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New York Police: Multiple Fatalities and Entrapments After Tour Bus-Semi Crash; DOJ Releases Blanche-Maxwell Interview Transcript; Epstein Records Sent to House Oversight Committee. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired August 22, 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]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: We do have breaking news out of New York State, which is where investigators are giving an update after a crash involving a bus and a semitruck along the New York State Thruway. Here is that update from moments ago.

TROOPER JAMES O'CALLAGHAN, NEW YORK STATE POLICE: We had a vehicle collision, a significant vehicle collision. It is a tour bus coming out of Niagara Falls back to what we believe New York City. And it had about 50 plus passengers on that, women, children also.

The bus was traveling eastbound right before the Pembroke exit, and for unknown reasons, the vehicle lost control, went into the median, over-corrected, and ended up in the ditch, which would be on the right side of the roadway or the south side of what would be the 90. And at this time, we have multiple fatalities, multiple entrapments, and multiple injuries. You can see behind me the amount of first responders from a lot of different police agencies besides New York State Police, fire, EMS, helicopters.

A lot of people are being taken to Straw Memorial Hospital and Erie County Medical Center at this time with a lot of different injuries and a lot of different things going on. But like I said, this is an ongoing incident. We don't have all the answers.

We don't have the total tally of people as of this time. But if you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer whatever you have.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you know what company it was, the tour company?

O'CALLAGHAN: We have the company. We're in contact with them. We're working with them on kind of where they're going, where they're coming from, getting a list of the passengers and their names and all of the details like that.

That's something that's ongoing right now. They are cooperating. We are working with them. We are working with getting footage off of the bus at that time.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are people still being rescued at this point?

O'CALLAGHAN: Absolutely. There's a lot of rescues. We still have entrapments. We still have people we don't know their whereabouts. We're assuming that we need that count, the passenger count, so we can count how many injuries we have, how many fatalities, or how many possible entrapments.

Like I said, the bus did roll. There were multiple ejections. There were multiple people trapped, and there's multiple fatalities. And this includes children as well.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How many agencies are responding to this?

O'CALLAGHAN: I'm sorry?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A massive response is there. How many agencies do you have right now? People, if you have an estimate.

O'CALLAGHAN: Just walking through it, I know Genesee County Sheriff's Department is here. We're here. Pretty much any fire EMS from the area is here.

Like I said, we have the DOT and we have the Thruway Authority closing the lanes, trying to shift people around, trying to get people off from being stranded on the 90. That's also an importance.

[14:35:00]

People have families, people have kids, people travel, and we don't want people sitting on the 90 without food, without the proper necessities.

So they are working at the same time we are working. They're working to clear and turn around those Thruways, clear the people out, and that's why you're going to see a large amount of people moving in a lot of different directions.

A very volatile scene. You have to remember that we have vehicles going the wrong way on the 90, but it's to clear traffic out. We want to make sure we're taking care of our travelers as well as we're taking care of the people related in this incident.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, we hear that it's tourism, but can you talk about the nationalities, or is that information not available right now?

O'CALLAGHAN: Nope. The nationalities, most of the people speaking on the tour bus would be Indian, Chinese, and Philippine. So we have all that.

We have translators coming in to work with, you know, those languages. But right now, like I said, we have a lot of people injured. We have a lot of people over there.

You're going to see people coming in and out of here. A lot of ambulance. You can see there's helicopters lined up behind me.

Depending on who we have, we have people entrapped. They may be alive but entrapped. And depending on those injuries, that's why we have the staging with the helicopters, because depending on their injuries and how significant they could be, we will take them to Stronger Erie County Medical Center.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just a point of clarification, the fatalities, does that include ...

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: We have been listening there to James O'Callaghan. He is with the New York State Police, a trooper informing the public an update on this crash between a bus and a semitruck.

He says that it is an ongoing scene. There are 50-plus people involved. There were ejections as the bus rolled multiple times.

There are people trapped. There are fatalities, including children. This is a look at the scene where this took place.

We heard there from Trooper O'Callaghan that this was a bus of tourists, of Indian, Chinese, and Filipino folks that were visiting the area. We heard Governor Kathy Hochul earlier call this collision tragic. Obviously, officials are working as fast as they can to find anyone who may be alive and trapped inside the wreckage.

KEILAR: This is an incredibly sad scene, and what's clear listening to that update from moments ago is that they don't even at this point have full visibility of the scale of this because there have been ejections. They don't have a passenger count, and they have some people who are trapped, and they're trying to get a handle on where everyone is.

But how did this happen? That's really the question. We heard there from law enforcement that this bus was heading eastward. When it veered into the median, he said, overcorrected, ended up in the ditch.

We know it rolled, it appears, at least once, right, is that the case? That is why you're seeing such an incredibly significant situation here that has shut down traffic in both directions as we're still trying to get a full handle on the scope of this tragedy.

SANCHEZ: We're joined now live by former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. Ed, just given what you've learned from law enforcement just in that press briefing, what do you make of what was said, the fact that this is still an ongoing scene? What is the process of processing this scene like?

ED DAVIS, FORMER BOSTON POLICE COMMISSIONER: Yes, the police -- thank you -- the police are actually being very guarded in what they say right now. The public officials have to maintain confidentiality of the victims' names and things like that and the extent of the injuries.

But this is obviously a terrible tragedy on our nation's roads. And one of the things that the police will be doing is sort of balancing that necessity of rescuing people, and in this case, using heavy equipment sometimes to have to lift that bus up. If there are rejections, people could actually be trapped under the vehicle. So you need to do this with kid gloves because you need to maintain evidence and make sure you're not harming anybody else. But there's also an urgency of sort of getting to the victims and making sure that everyone's accounted for.

After that, they'll be looking at mechanical issues. They'll go over that bus with a fine-tooth comb to see if there were steering problems or braking problems. The statement that the bus oversteered and went off the road, sometimes that's as a result of a mechanical thing.

But they'll also be looking at things like impairment of the driver and the experience of the driver and things like that, and whether or not other vehicles were involved.

So there's a lot to do at the scene of a case like this. Most troubling when there's children involved.

KEILAR: And when you're talking about a bus, right, and they're needing at this point possibly to lift the bus, we see them working around the bus, how do they get the help they need there when you have traffic so impacted the way it is both ways?

[14:40:00]

DAVIS: That's another complication to this. I've seen situations where the highway has been shut down and emergency vehicles have to come in the wrong way, you know, get on an access route that's beyond the scene of the incident and then drive in the area that's been shut down. But they will be trying to worm their way through traffic there.

And one of the problems is when you're dealing with a piece of heavy equipment like a bus, you need to have large wreckers and rotators to get that bus supported so that rescue personnel can get underneath it.

Fire departments have a lot of heavy-duty equipment, but sometimes it's not enough when you're dealing with a commercial vehicle like this.

SANCHEZ: And Ed, we've just learned from law enforcement that the bus driver is alive. We don't know if that person is now cooperating with officials or their status, but we do know that they are alive. What does that mean for a potential investigation?

DAVIS: Well, detectives will be at his bedside or wherever he happens to be trying to talk to him. You know, if there's any indication of illegal activity and that he may or may not be in custody, they'll have to provide him with his Miranda warnings. And if he does, you know, opt to get an attorney, they'll have to back off.

But if he does not and he agrees to talk to them, that is the single most important point. A witness, the actual operator, someone who can tell you exactly what happened is going to lead that investigation in the best way possible. But again, in these, you know, initial hours, it's all about rescue and saving people's lives.

KEILAR: And can you talk, Ed, about the unique difficulties of buses? I mean, a lot of times people are on buses. They might not be wearing seat belts. And when you see a situation like this, I think a lot of people, they're on a bus, they think they're not going to crash, right, like they would in a car. This leaves them vulnerable.

DAVIS: It does. The lack of seat belts has been a big debate for many years, and, you know, that's still unfortunately the case in many of the vehicles out there. And, you know, when I'm driving on the road, most buses and most commercial vehicles abide by the law, go a reasonable speed, and they should because these vehicles are extremely hard to manage.

But every once in a while you'll see a bus or a track-to-trailer unit in the far left lane driving along with the race cars, and they just don't have the mechanical capability to be able to handle those high speeds. And so when you see that happening, you really have to question the, you know, the driver and whether or not there's any criminal liability here. If you do something that is illegal and it results in serious injury or death to people, not only have you failed them, but you've committed serious crimes.

SANCHEZ: Davis, please stand by. We're going to take a quick break, but we do want to update you. As New York police have announced, there are now multiple fatalities and entrapments in this ongoing rescue effort just off of the highway there in Pembroke, New York. A bus colliding with a semi-truck, more than 50 people involved, including children. We'll be right back.

[14:45:22]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: We have breaking news into CNN. Just moments ago, the Department of Justice has released documents to the Oversight Committee in Congress related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The Jeffrey Epstein files have now been released, at least the first batch of them, to Congress, including a recording, the transcript of a recording of an interview between Ghislaine Maxwell and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that is expected to be reviewed as we speak. And we are going through that transcript right now. This comes as the DOJ is also expected to give a congressional committee the first set of documents related to Epstein.

Let's go straight to Adam Horowitz now. He is an attorney who represented eight Epstein accusers who had civil lawsuits over claims of sexual abuse. Adam, thank you so much. As we are literally scrambling right now to cover this breaking news, with DOJ releasing these files to the Oversight Committee, what is it that your clients are looking for in these documents?

ADAM HOROWITZ, ATTORNEY FOR EPSTEIN ACCUSERS: Sure. Thank you. Well, the production and the eventual release of these documents is welcome, and it's obviously long overdue. It's something we've been clamoring for a long time. As we say, the sunlight is the best disinfectant, and I think that's the case here. In terms of what to expect, it's difficult to predict. There has been

no outreach from the Department of Justice or anyone else toward us or our clients in terms of what might be in those records. So there's certainly a lot of things that we want to see in those records, but we don't know yet what will be there. So there's a lot of speculation.

Our clients were part of the original group in 2006 who came forward to the Palm Beach County Police long before Jeffrey Epstein entered into the famous non-prosecution agreement.

[14:50:00]

And so my clients in particular want to know who, what, when, and why that non-prosecution agreement was entered into, because had Jeffrey Epstein been properly prosecuted in 2008, you know, this story would have been long over. But here we are, you know, almost 20 years later.

SANCHEZ: And, Adam, I wonder what you specifically are going to be looking for in the transcript of this interview between Blanche and Maxwell.

HOROWITZ: Sure. Well, Maxwell is a central figure in all this, and, you know, the Jeffrey Epstein story cannot be told without Ghislaine Maxwell. She was central to all of his criminal enterprise, as the jury found in New York State in 2021.

So what we're concerned about in those records is that once again political influence and an uneven system of justice is being handed out. It's very unusual for a deputy attorney general to be meeting with a criminal defendant individually, much less one who is still on appeal. She's still appealing her conviction to the Supreme Court.

So I'm not certain why the meeting was held or what they were looking for, but the concern is that, once again, there's going to be an uneven level of justice being administered. That's what our clients are most concerned about.

We've already seen that when she was transferred from one facility to another.

SANCHEZ: And, Adam, as we will begin to review these documents, DOJ obviously was instructed by the House subpoena to redact the names of victims and other sensitive information. Do you trust that DOJ is going to turn over everything that they can? Obviously, sensitive information could mean different things to different people.

HOROWITZ: That's right, and that's the concern, is that this will become a political exercise. We're certainly grateful that it was a bipartisan effort to subpoena these records, but once we get into the redactions, there's a concern that, you know, political influence will sway things and not everyone will agree on what should be redacted. From our perspective, the only things that should be redacted is the names of victims and any child sexual abuse materials.

But anyone else who might have criminal exposure or might have participated in Epstein's criminal behavior, their names should be out there, whoever they are.

SANCHEZ: I also am curious to get your thoughts on the possibility that the head of House Oversight, James Comer, argued that he can't imagine very many scenarios that there would be further redaction. Do you have any concerns about further redaction?

HOROWITZ: Absolutely. I mean, we've already heard just moments ago that the president called the Epstein documents a hoax. So already political influence is weighing in on this.

But, you know, more important than even the redactions, frankly, is how these documents are going to be used in the future. It's my hope and the reason that these documents should be produced is so that we can learn from them. Epstein was, by all accounts, one of the most prolific traffickers of children and abusers of children.

And so, you know, remember, this is an oversight committee. Their job is to promote accountability and responsibility in federal government. And certainly there's a lot of room for process improvements, to say the least here.

There were mistakes made by prosecutors, investigators, judges. And so I hope everyone can learn from these documents when they come out about those mistakes and identify the grooming behaviors and the techniques employed by Jeffrey Epstein and his conspirators in grooming and abusing children so that we can identify them and prevent it in the future. That's the whole point here is to learn the lessons from the mistakes that were made 20 years ago.

SANCHEZ: And, Adam, we spoke with a Democratic congresswoman earlier today who said that there was some hesitation among staff on the committee to call Alex Acosta to testify. He's obviously the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He's the one that brokered that 2008 non-prosecution agreement with Epstein.

Why do you think that is?

HOROWITZ: Well, why do I think he entered into the agreement? That's an excellent question.

SANCHEZ: Why do you think he hasn't been called to testify? Or why is a Democratic congresswoman saying that there's chatter among staff that there's a hesitation to call him to testify?

HOROWITZ: He absolutely should be called to testify. To me, that's, you know, from, again, our clients were the ones who reported this to law enforcement in Palm Beach County. And he was the one who brokered the deal that gave Jeffrey Epstein this unprecedented immunity.

[14:55:00]

I mean, Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to enter a plea to two counts of prostitution. Our clients were 15 and 16 years old, were called prostitutes. Absolutely, Alex Acosta should be accountable for that and answer questions for why that deal ever happened. Because if that deal hadn't happened, you know, this case would have been over long ago, and we wouldn't be talking about this this many years later.

SANCHEZ: I do want to update our viewers. CNN is now reviewing the material that the Justice Department has released, this transcript and audio of the interview that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had with Ghislaine Maxwell, the associate of convicted sex molester Jeffrey Epstein. Separately, the Justice Department has transmitted the records related to Epstein to House Oversight.

Adam, in a couple of weeks, Congress is set to return, and Republican Congressman Thomas Massey and Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna have said that they are going to hold a press conference with Epstein victims. Are you planning to come to D.C. and be a part of that?

HOROWITZ: Absolutely. Every one of our clients, if invited, will participate. They want to see that everybody is held accountable, who should be held accountable, and to bring exposure to all the many ways that the victims here were let down time and time again.

SANCHEZ: I also am curious to get your thoughts on testimony from the first witness that we know testified before the committee, and that is the former Attorney General Bill Barr, who was in office when Epstein died. He testified that the general consensus is that Epstein died by suicide. James Comer apparently characterized Barr's testimony that way.

There was some dispute about whether Barr completely cleared Donald Trump of any involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. The leading Democrat on that committee, Robert Garcia, said that Barr did not completely clear Trump. I wonder what you make of Barr's testimony overall, whether you trust that consensus that Epstein killed himself and the idea that Trump's name may come up in these documents.

HOROWITZ: I'm of the opinion, and I think most serious people who have looked at the issue are of the opinion, that he died by suicide. There's lots of conspiracies out there. I don't choose to participate in that.

With respect to Barr's testimony, I don't think that Donald Trump was necessarily cleared in the investigation, nor was he identified as a criminal conspirator. I don't think there's anything conclusive about that one way or another.

But we've already been told that when the FBI produces documents to the Congressional Committee that his name is going to be redacted. So we've been told that already, which just raises a lot of questions.

SANCHEZ: Adam Horowitz, we have to leave the conversation there. Thanks so much for joining us. We have much more on the breaking news.

The Justice Department publicly releasing a transcript and audio of a conversation between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Also, the Justice Department has transmitted records over to the House Oversight Committee that now has the first batch of Epstein files in its possession.

Stay with CNN, we'll be right back.

END