including the weather right now. it is here. decision day in iowa. good afternoon. i am erin burnett in washington. i am in new york. we want to welcome you to live coverage of the iowa caucuses. we are counting down to the official start of the first contest in the republican presidential race. we want to confuse people. washington, you are in new york. everybody, get ready. the battle for iowa taking place against those record cold temperatures we have been talking about. some places in iowa, the real feel temperature is 35 below zero, which has not stopped the candidates in a contest all about turnout trying to get every single person out they can. these final hours, they have been making one case for the candidacies. we know that this is how we are going to get our country on track. remember, today is the day we make history. i am running on your issues and family issues to turn this country around. here is what is interesting. you did not see trump, right? he
live in des moines. ron desantis is up first, followed by nikki haley. stay with us. ac 360 begins now. tonight on 360, a live report from perry, iowa, scene of the latest school mass shooting. what authorities are saying about how it unfolded, which included their discovery of a makeshift bomb at the scene. that and what a student says tonight about what she went through. also tonight, a new batch of unsealed documents in the jeffrey epstein sex trafficking scandal. what s in them and who. and later, house democrats say they have the former president s number, and knits the millions. what s in the report of how much foreign government money went into trump s pockets during the trump presidency. good evening. thanks for joining us. we begin tonight in iowa, but not for the reason you would expect, not for presidential politics. take a look. these are pictures tonight from perry, iowa, northwest of des moines. a vigil, one of two after a day that began with what is a
i i m wolf blilitzer in the situation room. erin burnett outfront starts right now. outfront next, trump appeals to the supreme court. the former president asking the nation s highest court to overturn colorado s ruling banning him from the ballot. his legal team says what happened on january 1 was not an inrex. also tonight on the drink of a global war after explosions killmore than 100 people in iran. the president there pointing the fing they are at the united states. is the war in the middle east about to get much bigger? and we are live tonight in iowa as nikki haley and ron desantis face some tough questions about days to go before the caucuses here. who has more momentum? let s go outfront. good evening. i m erin burnett. we re live from des moines, iowa, where cnn will host back-to-back town halls tomorrow night days away from the republican caucuses. we ll have much more on that in a moment, but we have breaking news tonight at this hour. former presi
To deal with russia. We want to talk about all of this with abby phillip and audie cornish, who are here now. Abby, whats your take away . I think what youre raising about abortion really speaks to something that i could not ignore, which was that this was a republican audience in the state of iowa about the republican caucuses. But she was speaking to a national audience. She was really trying to present herself, i think very differently from many of her other colleagues in this race. But she was also trying to leave herself a lot of room on some issues like abortion. I thought it was so striking to me, just the tonal difference here. This was almost like a republican candidate circa the george w. Bush era, incredibly hawkish on Foreign Policy, serious and very substantive on a number of other issues, whether its on entitlements or government spending, even things like guns and the border and china. But i was keeping track. It took her 70 minutes to say the word woke after she was ask
yo your body, but this is the latest from here. i ll send it back to you, jake. bill, thank you so much. now to west new york, new jersey, that s the name of the city, west new york. maria, tell us what the air is like where you are. reporter: yeah, it has been very, very bad throughout the day. things have improved in the last hour, but like the governor of new jersey said in your show earlier, it gets really bad depending on where you are. i want to show you what it looks like. we are really west of new york. that is midtown manhattan across the hudson river right now. you can kind of make out the buildings at this point. earlier today, you couldn t see anything. it was so dense and thick with smoke that it was completely white. it also got very dark hours earlier, to the point where the street lights, as bill weir said, turned on here. the authorities in new jersey are recommending that people stay indoors, that they limit their outdoor active tis. and here in this p