Gun Battle in Sri Lanka; Trump Defends Response to White Nationalist Violence; Biden Addresses Criticisms of His Past Behavior
NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): A deadly shootout and explosions in Sri Lanka as police raid a home of suspected terrorist and uncover what could be a bombmaking factory. U.S. president Donald Trump is on the defensive again over his comments about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 because of what Joe Biden said about him. And later, a jailhouse interview: Russian national Maria Butina talked to CNN about her future behind bars in the U.S. The stories are ahead this hour. Welcome to our viewers around the world, coming to you live from CNN Center, I'm Natalie Allen. And this is CNN NEWSROOM.</s>ALLEN: Across Sri Lanka, authorities are carrying out raids to make sure those behind the Easter Sunday massacre are brought to justice. On the island's east coast, police came under fire as they approached a home and then three bombs detonated. At least 15 people were found dead inside, six were children. They say two suspects are now on the run. We're joined by Nikhil Kumar. I want to ask you first, what more can you tell us about these raids that took place? And what officials found there.</s>NIKHIL KUMAR, CNN NEW DELHI BUREAU CHIEF: Well, Natalie, today there have been warnings about potential attacks following those devastating Easter Sunday bombings. And last night there is this raid on the coast of the country, where as you said, 15 people were killed, among them six suspected terrorists and one of them identified as Mohamed Marr (ph). he has been identified as a prominent member of the NTJ, the local Islamist group believed to have engineered those Easter Sunday attacks. And the brother-in-law, the spiritual leader, Zahran Hashim, killed himself when he blew himself up at the Shangri-La hotel on Sunday. So we are getting more of a picture of what the authorities are after. When they got to this place and they raided these locations, they discovered a huge cache of explosives, 150 explosive sticks and 100,000 ball bearings, a drones. A massive haul that explains -- that points to how large an operation it was. We heard over the past few days since the Easter Sunday bombings about the scale of what happened and about the concerns about just how well funded these terrorists were. And the raid yesterday further underlines that point, all these materials, flags as well, all this material points to a very well funded, sophisticated terror network that was out to cause potentially more havoc. For people here, now encountering as the raids take place, as the security forces trying to stem any further attacks and go after the two suspected terrorists who escaped yesterday and those are on the loose, people here are encountering curfews. They're countering the sorts of fears that they thought they had left behind, back when this country was locked in a violent and vicious civil war. This is very much a fluid situation as we come up to the one-week anniversary of the devastating attacks.</s>ALLEN: I'm sure all of this has people still on edge. You mentioned the two that got away during the raid. But the bigger picture, do authorities still believe that there are more terrorists out there in hiding and there still is a threat that is severe?</s>KUMAR: There is still a continuing threat. Authorities have been emphasizing this point again and again in the recent week since those bombings. They were criticized a lot for the intelligence failures in the run-up to the Easter Sunday bombings. There were several warnings, including one just an hour before the first explosion on Easter Sunday. And since then, they've been trying to get ahead of the curve after failing to act before those bombings. And they emphasize again and again, that more people are believed to be out there, that more attacks would be in the works. U.S. authorities have made the warning earlier in the week, Israeli authorities say there was a high, concrete threat of further attacks in this country. So it's very much still a threatening situation over here in Sri Lanka.</s>ALLEN: All right, we appreciate it, Nikhil Kumar there, live from Colombo, thank you. Three of the six places the bombers targeted --</s>ALLEN: -- last Sunday were churches filled with worshippers celebrating Easter. Our Will Ripley went inside and showed us how the attack unfolded.</s>WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I'm standing outside Saint Anthony Shrine, one of the three churches that was bombed here in Sri Lanka. You can see the clock there. It stopped at 8:45 when the bomb went off. Father Jude Fernando is going to take us inside the church. It looks pretty bad outside but I would imagine it's worse in there.</s>FATHER JUDE FERNANDO, ST. ANTHONY'S CHURCH: Yes. We just go in?</s>RIPLEY: OK. So he was only in the church for a few minutes?</s>FERNANDO: Two minutes, two minutes. This is the same place that he has exploded himself. And this is the area normally children they will play because there were children. Let's go around. Normally people want to stay in this area.</s>RIPLEY: So he chose the location nearest to the children?</s>FERNANDO: Because he, and I think people move in because this area is full of people.</s>RIPLEY: Most people who died were right in that area.</s>FERNANDO: In this area.</s>RIPLEY: I see the clothing and the shoes there.</s>FERNANDO: Yes, yes, yes, you can see where they took kids' bottles and the shoes and everything.</s>RIPLEY: Do you know how many people died in here?</s>FERNANDO: Of course, from here, they took 33 bodies out for the recognitions.</s>RIPLEY: Some of the bodies were in pieces?</s>FERNANDO: Yes, yes. This is the statue, which is St. Anthony's statue, which we take for blessings and everything. It was unharmed.</s>RIPLEY: That sad fact that the bomb didn't destroy these as well, what does that say to you?</s>FERNANDO: I mean, it's a real miracle, a miracle and the power of St. Anthony.</s>RIPLEY: Now are going to the roof?</s>FERNANDO: Yes.</s>RIPLEY: Pieces of the roof were thrown just all over the place.</s>FERNANDO: The whole roof is gone. Careful.</s>RIPLEY: Yes.</s>FERNANDO: People are here. The people were here</s>RIPLEY: The smell, I mean, you still smell the bodies.</s>FERNANDO: And you can see, the altar is still intact here. You see the image there.</s>RIPLEY: You just renovated this a year ago?</s>FERNANDO: Yes, a year ago.</s>RIPLEY: It makes you really wonder, when you walk around here, what kind of a person could ever do something like this.</s>FERNANDO: That is the biggest question that everyone in Sri Lanka has.</s>ALLEN: Will Ripley for us there in that report. U.S. president Donald Trump has a new talking point to try to fire up his base ahead of the 2020 election. He now claims he was the victim of an attempted coup, an apparent reference to the Mueller report. For more on the story, here's our Jim Acosta.</s>JIM ACOSTA, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Without providing any evidence, President Trump fired up a crowd of gay rights enthusiasts at the National Rifle Association's annual convention by alleging special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe was an attempted coup aimed at toppling his administration.</s>TRUMP: They tried for a coup, didn't work out so well. And I didn't need a gun for that one, did I? A disgrace, spying, surveillance, trying for an overthrow and we caught them. We caught them.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): It's an unfounded claim he also shared on one of his favorite TV shows.</s>TRUMP: Bigger than Watergate because it means so much, this was a coup. This wasn't stealing information from an office in the Watergate apartments. This was an attempted coup.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): The president also tried to knock down one of the most remarkable findings in the Mueller report, that he ordered former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel.</s>TRUMP: I never told Don McGahn to fire Mueller. If I wanted to fire Mueller, I would've done it myself. And I'm a student of history. I see what you get when you fire people. And it's not good.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): Mr. Trump is now savaging Mueller, a man he called "honorable" a few weeks ago.</s>TRUMP: We had 18 people that were Trump haters. That includes Mr. Mueller. He was a Trump hater.</s>JOE BIDEN, FORMER U.S. VICE PRESIDENT AND PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Very fine people on both sides?</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): The president is also relitigating his response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville after former vice president Joe Biden slammed Mr. Trump for saying there were very fine people on both sides.</s>TRUMP: And if you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): But that's not true. There were also neo-Nazis and other white nationalists chanting anti-Semitic slogans. CNN pressed Mr. Trump on this in the aftermath of Charlottesville.</s>ACOSTA: So the neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest the removal of that statue.</s>TRUMP: But you also had people that --</s>TRUMP: -- were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group - excuse me, excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.</s>ACOSTA (voice-over): Still, the president seems to relish a matchup with Biden. The president would rather have the 2020 race turn on the economy, as he tweeted out the latest government data showing the nation's GDP grew 3.2 percent in the first quarter, far above expectations. He's also defending his handling of Otto Warmbier, the American college student, who died after imprisoned by North Korea. Despite Warmbier's death, the president is describing himself as "the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States." Mr. Trump weighed in on reports that North Korea asked for $2 million for Warmbier's release.</s>TRUMP: We don't pay money for hostages. The Otto case was a very unusual case. But I just want to let you know, no money was paid for Otto.</s>ACOSTA: As for the Mueller report, sources close to the president say he's not putting himself in any legal jeopardy in attacking the Russia investigation. One advisor went as far as to say that the Mueller probe has become a unifying force for the GOP, one that the president will continue to tap into heading into the campaign -- Jim Acosta, CNN, the White House.</s>ALLEN: The president and first lady are spending part of their weekend hosting Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and his wife. It's the third time that Abe's been to the White House in two years. A senior U.S. official says that the two leaders will discuss North Korea, trade and investment and other issues during the two day visit. They also celebrated Melania Trump's 49th birthday. Joining me now to talk about this is Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngtown State University and currently on Fulbright Award in Tokyo. Paul, thank you for being with us.</s>PAUL SRACIC, YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY: Thanks for having me.</s>ALLEN: Let's begin with Mr. Trump meeting with the Japanese prime minister and they're talking trade and the other issue, of course, security regarding North Korea and this comes after the North Koreans accuse the U.S. of acting in bad faith during the last summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, clearly a worrying turn of events for Mr. Abe, isn't it?</s>SRACIC: Yes and no. You might say first of all, I think the Japanese were worried at the rapprochement going on with the United States and North Korea, concerned about whether their security concerns were being fully recognized, particularly the short-range missiles. I think they may have wanted things to slow down a little bit. But certainly, they wanted the situation in North Korea to be solved. They want denuclearization because the proximity of Japan to North Korea makes them extremely vulnerable to Kim Jong-un's weapons, his nuclear weapons. So they are nervous about that. So I think they'd like to see steps forward but to make sure we are going forward in total denuclearization.</s>ALLEN: We know Mr. Trump will be going to Japan twice in the next few weeks. Also to continued their discussions, we will follow that. I want to turn now to something else that happened on the campaign trail, Paul. And that is the president's comments on Charlottesville and what happened there with the rally. If he was going to respond to former Vice President Joe Biden's campaign, why do you think he chose to double down on his previous comments? Some might say rewriting history vis-a-vis Charlottesville.</s>SRACIC: I think President Trump -- and certainly you hear these views coming from the Right in the United States -- is President Trump's words in Charlottesville or after Charlottesville, I should say, were misunderstood. It is something called the Charlottesville hoax when he said there were many fine people there, that he specifically excluded white supremacists and neo-Nazis. So I think he wanted to take that on directly. But also, I think he realizes, that Biden's campaign for the presidency is going to be about Trump from day one. That is Joe Biden's justification for getting a nomination. He is the one that could beat Donald Trump. I think Trump looks and says that Biden is his most serious competitor among those in the field, that one that will give him the most problems with working class voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio. So I think he wants to directly respond to that very quickly.</s>ALLEN: With his comments on Charlottesville, Joe Biden is getting under the president's skin, isn't he?</s>SRACIC: I think he's provoking a reaction but it's not hard to get under Donald Trump's skin as we know.</s>SRACIC: So I think whatever he's hit, this is how Donald Trump acts. He fights back. Right away. He hits back on Twitter or comments to the press. This is not surprising. We used to think that the best way to deal with these criticisms for a politician is to ignore them. And hopefully they will be talking about something else. But President Trump never does that. The minute he gets hit, he hits back. So I think you're going to expect see this over the next year and a half as we ramp up to the election in November 2020.</s>ALLEN: Meantime, candidate Biden has issues of his own. He addressed two on the program, "The View," on Friday. Getting too touchy-feely with women. He talked about that and the other, the Anita Hill hearings from the '90s for the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Biden back then didn't call others to testify who could have reportedly corroborated her story about Thomas and sexual inappropriateness. He called chair recently, in his league (ph) . She said too little too late. But here he is talking about this issue today on "The View," let's listen.</s>BIDEN: I am sorry she was treated the way she was treated. I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done. I did everything in my power to do what I thought was within the rules to be able to stop things. But there were a lot of mistakes made across the board. And, for those, I apologize.</s>ALLEN: So is this a topic that will continue to possibly hurt Biden on the campaign trail?</s>SRACIC: I think so and maybe In the primaries. The problem Biden has is he's been involved in American politics for such a long time.</s>SRACIC: And we've seen this big movement, whether on same sex marriage or on the #MeToo movement. The politics in the world has changed. While Biden has been in the public. He's going to be caught flat-footed on many issues and this in particular, I think, is going to bother women, particularly with the whole controversy over Brett Kavanaugh and that nomination and allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault and things like that. So this is something that Biden is going to have to figure out how to answer. And frankly, I don't think he did a great job on "The View," because his continual answer is he was sorry for the way she was treated by the committee. So he's not taking that full responsibility for this. He's leaving an opening for people for criticism because of that.</s>ALLEN: We will wait and see what the others in the field do when we get to the debate season, if they come after Biden on this. We really appreciate your insights, thank you so much, Paul Sracic.</s>SRACIC: Thank you.</s>ALLEN: A powerful storm leaves parts of Mozambique in ruins but the damage could continue as the remnants of cyclone Kenneth still pack a punch. The second big storm in the past few weeks. Plus measles in the United States was eliminated almost 20 years ago. But now, the preventable disease is back and it is spreading.