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Army Vet Charged with Plotting Terror Attacks in LA; Remembering John Singleton; Cohen Frustrated Ahead of Prison Sentence. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired April 30, 2019 - 08:30   ET

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

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[08:32:11] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We have some major new developments to tell you about in a suspected terror case in Los Angeles. A U.S. Army veteran and recent convert to Islam has been charged with plotting terror attacks designed to inflict mass casualties. The FBI says he wanted retribution for recent attacks against Muslims.

CNN law enforcement analyst and former FBI special agent Josh Campbell is live in LA with more.

Josh, what have you learned?

JOSH CAMPBELL, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Hey, good morning.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force here in Los Angeles being credited with arresting a suspect that authorities believe could have caused massive loss of life if he hadn't come on the radar of federal officials. The suspect is a 26-year-old former Army infantryman, a recent convert to Islam, who just last month began posting in an online forum expressing his desire to do what he called a Vegas-style attack here in the United States. He also talked about seeking retribution for victims of the recent attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Now, after seeing this, an FBI undercover employee made contact with the suspect and established a relationship, during which officials learned of his desire to attack Jews here in the United States, along with churches and police officers. Ultimately, he decided upon a rally here in the Los Angeles area that was being conducted by white nationalists.

Now, as part of that effort, he sought to acquire an improvised explosive device. Went about gathering materials for that. This was all under the control of the FBI. They provide him with an inert device. He went and tried to place it in an area where a crowd was to gather and was taken into custody by officials.

Alisyn and John, we're told that at no point was the public in danger. This was an inert device. Were also told that they do not believe that he had any associates. JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Josh Campbell for us in Los

Angeles. The FBI at work stopping this before it had a chance to be deadly.

Hundreds gathering to mourn the death of Lori Gilbert Kaye, the congregant shot and killed by a gunman inside a California synagogue over the weekend. The attack is sparking new discussion about social media's role in violence against places of worship. And this morning, new statistics from the Anti-Defamation League show that there were nearly 2,000 attacks last year against Jews and Jewish institutions. Now, that's a small decline from 2017, but it's a big increase from 2016 and 2015.

I want to bring in Oren Segel, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

Oren, thanks for being with us.

These numbers just out this morning. And before people celebrate, because they're going to see the number of anti-Semitic incidents are down, that's because vandalism is down by a substantial margin, but harassment and assaults, which you also measure, are up from 2017.

OREN SEGAL, DIRECTOR, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE'S CENTER ON EXTREMISM: Yes, specifically the assault numbers are particularly alarming. We've seen a doubling of assaults against Jews, and that includes the shooting in Pittsburgh. And now as we're trying to still understand what happened in Poway. It's clear that attacks or efforts to actually target Jewish communities and the individuals are not going away.

CAMEROTA: Why? What's happening? What's behind this?

[08:35:02] SEGAL: Well, there're multiple factors. One is social media. You have these platforms that essentially act as digital hate groups. Individuals are able to reach and recruit and radicalize others and, frankly, they're signaling back to these communities before they're carrying out these attacks. We saw this in Poway. We saw this in Pittsburgh and we saw this in New Zealand.

BERMAN: I struggle with blaming social media sometimes for this. And it comes up in all the discussions we have and we talk about it a lot. And I do understand that it makes it easier at times to convey messages of hate. But I also think it makes it easy to ignore the roots of anti-Semitism and the fact that if you did away with Twitter and FaceBook and all forms of social media immediately, I still think it would be out there.

SEGAL: So anti-Semitism is not something that increases solely because of any one platform. And, frankly, the public discussion and the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic troupes and bigotry of all kinds also play a role in people's willingness to not only try to find others who share that hatred, but also try to leverage those conversations and insight each other to violence.

CAMEROTA: Well, there you go, because I disagree with John and we do debate it all the time because I think it wouldn't be able to be activated without social media or activated as easily without social media because we know they do find each other and they get ginned up and they make plans on social media.

And so what -- how do you crack down on that? What are the social media platforms doing about that?

SEGAL: Right. That's more important is, what do we do about this? We know that there are more platforms than ever before for people to be able to communicate their hatred. I think it's not unreasonable for users and the public to have expectation of these platforms that take -- they take more efforts and more initiatives to try to create efforts to make it more difficult for extremists to share their -- their hatred.

CAMEROTA: But just tell me what that would look like, because you know FaceBook, et cetera, say that they have all sorts of like First Amendment issues where they can't do that.

So what's your dream scenario where they would crack down on that?

SEGAL: Listen, it's not a one size fits all. You know, FaceBook and Twitter are different than Gab and 8chan. But we know that at -- you know, at the starting point you have to admit that you have a problem. You have to put the resources in protecting your users from those who seek to weaponize social media.

Like -- the reality is this, extremists and those who are carrying out these violent activities, they're preparing their social media approach at the same time that they're preparing their weapons.

BERMAN: Oh, that is chilling. But I will say this, you know, Twitter and FaceBook, perhaps the reason that 8chan exists is because Twitter and FaceBook had made it at least more difficult for people to hate online and publicly. But if you did away with 8chan, there would be 9chan or 10chan. They'd find a way.

SEGAL: There's always going to be other platforms. But what's the option --

BERMAN: Right.

SEGAL: Just to give up, not to address it on these platforms.

And, by the way, it's not just the role and responsibility of the tech industry. And some have made some efforts. It's also government, law enforcement, civil society organizations to call it out. And, frankly, it's to recognize what anti-Semitism and extremism is. We can't deny that there's a surge in white supremacy and we no longer can deny the surge in anti-Semitism.

CAMEROTA: So, historically, when you've seen a spike in anti-Semitism and white supremacy, what is it that has quelled it? What is it that's brought it down in the past?

SEGAL: Yes, I mean, that's a -- that's an important question, yes, and I think part of it is leadership, unequivocally speaking out against hatred wherever it is. I know Deborah Lipstadt has said anti-Semitism starts with the Jews but it doesn't end with the Jews. I think we need to address other forms of bigotry in order to reduce anti-Semitism as well.

And faith leaders of all kinds need to not just figure out ways to come together during times of crisis, but throughout the year we need to stop people from driving a wedge between these communities.

BERMAN: I have to say -- and one of the first things you said I find truly fascinating and troubling, which is the mainlining or mainstreaming of some types of anti-Semitism. And in my lifetime, and maybe I wasn't aware -- as aware of it when I was a kid, but I don't remember a time in my life when so much of it is so overt and out there. There was this cartoon in "The New York Times" over the weekend, that wasn't a double entendre, that was a single entendre. That was an anti-Semitic cartoon. And we get statements from our leaders that aren't double entendre's either. They're single entendres. They're just flat out anti-Semitic.

SEGAL: Yes, I would say that that was anti-Semitic propaganda. I wouldn't even call it just simply a cartoon.

BERMAN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: I mean -- but, obviously, to your point, also I think that the words coming from the president need to be stronger. He says that he's against anti-Semitism and he talks about being against white supremacy, but some of his messaging have been confusing.

SEGAL: Listen, I've been doing this work at ADL for 20 years looking at extremist narratives, how they speak to each other, anti-Semitic troupes and I don't recall a time in my doing this work that it has become so mainstream where people don't even tell the difference between what is anti-Semitism and what is not.

BERMAN: But that's my point. So how do you stop that?

SEGAL: Again, you'd have to consistently speak out the way we do and call it for what it is. Defining our terms and educating the public is always critical.

[08:40:01] BERMAN: Oren Segal, thanks for coming in. A really interesting discussion. I appreciate it.

CAMEROTA: All right, he was the youngest director and first African- American ever to get an Oscar nomination. Hollywood is remembering John Singleton, next.

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BERMAN: The entire country mourning the loss of Oscar-nominated director John Singleton. He was just 51 years old. He suffered a massive stroke nearly two weeks ago and died Monday after his family took him off of life support.

CNN's Sara Sidner has much more on Singleton's life and legacy. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "BOYZ IN THE HOOD": Either they don't know, don't show or don't care about what's going on in the hood.

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): At 24, "Boyz in the Hood" earned John Singleton a place in movie history as the first black director and the youngest director ever nominated for an Academy Award.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "BOYZ IN THE HOOD": Something wrong?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "BOYZ IN THE HOOD": Something wrong? Yes.

SIDNER: His 1991 debut film told the story of three childhood friends coming of age in violent south central Los Angeles. A place Singleton called home.

He loved movies from an early age and that passion took him from south central to the University of Southern California's named film school. Singleton's college screen plays won writing awards and landed him a Hollywood agent. In surprisingly short order, he turned his senior thesis "Boyz in the Hood," into a movie.

[08:45:17] JOHN SINGLETON, DIRECTOR: I look at the time my senior year in school as kind of a hallmark in my life, you know, because I was young, I didn't have anything. All I had was promise.

SIDNER: With dramas like "Poetic Justice," "Rosewood" and "Baby Boy," Singleton led a new generation of black directors making films that spoke to the African-American experience.

SINGLETON: My life's dream is to make films. The films I want to make -- the films I want to make that come straight from my soul and to just do what I want to do, not only to entertain an audience, but to raise people to a higher level of consciousness with every film.

SIDNER: He had action films as well, including the 2000 remake of "Shaft" and the second installment of the blockbuster "Fast and Furious" franchise "Too Fast Too Furious." He later worked mostly in television, directing episodes of "Empire," "The People Versus OJ Simpson," and "Billions."

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR: Who set you up?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR: Nobody.

SIDNER: He also created the series "Snowfall," which chronicled the '80s crack epidemic in Los Angeles.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "SNOWFALL": I'm here to buy.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "SNOWFALL": I don't sell coke to kids.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "SNOWFALL": Then what do you sell?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE, ACTOR, "SNOWFALL": I sell kilos to people with money.

SIDNER: John Singleton, a pioneering filmmaker whose journey took him from the hood to Hollywood.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: Obviously a major impact. "Boyz in the Hood" is an iconic film and it was his first. And he said that he didn't know how to direct when he started it. So that by the end of the film, he says the last third of the film was better because he actually knew how to direct by the time the whole thing was (INAUDIBLE).

CAMEROTA: A steep learning curve. What a loss. What a loss too soon.

BERMAN: All right, Michael Cohen heads to prison next week. What's on his mind as he prepares to go? Jeffrey Toobin with a remarkable profile. So much you've never heard before. That's next.

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[08:51:10] CAMEROTA: President Trump's long time attorney, Michael Cohen, is heading to prison next week for crimes he says he committed at the direction of and for the benefit of the president.

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin sat down with Michael Cohen for a new piece in "The New Yorker." He joins us now.

Jeffrey, you spent a lot of time with Michael Cohen and he had one burning question for you, and I think for himself, and so let's just get right to that.

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: Indeed.

CAMEROTA: He says, and how come I'm the only one? I didn't work for the campaign, I worked for him. And how come I'm the one that's going to prison? I'm not the one that slept with the porn star.

What's the answer?

TOOBIN: Well, the answer is that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and he made some terrible decisions. But what was fascinating to me, and what I didn't realize, you know, coming into this project was, of all the crimes he pleaded guilty to, all of them but one were entirely for the benefit of Donald Trump. You know, he set -- the illegal campaign contributions in connection with Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, raising the money to get the money to Stormy Daniels, making a false statement to Congress about Donald Trump's dealings with Russia to align himself with Trump's false story about that.

Now, there was also income tax evasion, which was his own problem, and he has his own explanation for it. But the degree to which his crimes benefited Trump more than him is really -- is really shocking and I think contributes a great deal to his bitterness about heading off to prison for three years, which is not a trivial sentence.

CAMEROTA: Oh, no.

BERMAN: First of all, everyone needs to go read this full article in "The New Yorker" and read it till the end because you get the Great Gaspee reference at the end. It's not until the last couple paragraphs.

TOOBIN: All right. Well, that's the dessert.

BERMAN: So you have to stick around till the end.

To that point you were just making, I guess that I had always assumed -- and I think we had all assumed -- that the investigations into Michael Cohen were for sketchy dealings he'd been doing anyway, and then they also tacked on the campaign finance stuff. But it seems to be the reverse. It seems to be what brought him under the spotlight first was Russia and the campaign finance, and then they got him on the other things.

TOOBIN: One thing that was fascinating to me, Robert Mueller was appointed May 17, 2017. July 17, 2017, they get a search warrant for Michael Cohen's phone. That's how quickly they focus on him. Just two months after Mueller is appointed, he's going after Cohen. So Mueller obviously thought that Cohen was the key to all of this. And it was -- it was part of the Russia investigation. It wasn't that the tax stuff and that, you know, the -- your comment shows how powerful Donald Trump's megaphone is.

BERMAN: I understand.

TOOBIN: Because megaphone -- because Trump keeps saying, oh, he was mixed up in all sorts of corruption and taxicabs. He was (INAUDIBLE), except for cheating on his taxes.

CAMEROTA: But usually the way this works, don't you use the type like Michael Cohen, the character in this plot, Michael Cohen, to get to the bigger fish? Don't you normally use him as a cooperating witness to then get the bigger fish? But why didn't that happen in this situation?

TOOBIN: Well, because Cohen himself made a terrible miscalculation. He sort of agreed to cooperate with the Southern District of New York's investigation, but he didn't fully cooperate. The Southern District, like a lot of U.S. attorneys' offices, has a rule that if you are going to cooperate, you have to agree to talk about anything they want to talk about. You have to spill your guts about everything. And Cohen wouldn't do that. He said, I will cooperate about some things and not others.

CAMEROTA: What didn't he talk -- want to talk about? Do we know?

TOOBIN: It's not entirely clear and, frankly, Michael wasn't entirely clear to me about that. But, in any event, he didn't. And so when it came for sentencing, the Southern District did not give him the sort of glowing recommendation that cooperators generally do.

[08:55:04] Interestingly, Mueller's office did say that Cohen cooperated successfully. And if you read the Mueller report, he -- the Mueller team adopts Cohen's version of just about everything he's involved with.

And, in fact, one of the things Rudy Giuliani said to me when I was working on this piece is that it was unfair to Trump because he believed Cohen so much. So that's an interesting point of departure between the two.

BERMAN: You know, at the end of the day, Cohen's truthfulness has been called into question by a whole bunch of people.

TOOBIN: To be sure.

BERMAN: But Mueller really did seem to lean on him quite a bit, and you make that point here.

TOOBIN: He's -- he's, I believe, the second most cited person after Don McGahn in the Mueller report. And particularly -- you know, one of the ten examples of obstruction of justice that Mueller raises on the part of the president is the efforts to get Michael Cohen not to cooperate with Mueller, not to cooperate with the Southern District. And in that accounting, in that episode, Mueller endorses Cohen's testimony much more than he does Trump's or anyone else's.

CAMEROTA: It is a fascinating and comprehensive piece, Jeffrey.

TOOBIN: And May 6th, he's off to prison.

CAMEROTA: Wow.

TOOBIN: It's a tough deal.

CAMEROTA: All right, thank you very much for sharing it with us.

TOOBIN: Thanks, team (ph). Thank you.

CAMEROTA: There is currently chaos on the streets of Venezuela at this hour and it is a possible military uprising.

CNN "NEWSROOM" is going to pick up now with much more.

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