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Trump Administration Lifts Restrictions On Anthropic's Most Powerful Models; Qatari-Donated Air Force One to Make Inaugural Flight to North Dakota; Left-Wing Surge in Colorado Strikes Another Blow to Democratic Establishment; Trump Made More than $1 Billion from Crypto Businesses in 2025; Taylor Swift's Rumored Wedding Festivities Set to Begin. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired July 01, 2026 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

CLARE DUFFY, CNN TECH REPORTER: I'd say that said Anthropic could start to allow a limited access to this model for U.S. government agencies, again, supposedly to address these cybersecurity risks.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: What change? Is it clear what changed?

DUFFY: Well, so CNN has learned that there was a customer of Anthropic's who found a potential jailbreak in Fable 5, a potential vulnerability.

So in theory, the government and Anthropic have worked together to address that jailbreak. But I do think this underscores the regulatory uncertainty around this technology and just how much the U.S. government is sort of scrambling to catch up to the powers of this technology. Anthropic had said that it didn't believe that a single small jailbreak should be reason for all of this.

But of course, it has to comply with the government's rules around this.

BOLDUAN: Yes, but I mean, what's unclear is how fast it's advancing and trying to keep up with it is like an impossible task at this point, which is the scariest bit, which is what we're seeing play out in real time. It's great to see you. Thank you so much.

DUFFY: Thank you.

BOLDUAN: A new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts right now.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: One hundred, one hundred, one hundred, day after day after day of 100 degree temperatures in Washington, Philadelphia, New York, some of the biggest cities in the country planning on celebrating the Fourth of July outdoors, deadly heat warnings. What does it mean for all of these plans?

And who will be the next Democratic incumbent to fall a 30 year veteran defeated in a primary? The establishment very much on warning this morning. And is that a crab in your jacket or are you just happy to see me?

Authorities uncovered a huge crab smuggling operation. The crabs were sewn into the pockets of the jackets. That's what I'm talking about.

BOLDUAN: They're happy to see you, John.

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

BOLDUAN: All right, so we're standing by to maybe hear from President Trump this morning as he's going to be heading out for an inaugural flight. He's soon going to be boarding what he has tried to deem the world's most luxurious plane, the new Air Force One. President Trump and top administration officials are going to be flying on it to North Dakota to celebrate America's 250th with the July 4th opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

This new Air Force One, replacing the famous baby blue aircraft that took to the skies for 35 years, has been in the spotlight for quite some time because of where this new plane has come from. This plane was a gift from the Qatari government. They called it a donation, one that they say will help bridge the gap between the old Air Force One and the new Boeing jet that's going to be ready in two years.

But this donation has drawn massive criticism, namely over the potential security risks associated with this plane, this gift, and the ethical issues raised in taking a gift of this magnitude from a foreign government. CNN's Alayna Treene tracking this one for us at the White House. What are you hearing, my friend?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, I mean, a massive day for this unveiling, really, of this new plane. I was actually catching up, Kate, with some White House officials yesterday who told me that several of them were clamoring to get on this first trip for this new luxury Qatari jet. Now, the wood paneling on this new presidential plane is the highest quality, according to President Donald Trump.

He says that the flag on the tail is waving just right. The colors, of course, no longer that robin's egg blue. They are now, what the president argues, much better and a more appropriate look.

Now, gone -- if you're looking at this plane -- gone is that light blue color scheme that was first conceived by the former first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. Instead, in its place, navy blue and white fuselage cut through with red stripes. Definitely more in line with what you'd expect to see from the president, who, you know, and maybe not coincidentally, looks very much like the private jet that Trump has flown on for several years now.

Now, reporters who took a tour of this jet earlier this month, Kate, just to give you a sense of some of the changes we've seen, they say that the leather seats on the plane lie flat. They say the walls and the carpets are tan and the light fixtures are gold, something, of course, President Trump very much likes. One modification that we saw Secret Service and other workers on this make, the seatbelts are affixed with the presidential seal.

Now, the reason for some of these new planes, to give you a little context, is that this new luxury jet is intended to bridge the gap, we're told, of the two aging modified Boeing 747-200s. Those are the planes that have been flying as Air Force One since the 1990s.

[08:05:00]

Now, Boeing is also, so you know, retrofitting two other planes to make two new planes that are expected to be done in roughly two years. But this is something we know that the president himself had argued was just not going to work for his timetable.

He's been frustrated with the delays for that. They were likely not going to be ready until the end of his term. That's when, you know, enter Qatar, which gifted this $400 million jet to the president.

Now, we have heard in the past, you know, the White House has really brushed aside a of the ethical national security concerns about taking a plane like this from a country in the Middle East. They're continuing to do so here. So look, this is going to be, I think, a big day for this new plane.

I'm eager to hear from my colleagues who work at the White House who are going to be flying on it today. The president is also, though, expected to try and debut this and fly it over Mount Rushmore, we're told, on Friday. He also said he wants to fly it over the Capitol on July 4th itself to celebrate America's 250th birthday.

So a lot more, as the president said, a lot more luxury that is expected with this new flight today.

BOLDUAN: All right, well, we'll see also if we hear from the president as he's heading there. It's good to see you, Alayna. Thank you so much -- Sara.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Breaking overnight, another blow to the Democratic establishment and a big win for the left wing and the party. In Colorado, 15-term Congresswoman Diana DeGette has fallen to 29-year-old progressive newcomer Melat Kiros.

Kiros is now the third Democratic Socialist to defeat a sitting member of the House in just the last eight days. Her victory, a sign of a larger left wing insurgency sweeping the Democratic Party. CNN political analyst Alex Thomas joining us now.

Thank you for being here. I guess the one thing you can't do is dismiss this now as just like, oh, this is just a New York thing. Democratic Socialists are clearly on the rise.

Is this consequential, though? Is this going to be something that you think we will see going forward in other parts of the country, or does it really depend on the electorate in certain places? You may not see this, for example, in Iowa.

ALEX THOMPSON, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: You may not see it everywhere, but I would keep an eye on Michigan with their primary in August. You have Abdul El-Sayed, you know, a progressive insurgent that is very competitive in that Senate primary. I'd also just want to add that, you know, I think it's something to just make this about Democratic Socialism versus capitalism or progressive versus moderate.

But some of this is also just insider versus outsider. It's complacency versus urgency. And what you are seeing is a new generation of Democratic politicians, Democratic Socialists that are just tired with the status quo and are tired of the Democratic establishment, that are disillusioned with the Democratic establishment, that let Donald Trump come back to a second term.

And, you know, a lot of this blowback is because Donald Trump won a second term, that in the eyes of some voters is what has discredited and led to this insurgency.

SIDNER: Look, there's something also going on the Republican side of the aisle. Speaker Johnson forced to scrap the House agenda, sent members home amid another GOP rebellion. What are these eternal fights telling us?

Is that party also going through a reckoning in some ways?

THOMPSON: Absolutely. You know, as midterms get closer and Republicans are more and more scared of a potential blue wave or losing their seats, you know, they're going to start looking at, you know, looking after number one. They're not going to necessarily vote as a bloc.

They're not going to take tough votes anymore if they think that they're going to get hurt. And Donald Trump hasn't helped these matters because Donald Trump has not been on message. He has not been talking about affordability in the way a lot of Republican leaders would like.

He seems to not be as interested in domestic political matters as he is in international ones. And that has really frustrated a lot of Republicans who now, you know, aren't willing to just go along on the party line.

SIDNER: I do want to ask you about your new reporting, that former Vice President Harris has reached out to Zohran Mamdani and pro- Palestinian activists, as she appears to be doing something here, which is a 2028 run. What are your thoughts? What did you learn?

THOMPSON: It's the latest sign that she is taking steps toward another presidential run, this time in 2028. It's also a sign of what we were talking about before, of the rising influence of this generation of Democratic Socialists, progressives. What Kamala Harris did is she called Zohran Mamdani last Thursday.

They'd been having a texting relationship, I've been told, the last few months. They talked about the future of the party and they talked about having a much longer meeting in the near future.

[08:10:00] I can also say that she has been meeting with a lot of the leaders of what was called the uncommitted movement, or these pro-Palestine activists in 2024 that were disappointed and, in some cases, furious with the Biden administration's reflexively pro-Israel stance during the Gaza war, ultimately declined to endorse in the 2024 primary, didn't endorse Trump and rejected Trump. But I think a lot of the people of those movements were disillusioned with Kamala Harris, too.

So she's been privately meeting with several leaders of that movement to hear them out, to potentially repair ties, and to try to find a path forward.

SIDNER: When it's clear the power of Democratic Socialists, if someone who is thinking about running for president thinks that it's really important to get them on the team, if that is indeed what's happening here. Alex Thompson, you know I've met you and know you, and I somehow said, Thomas, I apologize from the bottom of my heart, I mean that. Thank you so much for coming on.

You got to come back, even if I screwed up your name, all right?

THOMPSON: Thank you, I will.

SIDNER: You got to promise.

OK, good. OK, we're good. See, we've mended fences here.

Thank you so much -- John.

BERMAN: All right, he's been called worse.

All right, 100 degrees tomorrow, the day after, and the day after the 4th of July, you say? 100 degrees in some of the biggest cities, record-breaking deadly heat. What does this mean for all the planned celebrations?

It's good work if you can get it. The staggering amount of money the president has made since taking office, the new financial disclosure.

And there are new clues about the Taylor Swift, Travis, Kelce, probable, possible, likely wedding, mysteriously wrapped cargo, work crews in special uniforms, the latest on this developing story.

[08:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: So President Trump has released his annual financial disclosures, as required by law for presidents, and this one is a doozy, showing that he took in billions of dollars in his first year of second term in office, billions pouring in, especially from his family's cryptocurrency ventures. $526 million alone came from sales of crypto tokens tied to World Liberty Financial. That's a firm managed and parked by his sons, Eric and Don Jr. Then there's another $635 million that came from a licensing agreement with a company called Celebration Coins. This is the entity linked to Trump's meme coin business. And there's $77 million in resort revenue from his Mar- a-Lago club in Florida, and the list goes on from there. This puts us in unprecedented territory for a sitting president.

But the White House defends this ballooning wealth, saying that President Trump is not actively involved in managing his businesses or investments, and they deny any conflicts of interest. Joining me right now is Eric Lipton. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times.

It's good to see you. You've gone through -- you and your team have gone through this wildly long financial disclosure. And I wanted to quote from your piece, which said, "Never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who is in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president."

The White House says there's nothing to see here. What seems to be the biggest, I don't know, change here from his financials from the first term?

ERIC LIPTON, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, I mean, Trump and his family are kind of unleashed and unrestrained this time around in their pursuit of profit. Well, the president is in the White House in a way that just is radically different from the first term when, you know, they were selling martinis at the Trump Bar, the Benjamin Bar in D.C., or they had visitors at the Mar-a-Lago. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues, you know, not tens of millions or, you know, more than a billion.

So things are just, you know, at a scale just, you know, as reporters, we don't like to use the word unprecedented. We, you know, it's a dangerous word to use because someone always comes back to you and say, well, it isn't unprecedented because of this. But in this case, there's just no ambiguity.

There has never been anything like this, a sitting president who started new businesses that's turning profits and revenues based on regulatory actions that he's taken. For example, the meme coin, the Securities and Exchange Commission shortly after Trump came in issued a notice that said that that meme coins will not be subject to regulation by the SEC. And Trump runs a meme coin.

And the former chairman of the SEC had, you know, had concerns that maybe meme coins were securities. So again and again, he's taking policy actions that are benefiting his businesses in crypto. And like I also wrote about this week in the mining sector where he's offering, you know, tens of billions of dollars in loans to mining companies and his sons are invested in at least two of them.

BOLDUAN: Eric, I wanted to ask you because you did it really. I read it more than once. This deep dive in this Kazakhstan mining deal that the families of President Trump and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, stand to potentially see a huge profit from.

This deal, this one seems emblematic of a lot of the moves that you're talking about here. What sticks out most about this one deal that grabbed your attention so much?

LIPTON: It's just the scale of things. I mean, again, the federal government is investing tens of billions of dollars to try to stimulate mining by American companies because we need these metals for military purposes, for technology, for all kinds of products. No question.

[08:20:00]

It's a good thing that the United States government is doing this. And the Biden administration had started this effort to increase access to these critical minerals. But in this case, you have the sons of the president and the sons of the commerce secretary that are directly financially connected to at least 14 companies that are in line to get as much as nearly $9 billion in U.S. funding. And again, it's just like, how is that possible?

It creates at least an appearance of conflict of interest on a scale that we've never seen before.

BOLDUAN: Let me add one more thing into it. President Trump, we were just talking about the top of the hour. He's taking his first flight on this new plane, on the new Air Force One.

And I remember you reported extensively on this, this Qatari gift from last year. And at the time I look back, you wrote, "This plane would be one of the biggest foreign gifts ever received by the U.S. government for use by a specific person with no plans to seek congressional approval." And now it's ready to go.

I mean, how does this plane kind of fit into the context against the backdrop of what we're talking about right now?

LIPTON: I mean, again, it's sort of tiring to use this again, but again, completely unprecedented. Just nothing like this has ever happened before. You know, the number of people use is 400 million.

But that plane is, you know, it's just -- the United States has accepted a gift worth hundreds of millions of dollars from a country that has enormous foreign policy implications. We're at war with Iran right now. You know, that country is at the center of negotiations over, you know, whether there will be war or peace.

They also have enormous interest before the United States. And at the same time, the Trump family is, you know, potentially is pursuing a real estate deal there that was recently signed. It's just a mixing of official government business and personal financial interests and benefits to the president through a plane that may not have had the security upgrades.

You know, from what I'm told is it did not have a full suite of security upgrades that the other, you know, 747's are going through, you know, kind of, you know, barrier crashing is going on all around us.

BOLDUAN: Yes, it's not even a blurring of the lines. It's just the lines have evaporated and they just and they're just continued claims of nothing to see here. But you're definitely taking a look, Eric.

You've done great reporting on this. I really appreciate you coming.

LIPTON: We are. We're examining each one of these.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

LIPTON: Yes.

BOLDUAN: It's been great. It's been important to read -- Sara.

SIDNER: That's why journalism is so important. And he's so good at it. Thank you so much, Kate.

Who will now be able to access weight loss drugs and have insurance pay for it for the very first time. We will tell you who qualifies and the cost.

And it doesn't matter what vehicle you're in. Driving drunk is stupid and dangerous, even if your car is a tractor. This man's about to find that out.

Those stories and more ahead.

[08:25:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SIDNER: New details pouring out this morning about the celebrity wedding of not just the year. I think it's bigger than that. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who are, according to our sources, getting ready to tie the knot right up the street at Madison Square Garden.

CNN cameras capturing crews wearing shirts that read Taylor Swift's Carpenters. So far, only a few details have been leaked.

CNN's Gloria Pazmino outside MSG with those details. What are you seeing out there? Because this is -- people are always looking for Easter eggs. You're always dumping those in her songs and in different ways.

But there's a lot more than an Easter egg going on here.

GLORIA PAZMINO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And this is part of what happens when you are a follower of Taylor Swift, right? You're looking for clues and Easter eggs and little breadcrumbs, perhaps, in everything she does and says in her songs.

But we have been getting some real reporting clues throughout the past few days about what is expected to happen here. And we are told by our sources that are familiar with the plans that this is happening on Thursday and Friday. Thursday, we are hearing there's going to be a rehearsal inside of Madison Square Garden, and that will be followed on Friday by a larger wedding celebration, expected to have about a thousand guests. Now, we know that the rehearsal is going to include about 100 people. The larger celebration, about a thousand people. And we have been watching for the past few days as there is an increase in activity outside the garden, namely the equipment that's being moved in and out of the loading docks.

And, of course, that very telling T-shirt that you mentioned, Sara, the Taylor Swift Carpenters T-shirt. That certainly set off alarms for everyone who is hanging on every possible clue about what is shaping out to be America's royal wedding, right? We're talking about the most famous couple in the world, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, getting married, celebrating their wedding inside a venue where Taylor herself has performed eight times.

Now, today, we are getting even more tangible clues, this time from a guest talking about very specific instructions that he got about what not to bring to the wedding celebration. Listen to what San Francisco 49ers' tight end George Kittle had to say about the event.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What have you gotten Travis and Taylor for a wedding gift?

GEORGE KITTLE, SAN FRANCISCO 49S TIGHT END: Let's see. They said absolutely no gifts, but I was thinking Travis for some reason likes old coins, so I might get him an old coin.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PAZMINO: Now, Sara, I do want to say very quickly, I know people are wondering. It's gray, it's round, it's made of.