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Erin Burnett Outfront
Attorney: Sterling May Sue The NBA; Officials: Search Area "Can Now Be Discounted"; Another Near Collision In The Sky; Lawmakers to Obama: Shinseki Must Go; Source: Former Microsoft CEO Set to Buy Clippers for $2B
Aired May 29, 2014 - 19:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ERIN BURNETT, CNN HOST: Next, another major setback on the hunt for Flight 370. Have searchers been looking in the wrong spot the entire time?
And then for the fifth time in one month, two planes involved in a near collision in the United States.
And an OUTFRONT investigation, rampage killings by affluent young men. Did their parents make a huge mistake by sending them to therapy? Let's go OUTFRONT.
Good evening, everyone. I'm Erin Burnett. OUTFRONT tonight, breaking news, embattled Clippers owner, Donald Sterling declaring war on the NBA. We also have a report from the "Los Angeles Times" that the former Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer will be buying the L.A. Clippers for $2 billion. Sterling's lawyer is speaking to Wolf Blitzer calling the NBA's fine and lifetime ban, efforts to force to Sterling to give up his team quote, "draconian remedies."
Making it clear Sterling is going to take this to the court if the league moves ahead with Tuesday's vote to terminate Sterling's ownership over those racist comments that he made.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAXWELL BLECHER, DONALD STERLING'S ATTORNEY: On Tuesday, they will confiscate his team under terms that are by constitution and bylaws, they'll do that illegally. And if they don't want a lawsuit challenging that conduct, they need to let us know before Tuesday.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BURNETT: Our senior legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin is OUTFRONT. Jeffrey, you are part of that interview. You asked a lot of questions. Now of course, we have these reports that could already be a deal here, right, that you could have the former CEO of Microsoft buying the Clippers. What is going to happen here? I mean, are they going to fight back?
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: I think there is going to be a deal. You know, I thought the most interesting thing the lawyer said was he was not suing now because he wanted to give Shelly Sterling the chance to negotiate a deal. If "The L.A. Times" report is true, she has done that. The NBA wants a deal. He, Donald Sterling, apparently is willing to accept a deal. This looks like it's going to be resolved before Tuesday.
BURNETT: And is $2 billion a good deal for that? Because the great irony is in forcing, Donald Sterling to sell this, you are handing the guy, I mean, I forgot what he bought the team for --
TOOBIN: It's $12 million or $13 million.
BURNETT: Yes, OK, and now the report is $2 billion.
TOOBIN: That's called a good investment, I think.
BURNETT: Yes. I mean, that is, again, we don't know if this is true. But that will be at the very high end. So this would mean that, you know, that lawyer has to be smiling.
TOOBIN: Absolutely. You know, the terrific, tremendous sad irony of all of this is that Donald Sterling by embarrassing himself, embarrassing the league, by really engaging in this really ugly series of statements has made himself an enormous pot of money. So he has been embarrassed, $2 billion solves a lot of embarrassment.
BURNETT: I mean, it sure does. When you talked to the lawyer today and you were asking all these questions, and he was saying look, the league has no case. But it sounds like from your perspective here that there is -- there is a winner here.
TOOBIN: Absolutely. The league has a very good case. This is a private association. They can decide who is in and who is out. And clearly, at least as far as I'm concerned, this conduct would be grounds for throwing him out. His lawsuit, if Donald Sterling were to file one, would be a long drawn out disaster for all concerned, mostly for Sterling. And Max Blecher, the lawyer, is no dummy. He knows that a deal is very much in everyone's interest, more than a lawsuit. And that looks like where we're headed.
BURNETT: I mean, thank you very much, Jeffrey Toobin. But I got to say, I mean, you know, if we end up with this report being true, we knew there were bids coming in, but you would be looking at, you know, $1.99 billion game for Donald Sterling in all of this, if indeed the Microsoft CEO is buying the Clippers.
And now to our other top story tonight, another stunning admission the country leading the hunt for Malaysia Flight 370 says it's been looking in the wrong spot.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WARREN TRUSS, AUSTRALIAN DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has now advised the search in the vicinity of the acoustic detections can be considered complete. And in his professional judgment, the area can now be discounted as the final resting place for MH370.
(END VIDEO CLIP) BURNETT: That comes on the heels of the U.S. Navy bombshell. An official telling CNN the underwater pings thought to be from MH 370 aren't.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL DEAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR SALVAGE AND DIVING, U.S. NAVY: I'd have to say at this point, based on all of the imagery data we collected and looked at, if that black box were nearby, we would have picked it up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BURNETT: Rene Marsh has been breaking this story. Rene, Australia admitting the plane isn't at the search location.
RENE MARSH, CNN AVIATION AND REGULATION CORRESPONDENT: They're essentially confirming what we told you just 24 hours ago. Flight 370 is not where they thought it was. They searched a 329-square-foot zone where the four underwater pings were detected, and it simply is not there. Now a U.S. Navy official told CNN the very same thing yesterday. We now know that because they didn't find anything.
The search area expands to about 23,000 square miles. That's a lot of ground to cover. A much larger area to focus on. We're talking about hundreds of miles elsewhere along that Inmarsat arc and we do know that that search won't resume until months from now -- Erin.
BURNETT: Are they giving up on the pings altogether?
MARSH: Well, again, we know that the U.S. Navy official said in very plain language yesterday that those signals are most likely not from the black boxes. We should note, though, hours after that interview aired, the Navy tried to walk back that comment a little bit, calling it premature or speculative. Perhaps premature. But this morning, we want to be clear. The Navy did say it was accurate.
But it appears that Australian authorities are taking a little bit more cautious approach when it comes to the pings, saying at this point that at this stage, they do not understand the signals sufficiently to understand the cause. And they say that they are now studying them. So it is clear that the emphasis is really on that Inmarsat data, not so much on the pings.
BURNETT: Just pretty incredible that they're now just getting to that conclusion, 50 days after they have listened to the pings. I mean, it's not as if the pings were still pinging, right? It's been 50 days since they stopped. Thanks to Rene. The outrage about this is pouring in. How could searchers make such a massive error, losing literally months of time in the hunt for the plane? Tom Foreman reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Almost from the start, families of the missing passengers have been furious, accusing the Malaysian government of incompetence.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're all bloody liars and you're lying to us again now.
FOREMAN: While critics have steadily been suggesting the Australians might be putting too much trust in one theory about where the jet came down.
SARAH BAJC, PARTNER OF AMERICAN ON BOARD FLIGHT 370: The reality is every lead has been a false lead so far.
FOREMAN: And nothing now is easing that frustration or quieting that fear.
DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: I don't think this is a well-run investigation at this point. I know that they're making efforts to reset it. They've done incredible things. They've really tried to make this thing work, but every time there is something positive, it doesn't pan out. It just doesn't pan out.
TONY ABBOTT, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: I'm very confident that the signals that we are detecting are from the black box.
FOREMAN: Examples, this was on April 11th. Listen to the official assessment of those pings.
COMMANDER WILLIAM MARKS, ABOARD THE USS BLUE RIDGE (via telephone): We are detecting very continuous pings coming through in a manner consistent with exactly what you would expect from a black box. We've ruled out that it was anything natural or anything from commercial shipping or anything like that.
FOREMAN: The sudden reversal on that subject once seen as so promising is just the latest incident of hopes being raised for the families and then crushed. And there are many others. Despite flying thousands of miles week after week, search planes came up empty. Even a highly touted high-tech sub hunter found no oil slicks, no life rafts. Not one of many supposed eyewitness accounts of the crash ever panned out.
Floating debris has been reported dozens of times to much excitement, but not a single scrap has proven to be from the plane. Even the Bluefin underwater search robot, which was lowered amid much anticipation searched 328 square miles of ocean floor and came up empty.
FOREMAN (on camera): When you look at the map of all of the search areas, it does look chaotic. Authorities insist between early radar tracking and later satellite data, the plane must still be somewhere here off the coast of Australia. And they believe they will find it if only they keep looking.
(voice-over): But that is becoming a harder sell and the anger more difficult for families to contain as the disappointing months mount and the fate of Flight 370 with everyone aboard remains a mystery. Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington. (END VIDEOTAPE)
BURNETT: Miles O'Brien is in Barrow, Alaska tonight. Miles, the question I have to you, you've been so frustrated not getting a lot of this data from Inmarsat. They were so confident. They told us again and again, these are the pings, and guess what, it's a huge mistake. They're not the pings. How could this happen?
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Erin, I think it's nothing short of scandalous how these public officials have taken the raw data from what is a reasonably good search and put an unreasonable amount of optimism on their public statements about it. It's just pure varnish. And it's really toying with the emotions of these families. The experts all along have had a lot more skepticism about the pings, about the Inmarsat data, you name it. There has been much more of a sense that this is maybe possibly the location.
What you saw in public was a degree of certainty which never existed. And so these public officials have to apologize to these families, I think. And one way to make good on an apology right now is to lay all the cards on the table. Release all the data they're working from, all the radar information, including defense radar, which might have come into play here, particularly when we think about the Australian defense radar.
Did it in fact return a target from the airliner? Is that why they're so certain that they're searching in the right place? This data needs to come out now if these public officials ever have a chance of regaining the credibility of the general public, and more importantly, these families who have been through so much.
BURNETT: The families, Miles is talking about, and the public, with no one knowing what happened. I think he used the word there scandalous. It seems so fair.
OUTFRONT next, so here is the question. If those pings did not come from the plane, then where is the plane? Our experts with where authorities should be searching now.
Plus, another near disaster in the sky. For fifth time in a month, two planes just miss each other in the U.S.
And Brad Pitt attacked at a movie premier. Tonight he fights back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: It's America versus Australia in the battle over the missing plane tonight. The deputy prime minister of Australia tried to defend his work.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUSS: We are still very confident that the resting place of the aircraft is in the southern ocean and along the seventh ping line.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BURNETT: The U.S. Navy's though, deputy director of Ocean Engineering has raised a major red flag.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: I would have to say at this point based on all of the imagery data we have collected and looked at, if that black box were nearby, we would have picked it up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BURNETT: So should the pings be trusted or not? It's a crucial question because it's been 50 days that they have been centering the entire search around those pings. Joining me now, David Mearns, the director of Blue Water Recoveries, which has found 21 major shipwrecks along with our own Richard Quest and Arthur Rosenberg.
All right, you all have very ardently argued different point of views. Arthur, you have been skeptical about these pings from the beginning.
ARTHUR ROSENBERG, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Correct. So here is the bottom line. In terms of the pings and their -- whether they're accurate or not, there is two ways to look at this. One way is in gross terms. We heard pings. We went to look where the pings were. We didn't find the wreckage. Therefore the pings are erroneous. No one has talked about the technical side, the Australians, the Malaysians, the United States giving us technical reasons why they're not. But this is what we know. Number one, the frequencies were off.
BURNETT: Frequencies were off.
ROSENBERG: They were supposed to be 37.5. They came in at 33.3. Another one was at 27. Number two, the distances between the pings was always way too large. These pingers only put out a signal that can be heard one, two, three miles maximum. You're talking 10, 20, 30, 40 miles that they allegedly heard pings. It just doesn't make sense.
Number three, there was a Chinese -- one of the Chinese ships at a spare pinger, which I was told was actually put in the water. There was a British nuclear submarine, which we never heard a lot about after the very beginning, which allegedly could have put out a signal that would have been picked up.
BURNETT: These are things that could have sent false pings.
ROSENBERG: These are some of the technical reasons why you have to look at it with a jaundiced eye.
BURNETT: All right, and you have. At least at this point it seems you're right. David, I think you disagree. What about on these technical points, though, which have been raised many times. Do you think these are the pings? DAVID MEARNS, DIRECTOR, BLUE WATER RECOVERIES: Yes, I do. There is some question about the pings, I understand that were heard on April 8th. But the pings that were heard on April 5th, I still believe in what I understand there is still a great deal of confidence in those. And let's take a look at the technical reasons that Mike Dean said he is discounting these pings.
One, he says that it's possible that the towed pinger locator itself has actually emitted the sounds that it heard. Now, that is impossible. So it indicates a basic misunderstanding about Mr. Dean about this. This is a passive hydrophone. Passive hydrophone means it only listens. It can't ping. How could it have heard a sound that it can't even emit? Secondly --
BURNETT: Hold on a second. I want to get to your second point. But Richard, from your perspective, looking at both of these sides here, who is right?
RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: I think there is elements both are right in the sense. Arthur's argument infuriates me, simply because it's the argument that says they're all idiots and they must have got it all wrong. These are some of the most experienced operators in the business. They obviously took into account all of those issues that Arthur piously now puts forward.
And they came up with a decision that they still had to search because it was the best information they've got. So when you put it all together, and when you talk about officials that were too overconfident, if you go back and read what they said, they never said it's there. They said we're very confident in what we have found. What would you have them say? Well, we think it might be, but we're not quite sure so we're going go and have a look.
BURNETT: Maybe that would have been the honest answer and not to express too much confidence.
QUEST: No. Because they were -- because the experts in places like the Australian Acoustic Center of Excellence said it was the pings. They are the men and women who know about these things. You have to go on advice.
BURNETT: OK, go ahead, Arthur.
ROSENBERG: Richard, you're right and you're wrong. I agree that the end result is that they had to go to look, regardless of whether their confidence level for the pings was very high or very low. It was something that could not be disregarded. So the bottom line is they would have had to search whether they were 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong there is no question about that. And the Australians are far from idiots, which you've overstated it as you always do. They have some of the best acoustical knowledge on the planet.
BURNETT: Yes.
ROSENBERG: But it appears that they're wrong. They were wrong. These were not the pings. BURNETT: But why would it, David, take 50 days for them to figure this out. I know first of all you do think it is the pings. We haven't heard them for 50 days. So they would have known they weren't the pings earlier, right?
MEARNS: Exactly. If they knew that the pings were emitted from their own ship, which was one of the other reasons that Michael Dean came up with, do you think over a 50-day period they couldn't have figured that out? The first procedure that you do when you're starting the searches is you secure all the acoustic devices on your own ship. You turn off the echo locator. You turn off everything that could create a sound like this.
And I have heard directly from the ship that when they heard these pings on April 5th, they were so excited, they were running around the vessel, turning off every single piece of machinery, even to the point of going into people's cabins and turning off radios. They wanted that ship as quiet as it possibly could be to hear it.
Now, we're not hearing just one ping here or something. We're hearing a repeatable series of pings over two hours at the correct repetition rate, at the correct pulse length, at the correct peaked amplitude. You cannot reproduce this stuff. You can't reproduce it by natural means or the earth isn't doing it, the ocean isn't doing it.
The animals are not doing it and their ship is not doing it. And a broken towed pinger locator would be the last thing to do it. If it is broken, how could it even work to hear these things?
BURNETT: Interesting argument.
MEARNS: All the reasons that Michael Dean gave, frankly, showed to me that that's not a credible explanation for what happened here.
BURNETT: All right, well, thanks very much to all three of you. And please, all of you weigh in.
Still to come, another near mid-air collision. Two airliners coming within a quarter mile of a collision in the U.S. It's happening so often, could we all be in danger?
An OUTFRONT investigation tonight, young, rich, and murderers. Did their access to money and therapy and parents who tried to help them actually enable them to kill?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: Now to another scare in the skies, a near mid-air collision. Two airplanes a hair's breadth from a horrific crash. An Alaska Airlines 737 filled with 145 passengers and five crewmembers a quarter mile from a cargo plane seconds away. NTSB officials say air traffic control did not warn the planes. Alaska Airlines tells CNN the collision avoidance system alarm on the 737 is actually what saved those lives. OUTFRONT tonight, CNN aviation analyst, Mary Schiavo. Mary, I mean, this is a trend. This is the fifth incident we have reported on in the last month of a near miss of a mid-air collision passenger jets involved. What is going on?
MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, the Office of Inspector General, my old office has studied this many, many times. They found that several things are wrong. The air traffic control mistakes, mistakes made by the controllers themselves are on the dramatic increase. Now the FAA says it's just better reporting. But the inspector general found no, they don't actually report them as much as they should. They're increasing.
There is a lack of adequate training. The training gets spread out over three years. They don't report the problems and they don't have good procedures in place, like this one, where they had to do a go-round and they both turned the same way. So they need to do all those things to correct it. And that is a very alarming statistic because they are rising.
BURNETT: How often is a go-around? And when you're a passenger on a plane, are you able to tell or feel when your plane is in a quote/unquote "near miss situation?" Suddenly you feel those engines surge. Your plane suddenly goes up or down. Can you tell?
SCHIAVO: You sure can. When you're coming in and they've got you all buckled up and the flight attendants are seated and you look out and see is the ground coming up, and all of the sudden you feel the engines roar and you're pushed back in your seat, that's a go-round. You have just been through a near miss. It happens dozens of times a day. Over 4,000 times a year.
BURNETT: It's incredibly terrifying. I think everyone watching can remember an incident of that happening to them. I mean, are you worried there could end up being a horrific crash? You're talking about near miss, near miss, near miss, but is it going to happen?
SCHIAVO: Well, yes. Unfortunately, when you see the statistics, and what we always want to watch in safety statistics is that they're headed in the right direction. These are headed in the wrong direction. They're increasing. Now, there have been so many saves by TCAS, the Traffic Collision Avoidance System. That miraculous piece of equipment is required on commercial passenger planes in the United States that is life-saving.
But there are too many close calls. So we have to turn that around and the pilots play a very important role. Passengers can't do a thing. But pilots have to report it and demand action from the FAA. And if you make a record of it, there is hope of change.
BURNETT: So terrifying. Thank you very much, Mary.
And still OUTFRONT, the outrage over the VA scandal continues. Tonight, TV host and U.S. Navy veteran, Montel Williams has harsh words.
And Brad Pitt punched in the face at a movie premier. Tonight he fights back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: Tonight, onslaught. The calls mounting for President Obama's Veterans Affairs secretary to step down. First, Republicans. Tonight, dozens of Democrats demanding he'd go.
At this hour, 11 Democrats in the Senate, at least 20 in the House, say Shinseki must resign.
The outrage growing after an inspector general report pointed to, quote, "systemic problems throughout the V.A. health care system." In Phoenix, at least 1,700 veterans waiting to see a doctor weren't even actually put on a waiting list, and some of them died.
Jim Acosta is OUTFRONT from the White House.
Jim, you know, the scandal is getting bigger and bigger. You've now got Democrats getting on board, not defending the administration. What's the White House saying?
JIM ACOSTA, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Erin, the writing may be on the wall for V.A. Secretary Eric Shinseki. For the first time since the V.A. scandal broke, the White House is declining to say whether Shinseki has the confidence of the president. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney refused to answer that question of whether Shinseki has the president's full backing. Instead, Carney said the president wants to see the findings of an internal audit Shinseki is expected to hand over any day now.
Here is a bit of what Carney had to say.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ACOSTA: How does he run the department if he doesn't have the full confidence of the president? How does he conduct this investigation if he doesn't have the full confidence of the president?
JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: The president looks forward to the preliminary review that he asked the secretary to provide to him. And when it comes to general matters of accountability, I think the president said that he told this to Secretary Shinseki, including that day when he met with him, that, you know, he wants to see what the results of that review are.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ACOSTA: Now, as you mentioned, a growing list of Senate Democrats, many up for reelection are calling for Shinseki to go. The last straw for the senators, as you said in an inspector general's report pointing to systemic issues inside the V.A. system, noting those 1,700 veterans were never put on a weight list in Phoenix, and were likely, quote, "lost or forgotten," unquote.
As for the White House, Erin, an official cautions the president's loyalty only goes so far. Mr. Obama stood by Kathleen Sebelius because officials were confident the broken Obamacare Web site could be fixed. Remember all that, Erin? Well, the White House is not sure about Shinseki's ability to repair the damage at the V.A.
BURNETT: All right. Thank you very much, Jim Acosta.
And OUTFRONT tonight, longtime talk show host, Montel Williams. You all know him. You may not know this, he spent 22 years serving in the U.S. military before his television career.
You just heard Jay Carney. We're waiting to see the review.
MONTEL WILLIAMS, TALK SHOW HOST: You see, this is the problem. It's still the political conversation, and guys are dying every day.
You know, I wanted to tell you, I wanted to stop to the top and say one thing. I have to apologize to the president of the United States, myself, right now. I have to do so because yesterday I made a statement about something that he didn't say at the speech at West Point and this has been politicized.
And I didn't want this to be politicized like it's being politicized right now. We're not talking about the truth.
(CROSSTALK)
BURNETT: You said he didn't talk about this V.A. scandal.
WILLIAMS: All I wanted him to say, and I didn't write his speech, but I was saying, the point was I remember sitting at the United States Naval Academy, listening to the keynote speech of my graduation, getting ready to throw my hat in the air.
And I would have loved to this time have heard from the president of the United States say, no matter what you see going on with the V.A. right now, I'm going to guarantee you we have your back. This will never happen moving forward -- because those guys have to walk out of West Point and get ready to go fight the battle that both sides of Congress and senator are trying to put us into in Africa, in the Ukraine. They're trying to send more boys off to die, and we won't even settle the problem here.
Erin, please, look -- I'm telling you, I don't -- this is not going after the president. This is not going after the Congress or Senate.
BURNETT: People are turning it into a political statement against them.
(CROSSTALK)
WILLIAMS: That's not what I'm saying. Yes, I wish he would have said something. I wish right now that the politics would stop.
Look, you can cut the head off a chicken. This is so crazy. My brother told me this stupid story. There was a chicken called Magic Mike. They cut the head off the chicken. That chicken lived for 19 months.
They fed the chicken through an eye dropper. I'm not kidding. They took it around to carnivals. It was a terrible thing to do.
Think about the V.A. for a second. They can chop the head off. The chicken is still going to run around for the next 19 month, not getting the job done.
Let's get the job done.
BURNETT: So, how do we get the job done? By the way, this administration is an administration that has tried to do things for veterans, right? They talk about, hey, veteran unemployment, it's come down. Veteran homelessness, it's come down. The economy has gotten better over that time.
But they have tried to do some things for veterans. And yet here we are a country where even on the five blocks around this building, you see four or five people on the street who are homeless who are veterans asking for money.
WILLIAMS: I try to stop and give them something to eat every time I see one.
Look, right now, if you follow me on Twitter and @Montel_WIlliams, you can go up and tweet #vasurge.
Here is what has to happen. Remember four years ago? It took Congress and Senate 16 days to figure out we need to spend $50 billion and put 33,000 soldier in the field, to put their lives on the line, leaving body parts in Afghanistan. It took them 16 days to figure it out.
We launch it. It was done in 90 days.
We can surge right now. Surge. Watch this -- the president doesn't need the Congress, doesn't need the Senate, doesn't need anybody.
All he needs to do is tell each branch of the service -- watch this -- I want you to open up all the active duty hospitals and clinics on bases right now. I'm going to issue you a temporary order as the commander-in-chief. I'm going to bring on, back on temporary duty, temporary active duty, some of them the corpsmen who have just been let out, bring them on and help us in 90 days clear the backlog. We can do this. We can do this.
I'm talking to --
BURNETT: And you're saying he can do this without Congress. He can do this now?
WILLIAMS: It doesn't cost anything. It's in the budget right now.
BURNETT: Right now, there seems to be, you know, a bit of hiding behind reports and waiting for accountability, and you're saying there is something that can be done now.
WILLIAMS: Because some soldiers could walk right on to a base with any veteran should be able to. Of course, the president going to have to issue an order as the commander-in-chief to allow veterans to go on active duty bases to be treated..
BURNETT: Yes.
WILLIAMS: We're talking about for 90 days, 100 days, just a triage. Let's get a baseline.
Erin, we're talking about a debt that we have to pay for the next 50 years. We don't even know what the baseline is. There are guys who haven't been seen for two years. They went out as an amputee. They don't know what it's going to cost to take care of them.
So, we need to do something and get the politics out of it and start today.
BURNETT: Well, and we could do that today. And bottom line, though, is -- and I see your point about the chicken. I think it's a horrific analogy, but I think the fact that it is so horrific (AUDIO GAP) should the top still go?
WILLIAMS: Of course.
BURNETT: So he should go? No matter what? It's a fait accompli at this point?
WILLIAMS: I remember distinctly when I served as an officer. I'm the head -- the commanding officer. The buck stops with me. We need to restructure the V.A. We have needed to do this for 30 years.
You want to look at studies? They studied this over and over and over and over again. This president is going to be gone and they'll do another study.
Stop the stupid. Please. Guys are dying.
You know one of the most ignorant things that is going on right now? Again, I'm not politicizing this. But there have been statements made that look what the V.A. has the last ten years. We're taking care of all those Agent Orange guys. Really?
Do you know that we have almost 70,000 blue water sailors who served on ships that were pier side in Vietnam that because they didn't put boots on the ground, we're not protecting them from the Agent Orange damage that they got from the air, from the water that they used to drink. We denied this.
Seventy thousand lives will pass before we get this right. We need to stop.
And guess what? This is our fault. My fault, I'm sorry, your fault, we the people are the ones who got to celebrate this last weekend on Memorial Day on the lives and the body parts left in the field. And we don't respect them enough to demand that they get the care that they deserve. Come on.
BURNETT: All right. Montel, thank you.
WILLIAMS: Yes, ma'am. Thank you.
BURNETT: Beautifully put.
Well, as concerns amount about domestic surveillance, one New York City startup is actually asking residents to track each other.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BURNETT (voice-over): Americans spend roughly 37 billion hours a year in lines, at the grocery store, for a hamburger, at their favorite restaurants. Imagine if you didn't have to.
That may soon become a reality in New York where they're embracing new recognition technology that will count every pedestrian in the city.
NICHOLAS O'BRIEN, NYC OFFICE OF THE MAYOR: Every neighborhood in the city walks. We really need to have an understanding of what that activity looks like so that we can serve New Yorkers better.
BURNETT: Over 60 percent of commuters in New York travel by foot or public transit. For a city of 8.4 million, that's a lot of people to count.
O'BRIEN: The Department of Transportation counts pedestrians around the city. And they send a few people to go twice a year. And they just sit there with umpire pitch counters. It doesn't really give us a view of what it's like day in, day out through different seasons.
BURNETT: A startup called place meter is trying to change that by providing a real-time picture of New York's pedestrian traffic, using hundreds of existing video feeds around the city.
ALEX WINTER: We layer in computer vision algorithms that make it possible to detect and count people.
BURNETT: Using online traffic video feeds, place meter currently counts about 10 million people a day. They can even count how many people are inside a building.
The city is already using the data, providing pedestrian counts to small business owners in the city's online business atlas. And there is promising potential for integration with consumer apps.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If our data was instead of Yelp or Google Maps, you could set up an alert telling you that restaurant you always wanted to try but is always packed right now at the right time to go.
BURNETT: Today, the company only covers about 25 percent of the city. To help count the rest, place meter is offering to pay residents to stream video from their own windows using an old smartphone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Today, we count different kinds of vehicles on pedestrians. Tomorrow we're going to start detecting and classifying gender, then age. Then we're going to start depicting people with strollers or with bags and things like that.
BURNETT: With detection technology rapidly improving, an obvious concern is whether their systems will be able to track the details of our daily lives.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we do is turn on video feeds into data. Video feeds by nature are a little creepy, just somebody looks at them. In our case, a computer looks at them. So, whatever one frame gets for our system, we process it, turn it into some data, and then we delete it.
O'BRIEN: I think there is a lot more things we can do if we had better understanding of the pedestrian activity in the city. When we have to go schedule trash pickup, how many police we need to deploy to a particular area. The better information you have on a place, the better you're going to be able to manage it.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BURNETT: And still to come, an exclusive OUTFRONT investigation into a string of young affluent men committing mass murders. Did their -- the fact that their families try to help them and give them therapy make them do it?
And Brad Pitt attacked at a movie premier. Jeanne Moos tells us what she knows about the attacker's history.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
BURNETT: And the breaking news. Former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer is set to buy Donald Sterling's clippers for $2 billion, a source tells CNN.
This is an incredible number, everyone -- $2 billion almost four times the highest previous NBA sales price ever paid which was previously this year, $550 million for the Milwaukee Bucks. It also compares to the $13 million -- million -- that Donald Sterling paid to buy the team. The upshot of all of this is he is making about $1.9 billion.
Tonight, we're learning new information about last month's police encounter with Elliot Rodger, the young man who murdered six people on Friday in Santa Barbara. According to the Santa Barbara County sheriff's department, authorities making a welfare check say they found Rodger to be, quote, "shy, timid and polite."
And when they questioned him about the disturbing videos his parents had found, the young man described he had trouble fitting in socially and they were merely a way of expressing himself. A family friend tells CNN that -- well, those words might have come from a lot of therapy. The family had tried to get Rodger help. It was a never ending battle.
This is a story that we've heard before, young men, middle class and upper class in need of help. And they get help. And then engage in acts of mass murder. Why?
Ted Rowlands is OUTFRONT.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELLIOT RODGER, ALLEGED KILLER: I will destroy you.
TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Twenty-two-year- old Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger joins a disturbing group of young male rampage killers that have a lot in common. Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza, James Holmes, the Aurora movie shooter, the Columbine killers, and Jared Loughner from the Tucson massacre, were all in their late teens to mid-20s at the time of the shootings. All of them grew up in relatively stable environments, except the Columbine shooters all attended at least some college and all of them had mental health issues.
JAMES GARBARINO, AUTHOR, "LOST BOYS: WHY OUR SONS TURN VIOLENT": They come from a world where they're cared for and nurtured. They have resources. They're protected.
ROWLANDS: PhD psychologist James Garbarino has spent more than 20 years studying and writing about murderers. He has written several books, including "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent."
While Rodger is half-Asian, Garbarino believes one of the reasons the vast majority of rampage mass killers in the U.S. are young white men is because their mental illness is mixed with an inflated ego.
GARBARINO: The environment that they're in, and the narcissism that they experience -- all of that sort of predisposes them to take on these vendettas against their perceived enemies.
RODGER: I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm a perfect guy.
GARBARINO: The same condition of a kid who is living in a poor neighborhood, who's living with gangs, who's living with abuse, living with poverty and deprivation, they will do sort of crazy things but it will be aimed at an individual, not sort of abstractly society in general.
ROWLANDS: Garbarino also believes that young men suffering from mental illness are kept afloat, which allows their delusional anger and frustration to grow, which seems to be true with Elliot Rodger, according to family friend, Simon Astaire.
SIMON ASTAIRE, FAMILY FRIEND: He had been fooling everyone for many years, and the shame is that, in the end, no one could rescue what had happened on Friday night. And what these boys who go out to kill don't understand is that when they murder one they murder many, because they don't just kill the people who are lying dead on the streets or in apartments or in galleries or in cinemas, they kill thousands and thousands of others who are connected to those.
ROWLANDS: Sadly, Garbarino believes there are more of these young men out there. And until something is done to prevent people struggling with mental illnesses from obtaining guns, we should all expect that these rampages will continue.
Ted Rowlands, CNN, Chicago.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BURNETT: Dr. Michael Welner is a forensic psychiatrist. He's had a lot of experience in these high-risk patients.
So, Doctor, I mean, what I'm so curious about here is this -- I mean, this is an incredible report with our -- Ted's investigation. I mean, basically saying getting therapy itself, these kids who are wealthy enough to have that access and those support networks could actually allow their anger and frustration to grow, could actually enable them and encourage to kill.
MICHAEL WELNER, CHAIRMAN, THE FORENSIC PANEL: I just find it fanciful, actually. I have had the unfortunate experience of having had to work and wade within the bodies as a person who interviews people who have done this and who survived their rampages and gotten to know them. And they have been black and they have been Asian and they've been white.
And I think the minute we start fusing the Donald Sterling race and politics and all of this with something that is a societal phenomenon that has other things behind it, then it gets muddy.
I will tell you this, with respect to just the question of family and therapy --
BURNETT: Yes.
WELNER: What this case has underscored for us, which is experience that I've had. He brought it out starkly, is that the person who has determined he is going to go on a mass killing is not going to tell anyone. He is not going to tell a therapist because the therapist will take it away from him. He has organized it the way he has --
BURNETT: So, what is the point of therapy, then?
WELNER: It's not. The point of therapy is to help somebody who has a psychiatric illness. But if somebody does not want to be introspective, he is not going to benefit from it. It's not that therapy is part of the problem. It's just that the approach to somebody who's not willing to take responsibility and who blames everybody around him, it's going to be a much harder hill to climb for any therapist, unless, of course, what he has can benefit from medication. And sometimes, people are resistant and suspicious and resentful because of a treatable, biological condition.
BURNETT: All right. Dr. Welner, thank you very much, we really want your feedback on that report and his response.
Still OUTFRONT, Brad Pitt attacked, and it's not the first time the attacker has struck. Jeanne Moos is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BURNETT: So, actor Brad Pitt was attacked while attending a movie premiere last night. The attacker taken into custody, charges are going to be filed, Pitt granted an emergency protective order against the guy. But this was not the first time the prankster had tried something like this in the red carpet.
Here's our Jeanne Moos.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the story of the prankster who went one too far when he attended the premiere of Angelina Jolie's latest movie, and lunged at her fiance, Brad Pitt.
Instead of getting away, Pitt got struck in the face. TMZ reported the actor's sunglasses were broken, and the guy who leaped at Pitt ended up with his pants in the clutches of security with his oddball underwear showing.
He was then arrested by the Los Angeles Police.
Vitalii Sediuk was his name.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And they said an entertainment reporter, for who?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Who put him on TV?
MOOS: Well, at this point, maybe nobody.
Ukrainian channel One Plus One says he was fired after crawling under the actress America Ferrara's dress at the Cannes Film Festival and then getting dragged away.
Now, he is being called everything from --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This jerk.
MOOS: To --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This nut.
MOOS: "What an obnoxious moron", fumed one online poster.
He first attracted when he went up to Madonna at a press conference and gave her a hydrangea.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you so much.
MOOS: But she didn't love the hydrangeas.
A mic caught Madonna saying she loathes them.
MADONNA: I absolutely loathes hydrangeas.
MOOS: For his next escapade, Sediuk tried to kiss Will Smith on the mouth, though Smith kept turning his face and finally swatted Sediuk.
WILL SMITH, ACTOR: What the hell is your problem, buddy?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm sorry, Will.
SMITH: It's just awkward, Dave.
MOOS (on camera): I suppose if anyone deserves a slap, it's us, for covering the guy.
(voice-over): In 2013, Sediuk crashed the Grammys, as Adele accepted her award, he came on stage wearing glasses while Jennifer Lopez tried to keep him at bay.
Sediuk spent about 10 hours in jail.
VITALII SEDIUK, RED CARPET PRANKSTER: It was horrible experience, but still, it was experience.
MOOS: His latest experiences involved hugging celebrity crotches. That's actor Bradley Cooper trying to get Sediuk off of him. And that is Leonardo DiCaprio, taking the lap lunge with a smile.
Sediuk also tried to crash a Metropolitan Museum gala in a mankini. Come on, Borat did that at the Cannes Film Festival eight years ago.
This kind of behavior, no wonder celebrities are getting a little crotchety.
Jeanne Moos, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BURNETT: Is Leo petting his head?
Thank you so much for watching.
Don't miss the premiere of "The Sixties" tonight at 9:00.
Anderson starts now.
