Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

Poland Shoots Down Russian Drones, Accuses Moscow of Aggression; Qatari Prime Minister Says No Words to Express How Enraged We Are Over Israeli Strike in Doha; NATO Chief Says Violation of Polish Airspace is Absolutely Reckless; Harris Writes Reckless to Let Bidens Make Reelection Decision Alone; Trump's 30-day Emergency Declaration for D.C. Expires Tonight. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired September 10, 2025 - 14:00   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:00:55]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Testing Trump, two major foreign policy problem just got more difficult for the president. And they're calling into question just how much of an impact he's having on resolving these international crises. We are following the latest in Ukraine and in the Middle East. Plus, Trump's emergency authority over D.C. comes to an end today. What that means for the nation's capitol and other cities on the president's list?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": And fired FBI officials are fighting back, filing a lawsuit against Director Kash Patel and the Trump administration. We are following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

SANCHEZ: Today, global leaders are waiting for President Trump's next moves as his peace efforts look increasingly futile on two fronts. NATO taking historic action against Russia overnight after Poland says that 19 Russian drones invaded their airspace. Those drones shot out of the sky by NATO fighter jets. President Trump posting this reaction on Truth Social saying, "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go."

The president we're told will speak with his polish counterpart about the incursion later today. We're also standing by for Trump's full statement on Israel's attack in Qatar. He said last night that he was very unhappy after Israel's unprecedented strike on Hamas targets in a suburban area of Doha. CNN's Nic Robertson is live for us in Doha. So Nic, what is the latest?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yeah, we're just getting word now from an exclusive interview, CNN's Becky Anderson has just had with the Qatari Prime Minister. Let me just give you a couple of headline quotes from that. It is strong stuff in diplomatic terms. This is punching hard, punching heavy. Here's what he says. I have no words to express how outraged we are about Israel's actions. He said we are betrayed. He goes on to say that Bibi, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the region into chaos. He says the entire Gulf region is at risk.

The prime minister goes on to say everything about Qatar's mediating role in the Gaza crisis is now in question. In essence, that's what he's saying. So these are very, very strong lines coming from Qatar's prime minister. We knew last night from his press conference where he'd called -- where he'd called Israel a disruptor and a bully in the region. His language here perhaps more refined, more precise, but even clearer, no words to express our anger at what Israel has done.

Where this goes from here, certainly he'll be calibrating what Qatar will do and how Qatar may be respond by the strength of what he's hearing from his Gulf partners. He had the Emirati president here today. Mohammed bin Zayed was here today. He was using language like criminal about Israel's actions, strong language coming from the Saudi Crown Prince as well. We'll get more on this interview as it comes into us.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. And we're hearing more literally as you were speaking, Nic, the Qatari prime minister telling CNN that Israel has effectively killed any hope at a deal that would release the hostages currently being held in Gaza. Some serious words coming from the leader of Qatar. Nic Robertson in Doha, thank you so much.

Let's turn to Nick Paton Walsh for the latest on what's happening in Eastern Europe and this incursion by Russian drones into Polish airspace. Nick, what are you learning?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, look, this is frankly an unprecedented moment in the history of Eastern European security since World War II and in that of the NATO alliance, in which the United States security guarantees for Europe is really at the core.

[14:05:00]

Now, what we know last night is from about midnight till early morning, 19 separate incursions occurred according to the Polish government. We are also learning from initial police reports that they have assessed of the seven different locations where they appear to have found debris from drones. They believe three of these drones were not in fact carrying explosives. Still damage was done. You're seeing their pictures of civilian homes, their roofs blown off. It's thought some of these drones were Shahed type, lots of different variations. The most common attack drone that Russia uses.

And there've been suggestions from Russia's allies early on that maybe this was a navigational error, that these drones were drifted off course during a larger attack of 400 drones inside Ukraine. But Poland is saying, look, 19 incursions must be intentional. You can't put this all down to an accident. Polish President Donald -- Prime Minister Donald Tusk saying that this has brought Poland closer to large-scale conflict than any time since World War II, and indeed calling this a huge attack. It's key because now, of course, NATO must find some kind of cohesive response.

President Donald Trump, you saw in that Truth Social post saying, here we go. Well, that's not really the kind of ironclad guarantees that Europe expected from the United States. Maybe that will come indeed later. But I think sense of confusion here amongst European allies as to how they reply and possibly shock that Putin is so emboldened that he has tried something like this, incursions into NATO airspace, unthinkable that you'd see jets scrambling overnight to intercept Russian drones when Russia invaded in February 2022.

SANCHEZ: And yet, here we are. Nick Paton Walsh, thank you so much for that update. Brianna?

KEILAR: Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware is joining us now. Senator, thank you for being with us. Ukraine's foreign minister says that this is Putin testing the West. Russia is downplaying this. How are you viewing Russia's objective here?

SEN. CHRIS COONS, (D-DE) FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE: Frankly, Brianna, I think Putin and Putin's Russia and their aggression in Ukraine has been testing the West month after month for the many years this war has been dragging on. This incursion by many drones into Poland is just the latest and most urgent of these tests. And I pray and hope that President Trump recognizes that Putin will only stop when we stop him and that this calls for decisive action for a clear signal back to Putin that incursions into NATO airspace will not be tolerated, and that our support for Ukraine will be stronger.

There are many of us here in the Senate who support a bipartisan bill by Senators Graham and Blumenthal to impose tough sanctions on the country's helping fund Russia's war in Ukraine. I hope the president and the Republican majority here will seriously now consider moving ahead on sanctions against those helping fund and arm Russia.

KEILAR: How close is NATO to an Article 5 invocation?

COONS: I can't speak to that because Poland has invoked under Article 4 a consultation of all the NATO leadership. I don't know the details of that conversation. And I don't want to misspeak about the incident in Poland last night. I have not had a classified briefing on it. But as we have long said, in the Congress, our commitment to Article 5 is ironclad and that means defending every inch of NATO territory. This is an incursion of real significance. Don't take my word for it, listen to Prime Minister Tusk of Poland who has said exactly that.

KEILAR: So, Trump's response -- the president's response this morning was to put on Truth Social, "What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones. Here we go." How are you reading that? And if Trump doesn't really do anything in response here, how do you think history will judge this moment?

COONS: Look, I think President Trump has too many times casually said, well, I'll give him another two weeks. Well, he's misunderstood. Well, let's welcome Putin back into the community of nations. His summit with Putin in Alaska where he literally rolled out the red carpet for him seems to have accomplished nothing because Putin just weeks later was in Beijing arm in arm with Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un of North Korea and even Modi of India. So if Trump's engagement with Putin, his friendship with Putin was to win anything in terms of ending this war, I don't see evidence of it.

I think history will judge him if he takes no more action as naively accepting Putin's side of this war, rather than standing strongly with our allies and partners and a majority of the American people and helping defend Ukraine against Russian aggression

[14:10:00]

KEILAR: On this Israeli strike on Hamas leadership in Qatar, Qatar's prime minister just told our Becky Anderson that he believes that "Netanyahu killed any hope for those hostages remaining in Gaza." Do you think that's true?

COONS: Again, I certainly hope not. But by taking a military strike against the team that was negotiating a peace proposal, a ceasefire proposal that had personally been advanced by President Trump, Netanyahu is certainly putting a thumb in the eye to President Trump and putting at risk the lives of the hostages. There are still roughly 20 hostages alive being held by Hamas beneath Gaza. Let's be clear, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I don't mourn the loss of Hamas figures, but a military strike into Qatar against Hamas during the middle of negotiations to end this brutal war in Gaza, that was not constructive. It does not advance our interests.

KEILAR: Yeah. And we don't see that it so far struck any of those figures. Former Vice President Kamala Harris and I obviously need to ask you about this because huge headline with an excerpt out in The Atlantic today of her forthcoming book, "107 Days." Harris says about President Biden's decision to run for reelection, "it's Joe and Jill's decision. We all said that like a mantra as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego and individual's ambition, it should have been more than a personal decision." Do you agree with her on that?

COONS: Look, it's hard to second guess President Biden's decision. But given where we are today, given the harms that President Trump is wreaking across our relations globally and working families here in the United States, I certainly wish either one of them were president today, President Biden or Vice President Harris. And I can understand from her perspective, how she is second guessing the decision of former President Biden to go ahead with his reelection.

I haven't had a chance to read the excerpt or the book, but my impression is that Vice President Harris follows the line of many of us who admired and served closely with President Biden. That before the debate he had, we saw no evidence that he was diminished in his capacity. He was a strong and capable president who had a remarkable record of bipartisan legislative accomplishments and investments in helping reduce costs for the American people and make us stronger at home and safer abroad. So, I think if she's looking back and questioning that one decision, it's understandable from her perspective. KEILAR: So, I wonder if you think this hurts the Democratic Party right now, and I respect that you have not read the excerpt. But, I'm confident that you understand some of the contours, certainly, of what she's talking about. And I wonder if you think it hurts the party right now, or if it actually maybe helps to have what is a surprisingly candid exploration of Joe Biden's decision to run again from someone who's so central to his administration, when there are still questions and people do still want to hear from Democrats and they still have trust issues over these decisions.

COONS: Well, Brianna, look, what I think matters most is that we are in a fight. We are in a daily fight to put at the center of everything we're doing in Washington and in our home states, the working people of the United States. I'll remind you, one of Vice President Harris' core proposals was to reduce the cost of housing for working families. Something I hear from people in Delaware every day.

KEILAR: OK, Senator -- Senator, respectfully, I have to stop you though because this is the very thing I'm talking about. When Democrats sort of just want to move past this, right? And they don't want to talk about it. And I wonder if you think it's actually helpful maybe to talk about it and dispense with the issue in the aim of moving past it.

COONS: I haven't read the book. I don't know what's in it. I understand why it's of interest to folks in the press. It may be of interest to folks across the country, but what I hear in Delaware, every week I'm home, is what are you doing to help us have a more affordable life, reduce the cost of housing and groceries and prescription drugs? Trump isn't helping. His tariff war isn't helping. What are you doing to help? And the interest in re-litigating a decision made by a former president a year and a half ago is pretty limited in the folks I'm talking to.

[14:15:00]

Maybe it's of great interest nationally, but I frankly think American families are struggling and they want to know what Democrats proposals are to help meet their needs and address their concerns going forward.

KEILAR: Senator Chris Coons, thank you so much for being with us. Obviously, a lot of news today.

COONS: Thank you, Brianna.

KEILAR: We appreciate your time. And still to come, President Trump's 30-day crime emergency in Washington, D.C. is set to expire today. But how much of an impact did it make? We are going to break down the numbers as the president looks to expand his crackdown beyond D.C. Stay with "CNN News Central."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:20:13]

SANCHEZ: Tonight, President Donald Trump's 30-day crime emergency in Washington, D.C. will officially expire. And even though his takeover of the city's police department is ending, National Guard troops and federal agents will stay on patrol, at least for now. Last night, President Trump marked the occasion by going out to dinner in the nation's capitol.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: The restaurants now are booming. People are going out to dinner where they didn't go out for years. And it's a safe city. And I just want to thank the National Guard. We loved working with the mayor and the chief. And we all worked together and the outcome is really spectacular. We have a capital that's very, very safe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: But as this emergency expires, important questions remain like just how successful was this federal surge and which U.S. city might be next? Joining us now, CNN Chief Law Enforcement and Intelligence Analyst, John Miller and CNN senior Crime and Justice Correspondent Shimon Prokupecz. But first, we start with CNN's Gabe Cohen who's looking at the numbers for us at the Magic Wall. Of course, the question we're trying to answer here by looking at the data is whether this was actually the spectacular success that Trump claims it is.

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. And that is a complicated question, obviously, Boris. But I want to show you the overall D.C. crime stats over the past 30 days and how they compare to last year, because this is one important piece of it. And it's one that even local officials point to these numbers and say this has been the upside of the surge. So these are the violent crime statistics, down 40 percent compared to those 30 days last year. Non-violent crimes, you can see less, 12 -- down 12 percent, way more in line with that trend that we were already seeing in D.C., which is despite what President Trump has been saying, crime is dropping in D.C. It has been over the past couple of years, but not like this, not like these violent crime drops that we're seeing.

And if you break down the numbers even further, you can see homicides down 50 percent, robberies down 57 percent, carjackings down 70 some percent. But if you talk to local officials, particularly law enforcement and say, why is this happening? They point to one specific aspect of this surge and takeover that we have seen. And that is the collaboration that's happening particularly overnight, every night between local police and specific federal agencies, FBI, DEA, ATF, who are pumping in more than 500 federal officers each night to go out into high-crime areas, to take guns off the streets and to arrest people.

For years now, local officials here in D.C. have been saying, we have too few officers. We are missing hundreds of them. Now, they are getting that surge that they've been asking for. So that they say is working. And you can expect that collaboration to continue. What they don't like are the National Guard troops, more than 2,000 of them, who are deployed right now to high-traffic areas around the city. They don't want to see that. They don't want to see troops in the city. They also do not like the presence of masked ICE agents who have been out making violent arrests and creating these very tense moments with local residents, creating frankly what some are calling terror in communities across D.C.

SANCHEZ: So, now that this emergency designation expires tomorrow, what are the streets of D.C. going to look like in 24 hours?

COHEN: OK, so the short answer is they're going to look very similar to how they look today. Not that much is going to functionally change. The biggest thing that changes when the emergency expires at midnight is that the president loses his authority to be able to, in a sweeping manner, commandeer any local police resources that he wants for federal purposes. That means he has been able to demand that local police help with, for example, immigration enforcement, ICE raids.

Now starting tomorrow, the mayor and the police chief are going to have the authority again to be able to say no. And there's already indication that they're not going to work with ICE in the same way that they have been in recent weeks. They're not going to transport people they arrest; they're not going to assist with many of their stops the way they have been forced to do. The National Guard though, that does not end. Their orders have been extended through at least November. There's no indication that's going to be cut short.

And we know that federal agents, including ICE, can still operate in the city. It just is that the mayor now has a bit more authority. And then I talked about those overnight collaborations, you can expect those are going to continue in full unless, of course, the Trump administration decides we want to pull back some of those resources.

SANCHEZ: Right. Gabe, let's walk over back to John and Shimon because there are some lessons, perhaps some implications that we can garner based on what's been happening in the nation's capitol that may soon apply in cities across the country. John, Gabe was talking about the added manpower, the federal troops that are coordinating with local officials here. A lot of that has to do with gaps in how many federal, rather local law enforcement officials were here in D.C. fighting crime. Is that a problem that is exclusive to D.C. or is that lack of manpower something we see across the country?

[14:25:00]

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Oh, by no means. First of all, Boris, police departments across the country are down and struggling with recruiting efforts. Chicago is in a critical situation. They're short probably more than 2,000 cops, which is a big hit to operate on that kind of shoestring, especially when your main challenge in a place like Chicago is going to be shootings and murders. Now the good news is both shootings and murders are down dramatically.

The bad news is even with these decreases of 25 percent and 24 percent and 33 percent in robberies, they're still operating on a level of crime that is higher than they would want it to be, higher per capita than New York City. So, what do you do with these National Guardsmen? And I think the lesson you take from Washington, D.C. is they may not want them. They're not going to affect shootings and murders. They're not going to patrol the street and take police calls.

But when you're in Chicago and you have Michigan Avenue or Lake Shore Drive, men with axes attacked a Rolex store the other day and stole $170,000 worth of watches. Six are in custody now, or cars have been driven through store windows. That kind of crime is unlikely to happen if those commercial areas are lined with five or six soldiers with pistols and rifles and a Humvee parked there. So they could just, as uniform presence, perform a lot of good. They could also do perimeter at crime scenes, freeing up other units to go back on patrol.

SANCHEZ: Yeah. Supporters of the idea of having National Guard troops across cities like this argue that having their eyes and ears there alone is something that prevents crime. Obviously, critics go against that. But Shimon, you're in Chicago right now. We were expecting this immigration crackdown as of last week. What are you seeing on the ground there?

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: So, Boris, it's -- the best way to describe, there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of sadness over what's going on, over this concern that ICE agents are mobilizing -- and law enforcement working with ICE agents are mobilizing here in Chicago. We're in an area called Little Village, which is sort of referred to as like the heart of Mexico. This is the Mexican community, the third largest population of Hispanics by some estimates in this country. They're really feeling it here.

We had the governor yesterday talking about how, from what they understand, some a hundred law enforcement officials have been surged into this area to deal with this potential operation. And they're expecting some 200 vehicles here from law enforcement working with ICE agents. And everyone is very unclear as to how this is going to happen, what's going to happen.

But the fear, the fear here is palpable. I mean, I was talking to people all along 26th Street here, there's supposed to be a parade here, a festival with Mexican Independence on Sunday. That is a big deal for Chicago. Some estimates say 400,000 people could attend or have previously attended. That's not going to happen this year because of the fear. And when you walk up and down 26th Street here, you could see it. I went into a barbershop to talk to an owner there, and she told me she has customers that are afraid to leave their homes to come to the barbershop for haircuts.

And in some cases, they're calling her in advance, asking if she's seeing any ICE agents outside the barbershop. And she compared it almost to the pandemic, she told me, kind of that's the numbers they're seeing, the low number of people that are in the shops buying things here along 26th Street. This is a big week for them. And the fact that the administration is threatening this during this week is certainly very significant and has many people asking questions.

I also spoke to a snack delivery man, snack food delivery man. This really tells you what's going on here. A lot of the shops that buy snacks from this individual, they're not buying them right now because they can't get anything off the shelves because kids are not coming into the stores to buy anything. And most people are afraid to talk to us on camera. They don't want to be targeted, and they feel that if they speak out, they will be targeted. However, I did speak to the local alderman here who talked about that fear and certainly, what the businesses are feeling. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL RODRIGUEZ, (D) ALDERMAN, CHICAGO'S 22ND WARD: We are getting reports from some businesses that business is down as much as 60 percent. Other businesses are saying they're strong and they're doing well. The fact is migrants here in the city of Chicago, immigrants along 26th Street, create $900 million in economic activity here on 26th Street. Over a thousand businesses doing business here on 26th Street. They're worried. They're very worried.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PROKUPECZ: So where I'm standing here, Boris, is the -- these are street vendors. They come here every year through --