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McConnell Sent Several Versions of Health Bill to CBO; Intense Street Battles Against ISIS for Final Few Blocks of Mosul; Suspect in Chinese Scholar's Kidnapping Goes to Court. Aired 1:30-2p ET
Aired July 03, 2017 - 13:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[13:34:05] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Congress broke for the Fourth of July holiday with no vote on health care and no other vote in sight right now. Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is sending several different proposals to the Congressional Budget Office to help speed up the final scoring process.
CNN's Phil Mattingly is on Capitol Hill.
Phil, President Trump on Twitter urging Congress to repeal Obamacare now and replace it later. Is there a sense that there's been any support for that?
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Look, there's support for it almost certainly from conservative Senators, people like Rand Paul, Senator Ben Sasse and Mike Lee, saying, if we can't finish up the current negotiations, that's a great alternative. I can tell you this though. That's not the plan. And they don't want to move into that as a fallback position now. They want to get done what they're actually working on. What is that? Negotiations behind the scenes are occurring right now. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell working with his conference, staying in touch with his conference, trying to figure out the pathway forward. They left for recess not having the 50 votes needed to move this forward, not even having finalized proposals. But, and this has always been the case, Brianna, they know what the parameters are. They know what their Senators want, what the Medicaid-expansion Senators want, what Senators from states with vulnerable Medicaid populations want, mostly more money, a softer landing for the major dramatic reforms they're making in the Medicaid program. And they know what the conservatives want, how they want to cut back the regulatory infrastructure of the Affordable Care Act.
The question, and this has always the case, how do you marry those two very different ideological perspectives together? If they can thread that needle, in the weeks ahead, they have an opportunity to move it forward. If they can't, if the politics of this - you can look at the approval ratings across the country, if the CBO score, 22 million fewer insured by 2026 -- if all those come together and it ends up working in a poor way, it could definitely fall apart. The real question now, what can they do over the next couple days to set themselves up in a position when they come back?
[13:35:54] KEILAR: Phil Mattingly, on the Hill for us, thank you for that report.
Coming up, Iraqi troops fighting for the last city blocks held by ISIS in Mosul. We have an exclusive report you don't want to miss, next.
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[13:40:27] KEILAR: Iraqi forces are locked in an intense battle for the final few blocks of western Mosul, still under ISIS control. And with the city left in ruins, survivors are emerging from the debris. They're cradling children. They're begging for water.
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh narrates what is a chilling story as we get a look at extraordinary exclusive footage of what is left of this ISIS front line.
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NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): From here to the river is all ISIS has left of Mosul. And this is the story of how it fell on the streets around the mosque, they once held sacred, but then destroyed.
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PATON WALSH: Resilient photographer, Gabriel Cham (ph), is on foot with Iraqi special forces. Every foot fall could hit a boobytrap. An eerie silence, holes in just about everything, endless soot.
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PATON WALSH: The street empty, and each human they meet is either desperate for escape or the enemy.
In the alleyways, two men approached them.
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PATON WALSH: One is carrying a bomb.
They rush in to help the wounded.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
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PATON WALSH: The second man carrying a much larger device. Gabriel struggles to breathe.
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PATON WALSH: The dust also means they can't see if there are any other bombers or where their three dead and other wounded colleagues lie.
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PATON WALSH: The advance continues up to and around the mosque.
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PATON WALSH: And civilians, human shields for weeks, stoop on the gunfire, or are even oblivious to it.
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PATON WALSH: Some never leave the underground.
Loud, constant blasts in the darkness.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
PATON WALSH: Unable to walk, the first man feigns ignorance but soon admits ISIS were on the roof and have mined the entire street.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
PATON WALSH: The interrogator later tells his team the man is himself ISIS.
For the past week, the desperate rush to life continued. The U.N. estimated 150,000 people were trapped here. But in the end, nobody had any idea, or how many lie left behind them in the rubble.
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PATON WALSH: "Water, water! I'm dying," she screams. Her lips white.
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PATON WALSH: In crippling heat and panic, you've never know thirst like this.
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PATON WALSH: Or what it is like to carry your family out lifeless on a cart.
This is his mother.
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PATON WALSH: " For god's sake, help me carry him," he cries.
They try running to the closest point in the narrow street a vehicle can reach.
(SHOUTING)
PATON WALSH: "Stop the blood loss," they plead.
It's unclear if the boy survived.
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PATON WALSH: Even when this tract of dust is cleared of ISIS, the killing in Iraq's fractured society won't stop, and her private hell of memories won't suddenly be washed away.
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KEILAR: Nick Paton Walsh joins us now from Irbil, Iraq, not far from Mosul there. Here in Washington, Kim Dozier, she's a CNN global affairs analyst and senior national security correspondent for "The Daily Beast."
Nick, the Iraqi government said Mosul would be retaken months ago. Did they greatly underestimate how strong ISIS was there?
PATON WALSH: I think it's fair to say we often hear statements of ambition and bravado from the Iraqi military and government. But still, I don't think anybody could have expected the kind of resistance here. It is a brutal set of conditions they're facing. Just imagine, you're dealing with an enemy who quite frankly want to die themselves, who are quite happy to cause endless destruction around themselves, and uses human shields to slow the advances of Iraqi forces. Iraqi forces, who are often not as trained and equipped as they would like to be, and struggle in coordination and communication, in a city which is second largest in Iraq, where people used to live, and where ISIS have had about three years, certainly, three years since the beginning of their announcement here. And in fact, the day in which the mosque, their sacred mosque was considered to have been liberated. Three years to prepare for this assault. Incredibly stark feat, indeed, and one that does now appear to be days away potentially from at least politically being complete -- Brianna?
[11:45:22] KEILAR: Kim, you look at these drone photos and you see what looks -- it is post-apocalyptic. And just the end of Nick Paton Walsh's piece, and you get the sense there's so much ahead. And yet, right now, the Iraqis and the U.S. are at odds how to move forward from this?
KIMBERLY DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Yes. When you speak to Iraqi officials, they tell you they haven't heard a good enough plan from either the United States or the international community to help them rebuild, which they think will take billions of dollars. When you speak to folks from the American side or the international community, they say one of the things Iraq has to learn is how to manage its own rebuilding process this time. And also has to prove that the money isn't going to be squandered. Corruption is a real problem in Iraq.
I have to say, just on the heels of what Nick talked about in terms of how long it took to take Mosul, one person who did see that it was going to take this long was General Nicholson, who is in charge of the U.S. advise-and-assist mission there. He predicted back around Christmas that it would take possibly through the summer to clear Mosul and possibly through much of 2018 to now burn out the roughly 1,500 ISIS fighters who are left from other places like Hawija (ph) and this vast area of desert between the populated areas from Tikrit to Mosul, all the way to the Syrian border.
KEILAR: And you hear, Nick, where you have Kim talking about the disagreements between the U.S. and Iraq. But there's also this internal fighting, right, this political fight, where the Iraqi government, not exactly popular in Mosul even before ISIS took over. Where does that go?
PATON WALSH: A lot of what we're seeing in the military operations here, to some degree, the packaging of the effort. And that comes to its logical end when the whole city is liberated from ISIS. That is not the end of the task. Nobody has been naive enough to believe that here. They still, as you mentioned, have Hawija (ph), pockets of ISIS around the country. And then what ISIS evolves into, which will be a low-level insurgency, using its sleeper cells, suicide bombers. The fact that a large part of the Sunni population in Iraq feels elements of sympathy towards it, that's how they got a grip in Iraqi society in the first place. Remember, Iraq is split between the Shia and the Sunni ethnic groups. The Sunnis used to run the country under Saddam as a minority and now the Shia predominantly in charge of the government and a lot of the military as were as well. Unless that substantial, historic riff in Iraq is healed and, some say Prime Minister Haider al Abadi is doing the best he can, but he has a huge challenge ahead of him. Unless that rift is healed, we might see this kind of international tension continuing, taking on a different fact, a different guise. But the violence is not stopping. And most importantly, the reconstruction effort hampered, slowed without houses, water, schools, electricity. It's exactly the kind of breeding ground that let ISIS get hold in the first place.
KEILAR: Look at this map of ISIS-controlled territory currently and how they've lost some over time.
Kim, you see that reduction. You're talking about General Nicholson estimating through next year to get some of these pockets, I think in Iraq, you said, right?
DOZIER: Yes.
KEIALR: So what about Syria?
DOZIER: What Nicholson was saying was that the U.S. made a mistake the last time it tried to defeat al Qaeda of Iraq and it let them hide in these pockets where they reconstituted. The idea is to clear out all the areas in Raqqa inside Syria, the de facto capital, or at least it once was. They have now surrounded it. U.S. allies have cut off all exits for ISIS fighters inside. But a lot of the leadership already saw that coming. They've moved down the Euphrates River valley to other major cities. They've also tried to move out of the country. So while the U.S. is having great success with targeting, the wider conflict, how you're going to defeat the spread of ISIS through other countries, they haven't come up with that plan and probably won't introduce that until July.
[13:49:13] KEILAR: OK. All right. We'll be looking for that.
Kim Dozier, thank you so much.
Nick Paton Walsh, thank you to you as well.
Coming up, we have an eerie photo taken by CNN. It appears to show the suspect in an Illinois student's kidnapping at a vigil for the student. We'll have an update on this case, next.
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KEILAR: A man charged with kidnapping a visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois is making his first court appearance. Authorities arrested 28-year-old Brendt Christensen Friday. They charged him in the disappears of grad student Yingying Zhang. She disappeared June 9th. Authorities believe she is dead based on evidence they've uncovered in the investigation.
And CNN correspondent, Kaylee Hartung, joins us from Champaign, Illinois, with the latest.
Kaylee, walk us through what happened in court today.
KAYLEE HARTUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, Brendt Christensen has been arraigned in the courthouse behind me. We are just on the outskirts of University of Illinois where he and Yingying Zhang had both studies. It was a very quick proceeding today in a small but packed courtroom. Among the crowd, Zhang's father and boyfriend. Meanwhile, there were about 100 folks outside the courthouse with signs in support of Yingying Zhang.
This was his first appearance. We'll see him against on July 5th in a bail hearing. There was no plea today. A couple of yeses from him, and a, yes, I understand, in response to the charge of kidnapping. If convicted, Brianna, it could carry a sentence of life in prison.
KEILAR: There's disturbing details, Kaylee. You can tell us about this. There's a photo from the vigil, of course, for this victim. You took this photo. There's also information about a fantasy Web site. Tell us about these things.
HARTUNG: Brianna, last Thursday, there was a walk that the university organized for the members of the community to show their support for Yingying Zhang. Our crew was there. I took the photo as the crowd congregated before the walk begin. The subject was then arrested the following day. As he was identified and his picture circulated, I was able to confirm with a university official, who confirmed with campus police, to say, yes, that is the suspect, Brendt Christensen, you see in that top right-hand corner of that phone, just feet away from the victim's family on Thursday.
It was that same day that authorities, while surveilling him, were able to capture him in an audio recording explaining to someone how he kidnapped Zhang. Now he was put under surveillance because the police connected him to the vehicle that Zhang was last seen getting into on June 9th. He owns that vehicle. Also, when they searched his phone, a forensic search revealed he had visited Web sites on discuss how to kidnap someone and also abduction fantasies.
Brianna, the details of this case, as we continue to learn them, disturbing.
KEILAR: Oh, they're sickening.
And we mentioned, Kaylee, that the police believe that Zhang is dead. They have evidence. But we don't know what it is, right?
HARTUNG: We don't know what it is. We can connect Christensen to the car she was last seen in, to the troubling searches on his phone, and then with his presence at her vigil, as well as the audio recording, which is the most incriminating piece of evidence. But authorities not telling us further evidence they have that lead them to believe that she is no longer alive.
Kaylee Hartung, thank you so much.
That's it for me. I'm back at 5:00 p.m. Eastern.
For our international views, "AMANPUR" is next.
For our viewers in North America, Brooke Baldwin is next.
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