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New Day

A New Deportation Policy?; Reid: Ranchers "Domestic Terrorists"; New Questions Over "Pinger" Sounds; Inside The Boston Bomb Manhunt

Aired April 18, 2014 - 07:30   ET

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


JOHN KING, HOST, CNN'S "INSIDE POLITICS": -- we have the president, Peter, it's hard not to call this an end zone dance. The president came into the briefing room yesterday to announce even better than last week they said they were over 7 million. Now the president says they've reached 8 million enrollees in Obamacare. He also the percentage of young Americans while not as high as they would like was higher than many anticipated.

Listen to the president here. This essentially is the president trying to tell fellow Democrats, get out of the crouch. Start bragging.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: I don't think we should apologize for it. I don't think we should be defensive about it. I think there is a strong, good, right story to tell.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Will Democrats, Peter, in the states the president lost where they Democrats are running for re-election, Senator Mark Pryor from Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Beggets in Alaska, in those states will they heed that advice?

PETER HAMBY, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: They aren't yet. Changing the subjects to things that they are comfortable talking about. Louisiana, you mentioned, Landrieu likes to talk about energy. I was in Virginia this week. Obama won the state, but Mark Warner has a challenge this year from Republican Ed Gillespie.

I watched him campaign at the planking, a famous old tradition of Virginia politics, very Republican leaning. Many people came up to me afterward why did you vote for that bill? Did you read that bill before you voted it for it? Warner's response to them was, I did, but I've outlined several fixes to it. He was pretty adept at sort of pivoting and moving away.

He talked to reporters afterwards and we asked him, what are you going to run on from your Senate record this year? And he brought up a number of things. His work with the gangs, his efforts to pass, you know, legislation on debt, infrastructure and things like that. He did not talk about health care. He wanted to talk about more about his record as governor of Virginia rather than senator.

KING: If you look at elections as trial. If you don't mount a defense, you lose. And many Democrats won't mount a defense, won't say, OK, it's not perfect. As he just said Mark Warner said. Why don't a Democratic super PAC say, look, we have some plusses here because the Republicans can rebut what the president just said, but they have plenty to work with now if they want to cut a political ad. It is working.

MOLLY BALL, "THE ATLANTIC": I believe there is an outside group in Alaska that is running an ad that has someone who has benefited from Obamacare. But there hasn't been a lot of efforts along those lines. I do think there's been a lot of uncertainty and consternation. You have the president not really saying anything he hasn't said before about the ways he sees the law as being successful but with a newly aggressive tone.

And trying to set the tone for Democrats but then, you know, in a lot of these red states where Democrats may be trying to separate themselves from the president, I don't think it's at all clear if they will follow his lead or keep trying to change the subject.

HAMBY: They can't pretend they're not Democrats and they didn't take these votes. It's going to be really tough.

KING: How significant is it, the president in response to a question at that briefing yesterday talking a health care, wouldn't give the specifics. He seemed to confirm leaks out of the White House that relatively soon they will have a new policy out of the Department of Homeland Security about an issue that has frustrated the Latino community. How significant is that that the president seems willing now to use executive power to change that policy?

BALL: I think this is potentially huge. Immigration advocates have been pressuring the White House for a year now or more to take executive action if immigration reform doesn't pass Congress. It now looks like it's not going to pass Congress. And there has been increasing pressure on the White House to do something and they've consistently said no, that's out of the question. We're not going to do that.

Obama now saying he's going to take another look at it and that may signal that there's going to be a change in deportation policy. We don't know how sweeping it might be but the fact they're considering it I think is a big deal.

KING: And cynics will say, Peter, it's using executive power to try to gin up election year turnout, won't they?

HAMBY: Well, this happened in 2012, when he said he would stop deporting so-called dreamers in the campaign and the Republicans, you know, how this was a political thing. It also frustrates the Obama White House, yes, the deportation policy has angered immigration advocates, but they have deportations have come down per year. They've stopped some unpopular Bush administrations, worksite raids. They want to telegraph to the activist community, the immigration advocate community, that they are doing things.

KING: Let's quickly close. Harry Reid is the Senate majority leader. He is also the senior senator from the state of Nevada. There's been a confrontation. A rancher refuses to pay taxes, fees to the federal government because he doesn't recognize the Bureau of Land Management's right to charge him for grazing his cattle on that land. There have been some big confrontations. The government backed off after some supporters of Mr. Bundy came out with weapons and the children and the like. Harry Reid characterizing what he thinks of those people yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SENATOR HARRY REID (D), MAJORITY LEADER: These people who hold themselves out to be patriots are not. They're nothing more than domestic terrorists. We live in a country that people follow the law and what went up there was not very good. I repeat, what went on up there is domestic terrorism.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: It will be interesting to watch this one going forward in Harry Reid's campaign. I understand the questions that government official has about this conduct, but to label people who live in your state domestic terrorists is an interesting one for Harry Reid. We unfortunately don't have much time to talk about them.

Molly, thanks for coming in and Peter coming in. Now as I get back to New York, here's the question. Here's the question, 2052 by my math will be the first presidential election in which the Clinton baby is eligible.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: My gosh.

KING: Will that baby -- can Cuomo and I come out of retirement to moderate the Baldwin baby versus the Clinton-Misvinski baby debates in Iowa?

BOLDUAN: I don't know. Yes. You will. And then obviously you guys will be rooting for the right team, which will be the Bolduan team. Obviously. I will say, John King, the fall is a wonderful time to have a baby in 2014. Congratulations to Chelsea.

KING: Congratulations to Chelsea. But both of you might have to wait. Jonah king will be in his first term of election.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Jonah King is a strong name.

BOLDUAN: It would very fine in my book.

CUOMO: By the way there, J.K., just so you know, K.B. is on her second box of doughnuts.

BOLDUAN: This is such a lie. He's being mean.

CUOMO: Second box. KING: He's never mean.

CUOMO: And lost a finger this morning. Got to be a little quicker on the draw around the doughnuts.

BOLDUAN: Please. Have a Good Friday, John, because mine started off great until he started talking.

CUOMO: It was good. Moving on.

BOLDUAN: Yes, please.

CUOMO: Coming you on NEW DAY, with Flight 370 still nowhere to be found, many are asking but we heard the pings, right? So is it possible they weren't pings? And if so, what were they? We'll take a look.

BOLDUAN: A year ago today, a community outside of Boston paralyzed by the massive manhunt for the marathon bombing suspects. This morning a firsthand account of how that manhunt played out.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Well, this morning search crews are once again scouring the Indian Ocean looking for any sign of debris from Flight 370. But with nothing from the jet yet found, there are new questions today about this sounds that let the surge -- led the search to this location. Were the noises heard really from the jet's black boxes?

Here with us is a man who knows this all too well. Paul Ginsberg is a forensic audio expert. He has consulted for the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security among other. You're the man who listens differently than most of us do. We want to talk about the pings.

PAUL GINSBERG, FORENSIC AUDIO EXPERT: OK.

PEREIRA: The pings. We are still in ping land right now with it.

GINSBERG: Exactly.

PEREIRA: All right, so some of the things we know. Ping, the four ping signals that were detected, the first two were the longest. Let me draw in here. This one here, two hours and 20 minutes. This one here, ping number two was 13 minutes. The strongest, what does that indicate to you?

GINSBERG: Well, that it's consistent signal which gives us some confidence in the fact that we're close. And the amplitude was varying a little bit during this 2 hours and 20 minutes, but I don't think they lost signal. It was a continuous reception, which really tells us that this is an area that we should be searching and, in fact, this is the area that we are searching.

PEREIRA: Right. What would you attribute the variance in the amplitude to? GINSBERG: Flow of water, other obstructions, any number of undersea currents, and so on.

PEREIRA: You're confident that these pings are from the black box. Tell me why.

GINSBERG: I believe so. Because it's not just reception of a radio station, but it's like reception of a radio station where they're broadcasting specific tones. These tones --

PEREIRA: At one-second intervals, correct?

GINSBERG: That's right. And that can be measured to precision of, say, 1/10,000 of a second. So we know when we get something that is that periodic --

PEREIRA: Because there's nothing else in nature that would make that sort of frequent sound with regularity.

GINSBERG: No, not without the fish or sea life becoming very, very tired.

PEREIRA: Right.

GINSBERG: Over that period of time.

PEREIRA: So we want to look at this here a little bit because with -- we can look at the frequency area. We know the ocean depth is about 2.8 miles where they're looking.

GINSBERG: Right.

PEREIRA: And the pinger broadcast radius you say is about 3 miles, correct?

GINSBERG: That's manufacturer's spec.

PEREIRA: So does it seem reasonable that the towed pinger locator would function outside of this 3-mile radius?

GINSBERG: Well, it doesn't stop just abruptly. It tapers offer as if you're in a car approaching or leaving a city and you are listening to, say, an AM broadcast.

PEREIRA: You hear it faintly and it gets stronger the closer you get to it.

GINSBERG: And then it fades out when you leave the city. In the same way, when this gets closer there will be faint signals, it will get stronger and then it will fade out. This is why we use different algorithms to enhance the reception to see whether we have a pinger. And there are ways to pre-filter what you're listening to so that when you do hear something you know that is the pinger.

PEREIRA: So does it surprise you that they haven't found anything yet? GINSBERG: No.

PEREIRA: Why is that?

GINSBERG: We're looking -- as I said before, we're looking for something like a nickel in Yankee Stadium.

PEREIRA: In the dark.

GINSBERG: Exactly. Exactly. They have to be very careful as far as their radius, how wide their swath is that they're looking.

PEREIRA: Their searching, right.

GINSBERG: And come back and overlap it a little bit so they don't miss anything.

PEREIRA: Now one of the things that you've also said is that you think that in order to les if these pings are acoustically matching the ones on the plane you say that they should really take this -- they could take and test this technology in realtime, correct?

GINSBERG: Yes. And, in fact, I've done some research and they have done that. And they have done an extensive testing and doing examples of different depths, different oceans and so on, to see what the actual received signal looks like, how it's different from what the pinger actually puts out and how it's affected by the water, the temperature, all of the factors that enter into reception at the receiving end.

PEREIRA: We're in, as you said, pinger land right now. Your job will also be very important, very key, acoustic engineer, once, if and when that black box is found because then you can listen to the sounds that are coming from the data recorder.

GINSBERG: Exactly. We want to be in recovery, retrieval, download, and analysis land.

PEREIRA: Yes.

GINSBERG: And we all hope --

PEREIRA: Hopefully the next phase, right?

GINSBERG: Absolutely.

PEREIRA: Thank you, Mr. Ginsberg, a pleasure to work with you. Thanks so much -- Chris, Kate.

BOLDUAN: Coming up next on NEW DAY, the manhunt for the Boston marathon bombers captivated the nation. Coming up next, dramatic firsthand account of the search one year later.

CUOMO: And tune in this Sunday 9:00 p.m. Eastern on CNN for "PARTS UNKNOWN," this time Anthony Bourdain is putting his money down in Vegas. Take a look. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANTHONY BOURDAIN, HOST, CNN'S "PARTS UNKNOWN": Las Vegas, no matter what you feel about it, the casinos, these massive pleasure domes. What's the most overused word in the English language? I believe it's awesome. They are, in fact, awe inspiring. I mean, they're enormous. How do they work? How do they grind in all of these people in and out, relieving them so happily of their money?

Instinctively it would be so easy to smear it all, to find it obscene, horrifying. Even if you can pretend successfully to hate this, and frankly that's a very difficult thing to do, the strip, old school Vegas, who could hate that? Where is my damn toga?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: It was one year ago that we first saw the suspects of the Boston marathon bombings. Boston locked down, also terrifying a nearby community. It ended with the death of one suspect and capture of his younger brother. This morning we have a new firsthand account of the investigation from start to finish. CNN's Deborah Feyerick has that for us.

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. Everybody has such vivid memories of that manhunt that took place personal stories of how it all played out, the race to find evidence, even reconstruct the bomb, rebuild the bomb. Two of FBI's top people sat down to discuss the key moments of this investigation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK (voice-over): The force of the two blasts 12 seconds apart said it all.

(on camera): What struck you about it?

STEPHANIE DOUGLAS, FBI EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Just the magnitude of it. It wasn't something small. It wasn't something insignificant.

FEYERICK (voice-over): Within minutes more than 1,000 police and federal law enforcement agents would embark on the largest investigation and manhunt of its kind in the United States.

(on camera): By the time you got to the crime scene, this is what it looked like, correct?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was a scene of utter devastation and carnage. There was evidence strewn all over the place.

FEYERICK (voice-over): At FBI headquarters, chief of the National Security Branch Stephanie Douglas was keenly aware of the stakes.

DOUGLAS: We had to be concerned that there were other bombs or other co-conspirators elsewhere outside of Boston.

FEYERICK: Authorities knew at least one killer was on the loose but where, what next? By Tuesday investigators pieced together the pressure cooker bombs, identifying them as similar to those made in an al Qaeda bomb making manual.

RICHARD DESLAURIERS, FORMER BOSTON FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE: We were collecting pieces of the pressure cooker bombs, pieces of backpacks used to contain the bombs.

FEYERICK: A major break in the case came less than 36 hours after the attack.

DOUGLAS: A couple people from our counterterrorism division came in with the laptop like this. They said we think we know who did it.

FEYERICK: Of the more than 12,000 videos from businesses and marathon spectators, something unmistakable at the second blast site.

DOUGLAS: You see a man in a white ball cap. The hat is turned around backwards, walking into the frame of the shot.

DESLAURIERS: He places that backpack down on the ground, sliding it off his shoulder. Maybe 15 minutes later he makes a cell phone call. After that cell phone call concludes very shortly thereafter, you hear the first bomb go off farther down near the finish line. He glances quickly to the left, but walks diligently and deliberately to the right about 15 to 20 seconds after he departs the view of the camera the second bomb goes off.

FEYERICK: That video has never been seen by the public but is - expected to be shown at trial in November.

(on camera): What does that suggest to you when this man took a cell phone call before walking away?

DOUGLAS: That there was another conspirator.

FEYERICK (voice-over): That co-conspirator was identified later that day, another crucial lead.

DESLAURIERS: This video depicted the individual then called black hat walking with white hat down Boylston Street, both of them carrying black backpacks.

FEYERICK: It had been three full days, with the suspects still at large, a game changing decision.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today we're enlisting the public's help to identify the suspects.

FEYERICK: For the Tsarnaev brothers, things were about to unravel.

(on camera): How important was it for you and the bureau and everyone else involved in the investigation that the two suspects be taken alive? DOUGLAS: Very, very important.

FEYERICK (voice-over): But that's not what happened.

UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: They have explosives, some type of grenades, they're in between houses down here. Shots fired.

FEYERICK: Following an 8-minute fire fight in Watertown, police wrestled a wounded Tamerlan to the ground, his brother driving an alleged stolen car tried to free him. Instead, police say, he ran him over. Tamerlan was fingerprinted and finally identified by name. Brother Dzhokhar was identified later in a boat. He was less than 0.2 mile from where he abandoned his vehicle.

DESLAURIERS: We didn't know if he had bombs on him, weapons on him.

FEYERICK: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will stand trial in November.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FEYERICK: Like everybody on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, even the Boston PD they felt as though they had the weight of the world on their shoulders. They were so surprised that these two men had no game plan that they thought they would actually blow up the marathon and simply get away with it --Kate.

BOLDUAN: You were pointing out, Deb, talking about that eight-minute fire fight, that's unprecedented.

FEYERICK: Unprecedented. A normal fire fight takes 10 seconds. During that fire fight, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hit. He was wounded when he drove his car up the street and he had seen that his brother was actually tackled on the ground. He aimed that car trying to disburse the police, instead he ran over his brother. That actually contributed to his brother's death as well.

CUOMO: Don't forget, before that they tried to take the gun of Sean Calier. He resisted. That's how he was killed.

FEYERICK: All began to unravel.

CUOMO: How many videos did they have to go through?

FEYERICK: It's 12,000. They were identified in the man in the white hat before they identified the man in the black hat.

CUOMO: Amazing investigative work.

Let's take a break on NEW DAY. When we come back, the very latest on the search for survivors in the ship off South Korea. Divers are in the waters. Hundreds of lives are in the balance. Now arrest warrants for the captain and two of his crew. A live report next.

BOLDUAN: Also what's next in the search for Flight 370? An unmanned sub is in the water back on mission. Could a new approach bring better results? We'll talk to the experts about it. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)