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CNN Interviews Amanda Knox; Obama, Merkel Meet on Ukraine; Obama Faces Benghazi Firestorm; Pro-Russian Forces Detain CBS News Crew; Ukraine Launches Counter Offensive

Aired May 02, 2014 - 09:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Amanda Knox simply says I did not kill my friend. The convicted murderer spoke to CNN's Chris Cuomo for the first time since an Italian court released the explanation of her conviction in the death of her roommate back in 2007. The Italian court says it believes Meredith Kercher was killed by multiple attackers, including Knox's boyfriend. He's the man in the middle. And another man, Rudy Guede, that's Rudy on the left.

But the report also says it was Knox herself who delivered the fatal stab wound during an argument over money. In this exclusive interview with CNN, Knox says the evidence against her just cannot be proved.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Why do you think this judge goes further than any other, that not only does he say, this is the knife, not only does he say that you had it because of DNA around the bottom of the blade and the hilt, but that he believes that you are the one who actually killed Meredith Kercher?

AMANDA KNOX, ACQUITTED ON MURDER CHARGES: I believe -- I can't speculate what this judge's motivations are, personal motivations or otherwise.

What I can say is that, as this case has progressed, the evidence that the prosecution has claimed exists against me has been proven less and less and less.

And all that has happened is that they filled these holes with speculation. My DNA, any trace of me is not there. When you're talking about traces of me that they attribute to be to the crime scene, they are talking about my DNA in my own bathroom or my footsteps that tested negative for blood that had my DNA and Meredith's DNA on the floor between our bedrooms and the bathroom.

Well, of course our DNA is there. We lived there for a month. It was there. It tested negative for blood. So, it wasn't blood. And so it's irrelevant to the crime. But we are talking about the crime that happened in Meredith's bedroom. And there is no trace of us.

If Rudy Guede committed this crime, which he did, we know that because his DNA is there on Meredith's body, around Meredith's body, his handprints and footprints in her blood. None of that exists from me. And if I were there, I would have had traces of Meredith's broken body on me, and I would have left traces of myself around -- around Meredith's corpse. And I -- I am not there, and that proves my innocence.

I did not kill my friend. I did not wield a knife. I had no reason to. I was -- in the month that we were living together, we were becoming friends. A week before the murder occurred, we went out to a classical music concert together. Like, we had never fought.

And the idea -- I mean, he's brought up lots of things, crazy motives.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: With me now Chris Cuomo and Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and author. Good morning to both of you.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR, "NEW DAY": Good morning.

WENDY WALSH, PSYCHOLOGIST & AUTHOR: Good morning.

COSTELLO: Chris, Knox seemed passionate and angry. Is she different from the last time you interviewed her?

CUOMO: She's a year older. I think that she is laboring under the anxiety of what happens in this. And, of course, she's fighting two battles or at least, you know, one battle on two fronts, which is what happens in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion.

The strength of the case is always being measured against the strength of what people think about her. And I'm sure, Carol, you know, when you sit there and you watch her, you know, the question becomes not what do you know about the forensics? What do you know about the testimony? But do you believe what she's saying? And then it's for you to take away.

COSTELLO: It is easy to understand her anger, though. The Italian courts have now held, what, three trials? There have been six presiding judges, two hearings before the Italian high court and a third on the way. They're trying really hard in Italy to prove Knox guilty. Here's her take --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KNOX: I think what most surprised me is how this court has attempted to account for exonerating evidence. That is really surprising to me.

It is not surprising to me that they put so much emphasis on circumstantial evidence, as opposed to forensic, objective, proven evidence. And I'm really disappointed about that, because the circumstantial clues of this case have all been equivocal, have been unreliable, whereas forensic evidence that proves what happened in that room that night is there, is available for -- to be understood.

It has not been taken into consideration. And that continues to be an incredible difficult obstacle that I'm having to confront in proving my innocence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Wendy, Knox says she's innocent but her behavior through all of this has been all over the map. She's been silly. She's been serious. She's been angry. She's been defensive. Which is the real Amanda Knox, do you think?

WALSH: She's been a young woman in trauma, actually. You know, the stories that she changed her story after the murder, I want people to understand what happens with the human brain and how we record memories. It's not like a tape recorder that you just play it back the way it was recorded. We form kind of packets of information and attach it to other memories we may have to create schemas.

So here's a girl that doesn't think she's a suspect being kept without family far away from anybody else, with no lawyer in a room until 4:00 a.m. And police are telling her things that they are pretending is the absolute truth, so her brain is trying to make sense of the schema she's being told and what she actually saw, and that's how her story could have changed.

The other thing I have to add is, you know, the Italians, and I've lived in Italy, they have such a cultural whore-Madonna syndrome and they have the belief system that the young American girls are all whores, so this idea that they could hold this one up as an awful devil of a woman, the media would have gone crazy for. They love the scandals, it feeds the population.

COSTELLO: Well, Chris, it defies credulity that suddenly authorities in Italy found this - they didn't even the other knife, right? They just think another knife was used and that she plunged the knife into her roommate leaving no evidence behind.

CUOMO: Well, there is evidence. I mean, there's a lot of evidence. It's not a purely circumstantial case. And I think you have to be very slow to blame this process on a cultural stereotype. This isn't how Italians feel about Amanda Knox. This is about going through a process.

Is their process pefrcet? No. Is the investigation perfect? No. Is Amanda Knox's story about what happened that night perfect? No. And that's a problem, too, on top of everything that you pointed out, Carol -- how she behaved at the time, what is normal for her versus what would be normal for you, there are problems with the story that they told.

Now, here's where people get lost. It really doesn't matter if there are holes in Amanda Knox's story; the prosecution has to have a better story. In fact, their story has to be so good that it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt in Italy, just as in the U.S., that it is true beyond anything else that you could think of. There's nothing conceivable. This judge says, "What I've come up with is the only conceivable outcome of the evidence."

Now, what's interesting is he does not have new evidence. You do not have great forensics tying Amanda Knox to this. Many legal experts in the U.S. believe she would not have been brought to trial let alone convicted if in the United States.

But, as we're hearing from Walsh, you know, the idea of who she is as a person has become dominant in the coverage of this. You would hope not the same is true at court. However, when you read the rulings here, to be clear, this judge does take everything to her disadvantage. He believes the convicted killer Rudy Guede much more than he believes her.

COSTELLO: So how - and I guess the end result -- and, Wendy, I'll ask you this question -- the victim's family, the Kercher family, will always doubt Knox's innocence and Knox has to live with that. What will that be like for her?

CUOMO: Well, she says --

WALSH: At the end of the day - oh, I'm sorry.

CUOMO: No, please. Go ahead. I want to hear your take.

WALSH: At the end of the day, she does have to -- or she feels she has to win in the court of public opinion and certainly for this grieving family. Now, this grieving family is as much caught up in this horrific story, I believe, as many other people who are reading the media accounts.

But here is a man in jail, Rudy Guede, who is convicted of doing this crime and his crazy testimony is what the media is believing and the court is believing.

And I just want to say one thing, Chris, the evidence that you're talking about that does exist, the physical evidence, really makes sense with somebody who is a roommate living in the premises. The one bra clasp that was found in another room with a bit of her DNA on it had no blood and the collection of it was not necessarily clean, it was transferred around a lot. So, there's a lot of debate even about the physical evidence out there.

COSTEOLLO: And, Chris, you were going to say about what Amanda Knox said about having to live with the information that the Kercher family would always think her guilty.

CUOMO: Well, here are things that are just true, that people should put into the calculus of how they feel about this. And, as you know, Carol, we are doing the special again tonight. And we did an interview with her a year ago where I severely tested her story. This is a different context, a different point of time in the case now, so you can go online and watch all this.

She was dealing with this since she was 20, her entire 20s have been the anxiety of dealing with the perception of her, if not the reality, of her being a murderer -- and the specter of having to deal with being blamed for taking the life of someone who she says she liked and cared about. That has to be hard. She has to be stunted in a way. Her life is always incomplete because she has no sense of permanence and no sense, as she's developing as a person, of what to trust. I believe all of that to be true. I believe that personal toll is true. Whether she deserves to be experiencing that is an open question that we would hope would be given some resolution in the courts. I don't have great confidence in that.

COSTELLO: All right, your special airs later tonight, Chris, right?

CUOMO: Yes, ma'am.

COSTELLO: OK. Chris Cuomo, Wendy Walsh, thanks so much.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, the crisis in Ukraine will dominate talks this hour at the White Hour. A key ally sits down with the president but an old controversy flares up. We'll tell you whether Benghazi will be front and center.

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COSTELLO: Happening right now at the White House, in fact, the motorcade has just arrived. That's the arrival of the German chancellor Angela Merkel. She'll meet with President Obama just minutes from now and the focus will be on the crisis in Ukraine, specifically the need for allies to remain united against Russia's defiance of the west.

But when the two leaders hold a news conference in two hours, we're told the very first question will shift the spotlight to Benghazi and the deadly terror attack on the U.S. consulate there 19 months ago. It's firing up Republicans once again who are outraged by a newly surfaced e-mail from the State Department. Just two months before the presidential election, those e-mails suggest that the violence be portrayed as spontaneous and not terrorism that could be blamed on failed policies.

CNN's Jim Acosta has more for you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice over): New e- mails revealed this week by the conservative group Judicial Watch have sparked Republican charges once again of a White House cover-up over what happened in the deadly attack at the U.S. mission in Benghazi in 2012.

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R), CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE: It is disturbing and perhaps criminal that these documents that documents like these were hidden by the Obama administration from Congress and the public alike.

ACOSTA: Republicans point to this e-mail used to prep then U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.

SUSAN RICE, FORMER UN AMBASSADOR: The best information that we have --

ACOSTA: Who said in a round of Sunday talk show interviews that the killings stemmed from protests touched off by an anti-Islamic video. The e-mail from top White House national security spokesman Ben Rhodes urges Rice to underscore that the protests are rooted in an Internet video and not a broader failure of policy. The White House says that Rhodes' e-mail was about the demonstrations and not Benghazi. That's critical because the White House had said it was the intelligence community that had prepped Rice on Benghazi not political advisors.

JAY CARNEY, WHITE PRESS SECRETARY: That e-mail was not provided. Have you read the e-mail Jim?

ACOSTA (on camera): I have it right in front of me.

CARNEY: The talking points that Ambassador Rice used, again, produced by the intelligence community for members of Congress and in the interests of having everybody use the same information used by the administration and Ambassador Rice on those Sunday shows were divulged.

ACOSTA: Noting the President's own promise of full disclosure --

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We have provided every bit of information that we have and we will continue to provide information.

ACOSTA: Republicans say the White House just didn't want to admit Benghazi was the result of terrorism.

REP. TREY GOWDY (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: Remember the mantra Mr. Chairman, "Al Qaeda is on the run, GM's alive, Osama bin Laden's dead, al Qaeda's on the run".

CARNEY: What hasn't changed has been the effort by Republicans to -- you know, to claim a conspiracy when they haven't been able to find one.

ACOSTA: The White House says the full picture of what happened at Benghazi is still emerging.

CARNEY: I mean there were caveating all the time about the fact that more information might become available.

ACOSTA (on camera): But those responses aren't enough for Republicans. Senator John McCain wants a new special bipartisan investigation into these e-mails and House Speaker John Boehner has called on Secretary of State John Kerry to testify at a hearing on what he knows.

Jim Acosta, CNN, the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: All right, well, let's talk about that and the meeting soon to take place. CNN's Joe Johns live at the White House. So the first question will be about Benghazi?

JOE JOHNS, CNN SENIOR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Well, I don't know that for sure but you can certainly imagine that people are very interested in asking that question of the President of the United States. But the focus I think is on Angela Merkel expected to have several hours here at the White House, including lunch and a news conference with the President and they certainly do have a lot to talk about, Carol. This meeting comes at a critical time when both countries are trying to put pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin and on this issue, of course, of Ukraine.

It is also important to note that Germany has a lot of economic ties with Russia, and the question is whether you put more economic pressure on that country and actually affect the economic relations between Germany and Russia.

So, a lot to think about here especially since big German companies, Volkswagen to name one, have a huge stake in Russia. And the more pressure you put on, the harder it is for those companies to continue to do business very well and thrive, Carol.

COSTELLO: Joe Johns reporting live from the White House this morning. Thank you.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, tensions flare and Ukraine's military mobilizes. We'll look at a new offensive that could push the country closer to widespread fighting.

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COSTELLO: This morning, the world is keeping a close eye on Ukraine as the violence escalates there and fragile and uneasy peace appears to crumble. Ukraine's military has launched their biggest counteroffensive yet after the recent gains by pro-Russian militants. They have now seized control of government buildings in nine eastern towns and cities and Ukraine officials say they are powerless to stop those advances. Tensions really boiled over yesterday as pro-Russian activists attacked Ukrainian riot police. Rock, bullets and even grenades left more than two dozen injured.

Also new this morning, an American news crew was detained and blindfolded by pro-Russian forces just after being freed, we heard from Clarissa Ward of CBS.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLARISSA WARD, CBS NEWS (via telephone): We were stopped at a check point just outside of the city Slavyansk. We are trying to go because the Ukrainian military had allegedly started an operation to dismantle some of the pro-Russian separatists who are in the town we were stopped and told that the commander needed to ask the commander whether we should either be let go or taken prisoner. From there, we were then taken to another town where we were blindfolded, with sort of cloth and masking tape really quite tightly bound around our heads, so we couldn't see at anything all. They appeared to have a video camera from what I could hear although obviously I couldn't see anything and they were asking you know, do you have family and why are you here and where are you from. Of course, when you are asked in that situation whether you have family and they were like, do you have children and who is your family, you start to feel a pit in your stomach because it's not clear which direction things are going in.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: All right, Clarissa Ward went on to say one member of her crew was beaten by those who kidnapped them and then suddenly, they let them go. But she understands a little bit of Russian and she was getting the sense that she was getting a lot of anti-American sentiment from her kidnappers, which is a big concern.

And as I told you just a few minutes ago, President Obama and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel are going to talk about Ukraine, and then they're going to look -- have a live news conference at the White House. That will take place at 11:40 Eastern Time and of course CNN will carry their remarks live.

I want to get more now on Ukraine's new offensive against those pro- Russian militants. CNN's Nick Peyton Walsh is outside one city where tensions are rapidly building.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NICK PEYTON WALSH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): Well here, just on the edge of Slavyansk, we see Ukrainian soldiers with armor in one of the largest numbers we've seen really so far since the start of this crisis attempting to move into the center of the town.

They've occupied this bridge behind me here. There are about 10 to 15 armor personnel carriers, I'd say 50 or so, soldiers, professional, well-equipped, not messing around here at all. They are facing the biggest challenge they're going to face here in Slavyansk -- and that is angry local residents. They seem to have blocked both sides of the bridge they have taken up position. Anger focused on their presence here, but also on what they say were injuries caused to an old man who apparently trying to get in the way of one of these armored personnel carriers and then had his legs injured. We saw an ambulance take somebody away from here.

One of the soldiers also saying "look, why did he get in our way?" A tense situation here. We're at a distance hearing various rumblings, there's potentially incidents happening elsewhere in the town. Just a few moments ago, a helicopter landed and dropped off ten to 15 reinforcements for these soldiers here now, but according to the interior minister, such events are happening all the way around Slavyansk.

We're hearing multiple reports of them perhaps an attempt to seal off the city. But as I say the greatest challenge these soldiers are going to face is the fact that local residents here are overtly hostile towards them. They alarmed but they are furious and that is certainly going to limit what Ukrainian forces can do here without causing casualties.

Nick Peyton Walsh, CNN Slavyansk.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: The next hour of the CNN NEWSROOM after a break.

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