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Iraqi Security Forces And Militia Fighters Currently On Southern Edge Of Ramadi; Air France Jet Has Near-Miss With A Volcano; Severe Heat Wave In India; New Information On IRS Data Hack. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired May 27, 2015 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00] ERIC GUSTER, CRIMINAL AND CIVIL TRIAL ATTORNEY: Not criminally insane. There's a defense between crazy and criminally insane. And that's what people don't understand. In my opinion, you have to be crazy to go in a theater and shoot everyone. However, you may not be criminally insane, which means you did not appreciate what you were doing. You did not appreciate the gravity of the offense. So I don't think he's criminally insane. And I don't think this jury would let him off.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN HOST: Let me jump back to you, but of course, one piece of this is his psychiatrist, right, because she's going to testify. She's going to play a huge role here because w know that he actually had -- I remember when we were covering the story and we found out that he actually sent this notebook to her eight days before opening fire on that movie theater, you know, warning police of a suicidal thoughts. The package with the notebook held $400 worth of burned $20 bills, a sticky note bearing an infinity-like symbol. She's testifying. How does the play in this whole thing?

ROBERT SCHALK, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, she's going to start laying the ground work for any potential treatment or any diagnoses or any issues he had that predated the shooting to try to establish. Listen. Something was happening prior to the date of the murders. That he had some sort of mental psychosis, he had some sort of diagnosis. But again, as Eric pointed out, the most difficult thing that they're going to have to overcome is he didn't appreciate what he was doing was wrong, and he didn't appreciate his actions. The fact that he wore tactical gear, parked his car in a specific place --

BALDWIN: Doesn't that say thinking ahead to you?

SCHALK: Correct. So the cross examination of that doctor is going to be very fruitful for points the prosecution is going to be able to make. Granted, you're saying he had these issues. They predated everything. But let's look it like this. He wore this gear. He had a getaway. He booby trapped his apartment. This was planned out. So they're going to be able to cross examine her where she's going to have to agree with very important points.

GUSTER: You have a good point as far as what happened before this. You know, criminal insanity, it is typically a very long process. It doesn't just start on April 1st. It's a very long process. If they can show that he had some type of mental diagnosis along before this, not his self-diagnosis --

BALDWIN: But something on record.

GUSTER: Yes, it's kind of like a setup, in my opinion. It appears like he's trying to set up his criminal defense with this notebook. I'm going to write these things out. And when I get caught, you know, they're going to show that -- this is going to show that I'm insane.

SCHALK: He's an educated guy. He's a doctoral student. This isn't some guy who flunked out of high school sitting in his mom's basement.

GUSTER: Exactly.

BALDWIN: Who went and shot of all these people.

Bob Schalk, Eric Guster, thank you both very much. We'll follow this trial closely as we have been out of Colorado.

Meantime, a plane flying around a storm got incredibly close to an active volcano. Have you heard about this? We'll talk about this coming up.

Also ahead, we're getting some breaking information about the raid that took down an ISIS leader and the intel the United States received. We'll be right back.

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[15:37:09] BALDWIN: Got some news just into us here at CNN pertaining to this raid recently in Syria. Turns outs that the U.S. special ops raid in an ISIS compound in Syria resulted in a much larger haul of ISIS information than previously expected. U.S. official telling CNN they have now determined the raid that killed ISIS commander Abu Sayyaf, a man known as the chief financial officer, netted thousands of gigabytes worth of data in external hard drives and hard copy. Right now the U.S. is going through all of this to see exactly what's there and if it will lead to information that will help them in the war on ISIS.

Meantime, officials tell CNN that Iraqi security forces and militia fighters are currently on the southern edge of the city of Ramadi and are now gained control of the University of Anbar, battles breaking out on the outskirts of that city.

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BALDWIN: But this isn't just Ramadi here. There's a much larger war taking place across Anbar province, battles erupting in and around these cities, ISIS still getting the upper hand in a number of places. We now know 30 Iraqi soldiers were killed after a triple suicide attack at an outpost between the cities of karma Fallujah.

I have Michael O'Hanlon with me. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of "Bending History, Barack Obama's foreign policy."

So Michael, good to see you.

MICHAEL O'HANLON, SENIOR FELLOW, THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTE: Nice to be with you.

BALDWIN: Got a lot to get through, but first, back to this, you know, new information. As far as what, you know, U.S. has with this, you know, raid, this special ops raid getting thousands of gigabytes worth of data here, what kind of information do you think they might have?

O'HANLON: Well, it's a great question, but my first reaction after being intrigue and maybe slightly encouraged is to think the information must not be that good.

BALDWIN: Why do you think that?

O'HANLON: If they thought it was that good, they wouldn't be telling you and me about it before they could act on it. In other words, if this consisted of locations of other key leaders, for example, wouldn't we want to reserve the option of going in with another delta raid to go after them? So presumably, there isn't that kind of a gold mine. It's probably going to be more circumstantial information, maybe records of financial dealings, maybe names of people who are affiliated with this. Maybe some key crossing point information about parts of the Turkish Syrian border where people get through, I don't know. The kind of stuff that's going to be useful, but it's not going to be, you know, the smoking gun that lets you take out the number two guy tomorrow.

BALDWIN: Got it. On politics, then into military strategy, but in politics, it was Rand Paul who recently essentially blamed the hawks within his own party. And he put actually Hillary Clinton in that camp, you know, that U.S. weapons and tanks that were used in the Iraq war are now in the hands of ISIS. Do you think Senator Paul has a point?

[15:40:10] O'HANLON: Well, there's no doubt that it's horrible that that happened. There's no doubt that multiple mistakes happened along the way by both of the last two administrations that led to that outcome. But I'm not sure once we launched the Iraq war, which is a debate I assume Senator Paul is not asking to re-litigate because that's happening all the time anyway without him. Once you made that initial decision, the original sin, so to speak or whatever, from that point onward, you had to build an Iraqi army. And you weren't going to build it with just light weapons. They had to have some kind of capability.

So the real problem was not holding it together in more recent times both militarily and politically. And of course, that problem begins with how the former Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq abused and misused his military, put his cronies in leadership positions, created this climate and this culture where the Iraqi army melted away at the first sign of trouble in the last 12 months. That's what really created the problem here. I don't know how you blame Hillary Clinton or Marco Rubio for that, but I guess Senator Paul can try.

BALDWIN: OK. That said, militarily speaking, you know, when you hear about what ISIS has and how they are seem to be a lot of time in these battles like two steps ahead. I was reading that there were 30 car bombs detonated in the Ramadi city center, 10 of them similar to the Oklahoma City truck bomb, just to give people perspective, right, of how they're fighting. In order to stop them, Michael, what are the tactics needed?

O'HANLON: Well, you make a very good point. And so, part of what's happened here is that ISIL has been using more effective and frankly more intimidating tactics that just scare people. And the multiple truck bomb issue is obviously a way to in simulated. It's just like a psychological effect as well as a military one, exactly.

So, one of the things you have to do is obviously prepare for forces for this kind of scenario and train through this kind of a scenario. And obviously, if you're within 100 yards of that kind of bomb, you're not going to survive it. But if you're further away, you have to regroup. Easy for me to say sitting in this chair, but that's what training is all about. So you have to train the Iraqi military against those kinds of tactics.

Also, you have to figure out what kind of sanctuaries ISIL is using to make these kinds of giant weapons. Maybe the computer files you talked about a few minutes ago over the border in Syria will help a little bit with that. But ultimately, it's a reason why you can't give a group like this a large sanctuary. You have to start chipping away at that sanctuary. I think it would be important to do so with some tactics of our own, especially the Iraqis' owned tactics, that are aggressive and unexpected and produce some shock effects in ISIL's mind so that we can try to, you know, push them back in a way that they don't see coming in multiple cities simultaneously. And I would not be averse to seeing American Special Forces contribute to those kinds of raids in support of Iraqi special forces.

BALDWIN: That's precisely what I heard last hour from a colonel saying the U.S. more in an adviser role and getting beyond the wire training some of these forces.

Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, author of "Bending History, Barack Obama's foreign policy," thank you, sir, so much.

O'HANLON: My pleasure. Thank you.

BALDWIN: Talk about a close call in the skies. It's now under investigation after this air France passenger jet had a near miss with a volcano earlier this month. You heard me, an active volcano. It was during a short flight from Equatorial Guinea to Cameroon in Africa, pilot stood off their normal route to avoid thunder storm. But as they approached their destination, the city of (INAUDIBLE), they had a much too close for comfort encounter with Mt. Cameroon, an active volcano. The pull-up alarm began to sound, and the pilots ascended just in the nick of time.

CNN's safety analyst and former FAA safety inspector David Soucie is with me. Davis Soucie, I mean, I've never heard of anything like this before.

Perhaps you have with regard to an active volcano. I mean, do we know how close this plane got?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Well, it went down to 9,000 feet. And for the ground proximity warning to come out, now remember, though, that the aircraft ground proximity warning points forward. So it sees it as it's coming. It's not like it's looking straight down. So, it sees the possibility of intersecting with the mountain. Intersecting would the term to use. But nonetheless, the warning system work. The pilot responded the way he did. The question here is why was he there? Was he going under the clouds? What exactly caused this to happen? And that's what's going to take some investigating.

BALDWIN: If you're a pilot, though, and you are taking off in a particular part of the world, wouldn't you familiarize with yourself with potential, shall we call a volcano hazard, in a potential flight path?

SOUCIE: Absolutely. This shouldn't be a surprise. I mean, to say there's a near miss with a volcano, it's like, what, are you flying along saying, my God, there's a volcano in front of me. You know this terrain. You know exactly what's happening.

Now, in their defense, though, if you have a thunderstorm in front of you and it's too big to get over and it is too wide to get around without running out of fuel, he may have only had that option or thought he only had that option. But you always have the option of turning around. You always try to fly forward and straight through it before you make the maneuver to turn around because it makes you more vulnerable. But at this point, if you've had to descend to 9,000 feet to get through a thunderstorm, you should have thought about that earlier, and you should certainly have known that what the terrain was ahead of you.

[15:45:34] BALDWIN: Here's my final question because I'm thinking of -- I were on that plane. I'm thinking of the passengers. And if you're going from 13,000 feet down to 9,000 feet, what does that feel like if you're sitting on that plane?

SOUCIE: Well, that descent is probably a controlled descent. You're going to know you're descending, but it wasn't a rapid descending as in, you know, some kind of emergency it descend. It was probably around 1800 feet per second, which are permitted, which is slow enough where it's comfortable, but you would know you're descending. And you see the mountains coming up around you. So it could be concerning, very concerning to those looking out the window. But certainly, the ground proximity warning worked. The pilot pulled up in time. And fortunately, there was no further damage to the aircraft or the people on board.

BALDWIN: David Soucie, thank you.

Next, more than a thousand people have died in blistering heat. I'm talking 120 degrees. And it doesn't even dip when the sun goes down. Why so many people are dying and where is the help? You're watching CNN.

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[15:51:07] BALDWIN: The heat wave in India is so severe, the roads are warping. More than 1,400 people have died in less than a week, mostly from dehydration and sunstroke. The most severe temperatures soaring to 117 degrees Fahrenheit, many of the dead are homeless or from poorer communities without electricity or running water. So we want to take you to (INAUDIBLE), there in India.

Mallika Kapur is there. And this is the joint capital of two of the worst states I know hit by the heat. So we're talking 117 degrees, Mallika. How are people coping with this?

MALLIKA KAPUR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's difficult, Brooke. We spent the day in one of the villages that's been terribly hit. The District of Nalunda (ph) where government officials tell us more than 70 people have died in just one district alone. And it was really, really hot, you know, temperatures were about 117 degrees Fahrenheit today. And there is a very thick, strong, hot wind. It is windy right now, but during the day, the wind is really hot, which makes it feel much hotter than even 107 degrees.

People are finding it hard to cope, especially in rural areas. This heat wave is definitely hitting the poorest of the poor the hardest. Now, the government is issuing an advisory to people. A long list of do's and don'ts telling them, don't step out of the house during the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 4 p.m. Stay indoors. Drink glass of water. Stay hydrated.

But it's easier said than done because many people in India don't have that choice. They have to go out to work. Farmers have to go out into the field to make a living. Construction workers have to go to the construction site. Otherwise, they don't get their wages for day. If they don't get the wages for a day, they aren't able to feed their families.

So it is a tough situation. A lot of people don't have the choice. They have to go out and work. And also what we saw in the villages today is how much -- the effect of the shortage of power. You know, a lot of homes do have fans. But the fans barely work for a few hours a day because of the mass power shortage in India. So it is tough situation all around.

BALDWIN: I'm sure it's still warm where you are after 1:00 in the morning there in (INAUDIBLE).

Thank you so much for joining me, Mallika Kapur in India.

Next, we have some breaking news involving that IRS breach that exposed thousands of American tax returns. We now have a good idea who may have been behind this next.

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[15:57:48] BALDWIN: All right, before I let you go, I want to tell you about some breaking news just in to us. New information on that IRS data theft that allowed criminals to steal the tax returns of more than 100,000 people.

I have got Chris Frates with our investigative units joining me now. And what have you learned, Chris Frates?

CHRIS FRATES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Brooke. What we've learned is that the IRS now believes that this attack originated in Russia. Now remember, the IRS said yesterday that 100,000 taxpayers' tax returns were accessed by what they called a criminal syndicate. And they said this criminal syndicate had some taxpayer information already, things like Social Security numbers, addresses. They were able to use that information that they had obtained elsewhere to get into the IRS system and then access the tax returns of 100,000 papers. They then used the information in those forms to get fraudulent tax returns and the IRS had $50 million worth of fraudulent tax returns before they realized that they had this problem.

Now, this is early in the investigation. The IRS criminal unit is investigating and also the treasury inspector general is looking into this. The IRS also told the department of homeland security about this.

And the other thing to note here, Brooke, is that the IRS has been warned for years about their data security. It goes back a long time and this is an issue. And lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to know how did criminals access this information, why wasn't it better protected? So we're getting new information here that the IRS believes this attack originated in Russia. However, there's lots of questions still left on the table. I don't think we've heard the end of this, on Capitol Hill or frankly elsewhere.

BALDWIN: Yes, they have to figure out why and how to make sure they can shut it down and know that it never, ever happens again. Again, tax returns, more than 100,000 people originating in Russia, according to these two sources briefed on this data theft.

Chris Frates, thank you so much. I appreciate it from our CNN investigative unit there in Washington D.C.

And that does it for me today on this Wednesday. I'm Brooke Baldwin here in New York. We're going to send it to my colleague, Jake Tapper, in Washington. "The LEAD" starts right now.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST, THE LEAD: More rain falling in Texas as officials worry they could find even more bodies tangled in the storm.

I'm Jake Tapper. This it "THE LEAD."