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Jill Biden Speaks Out; DOJ Targets Trump Accuser; Iran Peace Deal Close?; Air Travel Restrictions Over Immigration?. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired May 28, 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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BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: The deal before the deal. A new potential breakthrough in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, as both sides try to prevent new attacks from upending a fragile cease-fire.

Plus: launching a fight against another Trump foe, the Justice Department now investigating E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine columnist who accused President Trump of sexual assault. Ahead, the allegations being made against her.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: And debate day confession. In a new interview, former first lady Jill Biden says she feared that her husband had a stroke during his disastrous performance on stage against Donald Trump.

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

SANCHEZ: Just minutes from now, the White House is holding a press briefing, as we're learning of a potential breakthrough in the war with Iran.

Just hours after the U.S. and Iran traded strikes, U.S. officials tell CNN the two sides have reached a tentative deal, though President Trump has not yet given his final approval.

CNN's Alayna Treene is live for us at the White House.

So, Alayna, what are you learning is in this deal?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, I mean, this is kind of a short-term deal that we know they have been working on. They have been referring to it as a memorandum of understanding.

And, essentially, where they are now is, they finalized the language and the text for this agreement. But, still, one, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, needs to give his approval for it. We also have not heard yet that the Iranians have accepted it as well. So things could still fall apart. We have been at this road before where you have heard a lot of

optimism, just for someone to change their mind and kind of upend the state of talks. But, as we understand it, a lot of the details of what would be in this framework are what we know that both sides have been pushing for all along.

Essentially, it would include language lifting constrictions on the Strait of Hormuz, essentially ensuring that passage through that key waterway returns to prewar levels. It would also end the lifting of the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.

But it would also start a 60-day negotiating period. And this is really where, in my conversations with sources, our colleague Kevin Liptak talking to his as well about this, that's where a lot of the thornier issues still need to be worked out, the question of nuclear.

Now, in the short-term agreement, one of the provisions is that Iran declares that it will not develop a nuclear weapon. But one of the key things we know that the Trump administration really wants to ensure is a part of this broader deal, a much longer-term deal, is the enforcement mechanism to ensure that Iran sticks to their word on that.

The other big issue, of course, the red line we know the president has talked about is the retrieval of highly enriched uranium. All of that, I'm told, would still likely need to be really parsed out in the longer-term discussions.

But this is a significant breakthrough. I think, if the United States and Iran can get both leaders of both countries to agree to the short- term deal, this memorandum of understanding, that would be the most significant development we have had since the start of the war, and certainly, of course, throughout the cease-fire, but again, some caution that I have been hearing in my conversations with sources that no deal is going to be official until it is actually put on paper and signed by both countries.

I'd also remind you that we kind of heard a little bit of less optimism from the president yesterday, who was, I think, pretty eager to show that he was not rushing into a deal and also that he really wants this to be stronger than the one that was struck during the Obama administration, so all of that also weighing heavily on some of these discussions, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Yes, Alayna Treene, thank you so much for the update from the White House -- Brianna.

KEILAR: First on CNN, the Justice Department targeting another Trump adversary, multiple sources telling CNN that DOJ has launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the woman who had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s.

In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll and awarded her $5 million. The following year, a different jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll more than $83 million in a second case.

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We're told that the new probe is focused on whether the former magazine columnist committed perjury during one of her depositions involving the first case, when she testified that her lawsuits were not funded by outside sources.

Her lawyers later revealed a couple weeks before the trial that billionaire Reid Hoffman, a nonprofit associated with him, had paid some of Carroll's legal fees and expenses. We should note that Carroll is still fighting multiple legal battles with the president.

He has appealed the $5 million sexual abuse judgment to the Supreme Court and has pledged to do the same with the $83 million defamation case. So far, the Supreme Court has passed on this.

We're joined now by James Sample. He is a professor of law at Hofstra University.

James, it's important to note that this issue of her deposition and the outside payment of legal fees and expenses was dealt with in the trial. Does DOJ have a case here? Explain what was done in that 2023 trial and whether or not that affects this investigation here.

JAMES SAMPLE, LAW PROFESSOR, HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY: Brianna, you are absolutely right that that is a critical clarification. And it does make a huge difference.

Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York presided over both of the underlying trials. And after E. Jean Carroll's lawyers disclosed to Alina Habba, who at that time was representing the president in her personal capacity and in his personal capacity, they then disclosed the information to the trial court as well.

And Judge Lewis Kaplan actually gave the Trump team the opportunity to engage in a supplemental deposition focused on this narrow question. He then reviewed that deposition, reviewed other testimony, determined that E. Jean Carroll had been credible and that she didn't come anywhere near the standard of perjury.

And, again, it's worth reiterating, she and her team disclosed to Trump's team the discrepancy in her initial testimony. So, after that disclosure, Judge Lewis Kaplan allowed this examination to go on. He tested it, he examined it, and he resolved the matter in favor of E. Jean Carroll, finding that she was entirely credible.

Why that's important, two reasons. One, it means this matter has already been litigated and has already been litigated by the very same trial judge who heard the underlying cases themselves. That's critical. In the law, we would call that matter res judicata. The thing has already been adjudicated.

The other factor is that this case is being brought by the Department of Justice in a case that is absolutely, entirely and 100 percent about Donald Trump in his personal capacity. So, as Adam Smith made this point last night with Anderson Cooper, the

president is in this case, even more so than in some of the other retribution cases, using the Department of Justice not just for retribution against his enemies, but for retribution against his perceived enemies in a matter that was entirely based on his private citizen conduct.

KEILAR: James, let me ask you, because this deposition in question here occurred in New York. That's not where this investigation is taking place. Is that unusual? What questions does that raise?

SAMPLE: It is unusual. We don't know exactly the reasons why.

And so some of this is a bit speculative, but it is a bit of a tell. The deposition took place in New York. The underlying cases took place in New York. LinkedIn and the nonprofit that is associated with this funding question is based in Chicago.

So there is a venue hook that is at least plausible, but this certainly begs the question, why wouldn't you bring this in New York? Possibly -- and this is a matter of speculation -- possibly because you needed to look for a friendly forum and a friendly U.S. attorney who would be willing to try and investigate this kind of a claim.

KEILAR: So this verdict has been appealed multiple times. It has survived. We should be very clear about that. Is it possible that the investigation is the point here? How onerous is an investigation even without an indictment?

SAMPLE: I think that that is absolutely correct. I think that the investigation is the point.

This is not a winnable case for the Department of Justice. Even if there were merits to the claim -- and it's already been determined that there are not merits to the claim, that's actually been determined -- it is an extremely high bar to establish perjury.

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You require a knowing falsehood, that the individual testified knowing it was false, and that they intended it to be false. That's a high bar in a normal perjury prosecution. Here, you would be talking about a perjury prosecution that's already been adjudicated.

This -- the point of this is to exact the harassment, to exact the time, the inconvenience, and the annoyance, frankly, of knowing that you are the subject of investigation being spearheaded presumably by the president of the United States.

KEILAR: James Sample, appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much.

Still to come: a revealing interview. Former President Biden's debate performance was so bad that his wife, the former first lady, says she actually worried that he'd had a stroke. We're talking to a former senior adviser for Biden's campaign. Plus, a new Homeland Security plan could upend international travel just before the World Cup. We're going to take a look at what's being floated.

And then later: The Trump Accounts app is now live. What parents need to know.

We have these stories and much more coming up on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

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SANCHEZ: Former first lady Jill Biden is revealing for the first time what was going through her mind as then-President Joe Biden had a disastrous debate performance that sent his campaign into crisis mode and ultimately led to him dropping out of the 2024 election.

"The Atlantic" obtaining her new memoir, and, in it, she says that she -- quote -- "wondered if her husband had unknowingly ingested drugs or was having a medical episode on live television. 'Is he short- circuiting?' Jill Biden thought? 'Is this a stroke? I felt like we were watching an A.I. hologram of the man we knew and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?'"

The former first lady also told CBS News this:

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JILL BIDEN, FORMER FIRST LADY: I wasn't horrified I was frightened, because I had never, ever seen Joe like that before or since, never.

QUESTION: Or since.

BIDEN: Yes, or since.

QUESTION: You have never seen him like that?

BIDEN: Never, no.

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QUESTION: What happened?

BIDEN: I don't know what happened. I mean, when -- as I watched it, I thought, oh my God, he's having a stroke. And it scared me to death.

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SANCHEZ: Let's talk about this with someone from the Biden 2024 campaign.

Adrienne Elrod was a senior adviser.

Adrienne, I wonder what your reaction is to watching that clip and hearing these excerpts. ADRIENNE ELROD, FORMER BIDEN CAMPAIGN SENIOR SPOKESPERSON: Well, I

was certainly glad to hear Dr. Biden talk about this in her own words, what she was experiencing and feeling at the time.

I mean, look, Boris, anybody who watched that debate, including you and me both, saw that he was not at his best performance, by any stretch. And it was something that we had never seen before. I mean, I certainly had been on the campaign. I traveled with him. I saw him in his best light, and that was a dismal performance.

It was a disaster, I think, he called it at the time. So I certainly can understand why she felt that way. She was a concerned wife, a spouse, first and foremost. And now she's able to really speak her truth and share what she was going through in her book.

SANCHEZ: The campaign seemed to try to move forward despite that performance.

And as a Biden senior spokesperson, you appeared on "Morning Joe" the day after the debate talking about fighting forward and business as usual, with him stumping in New York and North Carolina. The first lady was talking about the idea that he might be having a stroke. I wonder if there was behind the scenes more concern in the campaign after the debate than you led on.

ELROD: I mean, look, again, Boris, certainly, anybody who watched that debate understood that that was not Biden at his best, by any stretch.

And we certainly remember some of his strong debate performances in 2020 against Donald Trump. We did not see that that night. We also saw him at a rally immediately after the debate, where it was back to the same old Joe Biden that we had known for a long time.

So, for us, of course we were moving forward, because we did feel like it was a blip and it was something that we had not seen before and something that we didn't expect to see again. And that was what we did. We moved forward. He traveled around for the next few weeks, before he ended up dropping out of the campaign, and traveled to a number of states...

SANCHEZ: Yes.

ELROD: ... spoke at a number of rallies and really gave that -- those strong performances that we were used to seeing him do.

He had a bad night. I mean, I'm certainly not sitting here and saying that that was something that we expected to see.

SANCHEZ: Sure.

ELROD: But the bottom line is, he didn't have a stroke. That, we know. He didn't have a stroke, and he went on to do the best that he could while a number of top surrogates and supporters were calling on him to drop out.

And, ultimately, I think he made the best decision that he thought he could make for the -- for the country and for his party.

SANCHEZ: Yes. Did anyone discuss a medical evaluation after the debate performance or even slowing down the campaign to figure out exactly what happened?

ELROD: Well, look, I was certainly not privy or part of those conversations if they did take place.

SANCHEZ: Understood.

Did you -- why do you think the first lady is sharing this now? Do you think it helps Democrats as they try to move forward toward midterms and beyond?

ELROD: You know, I'm not going to certainly speak for Dr. Biden. I think she deserves to share her story, what she was going through. She's writing a book. This is part of her book and she's speaking her truth.

I don't -- of course, the Dr. -- Dr. Biden and President Biden will be part of the Democratic Party. They are -- he did an incredible job for four years as president. But I don't think that the two things have to be symbiotic. I think that she is writing her book and telling her story.

I think, simultaneously, we have a number of new candidates who are running for Senate, running for House, running for -- potentially for president in '27-'28. People like me are looking forward to lifting up those voices, taking back the House and Senate in the midterms and making sure that we win back the presidency in 2028.

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SANCHEZ: Part of the reason that this conversation is pertinent now is because of the discussion over the autopsy report that CNN and others ultimately unveiled and questions about what could have been done differently in 2024.

And I hear you when you say that no one had seen Joe Biden speak that way previously, but there had been concerns about his age before debate night. I remember being live on the air as Robert Hur's report came out and reading some of those details about him being forgetful over certain pertinent details and leading to questions about his fitness for office.

So, do you think that that should have been incorporated in the discussion over this autopsy and conversations moving forward about what the party could learn about 2024?

ELROD: Look, Boris, again, I was on the campaign. I can tell you why we lost that campaign. There are a number of reasons, from the way the administration handled the situation in Gaza, to the fact that prices were too high.

I don't need an autopsy done by the DNC, by several volunteers who were not part -- by the way, not part of the 2024 cycle, to tell me why we lost the election. I also think that we should not take stock in that autopsy because it was so poorly done. What a disappointment.

But I think, moving forward, the DNC is not the only vehicle that's going to drive this party forward. Again, we see -- we have a number of candidates from Graham Platner in Maine to a number of people running across the country, Jim Cooper in North Carolina, who are really going to help chart our party forward.

And we -- we know that we're going to have a lot of strong candidates running in 2027, going into the 2028 election. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm not going to focus on an autopsy that seems to have been written on ChatGPT to tell me how we need to move our party forward.

SANCHEZ: Adrienne Elrod, we have to leave the conversation there. We appreciate you sharing your time.

ELROD: Thank you, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course.

The Department of Homeland Security is threatening to stop processing international flights at airports in sanctuary cities. We're talking LAX, JFK, LaGuardia, SFO in San Francisco.

That story is next.

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KEILAR: It is a move that could devastate international travel into the U.S.

The Trump administration is threatening to stop processing international flights into sanctuary cities. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says formal plans are being put together to pull Customs and Border Patrol staff out of certain airports unless their cities cooperate with federal immigration officials.

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MARKWAYNE MULLIN, U.S. HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY: We're currently drawing up plans to say, listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn't be processing international flights into their cities either.

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KEILAR: That was Tuesday. And here's Mullin again this morning:

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MULLIN: We're not going to halt the flights. What we're saying is, we just won't be able to process them, because we don't have officers there. And if they're not there processing international flights, then those individuals, when the airlines land, can't -- well, they won't be permitted into the United States.

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KEILAR: Travel groups, including major airlines and even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, say it was a bad idea.

CNN aviation correspondent Pete Muntean is with us now with details on this.

I mean, first off, let's talk about the locations that we'd be talking about here.

PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

And you can see why -- if you just look at the map, why the airline lobby and the travel industry lobby at large says this would be disastrous. We're talking cities up and down the Northeast Corridor that are sanctuary cities, also a big location in California here.

These are huge international gateways. And then, when you lay this over the major international airports in the U.S., we're talking some of the biggest international hubs. JFK, that's the number one airport for international arrivals. We're talking about 34,000 passengers passing through JFK internationally each day.

LAX is number two, San Francisco number three, huge hub for United Airlines. These airports are huge for Asia travel. These airports are huge for Europe travel. So you can see that, if you really slow the pace of Customs and Border Protection processing at the airport, that would just create a huge bottleneck.

We're talking major lines. And the airlines really sort of schedule their flights around the times that CBP can handle everybody, citizens and noncitizens, coming in through customs at these airports. So this would have a really, really bad effect if this does ultimately happen.

KEILAR: And what makes this plan so brilliant as well is that we're just two weeks away from the World Cup.

MUNTEAN: Yes. We have...

KEILAR: So the timing is not great for this.

MUNTEAN: The timing isn't perfect.

OK, take a look at the map now. Take a look at it again. Here are the stadiums where we will see World Cup games just two weeks' time, about a month-long of games. Looks pretty similar once again.

So, the State Department says we're anticipating about five million people in total coming through these major international gateways to come to these games. So that would have a pretty disproportionate effect on the World Cup, which the travel industry is worried about in a big way.

It's not just airlines. They're sort of the linchpin here, but we're talking hotels and restaurants and beyond that could really have a trickle-down effect. And that's why there's so much concern about this idea. And, remember, the World Cup was supposed to be something that would really sort of rejuvenate and goose tourism in the U.S.

It would, theoretically, according to the travel industry, be a bad thing.

KEILAR: Yes, because even people who look at this and say, well, I don't like sanctuary cities, the economy is all connected, right? So this isn't something that you can just sort of, like, wall off these cities and the economic impacts from.