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Brown University Shooting Suspect Found Dead; DOJ Faces Epstein Deadline; Helene Weiss is Interviewed about the Epstein Documents; HHS Plans to Overhaul Vaccine Schedule. Aired 9-9:30a ET

Aired December 19, 2025 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

LISA QUIGLEY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: There's something happening. And so, as long as we are smart enough to put our best players on the field, I think we're going to be able to take advantage of that. And I think that next November is going to be a big year for us.

JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice over): Country and western go together here. Democrats and optimism usually do not. So, it may turn out to be all hat, no cattle, but at the moment Democrats see a chance for a music city comeback.

John King, CNN, Nashville.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: The suspect in the Brown University shooting is dead, now linked to the killing of an MIT professor. All the new information we're getting this morning on how they're trying to find a motive.

It is deadline day for the Justice Department to release everything they have in the Jeffrey Epstein case, which they have to, by law. But the deputy attorney general, just moments ago, said that hundreds of thousands of documents will not be coming today.

And a customer injured after a car crashes right into a Starbucks. That's not where the car belongs.

Sara, working the night shift. I'm John Berman, with Kate Bolduan. And this is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: To the breaking news this morning. After six long days, the manhunt is finally over. The suspect wanted in Saturday's mass shooting at Brown University is dead. And in a twist, police say that while he was on the run, he also shot and killed an MIT professor at his home outside of Boston Monday. The suspect, now identified as 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who was briefly a Brown University grad student more than 20 years ago. This morning we spoke with the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, who confirmed that the break in this case came from this man you're seeing here, who posted a tip online, and then came forward to police after they put out images of him asking for his help. I want to play for you what the mayor told us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR BRETT SMILEY (D), PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND: There was a Reddit tip that had to do with the vehicle that turned out to be a central part of this investigation. The tipster, with respect to the vehicle, is the same individual that was in the photo that we released two days ago, which is the same individual who turned himself in there shortly thereafter. So, he provided the Reddit tip initially, anonymously. And then when we put the photo out and put the call out that we needed to talk to this person, he then turned up to a Providence police officer and was fully forthcoming.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: The investigation, though, still underway to try to finally establish a motive and why and how it's all connected.

CNN's Michael Yoshida is in Salem, New Hampshire, this morning, where a big part of the investigation now turns, because this is where this suspect's body was found.

Michael, what are you hearing?

MICHAEL YOSHIDA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hey, good morning, Kate.

You mentioned that suspect's body found at the storage facility you see behind me. Still surrounded by crime scene tape as this investigation continues. Described as still being very active. The search for that motive continues.

And as you just laid out, the key break in this case happened within the last 48 hours. That tipster from the Brown University Providence community coming forward and allowing investigators to identify a vehicle and a license plate that they then were able to track to a rental car company in Boston, Massachusetts. It was there where investigators figured out that the person who had rented that car was indeed their suspect.

As they dove into that individual's background, into his financials, they were led to this storage facility. And it was late last night when we saw all of those investigators, all those police, FBI and others, go into this facility. That's where they found 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente deceased.

And we did hear from the attorney general for Rhode Island after that, talking about just how crucial that tipster was in ending this manhunt

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETER NERONHA, RHODE ISLAND ATTORNEY GENERAL: He blew this case right open.

That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel that we see here in Providence.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

YOSHIDA: And investigators also revealed how these two shootings were connected in their minds, revealing that this suspect was caught on surveillance camera in the days after that Brown University shooting in the area right near that MIT professor's home in a suburb of Boston. Obviously, they're still working through that, trying to figure out an exact motive to both of these shootings.

[09:05:05]

That's an answer that those in this community are still waiting for. But also this morning, a real sense of relief across New England as, again, this manhunt has ended with investigators finding that shooter here in Salem, New Hampshire.

Kate.

BOLDUAN: Yes, certainly.

Michael Yoshida, thank you for your reporting.

John.

BERMAN: All right, with us now is CNN law enforcement contributor Steve Moore and CNN's senior law enforcement analyst, Charles Ramsey.

Chief Ramsey, let me just start with you and ask about what isn't known yet, which is motive. Given that this suspect is dead, how much work do you expect will be going into that? How much investigation do you do after something like this?

CHARLES RAMSEY, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, I mean, there's a lot of investigation that's still taking place. Even though he's deceased, there's still a lot of pieces of the puzzle that need to be put together. And certainly trying to find out the why is part of it. And so, search warrants being executed, combing through all the evidence, any writings this individual might have, interviewing people who knew him to find out any conversations he may have had about, you know, either the Brown shooting or the MIT homicide. So, there's a lot of work that's going to be done. But in this situation now, at least the people of Rhode Island can take a sigh of relief that this guy is no longer a threat. But that doesn't mean that the police aren't still actively engaged.

BERMAN: You know, Steve, it's interesting because what we know about possible connections with the two murder sites, these are things that are 20 years old, right? This guy, the dead suspect, went to Brown for like a year as a grad student 20 years ago. Went to school with the MIT professor in Portugal more than 25 years ago. That seems like a pretty thin connection, at least so far. What do you think?

STEVE MOORE, CNN LAW ENFORCEMENT CONTRIBUTOR: Well, yes, it is a pretty thin connection. But when you're talking about somebody who's willing to kill for a grievance that happened 20 years ago, the way you and I think about things, the way a normal person would think about things, may not really apply here. We used to say, if you could understand why they did it, you'd be a miserable person.

So, there's a lot that could be going on behind the scenes that we don't understand.

BERMAN: And, Steve, the way this case ended, it ended after a great deal, I think, of public frustration with how law enforcement was conducting it. But do you think at this point, retroactively, that that frustration was misplaced?

MOORE: Not completely. I think it's not that investigations don't lead you down to a dead end road sometimes. But what you have to guard against is making your dead-end roads public. You don't need to be doing press conferences before you have absolutely validated the information on the suspect you have.

Yes, things are going to, you know, turn sideways on you sometimes, but it's important that you keep things close to the vest until you know you've got a solution.

BERMAN: Chief Ramsey, what do you think the biggest lessons here are for Providence, for Brown University, for any university?

RAMSEY: Well, I think universities and places in general need to understand that, I mean, this can happen anywhere at any given time. And you need to always be vigilant. You need to make sure you have proper security in place. And should something like that happen, as Steve mentioned, you know, how you handle the press, how you handle the investigation is critically important. You know, and it's very challenging. You know, a high-profile case like this, there's a lot of pressure associated with that. And with pressure comes tension.

And so, you've got a lot of dynamics that are going on at the same time. And keeping your investigators focused on the task at hand, don't get too far out there ahead of yourself before the evidence can support. And that's what you saw in that one press conference, you know. Again, and a lot of that's just due to the pressure and the need to try to find a solution to it quickly. But these things take their own time. They really do. You can't rush it. You have to just be very methodical. And I think there's a lesson there that people need to pay attention to.

BERMAN: You know, from Providence to Boston -- or Brooklyn, I should say, to Salem, New Hampshire, it is now over, apparently.

Steve Moore, Charles Ramsey, thanks so much to both of you.

All right, moments ago, the deputy attorney general said there will be a release of a lot of documents today, as required by law.

[09:10:04]

But he also said that there will be hundreds of thousands of documents not released today. So, how does that square with the law passed by Congress requiring the release by tonight? New controversial changes coming from the CDC Vaccine Advisory Board.

What does this mean for the shots for your children?

And I have to be honest, I have no idea why this happened, but we have footage of Harry Enten holiday shopping with John Miller.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN MILLER: I'm ready.

HARRY ENTEN: Let's go shopping.

MILLER: All right.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BERMAN: All right, breaking just moments ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, spoke on what will but also what will not be released by tonight from the Justice Department. Remember, by law, Justice was supposed to release all the Epstein files by 12:59 p.m., with some exceptions. Sounds like there will be a lot of exceptions by midnight tonight.

[09:15:01]

Joining us now, CNN's Katelyn Polantz.

Katelyn, what can you tell us about what Blanche is saying now?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, that law does say transparency today, but the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, he says that there will be several thousand -- several hundred thousand documents released today. And then an additional several hundred thousand documents released over the next few weeks.

Here's more from Todd Blanche just now speaking on Fox News.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TODD BLANCHE, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: So, yes. So, today is the -- is the 30 days. And I expect that we're going to release several hundred thousand documents today. And those documents will come in all different forms, photographs and other materials associated with all of the investigations into Mr. Epstein.

And so, I expect that we're going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks. So today several hundred thousand. And then over the next couple weeks I expect several hundred thousand more.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

POLANTZ: Now, John, how does that comply with the law? Well, we'll have to leave that to the Justice Department to explain to Congress, who passed this law. Two separate branches of government. The Justice Department, though we know from several sources, talking to them this week, with some insight into how this is going, this is a tall task that the Justice Department is mounting over the past couple weeks, essentially since Thanksgiving. And there is frustration over how the redaction and the processing of documents is going over these several hundred thousand Epstein files.

What the sources have been telling Evan Perez and I this week is that there are lots of redactions. There's lots of exemptions that the Justice Department is looking at whenever they're going through these pages. And they're blacking out things. So, even what comes out today, it will not be unadulterated. It will be documents that have blackout redactions that the Justice Department is putting on things to protect things like victim privacy. But there are other things that will also be redacted. And there's also the possibility of mistakes, John. There could be over redactions.

BERMAN: Yes.

POLANTZ: There could be things that get out that shouldn't. And that is what a lot of people also will be watching for, especially tomorrow morning.

John.

BERMAN: Yes, look, it's a difficult process because there's a lot of information there. But the law wasn't, you begin releasing by midnight tonight. The law was, you release by midnight tonight. And, yes, there were exceptions. And the language that Todd Blanche uses right there saying, hundreds of thousands today, but also hundreds of thousands down the line. Again, doesn't seem to be the letter of the law there, but we'll have to wait and see.

Katelyn Polantz, great to see you. Thank you very much. Kate.

BOLDUAN: And here with us now, attorney Helene Weiss. She's with the law firm that represents several survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, including Maria Farmer. And you'll remember, Maria was the first woman to publicly report Jeffrey Epstein for sexual abuse in the '90s. She also later sued the U.S. government alleging they failed to protect her and other survivors of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Thank you so much, Helene, for being here.

And I do want to read for our viewers, we have a new statement that you -- that you were provided and you gave to us from Maria Farmer about what this moment means about this document release.

HELENE WEISS, PARTNER, MARSH LAW; FIRM REPRESENTS EPSTEIN SURVIVORS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: So, letting her have the say first. Let me read this for everyone.

Maria Farmer writing this. "This is a moment for which I have waited three entire decades, over half of my life. When I was ignored and hung up on by the FBI in 1996, my world turned upside down and I felt frozen in time. I faced death threats, ridicule, and mockery by some of the most powerful people on earth. When my FBI reports are finally made available, I am hopeful that I will be able to pick up where I left off at age 26. I am also hopeful that this will be an important step for many of the survivors, and to hold the government accountable for their grotesque law enforcement failure, one of the largest in U.S. history."

That from Maria Farmer, for the first time you're (ph) hearing, on this momentous day for her and for so many others.

What are you -- what are you expecting to see to say -- to see today? What is -- what are you looking for today?

WEISS: Thank you, Kate. Thank you for having me.

What we're going to see today is really -- your guess is as good as mine.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

WEISS: We were told that today would be the day of transparency. Today would be the day Epstein files are released.

Now, Maria Farmer, whom we just heard from, our client at the Marsh Law firm, let's be very clear, she reported her abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to the FBI in 1996. That's nearly three decades ago. And she did what society tells victims they should do. She reported it. And what did the FBI do in response? Absolutely nothing.

Now, if the FBI had acted, if they had taken action or done anything at all, they could have saved thousands of victims and nearly 30 years of trauma.

[09:20:10]

And what we're seeing today is finally, hopefully, the accountability that we've all been looking for, the accountability that these victims have been seeking for nearly three decades. They want to see what are in their files. And Maria wants to know, what is in her FBI file. Because when she called in 1996, 30 years ago, and the FBI did nothing, what did they document? What did they write down? What did they look into? Or, Kate, what did they ignore? That's what we want to know. That's what survivors want to know. And we want to see these records.

BOLDUAN: So -- and then you hear a top justice official, Todd Blanche, just saying this morning, several hundred thousand documents will be released today --

WEISS: Right.

BOLDUAN: But not all of them.

WEISS: Right. BOLDUAN: Several hundred thousand -- several hundred -- several hundreds of thousands of documents are not going to be released. They'll be released over the next couple of weeks. Is that OK?

WEISS: Is it OK? I mean, to me personally, I don't think it's acceptable that we were promised a date of delivery, of transparency. We were promised 30 days from November 19th. This is 30 days. This is December 19th. We weren't promised some sort of eventual tranche -- tranche of disclosures that are going to take place over, what, days, weeks, months, years. Today was the day we were promised.

And, you know, we're talking about a lot of information.

BOLDUAN: Yes.

WEISS: A lot of documents. A lot of storage. We understand there are complexities with sharing large gigabytes, but we're also talking about the federal government. So, no, it's not acceptable.

BOLDUAN: There's also -- and we've been talking about this a lot. The law for -- around release allows for the attorney general and the Justice Department to redact or withhold documents for -- there are exemptions, there are reasons, to protect the victims, to protect against graphic -- the graphic nature -- something that is extremely graphic for national security reasons and for on -- if it could jeopardize ongoing investigations. I'm summing it up.

How do you ensure that that is not -- those exemptions are not utilized to withhold more than what fits -- fits into those categories?

WEISS: That's an excellent question, Kate. What we have seen with these releases are redactions that are quite voluminous. Now, we know that redactions are necessary to protect victims' identities, to protect the sensitive nature of investigative files. But some redactions, for example, we received some of the interview notes that Maria Farmer had in 2006 when the FBI followed up with her. These are all notes that Maria Farmer had, that she took on the phone with the FBI, 24. 27 pages of notes, all nearly redacted. And so, we know those are statements by our client. Why are they redacted?

We've already seen inappropriate redactions. We already know inappropriate redactions are taking place and substantive redactions are taking place. How do we handle that? Well, we've got a lawsuit and we still have motions to compel. And if the release of documents today or over the next few weeks --

BOLDUAN: Right.

WEISS: Doesn't reveal what we need it to reveal, what the government promised that it would reveal, we're going to have to seek those documents in litigation.

BOLDUAN: Ghislaine Maxwell just asked the federal government, a federal court in New York, to set aside her conviction on sex trafficking charges and her 20 year prison sentence. WEISS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: This just -- this is a new ask, in a new filing with new court documents this week. Do you think this move impacts what justice will release?

WEISS: Absolutely not. I think, you know, post-conviction statements in and of themselves are self-serving. And the standard for having a habeas like this actually, you know, actually go through, actually be -- for Ghislaine to be released, the standard is incredibly high. We don't anticipate that actually happening. The probability is extremely low.

But it should not impact at all what the DOJ is releasing. Ghislaine making -- Ghislaine Maxwell making her legal application, that she's entitled to make by law, should have absolutely no bearing on what the DOJ already promised us and promised survivors, most importantly. The survivors who have been waiting for decades, what they would do. So, it shouldn't impact it at all.

BOLDUAN: Yes. One thing I can tell very clearly is you, your law firm, and so many people supporting these survivors are going to be watching this extremely closely --

WEISS: You bet.

BOLDUAN: To see what is -- what is released, what is not, how much is redacted.

WEISS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: Much more to come.

Helene, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you for providing the statement from Maria Farmer to have her say today.

WEISS: Thank you, Kate. Thank you, Kate, for having me.

BOLDUAN: We have so much news. A lot of breaking news coming in.

We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[09:29:11]

BERMAN: All right, new this morning, CNN has learned the Department of Health and Human Services is planning a major overhaul of the child vaccination schedule. The plan is not final, which means it could still change. But if it goes through, it would mean fewer shots recommended for children across the country.

CNN's Meg Tirrell has this new exclusive reporting.

What are you learning, Meg? MEG TIRRELL, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: So, we've learned that in the

latest step to sort of pare back the number of recommended vaccines for kids in the U.S., the Department of Health and Human Services is planning to essentially recommend that we change the childhood vaccination schedule and potentially make it look more like the way the vaccine schedule looks in Denmark.

Now, as you noted, this isn't a final plan and this could change. We had heard they were going to announce this proposal as soon as this afternoon, and now have pushed that back because there's a plan announcement on drug prices happening and they didn't want those to conflict. So, we may hear about this in the new year.

[09:30:00]

But it comes after the president essentially put out a memo after that big CDC vaccine meeting two weeks ago saying that we should compare the U.S. vaccine schedule with other.