FBI Interviews Shooter's Girlfriend Marilou Danley.
GORANI: Returning now to our top story, the brutal massacre in Las Vegas and the investigation into the shooter's possible motive. His girlfriend could provide some clues. The FBI is interviewing her. Her name is Marilou Danley. She just returned from the Philippines and an attorney is expected to deliver a statement on her behalf later in the day. Nic Robertson reports from Manila.</s>NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Well, Philippine authorities have been very cautious about what they are telling journalists here. The reason for that according to the spokesperson at the Immigration Bureau, is that they don't want to damage what is an active and ongoing U.S. investigation. But Marilou Danley's arrival back in the United States does appear to have triggered them being able to pass on some information. What the spokesperson at the Immigration Bureau said was that Marilou Danley arrived here in Manila on the 25th of September. But what was less clear when I talked to her was precisely the nature and conditions under which Marilou Danley left here.</s>MARIA ANTONETTE MANGROBANG, PHILIPPINE IMMIGRATION BUREAU SPOKESWOMAN: When she arrived on the 25th, she was processed like a regular passenger and on the 3rd of October, just yesterday, she passed through immigration at around 4:56 p.m. and -- to board her flight to Los Angeles.</s>ROBERTSON: And she passed through immigration when she was leaving with FBI agents?</s>MANGROBANG: I cannot confirm that, sir. That is not something that is in their travel records, but what I can say is that all the information with respect to the travel of Ms. Marilou Danley has been communicated with the Homeland Security as well as the</s>FBI. ROBERTSON: And as far as you know, she left on her own freewill?</s>ANTONETTE MANGROBANG, SPOKESPERSON, PHILIPPINE BUREAU OF IMMIGRATION: Well, we cannot say that if she was - we cannot confirm or deny that because it is an information that we do not have, but what we can say is that she passed through the immigration process and was cleared by an immigration officer to board her flight departing the country.</s>ROBERTSON: With the FBI?</s>MANGROBANG: We cannot confirm, sir, whether she was accompanied by the FBI or she was traveling alone.</s>ROBERTSON: The spokesperson also told me that wasn't Marilou Danley's only visit to the Philippines in September, that she arrived here on the 15th of September from Tokyo, left seven days later on the 22nd September for Hong Kong, then three days later traveling back on the 25th of September from Hong Kong. So, this raises many, many more questions than it answers for authorities here. They remain very, very cautious about opening up to details of Marilou's visit here - Marilou Danley's visit because they say they don't want to damage this ongoing, active US investigation. Nic Robertson, CNN, Manila, the Philippines.</s>HALA GORANI, CNN HOST, THE WORLD RIGHT NOW: Thank you, Nic. Now, we're hearing from Marilou Danley's sisters about why she may have traveled to the Philippines. They spoke exclusively to our affiliate, 7 Network Australia. They asked for their identities to be concealed.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And I know that she don't know anything as well, like us. She was sent away. She was sent away, so that she will be not there to interfere of what he's planning.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Marilou was there. And this maybe as well didn't happen because she won't let that happen. She would definitely stop something, whatever what he was planning.</s>GORANI: Those were the sisters of the girlfriend of the shooter in Las Vegas. Las Vegas where we're seeing the US president speak at a police operations center. I don't know if we have that footage. There it is. The image has frozen, OK. We'll unfreeze that as soon as we can and bring it to you. So, you just heard from the sisters of Marilou Danley. If their theory holds up, it's another sign of how carefully this shooter planned this attack in advance. Las Vegas police found at least 23 weapons inside the hotel room alone. Several were altered to fire like automatic weapons. Yet somehow Paddock managed to sneak them into the Mandalay Bay hotel without being detected. Though it's been explained that you could do that in several times and in suitcases. He also had thousands of rounds of ammunition. And from his vantage point on the 32nd floor, Paddock was virtually unassailable. CNN senior law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes joins me from Washington. He worked for the FBI for nearly 30 years. Tom, I guess, my first question is, this guy, 64 years old, no military experience, no background in law enforcement, do you think it's possible that he bought and modified those semi-automatic rifles to become automatic rifles and set up that whole hotel room all on his own?</s>TOM FUENTES, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, Hala, it certainly looks like he did and it wouldn't have taken that much other than how many trips it took from the lobby upstairs to bring all of his luggage pieces containing the guns to his room. But that and the modification of those guns, very easily done.</s>GORANI: So, the modification - sorry to jump in. This bump fire stock, which is legal to buy, that's easy if you just follow instructions on the Internet or something?</s>FUENTES: Absolutely. It's easy to do. And a man like him, with plenty of money, could easily have found gunsmiths and other gun enthusiasts that would've helped him with that modification if he needed it. If I could backup one second to what Nic Robertson was reporting, the FBI had no authority to bring his girlfriend back to the United States. She was not being deported. She could not be deported back to the US. She's not a citizen here and there was no extradition. She hasn't even been charged with anything yet. So, her trip back, being escorted by the FBI agents assigned in the Manila FBI office, was absolutely voluntary on her part to come back here. The escort would've also been for her safety, fearing that somebody might want to do harm to her, thinking that she may have been involved in this. so, this is absolutely voluntary on her part to come back to the US and, hopefully, she might be able to shed some light on what he was thinking, besides just buying the weapons and modifying them.</s>GORANI: So, if you're the FBI agent in charge of talking with this lady, what would your first question be?</s>FUENTES: My first question would be who else was close to him, who else would he have been in contact with. If she didn't know about all of these weapons or his intention to use them to murder people, did anybody else seem to be close to him that she knew of, a friend, a neighbor, a relative, a work associate, anybody that he had been talking to, so that the FBI and the Las Vegas police could go and contact any other person. And by the way, the FBI is just providing the assistance because of its considerable international assets. The Las Vegas authorities are still in charge of this investigation because there has been no indication of terrorism.</s>GORANI: By now, if there was suspicion of any kind of terrorism, whether it's white supremacist terrorism, another form of terrorism, would we have seen the FBI take over at this stage?</s>FUENTES: Yes, absolutely. If there was an indication that it was a white supremacist group, KKK, Aryan Brotherhood, neo-Nazis, any of that type of what would be classified by the FBI as domestic terrorism, a group originating or emanating from the United States as opposed to ISIS or someone overseas. So, if there was any indication, international or domestic, of terrorism, the FBI would absolutely take over.</s>GORANI: Now, I keep coming back to this because this is the thing I found the most confounding. This murderer was 64 years old. Really, really, his intention, very obvious. You don't have to be an expert, was to massacre as many people as possible. In your experience in the FBI, once someone is that age, wouldn't you expect that they've learned how to process whatever sick motivation pushes them to commit these types of mass crimes?</s>FUENTES: Yes, it's unusual for somebody his age. But, remember, a couple of years ago, we had a shooting incident in the United States at the Holocaust Museum where we had someone older than him kill a guard and exchange gunfire with another guard. He was a member of a white supremacist group who kicked him out of the group because they thought he was too old. So, he was trying to prove to them that he was fully capable of being a bad guy and that he shouldn't have been kicked out. And he was later apprehended. And I think he died in prison shortly after.</s>GORANI: And when you see how this was all executed, the operation itself, there is - no part of you is surprised that a 64-year-old civilian was able to organize himself so horribly efficiently? I mean, because it's not just - no, but it's not just the acquisition of the weapons, it's how he knew that was the best vantage point. He had cameras inside, outside the room. I mean, just feels military, doesn't it?</s>FUENTES: Hala, I'm 65. And I don't think most of us at my age are too feeble to carry out what he did.</s>GORANI: No, no. Not feeble physically. I mean, he doesn't have the training is what I'm saying, obviously.</s>FUENTES: It wouldn't take much training. You could buy these weapons. They are very simple to put bullets in a magazine, put the magazine in the gun, cock it, pull the trigger and off it goes. In this situation, he would not have to have been a skilled marksman because the group in this concert were not that far away from him and they're packed so tightly that he could just fire in that general direction and just spray bullets at that crowd, and that's how he could hit 50 people. If this individual was a trained special forces member, he would've killed three times that many people. So, it's not that difficult to do what he did. It took a lot of organization to, obviously, accumulate that many weapons, to put them in luggage, to bring them up to the room, and then set up like he did with a vantage point down the Las Vegas Strip, which gave him a long view of the thousands of people that were down there attending or nearby the concert venue.</s>GORANI: All right, Tom Fuentes. Thanks so much for joining us. We always appreciate your analysis and shedding some light there on some of the questions people still have about this case.</s>FUENTES: Thank you, Hala.</s>GORANI: He has been in the job for around nine months, but the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said he has no plans to resign and denied that Vice President Mike Pence had urged him to stay in the job. It stems from a report by "NBC News" that reported that Tillerson had called the president a moron in July. Here is how, after that report came out, he walked up to the podium at the State Department and addressed that accusation.</s>REX TILLERSON, US SECRETARY OF STATE: There is some news - I'm not going to deal with petty stuff like that. This is what I don't understand about Washington. Again, I'm not from this place, but the places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense.</s>GORANI: President Trump never one to miss a chance to bash the media immediately tweeted, "The @NBCNews story has just been totally refuted by Sec. Tillerson and @VP Pence. It is #FakeNews. They should issue an apology to AMERICA!" Meanwhile, "NBC" says it stands by its reporting. Let's get more with Elise Labott. She's at the State Department. So, Elise, the secretary of state says he's committed to the president, that he stands by him. He didn't exactly deny that he called him a moron.</s>ELISE LABOTT, CNN'S GLOBAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: He didn't deny it, Hala, but later his spokesman Heather Nauert, State Department spokesman, came out to the podium at the briefing today, told reporters that he did, in fact, deny ever having used that language. Other officials say he didn't want to kind of - as he said, get into that kind of petty talk and that disparaging talk upstairs, but sent his spokesman out to say that he did not, in fact, call the president a moron. Now, Secretary of State Tillerson, as you know, has been quite frustrated in the job. He's constantly undermined by President Trump. But aides tell us that he has continued to plow ahead, working with, as he says, Secretary of Defense Mattis and others on the president's foreign policy. He kind of went through some foreign policy successes. I will say that Heather Nauert said that after Secretary Tillerson made those remarks today, Hala, that he did have a phone call with the president. He said that president was - that call was a good call. And privately, aides are saying that things are blowing over. Obviously, the White House not happy with how this is playing out, telling our White House team that president, obviously, not happy that this is boiling out into the public and there's been frustration between these two men. But it seems as if this has kind of reached a plateau. This is a story that started in July and we have to see now if they're going to kind of just be willing to move on. Clearly, a lot of tension there, Hala.</s>GORANI: All right. Thanks very much, Elise Labott at the State Department. Just listening to instructions there, we're still expecting any minute now the president to speak in Las Vegas. He - you can see there, there's a podium that was set up, I understand, in a police command center area. He is surrounded there by about 150 officers, I understand, and journalists are gathered as well. We'll bring you that live when it happens. We'll be right back.