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Data Center Backlash; Ethics Questions Emerge at DOJ; President Trump in China. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired May 14, 2026 - 13:00   ET

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

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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: A warning from Beijing, Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivering a stark message on Taiwan to President Trump, saying the island could lead to a -- quote -- "very dangerous situation" if mishandled by the U.S.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Plus: not in their backyard. More Americans are saying they don't want data centers in their communities, those facilities provoking a fierce backlash, even as tech companies hope to build more across the country.

And they were stranded for hours on a raft after their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Now we're hearing from a survivor on board about the ordeal and the incredible rescue.

We're following these major developing stories and many more all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

KEILAR: A consequential start to the historic summit between President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, day one striking a positive tone with a little underlying tension.

While both superpowers toasted points of agreement, it was China's warning on Taiwan that has many bracing for what day two could bring, Xi saying that Taiwan is -- quote -- "the most important issue" in China-U.S. relations, adding it could create a very dangerous situation if President Trump handles it wrong.

As for the war with Iran, President Trump says Xi offered a hand.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: President Xi would like to see a deal made. He would like to see a deal made. And he did offer. He said: "If I can be of any help at all, I would like to be of help."

He'd like to see the Hormuz Strait opened.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KEILAR: CNN's Ivan Watson is live for us in Hong Kong.

Ivan, tell us what else was said.

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right.

Well, we haven't heard a tremendous amount coming out from the Chinese side about Iran, its ally, and the state of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, what we have had is, in a White House statement, a readout, again quoting President Xi of China and claiming that he says he does not want the militarization of the Strait of Hormuz and that he doesn't want anybody to have to pay tolls for ships to go through there, which reportedly Iran has been doing for some ships coming through there.

Now, the U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on his way to China, he did say that they -- the Trump administration wanted China to do more with its Iranian ally that it buys so much oil from.

And then this is what he said a little bit more recently about the Iran question when it comes to the Trump-Xi meeting:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARCO RUBIO, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: We're not asking for China's help or -- we don't need their help.

QUESTION: But he raises the issue?

RUBIO: We raise the issue to make clear what our position is and to make it clear so they understand, because, I mean, it's logical we would talk about it, given how dominant that issue is.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WATSON: Look, Brianna, day one of this has been focused very much on trade.

And it's been very respectful. And we have heard none of the kind of mudslinging that President Trump has engaged in, in the past. The Chinese side has been very respectful. And they seem to want to sit down and get some business done here.

And the Trump administration has some incentive, of course. The trade surplus that China enjoys with the U.S. has reportedly grown in the first months of this year, as opposed to 2025. That is something that President Trump used to complain about a lot when he used to accuse China of ripping the U.S. off when it came to bilateral trade.

KEILAR: And what's the reaction, Ivan, been in China to the visit so far?

WATSON: Again, the Chinese side very respectful. It's pulled out all the stops. It's quite literally rolled out the red carpet, held a banquet for President Trump, taken him to a temple in Beijing as well. And there's been a bit of Hollywood diplomacy, for example, two

American Hollywood movies that were allowed to release in Chinese cinemas. That's "Devil Wears Prada 2" two and the "Michael" biopic.

And in addition to that, though, there are expected to be some challenges and difficulties. And President Xi telegraphed that in his opening remarks with that warning about Taiwan. That's something that Beijing has always brought up, that it has always said is one of its most important priorities.

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And the irony is that the Department of Defense announced that it was selling some $12.5 million -- it's not big in the grand scheme of things -- worth of defense supplies to Taiwan as President Trump was flying out to Beijing.

So there's still clearly some differences here. Both leaders, though, have talked about meeting again face-to-face at two other summits later this year.

KEILAR: All right, Ivan Watson, thank you so much for the latest on this important meeting -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: Let's talk about the fallout now and the strategic importance of Taiwan with CNN anchor and chief national security analyst Jim Sciutto.

Jim, whether it was a warning or a threat, the readout on the Chinese side of what Xi told Trump is a clear message. And, notably, the American side, the readout on the U.S. said didn't even mention Taiwan.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: I mean, listen, it's a warning and a threat, isn't it?

The language is -- was quite stark: "If handled poorly, the two countries will collide or even clash." That's China threatening the prospect of war with the U.S. if the U.S. doesn't accommodate it on Taiwan or somehow tries to change the status quo.

So it was notable soon after that Marco Rubio, he said that the U.S. position on Taiwan has not changed and that no one should make any force change to the status quo, clear reference to military action or something else that might get in the way.

Now, you and I know the only words that matter from the U.S. side are the president's words. So it was notable just in the last hour that Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told CNBC -- quote -- "Trump understands the sensitivities around all this. Anyone who has been saying otherwise does not understand the negotiating style of Donald Trump."

Understand China's sensitivities around Taiwan could be interpreted as something of an accommodation.

SANCHEZ: Sure.

SCIUTTO: I know that this is an issue for them.

And I will just say this, that prior to this summit, there was a great deal of concern among Asian allies that President Trump would give some ground on Taiwan, soften the American position to some degree.

One way, just to get a little bit into the weeds, the current U.S. position is that the U.S. does not support independence for Taiwan. Could the president say, we oppose Taiwan's independence? Doesn't sound like a big difference, but it would be a major difference for -- from the Taiwanese perspective.

SANCHEZ: It also comes as this $14 billion arms shipment languishes.

It got approved by Congress in January. President Trump has given no indication that it's something that he's going to expedite. Do we think that's going to come now after this meeting?

SCIUTTO: It's absolutely on the table.

And it's, frankly, up to the president. And the president can sometimes, as you and I have experienced as well, surprise his own advisers, right, if he makes a decision in the moment that this is a price. Hey, listen, this might stir the pot to be sending all those weapons now. I understand the sensitivities. I'm not saying I'm canceling the arms support...

SANCHEZ: Yes.

SCIUTTO: ... but I'm just not doing it now.

SANCHEZ: But...

SCIUTTO: But from Taiwan's perspective, they'd be like, hey, wait a second. We need this help right now.

SANCHEZ: The delay itself sends a message, right?

Trump also said that Xi offered to help him with Iran.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

SANCHEZ: What does that mean?

SCIUTTO: Well, to Ivan's point, China didn't say that.

(LAUGHTER)

SCIUTTO: Now, I believe the president...

SANCHEZ: Yes.

SCIUTTO: ... that he offered to help.

What does that mean exactly? Is China going to turn the screws on Iran and say, hey, no more messing with the Strait of Hormuz? Because China stands to gain from that, buys a lot of oil from Iran. But China also sees benefit in its strategic position to have the U.S. bogged down again in another Middle Eastern war, right?

And that -- that serves their interests as well. So it remains to be seen, or, also, what might China demand in return?

SANCHEZ: Yes.

SCIUTTO: You want help there, help me out over here on this little island off my coast, right?

SANCHEZ: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

SANCHEZ: That's a good point.

Jim Sciutto, thanks so much.

SCIUTTO: Yes, thanks.

SANCHEZ: Appreciate it -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Russia hammering Ukraine in the biggest prolonged drone attack since the start of the war, the strikes overnight targeting Ukraine's capital of Kyiv, killing at least eight people and injuring at least 44.

Explosions lit up the skies over Kyiv. Our CNN team on the ground saying air raid alarms rang out for 11th hours. Video from the border shows the Ukrainian military shooting down a drone. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says more than 1,500 drones were fired off by Russia.

Zelenskyy notes that Kyiv was the main target, with 20 different locations damaged across the country. And in a nearby village, officials were on hand to remove what they say is part of a missile warhead that landed inside of a residential building.

Still to come, CNN's exclusive new reporting about ethics concerns within the Justice Department and how its top officials have responded.

Plus, new data showing Americans are willing to spend more on higher gas prices, but that's forcing them to cut back in other places. We will take a closer look.

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And, later, a survivor speaking out. A woman whose plane crashed and who spent several hours stranded at sea with 10 other people talks about their harrowing ordeal. You will hear from here -- you will hear from her ahead on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) KEILAR: Now to exclusive CNN reporting concerning acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Just weeks before becoming deputy A.G. last year, ethics officials advised him to recuse himself from cases where he had previously represented President Trump as his personal attorney.

SANCHEZ: But whether Blanche is actually going to do so is still an open question. We do know that the ethics official who advised Blanche on those recusals was fired last year and is now suing the Justice Department.

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CNN's Katelyn Polantz joins us now. She's one of the reporters on this story.

So, Katelyn, what are you learning when it comes to these recusals?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: Well, we didn't know what Todd Blanche had done about this.

And this question has been bugging me. For the moment -- since the moment Donald Trump won the election, it became possible that Todd Blanche and other former defense attorneys of Donald Trump would be running the show.

We now know from the reporting that Evan Perez, Hannah Rabinowitz, and I did around the Justice Department is that two weeks -- within the two weeks after Todd Blanche became the deputy attorney general last year, he and his right-hand lawyer at the top of the department, Emil Bove, they were given a briefing on ethics.

And in that briefing, Blanche was directly told by an ethics official at the Justice Department he needed to recuse from cases that would involve Donald Trump personally, because Trump was his former client.

Even if it was a case that Trump -- that Blanche himself hadn't worked on, if it related to Trump personally as a potential witness, having some sort of an interest there personally, it would be something that Blanche could not work on at the department.

Now he's the acting attorney general. He had signed the ethics pledge after this briefing, saying that he would recuse from cases like this. But this was the first time we really have pushed the question at the Justice Department, what's he doing about cases where Trump has a personal interest?

KEILAR: And he recently selected, Blanche, someone who's pushed a lot of conspiracy theories, former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova, to run an investigation into what has been described as a grand conspiracy against President Trump.

Does Blanche's involvement there potentially violate that ethics agreement that he signed on to? POLANTZ: Well, we don't know the extent of his involvement there.

That investigation, investigations around other people that Donald Trump really disliked, people, say, who may have investigated him personally when he was not the president between terms or before his first term, all of it is now a big issue of, is Blanche going to have to recuse?

And the history of the word recusal in Trump world is that Trump does not want his attorney general to recuse. He was furious when Jeff Sessions did it over the Mueller investigation and had to step aside. There was a possibility he was a witness.

So now what the Justice Department spokespeople are saying in response to this story, we asked, what about -- which cases? What's -- where is he recusing, if he is? They said that Blanche is recused from many cases before the Justice Department.

"In any cases that are still ongoing where he previously represented someone, he is recused. To the extent the Justice Department is investigating something related to the president for which Todd Blanche was previously representing him, then, hypothetically, yes, he would recuse."

Is he out of this conspiracy investigation that Joe diGenova is leading? Is he out of any other so-called Weaponization Working Group reports that would involve cases that had previously involved Trump? Big question. Let's see what he says, if he responds to this directly as acting attorney general, though, in my reporting, the only check on this at this point in time would be Congress, given that he's the acting attorney general.

KEILAR: Interesting.

Katelyn Polantz, thank you so much for that reporting.

Still ahead: If you build it, they will go. A new poll finds that most Americans are against building A.I. data centers in their communities. We're going to break down the numbers.

SANCHEZ: Plus: A controversial livestreamer known for racist videos now faces an attempted murder charge after allegedly shooting a man outside of a courthouse -- the new details on the case next.

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KEILAR: New government data shows Americans have been resilient when it comes to their spending. They are still shopping even in the face of higher gas prices and some of the worst feelings about the economy ever recorded. Retail sales rose for the third month in a row, climbing a half-percentage point last month.

CNN business and politics correspondent Vanessa Yurkevich is digging through the data here. Vanessa, Americans still spending, not on everything, though. What are they cutting back on?

VANESSA YURKEVICH, CNN BUSINESS AND POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: That's right.

Overall, really, this is a story of the American consumer strikes again. The resiliency of the American consumer strikes again, 0.5 percent increase in spending in the month of April. That's just shy of expectations. The expectations were 0.6 percent, up almost 5 percent year over year, though.

And this is important just because it shows a trend of three months of continued retail sales increasing in the face of higher prices at the grocery store, higher gas prices, and record low consumer sentiment. You can see the spending on the right-hand side of your screen there.

Where Americans are spending, this is interesting. You pointed this out. They are cutting back in certain places, durable goods. These are items that are supposed to last. So you're talking about car dealerships. Car parts spending was down there, furniture down 2 percent, clothing and accessories down 1.5 percent, but, of course, significant spending at the pump, gas prices rising 40 percent since the end of February.

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You see an increase in spending there, 2.8 percent, and then people still spending at bars and restaurants. This is usually discretionary spending, where people cut back first, but Americans still very much wanting to go out to eat and enjoy their lives.

One analyst did say that, sometimes, it takes a little bit of time for higher gas prices to really affect household budgets. So this is something to watch. Turning to also weekly jobless claims that we got today, these are the numbers of people that have filed for first-time unemployment, 211,000 people last week.

That's really on trend with what we have seen in the last year. So this really signals a low-fire labor market. But, also, we know that we're also in a low-hire labor market. We did see that jobs were added in the month of April, 115,000, but if you average it out, Brianna, over the last year, 76,000 jobs on average every single month.

That is pretty low. The exception here is the tech industry. What we have seen with the tech industry just in 2026 alone, the first six months, 108,000 layoffs so far this year. You're talking about companies like Cisco, LinkedIn, Meta announcing a 10 percent layoff of their work force. That's about 8,000 people.

All of this because of artificial intelligence and how that's changing the way that these companies operate and hire. Look at that compared to all of 2025, when 124,000 people were laid off in the tech industry. We have six more months to go. So this is certainly a sector to keep our eye on. This is an industry that is going through a transformation. One thing

to note, Brianna, that there are jobs being added in other industries if people are looking, health care a big one. It's been consistently adding tens of thousands of jobs over the last year or so. So that's a place to look at if you are a job seeker out there right now, Brianna.

KEILAR: All right, Vanessa, thank you so much for that -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: While Wall Street loves A.I., Main Street seems to hate what's needed to power it, data centers.

A new Gallup poll shows that a vast majority of Americans, seven in 10, oppose a data center in their community.

CNN business tech reporter Clare Duffy joins us now with the details.

So, Clare, Gallup found that this opposition was bipartisan.

CLARE DUFFY, CNN TECH REPORTER: Yes, Boris, that is some of the interesting -- most interesting findings from this poll.

And it's interesting too to hear Vanessa talk about those concerns about A.I. impacting jobs. That is part of the reason that you are seeing the American public say, wait a minute, we're not so sure about this technology and these data centers.

When we look at the numbers from this new Gallup poll, they did find that opposition to building new data centers in people's communities cuts across political lines. You find that more than 60 percent of Democrats, independents and Republicans saying that they oppose A.I. data center construction in their area, although Democrats are slightly more likely to say they strongly opposed it.

Now, why is this? This is because A.I. data centers are essentially big warehouses full of computers. They take up a lot of space. They require a lot of water and energy. They're noisy. These are massive construction projects that can be somewhat disruptive in communities.

And this poll found that most people are concerned about the environmental impacts, half of opponents of data centers saying that they were concerned about excessive use of resources, one in five opponents mentioning quality-of-life concerns like increased population, traffic, land that could be used for other purposes.

And 14 percent say they just are concerned about A.I. generally. They don't like it. They don't trust it. This is something that, Boris, we are seeing manifest across the country in terms of protests of new data center projects in communities, some communities even trying to pass bills that would ban the construction of new data center projects.

And this Gallup poll compare -- you compare to another poll they did recently about how Americans are feeling about nuclear power construction in their community. They found there that 53 percent of Americans opposed the construction of new data -- of new nuclear power facilities. And you compare that to the 71 percent that are concerned about data

center construction. So, interesting that data centers seem to be a really major concern for Americans.

SANCHEZ: What did Gallup learn about people who actually favored data centers in their community?

DUFFY: So, 27 percent of the respondents here said that they favored data center construction. Most of that is because of the economic benefits, things like tax revenue that these projects can bring; 55 percent of respondents mentioned job opportunities, also infrastructure development.

Boris, I spoke with Kevin O'Leary, who is trying to build a data center in Utah right now and facing significant local backlash. He talked about some of those economic benefits. Take a listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN O'LEARY, FOUNDER, O'LEARY VENTURES: Economic benefit is incredible. We're talking about bringing billions into the state and jobs and all the auxiliary businesses that go around that, and supporting new fire trucks and supporting new sheriffs and everything we have to, to make sure that we can protect this facility.

(END VIDEO CLIP)