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Top Energy Officials Planning White House Meeting to Attempt to Dissuade Trump from Testing Nuclear Weapons; Interview with Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA): House Expected to Vote Next Week on Releasing Epstein Files; Trump Administration Sues to Stop California from Redistricting; Anthropic: Chinese Hackers Used Its System in First AI- Led Hack. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired November 14, 2025 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: We have exclusive new reporting. CNN is learning top energy and nuclear officials are planning to meet at the White House in the coming Days in an attempt to dissuade President Trump from resuming testing of the nation's nuclear weapons. It's the latest sign of fallout after President Trump instructed officials via social -- via social media to resume testing of nuclear weapons. I want to bring in CNN's Betsy Klein to talk about this.

Betsy, what are these officials saying?

BETSY KLEIN, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Brianna, you might remember that absolutely stunning announcement from President Trump on social media just moments before he was set to meet with China's leader, Xi Jinping, in Asia just a couple of weeks ago, that he was directing the Pentagon to immediately begin testing of U.S. nuclear weapons on an equal basis, and that would mark a major shift in U.S. policy. The U.S. has not tested nuclear weapons since about 1992 during the Clinton administration. The U.S. does today, however, test every part of its nuclear weapons systems except for the explosive material in those nuclear weapons.

Trump recently told 60 Minutes when asked about this that he was doing so because Russia's President Vladimir Putin had announced that Russia had successfully tested a Poseidon nuclear torpedo, and he said, I don't want to be the only country that doesn't test.

But now we are learning that top energy and nuclear officials are set to brief the White House and the National Security Council in the coming days in an attempt to steer the president away from this. Two sources familiar with the matter say that Energy Secretary Chris Wright, along with the National Nuclear Security Administration leader Brandon Williams, as well as officials from the U.S. national laboratories, are planning to inform the White House in this meeting that they do not think that blowing up weapons for nuclear testing is a tenable strategy.

These officials, according to one source, are prepared to tell the Trump administration that there's, quote, not going to be any testing, an attempt to steer the White House into what they feel is a more workable plan, according to these sources, that doesn't involve blowing anything up. But a White House official noted that all testing remains on the table. Ultimately, this is going to be the president's decision.

But we do expect the president to head this way to Florida in the coming hours. We'll see if he weighs in on this -- Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, we'll be looking for that. Betsy Klein, live for us in West Palm Beach, thank you -- Jessica.

JESSICA DEAN, CNN HOST: President Trump is not happy as Congress prepares to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. In a new social media post, the president accuses Republicans of caving to Democratic pressure saying quote, "Some weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat and he is the Democrats' problem, not the Republicans' problem."

Joining us now from California, Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley. Congressman, thank you so much for coming here and being here with us this afternoon. We appreciate it.

I want to start first with this potential vote. You did not support the discharge petition.

[15:35:00]

How are you planning to vote next week?

REP. KEVIN KILEY (R-CA): I'm going to vote yes. I mean, I've said all along I'm for, you know, total transparency here, consistent with protecting the victims. And so this is going to be coming for a yes up or down vote on the House floor next week.

And I plan to vote yes.

DEAN: Your Republican colleague Thomas Massey told our Kaitlan Collins that in his words, he expects a deluge of Republicans to vote yes. I'm curious what you're hearing from your colleagues.

KILEY: Honestly, I don't really know. I think it'll pass and it'll probably pass by a comfortable margin. I think that, you know, everyone generally agrees that the victims deserve answers.

The American public deserves answers. And it'd be best to just get total transparency here so that we can all move on. I mean, I think that when you're talking about the victims who have been through such trauma and have suffered, they deserve answers, but they probably don't want to continue to have to see the scumbag Epstein's name on the front page of the paper every day.

I think that's probably true of the broader American public as well. They think we should have transparency. We should get answers here and we should move on.

DEAN: And so I'm assuming based on your answer there that, that -- that bit I read I read from President Trump where he says some weak Republicans have fallen into the Democrats clutches because they're soft and foolish that you would not agree with that assessment from the president.

KILEY: Well, I don't really think this is an issue of Democrats, Republicans. I mean, obviously, it's become this kind of hyper politicized thing that people have used for their purposes, which has been kind of off putting to me. I think when you're talking about, you know, victims who have suffered immensely, who have been through such trauma, this is a matter that should be treated with the utmost sensitivity, which is why I think it was appropriate to have a pretty thorough process of figuring out, OK, how do we have transparency consistent with protecting the rights and the privacy and the sensitivity of the victims?

And so, you know, now that it's coming for an up or down vote on the House floor, though, I think you're going to have, you know, a fair amount of bipartisan agreement that the best thing here is to have transparency so we can get answers.

DEAN: I also want to ask you about the fallout following the vote on Prop 50. That was something you were very outspoken against generally not doing any sort of redistricting in the middle of the 10 year stretch. The Trump administration has sued to stop California's redistricting effort.

They argue that the Prop 50 map is racially gerrymandered. What do you think about that?

KILEY: I think it's appropriate to test this in federal court. I mean, the Texas map is also being tested in federal court. The thing is that under our old system, when we had an independent redistricting commission, they were actually required at the very beginning of their process of drawing a map to assure that there was no racial discrimination, that it complied with the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that it complies with the Living Rights Act.

But when you have a politician gerrymandered map like this new Prop 50 map, none of that was actually done. So of course it's appropriate to test to make sure that the map complies with all legal and constitutional requirements. But I'm certainly not counting on that.

I'm preparing to run for reelection and win under this new map. But what I'm also doing is working on legislation to end gerrymandering in this country in every single state. I think it's wrong wherever it occurs, whether that's Texas, whether that's California, whether that's some other state.

And I think that this redistricting war that we have going on right now is particularly damaging to the country.

DEAN: And as you note, the redistricting there in California would impact your seat. But do you think this -- do you agree with the Trump administration that this particular map is racially gerrymandered?

KILEY: Well, I certainly agree that that claim needs to be tested in court. These legal issues are actually really complicated when you look at the interplay between the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause and even the 15th Amendment. And as I was saying, you know, when we had an independent redistricting commission in California, they were required in a public and transparent way to go through that legal analysis to make sure that the map that they were drawing did not have any sort of unlawful racial discrimination or did not run afoul of the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.

So if you didn't have some sort of federal action here in court, then that would never actually be tested. And we'd have a map that would go into effect without having assured compliance with federal voting rights laws. So I think it's perfectly appropriate to test it.

If it can be shown that, in fact, there was racial discrimination, then, of course, the map can't stand. But I'm proceeding on the assumption that the map that just was adopted by Prop 50 will be the map used in California in 2026.

DEAN: I also want to ask you about these health care ACA subsidies, which, of course, were at the heart of this government shutdown. I know you and your Democratic colleague, Sam Liccardo, have proposed a two-year extension of the ACA subsidies with reforms built in, including capping the eligibility, among some other reforms.

[15:40:00]

How confident are you you can get some traction on that when some Republicans are saying they only want reforms, they don't want extensions or other variations on that?

KILEY: Yes, I think we already have traction. We have co-authors on both sides of the aisle. And we have a lot of people on both sides who have come out and said, we think that this cliff that our constituents are going to experience needs to be avoided.

I mean, it's not the fault of the 22 million Americans who are going to see their premiums double, that Congress hasn't taken action to control health care costs. So they shouldn't be forced to pay the price for that, particularly in my state of California, which has such a high cost of living already.

And so I think that the proposal that Congressman Liccardo and I have put forward actually makes a lot of sense as a compromise, because, as you said, it's time limited, it's temporary, it's just for two years. But we actually pay for that extension in a way that doesn't increase the deficit, that doesn't require raising taxes through reforms related to fraud prevention and cost controls.

DEAN: All right, Congressman Kevin Kiley, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.

KILEY: Of course, thanks for having me.

DEAN: A leading AI company says its platform was exploited by Chinese hackers in a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. That story is next. Stay with CNN NEWS CENTRAL. [15:45:24]

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KEILAR: Just into CNN, we're learning when we'll get an accurate picture of the jobs market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics posting on its website that the September jobs report will release next week on Thursday at 8:30 a.m.

DEAN: That report, of course, was supposed to be released the first week of October, but it was not because of the government shutdown. And the shutdown has deprived American companies of that data that they need for planning. We now know we will get that report, again, six days from now.

KEILAR: Yes, we'll be looking for that for sure.

Disturbing new developments in artificial intelligence. AI giant Anthropic reports that cyber criminals used its popular chatbot, Claude, to target about 30 global organizations.

The company saying quote, "We believe this is the first documented case of a large scale cyber attack executed without substantial human intervention."

DEAN: A stunning 80 to 90 percent of the operations in the cyber attack were done without a human in the loop. That's according to Anthropic. And they believe Chinese hackers were behind the operation, targeting big tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies and government agencies. Anthropic says some of these attacks were successful.

And joining us now to talk more, Lance Ulanoff, editor at Large for TechRadar. Lance, thanks for being here with us.

Let's start first. Do we know exactly how they used this AI chatbot for the hacking operation?

LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR AT LARGE, TECHRADAR: Yes, it was a multi phased effort and sort of, you know, and most steps were them telling Claude to carry out tasks. And, you know, if they had said, please hack these agencies, Anthropic's Claude is basically going to say no. But what they did is they broke everything down into small sort of innocuous tasks that would not raise any red flags.

And had it go off and do those things, identifying soft targets, identifying the right databases, building its own programs, its own exploits for each of these agencies, for each of these places to then infiltrate them. So at each step, it was kind of following these small orders to build a big plan. And, you know, the real power in the last year of these AIs is the agentic capabilities where they can kind of go and do things for you without you having to do a lot of intervention.

And they put all those pieces together to build these very sophisticated attacks. KEILAR: That is not comforting.

DEAN: No, it's not. KEILAR: That is awful. OK, so how is Anthropic responding here, Lance?

ULANOFF: Well, the good news is that they did recognize the activity. They did start to see something was going on and they got in front of it as quickly as they could. They contacted all the affected agencies and they've upped their security game again to try and stop this.

But here's the thing about AI, which I think I've told all of you before. You know, the rate of development with these large language models, this AI, the agentic capabilities, intelligence is going at AI time. Meaning that the development is happening so quickly that in six months they could be twice as fast as they were before, twice as intelligent.

And I think that the hackers, the people, the malefactor who are looking at this, see this as an enormous opportunity. I mean, one of the reasons that we have so much spam and all those weird, crazy calls is because AI is behind it, because they found it was more efficient than doing these things manually. So these tools are going to be used again and again for attacks.

And hopefully the companies can help us get ahead of this.

DEAN: And so what are we hearing from these targeted companies and also the government? I mean, there's a lot of -- a lot of data at risk here.

ULANOFF: Right. Well, one, we're hearing next to nothing. But the reality is in most hacking cases, especially data breaches, we don't learn the full impact for months. They're going in.

They're trying to look at it. They're doing their forensic work to try and understand what systems were attacked.

[15:50:00]

What is in there and make sure that everything is clean and everything is safe. There's almost no way to pull back data that's been pulled. But the greater concern here is that if you have a cyber attack on infrastructure and the potential of them bringing something down in this case, that does not appear to have happened.

KEILAR: This feels like a window into the future, Lance. What are you seeing?

ULANOFF: I'm very concerned. I mean, I literally wrote a story today and I tried to explain that if the Terminator were coming, he would not be trying to stop the robots anymore. He would be going after the companies making these AIs with great concern.

And I think that really what that says is that, you know, open AI, Anthropic, all of these companies have to have their A game on. They have to understand that at the same time they're making these AIs better and better and faster and faster, they have to put in greater protections. They have to have some way of protecting us from the people who are going to use these AIs for something bad.

DEAN: Yes, I mean, I think that's the great push and pull of all of this is how how quickly it can progress in a positive way. And can that also be curbed by making sure it's safe and that people are protected? Lance Ulanoff, good to see you. Thank you so much.

ULANOFF: It's a pleasure.

DEAN: And still ahead, where others saw trash, she saw a chance to help those in need. Meet the CNN hero who found a way to feed the hungry with a little help from Hollywood.

[15:55:00]

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KEILAR: Voting is underway for the 2025 CNN Hero of the Year, and we're reintroducing each of our top five heroes as you vote for your favorites this month.

DEAN: So Hollywood productions may look seamless, but behind the scenes, there are hundreds of people who work to make it happen who are often fueled by gourmet meals provided on set. And assistant director Hillary Cohen was always disturbed that this leftover food just ended up in the trash. So she took action and the result is now helping people in need.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

HILLARY COHEN, CO-FOUNDED EVERY DAY ACTION: Working on a film set, there's this whole team of people, a props department, the costume department, an electric department and a lot of people that need to be fed. There's just so much food that's available, steak and salad, so much good food every day. When lunch was over, they would just throw it out.

It doesn't make any sense. I really was always told we can't donate the food. It's too hard.

If someone gets sick, it's a liability. As an assistant director, I was the logistical planner of a set. This is just the logistical problem. I think it's so easy to solve.

COHEN (voice-over): Every Day Action picks food up from film sets, corporate events, grocery stores to deliver the food to those in need.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nice to meet you.

COHEN (voice-over): We're the Grubhub. We take it from point A to point B. At the beginning, it was just me and Sam, one of my co- assistant directors in the heart of COVID.

We have this big cooler from Walmart, thermal bags, just picking food up. COHEN: I always like to see what the fancy meal is of the day.

COHEN (voice-over): Film and TV set, that's like our bread and butter. All you have to do is give us a call sheet, sign liability over, and the food's ours.

STEPHEN FAUST, EXECUTIVE CHEF: For decades, it broke my heart to throw food away, so we're happy to do it. It's just like clockwork. They show up.

COHEN: Hi, it's so good to see you.

FAUST: We pass off the food, and we're all set.

COHEN (voice-over): We pay production assistants and background artists, and then they drive the food from place to place.

FAUST: Salads. Tuna flake.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: There you go, Jeff.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Great.

COHEN (voice-over): So it started with encampments.

COHEN: Would you like some free food?

COHEN: Then it's food pantries, non-profits, anyone that's struggling with food insecurities.

COHEN: Here's three meals, and I'm going to get you some sides, too.

COHEN (voice-over): Giving someone that's hungry food is the best thing one can do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you so much.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Of course.

COHEN (voice-over): And that's about 80,000 meals a year that we save from landfills. I feel like my skill set is called to do this. Now more than ever, we have to help each other.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

DEAN: It's such a good idea. What an amazing, amazing work she's doing. You can go now to cnn.com/heroes right now to vote for the CNN Hero of the Year. You can vote for the hero that most inspires you, right there, cnnheroes.com.

KEILAR: That was a good one.

DEAN: Yes.

KEILAR: Such a logical match there.

DEAN: Yes.

KEILAR: All right, now to some of the other headlines that we're watching this hour. An infant botulism outbreak has now grown to 13 states with 23 suspected or confirmed cases. The FDA and CDC are investigating the outbreak's possible ties to whole nutrition infant formula made by the company ByHeart.

Tests show its products might be contaminated with the germ that causes botulism. The most recent illness was reported on Tuesday. Thankfully, no deaths have been reported.

Also, some dramatic video of the Coast Guard rescuing a father and son from frigid water off the coast of Washington state. The pair were stranded for two hours after their boat capsized. You can see them clinging to it here as they waited for help.

They were airlifted to a hospital after a family member notified the Coast Guard that they had not returned home.

DEAN: And police in Canada arrested a driver for a joyride in Ontario. He wasn't in some slick car, though. Not a Ferrari, not a Corvette.

He decided to live out his fantasy as a bus driver. Police say the man commandeered a city bus. I think it was one of these accordion ones --

KEILAR: Wow!

DEAN: -- which doesn't look easy. And he drove from stop to stop in Hamilton this week.

KEILAR: OK, so he allegedly picks up and drops off passengers. And in one instance, denies entry to a person with an expired bus pass.

DEAN: Because he's a rule follower.

KEILAR: He's a total rule follower here. After about 15 minutes, police stopped the bus and took the driver into custody. No one was hurt.

The bus didn't get any scratches or dings.

[16:00:00]

The man was charged with theft and possession, obstructing police and driving while prohibited, and following rules at the most unusual time.

Maybe they can add that to it, you think, Jess?

DEAN: Yes, maybe. I mean, I also am going back to how he commandeered the bus. More questions than answers.

KEILAR: That's right.

"THE ARENA" with Kasie Hunt starts now.

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