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New Day

Interview with Rep. Tim Murphy; Ground War Against ISIS Grinds On; Writer asks Jared Kushner to Speak Out Against Trump. Aired 6:30- 7a ET.

Aired July 06, 2016 - 06:30   ET

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

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[06:33:01] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Another dramatic chapter to the Oscar Pistorius saga in a South African courtroom. The Paralympic gold medalist sentenced to six years in prison for murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, back in 2013. Pistorius had faced the minimum of 15 years imprison but the judge said Pistorius is a good candidate to be rehabilitated. Pistorius said he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder when he fire four bullets through the bathroom door killing her.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: We now know there was a fire on doomed EgyptAir Flight 804. And there was an also a frantic efforts to put that fire out. That's what the plane's cockpit voice recorder reveals. According to a senior source at the airline, the new information lines up with a flight data recorder's findings. Investigators, however, still do not know what caused the fire.

You remember flight 804 went down in the Mediterranean back in May, 56 passengers, 10 crew members gone.

CAMEROTA: Great Britain appears headed to electing its second female prime minister. Theresa May won the first round of voting among law makers from Britain's ruling Conservative Party. She backed to be remain side in the Brexit debate but has committed to abiding by the vote to leave the European union. The next round of voting for prime minister is set for tomorrow with three candidates remaining.

CUOMO: Fall out at the FBI after the director recommends no criminal charges against Hillary Clinton. Will James Comey have to explain his decisions to Congress? And what will happen if he does? We'll give you a closer look next.

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[06:38:30] CUOMO: There's a real chance for change today. Every time there's a mass shooting, people focus on the gun, right? But mental illness comes into play, and often that is your opportunity to see expose the system that is not doing what it should to get people help. But again, that could change today in a big vote.

Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania joins us now. He is the co- chair for the Congressional Mental Health Caucus and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Congressman, I know this is a huge day for you. You've been waiting for it. I want to get in to the particulars of it but I do want to dispense with the news of the day. You have Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House saying he wants the FBI director to come in and explain how carelessness wasn't enough to charge Hillary Clinton in the email situation. What's your take?

REP. TIM MURPHY, (R) PENNSYLVANNIA: Well, I tell you, my phones are lighting up with people saying. One gentleman said, wait a minute, if I'm driving over the speed limit, can I just use the excuse for the placement (ph) that I didn't know what the speed limit was and the answer is no, you still get a ticket?

And here is someone who repeatedly said, she didn't know there's a class that are top secret and Comey is saying that they were labeled as such that she should have known and yet saying that even though someone like General Petraeus is given $100,00 fine and a couple years of probation. She has left with just saying, well we're just going to let her off the hook.

Those are questions the American people are demanding some answers to. But how could somebody has been secretary of state, a U.S. senator, first lady and running for President can use an excuse, I just didn't know.

[06:40:00] That's troubling with top secret and classified information specially given the kind of circumstances under which she was secretary of state. So, Comey has going to have to come and answer the questions of why -- what appears to be the selective enforcement of the law.

CUOMO: Do you think what Donald Trump calls bribery will come up or do you think that that's a scratch?

MURPHY: Me, I don't know where that's coming from but I surely think that it is nonetheless a question or this a circumstances someone above the law giving someone that kind of excuse in the future. This is why we're just going to let you off because your intentions were not to do this for someone who should have known better.

CUOMO: All right. So the matter of the day, something you've been working on for years. Actually you've been spending your whole professional life dealing with this issue. What is the problem and what does your bill propose to do to create a solution?

MURPHY: OK. So let me start up by thanking you personally for your advocacy for this important issue. We'll have in this country this year, 40,000 to 45,000 suicides, about 45,000 to 47,000 deaths from drug over dose who have homicides will have, you know, hundreds of thousands people die also from the slow motion sicknesses of chronic illness that comes with people who are seriously mentally ill. This is a devastating disease in our country.

And what we've realized of our investigations, the federal government actually stands in the way with policies have been medicate affect the poor, with a person being 10 times more likely to be in jail then in a hospital if they're seriously mentally ill. Not enough hospital beds, not enough psychiatrists, not enough psychologists.

Our system has failed in this area. Our bill changes many of those. It says that you can see two doctors in the same day if your pediatrician or family physician says you need to see a psychiatrist right now. This is urgent.

We do provide more incentives there for more psychologists, more psychiatrists. We lift the 16-bed rule and work with CMS, Medicare and Medicaid to say that we'll have like a 15-day per month limit from now but move that up in the future. We change the structure of the way our government works by having an assistance secretary of mental health and substance use appointed to help coordinate 112, 112 better (ph) programs and agencies out there that the general accounting office says the coordination was absolutely absent and it's a disaster there.

So this moves many things in the direction of saying, we're going to tackle this disease with the seriousness and the gravitize (ph) that it needs in order to help fight this insipidus disease that affects 10 million Americans with serious mental illness and upwards of 60 million Americans in any given year with some level of mental illness. We have to address it in a major way and this bill does that.

CUOMO: Now, for you at home that it seems like the congressman has an unusual definology about this issue. It's because he does. He's the only licensed psychologists that you have in the House of Representatives. And this has certainly become a passion for you as well as a vocation.

But one of the key elements that you and I started this conversation with long sometime ago, was you know that someone in your family needs help for mental, you know, mental help. But very often, you are not able to do enough for them. And that's the narrative that often pops up in these mass shootings. You know, you end up finding out the person was this affected, they weren't taking their medicine, they weren't getting treatment and the family was helpless. How real is that problem and is there a solution?

MURPHY: It's a very, very real problem. Your loving and caring family members who want to do something but HIPPA laws, confidentiality laws prevent it. Those laws were originally intended to prevent insurance records for being open by the next employer. And they more often to this position where a parent who have raised that child, who maybe the child -- the adult child is living with them, whether supporting them is basely told you can't find on anything. Even in circumstances where that adult was schizophrenia or bipolar illness. Maybe suffering from diabetes or cancer and lung disease, or infectious disease, the family just wants to help.

So our bill is actually calling finance (ph) HHS to fix that rule. They told me multiple times, as Secretary Burwell said, we think it's OK if a doctor tells a family member under some circumstances were saying, no, that's not the way it works. So this bill very specifically lays out what they have to do and bring that rule back to us with a change. Because otherwise, you may have many family members who were just helpless and feeling hopeless in saving their own family member. And we don't want a cruel society here that does that. We still respect confidentiality records. We still respect the confidentiality of therapy records but we want to have a level of compassionate communication available for a caring and loving family member who can assist and facilitate treatment.

CUOMO: Representative Tim Murphy, Republican from Pennsylvania, during an age when everybody criticizes the people in D.C. for doing nothing, you have worked for a long time to get something that matters done. Thank you for that, and it's good to have you here. I can't wait to see what happens with the vote.

MURPHY: Thank you. Vote this afternoon. We'll be able to save some lives when this is done.

CUOMO: Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: All right. We will be watching that Chris. Thank you.

Well, valuable intelligence from new raids against ISIS. What the U.S. and coalition partners are learning about possible future attacks, we have a live report from the pentagon next.

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CUOMO: The ground war against ISIS grinds on. We have news of raids and targets in Northern Syria bringing new intelligence on the terror group's future plans for that. Let's get to CNN Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr live with more. What have we learned?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Chris. Well, you know, right before Ramadan, ISIS issued this call for attacks everywhere that their operatives could possibly carry out their violence and we saw that happened over the last several days. But now, there may be more to it than just that a senior U.S. official telling me that they have recently gathered intelligence about ISIS that is showing them much more detail about how ISIS plans and organize its attacks. They won't say what the intelligence is, but a very tantalizing tip.

Some weeks ago, forces in northern Syria, local forces uncovered about 10,000 documents on a raid and not just documents. They also got things like cell phones, propaganda material, laptops, maps, digital devices, it was a haul. The official started (ph) saying that this is what led them to their new conclusions about ISIS carrying out outside attacks but it may have actually helped.

[06:50:18] And ISIS is working a way at it. Nobody expects a change in their strategy, the latest death toll from that attack in the Baghdad market area, 250 Iraqis perished at the hands of that ISIS attack. Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: I know that number just keeps going up and it is shocking every time we hear it. Barbara, thank you for that reporting. Well, an open letter to Ivanka Trump's husband from one of his employees and she's asking him to speak out against his father-in-law, Donald Trump, for his anti-Semitic tweets. And we will talk to the woman who wrote that letter next.

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CAMEROTA: Donald Trump's son-in-law, Ivanka's husband is named Jared Kushner and he owns a New York paper called the "Observer."

Well, yesterday one of the paper's staff writers, a woman named Dana Schwartz, wrote an open letter to Kushner, asking him to speak out against Donald Trump and what she sees as Trump's anti-Semitic messages. And Dana Schwartz who joins us now. Welcome Dana.

DANA SCHWARTZ, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER, NEW YORK OBSERVER: Thank you so much for having me.

CAMEROTA: You had never met Jared Kushner?

SCHWARTZ: No.

CAMEROTA: I mean he's basically your boss because he's the publisher of the paper for which you work.

[06:55:00] But you wanted to send him a message after what many perceived as Donald Trump's, this six-pointed star and the tweet went out.

So let me read a portion of this open letter you sent to Jared Kushner. You say to him, "You went to Harvard and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don't understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. When you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you're giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval." Why did you want to send this to him?

SCHWARTZ: To be perfectly honest, it was a personal issue. I think on July 2nd, Donald Trump sent out that tweet. And I responded because immediately I saw that it was an anti-Semitic symbol.

CAMEROTA: You had no doubt it is an anti-Semitic symbol. To you, it just immediately smacked of that.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, I saw that first thing in the morning and I was really aghast and surprised that a major candidate had sent that out. And then when I pointed that out on twitter, the wave of hatred and genuine anti-Semitism that came at me was astonishing and took my breath away.

CAMEROTA: We have some of those odious tweets that came your way and they are really offensive. So I just want to warn everybody that you're about to hear sort of disgusting things.

So, here's one from @Houston Welder, "Dana Schwartz, maybe you're just an insecure Jew, ever consider that?" This comes from Declan's (ph), "Here's a simple answer to your problems, kill yourself." Then nationalism rise, "A world without Jews would be a far more pleasant one." I mean, they are so sickening. I actually don't want to go on.

SCHWARTZ: Yeah.

CAMEROTA: Why did you want Jared Kushner to see those?

SCHWARTZ: And that's just a small sympathize. The fact of the matter is when Donald Trump tweets out something like that and then even with the deleted tweet, he changed the star into a circle but added the hash tag America first which is sort of a winking acknowledgments to the America first movement. The Anti-Defamation League has specifically requested that he not use that hash tag for that reason.

CAMEROTA: And so, because that mark (ph) is back to a World War II Era. So you see that also as a dog whistle.

SCHWARTZ: Yes. And not just me. His -- those supporters are the ones who see it. It would be one thing to say that I'm reading too much into it and anti-Semitism is not really an issue. But then, so many people wearing "Make America Great Again" hats are sending new messages saying that, Jews should leave this country. The world would be a better place without us, and I have to wonder what kind of country do we live in when a candidate is appealing to them for votes?

CAMEROTA: So, you wanted Jared Kushner to just get a little sort of taste of what you're experience has been like.

So, you put out the open letter and he put out a response. He sent this response to the wrap and it says here, "My father in law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife. I know that Donald does not at all subscribe to any racist or anti-Semitic thinking. I have personally seen him embrace people of all racial and religious backgrounds. The suggestion that he may be intolerant is not reflective of the Donald Trump I know." What do you think of that response?

SCHWARTZ: To be perfectly frank, it's a nonresponse. The issue isn't whether Donald Trump as an individual is anti-Semitic. The question is whether his supporters are and whether he's encouraging that and the answer is absolutely and technically (ph), yes.

CAMEROTA: But how was he responsible for what his supporters think?

SCHWARTZ: The fact that he hasn't disavowed them. When this tweet came down, he didn't say it was a mistake. He didn't apologize to people who might have misinterpreted it. He blamed that dishonest media. I say if anyone misinterpreted that tweet by Donald Trump's own account should have been the anti-Semites. And yet he blames the media and individuals for being over sensitive. He's blaming people like me for reading too much into it and not people like David Duke for reading too much into it.

CAMEROTA: Who liked it. What did you want Jared Kushner or what do you want Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump who converted to Judaism to say?

ACHQARTZ: You know, with the political climate, obviously he's not going to disavow his own father-in-law. But he is such a smart individual based on everything I know and have read about him. I can't imagine he could see the types of tweets I'm getting and think that that's the type of country we want to live in and that's what his father-in-law brings out in people.

CAMEROTA: And you want him to stand up for his own Judaism?

SCHWARTZ: Yeah, absolutely. I think that simply disavowing the white supremacist before you disavow journalist and individuals on tweeter be a simple step. I feel so silly and really ashamed that we're at in election, we're asking a candidate to disavow white supremacist has to be something we say.

CAMEROTA: Dana Schwartz, thank you so much for sharing your story and sharing your open letter with us. We'll see what happens next and if you do get any further response.

SCHWARTZ: Thank you so much.

CAMEROTA: Thanks for being here. I love to know what you think about this, you can find me on Twitter @AlisynCamerota but please, do not be hateful.

Following, breaking news for you this morning. There's out rage over a deadly police-involved shooting that's been caught on video. Let's get right to it.

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