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Minnesota & Illinois Sue Trump Administration Over Surge in ICE Operations; Trump Promotes Economic Policies Amid Affordability Concerns; Trump Advises U.S. Citizens to Leave Iran; Clintons Refuse to Testify in House Epstein Investigation; Contempt Proceedings to Move Forward Against Bill Clinton. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired January 13, 2026 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": -- thank you so much for that reporting. We actually want to go straight to CNN's Whitney Wild because we have some Breaking News into CNN.

Three federal prosecutors in the state of Minnesota have resigned, Whitney, after more than a week of pressure from the Trump administration to focus the probe of the ICE officer shooting of Renee Good on the actions of Good who was killed and those around her. That's according to a person briefed on the matter.

WHITNEY WILD, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CORRESPONDENT: Yep, this is this is what CNN's Evan Perez is reporting that Joe Thompson, the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, he is the number two, again, he is the acting U.S. attorney and two other top prosecutors in the office have resigned, again, after more than a week of pressure from the Trump administration, as you said, to focus this probe more on the actions of the woman who was killed, Renee Nicole Good, in the aftermath of that ICE shooting and focus the investigation on the people around her.

This is according, again, to a person briefed on the matter, who is in communication with CNN's Evan Perez. Evan is reporting that other resignations are also possible as prosecutors weigh how to respond to pressure from their superiors in Washington.

Let me give you some background on Joe Thompson. He is a career prosecutor. He most recently came out and announced an enormous new chapter in these fraud cases in Minnesota. It was on December 18th where he gave a press conference that was really stunning. He described a sprawling fraud scheme he thinks could reach into around $9 billion total. He had told reporters at that press conference six people were being charged in that case. He thought that that fraud investigation prosecutors were prepared to make the argument to court that that fraud spanned from 2018 through 2024.

And so, it is an interesting moment here. It is a curious moment because on its face, Joe Thompson seemed to be giving the administration what they wanted, which was proof that there is a major fraud problem in the state of Minnesota. And now, less than a month later, it appears according to sources who are speaking with CNN's Evan Perez, that the administration has done an about-face and now is very frustrated with Joe Thompson.

And he appears to be saying, you know, walking away from this. And I think that as we move forward, the questions that we are continuing to ask is about the partnerships here between federal and local law enforcement. There is a lot of pressure on those partnerships right now because, as we know, federal investigators have taken over the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer completely.

The federal law enforcement is in complete control of that investigation. Local law enforcement wanted to be involved in that in at least some capacity. That had been the original plan around the time of the shooting. Shortly after that, the feds got together, the locals got together, and there was a decision that they would go together. And then by that afternoon that decision had changed. Federal law enforcement, again, taking over that investigation completely.

And so, the questions we're continuing to ask is how is this all going to work together? They have other cases they have to prosecute moving forward together. So this is putting a lot of pressure on longtime relationships in Minnesota. We now know that the fallout includes multiple career prosecutors from the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office. Back to you.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": All right, Whitney, thank you so much. I want to bring in -- stand by for us Whitney, if you would, as we're following this Breaking News. Let's bring in Elie Honig to talk about this.

How unusual is this that you would have the Acting Minnesota U.S. Attorney and two top prosecutors stepping down here?

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Well clearly, Brianna, these prosecutors are trying to tell us something. They're waving a flag. These are obviously protest resignations. You do not see that happen. It's very rare before this administration came in for career prosecutors, non-partisan career prosecutors to resign in protest over something.

And let me be clear about what is and is not relevant to this fatal shooting investigation. The actions and movements of Renee Good on that day, on that street, what she did immediately before the shooting, the way she moved her car backwards, forwards, all of that is very relevant in minute detail.

However, her activities before that day, who she may have associated with, what her views towards ICE were, are completely irrelevant and inappropriate as subject matters for this investigation. They have nothing whatsoever to do with whether that shooting was justified or not.

And so, if that's the reason why these career prosecutors have resigned, then they are well supported in doing that and I applaud them if that's the reason why.

KEILAR: And another question, Elie, were you surprised to learn of a focus perhaps on those around Renee Good? Considering in the past, we saw this play out in Chicago. There was another case where a woman, Marimar Martinez, also in a vehicle where there was an incident with ICE, ultimately she was shot five times and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago ended up bringing criminal charges against her.

[14:05:00]

Is this kind of par for the course to kind of turn that lens towards the person who has been shot or maybe in the vicinity of them?

HONIG: Absolutely. The question when you're looking at a fatal shooting or a non-fatal shooting, as in the Martinez case, is focused on the officer. The question, the relevant legal question is, was the officer in reasonable fear of imminent death or serious bodily injury? What the person who got shot was doing, again, unconnected to the shooting, is totally irrelevant.

It doesn't matter who they're associating with, what the people around them believe in, what the speech is of those people. Any other prior conduct is completely irrelevant. To say, OK, we're not going to focus on the actions at the scene of the shooting. We're going to start investigating people around the people who have been shot.

We're going to look at who they may have associated with or what they may have done on previous days or weeks. That's completely, A, missing the point of the criminal investigation and, B, really turning the focus on in a punitive way that seems aimed at deterrence at irrelevant parties who have every right not to be investigated simply because they have some proximity to a person who was fatally shot.

SANCHEZ: I do want to clarify just one detail in our reporting. Joseph Thompson was formerly the Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota. He's since become the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, so it's the three top prosecutors in this case that have abruptly resigned. Elie, when you hear a source tell CNN that others are also weighing whether to resign instead of following these unusual demands on how to handle the shooting, what happens next in the case? Is it a matter of the administration just finding someone who will do their bidding?

HONIG: Yeah, so you don't see career DOJ prosecutors resign routinely at all. These are people who have been there in some cases for a decade or more. These are people who have served across Republican and Democratic administrations alike. These are -- many of these folks, including Mr. Thompson, served through the entire first Trump administration. So, it's really telling us something unusual when you see a mass resignation like this.

What happens next is somebody else gets put on the case. Will that be somebody of the same level of expertise and experience? Will that be somebody who is politically partisan towards one side or the other? Remains to be seen.

But the whole beauty of DOJ is that you have this very large pool of people who've been there for a long time, who have experience, who are not politically motivated, who can handle sensitive investigations like this. And when they resign, you're going to get replacements. And you may well get people who are less experienced and less impartial, and the results may show that.

SANCHEZ: And we've seen some of that play out already. Elie Honig, thank you so much for the perspective.

Happening now, President Trump is speaking to an economic forum in Detroit. But while he's away from Washington, there's a major foreign policy challenge with Iran that is taking shape and growing more urgent. The president just advised U.S. citizens to leave Iran. He is expected to huddle with his top national security advisers today as a U.S.-based rights group says that more than 1,800 anti-government protesters have been killed in Iran in roughly two weeks of demonstrations.

KEILAR: Earlier, President Trump said he canceled all meetings with Iran until those killings stop, and he then told protesters help is on the way. CNN Global Affairs Analyst, Brett McGurk is with us now. He's the former Middle East and North Africa Coordinator for the National Security Council.

Help is on the way. I mean, that is a promise.

BRETT MCGURK, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Hard to walk back from that.

KEILAR: Yeah, what does that mean? And what does he have to do without walking away from a red line here?

MCGURK: Well, he drew a red line last week and Iran appears to have made the choice to massacre its own people. So they kind of crossed that line, and the president today has doubled down on that. I think what they're doing is trying to put together a holistic policy, I think, goes that -- some measures I expect to see.

Iran is still exporting almost two million barrels a day despite a U.S. policy to get those down to zero, so I think you'll have increased enforcement against sanctions. Trying to get around this communications blackout that the regime has put on its own people. I was in the White House during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022.

We worked with Starlink, other tech companies. The technology is advanced now, so there's direct-to-sell technology that might be available for Iran. I think you want to try to do that, so allow people to communicate. That's critical.

You want to work with allies, particularly the Europeans, none of whom have designated the Revolutionary Guards Corps, kind of the core of the repressive apparatus of the regime, as a terrorist group. I think that all goes without saying.

Big question is military force, and whether or not the president is going to order strikes here. I think the indications based on the statements today is that is where this is heading. That is much more complicated than what we saw in June.

[14:10:00] The June operation was against the nuclear facilities, Brianna, which was a rehearsed operation over years across administrations. This would be much more open-ended, much more dynamic. And I have to say the option for a limited strike I don't think is really there, because you can't do a small strike inside Iran. You have to go after the missiles and what Iran could do to retaliate.

So potentially, we're looking at quite a significant military operation triggered by Iran making this decision, again, to massacre its own people. The numbers that are coming out, we can't confirm them, but they continue to grow, and they seem to be quite large. So I think probably within the White House, within the intelligence community, they know more than we know about what is really going on, but it looks pretty grim.

SANCHEZ: Well, the president himself said that he wasn't able to get an exact number from any one of how many people had been killed. Forgive me for sounding cynical, but the talk of negotiations, what are they negotiating? Iran, are they suddenly going to stop killing their citizens for sanctions relief?

MCGURK: No, no. I thought the dangle of talks which came out yesterday, the president mentioned yesterday, a couple days ago, it's almost absurd. Like I've negotiated with Iran. Iran will talk to the United States about two issues, hostages and its nuclear program. That's it.

SANCHEZ: Yeah.

MCGURK: And they're trying to dangle talks to talk about the nuclear program, which of course we struck last summer. There's really no -- unless Iran is willing to talk about its support for terrorism, its repression of its own people, the kind of the core of what it is as a regime, there's really nothing right now to discuss, and I thought the president took that off the table today. So again, I -- the open -- I was looking at this yesterday, kind of weighing 50/50 whether the president might order a military force.

It appears that that is now where this is heading. I just have to say that is going to open up a lot of unknowns. Unlike Venezuela and unlike the June War, it's hard to know exactly what the objective here would be, but the president's statement today is telling the Iranian people, stay in the streets, take over your institutions, help is coming, very hard to walk back from that.

So I suspect now, we're gearing up for that. And I have to say, I just -- I dealt with the crisis from October 7th, 2023 throughout. Iran has made choices from the first days of that crisis. It chose to join in with Hamas. It chose to start attacking us. It killed Americans in Jordan. It joined the mayhem, and this is all blowback from those decisions, and then it has made the decision here this week to massacre its own people.

It -- you know, it speaks to who, what this regime is and why we all want to see it changed. However, changing a regime is extremely difficult, and even if the supreme leader was no longer around, who is actually going to fill the vacuum? It could be the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the people with all the guns. So, this has the ways to go. We need to be on support, on the side of the Iranian people in the streets, every single Iranian you see in the streets is risking their life. Their friends are being shot, and they're still in the streets.

It's extraordinary. It's inspiring, but, you know, this situation in Iran right now is extremely serious, very grim. It's a huge country. We might know what's going on in Tehran. It's hard to know what's going on in all the other cities and smaller towns and villages. So, look, I think the president has a decision to make. He may have already made it.

KEILAR: Help is on the way. It doesn't sound like sanctions, I will say, Brett, just the language of it. It's so great to get your insights on this. Thank you so much, Brett McGurk.

MCGURK: Thank you.

KEILAR: And still to come, President Trump is in Detroit right now, sharing his message about the economy, just as new numbers show millions of Americans are still struggling with inflation.

SANCHEZ: And one of the most anticipated Supreme Court cases of the year, we are going to speak with a transgender athlete about what a decision in the case might mean for the future of sports in schools. And later, could the mystery of Havana syndrome finally be solved? We have details on a secret device the U.S. obtained through an undercover operation. It cost millions of dollars. We'll tell you about it in a few minutes.

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[14:18:52]

SANCHEZ: Right now, President Trump is delivering a speech at the Detroit Economic Club. He says he's there to report on what he calls the strongest and fastest economic turnaround in U.S. history. This comes as many Americans are still struggling to afford basic necessities. In fact, new government data shows that consumer prices remain stubbornly high.

CNN's Kristen Holmes is covering the president's trip live from Detroit. Kristen, what's the latest there?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, Boris, we're hearing that President Trump really tried to sell his economic messaging here in Detroit. This is an opportunity for him to talk directly to the American people in a very critical state of Michigan about those economic policies.

And there is a belief among the administration, among Republicans, that the best messenger when it comes to the economy is President Trump. This is what we want the president to be doing. This is what they want him to be focusing on, particularly as we go into this midterm election. And as you said, many Americans are still struggling. They are still finding it hard to afford their everyday life. Now, I will tell you, I talked to multiple people on the ground here in Michigan. And much like all of American politics, they were split almost evenly down the middle on people who thought that President Trump was doing a fantastic job when it came to the economy, that he was starting from the top up, that he was working as a businessman, to people who felt like they were struggling every day, that nothing had changed, that they wanted him to focus less on foreign policy, on this foreign intervention, and more on the economy.

[14:20:18]

So, again, talking about pretty evenly split here. But we're hearing him talk about is what he has done and what policies he has put in place that they are trying to sell as helpful to the American public, essentially saying that even if it's not helpful at this moment, these are things that over the next several months, years, will help the American economy grow.

So you've heard, of course, President Trump talking about tariffs, talking about other policies that he's put in place, blaming the previous administration, something that we've heard before. But again, as all of this foreign policy looms, you are hearing him today stick with this economic messaging, something that Republicans had hoped that he would do.

SANCHEZ: Kristen Holmes, live for us in Detroit with President Trump. Thank you so much. Let's turn to CNN's Matt Egan now for what the reports show about the state of the economy as the president is promoting his policies. Matt, walk us through the numbers.

MATT EGAN, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Boris, the president has argued that he would give the U.S. economy an A+, but polling shows that Americans do not agree. Many Americans would give the economy much, much lower marks. And that's because while GDP is strong, which is something that we can expect to hear the president tout today, the job market is not strong, right? Look at this.

The unemployment rate at the end of 2024, at the end of the Biden era, was at 4.1 percent. It has moved in the wrong direction to 4.4 percent at the end of last month. Now, even worse is what we've seen in terms of job growth. Job growth at the end of 2024 was pretty healthy, 200,000 jobs being added to the U.S. economy each month. It has now turned negative, with the economy losing an average of 22,000 jobs per month.

Now, part of that is because the Trump administration has slashed the size of the federal workforce. But these numbers help show why people worry that if they lose their job, they might not be able to find another one. And the situation is even worse on the manufacturing front. This is roughly April when the president rolled out his tariffs.

And you can see, the manufacturing sector has lost jobs every single month since then, losing jobs eight months in a row. So that manufacturing jobs boom that the president has promised, it has not arrived, at least not yet. When you look at the numbers overall last year, the U.S. economy gained less than 600,000 jobs. That's the worst for any year, outside of a recession, since 2003.

Now, the news on inflation is a bit more mixed. We learned today that the inflation rate as of December was 2.7 percent. That is a step in the right direction from the end of last year. But remember, this doesn't mean prices are falling across the economy. It just means they're going up at a slower pace.

When you look at some of the specific categories, some things have gotten cheaper. Look at this. Egg prices are down by 21 percent over the past year. Gas prices are near four-and-a-half-year lows. New car prices, they barely budged over the past year. But other things, electricity up 7 percent, natural gas 11 percent, ground beef 15 percent more expensive. That's the most since June 2020.

And so, Boris, I do think this helps explain why the president has rolled out so many aggressive moves in just the past few days, aimed at trying to address these affordability problems. That suggests that even he acknowledges that more work needs to be done, at least on that front.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, notably among them, scaling back some of the tariffs that he enacted. Matt Egan, thank you so much for walking us through that report.

Still to come, the Clintons refusing to testify in a congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein despite a threat of being held in contempt. Hear their reason for deciding not to go and what House Republicans might do next.

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[14:28:43]

KEILAR: The Epstein files investigation could bring us a historic first, a contempt of Congress charge against a former president. That is what House Republicans say is going to happen after Bill Clinton failed to show up for his deposition this morning about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Clinton has never been accused of any wrongdoing surrounding the late sex offender. He also claims that he never knew of Epstein's crimes. But after today's no-show, the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee pointed out the vote to subpoena the former president last year had bipartisan support.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JAMES COMER, (R-KY) OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: As a result of Bill Clinton not showing up for his lawful subpoena, which again was voted on unanimously by the committee in a bipartisan manner, we will move next week in the House Oversight Committee markup to hold former President Clinton in contempt of Congress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Hillary Clinton is also expected to be a no-show for her deposition, which is set for tomorrow. In a letter to Committee Chair Comer, the Clinton's lawyer says, "Insisting on in-person testimony can have no purpose but to harass and embarrass President and Secretary Clinton."

CNN's Annie Greyer is on Capitol Hill for us. Annie, the Clintons say their sworn statements should be enough. Chair Comer is saying it's not. Tell us why.

ANNIE GRAYER, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Comer maintains that he has questions for the Clintons that can't be answered in a written statement. He wants to know about the times that Epstein visited former President Bill Clinton while he was president at the White House --