Return to Transcripts main page

Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Missing Jet Probe; Campaign Donations; 8.2-Magnitude Quake Rocks Chile; NATO Chief Warns Russia About Moving Further Into Ukraine; U.S. Troop Casualties in Afghanistan Zero in March; Man With Chainsaw in Neck; Malaysian Authorities Say Criminal Investigation Continues, All Passengers Cleared

Aired April 02, 2014 - 12:00   ET

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

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: "Luck of the Jedi I have." He's wearing a Yoda shirt. Yes, the force is strong with this one. Good man.

That's all for us today. Thanks for joining us at this hour. I'm John Berman.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: And I'm Michaela Pereira. We'll see you again.

"Legal View" with Ashleigh Banfield starts right now.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Twenty-six days into the search for Flight 370. And the plane's pilot and copilot are still under investigation. And now sources tell CNN that Malaysia Airlines is beefing up its rules for who can be in the cockpit and who can't be in there alone.

Also ahead, an 8.2 magnitude earthquake rocks Chile. That's almost as powerful as the scale gets. It looks like disaster was averted this time, but experts say this wasn't even the big one.

And the CEO of GM back on the hot seat today. Senators grilling Mary Barra. They want to know why it took GM 10 years to issue a recall for a defect that has killed at least 13 people. All of this as relatives wonder if they will ever even see a dime.

Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. It is Wednesday, April the 2nd, and welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

Twenty-six days ago, Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared. Twenty-six days ago, hundreds of families were rocked to their core. For 26 days, a whole world has wondered what happened to the 239 souls on board. Here is the very latest of what we know today.

First, Malaysia Air is tightening cockpit security. From now on, pilots and first officers are no longer allowed to be in the cockpit by themselves.

Plus, the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean shifts eastward today. It's now less than 1,000 miles off the western coast of Australia. And now Malaysian police say all 227 passengers on board that flight have been cleared of playing a role in four key areas that could explain that plane's disappearance. And those key areas are hijacking, sabotage, personal problems and psychological issues. That said, the crew has still not been ruled out.

Malaysia police also confirm that the investigation has been considered a criminal probe since March 16th. That's just eight days after the plane went missing. And officials also said today that as the investigation continues, quote, "every little thing must be considered."

Let's dig now into this ongoing investigation into the Flight 370 disappearance, especially the one that began March 16th, the criminal probe. This is just like the ocean search for Flight 370, the inspector general of the Malaysian police says that the investigation is an international effort.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KHALID ABU BAKAR, POLICE INSPECTOR GENERAL: This is a criminal investigation. It is ongoing. We have not concluded the whole thing. And we are still waiting for expertise reports from experts overseas and internally.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Joining me now to talk about how this investigation is being conducted is CNN's national security analyst, Bob Baer, as well as CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos and Paul Callan.

Bob Baer, first to you. How on earth do you clear passengers who you can't even speak to, who you don't even know where they might be at this time, of things like hijacking, sabotage, personnel issues, and psychological issues? How does that happen?

BOB BAER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, Ashleigh, that's just the point, you can't clear them at this point. Somebody on that airplane, the hypothesis is, the strongest hypothesis, they hijacked - they diverted the airplane. You cannot clear people this early. There's somebody there who had a motivation for taking over this airplane. It may take years or maybe never. But you can't get in people's minds.

And I understand why the crew is at the top of the list as suspects because they had access to the controls. But as for the passengers, you just can't do it. And don't forget, the two Iranians. You know, just because the Iranian government said there's no problem with them, you know, why are we trusting the Iranians at this point?

BANFIELD: And why, I hate to say this, would you trust the people closest to all of these passengers to give up anything if there were something to actually give up?

BAER: Well, Ashleigh, what about the Malaysians? I mean if there's a political problem behind this, you know, al Qaeda, for instance, they're going to be loath to admit that at the beginning. They're just - they're embarrassed by this plane's disappearance. They have been withholding information. And they just don't want to admit they have political problems inside their country.

BANFIELD: I want to bring in the legal analysts on this one because, look, if you're looking at a criminal investigation at this point, you think you'd need some evidence to start with. Paul, start on this and tell me, where do you even begin and how could you possibly assume this is a criminal investigation when we don't even know where the plane is.

PAUL CALLAN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, yes. And, by the way, if you were able to make out a case, a criminal case, who are you going to charge? Obviously, everybody on this plane would have to be assumed to be dead by now as a result of the crash. So the criminal aspect of it, I wonder about.

The second thing I want to throw into the mix here, and we're going to see more of this as time goes on, the Malaysian legal system is a very interesting system. It's half British arising out of the British common law, which we're very familiar with, but it's also Islamic law. So they have a dual system. Some Islamic courts and some old-time British courts. And they're all going to be involved in this criminal investigation, which is ongoing. So it will be very interesting to see how that plays out.

BANFIELD: And, you know, curiously, so much has been lost in translation or communication. There have been plenty of breakdowns, whether it's been coordination or whether it's just been missteps. And I almost wonder if this is one of those things where they suggest it's also a criminal investigation.

DANNY CEVALLOS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: I think you're exactly right. I think they're covering all their bases, to be sure. But, however maligned the criminal investigation is, there are certain things that have become global. For example, e-mail is -- if you have a Gmail account, that's sort of a universal thing. Some of the other information and data that these people create are going to help investigators piece together, what were their activities leading up till the plane disappeared.

You can look at that another way and say that, if they were trying to hide themselves, you're not going to send any hijacking e-mails through your Gmail account. So there is two ways of looking at it. We live in a world today where we all create a lot of data every day that we walk around and communicate. But at the same time, if you have nefarious things in mind, are you going to use the traditional modes of communication?

CALLAN: But, you know, by them throwing the veil of a criminal investigation into place now, they're using it, Malaysian officials, to protect themselves.

BANFIELD: Possibly (ph).

CALLAN: Because, obviously -

BANFIELD: Possibly (ph). CALLAN: Were they negligent? Were they - were they - you know, did they engage in improper operation of the maintenance system on the plane. But if it's a criminal investigation --

BANFIELD: It's someone else's fault.

CALLAN: It's someone else's fault. There's a crime (ph).

BANFIELD: That is, by the way -

CALLAN: Yes.

BANFIELD: If we know all there is to know. Because I guarantee you, there's a lot we don't know that they're holding close to the vest for all sorts of reasons, investigative usually the top reason on that list.

Hold those thoughts. Appreciate it. Bob Baer, thank you. And Danny Cevallos and Paul Callan, as always, thank you for that.

There is a big ruling that just came down today. And are you holding on to your wallet because it affects you and the way you elect your leaders, folks. Just how much money are you allowed to spend to support your favorite candidate? The government has rules on that, and those rules just changed up somewhat fierce. I'll explain in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Just in time for the midterm elections, the Supreme Court did something today that affects just about every one of us out there. They did away with some long standing limits on individual contributions to political campaigns. The key word here is some, not all. And why does that affect you? Because most people think that politics is purchased. Is it? Will it be? I turn, of course, to our senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, to explain.

This is sort of the prevailing wisdom by so many naysayers who are so frustrated with what they see on Capitol Hill that we try as we might to regulate how the rich people buy off politicians with their contributions and then we have a ruling like this that tells us it was all in vain. Am I wrong?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: You are right.

BANFIELD: I was right.

TOOBIN: You were right.

BANFIELD: I'm never right.

TOOBIN: Never -- you were right about this.

BANFIELD: So explain what happened.

TOOBIN: OK. In simple terms, there are rules that say you can give $5,200 to any individual candidate for federal office in one election cycle.

BANFIELD: That's a two-year cycle.

TOOBIN: Yes, every two years. The -- there is also a rule that says you can only give a total of about $123,000 to all the candidates in chunks of $5,200. What the court did today was it left intact the rule - the $5,200 rule, but it said, you can give $5,200 --

BANFIELD: To as many --

TOOBIN: To as many people --

BANFIELD: People as you want.

TOOBIN: Exactly. Correct.

BANFIELD: And how does that change the game?

TOOBIN: Well, basically, it gives people who have a lot of money at their disposal the chance to spread their influence even more widely. If you have $1 million now, think how many chunks of $5,200 that makes. It's a lot.

BANFIELD: You've got to write a lot of checks.

TOOBIN: You can write a lot of checks. But if you have $1 million, it's not that big -

BANFIELD: You've got a check writer.

TOOBIN: You have someone - you're having someone do it for you.

BANFIELD: You've got a check writer. Is it - is it - and I, look, what -- it seems pretty simple to me that we have a first amendment right to say what we want. And effectively, isn't writing a check to someone saying, I believe in you and I want you to be my voice. And isn't that effectively how this was argued?

TOOBIN: Well, exactly. That's the - that is the core of this decision. Citizens United, which is, of course, a very celebrated decision from 2010. The idea that money is speech is that the act of giving money to a political campaign, according to the current Supreme Court, is essentially equivalent to giving a speech on a street corner or painting a picture or holding a picket sign. It is a form of expression and under the First Amendment, that can be regulated in only very, very limited ways.

BANFIELD: Yes, there's some justices who feel very strongly about this on the descending side -

TOOBIN: Right.

BANFIELD: Saying this -

TOOBIN: Right, it was a 5-4 decision (INAUDIBLE). BANFIELD: Yes. This devastates what remains of campaign finance reform, is what the dissenting opinion from Justice Breyer said. Obviously - and a very split, 5-4.

TOOBIN: Five-4. And, you know, what's so significant about this is that it really signals that the court is very interested in limiting and maybe even eliminating more forms of campaign finance rules.

BANFIELD: Well, let's see how things shake out in November. Perfect timing.

TOOBIN: Yes, indeed.

BANFIELD: Jeffrey, I haven't seen you in --

TOOBIN: I know.

BANFIELD: Four weeks.

TOOBIN: Yes. What a coincidence.

BANFIELD: Nice to see you.

TOOBIN: Nice to see you.

BANFIELD: Thank you, Jeffrey Toobin. Appreciate it.

We have another big story that developed overnight, as well. If you were watching the breaking news, Anderson Cooper wall to wall with this last night. A magnitude 8.2 quake. They don't get more powerful than this. This created confusion and there were fire sparks throughout Chile. We're going to go live to Santiago for more on the damage. And then there's this question, this isn't even the big one? Seriously?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: So this is what the few minutes after a terrifying earthquake typically looks like, a bit of confusion, a lot of panic, people standing outside, waiting for the aftershocks, wondering what just happened.

And this was the scene in coastal Chile last night right after an 8.2- magnitude quake shook buildings and knocked out power and phone service.

We're just now starting to really see the extent of the damage, and we're getting reports about people hurt. At least six people also killed. More than 2,500 homes have serious, structural damage this morning, including cracks in the foundation.

Rolando Santos is senior vice president of CNN Chile. He is live in Santiago. And our Chad Myers live at the CNN Weather Center with more on what comes next.

Rolando, I want to begin with you. Can you get me up to date on the death and the injuries and the damage totals? What's the story?

ROLANDO SANTOS, CNN CHILE, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT: We're waiting now for the next report from the Chilean version of FEMA. That should come out in the next half hour.

As it stands right now, there are six people dead in the region. We don't have a number of casualties at this point.

There are three pressing problems. The number of aftershocks, so far, there have been more than 94 aftershocks since the initial earthquake last night at 8:45, 8:46 p.m.

The second big issue is, that part of the country is a northern -- is a very northern tip of the region, is a desert area and they have water problems to begin with.

And remember, Ashleigh, down here we have opposite seasons from you. We're actually going out of our summer into winter, or fall and into winter, and we had a particularly dry summer.

So water at this point is very important. About half of the region does not have electricity at this point. Of course, that impacts the water, because they can't bring the water and move the water about.

So they've got more than 300 relief workers that have been moved into the area at this point. In terms of damage and having lived through the earthquake from 2010, there's not the kind of damage that we saw there where you saw blocks being burned and burning for hours and everything else.

It's a little bit different there. The two cities are fairly earthquake resistant. The problem is going to be in the towns and villages. In one town in particular, of 600 homes that were surveyed, 70 percent had damage, and 20 percent of those were uninhabitable.

BANFIELD: Wow. The pictures that we're running are really significant.

I want to bring in Chad Myers, just to sort of put in perspective. Look, this is an 8.2., and on the scale, it doesn't get a lot bigger than that, Chad.

And they're saying this isn't even the big one. How can that be?

CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: The big one was in 1960. It was 9.5 and over land. That's a big one.

Another thing going on here, this is a subduction zone. It's the line between two plates, the Nazca Plate, the South American plate here, the Nazca Plate here. The Nazca Plate is actually diving under the South American Plate, building the Andes Mountains, and they've doing that now for millions and millions of years.

The problem with the big earthquakes that we see here, unlike other subduction zones, and this is the crease here, this plate would be diving below this plate here, which is just sitting here. This was a thrust fault, so as these came together last night, and they have been going together for years and years and years, something popped right along this plate boundary right here, and all of a sudden the sea floor lifted.

And because the sea floor lifted, that's how we got the tsunami to go that way and also the tsunami to go this way.

The problem with the Chilean sea floor and Chilean earthquakes is that they're pretty much shallow, somewhere less than 50 miles deep. And so when that shakes, it really shakes hard.

A lot of subduction zone earthquakes are 200 miles deep, and there's a lot of padding between the shaking part and the earth surface where we live. But here in Chile, it is not that way.

One great thing about where this tsunami happened, even though it was only about a six- to eight-foot wave. This is not a very highly populated area, because you look at this cliff, these cliffs here almost of insanity, as we'd call them. Right down here, there is not a lot of place for people to live there.

Now, the people that do live here, live right along the coast, because they have to. It's the only flat land, and that's where we saw that last night. Some of these areas here just north of Iquique did see this water coming up and getting right into that community, right through here.

Ashleigh?

BANFIELD: Great graphics. Really does help sort of explain the topography and how this played out.

Chad Myers, thank you for that. And also our thanks to Rolando Santos, live for us in Santiago, Chile.

We'll continue to update that story. Got a couple of other big ones, too, that we're following for you.

And keeping an eye on this, the head of NATO says that if Russia moves another inch into the Ukraine, it would be making a, quote, "big mistake."

Anders Fogh Rasmussen today accused Russia of trying to move its troops into places it hasn't controlled since the days of the Soviet Union. He says NATO is gravely concerned about Russia's troop buildup on the border it shares with Ukraine.

The number of United States troops killed in Afghanistan in March? Zero. That's right. There hasn't been an American casualty-free month in the "War on Terror" since January 2007, so zero is a very significant number.

It does not, however, mean that Afghanistan is stopping, a very, very violent place. Officials there accuse the Taliban of kidnapping and killing a politician and nine of his supporters, just last night. And since October 2001, it needs to be reminded of all of us that 2,300 U.S. military members have died there, and that is a rough number. It's actually more.

Want you to take a look at a doctor's face. There's a reason. There's a reason she's looking that way. That is something weird stuck in a human body. It is a chainsaw. There was a guy who was trimming trees who had a little accident and wound up with his own chainsaw jammed deep into his neck and shoulder, really missing everything that you don't want a chainsaw to get close to.

The guy will be OK. The doctors say it was pretty quick work by not only his colleague and himself for keeping the chainsaw in place and not trying to move it, and the paramedics who came in and saved his life.

Guaranteed, no one is ever going to believe the story about how he got his scar, chainsaw in the neck. And by the way, surprisingly enough, it only took 30 stitches. Chainsaw in the neck, only 30 stitches, but good for him. He should buy a lottery ticket.

Want to take you back to our top story now, the search for that missing airplane, there's word today that Malaysian Airlines is changing its rules for the pilots in the cockpit. But does that reveal anything about what might have happened to Flight 370? And, also, is it a gentle nudge to the theory that some investigators have that it might have been the pilots that took that plane down?

You'll find out why in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: We are fast approaching four, solid weeks since a wide- bodied jet carrying 239 people simply vanished, and we now know for most of that time a criminal investigation has actually been under way.

The inspector general of the Malaysian police today said the criminal probe actually began on March 16th. That's just eight days after the flight, Flight 370, made a sharp turn off course, and most likely crashed into the southern Indian Ocean. He said, all of the passengers have been cleared now as suspects, which is an unusual declaration, and to date, no evidence implicates either pilot, either.

The search for debris has still proved just as fruitless. Today, as many as nine ships and 10 planes scanned an area roughly 900 miles off the Western Australian coast.

And a submarine from the British Royal navy has now shown up on scene to help. The nuclear-powered HMS Tireless just turned 30-years-old, and it's got its work cut out for it.

Tomorrow, the Australian navy ship carrying a U.S. pinger detector and a submersible search pod should finally be in place after that long three-day sail over treacherous seas.