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THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER

Russian Threat; Terror Teen; VA Hospital Troubles; Sources: V.A. Lying About Wait Times at L.A. Hospital; Mayor Reacts to Calls for His Resignation

Aired March 13, 2015 - 16:00   ET

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


JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Is Putin's aggression now putting the U.S. homeland at risk?

I'm Jake Tapper. This is THE LEAD.

The national lead: President Obama has said Vladimir Putin is stuck in the past, but now a top U.S. military commander warning that Russia has a new silver bullet that poses a threat right here in the U.S., and there might not be a way to stop it.

The world lead. He was just a teenager who left home and blew himself up in the name of ISIS. Now intimate blog posts give new insight on this teen's journey from a shy soccer-loving neighborhood kid into an ISIS suicide bomber.

And the money lead. I'm sorry to tell you this, but your tax bill is due in one month. Just filling out those forms is stressful enough. But imagine picking up your phone and hearing this.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the Internal Revenue Services. This issue is very time-sensitive and your address is under state investigation.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

TAPPER: If that voice sounds familiar, someone is trying to swindle you. How many Americans have already been duped by this scam?

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

We begin today with our world lead and a dire warning from a top admiral, the man responsible for keeping you and me safe here at home. The U.S. chief of NORAD, Admiral William Gortney, says right now Russia is building a new missile that could strike U.S. and Canadian military facilities.

The relationship between President Obama and Vladimir Putin already considered to be strained, if not openly hostile. Obama said last month Putin keeps a foot firmly rooted -- quote -- "in the Soviet past." That is a nice way of describing Putin's invasions and his land grabs and the fact that NATO allies have had to scramble jets more than 400 times to intercept Russian military flights just last year, 400 times. And they are not just buzzing around in the airspace of our European

allies, apparently. Admiral Gortney testified that Russian planes have been flying more missions closer to North American airspace than at any time since Russia was the USSR.

The Pentagon clearly concerned. Just yesterday, the U.S. asked Vietnam to stop letting Russian military planes refuel in that country.

Let's get right to Barbara Starr. She's live at the Pentagon.

Barbara, a lot of concerns here, but this new missile seems to be the chief concern of NORAD.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: It is right now. And I have to tell you, though, Admiral Gortney is far from alone on this. Several top commanders sounding a warning of their worry that Russia is rearming up for a new Cold War.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STARR (voice-over): Defending against Vladimir Putin's Russian military aggression is about to get harder, the head of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, warning a new generation of Russian cruise missiles could strike critical military radars and missiles inside the United States.

ADM. WILLIAM GORTNEY, NORAD COMMANDER: The development of the cruise missiles that they have that have a very long range, that from the Russian, from Eastern Russia, they can range critical infrastructure in Alaska and in Canada that we rely on for our homeland defense mission.

STARR: This is the missile, the KH-101. It's a non-nuclear long- range cruise missile now in the final stages of Russian development. Its 2,000-mile-plus range gives the Russians the ability to fire from near their own coastline. It's highly precise, flies low and is difficult to detect.

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), U.S. AIR FORCE: If we don't have the ability to detect it, we can't defend against it.

STARR: That means not just Alaska is at risk, but even the Eastern United States from potential missile launches in the Atlantic. Russia already has doubled its long-range Bear bomber patrols around U.S. coastlines in the last year, now 10 a year, more than 100 around Europe, the most flights since the Cold War.

In the last month, several U.S. officials publicly sounding warnings.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Russia's provocations are only more worrisome in light of Vladimir Putin's intense focus on building up and modernizing Russia's military forces.

STARR: The top U.S. commander in Europe even raising nuclear weapons concerns. GEN. PHILIP BREEDLOVE, NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: There are those

dual-use weapons systems that could very easily be nuclear or non- nuclear. And our ability to tell the difference between one and the other is very tough. And this is very worrisome.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STARR: Now, these increased air patrols by the Russians, some of it to thumb their nose at the United States, but there is a good deal of concern that they are also engaging in intelligence gathering, pinging the airspace, if you will, to see how Admiral Gortney's fighter jets respond -- Jake.

TAPPER: Barbara Starr at the Pentagon, thank you so much.

Let's talk more about this with former NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark. He's author of -- quote -- "Don't Wait for the Next War" and a retired four-star general.

Sir, as always, thank you for being here.

This seems like a pretty dire warning from the admiral, Russian missiles in range of the U.S., KH-101s. If they go operational, what then? Could that spark a new arms race of some sort?

WESLEY CLARK, FORMER NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: Well, they will go operational. There's no doubt about that. And, yes, there is an arms race that's coming.

We just have to face the fact that Russia is coming back under Vladimir Putin. As President Obama said, he's got a foot firmly in the Soviet past. All these bomber patrols are part of Putin's strategy. He wants to rebuild the Soviet space, so he's in Ukraine, but he wants to send a warning to the rest of the world about Russia's military power.

And they are in about the fifth or sixth year of a major military overhaul that started after the Russian invasion of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia in 2008. So we have been involved in the Middle East, we are worried about ISIS, we are worried about terrorism, there are lots of threats, but this is a different kind of threat.

This is a threat to the stability of the international order, to NATO, to the European Union, to the system of structuring of the world that we have taken for granted since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

TAPPER: Well, General, I can almost understand theoretically why Putin would have Russian fighter jets buzzing Poland, the Czech Republic, even Germany or France, but why North American airspace? What is he trying to say?

CLARK: Well, what he wants to do is, he wants to set the hook here that if we try to do something in response to his actions in Ukraine, or maybe further actions in let's say Lithuania, Latvia or even Poland, that we will be afraid in the United States to take action because he's been demonstrating his ability to reach out and touch us. This is -- we would call it a flexible deterrent option. He would

call it psychological warfare. He would call it hybrid warfare. They are attempting to impact our mentality right now, this broadcast, American people listening, fear, so the next time we want to confront Russia, you will hear analysts speaking up, academicians speaking up and say, oh, no, no, let Russia have what it wants because, after all, they are a nuclear power.

And so we have to have the means to counter his buildup of forces.

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Right. And how do we do that?

(CROSSTALK)

CLARK: Sometimes, that's deterrence.

TAPPER: Well, how do we do that?

(CROSSTALK)

TAPPER: Yes, go.

CLARK: We make sure that he doesn't have any nuclear capacities that we can't match. We have linkage between our first forces on the ground all the way back to the strategic nuclear threat that we pose to him with our missiles, submarines and long-range bombers, and, as necessary, we build out our strategic missile and strategic bomber defense capacity.

TAPPER: All right, General Wesley Clark, thank you, as always. Appreciate it. And, as always, thank you for your service, sir.

In other national news, it was being investigated as a cover-up, but was the supposed car crash involving two Secret Service officers actually something totally different? Details just in on that investigation are raising a lot of new questions. That's coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

The national lead now, today, President Obama stepping inside the Phoenix VA hospital shrouded in scandal, of course. CNN was first to report about veterans dying while on the waiting list to get help at this facility, trapped on a secret list as they literally wasted away.

That evidence spawned congressional hearings, led then Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign and his successor, Robert McDonald, to attempt to clean house. But CNN now has new evidence that those same problems persist at other VA facilities.

Let's go right to CNN senior investigative correspondent Drew Griffin, who broke the story of the first VA scandal. Drew, your sources are telling you and your team that this VA that you

are about to talk about is still very much covering things up going on inside their hospitals?

DREW GRIFFIN, CNN INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: Yes. And we are not just talking about long wait times persisting, but from sources inside VAs across the country, and even VA headquarters, it's our reporting that we, the public, and, Jake, maybe even Secretary McDonald is not hearing the truth, that, in fact, sources tell us a cover-up of numbers is still going on at the largest of the VA's medical centers, that massive health center out in Los Angeles.

Sources say administrators are fudging the numbers, hiding real wait times and then, in fact, even mental health patients, which is very troubling, are waiting months to get an appointment. That's according to multiple administrative and medical sources and the VA's own documentation from inside that hospital, Jake.

TAPPER: Drew, do the administrators know about this, or is this just at the hospital level?

GRIFFIN: Well, it could be even worse. A high-ranking VA official testified specifically about wait times in Los Angeles.

There she is there. And our investigation shows what this woman told Congress simply wasn't true. It happened at a hearing last month. The Los Angeles VA official, Dr. Skye McDougall, told members of Congress wait times for new patients at the VA centers in Los Angeles were about four days.

They are actually 10 times that, according to our sources and to documentation we have uncovered. It outraged the medical and administrative staff within the L.A. medical centers. That's when those sources came forward to us, showing examples and actual documents refuting what she said.

We are going to have that full report on "A.C. 360" tonight, but suffice it to say, Jake, members of Congress very concerned they are again not being told the truth, and even after all the reforms, the money spent, the VA secretary coming in, saying, We were going to overhaul it, it's just not going that well.

TAPPER: All right. Drew Griffin, I do want to ask you before you go, what does the V.A. have to say about this?

GRIFFIN: They are sticking by the math that was provided by the L.A. official that brought it to Congress.

But when you read the numbers, when you look at how they explain their math, it just doesn't make sense. It gives them wiggle room. It helps them to fudge the numbers.

The president today announced there's going to be an outside advisory council looking in at the V.A. I think that's a good, good sign. Business leaders looking in at just how the bureaucracy of the V.A. makes its own accounting I think can expose a lot of what's going on there.

The fact of the matter is, veterans are not getting seen in a timely fashion right now at that L.A. V.A. Center.

TAPPER: You know, we vote for leaders, the leaders send them to fight these wars, they come back, they're not the same, they need help and they're not getting the help that they need.

Drew Griffin, thank you for that report. Thanks for your reporting in general. You can see the whole report tonight on Anderson Cooper, "AC360", 8:00 p.m. Eastern.

In other national headlines today, new signs of dysfunction in the Secret Service. This after accusations the two senior agents possibly drove under the influence and they hit a White House barrier while doing so. Now, we now know the agency's new director, Joe Clancy, did not get a heads up until five days after the fact. It's unclear when President Obama found out that the incident involved his number two agent on his security detail.

But some questions now. Were the agents really actually intoxicated, was the situation worth going up the chain of command?

It's still another embarrassing mark for the agency in charge of protecting the president and first family, and tell-tale signs of dysfunction all around.

CNN's Michelle Kosinski joins me now live at the White House.

Michelle, your sources give us a whole new view of this story. What do they tell you?

MICHELLE KOSINSKI, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Right. I mean, it's changed considerably from the beginning when the story first broke that this was a story of possibly drunk agents crashing into this crime scene, going through police tape, slamming into a barrier or a gate.

Well, now, it's looking a lot different. At least according to these law enforcement sources that are familiar with the investigation. I mean, they do say that the new director of the Secret Service wasn't notified for about five days that that should not have happened. Somewhere along the line, the chain of communication was broken.

But they say when you look at the video and you look at what happened in their view of what happened that night, that these agents and the same government car did drive into the crime scene investigation of a suspicious package, that they went under some crime scene tape, but these sources say they were going one mile an hour and they nudged a plastic barrier out of the way a few feet, went to a checkpoint, to the point where they were rolling down their window, showed their badges for 25 seconds without incident, went to the next checkpoint, their car was checked, and that that was it.

They are also casting some major doubt about this story that first emerged that a supervisor had let them go home even though officers at the scene thought they should be tested to see if they were drunk. From what these sources are saying, there's nobody in their view who can corroborate that story and that is seriously in question.

So, it raises a bigger question of when did that controversy even come up. Was it that night or was it later? Was it possibly several days later? And why would that come up in that way?

Keep in mind that the two agents have been reassigned but there's no supervisor or anybody else who has faced any disciplinary action at this point.

They might have been drinking at the party, though. That part is unclear. If they were, then it would have been against the rules to drive their government vehicle, we believe, Jake.

TAPPER: All right. Michelle Kosinski live on the White House North Lawn, Michelle, thanks.

Coming up, he has vowed to stay but after several resignations and firings, can the mayor of Ferguson keep his job? There are new calls for him to step down. We just caught up with him for his response, and that's next.

Plus, never before seen video of three teenaged girls who are thought to have joined ISIS. Here they are getting out of a taxi in Turkey. Police want to know who is helping them.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.

In other national news today, moments from now the St. Louis County police chief will update the world on the manhunt for the shooter or shooters behind what's being called a cowardly ambush on those two police officers in Ferguson. Right now, two people are wanted for questioning in connection with that shooting and soon we could learn the identity of those wanted or whether they have been taken into custody.

Let's go live now to CNN's Sara Sidner, who is in Ferguson, awaiting the news conference.

And, Sara, I know you also just spoke with the embattled mayor of Ferguson. Protesters have been demanding his resignation. What did he have to say?

SARA SIDNER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: He had a very candid conversation with me, Jake. Basically I asked him about that, I said how could you still be in this position with so many groups, protest groups, calling for your ouster?

He said, look, there's a way to remove me. It's called a recall. If the citizens of this city do not want me in place, they can remove me. There is ample things they can do to get rid of me.

But he is from here, and he's not going anywhere and he feels that he is meeting with so many residents who are saying the opposite, the ones who aren't vocal, the ones who don't come up to the cameras and yell and holler and stand outside the police department.

So, you really do have a lot of different voices here, not all of them are being heard so clearly. The mayor is staying put. As far as the safety of the police officers here, he is concerned about that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(GUNSHOTS)

SIDNER (voice-over): A city again on edge as the intense manhunt continues for the gunman who police say targeted two officers early Thursday morning.

POLICE OFFICER: Officers down, officer down, shots fired.

DISPATCHER: All cars en route. Officers down. Officers in need of aid.

SIDNER: Police went door to door looking for suspects, detaining and questioning, and ultimately releasing three people who may know something.

IRESHA TURNER, QUESTIONED BY POLICE: I look at my chances, I have my hands up, I start crying, please don't shoot me.

SIDNER: So far, no arrests have been made. Last night, a call for calm as a prayer vigil replaced the normally tense and sometimes violent protests.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We ask you to be with those police officers who have suffered an injustice that, you will raise them back up.

SIDNER: President Barack Obama in an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" Thursday condemned the attack on the officer but said it shouldn't detract from the main issue.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What has been happening in Ferguson was oppressive and objectionable and was worthy of protest. But there was no excuse for criminal acts.

SIDNER: Since the shooting the police have changed tactics. The St. Louis County police together with the Missouri State Highway Patrol have assumed command regarding protests in Ferguson, as they once did during the early protesting following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer.

So far, six people including the police chief, city manager, top court clerk, judge and two police officers have resigned or been fired after a Justice Department report highlighting a pattern of racial discrimination in Ferguson. But some activists say that isn't enough and want to see more added to that list, especially the mayor.

KAYLA REED, ORGANIZATION FOR BLACK STRUGGLE: We also want the resignation of the mayor in Ferguson and we need to look at what happened in August and September and those people who made those decisions to be held accountable.

SIDNER: But the mayor says he has no plans on going anywhere.

MAYOR JAMES KNOWLES, FERGUSON, MO: Somebody's got to be here to take care of business. Absolutely, I intend to stay.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SIDNER: And the mayor says he is taking care of business. He has been meeting with a diverse group of residents. I have been to some of those meetings. There are people, the protest groups, asking for his resignation. There are also residents who are asking him to stay.

So, we'll have to wait and see what he does. We do know there should be some new information coming out from St. Louis County Police Department about the investigation into the shooting of those two officers -- Jake.

TAPPER: Sara Sidner, thank you so much.

In our world lead today, the first real insight ever into the mind of a seemingly normal teenager who became an ISIS terrorist. In a newly discovered blog, this 18-year-old talks about his middle class upbringing and why he ultimately wanted to die as a suicide bomber. It looks like earlier this week, he may have done just that.

Stay with us for that story.

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