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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email During Tenure At State Department; ISIS Butcher Said 9/11 Was "Wrong" In 2009; Michael Jordan Joins Billionaire Club

Aired March 03, 2015 - 16:30   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

In other world news today, those who published the leaks from former NSA security contractor Edward Snowden have been honored with a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar even. But can those working with Snowden pull off an even more difficult feat and get him freedom back here in the United States?

A possible deal is being negotiated that would bring the 31-year-old back to the U.S. to stand trial for leaking classified information about secret U.S. surveillance programs.

Snowden, as you will recall, was granted asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin two years ago and is currently living in Russia with his girlfriend.

CNN's senior international correspondent, Matthew Chance, joins us now from live Moscow.

Matthew, where are these reports coming from?

MATTHEW CHANCE, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They're coming from Snowden's Russian lawyer. His name is Anatoly Kucherena. He's very close to the Kremlin. He's been representing Edward Snowden throughout this whole period that he's been claiming asylum here in Russia.

Now, Mr. Kucherena has just written a book in Russian about Edward Snowden and he is on a sort of tour, a publicity tour, promoting that book. It was during the press conference earlier today in Moscow that he made these remarks that Edward Snowden really wants to come back to the U.S. and that they're doing everything they can to make that happen.

This is really the first time we have heard about the possibility of any negotiations being under way to get Edward Snowden from Russia into the United States. Now, the detail was a bit sketchy, Jake, but he said there were German lawyers, there were American lawyers, and obviously the lawyers on the Russian side, of which he is the main one, of course, who are talking now about the terms in which Edward Snowden would return to the United States.

So it's not a done deal by any means, but the best we can say, I think, is that there are talks under way.

TAPPER: Have there been any reactions from U.S. or Russian officials on the record or on background?

CHANCE: From the Russians, I have had nothing. But the deputy State Department spokesman has said -- Marie Harf has said earlier to our State Department colleagues that they would be happy to have him come back, Edward Snowden, and face the very serious charges against him. And the United States would help Edward Snowden do that.

But she didn't give any indication that they were actively engaged in kind of official negotiations with the Russians or with Snowden's lawyers to make that happen. And so I don't know the extent to which this is really that different.

I mean, we have spoken to the lawyer this evening. He came into our office a few hours ago and gave us a bit of a briefing on what was being said. And we asked him, is Snowden any closer to going home as a result of these negotiations? And he said, as far as he's concerned, no, he's not at this point.

TAPPER: Matthew Chance live for us in Moscow, thank you so much.

In other national news, former CIA Director General David Petraeus has struck a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to mishandling classified information. Petraeus resigned from his post in 2012 after it was revealed that the distinguished four-star commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

CNN reporter Evan Perez joins me live with the latest.

Evan, what are the terms of the agreement and what is he confessing to having done?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's confessing -- he's pleading guilty to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which is a misdemeanor.

His deal with the government allows him to pay a $40,000 fine and the government will not oppose his request to serve no jail time as a result of this plea agreement.

TAPPER: What exactly was the classified information? It was diaries that he kept with all sorts of code names and information about covert activities?

PEREZ: Right. Right. He kept a diary during this time leading the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Jake. And in these diaries, he had everything from covert names of officers there to battle plans to notes that he took from top-secret meetings with national security officials.

So, these were -- very, very important, classified information. Apparently, he kept these in these notebooks in his house, and he shared them with Paula Broadwell as she was preparing to write his biography.

TAPPER: And then correct me if I'm wrong, but when he was initially asked about this by the FBI, he was not honest about it.

PEREZ: He lied. According to the government and according to the stated facts that he has now admitted, he lied when he was first asked about this by the FBI.

TAPPER: Other government officials who have leaked similar information have gone to prison for their crimes.

PEREZ: Right, exactly. That's one of the things that this case sort of shows a stark comparison to.

John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who just got out of prison, he went -- he got 30 months in prison for revealing the identity of intelligence officers. Last year, Stephen Kim, who leaked top-secret information to a FOX News reporter, got 13 months in prison. And this is more like Sandy Berger, the former Clinton administration official, who took documents from the National Archives and then lied about it to the FBI.

TAPPER: All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

PEREZ: That's right.

TAPPER: Evan Perez, thank you so much.

The politics lead now. You probably avoid using your work e-mail account when you're sending out something juicy, right? Right? Well, it turns out Hillary Clinton never used a State Department e-mail account during her entire time as secretary of state. In fact, she did not even have an account set up. She only used a private account.

And now some are asking if Clinton had something to hide, if that's why she did that. And that story is next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD.

Today's politics lead, did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have something to hide? We now know that the potential presidential candidate used a personal e-mail account regularly to communicate with her department staff. Forget the president's push for transparency in his Cabinet, demanding that they use government e-mail accounts.

Now we may never know what she was typing away in that meme with the sunglasses and the BlackBerry in hand. Did she break the law by doing high-level work on a personal account with no apparent records kept of what she sent? How do we know if her account was properly encrypted?

Lots of questions for senior political correspondent Brianna Keilar, who has been looking into this all day.

This does raise a lot of raise of questions. BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And her

supporters I think would say records were kept.

But the issue here, Jake, is really that appears records appear to have been kept by her and those close to her. That is an issue for a lot of people. As of 2009, regulations for the Federal Records Act said that such e-mails, these business e-mails that she would have been using, needed to be preserved in the State Department record- keeping system.

It appears they weren't and now the Democratic presidential front- runner is coming under fire.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR (voice-over): It's the most iconic image of Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state, checking her e-mail on a trip to Libya, her private e-mail, it appears. While heading the State Department, Hillary Clinton relied solely on a personal account.

It's raising questions about whether Clinton skirted the Federal Records Act, designed to preserve e-mails for historic reference, though the White House says Clinton followed the rules.

JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The policy as a general matter allows a person to use their personal address as long as those e-mails are maintained and sent to the State Department, which if you ask Secretary Clinton's team, that's what they completed in the last month or two.

KEILAR: In 2014, Clinton and her team turned over tens of thousands of pages of her e-mails to the State Department after a White House request to former secretaries of state.

"The New York Times" reports 300 e-mails were sent to the House Select Committee on Benghazi investigating the 2012 terrorist attack on U.S. facilities in Libya. But revelations of Clinton's sole reliance on her personal account has political opponents hammering her. Jeb Bush tweeted, "Transparency matters. Unclassified Hillary Clinton e-mails should be released. You can see mine here."

He recently released thousands of e-mails from his time as governor of Florida. But like Clinton, he also used a personal e-mail address and he was able to choose which e-mails to release.

A Clinton spokesman says, "Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government e-mail as long as appropriate records were preserved," insisting they were.

But experts say there may be no way to verify it. David Kennedy, a cyber-security expert who used to work with the Marines' cyber-warfare unit, says personal e-mail isn't backed up the way a government account would be.

DAVID KENNEDY, FOUNDER, TRUSTEDSEC: When you delete that and you go to your trash box, and you delete it out of there, it's gone. There's no more recovering it. All of that information is now completely destroyed.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: There is this issue of security, but there's very much this issue of transparency. That's where it becomes so much of a political fight and Republicans, as you can expect, are really beginning to and will continue to have a field day over this.

TAPPER: This is something that feeds into negative impressions that some voters have of her about secrecy.

KEILAR: Yes. That's right, that she isn't fully forthcoming, that she isn't transparent and also I think some narratives -- this is just some -- for instance, I talked to a Democratic congressman who said, Democratic a Democratic congressman, typical Clinton.

That's coming from someone who I think would consider themselves to be an ally of hers, this idea that the Clinton and in this case Hillary Clinton maybe she doesn't feel that she has to abide by the rules other people have to. That's a narrative that is out there, and this certainly reinforces it.

TAPPER: Do you think that voters care about stories like this? We in the media make a big deal out of transparency stories. In Florida, they're making a big deal. The Republican governor there is having a similar e-mail battle. But do you think voters actually care?

KEILAR: I'm not sure. I'm not sure they do, honestly. And I'm not sure that this is really going to affect her in some huge negative way.

We still have to see, of course, but this is something that obviously is really capturing the Beltway. Are voters going to not vote for her because of this? I don't know if that's the case. But I think there are some people who kind of think back to the '90s and they wonder if Hillary Clinton is going to reinvent themselves.

And they see something like this and they wonder, you know what? Maybe you can take Hillary Clinton out of the '90s, but you can't take the '90s out of Hillary Clinton.

(LAUGHTER)

TAPPER: Very nice. I think my wife would say that about me.

KEILAR: Maybe the '80s, Jake Tapper.

TAPPER: Brianna Keilar, thanks.

Coming up next, we've heard his voice as he threatened the lives of American hostages. Now a brand new recording of ISIS executioner, Jihadi John, talking about the September 11th attacks, does it explain how he became such a ruthless terrorist?

Plus, he's one of the best basketball players of all time, perhaps the best, but that's not all he's good at, Michael Jordan's latest accomplishment coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. In other world news today, he is arguably the most infamous terrorist in the world right now, the masked man waving a knife and making demands before hostages' heads are cut off in horrific ISIS videos.

But now a new tape has surfaced of Mohammed Emwazi, the man perhaps better known as Jihadi John. It's not quite what you would expect. CNN's Atika Shubert has the news from London for us.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I want to ask you some serious question.

ATIKE SHUBERT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The voice of the masked militant known as Jihadi John has been scrutinized for months, every vowel, every turn of phrase analyzed. Now the world knows him as Mohammed Emwazi. This photo is believed to have been taken in 2010 while he was in Kuwait.

And now an audio recording purported to be Emwazi in 2009. A voice analyst tells CNN that the voice matches that of Jihadi John.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you think of 9/11? This is a wrong thing. What happened was wrong.

SHUBERT: The British advocacy group, KAGE, released this audio on Tuesday. In it, Emwazi recounts KAGE his version of events when British officials questioned him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I said, after I told you that what happened is extremism, you've still suggesting I'm an extremist. All of this fighting going on, trying to put words in my mouth saying you're doing this, this, this, we're keeping a close eye on you. You already have been. We're going to keep a close eye on you.

SHUBERT: Slowly we are getting a clearer picture of who Mohammad Emwazi was before he became the masked murderer he is today. The former head master of Emwazi's high school remembers him specifically.

JO SHUTER, "JIHADI JOHN'S" FORMER TEACHER: He was bullied a bit because he was quiet and he was reserved, but generally he was fine. There were no issues with him. There were no massive behavior problems with him. And by the time he got into the (inaudible), he had settled. He has working hard and he achieved great grades.

SHUBERT (on camera): How did you first hear that Mohammed Emwazi was in these horrific videos and what was your initial reaction?

SHUTER: My blood just ran cold. Honestly even now when I hear the name I find it incredible that to marry what is seen on the TV with the person that I knew, it literally makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up. SHUBERT (voice-over): For the people who knew him, it is difficult to fathom that Mohammed Emwazi is the man behind the mask. But for his family now believed to be in Kuwait, it is a nightmare.

British media citing Kuwait government sources say his mother recognized his voice from the very first beheading video. His father, according to the "British Daily Telegraph," has denounced his son as, quote, "a dog, an animal, a terrorist." Atika Shubert, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: And our thanks to Atika Shubert in London. The terror group, Boko Haram out of Nigeria is now taking a page out of the Jihadi John playbook. The group posted online a new video that claims to show the beheadings of two suspected African spies.

While the images are disturbing enough, what really has experts worried is the production quality of this video leading some to suspect this is perhaps much more than just a copycat situation that Boko Haram may now really have ties to ISIS.

Boko Haram has publicized the beheadings of hostages before this is the first time the video was posted online, which according to the site intelligence group, quote, "Borrows certain elements from ISIS beheadings."

Wolf Blitzer is here now with the preview of "THE SITUATION ROOM." You're going to get reaction on today's speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu from a boycotter and from the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST, "THE SITUATION ROOM": Two influential members of the House of Representatives, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce. He liked the Netanyahu speech. He's the Republican.

Also Democratic Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, he is the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. He boycotted the speech, didn't want to go hear what he had to say.

We're going to get reaction from both, what they heard or where we go from here, what can be done now that the speech has been over, the president has reacted. What happens next?

TAPPER: All right, a lot to chew over in "THE SITUATION ROOM" on in 6-1/2 minutes. Wolf Blitzer, thanks so much.

Coming up, thousands woken up in the middle of night, forced to evacuate as this volcano erupts with little warning and the lava and ash are not the only things these residents have to worry about, that's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: We're back with today's Money Lead. I'm Jake Tapper. The list that most of us can only dream about being on, Michael Jordan is a newbie on it, arguably the best basketball player of all time is now one of the richest people in the world according to "Forbes." Jordan has a net worth of $1 billion. He can thank sales from his Nike Air Jordans, of course, but mostly from owning the Charlotte Hornets.

Also on the billionaires list, Walmart heiress, Christy Walton, she is the richest woman on the list with $41 billion. Widow of Apple founder, Steve Jobs, Laureen Powell Jobs is worth $19.7 billion.

And how about this for inspiration, the 31-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, America's youngest self-made billionaire, Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 and started a company that develops blood testing technology. She is worth $4.6 billion.

Speaking of money, one of the highest paid women on television is not letting up her number one status. Judge Judy just renewed her daytime contract through the year 2020. The sharp talking quick thinking 72- year-old has been telling people off on television since 1996.

Judge Judy has been the number one court show for 969 consecutive weeks. She is the highest rated show in syndication and her last contract was worth about $45 million a year, but she's not a billionaire.

So the Buried Lead now, people are running for cover in parts of Chile and let me show you why. This is the Villarica volcano erupted today, in a tourist town south of Santiago. It erupted early this morning.

Sure the images are incredible, but this mountain is now a danger to some 22,000 people who lived nearby. Many evacuated their homes shortly after the explosion of lava. Not only that, but there was a lightning strike from the cloud of ash.

The eruption caused several rivers to rise, melted the snow along the side of the volcano. Emergency crews are watching out for possible mud slides as a result.

That's it for THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper. I'm turning you over to Wolf Blitzer in "THE SITUATION ROOM." Thanks for watching.