Video Raises New Questions in Alex Pretty Shooting Case (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The new video of Alex Pretty is the man shot and killed by federal agents over the weekend. But this video is from another encounter that was more than a week before he was gunned down. The video was first posted by the news movement and appears to show Pretty, here in the brown jacket and hat, kicking out the taillight of an SUV. Agents then get out of their car and tackle him to the ground. The encounter lasts a few seconds before Pretty is let go. At one point, a gun is seen in his waistband, but it's unclear if agents saw it. Agents then deploy tear gas and walk away. In another video, we hear from Pretty moments after agents leave.

[00:00:40] Speaker 2: Are you OK? Somebody is missing.

[00:00:42] Speaker 1: I'm OK, I'm OK. Are we all OK?

[00:00:45] Speaker 3: Are we all safe? We OK?

[00:00:47] Speaker 1: So the Department of Homeland Security says it is reviewing this footage. President Trump hasn't commented on it publicly, but he has been reposting the commentary from social media. So, for example, comments like this from his supporters, which say that Pretty, quote, such a peaceful protester and he was a domestic terrorist. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, said he hadn't seen the new video during CNN's town hall. But he also says it doesn't matter.

[00:01:15] Speaker 4: Are we actually making the argument that Alex Pretty should be killed for something that happened like 11 days prior to the shooting itself? No, I think we should be talking about the circumstances that actually led to the killing and what took place. And those circumstances, I mean, you can believe your own two eyes.

[00:01:38] Speaker 1: Joining me now in the group chat, Zolan Kano-Youngs, CNN political analyst and White House correspondent for The New York Times. Doug High, Republican strategist and former RNC communications director, and Megan Hayes, former Biden White House director of message planning. OK, I want to talk to you guys because this video coming out sort of created more fuel for the people who say that Pretty was an agitator, that he was putting himself in harm's way. Can I come to you, Doug, just for the messaging? Because the White House is as we've sort of struggled the last couple of days. What do you think they're going to be doing with this video? And does it change things?

[00:02:17] Speaker 5: In some ways, it does. It is agitating and it is putting yourself in harm's way. And ultimately, that shouldn't matter for what happens 11 days earlier. But everything in our discourse is so weaponized, has been for a long time. So I think if we go back to the Rodney King beating, after that, we heard, well, Rodney King did this and it turned out six months later, Rodney King did that. None of that had any real relevance to the actions that police did on a highway in Los Angeles. But in our political discourse, we know this is going to be used. We know it's going to be weaponized. And as we talk about de-escalation, I would hope that everybody can de-escalate a little bit. Everybody can exhale. We're going to keep talking about that part of the situation as well.

[00:02:58] Speaker 1: Exactly. Tom Holman is going to speak today. We're going to talk about that separately. I want to play this clip of Steve Bannon on Wednesday, just because he's the kind of person who is very loud from the sidelines, right through the war room and trying to tell the White House, look, this is what you should be doing at any given time. And here was his take on this moment.

[00:03:19] Speaker 2: We have to hold the line. There can be no de-escalation at all. You don't need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature. Put them under pressure. They're the ones that are cracking.

[00:03:31] Speaker 1: Are you guys cracking?

[00:03:33] Speaker 6: No, I mean, I don't think I think that that's inflammatory and disgusting. And I don't know what his reasoning is for saying that it might be because he wants Christine O'Malley. And if they keep raising the temperature, she'll inevitably say something stupid again and maybe lose her job this time. But I do think that what he did 11 days prior to being killed doesn't change the fact that he was still murdered. If you want to surface that video and he's still alive and charge him with something retroactively, that would be a different conversation. But you can't do that because the man is no longer living. So I just think it is even it's kind of a silly conversation to have. It just shows, again, how long this has been going on and how people are just so enraged and it just keeps going. And so this is what's going to continue to happen. You're going to have people continue to go to the streets over and over and over again. But something that happened two weeks prior should tell us that this has been going on too long.

[00:04:17] Speaker 7: And it also doesn't explain why the administration, administration officials said that he was brandishing a gun in the moments before he was shot as well. Right. There's core questions as far as this shooting. Why did you say he was brandishing a gun? You were so quick to also use the term domestic terrorism as well. Assassin. A video 11 days prior doesn't answer those questions, nor does it provide clarity on why the administration in the investigation they're doing is not examining criminal wrongdoing for these agents as well.

[00:04:48] Speaker 1: Especially because there you have an example of ICE agents not circling someone and ending up shooting them. Right. Like, arguably, you see him taking an action and you don't see them reacting the way we saw in the moment to his death.

[00:05:02] Speaker 5: Republicans are spooked. Two examples I'll give you. One, I got an email two days ago from a very conservative, very senior Republican member of Congress. He said, what should I say? This is somebody who is a very big Trump ally, usually knows what to say. I reached out to one of the party committees yesterday and said, what are you telling your candidates? Point one, message of unity, slash calm, slash order. That's de-escalation. That's not raise the temperature.

[00:05:26] Speaker 1: One more thing I have to show you then. We had a CNN hall, a town hall in Minnesota. People got to ask questions. There was a Republican lawmaker there, State Senator Michael Holmstrom, and he was trying to talk about the way the president has handled this moment. I want you to hear not just what he says, but how the crowd reacts after.

[00:05:46] Speaker 3: President Trump met with these leaders and he came out and he said great things about them. If you read his post, he was very complimentary and it was repudiated with more insults from the leaders here in Minnesota. The olive branch is constantly extended and it's swatted away because of anger and resentment. Laughter.

[00:06:06] Speaker 6: I mean, I think that's the problem. I think that's the problem that Republicans are going to face going into the midterms is what they keep saying, don't believe your lying eyes. It's like they're in this little bubble that they are the only ones that believe what's going on outside of it. But the voters are going to have the final say. You hear people just blatantly just laughing at this guy, which is not normal in those town halls. We've all sat in them before. They're normally very quiet and very respectful. So it's just, it's kind of interesting that you hear all these people just having open reactions to just the lies that you're being told to see. John Miller is here.

[00:06:33] Speaker 8: So John, as Priscilla is saying, it is, we cannot definitively say that it was at this incident when he got the rib broken. But we do know that they've only said there was one other known incident. So I'm going to say it appears likely that it is that incident, but we don't, we cannot definitively say that. But this is very significant that we're actually looking at this.

[00:06:57] Speaker 9: It is. And it raises a whole raft of different questions. But one question is, and it goes back to the tactics, behavior and procedures of these officers. So here you have an individual who is kicking their car, breaks a taillight. The officers immediately get out of the car, grab him, wrestle him to the ground or attempt to. For 25 seconds, they're struggling with him. It does not appear that during that time, even though he wriggles out of his coat and escapes their grasp, that they detect or know that he has a loaded firearm in the small of his back in a holster. So they missed that.

[00:07:39] Speaker 8: But in the case where he died, of course, they saw it, removed it. And then subsequently he was shot.

[00:07:47] Speaker 9: Exactly. So that's a kind of a pattern of poor tactics that we're seeing here. Because if someone destroys government property, breaks a taillight on a vehicle and you get out and you wrestle with that person, the normal thing to do is to arrest that person.

[00:08:05] Speaker 8: You don't beat them up and leave them and leave them there, right? That's just not, that's not. Exactly.

[00:08:10] Speaker 9: And in fact, the unwritten rule is, if you end up in a physical confrontation where you end up rolling around on the ground with somebody, enough to maybe even create an injury, that usually follows with an arrest. Otherwise, you're just committing an assault under the color of law and leaving. So the fact that they didn't take police action is another deficit in kind of what are the rules of engagement and what does law have to do with it?

[00:08:36] Speaker 8: Right. So operating outside the law, outside of precedent, outside of norm, outside of training, sloppy, all of that true. When it comes to the next incident, I was saying to you, as you and I were getting ready to come to air, I was saying, well, in a sense, the two may be completely unrelated, right? If he comes upon a group of, you know, he's protecting the woman that he was trying to do, and there's a group of Customs and Border Patrol officers, and that would end so tragically. But you raised a very interesting point.

[00:09:03] Speaker 9: So the question is, are any of the agents involved in the confrontation we just looked at 11 days before, any of the same agents who encountered him on Saturday that ultimately led to him being shot to death? In other words, one of the questions we've been asking as we look at that video is the government narrative. The first version was he approached agents with a gun. In fact, when you look at the videos, they approached him rather aggressively. And we don't know the answer to this. But if they were the same agents from the earlier encounter, were they still upset? Were they angry at him over what he did to their car, the fact that they tried to arrest him and he got away? Was that a factor? And until we figure out which agents were at both encounters, we won't know that.

[00:09:48] Speaker 8: No. And obviously, none of that information has been released. Although, of course, as we point out, Attorney General Bondi is very quick to release mug shots of people that they arrested today. But we don't yet know those identities of the people who shot him yet. All right, John Miller, thank you very much.