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Pittsburgh Mourns Victims of Synagogue Attack; Indonesian Plane Crashes with 189 Aboard Minutes after Takeoff; Trump Denies Responsibility for Feeding Hate-Filled Rhetoric as Hate Crimes Sweep U.S. Aired 6-6:30a ET

Aired October 29, 2018 - 06:00   ET

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


(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I have no words. I'm shaking inside. I'm shocked.

[05:59:58] UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We know that hatred will never win out. Those that try to divide us will lose.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can't imagine the world without him. When you see him, your eyes light up; and he's gone.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D-CA), RANKING MEMBER, INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY: This president's whole modus operandi is to divide us.

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I could really tone it up, because as you know, the media's been extremely unfair to me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He bears special responsibility for the moral tone of the country.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is NEW DAY. It is Monday, October 29, 6 a.m. here in New York, and we do start with breaking news. This out of Indonesia. That's where a passenger plane has crashed with 189 people on board into the Java Sea. There is a frantic search for survivors at this hour, so we will have much more on all of that in a moment.

But first, hate crimes and violence rattling America. Thousands gathered last night to remember 11 people shot and killed inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. This is the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, the massacre capping a week where 14 mail bombs were sent around the country to targets of President Trump's and to this network. And in Kentucky, two African-Americans were killed by a gunman at a supermarket, and we're now learning that that gunman tried to enter a black church minutes before that attack.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The president issued a strong statement condemning anti-Semitism. He issued a strong plea for the country to unify. And then he attacked Democrats by name, called one a lunatic. He blamed the media for the divisive tone in the country. He went after the losing manager of the Dodgers and made jokes about his own hair.

In a national discussion about who we are and how we treat each other, the daughter of Ronald Reagan wrote overnight, "This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. Let's stop asking him." Is that really fair? We'll talk about that.

The midterms one week away, and we are getting word the president intends to accelerate the pace of his political rallies.

We have a lot to discuss this morning. Let's begin with CNN's Jessica Dean, live in Pittsburgh with the very latest -- Jessica.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, John. Authorities say the man behind the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history is expected in court today. He's facing 29 charges and multiple charges of committing a hate crime.

We also know that federal prosecutors are seeking approval from the attorney general to seek the death penalty in this case. And all of this as this community comes together to mourn the many victims.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DEAN (voice-over): The people of Pittsburgh showing they really are a city of steel, thousands coming together to mourn those killed so senselessly in Saturday's massacre.

RABBI JONATHAN PERLMAN, NEW LIGHT CONGREGATION: What happened yesterday will not break us. It will not ruin us. We will continue to thrive and sing and worship and learn together.

DEAN: The crowd at the interfaith vigil spilling outside, the city's mayor declaring that hate is not welcome in his city.

BILL PEDUTO, MAYOR, CITY OF PITTSBURGH: We will drive anti-Semitism and the hate of any people back to the basement on their computer and away from the open discussions and dialogues around this city, around this state and around this country.

DEAN: Less than two miles away, a memorial has grown outside the Tree of Life synagogue, where 11 people were shot inside the Jewish house of worship, among them brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal, described as having a love for life and for those around them.

SUZAN HAUPTMAN, FRIEND OF VICTIMS: Cecil was tall. David was small. They stood proud at the front door, at the door that was open, into the sanctuary, whichever sanctuary it was. They just stood there. They said hello, or they said, "Good Shabbos," or they -- they were like the ambassadors.

DEAN: Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz was a primary care physician. His nephew says he always wore a bow tie and had an infectious laugh. SUSAN BLACKMAN, FRIEND OF DR. JERRY RABINOWITZ: And Dr. Jerry was just somebody who, when you see him, your eyes light up.

DEAN: The oldest victim, 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, is remembered as a sweet lady who regularly attended services with her daughter.

ROBIN BLOOM FRIEDMAN, FRIEND OF VICTIMS: You look at her, she had a lot of years left. It's not something we'll ever be able to wrap our heads around.

DEAN: Police racing to the scene Saturday morning after they say 46- year-old suspect Robert Bowers opened fire inside the synagogue.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Contact! Contact! Shots fired! Shots fired!

DEAN: Police say Bowers targeted congregants until he was confronted by a SWAT team in a shoot-out injuring four officers. Authorities say Bowers was armed with an AR-15 and three handguns and had 21 guns registered to his name.

[06:05:10] Bowers eventually surrendering after being shot multiple times.

ROBERT JONES, SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION: This is the most horrific crime scene I've seen in 22 years with the Bureau of Federal Investigation.

DEAN: According to an FBI affidavit, the suspect told the police during the shoot-out, quote, "They're committing genocide to my people. I just wanted to kill Jews."

Bowers frequently posted anti-Semitic material on the social media platform Gab and blamed Jews for helping migrant caravans in Central America.

Minutes before storming the synagogue, Bowers posted, quote, "I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I'm going in."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DEAN: President Trump has said he plans to visit Pittsburgh sometime this week, but a group of progressive Jewish leaders wrote a letter saying he's not welcome here unless he denounces white nationalism.

Meantime, this investigation continues. We know that they have searched Bowers' home, his vehicle. They're also collecting surveillance video, piecing together the evidence to kind of lay out his whereabout in the days and hours and minutes leading up to all of this.

And John and Alisyn, we have been here since Saturday afternoon, and I have to tell you that the community here has really come together in an outpouring of love and support for one another, and of course, the victims' families and friends. BERMAN: It's such a special place, which makes it all that much

harder to digest this morning. Jessica Dean, thank you very much for your report. Thank you for being there for us.

We're joined this morning by CNN political analyst David Gregory; "New York Times" op-ed columnist Charles Blow with Max Boot, senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right."

And gentlemen, I mean, this is a morning where we need to take stock and ask who we are and where we're headed.

So David, as you sit here this morning, after everything that's happened over the last 10 days, where are we?

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I think we are in the middle of a political season that, even before this round of violence, was incredibly tense and divided, but we -- now we have had nearly a week of this frenzy of violence, of attempted assassination of carnage in a place of worship that I think has to make everyone in our public life, starting out with the president, who can set the tone, to do as you say: to take stock, to mourn, to tamp down all the passion in the country and to speak out in a way that would prevent anyone from taking anything but the right message from what comes out of all of this, to provide any comfort to people who want to not just divide us but to hurt us.

I think that's where we are. We've got to get back to -- to really understanding how much words matter. And the words that we need right now are words that are going to bring us together, instead of what's happening.

CAMEROTA: That sounds great, and of course who wouldn't agree with that? But the president says that he doesn't need to tone it down. He could tone it up, in fact. He's using a lot of restraint, he suggests, to not tone it up.

I mean, is that doing all he can to -- for the conversation and the rhetoric to be tamped down right now? I mean, Max, you wrote a piece over the weekend that said, "What is happening to our country?" What is the answer to that?

MAX BOOT, SENIOR FELLOW, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS/"WASHINGTON POST" COLUMNIST: I think there has been a radicalization of the right, Alisyn, which has been going on for a number of years; and you're now seeing some of the consequences of it.

And it's -- a lot of people, I think, bear responsibility for creating this hateful climate. President Trump certainly, the way he talks, for example, about globalists, or George Soros, or embraces nationalism, that sends out the signals pretty clearly.

But a lot of other people in the Republican Party are doing the same thing. They've been demonizing and vilifying George Soros, essentially, as a symbol for Jews for years. And it's not just the Republican Party. Think about the right-wing

media machine, especially FOX News. Just last week, for example, Lou Dobbs had a guest on who was talking about the Soros-occupied State Department, which is echoing neo-Nazi propaganda.

So there are a lot of people who need to be held accountable and responsible for what's going on. I mean, this is like imagine what happens after we have a lone wolf Islamist attack. Some jihadist shoots up some -- some location somewhere, we ask, what was -- what influenced them? What radicalized this person? We need to ask the same thing about all these right-wing terrorism -- all these right- wing terrorists, because there is more right-wing terrorism in American than there is jihadist terrorism.

BERMAN: I want to play you about what the president did say, denouncing the attack over the weekend, saying there needs to be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in this country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: There must be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in America or for any form of religious or racial hatred or prejudice. With one unified voice, we condemn the historic evil of anti-Semitism and every other form of evil, and unfortunately, evil comes in many forms. And we come together as one American people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[06:10:21] BERMAN: Charles, necessary words, but are they sufficient?

CHARLES BLOW, OP-ED COLUMNIST, "NEW YORK TIMES"/CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: I don't give much credence to these when he reads these scripts, because the real president is not the person who reads these scripts. I don't even know who writes those scripts. So we have to put that aside.

You can't recognize that person who just gave that speech to the person who says there are very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville, when the guys are marching through the streets, literally chanting, on video, that "The Jews will not replace us." Right?

And he says, somehow, there are very fine people among those people with those torches. How do you reconcile that? How does that make any sense? It doesn't make any sense.

And we have to stop talking about this as an issue of tone. It's not an issue of tone. This is an issue of actions.

I still believe that the most outrageous thing that this president has done on the issue of kind of neo-Nazis and the alt-right and anti- Semitism was the -- the elevating of Steve Bannon to run the campaign and then to be in the White House. It is still an outrageous thing. We cannot ever get over the idea that Steve Bannon positioned himself as a hero of the alt-right, right? That he did that. We didn't do that.

And that was at a time when we thought that the president didn't have really deep kind of grounded principles and policies. We thought that he was just kind of winging it and that Steve Bannon was, in fact, the person with a policy argument, that he had a sense of principles that he wanted to advance, and he was grafting those onto the president.

CAMEROTA: But, I mean, he's gone. Now.

BLOW: He's gone. He's gone. But one thing about Trump is that he -- once he says I think -- there's something I want. I've said it. No, he just has to make it real. He has to make it true, regardless of whether or not that is something that is beneficial to him or to the nation or to whomever. Once he says that "I believe in this," he believes he must make it come true and make it be right.

CAMEROTA: David, you can draw a direct line from all of the vitriol and hate about the caravan that's, you know, some 2,000 miles away from our border and the gunman in Pittsburgh who referenced that, who referenced that and somehow turned it into an attack on Jews.

GREGORY: Yes, well, first of all, I just want to say we -- we have to be careful about having a discussion that is going to blame the president or another political leader for these acts of violence. And in that way, tone does matter, and in that way, our words do matter --

CAMEROTA: But I mean, he didn't pull the trigger, right? But you don't --

GREGORY: Let me finish -- is that at the same time, we cannot ignore that relationship. We cannot ignore the relationship between the president criminalizing immigration and saying, you know, this shooter -- I mean, what was so painful, among the things that were so painful about what he did, is not just targeting Jews in such a vulnerable time during Shabbat, but to target this group, HIAS, which is the immigrant group, which is doing group as a fundamental Jew issue value but in a secular way, it's a fundamental American value, which is looking after the stranger and the immigrant.

So there's no question that a president who has waged rhetorical war, and worse -- and you think about family separations -- on immigrants and suggesting that they're vermin and they're infesting the country, you cannot ignore how that can be heard by people who hate immigrants, who are afraid of anyon who they think is going to change their way of life and who hates Jews.

So yes, I mean, I just -- I think that -- that part of it is awful. Abd I just -- I don't fully agree with Charles, in the sense that I do think words matter. All words matter.

So when the president says the right thing, speech writers work for the president and they -- they write out his speeches. But he has a special obligation, given the language he's used, that are anti- Semitic dog whistles, just like he uses racist dog whistles, to be much -- to go much further to denounce this kind of hate, because rightly or wrongly, there are people who support him, who think he's sympathetic.

CAMEROTA: Well, yes, if he said some of those things at his rallies and meant it off-script, I think that it might be more convincing.

GREGORY: Yes.

CAMEROTA: But there's this, as we know, bifurcation between what he says, teleprompter Trump, and then what he says at the rallies, where he continues to insult people and gin them up.

BLOW: Exactly. If he's flipping back and forth, literally, one moment to -- one hour to the next, and saying one thing in the teleprompter, and then literally signaling sometimes in the speech, signaling that he doesn't really believe what he's saying. Or right after that, either in tweet -- Twitter form or coming out to go to a helicopter or to a plane and say something completely different, he is reducing the importance of those words, not me. So he is making -- he is saying that those words don't matter, not me.

[06:15:15] BOOT: And he's still engaging in attacks, you know, calling Tom Steyer, one of the targets of the MAGA bomber, calling him a "crazed and stumbling lunatic," and attacking the so-called fake news media. I mean, this is not normal. This is not how any president of the United States should behave, and we should not accept this as being an acceptable way for President Trump to behave.

But the other point that I would stress again, as I was saying earlier, it's not just Trump. OK? There are a lot of Republicans who are doing exactly what he is doing, and there's this vast right-wing propaganda machine, led by FOX News, which needs to do some major soul searching here. And what I suggest in a new column this morning is advertisers and investors need to boycott FOX News until they pull back from their promotion of extremism and hate. This is not acceptable.

BERMAN: Anti-Semitic attacks are up 57 percent in 2017. They're up 30 percent in 2016, after being very low for a number of years.

Jonathan Greenblatt, who runs the Anti-Defamation League, will be on later in the show, says this existed, and this trend exists independent of Donald Trump. This is not happening because of him. The question is, though, is he doing anything to make it --

BOOT: He's turbocharging it. I mean, I've lived in this country for more than 40 years, and I never encountered this kind of open anti- Semitism that I started seeing in 2015 when Donald Trump started running for president. I mean, I -- maybe I was naive. Maybe I lived in a bubble in California and New York and so forth, but I just had not seen it. And all of a sudden, my in box started filling up with this filth. You cannot divorce the president's words and actions from the words and actions of these extreme supporters.

GREGORY: And the hateful connective tissue on social media, too, which is, you know -- and what he has said, and not taking responsibility when he uses dog whistles like "the globalists" and going after Soros, is just not -- inexcusable. CAMEROTA: David, Max Charles, thank you very much for the

conversation this morning.

Now we have some breaking news, because at this moment, there is a desperate search under way, after that Indonesian plane has crashed in the Java Sea. There were 189 people onboard this flight. It vanished from radar just 13 minutes after takeoff.

Investigators are pulling up debris from the ocean, and bodies have been recovered.

CNN's Will Ripley is live in Hong Kong for us with all of the breaking details.

What do you know, Will?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Indonesian authorities, Alisyn, confirming just moments ago that at least six bodies have now been recovered from this crash site. It is getting increasingly difficult for the hundreds of rescuers who are out there, including divers, 34 nautical miles off the coast of Jakarta in the Java Sea, because the weather conditions are worsening. The waves are picking up. There have been scattered thunderstorms throughout the day.

However, there was nothing at the time that this plane crashed that would have posed a danger to a brand-new Boeing 737 that was just delivered to Lion Air back in August, only had 800 hours of flight time. And the flight crew had more than 11,000 hours of combined flight experience.

So that leads to the question: what could have caused this crash? We are learning that there was a technical problem with the aircraft reported the night before. Lion Air says it was fixed, the plane passed all the inspections. It was fit to fly. So really a mystery right now as to what could have caused this plane to go down.

Apparently, the captain called shortly after takeoff, asked to turn around and go back to the airport, did not indicate an emergency. But of course, after that call was made, the flight dropped from 5,200 feet down to 3,000 feet. Then it vanished from radar screens altogether.

Agonizing for the families who have been waiting for answers, and all they're getting this morning, grim news -- John.

BERMAN: Will Ripley for us in Hong Kong. We will follow that story all morning long. As we get new information, please let us know.

In the meantime, here in the United States, so much to think about for voters as they head for the polls for the midterm elections, just one week away.

Attacks, bombs sent to opponents of the president. A synagogue, a mass murder at a synagogue. The most deadly anti-Semitic attack on U.S. soil, ever. How will that play? Not just how will that play; how does it affect the mood heading into the midterms? (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:23:13] CAMEROTA: We are eight days away from the midterm elections, and hate-filled crimes grip America as voters prepare to vote.

President Trump defiant and defensive at the suggestion that his heated rhetoric is in any way to blame.

We are back with Max Boot, David Gregory, and joining us now, we have CNN senior political analyst John Avlon.

David Gregory, when the bombs, the serial bomber was on the loose, President Trump tweeted about "this bomb stuff" was really going to slow down the momentum. I mean, that was the tone that he decided to take.

I'll just read it: "Republicans are doing so very well in early voting and at the polls, and now this," quote, "'bomb' stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows. News not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!"

GREGORY: Right. And it -- well, it says -- it says that his real focus is driving enthusiasm and getting voters out, his voters out around fear, you know, fear of immigrants, fear of Democrats taking power. And all the ways that injustice win reign in the country if that's the case.

When moments like this happen, where we've had this massacre in Pittsburgh, and when we have an attempted assassination plot by this guy out of Florida, people do want the passions to be tamped down. They do look for a national leader when you have people who are -- who are hate-filled around political views and around hatred for other people.

They want someone to step forward and bring a little context to elevate people, and he has decided not to do that, deliberately deciding not to do that.

BERMAN: Tom Friedman, "New York Times" columnist, was on CNN yesterday and noted the reason this is so hard for the president to do, to bring the country together, is it's his political business model to divide.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Yes.

[06:25:09] BERMAN: Division is what has brought him to this point politically. And you can argue about how much or whether his tone contributed to what happened in the last ten days, and we are having that discussion, but look at what he has said and done since, as an example of how he thinks.

He's gone after Tom Steyer, who received a bomb in the mail, and called him a lunatic. He went after Maxine Waters, who received a bomb, two bombs in the mail, after the fact. He went after the media after the fact. He went after the Dodgers' manager, for heaven's sake.

So if bringing the country together is his goal, we are not seeing him pursue that goal.

AVLON: No, and that problem is the core responsibility of the presidency. Remember, FDR called it primarily a place of moral leadership. This president is not interested in either. His business model is to divide and conquer.

And the fact that he went after some folks who received bombs in the wake, that he dismissed it as "bomb stuff" and really gave a lot of room for people who were describing it as a false flag operation on the far right and the media, I think, indicates the toxic effect of a lot of his leadership.

But what we expect as a president, to do what Bill Clinton did after Oklahoma City, to do what Barack Obama after the Charleston Emanuel AME, to do what Ronald Reagan did after so many events, whether it be the Beirut barrack bombing or the Challenger explosion. That is the role of comforter in chief. It is part of being commander-in-chief. This president isn't interested in that.

And therefore, his attempt to make the election about a get-out-the- base play, typically, in an election like this would be decided on the economy. The economy is doing well. But the president has decided to divide. The president decided to try to inflame the base.

And this all cuts very much against the narrative. And so what a lot of folks may be asking isn't "Are you better off than you were two years ago"; is the country better off, if the country more unified than we were two years ago?

CAMEROTA: Max, I know we're living in upside-down world, where the rules don't apply any more, but is there any way to predict what a week of violence will do at the midterms?

BOOT: You know, I never thought Donald Trump would get elected in the first place, so I've given up predicting what's going to happen. But I mean, it was significant, I think, the tweet that you quoted, where I mean, it was significant and appalling that his immediate reaction to these acts of domestic terrorism is "This is going to slow our political momentum." That is utterly inappropriate for a president to -- maybe he can think that, but he should not be saying that out loud.

But it dies indicate that he is worried because, you know, as David was suggesting, and he was really running a fearmongering campaign. They decided that the tax cuts were not paying off politically, and so the way they were going to get elected was by fostering hysteria about this poor caravan of Central American refugees.

And now we're seeing the consequences, I think, of that kind of rhetoric, because it is, in fact, the shooter in Pittsburgh, he was radicalized by this hysteria about the caravan. So I don't know how this is going to play out, but clearly, their game plan was reprehensible; and we'll see how -- how voters respond to it. GREGORY: Well, look, I think he was probably radicalized before the

notion of the caravan. I mean, this kind of anti-Semitism and anti- immigrant fervor, which I do think the president was absolutely culpable of for -- complicit, among others, is part of the political debate in Europe on the right, and it's certainly part of the debate here in the United States.

I think part of this discussion -- see, there's such an imbalance. Because the president deserves singular scrutiny, because his words matter than almost anyone else's. But we are in a political climate where Democrats, too, are engaged in demonizing Republicans. And a lot of Republican voters feel that. When Hillary Clinton says you shouldn't be civil with these people; when Eric Holder says that when they go low, you should kick them, I, mean, that is demonization. It may not be on the same order. But a lot of people are going to hear that, and see echoes of a lot of the same thing. And they do deserve scrutiny.

When we sit around and just talk about the president, there's a lot of people who hear that and will start to listen to what he says about the media and others, you know, giving all that a pass.

BERMAN: And that feedback loop does inflame passions further. They're not equivalent, but folks do focus on that on the left and say what about, you know it emboldens the victim card, and that, in turn, emboldens extremism, because it gives excuse to it.

But that's not what -- the presidency is at a different level. It deserves higher scrutiny, because there's greater responsibility; and the president instead seems to be emboldening extremists.

CAMEROTA: Max, what did you want to say?

BOOT: Well, I just want -- I mean, they really are not equivalent. There's nobody on the Democratic side who is celebrating a physical attack on a reporter, for example, in the way that Donald Trump has done.

GREGORY: I just want to be clear. I did not say they are equivalent, but they are part of the discussion and is a -- an attempt to demonize, as well.

BERMAN: Look, the president, listen to his words. He called the anti-Semitic attack evil. When else has he used that word? Oh, in the last few weeks, when he's called people opposed the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh evil. So just remember: the language here, it does matter and, in some cases, seems very deliberate.

Ahead on NEW DAY, We're going to speak with counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.