Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

Vance Secret Service Agent Under Investigation?; Republicans Refer Jack Smith For Prosecution; Red Sea Attacks. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired July 23, 2026 - 13:00   ET

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

[13:00:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:00:58]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Fears of a widening war. Oil prices soar after Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claim responsibility for attacks on Saudi ships in the Red Sea. Ahead, how the president is responding.

Plus, a push to prosecute the prosecutor. The Republican House Judiciary chair asking the Justice Department to criminally charge former special counsel Jack Smith, who famously investigated President Trump. CNN has new details.

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: And a Secret Service agent on the security detail for Vice President Vance is placed on leave and under internal review, that agent suspected of leaking information for a news story which included details of Vance's personal travel.

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

KEILAR: We have breaking news from President Trump, as the war with Iran widens and threatens a global oil crisis.

Just a short time ago, the president issued a new warning. He said that the U.S. will punish Iran if the Houthis, an Iranian-backed proxy group, launches any future attacks on oil ships.

SCIUTTO: Overnight, the Houthis claimed they struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, this image from NASA appearing to show at least one ship on fire.

All of this pushing oil prices higher once again, Brent crude now topping $100 a barrel for the first time since back in May.

CNN's Kristen Holmes is live at the White House with more.

And, Kristen, are we on the precipice of the president expanding this war? And would that include attacking the Houthis? Because the president seemed to give himself some wiggle room there to say, well, I'm going to punish Iran for the Houthi attacks. KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, it

certainly seems that way, just based on what the president has said. We were going to ask Karoline Leavitt that question in the press briefing, but it was cut short because of the president's activities this afternoon.

One of the big questions, though, is, what is the plan here? I mean, that's what you're asking overall, Jim. And this is even more severe, given what we have now learned today, CNN reporting that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have recently assessed the kind of bombing that the United States is doing every single night right now is unlikely to move the Iranians' negotiating position.

So what exactly will President Trump do to break that deadlock? And the White House, President Trump, they are keenly aware that this war is incredibly unpopular, one of the big reasons, as you mentioned, the cost of oil.

I just want to show you here this graphic of the price of oil when President Trump started in office, the start of the Iran war. You can see how it started going down after that memorandum of understanding was signed, something that the White House was celebrating.

But each day since, it seems to be ticking upward. And the White House officials I have talked to, they don't want to be focusing on the Iran war. They don't want to be talking about it. They understand how unpopular it is. And they also want to be talking about the economy, in part because of President Trump's recent polling on the economy.

If you look at this poll, this FOX News poll among registered voters, only 24 percent of people believe that the condition of the economy is excellent or good, with only fair and poor being 76 percent. And the economy is a huge reason why President Trump was elected back into office.

So it likely is also playing a role on his approval numbers, which you can see here 39 percent of people only approve of his job -- of his job that he is doing in office, where 61 percent now disapprove.

But, again, Jim, I mean, the big question here is, what is he going to do? We know that for weeks he has been considering expanding the war. "The Wall Street Journal" is reporting the medics are being sent to Germany. We know that ships are being sent to the Middle East.

But is he actually going to take that step? And is there anything that he can do at this point to break this deadlock?

KEILAR: And, earlier, Kristen, the president set a new demand for this nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Walk us through that and tell us what it means.

[13:05:06]

HOLMES: Well, it certainly seems as though this threw a wrench in the entire deal. And Karoline Leavitt said as much during the briefing, that he decided this condition this morning. So I'm going to post -- we're going to show you the post that he made about the Saudi nuclear deal.

It says: "Even though it's already been approved, it is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords." There is a lot to unpack here. One, we have no indication that Saudi Arabia is willing to join the Abraham Accords. They had their own conditions on Israel, which Israel has said that they will not meet if they were going to s normalize relations with Israel.

It's unclear what this does. Karoline Leavitt saying that the deal was still moving forward, but also said it was dead if in fact they didn't sign up for the Abraham Accords. We have not learned what caused President Trump to make this shift, to add this condition to this civil nuclear deal, although it does seem likely there was an enormous amount of unease in the Senate.

There was a lot of media coverage about this deal, a lot of pushback on the deal overall. So this is now a condition, that it it's unclear why they went through the process of approving it, signing it, and now they're saying it's going to be dead if they don't meet these conditions, which we have not gotten answers on they have -- if they have said they will in any way.

SCIUTTO: Yes. And is a tweet legally binding or whatever they signed in that agreement?

HOLMES: Right.

SCIUTTO: Kristen Holmes, thanks so much.

We're joined now by former Defense Secretary and CIA Director during the Obama administration Leon Panetta.

Sir, good to have you on the show.

LEON PANETTA, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Good to be with you, Jim.

SCIUTTO: So, first on the Iran war, because the Trump administration, the president seem to believe they have control here, that they could dial up or dial down military action as they need. But it's actually Iran and its allies that have now expanded this conflict once again to another front, the Houthis attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

And I just wonder, from your perspective, who has the upper hand right now in this conflict.

PANETTA: Well, history tells us that forever wars do not end well.

And I think that's the box we're in right now, whether it was Vietnam, whether it was Iraq, whether it's Afghanistan, or whether it's Iran right now. The problem is that there really is no clear objective that the president is trying to put his arms around. So he continues military attacks, which intelligence makes pretty

clear it's not going to move Iran. And, at the same time, the American people are paying a very heavy price as a result of oil prices going sky high and the cost of living increasing as much as it is.

And so he's basically in a box right now, trying to figure out if there's a way out. And, frankly, I think right now this country is in deep trouble in terms of figuring some kind of strategy that can end this war. It does not look well at this point.

KEILAR: So this attack was on Saudi ships. How do you see that? Is it at all a response to this Saudi-U.S. nuclear deal?

PANETTA: Well, it's hard to tell. You cannot ignore the fact that the Houthis are now trying to basically establish a blockade on oil passing through the Red Sea.

And with the Straits of Hormuz closed and the Houthis now trying to block oil going through the Red Sea, what you're talking about is even a greater impact in terms of the price of oil. So the president really doesn't have much alternative but to be able to go after the Houthis in order to try to interfere with their blockade.

If he doesn't do that, then we're going to continue to sit here with what I think is a potential oil crisis that could really hurt our economy.

SCIUTTO: The trouble is, the administration has tried before to eliminate the Houthi threat and attacked Houthi positions and shot down Houthi drones with multimillion-dollar missiles and so on, and determined that it really wasn't worth it,you know, either the financial cost, which was enormous, but also the cost to U.S. munitions, which have been further depleted by the ongoing war with Iran.

Is there a good military operation for dealing with the Houthi threat to the Red Sea?

[13:10:00]

PANETTA: Jim, you're familiar with what happened with the Houthis in the past.

And, essentially, it was another one of these forever wars, where we decided to go after the Houthis, the Saudis went after the Houthis, the UAE went after the Houthis, and, in the end, none of that worked. The Houthis continued to attack ships in the Red Sea.

And so I don't see a viable strategy here to ultimately be able to shut down what the Houthis are doing. I think the only alternative for the administration is to get back to the negotiating table in some way to be able to try to address a way out of this war. Attacks, bombs, blockades, other approaches, yes, it can look like the president's taking the right action, but, in the end, it is not going to result in any kind of significant change to the current situation.

We're in a box. We have got to figure out a way to get out of it.

KEILAR: How do they get back to the table and have leverage? How would you do that?

SCIUTTO: Yes.

PANETTA: I think there's -- there's only one way I have thought of to achieve any kind of leverage in dealing with Iran. And that relates to the Straits of Hormuz.

It was a mistake in the MOU to imply, and it did strongly imply, that Iran would control the Straits of Hormuz. That was a bad mistake. And the result is, they continue to use that as leverage to get back at the United States. What the United States has to do in order to get any kind of leverage here is, it has to take control of the Straits of Hormuz and be able to control the free access that is necessary in order to be able to restore our economy.

If the president doesn't take any action to be able to take control of the Straits of Hormuz, then I think we're only left with the hope that somehow we're going to get back to a negotiating table that is now not only going to consider what happens in the nuclear area, but is going to consider what happens to the Straits of Hormuz as well.

That's going to be a very complicated negotiation.

SCIUTTO: And, from a military perspective, the possibility of a ground element and all the danger that a ground element would involve.

Leon Panetta, thanks so much.

PANETTA: Good to be with you.

SCIUTTO: Still to come: Republicans formerly ask President Trump's DOJ to prosecute former special counsel Jack Smith. What exactly they are accusing him of.

KEILAR: Plus, a Secret Service agent on the vice president's detail is put on leave. Ahead, the information that he is suspected of leaking.

And then, later: A police shooting in Wisconsin is renewing questions about the lack of body-worn cameras after officers shoot and kill a man they say was armed with a knife.

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:17:18]

KEILAR: A new push to prosecute the prosecutor.

The Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, is asking the Justice Department to consider criminal charges against former special counsel Jack Smith, who previously prosecuted President Trump. Congressman Jordan alleges that Smith misled the committee during testimony last December about records he obtained as part of the federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

SCIUTTO: The DOJ has already responded that it will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct.

CNN crime justice correspondent Katelyn Polantz is here.

So, Katelyn, of course, this is not the first of the president's perceived enemies that he's attempted to prosecute, most of which have gone nowhere. But can you explain the substance of the allegation here? And do legal experts you speak to consider them concrete?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN SENIOR CRIME AND JUSTICE REPORTER: I don't think the question is whether it's concrete at this point. The question is that the Republicans in Congress, they want the Justice Department to investigate Jack Smith for lying to them in a deposition he did in December, closed-door testimony.

And the Trump administration, including the Justice Department, we know that they have wanted to have a way to investigate Jack Smith and potentially prosecute them. Whether this is going to have legs enough to go that distance, go through a grand jury proceeding, have evidence that merits a case, that is way down the line.

The Justice Department just says they're going to investigate all criminal conduct. But this false statement, this is about testimony that Jack Smith was -- given when he was being asked by the House Judiciary Committee if he had sought the text messages and content of messages of members of Congress.

He said, and this was truthful in his answer, he did not seek search warrants for the contents of texts of members, and that when he -- his office did seek search warrants to try and get call logs to showing like incoming calls, outcoming calls of members of Congress' phones, hat did not include them seeking the actual content of the messages.

SCIUTTO: Right, just the logs.

POLANTZ: That's right. And so that's what he said in Congress truthfully.

What Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, is saying is, he's saying this is a half-truth, and that that is what should be prosecuted, that Smith didn't volunteer that they had swept up the messages of members of Congress when they went to the National Archives and got access to the phones of White House officials.

So they were going after White House officials' phones, the people around Trump, and on those phones, there were messages between White House officials, official phones with the executive branch, messages between them and members of Congress. That's what Jack Smith's team ultimately saw, and the basis of this false statement allegation that the Justice Department may now be looking at.

[13:20:02] KEILAR: Are hearing rules kind of like deposition rules, though? I mean, do you have to go above and beyond? Is he supposed to do that?

POLANTZ: Well, that would be the sort of thing that may come up in the litigation over something like this if there were to be a case. His team says that this referral has no basis, that there's a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice assist system by attacking someone who serves faithfully and fearlessly.

KEILAR: Interesting.

OK, so what else are Republicans accusing him of?

POLANTZ: Well, that's the real meat of this. There is a long-running tension right now between how the Smith investigation conducted the business in the way that prosecutors conduct their business. They get search warrants for toll records regularly in an investigation.

But members of Congress, they do not like that they were able to get the members' call logs, toll records, not the content, just showing who they were calling in and out, because they say that should be protected under the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution, sort of this privacy confidentiality around members of Congress so that they can do their legislative work, and it won't be used against them in court.

Now, that doesn't extend so far to there being a violation of law around it, but it is something that the members of Congress are saying, this is our issue, too, and we're wedging in this false statement accusation as well.

KEILAR: Katelyn, thank you so much for that.

Katelyn Polantz.

And still ahead: A Secret Service agent is now on leave, suspected of leaking information about the second family -- the information he's accused of sharing with a media outlet next.

SCIUTTO: And you're looking at right here what was once a boat marina in Lake Powell. However, a drought there is now putting the water supply for millions at risk. CNN's new reporting just ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:26:23]

SCIUTTO: Today, the Secret Service confirmed that one of its own agents is under internal review, though it declined to say exactly why. A source tells CNN, the agent who protects Vice President Vance and his family is suspected of leaking information for a news story.

KEILAR: The piece by MS NOW revealed that some in the Vance security detail are -- quote -- "fed up" with unpredictable last-minute requests, including the V.P. planning to fly his son on a military chopper to a golf lesson. The trip was reportedly canceled due to weather.

CNN senior correspondent Josh Campbell is joining us now with the latest.

Josh, what are you learning here?

JOSH CAMPBELL, CNN SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Well, a very unusual development here. But, as you mentioned, we're hearing that a Secret Service agent that is on -- or was on Vice President J.D. Vance's detail is now under internal review, a law enforcement source tells me.

They have also been placed on administrative leave as this investigation continues. We got a statement from the Secret Service today confirming our reporting from overnight.

I will read you part of that statement. They say that: "A member of the vice presidential Protective Division is the subject of an administrative investigation and potential criminal inquiry involving allegations of compromising operational and information security."

They go on to say that: "Any conduct that undermines the trust and confidence between a protectee and their protective detail is fundamentally incompatible with our mission and will not be tolerated."

Now, as you mentioned, this all stemmed from that report by MS NOW that quoted different Secret Service sources. They described this budding morale problem within the team of agents assigned to Vance. They were concerned about frequent last-minute travel demands requiring them to cancel days off.

They were also concerned reportedly about Vance's use of government vehicles, to include a helicopter to go to a golf lesson, at taxpayer expense.

Now, look, we have heard from sources that for months have been concerned about what they describe as the often chaotic schedule of the vice president, including his personal schedule, that within law enforcement and military circles, people may not understand that, in order for the vice president to move, to travel, that sometimes involves hundreds of people, who have said that oftentimes this kind of erratic start and then stop and then reschedule obviously has reverberating effects.

It's worth pointing out that, for the Secret Service especially, this has been concerning because they face staffing shortages and they have a very serious mission, a no-fail mission. We, of course, have reached out to MS NOW for comment on the incident, guys.

SCIUTTO: Josh, are there any legitimate questions here about how the Secret Service was used here for having the possibility of travel not related to the vice president's work?

CAMPBELL: Well, two things I think can be true with this story. That is, this is highly unusual to see this type of leak investigation within the Secret Service. They obviously take the mission very seriously. They have close access to the government's most senior leaders.

So this is not something you often hear about. But, to your point, it does raise the question, were there -- was there such concern among this team that they felt that the only option was to try to share this information, concerns that MS NOW reported, that we have heard ourselves about the use of some of this taxpayer equipment for travel?

So, again, it does raise important questions. But, of course, for the Secret Service itself that's conducting this criminal investigation, they have no tolerance for any of this. And so we will obviously have to wait and see where this goes. We don't know if there will be administrative penalties or perhaps even potential criminal charges here.

KEILAR: All right, Josh, thank you so much for that.

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: Brand-new polling painting a very positive midterm picture for one party. We're going to tell you which one right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)