Secretary Scott Bessent, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Jim Himes, Dr. Scott Gottlieb

21:14Margaret Brennan:And 95 % of the Somalis in your state are U.S. citizens. Yes. Just for clarity there. But the president has restricted all immigration processing, including asylum claims from Somalis already on U.S. soil, along with 18 other countries. ICE reports it has rounded up about 19 people. And they put out press releases with the images of about five of them that they say are the worst of the worst. Is that the entirety of the crackdown to date? Yeah, so far we know of the people that they've picked up in Minnesota. About five of them are Somalis. And from what I have read and from the people that I've spoken to, all of them had already had orders of removal.

21:58So these are not people who are undocumented, but people who have committed crimes and who should have already been sent out of the country.

22:08Margaret Brennan:I want to ask you something else that the architect of the president's immigration policy, Stephen Miller, said. On Thanksgiving Day, he posted, No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions and terrors of their broken homelands. What do you make of this argument of failure to assimilate and sort of ruining America? How do you understand this? I mean, when I think about Stephen Miller and his white supremacist rhetoric, It reminds me, yes, it reminds me of the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany. And, you know, as we know, there have been many immigrants who have tried to come to the United States, who have turned back, you know, one of them being Jewish immigrants.

22:58We know the way that people were described who were coming from Ireland, Irish immigrants. We know the way in which people were described back then when they were Italian immigrants. And to me, you know, we're, yes, of course, ethnically Somali. We are in this country as Americans. We are citizens. We are productive part of this nation. And we will continue to be.

23:26Margaret Brennan:Congresswoman Omar, thank you for your time today. And we'll be right back with a lot more Face the Nation. Stay with us. We'll be right back with the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut and former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

23:47Margaret Brennan:Welcome back to Face the Nation. We turn now to the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Jim Himes. He joins us this morning from Connecticut. Welcome back to Face the Nation. Thanks for having me, Margaret. You are one of the few lawmakers shown the classified version of this September 2nd video of the U.S. strikes in alleged drug boat near Venezuela. Four strikes in total, we've learned. You met with Admiral Bradley, who commands special operations as well. The President of the United States says he's open to this video being made public. Do you think it is essential that it become public, and are you confident it will be?

24:26I think it's really important that this video be made public. It's not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself. I know how the public is going to react because I felt my own reaction. You know, I've spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken often in the terrorism context. And this video was profoundly shaken. And I think it's important for Americans to see it because, look, there's a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners.

25:10but I think it's really important that people see what it looks like when the full force the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we're doing well why

25:25Margaret Brennan:was it why did it shake you so much what specifically was bothering you well you know and this is sort of the distinction and there's a lot to unpack here about whether this is an authorized military action, which it is not, and right on down to whether these were legitimate targets, and they were not. But let me go back to some of the reviews I've done of other lethal action. Oftentimes, when the Department of Defense takes a strike against a terrorist in Yemen or Pakistan or wherever, you watch a video of guys fully armed with AK-47s and sidearms and bombs and you name it, and they're on their way to do something terrible.

26:03And in this instance, you may have had bad guys. I have no doubt that these guys were involved in the running of drugs. Now, whether they were running it to the United States or Europe is yet another question. But in that instance, these guys were about to die. Had the United States just walked away, their little piece of wood would have gone under the waves. And as many times as Tom Cotton may say that it doesn't matter what they were doing, it matters essentially what they were doing because under the law and if you've spent 15 minutes in law school you know this under the law if someone has been struck and is in continues to engage in hostilities points a gun at you has a gun they may be a legitimate target but if they are outside of combat they are not and attacking them is a violation of the laws of war and these guys and this is why the american people need to see this video So these guys were barely alive, much less engaging in hostilities.

26:58Margaret Brennan:Well, the DOD Law of War manual seems to hinge a lot of that on whether the person is wholly disabled from fighting. And that is where the Secretary of Defense has used language saying they're about to return to the fight. I'm going to play for you what Secretary Hanks has said at the Reagan Forum Saturday. He described what was happening with these four strikes on the alleged drug running boat. A couple hours later, I was told, hey, there had to be a reattack because there were a couple of folks that could still be in the fight. Access to radios. There was a link up point of another potential boat.

27:35Drugs were still there. They were actively interacting with them. Had to take that read. I said, Roger, sounds good.

27:41Margaret Brennan:Does what Hegseth said match what Admiral Bradley told you? Well, there was a lot of lack of clarity over exactly what Pete Hegseth's role here was. But Pete Hegseth has no credibility on this matter, right? Remember, a week after this strike, there was a briefing for Congress. Why was a follow-up strike taken? The answer then, in the first week of September, was a follow-up strike was taken because we needed to clear the wreckage so that there wasn't a danger to navigation. That was explanation number one. Explanation number two, right before we watched the video, was that they might have had a radio, and they might have been radioing a boat, and they might have been trying to recover the cocaine, and then when you actually watch the video, you realize they don't have a radio.

28:23They're barely hanging on and not slipping beneath the waves. Then we get this thing of how they're trying to right the boat. This was about a 40-foot boat that had just been hit with a massive piece of munitions. The conflagration probably destroyed everything in that boat, But, oh, maybe they might have swum under, gotten a radio, probably waterlogged, and radioed a boat that we're not even sure was there. So what we've had is a series of shifting explanations. Oh, and including the fog of war, right? You know that Hegseth said, well, they took the second strike because of the fog of war. There was no fog.

28:56The military watched this boat very carefully, or I shouldn't even say boat. They watched the wreckage of the boat very carefully for a long period of time before they took the second strike. So look, what Pete Hegseth says about this strike has zero credibility at this point.

29:11Margaret Brennan:Do you have confidence in Admiral Bradley? You know, Admiral Bradley, this was my first meeting with him. Anyone who has ever worked with Admiral Bradley will tell you that he has a storied career and that he is a man of deep, deep integrity. And frankly, I have no reason to doubt that. But what it raises is what happens when an apparently good man like Admiral Bradley is placed in a context where he knows that if he countermands an order that he is perhaps uncomfortable with, it is very likely that he will be fired. When he works for a guy, Pete Hegseth, who wrote a book about how we shouldn't observe the laws of war, about how we need to be lethal and severed.

29:48It's interesting to think about how a good man in that context maybe does something that if he weren't in that context, he might not do.

29:56Margaret Brennan:Well, Senator Tom Cotton, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there were dozens of JAG lawyers observing all of this. On NBC this morning, he said all 11 people on the suspected drug smuggling boat were valid targets because the U.S. had high confidence they were part of a foreign terrorist organization. Do you know, were these high-level cartel members? No, of course not. Of course not. Who were they? If the U.S. had high confidence. Escobar, back. Well, first of all, let's be super clear about this. I don't think we knew the identities of any of the people in the boat. We might have known one or two, I don't know.

30:33But we certainly didn't know the identities of all 11. So nobody can characterize who all these people in any of these boats are. Now, I have enough confidence in the intelligence community to know that these are probably not guys out fishing or guys out being tourists and stuff. They are almost certainly running drugs. But this really matters for the reason that you said. If you're going to occupy an immense amount of the American naval combat capability, you'd like to believe that you're going after the leaders, the cartel leaders, the kingpins, as they say. What we're doing here is we're taking out the equivalent of the corner drug dealer in the Bronx, right?

31:10Which, by the way, we should arrest the corner drug dealer in the Bronx. But the main reason we do that is to go after the kingpins, who I promise you are sitting in very comfortable villas right now in Colombia and Venezuela and everywhere and watching as much of the United States Navy is dedicated to taking out their lowest level employees.

31:27Margaret Brennan:So I hear you saying they were not on an internal military target list for high value individuals. That's what I hear what you're saying. Well, this is an interesting question. I'm not at all convinced that there is a list of individuals. Now, this is what we do in the terrorism world, right? We designate high-value targets. We designate individuals. I have no reason to believe, and in fact, I doubt that there are any individuals on the list anywhere. What we are doing, and I'm not going to get terribly specific about it for obvious reasons, but what we are doing is we're picking up that this boat may be carrying drugs, and to the administration, it doesn't matter who's in that boat.

32:00And look, they're saying this because if this boat is actually carrying drugs, then we can strike it. So, no, I don't think there is a list of individuals. I don't think we have any idea who precisely the individuals in these boats are.

32:13Margaret Brennan:So as I understand it, these are signature strikes. This is an intelligence assessment based on signals intelligence saying this is who we believe these individuals to be. You know, some of these defenders of the Trump policy, like conservative columnists, have argued this is a precedent that was set by the Obama administration, which used signature strikes to kill alleged al-Qaeda operatives, including a U.S. citizen at one point in Yemen. Do they have a point here that the drone policy has long allowed the killing of suspected criminals even without due process? Well, there's a couple of really important distinctions.

32:50and you'll remember that the Obama administration, there was a lot of debate over whether signature strikes were okay or not. The most important distinction is that Congress authorized the war on terror. There is an authorization for the use of military force. The original sin of this whole thing, whether you think we should be wasting these guys or not, the original sin is that there is no congressional authorization. And then in the Obama administration, they did have a list of individuals, right? Often high value targets or HVTs as we've referred to them. And then the question was, if you have an HVT, a high value target in a Jeep in northern Pakistan, and there's a guy next to that HVT, how do you feel about taking that strike?

33:31You want to take down the high value guy, but what about the young guy next to him? Well, the young guy has an AK-47, and the young guy was actually arranging for the transfer of explosives. You have that conversation, and then you decide whether you're going to take the strike. Now what we're doing, and again, I don't think that there's a list of individuals anywhere. They're just saying that boat is carrying drugs. And even though military is not authorized by the Congress of the United States, we're taking out the boat and we don't give a damn about who's on it.

33:58Margaret Brennan:Well, and when you say I don't think, you are a member of the Gang of Eight. So presumably that information should be shared with you if it does exist. I want to ask you before I let you go, SignalGate. People may remember a few months ago, a Trump official added a journalist to an online group on Signal and shared advanced information of an upcoming bombing operation in Yemen. The Pentagon inspector general said Hegseth's actions risked operational security and violated federal laws on record keeping. Hegseth said he'd do the same thing all over again. Are your Republican colleagues saying in private that they have problems with what happened?

34:34Absolutely. They're saying it in private. In public, of course, they're saying that it was perfect exoneration. Right. That this report and you read the key line that this report that said that the secretary of defense put his troops in the mission at risk, that that's total exoneration. Now, I didn't hear the comment about I would do this again, but if Pete Hegseth said he would do that again, and look, again, you don't need to be a military expert to understand that sharing operational details before an operation is a really, really, really bad idea. If Pete Hegseth said that he would do that again, he's just reinforcing what we all know, which is that he has absolutely no business in that job.

35:10One of the most sensitive and difficult jobs to do in the United States government is being done by somebody who put his own people and the mission at risk.

35:18Margaret Brennan:He said he lives life without regret at the Reagan Forum. That was the phrase to be more exact. But Congressman Himes, always good to have you on the program. I'll have to leave it there for today. We'll be right back. For a look at some recent changes to U.S. public health policy, we're joined now by former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. He also serves on the boards of Pfizer and UnitedHealthcare. Welcome back. Thank you. You know, there was some pretty big news on Friday and the American Academy of Pediatrics said they are deeply alarmed that the CDC's vaccine advisory panel, ACIP, voted in this 8-3 decision to change this 30 year long policy regarding hepatitis B in newborns.

36:04Margaret Brennan:They are now recommending delaying the dose until a child is two months old instead of within 24 hours of birth. What does this decision mean for families of newborns? Yeah, well, look, I think we first need to understand why we give that birth dose of the vaccine, because the idea of giving a vaccine to a newborn to a lot of parents sounds discomforting, that the first thing a child is going to face when they're born is going to be a vaccine within the first 24 hours. For a child over the age of five, if they develop hepatitis B infection, if they're exposed to it, they're going to have a 95 percent chance of clearing that infection.

36:40And they'll go on to develop lifelong immunity. For children between the ages of one and five, they only have about a 25 to 50 percent chance of clearing the infection. So about 25 to 50 percent of kids will develop chronic infection. And about a quarter of them will go on to die from hepatitis B if they're between the ages of one and five. So children are more vulnerable to this virus and can't clear the infection. But when you're talking about a newborn, an infant, 90 % of newborns who become infected, and they'll become infected during delivery, will go on to develop chronic infection. They won't be able to clear the hepatitis B.

37:13And about 25 % of them will die from sequelae of that infection, either from liver disease, cirrhosis, or from liver cancer. So we have this unique opportunity by giving this birth dose and the subsequent inoculations to virtually eliminate the chance that a newborn can contract hepatitis B and go on to develop chronic infection. It's almost 99 % effective at preventing that chronic infection. And the refrain is, and one final point, the refrain is, oh, sorry, please.

37:39Margaret Brennan:No, no, and this decision now is to wait two months before giving that dose. The president of the United States came out and said this was very good because hep B is only transmitted sexually or through dirty needles. Yeah, look, that's the problem. That's simply not true. The fact is there's a refrain that if you just test the moms while they're pregnant, you can detect whether they have hepatitis B. And if they have hepatitis B, you continue to give that birth dose. But the reality is many moms don't get tested, even though they intend to. Many times those test results aren't checked. And the tests themselves have a false negative rate, meaning they're going to say you don't have hepatitis B when in fact you do of about 2%.

38:22That may not sound like a lot, but that 2 % is going to translate into at least 1 ,000 babies being born and getting infected with hepatitis B. There was one modeling estimate that estimated in the first year of this new guidance, there's going to be 1 ,400 children, infants contracting hepatitis B. And again, 25 % of them will die from that infection.

38:42Margaret Brennan:Well, we look at this because there is this broader scrutiny of vaccines right now by the Trump administration. And in this board decision, which the public could listen into, it was publicly broadcast that the board was handpicked by RFK Jr., who is a skeptic here of vaccines. From those who voted against the decision to delay, one of them, who you heard at the top of the show, said the CDC is doing harm. Another said no rational science has been presented and the committee must accept responsibility when harm is caused. Those are pretty extraordinary statements. If the group making a decision that has such high consequences for the most vulnerable Americans isn't basing it on science, no rational science, what does that indicate about what comes next?

39:35Well, look, this is the ACIP by and large, except for a handful of members are anti-vax activists who were put there to carry out a specific agenda. And look, the secretary, to his credit, has been very honest about what his intentions are here. He's the most prominent anti-vaxxer in the country prior to coming into this position. And he stated that his goal is to eliminate childhood immunization or many of these childhood immunizations. And I think they're going to take a methodical approach and slowly chip away at this. This is a big unforced error insofar as ACIP was a esteemed body that a lot of states tie their own decision-making to.

40:09And what we're seeing right now is, as a group, it's being degraded. And I don't think it will ever be restored. I don't think you can just flip the switch and restore this, where people are going to suddenly respect its decisions again. There's about 600 state laws that were tied to decisions ACIP made. About 17 states have already passed new legislation saying they will no longer respect the decisions of ACIP. But the insurers came out and said they're going to tie their own coverage decisions to the professional bodies like the American Academy of Pediatrics and not ACIP. So I think in time, ACIP is going to be fully degraded as a decision making body.

40:41And it's going to be more symbolic. There'll be certain states that that adhere to it. They'll be more symbolic.

40:47Margaret Brennan:So you this week, we saw a big sell off in biotech stocks following these reports of the FDA, which you used to run at the first part of the Trump administration, is now going to require one study to clinch approval of vaccines. You were one of the former commissioners who put out this really extraordinary editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguing that the FDA and top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, are changing policies in a way that's going to slow down new and better vaccines. What specifically is the problem you see? Because this isn't just Hep B. This is the vaccines of the future, you're saying, just won't be created.

41:28Right. So Vinay Prasad, who is the head of the Biologic Center, also oversees the vaccine division. He also has been appointed the head of biostatistics, the chief medical officer of the agency and chief scientific officer. So he occupies a lot of positions, put out a memo saying that they're going to do away with or move away from what they call immunobridging studies. These are studies that allow you for well-validated vaccines like the flu vaccine. to be able to demonstrate each year that the vaccine, the new vaccine that's formulated against the circulating strain, can elicit antibodies that are effective against that particular strain.

42:01And that could be the basis of approval rather than requiring new outcome studies every year to prove that the vaccine actually reduces the incidence of influenza. For established vaccines where we know that antibody production is a good correlate for immunity, this has been a longstanding practice. We do it for flu vaccine. We do it in COVID, certainly. we do it for things like pneumococcal vaccine, the vaccine for pneumococcal disease, where we look at serotypes, circulating bacterial serotypes. This allows us to update vaccines as these viral and bacterial strains change and as the composition of the strains change in time to provide protection for the fall respiratory season.

42:37If they move away from this, which is what he said they plan to do, we're just not going to be able to update vaccines each season, as we've done historically, to accommodate whatever the circulating strain is.

42:47Margaret Brennan:And 12 former FDA commissioners came out saying they're deeply concerned about what is happening. That memo that made clear the changes that are happening within the FDA from Dr. Prasad was obtained by CBS, and it claimed that career FDA staff are making changes in part because they found at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving the COVID vaccine, referred to it as a profound revelation and said and asked, did it kill more healthy kids than it saved? The administration to date has not backed up information to back up these claims. But but what questions do you have for the FDA commissioner?

43:28Margaret Brennan:Because they're arguing they're doing this to help people. Yeah, look, well, first of all, one thing doesn't flow from the next. So the idea if in fact they found cases where the COVID vaccine was linked to tragic deaths, it doesn't then follow that you make these policy changes. In fact, the policy changes wouldn't address what their concerns are related to the COVID vaccine itself. These are, every case needs to be carefully adjudicated. It's tragic to see any suspected case that could be linked to a vaccine. And these were looked at previously by the FDA. And I don't believe that the new FDA had access to the case level data.

44:05Analysis of cases, individual cases that get filed with the agency where there is a death in proximity to vaccination, and some of these are filed by the manufacturers themselves, are very subjective and require the goodwill of the people involved in that. And so I think that they should make that analysis public so it could be scrutinized and people can get comforted. They've already backed away from the 10. There's reporting from endpoints that now they're saying it's eight or nine. So they're already backing away from it.

44:29Margaret Brennan:Okay. And HHS said they will eventually make that data public. We'll look for it when it comes out. Dr. Gottlieb, thank you for your analysis today. We'll be back in a moment. Our Leslie Stahl spoke with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene about her relationship with President Trump for 60 Minutes. I'm going to ask you about this almost solid support he has among Republicans in Congress. Is there in that support fear? Does the support come about because they're afraid that they'll get death threats? I think they're terrified to step out of line and get a nasty truth social post on them. Yes. And they're watching what happened to you.

45:09Yes. Behind the scenes, do they talk differently? Yes. How? Oh, it would shock people. Well, let's shock people. Okay. I watch many of my colleagues go from making fun of him, making fun of how he talks, making fun of me constantly for supporting him, to when he won the primary in 2024, they all started, excuse my language, Leslie, kissing his ass and decided to put on a MAGA hat for the first time.

45:44Margaret Brennan:You can see more of Leslie's interview tonight on 60 Minutes at 7 p.m. Eastern. That's it for us today. Thank you all for watching. Until next week. For Face the Nation, I'm Margaret Brennan. Today's guests were Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett, Minnesota Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Connecticut Democratic Congressman Jim Himes, and former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb. The senior executive producer of Face the Nation is Mary Hager, and the executive producer is Anne Hsu. This broadcast was directed by Shelley Schwartz. Face the Nation originates from CBS News in Washington. For more, we're online at facethenation.com and on YouTube.

46:21Margaret Brennan:We're also rebroadcast on our CBS News 24-7 streaming network at 12.30 on Sundays, and we're available through our apps, CBS News and Paramount+.