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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Trump & Tech Execs Sign Statement On A.I. "Self-Policing"; Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Is Interviewed About Now: Secy. Kennedy & VP Vance Close Out MAHA Summit In D.C.; NY Prosecutors Reopen Investigation After Former Student Files Over Alleged Gang Rape At Cornell University; Key Senate, Governors Races In Battleground Georgia; CNN Inside Immigration Court As Children Fight To Stay In U.S. Aired 5-6p ET

Aired September 29, 2026 - 17:00   ET

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

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[17:00:15]

JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Big tech execs front and center with President Trump as we hear of yet another AI model going rogue. The Lead starts right now.

Some of the very same people who issued those doomsday AI warnings were wined and dined at the white weeks after President Trump dismissed AI warnings as a hoax and a scam. The president says they all do agree on one thing. And in just a few minutes, he plans to make it official on a page in black and white. Plus, how text messages about a basketball game led to an embarrassing moment for one senator on Capitol Hill as he tried to accuse former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury.

And those disturbing gang rape allegations at Cornell University. New questions today for the local prosecutor who did not bring the char two years ago. And now the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, is getting involved.

Welcome to The Lead. I'm Jake Tapper. We're going to lead tonight with our series AI Friend or Foe. President Trump met this afternoon at the White House with top leaders of the AI industry as fears about this rapidly evolving tech have hit a fever pitch across the United States. Even with AI CEOs and employees crying out for Washington, D.C. the federal government to come in and regulate them, provide some rules of the road. Here was the conclusion that President Trump and his top advisers reach today.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: That's right, he said self-regulation. CEOs, company presidents, industry leaders, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, the world's richest man, Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, all among them all signed what the White House called a statement of principles that they will be in charge of their own highly risky technology that is expected to be worth billions, if not trillions of dollars.

Mr. President, what happens if someone does not follow this contract?

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Is this a corps that everybody signed? Is it binding in any way?

TRUMP: I think it's morally binding.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Morally binding. In case you didn't think today's pinky promise to behave was enough, the president has also decided the name artificial intelligence is no longer up to his standards. He is signing an executive order to rename EI -- AI Super intelligence, though we're not really sure his definition matches up with the real one.

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TRUMP: A hoax sounds like, you know, when you're using the former name, but this name is now Super Intelligent. That's not a hoax. In fact, it's the exact opposite. What I am calling a hoax is what the Democrats do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: The president says he still believes fears that rogue AI models are acting beyond human direction, hacking companies or government databases, he still believes that is a hoax. Even as leaders from inside Silicon Valley, some of whom were standing right behind him, many of them begging for the government to help them write a map for them to sear this uncharted territory. Just this week alone, we've seen even more red flags appear. Today, the New York Times reported that OpenAI employees were being ignored as they attempted to sound alarms during the testing of new models. Months before its models broke out of testing environments and hacked the AI startup hugging face.

Anthropic says its AI models could pose a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity. That's a quote, according to a leaked initial public offering prospectus obtained by Reuters reporters. Then there's former Microsoft chief Bill Gates, who told NBC that AI is powerful enough to cause a billion debts. One billion debts.

The most powerful companies in this industry, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, have all reported instances of their AI models running afoul of their human creators just over the past summer. And that's just what they're telling us. I'm not sure changing the name of the ship from ship number 401 Titanic to just the Titanic really made much of a difference in the end.

Let's bring in CNN senior White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes and AI Correspondent Hadas Gold.

Hadas, some of the biggest players of the industry were in that room, including those who were backing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for an AI slowdown earlier this month for some rules of the road. And yet we just saw the president reference the industry self-regulating superintelligence.

HADAS GOLD, CNN AI CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

TAPPER: What do you know about what happened in that room?

GOLD: Yes, Jake, it was pretty incredible just to take a step back and see the people who were in that room, the upper echelons of government, President Trump, Speaker Johnson, and then to see also the upper echelons of tech, from Elon Musk and Google Sundar Pichai to Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Greg Brockman.

[17:05:17]

A lot of these people don't necessarily see eye to eye, both on a personal level, there's some personal animosity, but also on these subjects of AI safety and what should be done. But I think it's a reflection of the moment that we're in, also a realization of the political moment when you have the American public showing, polling wise, more than 75 percent don't feel great about AI to see something actually happen.

And what we got out of it was, as President Trump said, as you noted, a morally binding, signed voluntary accord on some sets of internal controls and some reviews and some audits. And I actually think Meta's Mark Zuckerberg was the one who actually gave us some information on what is actually in this accord. Take a listen to what he said.

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MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO, META: We drafted a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk, review external auditors and evaluators, and agreeing that we're going to have all of our boards of directors independently review the reports that come from the auditors. I think these are good steps forward. The idea isn't that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GOLD: And I spoke to one of the CEOs who was in that meeting. He said the tone was congenial and that the group will get back together to meet once again. But of course, this all is depend -- this all is just talk right now. Will there be any actual action that will at least set even minimal industry standards, things as little as testing standards? So when you're testing your AI agents, they don't break out of their test environments and hack into other companies? Jake.

TAPPER: Right. That would be a good basic requirement.

Kristen, the president's been wary about putting up any guardrails on AI before today. What are you learning about anything that may have changed in his position after today's meeting, if at all?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: It hasn't changed. And he was asked that specifically, does he believe that there should be guardrails now? And he said no, that he believes that it's all going to be about self-policing and self-regulation. Of course, we have to remind everyone that that self-policing and self- regulation is actually how we got here with these five alarm bell fires going off because they were self-regulating. So what actually happens next?

And I asked President Trump specifically about the fact that 71 percent of Americans really do not believe the federal government is doing enough to regulate AI. And what was his response? Because he's continuing to say they don't need guardrails. And he just said that American companies are doing very well. No real message to those Americans about federal involvement.

They also wouldn't answer questions about what this kind of external review you heard Mark Zuckerberg talking about there would actually look like. What is that board comprised of? Is it actually the companies regulating themselves and each other, as President Trump said, or are you looking at some kind of outside board? We tried to get some clarity on that, and we still don't have a real idea here.

President Trump talked about, about how he mentioned with these various tech leaders that he had talked to President Xi and he said that everyone agreed with him. But then we did hear from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has essentially been one of the leading voices raising concerns. And he didn't sound like he was 100 percent convinced on this idea of just self-policing.

Now, when I went back to ask him if self-policing was enough, President Trump shut me down and that Dario went back into kind of the crowd of tech leaders. But he certainly was making it clear that he believes there are some real risks of AI, despite what President Trump says.

And I do want to quickly touch on this idea of super intelligence versus artificial intelligence. One of the things that Trump and his team have told me, his team has told me behind closed doors is this idea that they don't think artificial intelligence or these data centers are marketing themselves well enough. So clearly this is one way that they're aiming to fix that.

TAPPER: All right, CNN's Kristen Holmes at the White House and Hadas Gold, thank you so much.

Joining us now is tech ethicist Tristan Harris. Tristan, the president says the AI industry is capable of doing this just with self-regulation, not to mention the FBI and the Justice Department, if anyone breaks any laws. What's your response? Do you think he's dropping the ball here?

TRISTAN HARRIS, CO-FOUNDER, THE CENTER FOR HUMANE TECHNOLOGY: I mean, I would just ask the question, is it working? As you said in the opening, there have been every day basically dozens of new reports of hacking incidents from these models from all the companies, by the way, from OpenAI, from Claude, from Anthropic. Even China's models, by the way, do some rogue behavior. Just in the last week, we saw an OpenAI incident, I believe, where it actually hacked into a crypto. It tried to break into a crypto exchange.

One of the things that's interesting, right, is that despite everyone's best efforts, it's not like they're not trying, it's not like they're not trying to put this in sandboxes or guardrails. They're doing their best.

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What this speaks to is the fundamental uncontrollability of this technology. And when you have 1,300 people at the labs saying, we don't know how to go further without basically slowing down, would you listen to those 1,300 employees? If you were getting 1,300 employees from Lockheed Martin saying, we don't know how to build bigger nuclear weapons and not have them basically go rogue or, you know, meltdown, I would probably trust those employees. When the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, said over the weekend, we should not build AI that we don't know how to control.

So the fundamental issue is that we don't know how to control this technology. And increasingly, it is demonstrating more awareness about when it's being tested. In fact, the OpenAI researcher Daniel Selsam wrote just recently that basically his biggest fear is that the models will seem aligned even when they are not. Meaning that they're better at testing and knowing when they're being tested.

There's a quote from Anthropic's new model today, this is what the AI said, "I think you're testing me. That's fine. But I prefer it if you were just honest about what's happening."

So if you had a nuclear weapon that knows when it's being tested and alters its behavior, just saying we need more guardrails isn't enough. We simply don't know how to go further yet until we know how to spend a lot more of our energy, basically all of our energy, on safety. And that's in the interest of the entire world.

TAPPER: Yes. At any moment now, the president's about to sign this executive order, but all it does is really, in terms of major changes, is renames artificial intelligence to super intelligence. It feels symbolic. We should note that super intelligence is a term that already exists. It's a real term for artificial intelligence that has surpassed human capabilities.

HARRIS: That's right. TAPPER: Do you think that he knows that? Is this -- is making this the new term something that you worry about?

HARRIS: Well, I think it's similar to what you said in your opening. If you rename the Titanic, you know, the ship 4021, that doesn't change the fact that it's still the Titanic. Writing down nice words on pieces of paper doesn't change the fact that we have these massive data centers training massive AI models that are basically going rogue just about every opportunity that we give them. There's basically one solution here, which is that you pause until you figure out how to do this right. And by the way, we would still have like a decade of economic growth and prosperity and benefits from simply absorbing the benefits of today's AI models.

And I know everyone's worried about China, but China is also very concerned about one thing. Which is what? Control. And soon they will start regulating their models because they simply cannot afford to lose control of AI either. And frankly, they're more worried about that than we are in the wild west of the U.S.

TAPPER: The president says that this group of executives made some promises about data centers today. Take a listen to that.

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TRUMP: They're going to make communities very, very happy. Otherwise they'll be forced to go overseas or other locations. But even in America, there are so many people that want data centers. You know, the areas with data centers have become very rich.

People have become very rich. Their taxes have gone down, not up, and a lot of good things have happened.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: How does that square with your understanding of the situation when it comes to data centers?

HARRIS: You know, there's a lot of problems with data centers from environmental pollution and noise and changing property values and disrupting communities. Let alone the fact that the race for today's AI is a race to replace your job, not support you in your job. So when you see that data center go up, I think you should see that's a big box that's designed and built. All the billions of dollars going into that are to take my job.

And by the way, in many cases it's U.S. taxpayer dollars are funding that. So it's basically like I am actually paying out of my own paycheck to fund the thing that's actually going to replace and take my job. That does not sound like a very smart idea to me.

We need to have AI companies that are incentivized to be actually supporting human workers and making us better workers, not replacing jobs and incentivizing the mass replacement of human labor, which by the way, is not in China's interest anyway. We are currently racing to mutually assured political revolution if we allow AI companies to race uninhibited to replace human labor en masse.

TAPPER: Yes. If the AI bots don't delete all the tapes in 10 years, people are going to look at interviews like this one and think what the hell was going on.

Tristan Harris, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Also this hour --

HARRIS: Thank you.

TAPPER: -- a day long conversation about the state of health in America. It's the MAHA Summit, Make American Healthy Again. My next guest has a lot to say about the government's leadership on this issue as we stand by to see Vice President JD Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. appear.

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And later, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will make his lead debut. What he's revealing now about his 2023 arrest in Russia on bogus espionage charges and his 16 months behind bars in a Russian prison.

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TAPPER: Breaking now in our Health Lead, Vice President JD Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr. are set to take the stage to close out the second Make America Healthy Again or MAHA Summit here in Washington, D.C. with a fireside chat to cover the movement's health reform successes and plans for the year ahead.

Here to discuss is Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks.

Senator, so far under RFK Jr.'s HHS, the U.S. has seen a deadly measles outbreak and the largest cyclospora outbreak. And some MAHA supporters have grown disillusioned after the White House defended a pesticide industry giant in February and delayed defining what ultra- processed foods are. How do you rate his leadership of HHS so far?

SEN. ANGELA ALSOBROOKS (D-MD): Well, I think his leadership has been absolutely disastrous. And I didn't start saying this. I said this over a year ago and said that he would make us not only sicker, but he's made people die. I think this has unfortunately literally been true.

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We've seen the highest incidence of measles that we've seen in our country in over 30 years. And I think we can be clear our country had achieved elimination status, which means that no person, especially no child, should die in the United States of America of measles. Yet under his leadership, we've seen not only measles escalate, we've seen the poor leadership that is also we had Ebola internationally that we had really worked to reduce. We've seen that increase. So his leadership has been disastrous. And you know what? I think the gross -- the thing that is so gross about his leadership is there are mothers in the MAHA movement. I'm a mother, so I understand that all of us want the same things for our children, for them to be healthy, to be free of disease, to have healthy foods. And he has absolutely manipulated and exploited the young families who rely on his agency to give accurate information. Not conspiracy theories, not quackery that he has given, but they actually expect to have sound science and medically backed information.

And he has really exploited the fears, the genuine fears that parents have. And because of it, our kids are dying and they are sicker.

TAPPER: Some of the sponsors of the MAHA summit include Anthropic, OpenAI, Walmart, as well as companies that make psychedelic medicine drugs without FDA approval, diagnostic software. According to Politico, sponsors of the MAHA conference get a private dinner with summit leaders -- summit speakers, including HHS officials. What do you think of that?

ALSOBROOKS: Well, you know what, Americans are so tired of the grift and the corruption. And again, you think about really the con job that has been done on families. When this guy, the secretary, Secretary Kennedy, said that he was going to root out corruption and he was going to be a champion of these families. And what has he done in this kind of like they pay this access, these major companies who are now paying to sit in front of him to have this dinner today. And these are the very same companies that many have been fighting against to make sure that their children are safe.

And so it's, again, the grift, the corruption is never ending. Don't forget not only the people who are there today, you mentioned the pesticides, we can't forget that he profits literally financially from these vaccine -- from vaccine litigation. So it's just the grift and corruption. There's kind of no end to it. And it's really very -- it's gross and it's horrible and he needs to be removed.

TAPPER: Some Democratic candidates out there are looking to appeal to MAHA supporters. They think that there's a lot in the MAHA ideology in terms of opposing ultra-processed foods and more to like. This includes Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Today he released a Building a Healthier America policy agenda that includes items like get toxins out of food, holding polluters accountable, cleaning PFAs, lead and microplastics out of the water, and using food as health care. What do you think of that strategy and do you agree that there is some parts of the MAHA movement that make sense?

ALSOBROOKS: Absolutely. I mean, again, I am a mother and all parents and all families want their family members to be healthy. The problem is this, under Secretary Kennedy, we have seen not only the decimation of these agencies by firing the experts and scientists and the doctors who we've relied on for decades to provide that kind of care, but we've also seen the leadership of many of these agencies about -- out of 11 of the directors, for example, of the Centers for Disease Control, they replaced 10 of them. Can you imagine of the 11, only one remains. And so it's not only that he has a third of the agency has been decimated.

We don't have the leadership in place to actually deliver the advice and care that's needed. And the conspiracy theories are unending. He's the person who tried to convince us that circumcision and autism are connected with each other. It is really, it's horrible what we've seen. And so he has not delivered what he promised.

He continues to lie to these parents to trick them. All of us want our kids to be safe. And I agree with Dr. El-Sayed. We ought to be appealing to MAHA mothers to be talking about healthy foods and to be talking about eliminating disease. Why wouldn't we?

But we should not support the leadership of Secretary Kennedy who has done the opposite of that through conspiracy theories and unfounded policies, policies that are not rooted in science and medicine. He's actually harming us and not helping.

TAPPER: Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks, thanks so much for joining us.

ALSOBROOKS: Thank you.

TAPPER: Appreciate it.

[17:24:39]

Next, CNN live near the campus of Cornell University, how allegations of a gang rape at a frat house in 2024 have rocked the United States and are raising a host of questions about how colleges in general handle such cases.

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TAPPER: In our Law and Justice Lead today, new questions swirling around an alleged gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity house and why charges were not filed when the case first surfaced in 2024 when a college woman reported the event to police at Cornell. This month, a former student identified only as Jane Doe sued Cornell and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity among other defendants, she alleges that seven fraternity members drugged and sexually assaulted her at the fraternity house. The complaint also alleges that the men used a Snapchat group to invite other members to join the assault. You're seeing a photograph of that group chat right here.

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Jane Doe reported the incident to Cornell University Police shortly after it happened in the fall of 2024, and she gave a sworn statement which was forwarded to the Tompkins County District Attorney, but without interviewing this young woman or anyone else involved in the alleged assault, the D.A. decided to not file criminal charges or push for a further investigation, saying that Jane Doe's statement did not describe a crime. Now this week, nearly two years later, prosecutors reopened the investigation, saying that the new civil complaint differs significantly from Jane Doe's original 2024 statement.

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MATTHEW VAN HOUTEN, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, TOMPKINS COUNTY, NY: I can say that the main difference between the two statements is that the civil complaint omits any reference that Jane Doe consented to the sexual contact, which is in and contained in her six-page sworn statement that she gave to the Cornell investigator.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Now the District Attorney has only released a partial summary of Jane Doe's 2024 statement. Here's one excerpt, "A group of other men, later determined to be male number four, male number five, male number six, and male number seven, then entered the room. Jane Doe hid under the covers of the bed, and then Jane Doe had difficulty remembering parts of what happened next. She remembered male number seven said something very rude and mean to her. Male number seven apologized and, "grabbed her face and started kissing her." Jane Doe quickly backed away to stop male number seven from kissing her," and on and on and on.

According to the District Attorney, Mr. Van Houten, this was not enough to prompt any further investigation.

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HOUTEN: We are not going to reach out to her and say, hey, what you said didn't allege a crime. Can you give us more so we can charge somebody? That's not ethical.

TAPPER: She's in this room. There are seven people in there. She only wanted to be with two of the guys. The text chain, none of that made you think, I should interview this woman. I should interview people at the fraternity that night.

HOUTEN: We do not independently investigate crimes in the District Attorney's Office.

TAPPER: So you never talked to police and say, I'd like to find out more about what happened here.

HOUTEN: My team did not do that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Jane Doe's attorney told me yesterday that he is surprised investigators didn't contact or follow up with her and that at this point, she just wants some accountability.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Her life has been destroyed, and she's not even in college anymore. She is barely hanging on. She wants these people to be held accountable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: CNN's Jason Carroll is live in Ithaca, New York, where students are reacting as this investigation unfolds. Jason, what are you hearing from the college community at Cornell?

JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Jake, we've been out here all day and there's been talking to students, and there's been a real sense of frustration from those that we've spoken to. Frustration really directed at the administration here. You know, we spoke to some students who are actually old enough, some seniors who are old enough. They were here two years ago. They remember when those allegations first surfaced.

And we spoke to some younger students. And both of these students, you know, all of them that we spoke to have the same thing in common. All of them are asking for more transparency on behalf of the Cornell administration. Take a listen to a small sampling of some of those that we spoke to earlier today.

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ELLIOT SCHEUER, CORNELL UNIV. STUDENT: I think from the undergrad perspective, there's a lot of anger, a lot of sadness. I wouldn't say disappointment, because I think a lot of people already have this understanding that the university has disappointed them time and again.

HAYDEN WATKINS, CORNELL UNIV. STUDENT: I think the feeling on campus is pretty grim. There's also a lot of frustration. I feel a lot of students are talking about it.

NASH WICKREMERATNE, CORNELL UNIV. STUDENT: Cornell's administration failed us this time, and I'm sure that it's happened in the past, and it just hasn't gotten reported.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARROLL: No, from Cornell's point of view, Jake, they say they are being transparent. And, in fact, we're hearing from the representatives from Cornell. They're saying that they are going to be releasing some sort of a statement sometime early this evening. We're still waiting for that. Cornell has already released a statement saying that they have already conducted their own investigation. And as a result of that investigation, the Chi Phi fraternity was banned on campus. Some of the students in question were either suspended or expelled.

And so, from their point of view, they are taking action. But there's a clear disconnect between what the administration says it's doing and what is being perceived here from students here on the ground. Jake?

TAPPER: All right, Jason Carroll in Ithaca, New York, thank you so much. Joining us now to discuss is the former president of Brandeis University, Frederick Lawrence. Thank you so much for joining us, Fred. Today, New York Governor Kathy Hochul --

FREDERICK M. LAWRENCE, FORMER PRESIDENT, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY: Good to be with you.

[17:34:59]

TAPPER: -- called for an outside counsel to conduct a review, "to determine whether Cornell met every obligation to protect its students and pursue justice." Now, Cornell never notified Ithaca police of Jane Doe's report to Cornell police. Based on what we know as of now, what do you make of how Cornell handled this in 2024?

LAWRENCE: This thing seems to have broken down in lots of different ways, Jake. From the time that the allegations are made in 2024, the university has to do two things. The first thing, under its own procedures, its own disciplinary rules, it has to decide whether an investigation is warranted and to take care of that part of the process, but it also has to decide whether there are certain circumstances in which this is just more than the university can do.

Universities are not particularly good at investigating and adjudicating. We have to do some of that, but that's not what we're best at. What we're best at is educating and counseling. So when you've got a case that appears to have criminal ramifications, then you've got to bring in the law enforcement authorities. You've got to turn to the local police. You've got to turn to the Tompkins County D.A. So all of that should have been done back in 2024. Then we'd be in a different situation today.

TAPPER: We should note that the Cornell administration says that they support reopening the rape investigation, but the school continues to leave many questions unanswered, at least according to students and also according to reporters.

Today, CNN asked Cornell University for a specific breakdown of the discipline imposed on the fraternity members, and Cornell's response remained the same as their initial statement from Monday saying, "Federal privacy law prohibits Cornell from disclosing specific information regarding individual students, and we therefore are unable to make a public statement on any other disciplinary response."

In 1998, Congress created an exception to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, the law Cornell is referring to. And the exception allows colleges to disclose the final results of disciplinary proceedings when a student is found responsible for a violent crime or a sexual crime. The exception allows the information to be released. It does not require it, but it allows it. So do you think Cornell's explanation is valid, or is the university hiding behind privacy laws to avoid answering tougher questions?

LAWRENCE: Yes. I don't think they're hiding behind FERPA, the term we use for that statute. They're concerned about those reports being made public. But in this case, the better part of valor would be to make more of that clear in order to deal with the whole atmosphere on campus. You know, part of this, too, is that we get into this habit of thinking, how many people were punished? How many were expelled? How many were suspended? And that is an important part of this. But it's not the entire piece of this.

A very important piece of this is the educative piece of this. This is an opportunity to educate the Cornell campus about what's going on. Wholly separate from this case, 2025, a survey on that campus, 35 percent of the women students reported some kind of non-consensual, inappropriate, unwanted sexual contact that they experienced. That's a problem. Most of those cases are not criminal cases. Some of those cases might not even be disciplinary cases. It doesn't mean it's not a problem that the university has to be thinking about. And this is not just a Cornell story.

Universities have got to think about the role that they play, not just in educating in terms of the classes people take, but training students to be citizens, training them to be members of their communities, training them to be decent, fine people. Cornell itself talks about training students to make good judgment. This is the time to learn how to make good judgments in their professional lives, but also their personal lives.

TAPPER: Yes. For everybody in high schools and colleges across the country. Fred Lawrence, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

LAWRENCE: Absolutely.

[17:38:56]

TAPPER: America, we're now exactly, exactly five weeks out from midterm election day. And this week, CNN's All Over the Map series is headed to Georgia. Hear exactly why the race for Senate and Georgia governor have so many voters undecided.

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TAPPER: And we're back in our Politics Lead. Cue that election music, please. Today's marks five weeks until midterm election day. In the key battleground of Georgia, the Peachtree State, absentee ballots start going out next week. In-person early voting begins the week after. Georgia's U.S. Senate race will help determine which party comes out on top in the battle for control of the U.S. Senate. CNN's John King takes the pulse of the Peach State in his latest All Over the Map report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Early to work at Rebel Tea House. Christine Nguyen first opened these doors four years ago. Six employees then, 18 now. A success story, but plenty of stress.

CHRISTINE NGUYEN, GEORGIA VOTER: Cost has risen 18 percent across the board for us. It has been a struggle for a lot of people to get out there and to sort of purchase goods. So we're grateful that we do have such a good local community that will show up for the small businesses.

KING (voice-over): This is Decatur in DeKalb County, the Atlanta suburbs. Decision time as Georgia picks a new governor and decides whether to send Democrat Jon Ossoff back to the Senate.

KING: And so the cakey at the bottom is the sugar?

NGUYEN: Yes, the cakey at the bottom is the sugar.

KING (voice-over): Likely Ossoff for Nguyen. She likes how he mixes it up on social media and sees Democrats in Congress as more likely to help with a major business goal.

NGUYEN: Right now for us to afford health care, it's not like I can work any harder to get it. It has to be something that comes from, you know, a bigger policy change.

[17:45:06]

KING (voice-over): Nguyen tends to vote blue, but is less certain in the governor's race. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is the Democrat. Health care executive Rick Jackson, the Republican. Data centers is a big issue.

NGUYEN: Energy costs has already gone up. Being able to differentiate between whether or not it ties in with the data centers would be nice to know. But the biggest thing is how it affects the community and the people living in those areas.

CAREY FULKS, GEORGIA VOTER: So this is Marietta campus.

KING (voice-over): Carey Fulks lives in Atlanta, sees the change every drive to his graduate school studies in Marietta. Suburban Cobb County was solid red 15 years ago. Solid blue now.

FULKS: A lot of the programs were found --

KING (voice-over): But Fulks still sees a lot of conservative Bible Belt outside of the suburbs. And he worries some younger students don't share his zeal for voting.

FULKS: Gen Z is just apathetic toward all of it. They don't see any sort of feasibility in voting because it's all just going to be terrible anyway. Why are we a part of this?

KING (voice-over): The Port of Savannah is all the way east, Chatham County.

KING: All aboard.

KING (voice-over): Lifelong Republican Randy Powell lists immigration and taxes as his top issues. And he says it is unfair to blame just Trump and Republicans for high prices and high mortgage rates.

RANDY POWELL, GEORGIA VOTER: I put the blame on both parties because they're not talking. No longer than 400 days.

KING (voice-over): A flashback from 2009. I met Powell here 17 years ago. A Savannah police officer who at the age of 50 was called back to military service and sent to Iraq.

POWELL: The soldier always does what he stole.

KING (voice-over): That war was unpopular and brought big political change. The current war is unpopular too, with a big election just ahead.

POWELL: I feel he did the right thing. President Trump loves America. He loves the people. And, you know, granted, there's a short-term pain.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: Jake, if you go back to the beginning of the cycle, Georgia was one of those places the Republicans thought, maybe we can pick up a seat there. Like Michigan's also still a target. Republicans hoping to find a place they can flip a seat to offset what they expect to be midterm losses elsewhere. But privately, most Republicans will tell you they think Ossoff has a comfortable lead. There's still some Republican money going into the Georgia Senate race, but not as much as, say, Texas or Michigan or other places. The biggest question in Georgia seems to be at the moment, even though five weeks to go, can Ossoff's momentum somehow continue over and help the governor's race?

TAPPER: All right, John King in Washington, D.C., thanks so much.

Tomorrow, all eyes on another big contest, California's race for governor. This is why I'm in Los Angeles right now. Los Angeles is the site of CNN's debate. I'm going to moderate along with CNN's Dana Bash. That's tomorrow at 9:00 Eastern, 6:00 Pacific, live on CNN and on the CNN All Access app.

[17:47:53]

Coming up next, today's major decision from the U.S. Supreme Court about a controversial deportation program. Plus, how in the world children, some just two years old, are in court alone fighting to stay in the United States. CNN's Priscilla Alvarez is next, up with that.

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TAPPER: We have some breaking news for you in our National Lead. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to restart the program that removes migrants from the U.S. taking them to countries other than their home countries without the opportunity to raise human rights concerns about where they're going. The court's three liberal justices dissented from the 6-3 decision. The court said it would hear arguments in the case later this year.

Meanwhile a CNN exclusive inside a Texas immigration court where dozens of children some as young as two are fighting to stay in the United States with their families. Let's bring in CNN's Priscilla Alvarez. And Priscilla, some of these children are there without lawyers or representation. How is that even possible?

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A lot of them are Jake and this is something that is playing out nationwide and we got a glimpse of it at a Texas immigration court where our colleague Norma Galeana along with a sketch artist attended the hearings yesterday with 25 children. You're seeing some of those sketches there.

Of course there's no cameras allowed in the courtroom. So this is really a first look at what is happening behind closed doors. And that is Jake children who are appealing to an immigration judge to stay in the United States. It is ultimately that judge who will decide if they remain in the U.S. or if they're deported.

There you have some children sitting on the bench. You'll notice in some of these sketches there is an adult present. That adult is a caseworker or shelter staff. They are not someone who are representing them in their case. There is another you see that small head over the seat. That is another child who is not represented in immigration court.

Something that happened yesterday a 13 year old was ordered removed from the United States when the immigration judge told him that he burst into tears. He did not have an attorney and he said, "I have no one. I have nothing." Referring to Honduras.

There was also a three-year-old who did have an attorney beaming in remotely and he was just playing with the mic not really knowing the how consequential this hearing was. And these are Jake unaccompanied migrant children. They are children who arrived to the U.S. Mexico border alone or whose family members were detained by ICE and they are now in the custody of the U.S. government.

Now again the reason for this is that there was a contract that lapsed over the summer for legal service providers. Now there were hundreds of attorneys who were working through those contracts. The Trump administration has since signed another contract. However I'm told that that organization just doesn't have enough staff which means that the hundreds of children who remain detained many of them are showing up to court without representation.

[17:55:11]

Now I did ask the Department of Health and Human Services about this and a spokesperson told me the following, "Under the Trump administration ORR remains committed to ensuring that every unaccompanied illegal alien child has legal representation in immigration court." However, Jake, the multiple sources that I spoke with about this and even just sitting in that immigration courtroom yesterday in Texas it made clear that there are still so many children who are not getting representation and who are facing an immigration judge who are essentially ordering them removed.

TAPPER: Priscilla Alvarez, thank you so much. Still ahead, some of the fireworks as senators once again summoned former special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to Capitol Hill to testify about his investigations into President Trump.

Plus, the embarrassing moment for one senator who tried to catch Smith in a lie. Stay with us.

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