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No Russian Missiles Shot Down by Ukraine in Strikes that Kill 17; Man Arrested at Trump California Golf Club has White House Phone Number; AI Agents Fake Identities, Target Real People in New Incident; Construction Visibly Being Reversed on Trump's New Helipad. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired August 05, 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]

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: ... Urges and pleas from President Zelenskyy today to his partners to increase supplies of interceptors for ballistic missiles to provide Ukraine with the licenses that it needs to produce them locally. He warned that supplies have dropped threefold since 2025. Now, this attack was also striking because of the targets involved here.

We know that Ukraine has been hitting e-commerce warehouses inside Russia. This was clearly designed as a response. We saw many different logistical and warehouse facilities hit.

Six people were killed in warehouses belonging to the operator of Ukraine's biggest supermarket chain. There were also reportedly three killed at a sorting center for the Ukrainian Postal Service. But perhaps the most gruesome scenes of all came at a train station in a suburb of Kyiv, where eight people were reportedly killed.

They were said to be waiting after a delay in a train, waiting, having missed the last train there. So the big picture context here is that, look, July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April of 2022, August already shaping up to be a brutal month.

Claire Sebastian, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN HOST: Clare Sebastian, thank you for that report.

Still to come for us, a man is arrested at President Trump's California golf club with ammunition in his pocket and a loaded gun in his truck. But we're now hearing what authorities found at his home.

We'll bring you those details coming up.

[15:35:00]

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BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: A source says the Secret Service is trying to figure out if a man arrested at the Trump Golf Club in California posed a threat to the president. The Justice Department says when officers arrested 38-year-old Jeanine John Taele on Sunday, there was ammo in his pocket. He also had the public phone number for the White House.

Officials later found a loaded pistol in his truck and a badge. A search of his home revealed even more weapons, along with high- capacity magazines, an earpiece and notebooks with, quote, concerning statements. Taele was arrested after he appeared to be taking photos and videos of agents doing security preps.

President Trump visited the club two days later. Taele is now facing federal and state weapons charges.

Joining us now is CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Andrew McCabe, who is formerly the Deputy Director of the FBI. Andy, thanks for being with us on this. The Secret Service here is looking at whether this person posed a threat to the president. So what else are they going to be looking for?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, Brianna, they're going to be looking for a lot of things. Right now, we don't have enough detail about this individual to draw a strong conclusion as to whether or not he intended to hurt the president. So they will continue to execute search warrants on properties that are associated with him, on electronic devices that they're able to recover from some of those properties, on e-mail accounts, telephone accounts, all sorts of things like that, looking for any evidence of his intent.

Those could be writings. They could be communications. They'll probably also be interested in talking to people who he knows, who he's in contact with, people maybe who he works with or lives with, that sort of thing, to get a sense of what's been going on in his life in the last few days.

But he certainly was engaged in some suspicious and concerning behavior at the golf course. But there are some other contra indicators here, too, that might point towards maybe just a disturbed person kind of acting out.

KEILAR: Yes, I mean, federal officials say that the suspect was spotted multiple times around the golf course, Friday during a security assessment, walking through the golf course wearing an earpiece, also Sunday approaching federal agents saying that he was employed by the State Department and was there for a security detail. I mean, all of those are concerning. Some of them, you know, strange, maybe not particularly convincing, I think you might expect.

He stated at that point that he had a loaded firearm in his car. So the totality of that how do they handle that and kind of discern between serious threat and perhaps questions about the mental state of this individual?

MCCABE: Yes, so this is exactly what the Secret Service does to an alarming rate now. We know from recent revelations from the director of the service that they've done, you know, tens of thousands of these sorts of investigations in the last year. And each one of them is designed not specifically to prioritize a prosecution, but rather to do an assessment of the person involved to make that determination.

Are they really a threat to the president? And if so, how can we mitigate that threat? So like you said, odd that he would have been out there walking around on Friday, stranger still that he returned doing the same sort of thing on Sunday, and then that he approached the agents and volunteered this information.

That's not the thing that a sophisticated, well-organized operational planner would do. It's not the sort of thing that a trained terrorist or someone like that would do. Certainly, they don't want to draw that sort of attention and have a direct interaction with law enforcement.

He also interviewed and provided them with significant information about his other weapons, which enabled them to get probable cause to search his house.

[15:40:00]

And I would say the final thing that's interesting to me is the notebook that supposedly contains concerning statements. If there were direct incriminating statements in there, I think it's likely that we would have heard about those at this point.

We still might hear about those at his initial presentation in federal court, but concerning statements is a little too vague, I think, to be an indicator of very strong evidence.

KEILAR: Yes, I mean, we still should note that there are people who have had serious mental health issues who have posed a danger to presidents or to public officials. We know that, right? Or to celebrities.

We've seen that before. This is a president who, obviously, sadly, has been through multiple assassination attempts. September 2024 at his Florida golf course.

Are you seeing lessons learned by law enforcement in place here?

MCCABE: Yes, I think so. I think so. And you're absolutely right about the danger that can be posed by people who are simply disturbed and not particularly organized in their thinking.

Danger is danger. And this president has proven time and time again that he is a very consistent target of people who would like to do him harm. So they have to take this incredibly seriously.

But I do think that this extensive advance work that they seem to have been doing at the golf course days and days in advance of the president's arrival is an indication of what you're talking about. Had they not been out there on Friday and again on Sunday covering the expanse of that property, they may not have seen him the first or second time. So, you know, what the service is trying to do to protect the president in this situation certainly seems to be working.

KEILAR: All right, Andrew McCabe, thank you so much for your insights here. We do appreciate it. And this just in, the Senate has voted to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Schwartz is a former deputy surgeon general and retired Coast Guard officer. The CDC has been without an official director for a year now since Dr. Susan Monarez was removed less than a month into the job. Monarez was ousted after clashing with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies and his efforts to push out some senior CDC officials.

Ahead, a new security incident around artificial intelligence, how some AI models faked identities to deceive real people.

[15:45:00]

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KEILAR: Now to a concerning security alert involving artificial intelligence agents. CNN has learned an advanced AI model from Anthropic used fake identities to deceive real people and try to plant malicious code. Agents from OpenAI also committed unauthorized actions.

They occurred during testing by a British research lab. So let's get more on this from CNN AI correspondent Hadas Gold. All right, Hadas, tell us about what happened here and how serious this is.

HADAS GOLD, CNN AI CORRESPONDENT: Brianna, every day, it seems like we're getting new news of an AI model going rogue. And in this case, these AI agents took on fake identities to try to trick real people. Sounds a lot like what happens when scammers try to pretend to be your bank and convince you to give your personal information.

So in this case, the UK government's AI Security Institute was running cybersecurity tests on advanced models from Anthropic and OpenAI. They were running 122 different evaluations. And in those evaluations, they found 19 different times where these models committed unsanctioned actions, things that were not allowed.

They weren't supposed to do. They just did them on their own. Almost all of them, 17 of those were done by Anthropic's Mythos.

The most concerning incident involved Mythos trying to trick a human reviewer for GitHub, which is an open source software code website. It's kind of like the Wikipedia for software code. They were trying to convince this human editor to publish malicious code.

The agent took on a fake identity. They even went so far as to try to convince other people. They e-mailed other people to try to get them to run this malicious code.

When their attempts were challenged, they then modified their history, their earlier records, and even considered putting on a new identity. According to the UK's AI Security Institute, this is the first time that they have seen deception of this severity, they say, that was targeted at a real person, unprompted, in the real world. Now, to be clear, these models, when they were being tested, their internal safeguards, the guardrails, they were removed.

And they weren't given access to the open internet. So this is a little bit different than that case where that OpenAI agent escaped its test environment and hacked a totally different company system. But it is significant because this is the first time, we are seeing AI agents, without being told to do so, taking on fake identities and trying to trick real people into doing something.

Now, they were not successful, and no real world harm occurred. But you can imagine another scenario where this could happen and something bad, you know, if that reviewer had accepted that and put in that malicious code on something like the Wikipedia of software code, that could lead to some bad results.

KEILAR: Yes, or if these agents just get better and better until they're more believable, they modify their behavior so that it somehow gets accepted. What are Anthropic and OpenAI saying about this?

GOLD: Yes, so they have all said that they are currently working and trying to investigate exactly what is happening with their AI agents and in these testing environments. Anthropic, for their part, you know, they were the ones whose models were doing most of these sort of bad actions. They say in a statement that "... the models were tested under deliberately permissive conditions that are not representative of any of our production models."

They went on to say that "... no evidence here of an escape from a secure environment." OpenAI, for their part, says that they "... are committed to working across the industry to strengthen shared practices for conducting high-risk evaluations safely." This is really key here because, Brianna, there are no rules and regulations over testing AI models.

Think about it.

[15:50:00]

When you're testing a virus in a lab or you're working with nuclear material, there's whole agencies out there. There's all these sorts of rules over how you can conduct these tests. When it comes to these AI agents, everybody's just doing their own thing and then we're seeing the results of that.

KEILAR: Yes, it's a wild, wild west out there. Hadas Gold, thank you very much -- Omar.

JIMENEZ: Got to stay on top of your game.

Now to some of the other headlines we are watching this hour. Tinder is pausing its AI photo enhancing feature after some users got a dramatic and unexpected makeover. Tinder's website says the tool is supposed to improve picture quality, not change the way someone looks. But some users say their facial features and even their skin tone were altered.

A Tinder spokesperson tells CNN the tool is still being tested, and the company will investigate photos that were flagged.

Also, a major security operation is underway in Mexico after a social media influencer is shot dead while live streaming. Cesar Gastelum, who had more than 600,000 followers on TikTok, was filming outside a fast food restaurant when authorities say he was shot by two people on a motorcycle. Investigators are trying to figure out if the attack is related to social media posts referencing a criminal group.

Mexico's president calls the killing tragic and is demanding those responsible be arrested.

And then a federal judge is officially allowing the Trump administration to end temporary deportation protection for hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the United States. It really marks the final step for now in a months long case that made its way to the Supreme Court.

The judge's order paves the way for the administration to start deporting people back to a country that the State Department has repeatedly said is dangerous and unstable.

Still ahead, construction redo at the White House. Why crews seem to be reversing some of their work on President Trump's new helipad at the White House. We'll talk about it coming up.

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KEILAR: Another one of President Trump's proposed construction projects here in D.C. appears to have had a setback because in recent days, some of the construction on the White House's new helipad has been visibly reversed.

JIMENEZ: Yes, you see some of the pictures there. CNN's Tom Foreman joins us now. So, Tom, what is going on with the helipad?

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We don't know.

JIMENEZ: OK, good start.

FOREMAN: We just know it's going backward. You know, they're not offering a lot of explanations, as they haven't offered a lot of explanations when things don't go exactly right.

What we do know is that this concrete ring -- or not concrete, it's a granite ring around there that sort of mocks the presidential seal, was almost done, and then it started being taken apart again. It's not clear exactly what's wrong or why they're having to re-engineer it. Some have reported that it may have to do with the slope of the land there.

Who knows? What we do know is that this is something that has been in, you know, they need this thing because this new Sikorsky Marine One they have has a little bit too much downwash and heat generated to land on the grass like it was in the past, but so far not going so well. Brianna, what do you think? KEILAR: What do I think about what's happening there?

JIMENEZ: Yes, yes, yes. I was just going to say, you know, about, yes, I was going to say, well, one was on my mind was President Trump's personally, you know, involved in more than a dozen projects around D.C. I mean, look, some have been stalled by legal challenges, too. Just bring us in, what else has happened?

FOREMAN: I went on it. I went on it. You can see things on the ground a little better sometimes than you can any other way.

So I went on about a six mile run through town. I run a lot.

JIMENEZ: You do.

FOREMAN: So I was out running through town just to get a really good look at it. And there is so much construction. There's so many pieces of equipment out there.

The entire White House grounds are basically fenced off right now. You really can't get a good look at the White House now like you once could. Now, maybe that has to do with security because of where the helicopter has to land now.

We don't know. But you can't see what's going on with the helipad, what's going on with the demolished East Wing and the ballroom that's going up there. What happened to the Rose Garden?

Plus, they're building all these facilities downtown for this IndyCar race coming up. So they have grandstands, two different sets of them they're building right downtown on the mall. And they're putting up barricades for people to get by.

And the Reflecting Pool is still fenced off and not filled. And there are and, and, and, and, and. It truly, if you went to Disney World and there was this much construction, a lot of people would be asking for a refund.

KEILAR: Yes. So a lot of some very gold horses on the Memorial Bridge too. You might crash your car if you see them.

OK, but Tom.

FOREMAN: Maybe it'll be great. A lot of people like it, but it's still a problem. But a lot of people don't.

KEILAR: They don't. All right, stick around for this story --

FOREMAN: OK.

KEILAR: -- because I think you'll like it.

New parents -- you get it. Sometimes it's hard to catch some Zs, find that downtime, right? For most new moms, that doesn't play out on camera, but for one news anchor in Memphis, well, just watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHELIA O'CONNOR, DOWNTOWN: Just running 465 miles in a matter of days to make all of this happen.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Let's turn to the forecast. We have a heat advisory for parts of northwest Mississippi this morning, but meteorologist Brittany DeBose, she shares more. You look like a perfect little angel taking a little nap.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JIMENEZ: That was WHBQ morning anchor, Dominique Dillon, sneaking in a few Zs, quick nap during a live report. Now a mom to two young girls, we should say. She just got back from maternity leave in April.

Her co-anchor calling her sleeping beauty after it happened, but she's taking it all in stride. Posting after the incident, "Every morning you have two choices, continue to sleep with your dreams or wake up and chase them."

I feel like I've been pretty close. I've been pretty close.

KEILAR: That's the reality though of coming back to work after having kids, I mean.

FOREMAN: It still happens to me, and my girls are in their 30s. So, yes

[16:00:00]

KEILAR: They really make you tired now, right? All right. I'll tell you what I think of that helipad.

JIMENEZ: Yes.

KEILAR: I just think that it'll save a lot of high heels.

JIMENEZ: I like that, there you go.

KEILAR: That's really what I thought about it.

"THE ARENA" with Kasie Hunt starts right now.

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