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Interview with Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA): Former JPMorgan Chase Executive Jes Staley Testifies on Epstein Ties; CNN Heads to NORAD Amid Tensions Between U.S. and Canada; 5 Deaths Reported in NYC Legionnaires' Disease Cluster. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired July 23, 2026 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Today, one of the world's former top financial executives faced pointed questions about his ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Jes Staley, a former executive with JPMorgan Chase and Barclays CEO, was on Capitol Hill testifying behind closed doors in the House Oversight Committee's Epstein investigation. Staley exchanged more than a thousand e-mails with Epstein, with some describing his friendship with the late sex offender as profound, calling him family.

Staley has maintained that he was unaware of any of Epstein's crimes.

Joining us now just out from listening to that testimony is ranking member on House Oversight, Congressman Robert Garcia. Thanks for being with us to talk a little bit about what you heard here.

And I do just want to jump into some of the reporting that we have involving Staley to see what came of it in this interview. Previously, we've reported on a woman who told the FBI that Epstein directed her to massage Staley, and she said Staley then abused her at Epstein's New York home sometime between 2011 and 12. Did that come up?

REP. ROBERT GARCIA (D-CA), RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE: It did. Look, we've been first in this interview now for a few hours. The interview is actually continuing right now.

And he has been asked extensively about this, of course, accusation, which is quite serious and quite credible. We also have talked to survivors as a committee ourself. And there are real credible allegations of abuse by Jes Staley.

And quite frankly, he is denying this abuse. He is denying even having a friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which we know is complete BS, because we have communication between the two. I mean, we're talking about endless amounts of documents, hundreds and hundreds of pages of exchanges of e-mails.

And so what's happening right now is this is an issue with not putting Mr. Staley under oath. Republicans continue to not put these witnesses under oath. And these witnesses continue to either lie or evade questions from the committee. Look, we are getting some good information, but he is continuing to deny any of the accusations that are that are quite serious from survivors.

KEILAR: He's denying having a friendship with Epstein. What exactly -- I mean, how did he characterize his relationship? And can you give us a better sense of what his denial is like?

GARCIA: He is denying having any sort of close relationship or friendship with Epstein, which is completely ridiculous. And we all we have to do is read exchanges where literally there is reference of a best friendship there. And so he also continues to deny some of the e- mails and that we have seen in the files, which is quite bizarre.

He's also denying essentially evidence have been presented in front of him.

[14:35:00]

And so he, like others that we've interviewed because he's not under oath, I think is empowered to not be fully honest with the committee. And so what we have said is all of these witnesses, we're going to bring back under oath to answer these questions. And I think it's again, it's ridiculous.

And quite frankly, it's shameful on the investigation that Chairman Comer continues to not have witnesses under oath. I will say this, there are other information that we're getting from Jes Staley, from Leon Black, from Les Wexner, these kind of millionaire and billionaire benefactors that are opening up new portions of our investigation about what Jeffrey Epstein may have known, where he's getting his financial fortune. So that is going to be interesting, but there's a lot of questions he's not answering.

KEILAR: What did he say on that front?

GARCIA: Well, he is pointing us in an important direction. We have questions, for example, about his relationships at his own financial institution, of course, with JPMorgan Chase, and kind of who was involved and who else knew about what Jeffrey Epstein was doing, which we have found quite interesting, which is going to lead us in some new directions.

KEILAR: So the top Democrat on House Judiciary, Jamie Raskin, is launching this investigation into potential ties between Epstein and foreign intel. Vice President Vance told Joe Rogan on his podcast earlier this month, that he, the vice president personally thinks there's probably -- that there probably was a broader conspiracy. And you know, there are multiple possibilities for that, including this one that he outlined.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

J.D. VANCE, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNTED STATES: So there's the theory that whether it was American intel or foreign intel, that Epstein was sort of using -- Epstein was using sort of the sex ring to blackmail rich and powerful people.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: So there are these conspiracy theories, you're well aware of them, that Epstein was a spy, you know, Mossad. Have you seen any real evidence of that sort of writ large over the course of this investigation? Has Staley been asked about that?

Has he been was this just a case of Epstein appearing to kind of like chase wealth and influence with wealthy and influential figures who were foreign?

GARCIA: What I'll say is, we've been -- we've asked this question of many of our witnesses and folks that have come to testify in front of us. We as of today, there is no direct evidence linking Epstein to a kind of -- to a foreign entity. But and I think this is important.

There is -- there's enough information out there. And there are enough individuals who believe that there could be connections. And it's something that we're actively investigating and following.

So we do not rule it out. And so certainly, it's something that can't be ruled out at this moment. Could Jeffrey Epstein been involved with foreign governments?

Could there have been even blackmailing? Obviously, some of these rich and powerful men in government leaders, perhaps on behalf of others. Those are things that could be true.

And so we have to explore those. And we continue to dig and dig through the financial records. And of course, the witness testimony.

KEILAR: Could be true, but you don't have evidence to indicate that they are true at this point. Is that a fair characterization?

GARCIA: I think it's fair to characterize it as of right now, there is no direct evidence, but there are there is enough there to further investigate.

KEILAR: So I spoke last night with Congressman Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie about their push for another Epstein files Transparency Act like a 2.0 that they're doing, which would give standing in court to those at the state level, to victims to others who are challenging what they say is DOJ noncompliance with the original law to disclose the files. Obviously, DOJ has a lot of stuff that they did not put out. If that were to pass, do you think it would work?

Do you trust DOJ to cooperate?

GARCIA: Well, I definitely don't trust DOJ to cooperate at all. I mean, let's be clear, they they're not even in compliance right now with the first Epstein Transparency Act. Let's remember that half of the files we're talking about between 2.5 to 3 million files and documents have not been released to the public. And so only half the evidence has been actually released to the public. And so they're not even in compliance with the first act. Now, passing a second piece of legislation we support.

I've been talking to obviously to Ro Khanna, who's on our committee about this, and we support that effort. However, we should we should understand very clearly that Todd Blanche and his entire mission seems to be to protect Donald Trump, the White House, and to continue this cover up. There has been a cover up from day one that goes all the way back to the Department of Justice, President Trump, all calling this a hoax, not getting the files out there.

So we're going to continue to push and another piece of legislation is another important way of getting there.

KEILAR: Congressman Robert Garcia, thanks for being with us.

GARCIA: Thank you.

KEILAR: Still to come, could a political rift between the U.S. and Canada splinter the strong military alliance between the two countries?

[14:40:00]

We'll take you inside NORAD to examine how service members are working side by side in the air with their Canadian counterparts, despite the insults and politics on the ground.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney says that he and President Trump have agreed to intensify trade talks, but warns that he would consider, quote, all options if Trump's 50 percent tariffs actually take effect. The levies are set to kick in next month, but the president, for his part, is only ramping up the rhetoric when it comes to our neighbors to the north.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I love Canada. I love the people of Canada.

[14:45:00]

Many friends that live in Canada, but their leadership from Trudeau to the current leadership, I mean, in all fairness to them, they need us to survive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: As tensions rise between the U.S. and Canada, I went to NORAD at bases in Alaska where U.S. and Canadian forces are very much joined at the hip in protecting the U.S., Canada, and North America from a whole host of threats and adversaries. So how do they view the ongoing spat between the leaders of their two nations? We went to find out in this CNN exclusive report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) SCIUTTO (voice-over): While the U.S. and Canada trade tariffs and insults on the ground --

TRUMP: What I'd like to see Canada become our 51st state.

MARK CARNEY, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: But Canada doesn't live because of the United States.

SCIUTTO (voice-over): In the air, they still fly side by side. NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, is the first line of defense for both the U.S. and Canada against aircraft and missiles from Russia, China, North Korea, and beyond.

SCIUTTO: Tell me how important and how that partnership works.

COL. MICHAEL MULLEN, FORMER, DEPUTY COMMANDER, 354TH FIGHTER WING: That partnership is fantastic, right? So if you look at as we go to work in protecting the, really, Alaska, the Pacific region, really our northern hemisphere, you saw that map again. If you look down the top of the world where the Arctic is and everything gets out there.

So we are working constantly together with our Canadian allies. We really can't do this homeland defense piece for the Arctic region without our two nations working in collaboration with each other.

SCIUTTO (voice-over): Here, everything is a combined effort. Joint mission, joint commands, and joint sorties, often scrambling to intercept Russian and Chinese aircraft testing North American airspace. And those flybys can be close and dangerous, like this one involving a Russian fighter jet in 2024.

LT. COL. NATHAN MONDUL, FORMER SQUADRON COMMANDER, 18TH FIGHTER INTERCEPTOR SQUADRON: That was one of my pilots. I'd say that I don't know who that Russian pilot was, but I'm sure that they probably got some talking to, and they got back to their base. I would hope they did.

SCIUTTO: Eielson Air Force Base is first to respond to any air incursions by Russian or Chinese aircraft. And it's home not just to F-16s, but also state-of-the-art F-35s.

SCIUTTO (voice-over): Inside NORAD's operations center, the wall is decorated with stars marking each intercept of a Russian or Chinese aircraft. And that list is growing. Since January 2025, U.S. fighter aircraft have conducted some two dozen intercepts in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, where U.S. and Canadian fighters respond to any threats in the air.

SCIUTTO: What is the operation tempo up here lately?

BRIGADIER GEN. MARK LACHAPELLE, DEPUTY COMMANDER, ALASKAN NORAD REGION: Yes, the operation tempo has been pretty heavy. I've lost count, to be frank and honest. But we do it, and it helps us demonstrate our ability to defend our theater and operate in the environment, which we know Alaska is challenging.

SCIUTTO (voice-over): It's a challenge U.S. and Canadian commanders still make clear they can only meet together.

LT. COL. JONATHAN BLENKUSH, ALASKA AIR NATIONAL GUARD: Absolutely essential here. Not just from Alaska being, you know, a lot of common interests with Canada, but from a mission partner perspective, showing that combined effort in defense of the homeland of North America, keeping integrated on that is absolutely essential for us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SCIUTTO (on camera): You'll notice there that I spoke to both U.S. and Canadian commanders, and that's because the units in NORAD are deliberately mixed commands. If you have a U.S. commander, you have a Canadian deputy. If you're a Canadian commander, you have a U.S. deputy. They very much continue to work together.

Now to some of the other headlines we are watching this hour. Ousted Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov is publicly rejecting an offer for a new role within the government.

That offer coming from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Fedorov was fired by Zelenskyy earlier this month, which then sparked widespread protests across the country.

Ukraine has continued to turn up the pressure on Russia, however, striking deep inside Russian territory yet again today. Video shows large plumes of black smoke rising over an oil refinery there. Moscow's Ministry of Defense says its air defenses intercepted more than 200 drones in an overnight attack. Many, though, hit their targets.

While crews rescued more than 100 people from flooding in West Virginia, where scores of roads have been washed out, thousands of residents have lost power, the governor said today that two people remain missing. He called in 500 troops from the National Guard to help.

In the town of Buchanan, seven inches of rain fell in just over a handful of hours. Check out how the high waters there carried away a storage shed. One stream in Buchanan flowed above 10 feet, the highest level reported in 80 years of record keeping. Seems like new records set all the time.

[14:50:00]

And a good signal for the job market. New applications for unemployment benefits fell to their lowest level since September 1969 in the last week. The Labor Department says first time claims fell to about 187,000.

Economists say it is a sign that fewer people were laid off. Some good economic news there.

Still to come, New York City is facing a deadly disease. The Legionnaire's outbreak, which has already claimed five lives. We're going to speak to an infectious disease expert next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: New York City health officials say five people have died in connection with the cluster of Legionnaires' disease cases.

[14:55:00]

As of last night, seven people remain hospitalized, but no new cases had been reported, and officials believe that the source of the outbreak, cooling towers on the Upper East Side, has now been eliminated. But this is all too familiar in New York City.

There was actually a community cluster last year of cases that was connected to cooling towers in Harlem, and that sent 92 people to the hospital and killed seven. In May, a new law was passed that required more frequent inspections. Facing criticism, Mayor Mamdani is defending his administration's response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI, NEW YORK CITY: While in the past, the city began investigations after three confirmed cases in a tight time frame and geographic area, the department acted at the earliest indication of a potential cluster, launching our investigation on Thursday, July 2nd, at which point there were just two confirmed cases. We immediately mobilized to test all cooling towers in the investigation zone. This is the most aggressive remediation and enforcement strategy that our city has ever taken to eliminate the source of Legionella bacteria.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Let's discuss now with infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja. OK, Dr. Adalja, thank you for being with us, because I think a lot of people are looking at this, and they want to know more about it. So first off, just tell us about Legionnaire's disease and how this spreads.

DR. AMESH ADALJA, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR HEALTH SECURITY: So Legionnaire's disease is a bacterial infection. It was first described in 1976 during a convention of the American Legion Association in Philadelphia, which led to this kind of mysterious pneumonia being described. And what it is, is an infection where you inhale the bacteria, and it can cause severe pneumonia in certain individuals, not everybody, but people who have risk factors for severe disease that might be older, they might be alcoholics, they might have chronic lung disease.

That's who we usually see get Legionnaire's disease. And it's not something that spreads from person to person. I think of it like an industrial disease.

So it likes to breed in water, so cooling towers on apartment buildings, that's kind of the mainstay of where we see it, but we also see it sometimes in other water supplies. And these outbreaks can be deadly, but they're usually contained once remediation is in place, and you treat it with standard antibiotics.

KEILAR: How deadly is it?

ADALJA: So if you get Legionnaire's disease and have pneumonia, the case fatality ratio could be about 10 percent. And that reflects the fact that the people that are getting it aren't usually the most healthy people. These are going to be people that are at an advanced age, have lung disease, heart disease, other comorbidities that make Legionnaire's disease so much more serious for them.

And that's likely what we're seeing with these deaths that are occurring in New York City.

KEILAR: So I wonder what you are looking at here when it comes to New York's response, because you have the mayor stressing that there were only two confirmed cases when they really launched their response. But there was this Legionnaire's outbreak in Harlem last year, and Gotham has reported that there were supposed to be staffing improvements to help, and they just haven't been able to staff up to where they need to be. The New York City Health Department is budgeted for 56 water ecologist positions, currently only has 35 ecologists and supervisors on staff, according to a spokesperson for the department.

How critical is it to be staffed up to prevent clusters like this?

ADALJA: It's very critical that health departments have robust funding. That is not something that's subject to kind of political whim or ups and downs, panic-neglect cycles. And we know that health departments all across the country are getting less than what they need.

That's always been a chronic problem. So the more people you have in place at a health department, the more resilient your city is to Legionnaire's disease and to many other infectious disease threats that they're constantly battling. I think with New York City, the key thing here was finding the buildings that were impacted, that had Legionnaire's bacteria in their cooling towers and quickly remediating them.

And you can see the results of that because there haven't been new cases for some time. If you look at the epi curve, the epidemic curve, where the cases go up and down, we haven't seen new cases. The cases that you're hearing about that are becoming fatal, those are people that are already in the hospital, which tells me that they likely have remediated the source.

We'll know more as days go by, but it does seem that they have been acting aggressively and appropriately with handling this outbreak, which is kind of a function of the fact that we're in a big city that has lots of cooling towers that are going to be impacted by Legionnaire's disease.

KEILAR: I'm sorry, you said they likely have remediated the source?

ADALJA: I do think so, because when you look at when the cases occurred, based that on the incubation period, they haven't had new cases occur. So it seems like we're not getting anything new, which means what we're seeing in the hospital, these are people that got infected prior to that. So they do seem to have gotten control of it.

But we'll see as time goes by, if any new cases pop up, that's going to be the key thing.

KEILAR: All right, Dr. Amesh Adalja, thank you so much. Really helpful to have you take us through that.

ADALJA: Thanks.

KEILAR: And a new hour of CNN NEWS CENTRAL starts right now.

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