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Search Expanded for MH370; Trump Lashes Out at Moderator Following Debate; Carly Fiorina Gets Noticed in Debate; Pentagon Computers Hacked, Including Joint Chiefs; Formula One Driver Victim of Jewelry Heist. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired August 07, 2015 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00] SAIMA MOHSIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's debris, like window panes and seat cushions. We're waiting for that to be sent from Reunion to here -- Poppy?

POPPY HARLOW, CNN ANCHOR: And we know that the French, in particular, have really stepped up the search here, right, by air, by sea, by land?

MOHSIN: Yeah, absolutely. Because, of course, when the flaperon turned up and they started to do the drift analysis, seeing where the search is being conducted off the coast of Australia, Poppy, and Reunion Island, they realized that this is the time and the place that debris might stop washing up. Of course, as they are finding more potentially and unconfirmed, they have sent out an aircraft, three helicopters, speed boats. They are searching the surface of the ocean, Poppy. They are not looking under water yet. They don't have the capabilities. But certainly searches have been stepped up, 30 by 50 nautical miles east of Reunion Island. They are hoping that they'll find more clues in this massive jigsaw puzzle, the biggest clue so far, Poppy, is the flaperon identified from being MH370.

HARLOW: The families -- none of us can understand what it is like for them to wait to get answers and then get conflicting reports.

Saima Mohsin, thank you.

Next, Donald Trump getting many tough questions at the debate last night, arguably the toughest from Megyn Kelly when she asked him about some of his statements about women. Does he have a problem with female voters? We'll look at what the poll numbers are telling us. Also, is this a problem for the GOP? That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:35:] HARLOW: Donald Trump lashing out today after he says he was treated unfairly at the big GOP debate last night, the first one, the most watched primary debate in history with 24 million of you tuning in. Take a look at this moment from last night.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MEGYN KELLY, DEBATE MODERATOR: You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals. Your Twitter account -- (CROSSTALK)

DONALD TRUMP, (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE & CEO, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been --

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: I've been challenged by so many people and I don't, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time either. And, honestly, Megyn, if you don't like it, I'm sorry. I've been very nice to you, although I could probably not be, based on the way you have treated me, but I wouldn't do that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Trump later came out swinging on Twitter calling Megyn Kelly unprofessional and overrated, and referred to her as a bimbo, something she certainly is not. That is absurd.

One female voter in Iowa said this about Trump's performance during last night's debate. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE VOTER: I didn't like his comments about women and women make up half of the population and he's called them names like dogs and things and he didn't really take that back and he even made a negative comment to Megyn Kelly in the process. So, I mean, if he's not going to get the women's vote and women's issues are hot topic, according to the Democrats, even though it's kind of an old subject. Still, I don't think he respects women.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HARLOW: Joining me now to talk about it is CNN chief political analyst, Gloria Borger; also, Alan Schroeder, author of "Presidential Debates: 50 Years of High-Risk Television."

Boy, was that television last night. Right, guys? We were all glued from the beginning.

Gloria, let me begin with you.

You just heard from that Iowa woman. Also, look at these numbers from a Quinnipiac poll last month, saying 37 percent of Republican women say they would never support Trump. What did he do to the critical women's vote last night?

GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, he didn't help himself or the Republican Party with women's vote. Remember, Barack Obama won women voters by 11 percent. OK? There's a gender gap to begin with. If you look at the country as a whole, 62 percent of women have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump. What he did last night to Megyn Kelly, the question was perfectly legitimate for her to ask and what he did to her last night did not help with women voters. You know, people who love Trump are going to love Trump, women, male, whatever. OK? But people who are getting a really first look at him and saying, is he presidential -- because that's what these debates are all about. He didn't help himself. And the voter that you just showed is a perfect example. Women would take a look at that and say he insulted Megyn Kelly and they don't like it. Why should they.

HARLOW: Alan, to you, some of those words Megyn used in her question, saying you used X, Y, and Z about women, he's also used those words to describe men. He referred to Pollster Frank Luntz as, quote, "a low-class slob," and also, quote, "a clown on Twitter." This is after Luntz said Trump was the loser from the debate last night. Is this Trump being Trump or is this more, and will it have a detrimental effect on him?

ALAN SCHROEDER, AUTHOR: I think it's more than Trump being Trump. One of the things you can do in a debate is dispel a negative view about you. There were already stories floating out there. And so he had a chance to really overcome that or do something to ameliorate that but instead made it worse. And not only do women make up half of the population, they vote in greater numbers than men. So it didn't make any sense as a tactic.

[14:40:21] HARLOW: Alan, isn't that the tactic that has been working for him thus far, to never back down?

SCHROEDER: Never back down except there's a point of diminishing returns. There has always been this thought that if he kept doing that, he was going to say something that really crossed the line and maybe it didn't cross the line for everybody but certainly for a lot of people. And for being the first time that he's in a debate setting and it's a chance for him to look like a president, as Gloria said, for him not to do that just was nuts.

HARLOW: Gloria, you just wrote a fascinating column today on CNN com about this. Let me read part of it. You wrote, "After 2012, Republicans decided to hold seminars for GOP candidates on how to talk about women. Guess they left Trump off the list."

Talk about the bigger impact of this on the party.

BORGER: You know, look, this is a party in search of the presidency. And they need two things, Hispanic voters and women. They are up against Hillary Clinton. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know if she becomes the nominee, women are going to vote for her. A lot of women will say, yes, we want a woman president. So you have to go and tell them that you are on their side. So you had Jeb Bush recently misspeaking, as he later apologized, but saying, for example, I don't think we need to spend $500,000 on women's health. What he really wanted to say was he wanted to defund Planned Parenthood. It didn't quite come out that way. You have a party that had Senate candidate, Todd Aiken, in the last midterm election talking about so- called legitimate rape. You have a party that is struggling to figure out a way to talk to minorities and to women.

HARLOW: There was one woman on the stage last night, not the 9:00, Alan, but the earlier debate, Carly Fiorina. A lot of people sat up and reacted to her on stage. And she's also talked about being a woman and giving her a unique advantage in running against Hillary Clinton. What was your takeaway from Carly Fiorina last night?

SCHROEDER: I thought she was the best of that lot, but I think she's being a little over-praised today. She didn't have much competition on that stage. Without Donald Trump there, she had an opportunity that others did not. It would have been interesting if she and Donald Trump had been on the same stage. How would she have played into that dynamic? And next time, it may.

BORGER: That's what was interesting. She wasn't on the stage. Not one of those candidates got into that and said, you know, I think that's inappropriate language. They have the excuse of the rules but rand Paul managed to mix it up a little bit on other issues. I guarantee you, if Carly Fiorina had been on that stage, she might have defended Megyn Kelly.

HARLOW: We will see.

September 16th, the next Republican debate right here on CNN. We'll see what happens then.

Thank you both, Gloria Borger, Alan Schroeder.

Also, tonight, our very own Don Lemon sitting down with Donald Trump. He has a host of great questions for him. You're going to want to see the full interview right now here on "CNN Tonight" with Don Lemon.

Next, the Pentagon e-mail server that includes the Joint Chiefs of Staff was hacked. The suspect is Russia. How could they hack such a high-level government office? I'm going to speak with a former White House cybersecurity director, next.

A brazen burglary in the south of France. A Formula One race car driver and his wife may have been gassed as they slept. The thieves got off with almost $500,000 in jewels. That story ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:48:49] HARLOW: Russia appears to be the number-one suspect in the hacking of a Pentagon e-mail service. The attack happened about two weeks ago on an unclassified e-mail server used by 4,000 employees at the Pentagon who work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The server is still down and there's a lot of talk about who could have carried this out.

I want to talk about it more and the significance of it with Robert Knake, a former White House cybersecurity director, and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Looking at this first, the U.S. military describes this as a very sophisticated, a stealth spear fishing hack. Walk us through what happened and why it is different this time, why it shows more precise capability from the hackers. ROBERT KNAKE, SENIOR FELLOW, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS & FORMER

WHITE HOUSE CYBERSECURITY DIRECTOR: What we saw in this specific incident was an incredibly sophisticated set of tools that had never been seen before. Tools that allowed the attacker to get into the network, to find the information they want and to extract it in a very, very short amount of time. What we've seen is the in networks for three quarters of the year. They were able to get in, get the information they wanted and get out in a very, very short amount of time. I'm told days.

[14:50:00] HARLOW: Wow. A senior defense official told CNN exactly what you just said, that this hack exposes sort of a new vulnerability from what they've ever seen in the past. You are highly confident this is Russia. We don't know for sure yet. But that's what you are leaning towards. I wonder if you could take us into what retaliation looks like for something like this.

KNAKE: For something like this, I think retaliation is probably unlikely. This is the kind of --

(CROSSTALK)

HARLOW: Why?

KNAKE: It's what people might call tit for tat spying in the great game. This is what country adversaries like Russia and the United States did to each other in the Cold War and now it's taking place over the electronic networks. It's not the kind of thing that crosses the red lines that the president has laid out on cybersecurity. It's not economic espionage, not stealing secrets from corporate, not doing any of the things that he's laid out as requiring a response.

HARLOW: But what it does show is that new capability and vulnerability. So aren't you just waiting for that to happen, for that to hit the line for what it called for or spark retaliation?

KNAKE: If the Russians are behind it, what would be the response if they used it against a target like critical infrastructure, if they used it to access systems, take down a power grid, disrupt communications, to mess with our financial markets? They use the capability for that and, yeah, it certainly crossed that line. In this case, I think the response is to take a hard look at how DOD markets are protected and they are some of the best protected markets in the world but in this case they were hacked and exploited.

HARLOW: Take us behind the scenes of who comes in, then. You're saying don't focus on retaliation. The focus should be on our vulnerabilities and where the weakness was or is, frankly. Who do you bring in to solve that?

KNAKE: What they have done is they have shut down this network for ten days and that means they are going to have to rely on other networks and their capabilities which were not touched by this attack and then they are going to figure out how this happened and once they figure out how it happened they will share that information with the rest of the department of defense and the rest of the government and hopefully with the rest of our partners in the private sector. So that they can prevent this kind of attack from happening again. There is, I think, good news here, the fact that this was caught. I think that we're going to see a lot more of these incidents being caught and making news whereas in the pass we might not have known that something this sophisticated was taking place.

HARLOW: That's a good point.

Robert Knake, thank you very much.

KNAKE: Thank you.

HARLOW: Coming up, last night's GOP debate, the most watched in primary history. I'll have the highlights for you ahead. What the candidates said and big winners and losers of the evening. That's straight ahead.

Coming up as well here on the program, a jewelry heist in the south of France in the vacation home of a Formula One race car driver. We are learning the thieves may have used sleeping gas during the brazen burglary. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:57:32] HARLOW: Formula One driver Jenson Button and his wife, Jessica, were the victims of a brazen burglary. Thieves reportedly got away with $500,000 in loot while the couple in their vacation home on the French Riviera. Button says he thinks that they were gassed so they would not wake up.

CNN's senior international correspondent, Fred Pleitgen, reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRED PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Poppy, it must have been a shock to Formula One driver to Jenson Button and his wife and some friends when they woke up in the villa that they were in that it had been burglarized overnight. What is worse than the fact that it happened at all is the way it possibly happened.

(voice-over): One of the top race drivers in the world, robbed when he was most vulnerable. Jenson Button was asleep in a rented villa in France. His wife, Jessica, and some friends also in the house. "Jenson, Jessica and friends were on holiday when, on Monday evening, two men broke into the property while they all slept and stole a number of items of jewelry, including, most upsettingly, Jessica's engagement ring," Button's spokesman said. The ring alone is allegedly worth hundreds and thousands of dollars. In total, almost $500,000 worth of jewelry may have been stolen.

Even more disturbing, Button believes the burglars may have used gas to knock him and his guests out, according to his spokesman.

Saint Tropez is on the French Riviera and frequented by the rich and famous, and break-ins happen quite frequently, says Will Geddes, who runs an international corporate protection company. WILL GEDDES, MANAGING DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL CORPORATE PROTECTION:

There have been a number of reported incidents where gas has been used by intruders, burglars trying to obtain access to properties to burglarize, especially when the occupants are in resident.

PLEITGEN: In 2006, burglars pumped sleeping gas into the Cannes home of a French soccer star, Patieque Viera (ph) before breaking in.

But the vice president of London's Royal College of Anesthetists says he's skeptical.

DR. LIAM BRENNAN, VICE PRESIDENT, ROYAL COLLEGE OF ANESTHETISTS: Anesthetic agents would need to be delivered in enormous quantities and that would be very difficult. The delivery devises that we use in an operating theater would not fit the bill for this purpose.

PLEITGEN: Whether or not gas was used, Button says he and his wife and friends didn't notice the break-in as it was going on, and that all of them are shaken by the events.

(on camera): Poppy, we have to keep in mind that burglaries in that area in Saint Tropez are something that do happen again and again. It's something that we've heard from the police.