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GOP Leaders Consider Controversial Vote; Shutdown Deadline Is September 30; New Info in Navy Yard Shooting; Starbucks CEO: Don't Bring In Guns; House Speaker Boehner Speaks; GOP Leaders Talk Spending, Obamacare; Colorado Reels From Flood Devastation; Train Hits Double Decker Passenger Bus

Aired September 18, 2013 - 10:00   ET

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

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Happening now in the NEWSROOM, an interview you'll see only on CNN, the Starbucks CEO says, come on, grab a cup of coffee, but leave your gun at home. How he found himself in the middle of the national gun debate.

Plus, new details on the Navy Yard shooting, what happened in the shooter's last days and how did the gun battle with police play out?

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The reality is I couldn't go in my own restaurant. I couldn't go into any restaurant.

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COSTELLO: He can normally eat out wherever he wants, but this week the CEO of Panera is eating on less than 5 bucks a day. I talk with him about his food stamp challenge. NEWSROOM starts now.

Good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you for being with me. Congress and the White House have just 12 days to avert a possible government shutdown. Yes, we're talking about that again. While House Republicans are looking to vote this week on a bill to keep the government running, they could tie that legislation to a plan to defund Obamacare. And that would certainly be a nonstarter with Senate Democrats and the president.

So we are expecting the House Speaker John Boehner to speak at any moment about this piece of budget legislation with the Obamacare part included in. Dana Bash is in Washington right now awaiting the speaker's remarks. So tell us more, Dana?

DANA BASH, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's just finishing a meeting with his entire Republican caucus that's happening just in the room next to us. We are awaiting his arrival and also the rest of the House Republican leadership. This is something that it's definitely fair to say that John Boehner and most of his leaders wanted to avoid.

When I say "this," it is effectively giving in to many of the conservatives in his caucus who say that they want to tie funding the government to defunding Obamacare. The reason he wanted to avoid it is because of the politics of a government shutdown. It's setting up in such a small window from now until September 30th, as you said, 12 days, a very high-stakes game of sort of back-and-forth with the House, which is led by Republicans.

If they put this on the floor, which it looks like they are going to, it will likely pass, and the Democratic-led Senate, which is going to say obviously no way. They are not going to do this. In fact, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said yesterday that this is like the definition of insanity, thinking if you do something over and over again, you're going to get a different result.

But the bottom line is that they understand in the Republican leadership that this is probably at this point the only way they can pass any kind measure to keep the government running. So they're hoping at least maybe they're going to get this out of their system when it comes to conservatives and hope that they can figure something out to compromise in the next 12 days. But it is definitely something that Republican leaders tried to avoid behind the scenes and didn't have much success.

COSTELLO: They'll pass something maybe in the House that they know the Senate won't pass because it's Democratically controlled and they know the president would veto because it's Obamacare, and it's a signature issue. OK, so when John Boehner begins to speaking, I know you're going to be listening to his remarks. We'll get back to you. Dana Bash reporting live from Washington.

BASH: Thanks, Carol.

COSTELLO: How and why, those two key questions have investigators back at the Navy Yard in Washington again today. It's still an active crime scene. Two days after Aaron Alexis walked into the building, Building 197, and killed 12 people. But now we have a better idea of how an armed man, how he got inside and the shooting battle with police that lasted more than a half hour.

CNN's Evan Perez joins us from Washington with more on that. Good morning.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. The scene inside the Navy Yard this morning is the FBI is still back in there trying to catalogue all -- everything that went down including all the shots fired. We now know the authorities tell us that this was a gun battle that lasted well over 30 minutes.

Apparently the suspect, Aaron Alexis, entered the Washington Navy Yard with a small bag. He apparently had it in his car. He got into the building with his pass, went up to the fourth floor, got into a bathroom, reassembled the Remington 870 that he was carrying and came out and started shooting.

We're told that in about 7 minutes the first police officers on the scene started firing back, and they continued with a running gun battle essentially going down the halls. He was ducking in and out of rooms with the police officers essentially pursuing him and trying to bring him down. It lasted well over 30 minutes. Altogether about 40, 45 minutes perhaps before they were able to bring him down -- Carol.

COSTELLO: So just to make it a little more clear, he goes into the bathroom, reassembles this shotgun, then does he go directly to the atrium and then shoots down the people.

PEREZ: Right.

COSTELLO: -- and then this gun battle ensues.

PEREZ: That's right. And we know that, according to the authorities that he somehow at some point one of the first people he shot was a guard. Not only had this shotgun that he was carrying with buck shot, but he was also carrying a handgun, which he was able to use both. Now, we don't know exactly how many of the injuries and fatalities were caused by the shotgun and how many were caused by the handgun.

That is something that the FBI is still working on, on the scene today. We do know, though, that it was something straight out of a movie. You have a scene where officers are coming into the building and coming under fire. He is running from room to room, and they're pursuing him. It's an incredible scene.

COSTELLO: So he was never holed up in any room inside the building. That's just incredible.

PEREZ: Right. It was a chaotic scene as you might imagine.

COSTELLO: Evan Perez, thanks so much.

So when Aaron Alexis entered Building 197 inside Washington's Navy Yard Monday, very few people were likely armed, at least inside the building because most military personnel are not allowed to carry personal weapons unless there is a specific and credible threat. Now some say if everyone in the building had been able to carry arms, guns, the number of victims would have dropped dramatically.

So let's talk about that. Tom Fuentes is a former FBI assistant director and a CNN law enforcement analyst. He was also part of the FBI investigation into the 2008 Mumbai Hotel terrorists attack. Good morning, Tom.

TOM FUENTES, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Good morning, Carol.

COSTELLO: OK, so let's go back to the story that Evan Perez just told all of our viewers about what happened inside that building. Police were running down halls, and there was this horrific gun battle going on.

FUENTES: Right.

COSTELLO: Your thoughts on that.

FUENTES: Well, first of all, from a tactical perspective and I was a SWAAT team member and a SWAT team leader -- the lasting thing you want to be in is a situation where the bad guy has the high ground. In this case, when he's on the fourth floor, as police officers are arriving, he's looking down on them. That makes it a much more difficult situation tactically to get to him.

So fortunately, they were able to get to him and eventually kill him to stop him from killing any more people. The notion that all 3,000 employees at this Navy Yard should be armed, would that have helped? Well, possibly and actually if all 3,000 were Navy SEALs, it would have turned out better. But those suggestions are ridiculous.

COSTELLO: Why are they ridiculous?

FUENTES: Most of the employees in a place like that are civilians. They are not military trained. You have analysts. You have a number of people that have not had the degree of firearms training. So the greater likelihood of danger is they might accidentally shoot themselves or somebody else if they don't have adequate training.

Just having more guns, again, it looks like in this case he was able to get a hold of one of the police officers or two of the police officers' guns to be able to sustain the gun battle in addition to his shotgun. So if you have 3,000 people in there with guns that can give a guy like that with a long-barrel weapon access to 3,000 more guns. So these are suggestions that are fanciful at best.

COSTELLO: And I was going to ask you that. There were people who were armed at the U.S. Navy Yard, right, and they were standing at the door and they did not prevent this man from getting into the building and doing whatever he did?

FUENTES: Well, certainly, because he carried the gun dismantled in a bag. You have people that gain access to the premises using their CAT card, the military I.D. card. They go through the security gate in their car, whether it's personally owned or a rental. They can have a gym bag sitting next to them on the front seat. Nobody searches the cars, the trunks, you know, behind the driver's seat, any of that.

So a person coming in with a gym bag and most active duty military duty work out on a regular basis. So someone bringing their gym bag to work so that they can take a lunch hour workout is not going to be unusual or not going to be anything that's going to attract notice. He carries the bag into the building. Nobody is going to search the bag on the way in. He's a card-carrying employee.

Then when he goes into a bathroom, then he comes out. He assembles the gun in the bathroom and comes out with it ready to go. So there's really no -- no way to really stop that. They can do will all the reviews in the world of these military bases. I don't think you're going to see them suddenly implement full-body searches of every person entering the premises employees and visitors as well as full searches of every vehicle coming in there. Those doors will be lined out the door to the capitol building every morning --

COSTELLO: Are you telling us there's no answer? I mean, what rule would you change?

FUENTES: I'm telling you -- yes, Carol, I'm telling you that there's likely not going to be much of a change, as is normally the case after every one of these major shooting there's a lot of talk, everybody scurries around. We're going to have hearings. We're going to have discussions and at the end of the day, how much actually changes?

And the other thing is, they're talking about shutting the government down in two weeks. Where are they going to get the personnel for increased background checks? I know there's been discussion that he had secret, not top-secret, which carried a ten-year term before reinvestigation. Now, I've held top secret my whole career.

That requires a five-year reinvestigation. So if you're going to increase secret to five years or one year or something closer in time, where are they going to get the personnel? And the people who do these Pentagon background checks, by the way, are contractors themselves. So the other issue that comes up for Congress is we've got to downsize government.

We can't have this many government employees. We can't have this many people working in the military. So the answer is they downsize employees and upsize contractors to make up because the work still has to get done.

COSTELLO: Wow. I hear you. Tom Fuentes, thanks so much.

FUENTES: You're welcome, Carol.

COSTELLO: A bit of news just in to CNN. We are hearing that multiple people have been killed in Ottawa, Canada, when a city bus collided with a train. These are live pictures from Canadian affiliate, CTV. Ottawa police now confirming that there are multiple fatalities and at least a dozen more have been injured.

Spokesman for the fire department says all of the casualties are on the bus. It was a double-decker bus. Of course, we'll continue to monitor this for you and bring you updates. We're just getting word of this now.

Now to a CNN exclusive, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is asking customers not to bring gun to his coffee shops. He's not calling for a ban, though. CNN's Poppy Harlow sat down with Schultz and she joins me from New York with more. Good morning, Poppy.

POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Carol. This is a move that we wouldn't see from a lot of CEOs I think, but Starbucks says that it has been thrust unwillingly into the gun debate. It is coming out and saying we do not want your guns in any of our U.S. stores. This is an open letter that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz penned.

It will run in newspapers across the country tomorrow morning, and he is not banning guns but he is saying we do not want them in our stores. We talked to him about why. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW (voice-over): Why are you doing this and why are you doing it right now?

HOWARD SCHULTZ, CEO, STARBUCKS: I think it's important to start the conversation by framing the fact that Starbucks is not a policymaker and in fact, we're not pro or anti-gun. However, we do believe that guns should not be part of the Starbucks experience. As a result of that, making that decision, we are respectfully requesting that those customers who are carrying a gun just honor the request and not bring the gun into Starbucks.

We're also saying something else. This is not a ban. The reason it's not a ban is that we don't want to put our own people in a position of having to confront somebody who's carrying a weapon. So those customers who will bring in the gun, we hope they won't, we're still going to serve them. We're not going to ask them to leave.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: But still, I mean, I hear what he said. You know, he's just talking about this just because, but something must have prompted him to say these things.

HARLOW: So a number of things are going on here, Carol. Forty three states are open carry states and that means if you have a legally licensed gun, you can carry it visibly and carry it into frankly most businesses. You can carry it into Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Target, Dunkin Donuts. A few businesses ban them like AMC Theatres or Pete's Coffee, but in most businesses you can.

So because of that, we've seen these gatherings of pro-gun activists over the past few years and it has ratcheted up. In places like Newtown, for example, there was one planned last month where they come in with their guns, even post photos of these meetings in Starbucks stores.

So Howard Schultz has made it very clear that they're not welcome to do that. He doesn't want to see this in the stores. He said this is bothering most of their customers. They don't want to see it. But also what I think is interesting, the Newtown Action Alliance, family members of victims from that tragic shooting also penned a letter to Schultz last month asking him to ban guns.

So I think that played into it. That was not the decision maker, but this has been increasing and we're seeing it -- it's more visible in recent years and certainly recent months. So listen to him more on why he made this move and what exactly prompted it.

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HARLOW: In this letter you write about the open carry debate and you write in part that that debate has become increasingly uncivil and in some cases even threatening on both sides. Give me examples of what you've seen.

SCHULTZ: Well, I think we all can agree that there are few things in the life of American citizens that is as polarizing and as emotional as this particular issue. As a result of that, we've seen advocates on both sides of this debate use Starbucks as a staging ground for their own motivations. And as a result of that, we have been mischaracterized as being either pro or anti-gun. We're neither and we're not a policymaker. We are a company that is in business to serve customers. And as a result of the mischaracterization as well as a number of episodes in which people have walked into our stores carrying a gun. Customers have felt significantly uncomfortable. Children have felt uncomfortable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: OK, so Poppy, that seems like kind of a cop-out to me. I mean, he's talked about a lot of social issues. He puts his views right out there. So why not say you're pro or anti-gun?

HARLOW: I hear you. That was a question to him as well, right. So Starbucks has come out vocally supporting gay marriage. This year, they banned smoking outside of their stores. Last year, Howard Schultz called on all Americans to stop political donations until Washington really got its act together. So they've been out in front with a clear, clear message on controversial topics.

COSTELLO: Poppy? I'm sorry. I have to interrupt you, but the House speaker, the Republican John Boehner, is now talking about the proposed budget and Obamacare. Let's listen.

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: -- for legislation to cut spending and even President Obama worked with us two years ago in the debt limit negotiations to put controls on spending. This year is not going to be any different. We're going to continue to do everything we can to repeal the president's failed health care law. This week the House will pass a CR that locks the sequester savings in and defunds Obamacare.

The president has signed seven bills over the last 2-1/2 years to make changes to Obamacare and I sincerely hope our friends in the Senate have plans to make this an eighth time. The law is a train wreck. The president has protected American big business. It's time to protect American families from this unworkable law.

REPRESENTATIVE ERIC CANTOR (R), HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER: Good morning. First I want to express my deepest condolences to the families who have lost a loved one on Monday in the horrific attack on the Navy Yard just blocks from Capitol Hill. It is in these tragic moments that we also witness the steel resolve of all those who serve our nation there as well as the first responders who came to help.

Now, we've just come out of our conference and had a very good discussion on our work on a budget measure that will continue our record of reduced government spending and deals head-on with Obamacare. Not since the Korean War has the federal government reduced spending two years in a row. We aim to make that happen and we aim to put a stop to Obamacare before it costs one more job or raises a family's out-of-pocket expenses one more dollar.

And that fight will continue as we negotiate the debt limit with the president and the Senate. In the coming weeks, we will unveil -- in the coming week, we will unveil a plan to extend our nation's ability to borrow while delaying Obamacare and protecting working middle class families from its horrific effects.

Those discussions will also focus on a path forward, on tax reform, and the keystone pipeline and a variety of other measures designed to lower energy prices, simplify our tax system, and get our economy going for the middle class working people of this country. Together, we, House Republicans, will not ignore the problem of our debt or the problems facing the working middle class of this country.

So we hope and we ask that this president finally engage with congress and work with us on behalf of the American families.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We all join with the comments that the leader made on the loss that we saw this Monday. I tell you we just walked out of conference and I noticed all of you --

COSTELLO: All right, let's break away. You heard the House Speaker John Boehner and the Majority Leader Eric Cantor talking about this short-term spending bill they're going to introduce in the House of Representatives. It would keep the government running, but it would also defund Obamacare and the reason that's important is that makes it much more likely that the government will shut down before lawmakers can come to any sort of agreement over the budget.

Now later today, President Obama will speak at the business roundtable. That will happen around 10:45 Eastern Time. So if you president mentions this at 10:45 Eastern Time, of course we'll bring some of his remarks to you live.

Dana Bash is also listening to those Republican lawmakers right now. When she gets out of that news conference, I suppose, we'll talk to her. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with much more in the NEWSROOM.

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COSTELLO:

COSTELLO: Coated in mud and still awash in misery. You see it there thousands of people are returning to flood ravaged neighborhoods in Colorado to find their homes destroyes.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's the worst that I thought it would be. We lost absolutely everything we own.

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COSTELLO: Homes ripped apart and families separated. Hundred still waiting to hear from loved one who vanished in the deadly floods.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I know they're all out looking for them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What we've gotten is more love than I had ever known existed.

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COSTELLO: Days in limbo. Answers still out of reach this morning as Colorado continues to grapple with this devastation. CNN's George Howell is following this unfolding disaster. He's in Boulder this morning. Good morning, George.

GEORGE HOWELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Carol, good morning. So you've seen a lot of those images in residential areas. You've seen the homes that have been damaged and flooded. But sort of take a moment here, to show you what it's like for some of the businesses and more industrial and business areas, the infrastructure that was damaged here.

If you look back here, we're right behind a strip mall, just to give you perspective, the water got into a lot of the businesses right up there. And to really show you where the water came from, if you come down here, you can see the St. Drain River. We're on what's called the St. Drain Dreamway and I want to show you that bridge of there. This is a running trail, bike trail, that people around here take a great deal of pride in.

The bridge is gone and Dave, if you can pan over and show the sidewalk that got washed away and then we found a few slabs of sidewalk that are still there in the river. You can see them. There's a lot of infrastructure that you find damaged, washed away, missing all over these parts. We did hear, though, that Governor Hickenlooper, he indicated that he hopes that this part of the state comes out better after this.

Simply because the federal government, because FEMA will help people start over, to help them rebuild, and that money may also help when it comes to rebuilding will some of these roads, bridges that were washed away. Keep in mind, the recovery effort continues. We also see the rescue effort continuing today.

Those helicopters doing their best to get to those hard to reach areas looking for survivors, people who may be missing or unaccounted for. As for the number of unaccounted for, carol, it is significantly down, now 306 people. That is great news, and the hope out here is that, as the rescue continues, more people will be found and crossed off that list.

COSTELLO: I hope so. George Howell reporting live from Boulder, Colorado this morning.

Let's go back to our breaking news this morning out of Ottawa, Canada. The pictures are just horrific. These pictures are from our Canadian affiliate C-TV. Apparently a double-decker bus collided with a train. We're told there are multiple fatalities and at least a dozen more people have been injured. A spokesman for the fire department says all of the casualties are on the bus. Here is a witness from our affiliate C-TV. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I didn't hear much. All I felt was a bump, and then I saw smoke and then we were going off the tracks. I thought we were going to flip over. Other than that, though, not a whole lot on my end.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can you describe what it was like in the train?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People were just shocked because it happened so suddenly. Like I was just doing a little bit of work and all of a sudden -- you wouldn't expect all of a sudden to be hit, in a panic a little bit.

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COSTELLO: You can only imagine. We have a few comments from fire and rescue personnel on the scene. One fire official said, we had bodies and debris pretty much everywhere at the impact site. It's definitely a serious scene. He said, our top priority right now is getting anyone with serious injuries to the hospital and getting them into proper care. Of course, police and fire rescue workers will be on the scene for a very long time. Again, a double-decker bus and a train have collided in Ottawa, Canada, this morning.

Coming up in the NEWSROOM, struggling with life on food stamps, the millionaire CEO of Panera Bread eating for a week on $4.50 a day.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Food begins to dominates your life. Each day I've been trying to figure out, how do I make sure I have enough to the end of the week?

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COSTELLO: Why he's doing it and what he's learned, next.

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