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The Lead with Jake Tapper

More U.S. Troops to Iraq; Power Lunch: Obama Hosts Hill Leaders; Interview with House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer

Aired November 07, 2014 - 16:00   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Three days after Election Day, the White House announces a significant escalation in the war against ISIS and more troops heading to Iraq. I'm sure the timing is just a coincidence.

I'm Jake Tapper. This is THE LEAD.

Breaking news in our world lead, doubling down, literally. President Obama decides to double the number of bats on the ground if Iraq, although he insists they're not boots on the ground. And they also won't just be in the relatively safer areas. Is this a sign that months of airstrikes in two countries are not working?

The politics lead. The White House kitchen staff might need a little R&R this weekend after feeding the great big elephant in the room today. President Obama inviting congressional leaders to lunch for the first time since Republicans flipped the Senate. Did they all leave with a bad taste in their mouths?

And the money lead. They know where you are. They can even shut off your car. Are you driving at the mercy of your car salesman who decided to sneak a tracking device into your ride?

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We begin this Friday with breaking news in our world lead. President Obama, the president who ended the Iraq war, is now about to double the number of American troops back on Iraqi soil. The White House announcing it will up the number of military advisers in Baghdad and throughout the country from 1,500 to 3,000. The Obama administration insists the troops will not be in combat, but focused on better positioning Iraqi security forces to battle ISIS.

The move also comes with somewhat of a hefty price tag. The administration says it will ask Congress for $5.6 billion for the ISIS campaign, $1.6 billion just to train Iraqi and Kurdish fighters. The timetable for just when these troops will get there, that remains fluid. But there are more and more signs Iraqi security forces desperately need some sort of help.

Suicide bombers detonated three devices in a military checkpoint in Baiji near a critical oil field early this morning. The attack killed a senior police officer and wounded five others.

Here now with all the latest on this administration announcement, CNN chief national correspondent Jim Sciutto.

Jim, where is CENTCOM deploying these troops?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: In addition to being a massive numerical deployment in the number of troops on the ground -- and to be fair, it's double the number that's there now, but it's actually 10 times the number of advisers that were sent there originally with 300 on June 19.

Think of that over that span of time. But geographically this is fascinating as well, because to this point those advisers have been confined to Baghdad and Irbil, two relatively safe locations in Iraq well-protected by the Kurds in Irbil and well-protected by Iraqis security forces in Baghdad.

They're going to now establish two more so-called advise-and-assist centers outside of Baghdad and Irbil. The two places that have been discussed are Taji and Anbar province just to west of Baghdad. In fact, we reported last week that they were preparing plans to send advisers to Anbar.

TAPPER: And reported the week before that they were -- Anbar was falling into ISIS hands.

SCIUTTO: Absolutely, 80 percent controlled now.

But in addition to those operation centers, the Pentagon says they will establish several sites in Northern, Western, and Southern Iraq to train a further 12 Iraqi and Kurdish brigades. Imagine this. You will now have U.S. military advisers not just in Baghdad and Irbil, two additional operation centers outside of Baghdad and Irbil, it is thought Anbar and Taji, plus several more sites distributed around the country where these Iraqi forces are to train them, not combat troops, but, to be frank here, much closer to the combat than they were before.

TAPPER: And why now, Jim?

SCIUTTO: What the administration says is that the Iraqi forces have finally been taking the fight -- to the Iraqis. In fact, they claim the president in a statement today that ISIS has in the words of the White House suffered a series of defeat in Iraq recently.

And it is fair to say Iraqi security forces have had their first victories in recent weeks. They took back the Mosul dam, for instance. They took back a key border crossing, Rabia, up on the Syrian border. They took back a town just to the south of Baghdad.

These are small victories when you consider the amount of territory it controls, but it's their argument that now that Iraqi forces are doing that, it is our assessment that if we help them they can do more to prepare them for more offensive operations. To be fair, U.S. military officials say that substantial offensive operations by Iraqi security forces are still a number of months off and you could see these advisers as being sent there to prepare them for that. TAPPER: So they are portraying this obviously not as mission creep.

They are saying the mission is the exact same. But certainly, as you point out, it's 10 times the number of troops as were originally sent in June.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Look at the steps. June 19, 300 advisers sent there in a limited role to assess the Iraqi forces. August 8, you begin the air campaign, which you remember in Iraq only, which you remember at the time they defined purely as protecting the Yazidi people could find up on the mountain in Sinjar and protecting U.S. personnel in Baghdad and Irbil.

September 22, you extend the air campaign into Syria. And over the course of time, clearly, the airstrikes have been about more than protecting U.S. personnel or protecting minority groups under threat. They have been about trying to fight back and degrade and destroy ISIS. So you have seen it, whether you use the term mission creep, clearly the mission has expanded substantially during these last several months.

TAPPER: The mission and the size of troops.

(CROSSTALK)

SCIUTTO: Absolutely, numerically, geographically.

TAPPER: Jim Sciutto, thank you so much.

For details on how significant this move is to U.S. military operations in the region, let's go to General Spider Marks. He joins us now on the phone.

General, would you tray to explain the timing behind this move? Why is the White House announcing this now? Why is it urgent to get 1,500 more troops into Iraq?

BRIG. GEN. JAMES "SPIDER" MARKS (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Jake, I can't speak to the political reasonings for the expansion of the mission at this point, but I can tell you that clearly what the U.S. wants to do with its coalition partners, as Jim has just described, is you want to reinforce success.

And we have given the ISF, Iraqi Security Forces, an opportunity with the U.S. presence that's on the ground right now, an opportunity to achieve some small victories, which is what it's all about. That leads to confidence. That leads to increased missions for them. And that provides an opportunity for the United States to fall off and say, look, we're reinforcing success.

I would suggest that there clearly is a political aspect to this as well. I'm not naive. But I would say what we're seeing on the ground would drive you to this type of a conclusion.

TAPPER: Defense officials have told CNN that part of the reason that the aerial campaign has not significantly rolled back ISIS especially in Syria is because the U.S. does not have the intelligence and the reconnaissance personnel to effectively target ISIS leadership.

Even though these troops are going into Iraq, will this maneuver help solve that problem? Obviously, 1,500 troops can only do so much, but is it a step in the right direction to solve that problem?

MARKS: Well, that's a great question, I would assume the United States certainly is not going to take its eye off of or its resources off the fight in Syria.

With the increase of the resources in Iraq to cover down on the Iraqi security forces and to bolster them in terms of the train-and-equip mission, simultaneously, the United States is probably supporting as best they can Kurdish fighters, PKK, if they can, in order to try to put some very specific targeting against these dispersed targets that exist in Syria

Because there's been success in Syria, specifically by the air campaign, the targets of ISIS have now dispersed. That's a good thing. That decreases their ability to conduct command-and-control and try to mass targets where they would like to mass.

The downside is you now have targets all over the place and if you wanted to try to continue to attrit those, you have to have a real large number of, I would suggest, special forces-type operations that can go after and lase these targets from the ground so you can have close air support going against it.

It's a much more expansive mission, but it's one the United States is probably starting to take on anyway. We're just not getting any publicity or media coverage on that aspect.

TAPPER: General Lloyd Austin, the commander of CENTCOM, the U.S. Army general leading the campaign against ISIS, told me this yesterday at a forum on just how many troops it will take to beat back ISIS.

He said this. "I think it's somewhere between 9,000 and 17,000." He's referring to the number of members of ISIS. "Between 9,000 and 17,000 and, again, without having the human intelligence on the ground to confirm or deny, it's very difficult."

He was expressing concern that he did not have the human intelligence that could tell him how many members of ISIS there were. And I suspect -- I mean, a guy like General Austin is not going to voice concerns or frustrations publicly, although he came close by saying he didn't have the human intelligence that he needed to discern how many members of the enemy he was fighting.

Do you think that this is one of the reasons why these men are being deployed?

MARKS: If you try to separate the two, you have a hard time. These soldiers are being deployed into Iraq to support the Iraqi security forces.

There will be an associated intelligence collection mission with that. The presence of ISIS throughout the region certainly goes beyond the purview of ISF, the Iraqi Security Forces, to fight outside of Iraq.

So, there still remains under General Austin's command a responsibility to prosecute from the air in Syria and to prosecute now from the ground to an advise-and-consent-type role the ISF. Yes, there will be an intelligence collection mission to go against the ISIS numbers.

But he did voice a concern. When he gives you a number between 9,000 and 17,000, you essentially have 100 percent variance in terms of a number. That's a difficult problem that you need to get your arms around, and it does relate directly to precise intelligence collection on the ground.

TAPPER: General Spider Marks, thank you so much.

MARKS: Thank you, Jake.

TAPPER: We're also waiting for Pentagon spokesman Rear Admirable John Kirby to come out and brief reporters on the White House announcement that the president has authorized sending 1,500 more troops to Iraq to help advise and train Iraqi security and Kurdish security forces, they say. We will bring that to you when it happens.

Coming up on the lead, power lunch or a food fight? President Obama has congressional leaders over for the first time since Democrats were kicked around on election night. We will ask someone who was there if there is any hope of finding common ground.

Plus, he was trained to believe he was protecting a living god. CNN talks to one of Kim Jong Il's former bodyguards, who says the late North Korean leader's son, Kim Jong-un, is even more dangerous.

Stay with us.

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TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

Turning now to the politics lead and what really is the first day of President Obama's new political reality in Washington, D.C. -- a political reality summed up by this, the cover of next week's "New Yorker Magazine." It's the great big elephant in the room, the room being of course, the Oval Office.

Today, the president and congressional leaders tested their threshold for compromise over something of a power lunch at the White House. Ever since Tuesday night when Republicans won the majority in the United States Senate, and beefed up their House majority to historic levels, we've heard that both sides are willing to try to find a common ground. We've also heard areas where both parties will not budge, no matter how important the issues might be to you and me.

CNN's Michelle Kosinski is live for us at the White House.

Michelle, what went down at that table today? MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hey, Jake, right,

it begins. Let's see how this is going to work out, this supposed new era of working together and getting a lot stuff done in this Congress. I mean, we've heard a lot said already about getting started, finding these areas of common ground. At the same time, though, these deep lines in the sand have been drawn and ominously hanging over all of this is the president's imminent executive action on immigration.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KOSINSKI (voice-over): It's a "come to meeting, get down to talking, let's start working together" lunch, days after Republicans delivered a blow at the polls, that placed them in control.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I am not going to judge ideas based on whether they're Democratic or Republican. I'm going to be judging them based on whether or not they work.

KOSINSKI: So, let's start with what will probably work, is the tack the White House is taking, a place where there already is some common ground -- funding badly needed infrastructure projects around the country that every lawmaker wants for their district, increasing U.S. exports, early childhood education. Hardly the things people tend to battle over.

On the agenda today is funding against Ebola, an update on the war with ISIS, and the president's listening to what Republicans want to get accomplished.

The thing is, though, looming over all this commitment to cooperation is what sounds increasingly like a nasty stalemate over immigration.

REP. JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The president continues to act on his own. He is going to poison the well. When you play with matches, you take the risk of burning yourself.

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY), MINORITY LEADER: It's like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

KOSINSKI: Some violent analogies there from the guys now in charge of Congress. But the White House continues to put the onus on Republicans, saying it's been a year and a half that the House refusing to even take a vote on comprehensive immigration reform that the Senate passed with bipartisan support and that, yes, the president will act alone before the end of the year, delivering a path to citizenship for possibly millions of immigrants here if Congress continues not to act.

OBAMA: I am eager to see what they have to offer, but what I'm not going to do is just wait.

KOSINSKI: Even today, the White House threw down the gauntlet.

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: There is one thing that they can do to prevent the president from taking executive action. The thing that they can do is they can allow that common sense, bipartisan bill to come before the House of Representatives. Maybe the republic will be saved. Maybe the ego of the House Republicans will not be bruised. Certainly, the United States of America would benefit significantly from them taking that step.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KOSINSKI: So, we're hearing at this lunch today the president and House Speaker Boehner talked about immigration for a half hour, going back and forth, that the president said, yes, it's within my legal right to take executive action and Republicans countering with, well, it's not so much what you want to do but how you want to do it and you need to work with us.

And we just heard the White House say that it's hard to take Republicans seriously, that they want to work with the president on immigration. We hear a lot of jokes, too, about what was going to be served at this lunch today. Some suggested how about crow or sour grapes, but it turns out it was just nice benign sea bass -- Jake.

TAPPER: All right. Michelle Kosinski at the White House, thanks so much.

Joining me now is the House Democratic whip, Steny Hoyer, who was at the White House today.

Congressman, thank you so much for joining us.

I want to get to the politics in a second. But, first, there is this breaking announcement from the White House this afternoon that the president has decided to double the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. Do you have any concerns about this announcement in terms of mission creep? Will you support it?

REP. STENY HOYER (D-MD), MINORITY WHIP: I don't think there's mission creep and, yes, I will support it. This is clearly pursuant to training and equipping a making sure that those folks on the ground, the boots on the ground who are indigenous to Iraqis or others give them the kind of support and training that they need to be effective in defeating ISIL, which is the president's objective and I think an objective shared by Republicans and Democrats and the country.

TAPPER: What do you say to the people watching at home who think, why is this announcement coming on a Friday afternoon three days after the midterm elections?

HOYER: Well, I don't say much about that because I don't know why the specific timing, but clearly they're developing a plan. We're briefed in a security briefing on part of that plan that they believe will be effective in accomplishing what I think the American people and the president have articulated is our objective, and that's the defeat of ISIL.

This announcement has to do obviously with the amount of boots from America not in combat, but to train and equip, which the Congress has already spoken to, that are necessary to get the job done. My own thought is that we need to make sure that we can, in fact,

accomplish the objective that the president has articulated. That's in our national security interest and in the interest of stability in the Middle East.

TAPPER: All right, Congressman. Let's go back it to the subject of today's lunch. What can you tell us about the meeting? Where are areas agreed upon where there can be some tangible bipartisan accomplishments?

HOYER: Well, I think the answer to that is yes. I think both sides made it very clear that they don't want to simply be throwing bricks at one another for two years, as has been the case. And the American people have sent, I think, a very strong message that they want to see us work together and that's why you hear so many people talking about that.

Now, the proof of whether that talk is going to be walked is whether or not, in fact, we do it. There were areas of agreement, I think. An agreement that we wanted to do an omnibus and that we wanted to do that hopefully by December 11th.

TAPPER: A big spending package?

HOYER: Well, completing the funding f this year's operations of government. The Ebola crisis funding that is going to be necessary so that we can do what the president and all the health experts agree, and that is make sure that in the sites in Africa where this epidemic has been generated, that we need to deal with it there on site. I think there was general agreement to that.

I think there was also general agreement on ISIL itself, as I've expressed, that we needed to make sure we are successful in this effort to defeat ISIL and to stabilize the Middle East.

TAPPER: Of course, the big sticking point is that President Obama has vowed an executive action on immigration this year, probably after he gets back from Asia, before the end of the year. We've already heard the speaker of the House say that would poison the well. The new Senate majority leader said that would be like waving a red flag before a bull.

What would you recommend to the president in terms of whether or not he should take this executive action or whether that would really spoil everything for the next two years?

HOYER: Look, I think it's clear that the president had taken executive action through the years. This president, frankly, hasn't acted on executive orders as many times as some of his predecessors have, both Republican and Democratic.

In addition to that there have been a number of executive orders under the first President Bush, the second President Bush, President Reagan, which dealt with immigration.

The president's position is, look, I've waited for a year and a half after a comprehensive bill passed. Everybody says the system is broken. We ought to fix it. Families are being wrenched apart. Children are being left without a parent or parents, and that is unacceptable. And given that, he believes he act with his authority but he also mad it very clear that if the Congress acted, that would be the law. And that is the preferable option that he wants.

Furthermore, he pointed out correctly, and the Republicans clearly acknowledge this, that if he acts and then a law is passed as the speaker has indicated in the past he wants to see happen, then that would supersede any action that the president took. But I think the president is in a position where he has said he's going to do something and I think he feels that he needs to do this.

Let me say that I am hopeful, and I will be urging the speaker and others on the Republican side of the aisle, we're going to have disagreements. And some are going to be serious disagreements. But if we allow the things on which we disagree to undermine the things on which we agree, we're going to further anger the American public. They're going to be frustrated and they're going to think their government doesn't work.

So, we ought to take those things on which we disagree, understanding that we're going to have honest disagreements, set those aside, not abandon them, but set them aside and focus on that on which we can agree. If we do so, I think this next negative can be a positive, not a negative. But if we simply say, if you do one thing that I don't like, then I won't work with you on other things I do like, that will not be a successful Congress and I don't believe the speaker is going to move in that direction.

I know there's strong feeling on their side of the aisle about the president's taking executive action, vis-a-vis immigration. But the president is right. It's been a year and a half. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill with a significant number of Republicans voting for it. It's a moderate bill. It took the middle course and I think the president rightfully is in a position where he wants to stop what is a policy that, frankly, Americans don't want to see and that is the division of families.

And from an economic standpoint, of course, if we passed a comprehensive immigration bill, it will give a very substantial shot in the arm to the economy which is going pretty well, much better than it has in the past. We had good numbers today.

But -- so I'm hopeful that whatever actions the president takes, and whenever he takes them, it will not undermine the ability to move forward constructively in a Congress for which the American people probably had pretty low expectations but very high hopes.

TAPPER: All right. It was a bad night for Democrats in Maryland but you were re-elected, so congratulations House Minority Whip --

HOYER: Thank you very much.

TAPPER: -- Steny Hoyer. Appreciate it. Coming up on THE LEAD, a major recall is growing even larger after

revelations that the air bags designed to protect you in a crash might be more dangerous than the crash itself in some cases. And now, Congress wants to in if the company behind those air bags knew that they we faulty all along.

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