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New Day
Cruz Calls Trump A "Sniveling Coward"; Who Would Win In A Clinton-Trump Matchup?; Belgian E.R. Doctors Tell Their Stories; Threat Of Returning Foreign Fighters To Europe; 2 Americans Killed In Brussels Terror Attack; France Terror Suspect Linked To Paris Attack Ringleader. Aired 7:30-8a ET
Aired March 25, 2016 - 07:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[07:32:00] SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It's not easy to tick me off. I don't get angry, but you mess with my wife, you mess with my kids, that'll do it every time. Donald, you're a sniveling coward and leave Heidi the hell alone.
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JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: That is Senator Ted Cruz ripping into Donald Trump after the Republic front-runner retweeted an unflattering picture of Ted Cruz's wife. Now, Donald Trump insists he's not the one who started this fight, but how is team Trump responding to the sniveling coward remarks?
Trump national campaign co-chair and Trump policy adviser Sam Clovis joins us now. Sam, great to have you with us. Ted Cruz called your guy a sniveling coward. Your response?
SAM CLOVIS, TRUMP NATIONAL CAMPAIGN CO-CHAIRMAN: Well, I think when you start to elevate the rhetoric like that I think what you're really faced with is the fact that perhaps you feel a little guilty about how things evolved, and so when you get backed in a corner I think what happens is people then react that way.
I think this is just a matter of elbows getting up. We're very close. We've got three people left in the race. We started with 17. So, I'm not surprised at Sen. Cruz's reaction because it seems to be typical of his campaign.
BERMAN: You say elevate the level of rhetoric. Isn't Donald Trump also elevating the level, or lowering the level in some cases, of rhetoric by doing that retweet with the photos? Isn't he somehow responsible for perpetuating this feud?
CLOVIS: Well, I think a lot of times when you sit down and you get an opportunity -- you watch this campaign, as we have for the last several months -- I think you'll note, and I think with a great deal of clarity and accuracy here, that Mr. Trump is a tremendous counter- puncher and so that's probably what you're seeing. BERMAN: Do you realize he's saying -- you guys throw around the term counter-puncher anytime Donald Trump says something that some people construe as offensive. You say you know what, he's just reacting. He's just reacting. He chose to retweet --
CLOVIS: Prove that we're wrong, John.
BERMAN: He chose to retweet that photo.
CLOVIS: Prove that we're wrong, John.
BERMAN: He chose to retweet the photo.
CLOVIS: Prove that we're wrong, John.
BERMAN: Whether or not it's a counter-punch, is it appropriate? I don't think -- you know, I've got to know you a little bit during this campaign.
CLOVIS: Yes.
BERMAN: I don't think you would ever tweet a photo like that, so why is it OK for Donald Trump to do it?
CLOVIS: Well, I think it was unfortunate in the first place that Melania gets dragged into this.
BERMAN: Yes.
CLOVIS: And then I think one of the things that was probably off- putting about all of this was the very slow reaction of Sen. Cruz and the Cruz campaign to put up a half-hearted denial or whatever it was. And, again, I think what happens is it builds a perception of the Cruz campaign if you go back to Iowa.
You go back to Iowa and you take a look at what happened with the voter violation paper -- if you take a look at what happened.And, Mrs. Carson, in a caucus room when one of the operatives from the Cruz campaign came in and announced that Dr. Carson was leaving the race. Robocalls --
[07:35:00] BERMAN: Sam, that was -- that was Iowa.
CLOVIS: The robocalls in every -- John, let me finish. The robocalls in all the states talking about the fact -- talking about Marco Rubio, talking about Mr. Trump. So this is, again -- it's a pattern of behavior and I think what that does is it raises your defenses. When you have somebody who has that kind of pattern of behavior that raises your defenses, then you're more likely to strike out at that individual because that seems to be the general direction that that campaign goes.
They always resort -- and then, here's the thing. Then they always fain oh, they're so innocent. Oh, we didn't know anything about it. Well, come on. This pattern indicates to me that there has to be some knowledge and forethought on what's going on or they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't be doing it.
BERMAN: On the subject of patterns there are those who say that there is a pattern of Donald Trump saying and doing things that are inappropriate with women. And, first of all, you're argument seems to be two wrongs make a right, here. Is it as simple as that?
CLOVIS: No, I'm not arguing that at all. I think that anytime that you bring family members into a campaign -- I've run for office myself and I can tell you the most difficult and the most absolutely fracturing, and one of the most hurtful things is when your family members get dragged into the campaign, and then you're stuck with a position there of how do you react?
I've had it happen to me. I've had it happen to my spouse and my children. And to me it's really one of the most hurtful things that happens because you don't anticipate this. You don't think because their names aren't on the ballot. And when that happens then there is a reaction and you're going to react, and some people react differently than others.
And, again, take a look at what's going on here. Here we are -- the tensions are getting higher. We get closer and closer to closing the deal here. The math for the Cruz campaign is incredibly difficult. It's a very steep hill for them to climb. I think you're going to see more of this, unfortunately, and I really do and it's unfortunate --
BERMAN: Does that mean --
CLOVIS: -- because this is the kind of thing -- we don't need to bring families into these campaigns.
BERMAN: Do you need to keep families, though, in the campaigns even if you make the case that the Super PAC and Ted Cruz brought families in? And, of course, the Super PAC is not connected to Ted Cruz. Didn't Donald Trump keep families in the campaign by doing that retweet and saying he would spill the beans about Heidi Cruz? He's, at least, a little bit responsible, Sam, for perpetuating this.
CLOVIS: John, you and I've had this conversation and, frankly,I'm a little bit surprised we're having the conversation after the last segment with Alisyn, and I sit there and listen to those two heroes and --
BERMAN: We would like not to, but why is Donald Trump involved at all then?
CLOVIS: But why are you dwelling on this, John? Why are you dwelling on this? This has been going on throughout the entire campaign. And, frankly, I haven't heard anybody talk about all of the outrageous acts of the Cruz campaign. I haven't heard one report -- one report on any network from any reporter talking about how Ted Cruz has conducted his campaign through dirty tricks. Not one.
BERMAN: We focused a great deal. I hear her talking to CNN here who was very involved with what happened in Iowa immediately after that, so that's just patently false. You know that CNN reported what happened and didn't happen in Iowa.
CLOVIS: I haven't heard it. I haven't heard it. I haven't heard, it John. Sorry, I haven't heard it.
BERMAN: All right, we will send you the report.
CLOVIS: I'd love it. Thank you.
BERMAN: Sam Clovis, always great to talk to you and next time, again, we look forward to talking about policy.
CLOVIS: I hope we get a chance to talk about policy, John.
BERMAN: Yes, sir.
CLOVIS: That would be refreshing, wouldn't it?
BERMAN: Thank you, Sam. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon -- Mic.
MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: All right, so we are talking the election and what matters to you, the voter. For that, we turn to CNN's chief business correspondenceChristine Romans, with your money, your vote.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, you guys. We're getting the first look at whom voters would support if November's election comes down to front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The most important issue among all primary voters so far, overwhelming, the economy and jobs.
And when voters were asked who agrees with you on important issues, Clinton with 48 percent of the vote topped Trump. Next, who is more in touch with the middle class? Clinton, 51 percent to Trump's 36 percent. Twelve percent, by the way, say neither. Trump's favorability rating among non-college grads, 39 percent. His unfavorable rating, 58 percent. Not great numbers but this was one of his highest favorability ratings among all the demographics -- Michaela.
PEREIRA: All right, Christine, thank you so much for that.
All right, up next we're going to take you inside the devastation in Brussels. Alisyn had the opportunity to speak to doctors inside the E.R.'s of the Belgian capital about what they faced after those attacks. That's next.
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[07:43:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to NEW DAY. In the minutes and hours after Tuesday's terror attacks, hospitals, local area emergency rooms went into overdrive to treat the wounded. We had a chance to visit some of those doctors who saw firsthand the horrors of these attacks, as well the bravery and resilience of the victims and their loved ones.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CAMEROTA: At this hospital in Brussels, the one closest to the subway bombing, the head of emergency and ICU says Tuesday morning was like being in a war zone.
DR. DIDIER CHOCHRAD, HEAD OF EMERGENCY AND ICU, HOPITAUX IRIS-SUD, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM: They were burns. There were limb fractures. There were shrapnel into the head, in the brain, shrapnel in the lungs, so very bad lesion, like what you see in the war -- war scene. So we are not used to see that. We are not facing that. It's the first time I ever seen that.
CAMEROTA: He says the hospital put a new emergency plan in place, 10 days before the blast, designed to handle mass casualties as a response to the November Paris attacks.
CHOCHRAD: When there's plane crash, when it's something like that, we -- the plane -- we're very ready. But for one, two, three bombs in the city, that was not -- nobody's prepared.
CAMEROTA: Amazingly, this hospital, ZNA Stuivenberg in Antwerpen, held a terror response drill with 1,000 people acting as victims the night before the Brussels attacks.
DR. MANU MALBRAIN, MEDICAL DIRECTOR & HEAD OF ICU & HIGH CARE BURN UNIT, ZNA STUIVENBERG, ANTWERPEN, BELGIUM: We learned a lot from that evening, so we prepared some dummy name tags to put on the arms of the patients, and most of the victims were unidentified when they arrived so it was very weird for us to experience that the night before it was not for real, and the day after it was for real.
CAMEROTA: While numbers cannot be confirmed both doctors believe it's possible there could still be patients who are alive and unidentified. How could there be a patient who isn't identified? How would that work?
CHOCHRAD: Because the lesions are very severe you cannot recognize the people. The people hasn't paper identity card or passport because the blast took all the clothes away and so the people cannot communicate. And there's nobody who can -- maybe the husband or wife of this person is dead also. So it can happen that we are searching for people like that.
CAMEROTA: This is Patrick, who asked that we not show his face. His 29-year-old wife, Sophie, was in the subway when the bomb went off. She suffered severe burns on her face and arms. Shrapnel pierced her lungs, but she survived.
PATRICK, HUSBAND OF SUBWAY BLAST SURVIVOR: Apparently she would have walked on bodies to get out and every time she tells about it she starts crying, saying that the blood on her hands wasn't hers, and I tried to calm her down. She couldn't do any other way. But sometimes, as well, she makes jokes. That's the small things where I try to hold on. The fact that she's still already making jokes.
CAMEROTA: Patrick is grateful Sophie is alivebut knows the hardest part may be ahead. PATRICK: I can't imagine what she went through and what she saw. I can't imagine seeing the same thing and it's going to be very difficult I think. That's going to be the hardest part knowing now that she's, let's say, fine, and that she will recover. It's the psychological part afterwards will be the hardest.
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CAMEROTA: So, Michaela and John, we heard that time and again. We've heard that from survivors, we've heard that from the doctors, we've heard that from their families -- that everyone knows that the wounds will heal in time but the emotions and the visions of what they saw that day will haunt them forever.
PEREIRA: Yes, they will bear the scars seen and unseen for some time, as will that community. We've seen that, sadly, time and time again, whether it's been Boston, San Bernardino, Paris -- all of these places. It's been really hard to get an idea of the numbers and you've felt that frustration. We've seen how, in breaking news, those numbers fluctuate. Is there any idea now if there are still people that they feel are unaccounted for? That's what we're still trying to understand.
CAMEROTA: That is really hard to get your arms around because the doctors both told me that they believe there are still people who survived and are unidentified and accounted for, but there aren't any in their hospitals. And so it's just hard to know if this is wishful thinking and if this is people praying that that situation exists. We haven't been able to find any hospital who says they have someone unidentified who is in a coma so it's just hard to know still at this hour, to tell you the truth.
BERMAN: And they can't count, they can only treat, and that's their job and they're doing it well. Thanks, Alisyn.
CAMEROTA: Yes. All right, back here in Brussels, foreign fighters have been trained by ISIS in Syria and they are being told to target Europe, we understand. So we're looking at the links between the Paris and the Brussels attacks. All that ahead on NEW DAY. We'll be right back.
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[07:53:00] PEREIRA: So it has been confirmed that two Americans were killed in the Brussels terror attacks. This, as the manhunt continues and intensifies for the two fugitive suspects. U.S. officials say they know the identity of the fugitive airport bomber and have shared it with Belgian authorities. The Brussels terror highlighting the threat that foreign fighters pose to Europe.
We want to bring in CNN contributor Michael Weiss. He is a senior editor at the Daily Beast and co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, and you can help us understand the whole sort of perspective that we're looking at. Looking at Europe -- obviously, Belgium is a focus, but we know that foreign fighters have come largely in great numbers from the Mideast -- Jordan, Tunisia, et cetera, but Belgium has its own issue. Forty foreign fighters per million in the population there in Belgium. This is not just a Belgian problem.
MICHAEL WEISS, CNN CONTRIBUTION: No.
PEREIRA: This is a European problem. This is a greater European problem.
WEISS: And I would say that the most significant European problem is what I call the francophone network of ISIS operatives. I can tell you inside Syria, within the upper echelons of ISIS now, French- speaking European ISIS fighters are gaining ground. They are moving up the ranks of the ladder --
PEREIRA: Interesting.
WEISS: -- in the spy services, yes. And the entire Paris plot was planned and conceptualized inside Syria and the network that we're dealing with here, Brussels and Paris, these are the same operatives, the same vast apparatus spanning throughout France and Belgium. And again, we tend to think of these overly codified categories --
PEREIRA: Right, right, right.
WEISS: -- of what is an ISIS agent. What is an ISIS operative? It doesn't work that way.
PEREIRA: And we'll look at that in a second --
WEISS: Yes.
PEREIRA: -- but I want to show you just an indication. Sweden also has its own issue.
WEISS: Sure.
PEREIRA: Thirty-two foreign fighters per every million in the population. This is a wider problem. Here's the question.
WEISS: Yes.
PEREIRA: Can Europe get its arms around this? Is it approaching it with the right tactics?
[07:55:00] WEISS: I don't think it's approaching it with the right tactics as we've seen. There have been so many failures -- clerical errors leading to things like this. Not knowing that somebody is not, say, a national from the Bahamas and is only a Belgian-national, which is reported today of one of the bombers.
This has been a decades-long problem. Scandinavia has been hosting radical clerics and Jihadism going back even before 9-11. There's a guy in Norway called Molacrecar (sp)who is an al-Qaeda-linked Salafi Jihadist deeply involved in operations in the Middle East.
But, as you mentioned earlier, the region is where the biggest number of foreign fighters are being fed into Syria. Tunisia, for instance, has a huge foreign fighter problem and this is a country that is considered to be relatively speaking more secular and pluralistic, so why do they have such a radicalization problem?
PEREIRA: So when we talk about the European threat, and not to pull away from there because we know this is -- because of what just happened in Belgium we're focusing on this. You've actually said -- I think you said as recently as yesterday that you would reconsider travel to Europe right now.
WEISS: Everything that I'm hearing from the ISIS guys and people who have recently defected from the organization suggests to me that they have put such an emphasis on taking the war to the West. As I say, guys who come from Europe are now considered senior intelligence operatives inside the caliphate, right?
PEREIRA: Right.
WEISS: And they're the ones doing the recruiting and the training up. And it's been reported 400 European operatives have been trained and sent back to Europe.
PEREIRA: And sent back. Well, let's talk about the network because we have to look at this and now we know that there were connections from the France attackers and the plots that played out in Belgium. And it's not just one link with Salah Abdeslam who's now in custody, but also there are other points of contact. We know Najim Laachraoui and Mohamed Belkaid -- they were all spotted at the border together and that they got money from this operative.
WEISS: Right.
PEREIRA: This is a web that is vastly connected.
WEISS: Yes, and it's important -- we tend to get overly -- we fetishize these things as though if you're a member of ISIS -- like you carry a little I.D. card or badge like you're a member of the CIA or the caliphate, it doesn't work that way.
PEREIRA: You're not a card-carrying member, necessarily. Right.
WEISS: There's a human component. It's what I would call Rolodex fragmentism. Who did you grow up? Who were your childhood friends? Who was in your family?
PEREIRA: Who was your brother? Right, right.
WEISS: You've got two brothers, right? I mean, look at these three. They've known each other since they were in the late teens, early twenties. Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Salah Abdeslam were arrested after trying to break into a garage in a town southeast of Brussels. That was 2010, even before ISIS was on the scene.
He went to prison, was radicalized, came out, started hanging around rather scrofulous areas of Molenbeek. Met up with an Afghan-Soviet veteran of that Jihad, so that goes back to the late 80's, right, who was giving money to guys just like them to go to Syria to join ISIS.
PEREIRA: So you make this point, but it also begs the question then -- so this is one area of connection.
WEISS: Sure.
PEREIRA: How far does this web then spread out?
WEISS: Well, let's put it like this, right? Salah Abdeslam is caught one block away from his childhood home. Is anyone under any illusions that people within that neighborhood didn't know that he was being safehoused or domiciled?
PEREIRA: You make a good point.
WEISS: So think about it this way. If ISIS has got its own informants and fellow travelers and sympathizers -- and by the way, people who are not ideologically paid up or agree with them, but they're terrified of dropping a dime on these guys. That means that ISIS commands an entire community.
PEREIRA: Yes. Michael Weiss, it is so great to have you here to walk us through this.
WEISS: Sure.
PEREIRA: Thank you so much. We'll have you back very soon, I know. We're following a whole lot of news. Much more on the investigation into the Brussels attack. Let's get right to it.
ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.
CAMEROTA: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to your NEW DAY. I'm Alisyn Camerota live in Brussels. Michaela Pereira and John Berman are in New York this morning, and we do have breaking news for you at this hour.
We have just learned that at least two Americans were killed in the Brussels terror attacks. That had been suspected but now it has been confirmed, and that sad confirmation coming from Secretary of State John Kerry. The news comes as Belgian police have detained six more people in raids overnight.
U.S. officials also telling CNN that they believe that they do know the identity of this man. This is the fugitive. He's the airport bomber -- the suspect who was captured on surveillance video. You see him in the light colored jacket and the hat. Americans believe they can help with the identity.
All of this as we get word that a man arrested overnight by French police in Paris for what they call an advanced staged terror attack has now been linked to the Paris attacks ringleader. We are tapping into the global resources of CNN to bring you the most complete coverage.
Let's begin with our CNN international correspondent Nima Elbagir. A lot to get to. Many developments overnight.
NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. We want to take you to the site of those raids overnight and we also want to show you a glimpse of the apartment in which the Brussels attack was planned. Have a look at this.
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ELBAGIR: Overnight, a series of anti-terror raids in several Belgian neighborhoods, all in connection with the Brussels terror attacks.
