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Pam Bondi Ousted as Attorney General; Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche Will Step Up to Acting AG; Trump Says U.S. To Hit Iran Extremely Hard Over the Next Two to Three Weeks; Police Release Video From Tiger Woods' Latest Rollover Crash. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired April 02, 2026 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:30:48]

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": We're staying on top of the Breaking News on CNN. Attorney General, Pam Bondi fired by President Trump. We have a panel of experts here to discuss. Evan, first to you.

Todd Blanche is taking over as Acting Attorney General, someone who has relatively not delved into politics until fairly recently, including an appearance at CPAC. Let's watch this soundbite.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TODD BLANCHE, UNITED STATES ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How many have been canned?

BLANCHE: Over 200. Over 200 either left before we came in because they knew it was coming, or were fired, or took early retirement. They are no longer employed by this department.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: To be clear, those are now former DOJ employees who worked on prosecutions of President Trump after he left the White House. It seems like Todd Blanche, having been President Trump's former personal attorney, would be game to pursue some of the ambitious prosecutions of his political adversaries.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, let me just first point out how astonishing it is for the second-in-command at the Justice Department, the person who runs the department day-to-day, to be boasting at a political event, a political convention about ousting people who simply were doing their jobs, right? These are people, agents, FBI agents, these are prosecutors who were doing their jobs. They were carrying out court orders that were, you know, issued by judges. There is absolutely nothing I've ever heard from a political leader at the Justice Department that really rivals something like this. And by the way, the other thing that's going to happen is that every single person that is suing the department and the government over their firings now has that soundbite to use in their lawsuits. But I'll say this, on Blanche's tenure, if I were him, I would not be too comfortable in how long I'm going to be around because the same dissatisfaction that the president has with Pam Bondi's job performance, you know, really also applies to Todd Blanche because he is the person who runs the department day-to-day.

A lot of the grumbling behind the scenes about the performance of the department in carrying out the president's retribution agenda has also been about Todd Blanche because people say inside, they say that that's where things go to die, that things have been moving very slowly, that he has not been willing to move things quickly enough.

Now, in Todd's defense -- in Todd Blanche's defense, I would say that he understands the reality of how things work, right? That you can't just, like, go indict people. You need to try to have evidence, you need to figure out where you can best bring cases, and then there's some evidence that's just not there, right? And so --

DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: Do you think the personal relationship that President Trump has with Blanche because of all that bonding time in the cases --

PEREZ: Yeah.

CHALIAN: -- when he served as his personal attorney --

(CROSSTALK)

PEREZ: I think that that has helped save him so far, right, from some of the anger of the president, but I think in the end, I think the president is very unhappy with how the department has done what he wants them to do, and some of that is Todd Blanche's, or at least a lot of the -- some of the blame goes to Todd Blanche as well. And so we don't know how long he'll last after this, depending on who the president appoints.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": He, Todd Blanche, has put a statement out on X saying that Pam Bondi led this department with strength and conviction, and I'm grateful for her leadership and friendship.

He goes on to say, thank you to President Trump for the trust and the opportunity to serve as Acting Attorney General. We will continue backing the blue, enforcing the law, and doing everything in our power to keep America safe.

Elie, I wonder what you think about what we expect to be this interim tenure of Todd Blanche. I mean, he is someone who factored certainly into this saga with the Epstein files. He's the one who went down, had the interview over the course of two days with Ghislaine Maxwell, who shortly thereafter was moved to a quite comfortable prison camp in Texas, which received a lot of criticism.

[13:35:00]

I just wonder how you think he is going to be as Acting Attorney General.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So I've known Todd Blanche for 20 years. We were both at the Southern District of New York together. We were roughly contemporaries. I started in 2004, he started in 2005 or 2006. So we were raised as prosecutors at the same time in the same place.

When Todd Blanche was defending Donald Trump in those criminal cases, a lot of people were criticizing Todd. They were saying, how could he do this? Why would he defend Donald Trump? And I publicly, in the New York Times, in Maggie Haberman's article, defended Todd Blanche for doing that.

I said, he's a criminal defense lawyer. He's defending a person who's a criminal defendant. That's the job. We all know better. We ought to respect that and not sort of cast him out.

When he then became the Deputy Attorney General, however, I think he gave away a lot of the principles that had governed him over his last two decades as a prosecutor. I think the expectation when Todd Blanche became the Deputy AG was that he would be some ballast, that he would restore and retain some of those prosecutorial principles.

Instead, as Evan just noted, he has largely gone along with Pam Bondi's political use of DOJ, as perfectly exemplified by that clip where he's boasting and getting applause about firing everyone who was involved in any of the Trump prosecutions.

SANCHEZ: Team, thank you so much for your analysis. Evan, Jeff, Elie, David, thank you so much.

We're going to stay on top of this story. We're actually going to ask a sitting member of Congress for his view of this Breaking News that Pam Bondi has been ousted as Attorney General, when we come back. Stay with us.

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[13:40:48]

KEILAR: We are following our Breaking News that Pam Bondi has been ousted as Attorney General. Todd Blanche, previously the Assistant or Deputy Attorney General, will be moving over as Acting Attorney General. The president calling Bondi a patriot and saying that she is going to be moving into an important private sector role that is still to be announced.

So this is huge news, obviously. She was just at the Supreme Court yesterday with the president, sitting there watching the arguments of the -- really the appearance of the Solicitor General as he was facing questions from the justices in the landmark birthright citizenship case. We're now joined by Democratic Congressman, Pat Ryan of New York. He sits on the House Armed Services Committee. He's an Iraq War veteran who served two tours and earned two Bronze Stars. We booked you to talk about the president's address last night, talking about the war in Iran. This news has just come in that Pam Bondi has been ousted. What is your reaction to this?

REP. PAT RYAN, (D-NY) ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: She's as far from a patriot as I could possibly think of. I mean, we've seen her degrade what was an independent office that's about justice for every American into this partisan, part of the cult of fealty to Trump, including her appearance yesterday, as you said, in an unprecedented way at the Supreme Court of the United States, one of our most revered institutions.

So I think it is a win that she is no longer in this job. Now, who comes next? Who could be even more of a sycophant? We will see. But I also think, I hope, this is the beginning of a trend here, sort of a breaking of the dam.

We've seen Secretary Noem out, now the attorney general out. I think Pete Hegseth needs to be next, given his both lack of competence, and the tone and tenor with which he's acting as Secretary of Defense. So I hope this means the American people raising their voices in objection to these folks carries on.

KEILAR: Your former colleague, Lee Zeldin, is being talked about as one of the logical choices or one of the top picks, potentially, to replace Pam Bondi as Attorney General, currently the EPA Administrator who's a member of the House. You served with him, so what is your thought on that?

RYAN: We overlapped briefly. I mean, he used to be a pretty, you know, facts count kind of a person. Since he's been EPA Administrator, he has gone way down the dark path of loyalty to Trump over loyalty to the Constitution. He's rolled back environmental regulations that literally are putting poison in water of kids across our country. And so, I don't think he's at all qualified for that job given that.

KEILAR: You would expect that he'd be confirmed?

RYAN: I think in today's Senate, probably, with Fetterman doing what he has continued to do, which is, I think, not doing right by the country, and instead, I don't really know what's going on with him, but I think probably Zeldin would squeeze through.

KEILAR: So I do want to talk to you about this address the president made last night, so important after multiple weeks now that the U.S. has been at war with Iran. And the president projected two to three weeks more of war. He often says that, two weeks, when he doesn't mean it, when he's just kind of punting. If we do get to that point, though, in the timeline, two to three weeks, and this does not wrap up, then what?

RYAN: Well, if I'm a family in America tuning in last night, I'm wanting to see an adult, a commander-in-chief explain a month plus in, what are we doing here? Why are we spilling American blood, now 13 Americans dead, spending American treasure, billions of dollars a day? Why am I paying exorbitant prices at the pump? And none of that was addressed, and we got kind of the same bluster and the same BS, a lot of the same tired talking points and no plan.

And I was actually on the phone yesterday with a mom of an Air Force airman deployed in the region before the speech.

[13:45:00]

And you know, imagine her watching this, hoping for some real news, maybe my son's coming home, or at least there's a plan and a strategy and we got none of that, and it's it is disappointing. It is infuriating.

KEILAR: The president had said that one of the objectives here is ensuring that Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon and he said that the nuclear sites were obliterated back in June, that it's nuclear dust. He said this before but I think it was really important that he said it in this particular forum, and he said that if we see Iran make a move again, we'll hit them with missiles very hard again.

It's well understood by people who are familiar with the planning that actually retrieving that material would require ground troops. And last week, Trump told our Kaitlan Collins, quote, "We want the enriched uranium." And then talking about how to get it, he said, it's very easy if we have a deal with them, we're going down and we'll take it ourselves. It's different than what we heard last night.

RYAN: Yeah.

KEILAR: Is surveiling that uranium by satellite enough to ensure that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon?

RYAN: Well, this is what happens we have a five-time draft dodger who spends most of his time on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago instead of being the commander-in-chief and actually understand what's happening, listening to his senior military advisers. He's changing his mind every minute and to be clear, this was always one of the big concerns of this operation, is what will happen to the nearly thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium.

We still, a month plus in, have no details and no plan. It would certainly require significant boots on the ground, ground combat forces. And by the way, we've seen in the last few weeks, including as the president was giving a speech last night, thousands of Army Brigade Combat Team to Marine Expeditionary Units significant Special Operations Forces all coming into theater. So the idea that there's one or two more weeks, it justifies the reality on the ground and I think it's important the American people understand that because, you know, at best, he was misleading and I think he pretty much lied to the American people last night.

KEILAR: But, real quick because we're out of time though, would that be enough just watching?

RYAN: No. KEILAR: That wouldn't be enough to secure it?

RYAN: No, I mean --

KEILAR: Or to ensure that Iran did not get a weapon? No?

RYAN: All the intelligence we've been briefed on makes clear we don't -- after June, we don't really fully know where all that highly enrichment is. So, overhead imagery would not be -- is not adequate.

KEILAR: Congressman Pat Ryan, thank you so much for being with us in studio. We really do appreciate it.

We have much more on our Breaking News again. Ahead, we have learned that Pam Bondi has been ousted as Attorney General. Stay with us.

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[13:52:09]

SANCHEZ: Officials have released a body cam video showing Tiger Woods' arrest after a rollover crash last week. Here's what it shows, just moments after police arrived on the scene.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TIGER WOODS, ARRESTED FOR DUI: I'm down, I have my phone, and all of a sudden, boom.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm going to just take a look here. Is this comfortable for you?

WOODS: Yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah, I'm cool. I'm totally cool. (Inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't feel anything out of the absolute (ph). We're still going to have our medic come and check you out, alright?

WOODS: Yeah, yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just run up to the 18th security. Alright. You good, man? Yeah, all set.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's OK. I just checked for anything on his back. I didn't feel anything.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: That scene played out after Woods' SUV apparently clipped a trailer that was turning into a driveway. Officials described the golf legend as having bloodshot, glassy eyes with extremely dilated pupils.

Here's the moment a sheriff's deputy questioned him about any medications he was taking.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you take any medication?

WOODS: I take a few.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What's a few?

WOODS: Hydrocodone (ph), Ibuprofen and --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Did you take all of them today?

WOODS: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah? At what time? (Inaudible)? Do you know the milligrams for each?

WOODS: No. Ibuprofen, eight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Woods was then given a field sobriety test and arrested after the deputy told him he had failed. Court documents say he took a breath test at the jail and no alcohol was detected. They also say he refused to provide a urine sample which led to a separate misdemeanor charge, along with driving under the influence.

He's pleaded not guilty to both according to the court affidavit. CNN Legal Analyst, Joey Jackson joins us now. Joey, when you watch that footage, what stands out to you?

JOEY JACKSON, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yeah, I think -- Boris, good to be with you. It's going to be evaluated on several fronts. I think first thing is you're going to examine how he appears, right? If you're saying someone's impaired, you have to match it with what you're seeing on the video as any DUI case, driving under the influence case. And I think that when you evaluate that, the police officer obviously made a subjective judgment that he was impaired.

That plays into account based on her training and past experience. I think a jury, if it went that far, could objectively disagree. I think also as it relates to any tests that are done, it's not only whether you could perform the tests, it's whether you can listen to instructions.

I think also, Boris, and he appears to have been listening to those instructions and have been lucidly applying and replying to them. I think the other issues we have to remember is that the context, this was after an actual accident.

[13:55:00]

So based upon that, anyone after an accident might not have all of their faculties together. But I think based on what I see, it seems like it would be a defensible case in the event that it went to trial.

SANCHEZ: How do you imagine the footage might be used in court then? JACKSON: Yeah, I think that a case like this, I don't see it going to trial. We know that he's in rehab and good for him. He believes that he needs some help and therefore, asked for permission to go out of the country, Boris, to get that help. I think that's from a public relations perspective.

But in these cases, in the event that it went to trial, it would be brought before a jury and a jury would have to make their own independent assessment as to whether or not his faculties were with him or without him, whether the officer's subjective judgment differed from a jury, whether he was able to respond appropriately, whether he was under the influence or not under the influence, or whether or not his responses or anything that might have been impaired was due to the accident, not necessarily any medications he may have been taking.

And so, a jury would see this in the event it went that far. I think oftentimes, in matters like this, deals are cut and ultimately, it does not go that far. We know he faces up to a year in jail based upon property damage, DUI charge, in addition to the 60 days for simply refusing, that's an independent crime in and of itself, when I say refusing, the urine analysis with respect --

SANCHEZ: Yeah.

JACKSON: -- to giving urine, so they could determine what if anything was in his system.

SANCHEZ: Joey Jackson, thanks so much for the analysis, appreciate it.

Still ahead, much more on our Breaking News, Pam Bondi out as Attorney General. We have new reaction from the White House and the Justice Department, when we come back.

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