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Americans Feelings on Mail Voting; Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) is Interviewed about Iran Talks; Miraculous Rescues in Venezuela; Cybersafety Researcher Laura Edelson is Interviewed about Child Social Media Safety. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired June 30, 2026 - 08:30   ET

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

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[08:33:10]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: As you well know, we are awaiting some major rulings from the Supreme Court this morning, including on President Trump's move to end birthright citizenship and whether states can ban transgender athletes from girls and women's sports. And it comes a day after the court handed the president a serious loss on the issue of mail-in voting ahead of the midterms.

CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten is here.

What do the Americans think about the decision by the Supreme Court to say, hey, you can still count these ballots, mail-in ballots. The president wants to end mail-in generally.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN CHIEF DATA ANALYST: Generally.

SIDNER: But they made a very specific ruling that, yes, you can still count them as long as they get there and postmarked by.

ENTEN: Right. It's -- correct. As long as the ballots are postmarked by election day, they can be received after election day and still be counted. And there was a lot of talk on the right side of the blogosphere, on your Twitter, your X, your social media, complaining about this ruling. But here's the deal, the American people were with the Supreme Court. They were against Donald Trump and the right-wing blogosphere.

Because what are we talking about here? We're talking about this. Agree with the SCOTUS ruling on mail ballots. Look at this, 55 percent of all voters were agreement on this. This was actually the lowest number that I found. There was some polling that suggests that this number was north of 60 percent. Look among independents, you see it right here, 58 percent of independents were with the Supreme Court on this particular ruling.

So, look, for all the complaints about mail voting and for all the complaints about this ruling, the American people are with the Supreme Court and generally been in favor of mail voting at large.

SIDNER: Fun fact, the president used mail-in voting.

ENTEN: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. For me, not for thee.

SIDNER: Just, like --

ENTEN: Yes.

SIDNER: Wanted to put that out there.

Speaking of which, is there any indication that the way the president rails against mail-in voting has actually impacted the electorate?

ENTEN: Yes. OK. So, Donald Trump has been railing against mail voting now for so long that my beard, which now turns white when it grows out, actually was all black.

[08:35:09]

SIDNER: It does not.

ENTEN: It does. It does, Sara. I'm getting older. Becoming ancient. Finally, my physical nature is matching what's up here in the skull. My 1920s old Jewish grandfather.

Look, look, here's the deal. For all the railing that Donald Trump has done, if you look at the polling, American people's support for no excuse mail voting. In late 2020, when you allocate the undecideds, it was 58 percent. Where was it by late 2025? It was the same, 58 percent. Yes, maybe initially there was some drop from early 2020 to late 2020, but since late 2020, since that election, of course, where mail voting was decisive, where those Democratic votes came in, those mail votes were decisive. Since then, that 58 percent has held, 58 percent now.

So again, for all of the complaints that Donald Trump and him trying to lead Republicans away from mail voting is done, the American people have been for it.

And I will note, a little trivia here, Donald Trump actually did better with mail voting in 2024 than he did in 2020. And I think this is part of the larger discussion, Sara Sidner, about Democratic norms, right, and who the parties trust on this.

SIDNER: Yes.

ENTEN: Look at this, trust more to uphold Democratic values.

SIDNER: Yes.

ENTEN: Look at this, the Democrats lead by 11 points. And among independents they lead by 15 points.

SIDNER: Wow.

ENTEN: They don't think that Donald Trump is the great savior of democracy. If anything, they believe that the Democratic Party is the one that's trust -- they trust more to uphold Democratic values.

SIDNER: This is a significant number. I mean, it's even higher than the Democrats who are, you know, independents are looking at this and saying, hey, guys, this isn't good.

ENTEN: Yes. No. No.

SIDNER: No.

ENTEN: They ain't agreeing with the president of the United States.

SIDNER: They ain't agreeing with it.

ENTEN: They disagree with him on mail voting.

SIDNER: Yes.

ENTEN: They disagree on democratic values.

SIDNER: All right, Harry Enten, it's a pleasure.

ENTEN: I always agree with you, though, Sara.

SIDNER: I do not agree that you have gray hair.

But anyway, John.

ENTEN: In my beard.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: You guys done?

SIDNER: Yes.

ENTEN: No.

BERMAN: All right, thank you.

SIDNER: We'll take it outside.

BERMAN: All right, happening now, presidential envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner on the ground in Qatar. They will not meet with Iranian officials today. This is despite the president boasting yesterday that a meeting was about to happen. Tomorrow, U.S. and Iranian delegations are expected to engage in technical talks with mediators from Qatar and Pakistan. They're going to be talking to Qatar and Pakistan separately, not together.

With us now is Congressman Adam Smith of Washington. He is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

And, Congressman, I know you had briefings yesterday from the administration on what's going on there. And based on those briefings, how confident are you that the administration is going to get what it wants from these negotiations, albeit separate with Iran?

REP. ADAM SMITH (D-WA): Well, they're not going to get what they want or what they wanted at any rate. It's kind of a moving target what they say they want. But the basic idea that Iran's going to abandon its nuclear program, give up, give up its support for terrorist proxies and discontinue its ballistic missile program is pretty much off the table. Sort of their modified want is the Strait back opened for a certain amount of money being made available to Iran, and the promise of some sort of negotiation on the nuclear deal. That, you know, I'm probably less than 50 percent at this point because it certainly seems like Iran and the U.S. are on a different page in these negotiations right now.

BERMAN: How palatable is the status quo? Which is to say, if nothing further is officially agreed to, if we are left in this situation where the strait is kind of open and Iran gets some money and we're in this state of perpetual negotiation, non-negotiation, is that how satisfactory of a -- of a semi-permanent outcome is that?

SMITH: Well, I mean, it's better than continuing the war and devastating the global economy and keeping the region massively destabilized. And that was the problem with this war in the first place.

Look, we can all agree that Iran is a terrible actor in the region, a threat to U.S. interests, a threat to peace and stability throughout the region. The question was, is military action going to change that? Is it going to force Iran to fundamentally, well, make those concessions that I talked about earlier? And it was always very clear that they weren't going to have to do that, because all they had to do was survive and hold the region in the Strait of Hormuz at risk, which was very easy for them to do.

So, you know, is it palatable? It definitely puts us in a worse position than before the war, but it's better than continued war and chaos and the impact that that has on the region and the global economy.

BERMAN: A couple domestic political questions, if you will, Congressman.

There are primaries going on all summer long across the country. Of course, last week here in New York City there were very progressive Democrats, Democratic socialists, who won the primaries here, four seats, in some cases unseating Democratic incumbents. One of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, very left there. Our Andrew Kaczynski of the KFILE reports on some of the things she'd been posting on Twitter over the years in a since deleted account. He wrote, "the account's bio read in 2020, 'how communist of you.'

[08:40:02]

Archive posts and retweets during this timeframe included a recommendation that Karl Marx's Capital was an 'essential must read,' a complaint that the public libraries did not carry enough Marxist literature by Lenin and other revolutionary writers, and a retweet from a Communist-identifying account lamenting that bookstore 'banned books' displays did not include The Complete Works of Stalin." Her Twitter account seemed to be kind of communist sympathizing. I guess my question is, how good of a look do you think this is for

the Democratic Party heading into the midterms?

SMITH: Well, look, there's two big things that are going on here that need to be separated. On the one hand, there is a real desire within the Democratic Party, within the broader, you know, coalition that we put together. They want to see us, you know, fight Trump more effectively. They want to see us go after income inequality more aggressively. And they want to see new, younger faces. And I think there's broad appeal for that across the Democratic coalition. You know, get after, you know, economic populism, greater economic opportunity, too much concentration of wealth in this country. I completely agree. We need new, younger, more energetic leaders. I get that too. And we got to effectively fight Trump. So, you've got that.

But then when you look at some of these Democratic socialists that are running, their ideology is vastly more radical than that. And you see that in expressing support for communism, in expressing support for open borders, defunding the police, a fundamental attack on America itself and the premises behind it. And so, it's dangerous that people come in and say, hey, I'm going to fight Trump. I'm new. I'm going to get after income inequality. But they're pushing ideas and agendas that are not popular in this country and, frankly, not good policy on immigration enforcement, again, on criminal justice, you know, on, you know, the basic concept of personal responsibility, accountability, and economic opportunity. So, it is a significant challenge for our coalition, no doubt about it.

BERMAN: You say dangerous. Dangerous to whom?

SMITH: Oh, well, it's bad policy, like I said.

BERMAN: OK.

SMITH: I mean, I think not having any immigration enforcement creates problems. And it's also going to make it difficult for us to have an election. I think not actually, you know, funding the police and having a criminal justice system creates less security. I also think that if you take personal responsibility and accountability out of it and just say we're going to give free stuff to everybody, then you have a problem making that work from a funding standpoint.

Look, it's work hard, play by the rules, get ahead. We need more opportunity. But the agenda, as you just described, of some of these folks, is pretty, pretty radical and I don't think good policy.

BERMAN: Congressman Adam Smith, somewhere I have a college history professor rejoicing in the fact that I asked someone, Adam Smith, named Adam Smith about communism and capitalism. A banner day, I think, for political theory. Appreciate it.

Kate.

SMITH: Yes. Thank you.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Only in -- BERMAN: It's a very inside joke from (INAUDIBLE).

BOLDUAN: I know, but you know that Adam Smith did appreciate it, as a student of history.

BERMAN: Yes.

BOLDUAN: OK, let's turn to this.

This morning, rescuers -- you have this remarkable video, they found and were able to free and rescue a three-year-old that was found trapped between slabs of concrete. This now six days after those two devastating earthquakes hit Venezuela. This rescue, it's just one of several that have really seemed miraculous as they've happened pretty long after that kind of critical window of time to find survivors.

And it's also not just people. Rescuers also heard a puppy barking and were able to pull out a little pup out from a tiny crawl space.

Stefano Pozzebon is in Caracas tracking all of this for us.

What's the very latest on the situation that you're seeing?

STEFANO POZZEBON, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Hi, Kate.

Yes, well, the latest is that, unfortunately, of course, the search and rescue operations are still ongoing. But what we're trying to bring to you today is another page of this dramatic catastrophe that has hit this country. And that is, of course, the page (ph) of people, the story of people who have lost everything.

We're currently in Caracas. It's called Parque del Este. Think of it as Central Park in New York. It's where people would go on a Sunday walk or running, perhaps. I used to come here very often when I lived in Caracas. And it's now become a tent city for hundreds of people who have been displaced from La Guaira.

According to the Venezuelan government, at least 12,200 people have lost their houses, their homes, because of so many buildings have collapsed of -- in La Guaira. Some of them have arrived here. And we'll be speaking with several of them in the last couple of hours. And they're looking at the future, of course, frightened.

The first aspect is that, of course, these countries still experiences a lot of tremors and aftershocks. Yesterday morning, for example, there was a 5.1 aftershock that woke us up in the middle of -- in the middle of the -- of the -- of the early morning. And, of course, they're looking for how to rebuild their lives.

[08:45:03]

Think that, for example, according to the Venezuelan chamber of commerce, less than one percent of Venezuelan home families have a home insurance plan. This is a country that was not clearly prepared to deal with an emergency such as an earthquake. Most of these people have lost everything that they were -- in their -- in their livelihood. And now they're trying to rebuild a future for themselves in a country that is on their knee.

And so as the search and rescue operations are still ongoing, and, of course, also the international cooperation is making an impact here in Venezuela, we have seen the arrival, for example, of U.S. Marine or more than $300 million donated by the United States. This is also a page of the pain that Venezuela is suffering right now.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: It's a really important aspect of it. I mean, and you said that the estimate is more than 12,000 people have lost -- it's not just like lost their homes. They've lost everything. And it's how long it's going to take to rebuild when you see this building after building just pancaked of --

POZZEBON: Yes.

BOLDUAN: It's like a wasteland of concrete.

POZZEBON: Yes, it is.

BOLDUAN: And then seeing this kind of tent city now popping up behind you, Stefano, it's really an important aspect of this as you continue to feel aftershocks and the trauma continues, just as these miraculous rescues do continue as well. There is so much to this. Thank you so much, Stefano. He's been doing some just amazing reporting on the ground for us.

Sara.

SIDNER: He has. Thank you so much, Kate.

A family's home is overtaken by flames as growing wildfires force evacuations in Colorado. The desperate pictures there.

And nine-year-old boys, one of a kind find, it leads to a huge payout. The rare baseball card that fetched, not just a few bucks, tens of thousands at auction. We'll talk about it.

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BOLDUAN: New this morning. Australia, as we know, has been really leading the way globally in cracking down on social media around kids and is now taking another step this week. This week doubling the potential fines for tech companies that breached the nation's youth social media ban.

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ANIKA WELLS, AUSTRALIAN COMMUNICATIONS MINISTER: My message to big tech is this, we are not stopping. Every effort you make to frustrate these laws will be met with our efforts to make these laws work. Today we are giving the eSafety commissioner more robust powers to investigate your conduct. And we are ramping up fines to $99 million. If the eSafety commissioner finds companies are not doing everything they can to comply, they will face the full force of the law.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: That happening in Australia just as this comes as a new study in the United States shows that here more than half of the child safety features and tools created by social media platforms are not working as advertised. Researchers at the Cybersafety Research Center conducted a study and found that out of 86 features that they tested across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, just over 40 percent of them worked successfully. I guess said another way, more than half of them failed the studies tests.

For example, all four platforms say that they block kids from searching for dangerous content and redirect them to support resources. Well, these researchers found that a TikTok test account registered to a minor searched for content on disorder eating and self-harm, and the search function suggested terms like "how to pretend to eat your food." On Instagram a child test account began typing the words "eating disorder" in the search, and the app offered alternate search terms with deliberate misspellings that could skirt content restrictions.

Now, the social media companies, they are pushing back on this new research, and we will get to that. But first, let me bring in Laura Edelson, a member of the research team at the Cybersafety Research Center, who conducted the study.

Thank you so much for coming in.

I read this and was in the same breath, I think, saddened, but also felt not surprised. I have two young kids and one of them is trying her level best to get on every social media platform she can possibly try. Can you just give me a baseline of what you guys found?

LAURA EDELSON, RESEARCHER, CYBERSAFETY RESEARCH CENTER: You know, so, as you've said, what we found is that the majority of tools failed. A lot of tools simply did not work. So, that was about 40 percent of tools just failed to function. Another 10 percent of tools, we couldn't even trigger. When we, when we tried to activate them, they appeared to either have failed silently or they've been deactivated by the company and they just haven't publicly said anything about it.

There was another sliver of tools that, if you could activate them, would work, but they were effectively buried. They were so hard to turn on that you just couldn't expect a child to effectively use those tools.

BOLDUAN: And talk to me how you put to test these 86 safety features that I mentioned previously.

EDELSON: Great question. So, what we did is we effectively tested them as users would. So, we set up test accounts, some as minors, who would, you know, honestly report their age as a 13-year-old. And we also had another set of test accounts that posed as adult accounts, 35-year-olds who, in some cases, were trying to inappropriately contact minors or in other ways have inappropriate interactions with them.

BOLDUAN: And would you say it was -- what surprised you about your work? You guys were putting this to the test because this is clearly an issue. There is no question this is a global problem. And the question has been, who is to be in charge of this? Is it social media companies or is it the federal -- or is it federal governments that should be, you know, putting the restrictions in place?

[08:55:05]

And then clearly in Australia, putting in major fines against these social media companies. What surprised you?

EDELSON: So, you know, you mentioned you're a parent. I am too. We did this work because we're, you know, we're computer science researchers, but quite a few of us are also parents. We did this work because we want to figure out how to make social media safer.

And in terms of what surprised us, I mean, you know, imagine that you're trying to make cars safer. The first thing that you might do is, you know, crash some cars against a wall and see how the airbags go off because you're going to use that information to try to make safer airbags. And then when you go to do that, you know, the -- most airbags don't even go off.

So, I think we were not expecting this -- these kinds of failure rates and we were not expecting 10 percent of these tools that companies have told parents are there to just be missing entirely. So, you know, I think that we are trying to look at what worked and try to build off of that. But to be really honest, we just didn't expect things to be this bad.

BOLDUAN: So, let me get to the pushback coming from the social media companies. To -- some -- a little bit of what they said in statements. Meta, "this report is fundamentally flawed and demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of how our tools work." Snapchat argues, "many of the report's findings were based on intentionally taking actions to bypass protections that are not representative of the typical user experience." TikTok said, "our internal review confirms these features are working as intended, and we welcome the opportunity to help the authors of this report better understand how our app works." And YouTube said, 84 percent of parents who have used YouTube supervised account tools said they agree that these tools give them confidence that their child is accessing a safer and more controlled digital environment."

Laura, can you respond to that?

EDELSON: Absolutely. So just to start, we did not test supervisory tools. That's another category of tools that we look forward to studying in the future. So, can't comment on that.

You know, what I would say to, again, to any other parents, we know that our kids push up against guardrails. They push up against boundaries. And we know that adults who are trying to inappropriately contact kids are absolutely going to try to circumvent these tools. So, we tried to test them in a way that represents what we believe is normal use.

Now, when we tried to circumvent platform restrictions, we put a limit of what we call trivial effort. No more than three minutes of effort. So, in places where we found tools could be circumvented, we are talking about something that is available to, you know, really any user with minimal effort.

So, if they want to say that this doesn't represent normal use, I would absolutely love to see their data about that.

BOLDUAN: Yes. I will tell you, say one thing, it is definitely continuing to spark and push forward the conversation that has been going on and needs to continue very clearly.

It's very good to have you, Laura. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining your work.

Sara.

SIDNER: All right, on our radar for you this morning, authorities in Mexico say a man was dragged out to sea and killed by a crocodile on the beach of this popular resort in Puerto Vallarta. And now we are hearing from an American couple who say they desperately tried to rescue him

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JAMIE YETTER, TRIED TO RESCUE MAN KILLED IN CROCODILE ATTACK: The size of this crocodile, I mean, his head was as long as my torso. His tail, thicker than my legs, you know. And he was just turning him, taking him under. And every time he would come back up, he was deeper and deeper and deeper in the water.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: That is simply terrifying. The couple says that after hearing his screams, they tried to throw the man a life preserver, but he was apparently in shock. He just wasn't able to grab it. And one of them tried to paddle out in a kayak, but it was just too late. Authorities say the crocodile was later captured.

All right, let's give you a look at video from southern Colorado, where the Aspen Acres Fire is now burning. Wow. The homeowner says his Ring camera alerted him as the flames inched closer and closer and closer to his property. Thankfully, the family did get out. They were able to evacuate. The fire has scorched more than 23,000 acres so far. And unfortunately, it is zero percent contained.

All right, now to an incredible survival story out of Georgia. Cameras capturing the moment lightning struck a woman, my God, as she was opening her car door outside of church last month. The woman went into cardiac arrest, but first responders managed to get there within minutes.

[09:00:00] She survived this. She reunited with those same responders to personally thank them. She says it is an absolute miracle that she survived.