i want to bring in brett mcgurk. it's great to have you on the show.r being here, and a good afternoon to you. >> thanks, hallie. great to be here. >> talk to me about the intelligence gathering that led to this raid, and why the president decided to pull the trigger now. it seems as though there were a confluence of events, right? good intel, good conditions on the ground that led to this being the moment. >> well, the intel came together around the summer and over the course of the fall, our military team working with the intelligence community started to put together options as we refined making sure this was the leader of isis in this house, and they're looking at who's in the house, and around the house and getting the patterns of life and that takes some time. the president got his first operational briefing about six weeks ago in december, and really walked through in exquisite detail what this operation would be like, the complexity, because there was a family living on the first floor, and he knew that, and it was kind of ironic. he was respon

. >> brett mcgurk, thank you for your time. >> victor, thank you. >>> a source tells cnn that the u.s. has new intelligence about a possible false flag operation in russia. the source says moscow has been preparing a fake propaganda video that would in turn help justify why putin would invade ukraine. >> the same source says the u.s. believes the officials already hired actors to pose as corporationcorpses or victims. cnn is following this story. natasha, where would this video, this false flag video with fake actors and explosions and everything, where would this have been distributed and seen? >> reporter: it's a great question, alisyn, and we don't actually know the answer to that. the administration officials we spoke to did not outline the way this would be distributed. it's a great question because it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media and the west in particular would actually pick up and carry this video knowing that it is propaganda, that it is unlikely to be trustworthy. the other option is that it's just uploaded to social media and wreaks havoc there and takes

cnn is reporting that nsc middle east coordinator, brett mcgurk, and state department energy envoy amos hochstein are in riyadh today. are we asking the saudi's to pump more oil and is winning if you could confirm that? i can confirm they're on a trip. there are a range of range of topics to discuss, including yemen. and as you know, we engaging with our partners around the world about ensuring supply meets demand is part of our objective from here as well. reporter: and that's one of the objectives of the meeting as well? ms. psaki: i don't have more details on the meeting at this point in time. go ahead. reporter: thanks, jen. the secretary of state said today that they have not seen meaningful pullback by russia when it comes to the forces that they've put on ukraine's border. what would meaningful pullback look like to the united states? ms. psaki: well, i'm not going to define that by troop numbers. i think we will know it when we see it, which is a verifiable reduction of troops at the border of ukraine. reporter: but you're not looking at a certain metric or anything like that? m

let's bring in white house coordinator for the middle east, brett mcgurk. ling of this isis leader? given this big hit, what is the strategy moving forward? >> mika, it is great to be here. i think courtney's report summed it up quite well. one thing not mentioned in the report and this took months of planning because in the ground floor of that building was a family, a wife and husband and four children, that we don't believe had any idea, knew who was on the third floor. we were focused on that family because one of the assumptions in the plan, we wanted to capture al qurayshi, known as abdullah, but we assumed like al baghdadi he might decide to kill himself. we actually rehearsed and the president in the back and forth asked about the structural stability of the building. we had engineers determine if there was an explosion on the third floor the lower level would remain sound. that's the extraordinary planning that the military undertook to make this load. this was not just al baghdadi's successor but the right-hand man, orchestrator of the genocide of