seems a little odd that the black kid are there with a white santa. it s all good. to each his own. you was scared of santa. he s got the cutest things. you can t really see my phone. there s a black santa and white santa stocking that we found. ryan, you re the best. thank you. cnn this morning continues right now. so glad that you could join us this morning on the eve before the eve of christmas. good morning, everyone. poppy and kaitlan are off and i m here with the lovely and smart and talented sara seidner. i was wondering where you were going with that but you re good. we re going to catch you up on the five big stories this morning. more than half the population is under winter storm and wind chill alerts as a major storm moves across the country. it s not like a snow day when you were a kid. this is serious stuff. please take this storm extremely seriously. more than 820,000 power customers are in the dark, thousands of flights have been cancel
yet to be identified as police work to determine a motive after a gunman killed at least ten people at a dance hall saturday night in monterey park, california. the shooter a 72-year-old man a fixture at that dance hall. police say armed with a semiautomatic weapon and extended magazines and died sunday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. it could have been so much worse. shortly after the attack, he went to a second location where a man there disarmed him, and this morning he described their frightening confrontation. i needed to get the weapon away from him. needed to take this weapon, disarm him or else everybody would have died. when i got the courage i lunged at him with both my hands, grabbed the weapon and we had a struggle. we struggled into the lobby, trying to get this gun away from each other. he was hitting me across the face, smashing the back of my head. i i was trying to use my elbows to separate the gun away from him, create some distance. finally at one
archives. despite the vast differences between president biden s case and donald trump s, attorney merrick garland made this announcement earlier this week. i m here today to be announced the appointment of roberts her as a special counsel, pursuing department of justice regulations governing such matters. this appointment underscores the departments commitment to both independents and accountability, in particularly sensitive manners. and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts in the law. joining me now is why our correspondent allie raffa. ali, will come in. thank you for starting us off this morning. what are you hearing from the white house this morning? cory, yeah. good morning. president biden is waking up in his bloomington home, where we now know that two of those three discoveries of classified materials were found just in the last month and this is, those discoveries and the timing of the white house acknowledgment of them now under intense
hello, everyone. i m bianna in new york. pressure mounts for garland to appoint a special counsel to oversee an investigation into president biden s handling of classified government records. we are following this from every angle, so let s begin with cnn s evan perez. what are you learning about what we can expect to hear from the attorney general in just a few moments? reporter: well, bianna, we obviously know that the justice department attorney general garland are in a difficult position given the fact that we are learning still new details about these documents that the president s team says that they found now at multiple locations. the justice department is facing the decision right now whether to appoint a special counsel, whether to open a fuller investigation. we know that, at least at this point, there was an initial review that was done by the u.s. attorney in chicago. that part of the investigation is completed, and so now the decision from garland that we expe
make clear what laws the fbi thinks he may have violated and he could produce that receipt for what they took from his home. so why hasn t he? that remains a major question. and in the meantime, inside the justice department, there is some frustration that so far the department said nothing about the search, while trump and his allies portrayed it as a siege, even suggesting without any proof that fbi agents may have planted evidence. joining us now is former trump white house acting chief of staff mick mulvaney. mick, it is great to have you on this momentous morning. i want to first start with your reaction to this search, because you did mention that there are two ways to see this unprecedented move. tell us about those. sure. i can think either it is a legitimate investigation into classified documents, or it is a political hit job. i think it is important that people understand why they re seeing the reaction they re seeing from the right. keep in mind, if you re repub