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Bill to Fund Homeland Security Department Stalled in Congress; Interview with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen; Police Shoot at Unarmed Man 17 Times

Aired February 27, 2015 - 08:00   ET

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

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ISIS appears to have money. Why shouldn't our homeland have billing to protect itself?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is not a partisan dispute. This is a party dispute.

BARACK OBAMA, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When they make decisions I'll let you know.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Six Canadian teens are feared to have fled to join is.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Terrorist known as Jihadi John.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I suspect over time he will be identified and killed.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They are trying to reshape the map, changing the shape of history and culture itself.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Millions of people, they start with the police.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it's safe to say there was a rock found next to his body.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo, Alisyn Camerota, and Michaela Pereira.

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CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Friday, February 27th, 8:00 in the east. And take a look at the clock on the screen. It's 16 hours and counting until Homeland Security starts shutting down. And the timing could not be worse. ISIS is on a rampage in the Middle East, and they are recruiting American citizens. Yet Congress has not found a way to fund this all- important agency.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Now the Senate is poised to pass a clean DHS spending Bill this morning, but House Republicans not yet on board. Can they break the stalemate by tonight's deadline? Let's bring in CNN's senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta. What's the latest with the clock ticking?

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Alisyn, the clock is ticking and Washington is peering over the edge of the Homeland Security cliffs you can call it this time. As you mentioned, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a plan to keep it funded until September. But over in the house where things are much less certain, House Speaker John Boehner, he has a plan that would only fund the department for three weeks. That is the more likely scenario at this point. But because there are these two differences up on Capitol Hill and because House Speaker John Boehner will be herding votes like cats or llamas today, the White House is portraying this as an intraparty dispute. Here's what they had to say.

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JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Republicans made an aggressive case over the course of last year about why the American people should entrust United States Congress to Republican leadership. And here we are seven or eight weeks into their tenure and they're on the precipice of falling down on the job, particularly when -- and that's notable when we're talking about something as important as funding the Department of Homeland Security.

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ACOSTA: Now, one person who does not like the idea of a short-term spending Bill for DHS is the secretary, Jeh Johnson. He sent a letter to lawmakers explaining why he says a short-term continuing resolution "exacerbates the uncertainty for my work force and puts us back in the same position on the brink of a shutdown just days from now." That is because lawmakers, if they do extend funding for DHS for three weeks, they'll be back in March doing this all over again to see if they can find their way out of this. And at this point nothing is guaranteed, not even that this will work by the time the clock strikes midnight later on tonight, less than 16 hours to go, guys.

CUOMO: All right, Jim, thank you very much. We'll be keeping that clock up there. It matters.

And the FBI's top counterterrorism official just admitted the U.S. is losing the propaganda battle to ISIS. CNN Justice Correspondent Pamela Brown has more for us on this.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Chris, law enforcement officials I've been speaking with say until the ISIS propaganda machine that is feeding rapid recruitment, especially among youth, is shut down the ISIS problem in the U.S. is not going away. In fact the FBI counterterrorism chief Michael Steinbach talked about that, as you point out, the losing battle in the social media war in his testimony yesterday, and how it's impossible to compete with the sheer volume of the various social media messages on all the different platforms. So the problem is clear, the solution not so much. In fact, Steinbach talked about the issue to me in a recent sit-down interview. Here's what he said.

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MICHAEL STEINBACH, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR COUNTERTERRORISM: Groups like ISIL have done an effective PR campaign putting out a false narrative describing what it's like over there. And that's a narrative that's sucked up by kids here in the U.S. and other western countries.

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BROWN: Also on the Hill yesterday the intelligence chief James Clapper, he testified about the Americans who have tried to join the fight in Syria. He said 180 Americans have gone or already returned to U.S. soil. And he also said once the final accounting is done, 2014 will have been the most lethal year for terrorism in 45 years since such data has been compiled, a very dire picture there. Back to you.

CAMEROTA: That was a stunning assessment from him, and we'll talk more about that. Pamela Brown, thanks so much for that.

Canadian authorities, meanwhile, investigating the whereabouts of at least four teenagers who investigators basically have traveled to Turkey on their way to join ISIS. CNN's Paula Newton joins us with more from Ottawa. What do we know?

PAULA NEWTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Alisyn, at least fourteen teenagers with a confirmed link to ISIS that are trying to get to Syria. The trail has grown cold now in Turkey. Canadian officials working with their counterparts there to try and figure out what happened to these young people.

Again, some of the parents speaking out saying they may have been radicalized at a community college. An Islamic preacher has been banned from teaching at that college. He'll be having a press conference this morning trying to explain exactly the motivations. As we just heard from Pamela, Alisyn, officials here are saying that, look, this problem of radicalization is growing ever stronger, that ISIS does have some momentum here, and that what we're hearing from parents, Alisyn, in Canada, as well, there seems to be little to no warning. The Canadian government prepared to take passports away from people they suspect are trying to get overseas to join ISIS. The problem, Alisyn, is those warning signs. Parents are not seeing them, if there are any at all. And we'll continue to follow this story through Montreal. Back to you.

CAMEROTA: So troubling. Paula, thank you.

CUOMO: All right, so big question this morning is what would drive a young middle class, well-educated Londoner to be ISIS's most prolific executioner. Counterterror officials are trying to figure that out just one day after Jihadi John was publicly unmasked. We have CNN senior international correspondent Nic Robertson in London with more. Nic? NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We've been

hearing, Chris, from the British prime minister, David Cameron, today, backing up his position that he's not going to verify the name that has been given for Jihadi John, Mohammed Emwazi, saying that however they will do, the British government will do everything it can to put these people out of action. So he is standing by that position.

But how did he become to be radicalized? That's a question we're getting some indication of. Court documents that are cycling in the British media here indicate that Emwazi was in a group of people that intelligence officials believe were connected with Al Qaeda in Somalia. They were raising funds to help support that group. Indeed, some of the people in that group had been to Somalia, one of them killed in a U.S. drone strike early 2012. So really that's what appears to have put him on the radar for British authorities. But quite how he came to take that path still something of a mystery here. Back to you.

CAMEROTA: OK, Nic Robertson, thanks so much for that update.

We want to bring in now Democratic senator from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen. She is the top Democrat on the subcommittee of Homeland Security. She's the perfect person to talk about this ticking countdown that we have this morning. Good morning, senator.

SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN, (D) NEW HAMPSHIRE: Good morning.

CAMEROTA: We are less than 16 hours away now from DHS possibly experiencing a partial shutdown because Congress can't figure out the funding. Can you give us a reality check here, because lots of people say, yes, this will be an inconvenience if they shut down. Yes, some people won't be able to show up for work for a couple of weeks, but they're not essential workers and really national security will not be threatened. Do you agree?

SHAHEEN: I don't agree, and I would just point out that the argument here is not about the funding for the Department of Homeland Security. That was agreed to by the House and Senate, by Democrats and Republicans last December. So the fight here is a partisan, ideological fight about the president's order on his executive action as it applies to immigrants. So what we need to do is get a clean funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security and we need to debate those issues around immigration separately.

CAMEROTA: You believe in that and Mitch McConnell has suggested that as well. But are you suggesting that national security truly will be in jeopardy if the funding doesn't happen today, because essential workers to DHS still need to show up?

SHAHEEN: Well, they do need to show up, but what kind of message does it send when we're asking people to show up, many of them who put their lives on the line every day, and we're saying to them we don't value you enough to pay you for the job that you're doing. Just this week we saw three Brooklyn men arrested wanting to go over and fight with ISIS but saying that they would be willing to engage in a terrorist attack here at home, and the Department of Homeland Security was crucial in getting that done. Earlier this week I was at home in New Hampshire and one of our small communities hearing from police and firefighters and members of our emergency response community about their dependence on the Department of Homeland Security and how important DHS funding and grants are to the work that they do every day. They said that funding allows them to be proactive in their planning. And they took me in to look at some work they're doing on human trafficking and the difference that DHS has made as they're looking at this case getting ready to prosecute it.

So make no mistake, there are very real consequences here if we don't fund the Department of Homeland Security. And for the speaker to say that what he needs is more time to try and work out a deal, he acknowledged two days ago that he hadn't spoken to Majority Leader McConnell in two weeks. So this is not about more time to figure out how to come to agreement.

CAMEROTA: Senator, you were in a hearing yesterday with the director of national intelligence during which he gave a stark assessment of where we are on terrorism. Listen to this.

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JAMES CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: When the final accounting is done 2014 will have been the most lethal year for global terrorism in the 45 years such data has been compiled.

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CAMEROTA: The most lethal year for terrorism. Let me put up some numbers on our screen for our viewers. There were 13,000 attacks, terrorism attacks, in 2014, compared to 11,500 in 2013, and the number of fatalities went up exponentially as well. That's alarming and it feels as though the trend line is not going in the right direction.

SHAHEEN: Well, it's very alarming. And, again, it points to why we need to provide funding for the Department of Homeland Security. We heard from Commissioner Bratton this week from New York. I heard from one of the deputy commissioners in New York a couple of weeks ago that the Department of Homeland Security has been instrumental in thwarting numerous terrorist attempts since September 11th. And so the idea that our response to the increased terrorist threat is to say we're not going to provide the funding that Homeland Security needs to do their job sends a very bad signal to those who want to attack the United States.

CAMEROTA: Senator, before I let you go, we want to ask you about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming visit to Congress. Next week he will be addressing Congress. A few dozen of your colleagues are going to be boycotting that address because it wasn't -- it didn't follow proper protocols by getting the approval from President Obama. Will you be going to that address?

SHAHEEN: I do intend to go. I think it's unfortunate the way the invitation came about, but Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East. It's very important, I think, for us to continue that positive relationship, and I want to hear what Prime Minister Netanyahu has to say.

CAMEROTA: So you'd rather hear his message than send a message?

SHAHEEN: Well, that's right. I think it's very clear that the way this was done was very heavy handed, that it was not the way we normally do diplomacy. There has been tremendous bipartisan support for Israel in the past. That should continue, and the kinds of efforts that we've seen among some quarters to undermine that doesn't make sense.

CAMEROTA: Senator Jeanne Shaheen, thanks so much for being on NEW DAY.

SHAHEEN: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Nice to talk to you. Let's go over to Chris.

CUOMO: All right, we have some breaking news to tell you about. There is a very troubling situation that is developing in Missouri. Here are the reports so far -- nine people have been killed, four separate locations. This is in Tyrone, Missouri. It's about 130 miles southwest of St. Louis. "The Houston Herald" cites the county sheriff who says there may be even more crime scenes. So multiple scenes, certainly there have been lives taken so far. The question is what is motivating this onslaught. We are working details. Stay with us for the latest.

CAMEROTA: Just terrible.

Well, the White House is sending National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power to AIPAC this weekend, the pro- Israel lobbying group. And the timing could not be more important. Relations between Israel and the U.S. are frosty at beast. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as we just said, will address AIPAC on Monday, and a day later he will address Congress about Iran. Two dozen Democrats are planning to boycott that speech.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: You've been sounding off all morning about the morning's most crucial debate -- what color is this dress? Do you see black and blue or gold and white? The dress debate tearing the Internet apart overnight, people looking at this very same image seeing different colors. And the colors you see means how your brain interprets light.

CAMEROTA: For real?

ROMANS: Yes. So what color is it? The company behind the dress tweeted out this picture of the original blue and black dress, and look at them side by side. So are you a blue and black or a white and gold? Tweet us on our Facebook page.

CAMEROTA: OK, do you still see those as the same?

ROMANS: So the first image that we saw, I saw white and gold. This image next to the blue and black, I see blue and black.

CAMEROTA: OK. Do you see the same color? Do you think those look exactly the same, those two dresses, blue and black?

ROMANS: One is a little bit darker but blue and black.

CAMEROTA: You really?

ROMANS: You see white and gold? I see blue and black.

CUOMO: I see periwinkle and gold.

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CAMEROTA: Leave it to you, Chris Cuomo. I see white and gold. Crazy talk.

ROMANS: I see blue and black. Look --

CAMEROTA: Please tweet us. We'd love to know what you see in that picture.

ROMANS: It broke the Internet. It broke the Internet. This is what everybody is talking about.

CAMEROTA: Meanwhile, harrowing video shows an unarmed man running away from police with his hands up. Moments later, he's killed with a hail of bullets. Is there more to the story and is enough being done to investigate? We'll let you know.

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CUOMO: Another case of cop shooting an unarmed man and it is raising questions. The story may be unique though because of how little attention it's getting. In this video, the event is on video, it's recorded by a witness in Pasco, Washington, you can see an unarmed Mexican man running away from police before stopping and turning toward the officers.

We're not going to show you what happens next but you can hear it. They shot him 17 times. Police say he was throwing rocks at them.

Felix Vargas is a business leader and former Green Beret. He's been working with the family and pushing for the DOJ to do an investigation.

Important to note, Mr. Vargas, you are not a local elected. You are not a local official. You say you are just a local resident and a concerned citizen here.

What is your concern?

FELIX VARGAS, CHAIRMAN, CONSEJO LATINO: What I'm concerned, Chris, is that this incident which occurred 17 days ago has shocked the conscience of this community, indeed, our nation, and what we're concerned about is the next steps that will be taken, that they be seen as credible. We have an ongoing police investigation of a police shooting, which in our view is not credible and lacks any impartiality. CUOMO: Why?

VARGAS: The track record, the history shows. So that's the problem.

CUOMO: Why? Why do you not have faith and confidence in the investigation, sir? That's what I'm asking. Why?

VARGAS: We don't have confidence in it because the police themselves have this association with the shooters of this particular incident and they're too close to the case, Chris, basically. They've not -- they've not led any conviction of officers in the past. We really need an impartial objective investigation, and that is simply not possible under the present circumstances.

CUOMO: The D.A.'s office says this, "Our office is waiting for complete reports from both pathologists before making any conclusions. Our goal is to be able to present this information to the inquest jury." That's from the prosecuting attorney.

Again, your reaction to that?

VARGAS: Well, that's fine. They are waiting for this. As you may know, there have been two autopsies and just this morning we've learned there's a third autopsy. In the two autopsies performed to date, there had been discrepancies in the number of shots fired, the impacts and the direction. The first autopsy commissioned by the coroner said there were no shots from behind. The second autopsy preliminary report states that there were, in fact, two shots fired from behind.

So, we need some conclusions here as to what really happened on that day. The coroner's inquest will also follow after this. All that and then the determination will be made by the prosecuting attorney for the county to determine if there are sufficient grounds to levy charges against the three officers involved.

So, there are a lot of moving pieces here. We think that the more eyes, the more credible the investigation why the greater chance that we'll have some justice here in Pasco.

CUOMO: Right or wrong -- right or wrong, as you know in these situations there is a scrutiny of the victim who is involved in this shooting, in this case the Mexican man that you're talking about, Mr. Zambrano Montes. He has a history, arrested for assaulting an officer, throwing objects at the police in that case, may have tried to grab an officer's pistol.

Do these facts reading into the situation make you more likely to believe the police version of events?

VARGAS: Well, Chris, the reality is that there has been this fascination into what Mr. Zambrano was up to the days and weeks before this, and it's -- it's of concern to us because we see a clear effort to lay a bias against Mr. Zambrano so as to make it seem like he had it coming to him. We do not believe that any of these circumstances, he was a troubled young man, he had mental illness, he suffered from substance abuse. None of this as he ran away from police warranted any actions by the police of excessive force, including two bullets are shots against him and then in effect executing him on the streets of Pasco.

By the police own acknowledgment, no knife and no gun in his hand when this happened.

CUOMO: Well, they say it was the rocks, right?

VARGAS: This is not normal behavior.

CUOMO: They say he was throwing big rocks and that an officer was hurt. When he turned they shot. You find that uncompelling?

VARGAS: That is not compelling. Most of the time that he was shot in that final volley, he had a small pebble in his hand. None of this rises to the level of an imminent threat involving potential death or serious injury to a police officer to warrant that. And if you read the police manual, governing practices and procedure of the police, there is clear guidance on how to comport themselves at incidents like this. Those provisions, and there are four, including the use of force and a use of limitations on use of force which were clearly violated by the police on that day.

CUOMO: I know that you feel that the cops in the area have a tendency to go to the gun too quickly, that they're not given the proper training in dealing with people who may be mentally ill.

What do you think the chance is, sir, that you will get an outside review, either by the feds, the DOJ, or an independent body there in the investigation at this point?

VARGAS: Well, I'm confident that the Department of Justice is monitoring this very closely. I met with the U.S. attorney general for eastern Washington two days ago. He gave us assurances that he himself in addition to the FBI is monitoring this incident. The attorney general himself -- sorry, the U.S. attorney will become engaged.

We would like a formal response by Eric Holder to our request. It's been 11 days since we've submitted our request. Nothing yet.

We note Mr. Holder's remarks about Ferguson and Florida. I wish he would take notice of the situation here in Pasco.

CUOMO: Well, Mr. Vargas, that's why we're reporting on it. We know about the protests, we know about the feelings and that ethnicity is involved in the judgment. We will follow it and the developments. Thank you for coming on NEW DAY. We'll speak to you again.

VARGAS: Thank you, Chris.

CUOMO: Alisyn? CAMEROTA: OK. Chris, a scandal at the IRS is deepening. New revelations that e-mails that supposedly vanished may have actually been part of a criminal act. Who was behind it? All that's next.

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