Video Raises Questions About Border Patrol Shooting (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: CNN's Tom Foreman is here to walk us through what we're hearing from federal officials, but also what the videos show, including the new videos, because what they are saying and what the videos are showing are not always the same thing. Tom.

[00:00:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, very much. I want to start with the very first statement made by the Trump administration in the aftermath of the shooting. It was a tweet by the Department of Homeland Security showing a firearm on what appears to be the seat of a car. And the tweet reads an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun seen here. You see the picture behind it there. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement. Now, we have this new angle of the video that's just been cleared by CNN, and it shows the lead-up to this deadly altercation. This is what I want you to take a look at. Of course, this is a disturbing video. Let's take some time, though, and watch this together. Some things to note. As it begins, you see pretty out there in the middle of the street. He shows up right in this area here. You start seeing him, and he is at one point using his camera. There he is right there, and he's pointing to traffic, sort of waving traffic through. At some moment here, you see that law enforcement approaches him, and he backs away as they start moving up on him. He is not trying to move toward them. He's backing away. You're going to see one of these officers approach a woman near him and really forcefully shove her to the ground right there, and pretty starts rushing over toward her. Now, they're both getting pepper-sprayed at this point. He gets grabbed, and he's taken over to the ground here. I'll point out this is about 15 seconds from when officers turned to him. He's now on the ground. They are on top of him. The officers are all around. He does not appear to have a weapon in his hand. He doesn't brandish anything. He doesn't seem to do anything, and then all of a sudden, you see one agent in the middle there. Look. He turns away, and that's when the shooting begins. One shot, followed by, in our analysis, nine other shots there. We heard from Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino. He was asked at what point Priddy brandished a weapon in all of this. This was his answer.

[00:02:13] Speaker 3: Allie, this situation, again, is evolving. This situation is under investigation. These facts will come to light.

[00:02:24] Speaker 2: This is important because, an important detail, because concealed carry is legal. We know from local officials Priddy had a permit to carry a weapon. And law enforcement analysts here on CNN have raised questions as to why the picture of this gun that DHS shared online was shown on the seat of a car and not in the scene where Priddy was shot. And we now have an answer. What the CNN analysis shows, if you watch all those videos carefully, you see a federal agent right there who appears to be removing a gun. This is very critical to remember. That piece of video you're seeing right there is happening about a second, or maybe slightly less than a second, before the shooting begins. Now, it is just video. We have to look at it. There will be a lot of questions here. But that's the reason people say you have to have a truly impartial and fair investigation here, because if he removed the gun before all this shooting broke out, then why is this man now dead? It's really quite a remarkable series of events all coming together here. But almost all of them, Erin, contradict the story that came out of the Trump administration early on today.

[00:03:38] Speaker 1: And let's go now to our senior law enforcement analyst, Andrew McCabe, also the former deputy director of the FBI. So, Director McCabe, what do you see in all of this so far, from the information that we have, from the video you've watched, from the responses we've gotten from DHS and from Mr. Bovino?

[00:03:55] Speaker 4: Well, I mean, obviously, Erin, at the core of it, you have an unbelievable tragedy where it appears that a potentially unarmed person was essentially assassinated by horrible law enforcement tactics that dramatically escalated the situation. But there are so many questions here. At the absolute core of lethal force training in the FBI Academy, in the Academy at Glencoe, Georgia, where DHS agents, ICE agents, Border Patrol folks go through, you are taught from the very beginning that if you use your weapon, you have to be able to, after the fact, articulate exactly why you perceived an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. And so the question now is, when are we going to hear that articulation? What is the reason that these officers, or a single officer, we don't know how many people shot, believed they were in imminent threat of death by this person who was, by every video we've seen, on the ground with anywhere from four to five officers on top of him at the same time? Nowhere in these videos do you see a weapon in this man's hand. And so while Commander Bovino's statement was very artfully written, yes, they encountered someone who had a gun. It is not clear that that man ever presented the gun, brandished the gun, pointed the gun at anyone, threatened to harm any of these officers. So what's the excuse for having to use lethal force here? We have no idea.

[00:05:46] Speaker 1: No. And in fact, they were quick to post a picture of the gun, which they removed from the crime scene. They put in a car. They said, look at these extra magazines. It's a terrible act that he was prepared to commit. But they've never actually even said that he did brandish it. And obviously, there's no video evidence that he did any such thing. He did have a permit to carry it. He was clearly there. We hear all the whistles on that one video, right, the whistles people do when they're warning of ICE. He was there trying to protect, it appears, a woman that they pushed over. So, Director McCabe, I'm just curious, though, if there is no investigation, which at this point doesn't appear that there are going to be any indications they are. They're saying case closed and sealed, right? And they don't give access to the state for an investigation, which, again, that would be surprising if they did. They didn't do it with Renee Nicole Goode. Then what happens here?

[00:06:43] Speaker 4: Nothing. Nothing happens here, just like nothing happened after the killing of Renee Goode, in fact. So what we have seen, Aaron, is now we have a very common set of circumstances. We know what the game plan is for the White House and DHS. Immediately after the event, they go to the media and they put out a version of events that paints the victim as a domestic terrorist. It happened to Renee Goode. They then said Renee Goode's wife was also a domestic terrorist, which, of course, neither of them are. And now, immediately, they say the same thing about this man. So that's absolutely contrary to any effort to stage a legitimate investigation. You would never have high-ranking officials from the agency involved going out to the public prejudging it. But that's what's happened in every one of these cases. In the Renee Goode case, you actually had the deputy attorney general of the United States of America came out on social media, what, a day after the event, and said there will be no investigation, there was no wrongdoing, there's nothing to investigate here, essentially and offered him a pardon from any accountability for this. And I can tell you that the other officers on the ground in Minneapolis, in Maine, in Chicago, wherever they may be deployed, they hear this loud and clear. And the signal they get is, do whatever you want. There will be no accountability. You can be as violent as you want. You can provoke as many conflicts as you want, as we've seen happen in this case. And there will be no accountability. And people should be very, very concerned about that. Any time there's a law enforcement shooting of any type, there should be a fair, unbiased investigation. That is not happening here.

[00:08:29] Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I think on the basis of it, too, and you talk about the lack of training and professionalism that may have been on display here when you're surrounded by that many people, right? I mean, when regular people get put into a scrum, you can understand all of the not knowing what's going on, right? But these aren't regular people. These are supposed to be trained law enforcement who know exactly what they're doing in situations like this, right? But that's not what we saw. So you know— Not at all. Yeah. So then, I mean, is it possible, then, that we would—look, in the case of Renee Nicole Goode, we know the name of the individual who shot her. We know they chose not to do an investigation to find out exactly what happened, right? But we know. But in this case, we may never actually even know, because it's unclear in that scrum who shot or how many people shot. The only thing we know for sure is that Alex Priddy, who was killed, was not one of the people who shot.

[00:09:21] Speaker 4: That's absolutely right. And there's no indication that we'll ever get to the bottom of this, because, you know, as I've said, the administration has proven in all prior events that they are perfectly comfortable going out and deliberately misleading the public as to what's happening on the ground in Minneapolis, convicting people for domestic terrorism before they've ever been presented a single piece of evidence. How about the photograph of Nekima Anderson, who the White House admitted they intentionally altered the photograph to make her look worse at the moment of her arrest? It's unbelievable. We've never seen this from any other administration that I'm familiar with at any other time in our history. We've never seen this level of violent conduct by law enforcement against the citizenry be completely ignored and swept under the rug by the administration. It should be troubling to every American, no matter where you are on the political spectrum. You should not be comfortable watching public servants act like this and commit these acts of violence and suffer no repercussion for it.

[00:10:33] Speaker 1: Dr. McCabe, thank you very much. I appreciate your time.