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The Situation Room

Will U.S.-Iran Talks Resume?; Women and Alzheimer's; Interview With Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts. Aired 10:30a-11a ET

Aired May 07, 2026 - 10:30   ET

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

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PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: Happening now: Fulton County, Georgia, is seeking to block the Justice Department from gaining access to the personal information of thousands of 2020 election workers in court.

The county's Election Board argues the department subpoena last month marked the -- quote -- "latest effort to target and harass President Trump's perceived political enemies."

The FBI previously opened a criminal probe into what the department described as irregularities in how Fulton County, home to Atlanta, carried out the 2020 election. President Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed the election in Georgia was rigged.

CNN has reached out to the DOJ for comment.

Joining us now to discuss his Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts. He's running for reelection and is a member of the Democratic Party.

Thank you for coming on.

Why, in your view, is it so critical the personal information of election workers is not shared?

ROBB PITTS, CHAIRMAN, FULTON COUNTY, GEORGIA, BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS: Well, first and foremost, I believe that the workers are -- they are doing their civic duty by participating.

But to have their personal information released to the public makes no sense. And it -- I think this is a form of harassment. It's a form of intimidation. And it's designed to have a chilling effect on people who would volunteer to work in our elections and also to suppress the turnout.

So, I think this is all a part of an orchestrated, calculated effort on the part of the Justice Department, at the direction of the president, because we know here that Fulton County Georgia is a target, has been a target and will continue to be a target of this administration.

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BROWN: After the 2020 election and the spread of those baseless claims of fraud, we did see several election workers face legitimate security threats.

I want to talk a little bit more about your concern that, if the Justice Department obtains this information, how it could potentially have a further chilling effect on recruiting workers for future elections.

PITTS: It already has.

I have received correspondence, written correspondence from people who worked in the 2020 elections, people who were planning to work in the 2026 elections and, more importantly, in the 2028 elections.

And they are having second thoughts at this point in time because they do not want to risk the possibility of having their personal private information made public. Who knows what's going to happen to it?

In fact, I say, when that last FBI truck left our warehouse on the night of January 28, as I talk with you today, I still do not know who has those documents, where they are, or what they're doing with them. So we are definitely concerned here about continuing to be a target of the president and his allies.

BROWN: You bring up those ballots. A federal judge just said yesterday that it would not order the Justice Department to return the 2020 election ballots it seized from your elections office back in January.

You sought to retrieve those materials. Is there still a path forward for you to do that at this point?

PITTS: I think there is.

But, first of all, I mean, I'm disappointed in that ruling, but not surprised, because the judge, let's be clear, is a Trump appointee. So, even though the facts and the truth are on our side, I'm not surprised at the outcome.

But I agree with the court, though, that the warrant, that the affidavit was defective, it was problematic, and it was troubling. But what I strongly disagree with is the judge's denial of our request that the FBI return those documents to us that were seized that night.

Now, we're going to fight. We're going to fight fire with fire. We're going to use every tool at our disposal to retrieve and have those documents returned to us here in Fulton County, Georgia. I mean, they're going to be in for the fight of their lives if they think that we're going to roll over and play dead. It's not going to happen.

We think that we're the...

BROWN: What does that look like, fighting fire with fire, in this case?

PITTS: In terms of using all legal means available to us.

We have very competent in-house counsel, but we have also contracted with two outstanding nationally known attorneys who are specialists in this area. That's what I mean. We're going to fight fire with fire.

BROWN: What do you say to the argument that, if Fulton County has nothing to hide, it should just comply and let the Justice Department have all this information it's asking for to put this investigation to bed?

PITTS: Well, this goes back to the 2020 election. That's six years ago. There's a statute of limitations, five years. It's over with.

So, we believe that this is just a form of intimidation. We believe that -- we know for a fact, I mean, that 2020 election it has been reviewed. It's been audited. There's been a hand count. We have had 16 or 17 successful elections since then.

And what we really believe is going on, that all of this is leading up to what the president, when he talks about nationalizing elections, if they are able to -- once again, to beat us down here in Fulton County, they're going to take this show on the road.

That's why this is so important. That's why, when I say that I believe that democracy is at stake here, and we're going to fight and fight like hell to make sure that does not happen.

BROWN: All right, Chair Robb Pitts, thank you so much.

And coming up in our next hour, we will be joined by former Attorney General Eric Holder to discuss the current state of voting rights in the wake of last week's Supreme Court decision.

Breaking news: Iran is due at any point today to respond to the U.S. proposal to end the war. Sources tell CNN both sides are moving closer to an agreement on a short memorandum that would set a road map for negotiations.

Meantime, tensions at sea remain high, as Iran tries to formalize control over the Strait of Hormuz and would allow safe passage under what it calls new procedures.

And outside the critical maritime choke point, the U.S. military is still enforcing a blockade, preventing passage of any Iranian vessel.

So, for more perspective, let's bring in CNN military analyst retired Colonel Cedric Leighton.

Great to see you, Cedric.

President Trump continues to claim victory and that the war will be over quickly. Here's what he told reporters. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I think we won.

Now it's only a question of -- look, if we left right now Iran, it would take them 20 years to rebuild. You would call that we're in good shape, right? We're in good shape. And, now, we're doing well.

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Now, we have to get what we have to get. If we don't do that, we will have to go a big step further.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: But, with that being said, they want to make a deal. We have had very good talks over the last 24 hours. And it's very possible that we will make a deal.

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BROWN: So, in your view, has America won, given the objectives laid out in the beginning for this war?

COL. CEDRIC LEIGHTON (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, Pamela, great to be with you.

I think that the answer is a qualified no. There are certain things that the United States has done. They have, in fact, decimated the Iranian air force and the Iranian navy. But remember that Iran doesn't really work in those standard areas when it comes to measuring its power and its ability to actually effect change.

So, what the Iranians are doing is, they're gaining a strategic foothold in not only the Strait of Hormuz, but potentially regionally throughout the Middle East. And what that really means is that the actual objective of opening the Strait of Hormuz is now in question.

So, that was one of the U.S. objectives, was to make sure that the Strait of Hormuz remained open, or, in this case, is reopened. That is questionable because of this new toll regime that you mentioned.

Then we have the issue of the nuclear -- the enriched uranium that the Iranians have. There is basically nothing that's being talked about in that regard. We certainly don't have real regime change. We have a swap-out of people who are part of the same regime.

So, in the aggregate, the U.S. really hasn't won this. The best -- the best thing we can hope for, I think, at this point, is to go back to the status quo ante, in other words, the time before this war started. But, at this moment in time, that even is questionable.

BROWN: How much do the hard-liners still have a grip on Iran as we await for Iran to respond to this short memorandum that would essentially set this road map for negotiations?

LEIGHTON: Well, I think we have to remember that hard-liners or what we would think of as hard-liners are pretty powerful in Iran. And when you have a supreme leader who has -- based on most reporting,

at least, has been wounded, possibly severely wounded, in the attacks on the supreme leadership, his father has been killed, his wife has been killed, other family members have been killed or wounded, that certainly has -- has got to be a factor in hard -- making the positions harder on the Iranian side.

So you have that as one example that the Iranian position itself may be quite difficult to overcome in terms of softening things up from a diplomatic perspective. And then you also have people who are naturally averse to working with the United States or doing anything that would result in the United States gaining any type of perceived victory over this.

So this is a very difficult diplomatic issue. When you look at the difficulty of this, I would say, Pamela, that what we're looking at here is, we have to basically work with people who are varying degrees of hard-liner.

And, in this particular case, there is a possibility of a kind of tacit agreement with these folks, but, remember, we're only talking about a one-page paper that is supposed to set the stage for further negotiations. And that is definitely something where there are a lot of details that still need to be worked out.

And, as they always say, the devil is in those details.

BROWN: That's right.

All right, Colonel Cedric Leighton, great to see you, as always. Thanks so much.

And coming up here in THE SITUATION ROOM: There's a new study looking at the prevalence of Alzheimer's and why women make up so many cases. Maria Shriver joins us to talk about it.

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BROWN: And now to our women's health watch.

Could Alzheimer's be preventable? Right now, there's a renewed push to further study why women make up two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer's. And one of the people leading the push is Maria Shriver, who is co-hosting the Cleveland Clinic Global Women's Health and Women's Alzheimer's Movement Forum.

This event is focused on advanced research on women's health and will include expert-led discussions on brain health, longevity, menopause and cardiovascular health, so important.

Maria Shriver joins us now. She's the founder of the Women's Alzheimer's Movement within the Women's Comprehensive Health and Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic and the author of "I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home."

Maria, so great to have you back on the show. We're going to do a deeper dive into Alzheimer's in just a minute.

But, first, the Women's Comprehensive Health and Research Center just shared its 2026 State of Women's Health report. Tell us more about some of the most striking findings from it.

MARIA SHRIVER, FOUNDER, THE WOMEN'S ALZHEIMER'S MOVEMENT, CLEVELAND CLINIC: Well, thank you for having me, Pamela. And I know we have the shared interest in women's health and Alzheimer's. So it's always really great to talk to you.

I'm super excited about the status report on women's health in 2026, because I think it's alarming. And I think it tells us there's a crisis in women's health hiding in plain sight.

What struck me was that women were more concerned about their ability to pay for their health than they were about getting Alzheimer's, heart disease or cancer. That was their number one concern across generations. We looked at every generation, and that's what came to the top.

And I think that should alarm us all. I think it also should alarm us that women didn't realize that menopause affects every bodily system that they have, that it is in the brain, it's in the body. They didn't really understand that.

[10:50:10]

They also didn't know that they were more vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease than men, and they didn't even kind of -- they weren't aware of that. It struck me as unbelievable how few women, particularly of my generation, have been to see a gynecologist in the last year, that they don't even think about UTIs or their sexual health.

So there's a lot in here that is striking, that's concerning. But there's also information in here that women say, once they do know these things, they will change their health trajectory. So there's hope within these figures.

BROWN: Information is empowering.

You note in the report it discovered nearly half of women are concerned about affording health care more than they are about developing serious conditions like cancer or heart disease. How much is this deterring women from seeking out the care they may need because they fear the bill that comes after?

SHRIVER: Well, 100 percent. That's in a nutshell.

They don't go because they don't think they can afford it. And families across this country are making decisions like this every single day. They're making decisions about, can I eat or can I go to the doctor? If I have 15 minutes at the doctor, am I going to talk about cancer? Am I going to talk about heart disease or am I going to talk about Alzheimer's or sexual health?

They think they can maybe even talk about only one thing.

BROWN: About two-thirds of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's are women.

SHRIVER: Yes.

BROWN: But, as you well know, Maria, the research has not caught up to understand why it has this disproportionate impact on women. I know my grandmother had it. It's hit my family hard.

SHRIVER: Yes.

BROWN: How is your forum working to change that trend?

SHRIVER: What we're announcing today -- the Women's Alzheimer's Movement you mentioned that I founded many years ago was founded to try to understand why women are two-thirds of those with Alzheimer's.

We fund research into all aspects of a women's health journey, trying to understand, perhaps is there -- is it menopause that makes them more vulnerable? Is it the lack of protein that they may have? Is it an autoimmune disease? What is it that we can learn from a woman's health journey?

So I think we need to have a lot more information about a woman's health span. We need to understand how women age better. We need to understand what's happening to women at midlife. And I think this Comprehensive Center that's been built here at the Cleveland Clinic, it's been so successful.

Women are coming here in droves for answers, particularly about what is happening to them at midlife. And I think that's both concerning and also inspiring.

BROWN: You talk about midlife. Tell us more about how perimenopause and menopause factor into Alzheimer's for women, what we know from the research, because, from what I have learned, you can start developing it in this period well before you start showing the symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer's.

SHRIVER: Right.

Well, we know a lot more now because we have technology and we can look at how a woman's brain changes at perimenopause, menopause, and beyond. So we're funding a lot of research into that. We don't have the magic answer, I should say, that most women want, that most people want when it comes to Alzheimer's.

I think that we know very little about women, as I said, their entire health journey. We know, I think, that it's important to stay strong. It's important to prioritize your sleep. It's important to exercise. That build speed BDNF.

We now know that maybe half or 40 percent of Alzheimer's cases could be or can be prevented if one adopts a brain-healthy lifestyle.

BROWN: Just remind our viewers how much women's health in general has been underfunded and understudied over the years.

SHRIVER: Oh.

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BROWN: This is a big reason I focus on this too on the show.

SHRIVER: Well, this has been a huge issue of mine. It's why I partnered with President Biden and the first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, to launch a White House Initiative on Women's Health Research to bring the whole issue up to the federal government, to tell the Congress about how much -- how far behind we are when it comes to women's health and research.

And so this is a drum that every woman should be beating on, because it's not up to Republican or Democratic women. It's up to women overall to understand, to demand that we bring research up to parity. We're so far behind. It's -- I don't know what the right word is that I can say on television.

BROWN: It's unjust, at the very least.

SHRIVER: It's maddening. It's maddening.

BROWN: It's unjust.

SHRIVER: Yes, unjust. There you go.

BROWN: We are half the population. How is that possible?

SHRIVER: Half, 51 percent.

(CROSSTALK)

SHRIVER: Yes, so we need to advocate. Every single woman needs to advocate for increased funding for women's health and research, every single woman.

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BROWN: Oh, my gosh, Maria, I'm so happy about the work that you're doing and to have you on. I hope that, one day, we look back and say, I cannot believe that med school did not teach more about perimenopause...

SHRIVER: Yes.

BROWN: ... and menopause and all of the differences that we experience as women in our health...

SHRIVER: I know.

BROWN: ... up and down our bodies. SHRIVER: You know, Pamela, when I tell that to my daughters, who are

in their 30s, they're like, I can't believe there weren't women obstetricians when you had a baby. I can't believe -- so this stuff changes in real time.

BROWN: Right.

SHRIVER: But we have got to -- you have got to keep talking about it and pushing.

BROWN: And that's what we like to do on this show in having you on, Maria. Thank you so much.

SHRIVER: Thank you, Pamela.

BROWN: And coming up here in THE SITUATION ROOM, former Attorney General Eric Holder joins me here to talk about what voting rights in this country look like after last week's significant Supreme Court decision.

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