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At This Hour

Homegrown Terror Bust; Mass Grave in the Mediterranean as Migrant Ship Capsizes; Suspect Dies After Police Custody; Stunning Admission About FBI Testimony; Lynch Nomination May Get Vote Soon. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired April 20, 2015 - 11:00   ET

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

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[11:00:12] KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Homegrown terror bust. At least six people arrested in two states for allegedly plotting an ISIS-style attack and federal officials now say they face a terror recruiting problem right here in the United States.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: It's been so long President Obama calls it embarrassing. After more than 160 days of stalling, the Senate could finally be ready to confirm the next Attorney General. So why has it taken so long and why could that change this week?

BOLDUAN: Video of a police officer's encounter with a suspect making headlines again but this time for a very different reason. A dramatic show of restraint. What his boss thinks of that judgment call.

BERMAN: Good morning, everyone. I'm John Berman.

BOLDUAN: I'm Kate Bolduan. We have new details this morning about an alleged terror plot inside the United States foiled. The FBI arresting at least six men it says were inspired by ISIS.

BERMAN: They say the sting happened on Sunday in Minnesota and California. Officials say the public was never in danger and the agents were in control of the situation the entire time. Now, moments ago, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota said the group of friends never stopped plotting a way to get to Syria to join ISIS.

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ANDREW LUGER, U.S. ATTORNEY FOR MINNESOTA: They never stopped plotting another way to get to Syria to join ISIL. They were not confused young men. They were not easily influenced. These are focused men who are intent on joining a terrorist organization by any means possible. People often ask who is doing the terror recruiting in Minnesota and when will we catch the person responsible? But it is not that simple. In today's case, the answer is that this group of friends is recruiting each other.

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BERMAN: Recruiting each other. Let's bring in justice reporter Evan Perez in Washington. Evan, the U.S. attorney there made a remarkable statement, said we have a terror recruiting problem right here in the United States.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE REPORTER: That's right, John. He said we have to break the cycle of terror recruitment in Minnesota in particular because this has been the hotbed in the last couple years of this type of recruitment.

Now, according to the complaint that was filed today in Minnesota there, there are at least nine people now who have been charged as part of this recruitment network. Six of them -- four were charged -- foru were arrested yesterday in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, and two were arrested in San Diego. So that's six now that are facing these new charges of material support of ISIS. But all together there are known nine according to the U.S. attorney Andy Luger.

And really what he's shining a spotlight on is a big problem that's centered right there in his backyard, which is trying to counter the ability of ISIS using social media and then friends becoming peer to peer recruitment, so to speak. And then getting these people over to Syria. According to the U.S. attorney, even after they'd spoke to these young men, after they stopped them, they still kept trying to get over there.

BOLDUAN: So, Evan, what does the FBI say about this? They say they now have a terror recruiting problem right in front of them. What do they -- they have an example of them stopping in one situation, one example of this they've stopped these guys finally. But what are they saying about the terror recruiting problem they're facing going forward?

PEREZ: Well, they're struggling really to keep up with it. But this is a novel case because you have a situation here where it appears they had one -- one of these people who was involved in this changed his mind and came to the FBI and provided recorded -- these undercover work for the FBI undercover, basically recording his friends as they were discussing how to get over there. And so that's a big breakthrough for the FBI in bringing these cases.

And the other thing that's important in this case is the fact that it appears they tried first -- to try to get the community to intervene before they tried to bring these charges. And that's the key, is to try to figure out a way to stop these people from going before the FBI has to come and arrest them and send them to jail.

BERMAN: Interesting. The message they're sending is not some guy recruiting people from Syria or Iraq. This is friends recruiting friends, neighbors recruiting neighbors. In some cases, makes it more difficult to stop. Evan Perez, thanks very much. We're going to stay on this.

Some other news this morning. A mass grave in the Mediterranean. That's how one official describes the horrible deaths at sea. Hundreds and hundreds of men and women and children could be dead after the rickety boat they were on capsized. So far about two dozen people have been saved. [11:05:00] BOLDUAN: This is all happening off the coast of Libya.

And what's only making the tragedy worse, survivors say that human traffickers had actually locked the migrants inside the boat, stopping them from trying to get out as the boat was sinking.

International correspondent Karl Penhaul, he is joining us from Italy with much, much more on this. What more are we now learning, Karl, about this tragedy? It seems the numbers continue to only get worse and worse.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, Kate. In the last few moments, we're learning a little bit more from Italian prosecutors about that vessel that was shipwrecked over the weekend. The prosecutor tells it was an 80-foot fishing boat, and the reports initially from survivors were that there was anything between 700 to 950 migrants onboard that vessel when it sank in waters about a mile deep just off the coast of Libya headed towards Italy.

Now, the Italian prosecutor quite crucially this morning has said that we must take those figures of migrants aboard that boat with caution. What he will be looking to do is that, when the 28 survivors we know have been picked up from that shipwreck, are brought here to Sicily later in the day, that authorities will look to debrief them to get a consistent account of how many people may have been onboard, why the ship capsized, and also were those people also locked in the hold of that vessel?

The other thing Italian authorities are vowing to do is hunt down these people smugglers and bring them to justice. Of course, that is much easier said than done since the smugglers are there in North Africa, in Libya, a country which has basically become a failed state and where Italian authorities have no jurisdiction at all.

And finally of course you get the sense that this migrant crisis is getting worse by the moment. Only this morning, fresh reports of another vessel sinking, carrying migrants off the coast of Greece, and also we're hearing from Italian premier that three other migrant vessels are now in trouble just off the coast of Libya and Navy vessels are headed towards them now to see if they can pick up survivors. Kate.

BOLDUAN: Yes, really just further proof, if you needed, that this is not the first or last time that this human tragedy is going to playing out in the Mediterranean and all of the nations along the Mediterranean have a huge problem on their hands that they're facing. Karl Penhaul in Italy for us. Karl, thanks so much.

Protesters in Baltimore, they're demanding answers right now after a man died after being taken into police custody there.

BERMAN: In a cell phone video, you can see it right here, it looks like Freddie Gray, that's the man, looks like he couldn't walk after being arrested last week. Police dragged him into a nearby van. Now it took 40 minutes total before an ambulance would be called. Gray spent the last week of his life in a coma. The details of this obviously in contention. National correspondent Suzanne Malveaux following the story for us.

Suzanne?

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Freddie Gray is 25 years old arrested by Baltimore police. This was eight days ago. Now, police say they suspected he was involved in some drug activity, that he went running, and that they had detained him.

But you take a look at the cell phone video. This was taken 14 minutes after he was initially detained. You see the hands behind the back in cuffs, his legs limp. He seems to be screaming in pain. It took 30 minutes then after that, after that was actually shot, for them to call for an ambulance. He was picked up at the hospital.

Now, Gray's family says he quickly fell into a coma, that there was a severe injury to his spinal cord, and that he died seven days after being in police custody. As you can imagine, there's outrage from his family, from the attorneys, and from the Baltimore community.

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WILLIAM MURPHY, ATTORNEY FOR FREDDIE GRAY'S FAMILY: What we do know for sure is that he was in good health when the police first contacted him. He died of an 80 percent severed spinal cord and three broken vertebrae in his neck. That's not good.

JERRY RODRIGUEZ, BALTIMORE DEPUTY POLICE COMMISSIONER: The officers believed that Mr. Gray was either immediately involved or had been recently involved in criminal activity and they decided to make contact with Mr. Gray. Now that is still a bit vague.

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MALVEAUX: So the mayor is quite frustrated as well. She's being pressured for an independent investigation. She has called for one. She says that some of these officers involved have been put on administrative leave. There's at least ten officers who have been investigated or at least interviewed. There are more to come.

CNN has also done some digging, has learned that Gray had a criminal record, open criminal cases, at least five, and 20 -- at least all together related to drug-related charges. But I have to tell you, it still does not answer the very critical question, which is what happened to Freddie Gray in the 45 minutes that he was in police custody that led to him being dead seven days later? John, Kate?

BERMAN: What happened indeed. Suzanne Malveaux for us in Baltimore. Thanks so much.

[11:10:01] Just minutes ago, the Tulsa County sheriff said, to his knowledge, the training records of the volunteer deputy who shot and killed a man were not falsified. The "Tulsa World" newspaper has reported that supervisors at the sheriff's office were told to forge the records for Robert Bates and they were reassigned when they refused. The sheriff has not provided those records to the media yet. This is what he just had to say. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHERIFF STANLEY GLANZ, TULSA COUNTY, OKLAHOMA: I know that he has received a lot of training and that's documented and he has those documents. And I believe they were released by his lawyer. I just know that Mr. Bates has been to the range several times and is qualified.

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BERMAN: Over the weekend, lawyers for Bates released some of their client's training records. They say the documents show Bates had one taser class, three firearms training classes, be qualified ten times to use a handgun. Now, at this point, CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of those documents.

BOLDUAN: Ahead for us AT THIS HOUR, a stunning admission from the Justice Department. FBI examiners offering flawed testimony in hundreds of trials. Could innocent people have been put to death because of it? That's a serious question in this examination. We're going to look at the extent of this growing scandal.

BERMAN: The Senate said to be close to confirming the next Attorney General after putting it off for what's been called an outrageous amount of time. So what's ending the stalemate now? Why couldn't this have happened two months ago?

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[11:15:00] BERMAN: New today, a stunning admission from the FBI. "The Washington Post" reports that the agency says that, for more than two decades, one of its forensic units gave flawed testimony in almost every trial during which it offered evidence. This deals with errors in hair analysis. An admission that throws hundreds of convictions into question, including 32 death sentences and of those, 14 defendants have already been executed or died in prison.

BOLDUAN: The FBI is vowing to examine all cases telling CNN this: "The department and the FBI are committed to ensuring that the affected defendants are notified of past errors and that justice is done in every instance."

So what does that mean? What does justice being done in every instance mean for all of those defendants?

CNN legal analyst and criminal defense attorney Danny Cevallos is here.

They are talking about 2,500 targeted cases. This is a huge deal. They say that 95 percent of the cases that these experts were in, they gave slanted testimony. They offered flawed testimony. What does this mean?

DANNY CEVALLOS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: We shouldn't be that surprised because this slanted testimony was in favor of the same DOJ that employed or had a relationship with the same examiners. They are hardly independent creatures. But basically, this is what happened. They treated this hair analysis evidence almost like the way we think of DNA, the idea that you can exclude somebody to a 99th percent chance, and hair analysis isn't that kind of science. They should never testify that they can exclude one hair or limit one hair to one person to the exclusion of all others. And at testimony in trial, it sounds like some people may have overreached a little bit and that's not applicable with this kind of science, with microscopic hair analysis.

BERMAN: I want you to reiterate that fact. Those of us who watch CSI on TV think, oh, there's a hair, they must be doing DNA analysis on that. How does this hair analysis differ from DNA analysis?

CEVALLOS: Hair analysis in conjunction with mitochondrial DNA analysis can give you some conclusive matches. But hair and fiber analysis alone can tell us whether we're dealing with a human or a wildebeest and can tell us relatively what kind of race and they use these terms, these are the terms they use, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid, which, you know sound a little offensive, but that's the terms that they use. They can limit it to certain races and exclude certain people, especially if they have particular identities like disease or bleach in the hair, but to say that you can exclude all other human beings the way we do with DNA is simply overreaching. It looks like that's what a lot of these FBI analysts were doing in testimony.

BOLDUAN: Importantly, these FBI errors doesn't necessarily mean all of these people were wrongfully convicted. There could have been other evidence that worked with the conviction. However, what does this mean going forward? Clearly, there's going to be appeals upon appeal upon appeal.

CEVALLOS: This will be treated like newly discovered evidence, which is not a get out of jail free card by any stretch. If you're going to be a petitioner, you have to show that it's something that you couldn't have discovered and that it would have had a material affect on the outcome of the case. If there are reams and reams of other evidence showing that you did the deed, then you may not prevail in a newly discovered evidence claim. If this newly discovered evidence completely excludes you, now it provides an alibi, maybe it's the only evidence that was used to convict you, then that might be a hypothetical where a petitioner trying to get exonerated may prevail.

BERMAN: You have to believe every one of these defendant will at least take a look at their case and ask a lawyer if they have a shot.

BOLDUAN: Some of these people were executed or died in prison since this happened.

BERMAN: 14 dead.

CEVALLOS: Not a whole lot of remedies there.

BOLDUAN: Danny, thank you so much. Wild. Good reporting by "The Washington Post."

[11:19:00] Ahead for us AT THIS HOUR, this has gone too far. President Obama has blasted the Senate for holding up Loretta Lynch's nomination for months but now a possible breakthrough. What is the breakthrough? Could we be talking about a new attorney general going through the nomination process, the confirmation process finally?

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BOLDUAN: AT THIS HOUR, it's looking like a big, long and dragged out fight on Capitol Hill might be finally coming to an end. President Obama nominated this woman, Loretta Lynch, to be the next attorney general back on November 8th. That was 163 days ago. If confirmed, Lynch would be the nation's first African-American woman to hold the job.

BERMAN: But history has been on hold. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has sort of held up the nomination as he tried to end a dispute with Democrats. Democrats were holding up a human trafficking bill because of a dispute over abortion funding. Sort of mutual holding up of progress here. But now a top Republican in the Senate says the longest attorney general nominee holdup in three decades could end this week.

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SEN. BOB CORKER, (R) TENNESSEE: My sense is over the next 48 to 72 hours that is going to be resolved. Getting ready to hit the floor, this logjam that you are talking about over this nominee likely will be worked out in the beginning part of this week once the human trafficking piece is worked out with it.

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BERMAN: Joining us now is Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow from the great state of Michigan.

Senator Stabenow, thank you so much for being with us. I want to talk about the attorney general nomination in just a second.

But first, we did just get some news out of Minnesota. Some arrests of six people out of Minnesota and California of people trying to provide material support accused of to ISIS and the U.S. attorney in Minnesota says something that I think a lot of people will find alarming. He said we have a terrorism recruitment problem here in Minnesota, in the United States. I wonder if we can get your reaction to that news.

SEN. DEBBIE STABENOW, (D) MICHIGAN: John and Kate, it's good to be with you. I have to say that, unfortunately, while there's a lot of good things about the internet and social media, the bad thing is that people can communicate anywhere, including in the United States and so we have people that feel disaffected and alienated. I'm not going to try to excuse it, it's really outrageous. But the truth is, we have to be paying attention all over the place, including right here, which by the way, is why we need a permanent attorney general and it's really outrageous that it's been over five months before Loretta Lynch can even get a vote.

BOLDUAN: Let's talk about that.

[11:25:00] Let me ask you about the attorney general nomination and the holdup in terms of confirmation. Both sides would take us - actually, I attempted to this morning to try to go through and see if I could sum up the holdings up and where we've come in now almost six months of the confirmation being held up. It's too much in the weeds and at this point it almost, it does not matter. It's politics at play, Senator. What's the fix now? We heard Senator Corker mention on the Sunday shows that nominations should be going through. What happened? What's the fix?

STABENOW: Kate, first of all, I hope Senator Corker is right but secondly, there's just no excuse for this. When Ash Carter was nominated and went through the confirmation process and committee, he came out within a few days and was approved. He wasn't attached to anything else. That was a few months ago. I remember when John Ashcroft, the most controversial attorney general under President Bush, was nominated. He was only held up before a final vote for 42 days. We're talking about 163 days and we gave him a vote because at that time Republicans said, and I believe that it should operate this way, when a president is elected, he deserves a right to have a vote on his team, elections have consequences, but that's not been true for this president and certainly not for this nominee. So no more excuses. Shouldn't be tied to anything. If anything, we need her expertise as we deal with human trafficking. She led an aggressive effort in New York. So it just makes no sense and it's politics at its worst.

BOLDUAN: Do you think that you're going to get a confirmation this week or do you not have any confidence in what Bob Corker was saying?

STABENOW: I have confidence in Bob Corker. I hope he's right. We have to hear it from Mitch McConnell. I can tell you, as someone who's been involved in the whole effort on human trafficking, we need to get that done as well. That's not connected. We could bring it up, the votes are there today for Loretta Lynch, and then we can continue on with other important issues. I hope -- I hope we'll get it this week. I don't know.

BERMAN: Senator, you're saying that the majority leader is playing politics with Loretta Lynch. Couldn't you bring up for a vote today the human trafficking bill? It's been Harry Reid, the minority leader, who's been holding up the vote on the human trafficking bill. Why not give that an up or down vote, even though I know there's language in there that you and other Democrats don't approve of?

STABENOW: We are working very hard to get that done. The truth of the matter is that, unfortunately, the politics of abortion got stuck into this as frequently happens on healthcare bills or bills that in some way deal with issues related to people. It should not be involved. We're talking about children. A very, very serious issue for girls and women. I hope we'll be able to get that provision out and have a final vote because there is strong support for getting that done. Again, it seems like there's always something -- always a curveball thrown in at the last minute. So hopefully we get that done this week. That has nothing to do with the attorney general of our country.

BERMAN: Both sides have pitchers that throw pretty mean curveballs.

Senator Debbie, Stabenow, great to have you here with us. Please come back to our show. Terrific to see you.

BOLDUAN: It's great to see you, Senator, from the great state of Michigan.

BERMAN: Tom Brady went to college there. Just saying.

BOLDUAN: Oh, good school.

BERMAN: Ahead for us AT THIS HOUR, police officers now making news for not using force. Dramatic body cam video shows an officer's restraint even as the suspect, the suspect told him to shoot.

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