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CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

FBI Requests Interview With Congressman Gary Condit

Aired July 25, 2001 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, after three conversations with Washington police, Congressman Gary Condit prepares to talk to the FBI about Chandra Levy. But is that enough for her parents? Their lawyer, Billy Martin, speaks out.

What does the FBI hope to learn from Condit? Where does the investigation go from here? I'll speak live with former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, and attorney Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor.

And Condit comes under fire from fellow congressmen. Is the wall of silence crumbling on Capitol Hill?

Also, a magic bullet against cancer? Taking aim with a new drug.

Good evening. I'm Wolf Blitzer, reporting tonight from Capitol Hill.

The search for missing Washington intern Chandra Levy is at a critical moment. D.C. police, the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office want Congressman Gary Condit to answer questions for a fourth time. They're hoping he will help specialists at the FBI create a fresh profile of the 24-year-old, especially her mindset in the days before she disappeared.

Today, her parents and their family attorney spoke out passionately, and that's our top story.

Chandra Levy's parents say their hearts are broken as they wait for word on their daughter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SUSAN LEVY, CHANDRA LEVY'S MOTHER: This has gone on for 11 weeks, but we feel that there are people out there who might know something, maybe siting on information that could be helpful, and that they would have the character and the courage enough to come forward and help us bring our daughter back safely to us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: CNN national correspondent Bob Franken has been tracking this story for all of those weeks. He's standing by live in our Washington bureau. Bob, first of all, what's the status of this fourth meeting with Congressman Condit?

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, it's still a work in progress. There's still discussions going on to decide exactly what the parameters of this discussion are. We know that Congressman Condit has agreed to talk to the FBI. Some question whether D.C. police investigators will sit in. Some question about whether he will go beyond producing the psychological profile of Chandra Levy. That is very important now to investigators, trying to see what her state of mind is when she disappeared. Some possibility that some of the questions that D.C. police wanted to ask would be asked by FBI investigators.

It's expected that all of this is going to occur by the end of the week. That's a couple of days away, still plenty of time to refine the interview process.

BLITZER: The Reverend Otis -- Otis Thomas, he had earlier said that his daughter also had had an affair with -- with Congressman Condit, but there's some confusion now in the aftermath of all of this. What is the latest on that front?

FRANKEN: Well, as you know, Reverend Thomas, subsequent to making that claim, was described by law enforcement sources as having lied to FBI investigators about that. You see him here in the Modesto, California area after, according to law enforcement sources, he was scheduled to meet once against with the FBI. He had no comment.

Now, Reverend Thomas is a Pentecostal minister, also a gardener who worked for, among others, the family of Chandra Levy out in Modesto, California.

BLITZER: And today, Bob, Billy Martin -- a high-profile, well- known Washington attorney representing the Levy family -- spoke out once again. What is all that about?

FRANKEN: Well, as you know, the Levy family and Billy Martin here in Washington, who represents that family, have, as a tactic to try and keep the story alive, to keep attention on Chandra Levy, who's been missing, have been putting pressure to keep the suspicion, quite frankly, on Congressman Condit. And once again, Billy Martin said to local reporters that in fact Condit still has many questions to answer.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILLY MARTIN, LEVY FAMILY ATTORNEY: Why is he acting so suspiciously? I don't know why he may have, if the reports are true, that he may have tried to deposit this watch just prior to the search being conducted by the FBI occurring. But it's suspicious activity. And his conduct creates this cloud of suspicion, not anything that we accuse him of doing or anything that others may feel that he -- information that he may know. It's his activities that are just suspicious. (END VIDEO CLIP)

FRANKEN: And it's important to point out, Wolf, that although Billy Martin used the term "suspicious" every chance he got, police sources continue to say that Congressman Condit is not a suspect in the disappearance of Chandra Levy.

BLITZER: Bob Franken in Washington, thank you very much once again.

And later in our program, I'll have more on the FBI's meeting with Condit when I speak live with a former FBI profiler and a former federal prosecutor. Meanwhile, Gary Condit's support is eroding here on Capitol Hill following a stinging rebuke by a friend and fellow conservative Democrat. As we reported last night, Texas Congressman Charles Stenholm says Condit has "brought controversy and discredit to his family, his district and the Congress." He has not called on Condit to resign, though some Republicans have done so. Will others follow suit?

I'm joined now by CNN congressional correspondent Jonathan Karl.

What's going on, on the Hill now?

JONATHAN KARL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, clearly this move by Congressman Stenholm is a significant move. Stenholm is a member of that Blue Dog coalition, a close political ally, if not friend, of Congressman Gary Condit. They sit next to each other on that House Agriculture Committee, Stenholm the senior member, Condit the No. 2 member on the Democratic side.

Now, Stenholm did stop short of calling for the resignation of Gary Condit. What he said, if you looked at his whole letter, he said, "The citizens of the 18th district of California will decide how they want to deal with their congressman."

The question of what this does to other members of Congress, Dick Gephardt, the top Democrat in the House, was asked about this. He again stuck up today for Gary Condit, saying Gary is doing, quote, "everything possible" to help the police in this investigation.

So it doesn't look like there's more following suit, but this was clearly a blow in terms of political support for Gary Condit.

BLITZER: Now, John, switching gears, a very different subject. For the first time, some Democrats here on Capitol Hill, in the Senate particularly, are threatening to subpoena the Bush White House. What's going on, on that front?

KARL: Well, this is Joe Lieberman, who is now that the Democrats are in control of the Senate the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee. What he is talking about is he wants to hold hearings on why the Bush administration has decided to repeal or suspend environmental regulations put in place by President Clinton, like the arsenic in drinking water question or building roads in national forests. And he's been trying to get information from the White House. He says he's not getting any cooperation from the White House. He is saying if he doesn't get the documents he wants by Friday, he will subpoena the White House.

Negotiations are ongoing between Liberal and the White House counsel's office, but Lieberman's aides expect he's going to have to do this.

Now, Republicans on that committee and also at the White House are saying, obviously, this is Joe Lieberman grandstanding, using this as a way to get at a potential challenger, you know, somebody he may run against in three years.

BLITZER: OK, Jonathan Karl, we'll be watching that (UNINTELLIGIBLE) as well. Thanks for joining us.

And in other news tonight, OPEC is slowing the flow of oil to keep crude prices from falling. The oil ministers say they plan to cut production at the start of September by about 1 million barrels a day. President Bush says the move could be damaging to the American marketplace.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our economy is bumping along right now and a run-up in energy prices would hurt. And surely, the OPEC leaders understand that. I think they do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Energy analysts, however, say it shouldn't have much effect at the gas pumps.

Updating you now on a story we told you about last night, the escalating tensions in Macedonia: The U.S. embassy there will be closed tomorrow, but not evacuated after sporadic firing -- fighting throughout the day. A special U.S. Marine security force in Italy will be deployed, if needed, to beef up embassy security.

After fierce fighting overnight, ethnic Albanian rebels have agreed to government demands to retreat to their former positions behind a cease-fire line.

And from the Pentagon tonight, word of a second attempt by Iraq in less than a week to shoot down a U.S. surveillance plane. Officials say Iraq came close Tuesday to hitting an American U-2 plane, like this one, with an unguided surface-to-air missile. The U- 2 plane was patrolling the southern no-fly zone in Iraq. The pilot says the missile came so close he could feel the shock from the explosion.

Last week, a Navy reconnaissance plane over Kuwait reported seeing a missile fired at it.

Secretary of State Colin Powell expects a quick easing of the latest tensions with China. Attending a regional forum in Vietnam, Powell suggests two U.S. residents convicted this week of spying in China will soon be deported and heading home. One is Gao Zhan, whose case has drawn concern because of her health problems. An academic at American University here in Washington, she's married to a U.S. citizen and has a young child.

Another academic, Li Shaomin, arrived back in the United States today. He was convicted of espionage in China earlier this month and ordered deported.

What does Gary Condit know that can help the Chandra Levy investigation? I'll ask former FBI profiler Robert Ressler and former federal prosecutor Victoria Toensing.

And a spectacular show as Italy's Mount Etna awakes from a nap, but was it just a nap?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back. He's met three times with D.C. police, but Congressman Gary Condit is now ready to sit down with FBI experts who will focus on drawing up a profile of Chandra Levy. At the same time, the attorney for Chandra's parents is now calling Condit's behavior "suspicious."

To help us learn what the FBI wants to learn from Condit and to assess where things stand in the investigation, I'm joined now by Robert Ressler. He's a former FBI profiler who helped write the book on violent criminal behavior, and Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor and Justice Department official, now a noted Washington attorney.

Thanks to both of you for joining us. First of all, Mr. Ressler, what is point of this FBI profile of Chandra Levy, now almost three months after she has disappeared?

ROBERT RESSLER, FORMER FBI PROFILER: Wolf, the idea here is to develop the state of mind of Chandra Levy at the time of her disappearance and up to her disappearance. The idea is to learn as much as they can about her to know if she was depressed, elated, upset with losing her job, glad to go back to California. They need to know her thinking pattern so that they can get a better direction in the investigation.

BLITZER: Victoria, why is it taking so long? A lot of people think this probably should have been weeks if not months ago.

VICTORIA TOENSING, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: Well, the FBI usually doesn't come in that soon on a profile, I'm sure he'd be able to talk to it much better than that. But it takes a while to develop all the evidence and all the questions in order to get to the profile stage. This is not usual.

BLITZER: In this kind of questioning that the FBI profilers, and you're one of them, would go through with Gary Condit, would it be normal for them alone to be in the room with Congressman Condit, or would there be representatives of the D.C. police force, the U.S. attorney's office? RESSLER: The fewer the people, the better. To have a whole entourage of people in an interview like that is just counterproductive. They'll want to have as few people in there as possible, the profiler, possibly the case agent and -- you know, maybe three people, at most.

BLITZER: And you participated, obviously, in several of these kind of moments. As far as Congressman Gary Condit is concerned, Victoria, how much potential legal trouble do you think he is in right now?

TOENSING: Well, he's in very big legal trouble, as far as obstruction of justice -- a possible obstruction of justice case. He did a number of things that are, as Billy Martin said, suspicious. He's lied to the police, he's lied to the public through his government-paid staff, he tried to get the stewardess, another paramour, to sign a false affidavit, he went off and tried to hide evidence before his voluntary apartment search. This is a very big problem -- not just one of these. But taken altogether, they become bigger than the sum of their parts.

BLITZER: The profilers -- getting back to the profilers, Mr. Ressler, last night a woman called into "LARRY KING LIVE" and said she's a neighbor of Chandra Levy's in that apartment building. Among other things, she said this, and I want to read to you what she said: "Nobody knew her," referring to Chandra Levy, "knew anything about her... she walked in and out, kept to herself... she wasn't known."

Is it that kind of information about Chandra Levy that presumably might help law enforcement find her?

RESSLER: Well, it might. But I think more importantly, if nobody knew her in that apartment complex, who did know her? We know Gary Condit knew her, but there had to be others. Other interns, people in the Department of Prisons. I mean, there were other people, and those are the people that have to be interviewed as well.

BLITZER: The fact that it's now almost three months into this investigation, Victoria, and Congressman Condit has had three meetings with the law enforcement authorities, his attorney Abbe Lowell says, what else can he do? He'll cooperate, he submitted to the DNA analysis and everything else they've asked him to do. What else should they be doing?

TOENSING: Are asking me as his lawyer or as a prosecutor?

BLITZER: As a prosecutor.

TOENSING: I want him to take a polygraph. If I'm his lawyer, I should have never mentioned from the get-go the word "polygraph," and Abbe has. And so now, you know, they're in the middle of a polygraph issue and a fourth interview issue.

BLITZER: A lot of people don't understand. If he has nothing to hide, except for perhaps the embarrassment of having had an affair with this young woman, why not submit to a polygraph? But a lot of defense lawyers make the point that he shouldn't necessarily do that, it could hurt him.

TOENSING: Even when I was a prosecutor, I didn't completely believe in polygraphs. I thought they were useful as a tool, but they certainly should not be the end-all and be-all for whether -- it's not like DNA evidence. It's not like fingerprint evidence.

So if I'm a defense attorney, I don't think I ever say the "P" word from the beginning of an investigation, and Abbe did when he started the: "We'll take our own polygraph." And then he got into a real problem for his client.

BLITZER: In trying to come up with a profile of Chandra Levy, what do they specifically need and how long will it take, do you think, the FBI, assuming they're going to get this fourth interview now with Congressman Condit.

RESSLER: It's not just the FBI profilers doing their work. What they will get and glean from that interview has to then be verified and further investigated by field agents, possibly in California, possibly in the suburbs of Virginia, way beyond the jurisdiction of the metropolitan police. That's why the FBI is in this.

So there's going to be a lot more work to do after they complete their interviews. The profile may come much later.

BLITZER: You may have seen the article in "The Wall Street Journal" today by Scott Turow, the novelist. He's a lawyer, himself. Among other things, he wrote this about Gary Condit. He said: "Mr. Condit's role in the likely violence that befell Ms. Levy... is simply being assumed with virtually no basis..."

TOENSING: I don't think that's true. I think that just about every single show I have seen or done, we have distinguished between the problems of his suspicious behavior and the fact that we don't have specific evidence linking him to the disappearance. But when somebody comes up and does all the things that we've just discussed on this show, so much suspicious behavior, the police and none of us who are looking at it can ignore that kind of conduct.

BLITZER: Is that your assessment as well, Mr. Ressler? That he's behaving in a suspicious manner?

RESSLER: Well, yes, it is, but at the same time, when you don't have a body -- we don't have a murder, here. We have a missing person. When you don't have a body and you don't have a subject, a person that you know did this, you have to go to the victim. You have to learn everything you can about the victim and all the people the victim had contact with. Now, he's one of the key people that she had contact with, so he's a focus right now. There could be others.

BLITZER: Last week, Victoria, we had James Woolsey, the former CIA director on this program. A fact that a lot of people still aren't very well aware of, that in addition to being on the agriculture committee, Congressman Condit is on the House Intelligence Committee, which is privy to the nation's top secrets. You were formerly a counsel of the Senate intelligence committee. Are you at all concerned that he is on this committee?

TOENSING: I am terribly concerned, because it affects oversight. How would you like to be a CIA official and asked to come up and give the secrets of the CIA -- all those kinds of weapons systems, what kind of covert action is going on, and to give that to him when you have seen this bizarre behavior on his part. He has shown that he can lie and hide evidence. He's really, you know, he's blackmailable, and by that definition, he is a walking national security risk.

BLITZER: All right. Victoria Toensing and Robert Ressler, thanks for joining us here on Capitol Hill. Appreciate it very much.

Up next, nature's fury is putting on an incredible show. We'll have a live report from the slopes of the erupting volcano at Mount Etna, in Italy.

And is it a magic bullet? We'll look at a very promising new treatment for cancer.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back.

Europe's most active volcano is living up to its reputation, with spectacular bursts of lava and rock. CNN's Matthew Chance is in Sicily, standing by on the northern slope of the volcano. He joins us by phone with the latest.

Matthew, tell us the details.

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Wolf.

I am indeed standing on the northern slopes of Mount Etna. I have to say, from the scorching lava flows that have been etching their way very slowly over the past few days, down the other side of this, huge erupting volcano towards populated areas. It really is, as you say, an awesome sight. Molten rock lava continues to be shot up in the air literally every few seconds.

Up here at about 1,800 meters above sea level, about 6,000 feet. The air is very thick with ash and smoke. You can smell the volcanic activity. I don't know whether you can hear it along this telephone line but, again, every few seconds, there are huge underground explosions as well. The kind that are really rocking the ground which my feet are standing. You really get a sense here of the awesome power of this volcano. I mentioned populated areas, the slopes and the whole surrounding areas of Mount Etna relatively heavily populated, scattered with villages, and towns that have for centuries been making use of the fertile volcanic soil around here.

One of them, several kilometers from where I am now, Nicolosi, has been only the most immediate threat. The main road to that town was about five to 7,000 permanently inhabiting it. The main road to that is said by authorities here to be under threat and now about 1800 feet from the end of the lava flows. That main road connecting with the rest of Sicily.

In short, then, the situation here very fluid. Very unpredictable. Italian authorities say populated authorities are not under threat at the moment but at the same time, the situation is very unpredictable and very dangerous to many people here -- Wolf.

BLITZER: OK, Matthew Chance, thanks for joining us. Be safe over there.

Tonight on the leading edge, progress in the hunt for a magic bullet against cancer. A genetically-engineered drug shows promise of succeeding where other methods have failed, at least in the case of a certain type of leukemia.

CNN's medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen has details.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Six years ago, Jeffrey Desind was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia. Chemotherapy, the only standard treatment, worked for a while, but then the cancer came back with a vengeance.

JEFFREY DESIND, LEUKEMIA PATIENT: I think the doctors had me buried six feet under, and I'm walking around, and every day it's another day.

COHEN: He says his cancer is in remission and he's alive today because his doctors found out about a small study at the National Cancer Institute using a new drug -- so new, it doesn't have a real name yet, it's called BL22.

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 16 patients were given BL22, 11 went into remission, meaning doctors found very few cancer cells or even none at all, and two went into partial remission.

Here's how it works. BL22 attaches itself to the surface of the leukemia cell. It then sends in a toxin that kills the cell.

(on camera): Hairy cell leukemia is rare. There are only about 1,000 new cases each year in the U.S. But scientists say they hope that the principle behind this new drug, which is given intravenously could be applied to other types of cancer.

(voice-over): BL22, like many new cancer drugs, targets the cancer directly, unlike chemotherapy and radiation which kill good cells along with the bad.

DR. IRA PASTAN, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: One of the advantages of this therapy is it doesn't have prolonged side effects, such as bone marrow suppression, so we frequently can retreat patients.

COHEN: But the researchers warn that even with repeat treatments, BL22 might not work forever. This is just the initial phase of their research and the longest it's worked in any patient so far is two years.

Elizabeth Cohen, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Please stay with CNN throughout the night. Much more on the Chandra Levy investigation on "LARRY KING LIVE" at the top of the hour. Up next, Greta Van Susteren.

Tomorrow night, we'll take a closer look at Congressman Gary Condit's standing among his colleagues in Congress. Until then, thanks very much for watching.

I'm Wolf Blitzer on Capitol Hill; "THE POINT" with Greta Van Susteren begins right now.

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