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South Carolina Confederate Flag Taken Down; OPM Director Steps Down After Data Breach; Hillary Clinton Facing Backlash over Private E-mail Server. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired July 10, 2015 - 13:30   ET

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

[13:30:00] REP. JOHN LEWIS, (D), GEORGIA: To see the flag come down, I almost cried. It reminded me of another period when I was in Africa back in 1964, in Zambia, to see the British flag come down and the Zambian flag go up. It was a day of independence.

I think what happened in South Carolina today tends to send a message to the rest of the south but to our nation and especially to people in Washington that we, do must join this movement to free and liberate ourselves from the past. In the final analysis, we're one people, one America, we all live in the same house, the American house. And it doesn't matter whether we are black or white, Latino, Asian American or Native American, it doesn't matter whether we're from the north or the south, the east or the West, we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters. As Dr. King said, if not, we will perish as fools. We must live under the United States of America flag.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: I have to play part of this speech that you gave on the House floor, Congressman. You were standing next a picture of the policeman who beat you in Selma, Alabama, and he had a Confederate flag emblem on his helmet. Here's what you said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEWIS: There's no way the federal government should ever display this flag on any federal site or sail it on federal property. It is a symbol of division. It's a symbol of separation. It's a symbol of hate. It is a relic of our dark past. We must defeat every attempt to return this flag to federal property.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Do you see this in a way coming full circumstance? You see that picture of a flag on the helmet of that police officer and then today we see the flag coming down. Or do you see this as just the beginning because there are so many other states who are -- whose -- who have this flag or even their personal flag is inspired by the Confederate flag?

LEWIS: Well, I see this as a significant step, a major step down a very, very long road. We're not there yet but we will get there. It is my hope that other states, cities and counties and even here in Washington in federal parks and lands that we will take a look inward and do what we can as a people to set our own house in order.

KEILAR: Donna, where do you see things going from here? Especially on this day that I know holds a lot of meaning for you as well.

DONNA BRAZILE, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, yes, and I wanted to say once again -- and I know he's heard it from me and others -- but I want to say thank you, John Lewis. You have been just an amazing role model. You have been a man who has continued to fight that dream that Dr. King had. You have opened your doors and you have helped lead the way. So thank you, Congressman John Lewis for your tremendous leadership. I hope this leads to healing, the healing that we often talk about but many of us don't go near it, whether it's state lawmakers, federal lawmakers, city councils, others, this is a moment that South Carolina has showed us the way and I think we should follow in their footsteps to take down the flag to remember those who perished just 23 days ago, the people of Mother Emanuel. Let us also grieve and remember their sacrifices and their loss and begin this healing process starting now.

KEILAR: A big day.

And thank you so much to both of you for joining us. Donna Brazile and Congressman John Lewis, really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

KEILAR: We have breaking news. Embattled Office of Personnel Management director, Katherine Archuleta, stepping down after a massive hack exposed the personal information of more than 20 million people. We'll have the details next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:38:23] KEILAR: We have breaking news now in that massive hack of the government's Office of Personnel Management, which is basically H.R. for the entire federal government. We now are learning that the director of OPM is out of there, gone.

And joining me to talk about it is CNN justice reporter, Evan Perez.

Evan, this is quite a turn here because just this morning, Katherine Archuleta, as we understood it, she wasn't stepping down, she seemed what defiant in these hearings. What changed?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. I think the calculus changed because the politics were getting worse and worse, frankly, by the hour. We had the first Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, Senator, who called for her departure, for her to step down and you had some of the unions who are starting to now call for her to go and frankly I think the administration realized she had become a liability, especially because the facts of this hack are just getting worse and worse. Now we are up to 22.1 million people who are affected, according to OPM, that's 21.5 million background checks. This is intimate details about people's sex lives, about their medical and their mental health histories. These are things that are golden for a foreign intelligence agency that can use them for black hail. This is a serious hack. Very serious attack on the U.S. government.

I'll tell you Archuleta sent out a statement this morning in which she said that, "This morning I offered and the president accepted my resignation as director of the Office of Personnel Management. I conveyed to the president that I believed it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in."

Brianna, this is certainly the worst breach in U.S. government History. And we now know that OPM should have seen this coming because they've been hacked five times since mid-2012. That's according to information that the agency has provided the lawmakers. This is plenty of stuff that they should have done more to safeguard this very important information. Now they're still trying to assess how bad the damage is.

KEILAR: It's almost in a way, right, like OPM sort of left the door unlocked. Because they could have done some things beforehand and they were just counting on the fact that maybe someone wouldn't try or a country wouldn't try to hack in, which was sort of ridiculous considering they already had tried, right, Evan?

[11:40:48] PEREZ: Right, exactly. Five times since mid-2012. One of the times they found that OPM had left a road map to some of their software, critical software systems, they left it on an unsecure web site available openly on the internet. This is stuff that was golden for hackers to use to get into the system. That's what they found. And for people who are affected by this, they're now going to have to have years of credit monitoring. They're going to have to be wondering whether or not they're getting a fishing e-mail from somebody who is a Chinese spy. That's what they'll have to be worried about. This is private information that people provide in order to get entrusted with some of the governments most important secrets and they've been betrayed by the government because the government wasn't taking care to safeguard their information -- Brianna?

KEILAR: Wow. Evan Perez, thanks so much for your report.

Coming up, the shooting death of a woman allegedly by an undocumented immigrant who'd been deported five times has fuelled the immigration debate. San Francisco sheriff speaking out today. We have details next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:46:06] KEILAR: This is a case that has drawn the attention of presidential candidates. It stirred up immigration laws debate in the U.S. Kate Steinle was walking along a San Francisco pier when she was struck by a bullet and died. The man charged with her death is a repeat felon who has been deported to Mexico five times.

Federal immigration officials say he would have been deported again but the San Francisco Sheriff's Department failed to tell them he was being released. But in a news conference a short time ago, the sheriff's department disagreed with that assessment.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROSS MIRKARIMI, SHERIFF, SAN FRANCISCO SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT: Mr. Lopez Sanchez was ICE's highest priority due to previous felony convictions and prior deportations. However, as I contend and will continue to do so, ICE failed to obtain and provide a warrant or judicial order for such deportation proceedings. Why would they have completely ignored the 20-year-old bench warrant for marijuana possession and sales previously and then had deported him and this time they decide that this warrant required a detour from their normal procedure?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Let's discuss this case now. Joining me now we have Paul Butler, a law professor at the Georgetown Law School, and we have defense attorney, Scott Bolden.

So there's a lot of finger pointing here going on, gentlemen, that's very clear.

Paul, you were a federal prosecutor. According to this law, who I right? Should San Francisco have reached out to ICE? I would suspect not because it's a sanctuary city, right? Or should ICE have figured out a way to deal with this knowing there were old warrants?

PAUL BUTLER, LAW PROFESSOR, GEORGE TOWN LAW SCHOOL: Well, ICE certainly could have gotten a warrant. San Francisco's position is, look, this guy was being held for a 20-year-old charge for selling $20 worth of marijuana. San Francisco doesn't prosecute cases like that so they had to lets him go. In order to continue to detain him, they say the fourth amendment requires a warrant. So all ICE had to do is to get a bench warrant to maintain him in the jail so I don't think they're wrong to say that the system broke down. Part of it is law enforcement, local law enforcement officer, like cops, aren't supposed to be enforcing federal immigration law. So we really do need more coherence to our immigration policy.

KEILAR: Scott, what do you think? You're looking at this. Who really should have stepped in here, especially knowing that he had been deported five times?

SCOTT BOLDEN, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Well, the local authorities certainly should have had that information somewhere. But the bottom line is, as Paul said, there's got to be better communication between the feds and local police and there is at several levels. They have to communicate whether it's a warrant, someone legal or illegal. That information given the number of visits to the criminal justice system by Sanchez, that information had to be available somewhere on the computer, on the printouts, on his record somewhere. And soy think there was a breakdown on both sides and while there may be finger pointing, the bottom line is Sanchez slipped through the cracks and now we have a dead young woman because this individual but for this individual being in this country she'd be alive.

KEILAR: You say both sides to blame here. And this is such an important issue. It's caught the attention of presidential candidates.

Gentleman, thanks so much. Paul and Scott, appreciate you being with us. BUTLER: Thank you.

BOLDEN: Thank you for having me.

KEILAR: Just ahead, Hillary Clinton facing more backlash over her use of a private e-mail account. She said she never had a subpoena. But the lawmaker leading the Benghazi investigation sent her one. We'll hear from him next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:53:50] KEILAR: Hillary Clinton is facing backlash over her private e-mail while secretary of state. It's her own words that are causing problems. In my interview with Clinton, she said, "I never had a subpoena." In fact, Clinton did receive a subpoena from the chairman of the House Select Committee, Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy. A spokesperson for Clinton clarifying after the interview that she was saying she hadn't had a subpoena when she wiped her server of her e-mails, that the subpoena came after.

I talked with Trey Gowdy earlier about Clinton's claim.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Congressman Trey Gowdy is joining me now from Capitol Hill.

Congressman, I want you to listen to exactly what Hillary Clinton said about whether she had been subpoenaed over her e-mails.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE & FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: I've never had a subpoena. Again, let's take a deep breath here. Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system. Now, I didn't have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[11:55:10] KEILAR: Now, let's take this by parts, shall we. I asked her in the interview about some legal advice that a Democratic attorney general of the state had said to CNN, which was, look, no lawyer is going to tell that you you should be wiping your server when you're facing a subpoena. So her campaign says at the time that she's answering to the fact that she did not wipe her server while facing a subpoena, the impression there that they are giving is that this happened before that. But what she said was, "I've never had a subpoena." So do you believe this, that she misspoke or that something else is going on?

REP. TREY GOWDY, (R-SC), CHAIRMAN, HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON BENGHAZI: Well, Brianna, I have no idea what she meant. I know what she said. She never said she had a subpoena. That is demonstratively false. There were also subpoenas prior to the one we issued in March of 1025. There's also a regulatory or statutory obligation for records. And when there is a congressional investigation, you also have an obligation to preserve records. There are three separate legal obligations that should have informed and instructed her not to delete e-mails or wipe her server clean.

KEILAR: She also said, "I didn't have to turn over anything." What do you make of that?

GOWDY: It's just wrong. I can put some adjectives in front of it but I'm not going to. It's just flat-out wrong. You have an obligation to preserve the public record. That's why the president put out the policy that he put out. That's why the State Department put out its cable, don't use personal e-mail, which applied to everyone other than her. You don't have to go into public service. You don't have to do it. But when you do and you create official records, you have to keep those records for FOIA, for the public, for congressional investigations, you have an obligation to do so. And she kept these for 20 months on her personal server, never thought about deleting them until we got into the throes of an investigation and then, after 20 months, she decided, this is too burdensome to keep on my server, let me wipe it clean.

KEILAR: Are you saying that she's a liar?

GOWDY: I don't use that word. I got in trouble when I was in court for saying that word.

KEILAR: Are you saying she lied?

GOWDY: I'm saying that it is false and she should have known what she said was false at the time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: I asked about the widening scope of the Benghazi investigation, his investigation and whether it had become too political. He said the Obama administration could speed things up by turning over all of the relevant documents.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOWDY: We have narrowed what we asked for. We asked for what we really need the first time. They begged us to narrow it, so we narrowed it. It's still like pulling teeth to get the information. You know what we got last week? 3600 pages, half of which were press clippings, including articles about Richard Gere. So if that is their idea of complying with the congressional investigation, then we are going to be at this for a long time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: CNN, the first to report those details from Congressman Gowdy about the latest documents his committee has received from the State Department.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OMAR SHARIF, ACTOR: Truly for some men, nothing is written unless they write it.

PETER O'TOOLE, ACTOR: It's better.

SHARIF: True.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: To other news now, famed actor, Omar Sharif, has died after suffering a heart attack in Cairo, Egypt. He's best known for his roles in such iconic films like "Lawrence of Arabia." The Egyptian- born actor starred in a slew of motion pictures after that, but his passion was for the game of Bridge. He was known as one of the world's greatest players and he was a great ambassador for the game as well. Omar Sharif was 83 years old.

And there's an exodus of sorts from Tunisia. Today, thousands of British tourists are leaving the country one day after the foreign office issued a warning that another terror attack there is highly likely. ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 38 people last month in the beach resort of Sousse. 30 of those victims were British. Ireland, which lost three of its citizens in the shooting, also issued a travel advisory, warning against non-essential travel to Tunisia.

And that is it for me. Thanks so much for watching. I'll be right back here at 5:00 p.m. eastern on "The Situation Room."

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers in North America, "Newsroom" with Brooke Baldwin starts right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: Brianna Keilar, thank you so much.

Happy Friday to you all. I'm Brooke Baldwin.