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Poland Shoots Down Russian Drones, Accuses Moscow Of "Aggression"; E.U. Official: Indications Airspace Violation "Was Intentional"; Escalations By Russia, Israel Challenge Trump's Credibility; Harris Book Excerpt Criticizes Biden For Running For Reelection; Harris: Biden's Team Thought "If She's Shining, He's Dimmed". Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired September 10, 2025 - 12:00   ET

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

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DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Today on Inside Politics, from NSYNC to at odds. Kamala Harris is revealing what she really thought about Joe Biden's reelection gamble. We have excerpts from her new book where she calls it reckless and accuses Joe Biden's inner circle of undermining her at every turn.

Plus, a potential tinderbox moment for Europe after Poland shoots down Russian drones that cross into its airspace more than a dozen times. The prime minister of Poland says, his country hasn't been this close to open conflict since World War II.

And supreme alignment. The highest court in the land has dealt President Trump a series of winning cards, but will they shuffle the depth when it comes to his sweeping tariffs. The president's desire to reshape the world economy hangs in the balance.

I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

We start with geopolitics, major international news. Poland shot down multiple Russian drones in Polish airspace during an attack on Ukraine overnight. It's the first time a NATO member has fired shots during Russia's war. Poland's prime minister says his country was closer to conflict than it has been in almost a century.

CNN chief international security correspondent Nick Paton Walsh is covering this for us in London. So, Nick, the Prime Minister Tusk described the drones as likely a large-scale provocation, not accidental. What's Russia trying to accomplish here?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, look. I mean, whether this is intentional or not is something possibly you can only divine if you're inside the psyche of those Russians who piloted those particular drones. But the evidence in front of Polish authorities here is that 19 separate incursions. It's quite hard to attribute to an accident or as Russian ally.

Belarus officials have suggested some kind of navigational error, perhaps from spoofing or some kind of jamming that may have caused these drones to stray. The latest information we're hearing from Polish state media is that three of these drones that were shot down were the Gerbera type, which may not actually have been armed, able to destroy targets.

And that may echo, potentially, something said by the Russian Ministry of Defense that it did not intend to destroy Polish sites in this. But regardless, this is an extraordinary Russian incursion into NATO airspace, hard to overemphasize how significant an escalation this.

Now three and a half years into Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This is in terms of the NATO alliance, damage on the ground inside Poland near its border, civilian homes destroyed, luck, frankly, that people weren't killed too.

Polish airspace also shut down, while NATO scrambled Dutch and polish airplanes, other assets to radar planes as well, to intercept these drones. The first time, possibly in NATO's history, certainly since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that they've had to act in this defensive way, shooting down Russian aircraft over their own airspace. That is utterly staggering as a development.

And now, of course, urgent consultations amongst NATO, they've called Article 4 meetings, which means that key officials will get together and plot the next steps. That's not the same as Article 5, which is the mutual defense treaty, where they ask all members to come to the aid of one, if indeed, they are attacked.

But it's almost an unimaginable place to be right now, from where we were at the start of a war which many felt back in February 2022, Russia would win in a matter of weeks. Now, they're still fighting in Ukraine. Yet they are using their sort of desire to attribute to accident things that may indeed be deliberate to broaden the field for Russia here and push NATO sense of security on its eastern flank.

Frankly, at a time in which U.S. role and backup for European security guarantees is not as solid as it always has been. President Trump posted recently on Truth Social the phrase, what's going on with Russian incursions into Polish airspace, and I may be paraphrasing there. Here we go! Not exactly the kind of rock-solid security guarantee response that maybe people have been looking to Washington to provide.

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But certainly, a sign that it is indeed on Trump's radar. He'll be speaking to his Polish counterpart in the hours ahead. But really, it's the nature of NATO's response, if it can offer a deterrent against Moscow, that Putin will be looking out for, not the talk we've seen so far today that they're just simply more ready to defend if indeed this happens again.

The question really is, what to stop it happening again tonight or next week, Dana?

BASH: And you know, there were a lot of people who heard President Trump when he was coming into office, saying it's him, and the fact that he was ascending to the White House again and his relationship with Vladimir Putin would stop it. And obviously, that has not happened.

Thank you so much for that reporting, Nick. Appreciate it. I'm joined here by a terrific group of reporters at the table, CNN's Phil Mattingly, Nia-Malika Henderson of CNN and Bloomberg, David Weigel of Semafor, and CNN anchor and chief national security analyst, Jim Sciutto.

So, Jim, just picking up on that. It's -- I actually want to put back up what Nick was referring to Donald Trump's post, which was just about an hour ago. What's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? Here we go. Here we go. Does that, I mean, again, we don't know what that means, but could it mean they're finally going to go forward with sanctions? Does it mean that after what like a month almost since his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, something's going to happen.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: I mean, we'll see, right? I mean, Trump has threatened sanctions before and not delivered multiple times. There were a lot of words he could have used in that that were stronger condemnations of an attack on a NATO ally. I've spoken to a number of European officials who do not believe that this was accidental. They believe it was intentional.

That you might be able to explain one or two stray drones over the airspace of a NATO ally, but several is different, and especially given how deep they went in. They see this as a probing exercise, testing NATO's defenses and reaction times, but more broadly, testing NATO's resolve, and crucially, President Trump's and the U.S.'s resolves -- resolve and their red lines. Is this too far to do a probing attack inside a NATO ally? That's key. It is a test.

And we should also be clear, it's not the first time. Last month, Russian strikes in Kyiv, hit the offices of the E.U. and the British Council. Russia has quite high precision drones. They know and you saw that with the recent attacks on Ukrainian government buildings. They know what they're hitting in attacks like this.

So, it's not the first time. And if you look at Putin's pattern, really for the last 20 years, he pushes limits. He sees what kind of resistance he could get, and if he doesn't get much or none at all, he pushes those limits even further.

BASH: Yeah. And this has been -- you've been in Ukraine so many times. I remember shortly after the war began, three plus years ago. This is exactly what Poland was worried about. And now this is, you know, this has happened. And so, the question is, what does President Trump do?

SCIUTTO: Yeah. Well, listen, we know what he has said he might do, and that is impose sanctions on -- additional punishing sanctions on Russia. Putin has not agreed to a ceasefire. But this goes back months, right? And repeated times he has not followed through on that. And you have to be clear, not just Democrats, but Republicans. I saw Republican Congressman Joe Wilson saying, now is the time to impose these sanctions. And you've long had bipartisan support for this bill that's working its way through Congress, but for whatever reason, Donald Trump has not pulled the trigger. We'll see if this is enough to do so.

BASH: Yeah. And it really is, again, just because this is Inside Politics, it goes to one of the core parts of his campaign. I'm going to end wars, and because I'm not Joe Biden, or pick your reason, he had many reasons. And so far, what we have seen is Vladimir Putin, kind of laughing at him with his actions.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: I think when the president made those claims on the campaign, and it was a kind of a cornerstone with his foreign policy during the campaign. So much of that claim, whether you take it at face value, which the president subsequently walked back and wondered why people actually believed him, when he said, I was going to end wars on the first day.

So much of that was based on his view of his own personal relationships with specific leaders. Vladimir Putin, in this case, Bibi Netanyahu in another issue, I know we're going to talk about. The degree to which whatever his belief was in his relationship with President Putin would lead to something has just been eviscerated over and over and over again.

And I think what's so striking to Jim's point is, if this is probing, it very much seems like it is. Every time Putin has done something that runs counter to Trump's belief of their relationship, it hasn't directly affected or connected to the United States. It's mostly been getting upset about the actions in Ukraine. This one triggers NATO issues that puts the president in a place where he has to react and do something. And we don't know what that is yet.

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BASH: This is what our colleague Stephen Collinson wrote this morning. The headline is Trump's credibility challenged in Qatar and Poland, bringing these two issues together. Yet again, Trump's self-proclaimed role as the president of peace is thrown into question. And his foreign policy team's understanding of ruthless global strongmen was left badly exposed.

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, BLOOMBERG POLITICAL & POLICY COLUMNIST: No, that's right. You know, Trump believed that in some ways, he was going to be a strong man too, on the world, right? And that the force of his personality, unlike Biden, who he assessed was weak. That the forces his personality could end this mess that was around the globe and all of these wars.

What we have seen since he's gotten into office was worsening situations all over the place, in Ukraine, obviously in Gaza as well. And you can see, if you listen to sort of MAGA radio and the conservative chattering classes, there is discontent about the way he has gone about his foreign policy, or lack of foreign policy and lack of accomplishments. Where he goes from here, this idea about NATO, does this sort of trigger some action from the United States? It goes against what MAGA wants, right? They did want a sort of pulling back and a settling down around the globe.

BASH: Speaking of MAGA media. Let's just go back in time to August 15, shortly after presidents Trump and Putin met in Alaska. Sean Hannity asked President Trump about consequences if there isn't an actual meeting, never mind a ceasefire. Let's listen to that.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Well, because of what happened today, I think I don't have to think about that. No, I may have to think about it in two weeks or three weeks or something, but we don't have to think about that right now. I think that, you know, the meeting went very well.

A lot of points were agreed on, but there's not that much, as you know, one or two pretty significant items, but I think they can be reached. Now it's really up to President Zelenskyy to get it done.

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BASH: Again, that was almost a month ago.

DAVID WEIGEL, SEMAFOR, SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, the timeline was not terrible from what he was saying in the interview. But to what Jim was saying, he's had -- he's issued some very vague statements and threats about what he would do in this situation. Is it where his head is at, or is his head at ending a conflict that he inherited from Joe Biden?

If you listen, there are Republicans who want the sanction power. There are Mitch McConnell, who want to -- who want to crack down. Now you mentioned Joe Wilson. The mood of Republican Party has shifted to where Trump is. And you have Republicans today, asking him to give Pat Buchanan the Medal of Freedom. You have an impulse that Tulsi Gabbard, I think, has shared on the trail.

Remember that new member of the Trump coalition that she's probably saying now, don't risk World War III. Whatever you have to do to de- escalate the conflict, if it involves giving Putin what he wants, don't risk World War III. This is the most -- this incursion to which you described, is the most like one of those nightmare scenarios. There will be voices in the movement saying, this is the time to back down, declare peace and hey, Nobel Peace Prize comes out in a month. Excellent timing, if you can pull that off.

BASH: But in fairness to Trump, he has been trying to deescalate, and the more he does it, the more Putin calls his --

SCIUTTO: We have a lot of data to work with now, right? We're several months into Trump's administration, and this policy and Putin has expanded, not shrunk the war, right? But both on the battlefield there, largest airstrike on Ukraine since the start of the war. You have attacks on European offices inside Kyiv, and now you have drones over Poland. So, the data is clear. Whether Trump sees that data, and that takes him off this blind spot he seems to have for Putin, we'll only know.

BASH: Thank you for being here. The rest of you don't go anywhere. Coming up. Kamala Harris is breaking ranks with team Biden. We have her politically explosive and pretty personal comments. New excerpts from her upcoming books. Stay with us.

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BASH: Former Vice President Kamala Harris is, you could say, unburdened by what has been. The first excerpt is out from her upcoming book 107 Days. And she has some choice words for former President Joe Biden's inner circle.

And at times, President Biden himself saying this about his ill-fated reelection bid, quote. It's Joe and Jill's decision. We all said that, like a mantra, as if we'd all been hypnotized. Was it grace or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn't a choice that should have been left to an individual's ego, an individual's ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.

And in these excerpts published by the Atlantic, Harris said, some of President Biden's closest advisors worked against her success. Writing quote, when polls indicated that I was getting more popular, the people around him didn't like the contrast that was emerging. Their thinking was zero sum. If she's shining, he's dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.

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My panel is back, and CNN's Isaac Dovere is joining us. Isaac, you have covered Kamala Harris for a very long time. What does this say to you, that she is -- I mean, obviously, we know that this is a book that she wants to sell. And any publisher is going to say, OK, we'll do the book, but you've got to actually give us more than you gave us on the campaign trail about what was really going on.

And frankly, it is more than I thought that she would say, because she was so fiercely loyal. I think she still genuinely is loyal to Joe Biden, the man, but she was loyal all around and obviously she sees that it hurt her.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, you think back to that killer moment in October of 2024 and she's on the view. And she's asked, can you think of anything that you would have done differently than Joe Biden? She says, nothing comes to mind versus what you just read. It's a really different approach to it. She is questioning a lot of what Joe Biden did and a lot of what his staff did.

I think if you read the whole excerpt, and this is only, of course, one chapter of this book. So, we don't know the rest of it, but the whole excerpt that's there doesn't delve into a lot of mistakes that she made in her own accounting of it. And there were many such mistakes and stumbles such as that answer.

But what it really comes down to is, if you pull all the way back and think about the Biden presidency, more than the infrastructure act and chips and all the other things. The fundamental mission of the Biden presidency was to end the Trump era of politics, and he picked her as his running mate.

He anointed her the successor. His successor, the future of the Democratic Party was to get her to be elected president. And neither of those things happen. And she is very clearly stating in what she's written here that she blames him and his team for that.

BASH: Nia?

HENDERSON: Yeah. And listen, you know, there is often distance between a vice president and a president, right? But early on in that administration, it was clear that there was real tension and that there was real undermining in some ways. A lot of people in Joe Biden's circle, you would have sort of off the record conversations with them. They would openly trash the vice president.

People in the vice president's office often would trash her too, in a seeming way to sort of curry favor with the Biden half of the administration. I am not surprised by what she's saying here. I am surprised that she's saying it. If you talk to anybody in her circle, that was always the sense that they were being undermined by the Biden team.

And it was always weird to me that I, you know, I take her at her word, this idea that a strong Harris would have made her stronger Joe Biden. So, that was always weird to me that there wasn't more support for her. The other thing I also think, I think Joe Biden was always going to run for reelection, even though he made this kind of quasi promise, you know, in the last days of his -- of the primary, and so that's essentially what you saw.

You saw an undermining of Kamala Harris. They thought it would bolster him. They thought it would make her unlikely as someone who the Democratic Party would rally behind. I also think this. I think Trump in that period was unbeatable.

We can sort of go back and rewrite Kamala Harris' campaign, rewrite Joe Biden's decision, maybe if there would have been some sort of Democratic primary. I think the forces of Donald Trump in this era, which had to do with post covid, which had to do with changing demographics, I think it was just a perfect storm.

BASH: And Phil, you covered the Biden-Harris White House. And, I mean, I'm sure you've had conversations like I have sort of ex-post facto from the Biden team that they kind of screwed up and they didn't get what she needed and what they needed to do to set her up for success.

MATTINGLY: Yes. And I think hindsight is very easy to some degree. I actually agree with, you know, that I was a little bit surprised by the candid nature of it. To the degree it's candid. It was a low bar, based on what we've all covered and seen over the course of the last several years.

But I think the best window this actually gives, which I think is difficult to understand, even though Isaac's written like 1500 stories about it, is what she's portraying in this is the distinction between staff, the kind of senior team around the president, and the president himself, which is, it was Joe and Jill's decision, kind of putting the president off the side.

The staff who was undermining. The staff was who was problematic. The staff was who gave her a lot of trouble, which is certainly true. But also, that remove that the president and the first lady had complicated a lot of things towards the end. And to your point, there was never an actual meeting to make a decision about reelection. It was always just kind of a rolling process, and that's where they -- why they ended up where they did.

BASH: Yeah. And on him, the president himself, former president himself. She said it was reckless. Just one more quick excerpt, Dave. This is about the whole question of whether or not Biden was competent to run for reelection in the first place. She rebuts questions about that.

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On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best. But at 81, Joe got tired. I don't believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.

WEIGEL: Yes. That is going to be litigated by every Democrat, because this is some of the legacy that Biden passed on to them. Two big questions. One, you're a Democrat, you're around the Biden era. Were you lying to us about whether he could do the job every day? Press to answer that. Two, why didn't you allow a open primary earlier, a question that's very hard for them to answer.

We can all answer. We can expect the timing and why they make that call. But I've seen these be depressing to people who might vote for Democrats around the country. The view part of it that you mentioned, the answer she couldn't give about Biden, there was an answer to that. The campaign was ready to give. What was that?

We have an immigration policy now that we can defend. We screwed up at the beginning administration. That part, I think, it's harder personally for Harris to defend. If she was vice president, she was from a border state, as her campaign ads told us, by the time she was the nominee.

Why did the administration make that mistake? How much of it -- was it other people's fault that they gave Harris that portfolio versus Harris didn't do the right thing with that portfolio, and only later, the administration recovered itself. And just there, you could go on and on with Biden legacies that he gave the Democrats. They have trouble explaining, without saying, it was a huge mistake to let these people run the government for four years.

BASH: Yeah, no question. And she was prepped for a different answer, and -- but that was sort of what I was getting at when we started the conversation about her heart of hearts, that she kind of, you know, felt bad about doing that.

I just want to expand, or maybe go back in time, because one of you mentioned that it's not a new phenomenon for a president and a vice president, particularly when the vice president has aspirations for higher office that there is tension. I mean, just -- I don't know, in 2022 this isn't about higher office. This is about democracy. You know that Vice President Pence was, there a threat to hang him. That's number one. That's number one on the card.

Why Biden? You sound like (inaudible). Obama-Biden bromance is a myth, and we know that Barack Obama really didn't want Biden to run, and that was a problem. George W. Bush never pardoned. Scooter Libby broke down his relationship with Dick Cheney. And of course, this is where I started in covering politics, when Bill Clinton was upset that Al Gore, when he was running for office, didn't want Clinton on the campaign trail.

DOVERE: Yeah. I think the difference -- the one that is more aligned with the Biden-Harris dynamic is the Clinton-Gore dynamic, because that was the one where it was clear that Gore was going to run for president. Dick Cheney was not going to run for president. Mike Pence was maybe going to run four years later.

But -- and even when Biden was vice president, the expectation was that he wouldn't run for president. But I do think that that gets into some of what we were talking about. Harris was given that portfolio of dealing with Central American migration.

Part of the reason why she was given it is because Joe Biden did it for Obama. The reason why Obama gave it to Biden is because he figured, you're never running for anything. You can take this terrible assignment. Biden didn't think, OK, don't give the terrible assignment to the person who will run again in the future. But also, Harris didn't think, I should push back and ask for a better portfolio.

But this dynamic was -- I mean, I'm sitting here over the course of this day thinking about this excerpt, remembering a moment in the fall of 2021, where I was sitting with a senior Biden aide, and I said, so what's going on with the vice president? The person said, like this, I don't really know.

And I wrote an article that the Harris team was quite upset about, about the dysfunction in her office. And it says at the beginning of that article that White House states are literally throwing up their hands from that, right? There was dysfunction in her office. There was also an undercutting of her constantly, and all those things came together and left the Democrats in the state that they found him something. BASH: OK. Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. Don't go anywhere, because we're going to talk about what's happening right now. And it is the Supreme Court and its powerful, so-called shadow docket. Getting spotlight attention as justices accept another emergency appeal by President Trump's administration. Why federal judges on the district level are starting to speak out. That's next.

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