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Support Ship That Lost Connection With Submersible Now Joins Search; Special Counsel John Durham Testifies On Report Criticizing FBI Handling Of Russia Probe; Accused Classified Documents Leaker Arraigned Today; Coast Guard: Search Area 2x Size Of Connecticut. Aired 3-3:30p ET

Aired June 21, 2023 - 15:00   ET

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

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: We are following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: More underwater noises detected today and still hope that critical search for this missing submersible can still be a rescue mission, five people trapped potentially more than two miles underwater. And officials estimate they have 14 to 15 hours of breathable air supply left.

This is an animation of how this expedition was supposed to go. We just heard from the company that owns the support ship, which took the Titan out for this dive, but then lost communication with the five- member crew an hour and 45 minutes into the journey.

Those underwater noises, by the way, detected by sonar, some Coast Guard crew describing them as banging noises, but they still cannot guarantee that they are from the missing vessel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAPT. JAMIE FREDERICK, U.S. COAST GUARD: We need to have hope, right? But I don't - I can't tell you what the noises are. But what I can tell you is - and I think this is the most important point - we're searching where the noises are and that's all we can do at this point.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Let's go now to CNN's Jason Carroll. He is live for us in Boston, which is where the U.S. Coast Guard is communicating what is going on with this rescue from.

Jason, what is the plan as we have 14 to 15 hours? Of course, that is just an estimate.

JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. And the plan quite simply is to keep going as they have been going, Brianna. When asked about that, what happens when the clock runs out so to speak, I mean - and the Coast Guard making it very clear, this is a search and rescue operation and that's how we basically answered the question to that.

But there was a lot of - there were a lot of questions specifically about the noises that have been heard, especially what we heard about yesterday, that Canadian aircraft dropping that sonar buoy and picking up banging noises, if you will.

Those same banging noises, it was revealed this afternoon, were also picked up again this morning also by sonar buoys. And so then that raises the questions, what more can you tell us about these particular sounds. And so that's what I asked the captain there.

And he said, "I just don't know what they are at this point." And so then you have to ask yourself, so what are they doing about the sounds. Well, they've sent in additional resources into the area where the sounds were detected. And what they've done is they've taken that acoustical information, they've sent it to the U.S. Navy for analysis so they can go over it and try to determine: is it human sound, is it someone knocking, trying to indicate that they are alive or is it some other sound from the ocean, is it from the wreckage settling near the Titanic or some other noise.

This is what the experts have to determine, which is why the U.S. Coast Guard is offering caution at this point. But as you - but you also heard offering hope, because that was also a question, what would you say then to the family members who are waiting to hear some sort of word and the word is they are going to continue to send as many resources into the area, continue to offer hope. Brianna?

KEILAR: Yes. They - there could still be time and so they need to proceed as if there could still be time.

Jason Carroll live for us in Boston, thank you. Boris?

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: As the hours pass and the oxygen on board the vessel begins to dwindle, this is an all hands on deck effort.

CNN's Miguel Marquez is live in St. John's port where the Canadian Coast Guard is headquartered.

Miguel, what more are Canadian officials saying at this hour?

MIGUEL MARQUEZ, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Horizon Maritime just held a little press statement and then took some questions from the press outside their offices here. This is the company that has the Polar Prince. This is the ship that they do a range of different things everything from oil exploration and gas.

And they were talking about the Polar Prince, that is the ship that took this submersible out there. It is now participating in the search as well. And the other ship that they have, the Horizon Arctic, that was ported here and then there were three U.S. Military C-17s that flew in yesterday. There was a ton of gear in that, including a deep water remote operated vehicle that is now on that ship and headed out to the search area as well as a Coast Guard ship here.

It is just - it's full on. There's going to be 10 ships out there in the next 24 to 48 hours.

[15:05:00]

They know that there is a time issue because of the air issue that the submersible has. But my sense is, is that they want to keep looking for every possible second. That's why these - despite how small the sliver of hope is, given these sounds that they heard yesterday and today, that's where they are focusing their search right now, because that's the one thing that they can do and they just have a massive amount of gear out there right now.

And hoping even if it probably goes past the time that they know that they'd have no more air, they will continue to search in the hope that somehow they have survived and they can bring them home to their families. Back to you.

SANCHEZ: Miguel Marquez in St. John's, Newfoundland. Thank you so much. Jim, this is an unprecedented effort.

SCIUTTO: No question.

Joining us to talk more about the search efforts and what hopefully at some point would be rescue efforts is retired Navy captain, Chip McCord.

Good to have you on, sir. I wonder if you could help us understand the significance as we know it of the noises that have been heard so far. Because if you listen to that Coast Guard press conference earlier today, they say in so many words, they don't truly know what the noises are.

They have hope. They had been described by some as banging although the Coast Guard Captain wasn't certain that's what it was, wasn't certain also the timeframe as described, was it every 30 minutes or some other indeterminate timeframe.

Based on what you've heard, do you believe they have a reliable potential contact with the missing submarine?

CAPT. RAYMOND SCOTT "CHIP" MCCORD, U.S. NAVY (RET.): Jim, I think I would agree with the Coast Guard captain that says that they don't exactly know what they have. So I guess I would leave it at that. They're all out there looking at it and we could put some conjecture into it.

But if they knew for sure that it was someone banging on a haul with an SOS, they would have told us. So I think right now the answer is for us out here they really don't know what they have.

SCIUTTO: Okay. And that's important for expectations, management, but it is apparently the best they have. So you have this indicator here, indeterminant one, you throw everything you can at it. What is the stage now? You're going to still be listening with our effectively sub hunting aircraft that: the P-3s and the P-8s. There's also side scan sonar that's going out there. Can you search an area twice the size of Connecticut quickly to kind of zero in on something like this?

MCCORD: I don't think they really need on the underwater portion of it to search an area twice the size of Connecticut. There - it's probably no more than a mile or two miles by two miles on the bottom, which is most likely, the place where the submersible is, most likely it's not on the surface or I think it would have been spotted.

And it's very, very highly unlikely that it's in the water column between the bottom and surface. So most likely it's on the bottom and again, the currents aren't that great down here, so most likely it's pretty close to the area where they descended to.

SCIUTTO: Interesting. So that's - so that search area, that's the surface search area. You're saying that based on what they know, they can probably and I know there are no certainties here, but greatly narrow that search area to a couple of miles. If that is the case, how quickly a couple of search that area?

MCCORD: Continue miles on the bottom. A large area on the - it's a large area on the surface, because there's currents and tides on the surface.

SCIUTTO: Right.

MCCORD: So if they're on the surface, it would have floated. On the bottom, it's not going to float down there.

SCIUTTO: And is it based on what you know more likely that this thing is on the bottom as opposed to floating halfway up or on the surface?

MCCORD: Oh, absolutely, yes.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MCCORD: And the reason it's still on the bottom is that it might have had an electrical failure. It might not have been able to offload ballast on it to help it raise. It might be caught under something or it could have crushed - had structural failure.

SCIUTTO: Okay. If it was not crushed and if it is still a livable space in there, can you bring it up? I mean, it's a very practical question. Can you - and if you can, how quickly?

MCCORD: Okay. So the U.S. Navy who is out there, supervisory salvage offices out there, they have experienced doing this and a lot of experience. In the last few years they've recovered a F-35 from, like, 12,500 feet of water. That's a fighter jet and an MH-60 helicopter from 19,000 feet of water.

So they - basically, both aircraft were intact and they recovered them. They normally don't go real fast when they're doing it. They don't go slow because they're not there's normally not a case of someone being alive in what they're recovering and so it's a pretty step by step process.

The way they do that is that they search, find the item that they're looking for, which again is the key in this situation right now with this submersible.

[15:10:07]

Inspect it with an ROV and then probably hook a line onto it and recover it with a line. Again, let's make sure we understand that it's two and a half miles deep, very few vehicles manned or unmanned can go down that deep.

When you put a line down there on it, it's a two and a half mile long line. And so the surface ship is going up and down. And so the Navy has this special system, that line is routed around a pulley on top of a basically a big shock absorber, so there's no snap load on the line.

And again, they have a lot of experience doing that. It's just a matter of timing. I believe that FADOSS system is out there. I believe the Navy's vehicle.

Again, there's other vehicles that can work at depths. These underwater vehicles are designed to do certain things at depth. So the Navy's vehicle is designed to do salvage recovery ...

SCIUTTO: Okay.

MCCORD: ... at depths.

SCIUTTO: Let me ask you this, sir.

MCCORD: Other people's ROVs may not be designed to do that sort of thing.

SCIUTTO: You say they've done this before with an F-35, with a helicopter, but those did not have living human beings on them. Has anyone ever successfully recovered people from depths this far down?

MCCORD: I don't believe from depth. I know that - boy, I'm trying to remember back in the '70s there was a submersible down in Florida (inaudible). I'm sorry for drawing a blank on this, but I think they recovered the people from that.

No, not at this depth.

Again, there's very few things that can go down there to get them and it's a very time consuming to get all the equipment on site, put it on board a ship, secure it to the ship basically weld that down so that when you go out to sea these things don't fall around.

You got a lot of equipment, contacts (ph), big cargo boxes of stuff, the ROV is the size of a small cargo van or a cargo van, it's cable is 20,000 feet and the cables are two inches - inch and a half to two inches in diameter and you got three and a half miles of that.

So all these things add up to a large surface area on board the ship that it's got to be loaded onto it.

SCIUTTO: Yes. Listen, those are the challenges ...

MCCORD: And then once you get it on (inaudible) out to the site.

SCIUTTO: Yep. Well, we know it's difficult. We can only - we know they're doing their best and we can only hope they're successful. Capt. Chip McCord, thanks so much. Brianna? KEILAR: Ahead this hour on CNN NEWS CENTRAL, his report concluded the

FBI was wrong to launch a full investigation into President Trump's connections to Russia. Now, John Durham is in the hot seat on Capitol Hill. What he's saying about his findings and his reputation.

And Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman accused of leaking highly classified government secrets back in court today, what you can expect there. We'll talk about that.

And dozens injured after a fiery gas explosion in central Paris. Hundreds of firefighters are on the scene and we will take you there live.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:17:32]

SANCHEZ: Today on Capitol Hill, Special Counsel John Durham is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. It comes just weeks after he released a report that was highly critical of the FBI's investigation into Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and possible contact with Russia.

Let's take you now live to Capitol Hill with CNN's Sara Murray.

So Sara, what did lawmakers hear from Durham during this hearing?

SARA MURRAY, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's a pretty spicy hearing today, as you might imagine, with a number of partisan attacks and, of course, John Durham at the center of it, defending his work investigating the origins of the Russia investigation and the FBI 's actions.

He penned a report saying that while the FBI may have been warranted in launching this preliminary investigation, they should not have launched a full scale investigation and he ran through some of his other concerns like the FBI failing to look at exculpatory evidence and failing to interview key witnesses.

Take a listen to what John Durham had to say about his findings.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN DURHAM, SPECIAL COUNSEL: As we said in the report, our findings are sobering. I can tell you having spent 40 years plus as a federal prosecutor, they are particularly sobering to me. A number of my colleagues who have spent decades in the FBI themselves, they were so boring.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MURRAY: Now Durham, of course, faced an avalanche of criticism for Democrats. They said his report and his investigation were essentially dog whistles to far-right conspiracy theorists that essentially that he was covering up for Donald Trump. They accuse their Republican colleagues of holding this hearing to distract from Donald Trump's indictment.

But what we heard from Republicans and especially Jim Jordan, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, were ongoing concerns about how the FBI has conducted itself and you can bet Jim Jordan is going to continue to be looking into that, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Now, there were some spicy moments indeed.

Sara Murray, live from Capitol Hill, thanks so much. Brianna?

KEILAR: Moments from now the Air National Guardsman indicted on charges of posting highly classified military documents online will be back in court. Jack Teixeira is about to be arraigned on six federal felony accounts.

And CNN's Oren Liebermann Ron Lieberman is live at the Pentagon for us on this. Oren, what are we expecting from this hearing?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, this arraignment is scheduled to start in just about half an hour or so at 3:45. And in terms of the process that will play out in court, this shouldn't be all that long, 21-year-old Jack Teixeira will be arraigned on six counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information.

[15:20:05]

For the first time, he will enter a plea. So either guilty or not guilty likely and we'll find out what he and his lawyers have decided in this case. And then the judge is expected to schedule the next hearing.

So in terms of what happens in court, this should go fairly quickly here, as this begins to move through here. The judge has ruled that Teixeira will remain in detention pending the trial. Prosecutors say that Jack Teixeira spread classified information in two ways.

First accessing it as a member of the Air National Guard, then writing it down and essentially posting it online. And then they also say that he then simply took pictures of classified documents and posted those pictures online.

In terms of the period, prosecutors say he did this for nearly a year and a half from January 2022 until April 2023. And that's when he was arrested, of course, and that's when the legal process began to play out.

Brianna, that process will continue today with the arrangement in just under half an hour. We'll keep you posted.

KEILAR: All right. We'll be looking forward to that.

Oren Liebermann live at the Pentagon, thank you. Jim?

SCIUTTO: Coming up next, an update on the missing sub as the Coast Guard reveals that search aircraft have heard unidentified noises for a second day, what that all means.

Plus, new information about DNA found inside the house where those four University of Idaho students were murdered. We'll have more just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:26:06]

SCIUTTO: Let's get back now to our top story this hour, the Coast Guard says there is still hope in the search for the missing submersible. Officials estimate the five people on board now have about 14 to 15 hours of oxygen left more vessels are headed to the search area.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAPT. JAMIE FREDERICK, U.S. COAST GUARD: This is a search and rescue mission, 100 percent. We are smack dab in the middle of search and rescue and we'll continue to put every available asset that we have in an effort to find the Titan and the crew members.

SCIUTTO: The Coast Guard also says that search aircraft detected more underwater noises today. Fact is though, they're not sure what those noises are at this point and whether indeed they did come from the missing sub. The search area on the surface at least has grown to two times the size of the state of Connecticut, the search area on the ocean floor perhaps much smaller than that.

CNN's Chad Myers joins me now.

Chad, a big question is find it, right? I mean, that's what they're trying to do desperately. Now, they're throwing what they can at it and these signals seem to be the best clue they have at this point. If they do, the sad fact of the matter is that recovery would be a different task entirely. What do we know?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It would certainly would be, because you have to think about even if they found it, and they could hook it up to something, that's 12,000 feet of cable. You have to get that 12,000 feet of cable to the bottom, then you have to get it on a reel to get it up to the top. How do we do that? There are so many unknowns here.

Really, I think what's happened - the best thing that has happened over the past 96 hours really is that the weather hasn't been too bad. Three to six foot swells, I'm not talking about these sharp waves that you see on lakes. These are the ocean swells. And even though there are a couple of clouds out there right now, there's no real change in wind direction. There's no big frontal system, there is no big low pressure system there.

We know the temperatures in the zone near this red square somewhere between 55 and 60 degrees. The closer you get to down here into the warmer temperatures, the brighter colors, that's where the warmer water is. Now the difference is when you get a little bit farther down than

that, things change dramatically. Things change when it comes to temperatures from the top all the way down at the bottom. Something else that goes on when we get to this thing called the thermocline. I know you've heard it probably over and over and over today.

Speed of the sound changes due to the temperature of the water and also the density of the water. So those sounds that they hear can actually be refracted. If a sound is made in the thermocline, it can go for hundreds, if not thousands of miles. They think that's how the whales connect, how they talk to each other or how they sing to each other.

And then you get farther down to the bottom and all of a sudden another problem is that the temperature of the water is 39 degrees. So you're above freezing, yes, but you're in a fairly non insulated capsule, you're in a non heated capsule. I know people are trying to take all the ingredients and put them all into one.

But even if we do get all the way down here and the time is running out, they need to really, really ramp this up and find it like now.

SCIUTTO: And just - I know you're a surface person weather, but currents are a factor, I imagine as you go to those various depths as well.

MYERS: Yes, sure. Sure. And, of course, they would have planned that out. They - because they knew that if we lost contact an hour and 45 minutes into the dive, typically about a two-hour to two-and-a-half hour dive. So they know that if it actually did stop, it didn't get entangled, that it just started drifting, they would have planned that into their drift category. And they would have planned that into the MH-370, they knew where that thing should have been drifting at the surface.

The currents at the bottom though are not nearly as fast as the gulf stream currents at the top.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MYERS: This is basically just not a - I don't want to call it a dead sea, because that already has a name, but down here things don't move very much.

[15:30:07]

SCIUTTO: That's - well, that's helpful to know.