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Republicans Prep for Last Face-Off of 2015; Ted Cruz Surges, GOP Rivals Attack; President Obama Makes Rare Visit to Pentagon; How Paris Ringleader Directed Attacks?; Female Killer's Visa Process Under Scrutiny; FBI Probes Vandalism of California Mosques; Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired December 14, 2015 - 10:00   ET

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

[10:00:05] CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

Republicans are bracing for their final presidential debate of 2015. And here's a glimpse inside the Venetian in Las Vegas. It looks like right now Ted Cruz is the candidate holding the hot hand, he's surging in Iowa just 15 days before its all-important caucuses.

And nationally Cruz is also gaining steam. In a new NBC News-"Wall Street Journal" poll Cruz has raked in another 12 points, he's up 12 points since October. Ben Carson is fading, though. He's in fourth place. Cruz's surge means he's now wearing a big bull's eye on tomorrow's stage.

CNN's Athena Jones live in Las Vegas to tell us more. Good morning.

ATHENA JONES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. You're absolutely right. Cruz is going to be a big target here tomorrow night. And we've already gotten something of a sampling of what we might hear from some of his rivals. Take a listen.

Why should voters go for you over Ted Cruz?

Because I'm more capable. Because I have a much better temperament. Because I actually get along with people much better than he does.

He talks tough on some of these issues. For example, he's going to carpet bomb is. The only budget he's ever voted for in his time in the Senate is a budget that cut defense spending by more than Barack Obama proposes we cut it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Why should voters go for you over Ted Cruz?

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Because I'm more capable. Because I have a much better temperament. Because I actually get along with people much better than he does.

SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He talks tough on some of these issues. For example, he's going to carpet bomb ISIS. But the only budget he's ever voted for in his time in the Senate is a budget that cut Defense spending by more than Barack Obama proposes we cut it.

DR. BEN CARSON (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You know, we've all had different types of experiences. There's no question that I haven't spent a lot of time schmoozing and asking for big money and going to cocktail parties.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JONES: Now, of course, Trump is going to be at center stage tomorrow night because he is still the leader nationally. Right next to him will be Ted Cruz. And so it will be interesting to see how Trump goes after Ted Cruz, how Cruz responds. We've been talking about how they've had something of a bromance the last several months, holding their fire against one another. Well, that's certainly changed at least on Trump's side with Cruz surging in Iowa.

We'll see how Cruz responds, though, because it looks like so far at least he seems to want to hold on to the strategy he's been using of ignoring Trump's digs and giving him a bear hug. That's Cruz's word. In fact, in response to one of Trump's Sunday interviews in which he called Cruz a maniac in the Senate, Cruz tweeted out this. He said, "In honor of my friend @realDonaldtrump and goodhearted maniacs everywhere." He tweeted that clip to that hit song from the 1980s movie "Flashdance", "Maniac." So Cruz is having a bit of fun there. We'll see if that fun continues tomorrow night -- Carol.

(LAUGHTER)

COSTELLO: And you're right. That song is in my head forever now.

Athena Jones, reporting live from Las Vegas. Thank you.

National security will be the topic in CNN's debate. And while Cruz and Trump might -- while Cruz and Trump are trading jabs using "Flashdance" clips, this all started when Cruz questioned Donald Trump's abilities when it comes to national security. Listen to what Cruz told supporters about Trump and Ben Carson during a private fundraiser.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TED CRUZ (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: People are looking for who is prepared to be a commander-in-chief. Now that's a question of strength but it's also a question of judgment and I think that is a question that is a challenging question for both of them.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Trump not amused by Cruz's comments. Trump tweeted, "Ted Cruz should not make statements behind closed doors to his bosses. He should bring them out into the open. More fun that way."

Let's talk about this with conservative commentator SE Cupp and Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord, both are CNN political commentators.

Welcome to both of you. S.E. CUPP, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Good morning.

JEFFREY LORD, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Hello there, Carol.

COSTELLO: Good morning. So, Jeffrey, is the bromance over between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump?

LORD: I don't know that it's over but -- you know, when you're running for president, you're not supposed to stand up there and say, I'm the best guy to be president, but, wait, the other guy is better than me. You're supposed to defend yourself. You're supposed to defend your record and you're supposed to attack the other guy. I really think that's all that's going on. At base I think they're pretty much in sync, although I will say that, you know, there are rumbling out there with Donald Trump about discussions on Justice Scalia and that sort of thing, that I think -- I think he needs to be careful with conservatives.

COSTELLO: What do you mean by that, Jeffrey?

LORD: Well, I think that Justice Scalia is pretty much an icon in the conservative movement. And to be critical of Justice Scalia is a difficult sell for some folks, so I think in that sense he needs to be careful. But, you know, he and Senator Cruz will go at it as best they do. And then, you know, somebody will win Iowa and we'll move on to the next set of primaries. And remember, Ronald Reagan lost the Iowa caucuses to George H.W. Bush and lost a few more after that, but he still came out on top.

[10:05:02] COSTELLO: SE, I don't know. I don't know about you but it sounds like Jeffrey is preparing himself for maybe Donald Trump losing Iowa.

CUPP: Yes, I think you just heard a lowering of expectation.

(LAUGHTER)

LORD: Oh, no, no, no.

CUPP: As Ted Cruz surges in Iowa, I think you're seeing Trump get fairly nervous and so, you know, going after Ted Cruz. He's called him a maniac. I recently saw at a rally he was talking about Ted Cruz, he said, I like him but, you know, he's an evangelical and I don't see a lot of evangelicals coming out of Cuba, which is sort after a weird non-sequitur, I think to sort of dog whistle to his crowd that Ted Cruz is some kind of scary foreigner, which of course he's not, and of course there are lots of evangelicals in Cuba.

But I think you're seeing Trump get ruffled, both by Ted Cruz coming up in Iowa and Chris Christie coming up in New Hampshire. Where does Donald Trump go if not -- you know, if he doesn't perform well in Iowa and New Hampshire? The map starts to get very tricky. So I think you're going to start hearing a lot more of this out of Donald Trump surrogates, that he doesn't actually have to win Iowa, he doesn't have to win New Hampshire. And actually, I think he's somewhat right. I mean, Trump has relied

on national polling to suggest his -- and assert his dominance. I don't even know if he needs to win primaries to keep his level of support really coalesced.

LORD: Well, we all remember --

CUPP: And eventually he does.

LORD: We all remember President Santorum and President Huckabee after they won the Iowa caucuses, so I'm just saying --

COSTELLO: Yes, I guess, but Jeffrey --

LORD: Let's be careful here.

COSTELLO: Jeffrey, here's the thing. And this new FOX News poll --

LORD: Yes, Carol.

COSTELLO: The FOX News poll came out yesterday. It says Cruz is actually more likely to keep rising. 30 percent say they would never support Trump. Just 6 percent say they would never support Cruz. So you've got to figure -- go ahead, Jeffrey.

LORD: You have to get -- you have to get beyond Iowa. I mean, Trump is ahead in New Hampshire, I believe he's ahead in South Carolina. And then you've got to get right back here to Nevada and you've got to go on to the southern states, et cetera, where they'll really start to slug it out. So all I'm saying is, I mean, even if Donald Trump won the Iowa caucuses, which is, you know, I still think very much a possibility, that's not going to mean all that much either.

You've got to start winning, you know, a collection of these things, or you're not going to make the grade.

COSTELLO: But, SE, so what's going to happen on stage tomorrow? Will Ted Cruz go after Donald Trump or will it be Marco Rubio or will it be Chris Christie? Because now's the time, isn't it, to go on the attack?

LORD: Yes, I'm not sure that Ted Cruz will do too much of it because I think the tactic has just -- as a rule of thumb at this point, has been proven not to be very successful. I'm not sure Ted Cruz is inclined that way.

I think Marco Rubio will definitely take a whack at it. And I think there will be some others. I think God bless, and poor Jeb Bush will try again. But I think that Ted Cruz has got a little different approach and perhaps that what's helping him.

COSTELLO: What do you think, SE?

CUPP: Well, I think Chris Christie is probably going to be the more vocal opponent of Donald Trump tomorrow night. I think he's going to differentiate himself on a number of different issues and probably be the more aggressive swinger. Maybe Rand Paul as well. But, yes, I mean, Ted Cruz has said that his strategy is to bear hug Donald Trump, bear hug Ben Carson, and then maybe when their voters go away, he collects them all.

So I would be very surprised if you saw a very aggressive Ted Cruz going after Donald Trump. His strategy thus far has been working, to do sort of a Donald Trump emotion but with slightly more practical and polite rhetoric.

LORD: Carol, one other thing. We're talking here about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Pulling back, of course, both of them are outsiders. Ted Cruz may be a senator, but he is -- I mean, if there's anything that would give the Republican Party a second heart attack if not Donald Trump, it would be Ted Cruz. So I think the outsider vote, just in general, is still very much in play here.

COSTELLO: I think you're right about that. Jeffrey Lord, SE Cupp, I've got to leave it there. Thanks to both of you.

You can watch the final GOP debate of 2015 only on CNN. It starts tomorrow night, 6:00 p.m. Eastern, live from Las Vegas.

Also later this hour, President Obama makes a rare visit to the Pentagon. And while he'll meet with top military officials behind closed doors, the message is very public, calm terror fears this holiday season and reassure Americans that the strategy against ISIS is working.

Joe Johns is our senior Washington correspondent. He joins us from the White House with more. Good morning.

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. This is not the first time of course the president has been over to the Pentagon, right across the river. He went there just back in July. He's also going later this week to the Counterterrorism Center. A lot of reasons for this. Among them, the president does want to calm the fears of jittery Americans, especially after Paris as well as San Bernardino.

[10:10:02] He's also going on vacation soon. Needs to be seen as having his finger on the pulse of national security issues. And there is, quite frankly, a need to review the strategy in the campaign against ISIS. He talked a little bit about that in his weekly radio address on the weekend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: In recent weeks our strikes have taken out the ISIL finance chief, a terrorist leader in Somalia and the ISIL leader in Libya. Our message to these killers is simple. We will find you and justice will be done.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOHNS: Whole alphabet soup of advisers need to meet with him from DOD, the State Department, Homeland Security Department, law enforcement officials. Just a lot of people who can sit down and talk to the president and give him some information, at least, about the strategy. The White House loves to say that the truth is the president wants to tweak the strategy against ISIS any time he can, but they're not expecting to make any big announcements -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Joe Johns reporting live from the White House.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, chilling revelations this morning on how closely the Paris ringleader directed the attacks.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: A new report suggests terrorists used a striking level of coordination in last month's attack in Paris. The ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, reportedly huddled in a doorway just blocks away from the Bataclan concert hall.

[10:15:04] He stayed on the phone with the killers until the moments they blew themselves up so he could orchestrate every single minute of the massacre.

Paul Cruickshank is a CNN terrorism analyst, and editor-in-chief of the "CTC Sentinel," which just broke the story.

Paul, what more can you tell me?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Hey, Carol. I mean, it is a stunning new revelation. The idea here is that Abdelhamid Abaaoud was standing outside that Bataclan concert hall while the attack was taking place, in touch by cell phone, by hands-free cell phone kit, with the attackers inside in real time as they murdered people inside the building, suggests a really tremendous amount of command and control over this attack on the night of the attacks.

And he had also been in contact by phone with Bilal Hadfi, one of the stadium attackers. Right until the time when the stadium attackers started blowing themselves up earlier in that evening. In fact, he stayed on the phone for a minute or two after the first of the stadium attackers blew themselves up so he might have heard it happening over the phone.

So this was a guy pulling all the strings the night of the attack. But he wasn't going to be killed himself. He was saving himself for a second-wave operation. A few days later he was going to target a shopping district in Paris, dressed in expensive suit so he could blend in with another co-conspirator. But of course, on the November 18th he was killed on that raid in the safe house in Saint-Denis in Paris.

But all of this recalling, Carol, what we saw play out in the Mumbai attacks back in 2008. But in that case the handlers were all the way back in Pakistan. They were in touch by cell phone with the plotters. This time around the ringleader was on the ground himself.

COSTELLO: And earlier this morning a Paris teacher was stabbed by a masked man who allegedly yelled about ISIS. He warned, this is only the beginning. Could that be associated with those other attackers?

CRUICKSHANK: Well, French police are going to be looking at that possibility very, very closely. Because one of the things one witness revealed about Abdelhamid Abaaoud, this ringleader, is before he was killed in that safe house, he was discussing the possibility of attack plans against schools in France. And of course, this attack this morning taking place on a kindergarten teacher in a school, she was stabbed in the neck by this assailant saying, I am the Islamic State. This is just the beginning.

It may just be the case of an ISIS-inspired attack, somebody with no direct connections. But given the current climate, they'll be running down every possible lead -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Paul Cruickshank, thanks so much.

In other news this morning, Egyptian investigators say they can find no evidence of terrorism so far in the crash of a Russian passenger jet. That puts them at odds with Russian investigators who say they believe there was a bomb on board that plane. 224 people died when the plane went down. ISIS has claimed responsibility.

Jerusalem, this is where a man rammed his car into a crowded bus stop. That car that you see there, hitting some type of hydrant. Multiple injuries have been reported. We're told the man behind the wheel was a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. Police say they shot and killed him at the scene.

And today marks three years since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. This is the first time students will be in class for the anniversary. 20 first graders were killed in that attack along with six educators. School in Newtown, Connecticut, has been torn down. A new one set to open next year.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, she once said Donald Trump was telling it like it is when it comes to immigration, but what does former Arizona governor Jan Brewer think about Trump's plans to ban Muslims from the United States? We'll ask her next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:23:11] COSTELLO: New insight into that flawed visa process that allowed San Bernardino killer Tashfeen Malik into the United States. The FBI says Malik chatted on social media about jihad before getting that fiancee visa. The only problem, there was no policy in place to check her social media at that time.

Paul Vercammen is in San Bernardino with more on this. Good morning.

PAUL VERCAMMEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. And in fact Malik passed three background checks in all. As you stated, no protocol allowed for them to go back into her background and check social media. But more has emerged recently as they say and they found some older posts. Had those checks, of course, been in place, many think that they would have raised alarm bells, they would have been able to stop Malik. "The New York Times" is reporting that not only did she show support

for violent jihad on social media, but she said she wanted to join such jihad. And they characterized her posts as zealotry. Now right at the very top of the Obama administration, they're now questioning those K-1 or fiancee or marriage visas. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN KERRY, SECRETARY OF STATE: We have plenty of ways to vet people. We already do it. We have a huge process of examining people for visas. We know who's coming into our country for the most part. Clearly, the social media has placed a whole new burden and a whole new set of questions, but not impossible ones to resolve. And I think we need to look at this very, very carefully, which is what we're doing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VERCAMMEN: And of course, Malik got through, and along with her husband carried out that slaughter that left 14 people dead. Behind me, a memorial to those people, many of them county workers. Another to be memorialized today, Benetta Bet-Badal. She is the woman who came from Iran to avoid Islamic extremism, she's a Christian. She leaves behind her three daughters and her husband.

On her GoFundMe site that they hope will raise money for the children's future, they are 10, 12, and 15, thinking about their college costs, they posted that this has just been a bad dream for all of them, Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Paul Vercammen, reporting live from San Bernardino, California, this morning.

Mosques around the country are beefing up security after two centers in California are vandalized. Local police classifying the incidents which took place in a city just an hour from the San Bernardino terror attacks as hate crimes. The FBI is now investigating.

CNN's Nick Valencia is in Atlanta with more. Good morning.

NICK VALENCIA, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. One night, two mosques vandalized, this both happening in Hawthorne, California, about an hour outside of San Bernardino. Both those mosques had the word "Jesus" spray painted -- outside of it. One mosque actually had a fake grenade left on the front steps. Led to very tense moments with police responding as well as those members of the mosque inside.

The attacks come shortly after another mosque in Coachella, California, also about an hour away from San Bernardino was fire bombed while people were still inside. The suspect in that incident has been taken into custody back to Hawthorne. Well, people there, those members of the mosques that were attacked, hope that people or persons responsible for these attacks are also taken into custody.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ZAHID MIAN, MEMBER OF VANDALIZED MOSQUE: It's disheartening, sure, because, you know, as Americans we all believe that, you know, this is the land of the free, the freedom of speech and religion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VALENCIA: The FBI has released a statement related to these attacks saying, quote, "The FBI is committed to ensure law-abiding citizens are protected and to deter those who would threaten them. We continuously work with our state and local partners to secure communities and to investigate and bring to justice those who would commit violent attacks or acts or make violent threats against others based on the victims constitutionally protected characteristics, beliefs real or perceived -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Nick Valencia reporting live from Atlanta. Thanks so much.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says his message is simple, terrorists should not be able to buy guns. He's pushing to ban anyone on the U.S. terror watch list from buying guns in New York state. Cuomo calls it shear madness that a suspected terrorist can buy a firearm.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. ANDREW CUOMO (D), NEW YORK: We have people in the country who are suspected of terrorism and who right now can't step on a plane but can buy a gun. I mean, that is ludicrous. I'm the New York governor. This is the state of 9/11. These people must be living in the state of denial. How many San Bernardinos, how many Sandy Hooks do you need before you have basic sanity that says, safety still matters?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Cuomo says, quote, "Too many senators are in the vice grip of the NRA," and in a "USA Today" op-ed former congresswoman Gabby Giffords challenges the Congress she says refuses to act three years after Sandy Hook. She says Congress has embraced a shameful status quo and is, quote, "in the gun lobby's grip."

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, a Baltimore police officer on trial on the death of Freddie Gray. William Porter's fate may soon be in the hands of a jury.

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