Transcripts For MSNBCW Andrea Mitchell Reports 20150119 : vi

Putting the Prophet Muhammad on the cover again. Richard, what do we know . This crackdown and Immediate Reaction to what happened in paris or is this are these raids that had been planned, surveillance that had been ongoing . Well a little bit of both. In some cases these were people who had been under surveillance for a long time. Generally europeans or european nationals or european residents i should say, who traveled to iraq and syria and because they did that they put themselves on the radar screens of different intelligence agencies. And then after paris, the authorities decided it was really just too dangerous to leave them on the streets and started to round people up. Thats what were seeing roundups all across europe belgium, greece investigations in spain, ongoing arrests in france germany and when you make arrests then occasionally they lead to more arrests. I dont think weve seen the end of this. And on a related but not related but also troubling issue yemen, what can you tell us about what is happening in yemen today . I know its still in process. Reporter yemen has been in a state of civil war and state of political deadlock for about a year now. When a rebel group called the hoojys took over a large part of the capital sanai, you have the u. S. Backed government in certain government buildings, one of them the office of the president and then this Rebel Movement known as the huthies controlling everything with checkpoints all around yemen. What we saw this morning was a breakdown of this very ten youous status quo. They took over and there were exchanges of gunfire and there were shots right by the buildings of the president ial offices. Officials in yemen said it was a coup attempt. Then there were reports of a ceasefire. What it all boils down to is the situation in yemen is completely unsustainable. You have the government, the u. S. Backed government which only controls parts of the capital and this Rebel Movement controls most of the capital and they are trying to operate in a operate kind of together without leading too much blood shed and today the system collapsed and we almost saw the government of yemen collapse. Which, of course would be troubling on all sorts of levels but importantly because al qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, one of the organizations that apparently inspired one of the kouachi brothers if not both is head quartered in yemen. Yemen is ground zero for al qaedas most important youre talking but i cant hear you anymore, ive lost audio. Sorry about that. Richard engel, we will follow up right now with the British Ambassador to the United States. Thank you very much. Of course, as i was just trying to say to richard engel, the importance of al qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula head quartered in yemen is critical. Who leads yemen is a very important issue. Very important. Worrying developments this morning as richard has been explaining. Is this a coup not a coup unclear . There can only be a political settlement between the different players and it does need to stable idilize stabilize, not only for the people in yemen, but also because of that is a breeding ground for one if not more than one of the terrorist organizations to which we are all victims now. One of the things that your Prime Minister David Cameron said during his trip here the last couple of days when he was here on friday was that there are recurring threats that london as well as the rest of the u. K. Is on alert. How high is the alert. This is true. And Prime Minister was clear about that. Thats one of the reasons why one of the task forces which he set up with president obama last week was to look at ways in which we can counter the threat of domestic extremism violence in both of our countries and with our other partners, weve had to raise states of alert and issue a warning to jewish organizations and individuals late last week because we were concerned that something similar to what happened to the kosher supermarket may happen in the uk, we have to expect that something similar or horrible could take place in the uk. We have gone up a notch and looking carefully at all threats and having to look at foreign fighters coming back from isil territory, iraq and syria, and home grown terrorist activities sometimes carried out by lone wolves who vs very hard to detect in advance. There is a meeting in brussels, of the 28 Foreign Ministers today. What needs to come out of the meeting . Were looking at several different aspects, one is to try to get the european government to talk to each other more effectively on passenger name records people traveling on aircraft between different countries. Theres an overall need for us to be better at exchanging information, better at passing on information when weve got something that is worrying and needs to be looked at by our counterparts. That is one of the Top Priorities today. We want to ask you about iran when David Cameron was here he and the both president both in their News Conference made it clear they believe it could disrupt the talks if congress were to pass sanctions, legislation currently pending and has a lot of support in democratic and Republican Leaders and that David Cameron had been lobbying senators against passing it. What would be the harm in passing sanctions legislation that is stand by sanctions only if the talks were to fall apart . Well what we think is fresh sanctions ought to be the result of negotiations collapsing. It ought not to be fresh sanctions that promote that collapse. So weve got to get things the right way around. The problem in the moment is that if we come up with fresh sanctions, theres a risk of the iranians look at this as an act of bad faith as the president said last week were not supposed to be an acting new sanctions legislation during the existence of a joint plan of action, the interim deal which is what is there in place and while we negotiate a more permanent solution or try to find the right solution. I think that if we go ahead with new sanctions now, if you say heres a sort of it strengthens the hands of the hard guys who are opposed to coming to a accommodation with the rest. We dont think its necessary to do that. Everybody knows if the negotiations fail and we cant get a good deal or satisfy ourselves that iran is not getting a Nuclear Weapon there will be a further sanctions afterwards. To do that now while negotiations are in course would be unhelpful. It does seem the negotiations are stalemated. There was a six month extension, now a second extension. No indication that some of the major obstacles are being cleared. I dont think they are stalemated. Theres just been a meeting of political directors and the people who were there said they were tough but useful. So i think what Good Progress progress of a sort is being made. I think were still a long way from having any confidence that there will be a deal but those negotiations are continuing and i think its important that we give the negotiators on both sides every chance to reach an agreement. For the United States congress to do something, which is unilateral, the risk is also that it undermines the multilateral nature of the negotiations. There are after all six governments working on this thing together. Its important that we stick together. Its been an extraordinary degree of coheerns and cohesion that has got us this far. Lets see if we can get a good deal because the alternatives frankly to a deal that makes sense are all bad. Thank you so much. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you. There was breaking news out of washington last night when the New York Times reported that a secret nsa program a cyber conference earlier this month that fbi director broadly hinted at this bring pointing a finger at north korea. I thought it was very important we as a government and we as fbi said we know who hacked sony. It was the North Koreans who hacked sony and call out that conduct and explain it. That is why we have as much as we can tried to offer our atrib bugs and the destructive nature of that attack proves everyone has to take Cyber Security seriously. It could happen to anyone in the room. We at the fbi and entire Intelligence Community previously attributed the attacks to north korea and we continue to believe that is the case. The correspondent who broke the story last night, we were able to confirm it but stand in awe, david, youre of course one of the people who broke the iran story. Lets talk about this. First of all, the gist of the story is that the u. S. Starting in 2010 was able to pen straight these Computer Systems in north korea. What i was told and what you were reporting also is that they didnt have advance warning of the sony attack but were able to confirm it after the fact. Tell me about that because someone would say, well wait a second, if they are really looking in real time at north koreas cyber war efforts, why didnt they say what was happening to sony and either prevent it call a whistle or do something . Andrea, its a question that always comes up when youve got implant some kind of malware sitting on another countrys system. We wrote a story about the terror attacks in mumbai were very much the same thing happened, there were indications but they didnt put them all together. In the sony case in september, the hackers had attacked sony with a spearfishing attacks, one of the emails that you get that you click on by mistake and puts Malicious Software on your computer. The way intelligence officials put it to me, there are a lot of spear fishing attacks that go a lot of places in and out of north korea. The connection they didnt make was that north korea had of course issued some threats that releasing this movie the interview, the comedy about a cia plot to assassinate kim jongun would be an act of war. It wasnt until the destructive attack on sony began on november 24th that people began to say, oh, i think weve probably got the data on this. So then they go back in and pumt the pieces together and that is why the president was so cat gorical, this is north korea and the fbi director as well. Andrea we have covered the white house for a long time. This is a very cautious president who doesnt come out and make intelligence pronouncements. In the case of cyber attacks, atrib bugs usually takes months if not longer and then usually uncertain. When he came out that hard and certain, we knew he had to have seen something. The question was, what did he see . And the snowden documents for people who have been looking at them as they have gotten released and there was interesting ones in the german magazine just this weekend, that also pertain to north korea. You would see that theres a fair bit of evidence that american intelligence was inside north korea very hard target starting about four years ago. And with with that evidence, why would anyone confirm this . Is this a way of saying to north korea, we have eyes on you so watch out . Well i never understand completely why people confirm things or dont. But the combination in this case of both documentary evidence the statements mr. Comy made which had to do with the evidence outside of north korea. He was very careful and referred to how they had identified ip addresses, internet protocol addresses that North Koreans had used. Most of those are in china. He didnt discuss the evidence they found inside north korea. If they are in their computers, why should we not think that we have the ability, u. S. Intelligence has the ability to do what they did to iran. We slowed down their Nuclear Program as the New York Times first reported and slowed it down bit inserting malware into their centuryrifugecentrifuges, screwing it all up to be blunt. Why couldnt we slow down their Missile Programs . Why couldnt we slow down the north korean Nuclear Program . Could any of those failed missile launches over the last few years been the result of u. S. Intelligence malware . Its an interesting question. When i was doing reporting on the Bigger Program olympic games, which was part of i had a number of people say to me it was a mystery to them we hadnt done as much in north korea. Its a question of what system youre in. You might be in a system thats involving say the leadership where you might see evidence of an order to go do Something Like sony. Its a different thing from being on the command and control system for the Missile Program or for the Nuclear Program. So just because youre in one system doesnt necessarily mean youre in others. And then deploying a malicious piece of software that can do damage, requires a little bit of different artist tri than doing espionage. To those people who have been in social media saying you see, the u. S. Hacked first, that shows were the bad guys first. What is the difference between us going into their Computer Systems to find out what they are doing on cyber war and them going into sony . Its a difference between espionage and destructive software. What made the attack on sony different was that it was one of the first cases of a major destructive attack on an American Target not just lifting out their data stealing intellectual property the kind of thing that happens every day in the cyber world. David sanger again, hats off. Thank you. The president will be highlighting his domestic initiatives for the middle class, including Community College tuition and family leave and state of the union speech tomorrow night and today the white house revealed who is going to be joining first latddy Michelle Obama as featured guest in her box. They include students and working mothers and Wounded Warriors and teachers astronauts like scott kelly, scientists and allen gross, along with his wife judy gross, i was of course released from cuba last month after being held in detention for five years. His release coincided with the president s change in policy to the island nation which promises to free up trade and travel relations to a level not seen in more than half a century. Tune in here tomorrow night tomorrow for a special edition at noon well be live from capitol hill. Among our guests senator john mccain and nancy pelosi and Patrick Leahy just back from cuba and former Senior Adviser david axelrod. Coming up now, shots fired outside the Vice President s home in delaware. The Vice President is fine but the investigation into what happened is hitting roadblocks. More coming up ahead. Youre watching Andrea Mitchell reports, only on msnbc. Alright, so this tylenol arthritis lasts 8 hours, but aleve can last 12 hours. And aleve is proven to work better on pain than tylenol arthritis. So why am i still thinking about this . How are you . Aleve, proven better on pain. Theyre coming. What do i do . You need to catch the 4 10 huh . The Equipment Tracking system will get you to the loading dock. There should be a truck leaving now. I got it. Now jump off the bridge. What . In 3. 2. 1. Are you kidding me . Go. Right on time. Right now, over 20,000 trains are running reliably. We call that predictable. Thrillingly predictable. When the game is on the line. Okay patrick, lets go base, shark, blitz. The nfl trusts duracell quantum to power their game day communication. Abort abort hes keeping it duracell quantum. Lasts up to 35 longer than the competition. The secret service is on an even higher lert than usual after a mysterious shooting outside the home of Vice President joe biden. They were shot from a speeding car saturday night on a road outside the perimeter of the biden home. The Vice President and mrs. Biden were not home at the time. Secret service and local Police Chased the car but the vehicle got away. Joining me now is former agent dan begnino. It certainly gets attention. What was the level of danger from a car being able to shoot from the perimeter . I know the house itself is set back quite a bit from the road. Well andrea theres always going to be danger from Something Like that. Its important the public and media understand what the secret service does. They minimize the threat of an incident like this but they cant eliminate it in a country were not a toe tal tear yan regime theres no way to stop an incident from happening. You can minimize but you have to maximize the response. And thats what the secret service does and did in this case. And is there any way that put yourselves in their shoes, they are trying to figure out whether this was an unrelated incident but this is not a neighborhood you would expect to see shots fired from a speeding car, criminal activity gangs. This is quite an exclusive section of wilmington delaware. Sure. The writing on the wall is probably not good. It certainly looks like when you combine all of the evidence that this probably could have some malicious intent towards the Vice President but no one can say that conclusively at this point. Its going to come down to getting the perpetrator, to admit what his motive was and in turn finding out what that motive was, some form of pathology