days since a jury in an appeals court cleared her and her boyfriend at the time of the charge. safe to say her family has been waiting for and working for this moment for a very, very long time. working extraordinarily hard. also safe to say it was a moment that meredith kercher's family has been dreading. >> a very complex case. you know, there's a lot of evidence there, whether it's forensic or physical. one of the things we're left questioning is how the decision was so adamant the first time around has been so emphatically overturned. >> the kercher family in britain earlier today. we're waiting to hear from the knoxes themselves tonight. drew griffin reporting tonight from seattle. the plane that amanda knox is on landing within just a few minute, do we know what's going to happen? >> reporter: well, she has to clear customs somewhat, and pick up her bags and extended family have to come. i'm expecting a news conference. i'm right in the middle of this huge, huge media gaggle, anderson, that is awaiting this news conference. we expect to hear from a spokesperson, an attorney and then kurt knox, the father, etta nellis, the mother, and perhaps a statement from amanda knox, although that was unclear. the family very concerned how amanda is going to handle all of this now that she's out and free and has the ability to interact with the media which she's not had in that italian prison. >> also the ability to actually speak freely, something she hasn't really been able to do. after they leave the airport, do we know what happens to her next? she obviously hasn't been able to plan for her future at this point. where is she even headed? >> reporter: look, you know, she lived with her mother. if that's where she goes back, we'll see. i can tell you there's going to be a lot of media chasing her, trying to find out where she is and capture every aspect of her life. the family told me they would like it if she could, quote, unquote, go dark for about six weeks, try to assess what she wants to do, what kind of deals she want to enter and kind of get back into this freedom and pressure slowly, but it's anybody's guess honestly if the media, the press, the tabloids will allow her to do that. >> let's hope people respect the fact that this is a very young girl who is just now a young woman trying to readjust to life and hope people aren't chasing her down. we'll be back with you shortly again. i want to bring you that live press conference when it happens. new jersey governor chris christie and the no heard around the republican presidential world. >> now is not my time. i have a commitment to new jersey that i simply will not abandon. >> governor christie today saying he was swayed by calls to run for president but ultimately not moved, which shouldn't come as news to anyone who has been following him the last couple years. >> i'm governor, i want to be governor, i'm not running for president. i don't feel like i'm ready to be president. i don't want to run for president. i don't have the fire in the belly to run for president. i have big things to accomplish here. and that does not include leaving and running for national office. i'm 100% certain i'm not going to run. >> you do see the presidency? >> no. >> are you running for president? >> no! my god, i'm not running for president. i did. i what do i have to do short of suicide to convince people i'm not running? actually i have to commit suicide to convince people i'm not running. >> with christie out, rick perry struggling for the moment, mitt romney appears to be a front-runner with herman cain getting a surprising boost. erick erickson, mary matalin, chief political analyst gloria borger. i can only imagine that mitt romney is breathing a big sigh of relief tonight. >> i spoke with some people in the romney camp. they are clearly breathing a sigh of relief. look, they would have been competing against chris christie for the same constituency in the republican party. they would have been competing for money in the republican party. and essentially they would have been making the same argument about being the most electable candidate in the republican party. with chris christie gone, what we're hearing tonight and what we're reporting on cnn is that some of those top would-be christie fund-raisers are now moving very quickly to the romney camp, including ken langone who is the co-founder of home depot. the romney people are quite happy about this. and all they have to do is convince republicans to get on board. they're polling at a solid 25%. but you need to do better than that to get the nomination. >> let's look at some of those polls because after losing support, gloria says some voters are giving romney a second look. new polls like this one from "the washington post" and abc show romney gaining the top spot. what do you make about the rise of herman cain and the stumble of rick perry? >> well, romney is the same floor and the same ceiling he's had throughout the race. the dynamic hasn't changed. still a two man race versus romney, a two-man race for the not-romney candidate. 75% of the primary elector et is still not with romney. what gloria reported is an important fact. see where the money goes. still an enthusiasm gap for romney and a 13-point enthusiasm advantage for the conservative electorate at large. so this primary's very rational. they want the enthusiasm for their candidate to be commensurate with their enthusiasm for their message. i think this thing will go longer into the primaries than people think. >> is the christie phenomenon, the interest in him as much about what voters thought of the current crop of candidates as what they thought about him? >> yeah, i think it was a lot to do with him. his leadership performance at this press conference was so strong today. there will be a poll out next week showing he moves into first place in the republican primary and bill kristol will start to rumor he's running again. then we'll have a press conference where he says for the 14th time he's not running. the republican conservative electorate wants someone who can beat barack obama but they want someone who can beat mitt romney along the way. that's why you see all these other numbers bouncing up and down. bachmann's rise, cain's rise, perry's rise. they're vetting these guys to see who can be the anti-romney and run against barack obama. romney is the bar in a survey that came out today that shows he has a huge problem with evangelical voters in the country, which will impact not just in iowa, but in south carolina as well. >> you know, anderson, this wasn't supposed to be an establishment year for the republican party. this was supposed to be an outsider's year. you know, this was the tea party coming in and saying we're going to bring you a different kind of republican candidate to challenge barack obama, who was a different kind of republican candidate. only guess what? it may turn out to be an establishment year. >> you know -- >> go ahead. >> well, i was going to say, gloria's absolutely right. it is largely because there are 50 billion tea party groups in the country all vying to be the national tea party. and each of them has a different candidate that they like. as long as there's no consensus there, it's mitt romney's race to lose. >> but let me say to that point there is no establishment message. >> right. >> there might be an establishment candidate at the end, but this is an anti-establishment, anti-washington, stop spending, start working year. so it doesn't matter who the messenger is. the message is not changing. that dynamic hasn't changed. >> mary matalin, gloria borger, thanks very much, erick erickson. i want to take you to live pictures right now. amanda knox, her plane has landed in seattle at the tacoma airport. british airways flight 49. amanda knox we saw her changing planes earlier in london. again, we anticipate a press conference, as drew griffin was reporting, she obviously has to clear customs. not sure if she'll get a special whisk through customs but there's a press conference at the airport scheduled where we'll hear from members of the family, her legal team as well and possibly amanda knox herself. we'll bring that to you live. we anticipate that happening within the next 20 to 30 minutes, we were told to expect that. we'll take a quick break. let us know what you think. we're on facebook, twitter twitter, @andersoncooper. an atf agent only learned about the botched gun operation a few weeks before lawmakers asked him about it. we have memos that say otherwise. we have tough questions for the man behind the investigation of the attorney general. let's check in with isha sesay. >> an interesting day of testimony in the michael jackson death trial. dr. conrad murray's girlfriends take the stand including the one who received cartons of the drug that killed michael jackson. 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>> i'm not sure of the exact date, but i probably heard about fast and furious for the first time over the last few weeks. >> however, keeping them honest, we've obtained memos that show otherwise. weekly reports from holder deputies to the attorney general, weekly reporting one dated the week of october 18th, 2010 talks about eight pending indictments then under seal in connection with gun running to mexico. quote, the ceiling will likely last until another operation, operation fast and furious, is ready for takeoff. assuming that attorney general holder read the memo, assuming that he was aware of the operation months before he testify head was. another memo from the first week that july also mentioned fast and furious and gives a brief thumbnail description of it. presumably the attorney general read that one as well. both, we should say, are heavily redaktded. we don't know what else they say about fast and furious if they say anything at all. an official told us all we know for sure is that the memo suggests that eric holder had reason to at least be aware of the operation months before he said he did before the oversight committee last may. an official of the justice department says the attorney general was simply repeating the answer he gave a senate committee in march about whether he was aware of questionable tactics. this official says, and i quote, chairman issa, of all people, should be familiar with the difference of knowing about an investigation and being aware of questionable tactics employed in that investigation. but recall in the clip that was played congressman issa's question wasn't that complicated. he asked when attorney general holder became aware of the operation, not when he learned the details of it. so is our source at the justice department splitting hairs or is congressman issa? you can decide for yourself. we spoke with the congressman earlier tonight. the chairman of the house judiciary committee has formally asked the president to appoint a special counsel to investigate what attorney general holder knew and when he knew it. it was based on an exchange you had with him back in may. do you believe the attorney general lied to you? >> i certainly believe that he either misrepresented the facts or he's sufficiently incompetent that he didn't know what was in his weekly briefings. i support the fact that the attorney general cannot investigate himself. >> cnn has obtained some of the documents that you and your colleagues have referenced. and the attorney general did receive some memos last year acknowledging the existence of operation fast and furious but only in passing. the justice department is saying basically look he receives dozens of reports every week, some more than 100 pages, there's no indication he knew the problems of this operation that far back. do you believe that? >> well, it's difficult to believe it. additionally there's a spin going that when they talked about guns walking in excess, that this or other programs, we've had testimony in front of our committee that says justice never lets guns walk. now we have written proof that they were concerned about the guns walking. they were concerned about the optics of press interviews in which they were going to talk about problems, including brian terry's murder. and very clearly this was not hundreds of pamg pages of repo. this is the key weekly briefing that the attorney general received on which there was a paragraph on fast and furious repeatedly. so to say when asked specifically about fast and furious, he didn't understand the question, he certainly had to know that every week he was seeing briefings on fast and furious, he had to at least say i'm familiar with the name. what is it that you mean? or i don't fully understand everything as well as i did two weeks before. instead, in fairness both to myself and to jason chafitz, he implied he'd never heard of this two weeks before and that he didn't know what a felony stupid program this was that led to the death of brian terry and the release of 10,000 weapons into the worst of the worse people's hands. >> they're pushing back on what you're saying. chairman issa, of all people, should be familiar with the difference between knowing about an investigation and being aware of tactics used in that investigation since documents provided to his committee show that he was given a briefing that included the fast and furious operation in 2010, a year before the controversy emerged. so i mean, did you yourself know about the operation last year? >> that is an outright lie that the justice department has been spinning. they shopped that to the newspapers until they found one that would print it. the fact is that kenneth melson, a man under oath very well recorded has said he didn't know much of this and clearly did not brief me in one briefing that was about gun trafficking into mexico. and let's understand something, anderson. they would have you believe that i knew that i knew what the attorney general didn't know, that i knew what they were deliberately withholding from atf and dea and from the u.s. ambassador to mexico. so is this cover-up and this game of spin and delay continues, the problem is it's only creating problems that didn't initially exist. initially this was a dumb program that led to very adverse consequences. now it's about a cover-up, about deception, about slow rolling discovery of this and other committees. understand i got involved in this because senator grassley was denied any discovery because he wasn't the chairman over in the senate, and i got involved somewhat on his behalf and my committee has taken a lead on it. but this was about stonewalling of the senate long before i got involved. >> i always thought this was the first time this kind of a program has been tried. new revelations tonight coming out that the bush administration had a similar weapons program something called operation wide receiver. do you think officials from that administration should be looked at as well? >> we'd know a lot more about it except that's among the documents we're still waiting to get. what we do know about wide receiver is very small amount of weapons, much more intensive following but in fact we will get to the bottom of whether or not this practice in a smaller way may have begun on the bush watch. we're not putting it past any administration and giving anyone a pass. the american people and the people of mexico expect us to have a zero tolerance for letting drugs come into our country or weapons go into mexico. >> congressman issa, appreciate your time. >> thank you, anderson. still ahead, the breaking news, amanda knox back in the united states just landing at seattle a short time ago. we're expecting to hear from her family, possibly amanda kno