60 Minutes - Sunday, February 17, 2019

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

In a highly anticipated interview with "60 Minutes," Andrew McCabe -- who became the acting FBI Director after the firing of James Comey -- tells Scott Pelley about the measures taken to ensure investigations into President Trump wouldn't "vanish." Plus -- Lesley Stahl learns what became of some of the school girls -- who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014. Those stories and more on this week's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Tonight, you will hear for the first time from the man who ordered the FBI investigations of President Trump, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. What was it specifically that caused you to launch the counterintelligence

investigation? If the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia's malign activity, possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator, you have to ask yourself, why would a president of the United States do that? The Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram attacked a local school and ran off with 276 girls. Some escaped, but it took the Nigerian government three years to negotiate the release of the others. Maybe you'll become a writer. We were able to meet with them at a kind of prep school.

The best revenge is massive success. And I really think these young women are going to be some senators, some governors. Some of these young women want to join the military. They want to be a general in the military and go get Boko Haram so they can't do this to any other young girls. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley.

I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Plans change over time and your financial solutions can too. Pacific Life has a variety of financial solutions that can help you complement your life goals and passions while managing the uncertainties. Backed by more than 150 years of experience, you can count on Pacific Life to be there so you can go out and keep living your best life. Pacific Life is one of the most dependable and experienced insurers in the industry and has been named one of the 2019 World's Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute. The freedom to go after whatever is next for you, that's the power of Pacific. Ask a financial professional about how Pacific Life can help give you the freedom to do what you love or visit www.pacificlife.com. Tonight, you will hear for the first time from the man who ordered the FBI investigations of the president. Former acting director Andrew McCabe is about to describe behind-the-scenes

chaos in 2017 after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. In the days that followed, McCabe says that law enforcement officials discussed whether to secretly record a conversation with the president and whether Mr. Trump could be removed from office through invoking the 25th Amendment. McCabe is the first person present in those meetings to describe them publicly. McCabe is a lifelong Republican who had a sterling 21-year career at the FBI, serving as head of counterterrorism and number two under Comey. But he was fired last year for allegedly lying to his own agents about a story he leaked to a newspaper. Not since Watergate has the FBI been drawn so deeply into presidential politics. Andrew McCabe was pulled into the center of the Tempest

on May 9th, 2017, when he was summoned by the president hours after Comey was fired. I'd never been to a meeting in the Oval Office before. I'm a career FBI agent, a government worker. Oval Office was above your pay grade. It certainly was. And the president immediately went off on a almost a gleeful description of what had happened with the firing of Jim Comey. And then he went on to state that people in the FBI were thrilled about this, that people really disliked Jim Comey, and that they were very happy about this and that it was a great thing. He was telling you what the reaction inside the FBI was. He was. It was very different than the reaction I had seen immediately before I came to the White House.

Which was what? People were shocked. We had lost our leader, a leader who was respected and liked by the vast majority of FBI employees. People were very sad. But anyway, that night in the Oval Office, what I was hearing from the president was not reality. It was the version of the events that I quickly realized he wished me to adopt. As he went on talking about how happy people in the FBI were, he said to me, I heard that you were part of the resistance. What did he mean by that? Well, I didn't know. And so I asked him and he said, I heard that you were one of the people that did not support Jim Comey. You didn't agree with him and the decisions that he'd made in the Clinton

case. And is that true? And I said, no, sir, that's not true. I worked very closely with Jim Comey. I was a part of that team and a part of those decisions. You had the sense you'd given him the wrong answer? I knew I had given him the wrong answer. You weren't trying to hang on to this job. I wasn't willing to lie to keep it. I didn't know when I'd be out of the job. I thought it would probably be pretty soon. And so I just put my head down and got to work trying to stabilize the people around me and do the things that I felt we needed to do with the Russia investigation, getting cases opened and getting a special counsel appointed. After Comey was fired, McCabe says he ordered two investigations of the president himself. They asked two questions. One, did Mr. Trump fire Comey to impede the investigation

into whether Russia interfered with the election? And two, if so, was Mr. Trump acting on behalf of the Russian government? That I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly. How long was it after that that you decided to start the obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president? I think the next day I met with the team investigating the Russia cases, and I asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward.

I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion, that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. You wanted a documentary record. That's right. That those investigations had begun because you feared that they would be made to go away. That's exactly right. McCabe says that the basis for both investigations was in Mr. Trump's own statements.

First, Mr. Trump had asked FBI Director Comey to drop the investigation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts. Then, to justify firing Comey, Mr. Trump asked his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to write a memo listing the reasons Comey had to go. And according to McCabe, Mr. Trump made a request for that memo that came as a surprise. Rod was concerned by his interactions with the president, who seemed to be very focused on firing the director and saying things like, make sure you put Russia in your memo. That's concerned Rod in the same way that it concerned me and the FBI investigators on the Russia case. If Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein listed the Russia investigation in his memo to the White House,

it could look like he was obstructing the Russia probe by suggesting Comey's firing. And by implication, it would give the president cover. He didn't want to put Russia in his memo. He did not. He explained to the president that he did not need Russia in his memo. And the president responded, I understand that. I'm asking you to put Russia in the memo anyway. When the memo justifying Comey's firing was made public, Russia was not in it. But Mr. Trump made the connection anyway, telling NBC, then Russian diplomats, that the Russian investigation

was among the reasons he fired Comey. There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts to open the investigation. The president had been speaking in a derogatory way about our investigative efforts for weeks, describing it as a witch hunt. Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven't made a phone call to Russia in years. Publicly undermining the effort of the investigation. The president had gone to Jim Comey and specifically asked him to discontinue the investigation of Mike Flynn, which was a part of our Russia case. The president then fired the director.

In the firing of the director, the president specifically asked Rod Rosenstein to write a memo justifying the firing and told Rod to include Russia in the memo. Rod, of course, did not do that. That was on the president's mind. Then the president made those public comments that you've referenced, both on NBC and to the Russians, which was captured in the Oval Office. Put together, these circumstances were articulable facts that indicated that a crime may have been committed. President may have been engaged in obstruction of justice in the firing of Jim Comey. What was it specifically that caused you to launch the counterintelligence investigation?

It's many of those same concerns that cause us to be concerned about a national security threat. And the idea is if the president committed obstruction of justice, fired the director of the FBI to negatively impact or to shut down our investigation of Russia's malign activity and possibly in support of his campaign, as a counterintelligence investigator, you have to ask yourself, why would a president of the United States do that? So all those same sorts of facts cause us to wonder, is there an inappropriate relationship, a connection between this president and our most fearsome enemy, the government of Russia?

Are you saying that the president is in league with the Russians? I'm saying that the FBI had reason to investigate that. The existence of an investigation doesn't mean someone is guilty. I would say, Scott, if we failed to open an investigation under those circumstances, we wouldn't be doing our jobs. When you decided to launch these two investigations, was the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on board with that? Absolutely. Rod Rosenstein has spent 28 years at the Department of Justice. A Republican, he was appointed by President Trump as Deputy Attorney General, number two at the department.

Mr. Trump's firing of James Comey on May 9, 2017, set off a week of crisis meetings between Rosenstein, who was in charge of the Russia investigation, and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. I can't describe to you accurately enough the pressure and the chaos that Rod and I were trying to operate under at that time. It was incredibly turbulent, incredibly stressful, and it was clear to me that that stress was impacting the Deputy Attorney General. We talked about why the President had insisted on firing the Director and whether or not he was thinking about the Russia investigation and did that impact his decision. And in the context of that conversation, the Deputy Attorney General offered to wear a wire into the White House. He said, I never get searched when I go into the White House. I

could easily wear a recording device. They wouldn't know it was there. Now, he was not joking. He was absolutely serious. And in fact, he brought it up in the next meeting we had. I never actually considered taking him up on the offer. I did discuss it with my general counsel and my leadership team back at the FBI after he brought it up the first time. The point of Rosenstein wearing the wire into a meeting with the president was what? What did he hope to obtain? I can't characterize what Rod was thinking or what he was hoping at that moment. But the reason you would have someone wear a concealed recording device would be to collect evidence.

And in this case, what was the true nature of the president's motivation in calling for the firing of Jim Comey? The general counsel of the FBI and the leadership team you spoke with said what about this idea? I think the general counsel had a heart attack, and when he got up off the floor, he said, that's a bridge too far. We're not there yet. That it wasn't necessary at that point in the investigation to escalate it to that level.

That's correct. But McCabe says Rosenstein raised another idea. The 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to remove the president. A discussion of the 25th Amendment was simply, Rod raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort. I didn't have much to contribute, to be perfectly honest, in that conversation. So I listened to what he had to say. But to be fair, it was an unbelievably stressful time. I can't even describe for you how many things must have been coursing through the deputy attorney general's mind at that point. So it was really something that he kind of threw out in a very frenzied, chaotic conversation about where we were and

what we needed to do next. What seemed to be coursing through the mind of the Deputy Attorney General was getting rid of the President of the United States, one way or another. I can't confirm that. But what I can say is the Deputy Attorney General was definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity, and about his intent at that point in time. How did he bring up the idea of the 25th Amendment to you? Honestly, I don't remember. It was just another kind of topic that he jumped to in the midst of a wide-ranging conversation. Seriously? Just another topic? Yeah.

Did you counsel him on that? I didn't. I mean, he was discussing other cabinet members and whether or not people would support such an idea, whether or not other cabinet members would shared his belief that the president was was really concerning, was concerning Rod at that time. Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president. That's correct. Counting votes. Or possible votes. Did he assign specific votes to specific people? No, not that I recall. As you're sitting in this meeting in the Justice Department

talking about removing the President of the United States, you were thinking what? How did I get here? Confronting these confounding legal issues of such immense importance, not just to the FBI, but to the entire country. It was disorienting. In response to our interview, the Justice Department gave us a carefully worded statement. It says McCabe's story is inaccurate and factually incorrect. The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording of the President, nor was the Deputy Attorney General in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment. McCabe told us, as the weeks wore

on, the President continued to express what McCabe thought was a strange affinity for Russia. He remembers a day when an FBI official returned from the White House to brief McCabe on the results of a meeting with the president. The president launched into several unrelated diatribes. One of those was commenting on the recent missile launches by the government of North Korea. And essentially, the president said he did not believe that the North Koreans had the capability to hit us here with ballistic missiles in the United States. And he did not believe that because President Putin had told him they did not. President Putin had told him that the North Koreans don't actually have those missiles. And U.S. intelligence was telling the president what?

Intelligence officials in the briefing responded that that was not consistent with any of the intelligence our government possesses. To which the president replied, I don't care. I believe Putin. What did you think when you heard that? It's just an astounding thing to say, to spend the time and effort and energy that we all do in the intelligence community to produce products that will help decision makers and the ultimate decision maker, the President of the United States, make policy decisions. And to be confronted with an absolute disbelief in those efforts and an unwillingness to learn the true state of affairs that he has to deal with every day was just shocking. McCabe wouldn't have much time

to be shocked. His FBI career soon spiraled to its destruction. The FBI's perilous proximity to presidential politics began with the investigation into whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used an unsecured server for classified emails. Later, the FBI launched its investigation into Russian interference in the election. For Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI, an investigation involving politics would destroy his career and damage his credibility after he allegedly lied about an FBI leak to a newspaper. It was a turn of events that began when candidate Donald Trump unexpectedly

took aim at McCabe's wife. Dr. Jill McCabe, an emergency room pediatrician, dabbled briefly in politics back in 2015 when she ran for state office in Virginia. Like other Democratic candidates that year, she was funded by a political action committee controlled by Virginia's governor, a friend of the Clintons. During the time that Jill was running for office, what responsibilities did you have at the FBI over the Clinton investigations? None. I was not at headquarters where the case was initiated and run. I was in the field office. There was no connection in any way between my campaign and Bill and Hillary Clinton. I've never met them. I don't know them.

But in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined, Clinton Ally Aided FBI Wife. It was about Jill McCabe's funding the year before. The article noted accurately that her husband's role in the Clinton email investigation began months after she lost. But candidate Donald Trump seemed to conflate the two. more than $675,000 to the campaign of the spouse, the wife, of the top FBI official who helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton's illegal email server.

How do you feel when you see that? Sick, sick to my stomach. I think sickening is the right word. It's disgusting to see the candidate for the presidency taking those lies and manipulating them for his own advantage. And then to hear, you know, the chants and the boos of thousands of people who are just accepting those lies at face value. It's chilling. Three months after Jill McCabe lost the election, Andrew McCabe was promoted to deputy director, number two under James Comey. Nine months after that, because of his wife's campaign,

he recused himself from the Clinton investigations. Then President Trump fired Comey and McCabe became acting director. In one of their first conversations, McCabe says Mr. Trump asked about his wife. What was it like when your wife lost her race for state senate? It must have been really tough to lose. And I said, well, it's tough to lose anything, but my wife has refocused her efforts on her career. And he then said, ask her what it was like to lose. It must be tough to be a loser. What did you think? No man wants to hear anyone call his wife a loser, most of all me. My wife is a wonderful, brilliant, dedicated physician who tried to help her community.

So she is no loser. It was just bullying. So rather than get into an argument with the President of the United States, I said, okay, sir, and we hung up and ended the call. That was the crisis week after Comey was fired when McCabe argued for an independent counsel to take over the investigations of the president. I knew from past experience with the Clinton case how dangerous, how perilous it was for the FBI to be investigating now not just a candidate for the presidency, but the president himself. This was a situation that clearly called for the appointment of a special counsel who would bring a level of independence, and that's the argument I made to the deputy attorney general.

The deputy attorney general is Rod Rosenstein, a career federal prosecutor who Mr. Trump appointed to the number two job at the Justice Department. McCabe says it was Rosenstein who offered to wear a wire into the White House, and Rosenstein who initially resisted appointing a special counsel. He was concerned what would happen to him if he appointed a special counsel, that if he did, it might mean that he would lose his job, and then we would no longer have a Senate confirmed official at the Justice Department to oversee all these efforts.

Eight days after Comey was fired, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller had been a career prosecutor who was appointed FBI director by George W. Bush. So far, Mueller has obtained public indictments, convictions, or guilty pleas involving six Trump campaign associates, including the campaign chairman, plus 25 Russian intelligence agents. We survived those crazy days in the wake of Jim Comey's firing. You know, we got to the point of having a new director appointed and confirmed. We got the cases open that we needed opened. We got the special counsel and probably the best special counsel we possibly could have hoped for in charge of an investigation that I think

everyone would admit is one of the most important efforts underway right now. But if McCabe had navigated the crisis around President Trump, he would not survive a controversy involving Hillary Clinton. About a week before Election Day, McCabe authorized the leak of a story to the Wall Street Journal. At this time, he was still deputy director under Comey. The resulting story said that McCabe had defended the FBI investigating the Clinton Charitable Foundation after a Justice Department official had cast doubt on that investigation.

You were accused of providing information to a Wall Street Journal reporter because you thought the story the journal was writing was going to be wrong. Do I have that right? That's correct. You are authorized by the FBI to release information to the media. That's correct. You did so through the public affairs office at the FBI. I did. The journal attributed the story to an unnamed source,

and it seemed like a garden variety leak of the kind that happens nearly every day. But according to a detailed investigation by the Justice Department Inspector General, McCabe lied under oath three times when investigators asked if he was the source. And the inspector general concluded that McCabe leaked the story only to make himself look good, which would violate FBI regulations. McCabe says correcting a story that he believed would be an error was in the public interest. As for lying, McCabe told us that he was confused by the investigators' questions and distracted by the Comey crisis. There's absolutely no reason for anyone, and certainly not for me, to misrepresent what happened. So, no. Did I ever intentionally mislead the people I spoke to? I did not. I had no reason to, and I did not. If the inspector general is right about McCabe lying, this would be another Washington story of an embarrassing matter made lethal by a cover-up.

President Trump weighed in, tweeting, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is racing the clock to retire with full benefits. 90 days to go. Did you expect to be fired 26 hours before you were able to collect your pension? I guess I should have, because the president spoke about it publicly. He made it quite clear that he wanted me gone before I could retire. I believe I was fired because I opened a case against the president of the United States. The president tweeted, Andrew McCabe fired. A great day for the FBI.

A great day for democracy. The idea that this president would know what a great day for the FBI or a great day for democracy was is preposterous. McCabe is considering whether to sue the government to get his full pension. Prosecutors are considering whether to charge him with lying to the FBI, a crime which, worst case, could bring five years in prison on each count. McCabe has written a new book about the campaign crisis and his 21-year career, entitled The Threat, How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump. We asked the White House for comment on McCabe's specific claims, but we received a general reply. Andrew McCabe was fired in disgrace from the FBI for lying, and he opened a completely baseless investigation into the president. Everyone knows he has no credibility.

You seem to have a very clear memory of your conversations with the president. Why so? I made memorandums to myself to make sure that I preserved my contemporaneous recollection of those interactions. That's what FBI agents were trained to do, write memos to the file after they speak to witnesses. That's what we're trained to do. And where are those memos today? Those memos are in the custody of the special counsel's team. Robert Mueller's team. That's correct. Has your memos are in the custody of the special counsel's team. Robert Mueller's team.

That's correct. Has your memos. He does. Imagine your teenage daughter was kidnapped while studying for her exams at school. And not just your daughter, but hundreds of girls in your town taken in the night. The families of Chibok, Nigeria, lived through that nightmare almost five years ago when the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates to Western education is forbidden,

attacked a local school and ran off with 276 girls. Some escaped, but it took the Nigerian government three years to negotiate the release of fewer than half of them. Since their release, the Chibok girls, as they're known, have been largely hidden from the public. But we were able to meet with them at a kind of prep school to hear their remarkable story of survival. This is a hostage video released by Boko Haram from their hideout in the Sambiza forest one month after the kidnapping.

The Chibok girls are all covered, chanting verses from the Koran. They were facing a life of misery with beatings and starvation. But now, at the new foundation school on the campus of the American University of Nigeria, the girls are singing again. This time, it's the Christian songs they grew up with. We are the Chiborgas that have been in captivity, and now we are alive. Getting out alive and singing hymns, things Rebecca feared might never happen. Did they let you sing when you were in captivity?

No, we are singing in private. They won't allow us to sing like that. So you're a whisper singer? Yes. For Rebecca and her friends, just singing out loud today is a gift after their three years of living in fear and pressure to become Muslims. So if you didn't convert to Islam, were you punished for not converting? Yes, they say if you didn't convert to Islam, you won't get home alive. That's what they say.

Here are some of the girls two years ago, right after they were released, alive, but looking like concentration camp survivors, haunted and numb. This is Rebecca, skin and bones. I heard you were eating grass. Yeah, some of us eat that. And we are just the patient and live like that. No food, no anything else. Look at them today, in their 20s. They're healthy and full of spirit at a school created just for them, paid for by the Nigerian government and some donors, where they are making up for lost time. They're from northern Nigeria, where life can be hard and

opportunities for women are limited. Now, in their Wi-Fi-equipped dorms, they have smartphones and laptops and their own beds. They go back to Chibok to see their parents twice a year, over Christmas and during the summer. Otherwise, they work hard here, going to class six days a week, studying subjects like biology and math, working toward getting into the university, which would, for them, be free of charge. What's the hardest subject? Most of the girls we spoke to were shy and reticent as they told us that their tight bond going back to Chibok helped them survive. When Grace's leg

was injured the night of the kidnapping, her sisters, as she calls them, Aisha and Mariam and others pulled her through. They are taking care of me. They are washing water. They are washing me, my clothes and everything. We are worried about her leg. We don't have anybody there that will take care of her, only us. You helped each other, sick or unhappy or scared. You were a unit.

Yes. They just had an unbelievable bond and an attachment to each other. Somiyari Dem is the girl's therapist, on call 24-7. Born in Nigeria, raised and educated in the States, she has been with this group since they arrived over a year ago. Can you tell us what their experiences were like generally? Just a lot of the stuff, the starvation. They ate grass.

Eating grass, exactly. The beatings, you know, these things, you know, the forced, you know, being forced to get married. At some point in time, you know, the bomb, the airstrikes. So these are some of the, you know, things that, the airstrikes. So these are some of the, you know, things that, you know, were reoccurring events. For three years? For three years, yeah. You were actually hit. The airstrikes started as the Nigerian government pursued and attacked Boko Haram. A bomb dropped where you were being held. They mistakenly threw the bomb. And you were injured?

With some particles. Shrapnel? Yes. And it's still inside my body. It has not been removed. Because the shrapnel is in her liver. She is in pain, but she perseveres at school. You were kidnapped because you went to school.

Now you're back in school. Do you feel like you're doing something courageous? Even what happened with me will not stop me doing what I already designed in my mind. Reginald Braggs, an American, has also been at the New Foundation school since its start. Getting ready for midterm? Okay. A former naval officer turned college administrator, Braggs runs the school and designed the educational program. What is the biggest challenge for you in this program? You know, it really is trying to help the students to meet their goal of getting into the university.

And part of that challenge is their English language proficiency. So I had this idea. I said, what would an old-fashioned American spelling be with these guys? Orange. O-R-A-N-G-E. Correct. Sometimes one of them struggles over even an easy word, like poor. Poor. P-U-T. No. And is embarrassed.

But when someone like Rebecca gets a hard word right... Assembly. A-S-S-E-M-B-L-Y. All right. A roar goes up. It's amazing how their confidence grows after this. You've seen a progression. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

But do you think there's a lot of pressure on them in the spelling bee? Yes, of course. That's okay? Of course. Correct. This is about education for them and knowing that they can do something. And it's always better when you have someone who is confident and they're doing something and the other students are observing them.

If they can do it, you can do it. It's not as easy as having a can-do attitude for these girls, says Dem. She thinks they're being pushed too hard and that the curriculum is too rigorous. I think at times we need to kind of scale it back. Trauma really changes the brains, whether memory, cognition, recall, retrieval. We have to meet them where they are. If not, all we're doing is making the situation worse. We were told they still get flashbacks and night terrors. And it doesn't help that over 100 of their friends are still missing.

Do you think about the ones who are still in captivity? When I think about them, I'm crying. And I know that place, I know the condition. I don't want my sisters to stay there. I want them to come out. Taking away any negative thoughts. Dem is using an array of therapeutic treatments to help them heal. Inhale.

She leads them in yoga and relaxation exercises and provides individual and group therapy where most of the girls have had difficulty talking about the suffering they endured. Can you tell us just a little bit about what life was like in captivity? Is it too hard to talk about? Yeah, because I don't remember some things. When I try, maybe I will feel like crying like that. But her sisters share her memories. The idea here is that the trauma happened in a group, so it's good to do the healing in a group.

Dem says she never pushes the girls to open up. So, for instance, she doesn't know how many were raped. But she says there's a fine line between rape and forced marriage. You got married. Miriam wasn't forced to convert. But she says there's a fine line between rape and forced marriage. You got married? Yes. Miriam wasn't forced to convert. She was already Muslim.

So she was quickly married off to a Boko Haram commander and got pregnant. You gave birth there in the forest? Yes. She said the birth was difficult, but her son, Ali, was healthy. After two years, her Boko Haram husband actually helped her and Ali escape. Do you feel still that you're married? No. And Ali, now two and a half, where is he? He's in Chibok with his grandparents.

The New Foundation School decided babies wouldn't be allowed on campus. Would you like it if they let you have the baby here? Yes, I like it, but you know it can't be possible to carry Ali here. What does he call you? Maryam. She's been separated from her son for so long he doesn't recognize her as his mother. As a child of Boko Haram, Ali is likely to face difficult odds. But Mariam feels that with a good education, she can ease the way for him. The Nigerian government is paying for most of their schooling. But thousands of other women and girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram are languishing with other victims in government-run camps like this one we found just 30 minutes from the school. The contrast with the Chibok girls at the new foundation school is glaring.

But their free education comes with the burden of great expectations. The school's walls are plastered with sayings like, there's no limit to what I can achieve. Their dorms are named after successful women like Michelle Obama and Malala. Do you feel that because you're getting this wonderful education free, that you need to give something back to your country. If I work hard and if I become something, it's not only this Nigeria, I will help many countries. You'll be like Malala.

Yes. Maybe I will do more than her. When I think about... Don Dekel, president of the American University of Nigeria, says the new foundation school is grooming these young women to give back by becoming leaders. The best revenge is massive success. And I really think these young women are going to be some senators, some governors. Some of these young women want to join the military.

They told me they want to be a general in the military and go get Boko Haram so they can't do this to any other young girls. It is ironic that their worst experience has led to opportunities beyond their wildest dreams. They're not completely healed, but every day they get stronger physically, mentally, emotionally, and they spell better. S-O-N-D-I-E-R. All right. Despite everything that they've been through, they push forward.

They come back, even with greater force, with greater determination, and they blow me away. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.