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What Did GM Know?; MH370 Captain's Daughter Lashes Out at Tabloids; Obamacare on Track to hit 7 M Sign-Ups; Bad Coordination Slowed Search Three Days

Aired April 01, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

ALLISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: That's what GM has said. And now "The Wall Street Journal" is reporting that lawmakers at this hearing today on Capitol Hill, they're going to ask about whether the government's bailout of GM, which was between 2009-2013, whether that had anything to do with how this whole thing was handled. Because despite knowing about the problem, the safety problem that was at hand here, even government regulators didn't investigate what was happening -- this was happening right around the time the complaints about the safety issue were coming in. And GM just happened to be going bankrupt. And that's when the government swooped in and rescued the company. So it really does, Carol, it does raise questions if GM's financial situation was behind GM not taking action on this safety issue early on. Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: And the other thing you have to wonder, Mary Barra has been with GM a long, long time. What did she know about this?

KOSIK: Well, that's what you have to wonder. Keep in mind, she wasn't CEO --

COSTELLO: Right, but she was with the company.

KOSIK: Right. And there's one more layer to this. And "The Wall Street Journal" is reporting the set Delphi, which is an auto supplier, told GM that there was a problem with this ignition switch and GM knowing, this according to "The Wall Street Journal", that GM knew about the problem with the ignition switch but went ahead and signed off on getting that part to be put into the Cobalt any way. It went ahead and did that because it said it would tell dealers to tell whoever bought the car to make sure that their key ring wasn't heavy.

So those are interesting details coming out of "The Wall Street Journal" as well, but there's yet another layer. Why would GM accept a part that it reportedly knew was faulty? Carol.

COSTELLO: Allison Kosik reporting live for us. Thanks so much. Still to come in the NEWSROOM, friends and family of Flight 370 pilot Zaharie Shah say they don't believe the captain was responsible for the plane's disappearance. Now his daughter is speaking out, and she's angry.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) COSTELLO: Malaysian officials say whoever was in control of the cockpit when the plane vanished had to know how to fly the aircraft for an extended period of time. For weeks there's been speculation about whether the crew had anything to do with the jet's disappearance. Now the daughter of pilot Zaharie Shah is lashing out against those tabloid reports. More now from CNN's Sara Sidner.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A daughter lashes out at a British tabloid that uses her name to cast doubt on her father's mental state. Aisha Zaharie's father has been synymous with MH370, Captain Zaharie Ahamd Shah the pilot of the missing flight. According to "The Daily Mail" article, a family friend quotes Aisha Zaharie, saying her father wasn't the father I knew. He seemed disturbed and lost in a world of his own.

Captain Zaharie is among many being scrutinized during the investigation into the plane's disappearance. Investigators searched his home and pored through data on his flight simulator, but no evidence of wrongdoing has been found. His heartbroken daughter is incensed and says the article is flat out false. On her Facebook page, she posts an open letter to "The Daily Mail" saying, quote, "You should consider making movies since you are so good making up stories and scripts out of thin air. May God have mercies on your soul. You can bet your [ EXPLETIVE ] I will not forgive you.:

We have reached out to "The Daily Mail" and are a waiting comment. As Zaharie's family aches from his absence, they have shied away from media attention and they say the attention and suspicion surrounding their father is quote, "torturing them".

Sara Sidner, CNN, Kuala Lumpur.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: With me now, Tom Fuentes, CNN law enforcement analyst and former assistant director of the FBI and CNN correspondent Jim Clancy. Jim, I want to start with you. Malaysian Airlines also released the full transcript between the cockpit and air traffic control. But when you read that transcript, it seems so innocuous, it makes you wonder why they didn't release it before.

JIM CLANCY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It makes you wonder. Their reasoning was that they didn't want to release anything while they were still investigating at least this part of it. And I think they looked at it and concluded there's no harm in doing this. The media had originally asked them to release the recordings of the voices between the cockpit and tower. They haven't done that. The media is also asking them for the radar records, and the radar records are what really go to the heart of this story. It should tell us the flight path as it abruptly turned out of the South China Sea and made way for the Indian Ocean.

COSTELLO: The families played a big part in why this full transcript of that conversation between the pilots and the air traffic controllers was released. They saw the transcript first, so maybe added pressure from the family will force officials to release other things, Jim.

CLANCY: You know, it certainly poses a question on that front. And that is if you want to blame the pilots for this, as many have been wont to do, you look at this transcript and see there's no evidence here. You also have -- if there was a political motive, where's the manifesto? If it was a hijacking, where are demands? It's all kinds of things that simply don't add up.

Still, officials here are saying -- both international investigators on the ground here and Malaysian investigators -- think somebody was there maneuvering the plane. Now that's the evidence that shows up on the radar data. That shows how capable someone had to be, what their intent might have been.

COSTELLO: Interesting. OK, so Tom, what do you think about that? I mean, Malaysian investigators say it's a criminal act. How can they be sure? And is it because they've seen these things Jim is talking about and they've made conclusions we don't know about?

FUENTES: That's true, Carol. But they were making these conclusions, if you will, or at least theories, early on in the fourth or fifth day of the investigation, when they finally went into the homes of the pilots and removed their computers. They said, well, now we have a justification to do it and they were basing that on the fact that maybe this wasn't just a mechanical. Maybe there was something sinister in why the plane turned.

But the investigation into the pilots and crew and the passengers and the ground crew, that began the very night the plane disappeared. So the investigation itself into a possible criminal act began instantly when that plane turned up missing.

Now, the other part of it, the confusion of radar, did the plane go up, down, sideways, left or right, loop to loop like we heard yesterday, that's based on radar and the aviation experts -- or we hope experts -- analyzing the data about the radars and data from satellites. That's a separate matter from the investigation into the people involved with this airplane.

COSTELLO: I know, we just seem to be going in circles, right? There just aren't any hard core answers right now. I mean, you look at the pilot. There's no hard core evidence against him at all. There's nothing on his flight simulator. The FBI said there's no smoking gun, right? We can't find anything in his background that's remotely suspicious. So I understand why Captain Shah's daughter is so angry.

FUENTES: Right. When the Malaysian authorities say that human hands turned that aircraft, they're not saying it had to be the pilot or co- pilot. They're not ruling out that someone else came in the cockpit and either made them turn or did the turn themselves. But we've heard so many reports the co-pilot wasn't capable of flying this aircraft and making it turn around. That's ridiculous. How much training did Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 hijackers have to be able to turn the flights around in mid-air and target the World Trade Center? Which from a pilot would look like a pencil in the sky. They were able to do it with precision as well as the Pentagon. So the idea that you have to have 25,000 hours in a flight to make it do a 180 turn is ridiculous in and of itself. And the daughter, as we've been saying, the families of these pilots are in a particularly anguished situation because not only have they lost their loved one, and it appears they have lost their loved one, but their father, son, brother, husband, is being accused of mass murder when you have this kind of speculation.

COSTELLO: Tom Fuentes, Jim Clancy, thanks so much.

FUENTES: Thank you Carol.

COSTELLO: You're welcome. We'll have more on the investigation into Flight 370 in just a minute. But first CNN's Jim Acosta is live at White House this morning where people are celebrating a huge Obamacare milestone. Jim?

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right Carol. It is no April's Fool joke. Obamacare may actually hit its original target of 7 million people signing up. I'll go behind the numbers in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: We'll get back to the investigation into Flight 370 in just a minute. But first Obamacare is on track to hit its original target of seven million signups. That's right. Despite all the drama after that botched Web site launch back in October, a surge of signups yesterday and may have put the numbers over the top on the final day of enrollment.

Now some say a strategic push on television and radio and Twitter helped the White House pull in those last numbers. Others think the so called -- you know, ok somebody has to say this guy's name for me. Galifianakis, I can never see that the Galifianakis is the reason referencing, of course, that viral video Obama shot with the comedian.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ZACH GALIFIANAKIS, COMEDIAN: It must kind of stink though that you can't run three times.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Actually I think it's a good idea. You know, if I ran a third time, it would be like doing a third "Hang Over" movie. It didn't really work out very well, did it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Galifianakis, Galifianakis -- senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta live at the White House with more. Good morning Jim.

ACOSTA: Good morning Carol. That right and I can confirm it is Zach Galifianakis that help him anyway.

COSTELLO: Thank you. ACOSTA: Just the guy from the "Hang Over" just go with that.

COSTELLO: Yes.

ACOSTA: You know Carol, if Obamacare were a patient, this would be a pretty miraculous recovery when you consider the fact that this -- this program, this Web site, Healthcare.gov was almost pulled off line by the President himself during that disastrous roll out in October and November.

But of course they got things back on track. They got the Web site working. And now according to a senior administration official, yes, they are on track to hit seven million signing up as of this week. And that is -- that is pretty big news over here at the White House. They're reacting with a lot of glee and happiness I can tell you. And a lot of this is due to -- check out these numbers; 4.8 million visits to Healthcare.gov and two million calls to the call centers that they had set up.

That is just yesterday people flooding in to buy insurance before that deadline day of yesterday for enrolling in Obamacare.

Now we looked at some of the other numbers that the administration is putting out about what happened. Administration officials in the last six weeks did 300 different radio interviews Valerie Garrett a senior White House official alone did 80 radio interviews according to a White House official.

Those Web videos like the one you just showed with Zach Galifianakis attracted 30 million views in the last six weeks. And they had about 100 celebrities and athletes tweeting out their support for Obamacare.

So for all of those people out there who are you know sort of complaining that they didn't go to through traditional media, which is something you heard over here at the White House among people in the Press Corps there are some grumbling about that this -- this alternative media strategy did work in many ways for this White House.

Of course we still have to wait and see Carol you know in terms of how many people have actually paid for enrollment. That will lower these numbers somewhat but they are on track to get the seven million figure and perhaps even zoom past it I'm told by folks over here at the White House -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Jim Acosta reporting live from the White House. Thanks so much.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM was the search for Flight 370 flawed from the start? A new report out says yes and claims it caused teams several days in their bid to find that missing plane.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Now teams in the Indian Ocean try desperately to find includes to the disappearance of Flight 370. A "Wall Street Journal" report is raising serious questions about how the pursuit was initially organized. The reports claims that a lack of coordination led to three days of searching in the wrong place in that vast Indian Ocean.

Colleen Keller is a senior analyst with Metron Incorporated, a firm that helped in the search for Air France Flight 447. Welcome Colleen.

COLLEEN KELLER, SENIOR ANALYST, METRON INCORPORATED: Hi.

COSTELLO: So there are so many countries involve and was this mistake understandable or unconscionable?

KELLER: Well this was a very large scale search Carol and it was very daunting. I mean there was a lot of conflicting information initially. We do see this in searches that they -- they are a little bit disorganized. And then they finally find their groove. And it's unfortunate that it seems to have happened a little bit late in the search.

COSTELLO: That's right because those batteries and those black boxes are going to start to die on Saturday. There is just not much time.

So I guess my next question is, the original area was determined based on satellite data and the new area being searched now used radar and aircraft modeling. So was it a mistake altogether to rely so heavily on those fuzzy satellite images?

KELLER: Oh no actually this was a natural progression initially what we try to do is we use any circumstantial evidence we have -- radar, satellite, intended flight path, to try to narrow down the area so that we can start to focus those area.

The next step is to use drifting debris to try to really narrow it down even more so that we can get underwater search assets in to look for the underwater beacons and then to look with cameras on the bottom of the ocean.

COSTELLO: Still, it's been three weeks. Absolutely no debris related to the plane has been found. Are you a little surprised by that?

KELLER: No. I'm not surprised at all. I think that what's going on here is that our initial evidence has put us in the wrong part of the Indian Ocean. It's such a big place that even, you can see when they show the search areas on the map, that it is just a small part of the entire Indian Ocean. A little bit of error in the initial heading of the aircraft would put us in a completely different tangent.

So we're obviously looking in the wrong place or we're not covering it sufficiently. And there is still evidence out there floating around that we haven't picked up yet.

COSTELLO: You know even Australian officials who were searching don't seem very optimistic now that they are going to find anything. Especially, they are not going to find those black boxes in time. Because frankly the ship, on the way to that area, we don't even know if that's the right area. KELLER: Right. That's -- that's really unfortunate. We have to get the ship out there in case we do pick up debris. But if it's in the wrong place and they -- you know they switch us again to another spot, it would take days to steam there. We really are running out of time for the towed pinger locators at this point.

The good news is we found Air France without any benefit from detecting the pingers, we found it with cameras. And we found other things on the bottom of the ocean without beacons. So there is still a chance. But we really have to narrow the search area down more.

COSTELLO: Colleen Keller, thanks as always.

KELLER: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: We'll have more on the missing flight in moments.

Also ahead in the next hour of the NEWSROOM, General Motors CEO testifies on Capitol Hill this morning about a fatal design flaw that the company waited a decade to address. I'm going to talk to the head of the congressional subcommittee handling her testimony.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)