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NBA Players, Coach Arrested in Federal Gambling Probe; Family Rescued by Coast Guard After Stranding on Island; Dan Goldman Says Four American Citizens Arrested in Canal Street ICE Raid; New Photos Show the White House East Wing is Gone; More Than a Million Government Workers About to Miss First Full Paycheck; Closure Has Lasted Three Weeks, No Signs Yet for Resolution. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired October 23, 2025 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:33:55]

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": All right, we're following really bombshell news rocking the NBA right now, just days after the League tipped off its brand new season.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": That's right. Portland Trail Blazers Head Coach, Chauncey Billups; Miami Heat Star, Terry Rozier; and former player and Assistant Coach, Damon Jones are among 34 people who are named in these two sprawling investigations into illegal sports gambling and elicit poker games backed by the mafia. As if it just -- everything you say about this, it gets more and more salacious.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

KEILAR: Rozier and Billups have been placed on immediate leave by League Commissioner, Adam Silver. So let's talk about this now. Just shock waves reverberating through the League with Sportscaster Bomani Jones, who is the Host of "The Right Time with Bomani Jones" podcast. Bomani. What did you think when you heard this news?

BOMANI JONES, HOST OF "THE RIGHT TIME WITH BOMANI JONES" PODCAST: I mean, it was a slow trickle of what exactly the news was. Like, I was getting off of a plane and I hear, OK, the top-line people have been arrested. Now, the question comes down to why it is that people got arrested. And so Terry Rozier, we had whispers about this for a while, that this was coming.

[13:35:00]

And I, on this -- particularly on that part, I doubt that that's the end of what we hear about player involvement on that end. The Chauncey Billups one is the one that is shocking. Like, this is someone whose reputation around the League is pretty pristine and very well liked and very highly respected, and we literally find out that he is alleged to have done bidding on behalf of the five families. I mean, I think a lot of us didn't even realize that the five families was still how it worked. And apparently, Chauncey Billups works for them at poker games with x- ray machines? I mean, there are things in this that people did not know really happened in life.

JIMENEZ: Yeah. That was the same with me. I felt like, the NBA season just started. I was expecting to be talking about Victor Wembanyama this morning. And we can -- that's a whole separate segment. And then we wake up and it's drip by drip, as you were just talking about, one person arrested, another person arrested. And I just wonder, from a League perspective, I mean, what impact does this have on the teams implicated and the League overall? I'm sure Adam Silver, this is not what he wanted to sort of start this season off.

JONES: No, I mean, it's a catastrophe. There's no way around that. Now for the teams, I mean, it is what happens if Terry Rozier doesn't play for you anymore? That's its own thing. For the Trail Blazers, I think it's a bit of a bigger thing. Your head coach that you just extended very recently has probably coached his last game for you. The person that this matters to the most is Adam Silver. Like to me, the thought of what's going on with the teams is, I think Rozier plays for the heat (ph) now, but like what's going on with the teams is really secondary.

The question is, what does this mean for the NBA? As many times as Adam has said, "Hey, we cooperate with law enforcement when these things happen." And he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in 2014 that made the point that it was better to have sports gambling be legal because then it could be regulated. He's correct about that. But part of that regulation means you're going to have moments like these in a sport whose history has been fraught with tattered credibility, in part because of the specter of gambling.

Now, you're saying a head coach has been doing work with the mafia and that a player has been effectively shaving points in the prop bed (ph) sense. This is bad. I don't know exactly what the NBA is supposed to do to make anybody feel better about this.

KEILAR: Yeah. The question will be, as you move towards allowing things or regulating things, what's the effect, right? I mean, if the effect is this, you have to take a look at it. But Bomani, we're really looking, as you are I'm sure, at these comments from Silver on "The Pat McAfee Show" just two days ago about the impact of sports betting on the League. And he brought up what he called the worst-case scenario, which was a player potentially trying to impact their own performance where he said, "We have a framework, a structure in place to monitor, to prevent those kinds of things from happening. There's no question it introduces a whole new set of issues."

And as you mentioned, he calls for federal legislation to further regulate legal sports betting. How are you seeing those comments? I mean, for me, that brings up questions about what is the structure? Did -- has it been working? Could -- because we're seeing these indictments here. What questions do you have after those comments from two days ago?

JONES: Well, so that's the difficult part, is that when somebody gets caught, then one can easily make the argument that your safeguards are in fact working. If nobody gets caught, that's when you know they're not working. Like, the aspect -- how much is -- how much malfeasance is to be reasonably expected and just to be treated as the cost of doing business? Like that, I don't have the answer for. But I would argue that what we have here is a catastrophe, but it is not worst- case scenario.

Worst-case scenario is not Terry Rozier being alleged to be involved in something like this because most people can't pick Terry Rozier out of a lineup. Worst-case scenario is somebody that you've really, really heard of getting caught up in something like that. That's what the League really, really, really has to fear. But if this comes up too many times, it starts making people question the credibility of the product.

And once people question the credibility of the product in this game where the fundamental -- or this business rather where the fundamental integrity of the games is most important, I don't know how you turn around from that. But the issue is all these sports leagues have gotten in bed with the gambling companies in large part because they needed to recover some of that money that they lost from the pandemic. There's really no turning back from that.

Growth is essential. Growth is required. You can't give up this money unless you've got some other money that's going to come in. And what we've done is we've taken a world where the cell phone makes it such that you're online all the time. You put betting onto the cell phone, thereby that means that you're always at the casino. What that means to different people, it all depends, but the room for that to be terrible for everybody involved is really, really high.

JIMENEZ: Yeah. Bomani, appreciate the time and perspective as always. Good to see you. Thanks for being here.

JONES: Thank you.

JIMENEZ: All right, let's get to some of the other headlines we are watching this hour. New video appears to show the moment the thieves escapes the Louvre Museum. You can actually see them after Sunday's historic and brazen heist, the video shows them descending that truck- mounted lift. One person wearing all black motorcycle helmet.

[13:40:00]

The other person has on a fluorescent vest, which by the way, that's consistent with video recorded inside the gallery where the French crown jewels were taken from. You see that there, the stolen items have an estimated worth of $102 million and that's one of their clue right there, that video,

KEILAR: Sure is. Also the Coast Guard rescuing a family of three off a small island near Cape Cod. Their boat caught on fire. They had to swim to shore where they sheltered in a barn for two days. The family was saved when their son found the boat's Marine Radio washed up on shore on the island and called the Coast Guard.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Our ship went down at Tarpaulin Cove. Our ship burned while we were sleeping and we barely escaped.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JIMENEZ: A helicopter came for them soon after and rushed the family to Cape Cod Hospital. And we want to bring you an update on the ICE raid on New York's famous Canal Street, targeting illegal street vending. Democratic U.S. Congressman Dan Goldman says at least four American citizens were among those arrested on Tuesday. The four were released Wednesday without charges, according to CNN affiliate, WABC. The Department of Homeland Security says they arrested nine people in the raid who were in the country illegally, saying they had violent rap sheets including robbery, domestic violence, drug trafficking, and more charges.

And this just in as well, brand new pictures from The Associated Press. Let's take a look. Show the true extent of the ongoing demolition of the East Wing of the White House. Based on these pictures and at this hour, it appears to be gone. President Trump's project has led to questions about whether he was within his legal authority to dismantle entire sections of the executive mansion.

KEILAR: Once completed, the ballroom will be roughly 90,000 square feet, which is nearly twice the size of the White House.

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[13:46:35]

JIMENEZ: We are just a day away from a crucial deadline in this government shutdown from more than a million federal workers missing their first full paycheck. And as pundits debate which party is winning the shutdown, there's no doubt that those workers are losing as things drag out. I want to bring in Pollster and Communication Strategist, Frank Luntz, who joins us now. Good to see you, Frank.

Look, you work in polls, you work in people and data. I wonder, look, we are in Day 23 of this. What do you think will bring the most change? Is it members taking action or essentially waiting for public opinion to weigh more on one side or the other? How do you see this?

FRANK LUNTZ, POLLSTER & COMMUNICATION STRATEGIST: I've been mulling this over for the last 48 hours, trying to figure out how best to respond to you. I want to give you the answer that most Americans would give you. I want to be accurate about this and impactful about this. No side is winning. I want to be clear about what I'm saying here. No side is winning the shutdown because everyone is being punished for it, even if you don't feel it.

Now, make no mistake, Trump voters believe that Donald Trump is absolutely winning and they want him to fight just as hard, if not harder for his side in this. And the same thing on the Democratic side. Hakeem Jeffries is being absolutely advised by his own party, his own members, to keep pushing, and that no one is speaking for the sensible center. No one is speaking in terms of common sense that this is not a good look or presentation for the federal government.

The idea that we can't get along with each other, that we can't talk to each other, sit in the same room at the same time and give, because if we just give enough, everybody receives. And if we give nothing, nobody gets anything. And that's what the polling shows. But make no mistake, Trump voters love what Donald Trump is doing. And Democratic voters love what Hakeem Jeffries and to a lesser extent, the Senate Leader doing. And that's why we're in the situation that we're in right now.

JIMENEZ: And you know, some Democrats might be looking at the Reuters-Ipsos Poll from last week, 50 to 43 percent Americans blame Congressional Republicans more. There's a CNBC Poll a little bit prior to that, about two weeks ago at this point, 53 to 37 percent blaming Republicans versus Democrats more. But as you sort of lay out to me, those margins don't necessarily get to what the larger issue is right now, that even if Republicans do control the House, Senate, and White House, and maybe if those -- if that messaging or optics is breaking through a little bit more than the other, that that doesn't solve what has sort of gotten us to 23 days of this.

LUNTZ: We're going to have the longest shutdown in American history. The first shutdown of this only goes back to 1981. You and I were -- I don't know if you were, I was alive then. I remember it. It's not a part of major history. This is something that's relatively modern. But the shutdowns are getting longer and more vicious and more divisive as all of American politics is. And that we have two separate narratives going on right now, which do not in any way overlap the other.

[13:50:00]

I get it that Democrats think be tougher with Donald Trump, continue to hold these kings, no kings rallies. Continue to stand up to the things that he's saying and doing. That is the Democratic narrative and that is supported by a majority of Democrats, progressives, people on the left, just as the voters for Donald Trump appreciate and support almost unanimously his efforts to bring Washington to heal, to eliminate wasteful Washington spending, and to hold Washington accountable for what's happened, not over the last few months, but over the last few years.

And because we're not hearing each other, and CNN is the one place where people on both sides still do come together, I'm speaking for those who feel alienated and ignored and forgotten. The people who simply want Washington to get on with it, to provide an economy that everyone can benefit from, to have a foreign policy that people feel safe and secure and sound. And this is probably not where you wanted this interview to go, but you're still a place where people come for information and knowledge and even wisdom.

And so those people listening to the sound of my voice, you have to find this common ground. Senator Merkley gave a brilliant analysis of why Democrats should oppose Donald Trump. Earlier, Cory Booker did the same thing a few weeks ago. JIMENEZ: The marathon speeches, yes, on both of them. Yeah.

LUNTZ: But that is speaking to (ph) the Democrats. Yes.

JIMENEZ: And sir, just quickly before we go -- no, I don't want to cut you off. Go for it.

LUNTZ: It's simply enough.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

LUNTZ: That's the one word that we've asked the American people, one word to describe how they feel about politics right now.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

LUNTZ: ENOUGH! All caps, exclamation point.

JIMENEZ: That puts the point on it. Frank Luntz, appreciate your time and perspective. Thanks for being here.

LUNTZ: Thank you for having me.

JIMENEZ: And as we've been talking about, we are seeing the impact of the government shutdown on active military members and their families. But, what about those who used to serve the country? After the break, we're going to talk about how services aimed to help veterans are taking a hit during this stalemate. Stay with us.

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[13:57:20]

KEILAR: On Home Front today, a warning about the impact the government shutdown is having on our nation's veterans. In a letter to Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, Veterans Affairs Secretary, Doug Collins writes, "I strongly urge you and your colleagues to move forward immediately on a continuing resolution to reopen the government." And it goes on to say that veterans should never have to doubt that their nation will uphold its commitments to them.

CNN Correspondent Brian Todd is with us now. You were at the VA Medical Center in D.C. as Collins yesterday, was touring it. What did veteran services, as he's saying, are being affected by this?

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, this is Doug Collins really starting to warn everybody that veterans are really starting to suffer from the government shutdown and that more suffering could be on the way. We should probably point out here that more than 30,000 of the VA's roughly 450,000 employees are currently furloughed during the shutdown. Now, here's a look at what has been -- what has not been impacted. There are some very important services here that we should tell you have not been impacted.

Medical care, not impacted by the shutdown. All the veterans hospitals and the clinics still operational. That's of course very important. Suicide prevention services are still operational. The 24-hour Veterans Crisis Hotline is still operating. Education, disability and pension payments are still being given out, but in many cases, they're being given out by employees who themselves are not getting paid. And also, burials are still going on at cemeteries. These are being done by employees who are exempt from being furloughed. They have to come in and conduct the burials.

Now, here is what is being impacted by the shutdown regarding veteran services, and these are important things. The VA Regional Offices, these are places where veterans go to ask questions about their benefits. Those are closed right now. The GIBILL Hotline is not being staffed. For veterans who are getting out of the military and are in need of vocational counseling, those services are not available. And some very basic maintenance at the American cemeteries are also not going on although, as we mentioned, burials are still happening, Brianna.

KEILAR: Yeah. These are really important benefits.

TODD: They are, absolutely.

KEILAR: Those other ones that they have in place, you can see how they are of utmost importance, but these are still really important. You also had some really significant reporting on mental health therapy sessions that some veterans at some facilities, not all, some were reporting were being limited or cut short. Did you have a chance to talk to the VA secretary about that?

TODD: We did. We saw him at that event yesterday and we asked him about our reporting quickly. Our reporting details how some veterans hospitals have stepped up the enforcement of a previous policy that was put in place in previous administrations that limits the number of long-term mental health therapy sessions for some veterans. That's according to half dozen VA mental health care providers --