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FBI Director, in Unusual Move, Reveals New Evidence in Kirk Case; New Details Emerge About Charlie Kirk's Suspected Killer; Investigators Scouring Life of Charlie Kirk Murder Suspect; Kirk Shooting Suspect to Make First Court Appearance Tomorrow; Trump Expected to Attend Kirk's Memorial in Arizona on Sunday; Trump Admin Focuses on Left-Wing Groups After Charlie Kirk Killing; Inflammatory Social Media Posts About Krik's Death Lead to Firings; WAPO Report: Suspect Appears to Confess to Killing on Discord Platform. Aired 3- 3:30p ET

Aired September 15, 2025 - 15:00   ET

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

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[15:00:10]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: In a highly unusual interview, the FBI Director is sharing new details on Charlie Kirk's shooting investigation. What Kash Patel said about a note allegedly written by the suspect and DNA evidence found at the scene.

And two suspects under arrest for allegedly planting an explosive device under a local TV news van in Utah. What police are saying about the disturbing incident and the charges the suspects are facing.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Plus, frontrunner and Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani, landing a high-profile endorsement in the race for mayor of New York City.

We're following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

SANCHEZ: New details are emerging about Charlie Kirk's suspected killer, but a lead official in Utah tells CNN a lot more information is expected to drop just under 24 hours from now. That's when the alleged gunman is set to make his first court appearance.

Earlier, FBI Director Kash Patel appeared to give a preview of some of the findings they now have, including alleged DNA evidence. CNN's Ed Lavandera is live for us in Orem, Utah.

And Ed, it is unusual for the FBI to be sharing some of this information ahead of some of these charges even being filed.

ED LAVANDERA, CNN SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, this is a level of detail that you would normally find in some sort of official court filing accompanying formal charges, that sort of thing. So, it is unusual for the head of the FBI to talk about this level of specificity on the evidence that they are collecting. But the FBI Director, Kash Patel, has been under a great deal of criticism over the last few days about his handling of this case, especially during the 33-hour manhunt.

So, that's kind of the overarching kind of theme over everything. But let's get into some of the details he did share. There was -- according to the FBI Director, there -- he says that they have messages that show that the 22-year-old suspect, Tyler Robinson, had written that if he had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, he was going to take it. He also talked about details of DNA evidence that was found on a towel and a screwdriver that was found with the firearm used in the shooting and killing of Charlie Kirk.

And remember, that firearm was found after the shooting in a wooded area just on the edge of campus and by a neighborhood that the suspect used to flee the scene safely on last Wednesday afternoon, and unable -- or authorities were unable to catch him in the moment, which triggered off the manhunt.

And the FBI Director is also talking about what they're learning from family members and friends who are cooperating with investigators.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KASH PATEL, FBI DIRECTOR: His family has collectively told investigators that he subscribed to left-wing ideology and even more so in these last couple of years. And he had a text message exchange. He, the suspect, with another individual, in which he claimed that he had an opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and he was going to do it because of his hatred for what Charlie stood for.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAVANDERA: And, Boris, the suspect is expected to make his first court appearance tomorrow. It will be brief. The formal charges are expected to be filed against him. He will not appear in a courtroom. He will appear virtually from the jail where he's being held without bond, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Ed Lavandera, live for us in Orem, Utah. Ed, thank you so much. Brianna?

KEILAR: We're joined now by CNN Law Enforcement Analyst and former Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow. Jonathan, FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox this morning that the suspect wrote: "That he had the opportunity to take out Kirk." That's a quote. And quote, "I'm going to take it."

Patel said it was written prior to Wednesday's shooting. What questions does that raise for you?

JONATHAN WACKROW, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, what questions that it raises is actually who is that message intended for or who did it get to? Research, Brianna, indicates that in these cases, 75 percent of the time prior to launching an attack, a targeted act of violence, suspects make what's known as concerning communication. This is a textbook example of concerning communication. And it really speaks to the premeditation and intent of this suspect. And at the end of day, this piece of evidentiary value reinforces the act that this was a act of political violence as well.

So, this is a very common. Again, 75 percent of the time, these messages telegraph what the individual is going to do.

[15:05:03]

Now, what I want to know is from that, you know, what red flags were missed by individuals or groups that may have had knowledge of his intent to cause harm.

KEILAR: The Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason was on the show earlier and said a lot more information is expected to be released once the state files formal charges tomorrow. He told Boris that. What are you looking for?

WACKROW: Well, listen, I'm trying to fill in the gaps right now, right? You know, we know that the suspect is no longer talking to law enforcement. But we do know that family and friends are cooperating. We also want to know what type of evidence the state is going to present to bring all of these gaps together, to paint a greater picture, to understand why this individual really who has had no criminal history past, that didn't have behavioral anomalies that were really marked of concern prior to this incident. What led this individual to assassinate, you know, this key political figure at this moment in time?

Again, it sounds like from the evidence that they have right now that the prosecution at the state level has a very solid case. But again, I want to round out those edges to really understand it from a, you know, criminal prosecution side. But more importantly, what can we garner from a behavioral threat assessment side so we can now understand what key indicators should we be looking for to hopefully prevent this type of targeted political violence from happening again.

KEILAR: And speaking of that, you have the White House requesting an additional $58 million in security funding for the executive branch, for the judicial branch as well after this assassination of Charlie Kirk. House Speaker Johnson says he's looking at all options to bolster security for members of the House. Where are we headed in terms of protection for public service, do you think?

WACKROW: Well, first of all, where we're heading is it's long overdue, right? And we've been talking about the rise of, you know, political violence and now we've transcended into this world and this new concept of the assassination culture. We know that there is this dangerous mix right now of, you know, grievance fueled hate, ideology and this sense of like moral absolutism that is, you know, representing itself and presenting itself time and time again.

The necessity to protect our political leaders and key individuals in the political conversation who are trying to express their, you know, First Amendment free speech right is absolutely essential. We've been calling for it for a long time and it's about time that we're actually putting action behind it in funding actual security measures, both from the public side, but there's also a significant necessity on the private sector side to bolster security in close protection. So again, people can engage in their constitutional rights free from fearing that they will be assassinated.

KEILAR: Kirk's funeral is scheduled for Sunday and that's going to be a huge event. It will be held at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. The Secret Service says that joint security planning is underway and Secret Service will also be with President Trump, we should mention, on his state visit to the U.K. this week ahead of the service.

They have their hands full. They're tasked with supporting the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week. How do they deal with all of these back-to-back major events?

WACKROW: Well, listen, you know, I said earlier to Betsy Klein in her reporting, you know, for the Secret Service, it's all hands-on deck, but there are numerous decks right now that they have to deal with. Right now, you know, the Secret Service has to prioritize their near Horizon Protective Mission, which is, you know, the foreign trip. Then, immediately pivoting into this, you know, major event in Arizona, coupled with over 130-plus foreign heads of state and government coming into New York for the U.N. General Assembly.

So again, you know, all of this is happening at the backdrop of this really dynamic and changing threat environment for the Secret Service and what they have to deal with, you know, in -- across all of these different domains. So again, resource allocation and focusing on, you know, putting the right mitigation in at the right time, you know, to protect these political leaders is essential.

So, they are going to be taxed by no means. They have an easy day for the next few weeks, but they're up to the challenge. The Secret Service has been in this environment before, and I think that the current leadership is really focused on ensuring that the mission is focused and that, you know, we have no missteps.

KEILAR: Yes, it sure is a lot when you go through the list here.

Jonathan, always great to speak with you. Thank you.

WACKROW: Thank you.

KEILAR: A short time ago, Vice President Vance finished his tribute to Charlie Kirk. The Vice President hosted Kirk's podcast today.

[15:10:02]

And he remembered the MAGA activists with several top officials of the Trump administration, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

SANCHEZ: Notably, Miller told Vance that the White House is going to go after leftist terror networks in the name of Charlie Kirk.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHEN MILLER, WHITE HOUSE POLICY ADVISER: The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger and incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: CNN Chief National Affairs Correspondent Jeff Zeleny is here now.

Jeff, what more are you learning about what the White House is describing as these leftist terror networks?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: There certainly is not a lot of detail there that was, you know, quite a specific what Stephen Miller was talking about in terms of the consequences for some groups. But it's very unclear what nongovernmental organizations he's talking about. Neither he nor Vice President Vance specified anything.

But look, there are major constitutional and free speech questions here, obviously. But there's no doubt that the Justice Department, in some respects, has already been going after and investigating what the President said Friday, George Soros-led group. So, there are likely to be investigations, but it's not at all clear what they are talking about.

But the Vice President has said this, I thought it was very interesting. He said, "Critics will say that we are going to go after constitutionally protected free speech." The Vice President said, "No, no, no, we're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence."

So, again, unclear exactly what they're talking about. There are violent groups on both sides, of course, but the Trump administration and the far right has often talked more about groups like Antifa and other things. So, it seems that's what they're talking about. But not any specific names were used in that portion of this podcast today.

KEILAR: Yes. And interesting, too, because what is the link to this specifically what we're talking about, which is so concerning, what happened in Utah? You want to make sure that they're zeroing in on what actually the problem is here.

Vance, we should note -- I mean, he had a very strong bond with Charlie Kirk. That was very evident. We saw that with his wife holding hands with Erika Kirk. We saw that with how Vance really showed up for the Kirk family in Utah and taking his body back to Arizona. He even credited him for his vice presidency.

ZELENY: Well, he is right about that, actually. But for Charlie Kirk and his supporters and network, J.D. Vance would almost certainly not be sitting there as the Vice President of the United States and would not have been the Ohio senator.

The reason we know this is because Charlie Kirk and his group stepped up to support J.D. Vance when he was polling in the single digits back in 2021 and 2022 in the Ohio Senate race. They helped pull him over the line. So, yes, they are very, very close. There's no doubt about that.

I mean, the Vice President missed or decided to miss a September 11th commemoration event in New York to fly to Utah. So that shows how significant he thinks of him. But he's also talking to Republicans around the Vice President, as I have been today. He's also hoping to sort of step into that movement.

I mean, J.D. Vance is trying to sort of become one of those voices that Charlie Kirk was leading this movement of younger conservatives. Of course, J.D. Vance young himself, I think, a 40 or 41 years old, so it's a movement that he's also trying to step into.

SANCHEZ: He also had some kind words for a group of Democrats.

ZELENY: Well, he did. He said that he's been heartened by the gratitude that he's received from some Democrats, the outpouring of support. And he really -- this is one of the first times I've heard a top administration official say that the loudest voices are not the entirety of the Democratic Party. He offered some specific examples of how some Democratic leaders, members of Congress and others have reached out to him and their outpouring of support here.

So, look, one thing is clear is the politics of the assassination are coming into further view. This is going to be a very big heated moment that's not going away for the Republican Party. This is not going away because it's so intense. Obviously, the funeral is next Sunday. What comes from it, we don't know exactly. But calling for the investigation and other things of left-leaning groups, it - it's just one example of how this will continue to be an issue likely this year and perhaps for years to come in our politics.

SANCHEZ: Jeff Zeleny, thank you so much for being with us.

[15:15:02]

Still to come this afternoon, companies holding their employees accountable for what they say online about Charlie Kirk's fatal shooting. We're going to discuss the rhetoric and why social media companies are not doing more to police their platforms.

KEILAR: Plus, President Trump says he will call a national emergency once again in the nation's capital if local police do not cooperate with ICE.

And then later, a high-profile Democrat endorsing Zohran Mamdani in the race for New York City mayor.

We'll have that and much more coming up on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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SANCHEZ: We've seen a range of online responses to the killing of Charlie Kirk, including celebratory or unsympathetic remarks, and several companies are holding employees responsible.

Airlines have suspended employees who celebrated his death, while other companies have also fired staff over their posts. These reactions are leading some to criticize online platforms for not only propagating this rhetoric, but also the kind of content that radicalizes. The kind that led Utah Governor Spencer Cox to call social media a cancer on our society as he demands social media companies be held accountable.

Let's discuss with Tamar Mitts. She is a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and the author of "Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism."

Tamar, thanks so much for being with us.

First, talk to us about the process of radicalization and how extremists use social media to recruit.

TAMAR MITTS, PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Thank you, Boris.

Yes, so we've seen these many times. Unfortunately, this is not the first time we see this sort of process where people are engaging online in different forums and platforms. And as a result of that, radicalize their views to the point that they can actually go and do something offline to harm someone and, God forbid, even kill them.

So, the process, oftentimes, relates to the kind of content that they engage with online. And the interesting phenomena that we're seeing is that this content tends to not be policed consistently across different platforms, which really is the core of the problem that I study in the book.

SANCHEZ: So how would you go about doing that? So, a form of sort of uniform moderation of content, especially when so many of these platforms are extremely different between, you know, Facebook and Discord, for example, where there's kind of a decentralized cell of a conversation.

MITTS: Yes, this is actually the core challenge. Basically, the way this works, at least in the United States, where many of these platforms are kind of hosted, is that platforms have the freedom to police harmful content the way that they want because of Section 230 and so on and so forth. And as a result, different platforms adopt different standards for policing, hate speech, policing harmful content that can lead to radicalization. And that inconsistency, in fact, is really powerful for actors who wish to promote extremism on social media. That allows them to find people who may be attracted to the ideologies and recruit them on less moderated spaces.

And the analysis I show in the book kind of points to something we tend to overlook, which is we need a more systematic way of addressing the problem. So, we need to not just focus on Facebook or the Discord independently. We need to actually see what these actors are doing on multiple platforms at the same time, because this is over and over again what we tend to see when we study these networks online.

SANCHEZ: How do you differentiate between fostering freedom of speech and sites that harbor extremism in the name of free speech? I'm thinking of like 4chan, for example. It's a bit of a fringe site and it advertises as being absolutionist on free speech. And there's a ton of hate on there. Is there a way to navigate the two in a way that limits radicalization and content that would then lead someone to violence?

MITTS: Yes. You hit the nail on the head on the difficulty with this challenge, because what we are seeing is that we have political differences in views on what we define to be harmful. And this is indeed the challenge that we see on different platforms and kind of how they adopt what they believe is harmful or not and how they police their content with some, like you say, kind of champion free speech, the ground for hosting a bunch of problematic content.

What I would say is that if you look at public opinion in the United States, for example, you would see that the majority of people would actually support policing, at least that horrible speech that promotes, you know, offline political violence. And I think that we can start there. We can start in places where there is broad agreement on what is the kind of content we don't want to have online radicalizing people and starting to set more consistent standards on how to address it, and there's more and more tooling today that always platforms to actually share resources and share policies and share the way they address this content.

So, we just have to agree on what is harmful, which is, as you say, it's the toughest challenge.

SANCHEZ: Tamar, please stand by, because we are getting some breaking news as we were speaking into CNN. And I want to go live to Ed Lavandera, who is in Orem, Utah, for us.

[15:25:03]

Ed, CNN has learned through The Washington Post, reporting from The Washington Post, that the suspect in the Charlie Kirk murder apparently confessed to the act on a Discord chat.

LAVANDERA: Yes, this is a walk you through what The Washington Post's reporting, according to two of its sources that in about two hours before the 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was taken into custody, he entered -- used a discourse -- a Discord social media app to message a group of friends on there where he said, I have some bad news. It was me at UVU yesterday. And he then also went on to thank them and telling them that -- he would be surrendering and thank them for, quote, "all the good times and laughs."

What is interesting is that, according to The Washington Post reporting, that message and those messages were sent about two hours before he was taken into custody. And if we walk you back to last Thursday night, about two hours before is when authorities were holding the press briefing where they released that -- those video images of Robinson allegedly running across the rooftop of the building from where authorities say he was able to get the vantage point to be able to shoot and kill Charlie Kirk last Wednesday here on the Utah Valley University campus.

And so, all those messages were being sent at the same time that authorities were releasing this -- the latest video and these new images of the person they believe to be the suspect. And at the time, it was very clear that authorities had no real clue as to who the suspect might be or where he might be.

So, it's kind of fascinating to piece the - piece together the timeline, because then it was shortly after that where he was confronted by his father at some point about whether or not he was the suspect and the culprit of the shooting. And that is what got the ball rolling to bring authorities to his home there near St. George, Utah, on the southwest corner of the state, where he was taken into custody around 10 P.M. last Thursday night.

So, this new reporting from The Washington Post, according to two of its sources, that in this Discord group chat that the suspect confessed to the killing of Charlie Kirk. Boris.

SANCHEZ: Ed Lavandera live for us in Orem. Thank you so much.

Let's go back to Tamar Mitts now.

Tamar, I mean, I'm curious to get your reaction here, because this suspect, before turning himself in, confessed to his Discord chat and said, thanks for all the good times and laughs reportedly. What does that tell you?

MITTS: Yes, that is just so playbook -- by the playbook of how we see radicalization works. Oftentimes, those who go through these processes become part of a community of people who think like them. And that process oftentimes happens on places like Discord. And the double- edged sword here is that on one hand, what we just heard -- that was crucial information for law enforcement to actually point to, you know, him as being the suspect.

But at the same time, I study kind of what these people do and how that process radicalizes them is also a place where these things could happen and lead to violence. So, my thinking on this is that it just illustrates the need for us to think broader about the problem of online hate, of online radicalization, and how we can think of better solutions that help us address this at the systemic level and not just platform by platform.

SANCHEZ: Tamar Mitts, thank you so much for the expertise. We appreciate it.

MITTS: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Stay with NEW CENTRAL. We'll be right back. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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