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Turkey-Russia Dispute High on Rhetoric; Trump's Latest Verbal Miscue; Band Members' Account of Paris Rock Concert Shooting. Aired 7:30-8a ET

Aired November 26, 2015 - 07:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Turkey president ratcheting up the rhetoric in the heated dispute with Russia over the shoot down of that Russian warplane.

Erdogan saying that he would do it all over again if he had to. This as French President Francois Hollande meets today with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. The two world leader expected to discuss the coalition against ISIS, but how will the talks go now in the wake of this plane incident?

Joining us this morning is Ambassador James Jeffrey. He's the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq and a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute.

Mr. Ambassador, thanks so much for being here.

JAMES JEFFREY, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO TURKEY AND IRAQ: Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.

CAMEROTA: And to you as well.

Do you think that Turkey was justified in shooting down this Russian plane?

JEFFREY: Legally, yes. To figure out if this is politically wise, you have to look at the back story.

Turkey had an F-4 fighter plane shot down by the Syrians, Russia's ally, several years ago. Both pilots were killed. Since that time, Turkey has made it very clear it will not accept incursions into its territory, particularly in the politically sensitive area of Hatay Province, where the shoot down the other day occurred. That province has been planned for many years by Syria.'

Turkey saw several incursions back in October. It protested. The Russians continue doing it, and we're where we are today.

CAMEROTA: now, Russia of course says that it did not go over Turkish airspace. Turkey says that it did. Turkey says that they issued 10 warnings to the Russian pilots. The surviving pilot, one of them was rescued, says that he didn't get any warnings. So obviously, there is a conflict. But despite that, we've had our military experts on -- even this morning, one of our generals, who said that there were a bunch of things that Turkey could have done to the escalate the situation. So why did they try those options?

JEFFREY: Again, Turkey had tried those before, and it wanted to send a message to Putin. Russia has been provocative not only against Turkey that all over NATO for the last several years. And there's a long history of Russian shoot downs of planes, particularly American planes, that have crossed into its borders. Again, Turkey felt threatened by these Russian actions.

CAMEROTA: So what do you think about President Erdogan? Because we've heard analysts say that he might be a bit of a loose cannon and that he might be sacrificing NATO stability. I mean, this is the first time that a NATO country has shot down a Russian plane at least since 1952, and so that he is sort of advancing his own agenda at this expense of the global community.

JEFFREY: There is -- you can look at it that way. I take a more balanced viewer.

Sooner or later, Putin, with this aggressive behavior, and everything he's done in Syria -- his aggressive behavior -- and it is accompanied by nothing but lies. We know, the American military, that the Russians were warned. They were warned 10 times. We do know they crossed into Turkish airspace.

Erdogan, I know him pretty well, he is some respects a loose canon, but Turkey is, in fact, embedded into the West. It cannot go off on adventures on its own. It cannot issue totally false statements about what happened, because it is plugged into us and a thousand different electronic and other ways, and we would catch than on any lie immediately.

So you're getting basically truth out of Turkey. You're getting nothing but lies out of the Russians.

CAMEROTA: So what now? What happens when President -- French President Francois Hollande meets with President Vladimir Putin? How did this change the equation today?

JEFFREY: It change the equation superficially, because the shoot down means that it's going to be harder to put together even a superficial NATO regional powers Russian alliance against ISIS, which is Hollande's primary purpose, because, of course, Paris has been attacked twice by Islamic terrorists in the past year. And he fears a third one if the ISIS state, if you will, is not taken down in Syria and Iraq. So he's looking for help.

His main address is Washington. He didn't get everything he wanted in Washington, so he's hoping that if he can get some commitments by Putin, this could, in turn, pressure Washington to act in a more aggressive, and more effective way. I don't think this is going to work though. CAMEROTA: But, I mean, of course, Putin also wants to fight ISIS. Putin also has a rationale. They shot down the Russian metrojets, so why wouldn't Putin be on board?

JEFFREY: First of all, Putin is exploiting the ISIS threat to everyone, including Russia, to advance its core strategic interest, which is to form an alliance with the Iranians, with the Syrian government, and to expand it militarily in the region at the expense of the United States and its alliance system. This is something that isn't good for us, and it isn't good for the people of the region.

But on the margins, Putin will do a few strikes against ISIS, but he is not the answer to the Isis campaign. America has somewhere between 10 and 100 times more military capabilities in the region than Russia can bring to bear. The difference is we are not doing that. And Hollande is hoping a bit more Russian military commitment could lead to the United States trying to up its game two.

CAMEROTA: Yes. Fascinating information.

Ambassador James Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us today.

JEFFREY: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: Let's get to Michaela.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, Alisyn.

Donald Trump coming under fire for mocking a reporter with a disability. Could this be an incident that puts a dent in his armor? We'll talk about this ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

The New York Times is slamming Donald Trump after the Republican frontrunner mocked one of their reporters with a disability.

The reporter, Serge Kovaleski, suffers from a condition that limits the movement of his arms, something that Trump exaggerated at a campaign rally Tuesday night while defending -- he was trying to defend his claim that he'd still saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Right after a couple of good paragraphs -- and they're talking about northern New Jersey draws the probers' eyes, written by a nice reporter. Now, the poor guy, you have to see this guy. Oh, I don't know what I said. Oh, I don't remember. He's going, like, I don't remember. Maybe that's what I said.

This is 14 years ago. He still -- they didn't do a retraction.

(END VIDEOTAPE) Here to respond, our senior contributor for the Daily Caller and conservative commentator, Matt Louis, and CNN political commentator and political anchor of Time Warner Cable News, Errol Louis.

Great to see you guys. Happy Thanksgiving.

Matt, I want to start with you. What -- I mean, what was that? Donald Trump goes after reporters that he doesn't like the coverage. That's not new. But what did you think about that body language and that display?

MATT LEWIS, SENIOR CONTRIBUTOR, THE DAILY CALLER: It's nothing new for Donald Trump. This is right in his will house, and it's really sad, because I don't think it's going to hurt him.

I think that, you know, we have this schizophrenic nation right now. On one hand, you have a sort of liberal world where people do a lot of hand wringing and there's political correctness run amok, there are micro-aggressions and safe zones. On the other hand, you have Donald Trump fans who frankly, I think, really don't care about decency or politeness for what I would call common decency. So it's really a sad commentary, I think, on our culture that I don't think this will hurt Donald Trump one bit.

You know, Errol, I was thinking -- I was just wondering how this is going to effect the press is covering him because he's essentially taken swipes -- you can take down a list of all the people here at CNN and other organizations -- and I know that -- you know, we have to have thick skin. That you've been in the game, and I'm sure you've asked him questions of a politician from time-to-time that they haven't taken kindly to.

ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Sure.

PEREIRA: But what do you think this is going to do as time goes on and the mean-spirited, you know, cruel nature of this kind of carries on?

LOUIS: Well, I think there's a -- that there is a portion of this that everybody's accepts as part of the trade, right? I've been -- you know, I've been insulted, I've been sued, I've been you know, barred from press conferences, all of that stuff. But when you see this kind of -- kind of petty cruelty that has nothing to do with anything, it's very personal. It's something they wouldn't teach our children to do, or we would teach our children not to do.

To see somebody who is the Republican front-runner, I would just caution Republican voters, especially those who support Trump. Republicans have lost five -- the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Every single person in America, every family has people who are disabled in it. You know, there comes a point where, I think, when people in the quiet of the voting booth will say do I really want to support this? You know, he's mocking someone the same way we might have experienced people blocking our friends, our relatives, our coworkers.

PEREIRA: Well, we didn't mock them.

LOUIS: I think it starts to turn to something very, very different.

PEREIRA: Now...

LOUIS: And I wouldn't -- I wouldn't necessarily count that out as a factor, even if the polls don't pick it up.

PEREIRA: I mean, in fairness to the crowd in South Carolina there, they don't know this reporter. They don't know that he has a disability. They thought that that was just Donald Trump being Donald Trump.

And the New York Times issued their own response to what they saw. They said we find it outrageous that Trump would ridicule the appearance of one of our reporters.

Matt, does Donald Trump me to apologize? Does he need to respond to this?

LEWIS: He won't do it is the bottom line. I'm glad to see us the media sort of standing up for their -- for their own. I think that's entirely appropriate. They should do that for their employees, for their colleagues.

Look, I think that's this is part of two Trump is, and there is a sense out there is that the media is the enemy amongst a certain quarter and that you have to stand up and really but there's a war that the old conventions of politeness are out the window. I, though, think that frank -- that if you're a conservative, you should be standing up for things like humility and wisdom and prudence and common decency.

I mean, you know, it used to be that we wanted -- you talk about teaching your children certain values and behaviors. This is not a good example.

PEREIRA: Well, it's interesting. There's a new poll. We should actually point out that Donald Trump has leveled his sights on the New York Times now, too.

CAMEROTA: Right. He's been tweeting up a storm this morning against them. There's no apology.

PEREIRA: I'll read it to you.

"The failing New York Times should be focused on good reporting and the paper's financial survival and not with constant hits on Donald Trump."

CAMEROTA: Well. So a new poll has just been released that point perhaps, Eroll, to a potential reason that -- we've been talking about what it is that Donald Trump is speaking to and capturing what's going on in the nation.

I want to pull this poll up, because it's very interesting -- 79 percent of Republicans think their party's on the losing side when it comes to issues that matter. Is this -- I mean, that is so significant to me that 79 percent think that -- you think that that could work both ways?

LOUIS: Well, it does.

CAMEROTA: If they feel like they're outside of the political conversation, that might make one a disillusioned voter.

LOUIS: Well, that's right. There are lot to disillusioned voters, and the majority of the supporters for Trump -- the polls reveal this pretty consistently -- they support him not because he's the most effective, because he has the best experience, or because he is the most honest and trustworthy -- it's because they think he can win.

CAMEROTA: They're just mad.

LOUIS: Because they think he can win. And that, I think, is the great question that people are going to have to try and answer. Do you think that this is the way to win by trying to talk about deporting 11 million people? Or watching a black protester get beat up and sort of urging that from the podium? Mocking the disabled? On and on and on and on.

If you think that that's the way to get to the White House and you're a very frustrated voter who thinks that politics doesn't work for you, you have to make a real hard choice about whether this is the horse to ride to get to where you think you want to go.

CAMEROTA: All right. But that's not what they respond to about him. I mean, they respond to his success story. They think that he's a success. And it's not -- I mean, they sort of excuse these other things.

LOUIS: Well, they're overlooking quite a lot. I mean, let's keep in mind that in this case where he's mocking a reporter, this is the reporter who exposed, I thought, pretty conclusively that it was a complete fabrications they came out of Trump's mouth. And so we shouldn't get distracted from that, that he was lying about these thousands and thousands of people who were supposed to be cheering as the World Trade Center fell. This is the reporter who exposed it.

CAMEROTA: All right. Our thanks to both of you. Ron -- or Matt and Eroll, sorry. Thank you so much.

PEREIRA: Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

CAMEROTA: Happy Thanksgiving to both of you.

Really compelling to hear from these young men. They were on stage when terrorists opened fire at the Bataclan theater in Paris. The Eagles of Death Metal band opening up about the horror they witnessed and their fight to survive.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) JESSE HARRIS, EAGLES OF DEATH METAL: Then I opened up the hallway door, and that's when I saw the shooter. And he turned on me. Brought his gun down, and the barrel hit the doorframe. And I was like, oh, (beep).

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: An emotional look now inside the Paris terror attack. We're hearing from the American band Eagles of Death Metal. They were on stage at the Bataclan Concert Hall when the terrorists stormed in. The band members recounting the screens, the gunfire, bloody people. Listen to the chilling firsthand account they gave Vice of what happened.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MATT JUNKINS, EAGLES OF DEATH METAL: When the shootings started, I threw down my bass...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.

JUNKINS: ...hid for a second sort of behind the curtain and sort of behind the monitor desk and immediately, you know, people starting pouring through -- there's like a door to get up to the stage for stage access.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. On your side?

JUNKINS: Yes. And people were coming and Steve, our tour manager, he was there. And he's the first -- you know, he's the first person I saw. Just the look on his face of, like, we both had the same thought of -- you know, he was like there's no exit over here.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

JUNKINS: And he was trying to tell people that, you know -- like they were running.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're just trying to get out?

JUNKINS: Everyone's running. Well, everyone sort of going up into this room or -- you know, just to escape the gunfire, you know, naturally, instinctively.

From my perspective, you know, I see the shooting. I see it. I see, you know, the pops go off, the lights flashing. Sort of dive over. And then just have to make that decision of whether do I really want to run across the stage, or do I want just go in this room and hope for the best.

So I went into the room with a bunch of people. And there's a bunch of people all helping each other to get up there, you know, like holding on and just like let's -- you know, we're in this. And as soon as we get there, there's a few people that had been shot and were bleeding. People started -- we started grabbing chairs to barricade the door.

There was like a little mini-fridge, and someone said, look, they -- a bottle of champagne in the room for like a post-show thing. They had that to use in case as a weapon. Because that's it. That's all we had.

You know, there was a woman in front of me who -- it was scary because she was bleeding the whole -- you know, she got shot like right here, you know, on her upper thigh. And there was nothing to do except for there was this guy -- I don't know -- you know, this -- he was holding her and just keeping pressure on her.

And she had a friend who was doing the same thing, and this guy was just trying to like keep her comfortable. And I mean -- and her blood was running out on the ground, and there was -- there was a leak for some reason. But the whole room was starting to get flooded, and we were worried, because water was -- I mean it was -- like it was up to here, you know...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right.

JUNKINS: ...covering here. She was -- start trickling down the stairs, and then that would -- we were worried that that would -- maybe that would alert someone that like, hey, there's people in this room.

The gunfire got closer. It went on for, you know, 10, 15 minutes. It just didn't stop. And then it would stop, and there was this sense of relief, and then it would start up again.

And then there was an explosion...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

JUNKINS: ...that just shook the whole room, probably the whole building. And, you know -- and of course, we didn't know what that was. So we didn't know if someone was trying to bomb the place or trying to maybe blow up the whole venue or what. Just (inaudible)...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And what was it? It was a vest.

JUNKINS: I think one of the -- yes, we found out later.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So it was a suicide vest?

JUNKINS: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And so, Jesse, you were looking for your girlfriend, Tuesday. He's going off stage right. You're going off stage left. He's behind the drum riser. What happened to you?

HARRIS: I ran up. I didn't see her on the side of the stage, so I ran up to the dressing room. And just like he said, I threw the door open. She wasn't in there. And then I opened up the hallway door, and that's when I saw the shooter. And he turned on me. Brought his gun down, and the barrel hit the doorframe. And I was like, oh, (beep), and I turned around and I started -- because I could tell people were following me.

You know, this was a situation where everyone was looking for the place to go, you know? And I realized that, and I was like no, no, no, no, no. Do not (beep) come this way. Do not.

And we started heading back down. And we got to that exit door, and I still hadn't seen Tuesday. Julien got out in front of me, and I was -- Eden and I -- he was like standing with me, and actually, I think, if you think about it, you were like, what the (beep), dude. You -- it was almost like, let's move. Let's go.

But I didn't know what to do, and -- but when Tuesday saw Julien, and I heard her voice, I knew she was cool.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PEREIRA: He is so traumatized, and why wouldn't you be? That is the most horrific thing. No human should ever have to experience.

CAMEROTA: And I think that people don't realize that it went on for 15 minutes. You know, these -- sometimes these things happen and this burst of gunfire and it's a few horrible, traumatic seconds...

PEREIRA: No.

CAMEROTA: ...they listened...

PEREIRA: That's so long.

CAMEROTA: ...and hid for 15 minutes.

PEREIRA: Yes.

We want to show you this image. It's really powerful. It's from the stage, looking at the crowd before the attack. These for young people excited to see this band but they were fans of -- following -- people from all around the world there to see this concert. And this was taken before. You can see the joy, the happiness, the energy in that crowd.

CAMEROTA: Gosh, just the crowd.

All right. We'll leave it on that note. We're following a lot of news for you this morning, so let's get right to it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A second night of unrest as hundreds of protesters return to the streets.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We saw, like, a killing and cover up. And both of those lead us to questions.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The video clearly shows Laquan walking away, and he was not threatening anybody.

DAN HERBERT, JASON VAN DYKE'S ATTORNEY: It doesn't show quite a bit. It's a limited video.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is going to be a long, long, long battle.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: New fallout from Turkey shooting down that Russian jet.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: No one can predict what Vladimir Putin may decide to do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's not in the interests of either country to see this escalate.

ROBERT BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY ANALYST: We are moving closer to a war in the Middle East.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Law enforcement on the alert across the country this holiday weekend.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You'll never have 100 percent confidence in what's going on.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We are taking every possible step to keep our homeland safe.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. Welcome to a special Thanksgiving Day edition of CNN Newsroom. It is Thursday, November 26th at 8:00 here in the East.

We do have some breaking news to tell you about, because breaking overnight more unrest in Chicago. Protesters marching over that video of a police officer firing 16 shots at a black teenager, killing him. This as four more dash cam videos offer new perspectives on the moments leading up to the 17-year-old's death.

PEREIRA: In the meantime, the Chicago Police Department is warning its members of threats of an ambush from a gang enraged by Laquan McDonald's death.

CNN's Ryan Young is live in Chicago tracking all of the developments...

(END AUDIO)