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Migrant Surge; Winter Storm; Colorado Supreme Court Justices Under Threat; Netanyahu Confidant Meets With U.S. Secretary of State; President Biden Orders Strikes on Iranian Groups in Iraq. Aired 11- 11:30a ET

Aired December 26, 2023 - 11:00   ET

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

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN HOST: Let's start in Iraq this hour, where we're learning this morning that President Biden ordered a series of airstrikes targeting three facilities used by the Iranian-backed militant group Kataib Hezbollah.

[11:00:05]

That group claimed responsibility for a drone attack Monday at the Erbil Air Base, which injured three troops, one of them injured critically. The Iraqi government, though, is condemning the U.S. strikes, calling them hostile acts.

CNN's Oren Liebermann has much more on this. He's joining us from the Pentagon.

Oren, what are you learning about these strikes?

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: You get a sense there of how sensitive these decisions are from the United States to carry out strikes inside of Iraq, but we will get to that in a second.

This begins Monday morning, according to the U.S., when U.S. forces in Erbil, Iraq, came under attack from a one-way attack drone, or a suicide drone. In that attack, which Kataib Hezbollah claimed credit for, three U.S. service members were injured, including one critically.

President Joe Biden was briefed on the attack and was then given a series of options in terms of how to respond. That response, we saw early in the morning local time of Iraq, when the U.S. carried out three strikes against targets of Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups of Kataib Hezbollah. They are an Iranian proxy that operates inside of Iraq.

The attacks, according to U.S. Central Command, targeted specifically the unmanned aerial capabilities of Kataib Hezbollah. That was the weapon they used to target U.S. forces. According to Central Command, a number of militants of Kataib Hezbollah were killed. They say, according to those early assessments, civilians were not affected by the strikes.

This comes in the broader picture of a number of attacks on Iraqi -- on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria that we have seen over the course of the past several months, the number of those attacks, about 100 since mid-October, as of right now. Iraq condemned the U.S. attacks in Iraq, saying they were hostile acts that have infringed upon Iraq's sovereignty.

It's worth pointing out the U.S. forces are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government. So anything that upsets that or threatens that is an incredibly sensitive point here, so the U.S. trying to maintain those military-to-military relations, even as it carries out these strikes against Iranian proxies inside of Iraq.

The U.S. has tried to calibrate these to make sure it doesn't escalate the situation. But, Kate, given the number of attacks we have seen on U.S. forces, it's hard to believe that those attacks are going to stop, which means the U.S. has to figure out how to calibrate its continued actions at this point with its forces inside the Middle East, with, of course, the ongoing war in Gaza.

BOLDUAN: And, Oren. we're talking about here, this instance is an Iranian proxy. But, over the weekend, there were other attacks the United States says can directly from Iran in the region.

LIEBERMANN: And this is worth noting.

Normally, when we have seen attacks in the Middle East, it has been attributed to Iranian proxies. In the maritime domain, it was many of those, the Houthis, an Iranian proxy in Yemen. But over the weekend, the U.S. says an Iranian drone launched directly from Iran targeted a ship in the Indian Ocean, causing a fire on that ship, but not injuring any of the crew members.

It was on its way from Saudi to India, where it docked. The Indian navy essentially picked it up and helped it in with an aircraft and a ship. But it's interesting and certainly noteworthy that the attack was attributed directly to Iran. So there, too, we see the risk of possible escalation, and one more thing U.S. Central Command needs to keep an eye on as it tries to sort of grapple with the entire situation and the unrest in the Middle East.

BOLDUAN: Oren, great. Thanks for coming in. Great reporting, as always.

SARA SIDNER, CNN HOST: Now, as the humanitarian crisis worsens and the war dead rise in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promising there is still a long fight ahead.

One of the key members of his war cabinet and close advisers to the prime minister himself is now in Washington, D.C., to talk about the future of the war against Hamas. Today, Ron Dermer Israel's minister of strategic affairs, will sit down with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and several other top administration officials.

CNN's Priscilla Alvarez is at the White House for us.

What is this meeting sort of hoping to accomplish, when we know in the background that the Biden administration has been very pointed with the Israeli administration, saying, you have to do better when it comes to trying to protect civilians in Gaza?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: And, Sara, you can expect that to be a serious point of discussion during these meetings.

And, of course, it comes at a critical time, because the U.S. does want to see Israel move away from the high intensity war that has led to thousands of deaths of innocent civilians. Now, as you mentioned there, Ron Dermer will be meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan this afternoon.

He's a close confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a member of the war cabinet and previously also Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Now, up until this point, Israel has assured the U.S. that it's planning to move to a lower-intensity war, targeting, for example, Hamas leadership.

But there hasn't been a timeline for when they will move into that phase. And U.S. officials have previously said that they would expect those localized operations to happen in January. But, again, when talking about this publicly, it's still unclear what the timeline of this next phase looks like as the U.S. tries to urge Israel not -- or at least to take a more targeted approach to avoid the deaths of innocent civilians.

[11:05:21]

Now, this morning on CNN, a senior Israeli official described the conversations between Israel and the U.S. as very good, even if they have their differences.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARK REGEV, SENIOR ADVISER TO ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: We can have different discussions on this tactical issue or that tactical issue. We listen very attentively to whatever Washington says, and I believe they listen very carefully to whatever we say to them.

But, ultimately, we're on the same side of this. We want to see Hamas destroyed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALVAREZ: Now, President Biden has warned that Israel -- Israel's support or international support could wane as their death toll in Gaza continues to grow.

We saw that rift play out publicly earlier this month, and so -- and this all, of course, as the president faces domestic and international pressures. The question going into these meetings is, what does the next phase of this war look like and when will we start to see those results? That is what the U.S. is looking for, and that is what will be a key part of these discussions this afternoon.

SIDNER: Priscilla Alvarez, thank you so much. Appreciate it -- Kate.

BOLDUAN: Joining us now for more on all this is former State Department Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller.

It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in.

For those who may not know, help people understand how close Dermer is to the thinking of Netanyahu. And why would he be sent over to meet with the president's national security adviser and the secretary of state right now?

AARON DAVID MILLER, WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS: You know, Ron Dermer serves two purposes, Kate.

And thanks for having me.

First of all, he's probably the prime minister's closest confidant outside his immediate family. And, number two, over the last decade or so, he's established pretty good relations both with Republican and Democratic administrations, I think a priority, frankly, on the Republican side.

But, nonetheless, he's an authoritative conduit. And if Dermer's in town, I suspect what he's dealing with and what the Biden administration is dealing with is an expectations gap. The administration wants a fundamental change in Israeli tactics, lower- intensity, in a matter of weeks.

The Israelis, particularly the prime minister, whose political forehands are tethered to a successful campaign and probably a longer war, is thinking in terms of months. Whether or not that -- those two clocks can be synced, and, if they're not, what the administration tends to do by the end of January, I would think that's the -- I don't believe in moments of truth in the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

They never seem to materialize. But I think, by the end of January, you will see a significant change in Israeli military tactics.

BOLDUAN: So, the prime minister, he wrote in a "Wall Street Journal" editorial published yesterday about, from his view, the prerequisites for peace.

And throughout the piece, throughout this article, he writes: "First, Hamas, a key Iranian proxy, must be destroyed. Second, Gaza must be demilitarized. Israel must ensure that the territory is never again used as a base to attack it. Third, Gaza has to be deradicalized."

What do you think of these prerequisites to peace, Aaron?

MILLER: Well, every time the prime minister weighs in publicly and certainly in "The Wall Street Journal," I think it's -- there's also political objectives in mind.

The prime minister's looking for a comprehensive victory. He wants the destruction of all of Hamas' military infrastructure above and below ground. He wants to identify and find the three senior Hamas officials who were responsible for the savage and brutal terror surge on October 6. And he wants Gaza demilitarized, some sort of new post-conflict

reality. I think, frankly, almost -- we're now in the third month of this war. And by the looks of things, the Israelis may be making progress in terms of eliminating Hamas infrastructure and fighters, but they're nowhere near destroying Hamas, let alone finding and killing these top three.

And I'd remind everybody it took us a decade, 10 years, to identify and kill Osama bin Laden. So, that search for these three, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Marwan Issa, the three architects of what happened on October 7, that search is going to continue.

I just think that the prime minister's objectives -- and I think the Biden administration, frankly, shares a couple of them -- are extremely ambitious. And they have to be weighed against how much time it's going to take, how many Palestinian civilians are going to be killed, and what sort of humanitarian damage is going to be done to the infrastructure.

[11:10:00]

But there's no doubt, as we move into 2024, the Israelis are going to be operating in Gaza in some form in some military activities and operations.

BOLDUAN: Let me add a third part of it, another part of this that I wanted to get your take on is, when the -- when the IDF takes out Hamas and leaves Palestinian cities, what is left behind remains a huge question.

MILLER: Yes.

BOLDUAN: Do you -- how big is the risk, do you think, that there is this vacuum created that we have seen before in other places, where no one is in control and people there are becoming more and more desperate to get aid? And what then happens?

MILLER: I mean, that's the key question.

And, remember, military operations is an instrument. It's an instrument to drive and to achieve a political objective. That political objective should be a new reality in post-conflict Gaza, which provides security and prosperity to 2.3 million Palestinians, who have suffered greatly over the course of the last three months.

Right now, I mean, to be -- I mean, to be brutally honest, the ideas for fixing that problem, I think, are light years away, the prospects of the Palestinian Authority returning anytime soon grim, the prospects of the United States cobbling together an international force to assume responsibility for Gaza not likely.

The reality of Arab states deploying their forces to maintain security, that's a real stretch. I think the only thing that we can actually predict is that Israel will be operating in some fashion militarily in coming months. Hopefully, hopefully, the reduction of the intensity of that campaign will allow badly needed humanitarian assistance to surge into Gaza.

I hope so.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

Aaron David Miller, thank you. It's good to see you.

MILLER: Thank you.

SIDNER: And still ahead: the serious threats that are now being made against Colorado justices who ruled last week Donald Trump could not be on Colorado's state ballot. Now the FBI is stepping into the fray.

Also, no end in sight, that's what a nonprofit center taking in migrants is saying about the situation along the U.S. border. We go there live just a bit later this hour.

And some parts of the Central U.S. are facing this, blizzard conditions causing all sorts of holiday travel headaches. Sorry, you guys, but it's so beautiful.

Where all that bad weather is -- coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:17:01]

SIDNER: This morning nearly five million people are under winter weather alerts, including blizzard warnings as a major winter storm is sweeping across the Plains and into the Rockies.

Conditions reached a point that a stretch of Interstate 90 in South Dakota had to be closed overnight. Officials are warning whiteout conditions could make travel difficult to near impossible. And you saw that Amazon truck there stuck with all those packages, I'm sure. In Nebraska, we're getting reports and video of vehicles and tractor trailers just sliding off the roads due to ice.

CNN's Derek Van Dam is tracking this all for us.

Derek, we're having such a mild winter here in New York, and yet look at Nebraska.

DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes, overturned semis, jackknifed 18-wheelers not something you want to see the day after Christmas, everybody trying to travel home from family and friends.

And, unfortunately, we're going to have to contend with very difficult driving conditions if you live in the Eastern or Central Plains, right? So that's where we're going to focus our attention on, because that's where the worst weather is at the moment.

May not look like much on this video, but, as you see it kind of traversing some of the roadways, you will see that the visibility does drop off rather quickly because this wind is blowing around the snow, and that, of course, makes it very difficult to drive on the roadways.

You saw the video of the overturned trailers there just a moment ago. This is part of a larger, expansive storm system that stretches from the Southeast all the way to the Upper Plains. This is the low focused right over Nebraska, and what it's doing is actually driving down a significant amount of wind on the backside of this system, and that is what's whipping up the snow that is falling from the sky.

So that reduces visibility as we reach the blizzard criteria for many locations. There's the half-a-million people or so that are under blizzard warnings, but we still have ice storm warnings for parts of South Dakota and North Dakota, even Western Minnesota, and then these winter weather advisory stretch all the way to Kansas and Nebraska as well.

Current wind gusts right now, check this out, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 55 miles per hour. So you add the falling snow from the sky, you're going to reduce the visibility across these locations, and that is going to make it very difficult to drive. So, according to the National Weather Service coming out of the Denver office, they're actually discouraging travel along that interstate 25, I-80, perhaps into I-70 as well, some portions of that, before the winds relax overnight tonight.

And then the snow starts to taper off and conditions improve there. But I told you this is a far-reaching storm system. Because the East Coast is now getting the warm side of the storm, this is all rain. And we're focusing our attention in on Western South Carolina and Western North Carolina.

That's where we have flood watches in effect, the potential here for another two to three inches of what's already -- on top of what's already fallen. And, yes, you're right, Sara. You noted it's been a mild winter in New York City, still going almost 680 days without an inch of snow on the ground in the Big Apple. Incredible.

SIDNER: I'm not happy about it.

VAN DAM: Me neither.

SIDNER: But I might be the only one.

(LAUGHTER)

SIDNER: Derek Van Dam, thank you so much.

VAN DAM: All right.

BOLDUAN: Also new this morning, the FBI says it is now jumping in to help to investigate a series of violent threats made against state Supreme Court justices in Colorado.

[11:20:03]

These are the same justices who ruled last week that Donald Trump is disqualified from appearing on the Colorado presidential primary ballot. CNN's Katelyn Polantz has more on this. She's back with us.

And, Katelyn, what more are you learning about this investigation?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Kate, well, this is something that has really become something law enforcement is interested in, in Colorado and tracking since that ruling last Tuesday a week ago from the Colorado Supreme Court saying Donald Trump could not be on the primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection.

That led to what we understand on Thursday was a situation where the Denver police had to go to one of the justices' homes because of what they call a hoax report that was made. And, since then, there are the names of justices on the Colorado Supreme Court being discussed on far right pro-Trump Web sites.

One of the things that we had heard was written was that "Robed rats must hang." That is some of the language that's being used online by extremists. But those are very nonspecific threats at this time. And so, at this moment, now the FBI is saying publicly: "The FBI is aware of the situation and working with local law enforcement. We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation."

So, no specific threats at this time that are requiring law enforcement to make arrests that we know of. But this is a climate where there are many, many people making general threats and using violent rhetoric around public officials, especially judges who are ruling on these heavily watched, closely watched political cases involving Donald Trump.

BOLDUAN: Yes, this absolutely is not theoretical. We have seen when these threats have been taken into action, and it's terrifying very much in real time.

Katelyn, thanks so much for the update.

SIDNER: All right, next, we will take you to the U.S. Southern border, where nonprofit centers say they are frustrated, they're overwhelmed, trying to find resources to meet the massive surge with, how they put it, no end in sight.

Also, why you should be aware that there are hidden costs potentially when you go to return those holiday gifts this week. How some companies have decided to increase the charges for returning things.

Boo.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:26:53]

BOLDUAN: Two busloads of migrants were moved from Texas to a Chicago suburb and then into the city over the weekend. The city of Chicago is reporting that it has received roughly 26,000

migrants from Texas in the past 16 months, and there are potentially more to come. The caravan of thousands of migrants is still on the move headed through Mexico toward the U.S. border. It's the largest caravan seen in a year.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken is headed to Mexico tomorrow to try and hammer out new agreements to better control this flow of migrants.

CNN's Rosa Flores has more for us. She's joining us now.

Rosa, what does all of this mean for where you are in Eagle Pass, Texas?

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, Kate, what we're seeing here is that nonprofit organizations are yet again filling in the gaps when the federal government fails.

And what I'm talking about is all of those nonprofit organizations along the U.S. Southern border that end up having to provide food and shelter and sometimes even transportation for migrants. Now, here's what I mean. So, if you look behind me, you can see that this field has been emptied out.

There's probably just a few migrants and these migrants arrived here in the past 30 minutes. Once these migrants are transported out and sent to immigration processing, some of them will be deported because Title 8 is applied. Others will be released into communities along the border.

And to decompress, to deal with this surge, what U.S. Border Patrol does is, they transport these migrants to other areas, like the Rio Grande Valley, like Laredo, like Del Rio, to make sure that they are being -- they are processed more swiftly and they're able to take them through the process a lot quicker.

What that means for these nonprofit organizations is that they are getting hundreds of migrants here from Eagle Pass in their communities. Just to give you an idea, in the Rio Grande Valley, Catholic Charities there, last week, they were getting 350 migrants from El Paso -- Eagle Pass every single day. This week, it's 550.

To give you an idea, in Del Rio, in a week, last week, they assisted 4,200 migrants. But last week -- that was last week. But, in August, just to give you an idea, the total number assisted for the month was 5,800.

And here's what the director of that respite center said -- quote -- "There's a level of frustration knowing that there is no end in sight. The number of migrants entering the U.S. Southern border has long surpassed a breaking point. Some arrive with only hope of reaching American soil. Once that goal has been achieved, there is no plan in place."

And, Kate, I can tell you by experience what this woman is saying is true. I have talked to many migrants. Once they arrive in the United States, they realize that they need documents to work here, that there is no money or no plan to go into the United States, to other communities in the United States. They don't have family waiting for them.

They don't have money for transportation or food. And many a times, they end up taking those controversial Governor Abbott.