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U.S. Strikes Another Boat in Caribbean; Manhunt for Jewel Thieves; Larry Lawton is Interviewed about the Louvre Heist; Amazon Had Global Internet Outage; cargo Plane slides off Sunday. Aired 9- 9:30a ET

Aired October 20, 2025 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Patrick Fitzgerald himself at one point a sort of special counsel on a different case, for him to be tossed. What's going on there?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, this is always a dicey situation. Look, you are never supposed to be both a lawyer and a witness in the same case. And it sounds like the prosecution's allegation, not necessarily that Pat Fitzgerald did anything wrong, but that he may have been a part of one of these chains of leaks that Jim Comey allegedly set up. If so, if Pat Fitzgerald, even if he's just a witness, he generally cannot then be a defense lawyer in the case.

So, the judge is going to have to let the parties dig in, figure out, a, if this is correct. If so, then he's going to decide whether to disqualify Pat Fitzgerald from serving as defense lawyer. If he does, then Jim Comey is just going to have to find other counsel -- he does have other counsel beyond Pat Fitzgerald, but he may want to replace him as well.

BERMAN: A lot to watch today.

Elie Honig, great to see you this morning. Thank you very much. And a brand-new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts now.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump calls the president of Colombia an illegal drug dealer and announces he plans to hit the country with new tariffs and end all aid payments over Colombia's drug trade.

And just seven minutes. That is how long it took thieves in Paris to make off with priceless jewels after a heist at the Louvre. We'll speak with a former jewel thief about what the crooks may be planning to do now with their haul.

And for hours a global internet outage keeping people from posting on some social media sites, accessing bank accounts and watching their favorite shows. We've got an update on where things stand this morning.

I'm Sara Sidner, with John Berman and Kate Bolduan. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: So, happening today, President Trump says that his administration plans to unveil new tariffs on Colombia. And he is now very clearly turning his focus to that South American country now as a new target and escalating his attacks on Colombia's president. Trump announced yesterday that he will end all U.S. assistance to the country and called the Colombian president a, quote, illegal drug leader, who Trump also accused of doing nothing to stop the production of drugs.

The Colombian leader, though, in turn accused President Trump of murder after one of the latest U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.

And yesterday we just learned of another one of those strikes, the seventh in the Caribbean. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And again, they releasing more video of it. Hegseth said the boat was affiliated with a Colombian terrorist organization.

CNN's Alayna Treene is at the White House tracking this one for us.

Where is this headed now, today? What's going to happen?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well, it's only escalating further. And this escalated actually pretty quickly, of course, as we saw over the last 24 hours with this war of words between President Donald Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro. As to where it heads today, the president has promised to unveil new tariffs that he said he is going to be imposing on Colombia. And he's also said that he's seizing all aid and money going to the country. Something that is very significant when noting that Colombia is one of Washington's top aid recipients in Latin America.

But just to get into some -- you broke some of this down, Kate, but I think it's worth us revisiting, is that, one, the president has now called the Colombian president an illegal drug dealer. Hegseth has said that U.S. forces had attacked a vessel associated with a rebel group.

Meanwhile, you have the Colombians arguing that that boat that they are referencing, that's kind of at the heart of all of this, was not a boat associated with a rebel group. Instead Petro said it belonged to a, quote, "humble family," and that -- arguing that the president had murdered a -- essentially a fisherman.

Now, all of this comes, of course, as we've seen the United States and South America, particularly Venezuela and Colombia though, really engaging in this conflict as the United States has ordered strikes on a series of boats off the Venezuelan coast. Many of those, I should note, the United States has not -- and the administration has not given a lot of details on. Something that we know that they've been criticized on is they haven't specified who these boats were, what illicit drugs that they have been carrying. And that's according, you know -- accusations according to the Trump administration.

And then we heard the president last night, Kate. He essentially went further in some of this rhetoric that he is ratcheting up against Colombia. And he argued that the country is a drug manufacturing machine.

Listen to how he put it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: They are a drug manufacturing machine. Colombia. And we're not going to be part of it. So we're going to drop all money that were giving to them. They had -- it has nothing to do with them stopping drug production.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TREENE: So, clearly you can see, the president actually seems a little bit angry there when talking about this.

And I do think, Kate, some of the context of this is also important to note.

[09:05:00]

This isn't the first time that President Donald Trump has clashed with Colombian President Petro. Earlier this year, actually just days after Trump was sworn into office for his second term, he had tried to impose or he had threatened to impose sky high tariffs on Colombia after Petro essentially moved to block a military aircraft that was going to be taking or deporting migrants from the United States. All to say, they ended up settling that out. We'll see if they'll be able to settle this, but it's very clear that the relationships between these two leaders and these two countries is very much not in a great place today.

BOLDUAN: To say the very least. And not -- and not, as you mentioned, not headed in the right direction, for sure.

It's good to see you, Alayna. Thank you so much.

JB.

BERMAN: All right, a sprawling international manhunt underway this morning after thieves took priceless jewels from the Louvre museum in Paris. The heist took just seven minutes. Investigators say they used an angle grinder and a blowtorch to get inside the ornate Apollo Gallery. And then they took off with eight pieces of jewelry. They dropped a ninth piece during their escape. And this morning there's real concern the jewels might never be recovered.

CNN's Melissa Bell outside the Louvre this morning.

I got to say, I mean, an uproar in Paris over this.

MELISSA BELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Oh, there is. I mean such huge security breaches. The idea that these four men, we understand that they're looking for, could have broken into the room housing France's crown jewels, John, making off with such treasures of inestimable value. That's what French authorities are saying. This isn't so much about the price of the gems involved or the gold, although that would be considerable if it was all melted down and sold. It is that these are priceless objects when it comes to France's cultural heritage. You're talking about the crowns, the tiaras, the brooches, the earrings, the necklaces worn by the queens of France in the 19th century.

So, yes, there's a great deal of outrage this morning in the French press. Many newspapers describing it as the heist of the century. So brazen was it. So quick was it. So efficient was it. These are, after all, we understand from investigators, extremely well-trained criminals who had very carefully plotted getting in and out of the Louvre museum. Still, that it should have been impossible for that to happen at 9:30 a.m., in broad daylight, when the museum was about as packed as it is now. This is -- this is what Paris looks like on a Monday morning or a Sunday morning. There were people everywhere. They managed to get in and out.

There was some altercation, we understand, with one of the security guards inside. The alarms went off. The museum was evacuated. Still, they went off and got away down the keys of the Seine on their high -- high speed scooters, carrying at least eight pieces of jewelry, having dropped the crown of the Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III. Slightly damaged, but at least retrieved.

Now this manhunt is underway. We were just speaking out here to a French senator, John, who believes that none of the burglars, nor indeed any of these pieces of jewelry, are likely still even to be inside France. And so, what authorities and investigators say crucial period is that first 48 hours. And the clock is ticking. By tomorrow morning we'll have reached it. And if nothing is found, it could be that we never get to the bottom of this at all.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NATHALIE GOULET, FRENCH SENATOR: The jewelry will be cut up, or butchered, and sold. I don't think anything else. I mean we -- we have to wait investigation. Maybe there will be a ransom, but I doubt, seriously, regarding the price of the stone and the high level of the price of the gold, I doubt that these things will never come back.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BELL: So, a lot of questions about whether this was a commission. These burglars took these pieces of jewelry for a private collection, say, to keep them intact, or whether, and this is the great fear that's increasingly being spoken of, they will have been stolen to be melted down, in which case these treasures would be lost to France for good.

BERMAN: Yes, you break up the jewels, really almost no way to find them.

Melissa, you know, people see heist movies and they see lasers and high tech and computers here. From what it seems, these guys smashed a second-floor window, went in, grabbed the stuff and left. Other than getting that -- that sort of ladder up there, this didn't seem particularly high tech.

BELL: These were pretty rudimentary pieces of equipment. An angle grinder, John, was used to smash open that window. The entire operation, from the moment they pulled up that truck with its mechanical lift, broke through the window, smashed through the display windows, grabbing those pieces of jewelry and made their way back out, getting away on their scooters, seven minutes in all. It took them very little time.

But you're quite right, there is this sort of disconnect between the value, the pricelessness of what they've made off with, France's crown jewels after all, and the very basic equipment that they use to get in there. No fancy lasers, no high-tech equipment, none of the Hollywood trappings that you would imagine for a heist as brazen, as spectacular and as successful as this one.

[09:10:03]

BERMAN: Yes, my jaw kept on dropping further and further to the floor as I was reading the details of this, just because of how easy it just seemed.

Melissa Bell, great to have you there this morning. Please keep us posted. I know a lot of people are concerned about this manhunt.

Sara.

SIDNER: All right, you're going to want to stick around for this because joining us now is an expert on the matter because he's a former jewel thief. Larry Lawton is here with us.

All right, look, John just went over some of the things that happened. They used a truck that has a ladder that usually is used to lift things like furniture into windows on high floors. They used a grinder and a blowtorch to break the window, but that set off security alarms. This was in broad daylight, while the Louvre was open.

What does this tell you about these thieves?

LARRY LAWTON, FORMER JEWEL THIEF: Well, first off, it tells me that they planned this very well. I mean to case this place, to know what equipment to take, even to know in the museum itself, how to get through the glass.

Was it alarmed? Was it extra strength glass? What they needed? They got out of there real quick.

So they planned this very well with inside help, for sure. They made a lot of mistakes as well, though, so I could go into that, but it's definitely well planned.

SIDNER: What are some of the mistakes you think they made? Because they did make off with a lot of jewels that are worth -- we don't even know what, because they're considered priceless.

LAWTON: Well, you know, well, there's a couple of ways they can get rid of the jewelry. I will go into that in a second.

SIDNER: Yes.

LAWTON: But here's a mistake. They dropped one of these brooches. They only robbed what, nine? I think it was nine --

SIDNER: Yes.

LAWTON: -- you know, diamond like pieces.

Well, you just dropped a ninth of your whole entire load right there. That's an amateur move. I never dropped a piece of jewelry ever in 25 jewelry stores and $18 million.

It's not going to happen. They also got the motorcycles caught right away. I mean, they're done there.

What are you going to find? They found a vest. They found one of the construction vests already.

So they made a couple of, I call them amateur mistakes, but they did get away with a lot. And obviously now, how do they get rid of it? That's the thing.

SIDNER: Yes, that is the big question that they made off with. And we'll just go down some of the things they made off with. Royal sapphire necklace, a royal emerald necklace and the earrings to match and a jeweled headband worn by Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III.

So how hard is it? How would something -- people like this go about selling something like this, which are historical in nature and worth who knows what?

LAWTON: Well, the people who robbed this don't care about the historical nature, which is just what it is. What they could do is three ways to do it. They could break them all up, sell the gold, sell the diamond.

Listen, there's a lot of diamonds and they're not what they call Lazar Kaplan, which is a laser cut diamond. These are all diamonds. These are cut with a hammer and a chisel, literally, you know, a diamond chisel cutter.

So they're really beautiful and they're very sought after, even as small stones. So if they break them up, that's one way. Then they could also wait a while.

And a lot of times the insurance companies will put out a reward. No questions asked. If they get a five million dollar hit, they'll put out a million dollars right now.

And, you know, people do that. They actually wait. I was around a bunch of criminals in prison, actually, who waited for that.

So that's another way. Another way is to get like an eccentric person who really wanted some -- did somebody hire these people? I don't believe that.

But you got to remember three things. Very important. The guys who did this, they didn't just do it.

You have to have cojones. You have to have guts and you want to call it to go in there in the middle of the day, know what people around.

Knowing you're on a clock. Slip and fall. You're done. A whole bunch of stuff.

Europe is having a big problem with museum robberies, actually, which is crazy. And museums got to step up their game. They really miss the boat, the Louvre. I mean, they've never been hit really.

1911 for the Mona Lisa. But I mean, it's really -- they never been hit. And I think a lot of -- after the German robbery in that museum, they have to start stepping up security in these facilities because that's where I would go.

SIDNER: Larry Lawton, you taught us a lot about how this could go down and noted that you never dropped a jewel. They did. It was a crown that he didn't make a way with.

So we're learning a lot from you this morning. Thank you so much for joining us.

John.

BERMAN: Was that like a how-to guide there?

SIDNER: Yes, a little bit

BERMAN: I'm just saying. Is this like a side hustle we're talking about now for us on this show?

All right.

SIDNER: If I show up with sparkly things tomorrow, you'll know something has gone seriously wrong.

BERMAN: Ask the questions.

A cargo plane skids off a runway. There are fatalities. It broke apart, fell in the water. We've got the latest.

[09:15:01]

A huge, worldwide internet outage overnight. Venmo, United Airlines, banking, gambling, Snapchat. I mean more and more and more. So much of what people use every day. So, what went wrong and what's the status of the fix right now?

And then brand-new data about deadly peanut allergies. Some surprising new numbers out this morning.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BOLDUAN: So, the breaking news we've been following all morning, major websites and apps, they're coming back online now after a global internet outage impacted millions of people, hundreds of online services affected.

[09:20:09]

At the center of it, Amazon Web Services, a leading provider of cloud services for companies, which now says that the underlying problem has been, in their words, "mitigated." So, besides Amazon, we'll show you, the outage impacted, I mean, everything from AT&T, to Delta, Disney Plus to Facebook, Hulu, Snapchat. You pick it, it seemed to be impacted this morning.

CNN's Brynn Gingras joining us now with much more on this.

What is the latest now?

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, I don't even think our screen can hold how many companies that this has impacted.

BOLDUAN: I agree. Yes.

GINGRAS: Because, actually, I was just checking Ring cameras and those are still down. So, that's the point.

BOLDUAN: Oh.

GINGRAS: Sure, it's fully mitigated. The issue is being resolved. But there are still residual effects to it.

So, you might click on an app this morning, get really annoyed because you can't get your Starbucks app to work or you can't get something to work. This is likely the problem.

So, what we do know is the -- what happened here.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

GINGRAS: And I have to go to our CNN's David Goldman, because he breaks it down much better than I can. But essentially he says, the domain name system, or DNS, which is basically a phonebook for the entire internet, it's what basically points a website, like amazon.com, to its IP address and therefore accessing the data it needs to run that app. There was some sort of issue with that system.

So, they've been able to pinpoint it.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

GINGRAS: Now how it happened, that's still a question that Amazon Web Services is still trying to answer. And that might take a few or maybe many more days to come.

But essentially, that's the good news is that it has been resolved. But you're going to still see some hiccups. And like you said, it just impacted so many companies. It's still impacting so many companies. And it really is from, you know, Roadblocks, to Fanuel for John, so you have Starbucks for you, to Ring for me, to so many companies, including banks in the U.K. were shut down at some point.

BOLDUAN: Really?

GINGRAS: So, a lot of issues this morning. Not great for your Monday morning, but certainly here are some answers for you if you get annoyed when you're trying to open up that app.

BOLDUAN: And, Brynn, one of the things that you highlighted when you were looking at is just -- we talk about Amazon Web Services, we talk about AWS, kind of like this amorphous thing, but how huge they are in this space.

GINGRAS: Yes, 30 percent of the marketplace. And actually my brother- in-law is in IT for Eileen Fisher. And essentially, I told my sister, oh, by the way, AWS is down, not really knowing how big of an impact it is. And he was like, oh, crap. You know, like, I mean, it really impacts so many levels, not just the consumers, but, of course, these companies who are depending on the consumers to be using their apps. A huge part of the marketplace. Its major -- you know, kind of raises a red flag of how sensitive our infrastructure is. That's for other people to answer.

But the good news is, it was only a few hours, but you might be still seeing these effects.

BOLDUAN: But the ripple effects is pretty interesting.

GINGRAS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: It was -- you told us at the top of last hour that it had been resolved.

GINGRAS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: But the ripple effects of the catch up is quite something still. So --

GINGRAS: Yes. Companies are told to clear the caches and hopefully that will help trigger it. But that might not still yet be the answer.

BOLDUAN: OK.

Good to see you. Thank you, Brynn, so much.

GINGRAS: All right, thanks.

BOLDUAN: Sara.

SIDNER: All right, breaking overnight, this is what happened at one of the world's busiest airports. That is a Turkish cargo plane after skidded off the runway and into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport. Now, as it slid, the Boeing aircraft hit an airport security patrol car and pushed that into the water and killed the two people inside.

CNN aviation correspondent Pete Muntean tracking all of this.

What have you learned about what happened here, why this happened?

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The images are so dramatic, Sara. You know, four crew on board this Boeing 747-400. They are safe. But as you mentioned, the two airport security staff have died.

Airport officials say they were in a patrol car on the outer perimeter road of Hong Kong International Airport, just outside of the airport fence, and that car was apparently hit by this jumbo jet as it careened out of control.

This is what's known as a runway excursion. And they seem to be happening all the time lately. Took place around 3:50 a.m. Monday. That's Hong Kong time. That's 3:50 p.m. Sunday on the East Coast.

This 747 coming in to land on Hong Kong International's runway seven left and the plane apparently touched down OK but veered to the left off of the runway. This is essentially an artificial island that the airport is built on. The plane then swapped tail with nose. Finally came resting there in the South China Sea.

The big question for investigators now, how did this airplane lose what's called directional control? There was no significant weather at the time, though airport officials say they will be looking at the conditions of the runway at the time of this.

Of course, they'll also look at the experience of the pilots and whether they were fatigued, because most of these cargo flights occur overnight. This flight from Dubai, no exception. Thankfully, the crew got out OK. They appeared to use the left side inflatable slide on the upper deck of the 747-400 to slide down to safety. There's also an escape hatch on the top of a 747, where the crew can essentially repel down to the ground, like Batman, kind of.

Not the first crash involving the operator of this cargo plane known as Air ACT. It's headquartered in Turkey. Three total losses of airplanes that they've had in the last 15 years.

[09:25:05]

This crash leaves them with only one airplane in their fleet, Sara.

SIDNER: Yes. The sad part about it is that two people die. They were just sitting there in their car during all of this. And you can see the deployed slide there that you spoke of.

I do want to ask you about another incident on a flight. United flight diverted because of a cracked windscreen. How often does this happen? What do we -- what do you know about that?

MUNTEAN: Well, the real rarity here is that the NTSB is investigating this. And that's not very often that the NTSB will look into a cracked windscreen. So much intrigue here, the images have surfaced online, what appears to be this plane maybe got hit by something. And there are a lot of questions now for the NTSB, which has this windscreen in its lab in Washington, D.C. It's also looking at the flight data recorder.

But what may have come into contact with this airplane? Was it a piece of hail? Was it another part of an airplane? Maybe some conjecture out there. And I'm leaving this to the internet skeptics about space junk. There's a lot of question about that, especially as space gets more crowded. You know, for a long time they said it was a big sky. Now that big sky getting more and more crowded. And the NTSB looking into this one. A lot of intrigue here.

SIDNER: Yes, I know the Trump administration saying something like one in a trillion cases -- we don't know where they're getting the numbers from -- but for the space junk to have been the problem. But we will have to wait and see what the NTSB says as they look at this aircraft.

Pete Muntean, it is always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: Israel and Hamas say they remain committed to the ceasefire deal this morning, even after two Israeli soldiers were killed and Israel then responded with airstrikes. We're live in the region for an important update on this.

And Philadelphia police find remains in a shallow grave while searching for a missing woman. An update on that case.

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