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Titan Tragedy Investigation; Israel Launches West Bank Military Operation; Volodymyr Zelenskyy Speaks Out. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired July 03, 2023 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:00]

DANA BASH, CNN HOST: That's tomorrow 7:00 p.m. Eastern on CNN.

Thank you for joining INSIDE POLITICS.

"CNN NEWS CENTRAL" starts right now.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling CNN in an exclusive interview that Vladimir Putin is weak and that his power is crumbling. Hear what the Ukrainian president said about the counteroffensive and what it will take for the war to finally be over.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Plus: an accident waiting to happen. That's how one former OceanGate employee described the doomed Titan submersible years before it imploded. A new report unearthing ominous e-mails. We're going to speak to the reporter who tracked down those messages.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: And Mike Pence responding to reports that Donald Trump pressured the Arizona governor to find fraud in the 2020 election. Hear how the former vice president is describing those calls and what this could mean for the special counsel's investigation.

We're following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

KEILAR: We begin with a CNN exclusive.

In the midst of Kyiv's counteroffensive, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sitting down with CNN's Erin Burnett, and he discussed a wide range of topics, including leaks about his meeting with America's CIA director, as well as his blistering assessment of Vladimir Putin's vulnerabilities after the brief revolt by Wagner mercenaries.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Mr. President you recently said that you have dealt -- and I will quote you, the way it quoted -- with different Putins.

"It's a completely different set of traits in different periods."

Now, of course, he's faced a rebellion, an attempted coup from Yevgeny Prigozhin. Have you seen any changes in how you think he's acting, in his behavior since the attempted coup?

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT (through translator): Yes, we see the reaction after certain Wagner steps. We see Putin's reaction. It's weak.

Firstly, we see he doesn't control everything. Wagner's moving deep into Russia and taking certain regions shows how easy it is to do. Putin doesn't control the situation in the regions. He doesn't control the security situation.

All of us understand that his whole army is in Ukraine. Almost entire army is there. That's why it's so easy for the Wagner troops to march through Russia. Who could have stopped him? We understand that Putin doesn't control the regional policy, and he doesn't control all those people in the regions.

So all that vertical of power he used to have so little just got crumbling down.

BURNETT: Do you believe he's fully in charge of the military right now?

When it comes to your front line and this counteroffensive, do you believe Putin is fully in charge of the Russian military?

ZELENSKYY (through translator): I don't think he fully controls all the processes. He gives orders to the commanders. It's understood. They are scared to lose their jobs.

But he doesn't understand and doesn't control the middle layer of the Russian military, nor the lower-rank officers and soldiers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Zelenskyy has also acknowledged difficulties on the battlefield here in recent days, but says his forces are making progress.

CNN's Ben Wedeman is on the ground for us in Eastern Ukraine.

Ben, what else did Zelenskyy tell CNN?

BEN WEDEMAN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A lot of interesting things, Brianna.

One of them is that, as far as Ukraine is concerned, this war will not be a complete victory for them until they get control back of Crimea, which has been under Russian occupation since 2014. He also, Zelenskyy, touched upon, but would not go into any detail about the recent visit to Kyiv by CIA Director William Burns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZELENSKYY (through translator): We cannot imagine Ukraine without Crimea.

Now Crimea is under the Russian occupation. That means only one thing. War is not over yet.

BURNETT: To be clear, in victory, in peace, is there any scenario where Crimea is not part of Ukraine?

ZELENSKYY (through translator): It will not be victory then.

BURNETT: I know the U.S. CIA chief, Bill Burns, has come and visited you regularly. He was here recently.

What did you tell him about your plans to take back territory in the counteroffensive?

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ZELENSKYY (through translator): To be honest with you, I was surprised to see the information in some media, both in the U.S. and Ukrainian and European media.

My communication with the CIA chief should always be behind the scenes, and the media attention, because we discuss important things, what Ukraine needs and how Ukraine is prepared to act.

We don't have any secrets from CIA, because we have good relations, and our intelligence services talk with each other. I don't know what were other contacts. I don't really remember which media I read it in. The situation is pretty straightforward.

We have good relations with the CIA chief, and we are talking. I told him about all the important things related to the battlefield which we need.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WEDEMAN: And what was widely reported was that Burns talked -- wanted to talk about or talked about the current Ukrainian counteroffensive and also the possibility of a negotiated settlement to the war by the end of the year -- Brianna.

KEILAR: And what are you seeing, Ben, of the counteroffensive from where you are?

WEDEMAN: What we see is that the fighting is intense.

And the Ukrainians are saying that, for instance, over the last week, they have been able to seize in the south, south of Zaporizhzhia, and in the Bakhmut area, a total of 14 square miles, not an awful lot of territory.

We know that the Russians have redeployed thousands of troops from elsewhere along the 600-mile front to the Bakhmut area to reinforce their troops there. But it's a well-established fact that the Russians had many months of forewarning that this counteroffensive was coming.

And, clearly, they have dug in deeply, put in extra armor, artillery, and troops. So the going has been very difficult for the Ukrainians. We have no idea about casualties on either side. Neither side has put out any reliable figures in quite some time.

But, in short, the battle is very difficult, and progress has been slow -- Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Ben Wedeman live for us in Eastern Ukraine, thank you so much.

And you can watch Erin Burnett's full interview with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That will be Wednesday night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: Let's get some perspective now from former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark. He's also a CNN military analyst.

General Clark, great to see you, as always. We appreciate you sharing part of your holiday weekend with us.

Let's start with your assessment of Zelenskyy's view that Vladimir Putin is getting weaker. Do you agree?

WESLEY CLARK, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, I think that, certainly, Putin is facing challenges that perhaps he hadn't anticipated.

Whether this actually makes him weaker or makes him stronger remains to be seen. If President Zelenskyy and his intelligence services say that Putin is weak, I'm willing to listen to this. But the past record of challenges like this indicates that dictators take these challenges in stride.

They use them to identify those who are not supporting him and eliminate them, and they come out stronger in the end. That's my concern here.

SANCHEZ: General, something stuck out to me about Zelenskyy's interview with Erin Burnett. There was some reporting there that indicated that he's anticipating a potential cease-fire before the end of the year.

He also said he was surprised that his conversation with the CIA director went public. What of his plans do you think is realistic?

CLARK: Well, on the one hand, President Zelenskyy says that he can't imagine a win without Crimea.

On the other hand, if you look at the state of the battlefield right now, the relative balance of forces on each side, the fact that the Russians are really fighting from a prepared defense, it looks to me, as someone who's looked at these military of battles historically and many other times, that the Ukrainians simply don't have the combat power to get into Crimea without airpower, without the ATACMS, without better electronic warfare, without the ability to target deep and go after Russian reserves.

This is a grinding battle, and they're still fighting really in the first echelon, the security zone of the Russian defense. So, maybe President Zelenskyy is understanding he wants Crimea, but maybe he's going to not be able to get it.

That's, I think, the kind of undertone I got from that.

SANCHEZ: And I'm wondering about that effort to retake Crimea. You had a list of items that you said they would need in order to do so.

[13:10:05]

Is that something that would require more investment from the West that it has already provided to Ukraine?

CLARK: Much more investment, because what we're not really able to report on is Russian innovation and Russian efforts.

And the Russians, they're not standing still on this. Now, we have made a lot about the fact that the Russians are poorly trained, and they have thrown people willy-nilly into battle, and they have taken huge losses and stuff.

But the Russians are also developing new technologies. They're trying to strengthen their electronic warfare, jam the drones. they're jamming the HIMARS system now. So it's not as effective in striking precision targets deep. We haven't given the Ukrainians the ability to really go deeply enough to go after Russian helicopters and other air assets that are inside Ukraine and striking the Ukrainians to try to move forward.

And, as General Zaluzhnyi said, he said, you NATO countries, you would never do a big attack like this without airpower and trying to get air superiority. And that's one thing, of course, that Ukraine doesn't have here.

So I think, if we want to see Ukraine really advance effectively on the battlefield, they do need more outside support, including more modern Western systems and electronic warfare, the long-range missiles, but especially electronic warfare. And because that's so highly classified, we have been very reluctant to give them the latest systems.

SANCHEZ: So, General, back to the question of a potential cease-fire before year's end if they don't try to retake Crimea, is that a realistic proposition?

CLARK: It is a realistic proposition. But I -- it's not necessarily a good proposition.

Look, Putin is in this to win. He's not in it to get a cease-fire. And he's not willing to take a cease-fire at this point. Now, if Ukraine stops fighting, it gives Russia more time to strengthen its forces, and they could move forward again. And so they could break a cease- fire once they have signed it.

So I don't think a cease-fire is a solution to anything. I hear discussions in the U.S. media and U.S. academic circles about an armistice and making it a Korean solution, and wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody wanted to stop fighting? But that depends on a balance of power and strength. And in the Korean War case, Eisenhower had to deploy an atomic cannon to Korea, and Stalin had to die before there was an armistice in Korea. So, as long as Putin wants to keep fighting, as long as Putin thinks he has a long-term advantage, as long as the West is holding back its most modern technologies, while Russia is putting its most modern technologies into the fight, we have got an asymmetry here that makes it look like it's difficult to get a lasting solution.

SANCHEZ: Yes, that example of the Korean Peninsula really stark when you consider that that demilitarized zone has not been the epitome of peace, especially in the last few years.

General Wesley Clark, thank you so much for the perspective. Always appreciate it.

CLARK: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Jim.

SCIUTTO: Now to an alarming spike in violence in the Middle East, where Israel has launched its largest military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin in more than 20 years.

The Palestinian Health Ministry says at least eight people have been killed in these attacks. The Israeli military says its forces were targeting what it called terrorist infrastructure. One Israeli lawmaker says Jenin has become a hub for terrorism and that seven of the eight people killed were carrying weapons.

Gunfire and explosions could be heard the streets. Large plumes of smoke billowed from the arrow -- area following those strikes.

CNN's Hadas Gold is in Jerusalem.

Hadas, this is part of a spike in violence we have seen in recent weeks, really. I wonder, what evidence has the Israeli government presented as to what is behind these particular attacks?

HADAS GOLD, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Well, really, this has been going on now for a year-and-a-half, these regular Israeli military raids into various cities in the occupied West Bank.

This is in response, they say, to a wave of Palestinian attacks targeting Israelis, but Jenin in particular has really been a hot spot of militant activity and of some of these new -- new militant groups that sort of have some varying ties to the more established ones, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

But what we saw overnight, this was by far the largest military -- Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank, period, since 2002. So we're talking about the days of the second intifada, when Israeli tanks were literally rolling through the streets of Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

[13:15:02] This -- there were hundreds, if not up to 1,000 Israeli forces operating in Jenin. They utilized airstrikes from drones. And there were bulldozers that were ripping up the streets of Jenin. Now, this was to try and get rid of IEDs there. And, also, there were tanks. Now, they were not inside Jenin itself, but they were on the outskirts of Jenin.

But I cannot emphasize enough how just the sight of Israeli tanks just on the outside of a Palestinian city, how much that brings back the memories of the very, very violent and heady days of the second intifada.

Now, the Israeli military saying that they started this surprise operation overnight around 1:00 a.m. with these airstrike. Now, they say they have been targeting command centers for militant groups. They say they have been targeting weapons site. They say that they have found kind of improvised rocket launchers.

They have been engaging, they say, in gunfights with militants at mosques and saying that they have discovered tunnels underneath the mosques. And I should also note this is still going on as we speak. Apparently, this operation is still ongoing as we speak, and firefights are still erupting as we speak.

And, of course, what that means for the civilians in Jenin, it means that they have been holed up in their houses now for hours. We know that at least eight Palestinians have been killed, at least 80 others have been injured. One Israeli soldier has been injured.

The question now, Jim, is, will this spill over into other cities in the West Bank, Israeli military saying they're keeping this focused, this isn't some broad-scale operation. But Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, has been calling on its members to, they say, strike Israel wherever they can -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: And, sadly, we have seen, in many of these operations, civilians are often victims as well.

Hadas Gold in Jerusalem, thanks so much -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Red flags raised years ago, the warning that a former OceanGate employee sent about the doomed Titan sub and the CEO who built it. We have some new reporting coming to us from "The New Yorker" detailing an extensive paper trail on this.

Plus, it wasn't just Georgia. How Donald Trump may have tried to get Arizona's governor to overturn his 2020 loss there as well.

And a manhunt for the people who turned a Baltimore block party into the site of another mass shooting. Two people are dead, nearly two dozen teens injured.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:21:23] KEILAR: We are learning more missed warning signs for the company behind the Titan submersible that imploded on a mission to the Titanic.

According to "The New Yorker," David Lochridge, who is a former OceanGate employee who claims that he was wrongfully terminated for raising red flags, once sent an ominous e-mail to a colleague about the doomed vessel, writing: "That sub is an accident waiting to happen."

He also added this about then CEO Stockton Rush. He said: "I don't want to be seen as a tattletale, but I'm worried he kills himself and others in a quest to boost his ego."

Rush, of course, was among five people who died in the tragedy.

Joining me now is Ben Taub of "The New Yorker," who wrote this really incredible story, Ben.

And you obtained this never-before-seen report by David Lochridge, the fired OceanGate employee, and it details so many issues that he found with the sub during an inspection. Tell us more about what he found in this report.

BEN TAUB, "THE NEW YORKER": Sure.

Yes, David Lochridge was perhaps the only highly experienced submarine pilot who worked at OceanGate at the time, and he was hired as their director of marine operations. And as part of that role, as they transitioned from the building phase into the testing phase, he was required to sign off that this was safe to dive.

So he was raising concerns on the factory floor for much of the latter half of 2017 and was just constantly being dismissed, at which point he decided he was going to take this serious inspection report, and he was going to detail everything in writing and submit it in writing to Stockton Rush, the CEO, and Tony Nissen, the director of engineering.

And in this -- over the next sort of day of -- it was January 18, 2018, so more than five years ago -- Lochridge inspected every asset, every major component of the sub, and found that glue was coming away from the seams of the ballast bags. You had mounting bolts threatening to rupture things, sealing faces that had errant plunge holes, O-ring grooves that deviated from standard parameters.

Everything that could go wrong was sort of going wrong. There were snagging hazards. There were important components attached with zip ties, flammable flooring, and interior vinyl wrapping would emit highly toxic gases upon ignition.

But the number one concern for Lochridge was that the actual core of this submarine, the pressure boundary, which is what keeps people alive at 3,800 meters, where Titanic is, where the external water pressure is about 6,000 pounds per square inch, is made of carbon fiber, which is not used at -- in deep ocean submersibles, because, under compression, it's a capricious material. It's not made to be used under compression. It's fibers. It's like

rope. You -- it's strong under tension, but not under compression. So he examined a section of it and found that it was filled with little holes. He held a -- it was delaminating, these layers. It was porous.

He held a light behind it and found that the light was streaming through. And he refused to sign off on the dive. And Stockton Rush said that, because you refuse to sign off on this man's testing, you cannot do your job as director of marine operations, and so he fired him on the spot.

KEILAR: Yes, in a way, he was doing the job, Ben. And he was fired for doing his job.

And you have to wonder what would have happened if he'd been able to actually do his job. So you have in this -- you also share instances where Rush, he seems to take personal offense to criticism, right, because Lochridge knows people outside of OceanGate. And there's a co- head of a company that actually has a classed titanium sub.

[13:25:05]

Of course, this sub, the submersible that imploded, it was not classed. And this co-head of this company says to him, basically warning him. And he lashes out, Stockton Rush does, saying that he's tired of industry players who tried to use a safety argument to stop innovation.

He seemed so confident that he was doing something new and different, and that he was being stymied by people saying it was in the name of safety. But he seemed convinced it wasn't, even though, truly, clearly, it was.

TAUB: Yes, at the end of the day, this tragedy comes down to hubris.

It was a matter of this kind of Silicon Valley disrupter attitude. But it wasn't about beating the other companies. It was about trying to beat physics. And you're not going to win that. And they didn't win that. And it was sort of blindingly obvious for years that the sub was not being constructed in a manner that would work under great pressure.

You can build a sub that's experimental, but you can't take passengers in it. That's completely illegal. And so they have structured the company such that it was falling outside of U.S. jurisdiction in various ways. They had all kinds of sort of steps taken so that they weren't actually passengers. They were categorized as mission specialists.

But how can you have a 19-year-old kid who's terrified of going inside (AUDIO GAP) mission specialist? It's completely incoherent. And I imagine that this will -- this will continue for a long time in courts, because you can only call something an accident if it's truly an accident.

And if there's five years of very explicit warnings from engineers explaining, this is how it will implode, and you refuse to take them seriously, there has to come a point where someone takes responsibility for that.

Dave Lochridge, for his part, after he was fired -- mm-hmm?

KEILAR: What's the lesson here on classing? Because he was so, Stockton Rush, resistant to having his submersible classed.

And yet what is so clear in your report is how essential that process is to providing a submersible that is safe for people to go to these depths.

TAUB: Yes, 3,800 meters is not actually -- it is an extreme depth, let's be clear, but it's not unprecedented. Nothing he was doing was breaking boundaries.

The boundary-breaking part of this operation was to try to do it in a sub that was unclassed and was clearly designed to do what it did, which was to fail. Classed submarines can go, have been going to the Titanic since the '80s.

One of the guys in my article had been leading tours to the Titanic in the mid 2000s using Soviet submarines that were built in the '80s. Others in the article -- because I happen to be at sea with them some years ago for a much more sort of serious venture, where they were sending a manned submersible that was classed to the deepest point in each ocean.

The deepest point in the Pacific Ocean is 11,000 meters. It's triple the depth of Titanic. And for that sub, they took the guy from the classification agency to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He signed that it was unlimited depth at 11,000 meters down.

And, for that sub, a titanium spherical hull, which evenly distributes the pressure, not a cylinder which will get crushed under pressure, titanium -- that titanium sphere hull, the Titanic didn't even count as a dive for classification insurance reasons.

Every 100 dives, you have to do inspections, but the threshold for them was 4,000 meters. And if it's above 4,000 -- Titanic's 3,800 -- it's not even a dive. So the notion that Stockton Rush was doing something innovative is a complete lie.

And, basically, he had to change the narrative around the point that it became clear that they would never get it classed because it was going to be a failure. And the way that they did that was to sort of lie to their mission specialists, again, their passengers who they have misclassified on purpose for legal reasons, that this -- they stopped trying to say that it was safe.

They started telling them explicitly, oh, yes, it's incredibly dangerous. You might die. You have to sign a waiver. This is an experimental sub, which was true.

KEILAR: Yes.

TAUB: But the lie there was that this is how serious a operation is done.

KEILAR: Yes.

TAUB: It's not how it's done at all.

And a last thing that I just needed to make very clear is that Dave Lochridge actually did raise this with the U.S. government. After he was fired, he was so concerned about what was going on that he shared his report with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

And that report was then passed on from OSHA to the U.S. Coast Guard. And there's no evidence of any follow-up from there. That was in March of 2018.

KEILAR: Yes, you make that so clear. He tried to raise some flags, and, in the end, he was buried in legal bills, as you describe in your report.

Ben, excellent reporting. I think it's such an important lesson for so many people, not just when it comes to submersibles and deep ocean exploration, but anything that could be unsafe. It's a really important read. So thank you for being with us and sharing it.

TAUB: Thanks very much for having me on. I appreciate it.

KEILAR: Boris.

SANCHEZ: A new CNN KFILE investigation reveals that Donald Trump once argued that a president under indictment

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