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Terror in Indonesia; FBI Investigates Philadelphia Shooting; Republicans Set to Debate. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired January 14, 2016 - 15:00   ET

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

[15:00:02]

CRISTINA ALESCI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Until then if Americans want fish, there's a good chance they will have to keep importing it from places where the U.S. can't fully enforce its own safety standards.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Any moment now, FBI Director James Comey will be holding a news conference in Philadelphia. We're expecting that he will comment on the apparent terror attack against a Philadelphia police officer.

Yesterday in Pittsburgh, for the first time, he called the investigation a terror investigation. We will bring that to you live.

Top of the hour. I'm Pamela Brown, in for Brooke Baldwin.

And we begin with the Republican race for the White House. Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, they are neck and neck in Iowa polls, and in seven hours from now, they will be side by side and face to face for the first time since their once-hailed bromance began turning bitter.

But will we see the jabs come out during tonight's GOP debate? Trump has more on his arsenal now with new questions emerging about Ted Cruz's finances during his 2012 bid for the Senate. Cruz failed to disclose to the Federal Election Commission hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans he secured from Citibank and Goldman Sachs, where his wife worked.

Chief political correspondent Dana Bash asked the senator about those loans. She joins us now from North Charleston, South Carolina, the site of tonight's Republican debate.

So, what did he have to say, Dana?

DANA BASH, CNN SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, as you can imagine, he pushed back pretty hard.

In fact, just before coming on with you, I noticed that he's already sending out fund-raising e-mails to supporters using this because it was in "The New York Times," which is a pretty easy target for conservatives to say that "The New York Times," the liberal mainstream media is coming after him. But the bottom line is for someone like him who has built his brand on

being an outsider, being a populist, appealing to sort of the "Duck Dynasty" voters -- he got Phil Robertson of "Duck Dynasty"'s endorsement just yesterday. This is something that he clearly wants to try to manage. Listen to our exchange about it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Senator, how do you explain to your supporters that you got a very large loan from your wife's Wall Street bank in order to fund your upstart insurgent Senate campaign?

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, the premise of your question is not right.

BASH: You didn't get a loan?

CRUZ: Heidi and I -- the premise of your question is not right.

Heidi and I, when we ran for Senate, we made the decision to put our liquid net worth into the campaign. And so we did so through a combination of savings, liquidating our savings accounts, through a combination of selling assets. And then we had a brokerage account that has a standard margin loan, like any brokerage account has, and we borrowed against the stocks and assets that we had under ordinary terms.

And so those loans had been disclosed over and over and over again on multiple filings. If it was the case that they were not filed exactly as the FEC requires, then we will amend the filings. But all of the information has been public and transparent for many years, and that's the end of that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: So, Pam, he wants that to be the end of that, but Donald Trump already in an interview said: I don't know. I like Ted Cruz. It sounds like it could be a problem, though.

So, he's in kind of his Donald Trump-esque way trying to fan the flames of this story as well.

BROWN: As he did with the birther issue.

BASH: Exactly.

BROWN: Dana, the earlier debate will only have -- yes. The earlier debate will only have three candidates. Rand Paul will be opting out. What was behind that move? Is this a good move?

BASH: I think we're going to see down the road if this is something that can help him. The Rand Paul campaign feels that it can only diminish him to be on the happy hour stage, the earlier debate, because he has been playing on the main stage for all of these months.

And they are afraid that he could sort of never come back from that. Now, we do know that there's an example of somebody coming back. Chris Christie at one point was polling so low that he was on the earlier debate stage, and he was doing better and now he's back in prime time.

But what Rand Paul is trying to do is opt out and use it to gin up his libertarian base that he has been able to in the past, before this presidential campaign, use to say, look, it's the party and the media out to get us and the people who are kind of outsiders. That's a tactic he's using. Whether or not it's enough to energize those potential Rand Paul supporters, we will see.

BROWN: Yet to be seen. Dana Bash, thank you so much.

And let's discuss how all of this could impact what we see from the candidates tonight.

Joining me now, Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center and a contributor to "The National Review." Also here, Jamie Weinstein, senior editor at Daily Caller, who is in North Charleston for the Republican presidential debate this evening.

[15:05:06]

Henry, I'm going to start with you.

Donald Trump has been a little more subdued at debates, Friday compared to what we see of him at these rallies. Who do you think will be the first to go on the offensive tonight, Cruz or Trump?

HENRY OLSEN, SENIOR FELLOW, ETHICS AND POLICY CENTER: Kind of depends on the question order. I think they will go at one another.

I think Cruz will probably try and defend himself preemptively against some of the charges that Trump has levied. I think the interesting question is also going to be who goes at each other first, Rubio or Christie? They have been battling each other on the airwaves and in personal attacks in New Hampshire. That's a crucial state for them. And I would expect the two of them to mix it up as well.

BROWN: Yes, because the stakes are high for the establishment candidates to sort of break out tonight, right, Jamie?

JAMIE WEINSTEIN, THE DAILY CALLER: Absolutely.

And if you look at what the attacks have been in New Hampshire and Iowa and elsewhere, a lot of these establishment candidates, like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, John Kasich, they haven't really been attacking Donald Trump, the front-runner. They have been attacking Marco Rubio, because they see him as the biggest threat for them to break out in that establishment lane.

Now, I think Marco kind of spans both lanes, the establishment and the anti-establishment lane. He's kind of a hybrid. But they see him as the greatest threat to consolidating establishment support. They are not actually attacking him in many ways Donald Trump on the stump. They are attacking with their commercials and on stump Marco Rubio. It will be interesting to see if they gang up on him tonight, kind of like they did in the last debate.

BROWN: And what's interesting here, Henry, is we're seeing Ted Cruz sort of ramp up his rhetoric against Donald Trump. They are neck and neck in the polls. He said -- quote -- that Donald Trump has "New York values."

I want to play you Trump's response during his interview with Bloomberg Politics.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: If you would have been there and if you would have lived through that like I did with New York people, the way they handled that attack was one of the most incredible things that anybody has ever seen.

And you want to knock New York, you got to go through me. New York is an amazing place with amazing people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Clearly Trump sort of using that to spin on it and put a positive spin.

First of all, Henry, what are New York values and does this make Cruz look bad in light of the fact we're learning he borrowed tens of thousands from Goldman Sachs and didn't disclose it during the Senate race?

OLSEN: Well, typically, candidates running in Iowa try and show their opponents as being out of touch with mainstream, small-town values. When he says New York, it's code for big city, not evangelical Christian, not your type of people.

Will it help? Will it hurt? Certainly, the fact that Trump is attacking Cruz on the big bank out of New York question raises a question whether Ted Cruz himself has what he would call in a more sanguine moment New York values.

But it's clearly they are trying to shore up the base of support for himself, Cruz, by reminding his voters that Trump is somebody who comes from a big city, doesn't share their backgrounds and allegedly Cruz does.

BROWN: Jamie, what do you think? Could this hurt him, this news about the Goldman Sachs loan and the trust factor? Because Cruz has been this anti-establishment candidate who has said you can't trust Washington, but will this hurt sort of voters' trust in him?

WEINSTEIN: I think it could hurt him, not on the merits of the charge, because he may have made a mistake in filing with the FEC. He did file that he took a loan from Goldman Sachs elsewhere before his election in 2012. But what could hurt him is that Donald Trump doesn't need to win on

the merits or have the merits on his side to make something an issue. He's going to repeat over and over and over again that Ted Cruz is a tool of Goldman Sachs, and that might be able to -- he might be able to brandish or kind of make Ted Cruz toxic in that way to voters who don't like Goldman Sachs, kind of base of the Ted Cruz base. So that could hurt him in that way.

BROWN: And, Henry, you just wrote a piece in "The National Review" about how the Republican Party needs to understand the kind of voter that Trump is drawing here, blue-collar whites.

But is it possible to do that and still win in the general election? Remember the autopsy that the GOP did after that 2012 election calling for the party to reach out more to women and minorities.

OLSEN: Well, the autopsy is flawed in a number of ways, not the least of which is, where voters who can decide swing states live.

For example, if you want to reach out to Hispanics on immigration grounds, you have to recognize that you can increase the Hispanic share of the vote by 13 percent from 27 to 40 percent and you only swing three states, not enough to get a Republican elected president.

The only constituency that can swing enough states that can actually elect someone are blue-collar whites, who disproportionately live in the Upper Midwest swing states. And the way to do that is not a way that's inconsistent with conservative values, but it is inconsistent with some of the way that candidates have been talking or some of the elites in the party have been talking.

BROWN: Jamie, do you want to add anything?

WEINSTEIN: I think that's right. Obviously, if you increase the white turnout, this middle-class white, that will be more important than winning over Hispanic votes.

[15:10:04]

But I'm not so sure that's what's getting the attraction with Donald Trump's campaign. I think it's more personality than adopting issues that appeal to that constituency. But I guess we will wait and see when we get more data in. But I still it's a persona driving Donald Trump, much less than the issues necessarily he's raising.

BROWN: And we will wait and see what he has to say on stage tonight at the debate.

Henry Olsen, Jamie Weinstein, thank you.

OLSEN: Thank you.

BROWN: Coming up on this Thursday, a chilling Paris-style attack, a suicide explosion near a Starbucks in Indonesia, with gunmen opening fire as people scramble for safety. Was this the work of ISIS? We will have a live report. And happening right now, FBI Director James Comey answering questions

about the attack in Philadelphia last week. We will bring that to you next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:15:10]

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

JAMES COMEY, FBI DIRECTOR: I'm limited in what I can say because we and our partners in the Philadelphia Police Department are still investigating that.

We at the FBI level, through our Joint Terrorism Task Force, are investigating that attack as a terrorist attack. We're working hard to understand motives, understand direction, inspiration, whether there might be anybody else involved.

We're obviously trying to understand, did this individual engage in foreign travel that would be meaningful to understanding the motive for the attack? All that work is being done. I think what I can say to you at this point is, so far, we see no indication that he was part of an organized cell of any sort and no indication that there is any follow-on plot connected to that, any specific or credible threat of violence beyond this connected to that attack.

But we never take our eye off the ball. We have a lot of work still to do to understand it better.

Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Yes. My question is, if you're looking at it as a terrorist attack, why is he not in FBI custody? And also can you tell us how long have you been able to talk to him and have you identified...

BROWN: FBI Director James Comey holding that press conference there in Philadelphia. That's where an officer was attacked last week by the suspect, Edward Archer, who said he launched the attack and fired 13 bullets at the officer in the name of ISIS.

Director Comey saying now this is a terror investigation, but it's not believed that that suspect was part of any organized terror cell.

Now, speaking of ISIS, an American icon is now the scene of a deadly bombing, ISIS claiming responsibility for a series of coordinated attacks near a Starbucks in Indonesia's capital, a suicide bomber blowing himself up, and as people ran, gunmen were ready and waiting, opening fire as they fled the scene.

When police arrived, the attackers threw grenades at the officers, an unbelievable shoot-out between the gunmen and police playing out before those horrified bystanders, police bringing down each attacker one by one. But, by the end of the attack, at least two civilians were dead and dozens more wounded. I want to go live now to Jakarta and our senior international

correspondent, Ivan Watson.

Ivan, what is the scene there like right now and who is behind these attacks?

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, it's very quiet here. It's around 3:00 in the morning.

And, as you see, that's the Starbucks that the suicide bomber began with an attack against. And if Brad zooms in closer, you can see, for example, some damage to a vehicle there, possibly either from the suicide bomber or perhaps from one of the grenades that was thrown here.

The police have put a barrier around this. But this is hardly a high- security zone. It's pretty deserted right now. There's a Burger King here. There's a McDonald's over here. There are a lot of international hotels around here. And people in Jakarta I have talked to say this is probably the quietest they have seen this place because it's usually humming 24 hours, at all hours of the night.

Now, the police say that this was an ISIS attack. And ISIS has said the same, they have claimed responsibility and they say that they wanted to attack what they describe as the crusader alliance and drive them out of Muslim countries.

Well, at this stage, there does not seem to be anywhere near a great deal of support for ISIS in Indonesia, which is the world's most populous Muslim country. This is not the first time it's dealt with terrorism. There were some devastating attacks a decade ago in Indonesia that killed hundreds of people. In this case, these attackers may have wanted to copycat the kind of devastating attacks that were carried out in Paris a few months ago, but, fortunately, the number of casualties was relatively small.

And police say at least five of the attackers were killed in this series of attacks -- Pamela.

BROWN: Very disturbing there.

Ivan Watson, thank you so much.

And we're now getting some new details about that confrontation at sea and what led Iran to grab 10 U.S. soldiers. As it turns out, when the Iranians approached, engine trouble prevented the U.S. boats from returning to international waters. And as these pictures surfaced right here, it's clear that the Iranians took that as some kind of sign of hostility.

Well, now the U.S. Navy says it's also looking into the sailors possibly being coerced into that apology.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Iranian patrol boat came out when we were having engine issues and had weapons drawn, so we talked -- tried to talk to them until more boats came out and took us in.

It was a mistake that was our fault. And we apologize for our mistake. It was a misunderstanding. We did not mean to go into Iranian territorial water.

[15:20:08]

The Iranian behavior was fantastic while we were here. We thank you very much for your hospitality and your assistance.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Joining me now to discuss this, Admiral James Stavridis former supreme allied commander for NATO, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and author of "The Accidental Admiral."

Admiral, thank you so much for coming on with us.

ADM. JAMES STAVRIDIS (RET.), FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: You bet. Good to see you, Pamela.

BROWN: First off, what do you make of this apology?

STAVRIDIS: It seems to me he was probably in a very coercive situation. Certainly, looking at his body language and generally knowing the training our sailors get before they are in a situation like that, it's highly unlikely to me that he would have conducted that interview, that video of his own volition.

BROWN: Doesn't this violate the Geneva Conventions?

STAVRIDIS: I think it's right on the edge. Certainly, what disturbs me are the shots of our sailors brought to their knees, hands on their heads. They were doing nothing offensive, nothing that was untoward.

I assure you that if an Iranian ship had engine trouble in U.S. territorial seas, Iranian sailors would not be on their knees with their hands behind their head. I find that disturbing, to say the least.

BROWN: Have you ever -- we're looking at visuals right here. It's pretty incredible. Have you ever seen anything like this before from U.S. Navy sailors?

STAVRIDIS: I think you would have to go back to the Pueblo incident of North Korea decades ago to find another point in time where a small boat was boarded and taken.

BROWN: So, why would the Iranians want to provoke an incident by capturing these sailors, rather than assisting them?

STAVRIDIS: Well, I think what you're seeing is kind of a two-speed operation out of Iran.

At the high political level, we see the foreign minister working with his counterpart, Secretary of John Kerry, to effect the release. That's good. But at the lower operational working level, these are Revolutionary Guards. They took a very aggressive assistance against our sailors.

And I think it's very worrisome. We ought to look at this not only in the context, Pamela, of U.S.-Iranian relations, but Saudi Arabian- Iranian relations at sea in the Persian Gulf. This is going to be a significant flash point in the time ahead.

BROWN: Admiral James Stavridis, thank you very much.

STAVRIDIS: Pleasure, Pamela.

BROWN: Well, after a legal battle, a judge in Chicago ordered the city to release videos of yet another fatal police shooting of an unarmed black teen. We now have that video and we're going to show it to you right after this break. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:26:47]

BROWN: Some breaking news we're following right out of Chicago.

We have the video of a Chicago cop shooting and killing an unarmed black teen. We're working on bringing that to you momentarily. This video is just now coming out after three years because the city had fought its release, even as officials vowed to be more transparent.

But, today, a federal judge ruled that the video should be released immediately and scolded the city and the mayor for how the case has been handled.

CNN's Rosa Flores is following this story from Chicago.

You have seen the video. Tell us about it, Rosa.

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Pamela, it comes down to 10 seconds of video.

And let me take you through this, because what you see initially is Cedrick Chatman getting out of his vehicle and start a sprint away from police. Now, you can see that he squeezes between two cars and there's a police officer trailing right behind him. He's just a few feet away from Chatman.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: We're showing it to you now.

FLORES: Then a few seconds transpire and you see the other police officer, the shooting police officer, actually aiming at Chatman.

And, again, this happens very quickly in about 10 seconds. And then after that, all you see once the angle of that camera changes, you see Chatman on the ground. But, Pamela, I have to tell you, we have heard this story before, the description of the video. This is the first time that we're actually seeing this video.

And, Pamela, I have got to tell you, one of the -- and probably the most disturbing part of it is towards the end. If you keep playing this, you see the police officer place his foot on top of the body. Now, from talking to an investigator who was actually fired after he decided that this was not a justified shooting, he tells us had that what happened after is the officer handcuffed Chatman, and then what you see in that video is this police officer places his foot on top of his body.

BROWN: So, walk us through this again, because we just saw some clips of it. But I personally had a hard time kind of figuring out what was going on.

So, Chatman was essentially running away from the police. Can we bring that video back up, guys, just to kind of walk through it? OK.

So, what do we see right here? Is that the police officer going after him with the gun drawn, right?

FLORES: So, what you see -- and I can take you back through this.

So, Chatman is a carjacking suspect. These two police officers arrive next to him at that stoplight. So, that light is red. Chatman is in a vehicle. And so these police officers get out of the vehicle with their guns drawn. Chatman see this. He gets out of the car, out of his vehicle and starts running away from police officers.

Now, you see him kind of squeeze in between two vehicles. And there's a police officer right behind him. That police officer is still following him as Chatman continues running on the sidewalk. And then he's going to turn the corner there.

And now, again, a part of this we don't quite see, because the framing of that shot changes. But you do see the shooting police officer, and he is, with gun -- with his gun drawn, following Chatman. And then you see that officer at the intersection. And then once the angle of that camera changes, you do see Chatman on the ground --