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NEW DAY

New Intel on Khashoggi; Michael Carves Path of Destruction; Trump Holds Rally during Hurricane; Trump on Missing Journalist. Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired October 11, 2018 - 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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[06:32:23] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We have some breaking developments now in the mysterious disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. U.S. intelligence intercepts show Saudi officials had discussed and planned to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him.

CNN's Nic Robertson is live in Istanbul with the latest news.

Nic, these intercepts sound damaging.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: They sound damning and it seems to emboldening President Erdogan here, who has spoken strongly publically about this for the first time. He has said that he cannot remain silent that this happened in Turkey, that this wasn't a normal situation. And he seems to be emboldened because President Trump is beginning to speak out a little on this issue.

But the investigators here are not having an easy time. They're trying to piece together the movements of what they continue the hit squad was that travelled from Saudi here to Istanbul to meet with Jamal Khashoggi.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTSON (voice over): All fateful steps and he is gone. The last moments Jamal Khashoggi was seen alive in public, entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul October 2nd.

ROBERTSON (on camera): That was at 1:14 p.m. on Tuesday. What happened over the next hour and three quarters remains at the center of this mystery, core to the investigation. At a little after 3:00 p.m., several consulate vehicles were seen leaving the consulate. The question now, was Khashoggi in one of those vehicles. And, if so, was he alive.

ROBERTSON (voice over): The vehicles pull away just after 3:00 in the afternoon, arriving minutes later at the council (ph) general's house nearby. The dark windowed van disappears from view into the compound.

These tantalizing CCTV recordings, leaked to Turkish media, have Turkish investigators scratching their heads. How could Khashoggi just disappear?

Their investigations are being hampered. Saudi officials had promised access to the consulate, hidden behind a high razor-wire topped wall, but now Turkish officials say the Saudis are not cooperating. Piling on the pressure, a Turkish pro-government national newspaper has published names and pictures of 15 Saudi men who Turkish officials confirm to CNN are persons of interest in Khashoggi's disappearance. A Saudi source familiar with four of the men confirms to CNN one of them is a former diplomat in London, and an intelligence officer. Another is a forensics expert.

[06:35:11] CNN has pieced together a timeline for how at least some of these men got to Istanbul. Some left Riyadh at 11:30 p.m. Monday on a private jet, landing in Istanbul around 3:30 a.m., hours before Khashoggi disappears. Leaked CCTV recordings show the plane arriving at Ataturk Airport at 3:28 a.m. Minutes later, nine men from the aircraft are picked up on cameras going through passport control. They head to a city hotel.

ROBERTSON (on camera): At around 5:00 a.m. that morning, they check into the hotel just around the corner from the consulate. About four and a half hours later, they all leave, divided into small group.

ROBERTSON (voice over): Investigators believe they went to the consulate to wait for Khashoggi.

CNN has also tracked a second chartered jet, arriving from Riyadh at a critical moment that day. it lands in Istanbul around 4:00 p.m. and leaves just one hour later, stopping in Cairo, en route back to Saudi.

Why is this important? Turkish officials say the other plane that left later in the evening with Saudis on it was checked, their bags x- rayed. But we don't know whether the first Saudi plane to leave Istanbul was checked and it left about two hours after the van swept into the counsel's (ph) residence.

As it flew to Saudi, Khashoggi's fiance was pacing up and down outside the consulate, more and more anxious. More than a week after Jamal Khashoggi entered this building to finalize his marriage papers, the mystery of what happened to him continues to deepen.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMEROTA: Nic, this is all very, very ominous. The way you have mapped it out there, it just sends a shiver down your spine. And, you know, listen, President Trump, about his reaction, he's had ample opportunity to strongly condemn this or to demand answers from the Saudis, but he has thus far been reluctant to do so. So how is that going over there?

ROBERTSON: It's really led to, you know, not having a strong push from the Turkish government, although they've leaked all these videos to the media to sort of shape their story. We're not seeing Turkish officials get out in front of this and begin to point fingers. I mean what we're being told by Turkish sources is that they think Khashoggi was tricked into going into the consulate and was murdered soon after getting in there. They just don't know how they disappeared his body out of the consulate. So to not have Turkish officials coming out publically and strongly saying that is an indication that, you know, they're concerned about dealing with Saudi Arabia by themselves.

But President Trump weighing in on this. That will strengthen their resolve. There's so many things at stake over this here right now.

CAMEROTA: Understood, Nic. And, by the way, this bipartisan group of U.S. senators are calling on the president to be more aggressive about this. So we'll see what happens today.

Thank you very much, Nic Robertson.

OK, up next, we go back to Florida and we talk with someone who rode out Hurricane Michael. What was that experience like and why did they do that?

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[06:42:37] JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. John Berman in Panama City, Florida.

You can see the aftermath of Hurricane Michael all around me. A grocery store, office building, just torn to shreds here, made of cinderblock. A lot of people did decide to ride out this storm, even though they were warned it would be very, very powerful.

Joining me now is John Klash, not far away from where I am here in Panama City. He rode out this storm in his in-law's house.

John, I know you chose that house because you believed it was strong enough. I have to say, during that time the storm was hitting, I wasn't sure the building that I was in was going to survive. What were those moments like for you?

JOHN KLASH (ph), RODE OUT HURRICANE MICHAEL (via telephone): It was pretty scary. We were in a hallway with my children, my in-laws, my wife's grandmother and my wife. You know, just every minute with the house shaking, we really didn't know how long the house was going to hold together, if the roof was going to hold. You know, we just kind of just sat there and prayed and hoped everything would be OK.

BERMAN: Describe those moments. The building that I was in, you could hear a roar and you could feel vibrations.

KLASH: Yes, it was -- it was like nothing I've ever experienced before. I mean I -- we -- I was here in this area when Hurricane Opal hit. Actually I was in my hometown, Enterprise, Alabama, when that happened. And, you know, it just -- it was -- it was scary and winds were howling, but nothing, nothing like this. I mean this was just -- you know, you just felt like a, you know, a tornado was outside for three hours. And that that's when we -- when we went outside, when we finally got some visuals of what was going on, I mean it looked like a tornado had hit everything within five miles.

BERMAN: Talk to me about how the house you were in faired and tell me more about your surroundings.

KLASH: The house that we're in right now was fairly fortunate. I mean we've got a roof leak right now in the middle of the home. There was some damage to, you know, some exterior of the home. But the houses around us, we've got houses two doors down that the roof's completely gone. We've got trees uprooted on every single road.

I was out yesterday. I was able to actually get in a car and drive to Winhaven (ph) with a gentlemen, a friend of mine in the neighborhood, and it's a war zone right now. And there's -- there's downed trees and power lines all over down the road and it's just -- it's awful.

[06:45:06] BERMAN: So given what you went through and given what you are now seeing, how do you assess your decision to ride out this storm and stay?

KLASH: Yes, we're really second guessing whether we should have done it. I mean, you know, we had an opportunity to get out. When we thought it was going to be a category three storm, you know, we -- you know, we were thinking that it may hit Panama City Beach. You know we -- we're like, you know, you just never think it's going to happen to you. And, you know, the next thing, you know, it's -- you know, you wake up and it's a whole city around you, everything that you've been familiar with for a long time is just either gone or destroyed. And that's what we're experiencing right now.

BERMAN: John Klash, you and your family have a long couple days ahead of you. We wish you the best. We are glad you made it through the safely. Thanks so much for being with us.

KLASH: OK, thank you.

BERMAN: So after this storm passed through Florida, but was still very much bearing down on Georgia and other places causing devastation and destruction, President Trump was at a political rally. Was that a smart move? We'll discuss, next.

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[06:50:12] CAMEROTA: As one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever strike the United States was slamming Florida, President Trump decided to go ahead with a campaign rally in Pennsylvania. But he did offer his thoughts and prayers for those impacted by the storm.

CNN's senior political analyst John Avlon and associate editor at "RealClearPolitics" A.B. Stoddard are here to discuss this and so much more, including the case of Jamal Khashoggi.

But, so the optics, A.B., were of the storm hitting, you know, all of the intensity of the wind, people being displaced, the president holding this campaign rally, but he did talk about the hurricane. He did offer thoughts and prayers. I mean what did we want him to do?

A.B. STODDARD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, "REALCLEARPOLITICS": Well, there's, as you know, we have a rock band called there's a tweet for this and he bashed Obama after Super Storm Sandy, close to the election, for holding a campaign rally. So it's, you know, just another thing to mention.

But it was also interesting that he sort of was struggling with this publicly hours before the event saying, maybe we shouldn't do it. He called it a quagmire. And then said, but I'd disappoint so many people. I mean, you know, we -- this is what he likes to do. Of course it's the right thing to do. If you do the rally, he seemed to talk about those in the path of the hurricane and how much the government will be there to help them and support them before and after. But --

CAMEROTA: And he did that.

STODDARD: He's going to get -- he's going to get criticized for doing this because he attacked someone else for doing it.

CAMEROTA: Yes. Got it. It's the hypocrisy.

STODDARD: Right.

CAMEROTA: It's the hypocrisy, John, once again that he --

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

CAMEROTA: I mean the imagine if President Obama had done it.

AVLON: Yes, which would have been a collective freak-out on the right, but instead it's rally around the president.

Look, just from a pure level of optics, he chose to take a warm base bath while the people of Florida were getting slammed in the face with 150-hour winds. That it.

CAMEROTA: Glad you did add sponge to that. OK, thank you very much.

Let's move on to the deadly serious story of the journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

The details of this are so chilling, A.B. I mean it's the stuff out of the darkest mob movie you've ever seen, what journalist have been able to figure out from unnamed Turkish sources of what they think happened to Jamal Khashoggi once he went into this Russia -- sorry, this Saudi Arabian consulate. Yet the president has been I mean really tepid, I think is a fair word, in his response. Hear when he's ask if he thinks that Jamal Khashoggi's been murdered, when he is asked what he's going to do to Saudi Arabia. Here are his responses.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I am concerned about it. I don't like hearing about it.

We'll have to find out who did it, but people saw him go in but they didn't see him come out, as they understand it. And we will take a very serious look at it.

Well, it's a terrible thing and it certainly would not be a positive. I would not be happy at all. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: No, this is not a positive thing. And so why -- why is he pulling at least his verbal punches with this?

STODDARD: Well, There are several layers of treacherous terrain for the Trump administration to this story. If you're just beginning to learn what happened, the first thing you're wondering is why he wouldn't be pressuring the Saudis more publicly and wondering about what the government is doing to pressure the Saudis privately. And you -- obviously, we are seeing an enormous bipartisan pushback in the Congress for the rhetoric, publically at least, to be -- to be firmer and more demanding of some accountability.

The second layer is, what more are we going to learn from intelligence leaks about how much our government might have known about the danger through intercepts to Khashoggi and whether or not there was something our government could have done. A State Department spokesman has affirmatively denied that there was anything that we could have done in advance.

Then you get into the layer of all the connections of Trump and his family, the business they've been doing with the Saudis, how much they're depending on this great relationship with the crown prince, who's very close to Jared Kushner, on sort of a Mideast strategy that requires help from the Saudis. Trump has admitted he doesn't want to stop the arm sales. It's good for us. He needs them to counter the Iranian regime. He wants their help in Syria.

And then there's this sort of fourth macro layer of whether or not Trump's initial sort of just total acquiescence on the issue of human rights, with regard to the Chinese, the Russians, the Chinese, people all around the world have ended the accountability on this issue and permitted and fostered an environment in which they are brutalizing their people and murdering people more easily because the United States is turning away from this.

AVLON: Yes.

CAMEROTA: John, just very quickly, I mean in a moment when it's so hard to find bipartisan for anything here, we found one. These -- a bipartisan group of senators are call -- sent a letter to President Trump calling on him to do something about this, to confront the Saudis, maybe even impose sanctions.

[06:55:07] AVLON: That's right. So what they've done is this, requested an invocation of the Global Magnitsky Act, which would require an investigation and then possibly sanctions. This is the last team the Trump team wants. You heard the president, he's trying to find a way to make this go away because U.S. policy depends upon Saudi to check Iran, to do arms sales.

Here's the problem. This administration has no freedom agenda. This administration isn't a backer of human rights. They've sum -- they're very personally close with the crown prince and they want him to succeed and, therefore, they're invested. And there are folks who will say, look, you've got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Well, Khashoggi is one of those eggs, potentially. This is a serious story and they're going to want to make it go away, but it's not going to go away.

CAMEROTA: We are staying on it. John Avlon, A.B. Stoddard, thank you both very much.

OK, so, up next, two breaking stories. There was this emergency aboard the Soyuz spacecraft. We're happy to report both crew members were rescued after they had to abort their launch.

And, of course, we'll have much more on the devastation in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Michael.

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