from washington, the "the mclaughlin group." the american original for over three decades. the sharpest minds, best sources, hardest talk. >> "the mclaughlin group" is brought to you by siemens. acro and we're

building them to last. siemens. answers. we have been able to with these situations with the united states and russia in a way that is good for the security and the prosperity of both of our countries. we are cooperating on non- proliferation, on nuclear security. on intelligence and counterterrorism. >> president obama and then russian president dmitry medvedev of russia ry medvedev of russia agreed to join forces on agreed to join counterterrorism. specifically against chechen terrorist doku umarov and his al-qaeda affiliated caucasus

emrit. umarov's casualty business emrit is in a region between the caspian and black seas that includes the russian republic of dagestan. after this agreement was reached, russian intelligence then asked the fbi to investigate tamerlan tsarnaev, the elder of two brothers charged with carrying out the boston marathon bombings that killed three people. two americans and a chinese national and wounded 260 on april the 15th. tamerlan was age 26 when he was shot and killed four days after the marathon by police in watertown, massachusetts, where he and his brother dzhokhar, age 19, had sought refuge. okay. back to russia's request in 2011. the fbi fulfilled the russian request and interviewed tamerlan and found nothing suspicious. but the russians were not

satisfied with the fbi nothing suspicious report so the russians then asked the cia to look into tamerlan's background, especially any links to radical islam. so the cia added tamerlan's name to its terrorist database. tamerlan's parents watched all of this from dagestan, the russian republic, where they were interviewed late this week over there by the fbi. the fbi's findings. 15 months ago, january of last year, tamerlan visited dagestan where he stayed some seven months and then returned to the u.s. that was july of last year. nine months before last week's boston attacks. this seven-month stay by tamerlan in dagestan has led u.s. terror experts to speculate on what happened to tamerlan while in dagestan. here's one informed view." while it is too early to tell, i suspect that tamerlan was

radicalized in the u.s. but used his months in dagestan to receive the military training and bomb-making skills needed for the boston attacks." so says glen howard, the president of 9 jamestown foundation, a d.c.-based think tank founded to help soviet dissidents. question. was there a lack of follow- through by the white house on the potential threat from chechen terrorism following our deal and our understanding with medvedev? >> i don't think we can blame it on the white house, john. but clearly the russians knew something about tamerlan when they got in touch with us. they had some information. we don't know exactly what it was. enough to go to the fbi and then go to the cia. and they believed that tamerlan was connected with chechen terrorists somehow in some way. and the idea that after all this he goes to dagestan, which

is has sedition and terror, and stays there six are or seven months and is not in touch with some kind of terrorist, i mean, that boggles the mind. and the question is why, when he came back, did the american intelligence not look this and follow up on this? and there are a number of occasions in boston where the guy acted strange. clearly, all along the line the ball has been dropped. it's not the white house fault, john, but it is in the security establishment. >> acting strange does not necessarily mean that you're a terrorist. i think based on what the fbi discovered in their interview with tamerlan and in their investigation, they couldn't find anything. and they went back to the russians, and the russians refused to provide any hard information, which is not unusual. so the russians probably knew more than they were saying. there does seem to be some murky third figure here who has

been identified only as meish who may have had something to do with radicallizing the older brother. frankly, you know, i don't know that you can necessarily lay blame at any of these particular focal points because the two brothers didn't do anything wrong, didn't do anything illegal until they built that bomb. and you can break up a cell once it's operating in real life. but if people are going to self- radicalize over the internet, it's a huge challenge for our intelligence agencies in following the -- >> i know just up on capitol hill this week talking to the lawmakers, there is some -- conversation about the lack of sharing of information between agencies. that that may have played a part in this dropping the ball about discovering what these brothers were up to. i know that there is lots of conversations about what did the fbi know, what did the cia know, what did homeland security know and why didn't they share this information with each other? did they know when he was leaving the country?

there was misinformation about hem land security thought they didn't know whether they tracked him leaving russia then coming back in, then they did know. there is all kinds of -- i think people are also trying to cover for themselves at this point because obviously there is blame going around about who should have known about this. these guys were walking around at the marathon. no one was keeping an eye on them, yet the russian government was warning about them. somebody, i believe, dropped the ball at some point and i think it may eventually come down to this inability of our agencies to share information. this is what led up to some of the problems on september 11th, 2001, and i think we're going to hear more about it now with this case. >> there is a question raised about how dzhokhar, he's the person in question, should be put on trial. should he be put on trial as a criminal defendant or as an enemy combatant? >> i don't think he would be an enemy combatant. i would certainly put him on trial as a criminal defendant. i want to go back to the point

of not informing people. it has now come out that the police in boston did not inform the police in new york that he was expected to come to new york. and this was his next journey and he basically said that and the police are up in arms in new york for not being informed about something like this. if he had come to new york and there had been another incident -- >> what's the reason they were not told? >> they just didn't tell them. >> they were caught up in the -- >> they were captured by them. >> they were. nevertheless, this was the next stage. who knew how many people were involved in this thing? and one of the things you always do, the one department should have informed the police in new york and they were up in arms over it. and rightly so, as far as i am concerned. >> it's hardly an organized plan. they just decided to do it in the car. then the car didn't have enough gas in it. i mean, that -- the question -- excuse me -- the two bombersk had no exit man at automatic. they thought they have to get rid of these bombs. >> they throw the pressure

cooker out of the wind owe of the car. >> they could have easily have gone to times square. this question whether he is tried as an enemy combatant, i think the real question is whether or not the fbi should have had more time to question them without having a lawyer present. now, they were cut off. they had several hours left to do it. he was becoming more lucid because he was recovering from his injuries, providing more information. that questioning was cut off when a judge showed up -- >> an american citizen with a lawyer -- >> here's a lawyer. he stopped talking. they lost precious time. >> just a moment. >> anybody who has watched law or order or "csi" knows you are entitled to a lawyer. >> the enemy combatant versus being put on trial is the advantage the interrogation could have gone on as days if he were tried as an enemy combatant, months if necessary, for investigators to feel certain he revealed all he could revealed. >> you can question him.

but since he is an american citizen, committed his crime on american soil, he is going to be tried in an american court, not in a military tribunal. i do agree they should not have stopped the interrogation. he was delivering an awful lot of information and a judge walks in and mirandizes him right on the spot when these guys -- when these guys -- >> and he had a lawyer with him. very unusual. >> they are getting all this information out of him. >> he says do you need a lawyer? here's one for you. they immediately stopped talking. >> the judge interfered with the investigation. >> question. how big an embarrassment is this for president obama? >> i think it's -- i don't believe you can blame president obama. it's underneath him. it's the fbi. i agree with susan that basically this is a lack of coordination in all of these agencies. a lack of follow-up. something went wrong that was supposed to go right after 9/11. >> what's disturbing -- excuse me, i think we are going around the circle here. i don't think you can fault

president obama on this. but you can look at maybe some of these procedures, maybe they can be tightened up. self-radicalized over the internet, which is what this appears to be. the lone wolf. this is tough to find out until -- >> don't bring these kinds of guys into the country. >> susan? >> self-radicalized over the internet until he traveled overseas doing god knows what for several months. a lot of these answers we may never get because as we were saying, they stopped the questioning at a critical moment. and it's questionable whether they should have done that. >> he was brought into the country when he was how old? six years ago? >> the 26-year-old was a teenager. >> i'm talking about the younger brother. the other one was a teenager. so you would have kept him out then. i don't know what kind of -- >> you are bringing in their parents from the most explosive region in the country which has undergone slaughters in

chechnya >> and the obama administration stopped with a certain policy that would have provide the more scrutiny for people from countries where there is a lot more terrorism. >> you know that the russians are holding the games in sochi. sochi is about 200 miles west of this whole area. >> it's on the black sea. >> right next to english sea and dagestan. >> about as far as washington is from new york. not too far. do you that i it any of this is going to play out perhaps -- does putin have to be concerned about locating the games at sochi, which i visited, by the way? >> i doubt it. i have a feeling there will be enough both police and specific police coverage to not -- that they will not have to worry about it. they have plenty of underground and undercover -- they have guys on the ski slopes from the fsb, which is the old kgb, going down with

the skiers. >> right. as putin i think has a little clave to say i told you so because he accused the west of romanticizing the chechen fighters. the chechen fighters are pretty brutal, too. i don't think what happened in boston had anything to do with chechen -- >> how big is the number of chechen radical islamists such as we've seen? how big is that number? >> i don't know what the numbers are, but it's the not chechen so much as dagestan. >> is these were not lone wolves by any means? >> we don't know. i mean, somehow or other they got radicalized. we don't know exactly how it happened. there are all sorts of different versions of it. the one thing that i think is absolutely clear, and this is incomprehensible to those of us who live in new york city, that the police in boston did not inform the new york city police. >> that is known as mobster central. there were mobsters there. we know that. it's an embarrassment to the

ussr. we know that sochi is 200 miles away. do you think they will run out of steam when sochi comes along. >> no. but putin is capable of putting up, shall we say, police officers in civilian clothes so that he will cover that area like a blanket. >> i drove through part of it. you know what they told me to do? keep your a bipartisan group of senators, the so-called gang of eight unveiled this 440 page immigration overhaul last week. now congress is out next week. so the 435 members of the house of representatives and the 100 senators go home to their districts and their states and can explore this sensitive and wide-ranging legislation with their constituents.

there's welcome news. highlights of the bill include giveaways to major industries. silicon valley gets a 300% increase in h-1b skilled worker visas. agribusiness gets a third of a million workers a year. blue-collar employers like meat packing plants get 18 5,000 more workers over four years and automatic increases thereafter. as for the 11 million illegal aliens in the u.s. today, the bill grants them conditional legal status and a path to citizenship. what's the cost? the official estimated cost to taxpayers over ten years $17 billion. in fact, the heritage foundation currently estimates the true ten-year course at $2.6 trillion. a trillion being a thousand

billion. the last measure to control immigration and create legal status for undocumented workers was the 1986 immigration reform and control act. that's 27 years ago. that law legalized 2.7 million aliens. 1 million of these legalized aliens went on to become citizens. the principal economic impact was to raise income for imup as much as 13%. the 1986 immigration amnesty, by the way, caused a wave of follow-on immigration of 400% surge from 2.7 million illegal aliens then to 11 million now. in the wake of the boston marathon bombings, the senate may the boston marathon bombings, the senate may not move as fast as president obama wants. question. will boston marathon bombing slow down the momentum of u.s.

immigration policy and procedure reform, pat? >> it already has, john. but i believe the bill is going to pass the united states senate. so many people are out front on there. marco rubio is the key player for the republicans, is being bashed -- was being bashed by conservative talk-radio bosser this. i think he would like to pull back on it. what's going to happen is it's going to pass the senate and it will go over to the house and it will beled. i don't think it's going to go -- it will have to go to conference and you are not going to get the amnesty. >> hold on. there are eight people on this committee. republicans are rubio florida, john mccain arizona, lindsey graham, south carolina, the democrats are dick durbin illinois, robert mendez new jersey, chuck schumer new york

and michael bennett colorado and i think schumer is the head of this group. >> yes, he is. >> go ahead. >> well, senator schumer and mccain met with reporters last week, and basically mccain said if they pass this bill republic the republicans back on the playing field where they can compete. you can't compete in a country where the hispanics are going to be the majority of some states. so there is political incentive on the republicans side. americans for tax reform did a poll among republicans only. two-thirds of republicans support this bill as it's described. you call it amnesty. i don't call it amnesty if you have to pay back taxes, pay some pretty hefty fees and it's 13 years before you can become citizen. but this does legalize people, gets them out of the shadows, and strengthens our defenses, frankly, if you know who is in the country as opposed to just having people in the shadows.

and i would say call them undocumented immigrants. illegal aliens i think is a rather offensive determine. >> undocumented democrats. >> they are both illegal and they are also aliens. >> come on. >> he is accused of doing this. >> this is not a bill was passed 27 years ago in 1986 when our gross domestic product growth was about 8%. today, on the threshold new procedure, 14 million americans are unemployed. what's the impact of that? >> the republicans are in a really tough spot right now because if in the last election part of the reason they lost is they lost the hispanic vote very badly. however, they support this measure. we passed this measure. there are going to be tens of millions more democratic voters for generations to come. at the very least, perhaps longer than that. but what are they going to do? i agree with pat. i think part of this will have

to do with cost and jobs. i think it's going to get to the house and they are going to start talking about the fiscal implications of this and they are going to talk about what? going to do for wages for americans. there is at least one study that's going to show this isgoing to drop wages four lowest income workers. so it's not going to be helpful for people who are already struggling right now to bring in workers who are going to lower wages for everybody. >> i just want to say one thing. it's not 14 million people. there are 24 million people in america who are unemployed working part time or have given up looking for work. we have the worst unemployment conditions we have in deferral decades. this is going to be a difficult time to bring in a lot of people who are going to be competitive with these people who are either out of work or can't get full-time work. >> do you think immigration reform is going to be slowed down by the unfortunate events of the boston marathon? >> i think -- i don't know that it will be much slowed down. i think it will be slowed down because it's going to take up a

lot of the oratory on this bill when this gets to the various house. i think it's relevant on e level. >> the coalition in support of this bill includes business, they want the agricultural workers. >> they want the cheap labor. that's what they want. >> a lot of people -- the people who don't want this are house republicans -- >> that's not true -- >> to your point, john, because these fellows were from chechnya and caucasus, people are going to start taking a look at where the immigrants are coming from and should we go to areas that are horribly inflamed and where any americanism is great and be bringing in folks willy-nilly from these regions. it's time we thought seriously -- >> the family lived near a while. they received asipe lum due to the chechen war. they lived largely on welfare. the mother has an arrest record

for shoplifting. tamerlan was denied citizenship because of a domestic abuse offense. before the bombings, these were hardly model immigrants. that's pretty tough. >> but they fell short of looking at them and say they are going to commit a terrorist act. >> it hasn't helped the advance of the legislation. >> we have crossed a new threshold here. you know what? we've crossed a new threshold here. for years since the september 11 attacks nothing has happened here. now a bomb has gone issue three. dazed and confused. >> adding marijuana to alcohol and tobacco is like putting gasoline on the fire. >> patrick kennedy is against making marijuana legal. he compares the burgeoning marijuana industry to what he calls big tobacco and big tobacco's earlier heavy-moneyed campaign defending adult

tobacco usage. the legallality or illegallity of marijuana is a confused and confusing matrix. let's start on the federal level. the federal control substances act makes the use of marijuana a federal crime. despite that federal injunction, many states have and are moving ahead with their own laws legalizing marijuana, and that worries patrick kennedy, former democratic congressman from rhode island, and son of the late ted kennedy. the district of columbia and 18 states have now legalized marijuana in varying degrees for medicinal use or recreational use or by decriminalizing the possession of the drug in small amounts of the state list. alaska, california, colorado, d.c., hawaii, maine, massachusetts, minnesota, mississippi, montana, nebraska, new york, nevada, new york, vermont, oregon, washington. in december of last year,

president obama was asked what he thought of the november 2012 ref ren da in the states of colorado and washington wherein voted he is of the majority voted yes on the legalization of recreational marijuana. obama said there were, quote- unquote, bigger fish to fry. he also said this. >> it does not make sense from a prioritization point of view for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law that's legal. >> the president drug czar talks tougher on states rights on marijuana usage. quote, no state, no executive nohas been passed by congress, unquote. question. does president obama have the option of choosing which federal laws to uphold and which to disregard? >> no. >> yes. >> pat? >> let me just say no, john. this is the old john c. calhoun nullification and enter

position. no state law can invalidate a federalaw. federal law trumps state law in this area. as a matter of policy, you may not run around and enforce it vigorously in states like colorado, but you cannot invalidate a law with a state -- >> what do you think should be -- should it be the law of the land on marijuana? >> john, we had a civil war over this issue whether the states had their right to interpose their own laws and beliefs against the federal government. >> i am talking about the danger of marijuana being an escalated drug, if that's what the real danger of it is? >> there are things called prosectorial discretion. the administration is not going to aggressively pursue these cases. we learned in california you can't get injuries who are going to convict people for recreational use. you have people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s, older people today, and never you have younger people,

libertarians. we are reaching a tipping point on this issue. the notion that it's criminalized is nonsense to most people. >> the state of affairs in colorado, adults up to 21 may buy one ounce of pot, grow two plants. a state sales tax of 30% has been proposed but not settled. what does that tell you, mortimer? >> it tells you they will probably be able to implement it in colorado. i happen to be opposed to the legalization of any kind of drugs like this. they lead to a lot of things, as you said. they are escalator drugs. we don't need this as an additional component to fourth prediction. guantanamo bay prison will be shut down by january 1 of next year? >> no way. >> i wish yes, but no. >> no. >> no. >> the answer is yes. bye-bye!

debate is raging around governor jerry brown's sweeping proposal to change how school districts are funded as he pushing back against critics. >> this is a cause for the children of california and a cause for our own future. >> in the wake of the boston marathon bombing, a call for more security cameras for san francisco's market street. drawing concerns for the civil liberties groups. and the keystone pipeline across the center of the united states could expand in the california area. and an interview with haurz