Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Biden Orders Independent Review of Trump Rally Security; Secret Service Faces Scrutiny After Trump Rally Shooting; World Leaders React to Assassination Attempt on Trump; Secret Service: No Plans to Tighten RNC Security. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired July 15, 2024 - 04:30   ET

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

[04:30:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: What a weekend in this country. Welcome back to CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington, D.C.

U.S. President Joe Biden is putting partisan politics aside for the moment with a rare Oval Office address on Sunday. President Biden offered a forceful condemnation of the assassination attempt against his political rival and urged all Americans to unite and tone down the political rhetoric.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A former president was shot. An American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing. We cannot. We must not go down this road in America. The political record in this country has gotten very heated. It's time to cool it down. We all have a responsibility to do that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: We all have that responsibility. Donald Trump is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preparing for the Republican National Convention, which begins later today. In a new interview with the New York Post, Trump says, quote, I'm supposed to be dead.

He went on to say that he was either saved by luck or by God.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

[04:35:00]

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT, 2024 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Take a look at that chart. Take a look at the arrow on the bottom. And then the worst president in the history of our country took over and look what happened to our country. Probably 20 million people --

(GUN SHOTS)

(END VIDEO CLIP) SCIUTTO: This was the view of those frightening moments from inside the crowd. You can hear the former president speaking. You then hear the shots fired. Highlighted there is the counter-sniper position of the Secret Service.

Joe Biden is ordering an independent review of the security situation and the Secret Service preparations at the rally. The Service faces intense scrutiny in the wake of the shooting, including how the gunman could have accessed -- access to a roof within sight of the former president just a few hundred feet away. U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson says Congress wants answers as well.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA), U.S. HOUSE SPEAKER: I think pretty clearly there was a security lapse at least. And we need to find out, for example, why were drones not used in the area? I've not gotten a satisfactory answer on that yet.

We have more questions than we have answers. But Congress is going to get down to the bottom of this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: Security and terrorism expert Glenn Schoen joins me now from The Hague in the Netherlands. Glenn, it's good to have you here. You know, the more we learn about the freedom of movement that the shooter had prior to this attempt on the former president's life, not only was he able to get to the to the top of that building so close and with line of sight, but folks saw him there. We played that video earlier. People in the crowd were trying to draw attention. And there was a there was a law enforcement officer who tried to climb the roof there.

What does that tell you, though, about what doors were left open here?

GLENN SCHOEN, SECURITY MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT: Well, it tells us something went wrong here between at least the planning and the execution, if not the planning already. I mean, normally speaking, the U.S. Secret Service for an event like this will be having the inner ring, so to speak, around the candidate, but will also do the structural plan for the area. And they will do that in concert with state and local officials, people from other federal agencies.

So what it tells you here is that either in the planning of who is supposed to be checking this building, where does it fall within the perimeter? What are the sweep procedures? Is this going to be a visual sweep beforehand?

Is it going to be camera assisted sweep? Is it going to be even a thermal imagery camera sweep? But there's all different variants of that of what you would do to a building like that within this close of distance to the candidate's location.

So I think the focus will be here on was the mistake made and how this was planned and then executed up to the moment that the event began. Or were there errors at the moment where the event actually began and, for instance, somebody or a group of people left their post or never got to a designated post to cover this building?

SCIUTTO: There were local law enforcement officers involved here, as well as, of course, U.S. Secret Service officers. Is that a typical arrangement to have some duties, perhaps even some areas that, I don't want to say fall under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, but that the Secret Service works with law enforcement locally and kind of delegates some responsibilities?

SCHOEN: It is. Of course, the U.S. Secret Service has finite resources. If you look at the total envelope of who all they need to cover, that's quite an extensive list from the president, vice president, former presidents, and, of course, in campaign season, leading candidates.

And in this case, too, the template normally is there in place that U.S. Secret Service will use consistently. It's just that they have to apply it in a different setting, in a different location. And the difference there is you're dealing with officials who it might be the first time that, in this case in Butler, Pennsylvania, a president or a presidential candidate comes by.

So it's all new for at least half to a third of the people who are involved with executing this. And therefore, you know that it's likely we're going to see errors made.

SCIUTTO: Of course, investigators are going to be looking at the shooter's social media profile, who perhaps he was in contact with prior. It's not dissimilar from what you see following a terror attack, right? You look to see when or how a person would have been radicalized.

I suppose that then raises the question, well, if he was commenting on groups or in touch with groups or following certain accounts, et cetera, why weren't those warning signs spotted earlier? But I imagine, particularly in the current environment, you have an enormous pool of this kind of stuff. It must be difficult to weed through folks to figure out who the actual threats are.

[04:40:00]

SCHOEN: It certainly is. I mean, since roughly 2016, there's been a tremendous increase, not just in the U.S. theater of these messages, but also internationally. And remember that even when we look at this in a U.S. context, some of these people also correspond with folks who react to them abroad. And some of these actors, especially lone violent actors, do feed off one another. So somebody who did something awful in Norway might inspire somebody in New Zealand who inspires somebody in the U.S.

But yes, tracking the whole volume of these people is quite a challenge. What you're essentially looking for is to what extent can you structure or automate different kinds of searches where you can catch signals where people radicalize. And that may be on social media, but it also may be in their social or school or work environment. And the trick is, of course, to use models to try and combine what you can find. It's not simply social media searches. Some of these people intentionally try to stay out of the radar. And luckily, a lot of the tooling now is becoming more sophisticated that can be used for law enforcement to do this.

But it's still a challenge, particularly with lone actors who don't operate in a group and therefore always have less communications to detect.

SCIUTTO: Glenn Schoen, thanks so much for joining us and helping us figure out some of these key questions at this point.

Well, leaders around the world are speaking out now against political violence as they react to this event when we return the global response to this assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Many world leaders are reacting to the attempt on former President Trump's life, condemning political violence, also reaching out to Trump to express their sympathies. CNN's Clare Sebastian is in London, Marc Stewart covering the story from Beijing.

Clare let's begin with you. Tell us how leaders in Europe are reacting to this.

[04:45:02]

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Jim, of course we saw the initial shock and concern, not only for former President Trump, but also for U.S. democracy in general and democracy beyond that. I think now we're starting to see that mingling with sort of calculations from a number of countries as to how this could affect them domestically. And in some cases, calculations as to how they can use this for their own benefit.

Now, one of the first leaders to come out and express concern was Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel. Take a listen to him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER (through translator): We all watched in shock yesterday the criminal assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, a U.S. presidential candidate. This is not only a heinous crime, it is also an attempt to assassinate American democracy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SEBASTIAN: Well, Netanyahu has already been accused at home of using this moment for his own ends. He, in that cabinet minister went on to talk about -- in that cabinet meeting rather, went on to talk about the threats he faces, criticizing law enforcement in Israel for not doing enough. Saying, look, in the U.S. they're saying they saw the writing on the wall. We see the writing on the wall here in Israel, too.

Of course, he is someone who is fighting for his political survival amid the war in Hamas.

But this has elsewhere, of course, revived the debate about the safety of politicians, about the role of media and online rhetoric and its relationship to physical violence. I'm seeing TV debates here in the U.K. about this. And, of course, in countries where political violence is a real reality, for example, Robert Fico of Slovakia, who recently survived an assassination attempt, saying that political opponents of Trump are trying to shut him down, and when they don't succeed, he said they annoy the public so much that some poor guy picks up a gun.

President Zelenskyy in Ukraine saying this shows how serious the global challenges to democracy are right now. Now, he, of course, has skin in this game. He is heavily dependent on a stable America for support.

But on the flip side, we see Russia coming out with an interesting reaction. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Sunday saying that while he doesn't explicitly blame the current administration for what happened, they created the atmosphere saying that from the outside it was obvious to everyone watching that Trump's life was in danger.

An attempt, I think, if not to heighten divisions in the U.S. from which Russia feels that it benefits, at least then to emphasize them -- Jim.

SCIUTTO: No, no question. And you often see comments like that from Putin regarding the U.S. in general and Trump in particular.

Marc Stewart, China will often use events, particularly gun violence, in the U.S. to criticize the U.S. system, democracy. And I wonder how Chinese leaders but also Chinese state media is reacting to this event.

MARC STEWART, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Right Jim, this is so interesting to watch because on one hand, we have this official Chinese government response expressing sympathy and concern to former President Trump. Yet on the other hand, we have state media, which is essentially a mouthpiece for the central government, taking on a much more critical view of the American political system. And let me show you exactly what I mean.

I want to share with you some of the different items we have seen in state media over the last 24 hours or so. For example, an editorial in China Daily, the English publication put out by Chinese state media. It has a headline reading: Trump Incident Reflects U.S. Polarization, Divisions.

An article in China's Global Times carries this headline: Shooting at Trump Rally Shows Rising Political Violence as U.S. Divides Even Further.

This is all serving as a tool for China to discredit the American political system. And it really comes as President Biden in his Oval Office address just last night talked about foreign actors trying to get involved in the U.S. political discussion.

So we have state media, but we also can't ignore the power of social media here in China. Let me show you some of the rapid discussions that we've seen in what is typically highly censored social media here in China.

For example, on Weibo, which is China's version of X or Twitter, one post reads: What Democracy and Freedom? I now really think elections in other countries are not so different from talent shows. The world is but a circus.

Some, though, are more general, referring to this as a house of cards in reality. Others are saying that Trump is lucky and perhaps this could help boost his reelection bid.

One of these posts, at least one of these posts, Jim, is getting hundreds of millions of views. These different hashtags, which is probably not a big surprise to you as you have spent time in China.

These issues with the U.S. political system really do fuel some very fierce conversation.

SCIUTTO: And Marc, we know the Chinese government has enormous power and control over what is allowed to be discussed on social media, that they will deliberately clamp down on discussion of certain things.

[04:50:00]

June 4th, Tiananmen Square being one of the most obvious here. Are you seeing any attempt at censoring those or perhaps elevating that kind of criticism?

STEWART: Well, look, these are comments that are putting the U.S. political system in a negative light. And so they are being populated through these different social channels. So we can make this deduction that this is something that the Chinese government feels acceptable because it's casting some doubt about the American political system and it's perhaps giving the Chinese system some strength.

That's what we're seeing, at least at this moment.

SCIUTTO: And listen, Chinese government, Russian government as well, U.S. intelligence constantly will remind the American public of this, often dives into these issues on U.S. social media deliberately to elevate some of those political divisions. Marc Stewart, good to have you in Beijing. Thanks so much.

And still to come, the U.S. Secret Service says it is not changing security measures at the Republican National Convention this week. Are current plans enough to keep the attendees safe?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:55:00]

SCIUTTO: We're counting down until the kickoff of the Republican National Convention just hours from now in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The U.S. Secret Service says they have no plans to further tighten security even after this assassination attempt on Donald Trump. They say they already have taken the measures necessary. CNN's Shimon Prokupecz has more on the precautions in place.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: The Secret Service says they are not changing their security plans because of what happened on Saturday, the attempted assassination of the former president. They say they have a robust security plan in place and they are sticking with it. More and more law enforcement officers from all across the country have started to arrive here in Milwaukee.

We've seen law enforcement officers from Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Fresno, all across the country here in Milwaukee to provide security. There will be several perimeters set up all across downtown, which is going to limit vehicular and pedestrian traffic. The Secret Service says they feel that they have the right security measures in place.

The FBI says they are also assisting with security. They see no credible threats at this point. There are some concerns over the rhetoric that they're seeing online and in other places since Saturday, but they say that they are continuing with their security plans, they are assisting, and they expect everything to be safe.

Shimon Prokupecz, CNN, Milwaukee.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO: Thanks so much for joining me here on CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Jim Sciutto in Washington, D.C. CNN "THIS MORNING" is up next, right after a quick break.