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DOJ Watchdog Report Finds No Undercover FBI Agents at January 6 Riot; Evidence Mounts Against CEO Murder Suspect. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired December 12, 2024 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:16]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Forensic evidence mounting against the suspect in the murder of a health insurance CEO. Police are now trying to piece together Luigi Mangione's movements leading up to the killing, as we learn that he went radio-silent on his family and friends for months.

Plus, doubling down on Donald. "TIME" magazine once again names president-elect Trump its person of the year. And in a wide-ranging interview with the magazine, he talks about his plans to use the military for mass deportations, his views on vaccines and possible pardons.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: And mysterious drone sightings in the skies leading to fear and frustration the ground. Officials in New Jersey now demanding answers about who is behind this aerial enigma.

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

KEILAR: Luigi Mangione's attorney is defending his client, as New York police say they have amassed a mountain of forensic evidence against the suspect accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson just over a week ago.

The NYPD says the investigators have matched the ghost gun that was found with Mangione when he was arrested on Monday to shell casings at the crime scene.

SANCHEZ: And the commissioner says his fingerprints matched ones found on material gathered in the search for the killer both on a water bottle and a food wrapper.

Sources also say his prints were on a burner phone found at the crime scene. But the 26-year-old's attorney says he has yet to see the evidence for himself.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

THOMAS DICKEY, ATTORNEY FOR LUIGI MANGIONE: Saying you have something and getting that admitted in the court are two different things. We need to see it. We need to see how do they collect it, how much of it matches. You know, like, I don't want to get too technical, but fingerprints, they go by ridges, different things like that. And then we would have our experts. We would have experts take a look

at that. And then we would challenge its admissibility and challenge the accuracy of those results.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: We have CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller with us.

John, get us up to speed on the investigation, where it stands right now.

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, what you see is, they are at a place now where -- and we're relying on the statements of the police commissioner and other statements they have made, is, they have got the prints, they have the gun, they are waiting on the DNA, they have the manifesto, they have the spiral notebook that is the planning notes before the crime.

So, the who, what and where of it, the means, the motive, that's all captured. And that's pretty much what any prosecutor would be hoping for going in a trial. So, what are they lacking? They're lacking a little bit of the backstory.

We know that the suspect's mother reported him missing back in -- around November 18 to the San Francisco police, because she said, that was the last place that we knew he was living. The last time we had contact with him was months before that in July. So, he had gone off the radar.

Police can try to fill in those blanks. They can try to establish what were the stressors in his life that may have caused him to go off the deep end? What were the motivators that may have turned him against corporate America and the health care industry in particular?

They will have an interest in that, but they don't really need it. as you know, prosecutors don't have to approve motive to get a conviction in a case, but they understand that juries want to know the things that will help make sense of the case, but it's not a legal requirement.

So, that's kind of where we are.

KEILAR: Yes, they want to see how it fits into a story, basically.

John Miller, thank you so much for the latest there.

And as the evidence against Mangione mounts, so too it seems does the support for him from people outraged by the health care industry.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People get into these jobs and positions and forget that these numbers that they're interacting with affects actual people's lives.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We need to go ahead and get down to business and figure out how we're going to help my boy Luigi.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think he will go down as a hero in history.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Let's discuss this support for an accused killer with Robert Pape. He's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He's also the director of the university's Project on Security and Threats.

Robert, thank you so much for being with us.

You have described Mangione's alleged killing of Brian Thompson as a threshold-breaking attack. Help us understand what that means.

[13:05:02]

ROBERT PAPE, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: I survey with a research team at the University of Chicago public support for political violence in the United States, and we have been doing this for years.

We have found basically two big findings. First, political violence in America today has been normalized. Your listeners will already know that, several years ago, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, was almost -- was the subject of an assassination attempt that missed her, but almost killed her husband.

Barack Obama, a year later, there was an assailant with guns and explosives in his car trying to break into Obama's home in Washington, D.C. There have been two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, a whole spate of threats against congressional leaders.

Our surveys find that between 5 percent and 10 percent of Americans, not just Republicans, not just Democrats, actually both, between 5 percent and 10 percent of Americans support political violence. The second thing our research is finding is that we are now on the slippery slope of political violence, where the erosion of norms on one issue can lead to the erosion of norms on other issues.

And that's where the CEO attack really comes in as a threshold- breaking event, because we have seen the erosion of norms on so many other thresholds of political violence. This act is clearly an act of political violence. The shooter's markings on the shell casings, his manifesto all lead to a political element in this attack, an effort to change policy.

And what is happening is, we are now on the slippery slope, where breaking this threshold unfortunately does increase the risk to other commercial leaders. And if you just look at the outpouring of support, even before we have done our next survey, we already know that there's a large fraction of Americans who again are -- actually support this act of political violence.

KEILAR: Yes, and we're hearing it in their own words on social media.

You also say that typically perpetrators of political violence are on the margins of society. Obviously, there's so many examples of that, but that it's changing. And we have talked notably about something that was pretty surprising to people, which is that Mangione comes from a wealthy family.

He went to an Ivy League college for a bachelor's and a master's degree. Why do you see this trend trending in this direction?

PAPE: It is reflected in our surveys of the American public that supports political violence.

You see, if we go back 20 years, it is really the case that political violence was rare and perpetrated by people, you would call them on the margins of society. That's been far less true. The profile, the demographic profile of these lone wolves, these assailants have just been expanding.

And this reflects the expanded profile of those who support political violence in our surveys. Whether it's supporting political violence or acts on the right or acts that would be viewed as on the left, you can see that about 40 percent of those who support political violence have college -- some have a master's degree.

You can see that about 40 percent are between the ages of 25 and 60. You can see that they're coming from a whole walk of backgrounds. They're not coming from either specifically rural areas or specifically urban areas. They're coming from where the American population lives, which is mostly in the urban and suburban areas of our country.

So we are seeing the normalization of support for political violence. We're seeing this -- political violence itself is becoming more common. We're seeing it break and cross these thresholds. And it's really important that our political leaders don't just try to sympathize with this anger that's underneath it, but that they do more to redirect that anger away from violence and toward legitimate avenues, voting, the ballot box.

SANCHEZ: I'm curious what you think about where this might be headed.

Given that we have seen this outpouring of support for Mangione, I don't think you necessarily have to be a radical thinker to think that there's something unjust about health insurance companies for years getting money and getting money from people, who then they don't actually help when they need help.

But, clearly, if something like this is normalized, it opens the door for all kinds of violence over all sorts of issues, I imagine.

PAPE: Well, yes.

And what we find in our surveys is that deep distrust of democratic institutions, the federal government, our normal institutions is one of the key correlates, the key predictors of support for political violence.

[13:10:08] And so what that tells us is, since that deep distrust has been going down across so many institutions, that as we go forward and we see those institutions involved in, say, future controversial acts, such as if we see DHS, ICE, the FBI involved in various aspects of mass deportation (AUDIO GAP) institutions here are not sitting high on public trust now.

They have actually been declining. And so we have to be concerned that this slippery slope of the erosion of norms against political violence can extend to other issues in the future. So we are just becoming a tinderbox of the country.

I call this America's era of violent populism. And it's an era where we're seeing political violence associated with grievances on both the right and the left. And it doesn't mean that the perpetrators are always card-carrying Republicans or Democrats, but it does mean that we are on the slippery slope.

And, unfortunately, our political leaders, our community leaders need to do much more to not just condemn the act of political violence, but to condemn the support for political violence and to redirect it away from violence and toward legitimate expressions of that anger. Voting is the number one avenue.

SANCHEZ: Yes, it's hard to see a receptive audience when there is so much distrust in the political process.

Robert Pape, very much appreciate your perspective. Some fascinating work. Thank you.

PAPE: Yes, thank you very much.

SANCHEZ: Still ahead, we're following breaking news into CNN. A new watchdog report was just released on the January 6 riot. We're going to show you how this report undercuts a theory that Trump and his allies have pushed for years.

KEILAR: Plus, drones hovering over New Jersey with no clear answer where they're coming from or why they're there, the FBI now investigating.

And we will dig into the mystery ahead.

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[13:16:43]

KEILAR: We have breaking news into CNN.

A new DOJ watchdog report has just been released on the January 6 right at the Capitol, and this finds that there were no undercover FBI employees at the Capitol during the riot.

SANCHEZ: This finding runs directly counter to speculation from allies of president-elect Donald Trump, who for years have suggested the violence that day was provoked by federal agents. CNN's Evan Perez joins us now, along with CNN senior law enforcement

analyst and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Evan, first to you.

What does this report outline specifically?

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, the most important finding that -- is one that you just outlined, which is that this claim that you have had from Republicans in Congress, allies of Donald Trump, who have claimed that the FBI had agents, essentially, undercover, who helped instigate the riot, that there's video that seems to suggest in their view that either people who were being paid by the FBI were essentially helping to stage the insurrection that happened on January 6.

And this report flatly says that did not happen. And, of course, the FBI has been pushing back on this for the last few years, but that hasn't really satisfied members of Congress. And it's, frankly, one of the reasons why they had a beef with Chris Wray and why Chris Wray is no longer going to be FBI director.

They believed that there was something to this conspiracy that's been running around. And what we do find, though, is that the inspector general found that there were 26 members of these extremist groups that did attend the Stop the Steal rally, 26 of them who were being paid as informants for the FBI.

Now, these are members of the Proud Boys, the 3 Percenters, other groups that were here that day. And what we learned from this report is that 26 of them had been specifically told by the FBI, send us any information on possible violence and so on.

And according to the inspector general, three of those 26 actually did enter the Capitol. The others were -- did not enter. There's also a number of informants who were not specifically tasked by the FBI to provide that information, but they came anyway. There were supporters of Donald Trump and so they came and some of them entered the Capitol.

So the important -- again, the important part of this is that -- for once and for all, the inspector general who investigated this, has spent the last 3.5 years investigating this has now said that this did not happen, that the FBI did not have paid employees, undercover employees and did not instigate this riot.

Now, another important finding that I should add, the FBI obviously was in charge of gathering the intelligence before the riot. And one of the criticisms has been, why they didn't do more? And according to the inspector general, they did not ask all of their field offices to send in and to ask their informants to send in intelligence on this.

And that was a failure. And they also provided bad information to Congress, saying that they had done so. So that's an important thing that I think the FBI really is going to try to fix going forward, because, obviously, January 6 was a bit of an intelligence failure. We should -- we all know that, because it happened and law enforcement did not stop that violence before it happened.

[13:20:05]

KEILAR: Yes.

And, Andy, we will talk about the intel sharing here in a minute, but first just your reaction to this report, but also that bit of information that no doubt some Trump allies or those who are sympathetic to January 6'ers will seize on, which is that you did have these paid informants who were, three specifically tasked by the FBI to report on specific domestic terrorism case subjects who may be going to the rallies that day, one of whom entered the Capitol.

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Sure.

So I have to say, overall, I'm not surprised by those conclusions in any way. If you have been following the story since January 6, we knew through the discovery that came out in many of the criminal cases against January 6 participants that the FBI had intelligence from some -- from some informants, that they had informants who traveled on their own, by their own choice to participate in the rally, some of whom ended up on the Capitol, very few of whom ended up going inside.

And the FBI had a very small number of informants who they directed to go and report on those activities. Now, it should be known the FBI has many, many informants in the extremist communities around this country. That's what -- that's part of running an intelligence, a capable intelligence collection program.

You have to have informants in these communities. You admonish them that they are not allowed to involve themselves in criminal activity, but you don't control them. They can go pretty much wherever they want lawfully, as they choose to do so.

So I'm not surprised by the conclusions here about that at all. I don't think it'll change the narratives of those people on the Hill who have constantly beaten this false drum about FBI informants starting the riot.

I expect that if past is any indication of how they handle themselves, they will just direct all this, their ire at the DOJ I.G. now and claim that that person has been co-opted by Joe Biden or something. They're not going to back off this conspiracy theory. It's very helpful to them, but it is not based on facts.

SANCHEZ: And, Andy, I'm curious to get your thoughts on the two sort of intelligence failures here, one, the inspector general finding that the FBI didn't canvass all of its field offices for intelligence from informants who could have helped the Capitol Police and obviously other law enforcement agencies better prepare for what happened that day, but then also the communication from the FBI, falsely telling Congress that they had done that.

What do you make of that?

MCCABE: Yes, so Boris, to me, this is the really more significant finding in the report.

And it's something that many of us have been questioning since January 6. How could -- with this extraordinary informant base, how could the FBI not have known more? How could the FBI not have asked all of their informants whether or not they intended to plan on traveling and what information they had about the travel and participation of others?

And so I think it's appropriate to call it out. The failure was in the counterterrorism program as managed at headquarters is responsible for determining which major national level security events require that sort of precise intelligence collection in order to allow law enforcement to prepare their security measures.

This was clearly one of those events. And the fact that they didn't issue that sort of a broad nationwide collection from all of their sources is really -- there's no excuse for that. That's what the intelligence collection program exists to do, to collect that information and use it to inform decision-makers as to how to protect the country or, in this case, the Capitol.

So they were unable to do that adequately without having taken that step. The fact that they misrepresented to Congress that they had done it, it seems, just from my brief reading of the recommendations, there was a lot of confusion and disorganization around the preparation for this event.

And I think that some executives thought it had actually happened. They were wrong. They didn't know that those calls had not been made and that collection hadn't been rounded up. So, again, these were mistakes, not intentional acts. We're not trying to hang anybody out to dry here, but these are all areas in which the FBI really needs to focus and make sure they don't make those kind of mistakes in the future.

KEILAR: Yes, they certainly do.

And we will see, Andy. And maybe you can quickly comment on this. As we're looking towards a new era at the FBI, do you expect that they will be taking the lessons learned from this and doing something with it? Do you have any concerns there?

[13:25:04]

MCCABE: Well, I'm confident that FBI people who do this work will double their efforts to make sure that it is done perfectly the next time and every time after that. I'm confident in that.

But I am concerned about some of the comments that Kash Patel has made. If he is confirmed as FBI director, he's made a lot of comments about reducing the size of headquarters and getting rid of people at headquarters and sending them all out to the field.

This is precisely the sort of mistake that can happen when no one in the organization has an adequate view of the entire threat picture, the entire country. And that's why the analytical capability and the investigative oversight was centralized in headquarters for these national security matters, not for criminal matters, but for national security matters, in the aftermath of 9/11, because we realized this was -- not having that vision is part of why we didn't see 9/11 coming.

Well, here, January 6, we had the ability to do it. We just didn't do it and we didn't see the attack coming. So, Kash Patel is not going to solve any problems by taking headquarters resources and sending them elsewhere. He's actually going to make America less safe.

PEREZ: Yes, real quick, one quick thing I wanted to add to what Andy is raising, the question of whether the FBI will still be focusing on these extremist groups, which are largely -- let's say plainly, they are mostly conservative-leaning -- whether that is going to be continued in the new administration, that's a big question as well.

Are they even going to be interested in what the Proud Boys are doing and the 3 Percenters? We don't know, because that is that is certainly part of the base of Donald Trump support.

KEILAR: Yes, it's such a good point.

And Chris Wray highlighted the threat of these groups. And yet you expect, based on rhetoric, that that may not be shared if Kash Patel is the incoming FBI director.

Evan, thank you so much for the great reporting. Andrew McCabe, thank you so much to you as well.

Coming up: a mystery in the skies over New Jersey, just bizarre stuff, clusters of drones spotted flying overhead for weeks now. But where are they coming from? What are they looking at?

Hear what the Pentagon is saying next.

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