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Fauci Invokes the Fifth 100 Plus Times at GOP-Led COVID Response Hearing; Cornyn: Key Vote on Todd Blanche Nomination as AG could be Postponed; Zuckerberg: U.S. Should not ban Chinese A.I. Models; OpenAI Lab Leak was More Extensive than First Thought; Trump Takes Questions from Reporters During Oval Office Event 3-3:30p ET

Aired July 29, 2026 - 15:00   ET

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

DR. SHEILA SHANMUGAN, REPRODUCTIVE PSYCHIATRIST, PENN MEDICINE: And so, I would say that if someone currently has postpartum psychosis and is untreated, that that is psychiatric emergency and should be in the hospital.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Dr. Sheila Shanmugan, thank you so much. This is such an important conversation to have and we appreciate you being with us.

SHANMUGAN: Thanks so much for having me.

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

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: Pleading the Fifth, Dr. Anthony Fauci refusing to answer even basic questions about the color of the carpet, the color of his tie during a dramatic Senate hearing about the COVID pandemic. Now, Senator Rand Paul says lawmakers will vote next week on holding him in contempt of Congress.

Plus, tensions escalating in the Middle East. President Trump says Iran is going to get a beating after the U.S. military said it intercepted an attack from Tehran, ending days of relative calm in the region.

KEILAR: Plus, a warning from Mark Zuckerberg, why the Facebook boss says the U.S. should accelerate development instead of restricting it.

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

More than a hundred questions, few answers from the nation's top health official during the COVID pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci faces a contentious Senate hearing, but gave the same response to just about everything he was asked.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, FORMER DIRECTOR NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

I respectfully decline ... I respectfully decline ...

I respectfully decline ...

I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: In his opening statement, Fauci did address his personal diary that was released just days ago, saying he believes that Senator Rand Paul has an unhinged obsession with him.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FAUCI: The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, "behind bars," unquote.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: Senator Paul and several Republicans say that Fauci's diary entries prove that he was saying one thing publicly about the virus's origins, but then other things privately. Fauci, who's faced multiple death threats, says his diary was only made public to further embarrass and intimidate him.

Let's discuss with Dr. Paul Offit. He's the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Offit, thanks so much for sharing part of your afternoon with us.

What is your reaction to what we saw at today's hearing, including Dr. Fauci's decision to plead the Fifth?

DR. PAUL OFFIT, DIRECTOR, VACCINE EDUCATION CENTER, CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA: What a complete and utter waste of time. I mean, in theory, the goal of our Congress is to keep Americans safe. You've had three pandemic coronaviruses over the last 20 years, right? You had SARS1 in 2002-2003, you had MERS in 2012, and now you had COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 in 2019. They all were animal-to-human spillover events.

I mean, try -- if you want to bring somebody before Congress, bring representatives of the Chinese government, because they didn't kill the animals in 2002, so you could see that there were these wet markets that sold animals illegally, and you found SARS-CoV-1 in palm civets.

Now, they killed this time, however, they knew -- the Chinese government knew that this -- this outbreak occurred in one stall in the southwestern section of the Huanan whole seafood market. There was genetic evidence of that virus there. They killed all those animals because they didn't want people to see what had happened. What they're trying to do at this meeting is somehow blame Anthony

Fauci for giving money to echo labs that then went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where presumably they created a pandemic virus, which has never happened before in human history. And if you're going to make that claim show some evidence, other than just conspiracy and innuendo, what a waste of time.

I mean, we need to protect ourselves. We need to figure out where the next pandemic is coming from, because there'll be another pandemic, and this in no way got us any closer to that information.

SANCHEZ: So, is your view that the lab leak theory is unrealistic, that -- that it should be ruled out? And -- and if so, what questions do you have for not only Dr. Fauci, but other officials? Because in his diary, Dr. Fauci seemed to express that that lab leak theory was a possibility.

OFFIT: I think he was being nice. He was appearing open-minded. I mean, if you -- you look at the papers that are published in Cell, Nature, Science, I mean, in very good journals, you'll see this. You'll see that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 occurred in this -- right in that one section of the south -- southwestern section of the Huanan wholesale seafood market.

[15:05:10]

Those -- those were all the early cases, and then they spread out from there. They killed all the animals. But when you went back and you looked at evidence -- genetic evidence in, for example, the cages or the tables or the apparatuses that were used to kill the animals, you found two lineages of SARS-CoV-2 that correlated exactly genetically with those early cases. That's where it occurred.

I mean, I think that if you're asking Dr. Fauci about things, what they should ask him about is some of our early decisions about closing schools or restricting travel or closing businesses. I mean, did we do that for too long? Those are reasonable questions. But to ask him about, you know, things about trying to, in any way, imply that he was in any way responsible for this pandemic is nonsense.

SANCHEZ: I'm curious about that aspect and -- and things that may have been done differently in your eyes. What you described as reasonable questions. How would you say that the COVID-19 pandemic has informed how the second Trump administration is approaching public health and -- and whether you think we are now more prepared for another possible pandemic?

OFFIT: I think we're less prepared. I think you're right, though. I think the first two years of the pandemic created a lot of anger in this country. I think in that first year when we didn't have anything, we didn't have antivirals till October of 2021 -- sorry, 2020. We didn't have monoclonal antibodies till November of 2020. Didn't have vaccines till December of 2020. We didn't have anything. The virus was killing hundreds of people a day. It was spread asymptomatically. So what do we do? We closed schools, shuttered businesses, restricted travel, isolated,

quarantined social distance. And that made a lot of people angry. They thought that was massive government overreach.

In year two, 2021, when we had a vaccine, you couldn't go anywhere without your vaccine card, right? You can't go to your favorite bar, restaurant, sporting event. You may not -- you may be fired from work. That also really upset people. And I think that -- that what you're seeing is this sort of libertarian backlash, this all under the name of sort of medical freedom movement, which is like in many ways sort of an anti-science, anti-public health movement. And that's what today was. It was sort of a theater of the absurd with the themes being anti-science, anti-public health, anti-expertise.

SANCHEZ: Dr. Paul Offit, great to get your perspective. Thanks so much for joining us.

OFFIT: Thank you.

SANCHEZ: Of course. Brianna?

KEILAR: Just minutes from now, we expect to learn whether Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general will take a big step forward or if it's going to hit a major roadblock. Republican Senator John Cornyn, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, says a planned meeting with Blanche today was canceled. The two were set to discuss Cornyn's demands to formally kill the Justice Department's controversial $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund. And without Cornyn's support, the committee won't be able to advance Blanche's nomination.

CNN's Manu Raju is on the Hill. They're in the halls, clearly chasing people down. He's with us now. What's the latest, Manu?

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. In fact, we just caught up with Senator Cornyn himself about the latest and where the things stand. And it's simply where it was earlier today, where he said that the Justice Department has not been responsive to his demands to ensure that that $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is essentially dead once and for all. And this deal that was cut between the President and the IRS about who is subject to future audits and the like.

He wants all that essentially written into a proposal that could be signed off in court, where there's ongoing litigation over this very issue. He says he is -- they've been going back and forth with the Justice Department, but they have not responded to his latest request. And he made clear that he will not get rolled, as he told me just moments ago.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Senator, you went through the statement from DOJ. They said that they had sent you this -- this proposal. (INAUDIBLE) ...

SEN. JOHN CORNYN (R-TX): It was not -- really was not responsive.

RAJU: Mm-hmm. And -- and what do you mean by that as not responsive?

CORNYN: I mean, it did not cover the audit issue or the scope of the release issue. It's -- that's what I mean.

RAJU: Why do you think they're not getting message from you?

CORNYN: Maybe they think they can roll me.

RAJU: Can -- can they roll you?

CORNYN: No.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: And, of course, Senator Cornyn is free from political pressure, having lost his primary campaign earlier this year to a Trump-backed primary foe, Ken Paxton, in Texas, and has emerged a thorn in the side of the President. And that's what Senator John Thune, the Majority Leader, indicated earlier, that he believes that the Justice Department needs to resolve these concerns, not just with Senator Cornyn, but with Senator Thom Tillis, another senator who is not running for reelection. Because if either of those senators were to vote no at tomorrow's critical committee hearing, that this nomination could be stalled. And John Thune urged the DOJ to cut a deal with those two Republicans.

[15:10:01]

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: Would you advise the Justice Department to listen to the concerns of John Cornyn and make it clear in writing that this weaponization fund is dead once and for all?

SEN. JOHN THUNE (R-SD): I think that that's an issue between right now, the White House and Senators Cornyn and Tillis. But yes, I would encourage them to sit down, which I think they are, and trying to come to a resolution there so that the -- the markup can continue tomorrow and we can get Todd Blanche ready for the floor.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

RAJU: And Senator Cornyn just told us also that he plans to meet with the Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley in less than an hour, 4 P.M. Eastern, where they will discuss whether this vote can actually happen tomorrow, because that's the deadline that Cornyn and Grassley set earlier today. So, the Justice Department does not respond by then. Then, they'll have to delay this vote tomorrow.

And if they delay the vote tomorrow, it could leave this nomination lingering for some time and potentially delay until after the final confirmation vote, until after the August recess, which means it could end up being delayed until the fall at the earliest, guys.

KEILAR: So, Manu, just to be clear, Cornyn was saying that the scope of the release issue, I think -- meaning the -- is that the Epstein files, right? The scope of the Epstein files. And then the IRS audit issue was not addressed.

RAJU: He's talking about the audits.

KEILAR: Okay, he's talking about the audits.

RAJU: Yes.

KEILAR: So, the -- and the IRS audit issue wasn't ...

RAJU: Yes, so that ...

KEILAR: ... talk to us about that, because what became clear throughout this process of Blanche's confirmation, or his attempt to be confirmed, was that, yes, that weaponization fund was dead, certainly as he was communicating at the Congress. But the deal to protect the President and those around him from the IRS audit for past potential offenses, that was still in place.

RAJU: Yes, and for future audits as well. And that's one of the concerns of Senator Cornyn about the language that was in there about who could be protected from future IRS audits. He said that this -- the -- the initial language that was part of a separate -- an ongoing lawsuit that was proposed essentially would include a wide range of other organizations. He wants that essentially clarified. And I said, do you mean the President's family? You don't want them to be subject of -- them to be exempt from future audits?

And he essentially said that he wants that to be clear, that simply that all the President's allies essentially can't be exempt from the future IRS going in and examining people for possible tax issues. So, that's one of the things that they've gone back and forth on. And it clearly has not been resolved. Not just that, but also this weaponization fund, whether that can go forward, who can -- who will actually -- you know, and -- and the Justice Department making clear, needs to make clear enough to him that it absolutely will not, Brianna.

KEILAR: Really interesting. Manu, thank you so much for tracking down the Senator for us. We appreciate it.

And still to come as the intense debate rages over how far the U.S. could go in regulating A.I., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now has his own warning.

Plus, the latest on the investigation into the puzzling death of 18- year-old Nolan Wells. CNN has obtained new audio from the boat that Wells had been aboard off the Mississippi coast.

And then later, preservationists are trying to stop another one of President Trump's attempted makeovers of a Washington landmark. That and much more coming up on CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:17:44] KEILAR: Mark Zuckerberg is speaking out in defense of a more open approach to A.I. He says that the U.S. should not block Chinese models in an effort to gain an advantage in the global A.I. race. Zuckerberg telling the Financial Times that such restrictions would not be effective.

SANCHEZ: The Metta CEO also wrote an opinion piece published in today's Wall Street Journal saying he doesn't understand why the conversation around artificial intelligence is so filled with doom. He writes that the abundance of the A.I. future can be shared by everyone. Zuckerberg's comments come amid growing concerns over the risks of artificial intelligence including news that a recent OpenAI lab leak was more extensive than initially reported.

CNN Tech Reporter Clare Duffy and CNN A.I. Correspondent Hadas Gold are here with all of the details. Clare, first to you, what is Zuckerberg saying in this op-ed?

CLARE DUFFY, CNN BUSINESS WRITER: Well, Boris, I think he's really speaking to dual audiences here. On one hand, he is talking directly to the public, trying to shift this narrative of fear around artificial intelligence which recently hit Meta directly with critics decrying its latest Meta A.I. glasses release as a surveillance device. Just days before Zuckerberg wrote this op-ed, Meta released a national ad that painted a very rosy picture of the A.I. future.

And in this piece, as you said, he talks about the abundance that he thinks that A.I. will create. But I also think he is taking aim here, although not directly by name, at some of the other leaders in the A.I. industry who have been very outspoken about the risks of this technology and advocated for restrictions to advanced A.I. models to hedge against those risks. Leaders like Anthropic's Dario Amodei.

Zuckerberg writes here, he says, if only a handful of institutions have super intelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that control -- that concentration would limit people's ability to choose their own future.

So, Zuckerberg clearly trying to stake out Meta's position here in this debate that has emerged between open access to A.I. versus tight controls of these advanced models.

KEILAR: So, Hadas, I'm -- I'm a little suspicious of tech billionaires who also doom prep, warning all of us not to worry about things. Nonetheless, at the same time Zuckerberg is arguing for fewer restrictions, we're now learning about a bigger concern from OpenAI's lab leak last week. Tell us about this.

[15:20:02]

HADAS GOLD, CNN A.I. CORRESPONDENT: Yes, so this was the insane story of the OpenAI model that they were testing in a cyber -- on a cyber security test was supposed to be a closed lab environment. They call this a sandbox. But then the model figured out that the best way to ace the test was to cheat. And so, what it did is that it broke out of its lab using a previously

unknown vulnerability, gained access to the open Internet, which it wasn't supposed to have, and hacked Hugging Face, which is an A.I. repository, to get the answers to the test. But now we're learning more details, both Hugging Face is releasing more details as is OpenAI on exactly what happened here.

And we're learning that not only were these models, you know, running wild for like four days or something on the open Internet, but also that they were trying to hack into several other services in addition to Hugging Face and trying to get to Hugging Face. They were using other kind of stolen credentials and other things to get into four other services.

Some of them have either come forward and been named. Others have not been named. It is important to note, though, that none of these other breaches were nearly as serious as what happened to Hugging Face. That some -- in some cases, they were just trying to, you know, gain access to these sites just to read them, just to understand them.

But Sam Altman is coming out and saying in a recent podcast that because of this incident, they have paused training of their models trying to figure out how to really secure their sandbox test environment and that this was the first security incident that he said he has felt very viscerally, like he was very alarmed by the security incident and thinks that the whole world needs to really be alarmed as well.

SANCHEZ: So, Clare, does Mark Zuckerberg have any reservations about advocating for fewer restrictions on A.I. after hearing all of that?

DUFFY: Yes, Mark Zuckerberg did acknowledge in this piece that A.I. presents cybersecurity risks. But he says he believes those are best mitigated by giving everyone equal access to the technology so that, in theory, perhaps somebody could catch a cybersecurity breach with artificial intelligence. He also raises the concern of biological weapons being created with the help of AI. He says that he believes that can be mitigated by governments and organizations working together to carefully deploy these models. It's not entirely clear to me how that is different from restricting access to this technology, so perhaps he will say more on that point.

And I think the other interesting thing about the timing here of this open argument from Zuckerberg is the fact that Meta released this year its first closed-source A.I. model, which has restrictions on how people can use it. That was a major reversal for Meta and for Zuckerberg, who had previously been in support of open-source models.

So, I think a little bit of tension here between what Zuckerberg is saying in this op-ed and what the company is doing at this point.

KEILAR: And, Hadas, there's of course a debate about whether these, you know, models are the problem, whether they're the solution, whether they're both, whether you inevitably need them to be the solution to perhaps a problem. But is there a concern that without restrictions we could be seeing more leaks like what -- like what happened with open A.I. with even more disastrous consequences than that?

GOLD: Yes, this incident, I think, is a really seminal moment in the sort of A.I. industry, A.I. development, especially with these agentic models becoming so advanced. And just yesterday, more than 1,200 of the top scientists and staffers at a lot of these big A.I. labs signed a joint letter calling on the U.S. to develop tools that can deliberately pace, to deliberately slow down the pace of A.I. development because of a fear that it's just going so fast we don't have the apparatus to be able to understand.

I'll read part of this letter. They say, "There is a real risk, that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems. To realize, A.I.'s potential, industry, government and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures and strengthen oversight."

Guys, it's like the Model T was first, you know, introduced in 1908, but within two years you have a Lamborghini, but you don't have a Department of Transportation, you don't have, you know, safety belts, you don't have airbags yet, and that's what these people are arguing for.

SANCHEZ: Wow, that's a good way to put it. Hadas Gold, Clare Duffy, thank you both.

Let's go now to the White House where President Trump moments ago was taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Any questions?

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you, Mr. President. Very quickly on this issue, did you just say two years? It would take two years to finish this?

TRUMP: We think we can get it started fairly quickly. It's largely financed. And, yes, we need some approvals from Congress probably, but generally speaking, it's been very bipartisan.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: On the attack, the drone attack on the LNG tanker off of Egypt ...

TRUMP: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... what can you tell us about that, and is there any indication it's Iran-related? Does it represent (INAUDIBLE) ...

TRUMP: Well, I can give you a report. And we've -- I've been briefed. It's a little more of the same, but it's going to be straightening out. It's going to be straightening out. In the meantime, we're going to be hitting them very hard because it's our turn to hit them. They know it's coming. They're asking us not to do it, but, you know, they tried shooting it last night.

So, we had five rockets shot going 8,500 miles an hour, and all five rockets were knocked down to the ground, but they nevertheless took a shot, so it's our turn.

[15:25:08]

And we'll see if we get there with an agreement at some point, but we're going to hit them very hard.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, first on this, is this expected to affect any incoming or outgoing flights? (INAUDIBLE) ...

TRUMP: No, we think we can do it without a lot of disruption. Very little.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And then, on ...

TRUMP: It might even be better.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... on Leader Thune, he -- what's your reaction to him saying that there's no evident path to success on killing the filibuster or passing the SAVE America Act?

TRUMP: Well, that's too bad for him. I mean, that's too bad for him and too bad for the Republican Party.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Do you believe that?

TRUMP: He's got the votes. He should get it done. He should be able to get it done.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, Mr. President, thank you. Dr. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times today.

TRUMP: (INAUDIBLE) ...

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Senator Rand Paul said he's going to hold a vote on holding him in contempt of Congress. Do you think Dr. Fauci should face repercussions for this?

TRUMP: Well, I watched the whole thing today, but more importantly, I was a part of the whole Fauci -- I inherited Fauci. He was here from the 1980s, so I had him for a period of time, and I -- I disagreed with him on a lot. I would have had to close down the whole country if I listened to him. I -- I went the Federalist way, which is basically let the governors decide.

Generally speaking, the Republican governors did very well. The Democrat governors did not very well. But Fauci wanted to have nobody wearing masks, if you remember, and then everybody had to wear five masks, as many masks as you could get. I mean, he made a lot of mistakes, and he wasn't a big factor for me. He was a very big factor for Biden. And if you remember, even though we were sort of primetime in terms of

that whole disaster of COVID, far people died fewer in the Trump administration than in the Biden administration. We ran -- we ran it well. Operation Warp Speed was talked about as being one of the great success stories anywhere in the world, actually, and we did a good job. But many more people died under Biden than died in the Trump administration from COVID. COVID was a disaster, but Fauci did not help.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, do you think that the DOJ should reopen the investigation into the autopen, specifically pertaining to Fauci?

TRUMP: Well, the only thing you can really think about is the autopen, because the most powerful thing the President has, they say, is the power of pardon. So, he was pardoned by Biden, and I -- I respect that. I -- I know how powerful it is. It's a very powerful -- they say it's literally the most powerful thing a president has.

Now, whether or not I sign my things directly, always, almost everything I sign directly. You're a witness to many of them. He signed very few. The only thing I know that he signed was Hunter Biden's pardon, but I'm not sure that he signed -- he probably didn't sign this one.

So, I -- I can't tell you what the law is. I've heard that you have to have a lot of proof. You need to have letters. You need to have all sorts of things that the person operating the autopen has to know exactly what it's all about. He didn't know what it was about, because I saw him testify. So, maybe there's something on the autopen. Other than that, the power of pardon is very powerful.

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) ...

TRUMP: No, wait, wait -- Bev.

BEV TURNER, GB NEWS: Thank you. Bev Turner, GB News. We've just heard you talking about another example of American excellence. That's really what this is.

TRUMP: Right.

TURNER: It's a project where you're striving to be the best in the world. As a Brit, that's really striking to me. You've had a couple of weeks to get to know our new prime minister. Have you spoken to him much?

TRUMP: I have.

TURNER: And do you think he is the man to lead us to excellency? TRUMP: Well, he did say one very good thing. He said he's going to

open up North Sea oil. If he does that, you're going to be a wealthy country -- if he does it reasonably. I was telling Prime Minister Starmer, open up the North Sea. Open it up. You'll be okay. Open it up.

They have two problems. They have a huge immigration problem. People coming from all over the world and just camping out in your country. And we've taken a very tough stand. In fact, for 14 months, nobody has come into our country. Zero, which is almost hard to believe, but that's what the report says. We -- our border has become very strong and your border is very weak. He's got that problem and he's got an energy problem. He's got windmills all over the place and every -- anytime you see windmills, you see a failing country. And they're made in China. Not used by China, but they're made in China. And you have a thing called the North Sea.

And you buy a lot of your energy, as you know, from the North Sea. You buy it from Norway. And Norway gets it from the North Sea. They get their -- their oil from the North Sea. And Norway's got trillions of dollars in the bank. Trillions. It sells its oil from the North Sea. And Scotland has a better part of the North Sea. And you have 500, 600, 700 years. You have areas of the North Sea that haven't even been explored yet. You have one of the most valuable oil finds anywhere in the world.

[15:30:02]

And if the United Kingdom would use it, they'd be a wealthy country again. And I tell you what, I could not get Starmer ...