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Killer of Minnesota Lawmaker and Husband Sentenced to Life; Oil Prices Surge as Houthis Target Red Sea Tankers; Trump's DOJ Withdraws Subpoenas Targeting New York Times Reporters; Video Captures Orca Ram a Sunfish So Hard It Explodes. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired July 23, 2026 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN HOST: Now to some of the other headlines we are watching this hour. A Minnesota man who pleaded guilty to shooting and killing a top Democratic lawmaker and her husband was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. Federal prosecutors say Vance Boelter got the longest possible prison term allowable under law, two consecutive life sentences plus an additional 40 years.

Boelter pleaded guilty last month to murder and stalking charges in the killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark. He's also accused of shooting and wounding State Senator John Hoffman and his wife.

Plus, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says the administration is not planning to intervene in the case of two social media influencers facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the UK.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, pictured there, were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami over the weekend following an extradition request from the UK.

[15:35:00]

CNN has previously reported the Tate brothers were reaching out to people in President Trump's orbit to attempt to prevent their extradition. The brothers have denied all allegations against them.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: And switching gears to a much lighter note, or should we say a higher note? A maintenance worker, you see him there in Illinois, stuck, trapped inside a gas station sign 130 feet above the ground after the lift that he took to get up there broke. Rescuers tried to use a local ladder.

It wasn't high enough. He was up there for about three hours before a specialized lift was brought in to bring him down. Thankfully, no one was hurt and he seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor.

SCIUTTO: He did. I mean, I would be -- I would not be quite as comfortable as him in that situation.

KEILAR: Clearly not. He doesn't have a problem with heights.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

KEILAR: Maybe enjoyed the view for a moment. Glad he is down.

All right, so rising tensions in the Middle East are sending oil prices surging here at home. Iranian backed Houthi rebels claim that they attacked two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, possibly choking off a second major oil shipping lane in the region.

SCIUTTO: It's a big deal with that new threat emerging, world oil prices jumped to more than one hundred dollars a barrel today. That's the highest level in two months.

CNN's David Goldman joins us now. David, listen, the war clearly entering a dangerous new phase. A lot of folks have described this situation as a sort of sum of all fears moment when it comes to the oil supply.

What does it mean for oil prices going forward?

DAVID GOLDMAN, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, that's right. I mean, I think that what you're seeing is with one hundred and one dollar barrel. Let's see if I can circle that.

There we go. And up seven percent. We are clearly in a new phase of this war.

And I think that there's a difference in this oil market today than there was at the start of the war. Let me walk you through it, Jim, because before the old story was that there were seven million barrels per day that were getting rerouted out of the Strait of Hormuz through the Red Sea. Well, now there's this Houthi blockade.

So you can't get that oil out that way. You can go north through the Suez Canal, but that is not the most effective way to get to Asia where they need that oil. We're talking about doubling the trip for that. That doesn't really work that much.

Now, before they were charging you about three percent of an insurance rate, basically for the cargo that you're traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. That's pretty expensive, actually. Now, today, the insurance agencies are saying that you won't get coverage if Iran charges you a toll, which right now is the only way out of the Strait of Hormuz. This poses a big problem for the future of oil.

Russia has now entered the conversation. Before Russia was exporting 12 percent of the world's diesel. Now there's an export ban. You can't get it because Ukraine has been bombarding Russian refineries and now bombarding the Black Sea, preventing Russia from getting any crude out, taking about two million barrels of crude off the global market. That's a big deal.

Now, U.S. inventories were at an almost record high before the war started. Now we have reduced that by almost 200 million barrels since the start of the war. Now, this looks like a lot, 723 million barrels, but actually we are reaching operational floors for both commercial and emergency crude. That could be a big problem as well. And then oil demand, the other thing. Look, we have fallen four

million barrels per day. How much longer can this withstand? We don't know.

China's a big reason for this. We'll see if that continues.

KEILAR: All right, David Goldman, thank you for taking us through that. And we'll be right back.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: We do have this breaking news that federal prosecutors have withdrawn their subpoenas against three New York Times reporters who filed a story about security concerns surrounding the president's new Air Force One. Prosecutors were hoping to force the journalist to testify about their anonymous sources, alleging it was an issue of national security. The New York Times argued the subpoenas violated the First Amendment and were a part of the administration's efforts to intimidate the press.

SCIUTTO: It's a remarkable decision. I mean, we were just talking about it a few minutes ago about the implications for freedom of the press and the attempts here to, well, target individual journalists and their families.

Back with us now, former FBI Deputy Director and senior CNN law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe. Your reaction here to this. This is quite a remarkable 180 by federal prosecutors.

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, it is and it isn't. When you, you know, the more details we get about how this hearing went for the government, and that is to say it did not go well, the language that the judge used in this hearing, he made it absolutely clear that had they not withdrawn the subpoenas, he was going to quash them. So I see the withdrawal of the subpoenas really as more of a matter of limiting their losses.

I don't think it's a 180 at all. And the other thing that really catches me, Jim, is these are just the subpoenas that were issued to the individuals demanding their testimony in front of a federal grand jury. They also issued subpoenas to the telephone service providers of these journalists and several of their family members.

So there's no indication that those subpoenas have been pulled back.

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So this leak investigation still continues forward at a really alarming rate.

KEILAR: And I do wonder though, and you know, it's not the first time obviously that you've had the administration going after a reporter in some way legally here, but even with this withdrawn, this is a lot to go through. What is the message? MCCABE: The message is this administration is not having it. They are not -- they have departed from what has been decades of policy choices by prior administrations and prior attorneys general that this was a line that should not be crossed unless we were in some in extremis situation where literally lives were at risk and some sort of attack was imminent. Attorneys general, everyone that I ever worked for made it perfectly clear that we don't subpoena journalists.

We don't subpoena their phone records. We don't investigate journalists who are engaged in news gathering activity, even when there has been a devastating leak that could compromise national security. And I see this as someone who was responsible for those programs.

I remember when I was the -- when I was heading the FBI's counterterrorism program, we lost -- we had a leak in which someone shared the very minute details of a bomb that we had recovered, the bomb that the underwear bomb, Abdulmutallab almost used to take down an airplane on Christmas day. Somebody leaked that to the media and it was a devastating loss for us and to our partners in that case. We very much wanted to find out who among us leaked that detail, but we did not go out and subpoena the phone records of journalists because that's something that you don't do.

It's too chilling to the first amendment and it throws that balance that we talked about before all the way out of balance.

SCIUTTO: Well, it's a good point because the Trump administration is not the only administration, right? That has pursued leakers via investigation and otherwise it's just the Obama administration included, but it's the methods used to do so. Just to be clear, can the government resurrect these subpoenas against the journalists via other means or you're saying they could pursue the investigation by seeking other targets?

MCCABE: I fully expect they're going to continue to pursue the still existing subpoenas for the phone records because that's the data that will show them who these journalists were talking to and then they can take that data and start investigating all those people and try to figure out who shared the details about the jet. I doubt that they'll try to issue new subpoenas to drag those journalists personally in front of grand jurors because that's flamed out so spectacularly here. It would be very hard to do that in a way that didn't inflame the judge along those very lines that we saw in this decision today.

He came right out and said that this is an attack on the first amendment and it's absolutely beyond the pale.

KEILAR: Should the government have seen this coming that these were going to be squashed?

MCCABE: 100 percent, 100 percent. I mean, even in the first Trump administration as frustrated as they were with the leaks that were happening and to be clear, these leaks happened in every administration. As frustrated as they were, they didn't like the DOJ policy that we don't investigate journalists but they never changed it because they knew to go step beyond that line would cause such a very reasonable criticism.

This version of the Trump administration, round two is very different than round one in that respect. They don't seem to care about inflaming these concerns and so I think we should expect to see quite frankly more of this in the future.

SCIUTTO: Headline there, Trump's DOJ withdrawing subpoenas targeting those three New York Times reporters. We'll see where it goes from here. Andy McCabe, thanks so much for walking us through it and we'll be right back.

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(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Something fishy is taking place in the ocean and scientists are trying to figure out why. For the first time, scientists have captured orcas body slamming into their food, causing a sunfish to quite literally explode.

SCIUTTO: Yes, I mean, they're big fish as you can see behind us. So I want you to watch and listen to this video taken by research scientist Kathryn Ayers for the Marine Conservation Group Beneath the Waves.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. KATHRYN AYRES, RESEARCH SCIENTIST: Oh, God. Oh, God.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCIUTTO: So what was happening there is the orca was like ramming into that poor sunfish and exploding it. A new study conducted by Ayers and published today in the journal Frontiers in Ethology suggests this behavior could be part of a feeding strategy to get food to younger orcas or maybe they were just playing a game. A kind of brutal, like deadly game, I guess.

KEILAR: Very deadly game. Not a game that ends well for the sunfish. Let's talk about it with wildlife and conservation expert, Jeff Corwin.

He's also the host of Wildlife Nation. So Jeff, it's not just the torpedo-like slam into the fish and the ensuing explosion here that's so remarkable. If you actually look at the video closely, one of the orcas is holding on to the sunfish while the other slams into it.

So I'm seeing, you know, sunfish t-ball. I wonder what you were seeing as an expert.

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JEFF CORWIN, WILDLIFE AND CONSERVATION EXPERT: I'm seeing more something akin to sunfish hunger games. It is quite brutal. But this is very typical orca behavior.

They're incredibly strategic. They're smart. They hunt in pods. And they can be very lethal predators.

And oftentimes, play is a part of how they hunt. They use play to teach younger animals that are members of that pod to be good hunters. And what's really incredible about -- both about the sunfish and the orca, these are populations that are increasing.

So while we live in a world where many species are on the brink, not so much with these species. And let me tell you, mola molas are some to take on because these fish can get upwards to 5,000 pounds in size.

SCIUTTO: Yes, we have some pictures of them, I believe, with a human being next to them. Some of these sunfish, just so you get a sense.

There's a Santa. I mean, the reason Santa was a stunt in an aquarium. But anyway, it gives you the size of the fish.

They could be as big as 4,000 pounds. So I guess I wonder, I mean, I think of orcas like all whales, you know, as smart. I mean, is there something kind of unnecessarily evil about this holding onto one fish?

KEILAR: You want to know if they're psychos?

SCIUTTO: I want to know if they're going to come after me, you know, when I'm swimming and ramming into me.

CORWIN: Well, you know, there's really no examples of wild orcas attacking people in the wild. Although they've been known to -- like in the Strait of Gibraltar in Spain, attack sailboats and rip their keels off. Again, these are incredibly smart creatures.

And those sunfish are taking a risk when they're wallowing around in orca waters. And again, orcas are expanding. We think of orcas in Alaska, in the Pacific, but now we have them off New England.

We have them off South America. We have them off South Africa. Molas are now in New England.

But I wonder if there's some risk for the orcas to eat the sunfish because these Mola molas eat only jellyfish. And because they eat these jellyfish, they're loaded with parasites and toxins from the jellyfish. So maybe it's kind of like that Japanese puffer fish, you know, that fugo risk sort of sushi thing going on.

But yes, they're smart critters. They like to play and they play hard. And sometimes they're playing mola mola football.

KEILAR: I think they like to live on the edge, even culinarily. And maybe that to your point is what's going on here. But you said something that I thought was so interesting, which is you see play and you see them being strategic about the food.

And I just wonder, can you kind of explain that? Like what is that? What is adaptive about that?

How does that sort of make sense biologically to play with your food? Because I'm sure my children want to know. CORWIN: Yes, well, hopefully your kids won't be knocking around a mola mola back and forth. Then you'll be taking them to urgent care. But the thing about these incredible orcas is you said the word, they are adaptive.

They react to environmental changes. They learn. We have different communities, pods of orcas that have their own feeding strategies.

And, you know, it's one thing to take on a mola mola, but they'll take down a humpback whale. They'll take down a gray whale. They kill great white sharks and know where the liver is and just kill the great white shark to pull out that liver to get all the vitamins.

They learned how to haul that. This is an animal that weighs, you know, 15,000 pounds. They can haul themselves out on a beach and pull a giant sea lion into the water to a grisly, watery grave.

So they are remarkable predators. And learning and intelligence is a part of that.

SCIUTTO: So you just told me that I'm not even safe when I'm on the beach from an orca. I mean, you got me a little bit scared.

KEILAR: You're not a sea lion. So I think you're going to be OK, Jim.

CORWIN: I think you're pretty safe. You don't look particularly delicious from the dietary requirements.

SCIUTTO: So I will take that back. I should be offended. Can I just ask you, like, why are orca populations, why are they expanding?

Because you, of course, we hear about, you know, the challenges to a whole host of sea-like populations.

CORWIN: Sure. They are expanding around the world and everyone's excited that orcas is showing up. And I'm pretty excited, but I'm also a commercial fisherman.

And, you know, we are the top predator on the coast and we find our way into the ocean. They are our rivals in the ocean. Of course, there's a great upside to this.

Historically, this was a species that faced huge conservation challenges, like all the whales of the world. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of humpback whales. They were on the brink of extinction.

Same thing with orcas. While never critically endangered, they faced challenges.

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And now they are thriving in a world with many conservation unknowns and challenges.

SCIUTTO: Yes. KEILAR: Jeff, so great to talk with you about orcas and this story. We appreciate you.

CORWIN: I literally was -- I was in Alaska yesterday on a boat looking for orcas. So this is very apropos. Then I took that horrible red eye and I'm back home.

But I was actually looking for orcas yesterday up Alaska.

KEILAR: To talk with us. And we appreciate it.

SCIUTTO: Now we know the orcas were looking for you, too, by the way.

CORWIN: And I brought it all to you.

KEILAR: Thank you so much, Jeff.

"THE ARENA" with Kasie Hunt starts right now.

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