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Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees
Trump Announces Federal Takeover Of D.C. Police, Deploying Guard; Judge Rejects Bid To Unseal Maxwell Grand Jury Materials; One Dead, 10 Injured, One Unaccounted For After Explosion At PA U.S. Steel Plant; U.S. Officials Rush To Finalize Details Of Alaska Talks; The New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick Breaks Down How Much Trump Has Profited Off The Presidency; Israel Kills Multiple Journalists In Gaza, Including Prominent Al Jazeera Reporter. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired August 11, 2025 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HARRY ENTEN CNN, CHIEF DATA ANALYST: I still love it. I still love Meg Ryan. I still love Tom Hanks. I still love the Golden Retriever coming out and that's how she knew that of course, Tom Hanks was her beau to be.
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN HOST: Beau to be and she actually always inspired me. I always wanted to own a bookstore after seeing that movie, because of that Meg Ryan one.
ENTEN: Maybe one day.
BOLDUAN: Yes, maybe one day. Harry, one last thing, because we decided to have a little fun friends --
DIGITAL VOICE: Goodbye --
BOLDUAN: Had to do it.
ENTEN: There you go.
BOLDUAN: Love you.
ENTEN: Love you.
BOLDUAN: Thank you.
Thank you all so much for joining us today, I'm Kate Bolduan, "AC360" starts now.
DIGITAL VOICE: Goodbye.
[20:00:40]
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: Tonight on 360, citing a crime emergency, the President says he's taking over the D.C. Police, sending in the National Guard and is ready to do the same in other big cities.
Also tonight, a judge says no to releasing Jeffrey Epstein's grand jury testimony, leaving the administration one less way to answer demands by Democrats and Republicans for transparency. And later, a striking new report on just how much money the President is profiting financially from the presidency. The numbers are astounding.
Good evening, short of natural disasters and insurrections, it isn't every day that the President of United States takes over a big city police force, orders in the National Guard, says active duty troops could follow and suggest that he might do the same in other big cities across the country.
Yet today, this President did all of the above and whatever you hear tonight about the legality of it or the necessity for it or lack thereof, the sheer fact of what he did today is pretty remarkable. Flanked by his Defense Secretary, Attorney General and FBI Director, he announced he was taking federal control of the Washington, D.C. Police Department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to crack down on what he described as crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate, probably ever, they say 25 years, but they don't know what that means because it just goes back 25 years -- can't be worse. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people and we're not going to let it happen anymore. We're not going to take it.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: The President's action today comes in the wake of several high profile violent crimes in the district, including an apparent carjacking attempt that left a 19-year-old member of the President's Department of Government Efficiency beaten and bloody. And there's certainly no downplaying the impact that such crimes have on public safety, and especially on how safe or not people feel. That said, there are problems with some of the facts the President cited today to make his case.
For instance, murders in the district did spike in 2023. Two hundred and seventy-four people were murdered that year. Now, that's a lot, especially for the size of the Washington is. But sadly, the President is incorrect when he says it was the highest rate probably ever. In 1991, nearly 500 people were murdered there. Last year, murders actually fell by 32 percent.
As for all violent crime, quoting now from the Justice Department press release dated shortly before the President's inauguration, total violent crime for 2024, in the District of Columbia is down 35 percent from 2023 and is the lowest it's been in over 30 years. The release went on to detail, homicides are down 32 percent, robberies 39 percent, armed carjackings, 53 percent, assault with a dangerous weapon down 27 percent when compared with 2023 levels. With the District reporting, the fewest assaults, they said, with dangerous weapons and burglaries in over 30 years. Now again, that was in January.
Since then, violent crime has continued to drop, which is not to discount the impact of crimes on how safe people feel. Carjackings, take those, for instance, which the President cited today and which have been a very real problem and are a problem in D.C. and most of them are committed with a weapon. By this time last year, there were 300, according to the Metro Police. Over that same time frame this year, the number is down 189, which is still a lot and understandably angers and scares a lot of people driving in D.C.
The President today also talked about other cities, all of the ones he picked, of course, led by Democrats.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem and then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore, they're so far gone. We're not going to let it happen. We're not going to lose our cities over this and this will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C., and we're going to clean it up real quick, very quickly, as they say.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Now, the President could have said, yes, violent crime has been dropping in Washington, but I'm going to send in troops anyway to speed things along. He could have also cited a number of Republican led cities that have been facing problems with crime, but instead, he's pointing at Democratic led cities, and each of the ones he mentioned has actually seen drops in violent crime.
Well, the President is doing is part of a pattern claiming things are worse than they have ever been. Nobody's ever seen anything like it is, his go to phrase, in case you haven't been listening. And that is the excuse he uses to invoke the sort of emergency powers he did today to take over the police and deploy the National Guard, which has become a pattern for him. He did it to justify federalizing and deploying the Guard and Marines against protesters in Los Angeles earlier this summer.
And according to an Associated Press analysis at the time, 30 of his 150 executive orders up to that point had cited some kind of emergency power or authority, which, as the report pointed out, far outpaced any recent President and which is not the only thread running through today, nor the only thing making what happened today different. Whether deliberately or not, the President seemed to conflate criminals with people protesting the police, which is also remarkable given his defense of and pardons for supporters who attacked Police at the Capitol on January 6th.
Well, today, the President said quite openly, he's already told law enforcement that he's fine with officers beating people.
[20:05:55]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: You know, they love to spit in the face of the police as the police are standing up there in uniform, they're standing and they're screaming at them an inch away from their face, and then they start spitting in their face. And I said, you tell them you spit, and we hit and they can hit real hard.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: Joining me for more on this from the White House is CNN chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny. So, what's -- exactly what's behind this move by the President?
JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Anderson, one of the things behind this move is this is something that President Trump has often gone to. It's a very familiar well. He's long been agitated by crime in American cities, as a private citizen in New York, certainly running for President, law and order has been a central message but one thing lacking from all of this was a sense of context.
I'm told by people who are close to him that he's been bothered when he travels, not that often, actually, from the White House out to play golf in Virginia, or perhaps out to Joint Base Andrews when he flies out. He sees things out the window, sometimes homeless encampments, sometimes other things that really has gotten to him. But the bottom line is you got the sense today that the President was trying to make this the most important thing for the White House.
The White House was trying to hold this up as the most pressing concern for the U.S. President, never mind an inflation report coming out tomorrow. Never mind that meeting with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin on Friday, which is a challenge in and of itself, never mind the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The President wanted to go back to that well, talking about crime.
The bigger question is, is anything that he's actually doing going to improve crime? There is no doubt people here in Washington, I've lived here for a long time. There is concern about crime, there is no doubt, but it is much better than it was during the pandemic. So, that was the lack of the context that the President was missing. He declared an emergency today, exercising federal powers that we have not seen a U.S. President do.
So, right now on the streets of D.C., there are federalized police force, but there were no advanced conversations with the leaders of the police force how this actually will go. So, it's unclear who is in charge of the D.C. Police force is if the Attorney General, is that the Police Chief? So, for all of the time spent here at the White House, there is very little discussion beforehand behind the scenes how this actually will play out and if it will actually help reduce crime.
COOPER: And are these National Guard troops, Police Officers, are they M.P.s? I mean, are they actually trained in policing? Because obviously it's a highly specialized job. ZELENY: They are not and that is one of the concerns here. Of course, D.C. is different from every other city in the country because of the Home Rule Act of 1973. The President can actually federalize the National Guard. Of course, that is something he did not do on January 6th. So that, of course, also lends a layer of controversy to this. But National Guard troops generally do not have arresting powers.
However, here in Washington they can and they will, because it's not a state. D.C. is not a state. It is a federal city, so, he has threatened doing this in Chicago. We've seen in Los Angeles, obviously, sending out National Guard troops. But D.C. sort of stands alone. But there's no doubt this is one of the models he wants to use and point to it as he threatens other cities.
COOPER: Jeff Zeleny, thanks very much.
Joining me now is CNN political commentator, Alyssa Farah Griffin. She's a former Trump White House communications director, also former federal prosecutor Jeff Toobin and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who is our senior law enforcement analyst.
Alyssa, is this about crime in Washington, D.C.?
ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: So, I think Jeff hit on something very important, which stood out to me when I heard this announcement. When Donald Trump's in office, he sees Washington, D.C., as his home for a period of time. He drives around in his motorcade, he sees it, and he feels a lot of pride that the nation's capital should look and feel a certain way.
I remember this in the first term. He would be very frustrated when he saw sort of tents set up and sort of homeless encampments up. So, I think there's a --
COOPER: There used to be homeless encampments right outside --
GRIFFIN: Right, yes.
COOPER: Protesting camps right outside the White House.
GRIFFIN: Right outside of the White House, and so, I think there is a part of this that is a very real frustration. He thinks the nation's capital should represent the best of America. But I think he's also doing something that Trump is very good at, which he's goading Democrats into the fight that he wants to have.
Now, there's a very reasonable and important debate to be had over federalizing law enforcement and deploying the National Guard on American streets.
That's the debate we should be having. He's really trying to goad Democrats into arguing, there's no crime in D.C., D.C. is great. I lived there for ten years. I'm there all the time. You spend time there, you see a lot of crime. It feels worse. The stats may bear otherwise, but there's communities that didn't feel unsafe a few years ago that just don't feel as safe as they once did. And he is begging and goading Democrats into saying its actually much better than you think, because crime is an issue. Trump has generally performed very well on. That's what he's getting at here.
[20:10:50]
COOPER: And Jeff Toobin, legally, he certainly can do this. I mean, it's -- I believe for a 30-day period.
JEFFREY TOOBIN, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR: That's true as Jeff Zeleny was saying, you know, D.C. is not a state. They don't have a voting member of Congress. They don't have Senators, and they don't have home rule except for what was what was delegated to them in the Act of 1973. And in that Congressional Act of 1973 there's a provision that says the President, in his sole discretion, can take over the local police department. For, it appears up to 30 days but as I read the statute, it seems like he could extend it beyond 30 days.
But I think this is an important distinction with other cities that you know, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, L.A., he couldn't take over the Police Departments there because they are states and these police officers, these police departments are authorized by state law. D.C. is different and definitely has the right to do this as the Mayor of D.C., Mayor Bowser acknowledged today.
COOPER: Andrew, what do the National Guard, he's talking about the FBI going on patrol in the streets of D.C. What does that help the situation? Does it -- I mean, Jeff Zeleny was saying, you know, this wasn't done in coordination with. So, I'm not sure how much even if they know how this is going to work.
ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: So, as we understand from the reporting today, there was essentially no coordination with D.C. Political or law enforcement leaders. The times when plussing up the manpower contingent on the streets can help is during periods like a Presidential inauguration or a National Security special event where you need just bodies out there lining, you know, the path that the President will take as he's walking to the White House or something like that, like crowd control. You know, working magnetometers to let people into a secure area.
Policing night by night on the streets of D.C. is a very different thing. And I can tell you that FBI agents are not trained to do that, that is not what they do. Most FBI agents were not police officers before they came into the FBI. Even the most tactically astute, highly trained FBI agents, those who serve on SWAT teams, I know this as a former SWAT team member, they don't know -- they don't do community policing. They don't walk beats the way that police officers do every day, day-in and day-out.
And if FBI agents don't have that skill set, I can tell you for sure, National Guards, people don't have that either.
So, it is totally unclear how this infusion of manpower is actually going to have a meaningful impact on the crime rate, which we know is not as it was described by the President today in his justification for calling this emergency. So, the entire predication, as it were, the factual basis for this act, for this declaration, we know, is false, because the things he said in the press conference were not true.
COOPER: Alyssa, it was interesting to see Pam Bondi on stage, the Attorney General; Kash Patel, head of the FBI, both players in the controversy from several weeks ago about Jeffrey Epstein and what was going to come out and how much of Jeffrey Epstein is there in all of this, that it's the oldest game around, which is changed the narrative.
GRIFFIN: Yes, and Trump's ever the T.V. producer. Listen, it's August in D.C. Congress has gone, it's usually one of the sleepiest times in the political universe. And I was surprised that he made this major announcement, flanked by some of his most senior Cabinet members today. But I think he's somebody who thinks about how can I be driving forward a narrative that's helpful to me.
his allows him and the Department of Justice and the FBI to be talking about something that is not Jeffrey Epstein. But what I do think that that the President could run into an issue with his own supporters is if you're in the middle of the country, if you're, frankly, anywhere other than Washington, D.C., maybe for a few weeks, you're okay with the National Guard and federal law enforcement being deployed to police those streets. But you're thinking about crime in your own community. Why are your taxpayer dollars subsidizing this at a much heavier rate than they already were previously because of these deployments? That's going to be a lot harder for him to communicate why this is more important than people's communities.
[20:15:14]
COOPER: It's also interesting, Jeff. I mean, this is an administration which has been eliminating consent decrees by the Justice Department, which is the Justice Department going in and trying to fix police forces that have problems, you know, proven problems with racial issues or corruption issues. The administration has moved against doing that.
TOOBIN: Well, that's -- they are very clearly not concerned about excessive police force. As you heard from the clip we played today, the President is interested in more police force in beating -- you know, beating people who fight back at the police. So, they are very not interested in limiting police brutality, limiting police excesses.
I just want to raise one other possibility that there may be less to this story than meets the eye, if, in fact, this only lasts for 30 days, it couldn't possibly have much of an impact on crime in D.C., and this may be simply a media event to say that the President is concerned about crime, but in fact have nothing -- may accomplish nothing in D.C. or anywhere else.
COOPER: I'm shocked by your cynicism.
TOOBIN: Let's get the President talking about that.
COOPER: Shocked and appalled by your cynicism. I'm shocked and appalled by your cynicism.
Jeff Toobin, Andrew McCabe, Alyssa Farah Griffin, thanks very much.
In a scathing opinion today, well, we will actually have a story about a scathing opinion today.
Also, we want to look at the impact of a federal judge closing the door on making grand jury testimony in the Maxwell case public.
Later, how and why the President tried to lower the stakes today on his summit with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:21:20]
COOPER: In a scathing opinion today, a federal judge in New York has rejected the Trump administration's request to unseal grand jury materials from the sex trafficking case of Jeffrey Epstein accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, Judge Paul Engelmayer notes that much of the material that the Department of Justice actually sought to release the stuff they wanted to release and get out there is already public, having been presented during Maxwell's trial back in 2021.
The judge wrote that the government's, "... entire premise that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein's and Maxwell's crimes or the government's investigation into them, is demonstrably false."
Now, for weeks, the President and his allies have struggled to try to move past the interest in and attention on Jeffrey Epstein. After promising to release all of the government's so-called Epstein files, the Justice Department motioned to unseal only this grand jury testimony and exhibits from cases involving Epstein and Maxwell. Another judge overseeing the Epstein case in New York has not yet ruled on the motion.
For more, I'm joined by former federal prosecutor Elie Honig and James Marsh, an attorney whose firm represents multiple Epstein accusers. So, what stands out to you about the judge's ruling and the kind of the tone of it?
ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: The tone is a harsh rebuke. I mean, the judge could have written this ruling in a very vanilla way. He could have just said ordinary, ordinary grand jury materials are confidential. Here are the factors I go through, I find none of them apply, motion denied.
Instead, what the judge does is essentially call out DOJ for its artifice. He says this was more about the appearance of transparency than actual transparency, because, as the judge says, all that's in these grand jury materials is essentially already known to the public.
He says there's nothing new about any other wrongdoers. He says, there's nothing new about any other men who had contact, sexual contact with girls, nothing new about the circumstances of Epstein's death, nothing new about the financial dealings of this organization. So, this is a really stinging rebuke to DOJ, and I think it calls out what they're trying to do here. This is about trying to look transparent without actually giving the public anything.
COOPER: James, do you do you agree with the court that those transcripts, I mean, do you think those transcripts should be released? And if not, what should -- what would you like to see out there?
JAMES MARSH, ATTORNEY FOR EPSTEIN SURVIVORS: Well, I really do agree and I was also struck not only by the tone, but another important factor which is painfully obvious to the victims and survivors of these crimes, which is this judge was trying to establish the historical record, knowing that this decision is going to be published, it's going to be for the history books and both of the press releases that were made in regards to this entire lead up to this proceeding was published in the decision.
I was struck by one thing, which is the fact that the government revealed that there are 300 gigabytes of materials that they were combing through, and I did a quick search and 300 gigabytes of material is half a million pages. It was PDFs or something bigger, it's 100,000 pages.
So, I think what this judge is saying is like, they represented a 300 gigabytes of data, and they were asking for a record, which is already in the public domain.
COOPER: What is left to be released? I mean, I was talking to the reporter who really has worked on this story from the beginning, and she was saying that -- I was surprised to learn from her that the autopsy report of Epstein hasn't even been publicly released. Is that something you'd like to see released?
MARSH: I think the victims would like to see a comprehensive release of the information known to the government. Jeffrey Epstein was known to federal law enforcement for 30 years, long before the subsequent prosecution, the public scrutiny on Jeffrey Epstein.
My client came forward in the mid-90s, so she was known to federal law enforcement in the mid-90s and there's a long history here with Jeffrey Epstein.
So that not one page in the government's files, the FBI files, the long history of the government's involvement and knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein can be released is an insult because my client, Maria Farmer, especially came forward 30 years ago. Where's the substance of her file? The vast majority of which is redacted.
[20:25:37]
COOPER: Elie, I want to play you something that Vice President J.D. Vance said about the Epstein case.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) J.D. VANCE (R) VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: On the Epstein issue with the President has said very clearly, because we've had other meetings about that, is that he wants us to be fully transparent, and he wants the credible information out there. So, we're working to compile the thousands and thousands of documents that are out there for full transparency.
But I have to say, Maria, I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files for four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did absolutely nothing about this story.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COOPER: And this was just over the weekend that he said that.
HONIG: It's B.S., it's ridiculous. Here's why, the grand jury transcripts that were talking about here are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that 300 gigabytes of documents in this whole case. The rest of it, let's say 290 gigabytes rounding off, I guess, is completely in DOJ's control. And I've heard the Vice President and the President over and over say were trying to turn over everything we want to be transparent.
But most of this file is in DOJ and the administrations unilateral control, and they've still done nothing to turn that over. Yes, they'd have to redact out victim names and identities. They'd have to protect people. You can do that. So, if they want to turn over everything but the grand jury stuff, the vast majority of the case, they can do that on the spot.
COOPER: And James, if they were -- you would want them obviously to redact out names of victims, and that's something they certainly could do.
MARSH: Absolutely and the government does this all the time. It's Maria's record -- Maria Farmer's record is not all victim names, you know, it's not 24 pages of victim names. There's information in these files. It's information that the government possesses and have long possessed that detail. Their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein or not? Otherwise, we're left to speculation. So, the other the other thing here that's really been ignored is the presence of so-called child pornography, CSAM, is what we call it. We represent a lot of victims of CSAM. Those victims are also entitled to notice if Jeffrey Epstein was possessing images of their child sexual abuse.
So, we'd also want some accountability on CSAM. The government says it's CSAM. The government says its victim names. The government says nothing can be revealed and we represent victims in both of these areas that want additional transparency.
And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Materials. Is that right?
MARSH: Legally, it's called child pornography and that's the word that the that the decision uses and that the Attorney General uses. Yes.
COOPER: Just for our viewers to know. James Marsh, thank you so much. I appreciate it Elie Honig as well.
Coming up next, President Trump dialing back expectations ahead of his Friday summit in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. Also, what Russian officials are saying about it, I'll check with CNN's Fred Pleitgen, who is in Moscow.
And the moment an explosion occurred at a plant in Pennsylvania, killing at least one people and injuring several others caught on tape there.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:33:20]
COOPER: A search is underway for a worker missing in the wake of the explosion you see here. It happened at a U.S. steel facility in Clarendon, just outside Pittsburgh, which produces coke, a key ingredient in the steelmaking process.
Now, the blast killed at least one person and left 10 others injured. We'll have a live report from the scene just ahead as we gather more information later in the broadcast. First, we're just four days away now from the President hosting Vladimir Putin on American soil for a summit over Ukraine.
Ever since the date and the place, somewhere in Alaska, was announced, the question has been what the President would be willing to demand of Putin and where that might leave Ukraine, which will not be the negotiating table.
(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm going to meet with President Putin and we're going to see what he has in mind. And if it's a fair deal, I'll reveal it to the European Union leaders and to the NATO leaders and also to President Zelenskyy. I think, out of respect, I'll call him first and then I'll call them after. And I may say, lots of luck, keep fighting, or I may say we can make a deal.
(END VIDEOCLIP)
COOPER: The President also acknowledged the territory that Russia has taken since launching its full-scale invasion, saying today in his words, we're going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine. He also said he would know within two minutes at the summit whether progress was possible.
For more on how the Kremlin sees it, let's get the latest from CNN's Fred Pleitgen in Moscow. Fred, have Russian officials said what they expect to come out of this summit?
FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, first of all, Anderson, the messaging is completely different here, coming out of Russia, than we've seen from President Trump. President Trump, of course, saying that it was the Russians who wanted this summit to begin with. The Russians, however, after meeting Steve Witkoff here in Moscow last Wednesday, said that the Americans had made them an offer and that that offer was acceptable to them.
[20:35:06]
However, on the whole, one of the things that we have to see is that while President Trump says that he wants an immediate ceasefire, the Russians are saying that they want longer-term negotiations toward a broader peace deal. And they also say that they've not backed off their position on Ukraine, which means they'll want Ukraine to cede territory to Russia. They want Ukraine to not be a member of NATO in the future. And they essentially also want Ukraine to disarm as well.
Now, whether or not they're going to back off from any of that is very difficult to say. But for now, the Russians are saying that they're sticking by those positions, Anderson.
COOPER: And what about the prospect of President Zelenskyy having a role in the summit? Where does the Kremlin stand on that?
PLEITGEN: Well, see, right now, that's not even really being discussed here in Russia, whether or not that could even be a possibility. It was quite interesting to hear the Russians after they met Steve Witkoff here in Moscow last Wednesday, where they said that that was floated by the American side, a possible trilateral summit somewhere down the line involving President Trump, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin.
But the Russians immediately say that they didn't even react to that offer. And then, of course, later, Vladimir Putin came out and said that, look, he's not against meeting Volodymyr Zelenskyy at some point in the future, but that conditions need to be right for that. But then he also said that at this point in time, things are very far away from that actually happening. So it seems as though the Russians are still quite cool to even having that idea of having Volodymyr Zelenskyy even involved in that process, Anderson.
COOPER: Fred Pleitgen in Moscow, thank you.
Joining me now is Congressman Jake Auchincloss in Massachusetts. He's a Marine Corps veteran who's commanding infantry in Afghanistan and special operations in Panama. Congressman, you heard Fred reporting there on how the Russians are reacting to the summit. What do you expect to come out of this, if anything?
REP. JAKE AUCHINCLOSS (D), MASSACHUSETSS: I expect nothing to come out of this, Anderson. He's winding and dining Vladimir Putin on American soil and signaling weakness yet again. I mean, that comment, I'll see what he has on his mind. That's not the way an American president behaves with an enemy.
The American president should have a strong and forceful agenda of, here is what we insist upon. We are going to arm Ukraine with your money taken from the frozen assets in Brussels. We're going to build out. It's a military industrial complex.
We're going to let it join the European Union. We are going to ensure freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. Now, what's your counter? That is a position of strength. What he is doing is, you know, having a candlelit dinner with Vladimir Putin and putting Zelenskyy on the menu.
COOPER: Should Zelenskyy be there?
AUCHINCLOSS: Yes, of course. Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. But even if Zelenskyy were there, this summit still would not produce anything of substance. It would be like one of his pronouncements about pharmaceutical drug prices, which are always long on promises, short on substance.
It's the same thing, because the actual spadework hasn't been done to produce a substantive outcome. Ukraine needs to be able to plausibly threaten Russian oil refineries. The United States and our allies need to be sanctioning Russian oil, both directly through price caps and also indirectly through secondary sanctions of consumers like India.
We've got to be building out Ukraine's military industrial complex. There's work that hasn't been done yet. Now, what Trump could do that would be significant, although not a war ender, would be to insist that Vladimir Putin release all the Ukrainian children that have been kidnapped. That would be a signal of substantive good faith that could kickstart meaningful negotiations.
COOPER: I want to play something else that the President talked about, his expectations for the summit today.
TRUMP: This is really a feel-out meeting, a little bit. And President Putin invited me to get involved. He wants to get involved. I think, I believe he wants to get it over with. Now, I've said that a few times, and I've been disappointed, because I'd have like a great call with him, and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place.
(END VIDEOCLIP)
COOPER: I mean, it's so interesting because, I mean, he acknowledges he has said this numerous times and seems numerous times to have been proven wrong, and yet he still continues to say it.
AUCHINCLOSS: Anderson, you and I both remember George W. Bush saying, I looked into his eyes and I got a sense of his soul, right? That was 25 years ago. And it looks like the Republican Party still has not learned its lesson about Vladimir Putin.
The man is evil. The man only respects one language, and that language is strength. And what he sees from Donald Trump is vacillation, weakness, sycophancy, all of which invite more aggression. This negotiation needs to start from strength.
We need to be arming Ukraine, authorizing its strikes, nesting it into Article 42.7, which is the Europeans Collective Defense Treaty, appropriating Russian funds from Brussels to build out their complex. We have to do the hard work of making Ukraine formidable before Vladimir Putin will take seriously any Western offers.
[20:40:03] COOPER: Congressman Auchincloss, I appreciate your time. Thank you.
Coming up next, crypto deals and more. A new report looking at how much the President is profiting from his presidency. As President Trump so often says, we've never seen anything quite like it.
And later, the Israeli government being condemned for the targeted killing of one of the most well-known Palestinian journalists in Gaza working for Al Jazeera. Details ahead.
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[20:45:03]
COOPER: More on our breaking news from Western Pennsylvania. At least one person is dead, one unaccounted for, and 10 others injured after an explosion at a U.S. steel plant near Pittsburgh. CNN's Gabe Cohen is at the scene for us. Gabe, what more do we know about this explosion? What might have caused it?
GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Anderson, we really don't know the cause at this hour, though we did hear from a U.S. steel executive earlier today who said as far as they knew as of this morning, this facility and the area where the explosion happened were in good working condition. And so investigators are right now going through the wreckage, trying to figure out exactly what went wrong.
But one thing that is complicating that is that there has been this search and rescue operation happening throughout the day as crews were still searching for one worker who has been unaccounted for. They were able to miraculously pull out another who had been missing for hours. That was earlier this afternoon.
We are, though, still waiting for an update on that one missing worker. We have been told there's a press conference getting underway in just a few minutes. But I do want to tell you, Anderson, we've learned more about the worker who died this morning in the explosion. His name is Timothy Quinn, 39 years old.
I spoke to his sister a little while ago who told me he's a father of three, a loving dad, a caregiver to their mother, somebody who lit up the room every time he came in. Now this family obviously mourning, searching for answers, wanting to know why it took hours for them to learn that it was Timothy who died in the explosion as they were frantically calling hospitals all across the Pittsburgh area.
They want to know what happened here. Obviously investigators still trying to put that all together.
COOPER: Yes, just awful.
Gabe Cohen, thanks very much for the update.
Since the President started his second term, there's been a lot of reporting on the crypto deals and other projects he and his family are involved in. Tonight, a new report which is fascinating and comprehensive in the New Yorker magazine is out, and it tries to answer a very difficult question to pin down.
The article is titled, "How Much Is The President Pocketing Off The Presidency? Staff writer David Kirkpatrick is on the byline. He writes, "Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his presidencies. A $2 billion dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi Crown Prince, a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar, profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch." And that is just some of it.
David Kirkpatrick joins me now. I mean, this is -- I just found this in a -- as I said, there's been a lot of reporting on this, but the detail, the granularity of this, you start out the article citing what an attorney who worked for then-President-elect Trump said right before his first term. And I wrote it down. That lawyer said essentially that Trump and his family would never do anything that, quote, "might be perceived to be exploitative of the office of the presidency."
That lesson no longer seems to apply. The -- that message no longer seems to matter.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Yes, I think that's right. And, you know, she brought that up to justify the President's arrangement that he was going to turn over day-to-day control of his businesses to his sons --
COOPER: That's what he had said --
KIRKPATRICK: -- but not ownership.
COOPER: -- before the first term.
KIRKPATRICK: Right. And part of what the reason that she said he was doing that was because that way no one else will take his name and crassly exploit its connection with the White House. So to keep the White House protected from this kind of exploitation, the Trumps can be trusted to own it.
In retrospect, looking back, a lot of the liberal criticisms of Trump, the way that he was making money out of the hotel in Washington during the first term, those look not that substantial. You know, he lost money on hotel all four years. It did better under a new owner when Biden was in the White House.
But what we've seen now, I don't think anybody on either side of the -- I'm sorry, I don't think anybody on either side of the aisle could argue he's not profiting credits (ph).
COOPER: What surprised you most about in the reporting you did?
KIRKPATRICK: The amount of money that he's made from crypto is the first thing. And more broadly, the trend over time, that he's making more and more money from less and less substantial goods. The things that he's selling, ultimately, most recently, it's a meme coin, right, which is a form of crypto that doesn't even pretend to hold value. It's a novelty. It's a kind of a gimmick.
COOPER: Right.
KIRKPATRICK: And he's made, you know, maybe $300 million selling a Trump meme coin.
COOPER: And he has continued to do this during the presidency and talk it up. They had -- was the meme coin the thing that they had the --
KIRKPATRICK: The dinner for. That's right.
COOPER: The dinner for.
KIRKPATRICK: That (INAUDIBLE).
COOPER: Which juices the price up, gets more people buying and selling. Anytime people buy and sell, it's more money for the President. Is that correct?
KIRKPATRICK: Yes. And there's some evidence that he and his partners in creating the meme coin had dipped in to support the price. So they probably had some meme coin on their hands. And the dinner spikes the price and lets them unload it, potentially. We don't know. There's not a lot of disclosure in who owns the stuff.
COOPER: You also break down -- I mean, you go through the various different categories.
[20:50:02]
You talk about Trump goes -- Trump media goes crypto, you also talk about the Persian Gulf. What are -- what is he doing in the Persian Gulf? What are his family members do?
KIRKPATRICK: Well, to understand what's happening in the Persian Gulf, you've got to look for a minute at the big picture. So Trump is the first American President who is also a real estate salesman. Opposite him in the Persian Gulf, the heads of state there are all, not only political leaders, but also controlled giant sovereign wealth funds.
So they're all people who not only lead their countries, but they buy the kinds of assets that he has always sold. Trump and many of the businessmen around him in the White House in his first term and this term had previously sold to those funds. Both sides knew now and then they'd go back to those transactions after the fact.
And that's what's happened. Most recently, just in the last two years and especially in the last year or so, one Saudi real estate company has invested in five different new sort of resorts or hotels around the Gulf with the Trumps. You know, in Jeddah, Riyadh, you get it.
COOPER: Right. With -- for those who have said this, it's a kleptocracy and oligarchy. You say that goes too far.
KIRKPATRICK: Yes. I mean, when we talk about kleptocracy, oligarchy, you know, Putin, some foreign, these are governments where they don't disclose the budget --
COOPER: Right.
KIRKPATRICK: -- where the leader could just take money out of the Treasury and siphon it into his own bank account. Nobody says Trump is doing that. But what Trump's lawyer and Trump himself said at the start of his first term is that he would never do anything that could be perceived as exploiting the president for -- exploiting the presidency for personal profit. And I don't think anybody can argue that he's not doing that right now.
COOPER: It's a great article.
David Kirkpatrick in The New Yorker, thank you. Appreciate it. Available now.
Coming up, one of the best-known Palestinian journalists, Anas al- Sharif, is dead after an Israeli airstrike targeted him and four of his colleagues. We'll have details on his killing. He was accused by Israel of working for Hamas, which he and Al Jazeera have denied.
The widespread condemnation the killing has resulted in. We'll talk about that as well ahead.
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[20:56:46]
COOPER: Israel is facing international condemnation after it targeted a prominent Al Jazeera journalist in Gaza late last night, killing him along with four co-workers and at least two others. In a statement confirming his killing, the Israeli military accused him of leading a Hamas cell and claimed it had intelligence and documents confirming his Hamas affiliation. He denied it, so did his employer, and CNN cannot independently verify those IDF documents. However, the man in question has always denied any ties to Hamas, as I said.
CNN's Clarissa Ward joins us with more. So, Clarissa, what more do we know about the journalists who were killed and why the IDF says that they were targeted?
CLARISSA WARD, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, so first of all, Anderson, I think it's really important for our viewers to understand that Anas al-Sharif, one of the journalists who was killed, was literally the face of Al Jazeera inside Gaza. He was the reporter that people across the Middle East went to bed with at night.
They woke up to him in the morning. 24-7, literally, this man was on television. He's a household name across the Arab world. And that's just part of the reason that this really has sent such shockwaves. So what we know is that he and six others were targeted. They were in a tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital.
The tent reportedly clearly had press marked on it. At least six of the others who were killed alongside him were also journalists. When the IDF came out to claim responsibility, Anderson, which they did quite quickly, they did not talk about the others who were killed at all.
They really only spoke about Anas al-Sharif. They accused him of being Hamas operative. This is not the first time that they have made that accusation. And they say that effectively he was involved in launching rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF forces.
We haven't seen any documentation that we can verify --
COOPER: Do the Israeli government, have they offered any evidence to support these claims?
WARD: So they first made this claim about 10 months ago regarding Anas al-Sharif. They said that they had irrefutable evidence that he was, in fact, a Hamas operative. They did produce some documentation, but everybody who has seen this documentation says that it's incredibly difficult to verify, and it's therefore not really conclusive. People are wanting to see something more tangible, more substantive.
And I think more broadly, Anderson, what is being forgotten, and perhaps the focus on Anas himself, is the bigger picture here. We are talking about 192 journalists killed in this conflict, 176 killed in Gaza alone. This has been a bloodbath for Palestinian journalists who are already day in and day out struggling to feed their families, to find internet, to keep themselves safe.
Many of them are living apart from their families because they're so worried about family members being killed if they are, in fact, targeted. And it's also so crucial to remember, Anderson, that international journalists are not allowed into Gaza.
COOPER: And that's been the case this entire war.
WARD: And so that's why we can put it together -- that's been the case this entire war. I am, in fact, I have the sort of dubious distinction of being the only international journalist, or the only Western journalist to have gone in and reported inside Gaza without an IDF escort. And that was back in December of 2023, Anderson.
This is why you're seeing groups like the Committee for the Protection of Journalists coming out and condemning this in the strongest words, the CPJ saying today simply, Israel is murdering the messengers, Anderson.
COOPER: Yes. Clarissa Ward, thanks very much.
That's it for us. The news continues. "The Source" starts now.
