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24 Boko Haram Hostages Freed; Obama to Propose Tax Increases on Wealthy; Michael Moore Calls Snipers "Cowards"

Aired January 19, 2015 - 10:30   ET

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

PHIL BLACK, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, from the statements that we've heard so far, first of all, they are concerned with increasing cooperation not just among European countries although that's clearly a priority they say -- trade of information, greater cooperation, really tackling this problem of Islamist extremism in a more unified way, breaking down the borders between European countries to ensure that information and intelligence is traded as quickly as possible so that these sorts of attacks can be prevented.

But they are also looking at increasing cooperation with other regions notably the Middle East, Africa and Arab countries. That's a priority they believe in order to determine the level of travel, the level of coordination that takes place between these terror groups not just from the individuals that are here but those individuals who travel to places like Syria and other Middle Eastern countries before returning here perhaps with instructions or perhaps being inspired to carry out plots following the names, causes, ideas, of some of those Islamist groups that have taken root in places like Syria -- Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Phil Black, reporting live for us from Belgium

Some good news to report in the wake of the deadly Boko Haram crisis in Africa. At least two dozen of the 80 people kidnapped this weekend by militants in Cameroon were set free this morning. An official telling CNN that the hostages broke away while soldiers were chasing the insurgents, quote, "back to Nigeria from whence they came".

CNN's Diana Magnay joins us live with the latest from there. Hi -- Diana.

DIANA MAGNAY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Hi Carol. That's right.

On Sunday morning, Boko Haram militants crossed the border into Cameroon and razed two villages to the ground and took captive 80 people, many of whom were children. But Cameroon's army and one particular battalion, the mobile intervention battalion, gave chase and managed to free at least 24 of them.

So as you say, that is some good news and it comes as Chad has sent 2,000 troops into Cameroon to try and assist that country in its efforts to combat Boko Haram which since January has launched far more brazen attacks into Cameroonian territory, not just cross border raids where in the past we have seen them attack villages, kill, kidnap. But now they've been attacking military installations in Cameroon also, threatening the President with the same level of violence as they've already unleashed on northeastern Nigeria and that's why Chadian troops have now come in to reinforce the Cameroonian ones there -- Carol..

COSTELLO: All right. Diana Magnay, reporting live for us this morning. Thank you.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, a second death tax -- that's what tax reform advocate Grover Norquist says about President Obama's plan to hike taxes on wealthy to give more relief to the middle class. We'll talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Tax increases on the wealthiest Americans -- that's expected to be one of President Obama's main messages as he addresses one of the biggest television audience of the year. A plan that's not sitting well with Republicans, so how will the President fare after tomorrow's State of the Union? Michelle Kosinski is at the White House with more on the President's plans. Good morning -- Michelle.

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi -- Carol. Yes. Looking at these tax plans, many reacted in disbelief. I mean does the White House really think that any of this is going to pass congress? But the White House this morning is saying these are the President's proposals. He's still going to put them forward. Now it's time for Republicans to present theirs.

This is very much the start of a dialogue. A debate not unlike what the President has been saying that he's going to continue to do what he can in the face of Congress' inaction during this past year that was definitely an interesting one.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The President of the United States.

KOSINSKI (voice-over): President Obama is getting ready to deliver his State of the Union address and put a tumultuous year behind him, one that saw challenges to Obamacare, scandals in the VA and Secret Service and abroad, the rise of ISIS, a return to Iraq, air strikes over Syria, Americans murdered.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We will be vigilant and we will be relentless. When people harm Americans anywhere, we do what's necessary to see that justice is done.

KOSINSKI: Not quite getting away from a constant war footing that the President emphasized in his last State of the Union. Obama has been battered by Republicans over strategy and approval ratings down around the 40 percent mark. Add in a flood of immigrants, racial tensions and a violent end to Obama's attempted reset with Russia and 2014 ended with the painful loss of senate to Republicans in the midterm elections. But wait, Obama is now saying -- OBAMA: I'm still around. I got some work to do.

KOSINSKI: Which in just a few weeks has included ground breaking moves on immigration, Cuba, free college education, a victory lap on the economy.

OBAMA: America is coming back.

KOSINSKI: His ratings bouncing back as well. 2014 was also remember, Obama's self-titled "Year of action" with dozens of move on the climate, the labor force and trade. He proclaimed Obamacare a success and reached out on social media, sat between two ferns.

Now he needs to address the nation with resolve in the face of fresh cyber and terror attacks.

Are they having to rewrite it because of what happened?

JOHN BAYER, CHIEF SPEECH WRITER FOR PRES. CLINTON: Things are going on as we speak. They're rewriting now the whole thing anyway.

KOSINSKI: John Bayer was chief speechwriter for President Clinton, worked on his state of the union in 1995 after both houses of congress shifted Republican.

BAYER: This is a president who now is sort of saying the battle for the middle class in this country has begun. And in some respects, this is the first shot in the battle of the 2016 presidential election because there's a fight for what the next American agenda is going to be.

KOSINSKI: Does he need to start with countering terror because of France? If you were writing the speech, would you start with that?

BAYER: Probably not. I think I would probably start with domestic. That's a good question.

KOSINSKI: In the last few weeks the President has already laid out a sort of road show prequel, a trailer for his State of the Union. Will that encourage more Americans to tune in?

If you have to wager on how many millions of people were going to watch, what would you say? What would you say?

BAYER: $40 million.

KOSINSKI: Given last year saw the smallest audience in more than a decade -- that would be a success.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KOSINSKI (on camera): You know, what will be different about this State of the Union too is that it's hard to say what the surprises are going to be. Because the White House has wanted to kind of put it out there piece by piece ahead of the State of the Union kind of building momentum and trying to build excitement and they also said that they're not going reveal everything in this speech. It's going to be over time a kind of rolling announcement process that they have where they will release announcements during things like YouTube appearances or town hall meetings.

Of course remember the President will be interviewed by three Internet stars after the State of the Union. People are more generally focused on things like cinnamon challenge and makeup tips so that, too, could be different -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Well, I know we'll both be watching because of course we want to and we have to.

KOSINSKI: That's right. Absolutely.

COSTELLO: Absolutely Michelle Kosinski reporting live from the White House. Thank you so much.

Joining me now is Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a taxpayer advocacy group he founded in 1985 at President Reagan's request. Good morning sir.

GROVER NORQUIST, AMERICANS FOR TAX REFORM: Good morning.

COSTELLO: So the President is talking about raising taxes on wealthy Americans to pay for breaks for the middle class. It appears that 2016, because that's what he's projecting too -- right. It's deja vu all over again -- right.

NORQUIST: That's what he calls it. Of course, we do know it's a massive series of tax increases and they'll hit everybody. He's talking about massive spending to go with the significant tax increases.

What's odd is that if he really believed that any of this was a good idea, he could have done it in 2009 or 2010 in budget reconciliation with 51 democratic votes. He had 60 at one point. This is a list of things he didn't do when he had Democratic majorities in the house and senate. This is a political document.

And what's odd is the President had told the business community for six years now -- he's told them that he wanted to reform the tax structure which is very damaging for Americans. We pay higher rates, the business community pays higher rates than all of our competitors overseas or even in Canada. He's been telling them he wants to do this and he wants to do this and none of that is here. It's all just tax increases and more spending.

COSTELLO: Let's be specific about what the President wants to do. He is proposing $320 billion in tax hikes over the next ten years; an eight percent hike on capital gains; new fees for big banks, increasing the taxes for a couple of earnings. $500 and more and he wants to use that money to pay for college for some middle class people. And he also wants a $500 tax credit for married couples and he also wants to find a way to pay for child care in this country. That's all worthy stuff, right? NORQUIST: Well, it's a series of spending bills that he's put

forward, none of which he did in the stimulus package. You do have to wonder, he's been always very good as a political spokesman or as a candidate. He's going back into campaign mode.

Governing mode would have been what are we going to do on tax reform? There's no tax simplification. He doesn't help people who save their money through 529 programs. He damages those and damages the educational savings account and makes them less attractive.

COSTELLO: Well, let me ask you this -- Grover. Let me ask you this Grover, will you roll out a no tax pledge in 2016?

NORQUIST: Well, the no tax pledge has been shared with candidates for office going back to 1986. We have a majority of members of the U.S. House of representatives --

COSTELLO: But will you hold their feet to the fire like you did the last time around?

NORQUIST: Well, it's the American people hold elected officials to their commitments. President Obama promised he wouldn't tax anyone who made less than $250,000 a year -- took him 16 days to break that promise. There are eight taxes on the middle class in Obamacare. If he wants to help the middle class, let's get rid of the eight taxes in Obamacare which directly hit middle income Americans and make their lives more painful.

COSTELLO: Let's talk about that for just a second. Because you say President Obama wants a return to the Jimmy Carter era with higher taxes that can kill jobs. How can you say always raising taxes kills jobs when the President has raised taxes on corporate America? He has raised taxes through things like Obamacare, right, that impacts small businesses and the minimum wage has increased in several states and cities yet job creation is growing at a rate we haven't seen since 1999.

NORQUIST: You are looking at three months. He's been president for six years. If you take his --

COSTELLO: The economy is doing really great now and we were in a deep recession, might I remind you, in 2008.

NORQUIST: Let's compare this recovery to every other recovery since 1960. It's the worst recovery compared to all others. Reagan's, he's 10 million jobs behind Reagan's job creation at this point. His recovery is worse than everyone since 1960.

Yes, we had a great three months this last year but compared to all other recoveries, this is a very lousy recovery. Millions of Americans are out of work because he decided to tax and spend which slowed the growth rather than to take less regulation, lower taxes and have a more pro-growth economy. We're paying dearly to this day for the mistakes he made and he wants to do more of what didn't work.

COSTELLO: Surely you could argue that he has done nothing to make the wage gap better for middle class Americans, right? And even Republicans are lamenting the wage gap right now. Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul. As far as ideas go, I've heard only one. And I heard it from you as well. Reform the tax code. That, of course, takes a minute.

Surely there are other ways in the meantime that can solve the problem the wage gap. What are those ways?

NORQUIST: We're 10 million people unemployed in this country because of the President's policies compared to Reagan's policies.

COSTELLO: The wage gap though -- how can we solve the wage gap problem?

NORQUIST: By getting more people jobs. One of the reasons you have a wage gap is because people don't have work.

COSTELLO: But more people are getting jobs but their wages aren't rising. That's a fact.

NORQUIST: There could be 10 million more people -- more than ten -- that's a conservative estimate.

COSTELLO: And that will somehow drive up wages?

NORQUIST: Because you go from zero to your wage. The most important thing you can do is get people jobs and we want to have higher wages. The President's friends, the trial lawyers who are busy suing companies and individuals, are a tremendous cost on economic growth and they keep wages down.

The President has not gotten free trade agreements ready to go years ago. He's not focused on those because organized labor has told him no. Now he says he's going to. That would be helpful if he switched his policies. That's a very important thing to getting wages up and to having more growth in the country. We should be exploring for oil in more places in the United States. He's closed down ANWR which is thousands of jobs. He's killed the pipeline which is thousands of jobs.

COSTELLO: America's dependence on foreign oil has greatly decreased. That's a fact, too.

NORQUIST: Because we've been drilling more. Yes -- why?

COSTELLO: We have been drilling more.

NORQUIST: In private land. On federal land where the President has anything to say about it, it's gone down. Not up. Down. Not up. The President's case is very bad on this because in the private sector and on private land and on state land, that's where this new explosion of growth is coming from. If his EPA regs went in to stop that as they tried in other areas, we wouldn't have this growth. We have avoided this because his EPA has been kept out of being able to shutdown fracking. COSTELLO: I'll only throw one more thing at you because I think it's

confusing to a lot of Americans. Gas prices are almost $2 a gallon on average across the country, right?

NORQUIST: Yes because we're --

COSTELLO: That means states like North Dakota, right? North Dakota which is a big drilling state, the people who own oil companies there are planning thousands and thousands of layoffs. So help us understand that.

NORQUIST: Well, two things. When you expand more drilling and bring out more oil, at some point the price goes down. That's a good thing. What we're looking to do now is find out where we can -- you want a low price of oil and you want as much exploration as we can in the United States to help bring down prices.

COSTELLO: Absolutely but these layoffs are kind disturbing, right, because those jobs have greatly helped the American economy.

NORQUIST: They have. And we ought to be opening up opportunities to drill in other places such as offshore. People can move to new opportunities there. Look, in an economy, there are always jobs being created and jobs being killed. The problem we've had is we haven't had enough jobs created as you have a mix in jobs turn over. That's always going happen in a free economy. You want more jobs created than ones disappear. That's what we haven't been doing very well for the last six years.

COSTELLO: I have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me, sir. I appreciate it.

NORQUIST: Sure.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM, backlash over the Oscar- nominated film "American Sniper" as Michael Moore calls snipers, "cowards". Details on the controversy, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me ask you a question -- Chris. Would you be surprised if I told you the navy has credited you with over 160 kills?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: An unbelievable movie but a question arose this morning. This is the question. Do you think snipers in the United States military are cowards? It's not coming from me; it's coming from Michael Moore. He does. And apparently he's not alone. The documentary filmmaker went on Twitter last night and bashed the new Oscar nominated Bradley Cooper feature "American Sniper", a biopic about Chris Kyle, a former Navy SEAL and sharp shooter.

One of Moore's tweets read quote, "My uncle was killed by a sniper in World War II. We were taught snipers were cowards, who'll shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. They're invaders and worse."

CNN's Brian Stelter joins me now with more. I know it's Michael Moore but I was taken aback by this.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: Me too. And a lot of other people as well. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We don't know if he's actually seen the movie or not.

I think the first step is you have to see the movie and then maybe you can comment on it. But, you know, He's not the only one saying things like this. There's actually a billboard in Los Angeles for this movie. There's now graffiti over it with the word "murder" saying that Chris Kyle was not a hero, he was a murderer.

COSTELLO: And then Seth Rogen came out too. Mr. North Korea?

STELTER: He did. He was also -- yes, yes. He says he felt like this movie played like the movie that was in third act of "Inglorious Bastards", you know. And what we've seen generally is I think this movie mirroring a public debate that's happening about -- about war. 13, 14 years into the war on terror, many years after most of our troops came home from Iraq. No longer is the Iraq war something that's being shown on movie theaters as a present day event. It's now history. History is talked about differently than events that are still progressing. You know what I mean?

COSTELLO: Like the Vietnam War -- right?

STELTER: Yes, absolutely. The tone of movies changed after the Vietnam War as well. It evolved over the years. No time until now has an Iraq war movie been successful at the box office. "Lions and Lambs" and "Rendition" and these other films that came out years ago all of them did not -- even -- what was the one that won the Oscar -- "The Hurt Locker".

COSTELLO: Chris Kyle's story is so compelling Brian. I mean he's such a compelling character. And the way he died in real life was very moving and sad.

STELTER: Absolutely. And when I saw the movie, first of all, I thought it was the best movie I had seen all year. When it ended, everyone including me just sat there watching the whole credits. Nobody wanted to get up. It was that kind of movie. It was an incredibly powerful movie.

COSTELLO: Actually two other people told me the same thing. When the movie ended, you were emotionally spent.

STELTER: Maybe that's why it's breaking these records. I mean dateline.com says what record did this movie not break? We haven't almost ever seen a movie like this do so well in January but Warner Brothers -- which like CNN is owned by Time Warner -- it did something very smart.

It opened the movie in New York and L.A. at the end of 2014 then it was able to build momentum and got all those Oscar nominations last week and then on Friday it opened across the country at just the right time. There was already interest in this movie.

And now as a result of these huge ticket sales, it's going to have even more Oscar momentum. So it's sort of a virtuous cycle. But it does, you know, if we open these debates about the Iraq war -- I came away thinking depending on your perspective of the Iraq war, this is either prime, it's either pro-war or anti-war. You can see it either way depending on what attitude you come in to the theater.

COSTELLO: Fascinating. I would really like to know what our viewers think about this. They've already expressed very strong opinions on my Facebook page. It's at facebook.com/CarolCNN. Thank you for the comments. They are strong. Exactly what I wanted.

Thank you for joining me.

STELTER: Thank you.

COSTELLO: I appreciate it. Thank you for joining me today as well. I'm Carol Costello. NEWSROOM with John Berman after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)