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Inside Politics

Trump Cancels Harris' Secret Service Protection; Sources: Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst Won't Seek Reelection; Remembering Hurricane Katrina 20 Years Later. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired August 29, 2025 - 12:30   ET

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

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[12:30:52]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Now to reporting first on CNN, President Trump is revoking Kamala Harris' Secret Service protection, that's according to a letter that the president personally signed.

Now, as a former vice president, Harris is entitled to six months of protection after leaving office. But President Biden signed a previously undisclosed directive extending her detail for an additional year.

CNN's Isaac Dovere broke the story. Isaac, you reviewed the letter that President Trump wrote. What did it say?

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, it said this, Dana. It's a memo from the President to the Homeland Security Secretary. And it says, "You are hereby authorized to discontinue any security- related procedures previously authorized by Executive Memorandum, beyond those required by law, for the following individual, effective September 1st, 2025, Former Vice President Kamala D. Harris."

And then it's signed by the president. That's the full extent of the letter. There's nobody else who's included in this. And this, as you said, she had protection that took her through July 21st, six months after leaving office. But there had been some threat assessment and concerns in the closing weeks of the Biden administration.

And Joe Biden signed this extension of her protection. And Donald Trump revoked it with this letter. We have gone to the White House and asked them multiple times what happened here. They have not given us an answer.

I can tell you that we've got more CNN reporting that says that we talked to the Secret Service. And they have said that the directive came fully from the White House. It was not driven by the Secret Service here.

BASH: Do we have any idea what the current threat assessment is? I mean, she is first female, first female person of color to be vice president of the United States.

DOVERE: Yes. And more than that, of course, she was the presidential nominee.

BASH: And -- right.

DOVERE: So it's very high profile. She had for the entire time that she was the vice -- that she was vice president, even before she was the presidential nominee, her threat assessment had been higher than many previous vice presidents.

And that had continued to be the case, obviously, with the presidential campaign that made it higher. And this now is a moment where she's going from having spent the last bunch of months basically out of the spotlight to preparing to go on a book tour in the next couple of weeks.

She's got this book about her time on the campaign. She's going to travel all over the place. But the Secret Service protection, I think it's important to keep in mind what it is. We often think of it as just like the guys in the sunglasses who are around the people.

It's much more than that. They're guarding her home. They are -- they have intelligence assessment, looking at emails and texts and social media, deciding which threats are credible and which are not. All these things that can go on are going to disappear basically overnight as of September 1st.

And she will be left at the moment with nothing in terms of protection. That means anybody could come up to her at any time. And she now has to figure out what security might look like given that.

BASH: Right. Or get her own security, which is not cheap.

DOVERE: It's not cheap. Millions of dollars a year is the minimum estimate for it. Also, I was in touch with both Gavin Newsom's office, California governor, and Karen Bass' office, the L.A. mayor. They spoke last night about this and they're figuring it out.

Karen Bass, in a statement to me, said that she feels like this is going to make Kamala Harris less safe and it's egregious. And that she and the governor are committed to making sure that she does stay safe.

BASH: Great reporting, Isaac. Thank you so much.

DOVERE: Thank you.

BASH: Don't go anywhere because we have breaking news in the reelection world. Sources tell CNN's Jeff Zeleny that Republican Senator Joni Ernst will not run for a third term. Much more after a short break.

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[12:39:06]

BASH: Now to some breaking political news, two sources tell CNN's Jeff Zeleny that Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst has decided she will not seek reelection for a third term. She has reportedly been torn over the decision for months, plans to make an official announcement when the Senate comes back into session next week.

My panel is back here. Phil Mattingly, Joni Ernst was very much -- elected as very much a person in the moment back, what, '12 --

DOVERE: 2014.

BASH: 2014.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: 2014, yes.

BASH: A military vet. She served in the Iowa National Guard. She was in Iraq. And she was running in Iowa at a time when Iowa was still purplish. And she won her race.

And she, you know, wanted to focus on military issues. And obviously she's very much into cutting federal government spending.

[12:40:09]

And she has -- had an interesting time, I think it's fair to say, with her colleagues, both in the Republican Party and also across the aisle, navigating that, the Trump of it all, and the way that Iowa, her home state, has changed.

MATTINGLY: Yes. I think the evolution is actually emblematic of a number of people who are either were in the Senate in 2014 when we were all covering it and no longer or will soon be going in the same direction. We're just kind of aren't really focal points of the party anymore.

She was a member of leadership. Mitch McConnell, who was a leader at the time, thought future-oriented, this is young woman, amazing biography, willing to work on the issues, kind of the not a show horse or work horse type of senator that I think a lot of people often refer to there.

And it became very difficult. Thom Tillis is another example of this as well, now that I think about it. In this moment, with this president, to have any type of independent thought and said publicly, we all remember just watching some of the confirmation hearings or confirmation processes for some of President Trump's most controversial nominees that she got cross-eyes with people just for stating things that were facts.

BASH: Yes, and we'll hear what she says in her own words when she gives in more -- or any statement about this. But let's just look at some of the numbers of what Iowa looked like just a little bit before she ran. In 2008, Obama won Iowa, it's hard to believe now, by 10 percentage points, 6 percentage points in 2012.

Then in between is when she was first elected. President Trump won by 9 percentage points in 2016, 2020, and then the last one by 13 percentage points. You can see obviously the move from, I wouldn't call it a blue state ever, but a purple state over to a very red state.

DOVERE: Yes, and more than that, maybe to measure it, is that the senator who preceded her was Tom Harkin, right, a really --

BASH: That's right.

DOVERE: -- lefty stalwart, and then to Joni Ernst. But this is now a question of how much it affects the calculations for 2026 in the Senate map. Democrats have been desperate to try to figure out some path to get them to the majority.

Putting Iowa on the board would really make a difference there in terms of how many pathways there might be for the majority being up for grabs. There are -- even before Ernst made her decision, there are a lot of Democrats who are running in that. There were four candidates.

One dropped out and endorsed one of the other candidates. But three Democrats running for this open seat. Now we'll see who the Republicans put up and what kind of a race it looks like.

BASH: Yes. Again, we'll see what she says, but I think it's fair to say that talk privately to a lot of U.S. senators and House members, it's not always as fun as one would think to be in the U.S. Congress.

All right, still ahead, today marks 20 years, 20 years since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. The images are still devastating to look at.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: You live just down there?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I live down there, the corner on the beach. I just had to see if I could see anything that was mine.

COOPER: There were houses on -- all along here?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's now gone.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

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BASH: 20 years ago today, the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast changed forever as Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a monster Category 3 storm. Nearly 1,400 people were ultimately killed. More than 1 million were displaced from their homes. And New Orleans was mostly underwater after the levees failed, causing catastrophic flooding all across the city.

Here's a clip from former amazing CNN Reporter Jeanne Meserve describing what she was seeing on the ground 20 years ago today.

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JEANNE MESERVE, CNN REPORTER: It's been horrible. As I left tonight, darkness of course had fallen and you can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping. But for tonight they've had to suspend the rescue efforts. It's just too hazardous for them to be out of the boats.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: We all watched in horror and heartbreak as the chaos unfolded in the days that followed after the levees broke. And help did not come.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

CROWD: We want help! We want help! We want help! We want help! We want help! We want help! We want help! We want help!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have four kids. We have nobody. I lost everything. We have nothing. Nothing. And I'm looking for my grandmother.

Because we want to go home. I want to get out of here. That's sad. We were home. I never lived like this.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There were like bodies floating past my front door, you know. Bodies floating past my front door. I've never seen anything like this.

(END VIDEOCLIP)

BASH: Joining me now is Historian Douglas Brinkley who is the author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast." Doug, thank you for being here. You were living in New Orleans when Katrina hit after the storm. You helped rescue people. What's the memory most seared in your memory now, 20 years later?

[12:50:07]

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, I was a professor at Tulane University and I did a vertical evacuation right over the Mississippi River. And when the storm came, Katrina roared into town as -- I was stunned to see the Mississippi River going in the opposite direction because I knew the power of the river so well.

And then right after the winds died down, I wandered around and I thought maybe New Orleans had missed the big one. There was a lot of debris around the French Quarter, a lot of wires down. It was mayhem of sorts.

But it's only as I walked and kept exploring further that I realized that the levees had breached, three major levees, and water pouring in. And New Orleans is below sea level, so it's like a bowl, a saucer. The water from those levees breached just started filling and filling the city.

And then with electricity out, it was horrifying at night because you knew people were trapped in buildings. You didn't know how to get to them. And it seemed like there were no first responders in sight. BASH: Your book that I mentioned, "The Great Deluge," was published in 2006 and had an author's note that I want to read to our viewers. You said, quote, "There is, in my opinion, no such thing as too many Great Deluge anecdotes and offerings. Only by remembering and holding city, state, and federal government officials responsible for the actions, can true Gulf South rebuild commence in the appropriate fashion."

How much do you think that we as a country, as a society, have really learned from Hurricane Katrina? How much has actually changed?

BRINKLEY: Well, people still don't want to connect climate change to increased cyclonic activity or the heating up of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic. I'll leave that aside. I think the city of New Orleans got billions of dollars federal appropriations to rebuild the levee system in a much sturdier way.

And we have to thank the Army Corps of Engineers for that effort that they've done there. A big thing was the shutting down of MR-GO, the Mississippi River Gulf outlet. This was a boondoggle, brainless idea of connecting ships from the saltwater gulf to the freshwater Mississippi by building a shortcut.

And that canal, MR-GO, became a wind tunnel that just poured surge into New Orleans. And you had the National Guard at Jackson Barracks just swamped with water coming. So I think some of this has been rectified, but no city, particularly New Orleans, is prepared for a direct hit four or five because we're losing wetlands in Louisiana daily.

We used to say a football field a day, but it's worse than that now, which means no wetlands, that gulf surge can hit these levees and find ways into the city of New Orleans. So, it's still -- we've done a good job, but there's still anxiety that if the big one comes, we're not sure whether the city will be prepared or not.

BASH: Doug, I was covering the White House when Katrina hit. I was actually part of the press pool that went with George W. Bush to New Orleans for the first time, the first time he was there. Needless to say, his presidency never really recovered from the way that the government botched the response.

I want our viewers to listen to an infamous moment when the president praised his then FEMA director, Michael Brown.

(BEGIN VIDEOCLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, 43RD U.S. PRESIDENT: Again, I want to thank you all for -- and Brown, you're doing a heck of a job. The FEMA director's working 24 --

(CLAPPING)

BUSH: They're working 24 hours a day.

(END VIDEOCLIP) BASH: Now, Brown resigned because of incompetence. And just fast forward now to where we are, and it's a moment where the former and current FEMA workers are claiming that President Trump's overhaul of FEMA could lead to catastrophic failures in future disaster response. It was such a moment that we remember there are hard times when the government is very much needed.

BRINKLEY: Well, the -- you know, FEMA was created by President Carter, and it had its heyday under Bill Clinton's two-term presidency under Mick Witt (ph). And he did a great job. And then you ended up having Brownie.

Brownie was the head of the Arabian Horse Society, a crony of George W. Bush. And the Bush administration had taken FEMA, basically wanted to get rid of it, but they stuck it in Homeland Security, debunded it. So there was no FEMA president.

Brown couldn't have done worse. He was an AWOL, a zero, FEMA failed, big F, during Katrina.

[12:55:05]

But the lessons that were supposed to be learned is why FEMA's important and why we have to put our resources and tax dollars into it. But alas, the Trump administration seems to be repeating the era of thinking that FEMA's just some feel-good liberal program instead of essential to deal with people in need in a very lickety-split fashion, whether, you know, they're hit by a tornado or flood or hurricane.

BASH: Well, I don't need to tell you this. This is one of a million reasons why it's important to know our history, even in this case, pretty recent history. 20 years ago, it wasn't that long ago.

Doug, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it. It's always great to see you and learn from you.

BRINKLEY: Thank you. And I'm going to call out to all the people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who got hit hard with Katrina and devastated so many towns like Waveland and Bay St. Louis and Ocean Spring, et cetera.

BASH: Yes.

BRINKLEY: So we never want to forget them on anniversaries either.

BASH: Never. Yes. Well said. Thank you so much, Doug.

Thank you for joining Inside Politics. CNN News Central starts after the break.

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