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Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

Republican Race; Democratic Race; Jakarta Starbucks Attack; Powerball Frenzy. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired January 14, 2016 - 12:00   ET

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


[12:00:00] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: LEGAL VIEW with Ashleigh Banfield starts right now.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. And welcome to LEGAL VIEW.

It is debate night in America. CNN is live in South Carolina, along with the remaining Republican candidates. Most of them are going to be hashing it out this evening live on a stage in North Charleston, South Carolina. And I say most of them because not every GOP hopeful is going to be there. One candidate is boycotting altogether, even though technically he is still in the race. He's just not happy with the podium that he's been assigned. Going to give you more on that whole saga in just a second.

But this is a major event for those 11 Republicans because of the current calendar. We are less than three weeks away, folks, from today, people in Iowa are going to start casting their vote. That means the hard numbers, the hard data and not just opinion polls are actually going to start reflecting the real popularity and electability of those men and women who are running for the highest office in the land.

So here is the main stage for you. Seven men, Donald Trump in the middle. His closest rivals, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, flanking him. The undercard, just four were invited, but Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says, thanks but no thanks. Now this is the main stage or this is no stage for me was his argument. Senator Paul declining to participate at all in the undercard. So they'll only be three.

A new political ad from the Jeb Bush camp went live today showing a fired up and frustrated Bush highlighting the times that he called Donald Trump a jerk, not just once, but twice, and calling out Trump for the time that he allegedly made fun of a physically disabled reporter.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEB BUSH (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And when anybody, anybody disparages people with disabilities, it sets me off. That's why I called him a jerk. What kind of person would you want to have in the presidency that does that? At what point do we say, enough of this?

(END VIDEO CLIP) BANFIELD: Not sure if Donald Trump is even listening to Jeb Bush at this point. The newest Monmouth University poll that's out this week shows 32 percent of Republican voters are supporting Trump in that early primary state of New Hampshire. Jeb Bush, a bit farther down that list, with just 4 percent of Republican voter support.

Live right now to tonight's debate venue in North Charleston, South Carolina. I've got political director David Chalian standing by and also political reporter Sara Murray.

And, Sara, I want to go straight to another battle that just sort of came out of nowhere, and that is Republican Governor Nikki Haley and what she said in the Republican response to the State of the Union. A veiled attack on Donald Trump. He attacked back. And now she's responding once again. I want to play the sound bite and talk about it on the other side. Have a listen to what she said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. NIKKI HALEY (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: You know when I say it about my other friends that are running for president, they don't throw stones. And so what I would say to Mr. Trump is, don't take it personally. This is just something that we learned in South Carolina that I'm passing along.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: So, Sara, I find this amazing because, last I checked, Trump's not running against Nikki Haley and yet seems to be a lot of the conversation today. Is he taking the bait? Is he going at this again?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL REPORTER: Well, look, anyone who thinks they can hit Donald Trump and he's not going to hit back just hasn't been paying attention. And I think that Nikki Haley was fully aware of that when she gave her rebuttal to the State of the Union and took a dig at Trump. And I don't think Nikki Haley is particularly worried about what Donald Trump thinks about her. When he put out his plan to ban Muslims, at least temporarily, from the United States, she was very critical of that plan. And I just think that this is a continuation of that. She knows what she's standing for there in South Carolina. It does not match up with the Republican frontrunner. And so it is interesting to see this divide emerging within the Republican Party. But I do not think we should be surprised to see that Donald Trump has had harsh words for Governor Haley.

BANFIELD: OK. So, David, behind you, as they get all organized and ready to go live tonight, the podiums are shifting. And I think it's very sort of metaphoric of what's happening, obviously, in the campaign, and that's why they shift. Ben Carson's finance manager has resigned. And this is sort of really new news. I'm just wondering if there are reverberations where you are, if people are talking about that, or if Ben Carson is so old news already in this campaign that there's not much talk?

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: I mean, this is sort of another nail in the coffin, if you will. His campaign has just been having a series of problems in the last couple weeks. And, quite frankly, actually, the finances have been at the core of that problem because they've raised so much money and how that money's been spent has sort of been the central problem with his team. So now the finance chief is departing the campaign. That sort of puts a button on just what those problems were in the campaign.

[12:05:06] Carson is, you know, he still has some level of support in the polls. He still has money in his bank account. It's not that he's not a factor. It's just that he hasn't been able to get his campaign structure and organization to a place where they can actually execute on any kind of plan.

BANFIELD: And then the two of you can weigh in on this. Sara, if you would begin. It's the Cruz factor. Can he really continue his strategy of the bro hug approach to Donald Trump after Donald Trump has been chipping away at Cruz's numbers in that key state of Iowa all over his citizenship and eligibility to be president of the United States?

MURRAY: I think the bromance is over here. I mean it might not all boil over on the debate stage because Trump has a habit of hanging back on the debate. But even if it doesn't happen on the stage tonight, it's happening on the campaign trail. And the Cruz people basically went from, you know, saying we're not going to reciprocate Donald Trump's attacks, to ratcheting it up to 11 and throwing everything they could at Trump, from saying he embodies New York values, to saying he's too cozy with Democrats. And next up you're going to hear them talking about how - with Ted Cruz you know what you get. You know how he's going to govern. And they're going to say, look, you don't know what you get with Donald Trump.

BANFIELD: What do you think, David?

CHALIAN: I think that's right. I mean I think painting Trump as a risky choice is something that a lot of these candidates have tried to project to the Republican electorate. It has not been a well-received message. I don't know that Ted Cruz is going to have more success with that message. But I do think Sara raises a good point, Trump does tend to hang back on these debate stages. I don't know, we're 18 days away from Iowa now. They are doing this on the campaign trail every day. I have a little more faith that we're going to see this play out on the debate -

MURRAY: It might be go time. It might be go time.

CHALIAN: It might be go time, exactly.

BANFIELD: I can't wait. You know what, I don't recall saying that the sixth time in on a Republican debate that I can't wait. But the numbers, the ratings have been, you know, astronomical for every network that has aired these debates and I doubt things will be different tonight.

To the two of you, thank you. You've got your day cut out for you, so I'll let you go. I said before and I'll say it again, folks, the Iowa caucuses, so

close you can smell them. But you're also going to see Democratic voters casting ballots for the first time there as well. Smaller field. Just two candidates, essentially, Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders. They're the ones who are opted (ph) in the numbers, folks.

This is a familiar area for Candidate Clinton because she was also on top heading into Iowa the last time that she ran for the Democratic nomination. I want you to take a look at some numbers here. December '07, she and another U.S. senator were close in the polls. In fact, she was leading Barack Obama two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. And this is today. New Bloomberg/"Des Moines Register" poll puts Hillary Clinton ahead of Senator Sanders by the same margin that she led Barack Obama just eight years ago. And we all know how that turned out.

Brianna Keilar is live in Washington.

I want to go even further into that story, if I can, Brianna, because if you go back to October, when Hillary Clinton ran the first time around, she had a seven-point spread over - a seven-point lead over Barack Obama. And in two months, that completely flipped. And Obama, just days out from the very first vote, actually had a seven-point lead over her. It was - it was like a 14-point swing. And that was massive and shocking to a lot of people. And it makes me wonder if people aren't as surprised as what's happened between her and Bernie Sanders this time around.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, I don't know if they're as surprised. I think that one of the things Hillary Clinton has taken from 2008 is that she can't take a lead for granted. I do think they're a little surprised that the race has gotten quite as tight as it has. But something that really struck me about that first graphic you put up there, she was leading Barack Obama a little bit. She was leading John Edwards. Remember, she didn't come in second, she came in third. So both of those guys, she was leading them and she actually did - she was bested by both of them.

And that's one of the things that tells us that when you're looking at polls, it really just kind of tells you part of the picture. The other parts of the picture have to do with enthusiasm and they have to do with organization. Bernie Sanders really seems to have the enthusiasm in Iowa, but Hillary Clinton's campaign is very confident that they have the organization, that they have been getting volunteers mobilized.

And I do want to say, in terms of what the Clinton campaign is saying about this tightens race, listen to what Bill Clinton said, kind of downplaying it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL CLINTON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: All they're doing now, as they should be doing, is talking about the differences in their positions. That's good. That's healthy. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What about the polls tightening? Does it surprise

you?

CLINTON: No. I'm surprised it didn't happen 60 days ago.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: So I think one of the things we also -

BANFIELD: Wow.

BOLDUAN: Yes, it's pretty - he said he's surprised it didn't happen sooner. But one of the other lessons -

BANFIELD: Yes. I (INAUDIBLE) that.

KEILAR: Yes.

BANFIELD: Right.

KEILAR: One of the other lessons I think that we sort of learn from 2008 is who supported then Senator Obama. It was independents. It was young voters. It was people who said they would be caucusing for the first time because, as you know, Ashleigh, it's a pretty involved process and those people did show up to caucus for the first time. Those are the supporters that Bernie Sanders is doing really well with. But Hillary Clinton is also doing certainly not as well as Bernie Sanders with those groups, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't have enough support there that she could still edge him out.

[12:10:21] BANFIELD: Well, you know, it's so surprising. It's like the deja vu factor. I talked to David Chalian about this yesterday. It's not just those younger voters who are supporting Sanders, like they did Barack Obama, but it's also the older voters supporting Clinton, like they did back when she was running against Obama. It's just - everything's so eerily similar.

So here's what I got. She has the benefit of history. She knows how this played out before. She's got the ground game, like you just said. She's got the organization. What about spending all that money? Is she spending a lot of it to advertise in that key state? Is she doing anything differently than she did last time around?

KEILAR: So I will say Bernie Sanders is actually spending a lot of money. So I think there's a lot of money coming from both of them, but he's actually spent more money when you're looking at ads. There is, obviously, money being spent, a lot by both campaigns. They've both been able to fund raise quite a bit. But I think what it really comes down to for her and, you know, then Senator Obama had the enthusiasm and the organization, which really made him lethal in the caucuses. Like I said, she's bringing sort of the organization, Bernie Sanders bringing some of the enthusiasm. I think she's really zeroing in on that organization because she sees Bernie Sanders getting that enthusiasm in sort of these city centers, these more liberal areas, these college towns. Well, that enthusiasm does get capped by the caucus process actually. You know, you have to win - you have to win in the most areas. It's not just in terms of, like, the number of votes in a state or the number of people who would support you in the caucuses. So she's trying to kind of keep - thin out her support in a way so that even though Bernie Sanders has this enthusiasm, the overall picture will play better for her. And we'll see if that works.

BANFIELD: My guess is that they've got their DVRs set so they've got their popcorn popped so that they can watch the GOP debate tonight.

OK, Brianna, thank you for that.

Speaking of the GOP debate tonight, you just know that one of the topics that they're going to be hashing out on the stage is terrorism. And there's some fresh material for them because for the second time a terrorist has struck a major city. This time, the capital of Indonesia. And the claim of responsibility is, you guessed it, coming in from ISIS. The campaigns are collecting the details as we speak.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:16:40] BANFIELD: It is not often that you hear about a terror attack outside of a Starbucks, but that's exactly what happened today in the capital of the world's most populous Muslim country. I'm going to take you to Jakarta, Indonesia, right now where a suicide bomber attacked that Starbucks, smack dab in the central business area, an entertainment and shopping district, of course, popular among foreigners. And that set in motion a series of other attacks. Look at the people scrambling, running for their lives. At least two people were dead after this, 19 people were wounded. Five terrorists were killed. And no surprise here, ISIS is now claiming responsibility.

CNN's senior international correspondent Ivan Watson is live for us now in that capital city of Jakarta.

This just follows a couple of days after ten German tourists were killed in Istanbul, another suicide blast, another ISIS claim of responsibility. It looks as though the M.O. is to go after where the foreigners congregate. Is that what they're telling you there?

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That could be one interpretation of it. Certainly it's the first time that Jakarta has seen a major terror attack in some six years. Fortunately, not anywhere near on the horrific scale of some of the bombings that Indonesia saw in the last decade. In this case, it sounds like there were about five attackers. One first self-detonated in that Starbucks, as you indicated. And then chillingly we believe that two of the attackers tried to grab two people out in the street to try to execute them. One of them believed to be a foreigner. And then very close by in the intersection that's behind me there was an attack on an Indonesian - basically traffic police booth. And in the end, two people killed, one of them a foreigner, one an Indonesian civilian. Around 19 people wounded. And Indonesian police say five attackers killed. So the vast majority of the casualties here were the attackers themselves.

ISIS has come out with a claim of responsibility. They say that they don't want people from the crusader alliance to feel comfortable in Muslim lands. The Indonesian police have come out with a statement. They've linked this to a man they're called Baroun Niin (ph), who they say is trying to set up an ISIS network in southeast Asia.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: They've got a lot of experience, Ivan, with terror attacks there. I remember the Bali bombing as well. How are the police shifting gears? Were they ready for this? Were they able to respond quickly? Because by all accounts, the kind of bomb that we saw go off and the open fire technique certainly didn't yield as many deaths as it could have. Did they respond in a way that limited the casualties?

WATSON: It's possible that a swift reaction helped. It's possible that just poor tactics on the part of the militants helped keep the loss of life down. And it's also possible that just last month when Indonesian security forces ramped up security among fears of a possible attack like this and started carrying out operations targeting militant groups, maybe that also had an impact. There have been warnings coming from the Pentagon, from the Australian government, from the Indonesians themselves that people could be trying to do copycat ISIS operations in this country. This is the world's most populous Muslim country. And yet the scale of this attack, though it was brazen in broad daylight, they did not succeed in the kind of mass casualties that we saw, for instance, in Paris just a few short months ago.

[12:20:30] What's been really remarkable is to see the response from Indonesians, Ashleigh, with the elected president coming out and announcing, we should not be afraid. And Indonesians coming out with their own hash tag in their language, hash tag (SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE), "we are not afraid." And that's one of the signs that's been put up by a small memorial erected right near the little police booth that was attacked just a few short hours ago here in Jakarta.

Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Spent several months in that country. They are some of the most friendly people in the world. It is just tragic what they're undergoing yet again. Ivan Watson, incredible you got these so quickly. Thank you for your live reporting there.

In Texas, an Iraqi refugee has officially been charged with providing material support to ISIS. Omar Faraj Saeed al-Hardan was indicted in a Houston federal courtroom. He pleaded not guilty to those charges against him. In the meantime, a judge ruled that al-Hardan is a flight risk and he is now being held without bail.

The Defense Department has announced that the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay has officially dropped below 100. This after ten Yemeni men were held at the military prison in Cuba were sent to Oman today. This is a milestone. And it comes as the president steps up his efforts to close that facility before he leaves office. Attorney General Loretta Lynch addressed this during her interview with CNN's Pamela Brown.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) PAMELA BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The president reiterated his desire last night to shut down the prison at Guantanamo. By the end of the year, are we going to see a portion of the Gitmo population imprisoned in the U.S.?

LORETTA LYNCH, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Well, the president has made that a priority and certainly it's been a priority of this administration for the reasons he set forth last night. Guantanamo is a tremendous recruiting tool for terrorists who seek to do us harm. And certainly the administration is working within the current statutory regime to make sure that we can reduce that population. And I believe the president looks forward to continuing a discussion with Congress on the best way to resolve that matter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: And all that remains now, 93 detainees in Guantanamo Bay's prison.

Got some new video I want to show you of those ten U.S. sailors who were detained by the Iranian government after two Navy boats drifted off course. These images show the sailors on their knees with their hands on their heads moments before they were captured. In the meantime, it is now being revealed that one of those boats strayed from international waters because they were experiencing some engine trouble. Sailors have since been released back into U.S. custody. They are being canvassed about what happened and so far what's coming out is the quote that they are, quote, "tired and upset" about what happened.

Coming up next, dreams of millions of us have been shattered, but at least there are three big Powerball winners out there somewhere. Do you know who they are? We know where they are. We're going to take you there in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:27:45] BANFIELD: You want to talk about luck? Not only did three people or maybe groups people match all six Powerball numbers to claim a share of last night's record-breaking jackpot, but all three of the winning tickets were bought in states that will not tax those people on their winnings. Yes, they're chanting "Chino Hills," man, because that's the lucky place to be. They're cheering in that California tax code, even though not one of those folks in that - in that audience there presumably actually hit the jackpot themselves so far as we know. They're just thrilled that their 7-Eleven did. They were the ones who sold it in the L.A. suburb of Chino Hills. It beats ridiculous odds, you know, even to be the guy who sells that ticket. Look how proud they are. The odds were 292 million to one that you could actually win this baby. The store's owner gets a million dollar selling bonus.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BAIBIR ATWAL, CONVENIENCE STORE OWNER: I'm very, very happy, whoever bought someone (ph) from here. And I'm so thankful to my Chino Hill people that supported me all year long.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: The jackpot after 19 consecutive losses, which means rollovers and break-neck ticket sales topped out at $1,586,400,000, or a lump sum payout of $983.5 million. Man, can you imagine it? Just count all those digits.

The other two tickets that were sold with a claim on the money were bought in Tennessee and in Florida. And neither of those states actually has a state income tax. California doesn't tax lottery winnings. Those are some really lucky, doubly lucky people. There is still a hefty federal tax, however, so they are going to face that. But, come on, they've got so much money.

I want to bring in my colleagues Polo Sandoval and Alina Machado, keeping their eyes peeled for the new (INAUDIBLE), especially in Mumford, Tennessee, and Melbourne Beach, where my two colleagues are standing by.

All right, Polo, first to you. It's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly where the tickets were sold, so we don't have those exciting crowds in two other stores. But my guess is we're going to find out pretty soon.

[12:30:07] POLO SANDOVAL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, Ashleigh. And my producer colleague described it best, this town of Mumford, Tennessee is a place that you probably would want to move to if you