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Darren Wilson Grand Jury Considers New Evidence; Twitter Use Pushing Limits on Election Laws; New MH17 Footage; Tensions Rise Between Ukraine, Russia; Protesters Fed Up in Mexico

Aired November 17, 2014 - 13:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Jim Sciutto. Wolf Blitzer is off today.

A town and a nation nervously awaiting a grand jury decision on whether to indict Ferguson, Missouri, Officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting of unarmed teen, Michael Brown. As the grand jury continues to deliberate, it has dramatic new evidence to consider.

Here's our Stephanie Elam.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Jim, Sunday marked 100 days since Michael Brown was killed on that Ferguson street, and now for the first time, we're hearing Officer Darren Wilson's voice.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELAM (voice-over): These are the first images of Officer Darren Wilson, in the white T-shirt, captured just hours after Michael Brown was killed on August 9th. It's unclear in the video if Wilson was suffering from any injuries but police have said that Wilson sustained bruises and had a swollen face after his alleged struggle with Brown.

BENJAMIN CRUMP, BROWN FAMILY ATTORNEY: From the beginning, Dorian Johnson said that he wasn't injured, as far as he saw.

ELAM: This video, obtained by the "St. Louis Post Dispatch," shows Wilson leaving the police station after the shooting for the hospital. Later, it shows him returning, according to the paper.

"The St. Louis Post Dispatch" also obtained police audio, publishing a time line of the events that day beginning with a theft.

(BEGIN AUDIO FEED)

DISPATCH: Sir, we're taking a stealing in progress from 9101 West Florissant.

(END AUDIO FEED)

ELAM: 19 seconds later, dispatch issues a description of a suspect.

(BEGIN AUDIO FEED)

DISPATCH: He's with another male. He's got a red Cardinals' hat, white T-shirt and yellow socks and khaki shorts. He's walking up on (INAUDIBLE).

(END AUDIO FEED)

ELAM: Minutes later, Officer Wilson offers assistance.

(BEGIN AUDIO FEED)

OFC. DARREN WILSON, FERGUSON POLICE DEPARTMENT: 21 troy 25 or 22, you guys need me?

(END AUDIO FEED)

ELAM: The paper says shortly after, Officer Wilson stopped Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, for walking in the middle of the street. Officer Wilson calls for backup.

(BEGIN AUDIO FEED)

WILSON: 21. Put me on Canfield with two and send me a car.

(END AUDIO FEED)

ELAM: According to the paper's time line, Brown's fatal encounter with Wilson took less than two minutes. At 12:07, this call came in with someone apparently screaming in the background.

(BEGIN AUDIO FEED)

DISPATCH: Frank 25.

UNIDENTIFIED OFFICER: Get us several more units over here. There's going to be a problem.

(END AUDIO FEED)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ELAM: Jim, people in Ferguson are preparing best they can for the impending decision coming from the grand jury on whether or not they will indict Officer Wilson. Some are boarding up businesses. Other people are buying up groceries and are planning to stay in their homes until any potential unrest is over -- Jim?

SCIUTTO: A tense week there.

Coming up next, was Twitter used to stretch some campaign finance laws during the recent midterm elections? A CNN exclusive report on communications between Republicans and outside groups that may not have been on the up and up.

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SCIUTTO: Twitter has become a fairly basic campaign tool for candidates and parties to use during elections. We saw that during the midterm elections. But new CNN analysis shows that some Republican groups may have used Twitter to push the limits of election laws, and that's sparking hard questions about how social media is being used during political campaigns.

Senior digital correspondent for CNN, Chris Moody, explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS MOODY, CNN SENIOR DIGITAL ANALYST (voice-over): So in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that outside groups or corporations and unions can spend as much as they want on political speech to influence elections so long as they didn't coordinate with the campaigns but the campaign committees. Smart lawyers have been trying to find ways to send signals between campaigns and these outside groups that are all spending money for the same goal, and that is to get someone elected. Outside groups, including American Crossroads and the American Action Network collaborated with the National Republican Congressional Committee in order to share polling data. So because campaigns cannot coordinate officially with outside groups, what these groups did was set up public Twitter accounts that no one knows about in order to post polling data and numbers, and a secret code that you could only read if you have the formula. They would post these on the accounts. One of these accounts was named after Bruno Gianelli, the name of a fictional character on the show "West Wing." He argues in favor of using soft money to pedal issue campaigns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: The ad tried to influence the outcome of the election, so you can't use soft money, period.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Well, zipity do-dah, Sam.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MOODY: Here's an example tweet. It says, "CA NA 48/36-50/17 - 30/30 - NA - 10/28/14-21." What does that mean? We can guess that California is the state and the number at the end, 21, is the district, and then the polling in the middle, it's the top line numbers. After I got wind of this, I e-mailed a spokesperson for the NRCC and other groups, and literally minutes after I sent the e-mail, all of the accounts were deleted.

We've exposed a couple of these Twitter accounts but there's nothing stopping other campaigns or outside groups from doing this in the future so long as these groups continue to hide their information in plain sight.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Fascinating stuff.

Great to have Chris Moody joining us live from Washington.

So just help explain to our viewers here as to how, sharing that polling data, might be -- I know it's not clear -- but might be a violation of the election laws as they stand.

MOODY: Well, because the election law says that outside groups and political campaigns cannot coordinate. They can post these things in public areas they want outside groups to see and vice versa. But here they were doing it on anonymous Twitter accounts. They were basically masking their identity and posting in code that you could only read if you knew how to read it and where to find it.

Now, the issue of legality comes in here when you say, well, how did the groups know where to find it? How did the groups know how to read the information? And that's where the question comes in about whether this was legal, how they shared basically the decoder rings with one another.

SCIUTTO: Right. So it's punitively public but you have to know something to go to the sites where the information was. I wonder, Federal Election Commission, they watch this kind of stuff. Have they commented at all on your report?

MOODY: I've spoke to a lot of Federal Election attorneys and experts on this issue, and they said that they are not optimistic that the FEC will do anything at all. Now, today, a FEC vice chairwoman said they may be investigating into it and may be issuing a ruling but she also said that campaign finance laws are murky and it's really hard to make a declaration on the legality of these things, especially because no one has issued a ruling on this because it's all new. A lot of this stuff has not been fleshed out in law, especially when it comes to social media and tech and politics.

SCIUTTO: God knows there's billions of dollars involved, virtually every time we talk about this, every race.

Chris Moody, great reporting. Great to have you on.

You can see more of our coverage of this developing story on CNN.com. It's at the top of the site there.

Still ahead, some dramatic amateur video showing the moments right after Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 plummeted to the earth in eastern Ukraine.

And tensions are rising in that area, prompting a dire warning that the worst is yet to come.

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SCIUTTO: New details now on last summer's crash of the Malaysia Airlines crash in the Ukraine. This purportedly is the moments after the airliner hit the ground. You can see shocked villagers moving towards the site, seemingly confused about what they are seeing. And finally, as well, after four months, Dutch investigators are hauling away wreckage from the crash area. Phil Black is in Donetsk right in the middle of it.

Phil, remind our viewers why it has taken this long, four months, after this horrific event for the wreckage to finally be removed in any sort of substance.

PHIL BLACK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jim, at the time of that terrible accident or disaster, this area was, of course, a war zone between Ukrainian government forces and separatists. The fighting was very intense. Investigators from Australia, the Netherlands and Malaysia went to the site a few times but it was simply too dangerous to continue doing that. Back in September, a cease-fire between the warring parties was signed. And while the fighting has continued, it has, for the most part, until recently, been of lower intensity. It's at least given the Dutch authorities, which are now running this investigation, a chance to plan this operation to get out there and try to recover some of that wreckage -- Jim?

SCIUTTO: It's so late and certainly torture for the families.

I wonder, as we look at this new video, is there value in there to investigators, for instance, to determine definitively what brought down this plane? Is anyone analyzing it for that evidence?

BLACK: What that video shows is what you suspect when you stand in that area of the wreckage, and that was that there was an enormous inferno at the impact. What came down there is the largest part of the structure. What struck the air in that location was the midsection of the fuselage, the wings, the engines, the rear undercarriage as well, and the bulk of the economy class section of that aircraft. We know that this is of great interest to the investigators because that's where they've been focusing a lot of their efforts, recovering material. It is indeed important. It's late in the day that they're able to do this, but better now than in a few weeks' time because it will be winter soon. This will be blanketed in snow.

And, of course, this provides another opportunity to find the outstanding remains of the remains of the victims that have yet to be identified. Nine people aboard that aircraft have not been accounted for. They have found further human remains as they've been moving that wreckage out there in these more recent days -- Jim?

SCIUTTO: That's horrible to imagine that so many families have had to wait for that moment when they can see the remains returned.

Thanks very much to Phil Black on the ground in eastern Ukraine.

As the fighting rages on there, this warning from Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko. He says that Russian rebels are to a point of no return and failure could lead, in his words, "to full-scale war."

Joining me now is Julia Ioffe, senior editor of "The New Republic" and well as a former Moscow-based correspondent for foreign policy at the "The New Yorker." Julia, you wrote last week that there's never been a cease-fire in

Ukraine and, in effect, calls out Western leaders for being fooled or fooling themselves, that there was anything but a war taking place on the ground already.

JULIA IOFFE, SENIOR EDITOR, THE NEW REPUBLIC: Yeah. Well, you know, I think all parties were interested except for maybe Kiev. All parties were interested in maintaining the pretense of some kind of cease-fire. It allowed the Western governments to focus on threats of ISIS, on Ebola, things like that. And Russia and for the separatists in Donetsk, it gave them a chance to regroup, to rearm and to freshen themselves up for, you know, what looks like it's going to be a full- scale war. But since the agreement -- cease-fire agreement was signed on September 5th, there have been continual daily violations of it.

SCIUTTO: It's been incredible to watch. Now, President Putin left the G-20 summit early. This, after a lot of cold shoulders from Western leaders, strong words from President Obama and others. He said he needed sleep. It was a long flight home. What was the symbolism of him leaving early?

IOFFE: I think, the symbolism was, you know, he ran up against a wall. There's really not that much that he can do, you know, he can say any more to these leaders because they don't really believe him, at least the Western leaders. I think non-Western leaders in the G-20 are using him as an example, like, see, we're developing countries but not as bad as him. I think for Putin, though, it was a way to get out while still saving face and trying to show that he -- you know, he was not is going to stick around while being slighted continually by Western leaders.

SCIUTTO: Here's an essential question because President Putin, Russia, effectively annexed Crimea already at the southern tip of Ukraine. And while you hear Western leaders this will not stand, we won't recognize it, it has become a factor on the ground. I wonder if you think it to be the same for large portions of Western Ukraine.

IOFFE: I've been saying this from the beginning. Russia meets eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine, you see rebel forces continue to move south towards the ports. They need that section of land to connect Crimea to mainland Russia because, right now, there's nothing connecting Crimea to Russia, except for a ferry that's constantly backed up. People trying to get to Crimea from mainland Russia are waiting for days to get across. So they need this to supply the peninsula with water, with food, with electricity, et cetera. So, you know, I think in many ways, events of the last month, last month or two, have shown that effectively this region has broken away from Kiev. Kiev no longer controls it. They have their own elections. It's only a matter of time.

SCIUTTO: A sad reality on the ground. I wonder, do we see these difference, these divisions between Washington and Europe in terms of raising the cost for Russia? You have Angela Merkel of Germany saying no new sanctions now. Does this mean the Western response of this is now frozen, in effect? IOFFE: So that was last week. Then we saw the new invasion, you

know, the umpteenth invasion by Russian military vehicles. Again, you're seeing Russian soldiers in Russian uniforms without any identifying insignia. Angela Merkel said at the G-20 they are thinking about ramping up those sanctions. The sanctions are having a bite. The Russian economy is slowly but surely going belly up because of what OPEC is doing, lowering oil prices on which the Russian economy is so heavily dependent, and sanctions are not helping.

SCIUTTO: Understood.

Julia Ioffe, always good to have your opinion. Very strong on this situation right now in eastern Ukraine. Great to have you on.

IOFFE: Thanks, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Coming up next, the case of the 43 missing students sparking violent protests. Why it's divided one Mexican town.

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SCIUTTO: In Mexico, the former mayor of the town of Guerra is being linked to the disappearance of 43 students in December. They went missing after a gunfight where six other students were killed. This is just the latest incident in southern Mexico where crime has been an ongoing and severe problem.

As Rosa Flores reports, its fuel widespread and violent protests by those who are fed up.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The chaos starts as people roll into town.

(SHOUTING)

FLORES: Mass protesters blocking the highway, and siphoning gas, enough to scare drivers and people who call this village home, especially business owners who depend on open roads to get merchandise and make a living.

Like this woman, who doesn't want to be identified for fear of retaliation, but who says at least four distributors have stopped deliveries to her store.

(on camera): She says she feels a sense of hopelessness because there's not much that citizens, business owners can do.

(voice-over): Protesters have commandeered vehicles by day and night and turned them into fiery messages.

(on camera): There's this commercial vehicle that delivers milk.

(voice-over): It's all an effort to pressure the government into finding 43 students who went missing just under two months ago. Officials say they are dead. Families don't believe it.

(SHOUTING)

(EXPLOSION)

FLORES: While most support their cause, others are fed up.

(on camera): She has talked to other business owners who say they feel like taking arms and defending their stores and defending their property from protesters.

(SHOUTING)

This is a perfect example of how protests are impacting the economy. Right now, it's the middle of the day, but take a look. There's an empty parking lot and a closed grocery store.

(SHOUTING)

(voice-over): At the nearby airport, protesters beat a police officer last week. Their protests blocked air travel for several hours at one of the nation's top tourist destinations, all signs of the escalating dysfunction.

(on camera): In the hand of God, she says.

(voice-over): A test of faith that many in this community find increasingly difficult.

Rosa Flores, CNN, in Mexico southern state of Guerra.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Such a heartbreaking story for so many families involved.

That's it for me today.

For our international viewers, "Amanpour" is next.

For our viewers here in North America, "Newsroom" with Pamela Brown starts right now.