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Vance and Rubio Meet Danish and Greenlandic Officials; Trump Threatens U.S. Takeover on Greenland; Death Toll from Iran Protests Grows; Americans Divided by Videos Showing ICE Agent Killing Woman. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired January 14, 2026 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: At any moment now, the vice president, J.D. Vance, is due to host a much-anticipated meeting at the White House over President Trump's proposed takeover of Greenland. Vance will welcome top officials from Greenland and Denmark to the White House. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, will also participate in that meeting. The Danish foreign minister says they called for the meeting amid tense discussions with the White House. We've learned that there is an increased Danish military presence in and around Greenland beginning today.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: And we are covering all the latest developments. CNN's Nic Robertson is in Greenland. And Alayna Treene is at the White House where the meeting is set to begin. Alayna, to start with you, how broad will today's discussion be, particularly in light of President Trump's recent Truth Social post about Greenland?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's going to be a very interesting meeting indeed, particularly after the very aggressive rhetoric that the president used this morning, essentially saying that NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the United States.

But, look, I do want to update you. We actually did see both the Danish and the Greenland foreign ministers arriving just moments ago. They were greeted by Monica Crowley, who was the chief of protocol in the Trump administration, and escorted inside the Eisenhower executive office building, of course, where the meeting is going to be taking place. It's expected to kick off any moment now.

But, look, as for what's expected to be discussed, I've had extensive conversations over the last 24 hours with the people in that building behind me, Wolf and Pam, and essentially there's a few things that they want to take the temperature on from Greenland and Denmark. One is what is the cooperation that they are willing to work on with the Trump administration, particularly when it comes to national security concerns?

We know that annexing Greenland is, of course, a big priority for the president, but part of that is because of the national security interests in the Arctic, trying to, you know, counter Russian and Chinese aggression there. But also, they've tried to impart on me the importance of the missile defense systems, of being in the Arctic region, and what Greenland could allow. And so, that's going to be a big part of this discussion today.

And also, the idea of, you know, is there even a chance that Greenland is open and Denmark are open to potentially selling it, the territory, to the United States, something, of course, they've already said that they are not interested in, but that's really where a lot of these talks are going to be focused on.

BLITZER: All right. Standby. I want to go to CNN's International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson who's now in Greenland. Nic, the prime minister there has been very, very clear. Greenland does not want to be owned by the United States. Update our viewers on the very latest.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, the latest is that the Danish authorities say that they're going to be sending additional troops here to Greenland. Troops, warships and aircraft, they say. They say that's also going to that that presence will also involve other NATO forces. Not quite clear which other nations involved, but it does seem to be intended to send a very clear message that Greenland does not want to be part of the United States, does want to remain part of Denmark, does see itself as part of NATO. And that's the question that people here are asking us and asking themselves.

[10:35:00]

You know, President Trump, under the 1951 agreement between the United States and Denmark, has the right to have as many military bases as he wants inside of Greenland. And that is an open offer in terms of mineral resources that have been talked about. The United States has the opportunities and the offer from the from the Greenland authorities and the Danish government to come here and invest as much as they want and explore for minerals and export minerals and rare earths from here.

So, people are asking if President Trump has all this already on tap and the United States is part of NATO. Greenland, Denmark are part of NATO. How does that fit into this frame of strengthening NATO here of U.S. controlling Greenland to do that? So, the sides here are very clearly a long way apart at the moment, Wolf.

BLITZER: And Trump has just posted on Truth Social, a social media post. He said this, NATO becomes far more formidable and effective with Greenland in the hands of the United States. Anything less, and he says anything less than that is unacceptable. Strong words from the president and a warning to both Denmark and Greenland right now.

Nic Robertson in Greenland, Alayna Treene over at the White House. To both of you, thank you very, very much.

BROWN: Thank you. And coming up here in the Situation Room, we'll speak to Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz on his recent briefing on the situation in Iran as President Trump considers taking military action against the country.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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BLITZER: All right. There's more breaking news. Tensions throughout Iran are intensifying big time right now. A U.S.-based human rights group now reports more than 2,000 protesters already have been killed and at least 18,000 have been arrested since the regime launched its crackdown. A new graphic video shows many bodies lined up at the morgue in Tehran, in the province there. CNN cannot confirm the exact date this video was taken, but we do know it's a few days old. Here was President Trump's message on Iran last night. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: We will take very strong action if they do such a thing. When they start killing thousands of people and now, you're telling me about hanging, we'll see how that works out for them. It's not going to work out good.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: And joining us now to discuss what's going on, Democratic Congressman Jared Moskowitz of Florida. He serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees. Congressman, thanks so much for joining us. I know you were recently briefed on the situation in Iran right now. What's the latest? What is your understanding? Do you think the U.S. will be forced to go to use military strikes against Iran?

REP. JARED MOSKOWITZ (D-FL), FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE: Yes. I mean, look, obviously the situation is just dire in Iran right now. Thousands of people being killed in a matter of weeks for trying to seek freedom and liberty protesting on the street. And so, listen, for me, I think all options need to be on the table. This idea that we want to take any options off the table, I think, is a mistake. I think right now what the president is doing, ratcheting up pressure, keeping options on the table, is a good idea. I don't think we should tell the Iranians what we will or won't do.

And so, you know, I think right now that we're telling people to get out of harm's way. That may look like we're leading to do something. I would support some level of kinetic activity in assisting the Iranian people, but the Iranian people have to choose this path for themselves. We can assist. We can't come in and lead this for them.

BLITZER: CNN is learning that some U.S. personnel at the U.S.'s largest military base in the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf area, not far from Iran, they've already been urged to leave. How worried are you about a full-blown conflict breaking out between Iran and the United States? Or is now the time to take on the regime?

MOSKOWITZ: I'm not worried. This was the same concerns people had during the 12-day war between Israel and the Iranians when we came in and obviously bombed the nuclear facilities. We saw that did not spread outside of the region. And so, we have recent history that that won't happen. So, building a coalition, getting folks at the table, I think is very important. We shouldn't just go at it alone. We should make sure we're communicating.

But listen, if you said to me, do I support regime change, the world supports regime change in Iran. The question is, how do you do that? How do you do that? If you don't support regime change, then what you're saying is the Ayatollah should stay. No one thinks the supreme leader should stay. The Iranian people don't want him to stay. The world doesn't want him to stay. The question is, how do you do that?

BLITZER: So, would you support military action if necessary to get rid of the Ayatollah?

MOSKOWITZ: If necessary to support the killing of innocent Iranians, I would support military action.

BLITZER: Do you give the president, President Trump, credit for standing in solidarity with the Iranian people protesting the regime?

MOSKOWITZ: Of course, but other presidents have done that. The question now is, what are we willing to do about it? What are we willing to do about it? I mean, are we going to let another opportunity go by? But again, this has to be led by the Iranian people. They have to be the ones that lead this effort. And we should be there in a secondary supportive role. We can't just come in and bomb our way into freedom for the Iranian people.

BLITZER: CNN is learning now that three U.S.-allied Gulf Arab nations, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, have launched behind-the- scenes diplomatic efforts to try to prevent American military action on Iran. Where do you think Israel fits into all of this?

MOSKOWITZ: Well, let me say this. What they say publicly and what they say privately are different things. This is the same thing they said during the 12-day war, and yet we were running all sorts of missions in their airspace. So, you know, look, that's the game that gets played.

Obviously, you know, everyone in the region wants, you know, Iran to go the way of some of these other countries, which was, you know, they get freedom for their people and stability in the region. Iran is the only country right now that adds instability to the entire Middle East. The rest of these countries want to come out of the shadow. They want investment. They want to join, you know, the world of nations. And Iran's the one country that supports terrorism, kills Americans, kills Israelis. Where are the Israelis in this? I don't know the answer to that. Obviously, this should not be something, in my opinion, that the Israelis do on their own.

BLITZER: Because the Iranians have threatened, if the U.S. does launch some military strikes, to attack U.S. targets in the Persian Gulf. All the military bases, whether in Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere. And also, to attack Israel. Knowing the Israelis, as I do, normally when they see a threat like that, they launch a preemptive strike. You think the Israelis are gearing up for that?

[10:45:00] MOSKOWITZ: I don't know. We literally saw this. This is literally the playbook of just literally a couple months ago. When the Iranians said the same thing. They did launch missiles. You know, Israel used their missile defense systems. And so, we've seen this.

I hope it doesn't get there, right? We hope that doesn't happen. But at the same time, we want to make sure that we're supporting the Iranian people. We want to make sure that we're not seeing thousands of people killed weekly just for protesting. These are all civilians. There's no military. It's all civilians. No terrorist group. It's all just regular people in the streets trying to ask for freedom and liberty and rights. And they're being gunned down by their government.

BLITZER: Congressman Jared Moskowitz, thanks so much for joining us.

MOSKOWITZ: Thanks, Wolf.

BLITZER: Pamela.

BLITZER: All right. Coming up here in the Situation Room, Wolf, after the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota, Americans have seen a number of videos circulate on social media. But people are drawing very different conclusions. Up next, we'll ask a psychologist what makes that difference possible.

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BROWN: Happening now, a nation divided. It has been a week since an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed a woman behind the wheel of her SUV. A new Quinnipiac poll says a remarkable 82 percent of registered voters have seen a video of the shooting.

And much of America appears split into two camps with two very different conclusions of what they've seen. The Trump administration and many people on the right say it's a clear case of self-defense. The agent fired the three shots only after Renee Nicole Good put the car in motion. They say it appears she was trying to run him over. But others, largely on the left, say she had turned the wheel away from the ICE agent and was trying to drive away. The contrasting viewpoints couldn't be more different. But the question we want to dive into is why?

[10:50:00]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KRISTI NOEM, HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents. An act of domestic terrorism.

SEN. TINA SMITH (D-MN): They know nothing of who this person is. And they, frankly, know nothing about the community that I call home.

SEN. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): The driver of the vehicle weaponized that vehicle.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What we saw today is a murder.

MAYOR JACOB FREY (D-MN): To ICE, get the -- out of Minneapolis.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jacob's an embarrassment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Our next guest looks at the science of such radically different takeaways. Emily Balcetis is an associate professor of psychology at New York University. She's also the author of "Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World." Thank you so much for joining us.

This has been a discussion, you know, we were having with the team just about the different viewpoints of this video. And obviously politics could be playing a role here, particularly when we hear from Democrats and Republicans. But how is it that two people look at the same video and come away with such vastly different conclusions?

EMILY BALCETIS, AUTHOR, "CLEARER, CLOSER, BETTER" AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY: Well, first off, I'm not here as an expert on police misconduct or as a litigator. I'm a behavioral scientist. And for 20 years, that's exactly the question I've been trying to understand. How do we all look at the same evidence, the same visual scene, and yet come to see the world in different ways?

And I think there are two important points going on with this video of many. But one is that we feel like video evidence is a neutral witness. And of course, video provides important and valuable information that we need to understand the events of this case. But it's not a complete understanding of what has happened. Because video evidence and the footage that it creates is constrained by where the camera is located and what that camera is pointed at. It can't, any one video cannot take in the full complexities of a social situation like this one that we saw. The video is missing important information.

The second is that our visual and cognitive abilities are limited. That video and many others that we've seen of police and civilian altercations are complex. They're fast moving. There's many moving social dynamics. And that overwhelms our ability to take in with precision and clarity all of what we're seeing at the same time or at any one moment. That means when you couple those two facts together, there are gaps in our understanding of what's happening in this video.

BROWN: And just to follow up with you, how do you think confirmation bias could be playing a role here in terms of people who are typically pro-law enforcement or people who think law enforcement is exceeding their authority, like in Minnesota right now? How could that play a role in the way the video is perceived?

BALCETIS: Well, if we've seen the video once, we've probably seen it many times. But that's not necessarily helping us to understand the full complexities of this event. Because in lab-based studies that we've conducted, we've found that when people re-watch a video, they're looking at the same things that they saw the first time around. And that reifies and solidifies their first impressions. They're not seeing what they didn't see the first time. That maintains those misunderstandings.

But then how do we fill in those gaps of understandings? Because it's a common human drive to want to believe that we're right. Our brains are computational machines. Generations and generations have led our brains to evolve to fill in those gaps of understanding. And it does so by leveraging social identities. The more we feel aligned with police officers or with authority will shape not just our opinions about whether that officer was culpable for the violence that we saw, but how we view that video evidence in the first place.

In our lab-based studies, what we found was that the more that somebody paid attention to one target in that video, be it the police officer or anybody that they held a negative attitude towards, the more that they were confident that that person was the aggressor, that they were the ones responsible for the violence that they observed. Because the more you pay attention to any one target, what we found in the science was that the more inaccurate they were about the full scope of the case facts.

So, social identity is changing what we can pay attention to and how we fill in those gaps of understanding in a way that confirms what our prior beliefs are.

BROWN: Interesting. So, if you look at the video over and over again, or even look at the different angles, because initially there was the first video and then different angles were released, even by the ICE officers' point of view, that wouldn't necessarily change someone's opinion from what they thought from that first video, right?

BALCETIS: We need to be open to shifting our understanding. And that's part of the problem. Polarization has been on the rise, especially in the United States, and it's hitting market highs, which it makes it more challenging for us to want to change our opinion in the first place.

[10:55:00]

But if that is, in fact, the case, if we want to gain a fuller, richer understanding of all of the case facts, and that is the motive that we bring to the table when we're looking at that video, there is something that we can do that might help in that regard. There's no simple solution to the polarization that we're seeing.

BROWN: Right.

BALCETIS: But one thing that we can do is to try hard to look for the things that we didn't see the first time. If we try to pay attention to what didn't capture our attention, to the thing that didn't move fast, to the thing that we didn't think was threatening in the first place, we might understand the case facts in a different way.

BROWN: Yes. I want to elaborate on that because there's often nuance, right? I mean, as a journalist for two decades, one takeaway is there's nuance, right, a lot of the times. And sometimes that can be hard for people because they want it to be very clear cut, right? They want the certainty. They want to bring their own perceived, preconceived notions of hero and villain, right?

But how can -- give us some more of an idea or tools to look at evidence in a more objective way in our perceptions in this highly polarized time?

BALCETIS: From my own experience, I can talk about how I saw that video, the first video that was released from the ICE officer. And like I was saying, what moves fast, what you perceive to be a threat, the thing that you think might be unexpected or more visually interesting, just automatically captures our attention. That's how our visual system was evolved, is to help us pay attention and to find those things that we think are going to be threatening and to orient towards those.

That meant for me personally, the orientation of the wheels of Renee Good's SUV didn't pop it to my attention at first. But when I tried these tactics of, I'm going to look for something that doesn't naturally capture my attention, then I noticed the orientation of the wheels. That led me to have a different perspective than what first caught my eye.

It's also hard to be aware of the things that we're not aware of. We do know that there were bystanders that were standing on the sidewalks, but they are only in one camera angle for a short period of time. And yet, they are essential to understanding why would somebody have acted this way? Why would she have driven this way? Why didn't she go this way? And it's hard because they are not in the camera angle. And yet they are critical to how people are determining how are they going to act and assessing the level of threat and danger that any one action might cause. The unknown unknowns are very challenging to integrate unless we work hard to incorporate them into our understanding.

BROWN: Yes. I think that's really important. You don't know what you don't know, and you have to be aware of that, right? Emily Balcetis, thank you so much. That was really interesting and I think an important conversation to have in this moment. Wolf.

BLITZER: Very good interview indeed.

BALCETIS: Thank you.

BROWN: Thank you.

BLITZER: And coming up right after the break, the State Department now says at any time Iran could execute a protester. More on the brutal crackdown in the country and the response from President Trump.

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