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or good morning. >> are you irish? >> welcome to cnn this morning. we have a lot to get to. so this is the game-winning goal sending the u.s. to the knockout rounds. speak to the star defender on the team. >> he is the stare. also the leader of the oathkeepers, stewart rhodes, has been convicted of seditious conspiracy. his ex-wife is going to join us about what that landmark verdict

means. >> first we're going to start this morning with what is happening on capitol hill. you see all the lawmakers meeting with president biden, democrats and republicans coming together and preparing to enact legislation that would avert a rail strike. he is working to keep them from walking off the job. something he said could be devastating for the economy. >> i asked the four top leaders in congress to talk about whether they'd be able to come in and talk about legislation and there's a lot to do including resolving the train strike and what we're doing now and congress i think has to act to prevent it. it's not an easy call but i think we have to do it. the economy is at risk. >> reporter: melanie, it not often you see mitch mcconnell,

kevin mccarthy, chuck schumer, nancy pelosi and president biden in one room together. >> i think there's a general understanding that biden ultimately decided that the economic risk was too great. but the deal that he is asking congress to codify is running into resistance from the right and the left. on the right you have some republicans just weary of getting involved in a dispute involving private companies and on the left, they do not like that this bill does not include 15 days of paid sick leave. first they're going to vote on the deal, which includes a 24% increase in pay and includes a cap in health care premiums. and then they're going to have a second separate vote in just adding a paid sick leave. then all of that will head to the senate. it's unclear if the senate is going to take up the paid sick

league portion. they are vowing to get this deal done. every senator needs to be in agreement. congress is trying to act fast but that's always easier said than done around here, kaitlan. >> of course. >> it was a moment. do you want to do the goal thing, don? >> no. >> it's the moment american soccer fans have been waiting for since 2014. here it is. >> he makes it a big run, he has snuck in behind and scores! >> the moment the u.s. beat iran in the world cup yesterday to advance to the knockout round thanks to that goal. it didn't come easy for the u.s. iran threatened to score late in the game nearly ruining the u.s. chances to move on. with ice in his veins, one u.s.

defender made sure he and his teammates would get a chance. >> there's a hand on the shoulder for sure, but i t thin he's trying to play for the penalty. >> joining us now from doha is walker zimmerman, the defender on the u.s. men's national team. congratulations to you guys. even the president stopped what he was doing to let a whole factory in michigan know that you guys had won. congratulations and thanks for being with us this morning. >> thank you very much. we're extremely excited and thanks for having me this morning. >> you guys really set out to change how the world sees u.s. soccer. do you think you've done that so far? >> i hope so but we're not finished yet so i think the narrative continues. we're still going to try and do that and accomplish our goal of winning the world cup. i think if we're able to do that, we'll inspire a lot of young americans to pick up the spot and hopefully make them

proud. >> you're going very humble there. all morning we've been talking about christian and his goal. but there was this moment where the ball had slipped past the goalkeeper, it was going to this open net and then you entered. what was going through your mind in that moment? >> i knew there was only a few minutes left. nine minutes of stoppage time is a long time. just trying to be folk you used and be prepared for the first. as the ball went through to the goal, i was able to and 'tis pay something happening and help keep this clean sheet that helped us get to the next round. >> did it kind of feel like redemption at all for you? >> a little bit. it's more of just doing your job. that's what was expected of me to make a difference and see out the game and to come in and i

was happy to contribute. >> there's a lot of people paying attention for different reasons that have to do with rights and all of that but you have america back home cheering you on. are you aware of that or are you just focused on the game or are you aware of the other things that have happened? >> i think we're definitely aware of importance and different things and issues coming about in each game but at the same time it's not distracting us from our goal or shifting our focus away from what we're trying to achieve. we're aware but at the same time -- >> walker, we're losing you a little bit. >> i think he came back. you can hear us okay? >> i can hear you guys. want me to repeat that?

>> no, we got it. can you just talk a little bit about what we saw at the end of the game, some of your teammates and you guys embracing some of the iranian players and what means in this moment, especially given the human rights violations across iran? >> 100%. you know, we first and foremost as competitors what it like to lose. we also know the stakes of a world cup and then on top of that everything that they're dealing with emotionally and so we just, you know, congratulated them on their effort and empathized with them and let them know that we were proud of the way they competed on the field in the game last night. >> and a big question is how christian was doing. he got injured as he scored that goal. what's the latest that you've heard from your teammate? >> it was great seeing him at the hotel, he's in good great

spirits. >> we got the great spirits, saw him at the hotel. >> he said he's going to be there from his hospital bed. >> walk er zimmermann. oh there he is. thank you, walker. i don't know if you're still there. he's gone. a leader of the oathkeepers has been found guilty of seditious conspiracy. he was one of the five oathkeeper defendants to be convict of disrupting an official proceeding, which could carry a 20-year sentence. they say he stood outside the building acting as a general. his wife helped him stop the

oath keepers. his wife, it's her first tv interview since the verdict. thank you so much for joining us. we really appreciate you joining us this morning. how are you doing, tasha? >> amazing. the best i've done in a long time. >> what's your reaction to your ex-husk convicted on these charges, especially the historic one of seditious conspiracy? >> that's the one i was really worried about. you was so relieved. i don't even know how to put into word the difference the way the world feels now and it felt to me, except like being in a really noisy room for days, weeks, months on end and then it's just suddenly quiet. it's like the absence of fear.

>> why were you so skeptical that they would find him guilty? i know you said he hasn't faced consequences his entire life? >> he's been able to get away with everything. i wasn't even able to get a restraining order on him. he was given 50% custody. had he been acquitted, he could have shown up here in montana just taken my kids. it seemed to me he seemed all powerful, that there was nothing i could do. even when we even did finally get out, the police isn't me back home to him, to my husband. it seemed impossible he could lose. though i saw the evidence against him, i knew logically it was a pretty good case but emotionally he just seemed

unbeatable. >> the two of you have six children together. one thing you said that stood out to me after the verdict is you were concerned he might try to seek a pardon if trump is reelected? >> that's the shadow over all of this. i know that's what he is mentally doing right now, he's regrouping. maybe a potential desantis presidency there's still the potential for pardon there. i know it's slight. i know that trump could have pardoned him before and he didn't but there's that slight s shadow. i know that mentally stewart is already on the next step. >> you know the power that he has over others, right, the power to persuade, to propel.

do yo do you think the conviction will deter some of those followers? >> i think some. my fear is that these criminal charges, it's hard to imagine but they don't really hurt him on the extreme right. it's one of the reasons i feel sometimes compelled to just talk about the more personal side of him, the abuse, the misusing of funds. a lot of people look at it like, well, he misused funds but it's extremist money so what. that does hurt him on the right and does keep him from potentially rising again in an appeal or pardon. that's one of the reasons i need to talk about the more personal side of him and all the damage he's caused to everyone, not just criminally. >> do you feel safe? you talked about your kids.

>> do you feel safe? >> i do. of course there's some concern with some of his followers. i do get messages. i did get some last night, i've dishonored my husband, this is all my fault. i'm pretty used to everything being my fault. the fbi has been great. they check in on me, double-check, is there anything -- have you been getting bad messages? [ no audio ] and it's really the first time i've been able to breathe easy in years to tell you the truth. >> tasha, thank you. we're glad that you're safe and thank you so much for appearing. >> thank you. >> wow. >> all right. speaking of feeling safe, what that looks luike online.

a twitter official is saying he no longer believes twitter is safe under elon musk. >> and the lava flow of a volcano coming within four miles of the big island on hawaii. officials are now raising health concncerns. some are of intensity, others, joy. all are of - ahhhh. listerine. feeeel the whoa! hi, my name is tony cocooper. and if you have both medicare and medicaid, i have some really encouraging news that you'll definely want to hear. dependinon the plan you choose, you may be eligible to get extra benefits wadvantage dual-eligible special needs plan. all of these plans include a healthy options allowance. depending on the plans available in your area, you could get up to $1800 a year to help pay for essentials like eligible

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okay. so the man who was in charge of trust and safety at twitter until just a few weeks ago is now voicing his top concerns for the social media company. he left the company earlier this month. he had made the case in "the new york times" op-ed that twitter was actually becoming safer under elon musk's leadership but now his stance has changed. i'm going to listen to what he told our journalist. >> >> at one point you saturday twitter was safer under musk. do you still believe that? >> i don't. a trolling campaign emerged and a number of trolls you could sort of watch the organization happen on for chance. this was all happening in public. they were like let's go to twitter and test the new limits of elon musk.

twitter's challenge going forward is not can the platform build -- sure, they can. are they enough people that understand the emergent malicious campaigns and are there enough people that can verify strategy. i don't think there are enough people left do that work. >> and cara fisher joins us. it was a fascinating conversation. he was twitter's former head of trust and safety. are the alarm bells sounding for you? what did you get out of that? >> i've already been worried about that. when you cut people who have been doing this for a while, and they'll make complaints it was already a concern and it probably was. it's like keeping ahead of a man in trashville.

it was a combination of people. a lot of this is experience and it changes every day because these malevolent actors change their tactics all the time. >> what was the breaking point for him? don mentioned he wrote that piece knowing who elon musk was and knowing his erratic behavior in the purchase of the company. >> that was in a tweet. he was talking about that trolling campaign that happened right after elon took over. they were testing the limits and they fixed it. they were ubable to push that back. he's talking about the constant amount of people leaving and the fact of elon letting people back on the platform without a whole lot of oversight. he had a red line list, one was not to lie for elon. he didn't cross that one.

one of the ones that he was worried about was that the decisions were made by one person. that was his biggest worry and that's what's happening without -- and when the debacle happened and everything happened that they said would happen, i think that was enough for him, this guy was going to make decisions without any kind of input he wrote opinions saying that musk moved aggressively to remove hate speech. you also asked him about the decision around hunter biden's laptop and the story in the "new york post" and how people responded to it. >> we didn't know what to believe, what was true. there was smoke and ultimately for me it didn't reach a place where i was comfortable removing this content from twitter.

but it set off every single one of my finely tuned apt-28 hack and leak campaigns. >> so it looked possible. >> everything about it looked luke a hack and leak and smelled like a hack and leak but it didn't get there for me. when you feel a responsibility to protect the integrity of the conversations on a platform from foreign governments expending their resources to interfere in an lks, there were lots of reasons the entire industry it was on alert. it didn't get there for me. >> so it was a mistake? >> yes, it was a mistake. >> that's significant to say it was a mistake. >> what happened is he got targeted by the right wing as the one who made the decision. he actually didn't want to remove it.

and pretty viciously his point was they were all on too alert that this didn't happen before. i agree with him. they made a mistake. ne should have not done it. it wasn't life threatening. they should have waited to see how it turned out. that's what he said, it was a mistake they made. lots of news organizations and media companies and this is a media company, made mistakes. >> there have been heads of news organizations talking about why they didn't cover the unter biden story in a way that was searchable to some. and they said it just didn't get there for them. there was a lot of misinformation and it looked like a hack, considering who the players were, rudy giuliani, the guy at the computer store and so on and so forth. >> yeah, yeah. for sure. by no means no massive conspiracy theory. it was just a mistake they made

because they were on alert from 2016 and all the hacked emails and things. >> fascinating interview. thank you for joining on us. >> you can listen to the full thing on cara's podcast. >> two little girls reunited with their parents after going missing in the woods. aw. okay season 6! aw... this'll take forev—or not. do i just focus on when things don't work, and not apprececiate when they do? i lolove it when work actually works! i just booked ththis parking spot... this desk... and this conference room! i am filing status reports on an app that i made! i'm not even a coder! and it works!... i like your bag! when your digital solutions work, the world works. that's why the world works with servicenow.

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well, we fell in love through gaming. but now the internet lags and it throws the whole thing off. when did you first discover this lag? i signed us up for t-mobile home internet. ugh! but, we found other interests. i guess we have. [both] finch! let's go! oh yeah! it's not the same. what could you do to solve the problem? we could get xfinity? that's actually super adult of you to suggest. i can't wait to squad up. i love it when you talk nerdy to me. guy, guys, guys, we're still in session. and i don't know what the heck you're talking about.

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for the five things to know this morning, what do we need to know? >> there's a big update out of idaho. they will hold a candlelight vigil to honor the four students found stabbed to death, this as tensions and fears continue to mount. officials removed the remaining cars at that house. officials have received an uptick in 911 calls but no suspects have been identified and no arrests have been made. >> lava have the world's largest active volcano as it comes within four miles of a major highway on hawaii's big island.

kim kardashian and kanye west have agreed on a settlement. she will receive a $200,000 child support payment every month. and check this out, a heart-warming reunion. two young girls in luce ouisian after being missing for hours. they were found safe and sound following their disappearance with their golden retriever by their side. see you guys. >> thank you. that's what i do when i need to feel good at reuniting stories last night. seriously, this is what i did, dogs reunited and pets reunited.

one dog was gone for i think two weeks and found its way home two miles after breaking two legs. >> like that movie i watch with my kids, "homeward bound or whatever." we should move on. >> and south dakota will have no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations that hate us. there has been a new criticism of tiktok that said that some u.s. user data has been repeatedly accessed from china. in response to the report, tiktok previous said it is consistently maintained that our engineers in locations outside of the u.s., including china, can be granted access to u.s. user data on an as-needed basis under those strict controls. joining us cnn's chief law

enforcement and intelligence analyst mr. john miller. good morning to you. >> good morning, good morning. >> this just sort of renews my stance of no tiktok for me. >> first of all, the governor's right on a much wider level. on government phones you shouldn't be ingesting outside apps and contacts. in the new york city law department we had somebody basically download sin city but a malware copy but it was fake because it was free and crashed the whole system. now, tiktok, you know, is a private company in china but they also collect names, dates of birth, your phone number. that's what you give them to sign up. we all did that, right is this that's what we hand them. but in the background they're

collecting ip addresses that use, what your likes and dislikes are and what your interests are. from an intelligence gathering perspective, that's an enormous amount of data. >> all right. it's very complicated but fight dance is a company that has an american ceo, they say they're operating and the data is safe here. they do have engineers in china. we saw big companies pull out of china like linked in and yahoo because they couldn't comply with the requirements by the u.s. government. is there any assurance that you believe would make it safe to operate here.

mike pompeo said it's one of his biggest regrets is they couldn't get that. >> we fight all the time whether they'll respond to court orders even. in china you can't separate the company from the government, even if the company is fully legislate it and private, the requirements of the government do not include the ability to say no when the government says we want this data. either handing it out through the front door a the government requiring a back door to go in and vacuum that data themselves. look at the history of chinese intelligence and technology. they hacked the office of personnel management. basically the u.s. federal government's defendant of personnel. among the things they took were all of the am cautions for secret and top secret chinese. now china literally has a directory of every person who has valuable classified information in the united

states. think about what you could do with that, which is you could mix it with your border patrol, customs and immigration material so any time somebody from the united states with a security clearance came in, a bell would ring in your computer and say why is this person here? if they had a common name like john miller, you could use why are tiktok data or the health care companies they've hacked into to figure out is it a don lemon or that don lemon? >> this is what the chinese do. >> john miller. it fascinating we have some breaking news right now. there has been an explosion at the ukrainian embassy in madrid. the span ush inindustry of interior says one person has been injured after handling a letter. this person is being treated at a hospital and the national police are investigating what happened. we'll keep you updated as more information comes in. police say it too easy to know if it took place when a worker

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we need to talk about what's happening now. this is just in to cnn. the u.s. economy grew much faster than expected in the third quarter according to the latest gross domestic report, saying it rose by 2.9%. we were talking to christine romans and mark stuart about measuring the economy and after covid, you really don't know -- >> the weird economy? i just call it the weird economy. i was just looking at the

numbers. it's better than expected. previous reading show 2.6% growth. kaitlan, we were talking about this, black friday, cyber monday spending. this is good. i don't know how long it can last. i think that's the question. are they spending savings that were there from covid times and stimulus? but the consumer is all powerful in the u.s. economy. our spending controls 70% of this number. >> i don't know if black friday and cyber monday are included. >> it's not but people still have that power. >> we'll see how the white house to private sector job growth slowing. it's the slowest it been since early 2021. i wonder what that means with all this. if you're the white house, how are you responding this morning?

>> again, the u.s. economy rose faster than expected, the gdp by an annualized of 2. %. any growth is good news -- >> take it. >> we're also excited for what's next. >> we are. it's a weird economy. we can have him weigh in on all of this. there is sir richard branson. he's here in our studio to talk about his new hbo docuseries but we'll talk to him about a lot more than that. >> a lot more. and our producer, mike, who always makes his way into these shots. thanks! it l looks exactly like the picture. because without privacy in your vacationon home... it's a full log cabin guys.

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disrupt buying habits before they disrupt your business. and fuel the search for what comes next. so...what are you waiting for? what a treat. we have a special guest this morning. it is sir richard branson, knighted by the queen. h he offers a really rare intimate glimpse into his life and how his relatively humble upbringing in a family that valued risk taking made him the man he is today. >> our mom tried to get over our

shyness to get over ourselves. >> that led to a few more daring things. >> he thrives on jeopardy. it's a continuation of his childhood. >> having suffered from dyslexia, having left school at 15, i had a lot to prove. >> he is a bumble of contradictions. >> people were seduced into thinking that he was a bumbling good eye when in fact richard always had a firm eye on the bottom line. >> welcome again. let's start with where this docuseries starts. you are filming a video for your family 16 days before you go to space in one of your own space ships and it's only going to be seen if you die and you can't get through it.

you get choked up and we see your vulnerabilities. >> i have done a lot of foolish things in my life. before each i've made a point of writing a letter to my kids and grand kids now trying to explain why i'm pushing myself to the limit, why they should push themselves to the limit but just in case the balloon, you know, doesn't cross the pacific or go around the world and we end up in the sea and don't come home, i obviously want to be able to communicate with them. so the same obviously applied because it's very early days in the space industry. and but it's strange talking about yourself in the past. and, yeah, it did get to me on this occasion. >> you offer us some perspective on this. people think that you're sort of

bumbling around but you are focused on bottom line. can you offer us perspective as a business person, entrepreneur, on what's happening in the economy. we just did a story and the u.s. economy has grown 2.9%, gtp rose by annualized higher than they expected. and we're saying suns covid we're not sure we have the right metrics to measure our economy. what do you think about that? >> interestingly it was an independent documentary, so i don't agree with everything they said. my life is not focused on the bottom really believe in and open flee are the best, like the best airline, the best cruise company. and then i hope that more money comes in than goes out at the end of the year. as far as the economy is

concerned, i think -- i think that people -- there is pent up demand from people to spend after covid and obviously some people don't have any money to spend after covid, but for those who actually saved money during covid they have come out, they want to travel, i mean, virgin atlantic planes are full again, they want to go on cruises, you know, virgin voyages, our new cruise company is finally full of people, and they want to have a good time. so whether that will be sustainable we will have to see. i mean, obviously the fed are trying to reduce inflation and raise interest rates at the same time, so it's going to be interesting to see when things level off and whether they go too far and we will actually go into a bit of a recession. anyway, we will have to see. >> thanks for your response to that. >> i love that idea of pursuing excellence in the things that

you're doing but to do that you're taking big risks and obviously that is how people think of you as this daredevil risky guy. you are not immune to risk, you can see the rewards that have happened because of the ones you have taken, but how do you approach risk in a situation like yours? >> we started virgin atlantic our airline crossing the atlantic 38 years ago this year with one secondhand 747 and our team at the record company thought i had gone mad to go into the airline business and actually i suspect on paper they were right, but what i did was i said to boeing, look, i will give it a go, but at the end of the first year i want to be able to hand that plane back if i've got it wrong, if people don't like the product that we're offering. so it wasn't going to bring the rest of the virgin group down. at the end of the year people loved flying virgin atlantic and we bought two more planes from

boeing. by agreeing to cover the down side for us they actually ended up selling over the years many more planes. so i think i do try to protect the down side in every move i make. >> one of the things to kaitlan's good point is you wrote 50 years ago in a student newspaper you started at university "the brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all." we cover your public risks like going to space or going around in a hot air balloon, we don't often talk about the risks you've taken to fight for equality around the world, the work you've done with nelson mandella on the elders, trying to talk to saddam hussein, the climate change work you've done, trying to abolish the death penalty all of these things as well. talk to us how that plays into if you are too cautious you are really not living. >> so i think as an entrepreneur i have had a lot of experience

in trying to solve problems, so, you know, if there's -- if there's a war going on, you mentioned the saddam hussein, you know, i thought it was worth giving it a shot to try to stop the war by trying to persuade saddam hussein to step down and go and live in iraq for -- sorry, to go and live in libya for the rest of his life and using contacts with king hussein of jordan he basically agreed that he would go if we could send two elders to go and talk to him and nelson mandella agreed to go, kofi annan secretary general of the united nations agreed to go and sadly the bombing started just before the trip took place, but as a result of that we set up the elders, which is a wonderful group of men and women who do go in to try to resolve conflicts, who do talk out on climate change, who do try to address

the problems with the world from a moral standpoint rather than from a political standpoint. >> why was it important? you've been a supporter of lgbtq rights for a long time, you see what's happening with same-sex marriage that's happening in the senate and in congress. you wore a pin, a rainbow pin into space. you were ahead of the curve. why? >> well, i was a teenager and the film -- the hbo series got footage somehow of when i was a teenager we had a center for young people that had problems and one of the groups of people who used to come to the center were young gay people who had come from, you know, remote parts of the uk where being gay wasn't accepted and so we set up a place called heaven in london where they could meet and meet other gay people. so from a young age i realized that, you know, you're born gay,

you have no choice in the matter, you know, gay people need -- they need friends, they need to be loved, and we've tried to change the rules, you know, we're still working hard to change the rules in countries that do atrocious things to gay people, you know, russia is an exa example. anyway, countries in africa, i mean, some things leftover from english colonial days. but i think -- i think that -- i think it's important as entrepreneurs to -- i mean, singapore were executing a boy with low iq for bringing some drugs into the country, a small quantity of drugs, and we tried to stop the execution and -- and we didn't succeed, but i think we managed to highlight, you know, among singaporeans that they were one of the few

countries left in the world that are still executing people for taking drugs. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> the series premieres december 1st. it's going to be so interesting, i think. >> thanks for sticking up for folks who often don't have a voice. that's your power. >> you do as well. >> and taking risks. and taking us to space, maybe one day. thank you, sir richard branson. >> hbo and hbo max. we appreciate you coming in. >> great watch. >> thanks to all of you. we will see you here tomorrow morning. "cnn newsroom" is after this. when moderate to severe ulcerative colitis persists... put it in check with rinvoq, a once-daily pill. when uc got unpredictable,... i got rapid symptom relief with rinvoq. chcheck. when u uc held me back... i got lasting, steroid-freree remission with rinvoq. check. and when uc got the upper hand... rinvoq helped visibly repair the colon lining. check. rapid symptom relief. lasting, steroid-free remission. and a chance to visibly repair the colon lining.

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very good wednesday morning to you, i'm jim sciutto. >> and i'm bianna golodryga. we are following several major stories for you this morning