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Pimps Arrested During Super Bowl Game; Republican Lawmaker Calls Out Obama's Marijuana Policy Very Publicly; Facebook Celebrates Tenth Year Anniversary

Aired February 04, 2014 - 15:29   ET

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

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<15:29:25>

BALDWIN: Bottom of the hour. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

The FBI rescued 16 juveniles after being taken to the New York area before the Super Bowl and forced into prostitution. These victims range in age all the way from 13 to 17 and include high school students and children who had been reported missing by their families.

So straight to New York we go to Richard Frankel, FBI special agent in charge of the New York Criminal Division.

Agent Frankel, welcome to you.

RICHARD FRANKEL, FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE: Thank you, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Let's begin with the pimps here, more than 45 of them. Their associates were arrested. You guys helped facilitate this whole process, bust them.

Are these -- are these suspects separate individuals, or is this part of a -- more of an organized group, sir?

RICHARD FRANKEL, FBI SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, NEW YORK CRIMINAL DIVISION: Well, there were several investigations as part of the overall investigation. So there was not one group per se. At times, some of these individuals were arrested together. Other times they were by themselves. So, it was really not just one main group.

BALDWIN: OK. And then the victims, did they come from the New York City area? Were they brought in from all corners of the country?

FRANKEL: We did have some victims from the New York and Tristate area, and then we did have other victims who were brought in from other states. It really just depended on which part of the operation, the sting operation that we did target. The sting operation was an ongoing effort by not just the FBI, but with a local law enforcement partners, NYPD, the district attorney offices from several of the counties as well as local police departments up (INAUDIBLE) in Westchester.

BALDWIN: OK, so tell me more about the sting. I mean, obviously we knew the Super Bowl was happening in East Rutherford for a long, long time. The sex trafficking sadly happens, you know, really around these sorts of events each and every year. Were you watching all these different agencies, where you all watching these folks for months and months? How did you carry this thing out?

FRANKEL: These are ongoing operations that will continue by local law enforcement and have been continuing up and through the Super Bowl and will continue on. The FBI working again with local law enforcement targeted this event because during the Super Bowl as well as other special events, we do see an increase in the traffic. So it was a good time for us to work an overarching sting throughout New Jersey and New York. This is a very coordinated effort. But again, local law enforcement has always been doing this and will continue to do it.

BALDWIN: Sir, I am sure you have been doing this, being in law enforcement for years and years. I'm just curious, with this most recent sting. Did anything jump out at you? Did anything about this surprise you?

FRANKEL: I wouldn't say it surprised me. You know, I'm a father. I have children this age. I'm also an FBI agent. And the fact that this happens doesn't surprise me. But I also can't believe that it happens as often and with children as young as they are. It is a terrible thing that we have to deal with on a daily basis. But we do, and we will continue to target these individuals as well as other human traffickers. And again, this will be an ongoing effort by the FBI and local law enforcement.

BALDWIN: Nice work, sir.

Special agent in charge of the New York control division, agent Richard Frankel. Thank you.

And now to this, harsh words from a U.S. congressman on the Obama administration's stance on marijuana laws. He calls it, I'm quoting him, "schizophrenic." Today, a hearing to discuss federal marijuana laws.

Coming up next, hear what happened on Capitol Hill today.

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BALDWIN: I want to show you the big board now because we are just one day after the biggest one-day drop in more than seven months, Wall Street trying to make a do comeback. We are up just about 50 points to your 20 minutes of the trading day.

Let me show you this chart. This is the Dow. This is 2014. That line, that green line, that's going in the wrong direction, a dismal start for the year for a start. We already know January was a mess. And now, here we are in February.

Richard Quest, what was going on? Yesterday it was down some 300-plus points. RICHARD QUEST, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: You join me in the "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS" studio, and I'm going to call time on your suggesting that the market's going the wrong way. If you take a graph from the beginning of the year, yes. But if you factor it into what last year was like with its 26 percent rise, you start to see that all we are getting here is a correction. You have the famous correction. We've had earnings that were maybe not as stellar as we first thought. We've had a little bit of weakness on slowdown on some economic data. We have got some problems in emerging market and you have got the fed tapering.

Now, no market can withstand those sorts of pauses without having a major indigestion.

BALDWIN: So what does the indigestion end?

QUEST: Well, the indigestion is taking a breath, pausing, just easing up for a while. Let's not take once or few days trading making in time section out of it. Overall, what I'm hearing, everybody in the market, is this is not a crisis. This is not a calamity. Maybe one of those occasions that filed the dips. That's for individual investors. It's certainly not a moment when you look at your 401(k) and rush for the door.

BALDWIN: So no panic is what I'm hearing from you as this seeing.

Richard Quest from the "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS" studio.

Richard Quest, thank you very much.

A Republican lawmaker calling out President Obama's marijuana policy in a very public way. Live pictures, this is a congressional hearing under way on the hill, run by Florida Congressman John Mica, the head of the house subcommittee on government operations. They're calling it mixed signals, the administration's policy on marijuana.

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REP. JOHN MICA (R-FL), OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM: Just a few days ago, President Obama said, I'll quote "I don't think it's more dangerous than alcohol, referring to marijuana." I've got an article from "the Washington Post" and the DEA operations that the drug enforcement administration called the legalization of marijuana at the state level reckless and irresponsible. Again, I call it schizophrenic approach to what's going on.

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BALDWIN: Adding to this disparity, the key witness today, the deputy director of the office of national drug control policy is spending much of his time talking about how bad pot is.

So, joining me now, Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy of UCLA Luskin school of public affairs.

Professor, welcome. MARK KLEIMAN, PROFESSOR, UCLA LUSKIN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Thank you.

BALDWIN: So as we talk today, let me just say, you know, I listen very closely to my colleague Jake Tapper's interview with the president this last week. And the president said his biggest concern when they were talking pot, criminalization of pot use.

My question to you, are our feds, our police, are they cracking down equally on marijuana versus something like heroin?

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KLEIMAN: There are a lot of arrests for marijuana. There's not a crackdown in progress right now. Most of those arrests are possession and don't lead to criminal convictions. Perfectly reasonable to think we should be arresting fewer marijuana users. That's a different question from whether we should legalize marijuana sale. And the -- it was the marijuana market is very large, about $35 billion a year. And I don't think anybody including Congressman Mica has a plan for getting it under control. So I think it's reasonable for states to think about moving toward legal availability.

I'd hate to see that going direction with alcohol, aggressive promotion by corporate enterprise. There are lots of things in the middle need to be thinking about.

BALDWIN: I believe it was the word experiment was what the president used in talking to Jake last week in reference to Washington state and Colorado. But he also said, he is actually yet to really comment on whether he would support removing marijuana as a schedule one narcotic, a classification that is you know includes heroin and ecstasy.

But I want to play some sound. This is one of the congressmen at the hearing today in Washington.

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REP. STEVE COHEN (D), TENNESSEE: Ask the late Philip Seymour Hoffman if you could. Nobody dies from marijuana. And every second that we spend in this country trying to enforce marijuana laws is a second that we're not enforcing heroin laws. And heroin and meth are the drugs that are ravaging our country. And every death, including Mr. Hoffman, is partly the responsibility of the federal government's drug priorities.

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BALDWIN: Mark, react to that.

KLEIMAN: Well, yes, it's true. Cannabis is less dangerous than most of the other control drugs. I would have added to that list cocaine and prescription opiates. It's the prescription opiates that are now the rising problem. And yes, there's a competition. So, we could do more drug enforcement against other drugs if we did less against cannabis.

Cannabis takes a very large share of drug enforcement, maybe 10 percent. But that's more than zero. And that's what makes nonsense of the notion that the feds should be intervening in Colorado and Washington. They have to take resources away from something else. They can't be the local marijuana enforcement agency for states that have decided to regulate.

The law requires the attorney general to cooperate with state governments, and attorney general Holder has decided to cooperate with the governments of Colorado and Washington. That seems to be perfectly natural and normal.

I hope that some of these experiments will go beyond the alcohol model and look at not for profit distribution, look at states. Now, you couldn't even look at the states unless the Congress moved to change the classification of marijuana. Having the president reschedule cannabis from schedule one to schedule two has exactly no effect.

BALDWIN: OK.

KLEIMAN: The question is, is it going to be a controlled drug. All schedules two means is you can prescribe it and you can't prescribe it unless the FDA has approved it as a medicine. So, that's a completely different question. If it's out of the controlled substance act the way alcohol and tobacco were by name, otherwise they schedule the drugs, that's going to happen, Congress has to do it.

BALDWIN: There is so much to this marijuana discussion. You cannot lump all of this together. You've written books on this.

Mark Kleiman, professor of public school at the UCLA Luskin School of public affairs, thank you so much.

KLEIMAN: My pleasure.

BALDWIN: Facebook turns 10 today, so what is next for the social networking site? CNN has an exclusive interview with one of the people in charge of facebook's next innovations. His answer next.

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BALDWIN: Happy birthday to you facebook I'm talking to. Over the past ten years, folks have been poking and liking and tagging, and let's be honest, sometimes over sharing on the social networking site. Ten years after it started as a small digital playground for Ivy League college students, facebook now has an incredible one billion users.

I can't believe it's been ten years. Did a little digging today and I got on the facebook bandwagon. Kind of late. It was March of '08. I found some of the first pictures I up loaded. I was a local reporter in Washington, D.C., covered the opening night of the Washington Nationals stadium, you know. And I never did the MySpace thing. I lived with my little brother at the time. He was always on his laptop. So OK, I finally took the plunge in 2008.

To Laurie Segall, she is our CNN money tech correspondent. She has been looking at what's in store for the next ten years for facebook and it seems things could be a little trickier.

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CHRIS COX, VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT, FACEBOOK: And the big question was, is this something that could work outside of college? And everybody said no, it's probably not going to work outside of college.

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN MONEY TECHNOLOGY REPORTER: In honor of facebook's ten-year anniversary, we decided to take a walk down memory lane. Do you have some of those stories where you thought, my God, I believe we got through that?

COX: I mean, the news feed launch was pretty crazy. I spent, with a bunch of people, we worked really hard on making news feed. It took us almost a year to build. And we were pretty naive around how it would be received. Obviously, people were like, this is a lot of change. And there was like a protest organizing outside, so we had to, like, go out the back entrance.

SEGALL: You had to go out the back?

COX: Yes. And it was just one of those things I look back on right now and it's hard to believe.

MEREDITH CHIN, FACEBOOK: Since then, there have been a lot of landmarks that are hard to believe. Six billion likes per day, 7.8 trillion messages sent using facebook, and 1.2 billion monthly active users. It's a far cry from their early days. There were no chairs, no tables. They had to find like a bean bag chair. The kid interviewing me who is now a good friend, but he had bare feet. I was like what am I getting myself into?

SEGALL: Over the past ten years, facebook moved from this small office, to here and here and now to this sprawling campus here in Mendel (ph) park.

When we talk about the future of facebook, the word we keep hearing is mobile. When did you guys know mobile is going to be big and what is the future look like when it comes to mobile and facebook?

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COX: It really happen a couple of years ago. We sort of instituted all of these rules in the company, like whenever we show our product to each other, we need to start with mobile version.

SEGALL: But the future of facebook may look different. Alongside the traditional lap on your phone, you might start seeing a variety of apps created by the company.

COX: We already have facebook. We have Instagram messenger. We just announced paper, which is a more immersive way at looking at your news feed.

SEGALL: Paper, facebook's latest app, straight to your news feed based on your interest. But a challenge for the company will be continuing to grow at such a rapid pace. They are starting to saturate the internet-connected world.

COX: When you just look out over the next three years, there's going to be a lot more people with their first computer and first phone and their first access to the internet. And one of the things that we're really excited about is making the access to the internet in general a lot more affordable.

SEGALL: It will be a challenge and not facebook's only challenge. The company now competes with ample of apps like Snapchat and Twitter.

What do you look forward to for the company?

CHIN: I think it's the next billion.

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BALDWIN: Laurie Segall joins me from San Francisco.

And so, you were talking about paper, you are talking about some new apps, what else that you can share that is next for facebook?

SEGALL: You know, I asked Chris Cox about that. And I should mention, Chris has been there for eight years. I mean, he's a visionary. He's behind many of the products that we see now. And I asked him, you know, what about artificial intelligence? Because we've been hearing about a lot of companies investing in artificial intelligence and that's the idea that your tech could be even smarter, it can learn about you and your actions. And he actually, he told me that they have a small team that is working on it. And he said, they have a lot of cool and interesting data that they are working on, so they are on the early stages. And you can only imagine what that is going to look like.

And you know, also, I took the opportunity because I love when I interview entrepreneurs quite a bit and I always say for them, a lot of these guys have obsessive personalities. And I said, what keeps you up at night? And what he said to me was, you know what, being scrappy. And the idea that, you know, facebook got big because they have the move fast and break motto. And what he says, you know, now the company, they have over 6,000 employees. They are not a scrappy startup. They are huge public company. And it is really taking that egos and taking it into the next decade -- Broke.

BALDWIN: Scrappiness is key.

Laurie Segall, it is sounds like to their success. Laurie, thank you very much.

And so, here we have it, ten years. And to mark the occasion, facebook has created a 66-second video about you. So, one click of a button, if you go on to news feed and the best of your facebook's like poof, you know, flashes before you in this video montage. It's kind of cool.

To talk about this a little bit more, let's bring in Christina Warren. She is senior tech analyst at mashablle.com.

Christina, nice to see you.

CHRISTINA WARREN, SENIOR TECH ANALYST, MASHABLE.COM: Great to see you.

BALDWIN: Let me be real for a minute. The day that my dad -- love you dad -- the day that my dad got on facebook, I kind of started to question whether it's still cool. Is it?

WARREN: Definitely. It's certainly different, right? Like when it started, you know, it was just for college students and that kind of gave in an air, not only of exclusivity, but you felt like this is where I can go to complain about my teachers, my roommate, you know, my boyfriend, my parents. And then your mom and your dad, like you said, you know, are sending you friend requests and you are going, OK. This really isn't the same place it was.

BALDWIN: Yes. Accept, deny, I don't know. Initially if you've seen the movie you know it started as face mash. This is when you know, that's classmates that you rank colleague's attractiveness and then it became this Ivy League thing. And now, it is totally (INAUDIBLE). Remind us what it was like, Christina, you know, let's say at the very beginning at the inceptions versus now.

WARREN: So, I mean, when it started, again, I mean, it was very much about college. It was kind of a digital version of a college facebook. You know, it was a great way to find someone and was really one of the first big online directories that you could actually use to find people you know and then instantly communicate with them.

So, you know, when I joined facebook, I guess I joined in late 2004, it was great because I instantly had access to a lot of my friends from other universities and friends, you know, I had gone to high school with and you could use that as a way to plan get-togethers, parties, you know, talk about classes. And so, it really was very much an insular college-based network. And now, it's obviously much, much bigger than that. You know, they have 1.2 billion users. It's global. And that's changed things quite a bit.

BALDWIN: Listen to you, revolutionary on facebook starting in 2004.

Christina Warren with Mashable. Thank so much, Christina, for that.

He may headlines for calling out at San Francisco receiver in a post- game rant. And now Richard Sherman is making news again. He is revealing why the Seahawks defense was able to shut down Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Sunday night's game. That has a lot of people talking yet again.

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BALDWIN: OK. If you are still baffled by now the top NFL top offense got blown out during the Super Bowl, Richard Sherman has an explanation. The outspoken Seattle star told one write, he even spell fellow Seahawk defenders cracked Peyton Manning's hand signals. You know, Manning is known for his code words and audibles before the snap, he had his worst game of the year and I guess we know why.

Meantime, according to ESPN, gamblers bet a record of $119 million of casinos in Nevada and since it was such a huge upset that the public got rocked while bookies won big.

And speaking of wining big --

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BALDWIN: Bruno Mars, arguably the biggest star of the night, soaring up the iTunes charts because of his awesome half time performance. Both of his albums and several of his hits are sitting high. A lot of clicks since that performance on Sunday.

And as far as the ads, despite being called a dud, that Seinfeld mini reunion, remember we were wondering about this, when we saw the pictures sometime ago, the most re-watched commercial in the game. That's according to TIVO. The ad promoted Seinfeld web series comedians in card. And, get this, even though, you know, it was the game wasn't close at all, three of the five most popular commercials were actually seen in the fourth quarter.

One more story for you then I'll let you go. They were both nominated for an Oscar for their roles in "the Wolf of Wall Street," and now, you have Leonard Dicaprio and Jonah Hill. They are teaming up again, this time for a movie about Richard Jewel. Richard Jewel rings a bell, the man who was wrongly considered a suspect in the 1996 Olympic bombing? Jonah Hill will be playing Richard Jewell and Dicaprio will be playing a lawyer.

There you have it. I'm Brooke Baldwin. Thank you so much for being with me today. As always, I want to push you to Brooke blog. If you miss an interview, go to cnn.com/Brooke.

I'll see you back here tomorrow. In the meantime, my colleague, Jake Tapper, "the LEAD" starts right now.

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JAKE TAPPER, CNN CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Vladimir Putin arrives in Sochi as the director of the national counterterrorism center here in the U.S. says they are fracking specific threats against the Olympics.