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Civil Fraud Trial has Scheduled Three of Trump's Children to Testify; Judge Requires Ivanka Trump to Testify in Donald Trump's Civil Fraud Case; Maine Mass Shootings; Janet Mills, Governor of Maine, Dodges Questions Regarding Reports That Police Received Multiple Warnings About the Gunman; Five Months Prior to Shootings, Gunman's Family Alerted the Sheriff's Office; Israel at War; Abducted from a Music Festival, Israel Declares Shani Louk Dead; Smoke and Explosions Seen in Border Region Between Israel and Lebanon. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired October 31, 2023 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, a huge moment in a New York courtroom. Donald Trump's children tomorrow scheduled to begin testifying in the civil fraud case against him where he's already been found liable for fraud. So, Donald Trump Jr. kicks it off. He will be on the stand tomorrow, followed by Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump next week.

CNN's Brynn Gingras here with us now. So, where's this -- their testimony fit here.

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I mean, it's going to be pivotal to this case, right? The entire four weeks of this civil trial, the attorney general's team, they have been putting witnesses on the stand. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr, who are defendants in this case, not Ivanka Trump, we'll get to that in a second.

They -- their names have been mentioned by these witnesses or in e- mails or phone calls or, you know, sort of these guys could tie things together. Whether or not they answer questions from attorney general, lawyers, we'll see. But they certainly can tie together the pieces of who exactly was in charge of evaluating these assets for the Trump org and how they got to the civil trial basically in the first place is the argument that they were inflated to get loans.

BERMAN: And then Ivanka Trump, you mentioned, is at a little bit of a different category here?

GINGRAS: Right. She's in a different category because she -- well, she's no longer a defendant. She was, but an appeals court ruled in her favor to take her off as a defendant. And that's because she, you know, obviously left Trump org when Trump went into office. And so, their argument was she had no part in the discussions that were had about evaluating these properties. So, that's why she's no longer a defendant. However, the state basically said, listen, she still benefits from Trump org. She gets a paycheck. She could have some testimony that could be important to this case. And so, they won that argument. So, she is expected to testify next week after her father.

BERMAN: Talk to me about that, after her father. So, Donald Trump himself.

GINGRAS: Yes.

BERMAN: As soon as Monday?

[10:35:00]

GINGRAS: As soon as Monday. Of course, the schedule can shift just based on the testimony. You know, these two sons could be on the stand for quite a bit. But he's expected to take the stand and he's expected to be the final witness for the state before we head to his defense. Now, listen, he's not going to be in the courtroom for his children, which I found very interesting.

BERMAN: He's not?

GINGRAS: He's not, because he was there for Michael Cohen. He was there for the start of the trial, but he is not going to be in the courtroom. He has some campaign things going on. So, apparently, he will not be in the courtroom. Of course, that could always change. But as of now, he won't listen to his kids' testimony. But he is taking the stand himself. It's going to be a big moment. A big two weeks for this trial.

BERMAN: All right. Yes. A few weeks' worth watching here to be sure.

GINGRAS: Yes.

BERMAN: Brynn Gingras, I'm sure you'll be down outside the court as soon as tomorrow. Thanks so much.

GINGRAS: All right.

BERMAN: Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Coming up for us, growing anger and paranoia. The ex-wife and son of the mass shooter in Maine. They were so worried about his mental health and what he might do that they went to police months ago. What happened with those warning signs? We'll dig deeper on that, coming up.

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[10:40:00]

BERMAN: So, troubling new revelations this morning about the shooter in Maine who killed 18 people. Documents were leaked by the sheriff's office detail how as far back as May, the shooter's ex-wife and son went to the police to report concerns over what they described as his paranoid behavior. They also said, he had taken between 10 and 15 guns and rifles from his brother's house. Now, at a press conference, CNN's Shimon Prokupecz asked the Maine Governor, Janet Mills, about the missed signs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: We know that there is an alarming concern from the law enforcement community that activity and information here was ignored. And the simple answer is, why was that done and are you concerned about that?

GOV. JANET MILLS (D-ME): I think those kinds of facts were yet to be determined. You're making assumptions. I'm not willing to make those assumptions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So, Leroy Walker, whose son was killed in the attack, he expressed his frustration at the missed signs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LEROY WALKER SR., SON JOEY KILLED IN MAINE MASS SHOOTINGS: I think we've seen enough facts to know that they totally missed what this man was capable of doing. They should have removed this man's guns immediately. This man went rampant on people saying that he was going to do this and we still let him run around two or three months later.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: All right. With me now is CNN Chief Law Enforcement Analyst John Miller. John, let's just start off by acknowledging that the Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, didn't answer Shimon's question.

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: No, and I mean, the governor has created her own problem for herself, which is -- and many politicians do this in crisis these days which is when the national media is there, when it's all live, they show up, they say, I'm in charge, you know. I'm responsible. We're all together. Every resource is being devoted to this. And then when the questions get harder, they fade into the background. They don't have the answers.

Listen, what's going to be required of the governor, at some point, is either to battle off these questions for a long time, or to appoint somebody in a move of transparency, an inspector general, to say, I need you to go through this top to bottom, I need you to write a report, and we need to make it public.

BERMAN: Top to bottom here, it's pretty glaring, John. We talk about warning signs here. I can't recall a time where things were less subtle than this.

MILLER: So, if you look at the chronology, you actually learn a lot because you've got the family coming forward in September -- your family coming forward in May. You have the firearms purchases in July. You have, essentially, a mental breakdown 10 days later in July where the Army Reserve becomes involved. You have the concern -- that's in New York State, you have the concern of the Army Reserve up in Saco, Maine, where he's based out of. Going to the police and saying he's been making statements about wanting to shoot up the base. He had a fight with a friend.

So, you see this continuum. Now, what we know in the active shooter realm, because it's been studied, it's been documented, is in 85 to 90 percent of the cases there are what they call leakage. People are giving signs. He's leaking like crazy in terms of his intentions. It's not subtle. And the other alarm signs, the stressors of the mental episode with the Army Reserves, the losing of his job, being fired from the recycling center. The issue he had, you know, with the breakup with his wife, all of this is building.

And, look, they have the yellow flag law in that state. It's not a red flag law. But they've used it 82 times since 2020 in interventions where the circumstances are, in some cases, remarkably similar or many circumstances where the urgency is less so by the narratives. So, they have to figure out what went wrong here.

BERMAN: And look, one of the things that is often said in situations like this is a plea to the public. You know, you need to be on the watch. You've got to come forward and say something.

MILLER: Exactly.

BERMAN: They did.

MILLER: They did.

BERMAN: Family members did. Co-workers did in this case.

MILLER: And going over it, what I see is the army steps forward. I think they, kind of, clear the bar as they did their role in terms of notification, the Army Reserve. I see the sheriff comes forward, that's the sheriff where he lives, and an investigator and a sergeant go out and they start to talk to people and they look for him but they don't find him.

[10:45:00]

The police department, a local police department increases patrol. The problem you see is no one entity takes complete charge of this and says, we're going to have to own this start to finish, there are three or four entities involved. The second problem is they never go to the file six, as they call it in Maine, where it goes to the state police, and now every law enforcement officer is looking for that man, that car, that license plate to do a stop and have some kind of intervention. So, there are things that were missed.

BERMAN: Yes, there certainly were. John Miller, thank you for this. We know you're going to stay on this.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: Certainly were.

Coming up still for us, the Israel-Hamas war has sparked a terrifying surge in antisemitism across the world, including in the United States, especially on college campuses. What is going on here, and what can be done about it? We're going to dig into it.

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[10:50:00]

BOLDUAN: New this morning, Israel's military is confirming that they have located and identified the remains of Shani Louk. She is the 23- year-old woman who has been missing since the Hamas terror attack. Shani was at the Nova Music Festival on October 7th with hundreds of others when Hamas terrorists attacked, killing hundreds, kidnapping others.

You will also remember that Shani was shown in a disgusting Hamas propaganda video where she was seemingly unconscious, bound, and being held by -- in the back of a truck by Hamas terrorists and paraded around. Shani's mother has spoken to CNN many times, pleading for her daughter. And she spoke to CNN this morning after getting this final tragic news that her daughter was killed. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RICARDA LOUK, MOTHER OF SHANI LOUK: After three weeks that you have no idea where your daughter is. What they're doing to her. What is happening. What is -- you don't know if she's alive or not, or injured. Nothing. There's just like you're in a vacuum for three weeks. Just hoping to get some signs or life sign. And then suddenly you get the worst news, but in one hand, it's really OK now. It's final. Now, we can stop looking for her, which is some finality to go on.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Now, Shani Louk was just 23 years old, just going to that music festival, and now she has passed. She is killed.

I want to go now to Northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon. Our Jim Sciutto has been standing by. And Jim, there's some -- what's happening there right now?

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: You might have just heard that boom. As you travel along the border here, as we've been doing the last several days, you encounter this with regularity. The smoke rising their flames, and we just heard two booms just in the last several seconds. The top of that ridgeline is the Lebanon border there.

We believe that explosion on the opposite side, not clear if it was outcoming artillery fire from Lebanon or incoming from Israel. We do know the IDF told us just a short time ago there was another exchange just about two miles this way in a town we visited the other day. That zigzag of a concrete barrier there, that marks the border between Israel and Lebanon. And it is this kind of regular exchange of artillery rocket fire that we've seen the last several days with regularity. And something's underway there because, again, we're hearing those booms just in the last couple of minutes.

Kate, that's the low-grade kind of conflict you have going on up here. Hezbollah firing in. Attempting, at times, to cross that border fence, that border wall. And Israel, of course, firing back.

BOLDUAN: And Jim, you were also in a staging area earlier in the show of where you saw the IDF tanks, kind of, staging, if need be. What are you hearing from the IDF on what they are preparing for, what they are encountering, as things really seem to be at real risk of heating up in a big way on the northern border with Lebanon which could be significant change in this conflict?

SCIUTTO: Yes, we were just at that staging area -- goodness, maybe a half mile down the road. We saw the smoke here, so we came to investigate what was going on. There are many tens of thousands of IDF forces, including armored divisions like the one we saw down there, arrayed now along the northern border in case, right, as a defensive line in case Hezbollah were to attempt to come in numbers. That force deployed, really, since October 7th.

And when you speak to those soldiers there, the vast majority that I've met, they're reservists. They've been called up since October 7th as some 300,000 people. Think of that, a third of a million people called up in this country to do their duty. Defending the country. And many tens of thousands of them up in the north, in addition to, of course, the bulk of that force in the south, many of them now entering Gaza.

And when you speak to them, they say, listen, I'm here to defend my home. They feel that their home is under threat, not just from Hamas in the south, but Hezbollah in the north. And as we see this fire, and again, the flames rising there, you can understand. You can understand exactly why they feel they have that duty now.

BOLDUAN: That's absolutely right. It's so important that you're there, Jim. You can see the smoke over Jim's shoulder. A lot going on there. Jim, we're going to get back to you in just a moment.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

BOLDUAN: Clearly things heating up today. We'll be right back.

[10:55:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: Protests on Capitol Hill. Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, interrupted multiple times as he was trying to testify before the Senate. He and the defense secretary taking questions from lawmakers over the President's ask for billions of dollars in aid to support Israel and Ukraine.

BERMAN: Yes, so Israeli troops on the ground inside Gaza. What appears to be a sort of three-pronged operation now. We're getting the very latest on what they're going after and their rescue mission for the hostages there.

[11:00:00]