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Family of Aid Worker Wants Proof; Air Strikes Against ISIS Rage On; Obama and Merkel Talk Peace Plan; Can Brian Williams Recover from Scandal?; Boston Still Buried in Snow

Aired February 09, 2015 - 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: And good morning. I'm Carol Costello. Thank you so much for joining me.

After ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive and claimed an American aid worker was killed days later in an air strike by Jordan, the U.S. and other coalition forces are stepping up attacks against the terror group. U.S. military officials say at least nine air strikes hit ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq in just the last day.

This all comes as the family of 26-year-old Kayla Mueller pleads with ISIS for hard proof about her fate. They want to know if she was killed in that air strike as ISIS claims.

CNN's Becky Anderson is following the latest from Amman, Jordan, but we begin with CNN justice correspondent Pamela Brown. She's in Washington.

Good morning, Pamela.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning to you, Carol. It has been an agonizing wait for the Mueller family. But they do appear to be holding out hope, even reaching out to ISIS directly. In a statement Friday the family said, "We have sent you a private message and ask that you respond to us privately. You told us that you treated Kayla as your guest. As your guest her safety and well-being remains your responsibility."

Now, we have been speaking to family friends of the Muellers and they said that that news from ISIS that Mueller was killed in a Jordanian air strike on Friday was a punch in the gut for the family.

Here's what the family friend said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TODD GEILER, MUELLER FAMILY FRIEND: You have no control so you have to abide by the rules and it was a living hell and has been a living hell for the family and it is today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: A living hell for a year and a half since Kayla went missing in August of 2013. Now ISIS did not provide proof of death Friday other than a picture -- of a dilapidated building that it claims Mueller was in during the Jordanian air strikes.

We know, Carol, the FBI has been in constant contact with the family over the last several days and intelligence analysts have been working around the clock to gather as much evidence and intelligence that could prove Miller's fate -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Has anyone been actively looking for her on the American side, Pamela?

BROWN: Absolutely. I mean. they've been looking for her. They've been trying to work on this since she went missing back in August of 2013, but of course after the news on Friday, there was definitely a cross of the line here. In intelligence community and law enforcement, a lot of coordination to figure out, OK, is there any validity to ISIS' claims that she was killed in the Jordanian air strikes. Is she alive or not?

So absolutely they've been working around the clock as I said to gather intelligence, anything they can, any clues to help prove her fate -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Pamela Brown reporting live from Washington. Thanks so much.

Let's go now to CNN's Becky Anderson., she's in Jordan. Good morning, Becky.

BECKY ANDERSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: A bright good morning to you, Carol. And no further information on that from this end. The Jordanians saying absolutely no evidence to suggest that she was killed in an air strike by one of their planes. Look, there's been a real commitment by, for example, the emirates who have flown in half a dozen F-16 fighter jets with ammunition to fly alongside their Jordanian counterparts who have been taking this pivotal role in this fight against ISIS.

And the Jordanians making it very, very clear. They've been very, very blunt about this. They need more money and more military might, if they are going to attack, degrade and destroy this group that is pedaling this pervasive ideology.

We spoke to a government spokesman just earlier on today. There is a festering problem not just outside of Jordan's borders but within. And while they are slow to acknowledge that to a certain extent, they are very quick to suggest that this is a problem that needs dealing with and needs dealing with now. Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MOHAMMED AL-MOMANI, CHIEF SPOKESMAN, JORDANIAN GOVERNMENT: We have a very good grab of the situation here. We think the mass majority of Jordanians are actually rallying around this war. I think the majority of Jordanians understand that this is a war that we're fighting and these terrorists cannot be let go without being punished. We have a small number that is often exaggerated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON: And small but an often exaggerated problem here. When you talk to people both on and off the record here, there clearly is an issue here of people who might support the ISIS ideology. Not anything like perhaps the amount that did support it before the gruesome video of the young pilot being burned to death was released.

But the idea that they here can sustain the momentum for support of the Jordanians in this fight without other allies here in the region stepping up with significant military might and indeed looking to Washington to provide the same. I think there's a real concern here that that momentum for support will wane and then Jordan has a real problem on its hands both as I said outside its borders -- it sits right on the border with Iraq and with Syria, and not least the problems anyway that you've got in the region with radical Islam in Egypt, in Libya. Saudi has its own problems.

So this is a problem that needs dealing with and dealing with now -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Becky Anderson reporting live from Jordan. Thanks so much.

Right now at the White House German Chancellor Angela Merkel is meeting with President Obama. She's urging him to not provide arms to Ukraine's government for fear Russia would respond by escalating the crisis. The violence has already -- has already spiked in recent weeks including this massive explosion overnight.

A European diplomat now tells CNN that the thunderous blast was likely an arms depot or factory. Pro-Russian rebels say it was struck by a government artillery shell.

CNN's Michelle Kosinski live at the White House to tell us more about this meeting between Angela Merkel and President Obama.

Good morning.

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Carol. Yes, they have a lot on their agenda as they always do but now this urgency because of the crisis in Ukraine. And really there are kind of three areas that they want to look at. First of all, the fact that peace talks are now coming up on Wednesday in Minsk.

That kind of puts everyone's reactions on hold but the -- because France and Germany orchestrated that and really got into the planning and nitty-gritty of what that peace proposal will entail. The president wants to discuss that to see if the U.S. supports it and if everyone is onboard with what exactly are the parameters.

Number two, sanctions. We know that the EU has prepared some additional sanctions. We know that the U.S. is prepared to do that. They'll coordinate on that and see what can be done. But it's interesting when we just got the announcement about the EU getting sanctions ready, not imposing them yet, this is another round. But they were on Russian-backed rebels and some supporters, so clearly these are not the strong sectoral sanctions at this point.

It's another round of sanctions that appear to be targeted toward certain individuals. Not exactly the strongest reaction but it is something. Another step up, if you want to call it that, in the way sanctions have been going.

And then thirdly, this issue of the U.S. now considering seriously arming Ukraine. The Germans and others disagree with that. So you know there's going to be some tough discussion on, you know, the possible risks and what the outcomes could be.

The U.S. is considering the risks as well but much more -- much more onboard with doing something more serious as a result of Russia's continued action -- Carol.

COSTELLO: All right. Michelle Kosinski reporting live from the White House. Thank you.

And join us later this morning at 11:40 Eastern as Wolf Blitzer hosts our special programming on the Obama-Merkel news conference.

Let's dig a little deeper now, though, with our global affairs analyst and former U.S. Delta Force commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Reese.

Welcome, sir.

COL. JAMES REESE (RET.), FORMER U.S. DELTA FORCE OFFICER: Good morning, Carol.

COSTELLO: Good morning. So Senator Ted Cruz suggested that the United States should arm Ukrainians with defensive weapons. What does that mean?

REESE: Carol, that's a great question. Defensive weapons, offensive weapons, if we're pushing weapons in the Ukraine, they can be used for either war. I understand what Senator Cruz is trying to do. He's trying to put a deterrent in. But I believe we have to sit and listen closely to our friends on the ground like the Germans that are right there dealing with this every day, and I think we're making a mistake if we put legal aid in the Ukraine.

COSTELLO: Why so? Because there is a sense that if the United States arms the Ukrainians that Russia will ratchet things up and it will become a full-out war and then Russia won't stop.

REESE: I agree. I mean, this right now just like Angela Merkel said, this is a diplomatic and political fight right now. We have to continue down this road.

People got to remember, when Ukraine broke away and got their independence, unfortunately they sat on the fence for several years. Especially economically, kind of going back and forth, back and forth, and decided, did they want to go with the West or stick with the Russians. That's one cause.

It's tragic what is happening to the Ukraine people. They're great people. They don't deserve this. But at the -- at the political leadership level, they have screwed this thing up and now they're looking for people to come in and help them. And I believe we need to follow what the Germans are doing.

COSTELLO: OK. We just saw Angela Merkel enter the White House. So I would assume that she's going to say to President Obama exactly what you've said on air.

Why is it up to -- I keep asking this question. Like, why is it up to the United States to arm the Ukrainians? Why isn't it up to Germany and France to arm the Ukrainians? Because, you know, they got a real dog in this fight and we really don't.

REESE: Well, Carol, again, you are absolutely right. You know, the other key player here is, you know, President Putin. He is the master of play in this chess game. But one thing he has watched through the years, and he made some comments this weekend about Syria and, you know, that we -- that we as the United States are sticking our noses in places that we shouldn't.

But one thing President Putin watches is our inability to have a policy on Syria. We had red line after red line so he sees us as soft so he -- that gives him no reason to back down to Ukraine and again I personally think Putin has the upper hand in this chess game right now.

COSTELLO: So some might say well, then the United States should definitely act against Putin to knock him down a few notches.

REESE: Well, that's true. That is a -- that is a course of action. But again, when you look at the people, the European countries that are there every day, especially Angela Merkel, all right. They know, they have watched the economic aspects that Ukraine has tried to play back and forth. All right?

I think one of the things you need to take a look at doing is taking the whole NATO aspect off the -- off the table for the Ukraine and one of the political aspects has to do is maybe Ukraine becomes that -- you know, kind of (INAUDIBLE), between Russia and between Europe, it's that piece between it, and take NATO piece off but right now escalating there in Russia. The Russians have nothing to lose. They keep fighting, they keep taking land.

COSTELLO: All right. Lieutenant Colonel James Reese, thanks for your insight. I appreciate it.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, Brian Williams says he's taking a few days off to deal with the controversy surrounding his comments about a 2003 Iraq mission.

But will he ever return to the news desk? We'll talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: The -- the controversy swirling around Brian Williams shows no signs of dying down. The NBC anchor announcing he'll take a few days off from "Nightly News" to, in his words, deal with the issue. Williams says he's also canceled a scheduled appearance on David Letterman's show this week, an appearance that reportedly was part of the plan to rehab his image.

And on MSNBC where Williams anchored before taking over for Tom Brokaw on "The Nightly News" host Joe Scarborough had this to say about a man he calls both a colleague and a friend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE SCARBOROUGH, ANCHOR, "MORNING JOE": I'm hopeful that when all of the madness on Twitter and all of the madness online and all of the madness that's going on right now, the investigations that need to be going on. We're not saying they don't need to be going on, but when the fury dies down, and when we get through the storm and the decision is made to judge what Brian Williams' future should be, that that decision will be based on the entirety of his career and not on one or two or three mistakes.

Bad mistakes, yes. They were -- they were bad mistakes. And guess what?

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, ANCHOR, "MORNING JOE": And he would say that.

SCARBOROUGH: Guess what? He says that. We all make bad mistakes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: Senior media correspondent Brian Stelter joins me now.

And Joe Scarborough was right. We all make bad mistakes. It's just we live in the age of the Internet right now and this thing keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger for Brian Williams.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN SENIOR MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: I would say we all make mistakes. I don't know if we all make bad mistakes, Carol. I hope we don't all make bad mistakes. I know that when I've made mistakes I've tried as fast as humanly possible to correct them and to apologize and to be transparent about how they happened.

And I don't think we've seen NBC do that. And I'm not putting that all on Brian Williams. We haven't seen NBC News take full accounting yet of what's happened here. They say that's because they're busy doing an investigation into what's gone wrong, they're busy fact- checking and that they will at some point share some of what they've learned. But for now --

(CROSSTALK)

COSTELLO: So they're busy fact-checking, though, but as you have reported, NBC probably knew of these allegations a long time ago and didn't fact-check then.

STELTER: That's one of the questions. Maureen Dowd wrote that in her -- in the "Times" column over the weekend.

COSTELLO: Yes.

STELTER: And there were other NBC employees with Brian Williams on this Iraq trip. We haven't heard from them. I've been asking NBC if we can hear from them but we haven't. We just got the first data that suggested it is a problem for NBC beyond just to talk about it but actually in the ratings which is fundamentally what this is all about.

NBC does have to make a business decision here about when and whether Brian Williams can return to the chair. The data that I'm seeing which is preliminary, these numbers change a little bit usually but not a lot when they come in. The preliminary Nielsen ratings, it shows that Brian Williams was winning all week in that key demographic that you and I live and die by the 25 to 54-year-old demographic.

He was winning all week until Thursday. And then on Friday as there was a lot of public talk about this and after he had apologized and after people were wondering what's going to happen to him, suddenly he fell to second place behind ABC, and the fall was actually pretty drastic.

(CROSSTALK)

STELTER: About 35 percent. Whereas ABC fell about 16 percent. So they both fell. But NBC fell a lot. And that's just an early indication that could change. The viewers actually are paying attention to this story because that's one question I have personally, Carol. Journalists are really upset about this. Veterans, some veterans are really upset about this.

Do viewers at home care? Do Brian Williams' fans care? That's what NBC is going to be looking for now to see whether there's impact or not.

COSTELLO: Well, interesting that you say that, because last hour I interviewed a doctor from New Orleans who says that Brian Williams' reporting on Hurricane Katrina was not factual. He said it couldn't have happened that way. But he's a big fan of Brian Williams and he'll continue to watch him. So I don't know, maybe people are just -- I don't know. You just don't know, right?

STELTER: You know, I'm a little bit perplexed by that. Right? Because I want people to seek out the truth and I want people to seek out the most accurate information they can. But it is true that we live in a complex media environment and it is true that anchors like Brian Williams are oftentimes just reading what they are given by lots of other reporters. Right?

Brian Williams' main job is to introduce reports from other people. Set them up and then wrap them up in the end. Where he has shined in the past is in this field reporting that's now under scrutiny. And where he's told what are seemed to be tall tales about Iraq were mostly in other forums like in blog posts or on David Letterman's show, so some -- at some point you wonder about the celebrity notion of journalism and whether he should be going on those late-night shows and whether he should be telling stories like that in forums other than his nightly newscast. COSTELLO: Well, you know what Tina Brown tweeted, she said that,

quote, "Solve Brian Williams' debacle by removing his managing editor news title. Time to debunk the myth that anchors are journalists."

Now, in my mind, Wolf Blitzer is a journalist and he's an anchor and he's fantastic and he's very credible so I don't quite agree with her. But she does have a point with maybe other anchors out there.

STELTER: I think the best anchors on television are the ones that are reporters, that are gathering facts, that are doing the digging that's necessary.

COSTELLO: Absolutely.

STELTER: And you're right. We -- you know, there are a lot of them out there like that. But perhaps the higher you rise at NBC, for example, when you're Brian Williams, maybe the less of that you do. I'm trying to be conservative in my judgments here because we don't have all the information about these various tales.

But I think there's something to that idea that Tina Brown is raising. If you -- if you act on camera like you're the only one and you're not just the captain of the ship behind you with all the people gathering information, then maybe you can -- you can fall into trouble in situations like this.

COSTELLO: All right. Brian Stelter, thanks for your insights and your fine reporting on this. Thanks so much.

STELTER: Thanks.

COSTELLO: Still to come in the NEWSROOM. Boston blows through its snow removal budget. And big problems, two more feet of snow is on the way. So what's the city going to do?

We'll talk about that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: Well, Boston should be used to this by now but who could get used to this? Another week, another snowstorm. In addition, they're going to have, what, eight to 10 inches of snow. It's expected to fall through Tuesday morning, that's on top of, like, feet of snow that's already on the ground.

Yes, winter storms are absolutely punishing Massachusetts and snow removal budgets across the state are simply busted.

Here's why. Boston recently saw its snowiest seven days in history. From January 27th to February 2nd more than 40 inches of snow fell. So what is Boston and the rest of Massachusetts going to do with all of that snow?

Frank DePaola with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation joins me now on the phone to talk about that.

Good morning, sir.

FRANK DEPAOLA, MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION: Good morning. How are you?

COSTELLO: I'm good. I'm -- I just feel for you. I'm just curious how many tons of snow do you think you guys have removed from the streets of Boston?

DEPAOLA: Well, to put it in a better perspective, based on some calculations, we could have filled Gillette Stadium, which is the home stadium for the New England Patriots. We could have filled that 90 times with the snow we pushed off the roads in the last two weeks.

COSTELLO: I'm -- I'm speechless. That's just insane. So what are you going to do with the new snow that's going to fall?

DEPAOLA: Well, we're currently pushing it to the side and then once the storm events are over, we actually load it into trucks and then haul it off into what we call snow dumps, which are huge piles of snow. We're using athletics field, parking lots at parks, things like that are underused during the winter and just stockpiling it in big -- very large mounds.

COSTELLO: Are you using snow melters, too?

DEPAOLA: We do use them selectively. We don't have a lot of those available and we're in the very congested areas. We've been using those rather than trying to haul the snow out of, you know, the core of the city itself. But in a lot of the residential neighborhoods and other areas we have to load into trucks and haul it away.

COSTELLO: So if you do melt the snow, where do you dump that?

DEPAOLA: Well, the snow melters are set up so that you set them near storm drainage systems so that the melted snow goes into the storm drain and catch basin and then the pipes take that hot -- now hot water away into well -- river stream or whatever the discharge point is.

COSTELLO: So are people starting to get a little depressed?

DEPAOLA: I think we're getting a little bit of the stir crazy claustrophobia effect. People tend -- it's very difficult to walk on the sidewalk. It's difficult to get to and from your own front door of your home. I think people are constrained in their homes because of the inability to move around so they are getting a little cabin fever.

COSTELLO: I bet. And is your budget busted?

DEPAOLA: Not yet, but we're getting very close. I mean, we -- this is New England. We anticipate having rough winters. Last year, for example, we had over 100 inches of snow. Not all in two weeks, though. So we do have a healthy budget but we're going through it pretty quickly and our winters here usually run well into March if not into early April. So we have a ways to go. COSTELLO: Frank DePaola, thanks so much. And thanks for doing such a

great job. We all appreciate it.

DEPAOLA: Thank you.

COSTELLO: Even those of us who don't live in Boston. You're welcome.

Still to come in the NEWSROOM, the White House keeps a wary eye on Ukraine as the crisis deepens and the fighting escalates.

We'll have the latest from a rebel stronghold next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)