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Deflated Football Report; Germanwings Co-Pilot's Practice; Attorneys ask to see Knife. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired May 06, 2015 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:04] ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Breaking news now from the NFL. After months, we are finally getting an answer on the infamous "deflate gate." Well, that's actually depending upon who you ask. According to this league investigation released just moments ago, New England Patriots employees more likely than not - the language is precise - more likely than not deliberately deflated game balls during the AFC championship game against the Indianapolis Colts. When you read further into this report, it specifically says quarterback Tom Brady of the Pats likely had at least general knowledge of the possible violation. That finding a stark contrast to Brady's response right after the scandal broke.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM BRADY, NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS QUARTERBACK: I didn't, you know, have any - you know, I didn't alter the ball in any way. I have a process that I go through before every game where I go in and I pick the balls that I want to - the footballs that I want to use for the game.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is Tom Brady a cheater?

BRADY: I don't believe so. I mean, I feel like I've always played within the rules. I would never do anything to break the rules.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That was Tom Brady after the AFC game before the Super Bowl, which they won. Let me read also this for you. Patriots owner Robert Kraft, he has issued this swift and sharp rebuke of the report, writing in part, quote, "when I addressed the media at the Super Bowl on January 26 - over 14 weeks ago - I stated that I unconditionally believed that the New England Patriots had done nothing inappropriate in this process or in violation of the NFL rules and that I was disappointed in the way the league handled the initial investigation. That statement has not changed. To say we are disappointed in its findings, which do not include any incontrovertible or hard evidence of deliberate deflation of footballs at the AFC Championship Game, would be a gross understatement." And there's more of that statement that's, I think, even more significant. We'll get to that in a second.

But joining me now is CNN Sports analyst Christine Brennan. She's on the phone with me. Mike Freeman's on the phone with The Bleacher Report, and I also have CNN Sports correspondent, former NFL player Coy Wire.

So, Mike, let me go to you first, to this reporting. Again, this is from the Ted Wells report. What exactly did they find?

MIKE FREEMAN, BLEACHER REPORT (via telephone): Well, the - first of all, good to be with you again.

What they found was not exactly a smoking gun but a - but something close to it. And Wells basically found that - and this is where - this is the core of all this, that Tom Brady knew about this, knew about footballs being deflated, was part of it. And he doesn't come out and say directly, well, basically it was part of a cover-up. And there's the - one of the key parts of this are the text messages. Half of the language can't be used on television, but it shows a link to Brady. And so this - this is the problem for the Patriots. The report didn't - didn't find the Patriots as an organization at fault. It focuses on Brady. And this - this really hurts Brady. It doesn't destroy him. He's still a great quarterback. But it hurts him, and it hurts his legacy. And that's the important part of this - this whole thing, is that this will - this will impact his legacy probably - probably for a long, long time.

BALDWIN: Let me come back to that and the repercussions of the consequences. I mean that's a big statement to make considering he is the superstar of the New England Patriots team.

But, Christine, here's the thing that jumped out at me. I read Bob Kraft's statement in full and part of this graph was significant. He writes, "what is not highlighted in the text of the Ted Wells report is that three of the Colts' four footballs measured by at least one official were under the required PSI level." It goes on, the final sentence of that graph, "as compelling a case as the Wells report may try to make, I am going to rely on the factual evidence of numerous scientists and engineers rather than inferences from circumstantial evidence." What does that tell you?

CHRISTINE BRENNAN, CNN SPORTS ANALYST (via telephone): Brooke, what it tells me is that the Patriots are not yet done with this. That they - they want to fight or they want to, at least in the court of public opinion, have a bit of a fight and say, hey, wait a minute, listen to our side. What this means, of course, is "deflate gate" may now continue, which is almost hard to believe because we thought this was the story that ate America in January.

BALDWIN: It did.

BRENNAN: And now here we are again and it may go on for a while. I do think, though, that a resolution to this one way or the other, whether Tom Brady is fined, suspended for next year for a game or two or whatever, more, I don't know, we'll see what happens next. But I don't know for - from the Patriots' point of view, Brooke, with Bob Kraft, how much more they gain by continuing to fight this, especially when it's only Brady. As Mike pointed out, absolutely it's - they're focusing on Brady, Mr. Clean, the boy next door. It's not Belichick. It's not the organization. And I think in that way maybe the Patriots should cut their losses by not arguing anymore but just let Brady take whatever medicine he's going to be getting.

[14:05:13] BALDWIN: Coy Wire, I don't know what that medicine may taste like for Tom Brady. I imagine not so great. But what happens to him, I mean, hearing Mike say this could truly tarnish his legacy, that's huge when I hear that. Do you agree with that?

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brooke, I think absolutely it does. One, that it happened. Two, that he apparently lied that anything happened. Now, they just said that he was generally aware and that may not be true. This is speculation. They said it's more probable than not. What we do know is that this 273-page report listed Tom Brady's name 378 times. They did their due diligence, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Yowsa (ph).

WIRE: We know that they conducted a series of simulations and they found that 13 footballs could be deflated easily in under one minute and 40 seconds, more than enough time for Jim McNally, John Jastremski to be able to deflate those footballs. And I spoke to a current head NFL equipment manager and he said, looking back to Tom Brady's press conference when he denied that he had any wrongdoing in this instance, he said that he and the whole equipment staff were shocked. He said essentially now someone's going to get fired because of this, because what he's essentially saying is that there was a rogue ball boy, a rogue equipment manager doing this on their own. So looking back on it now with the Ted Wells report out, it does look, as it says in the report, more probable than not that Tom Brady had a general awareness of what was happening and was behind it in a sense.

Brooke.

BALDWIN: Just quickly, to end this, Christine, I mean we're talking about maybe firings of ball boys, maybe tarnishing of a legacy of Tom Brady. Does this mean a fine? What kind of punishment?

BRENNAN: Maybe one or two games, you know, next season, which is very significant, Brooke. I have no idea and we're not hearing anything yet from the NFL on that. But they cannot not do something. In other words, something has to happen. This story was so big and took over such - such amount of time and conversation right before the Super Bowl that there has to be a resolution and it seems to me there has to be punishment based on what we're hearing from the report.

BALDWIN: OK. Christine Brennan, and Mike Freeman, and Coy Wire, thank you all so much.

Now this.

A new report provides perhaps the most damning detail yet, that the co-pilot of that doomed Germanwings Flight 9525 committed mass murder. Investigators now believe Andreas Lubitz repeatedly practiced putting that plane into a deadly descent on the flight right before the one that left all 150 people on board dead, including two little babies. This information comes from a preliminary report by the BEA, that's the French agency investigating that March 24th crash. It put forth this graph to explain how Lubitz practiced. And I want

you to take note of all the red at the zero level. You see here? Because that is how often and how long Lubitz, according to this report, set the plane to drop toward 100 feet. The same auto pilot setting Flight 9525 was at when it collided in the French Alps.

The report said Lubitz did these, you could call them dry runs, over a period of five minutes when the pilot had apparently left the cockpit briefly and after air traffic control had directed the plane to go to a lower altitude. With me now, aviation attorney Daniel Rose and CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo, who used to serve as the inspector general for the Department of Transportation.

So, welcome to both of you. I have a lot of questions. So, Mary Schiavo, to you first. The fact that we know this co-pilot repeatedly set that altitude at 100 feet a couple of times during that previous flight, is that something that the folks on the ground, that air traffic control, could have detected, should have detected?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: No, that's a problem because they had already given him an order to descend, or the plane, and the captain ordered to descend. And what they had no way of knowing, because planes right now, why they can be capable of doing it if they subscribe to - the airlines subscribe to the service, while they can be capable of streaming data to the ground, they do not do that. And, of course, the flight data recorder is not downloaded unless there's a crash. So while he was practicing, since he was supposed to be descending, and he did it gradual enough that the pilot was back in the captain using (INAUDIBLE) lab for four minutes, he apparently didn't notice either because there's no discussion when he returns to the cockpit about, hey, what were you doing? So, no, he was free to practice and was undetected.

BALDWIN: And let me follow on that, Daniel, to you also as a pilot, when you're the pilot and you're returning to the cockpit, would there be anything tangible on the screens to indicate that that co-pilot had punched in 100 feet multiple times or no trace?

DANIEL ROSE, AVIATION ATTORNEY & PILOT: Not multiple times. I mean the best you could hope for is that he left the 100 foot in the little window when he did it the last time and forgot to put it back to the altitude that he wanted to. But really nothing -

BALDWIN: That's it.

ROSE: Right.

[14:10:00] BALDWIN: If you plug that in for a descent to 100 feet, what would he be - how would the plane respond? Let me just stay with you, Daniel, how would the plane respond? If - if he had gotten the, you know, command from the ground to start the descent? I suppose then if you place 100 feet in - for altitude, would it begin to descend as well? How - would anyone feel that?

ROSE: No. Well, it depends on the exact mode, but generally what it would be is a two-step process. So if you put in the 100 feet, you still have to hit another button to say activate, I want you to go to 100 feet. The prior altitude that was put in there was much higher. It was probably 34,000, something like that. So the airplane was still flying to that altitude. But you had to turn it to 100 feet and then press another button and say, you know, I changed my mind, I want to go down to 100 feet for it to actually start going down there.

BALDWIN: OK. And then for the doomed flight, the air traffic control, Mary, as we were just reporting, tried to reach the cockpit 11 times. We know that the military got involved, tried to contact them three times. Why would that have happened? What role would these agencies have played there?

SCHIAVO: Well, they're responsible for separating traffic and they need to know where it is. And, of course, on their radar screens, they see that the pilot and the plane are not responding. They would have seen on the radar tracings that its altitude, its flight level was decreasing. And so they have a job to do too. They have to keep planes apart from each other and here was this aircraft doing something that they had not commanded it to do.

And the report, the BEA report, today is very chilling in that it further clarify what we had already heard about the pilot just doggedly going ahead with his - with his plan and they could hear the breathing. But they also indicate that there wasn't a lot of - you know, there wasn't a lot of anything else. He used the side stick controller a couple times. You know, there's a lot of debate over what the report means about the door lockout mechanism. But it was a very driven, calculated move.

BALDWIN: And apparently it was the same crew, I think, that was on the previous flight in that - in that doomed flight.

Final question to you, just with your legal hat on, would any of this new information change the case at all?

ROSE: Not significantly. I think two things you take away, one is it emphasizes you need two people in a cockpit at all times.

BALDWIN: Yes.

ROSE: And, two, you know, this was not a one-off. It wasn't, he showed up for work and said I'm having a bad day, I'm going to - I'm going to drop this plane.

BALDWIN: It appears he thought about it.

ROSE: There's a whole history here. And, you know, Lufthansa and Lufthansa flight training, even here in the U.S., not only knew about it but, you know, made deliberate efforts to work around this known problem. And I think that's going to - that's going to be a problem down the road. They owned it.

BALDWIN: Yes. Yes. Daniel Rose, thank you so much. Mary Schiavo, as always, my thanks to you as well.

Coming up next, those now two of the six officers charged in Baltimore now saying Freddie Gray's knife was indeed illegal and that could change this entire case. We'll speak live with an attorney and someone who knows knives very well from the city of Baltimore.

Plus, just in, the ISIS recruiter linked to the shooter in Texas is now responding to the attack on that cartoon contest there over the weekend. Hear what he's saying.

And breaking news, ISIS forces have just breached the perimeter of a major oil refinery in Iraq.

You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Stay here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:17:25] BALDWIN: You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

To Baltimore we go. The mayor there, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, just announced this new partnership with the Department of Justice. Part of that deal includes asking the federal government to investigate if the city's police department consistently violates civil rights of the people of Baltimore, whether there is quote/unquote a pattern or practice of policing that violating the Fourth Amendment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR STEPHANIE RAWLINGS-BLAKE (D), BALTIMORE: We all know that Baltimore continues to have a fractured relationship between the police and the community. And recent events continue to demonstrate the need to press forward with these reforms. We have to get it right. Failure is not an option.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Also today, two now - two of the officers charged in Freddie Gray's death are making news. Their defense attorneys are challenging the state prosecutor's - the city prosecutor's claim that Gray was illegally arrested. Officer Edward Nero, who is the - one of the officers on a bicycle, and Officer Garrett Miller, both of whom face charges of assault, misconduct, and false imprisonment, want to inspect that knife, Freddie Gray's knife, as part of their client's defenses. They claim Gray's knife did indeed violate Baltimore city code and was justified, that arrest was justified.

Joining me from Baltimore, I have Michael Faith, a sporting goods marketing executive familiar with Maryland state laws as it pertains to knives, and defense attorney and former Baltimore County prosecutor Andy Alperstein.

So, gentlemen, welcome to both of you.

MICHAEL FAITH, MARKETING DIRECTOR, HENDERSHOT'S SPORTING GOODS INC.: Hi.

ANDREW ALPERSTEIN, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

BALDWIN: All right, Michael, let's talk knives first because - and we don't know - we don't know exactly what kind of knife Freddie Gray had apparently inside of his waistband. But what - what do we know about that knife?

FAITH: Right. Well, I can tell you what's legal in Maryland and what's not legal in Maryland. And I have a couple of examples here I'd like to show you. First of all, one of the most popular knives out there is called a fixed-blade knife. This is probably about a four-inch blade. This is perfectly legal in Maryland to have and to carry. OK. We have folding knives, which are very popular. This is a folding knife here. You have to manually open this knife with your thumb, OK? There's no spring assist. So you can see, it doesn't come up any faster than I move my thumb, and it locks into place. People carry these knives all the time. That's a legal knife in Maryland.

This is actually my own personal pocket knife I carry every day. Again, perfectly legal. There's no spring in it. I have to open that with my thumb. And it only opens as quickly as I can open the knife. Now, I can open that pretty quickly because I've used it a lot of times.

Where we come into kind of a gray area or a question mark possibly is a spring-assisted knife. Again, when you look at Maryland's law, this is a legal knife in Maryland. There is a spring mechanism inside of this that when I barely push it, it comes the rest of the way open. That's not a switchblade or an automatic knife. That's called a spring assisted knife. The difference between this knife and what you would call as switch blade or an automatic knife is that there is no - I don't have to touch the blade to open it. If there were a button here that I could push without touching the blade, that would open that blade, that would be considered an automatic knife, it would be banned in Maryland. Like I said, this is a spring-assisted knife. I have to touch the blade to get it open. It comes open the rest of the way.

[14:20:28] BALDWIN: OK, but here's the deal. Let me just jump in, and, Andy, I you're your voice as well. But, Michael, everything that I've read today is that there are certain kind of knives that are legal or illegal in the state of Maryland, right? So it was Marilyn Mosby, the state's attorney, who stood on those steps of the war memorial on Friday and said it was legal, his knife, in the state of Maryland. But then you have the police officers who say it was illegal under Baltimore city code. There is a difference, is there not?

FAITH: That is correct. And Andy could probably speak better for that answer because I don't know much about Baltimore city knives.

BALDWIN: Andy, hop in.

ALPERSTEIN: All right, yes, let me - let me do this. So Maryland's got a statewide law, that's the law in all of Maryland, including Baltimore city, and that law says that it's illegal to have a switchblade. Each jurisdiction, Baltimore city being one of them, can pass its own laws. And Baltimore city has a law that says it's not only illegal to have a switchblade, but it's also illegal to have a spring action knife. Now, that would be the knife that Michael just showed us, the fourth knife, because it springs open. It's a spring- assisted knife. The issue in the Gray case is that the police that arrested Gray, that's Officer Nero and Officer Miller, they arrested Gray and they charge him with the city code violation that says that he had a spring assisted knife. That's in the charging papers and ultimately led to a charge being issued by the district court here. So that's what they charged Gray with. Ms. Mosby gives the charging explanation on Friday and the charging documents say this was not a violation of Maryland law, that is what Mr. Gray did is not a violation of Maryland law because it was not a switchblade knife.

BALDWIN: Is it possible that they both could be correct?

ALPERSTEIN: Is it - well, I mean, ultimately the issue is going to be, one, is the knife a spring-assisted knife or a switchblade knife? What is it? And that's why motions were filed to inspect the evidence this week. And, number two, even if it were that this knife was legal, if the officers had a good-faith basis to believe that the knife was legal, then again, how do you charge a police officer when they did that?

And then the next layer of it is, the back-up officer who, you know, one of them saw the knife. The other one arrested Gray because the first guy said, get him, or whatever their code is, take him, and what's he supposed to do, stop and say I need to inspect the evidence before I effectuate the arrest? I mean that would lead to a preposterous result.

BALDWIN: Hmm, what are - I'm curious, what are Baltimore City Police officers telling you about all this now, Andy?

ALPERSTEIN: Well, I know a lot of police officers in Baltimore city, because I practice criminal defense and our firm represents police officers sometimes and I have friends that are police officers. It's not, you know, blue fever. We don't want to go to court or we don't want to do our job. What it is, is the police are afraid. I mean a lot of them are afraid because in cases every day in this country, police are challenged for constitutional defects if their charging. Is it a bad search, is it a bad arrest, is it a bad statement? And we hear about this stuff all the time.

The consequences typically, for that kind of failure by the government, are exclusion of the evidence. That's the law in this whole country. And sometimes it leads to the state being not able to prove its case.

Now, in this case, the prosecutor's gone further, much further. What she said is, if you violate the law by arresting these people falsely, then we're going to charge you with assault for touching them, false imprisonment for imprisoning them, and in this case, for Officers Miller and Nero, they're also charged with misconduct in office, which is an extension of the same acts. So this is very troubling and the police are worried about it. And they're - you know, I'm not saying widespread police aren't arresting people, but I'm having police tell me, hey, I'm hesitating. It has a chilling effect on the police doing their job.

BALDWIN: I have heard that.

ALPERSTEIN: I mean, look, I challenge (ph) what they do every day.

BALDWIN: I have heard that in the wake of the other cases we've covered nationally, the chilling effect. It is a real thing. And I'm hearing it from you as well, from you - people you know who are officers.

Final question to you, Andy, just on a different tangent of this whole story is that, you know, Marilyn Mosby is also taking a hit over how quickly, you know, this whole investigation was done, that it wasn't, you know, according to some of what I've read, not entirely finished. And those mistakes, including, you know, the names and addresses of those officers charged in the report. What do you make of that?

ALPERSTEIN: Well, I know that the lawyers were contacted by the prosecutor's office, because they all had lawyers before the charges were issued. I mean this is an ongoing investigation.

BALDWIN: Sure.

ALPERSTEIN: And they had an order passed where their addresses were to be shielded. They put - the court, or the state, I'm not sure which, still released some of the officers' addresses. Some of the addresses were actually people of similar names but they had the wrong people's addresses which, you know, this could be a real safety issue for those people. I think that happened in two of the cases.

[14:25:08] Then we're hear - you know, I'm looking at this charging paper, like I said earlier, and they're addressing city -- they're not addressing the city code provision when they're talking about these two arresting officers, they're talking about the state law provision. So you sure wonder whether or not if there was some time that this state's attorney's office sat on this and did what normally happens, I would, you know, come together in a more thoughtful way.

Now, I will say this. I expected an indictment would happen before this preliminary hearing date scheduled later in the month. And the state does have an opportunity to clean up the charges if they want. I'm sure they're going to present these felony charges to the grand jury before then.

BALDWIN: OK.

ALPERSTEIN: That's the normal course of cases like this. And when that happens, it may be a chance for them to clean things up if they've rushed to it. Now, look, they do arrest people all the time for homicides. You know, a policeman gets probable cause. They go lock it up. They don't wait for an indictment initially all the time.

BALDWIN: Got it.

ALPERSTEIN: But in an ongoing investigation, you think the state's attorney's office would work on this for a long time.

BALDWIN: We'll wait to see what happens with the grand jury and potential indictments.

ALPERSTEIN: Yes.

BALDWIN: Andy Alperstein, thank you so much. And, Michael Faith, appreciate it.

FAITH: Of course. Thank you (INAUDIBLE).

BALDWIN: Just ahead, Prince, anyone? Yes, this guy. Prince, the singer, putting on a concert this weekend for Baltimore. Hear who else may be attending and why he wants to be there.

Plus, one of the suspects in the Texas terror attack was in contact with a social media expert for the terror group ISIS. That man is now speaking out. Hear what he says in chilling threats, next.

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