Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

Judge Threatens to Remove Combs from Courtroom for Nodding at Jury; Trump and Xi Speak Amid Stalled Negotiations Over Tariffs; Workforce to Change Dramatically as AI Adoption Grows. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired June 05, 2025 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

JESSICA DEAN, CNN HOST: We are following breaking developments in the Sean Diddy Combs trial. The judge just admonishing Combs and his defense team, warning he will remove the music mogul from the courtroom if Combs keeps trying to interact with the jury.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: The judge said he saw Combs on two separate occasions looking at the jury during testimony of Cassie Ventura's friend, Bryana Bongolan. During a tense sidebar, when the jury was on a lunch break, the judge told Combs' lawyers, quote, Well, there was a line of questioning when your client was nodding vigorously and looking at the jury. I looked, and I saw your client looking at the jury and nodding vigorously.

He added, I could not have been any clearer in terms of what I said. It is absolutely unacceptable.

DEAN: Now, the jurors are back in the courtroom hearing from the government's next witness. She is one of Combs' accusers, using the pseudonym Jane.

And here to talk more about this is criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Mark O'Mara. Mark, thanks so much for being here with us.

I want to go back to the biggest news that we've had out of the courtroom today, which is this judge warning Sean Combs and his attorneys that he could potentially be tossed out of the courtroom if he continues trying to engage with the jury by making faces at them.

MARK O'MARA, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY, FORMER PROSECUTOR: Mr. Combs needs to be extraordinarily careful. This judge is not to be toyed with. I'm glad that he did it as a sidebar, as it should happen, which is, of course, as you said, outside the presence of a jury.

But there is a hierarchy in a courtroom. And, of course, the judge is way up at the top. And this jury is looking for insight, focus, or whatever.

And if they hear from this judge, because the next time might be in front of the jury, that Mr. Combs is doing something improper, that's going to weigh very heavily against him with everything else that happens in the trial. I'm sure that his counselor has told him, cut it out and cut it out now, because the next one might be of record in front of the jury.

SCIUTTO: Yes, so you're saying that a jury, based on your experience, you spent a lot of time in the courtroom yourself, if they showed up one day and the defendant was not in the box, they would look at that negatively?

O'MARA: They will, Jim. I will tell you that sanction will not be imposed in this case unless something outrageous happens. That sanction is the last resort to remove a criminal defendant from the courtroom.

Along the way, though, the admonition that will happen in front of the jury, that will almost have the same effect, which is the judge doesn't think you're playing by the rules, Mr. Combs, so neither do we. But I do not see him being removed from the courtroom. This is a violation, but not significant enough for removal.

DEAN: And would you assume that his attorneys had had these conversations with him? You know, I would think if you're being prepared for a trial that your attorneys would say to you, OK, listen, all eyes are going to be on you. You can't do this. You can do this. You kind of have a plan for that.

O'MARA: We do that every day. And I'm sure that they have as well. Because not only -- just the presentation, you know, no psshaws, no tisks, no nothing, no yawning. We tell our clients you are under the microscope and that jury is looking for everything that they can to try and figure out to trust you or not.

And that's, you know, inherent in a jury verdict. And yes, we tell him that day in and day out and he better start listening.

SCIUTTO: Back in November, the prosecution accused Combs of trying to taint the jury pool. That was even while he was in jail awaiting trial. Does that begin to present to the judge and perhaps to the jury if they become aware of this second instance here of a pattern?

O'MARA: Yes, they probably don't know about the argument about tainting or attempting to affect early.

But yes, no question. The prosecutor now is, of course, very attuned to it because now they're aware and you can bet that if it happens again, there is somebody in that prosecution team, maybe in the gallery, who is studying Mr. Combs.

[14:35:02]

And if it happens again, the government's going to bring it to the attention of the judge and something bad, something not good for Mr. Combs is going to happen. Because again, once he says those words in front of a jury, they cannot be unspoken. And that judge's words are very powerful to that jury.

DEAN: All right, Mark O'Mara, thanks so much for being here with us. We appreciate it.

O'MARA: Thank you.

DEAN: And still to come, new details from President Trump's long- awaited phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The president says they have a trade deal in principle.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCIUTTO: Turning back now to one of our top stories this hour.

[14:40:00]

President Trump says his phone call with the Chinese President Xi Jinping this morning was positive and mostly focused on trade. The two leaders agreed to hold further talks after their previous negotiations stalled. Primarily over dispute over China's restrictions on rare earth exports to the U.S.

Joining me now to discuss Ambassador Daniel Kritenbrink. He's a partner at the Asia Group. Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. This under President Biden. Before that also Ambassador to Vietnam. Good to have you sir.

DANIEL KRITENBRINK, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EAST ASIA: Good to see you again, thank you.

SCIUTTO: So reading the readouts of this conversation --

KRITENBRINK: Yes

SCIUTTO: -- which give you, you know, some signals but not all the details. They were both at least positive. What's your sense of the way the leaders described this call?

KRITENBRINK: Yes, Jim, I take this as a good sign. Look, you know, as I mentioned last week, leader level diplomacy has been the key to managing U.S.-China relations since 1972. So seeing a call like this, I think only helps impart some stability into what has become an even more fraught relationship.

So I see this as a stabilizing element. You'll notice that basically both presidents are instructing their teams to meet soon to resume the trade talks. I think that's the main benefit of the call is it provides some stability, keeps the channels open, and instructs the teams, you better get back to work.

SCIUTTO: Is it correct to say that the biggest issues for both sides, for the U.S., are the rare earth restrictions, because a lot of U.S. companies depend on them.

KRITENBRINK I think without a doubt.

SCIUTTO: And then on the Chinese side, the tech restrictions, but also access to Chinese students to the U.S. KRITENBRINK: Precisely. Look, the U.S. from the beginning said that

they believe that China agreed in Geneva to lift the restrictions on rare earths and other punitive measures they'd taken against the U.S. on trade. Of course, the Geneva agreement was a bit vague on that issue, and the Chinese have been silent on that issue. But I think some of the steps that the United States took, including on students and tech restrictions, there are longstanding reasons for taking those measures, but I also think the U.S. was trying to get China's attention and send a signal of how unhappy they were.

And you're perfectly right. The Chinese also believe that the U.S., by imposing these tech restrictions, has also violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva agreement.

SCIUTTO: Does that then potentially give a path to agreement? Because you have the makings of a quid pro quo. You lift the rare earths restrictions for us, and we will lift these other restrictions for you.

KRITENBRINK: Well, it does.

SCIUTTO: Or relaxed restrictions.

KRITENBRINK: Well, it does, Jim, but the jury's still out whether that still happens. I think this call shows that the two teams are going to meet imminently. I don't know where or exactly when, but I'm sure it'll be soon. I still think we have a really long road to go.

The U.S. has a long list of concerns and has many reasons for continuing to carry out tech restrictions, and I think the Chinese are going to be reluctant to give up all of their leverage, particularly over rare earths.

I do think the students' conversation was quite interesting. The Chinese readout says that President Trump indicated he welcomes Chinese students in the United States. So it'll be interesting to see how that factors into talks and whether these threats to restrict the number of Chinese students is implemented or was that simply leverage for the talks.

SCIUTTO: There's a view among some China watchers that in the midst of this longer-term struggle, competition between the U.S. and China and concerns that at some point it might go to war, that some Chinese or some in China see the war, as it were, has already started here. In other words, that we're in the middle of it right now and that the U.S. is trying deliberately to undermine and weaken China. Does that make it less likely to come to a deal?

Because if they see it in the terms of this is a, you know, this is a clash of civilizations, effectively.

KRITENBRINK: Well, Jim, two points. First of all, if you take a step back and look at the larger context, there's no doubt the United States and China are locked into a long-term existential, I would argue, competition.

SANCHEZ: Yes.

KRITENBRINK: That's not going to change. This is the world's most consequential but complex relationship, and nothing is going to change that in the near term.

So I see the call in the trade talks. This could lead to a tactical agreement, hopefully will lead to a tactical agreement, get tariff levels down to a manageable level, fix some of these market access issues, fix the rare earths restrictions, maybe some movement on students. That's probably about the best that we can hope for.

And maybe one more issue that I'm going to be following is fentanyl.

SCIUTTO: Right.

KRITENBRINK: When you think about the short list of top U.S. concerns, rare earths restrictions have sort of risen to the top, but for the last several months, actually, fentanyl would have been in the top position. China can and should do more. They've done quite a bit, but they can and should do more, and I hope the talks will lead to some kind of agreement on that.

SCIUTTO: In short, it sounds like the best outcome, in your view, is a truce rather than a peace.

KRITENBRINK: Correct. And even that truce coming out of Geneva, we've seen, has been fragile.

The one other thing to pay attention to, you'll see in both readouts there's talk of more leader-level diplomacy. The Chinese readout says that President Xi offered or invited President Trump to visit China, and President Trump agreed, and then in his readout, President Trump seemed to indicate that he had also invited President Xi to come here.

[14:45:00]

I think we have to pay attention to that. I don't rule anything out, but I think maybe a more likely outcome in the near term would be a meeting on the margins of a multilateral international gathering, like the U.N. or the APEC summit in Korea.

SCIUTTO: Right. State-level visit, that's a big deal.

KRITENBRINK: That's a big deal.

SCIUTTO: Dan Kritenbrink, thanks so much, as always.

KRITENBRINK: Thank you, Jim.

SCIUTTO: Our next guest has been arguing in favor of a universal basic income for years. He's now warning that artificial intelligence is about to make his idea more necessary than ever before.

Our guest, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, joining us next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) DEAN: What does the world look like with AI in 10 years? If you listen to the CEO of Anthropic, it's a world where cancer is cured.

SCIUTTO: That's good.

DEAN: Yes.

SCIUTTO: But also a world where the unemployment rate is the worst it's been in the U.S. since the Great Depression.

[14:50:00]

The CEO, Dario Amodei, spoke with finance Anderson Cooper about the coming revolution.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DARIO AMODEI, CEO, ANTHROPIC: A couple of years ago, you could say that AI models were maybe as good as a smart high school student. I would say that now they're as good as a smart college student and sort of reaching past that.

I really worry, particularly at the entry level, that the AI models are, you know, very much at the center of what an entry level human worker would do.

What is striking to me about this AI boom is that it's bigger and it's broader and it's moving faster than anything has before.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DEAN: Well, this week we're looking at what AI could mean for everyone's future, really. We're going to discuss what AI could mean for American jobs, though, specifically with Andrew Yang. He's a former presidential candidate.

And back in 2018, he wrote a book called The War on Normal People. The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future.

Andrew, thank you so much for being here with us. Good to see you. You have warned, quote, AI is going to make the economy impossible for a lot of people.

How do you see this playing out in the jobs market?

ANDREW YANG, FORMER 2020 DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Thanks for having me, Jessica. I keep thinking about the over two million young people who are coming out of college right about now. And many of them traditionally would be getting jobs at big companies.

But a lot of those big companies are replacing entry level workers with AI. And it's just going to speed up and accelerate. I talked to the founder of a large consumer brand company, and they're replacing their 2,000 customer service workers with AI. It's going to rip through large firms at first because they have the highest levels of resources. But it's going to affect just about every segment of the economy. And a lot of Americans are going to be looking up wondering what happened to the jobs.

SCIUTTO: Yes. I mean, you hear that. You hear the heads of banks saying, right, they need fewer analysts. The law firms need fewer associates to do kind of the early grunt work. Fewer coders, right, because AI can write some simple code.

I mean, I've read news pieces -- I hate to say this out loud -- written by AI for simple things like, you know, sports, you know, baseball games and that kind of thing. I mean, that's that's pretty cross industry, is it not?

YANG: A hundred percent. And AI is doubling in capacity just about every seven months. So if Dario is right and it's a smart college grad today, it might be a smart Ph.D. student next year. And then what is going to happen to the real Ph.D. students or recent graduates?

So it's going to transform the way work is done throughout a lot of the economy. Back in 2020, I was talking about truckers being the most common job category in 29 states.

And now you have self-driving trucks just hitting the highways. This is going to affect entry level white collar workers. But 44 percent of American jobs are either repetitive, cognitive, like we're discussing, or repetitive manual.

DEAN: And so when you ran for president, you talked -- you said you did it in large part because of this impending arrival of AI, what it could mean. What do you think? And I know you probably have a lot of thoughts, but broad strokes here.

What could be done by local governments, federal governments, state governments to prepare for the impact of AI on America's workforce?

YANG: We have to think a lot bigger, Jessica, about what the economy of the future is going to look like. Traditionally, the politically correct answer was to say retraining. But now the answer is retrain as what?

I mean, as Jim just said, coders now are being replaced by AI. I have multiple friends who've been laid off by tech companies recently. So we have to find new paths to give Americans structure, purpose, fulfillment, community that look a little bit like the jobs we're accustomed to but actually are structured a little differently and have different types of incentives.

Because we have to acknowledge that it's not about intellect or character anymore. AI is going to come for just about all of us.

SCIUTTO: Yes, a little known fact in the Big, Beautiful Bill is that it restricts any state restrictions on AI for 10 years.

DEAN: There you go. SCIUTTO: There nothing there.

You have talked in the past, Andrew Yang, about a universal basic income to help compensate for the loss of some of these jobs. I just wonder how this country could pay for that, given we're already in the midst of a debt to GDP ratio of about 130 percent. This budget bill seems like it's going to add to it. I mean, could the country afford a UBI?

YANG: Well, Dario Amodei, the CEO that you showed the clip of, put the answer right in front of us. As the CEO of one of the biggest AI companies, he said you should have an AI tax. We should have a data tax.

Our data is being sold and resold for hundreds of billions of dollars right now. We're not seeing a dime of it. AI is going to generate in all likelihood trillions of dollars worth of value.

[14:55:00]

And how much of that is going to be received by the American people?

You have to go to where the value is, and the value is in the compute infrastructure and the AI companies. And Dario called it. I mean, imagine, again, one of the CEOs of these self-same companies raising his hand and saying, look, we're coming for entry-level white-collar jobs, and you should tax us. People should take his advice to heart.

DEAN: I do want to ask you, before we let you go, we are watching the unraveling of President Trump and Elon Musk's relationship really continue to spiral just in the last several minutes. The tech billionaire posting a poll on the platform X saying, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80 percent in the middle? You've in the past said that your third party might be a natural fit for Elon Musk.

What do you think about this moment in time? Would you join forces with him to do something like this?

YANG: It was only a matter of time before Elon broke up with Trump, because Elon has a mission and a vision in mind around innovation and how technology can advance humanity. I personally think that Elon falls into this middle ground that the Ford party is trying to establish. And we are growing all the time.

People are joining right and left because they sense that the two- party system is not working. We need a third party. I'll tell you guys, actually, in my opinion, we need a third party.

We could probably use even more than that, because the two-party system doesn't represent the vast majority of the American people. And Elon now has lived that firsthand.

SCIUTTO: Well, he certainly has the checkbook to support a third party. $290 million just in the presidential election. Andrew Yang, I'm sure it's not the last time we talk about this. Thanks so much.

YANG: Thanks for having me.

DEAN: Thanks.

SCIUTTO: Coming up next, is the Republican Party's biggest donor, as we were just talking about, turning into its biggest threat. After attacking the president for most of the morning, Elon Musk is now asking whether, as we were just saying, there should be a new third political party. President Trump, of course, he's firing back as well. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

END