years. see that look at embassy in washington, d.c., speculate half the personnel are related to intelligence. reporter: as russia continues to figure into the controversy in america right now, whether hacking, spying or just talking. michelle kosinski, cnn, state department. bring in coauthor of isis: inside the army of terror and former moscow bureau chief. fascinating. attorney general in trouble for saying he hadn t met with russians but when he had twice with the russian ambassador. play what he said. talked about a number of issues. one the ukraine and had disagreement on that. ukrainian ambassador been in office the day before. had a little bit of a
hello, again. happy new year. thank you so much for joining me. a manhunt is under way after a terror attack in turkey. police are looking for the man seen in this surveillance video. he entered an exclusive nightclub in istanbul and open fire. 39 people are dead and one of them a police officer and 69 others injured. no group has claimed responsibility for this attack. cnn correspondent is joining us live now from istanbul. sara, all right all right. sorry, we re not going to be able to go to sara right now. instead michael weiss joining me now cnn contributor and co-author of isis inside the army of terror. michael. this nightclub is located in a very wealthy neighborhood. does the location say anything about the motivation behind this attack? yeah, it s a very chic and cosmopolitan area of istanbul, also known for a secular
isis inside the army of terror and a former director of fbi and also commander of fbi operations in iraq in 2003. michael, today we learned that the german intelligence and informant and others in the network talked about driving a truck filled with gasoline and a bomb into a crowd. why didn t they just roll him up when they discovered those five key members in november? that s the question of the hour. the network that was being run was by abu wala. he had two subordinates who ran a kind of ad hoc islamic center out of his apartment. his girlfriend was a german national who disappeared for several weeks and all of a sudden she was wearing a veil and the apartment had become this recruitment for jihadism. we don t know how many people attended these conferences or these sort of serm man events at
joining me now, cnn contributor, michael weiss, a senior editor for the daily beast and co-author of isis: inside the army of terror. let me start with the news we led with this segment, the idea that there was someone arrested outside the u.s. embassy firing shots into the air. we don t have any real information beyond this, other than that the man was shouting and shooting. is it the type of thing where officials are on higher alert, when we see copy cat cases, when he we see follow-up attempts at terror, typically, like this? yeah, and also, the fall of aleppo, remember, this is something the cia and the joint chiefs have said, is not just a humanitarian catastrophe for the syrian people, but also a veer krou counterterrorism threat to the united states. why? if you look at what s taking place in aleppo, this is not the assad regime that sacked the city. this is iranian-built militias backed by russian air power and russian special forces on the ground. this is going to be a r
endefinitely. some buses were burned even before they could reach their pickup points. i want to bring in michael weiss, co-author isis inside the army of terror and mohammed lela. what exactly happened here? this is actually a very big disappointment, there was a lot of hope the evacuations would take place but we know from a monitoring group with connections on the ground among the opposition that these will not be taking place tonight. that matches with some of the messaging we ve been getting from the red cross. simply put, they don t have the security guarantees in place to make sure to facilitate this exchange on the ground without anybody getting hurt. unfortunately as you said these evacuations have been postponed indefinite indefinitely. there s talk of trying again tomorrow but that would be a third day in a row we ve been hearing let s try it again tomorrow. unfortunately there are no