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Don Lemon Tonight

San Bernardino Shooting Investigation. Aired 11p-Midnight ET

Aired December 03, 2015 - 23:00   ET

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


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[23:00:29] DON LEMON, HOST OF "CNN TONIGHT": It is 11:00 p.m. on the East Coast, 8:00 p.m. in San Bernardino where investigators are desperately trying to piece together clues to yesterday's deadly mass shooting. This is "CNN Tonight". I'm Don Lemon.

This is the face of a mass killer. Law enforcement sources say Syed Rizwan Farook appears to have been radicalized but they still don't know why he and his wife slaughtered 14 of his coworkers. This is what we do know right now, the killers had turned their home into what amounts to be a home lab with thousands of rounds of ammunition and numerous pipe bombs. Chillingly, they apparently lived there along with their six-month old daughter.

I want to turn now to the investigation and some new information that Pamela Brown is getting for us. Pamela Brown, what are your sources telling you tonight about a possible motive in this case?

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, that is still unclear and what they are hoping for is to get the contents from their electronics and we have learned, Don, that were two cellphones that were damaged they believe belong to this couple that were found in a trashcan at one of the crime scenes. Those cellphones are being sent back to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, if they're not already there, being analyzed. So they are hoping to get the contents from that.

And also, we have learned that while investigators found a computer in the home, the hard drive belonging to that computer is missing. So they have to -- investigators have to issue a subpoena for electronics information content from the big providers. They are waiting on that right now last we heard

All of this will be crucial because from what evidence investigators are looking at now, there is nothing to indicate a clear-cut motive, as one source I spoke said this does not fit neatly into a box. There are suspicions, possible indications. They could have been radicalized but nothing to substantiate that. We know that Syed Farook had been in touched with terrorism subjects over the last several years but these are people who have not been arrested and there were not recent communications were told indicating that there was attack planning.

So there is still a lot to uncover in this investigation. I have to tell you, Don, officials I've been speaking with say this is a very unusual case.

LEMON: So this is just the -- what you mentioned about the phone and the hard drive and what have you, that's the new evidence, right? That's all we know about the new evidence that has come in, right?

BROWN: That's right. I mean there is also other electronics we heard that they are looking at as well. But specifically, there were these two damaged cellphones, the hard drive that is missing.

LEMON: OK.

BROWN: And so this leads investigators to believe clearly they're trying to hide something here.

LEMON: OK. Let's talk about him because you are saying, you know, a motive. I can't really figure it out. They're still working on it. They haven't ruled out terrorism. But he wasn't on any terrorist -- terror watch list or anything like that. What do you know about people he may have been communicating with, Pam?

BROWN: That's absolutely right, Don. So he wasn't on a watch list. He wasn't on their radar which is part of the reason why it's still so perplexing to investigators right now because they just didn't have anything on this couple. We have learned that telephonically he was -- Syed Farook had been in touch with multiple people that the FBI had been investigating for possible ties to international terrorism. But I'm told that these were loose soft connections, that they weren't frequent communication, that they weren't very recent in terms of the last few months they had been communicating. And so, at this point, investigators don't feel like that is significant.

Now, once they learned a little bit more about the communication, that could change. And of course they are going to want to talk to these people if they haven't already to figure out what the interaction was. But at this point, it hasn't been telling or at least telling enough for them to determine whether or not this was terrorism.

LEMON: Let's discuss now some overseas trip that Farook took, Pamela.