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CNN NEWSROOM

Trump and Clinton Both Under Scrutiny; Reactions to the Killing of Silverback Gorilla After Child Falls Into Zoo Enclosure; Ceremony at Tomb of the Unknowns; NBA Player Shot Dead After Entering Wrong Apartment; Rookie Driver Alexander Rossi Wins Indy 500. Aired 10:30- 11a

Aired May 30, 2016 - 10:30   ET

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


[10:30:50]

LARRY SABATO, DIRECTOR CENTER FOR POLITICS, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA: Neither one is very credible. Attacking the other's honesty and integrity. Probably they will want to leave some of that to surrogates.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Interesting.

BORIS EPSHTEYN, REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST: As far as this goes, one side, Hillary Clinton's emails under federal investigation by the FBI. The Inspector General just came out of the Secretary of State with a report saying that she absolutely went against the policies of the Secretary of State -- of the State Department. The Trump thing is a civil suit so the two absolutely are not equal.

Hillary Clinton's problem is much deeper and much worse. It goes against absolutely all her credibility as Secretary of State. And that's what she's running on. Not only was she a terrible Secretary of State, she didn't even follow the policies of the State Department.

COSTELLO: Bakari, he's right about that, Hillary Clinton is under a federal investigation. And it is a civil suit brought against Trump University.

BAKARI SELLERS, CNN COMMENTATOR: Well it is, you're right. I mean if you want to look at just the plain facts, one is a civil suit and one is an investigation. Hillary Clinton followed the same protocol that Colin Powell followed. I mean this is not ...

EPSHTEYN: That is incorrect Bakari.

SELLERS: This is not anything new. And you know, the investigation's going to shake out and we'll have an answer to that sooner rather than later we hope. And in all -- and everything looks to be that Hillary Clinton's going to be cleared of any wrongdoing -- of criminal wrongdoing. But that being said, we started this conversation talking about the harshness of Donald Trump.

And we have these moments, whether or not it's this Trump University, whether or not it's his casinos in the Taj Mahal that's coming under the bankruptcy filings -- which are going to be released sooner as well. Or anything that will happen next week with Donald Trump. I mean I think that that is the point. He is so unpredictable and he's proven to be a con artist that we don't know what's going to happen next with Donald Trump.

COSTELLO: But well wait a second ...

SELLERS: Hold on, that statement that previous Secretaries of State have done the same is just incorrect. And it's proven to be incorrect ...

EPSHTEYN: No that's not incorrect ... that ...

SELLERS: Colin Powell had a separate email, not a separate server. Very different.

EPSHTEYN: So did ... did Colin Powell use the separate email to conduct State Department business? That's a fact.

SELLERS: But not a separate server where half the emails have disappeared.

EPSHTEYN: There has been ...

SELLERS: Then the turn already (ph) and Washington Post concluded that's a lie.

EPSHTEYN: There has been no Secretary of State -- and Hillary Clinton has come forward and provided 55,000 emails, 55,000. There has been no Secretary of State, there has been no one who has actually done that. And while we're on this, what about ...

SELLERS: 55,000 emails have not been provided.

EPSHTEYN: While we're on this, what about Donald Trump and his taxes? I mean what -- when are we going to talk about the fact that this individual has not even put forth his taxes because he says the American public ...

SELLERS: There is no federal law or obligation to put forth your taxes. While Hillary Clinton is under federal investigation and she has to be more straight -- more straightforward.

COSTELLO: OK, so I hear both of you. I'm going to go to the neutral party now, Larry, when you listen to these arguments, is this what voters are going to be wrestling with? Or are Republican voters who are for Donald Trump, they don't care? And are Democratic voters for Hillary Clinton, they don't care? Is that it?

SABATO: Carol these two very articulate fellas are giving us a taste of the scorched earth campaign that is to come. There is an embarrassment of riches on both sides for attack material. And we will be hearing all of it ad nauseum, all of the way to November 8th, election day.

COSTELLO: Some election (ph), Larry Sabato, Boris Epshteyn, Bakari Sellers, thanks to all of you. I appreciate it. SABATO: Thank you.

SELLERS: Thank you so much, have a great day.

COSTELLO: You too. Dramatic video of a little boy inside the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. The boy, 4-years old, climbed through a barrier and fell into a shallow moat, coming face-to-face with a 400-pound gorilla. His mother standing above calling out to the boy that she loved him and asking God to protect her child. We're about to roll the video which starts with the gorilla cornering the little boy in the nook of the enclosure. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE GREGG, MOTHER OF FALLEN BOY: Mommy's right here.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Oh my God.

(CROSSTALK)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COSTELLO: So you see there the gorilla dragging the little boy by the calf. And then he seems protective of the boy. But then shortly after that he's going to be dragging him again. I want to get Jack Hanna, who is the expert here. He's on the phone right now to talk us through this video. Hi Jack.

JACK HANNA, DIRECTOR EMERITUS, CINCINNATI ZOO AND AQUARIUM (via telephone): Hi how you all doing today?

COSTELLO: I'm good. This video is so disturbing. Can we go back to the video for just a second? Scotty, can we go -- there we go. Is the gorilla being protective here, Jack?

HANNA: Well here's the thing real quickly -- just five seconds here. The Hanna family, the Columbus Zoo, Cincinnati Zoo, and the Zoo world -- American Zoo Association -- all of us -- love the gorillas. We've given millions, not a million, millions of dollars to protect the gorillas in the wild, as well as in zoos, over the last 30 years. Therefore this is a very hard decision.

To answer your -- what you -- you were just talking about the dragging, remember something, this is a Silverback male gorilla. I happen to have -- I happen to have a home in Rwanda, about two miles from where the gorillas live -- the mountain gorillas. But I've been there since -- I've been going there since 1982. So I've had gorillas -- working with them in the wild as well as the zoos for 40 years. So I've seen what's happening.

This is a Silverback male. All of a sudden you have screaming going on, you have this thing drop in the moat that looks like a gorilla, so to speak. This gorilla is sitting there. The thing that got me was when I first saw him jerk that child and go through the water with it. Why was he doing that? Because if you look at the face of this animal, if you know about gorillas, that is a -- that's something you don't want to see in a Silverback gorilla, trust me.

These animals -- I've seen a gorilla -- a big Silverback like this one -- take a coconut, you know a coconut, like green coconut? Takes a hatchet to open it up. They can squish it like a marshmallow. Now let's say you were to tranquilize the animal, I'm sure that would be your question. Everybody's asking, why didn't they do that? What would you do if someone came to you if -- and I've been a researcher in the wild who did research on gorillas trying to get (ph) the doctors working on them when they have to tranquilize them.

All of a sudden, they don't know the dart's coming. You wouldn't know, let's say, the dart hit you in the bottom, what would you do? Here he has the child in his hand, he feels this thing go off in his bottom, what do you think would happen there? You wouldn't want to see what would happen.

So obviously the decision the Cincinnati Zoo made was the only decision. You have human life and you have animal life here, everyone. And there -- no one loves animals more than me and none of us that work at the zoo, we're all -- love animals more than all of us. And this is what -- is a very tragic day, a hard day for the Cincinnati Zoo as well as even all of us that work at zoos across the country.

[10:36:15]

COSTELLO: Well let me ask you this, Jack. Because I had a person from PETA on earlier this morning.

HANNA: Right.

COSTELLO: And she said there have been examples of gorillas who are very protective of children. And maybe that's what this gorilla was trying to do.

HANNA: OK, that's a well -- she had a very good point there and guess what? If you look at your records -- you might want to do this for your news tonight. Look at the Brookfield Zoo 20 years ago or so. A child, a 3-year old I think, fell in the moat there, fell in the gorilla habitat, correct? A female gorilla picked that child up and held that child right there in her lap. Now why did that happen?

Guess where that gorilla came from -- the Columbus Zoo. Guess what again? That gorilla was raised by people here at the Columbus Zoo. We don't do that much anymore because we know a lot more about gorillas now today. That child -- if you watch that one, you should really show that video tonight. No one seems to be doing this or doing their research on it. Yes, the female gorilla did sit there with this. This is a female gorilla, it was raised here at the Columbus Zoo because the mother wouldn't take care of it. So therefore, that's why that happened.

You're talking about a big Silverback, and if you see this in the wild, by the way, their duty is to protect their family. All of a sudden people are screaming, all of a sudden the females run in the building. He's out here in a moat with something in the moat screaming. What would you think would happen with a full grown Silverback, 400 or 500 pound animal? Of course there's going to be a disaster.

This is a no-win situation for Cincinnati Zoo. They did the right thing and they had to do it immediately. If not, you wouldn't want to, you wouldn't want to see what you would see, I guarantee you it would've happened. I've been living with these things, I've been going to Rwanda. I mean I've had a home there, these are longing gorillas -- these are mountain gorillas by the way. But still the same species.

But I'm telling you now what would have happened. And I don't think any of us would be sitting here on the phone right now saying the Cincinnati Zoo did the wrong thing.

COSTELLO: But the fact that this little boy could climb under the barricade ...

HANNA: Right.

COSTELLO: ... and drop into the enclosure.

HANNA: Right.

COSTELLO: Should that have happened?

HANNA: Well there -- that's a very good question. If you actually take the zoo world and admit billions of visitors -- let's take a 20- year study real quickly. Billions of visitors go to them. Millions of employees, millions of animals there. You take the 20-year, take a 20-year period and look at it. You'll see that our fatalities and our injuries we will be at the very top of safety of like, water parks, amusement parks, ride parks, going to maybe even who knows what kind of games and sports. We can only do so much.

Our safety is our number one priority in the zoo world. Safety of our visitors, of our keepers, and our animals. Safety, we practice it hours and hours every week. We spend a lot of money on practicing this. I mean how do you build something that if somebody wants to jump over the wall at the Indie 500, how do you take care of it if they want to jump on a railroad track? I mean, or if they're in an amusement park or they go whatever, and they want to go down the slide at just a recreational area as children do. Look at what the lives that are lost in these places. I mean not lost -- not many -- not as -- what I'm trying to tell you is we can only do so much at our zoos.

COSTELLO: Right, right.

HANNA: And I don't know what happened here.

COSTELLO: Jack, Jack, some people say that the parents of this little boy should be criminally charged for not keeping an eye on the child. What do you think about that?

HANNA: Well again, I've been hearing that a lot here since my interviews at 6:00 this morning. I don't know the parents, I wasn't there to watch what happened. But I can tell you now that when you do go to a shopping center or you do go to places like this, you know, you watch your children. I mean, I don't know what -- who was watching who there. But you know, that's part -- whether you're in a zoo or whether you're at a ballpark, or whether you're at a shopping center with young children.

You know, right now at the zoo we have -- most all of our zoos have summer camps and camps during the winter and school's doing them. But we have 3-year olds up to like 14-year olds. We have several hundred of them here at the zoo, that are here at the zoo, we are monitoring these kids with these animals. So all we can do is, you know, like a parent, we always monitor our kids. I don't know what this couple did. I mean I'm sure that will be forthcoming. I'm sure they've apol -- they've thanked the zoo for saving their child's life.

But how it happened, you've got a very good question there. Only the parents know that. That's what -- I guess, you have to get a parent that knows what happened, and hopefully we'll know what happened. Because they'll say what happened. But obviously somebody wasn't watching somebody. I don't know who that was.

COSTELLO: All right, Jack Hanna, thanks so much for joining me this morning.

HANNA: Yes, and God bless all of our veterans.

[10:40:10]

COSTELLO: Ditto. Thank you, Jack. Still to come in the Newsroom, an NBA player shot dead after mistakenly entering a man's apartment. More on that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

COSTELLO: All right, a somber ceremony taking place in Washington, D.C. at Arlington National Cemetery. This is the Tomb of the Unknowns. The honor guard now doing their thing. Of course, President Obama will soon make his appearance and he will actually lay the wreath at the tomb. The Defense Secretary, Ash Carter, will be with them. And then we expect both men to speak at some point, to a gathering of families and also military people. Active military, non- active, and family members.

All right. We'll take you back when the President comes out with the wreath. In other news this morning, charges are being considered against the Texas man who mistakenly shot New Orleans Pelican player, Bryce Dejean Jones. Police say Dejean Jones was killed after he kicked open a man's bedroom door. His agent says he was visiting his girlfriend when he went into the wrong apartment and that's when he was shot. Dejean Jones died in a hospital from his injuries. CNN's Ed Lavandera live in Dallas with more. Good morning, Ed.

[10:45:50]

ED LAVANDERA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol. Well this is a story that has really shocked the NBA community. As this young player, 23-year old Bryce Dejean Jones, shot and killed early Saturday morning. Police investigators are still piecing together what brought him back to that apartment just near Downtown Dallas after 3:00 in the morning.

As you mentioned, police say Dejean Jones had essentially kicked the door open to this third-floor apartment. His agent says that his girlfriend lived in the apartment directly above on the fourth floor. And that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But police say that as Dejean Jones entered the apartment, the man inside called out to him, apparently several times. And then shot.

Dejean Jones stumbled back out into the breezeway of the apartment complex, collapsing. As you mentioned, he later died. Now the investigators tried to piece all of this together. It's not exactly clear if the shooter will face any criminal charges. Remember in Texas, people have the right to defend themselves, as in many states, if they feel threatened, or feel like their life is threatened inside of their home.

So deadly force can be used in some of those instances. And that is some of the things that police are trying to piece together at this point. But Dejean Jones, 23-year old young player just starting out in his career in the NBA, and his parents are devastated. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRANCHESCA JONES, MOTHER: Bryce was a loving and giving person. Would do anything for anybody. He was a hard worker, very determined.

K. C. JONES, FATHER: What I think about Bryce when I -- he reminds me of the -- when I looked at, the word tenacious stands out to me for Bryce. He has had so many things that have happened to him along his path. He's made up his mind that he wanted to do what he was doing, play pro ball. And whatever it took, he was going to get there, he was going to do it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: Carol, Bryce Dejean Jones' agent says that he was in Dallas visiting his girlfriend and their 1-year old daughter, to celebrate her first birthday. Carol?

COSTELLO: Ed Lavandera reporting live this morning, thank you. Last year he was watching the Indianapolis 500 on television, this year an unlikely rookie finds himself in the victory circle with a big old bottle of milk.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:52:05]

COSTELLO: A rookie driver coasts his way to his first win at the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. And I mean coasts. Coy Wire is here with more on this historic upset. This was something.

COY WIRE, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely, Carol. Good to see ya. 24-year old Alexander Rossi hadn't even ever been to the Indy 500, but he uses risky strategy and gets the biggest win of his life. 66 to 1 odds for him to win it. At one point in this race, Rossi was in last place. But in the end, when other drivers had to pull off and splash some gas in their tank, Rossi doesn't.

He gambles. He stretches his final tank, takes the checkered flag. But he barely made it. He was running out of gas on the last lap, coasting through the corners to conserve fuel. Carol, he didn't even make it around on the victory lap. He had to have his car towed in. Big gamble, pays off, what a story for the 100th running of the Indy 500. Rookie Alexander Rossi kisses the bricks, chugs that milk. Listen to him and his team after this crazy finish.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You just won the Indy 500, baby!

ALEXANDER ROSSI, 2016 INDIANAPOLIS 500 CHAMPION: It was a constant -- I was looking at the finish line, I was looking in my mirror, finish line, mirror, finish line, mirror. It was just like, please get there. And when we finally did it I just -- I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say. And it was just like so much joy that as a team we were able to pull off the upset.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WIRE: Awesome stuff. Now you know that NBA playoff action is hot when a courtside seat sells for $29,000. That's what's happening in this decisive game seven between the Warriors and Thunder tonight, at Golden State. According to reports, someone bought a pair of them for 58 grand. Carol, you can buy two brand new 2016 Jeep Wranglers for less than that. It's the summertime. You put the top down, let your hair blow. Oh a boy can dream, can't he? This

Western Conference final series has been like a heavyweight title fight. Back in sports, trading globes (ph), Golden State defending champs were down three games to one, at one point. But they came swinging back against the Thunder. Here we are now, tied up. It's must-see TV for hoops fans. You can watch it on our sister station, TNT. Tipoff is set for 9:00 Eastern and it's going to be hot. So you can either dish out $58,000 for a pair of courtside seats, or you can kick up your feet and watch it on the couch at home.

COSTELLO: Who were those crazy people? $58,000 -- even if I had all the money in the world, I would not spend $58,000 ...

WIRE: My goodness. I mean that's more than a brand new Mercedes E Class. You could get about 30 suite level seats, season tickets at your Detroit Lions for that much. I've done the math, this is crazy stuff, Carol.

COSTELLO: It was -- well maybe I'd pay to see the Detroit Lions in the World -- no I wouldn't.

WIRE: There we go.

COSTELLO: Cory Wire, thanks so much. WIRE: You're welcome.

COSTELLO: All right. Minutes from now, President Obama will mark Memorial Day by laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. These are live pictures out of Arlington National Cemetery. I'll be right back.

[10:55:05]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)