The Takeout with Major Garrett, 5/08/26

To contact Trace for any possible new cases. So far, there are five confirmed cases connected to the cruise ship MV Hondias. There have also been three deaths. The virus is typically known to spread through contact with rodents, but it may have passed from human to human aboard the ship. That's according to the WHO. Now, here in the US, six states are monitoring people who came into contact with people exposed to the virus.

While the COVID pandemic is fresh in people's minds, and a disease that is unfamiliar can cause some anxiety, the WHO is seeking to calm those fears, saying, quote, This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. So to help separate factors from fear. CBS News medical correspondent Celine Gowder is here to help us all navigate this. Uh Dr. Gowner, thank you so much. I think you know well when people hear any sort of virus now, they think of COVID.

And that's where all the fear comes in and the questions. So let's start there. How is this virus different from COVID 19?

Um, what we know about Andy's virus is that it has been transmitted person to person, but it's still a lower respiratory tract infection when that happens. So in other words, it's in the lungs. And so you need to have very prolonged, close contact with somebody to be infected in that fashion. It's more like tuberculosis than it is like COVID or flu or measles. Um what we have seen it with the biggest outbreak of Andes virus in Argentina.

Um, the people who were most likely to be infected were actually sexual partners. Not to say that this is sexually transmitted, but it's that very close, intimate contact, sleeping in the same bed, kissing, et cetera. Those are the people who are far more likely to get infected, even than just other household contacts. The really good news we got on the last day was that the flight attendant who was exposed on a flight to one of these hantavirus.

uh uh cruise ship passengers who was uh returning home on a plane. That flight attendant has tested negative. She was having some symptoms, was worried it was hontavirus. It is not hantavirus. Now she's will still need to continue to be monitored. A Spanish Spanish passenger from the same flight is also being tested. But if this same pattern holds, that supports that the virus requires prolonged close contact to transmit.

Nebraska Medical Center, the only federally funded quarantine unit in the country, is on standby and they will be drawing upon their experience with the early COVID cruise ship quarantines. So far, the 17 Americans are who left the ship earlier are being um the sorry, excuse me, the seven Americans who left the ship earlier who are back in the five states, none of them have symptoms.

Um, behind the scenes, some things are moving, but publicly, unfortunately, Americans are really hearing nothing. No one from HHS or the CDC has briefed the public. No health alert has gone out to doctors telling them what to watch for. A CDC source told me that the response team was only authorized to start work on uh late on Wednesday and the holdup appears to have been getting a waiver from HHS to cooperate and coordinate with the WHO.

All CDC communications now have to go through these heavy filters at HHS, which is partly why the public hasn't heard much of anything yet. There are no pre-prepared quarantine protocols for hantivirus, so they're writing them as we speak. Uh and monitoring is being handled state by state while the CDC finalizes those guidance.

Um, you don't have a surgeon general. So who does that leave? Well, you have the State Department that's coordinating this response. So Marco Rubio, we have Secretary Kennedy. Um, there's, you know, I guess President Trump, um, but there's not a lot of uh leadership on the public health front. And then uh I think one thing people don't realize is public health functions a lot like the military. It's very much about

operations, logistics, the chain of command. And when that chain of command has been decimated from the top all the way down, that does create issues for coordination, for communication. The good news is that there are some very expert people on the ground, specialists in Nebraska, for example, at the quarantine unit. They are excellent, but you just need to have all the different pieces functioning together to coordinate a response like that.

Shifting gears here in a victory for Republicans, the Virginia Supreme Court tossed out a congressional map that was approved by voters just last month. As you can see from these two maps, Democrats gained as many as four House seats in the referendum, but the ruling strips the party of those potential seats and reverts them back to the old map.

That you see on the left of your screen. So CBS News election law expert and contributor David Becker joins me now to help make sense of all of this. Um David, good to see you. Um, last a couple of weeks ago, we were covering this big referendum in Virginia. 1.6 million voters in Virginia voted to have these maps. And now the Supreme Court there, which we knew was a possibility, has overturned it. Um what what's behind this? How did it get to this point and why did they strike it down?

Now that was surprising to a lot of people because there was litigation over this effort going back to last fall when the legislature first started it. And the Supreme Court of Virginia had many opportunities to tell the legislature to tell the map drawers that these are the hoops you need to j jump through, specifically you need to get the maps done before quote unquote election day, which this the majority of the court, these four justices, said was the beginning of early voting.

That's not really the way we usually think of Election Day. If you think about Election Day in the United States, we think of Election Day as the last day of voting, even though states have early voting well before it.

The dissent says this was not the way it's interpreted in Virginia either. And the three dissenting justices, including the Chief Justice, really called the majority out for, you know, appearing to have played politics here in a way that you know, took away the will of the people, the millions of Virginia voters who voted on this referendum.

how the justices and the the the judges all around the country are being perceived by the American people. Last week we saw the Supreme Court by a six to three vote overturn decades and decades of precedent uh on the Voting Rights Act, which has led to a feeding frenzy on redistrictings around the country, particularly amongst Republicans. The Florida plan.

Is going to go up before the Florida Supreme Court. There is a constitutional provision in Florida law that says you can't have a partisan gerrymander. That's a twenty four to four plan. But those justices were also appointed by Governor Governor DeSantis and Republicans. So we'll see how much Politics plays into this and whether that has a long term effect on the perception of legitimacy amongst uh amongst the

Especially when parties in order to maximize their gains need to minimize some of their margins to get more districts. And so some of those districts they might be drawing might become vulnerable to a wave election.

And the Department of Defense today started releasing previously classified documents related to UFOs. The files included dozens of videos of unresolved reports of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomenon, like this one that you see here. from 2013 that was spotted somewhere in the Middle East.

Some of the documents also contain photos taken from the surface of the moon of objects observed by NASA astronauts during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions. President Trump had long promised to release documents like these. Alex Dietrich joins me now. She's a retired Navy fighter pilot and has spoken about her own experience encountering a UFO during a training exercise. Thanks so much for being here. I want to get to that experience in a minute.

Um, but you were one of the many people who were pushing for these files to be released. I remember the president talking about doing so on the campaign trail and the like. Why did you want these to be released?

maybe even uh see if there's some predictive trends in the data so that we can find when and where the next incident might happen.

And so we reported it. We reported it through our intelligence channel and our chain of command. But part of the value of having these documents released today and talking about it in a serious and grounded way is to encourage other people who see strange things. to say something, to report them, and then to have a system uh of uh

office and analysts there to receive the information, the technology and tools to analyze it. And again, maybe we can predict when and where something will happen and make sense of whether this is a national security threat, uh a safety uh concern, or just something curious for science.

And moving to the economy now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a better than expected jobs report for April. The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs last month, which is much higher than the 65,000 jobs that were predicted.

The employment unemployment rate stayed at steady at four point three percent. CBS News Money Watch correspondent and co-host of CBS Saturday morning, Kelly O'Grady joins me now. Kelly, great to see you. Thanks for being here. Um We're talking a lot about the state of the economy with everything going on Iran, but with these jobs numbers, what does that tell us about how the economy is doing right now?

Companies are still hiring and hiring by the way across a number of industries. It wasn't just healthcare that was the driver. It was retail, leisure and hospitality, transportation and warehousing. The thing though that did concern me is that wages did not rise as much as I was hoping. In fact, uh especially as prices are rising with rising gas prices, we only saw wages increase.

We like that to be higher than how much prices are rising so that you get more room in your wallet. And then the labor participation rate dropped the lowest level since September 2020. Mainly because of immigration policies, as well as people just saying, Hey, I'm not finding a job that fits my skill set. I'm just gonna tap out for a little while. But at the highest level, I would say this is a resilient, um, good.

And President Trump insists the ceasefire with Iran is still in effect, despite both sides admitting that the admitting to strikes in the Strait of Hormuz. The US said Friday it fired on two Iranian f flagged oil tankers that were trying to get past the US blockade. Iran called the US action a breach of the ceasefire. And this all comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio says: the US is expecting to hear a response from Iran sometime today.

on its latest peace deal proposal. So we have CBS News contributor Roger Karstens joining us now. He's a retired lieutenant colonel with the Army Special Forces. Great to see you. Thank you so much for being here. So much to unpack today on this Friday. We've been talking all week about what is going on in the Strait of Hormuz. Is this a ceasefire there if we're still not uh able to get the ships through?

uh blocked more than 70 ships that are preparing to go in, but they're they're staying outside. They've uh prevented 57 ships from docking in the last few days. And I think over the last 72 hours, not one ship's really uh crossed the line into the uh into the space there. So I think overall the blockade's working, the ceasefire is nominally working, and I think the most important thing that's happening today is waiting to see if the Iranians respond to the U.S. proposal.

But I would offer that the United States is in a very strong position right now. It may not look like that, but if you want to put the midterms to to the side, President Trump is has two and a half years right now to exert power if he were were to take the war that far.

Uh we have total naval and uh air domination out there. We have infantry in the in the way of marines that are en route or there. So we're in a very strong place in terms of what we were able to marshal in terms of combat power with the our Israeli partners. So uh I would say

If I were to give any advice to the negotiators, I'd be like, be tough, make sure that you get what you want. I would add prisoners to the list of demands and then I would uh go in and see what you can get. I mean, President Trump's right to try to negotiate. But I wouldn't be so uh easy on the Iranians.

Uh it's clear in terms of the Iranian response to any offer that we've had that they're having some uh problems, I guess, marshalling command and control. Uh in another way, we're we're s again still in a good position because they're having times talking or having a hard time talking within internally within the government, but

You know, I think what you're going to find is that the IRGC is going to keep reigning supreme, either to the front or most likely behind the scenes, to provide pr uh pressure on their political uh leadership when it comes closer to making that deal. So who are we talking to? We'll talk to whoever shows up. Who do I think's maybe uh exerting the most power behind the scenes? The IRGC.

I'll speak with a former congresswoman who helped make those payouts illegal. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again allies are looking to unseat Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy in next week's primary. The state of that race. with our political panel.

Pushing for his clemency. California Congressman David Minn joins us now. He is one of the three Democratic lawmakers who launched the Congressman, it's great to see you. Thanks for being here. Let's talk about these letters that you sent. What are some of the details? Good to see you. What are some of the details here that you are asking for in these letters?

uh to basically try to do a pay-to-play type scheme. And and my understanding is that uh there have been dozens and perhaps hundreds of pardons. that have been issued outside of the auspices of the Department of Justice's uh pardoned attorney's office. And so normally under previous administrations uh and under Trump 1.0, they would run pardons

uh through the pardon office of the DOJ, which would uh judge whether this was appropriate, whether uh the circumstances were potentially uh right for a pardon. Uh these apparently have been bypassing that. Uh it looks a lot like people close to Donald Trump are getting rich off of this. And we've heard reports of uh people who've donated millions of dollars to Donald Trump's campaigns or his different business ventures or to his children's business ventures.

Uh what we want is just answers. We want to confirm if there's any truth to this or not. Uh obviously this looks very illegal. I think it it uh really raises questions about the presidential pardon authority.

And so the idea that pardons are being sold to the highest bidder, uh, that people who have defrauded seniors, people out of uh tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, which has been the case in a lot of these folks' situations. Uh it's just outrageous to me. Uh but we do think that these folks will end up turning over information to

uh because they have already received a pardon. They're no longer serving time. And I think if they don't respond to us by May 22nd, they'll be putting a big target on their back. And so, you know, if you think Donald Trump's gonna be president forever, maybe you should not respond to us.

On the other hand, if you think there's a good chance that maybe say House Democrats take back control of Congress next year, uh I think it's in your interest to respond to us. So we're hoping to get answers here that we know we're not going to get out of the White House.

Uh so very much we we can uh push forward. Uh and folks who choose not to respond to us, I think are again putting a target on their back. Uh obstruction of justice is obviously something uh that could be seen out of this. So we think there's a lot of reasons why these folks

uh would want to cooperate with us and and provide us with information. We're not seeking, you know, anything damning on their part. We're just looking for understand an understanding uh of whether these media reports are accurate or not.

And there is no presidential authority, not even his authority as commander in chief. That is seen as absolute. There are checks and balances on all of them. Uh, and so we do think that there can be limitations, including required disclosure, uh, you know, guardrails around this. Um, there's certainly open questions around whether the president can issue preemptive pardons.

uh for people who've not been convicted of any crime but might be indicted or might just have committed a crime but uh have have not been indicted or uh convicted. So we think there's definitely limitations. That that is clear from the the text of the constitution. uh the the vast body of case law out there involving presidential authorities. But uh we'll get there when we get there, it'll probably be a couple years before this comes up.

And coming up, hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars were used to settle sexual harassment claims made against members of Congress. Former Congresswoman Jackie Speer joins me next with her reaction. You're watching the takeout.

Totaled three hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars since two thousand and four. So let's bring in former Democratic congresswoman from North Carol from California, Jackie Speer. She wrote the law that required members of Congress to pay for the settlements themselves and not use taxpayer funds. Congresswoman, great to see you. Thanks for being here. I think most Americans look at this and say, what?

This was happening at all. Um, so if not for this law, we wouldn't have perhaps even known. Um since then, you revealed that more than 17 million dollars has been paid out in various Amounts and various settlements. Um, can you contextualize that number for us?

Um, we didn't make them jump through hoops like mediation, mandatory mediation or uh cooling off periods or requiring them to sign NDAs. What is most troubling is that since 2018. Whatever cases have been dealt with haven't really been forthcoming in terms of transparency. And the fact that in Eric Swalwell's case, none of those victims came to the workers' right.

commission um is troubling. So I think Congress has got to do a deep dive into why these victims wouldn't come forward. Are they afraid of retaliation? Are they afraid of being ostracized? And there's a number of steps I think they need to take to stop this sexual predator paradise in Congress.

No question asked. No questions answered, maybe. But the truth is that's the only thing that's going to change their behavior. If they think they're going to lose their job, they're going to think twice about their zipper.

to discuss the impact this is all having on Capitol Hill. You're watching the Takeout.

So to discuss this, let's bring in our political panel, senior political reporter for Axios, Alex Eisenstadt, a national politics reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Ken Thomas join us now. Um great to see you both. Happy Friday. We made it to the end of the week. Um Alex, you had some reporting on this. RFK Jr.'s revenge. This is so fascinating to me because if it weren't for Cassidy, RFK Jr. would not be the Health and Human Services Secretary. What gives?

The Maha movement, including RFK and his political apparatus, they're striking back now against Cassidy with Cassidy's primary just about a week away. It's gonna be interesting to see how this plays out because Cassie represents everything that the Maha movement hates, which is he they see him as representative of the medical establishment. And Maha wants to overturn that.

uh part in her in her uh in in part of her career. So I think you know, he's gonna get behind let low. I think the question is can Cassidy somehow make it to a runoff in in Louisiana, you a unique uh way of doing their primaries.

And we've also seen the president really try to move around Congress using executive action to a degree that we haven't seen since Jimmy Carter's presidency. And then at the same time, they're just not really passing a lot of legislation.

They've they've there have been 90 laws that have been enacted uh this this Congress. That would be the lowest since the Civil War. So this is just a Congress that I think we've seen a lot of tension too of late, a lot of frustration. I'm sure you picked that up. Uh you know, Senate Republicans not happy with House Republicans, uh, you know, Republicans really sick and tired of Democrats. It's just it i there it almost seems like it's at a breaking point.

races. He loves endorsing in races. It's just what he does. And he also does understand that the stakes are pretty high, right? If if Republicans lose the house, it's all but certain that Democrats are immediately Gonna start impeachment proceedings, um, which could create which is gonna create big headaches for him, big headaches for people around him. And it could really hamper his ability to get anything done in the final two years. So he definitely understands the stakes. He understands.

Um, what's at what's at stake here? The question is, is how much is he gonna spend out of his political bank account? How much is he gonna travel? And if he does travel, where is he gonna travel to?

And up next our daily tribute to CBS Radio. Today's clip, a live reading of the classic HG Well. Very relevant right now. You're watching the take.

swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence, people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs. Serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small, spinning fragment of solar driftwood, which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of time and space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf. Minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle. Intellects. Vast, cool, and unsympathetic.

regarded this earth with envious eyes. and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the 39th year of the 20th century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30th. The Crosley Service estimated that 32 million people. We're listening in on radios.