopher krebs from the

department of homeland security, also a cnn national security analyst, former national intelligence director, james clapper. chris, director wray is making this parallel, likening these attacks to terror attacks. do you agree with that as asse assessment? >> well, i certainly think that it's important that the fbi elevate the priority of tackling ransomware gangs akin to the terrorist threat of 9/11. i think that's in part what you're hearing here. at the same time, you're seeing the deputy national security advisor, the deputy attorney general, the secretary of homeland, all making a very clear statement that ransomware is a top priority for this administration. >> director clapper, the 9/11 commission report, there were failures leegdading up to the attacks, one of the biggest the failure of imagination. is your government failing again on that front? are they doing enough? >> i don't think there's a failure of imagination here.

the intelligence community has long identified hacktivists and criminals as a problem. c dan coats did when he was dni. i think, though, that what has been in the past considered an annoyance or irritation has now risen to the level of a genuine national security threat. when we've seen recent demonstrations of the impact this can have in the case of the pipeline seizure and the seizure of the meat processing plant. so this is a harbinger of what adversaries such as most notably the russians can do. so i think it's quite appropriate for the government to sound -- generate a sense of urgency about this in the public. >> the question becomes what do you do about it. chris, you recently tweeted saying there's no silver bullet or single action that will stop

this. it's going to take a concerted and coordinated set of actions across government and industry to slow this down. even then the bad guys will look for openings. make them not want to play the game anymore. how do you go about that? >> i think the first thing we have to do is here in the homeland we have to work with our private sector partners, business leaders, to improve their defenses. they need to improve on the basics but unfortunately doing the basics still is a little bit on the harder side. second, we've got to look at the business model. ransomware is a business. business is good. we have to look at what facilitates the transfer of funds from u.s. businesses to these criminals. in part that is krimt cryptocur. so we have to look at regulatory regimes over crypto. and third, we've got to look at what our additional tools are, whether it's law enforcement or intelligence or military operations to disrupt the ability of these ransomware gangs to use the internet to launch their attacks and make

them, like i said, not want to play the game anymore. make it too hard for them to engage in this criminal activity. >> director clapper, does that all sound right to you? >> yes, it does. what this -- what i think chris is suggesting here is not just a whole of government approach but a whole society approach. and clearly private concerns need to step it up on defense. but i think the government needs to go on the offense here more and use more of the tools that are available to it. to chris' point, he's exactly right about if you dry up the funding and make it difficult for ransomware to be exploited, it will go away. we're just going to have to be a lot more aggressive about that. >> chris, what is the worst case scenario for a future attack? we've seen, you know, the impact on the colonial pipeline and what that did. it seems like there are a lot of

other things that could even be much worse. >> i think that's true. i think we have seen over the last year more. we've seen ransomware attacks on hospitals, on state and local governments, on water facilities. i do get the sense, at least from the folks i talk to in the private sector, cyber intelligence world, that programs the crew, the darkside crew with colonial overstepped, right? they didn't necessarily know they were going to be knocking out the pipeline and gas supplies to the southeast. and so there's been a bit of a reckoning in that community. but it's a clear indication that we have massive vulnerabilities and due to the unregulated nature of our private sector that we are going to have to think through a different set of incentives, whether carrots or sticks to improve our defenses here. >> director clapper, how much of this is state sponsored? if there are russian, you know, cyber groups, they're not -- i

assume they are not operating without the knowledge of the russian government? >> well, knowing russia and the way it operates, particularly under vladimir putin, it's inconceivable to me that the russian intelligence services aren't aware of this and that putin has certainly at least acquiesced if not directing it. it's inconceivable to me that they would permit an attack on these sensitive infrastructure apparatus or capabilities of ours without it being at least sanctioned by the state. now, russia wants to be in a position of -- perhaps it's attributable, but also deniable. and i think we need to keep that in mind as we consider options to retaliate. >> director clapper, chris krebs, i really appreciate your time. thank you. coming up next, breaking news on the grand jury investigating the president's company and senior company

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breaking news tonight in the manhattan district attorney's grand jury investigation of the trump organization. there's new reporting on what could be the first known company executive to have talked. "the new york times" headline reads senior trump organization official testifies before grand jury. the manhattan d.a.'s office

subpoenaed jeffrey mcconnie, a long-serving financial executive at the company. according to "the times" he's worked at the trump organization nearly 35 years. joining us now is elliot williams who served as deputy assistant attorney general during the obama administration. also barbara rez, former executive vice president at the trump organization and author of "tower of lies, what my 18 years of working with donald trump reveals about him." eliot, let me start with you. how significant do you think this could be in this legal case, that a trump organization employee has testified? >> it's not -- anderson, it's not just any trump organization employee, it's the controller of the organization. look, what's being investigated here are financial irregularities both by the trump organization and potentially the president himself and allen weisselberg, the chief financial officer. when you are investigating financial irregularities in an organization, there are two people you need to talk to.

number one, the chief financial officer and, number two, the controller. any dollar that the trump organization spent, whether in the form of inflating or deflating real estate assets or unlawfully making payments potentially to allen weisselberg would have gone through these two individuals. so what this all is a sign of is that they're putting pressure on the chief financial officer, mr. weisselberg, in an attempt to get him to cooperate in the investigation and potentially provide testimony against the president. so this is quite significant just given the nature of the crimes that are being alleged and the people who they're calling to testify. >> yeah, and you say alleged. it's important to point out no charges have been filed against anyone in the trump organization. barbara, you worked in the trump organization for 18 years. who is jeffrey mcconney? what's his role in the company and his relationship with allen weisselberg. >> when i worked back there, i

worked on a california project, i was a consultant at the end of my tenure, and jeff was a young accountant. we had occasion to talk to him once in a while. he would look at our expenses and things like that. he wasn't the controller. this is the first i'm hearing of it and i'm happy because i liked him a lot and i think he's a good man. but he was just doing pretty much journeyman work for allen. >> but do you know about his role now in the organization? was that when he was just starting out you said? >> it was basically when he was just starting out. he was young and a very smart guy and hard worker. i can imagine that he would have moved up in the ranks absolutely. >> eliot, you point out in new york a grand jury witness is granted immunity so that's obviously significant here. >> new york is a state that

grants immunity to witnesses compelled to testify before the grand jury. that means he can't be prosecuted for anything that he says during the course of this testimony. that's a huge -- of huge value to prosecutors because it allows them to ensure truthful testimony. now, if this -- if someone does get charged and this does go to trial, defense attorneys would likely challenge this witness and say, wait a second, you got a really sweet deal from the government. you've potentially committed unlawful acts and they have committed to never prosecuting you for anything? so, yes, it becomes a credibility thing for the individual who testifies. but at the end of the day, what the policy is here in new york state is to get valuable testimony and by ensuring that you're not prosecuting the people that come before you, that's probably the way to do it. >> barbara, how loyal is allen weisselberg to the former president? >> how what? >> loyal is he? >> that's a good question.

he was always extremely loyal. that's what i was going to say as an aside. i can't imagine that trump pults the same trust in jeffrey mcconney as he does in allen weisselberg. i'm happy he's testifying. but allen weisselberg, he adored trump. he worshipped the ground he walked on. he was a loyalist, probably the single loyalist person he has and the only non-family member. >> eliot, if allen weisselberg is their main interest, because according to everybody he's the person who knows everything there is to know. he knows where everything -- i mean he's been there forever. he worked for donald trump's father before he worked for the former president. is talking to a chief financial officer, somebody underneath

wiesel berks is that a step to getting information on weisselberg? >> it's not uncommon to work your way up the chain. if there's anyone who's going to know about the financial irregularities of the organization, it's weisselberg's deputy. now, look, this may never ending in charges for the president himself. people need to know that. but it's incredibly significant that the chief financial officer of any organization, let alone one run by the former president of the united states, is this much the target and subject of a criminal inquiry. >> it is so fascinating. i appreciate it both of you. thank you so much. just ahead, white house comments on what may be in that pentagon analysis of ufo sightings by some of its navy pilots. we'll be right back. we'll have a look at the evidence to date when we continue.

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pick a place to meet your family if you are not together and can't go home. remind your parents to pack an emergency supply kit. making a plan might feel like homework, but it will help you and your family stay safe during an emergency. the white house commented today on a story we've been following for a while about encounters between ufos and u.s. navy pilots, specifically on a new development that broke during last night's program, i could say, that sources are now telling cnn that a highly anticipated pentagon report, which should reach congress later this month, will reach no definitive conclusions on what these pilots saw. sources say the report concludes there's no evidence these were alien spacecraft, but say three of these sources the report doesn't rule that out. something that may only fuel the debate obviously.

today the white house was asked about the report and would only say this. >> i will say that we take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft identified or unidentified very seriously and investigate each one. safety and security of our personnel, of our operations are of paramount concern. there's a requirement to put out this report and certainly our appropriate teams are working on finalizing it. >> randi kaye has more on what sparked such interest in the subject by those in government. >> what is that thing? >> reporter: a u.s. navy aircraft captured images of that rotating thing back in january 2015, off the coast of jacksonville, florida. >> my gosh! they're going against the wind. the wind is 120 miles to the west. >> reporter: also in 2015 just a few weeks later, this happened. watch as a navy air crew

struggles to lock on to a mysterious fast-moving object off the atlantic coast. >> oh, got it! woo-hoo! >> roger. >> reporter: former navy fighter pilot alex dietrich told about seeing one off the coast of san diego. >> enter stage left, the tictac. that's what we affectionately refer to it as. >> reporter: it was about the size of an aircraft fuselage. >> it was white, like a matte finish just like a tictac. and it behaved in a way that we were surprised, unnerved. it accelerated. it almost didn't accelerate, it

sort of jumped from spot to spot and tumbled around in a way that was unpredictable. >> reporter: former navy commander david fraver was on the training mission and remembers how the object quickly maneuvered. >> like a ping pong ball bouncing off a wall. the ability to hover over the water and start a vertical climb from basically 0 up to 12,000 feet and then accelerate in less than two seconds and disappear is something i had never seen in my life. >> reporter: so what was it? the government won't say or maybe doesn't know. for decades, the pentagon's research into these close encounters has been kept under wraps, along with the images and a now defunct $22 million program designed to investigate ufos. so what are we to believe about moments like this? >> whoa, it's getting close. >> it splashed. >> reporter: members of the u.s. navy captured that footage of an unidentified flying object spotted off the coast of

california in july 2019, just before it vanished into the ocean. and with so few answers, extraterrestrials have become a favorite subject for conspiracy theorists, with much of the focus on a highly classified u.s. air force testing facility in nevada, known as area 51. bob lazar is the conspiracy theorist and former physicist who says he worked at the secretive government research site, area 51. he says he was hired to reverse engineer a flying saucer buried there. >> this came from somewhere else. as bizarre as that is to believe, but it's there, i saw it. >> reporter: others have bought into his claims that the u.s. government buried extraterrestrial technology at area 51. >> it looks like sand. it's made to look like the side of the mountain it's in, whether it's to disguise it from satellite photographs. >> reporter: so until someone says for sure what's really out there -- >> no sound, no blinking lights, just this big illuminated form.

>> reporter: we'll be left still to wonder. and it's all so mysterious, anderson, just to think about those former navy pilots. that's not a ufo, it's an airplane. but think about those former navy pilots who saw that tictac-like object who thought it was watching them for the five minutes they were in the same area, which is amazing and sort of mysterious to even ponder. but i should point out that the former head of that $22 million pentagon program that was designed to study ufos did tell cnn back in 2017 that there is compelling evidence, anderson, that we are not alone. >> and this report, it's going to be fascinating even for what it doesn't say. the fact that they said they found no evidence it was an alien craft according to these sources, but they also can't say that it's not something from elsewhere. randi kaye, thanks very much. appreciate it. dr. anthony fauci is

pressing china to be more open on the medical conditions of three lab workers in wuhan at the center of the lab leak theory of the coronavirus. a detailed report of the evidence for that theory when we continue. how great is it that we get to tell everybody how liberty mutual customizes your car insurance so you only pay for what you need? i mean it... uh-oh, sorry...

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dr. anthony fauci now says china must release medical records of lab workers in wuhan at the center of the lab leak theory on the origin of the coronavirus. this is what he told "the financial times" quote i would like to see the medical records of the three people reported to have got sick in 2019. did they really get sick? if so, what did they get sick with? the same with the minors who got ill years ago. what do the medical records say? was there a virus in those people? what was it? it is entirely conceivable the origins -- repeated support for investigating the possibility of a leak comes from nih as well as 18 scientists who wrote in the journal science last month the theory has not been given enough consideration. i want to get perspective from a contributing editor for "vanity

fair" her latest piece, "inside the fight to uncover covid-19's origins." you looked into the minors who fell ill in 2012 as well as researchers at the wuhan institute of virilology who got sick the fall of 2019 reportedly. what did you find? >> it is really quite remarkable, anderson. thank you for having me on. the minors in 2012 were tasked with shoveling out a thick layer of bat feces from this mine shaft. they became incredibly ill, you know, with symptoms that as we learned about them looked like covid-19 in 2012. the oldest one among them died first. the disease was fierce, as a masters thesis documented it. it was identified as somehow being linked to a bat virus. and the sample from the mine

that was taken was initially labeled by wuhan institute of virilology researchers as something called 4991. later, in the wake of covid-19, when they wrote about it, they labeled it ratg-13. researchers i write about in my story realized actually it was the same thing and the reason it matters is because it is at the moment the closest progenitor to sars cov 2 which is the virus that causes covid-19. so there are questions about whether researchers at the wuhan institute of virilology somehow attempted to conceal the links from this cave. i should say they were doing research to hopefully prepare us for and prevent pandemics but it seems that the case of those

minors was not reported to the world health organization at the time and was concealed. now revelations about this cave and the illnesses is raising a lot of questions. >> were those minors sent to shovel out bat guano without respiratory devices, without protection? >> we don't know the details of what they were wearing in the caves. i don't know that the masters thesis that documents this talks about that but when they cut to the hospital they pulled in a top pulmonologist who wanted to know if there was antibody testing, what kind of bat was in the cave and it was the same as linked to the initial sars outbreak in 2002. so in my story, i was tracking

not only what was happening inside the cave, what was happening to the viral strains and how they were documented and how they were reported but also what was happening inside our government to people asking those very same questions. >> you started that multiple state department officials investigating this were repeatedly warned not to open a can of worms or panned oraa's box. one official said, quote, those warnings smelled like a cover-up. why wouldn't the u.s. government want to get to the bottom of this? >> you know, this is a question i'm not sure we know the answer to. people inside the state department have said they never tried to conceal any information from the public. what they were simply advising is the kind of research going on in the wuhan institute of virilology was not necessarily

untoward but the real issue is the kind of research going on in the wuhan institute of virilology is called gain of function research. it is an effort to try to make p pathogens more infectious and whether they'll be infectious to humans. there is a lot of controversy surrounding this research. there is real concern that you've got an institute seven miles from the epicenter of the outbreak that had these strains which were taken from this mine. those strains were renamed. and they were doing this risky gain of function research. the other piece of this is that the u.s. government in part was funding some of that research through a sort of middle

organization called the health alliance. >> it is a fascinating report. it's up in "vanity fair." i really appreciate it. obviously more to be learned on the whole chronology of this. we'll be right back. se, diabetes and raised triglycerides,... ...vascepa can give you something to celebrate. ♪ vascepa, when added to your statin,... ...is clinically proven to provide 25% lower risk from heart attack and stroke. vascepa is clearly different. first and only fda approved. celebrate less risk. even for those with family history. ♪ don't take vascepa if you are... ...or become allergic to icosapent ethyl or any inactive ingredient in vascepa. serious side effects may occur like heart rhythm problems and bleeding. heart rhythm problems may occur in more people... ...with persistent cardiovascular risk or who have had them in the past. tell your doctor if you experience an irregular heartbeat or other heart rhythm problems. possible side effects include muscle and joint pain.

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