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Interview with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT): Congress to Send Epstein Bill to Trump After Near-Unanimous Approval; Federal Court Bars Texas from Using New Congressional Map; Internet Service Restored for Millions After Major Tech Outage. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired November 19, 2025 - 08:00   ET

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

[08:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Surveillance video shows her children led by the five-year-old chasing after him. The mother says her kids hit the suspect and officers took him down. A reporter talked to the five- year-old.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You chased after him real fast.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE CHILD: Yes I did. And I went bam, like this.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes you did. Mommy's so proud of you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Now police say what the child did was remarkable, but they typically urge people, especially children, not to chase suspects.

In Detroit, goat on the lam and it sent a man running for his life and on to the top of a car. Look at that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw it go outside. I'm like, OK, OK. I said, ma, ma, ma. And then as soon as you see Mr. Bob here come out of nowhere.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: I mean, they apparently made up there. The goat named Smoke -- is named Smoke. Its owner says Smoke jumped a fence and got loose.

According to CNN affiliate WXYZ, the owner was cited for keeping a wild animal who can't jump without a permit.

Brand new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts now.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: It does.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Did they become friends? Like they were in the same little.

BERMAN: Starts now, starts now.

SIDNER: Today could be the day the president signs a bill forcing the release of the Epstein files. Congress passed the bill with only one no vote, but what will the DOJ do once it's signed?

Plus more Americans are turning to chatbots for medical advice. What are the rewards and the risks of relying on AI for health information?

And in Colorado, how a random storage auction led to the biggest fentanyl seizure in the state's history.

I'm Sara Sidner with Kate Bolduan and John Berman. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

BOLDUAN: The breaking news this morning, the long stonewalled, much discussed, long debated bill to release all the Jeffrey Epstein investigated files is now headed to President Trump's desk. And the president, after months of, as you can recall, opposing it, calling it a Democratic hoax and slamming Republicans who backed it, the president has now said he will sign it. The only question appears to be when.

The bill won overwhelming support in Congress. All but one Republican in both chambers in the House and the Senate ended up supporting it. Sources tell CNN the president flipped his stance and urged House Republicans to vote for the bill after it became clear that he could not stop the momentum.

It is a major shift for a measure that looked like a long shot when it was first introduced and the passage, an enormous victory for the survivors of Epstein's abuse who fought for years, decades even for some sort of accountability. The president could sign the bill today. We will see.

Once he does, there are still big questions, though, such as could the Justice Department actually still refuse to comply with the order and still find a way to keep the files hidden -- John?

BERMAN: With us now is Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut who has served in many legal and prosecutorial capacities over the course of a long career. So, Senator, what happens when the president signs this bill?

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT), JUDICIARY COMMITTEE: What happens is that the Department of Justice should immediately review and begin to disclose the documents that have been sought so heroically by these survivors. Their fortitude, bravery, grace and simple guts so inspired the nation that it created this overwhelming surge of support for the bill. And make no mistake, if the Department of Justice fails to do good faith disclosure, those same survivors will be key to forcing the Department of Justice's hand.

But we have other tools and techniques as well. We've already begun the effort to scrutinize and oversee the Department of Justice by reaching out to whistleblowers, by approaching banks, the Epstein estate, other sources of information, including Trump's own Justice Department.

BERMAN: You said the Justice Department should start scrutinizing the documents and releasing them when they can. You say should. Do you believe, as you stand here this morning, that they will?

BLUMENTHAL: I have no trust, no confidence whatsoever, John, that this Justice Department will be even handed or fair in the disclosure of these files. It will be on us in Congress and hopefully a bipartisan effort to scrutinize and oversee this process.

[08:05:00]

The reason I say it is that, obviously, the Department of Justice has become a weapon in Trump's arsenal. It has become his personal law firm. He said prosecute Comey and James and the Department of Justice did. Just 217 minutes after he asked for an investigation of others like Clinton and Larry Summers, Bondi complied.

So there is no credibility in this Justice Department, which is why our oversight and scrutiny will be so important and reaching out to other sources of information.

BERMAN: What's a reasonable time frame here for some of the release to begin?

BLUMENTHAL: 30 days would be a more than sufficient time. I'm hopeful that even sooner, but we will be reaching out to our Republican colleagues because clearly in the Senate there was unanimous consent, literally unanimous consent, even before the bill reached the United States Senate, and it will be on President Trump's desk today. So I would say all deliberate speed means within 30 days we ought to begin seeing documents.

BERMAN: All right, 30 days. Now, in some of the e-mails that were turned over by the Epstein estate to the House Oversight Committee, Donald Trump was named in some of those e-mails. There were also e- mails to and from former Treasury Secretary, President of Harvard University, Larry Summers, who has now stepped back, he says, from public commitments.

There was the release, there was information that Jeffrey Epstein was texting with Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett during a hearing there. There are other Democrats who were mentioned or people associated with the Democratic Party mentioned by name. Does any of that give you pause?

Do you see this as being something that impacts one party more or less than another?

BLUMENTHAL: You know, as a former prosecutor, both as United States Attorney and State Attorney General of Connecticut, my view is let the chips fall where they may, reveal the files. Does it give me pause? The creation of this island of criminality, literally a sex exploitation ring of young girls is so totally revolting and repugnant. Any involvement by anyone gives me pause, but obviously it became a haven for the wealthy and rich, and there will be a lot of those bold- faced names revealed in these files, not least of them Donald Trump. And he resisted it so strenuously, obviously, because he fears what may be there about him. They had a relationship.

Epstein boasted about it. And the president went from calling it a hoax to a Democratic scandal. So he's going to try to tilt the public perception against one party, but I think we have a sufficient bipartisan group in the Senate and obviously in the House.

The subpoenas last night to Citi -- to JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank from the House Oversight Committee, I think are enormously significant. So too are the approaches we've made to the Treasury Department where their financial records follow the money, follow the money. The rich and powerful are not going to be immune here, and they will be on the, -- on the bench, so to speak.

BERMAN: Understood. Senator Richard Blumenthal, 30 days you just set for the beginning of document handover there. We will see if the Justice Department complies.

Thanks so much for your time this morning. Sara?

SIDNER: All right. Thank you, John.

A panel of federal judges determined Texas lawmakers likely racially rigged their redrawn congressional map, deeming it illegal. How the ruling could impact the balance of power in Congress.

Plus, popular apps back online after an hours-long outage. So what caused sites like Uber and ChatGPT to go down?

Plus, a storage unit auction leads to a record-breaking drug bust. That story and more ahead.

[08:10:00]

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SIDNER: This morning, a major setback for President Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterms. A federal court has blocked Texas from using its newly drawn congressional map, siding with challengers who said the map intentionally discriminates against voters based on their race violating the Constitution. In a two to one ruling authored by the Trump appointed judge on the three panel -- three judge panel, it ordered Texas to stick with its previous map.

Republicans had hoped the new map would flip five Democratic held House seats in next year's elections. CNN's Jeff Zeleny following all of this for us, I guess the big question is, now what?

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Sara, that is the question. And Republicans started this redistricting war really led by President Trump and the White House directly asking Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year to basically draw new maps to give Republicans a bigger advantage in next year's midterm elections to add five Republican seats.

Well that happened. The Texas legislature, as we all remember earlier this summer back in August, voted on those maps. But yesterday, as you said, a three judge panel in El Paso, the order was written by a Trump appointed judge, Judge Jeffrey V. Brown said, look, these maps are not proper.

And he wrote this specifically in a 160 page ruling, Sara. At the very beginning of the judge laid out the whole point of this.

He said, "The public perception of this case is that it's not about politics. To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 map, but it was much more than politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map."

So what does that mean? That means that if this ruling stands, that Republicans were hoping for a big advantage in Texas, which of course set off a wave of nationwide redistricting fights.

Of course, in California, they responded and passed that referendum earlier this month to give Democrats five easier seats. States across the country have followed in kind. North Carolina has added a Republican friendly district, if you will. Missouri has as well. Indiana is under pressure to do so.

Well, all of that is certainly thrown into question now, not their specific decisions, but the whole mathematical point of this, because Texas was the big plan for Republicans to get those five Republican seats.

So of course, Texas is going to appeal this to the Supreme Court, adding one more political case to the dockets of the justices here. But Sara, the bottom line is the White House was doing this unprecedented mid-decade redistricting across the country to try and protect their House majority. President Trump is obsessed, I'm told, by the midterm elections next year.

He wants to keep that majority because if Democrats, of course, win control of the House, they can launch all types of investigations. So going forward, we will see what happens with the ruling in Texas. But it certainly looks like Republicans started this fight.

Now the question today is, is it backfiring on them? And many of them believe it may be -- Sara.

SIDNER: We will find out what the courts decide going forward. We know, as you point out, there will be more cases to come. Likely the Supreme Court may end up looking at this.

Jeff Zeleny, it is a pleasure to have you this morning. Appreciate you -- Kate.

BOLDUAN: A CNN exclusive this morning. Iran says it's open to resuming nuclear talks with the United States, but there is a major catch in that. We're live in Tehran with more.

Plus, why more Americans are now turning to AI to answer questions about their health.

[08:20:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BOLDUAN: So this morning, services are back online after millions of people around the world were impacted by an hours-long Cloudflare outage.

The outage knocked some major websites offline, from Uber to ChatGPT and even the New Jersey transit system. Cloudflare now confirms it was a tech issue, not a cyber attack. But this does come less than a month after another major tech outage halted thousands of services from some of the biggest companies on the earth, including all having to do with Amazon Web Services. And we covered that on the show because it was unfolding as we were watching it.

Joining us right now to hear more about it is CNN tech editor, Lisa Eadicicco. Lisa, what are you hearing about this?

Why -- I'm going to say, why does this keep happening? And you can tell me if this is a trend or it's just coincidence.

LISA EADICICCO, TECH EDITOR, CNN BUSINESS: So we had these big three major outages that happened relatively close. The Amazon one, like you mentioned --

BOLDUAN: Yes.

EADICICCO: -- there was a Microsoft one right after that and now Cloudflare. So it's not necessarily that these are happening more often. That could be just a coincidence, but it certainly feels like they're happening more often. And there's a couple of reasons why.

One being that there's only a handful of companies that kind of power the backbone of the Web. So you have Microsoft, Amazon and Google that are the big players, but you also have companies like Cloudflare that play a really important role in that as well. So when one of these things goes down, it feels like everything is down. So there's that element.

And then also the element of how much of our lives have to do with the Internet these days.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

EADICICCO: It's not just work. It's not just social media. A lot of businesses run on Internet connected services.

So when a big outage happens like the Amazon one, you see disruptions across airlines and ordering a cup of coffee in the morning, managing your smart home devices. Luckily, the Cloudflare one wasn't that scale of impact, but it still disrupted daily routines I'm sure for many.

[08:25:00] BOLDUAN: When it came to the Amazon one, I know there were a lot of companies thinking we need to have a different backup system if the Amazon Web services come down. There seems to be -- are you -- like there needs to be lessons learned with each one of these for everybody?

EADICICCO: Absolutely. So that is one thing that I've heard from some of the experts that I've spoken with that companies need to have a backup plan. But it's really difficult because you're preparing for an event that may or may not happen. And that's very expensive to invest services elsewhere.

So a lot of -- some consultants and IT experts I've spoken with have said that it's important to look at backup plans. But to be prepared for these instances in the future, because this is not going to be the last one.

These kinds of things are inevitable. It's kind of like getting sick. You do everything you can to avoid it.

But sometimes it just naturally happens because that's the nature of these big systems that the Internet runs on, essentially.

BOLDUAN: Yes. So also I can then blame all my tech issues on my on my children is what you're telling me, because they're the ones who bring the illnesses home always.

Got it. That's my takeaway. Great to see you. Thank you so much -- John.

EADICICCO: Thank you.

BERMAN: It's always the kids fault.

BOLDUAN: Always.

BERMAN: All right. The Thanksgiving wine pairing, it could cost you. How tariffs are going to hit your holiday buzz.

And a former Formula One driver races against a car driven by AI. Guess who won. What if I told you it wasn't a fair fight?

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