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More Than 20 Million Are Under Winter Weather Alerts From Midwest to Northeast; Trump, Netanyahu Meet in Florida for Talks on Gaza, Iran; ; Trump Speaks With Putin After Meeting Zelenskyy on Sunday; Russia Says Ukraine Attacked a Home of Putin, Ukraine Calls It a Lie; Second Helicopter Pilot Killed in Collision. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired December 29, 2025 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

DEREK VAN DAM, AMS METEOROLOGIST: -- of Michigan. But look at the reduced visibilities. These were down to a quarter mile in some locations earlier with one- to two-inch snowfall rates per hour.

Now, as that cold arctic air spills over Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, you better believe that some of these lake enhanced, these snow bands that will form here, the favored areas will see several inches, if not feet, of snow going forward through about the middle of the week. Look at the wind gusts. This is incredible.

In Buffalo, they had a wind gust of 79 miles per hour. That's the highest wind gust they've recorded at the airport since 1980. We're going back 45 years and then all of a sudden this storm comes through and does just that. So, look at the snow starting to pick up a full- fledged ice storm for northern New England causing concerns, a quarter-inch of ice accumulated in upstate, New Hampshire and New York and into Vermont.

There's the snowfall totals and the winds, really a big concern here knocking down tree limbs and some power lines as well. This could cause some serious travel headaches for people trying to get in and out of the major East Coast airports. Double-check your flights. Boris? Brianna?

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": And pack your patience.

(LAUGH)

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": That's right.

VAN DAM: Yeah.

SANCHEZ: Derek Van Dam, thank you so much. A new hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.

President Trump stressing Phase II of the Gaza peace plan in talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His latest high-stakes foreign policy discussion with the world leader at Mar-a-Lago as 2025 comes to a close. SANCHEZ: Plus, more than a decade after it disappeared, a new search is underway for MH-370. How one company is set to get a big reward if it finds the wreckage of the missing jet.

And later, a year-end celebration like no other. We're going to take you live to Scotland for a taste of the holiday tradition of Hogmanay. I hope I pronounced that correctly. These major developing stories and many more all coming your way right here on "CNN News Central."

We start this hour following Breaking News. Right now, President Trump is holding a critical meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida.

KEILAR: Just moments ago, the president spoke about the stalled effort to advance the Gaza ceasefire plan, suggesting that he will push to get the second phase started "as quickly as we can." Let's bring in CNN's Alayna Treene with us here in studio. The president said quite a few things in that appearance with Netanyahu.

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: He did. He actually took a number of questions. I'm actually going to be very interested to see what the tone and rhetoric is like after this meeting. But I do want to focus on what you mentioned that part of Phase II because that really is going to be the key focus today. I know that many people have been working closely on the ceasefire plan are really worried about Phase II and getting it started. That is of course the disarmament of Hamas, the reconstruction of the enclave, and also post-war governance for Gaza. This is what the president had to say about how soon he believes that could get started.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: Very quickly. As quick as we can. But there has to be disarmament -- the disarming with Hamas, one of the things we'll talk about certainly, but there has to be a disarming of Hamas. Otherwise very quickly.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TREENE: Otherwise very quickly he said. Look, I mean we didn't hear from Netanyahu on that answer. We'll see if he agrees with that because some of the vibes from behind the scenes and my conversations with Trump administration officials has been questioning whether or not Netanyahu is actually slow walking that process. So those are going to be some of the key questions to be answered behind closed doors in this meeting. He also talked about reconstruction, that's of course another part of Phase II and the president essentially said that he thinks it'll also be very soon.

He said that he as in Netanyahu is looking forward to it. He said it's a mess, but they're working on getting things started, so that was notable. One of the other things that I found fascinating was someone actually asked President Trump about a pardon for Netanyahu. This has obviously been a huge topic of conversation. The president had previously, while in Israel, said that he was going to be calling for that and what Trump said there was that he had spoken to the Israeli president, different of course from the prime minister which is Netanyahu, and he said that it was on -- that the president tells Trump that it's on the way.

Very fascinating indeed, especially something of course music to Netanyahu's ears I'm sure as one of the big things for him coming into this meeting today is making sure the support for Israel from the United States is as strong as ever and the support for him specifically, because next year Netanyahu has elections in Israel. Having Trump's backing is going to be so crucial. So a lot of key things that they talked about today.

KEILAR: Yeah, a lot of praise in public. We'll see if there might be tougher words in private. Alayna, thank you so much for that. Let's talk about this more with CNN Politics and National Security Analyst David Sanger. To that point, I mean it seemed like quite a pleasant exchange, right? You had Trump saying that he thought Israel might not exist if it weren't for Netanyahu and yet Netanyahu, David, almost appeared to kind of -- he was hanging on every word the president said almost in like a way that he was bracing. I wonder what you were looking for in this meeting.

[14:05:00]

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICS AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, you know I think you heard a little bit of that before because there's a sense in the Trump administration that Prime Minister Netanyahu was never fully invested in this peace agreement, that he was somewhat forced into it by President Trump, that there was the immediate payoff of the release of the living hostages and all but one of the remains of the deceased hostages. And then comes the question, what happens to the rest of the plan?

And of course, the Israelis have been moving in and taking up positions in Gaza. The disarmament has not fully taken place and neither, of course, has the next steps of building a technocratic government there which the president promised and when he was in Israel thought would be well underway by now So here we are at the end of the year and they're just now talking about getting the rest of the plan in place. It's not clear Netanyahu really wants to. He may want to just stick with the status quo.

KEILAR: And talk to us David, a little bit about the domestic political situation for Netanyahu and how that's going to play into this meeting.

SANGER: Well right now, Prime Minister Netanyahu knows that and President Trump knows as well that the prime minister's popularity is pretty poor, looks like about 70 percent of Israelis by some polls are tired of his long rule. But what we've learned about Netanyahu is just when you think he has come to the end of a line, he comes back and has another political life. And he seems to think that he's got another one of those.

Now, he's got some big issues coming up including the question of whether the most orthodox of his constituency and those representing some of the coalition parties are going to be finally conscripted into -- forced to serve in the Israeli military in some form, which seems to be where things are headed after court rulings and so forth, and whether or not that could bust apart the fragile coalition that he's put together. But he has survived so many other predictions that his coalition was going to fracture.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, those October elections could potentially come sooner because of some of the crisis he's facing at home. I wonder David, as we look on the domestic front for the United States, as Trump takes on these different foreign policy challenges in Eastern Europe and in Gaza, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a new Trump critic, posted on social media yesterday, "Zelenskyy today, Netanyahu tomorrow, can we just do America?"

Trump's Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles was on the record with Vanity Fair saying that he could probably focus a little bit less on Saudi Arabia and more on the United States. What do you make of how President Trump is looking at foreign policy right now as opposed to domestic issues?

SANGER: Yes, it's really fascinating, Boris, because as presidents enter their second terms, they think about their legacy. They think about the areas where they've got the most freedom to act as they want, and Foreign policy is almost always it. And their party thinking about re-election, something the president doesn't have to face, then you know begins to worry more about the domestic legacy. It's exactly what happened with George H.W. Bush, right, who obviously failed to get re-elected. You heard these same complaints about his son George W. Bush in his second term. And you're hearing them now about President Trump.

President Trump is increasingly focused on that Nobel Peace Prize he talks about so often. When you when you speak with him, he is engaged in these foreign policy issues in a way that he doesn't seem to truly be engaged in the economic issues, other than tariffs, which of course have a huge foreign policy component to them.

So, you know, I think this is a surprise to his party. I don't think it's a surprise to anybody who has sort of followed what happens to second-term presidents.

SANCHEZ: It is a really interesting point. Notably, the location of where these meetings is taking place is Mar-a-Lago, the president's estate. Do you see it as a center for diplomacy? Does the location of these meetings actually matter?

[14:10:00]

SANGER: You know, I think the president probably views it that an invitation to Mar-a-Lago is to a foreign leader more valuable than an invitation to the White House. It's sort of more personal. It's the place the president loves. It's the reason that presidents in the past have invited their people to their other summer homes. Again, George H.W. Bush did a fair bit from his Compound in Maine. George W. Bush invited Saudi princes and Iraqi leaders and many others, including Putin, Vladimir Putin, to Crawford, to the ranch and it has a sense that you've been welcomed to the president's home, not just his official residence. And let's face it, it's the holiday period. That's where the president is and that's where he's going to operate from. You may remember that at the beginning of his first term, he had President Xi Jinping of China to Mar-a-Lago for an evening. It was an evening in which, as I recall correctly, they ordered first bombing in Syria.

KEILAR: We're still waiting on the readout from -- the official readout from Trump's call with Putin this morning, David. But he did talk a little bit about something they discussed which was Putin is alleging there was a this attack by Ukraine on one of his residences. Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine insists that was not a Ukrainian attack. But it was interesting to hear what President Trump said, you know, he took Russia's word for this. He said, Putin told him and so he just seemed to accept that that was the truth as he was discussing this outside of Mar-a-Lago. What did you think of that moment?

SANGER: You know, I thought it was one of those moments where the president should have just said we'll get to the bottom of this. It shouldn't be that hard an intelligence target to figure out who actually launched an attack? I mean you could imagine there have been internal attacks not in a while in Russia, but you know, even if it was the Ukrainians, you can imagine the Ukrainians saying, excuse me, there have been there have been attacks most evenings on Kyiv including near the government headquarters.

Now, whether or not this was actually meant to target Putin, whether it was Ukrainian or not, I suspect we'll find out fairly soon, but it does tell you that Putin is looking for any reason not to go deal with the substance of the 20-point peace plan that has been described to him, even if it hasn't been formally submitted to him.

SANCHEZ: David Sanger, appreciate the perspective. Thanks for joining us.

SANGER: Great to be with you both.

SANCHEZ: Still to come we have new reporting about an alleged confession from the January 6th pipe bomb suspect. What the FBI says were his beliefs on the 2020 election.

KEILAR: And this just in to CNN, a second pilot has now died after a horrific mid-air helicopter crash. We'll have the latest details on what happened here.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:17:29]

KEILAR: Today, there was a key decision over what the public will now be allowed to see in the case against Charlie Kirk's accused killer, Tyler Robinson. A Judge in Robinson's virtual hearing seen in the upper-right corner there, ruled that nearly all of the redacted transcripts and audio from a closed hearing on October 24th could now be unsealed. The documents were originally deemed Classified. The October hearing covered courtroom security, media rules, and Robinson's ability to wear civilian clothing at future proceedings. While Robinson wasn't seen on camera today, he is expected to appear in person next month for his next hearing. I'm joined now by Ankush Khardori. He's a former Federal Prosecutor. He's now a Senior Writer at POLITICO Magazine. Ankush, first on the release of these redacted transcripts from October. What's the significance of that?

ANKUSH KHARDORI, FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR AND SENIOR WRITER, POLITICO MAGAZINE: Honestly, look, it remains to be seen. We'll see when we have them available to us. Based on the description, I actually don't think this is likely particularly -- be particularly interesting to folks. Seems to have, as you mentioned, something to do with whether he should be seen in restraints, things like that. It doesn't seem like a really material hearing in terms of the sort of forward-looking aspects of the case that are likely to be of most interest to the public.

KEILAR: OK, the judge also denied a motion for limited intervention, which would have allowed media entities to join the case as a non- party. Can you put that into English for us?

(LAUGH)

KHARDORI: Well, see actually, I think he what he denied, if I understood correctly, was an attempt to join as a party. Now, parties to criminal cases are almost always just the government and the defendant or defendants. If there's an effort for anyone to join as a "party," those efforts usually get denied. But it does seem as though the judge recognized that there is a public interest in this proceeding. There's a constitutional right for the public to have access to this hearing, seems to have recognized it and I think that's sort of the key part here.

KEILAR: All right, that's very helpful. That's why we have you here, Ankush, to help us dissect this. So, are you surprised on the judge's ruling on that at all?

KHARDORI: No, no, not really. I mean this is pretty basic stuff and there's an intense public interest here, so he's -- you know, it's good for him to be deliberate about these things.

KEILAR: OK, so I want to ask you as well about this new DOJ memo that's on the alleged January 6 pipe bomber. The person who was alleged to have placed these pipe bombs that did not go off, but certainly could have, Brian Cole Jr. Prosecutors say that after initially disputing that he had any involvement in the pipe bombs, Cole confessed to placing them outside the headquarters of the RNC and the DNC here in Washington. How significant is that?

[14:20:00]

KHARDORI: Well, that would be highly significant if it's an accurate recitation of what happened, it would be tantamount to a confession. Now, but we need to be careful here, the defendant is still maintaining his innocence. They still want to -- a proceeding to go forward tomorrow. That will concern his detention and preliminary matters. So, what we're relying upon at the moment is the account of the Justice Department and its recitation of what happened in that in that meeting.

My expectation is that the core elements of it, the admissions, are probably correct. In terms of what they described about the motive, which we can get into, I think there are bigger questions.

KEILAR: According to prosecutors, Cole acknowledged feeling disillusioned by the 2020 election, that he was fed up with both parties and sympathetic to claims by Trump and some of his allies that the contest has been stolen. Cole said "Something just snapped" after watching everything, just everything get worse, and that he wanted to do something "to the parties" because quote "they were in charge." That's according to the memo here.

Prosecutors say when Cole was asked why he placed the explosives at the RNC and DNC, he responded, I really don't like either party at this point. How do you see prosecutors planning to use that as a motive in court?

KHARDORI: Yeah, look if they need to, if this gets to a point where it's litigated at trial, that would be helpful to explain to the jury why he did what he did. But I want to put in just a very, very I think important caveat here. These representations, the prosecutor's account of his motive are almost certainly the most Trump-friendly version of what happened in that interview.

The U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting this case, is Jeanine Pirro, a rabid and frequently unhinged Republican partisan and Trump loyalist, who herself participated in the effort to mislead the public about Trump losing the 2020 election. She was part of the problem here. Honestly, she should be recused because she can't possibly oversee a case that concerns this and be dispassionate because she was part of the problem. She hosted Sidney Powell on her show in November 2020 And that was one of the reasons that Fox had to pay out nearly $800 million in a defamation settlement with Dominion.

So, I would just urge everyone to be very careful about taking the government's representations on this point at face value because they do almost everything they can to protect Trump these days.

KEILAR: It's an interesting point there. Ankush Khardori, thank you so much for being with us.

And still to come, recalled products are being spotted on store shelves. We're talking baby formula linked to botulism, details on the safety risks to shoppers. And we'll have that and much more coming up on "CNN News Central."

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[14:26:50]

SANCHEZ: An important health alert involving a potentially dangerous issue for shoppers. A new CNN report finds that just because a product is under a recall doesn't actually mean it's being pulled from store shelves. CNN's Meg Terrell has more of how you can protect yourself and your family.

MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, folks might remember the recall of baby formula back in November over concern about contamination with botulism and in fact, 51 infants were reported ill and all were hospitalized. Thankfully, no deaths were reported as part of this recall. This was spread across 19 states with most cases being reported in Texas and California, but really across the whole country.

And so, November 11th, the company that makes this formula, ByHeart issued a recall of all lots of this formula. And we should note that this makes up about one percent of the baby formula market, so there aren't concerns about shortages of baby formula as part of this recall. But, our colleague, Brenda Goodman on the health team was shopping in her local supermarket in Atlanta, a Kroger, when she saw one of these containers of baby formula still on the shelf.

There was a sign underneath it noting that the product had been recalled, but she and experts in this space were concerned that this product was still on shelves. Now, Kroger says in a statement that "When the recall was issued, we urgently removed the affected product and immediately placed a block at the point of sale to make it impossible for a customer to purchase the recalled item." So essentially saying, even though it was on the shelf, if somebody had tried to take it and actually purchase it at the register, they wouldn't have been able to do so.

But obviously, still a major concern that it was on the shelf at all. Kroger not saying exactly why that was still the case. Now, the FDA had sent warning letters to Kroger and three other retailers December 12th because there were items according to their inspections and state and local inspections that found that these products were still on shelves. And Experts note that this has happened before, that products can be recalled but either due to lack of manpower or other issues, that retailers sometimes still don't -- aren't able to get them off of shelves.

The FDA itself also has been criticized for moving slowly in this recall. Now, they note that there have been more than 4,000 checks of retail stores that they and their state and local partners have conducted. But of course, seeing this just before Christmas by our colleague -- we should also note that ByHeart, the maker of this formula, said December 23rd that it had notified retail partners and confirmed that that communication was sent to stores. They also have said that they've paused all production and they're auditing every step of their supply chain to better understand this contamination issue.

Now, the FDA keeps a list of recalled items, so consumers can go to the FDA's website to search items that have been recalled. And for consumer products, this can be a big concern as well, especially for baby items. There, the Consumer Product Safety Commission keeps a list of recalled items as well and experts recommend, especially if buying secondhand, it's a good idea to go to the CPSC website and look through its list of recalls, ensure that the product that you're considering buying hasn't been recalled.

SANCHEZ: Important advice. Thanks so much to Meg Tirrell for that.

Still to come, new details involving a deadly midair crash in New Jersey. What investigators say happened right before two helicopters collided.