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Top Tech Execs talk Jobs with Trump; NYT Report Tracks Election Hack; Trump's Stake in DC Hotel; Aleppo Ceasefire Does Not Last a Day; Obama on Syrian Foreign Policy. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 14, 2016 - 12:00   ET

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

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[12:00:13] BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: You are live in the CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Brianna Keilar in Washington.

And Silicon Valley is meeting Midtown Manhattan today, Trump Tower to be precise, as the heads of some of the biggest and most powerful tech companies on the planet sit down with the president-elect 37 days before he is sworn into office. The focus is said to be jobs, but this meeting of minds comes amid explosive and detailed revelations about the extent to which hackers tied to Russian intelligence invaded U.S. computer networks in the months leading up to the election. We will dig into that in just a moment. But I do want to begin with CNN Money correspondent Laurie Segall on the nuts and bolts of what's going down about two hours from now. Who's going to be there? What do they want to talk about?

LAURIE SEGALL, CNN MONEY CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, to be a fly on the wall for this meeting would be so interesting, especially given the contentious relationship between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump and the rhetoric he's kind of put out there. But at 2:00 p.m. you have a meeting of everyone from Elon Musk to Tesla, to Sheryl Sandberg of FaceBook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Tim Cook of Apple, the CEOs of IBM, Microsoft. You name it, everyone's coming in. And I will say, there's a certain theater to it. They're all entering right behind me through Trump Tower. There's going to be a photo opportunity. And I'm told from a source close to the meeting that the focus will be on jobs and the quote was bringing good jobs back to the United States, which should be interesting. You've heard Donald Trump be pretty critical of Apple for manufacturing over in China. You also have Microsoft and Amazon who are also -- who also manufactured quite a bit of their goods over in China.

But you can imagine that this can go beyond just jobs. I'm also told they want to talk about tech and how it can be used to make the government more efficient. But we could hear things about immigration, tax reform, trade. You know, we'll be able to -- we'll hopefully have more details after the meeting, but it certainly will be an interesting group of people to be in the same room at the table with Donald Trump, Brianna.

KEILAR: It certainly will be. And we've seen some of these meeting before, Laurie, the media came to talk to Donald Trump. There was a -- let's call it a spirited exchange.

SEGALL: Sure.

KEILAR: So knowing sort of what's gone on between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump, is this going to be a bit of a woodshed moment, do you think?

SEGALL: Well, I have a feeling we'll probably see Donald Trump tweet about it, his version of it after. But I do think, you know, this is a moment for the biggest leaders in Silicon Valley to sit at the table and talk about issues that they have to be at table to talk about. There are regulatory issues. There's a lot at stake for them to sit at the table.

Now that being said, it has been contentious. I mean Donald Trump went after Tim Cook specifically during the Apple versus FBI -- when they wanted to -- the -- when they wanted Apple to open up the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, he called on his followers to boycott Apple. He's gone against Jeff Bezos, accusing him of antitrust violations on Twitter. He's also gone against FaceBook for immigration policy. So we'll -- and I'll tell you this, having covered Silicon Valley and tech for almost seven years, this is a spirited, interesting, innovative group of people walking into Trump Towers. So we'll see exactly the nature of that conversation and how it goes, Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Laurie, keep us posted.

And much more now on those enormous and explosive revelations today that show in great detail for the first time how intelligence officials believe Russian hackers got deep inside the American presidential election. And they did a lot of work to try to help Donald Trump, it appears. Who knew about it first? Who was slow to act on it? There were many who didn't think it was very serious and who fell for one of the oldest tricks on the Internet handing those hackers everything they need? It is all spelled out today in a piece in "The New York Times," a long and thorough investigation that names names and tracks the damage all the way back to the moment that it began.

Eric Lipton is an investigative reporter for "The Times." He's one of the three journalists who pinpointing this moment that Russian hackers broke into the DNC's e-mail network.

Eric, thanks for talking to us.

And just tell us about -- from the beginning here, because this was September of last year that an FBI agent picks up the phone -- and that's an important detail -- and calls the DNC. What happens next?

ERIC LIPTON, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": That's right. So there is a Special Agent Hawkins (ph) from the Washington field office of the FBI. The FBI is responsible for notifying different companies or individuals if they've -- if the government becomes aware that they are targeted by a hacker. In this case, the FBI special agent calls the switchboard at the DNC and reaches the help desk and then the help desk gives him to the I.T. consultant, who picks up the phone, and it's an FBI agent informing him that the FBI has evidence that the -- there are hackers that have compromised the DNC's computer system and that it is a hacker group that's associated with Russia. So this is September of 2015.

[12:05:07] The I.T. consultant at the DNC, at first does not believe that he's talking to an FBI agent because the guy's on the phone and he doesn't want to e-mail the DNC because he's worried that if he e- mails them he'll alert the Russian hackers. So for a matter of months, there's no real action taken to try to determine if the DNC computer system was actually compromised.

KEILAR: And to be clear, what's fascinating for folks who live and work in Washington, D.C., is just how close physically the FBI building and the DNC headquarters are. This is -- we're talking about a five minute cab ride here, maybe.

I want to talk to you about something that we're hearing from Donald Trump, because he is refusing against reason to believe that Russia is definitely behind these hackings. Here's what he said on Sunday.

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DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: Well, if you look at the story and you take a look what they said, there's great confusion. Nobody really knows. And hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don't catch them in the act, you're not going to catch them. They have no idea if it's Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. I mean they have no idea.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: So, Eric, I read the story that you and your colleagues put together and it renders that statement ill-informed, at worse, an act of denial. So tell us how officials were able to identify these two hackers -- they have names for them, "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear." Yes, those were the monikers used -- and how they were able to determine that Russia was behind the hacking.

LIPTON: There's an open debate as to whether or not there was the intention of the Russian actors to try to, you know, give the election to Donald Trump and to defeat Hillary Clinton. That is a subject of open debate. Whether or not there are -- there were in fact hackers who had connections to Russia, that were actors on behalf of the Russian government, there is unanimous agreement by all of the intelligence agencies in the United States, and by almost every member of Congress that's spoken publicly about this, that that did occur. The only person that's denying that so far is Donald Trump.

As, you know, as to how -- you know, they -- these -- the -- how the actors got there and how they determined that they were associated with Russia, for example, the malware that they used, that they put into the computer systems at the DNC, at the DCCC, which is another Democratic organization, that is consistent with the same malware that these same Russian actors have used in attacking other computer systems that the -- that the intelligence agencies had previously confirmed that they intruded with.

The other factors are that these are -- they targeted parties who they knew that the Russians were interested in trying to infiltrate and they also -- there was some Cyrillic (ph) in some of the e-mail, you know, in some of the manipulation of some of the documents that they took that suggested that these were Russian actors again. There's a whole number of hints that it is -- it is still -- the stuff that's public is still somewhat circumstantial, but it's overwhelmingly circumstantial.

KEILAR: Yes. Yes, you mentioned even in the piece that they were operating on Moscow business hours, which is an interesting point there. And you talk here about a series of failures. That FBI failure of the special agent who bumbled alerting the DNC. You also talk about sub-par malware detection at the DNC. And then a Clinton campaign I.T. person who, when John Podesta gets a phishing e-mail, which basically saying, hey, someone's tried to get into your g-mail account, you need to change your password, but this is really a trick, he e-mails and says, this is a legitimate e-mail. John needs to change his password immediately. It turns out that was a typo. He meant to say illegitimate. You found this to be a failure on multiple levels, it seems?

LIPTON: That was a very fateful moment that -- in that moment when John Podesta or one of his staffer that had access to his e-mail account changed his password, there were a decade worth of Podesta's e-mails, approximately 60,000 e-mails, that were transferred to these cyber hackers, and that was the reason that we then learned about all of Hillary Clinton's speeches, that we got all of the back and forth between various campaign aides and criticism of -- even of Hillary. It was -- it was months' worth of embarrassing moments for Hillary Clinton in the final months of the campaign. And it hurt her. And so it's sort of incredible historically to look at the act of an I.T. guy advising Podesta on that and the -- and the -- the implications of that for history is fascinating.

And I spoke with the guy. He feels terrible. He says he made the mistake. He says he looked at it and he immediately knew it was a phishing attack because he gets -- he was getting dozens of them and he says he mistyped. Now, some people say that's ridiculous to suggest that he mistyped, but it's hard for me to believe that he didn't recognize that as someone trying to hack into Podesta's account.

KEILAR: Sure. You detail a number of shortcomings and one also appears to be this -- I guess what some would say was dithering on the part of the Obama White House, how to deal with this. How to say, yes, this is Russia publicly or even address the option of sanctions. What is the responsibility there that lies with the White House for not dealing with this?

[12:10:10] LIPTON: And there are two things that the White House really needed to do. The first is to publicly attribute the attack to the determined actor. Because you need to do that, because it really changes the public's perception of, is this simply some, you know, cyber mistake? Is it -- was it a -- was it someone that leaked it? But if you publicly attribute his to Russia, the whole look -- the whole -- the kind of American public would treat this thing differently. It would have changed the narrative of it.

The second thing, and they -- they waited and waited and waited to make that public announcement. It was not really until October 7th that there was a formal statement by the intelligence agencies that this was an act associated with the Russian government. And that's like a month before the election. And the DNC knew, confirmed definitively, that they'd been hacked on April 29th. So from April 29th until October 7th, the core period of the presidential election, it took that long for them to make that public declaration.

And then the second thing is, once you attribute, what do you do? How do you tell the Russians that you can't be doing this to the United States so that they don't do it again? And there was an internal debate as to what to do. And, ultimately, nothing publicly was done and there is some within the administration that feel that that was a mistake.

KEILAR: And you talk about that in the story, Eric Lipton, that you did with your colleagues David and Shane. A great piece today in "The New York Times." Thanks for coming on. We appreciate it.

LIPTON: Thank you.

KEILAR: And up next, what's in the lease agreement for Donald Trump's posh new D.C. hotel that may force him to sell it before he moves into the White House?

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[12:15:04] KEILAR: House Democrats say a federal agency has determined Donald Trump must sell his stake in his luxury Washington hotel. It's a hotel that is just blocks from the White House, brand new. And the president-elect is leasing the property from the government. He was criticized for attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony a week and a half before the election and the criticism over potential conflicts of interest has not stopped.

CNN Money's correspondent Cristina Alesci joining me now on the very latest.

What are you hearing?

CRISTINA ALESCI, CNN MONEY CORRESPONDENT: Well, the agency that we're talking about is the General Services Administration. And the lease is between the GSA and Donald Trump. And there's a provision in that lease that says -- that essentially bars anyone in elected office from being party to the lease.

Now, as we were about to go on-air, the GSA basically says it doesn't have a position on this provision in the lease. So that seemed to suggest that essentially it is not willing to engage in a long, protracted fight with the president, or the president-elect, or when he's in office. And it's increasingly unlikely that the GSA will do anything after Donald Trump is inaugurated because he gets to appoint the head of the GSA. Yes, that person has to go through a Senate confirmation process, but, ultimately, the president could fire the head of the GSA.

Brianna, this is why conflicts are so important to talk about and to report on because Donald Trump will have influence obviously over who heads these government agencies and these -- this particular government agency has business with Donald Trump's business empire. Look, ultimately, all of this is going to have to be sorted out. My guess is they come to some sort of compromise that makes both sides feel good and that avoids any kind of acrimonious headlines.

KEILAR: What is this, though? If their -- the GSA now saying just before you came on air that they don't have a position, and yet we were hearing that they do have a position. What is the -- what's going on there?

ALESCI: What's going on is here -- what's going on here is the House Dems on the Oversight Committee want to draw attention to conflicts of interest. And they came out with a statement this morning saying, Donald Trump can be -- would be in violation of the term of this lease, which looks like, on the face of it, technically, that's true. But you and I know, in Washington, D.C., there is a lot of gray area. And when you talk about contracts specifically, because I was an M&A reporter for a long time, I know that there are ways to negotiate and there is some disagreement about the technicalities in these agreements that there may be some kind of way for Donald Trump to somehow keep ownership or transfer it to his children and for this lease to exist.

KEILAR: Yes.

ALESCI: For -- for it to be OK for a president-elect, or a president, to have an agreement with the federal government that will help his bottom -- or hurt -- help or hurt his bottom line, which is in and of itself the big question.

KEILAR: All right, the Trump Hotel maybe not becoming a Holiday Inn. OK, I hear what you're saying. Cristina Alesci, in New York, thank you.

And I want to bringing in my panel now. Molly Ball is a political writer for "The Atlantic, "and Carol Lee is a White House reporter for "The Wall Street Journal."

OK, so the GSA is saying that they -- as Cristina reported there, that they don't necessarily have a position. But it would be odd, right, for the GSA to end up fighting with the president? I mean who's going to win here, right?

MOLLY BALL, POLITICAL WRITER, "THE ATLANTIC": Well, that's the problem. Just as she was saying, the GSA is a part of the executive branch. The president is in charge of the executive branch. Checks and balances have to exist in the other branches because the executive branch is very hard for it to hold itself accountable. As she was saying, Donald Trump can just fire the head of the GSA, hire a new head of GSA if they make a determination that he doesn't like.

KEILAR: What happens -- because we also see the conflicts of interest seem endless that we're hearing about. Donald Trump Jr., it turns out, was actively involved in interviews candidates for the interior position. We've heard other instances of Eric and Ivanka being in conversations either with foreign leaders or involved in transition stuff. When does this come to a head? Is it something that we might see in the courts, do you think, Carol?

CAROL LEE, WHITE HOUSE REPORTER, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": Potentially, but, you know, they were -- the Trump transition was supposed to get out in front of this, this week. They were supposed to have this press conference. That's been delayed. And so it sounds like they're going to let this play out until right up to the inauguration. And that gives people very little time to really run through exactly what they're doing right before he takes office and then is, you know, the president and is overseeing all of these agencies and his businesses. And so, you know, they're letting it play out for a while. There's -- there are going to be -- Congress is going to be critical in checks and balances in terms of what a President Trump does and the courts.

KEILAR: The --

BALL: Well, and there's a couple of things we know about Trump from the campaign, right? Number one, it's a family affair. His business has always been a family business.

[12:20:03] KEILAR: And voters know that.

BALL: His campaign was run by his family.

KEILAR: (INAUDIBLE).

BALL: So that -- I don't think we can expect that to change. He's always held -- kept his family very close, and his adult children and his son-in-law, his closest advisors. Number two, Trump thinks he can get away with things that people like us talk about, right? He doesn't think he's subject to the normal rules. He thinks he can defy the disapproval of sort of officials who say it's never been done this way before and so he probably thinks he can get away with a lot of stuff that previous politicians have not gotten away with.

KEILAR: I want to ask you about this Russia story while I have you here. Donald Trump has denied -- flat out denied what intel officials agree on, which is, Russia was behind this hacking of the DNC and other U.S. government entities. Donald Trump, won't he need -- and, Carol, you can speak to this as someone who's covered the White House for years. At some point isn't he going to need to appeal to the American people and say, look, I have intel that backs up what I'm telling you I need to do. Doesn't this hurt him?

LEE: Of course. Yes, it could. You know, you have -- it's really remarkable what's happening right now. You have an incoming president who's already at odds with the intelligence community. And the people that are going to brief him every day and are going to -- well, if he chooses to take the briefings every day and are going to be giving him evidence to make very critical decisions about nation security. And if he is now challenging the legitimacy of their intelligence, it raises the question of when he actually does -- believes something or presents something to the country, that the question is going to be, well, why would we believe -- these are the same people that you said, you know, we couldn't believe on the Russia hacks, so why should we believe them now?

And it's just raising -- it's morale. It's hurting morale in a -- at the CIA and the other intelligence agencies and it's -- it's creating this whole fight before he even takes office that could really come back to bite him.

KEILAR: Speak to that because this issue of morale is pretty fascinating. Some people would say, oh, it hurts morale, whatever. But we're talking -- these are human beings who are doing very important work. And when they're told essentially what you're doing doesn't matter, what can the fallout be from that?

BALL: Well, I mean, the prospect for Donald Trump is that his own intelligence community declares war on him and we could see all kinds of things with, you know, selective leaks and stories being put out and information being released if they feel that the president is trying to undermine them. And, you know, Donald Trump is not someone who really formulates his believed based on evidence. He believes what he wants to believe and he ignores the facts and the evidence that don't agree with his view. That's what he's been doing with this hacking story. He did it repeatedly throughout the campaign. And so, you know, I think that we could see a real backlash from some of the agencies that feel that they're being undermined. That creates, you know, constitutional problems and it certainly creates the prospect for a lot of conflicts in this administration in the years to come.

KEILAR: Well, we have our work cut out for us. We do. Carol Lee, Molly Ball, thank you so much to both of you.

Up next, the cease-fire that we reported on just 24 hours ago in Aleppo, Syria, well, it is now in shambles. The dire situation there, more desperate than ever.

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[12:26:37] KEILAR: Breaking news from overseas now. In Syria, a cease- fire that was supposed to let thousands of people safely get out of the city of Aleppo, including many women and children, has fallen apart. They are shooting and shelling there again. This is a deal that was made just yesterday between Turkish and Russian officials and the hope was that tens of thousands of civilians could be evacuated from Aleppo, which Syrian rebels held ever since the Arab Spring. Today witnesses say the Syrian army is close to taking Aleppo back.

Frederik Pleitgen just left Aleppo. He is watching developments for us from Beirut.

And, Frederik, tell us about who broke the cease-fire and what this means for all of those people who are trapped in the middle of the fighting.

FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's absolutely devastating for those civilians who are trapped right there in the middle of the fighting. You know, some of the reports that we're getting is that even by the standards of those rebel enclaves in eastern Aleppo, the situation there on the ground for the civilians is more catastrophic than it ever has been in the past. There's barely any food. There's obviously almost no medical supplies. You know, you have wounded people in there. You have sick people in there. We have to keep in mind that right now in Aleppo the weather is really bad. It's very cold. There's been torrential rain. So these are weak people. Some of them are wounded and they're very traumatized people as well and at this point in time they simply can't get out.

And now on top of all this, they don't have this agreement that would see them evacuated to other places. Instead, there is full-on fighting once again, Brianna. The latest that we're getting is that that fighting is very bad. There's opposition sources who say that more than 100 artillery shells have fallen on that district that's still held by the rebels, a very small place, and also that warplanes have been pounding it as well. We're also getting reports now that apparently the rebels have detonated several car bombs to try and stop the Syrian government forces from advancing, because by all accounts it looks as though now that this deal has fallen apart, the Syria forces and all their allied militias seem to want to force a decision on the battlefield. Remember, they had been making massive gains before.

What's going on, however, is that the countries that brokered this deal in the first play, Russia and Turkey as well, they're apparently trying to talk, trying to get it back on track. But, of course, with every minute that passes and with every shell that continues to be fired, the hope of that happening becomes more bleak, Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Fred Pleitgen for us, monitoring the situation there in Aleppo. Thank you.

The American involvement in Syria has been mostly limited to training and helping local forces in the fight guess ISIS. And just a few days ago, the Pentagon announced a new deployment of U.S. troops to Syria, nearly doubling the number of American forces authorized to operate in Syria. CNN's Fareed Zakaria spoke to President Obama about the challenge of creating any kind of foreign policy there.

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FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST, CNN'S "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": He believes -- I think with some justification -- seven presidents tried to do this. Theodore Roosevelt is the first president to talk about universal health care and he actually got it done. He is -- he is more -- as aware of anybody else of the limitations. He would argue that a lot of them were forced on him. They were compromises he had to make.

ANDERSON COOPER, ANCHOR, CNN'S "AC360": Right (ph).

ZAKARIA: But at the end of the day, he got it done. And he -- I think my guess is the Trump question that you were asking, it's probably more than anything else about Obamacare. About --

COOPER: Keeping at least parts of it?

ZAKARIA: Keeping parts --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Fareed is with me now live from New York.

And, Fareed, this was a fascinating interview that you did with President Obama. Almost an exit interview where you focused on his legacy. When you asked him about Syria, how does he see this crisis as part of his legacy?