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Soon, Lindsay Clancy Back in Court for First Time Since Mistrial; A.I. Leaders to Meet Trump Amid Safety, Regulation Debate; FBI Grapples With Fallout from Massive Data Breach. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired September 29, 2026 - 07:00   ET

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

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KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Today, Lindsay Clancy back in court for the first time since a mistrial was declared in the murder case of her three children. Will prosecutors put her back on trial, or could her defense team convince the judge to dismiss it altogether?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking overnight, OpenAI scraps the rollout of a new model over safety concerns just hours before top A.I. leaders are set to meet with the president.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: And a driver says he was so desperate to use the bathroom, he crashed his car through the doors of a grocery store.

I'm Sara Sidner with John Berman and Kate Bolduan. This is CNN News Central.

BOLDUAN: All right. Today, Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who was charged for killing her three children, she will return to court for the first time since her case ended in that mistrial. And that case also ignited a national debate. The district attorney has not said yet whether his office will prosecute Clancy again.

But her attorney has filed multiple motions hoping to avoid a second trial. Among those motions, Clancy's attorney is pushing to dismiss the case on double jeopardy grounds. He also has asked the judge to question that lone holdout juror, obtain that juror's cellphone records from during the time of deliberations, and get a copy of the juror's questionnaire. That lone juror is also now speaking out after Clancy's attorney and other members of the jury accused him of failing to apply the law.

CNN's Jean Casarez is outside of the courthouse following all of this, and quite a morning it is going to be. We're going to watch it play out together. Jean, bring us up to speed

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, I think the pivotal question is what are prosecutors going to say? Remember, this is a status hearing, the status of the case. This is an active criminal case at this point, and everyone wants to know if the prosecution will announce that they are going to retry this case.

Now, the defense has all the motions that are going to be argued today, we believe. They will take the lead because they don't want this retried. And their major motion is really to dismiss this whole case because they're saying that when that judge, Judge Sullivan, ruled on a mistrial, that there was not the manifest necessity required by law. He should have taken that juror, that lone holdout juror, and inquired of him, questioned him, do you understand what reasonable doubt is? Will you apply the law?

Well, the judge, in fact, had every juror swear under oath, we know now, could they follow the law and the instructions, and they all said yes, and they sent out multiple notes that they could not reach a consensus. The judge believed he did that job, but the defense is fighting back on constitutional grounds, double jeopardy, as well as the right to a fair trial.

Now, secondly, looking forward, the defense is honing in on that lone -- that juror that would not concede and go with the other 11. His name is Michael Desronvil, and what the defense is saying is that they want a neutral person to take his cellphone, to look at his entries during jury deliberation.

They want surveillance video from the hallway of the jury deliberations to see what they can see on him. They want all the information the prosecutors have on him. They want his confidential jury questionnaire. They want a full-blown investigation into this juror. Well, that juror spoke out last night. Let's listen to what he had to say in a statement.

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MICHAEL DESRONVIL, LONE HOLDOUT JUROR IN LINDSAY CLANCY TRIAL: Hi, my name is Michael Peggy Desronvil, also known as the lone juror. I know the whole focus has been on me, but we want to reel everything back and put the focus on the three angels that's at hand, the ones that can't speak for themselves, the ones that can't defend themselves, and the one that can't fight their battles, and those are Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

A little bit about me. I want to thank God for my Catholic faith.

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I want to thank God for blessing me with the ability to love my daughter, and I'm -- foremost, I would like to thank everyone, every individual that have support me throughout this difficult situation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CASAREZ: We expect everyone to be in that courtroom this morning. Lindsay Clancy, we expect to be there. The defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, the prosecutors, most likely the district attorney of Plymouth County will be in that courtroom. It's a pivotal moment, 9:00 sharp Eastern Time, right here in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

BOLDUAN: Absolutely, Jean, and we will be watching it alongside with you. Thank you so much for that. And you can join Jean for CNN All Access special coverage this morning. Go to cnn.com/watch. John? BERMAN: All right. Very shortly, a high-stakes meeting at the White House in the face of growing doomsday threats about artificial intelligence. Top tech executives are set to meet with President Trump just as OpenAI announced it will not release its newest model because it, quote, didn't quite meet the bar for safety. OpenAI President Greg Brockman will be at the White House, as will Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, executives from NVIDIA and Palantir.

House Speaker Mike Johnson will be in attendance. He helped set this meeting up. The concern is not just about what AI can do today, but where it is headed next, with even Bill Gates warning that AI could cause a billion deaths if left unchecked.

Let's get right to CNN's Alayna Treene live at the White House this morning. The president's made clear, Alayna, he really doesn't see the need, doesn't want more government involvement with regulating A.I.

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And, look, I think this White House meeting today, it's definitely high stakes, as you put it, John, but it's also not likely to actually solve the problems facing the A.I. industry and also the potential of real government regulations to rein in some of these safety concerns and create guardrails for the industry on a more global scale.

Instead, so we're familiar with the meeting that's happening today, and you have a list of some of those key CEO leaders and tech leaders who will be part of it, it looked at more as a starting point. And it is going to be, I think, a great opportunity to get a lot of these people in the same room with the president as well as the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, and others, to figure out where the future of this actually looks like and whether or not the government does have a role in trying to regulate these.

You did have on your screen the Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei. He is someone who actually met with the president for a private dinner on Sunday. That was something that was viewed as more of kind of the thawing of tensions between Anthropic and this administration. The fact that he's coming back today, I think, is a signal that perhaps, you know, the president had open ears and that he's willing to listen to what they have to say. Anthropic is one of the key companies that has really been ringing the alarm bells about the risks and dangers of the future of A.I. if there aren't more regulations.

But I do want to give you a little bit into -- give you a sense a little bit into why there are so much of these doomsday kind of scenarios that are being thrown out there by some of these leading companies. For starters, I mean, what we're seeing happen with OpenAI is a major concern, and there's -- it comes after we've seen a lot of different kind of similar breakdowns with A.I. companies revealing more instances of models acting without human authorization, even just in the past week.

I do want to read through what we heard from one staffer, one person, one employee of OpenAI. They've had this letter, this essay that they shared on social media. They go by the name Joe. That's it. They're trying to keep their anonymity. This is what they said. To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of capabilities of our models is an understatement.

Again, this is an OpenAI agent, someone who's part of the agent security team there. He said that he purposely doesn't disclose more information for personal security reasons, but that the last few months, quote, has been hell, as his team has struggled to keep up with the technology's latest capabilities.

Now, to give you a sense of what is going on inside the White House in their minds, there are a couple people who, out the administration, who recognize that this is a problem that they have to think about. But the president and many of his closest allies are also very skeptical about what some of these A.I. companies are saying.

Trump is very focused on wanting to outpace China when it comes to the technology of A.I. and being a leader in this space. He also wonders why, you know, and we've heard this from the vice president, J.D. Vance, as well, why don't these companies just have third-party regulators inside their own companies and regulate themselves?

So, this meeting is going to be a big deal, especially as I think a lot of lawmakers on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue try to figure out how to deal with this. The midterms are coming. A lot of Americans concerned about this and the rise of, you know, data centers as well. So, a big moment. Hopefully, we'll see what they have to say after it wraps.

BERMAN: It'll be very interesting to see how they interact with the others, and how the president chooses to address this.

Alayna Treene at the White House this morning. Thank you very much. Sara?

SIDNER: All right.

[07:10:00]

Thank you, John.

Ahead, everything is bigger in Texas, especially when it comes to campaign spending. We have new reporting this morning on just how much cash Republicans are pouring into that highly contested Senate race, and how Judge Judy fits into that strategy.

Also one week after a massive cyber attack on thousands of FBI employees, new details on what's happening inside the agency after one of the most serious breaches in years.

And very soon, closing arguments set to begin in the trial of the former American Idol contestant accused of killing his wife so he could be with his girlfriend.

Those stories and more ahead.

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[07:15:00] SIDNER: New this morning, a Pentagon data breach of millions of military personnel is raising national security concerns. This breach follows a major hack on the FBI, where hackers may have stolen data on all FBI employee units.

CNN's Sean Lyngaas is tracking all of this for us. Sean, what are you learning about these hacks?

SEAN LYNGAAS, CNN CYBERSECURITY REPORTER: Yes, Sara, it's been a bad week for protecting sensitive information for U.S. military and the FBI and national security officials in both case. In some cases, I'm hearing from people households who are affected by both breaches because they have one person working at the FBI, one person working in the military.

Let's start with the Pentagon breach. It's a agency called the Defense Manpower Data Center. It's something most Americans probably never -- don't know by name, but it's basically the vast H.R. system that the Pentagon uses to keep track of employees and contractors and veterans and to allocate benefits.

So, last week, the Pentagon conceded that someone, they didn't really say who, but some unauthorized user accessed a set of files at the agency that ended up, you know, hosting files upwards of 3 million people. So, those-- that data was sitting unencrypted on that server, which is really objectively bad security practice. That's something that shouldn't be happening in 2026.

And what happened was the intruder took Social Security information and other sensitive personal data belonging to these service members. We don't know what they did with it. There's no signs of misuse yet, but it's really raising concerns in the military community about how the data might be exploited.

You can pair that with other data from other breaches and really find out a lot o-of things about someone's pattern of life.

Now, pivoting to the FBI breach, that's something completely different. We know who did that. That was a cyber criminal group that's very prolific, very loud, and likes to claim responsibility for these breaches. They claim that they were retaliating against the FBI for what the FBI said about the hacker group. So, it's a little bit inside baseball, but what matters here for the average person, and certainly for FBI personnel, is that lots of sensitive data on current FBI agents was exposed and taken.

And the hackers haven't done anything with that yet, other than share it with certain media organizations. But, really, the concern here, Sara, is that a lot of these FBI agents want to work under the cover of at least partial anonymity. They're doing very sensitive cases. They're investigating drug cartels. They're investigating organized crime. They're investigating the Chinese and Russian and Iranian governments, for example. And now you have a really brazen hacking group taunting the FBI online and saying, we've got all the goods on your on your prized assets. And it's really been, according to our reporting, a bit of a lack of communication from the higher-ups in terms of how this is affecting agents in the field. That's starting to change with some communication in recent days, but it's really been frustration inside the Bureau in terms of figuring out who's affected.

SIDNER: Yes, I mean, this is huge, or could be when you consider, look, this is the FBI and the Pentagon who haven't been able to secure their data, and now it's out there in the hands o- of people who, if they wanted to, could use it for many different nefarious things.

What hope do the rest of us have, I guess, to securing our data? It's a really important story, Sean. I'm so glad that you're on this. I appreciate your time this morning and reporting. John?

BERMAN: Republicans in Texas swarm Judge Judy. The gobs of money they're spending on political ads during her show alone.

And then up, stuck, and away, the riders stranded on top of a rollercoaster.

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BERMAN: This morning, closing arguments are set to begin in the murder trial of the former American Idol contestant accused of killing his wife and then staging the crime scene. Caleb Flynn's defense rested without calling a single witness.

Want to get right to CNN's Diane Gallagher covering this for us this morning. So, we could hear the closing arguments soon after a trial where we've seen some pretty stunning testimony.

DIANNE GALLAGHER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Stunning testimony indeed, John. And yes, those closing arguments should begin a little bit later this morning. They are expected to. The prosecution rested after calling 40 witnesses over seven days of testimony, and as you said, the defense called none. They did not present a case.

Now, 40-year-old Caleb Flynn, a former worship leader and American Idol contestant, called 911 in the early hours of February 16th to report that someone had broken into their home and killed his wife.

Now, 37-year-old Ashley Flynn was found by police lying in bed with gunshot wounds to the head. Yesterday, we heard from the detective on the stand who investigated this murder, and jurors also got the opportunity to see videos of police interviews with Caleb after the crime and in the days after. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why did you do this? Because I have to ask you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did I what?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you do this?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Okay. You know, what did you do?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I didn't touch my wife.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALLAGHER: So, also in video of his police interviews, Caleb Flynn ex's said to police that basically a man had come to the house the day before with a flag saying and talking about something weird about a sales pitch for America.

Now, prosecutors have focused very much on this affair that Caleb Flynn had with a fellow worship leader. It went on for about a year- and-a-half. They say that Flynn believed that if he could sort of stage this killing of his wife, that he could continue his relationship with his mistress, keep the custody of his two young daughters, keep his lucrative job at his wife Ashley's family's business, and also maintain his position as a worship leader.

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Now, one of the final witnesses that prosecutors called was an investigator who used data from Caleb Flynn's devices to sort of set up this timeline. And if you previously watched the trial, you do know that Flynn's mistress spent two days of testimony sort of going through these more than 100,000 messages between the two over the year-and-a-half of their affair. Some of them very difficult to listen to, as Flynn talked about hating his wife and thinking of ways to kill her.

The investigator used some of those messages, but also data from his devices to put that together. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SAMANTHA REEB, OHIO BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: Caleb does state that he felt he received word from the Lord that he can leave his wife, and that he's just trying to figure out how. In September, there's messages stating that he plans to leave Ashley in October. That date is not met. Plans to leave Ashley again in November. That date's also not met.

On January 11th, she informs him that he's not met his deadline and then she ceases communication with him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALLAGHER: Now, the investigator testified that they, of course, picked up communication again on February 15th, that is the day before Ashley was killed, and their final message was about 12:45 A.M., John. That is just under two hours before the 911 call was placed.

BERMAN: Okay. Closing arguments set for a little bit later. And when the defense doesn't present a case of its own, it's always crucial to listen to those defense attorneys making those closing arguments, because that can be everything.

Dianne Gallagher, thank you very much. Kate?

BOLDUAN: Great point on that one, that one for sure to watch.

Also this ahead for us, President Trump's ban on hundreds of millions of dollars of Canadian booze now in effect. But there's also another catch about what is actually going to happen when it comes to what you're going to see on store shelves.

And skydivers jump into action, John Berman acting it out, literally. How the group parachuted down to help the victims of a plane crash.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's your discretion if you want to drop jumpers over the area.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, I'm going to drop a couple of them. Yes, we are just going to drop them right now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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