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First mRNA Flu Shot Approved for U.S. Adults Over Age 50 ; Trump Dismisses Low Munitions Reports, Says U.S. Has Massive Amounts; GOP to Refer Dr. Fauci for Prosecution Without Full Senate Vote; Meta's A.I. Model Hacked Another Company During Testing; Iran Says Close to Finalizing Deal With Oman Over Strait of Hormuz. Aired 2- 2:30p ET

Aired August 06, 2026 - 14:00   ET

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

[14:00:00]

JACQUELINE HOWARD, CNN HEALTH REPORTER: -- mRNA-based, it can be quicker to develop compared with the more traditional flu shots. Because of this, vaccine makers may develop this vaccine closer to the actual flu season and tailor it to directly target the flu strains that are circulating at that time.

Now, the road to FDA approval was somewhat of a rocky one for this vaccine. The FDA originally refused to review this vaccine. But then once Moderna made some changes to its review application, then the FDA accepted the vaccine for review. And now we have this new FDA approval. Back to you.

OMAR JIMENEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": All right, Jacqueline Howard, thank you for that report.

New hour of "CNN News Central" starts right now.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": A munitions mystery. President Trump insisting the U.S. has plenty of weapons for its war with Iran, despite contradictory reports. And new CNN reporting suggests these stories are making the president angry.

Contempt of Congress. Senate Republicans escalate their fight with Dr. Anthony Fauci. Next, it could be up to the Justice Department to decide whether to charge the former health official with a crime.

And Russia's black widows. Women accused of marrying Russian army recruits in order to claim payouts if they're killed in the war with Ukraine, reporting you will only see on CNN.

We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

There is growing anger and frustration at the White House over reports on dwindling U.S. munitions stockpiles. Senior U.S. officials tell CNN that President Trump has privately complained about that information getting out. But publicly, the president is dismissing those reports while sticking up for his defense secretary. The president posted that he's extremely happy with the job that Pete Hegseth is doing. This comes amid new warnings that the Pentagon's munitions stockpile is dangerously low as the war with Iran is dragging on.

CNN's Kristen Holmes is live at the White House. Kristen, what's the latest there?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, sources confirm that President Trump has been incredibly angry, not over the stockpile itself, although he does have questions, instead over the leaks around the stockpile. The fact that this is now a narrative out in public, he believes that this weakens him at a critical juncture, that this makes it harder for him and for the United States as they are going to negotiating with Iran.

One of the things that we've heard President Trump say over and over again is this threat of prolonged military action to try and bring Iran to the table. And again, President Trump thinks reports like this weaken the United States' stance.

Here's what he posted on Truth Social, obviously trying to counter that narrative by saying, "The U.S. has massive amount of munitions, especially of certain types. Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our nation's history. The leakers of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long-term jail sentences will be sought."

And of course, one of the things that CNN has reported is that 80 percent of the United States interceptors that they have for key missiles defense system have been depleted, much of this happening during the war in Iran. And I will tell you, behind the scenes, President Trump has ranted about this, although we are told by sources that this ranting is not aimed at anyone in particular, not Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, but instead at who he believes are "unquote, treasonous leakers."

He has directed the Department of Justice to investigate these leaks. They want answers on this. Again, President Trump feels as though the United States is in a vulnerable position right now, and so people should not be putting this information out there. But the reporting does show that this stockpile of munitions has been depleted significantly.

KEILAR: Kristen Holmes, thank you for the latest from the White House. Omar?

JIMENEZ: Meanwhile, an unprecedented escalation on Capitol Hill as Republicans are moving to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, setting up a high-stakes legal and political battle over his role in the government's COVID-19 response. Now, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he plans to hand deliver a referral for prosecution to President Trump's DOJ by end of day today without getting full Senate approval.

And this all stems from Fauci's decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times during a congressional hearing last week when he declined to answer lawmakers' questions. He suggested the hearing was a Republican political effort to trap him into making a statement that could lead to a perjury charge.

CNN's Annie Grayer is following these efforts on the Hill for us. So, Annie, unprecedented, Democrats warning it could also have far- reaching consequences. What are you hearing on the Hill right now?

ANNIE GRAYER, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Well, Omar, we are in unchartered territory right now, because normally when a Senate committee makes a criminal referral like Senate Homeland did this morning, then it would go to the entire Senate to the floor to vote on, for all Senators to weigh in.

[14:05:00]

Instead, Rand Paul, the Chairman of Senate Homeland, is skipping that step and says that his committee will be hand-delivering these criminal referrals to the Department of Justice and to D.C. District Court today. Now, Democrats say that this is creating an entirely new precedent and warned Republicans that not only would this make it harder to get witnesses to come and testify in the future, that if Democrats were to ever get the majority back in the Senate, that they might use this same strategy.

Republicans that I spoke to after the hearing said that they're comfortable if Democrats want to also continue this strategy going forward. And take a listen to how Chairman Paul views this, why he's taking this unprecedented step when I asked him after the hearing this morning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. RAND PAUL, (R-KY) CHAIRMAN, HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE: This is outside of the ordinary bill-making process. It doesn't have to go to the House, doesn't have to be signed by the president, and really doesn't have to go before the Senate. There is some precedent for doing it that way, and it still may be done that way. But for now, we will hand-carry this over to the attorney general. We will hand-carry this to the District Court here in Columbia. And we will, as a committee, we have voted the majority to refer this. So that will be accomplished today.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GRAYER: Now, once it gets to the Department of Justice, it is in their court on how they want to handle this. But Republicans believe that they have a strong case here. They want the Department of Justice to criminally prosecute Fauci for not testifying, and for instead inciting his Fifth Amendment rights against incrimination over 100 times in the Senate hearing last week.

Now, Fauci defended himself for why he was taking the Fifth so much, saying that he felt that Republicans were trying to trap him in this hearing. Democrats this morning tried to delay this Senate vote because they wanted to discuss the process here. And they believe that charging somebody or trying to charge somebody for pleading their Fifth Amendment rights goes against the essence of the Constitution. Of course, Fauci also has a preemptive pardon up until 2025. But this is all going to be something that the Department of Justice is going to have to consider. We know that Republicans, the president, have viewed Fauci as a top target of theirs for so long. So it will be now up to DOJ to decide how they handle all the different factors at play related to Fauci.

JIMENEZ: And to this point, the proceedings have moved very quickly, as you've pointed out the latest on. Annie Grayer, I really appreciate the reporting for us from Capitol Hill.

The question is now what comes next for Dr. Fauci? We're going to talk to a legal expert and former deputy assistant attorney general about just that straight ahead.

Plus, the godfather of A.I. warning that technology is getting smarter and more capable of running amok, the latest A.I. model that went rogue and what tech giants are saying about it. And is all fair in love and war, because the black widow marriage is reportedly targeting vulnerable Russian troops is also a story we are following.

We'll have that and much more coming up on "CNN News Central."

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[14:12:37]

KEILAR: Facebook's parent company, Meta, is the latest tech giant to announce one of its A.I. agents has gone rogue, hacking into another company's system. This month, OpenAI and Anthropic reported similar breaches, and Meta's issue plays right into the predictions of the man considered the godfather of A.I., computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who just warned the world needs to brace for more cases of this rogue A.I. Hinton was at the big Ai4 conference in Las Vegas where he told CNN this.

He said, quote, "I think as they get smarter, we're going to see more and more complex intentions they have, and more and more ability to escape control. I don't believe we're going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can't escape." Let's turn now to CNN A.I. Correspondent, Hadas Gold.

All right, Hadas, explain to us how Meta's A.I. agent broke out and entered an outside system. I feel like you're telling us about a new one every week.

HADAS GOLD, CNN A.I. CORRESPONDENT: Almost every day now there's something else happening in this realm, and what happened with Meta is very similar to what we've seen happen to some of the other big A.I. companies, especially what happened recently with Anthropic.

Meta says that one of their A.I. models, Muse Spark is what it's called, was going through cybersecurity testing, which as we've learned means that their safety guardrails are turned off or lowered quite a bit. It gained access to the open internet, which it was not supposed to have. That was not their intention, and it ended up hacking into another company's systems.

We don't know what the company is. We don't know the extent of this damage. This all only broke late yesterday evening. And according to Meta, this happened due to the same misconfiguration in a partnership with a third-party testing company called Irregular. So these companies, when they're trying to test their models out, they'll sometimes use these other companies to come in and, you know, run the tests for them.

Now, according to Meta, they said in a statement that a misconfiguration by Irregular, which is an independent testing company that they use, inadvertently allowed one of our models to access the internet during evaluation. They said that the model then subsequently exploited the security vulnerability in the third-party service.

Anthropic actually also cited the same exact misconfiguration with Irregular as the reason why one of some of their models hacked three different companies' servers. And Irregular has noted that it's the same error that caused those Anthropic models.

[14:15:00]

They say that they have no current open issues, and they're currently working with all of these companies on a white paper to share best practices for containment because this is the fourth time now in less than three weeks that we've heard of different A.I. models going rogue. Three of those incidents involved cybersecurity testing, where these models in some way gained extra access that they weren't supposed to have, and went on to hack other companies' systems.

And then, of course, we have the incident yesterday that was there -- that was announced just two days ago, by the U.K. government's A.I. Security Institute, about the A.I. model pretending to try to be somebody else and trying to convince real people to run malicious code. So quite a busy few weeks in the A.I. world.

KEILAR: Yeah, and a busy few weeks for you because of it. So what else did Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of A.I., say about the future of A.I.?

GOLD: Yeah, so Geoffrey Hinton was just talking about how this is the beginning of rogue A.I. hackers, of hackers having just these incredible capabilities that we just won't be able to keep up as humans. And as he said, he said, humans should no longer rely on the fact that we will be able to outsmart these A.I. models, and that he doesn't think we're going to be able to control them in a simple way of just outthinking them.

Talking about how we really need to start building elements to help contain these in a way where we're probably going to be using A.I. to help contain A.I.

KEILAR: I was going to say, why don't we just ask A.I. to stop A.I. from doing this bad stuff? But you know, I'm not a smart A.I. person. But you know, just brilliant minds there thinking like Hadas Gold. Thank you so much. Still to come, growing concern among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as America's munition stockpile grows dangerously low. This is very serious and concerning, a lot of folks observing the situation in the Iran War. Is this going to leave the U.S. and its allies abroad more vulnerable? We'll talk to a national security expert next.

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[14:21:39]

JIMENEZ: Senior U.S. military commanders are sounding the alarm about the Pentagon's depleted munitions stockpile. Since the start of the war with Iran in February, inventory of U.S. THAAD missiles, those high-altitude anti-ballistic missiles, the inventory has dwindled nearly 80 percent. The U.S. has also burned through about half of its Patriot interceptors as sources tell CNN.

President Trump is downplaying those concerns, at least publicly, saying the U.S. has massive amounts of certain munitions. But as this war goes on, how long can that really be the case? With us now, CNN National Security Analyst, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Beth Sanner.

So Beth, I mean, look, this 80 percent depletion number of U.S. interceptors.

BETH SANNER, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yeah.

JIMENEZ: How are you reading how the U.S. got here? How does it get to that point?

SANNER: There aren't a lot of THAADs, right? So THAAD is a kind of special system. It's been based in Asia. We've had you know one in the Middle East, you know a few other places, but these are really expensive. They cost --

JIMENEZ: The number was small to begin with.

SANNER: The number was small to begin with and they cost about $13 million a pop. And a battery costs like between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, right? Patriots cost $4 million a pop versus like $13 million, right? So I think it's the overall, like let's not get caught up in one system. There are multiple systems that are depleted right now according to these reports.

There's defensive air defense systems, right? You need these defensive systems in order to actually go to war because defense and offense work together. You can't prosecute a war with offensive operations. You can't just bomb Iran if everything you have in your bases and your partners are exposed. So you need air defense to continue a war.

And so that's why this is important and these air defense systems also, as well as some of the offensive systems, are definitely lower. But when President Trump says we have plenty of weapons to prosecute this war, he's not wrong. We have lots of things that we can bomb Iran with that we're not short of. But we are really, really short on air defenses and some of our long-range precision strike weapons that we would use against China, for example, or in that kind of Pacific Theater. And so that's why this matters.

JIMENEZ: And you know, what is the practical reality of this? I mean, obviously, that metaphor you used to sort of -- not even metaphor, just real example of if you go completely offensive and leave yourself vulnerable defensively, that's just not a viable strategy.

SANNER: Yeah.

JIMENEZ: Is that what's at risk here? U.S. bases, Gulf allies, I mean, what is the practical reality?

SANNER: So I think that there are three. I mean, one is just this war and it's why the Gulf allies also are pushing America to stop and to de-escalate because they're running out of their own missile defenses and the entire Gulf idea of having a prosperous Gulf is dependent on missiles not flying into your territory --

JIMENEZ: Not being targeted all the time (ph), yeah.

SANNER: And right. But the second one is Ukraine, without Patriot missiles, I mean, we are seeing right now, they intercepted -- the Ukrainians intercepted zero ballistic missiles in this last round a night ago when, you know, over a dozen people died. They are out of Patriot missiles and with us being this short and with European stockpiles also being super low because they've already transferred their stocks, that's a problem.

[14:25:00]

But then there's the long term, the fact is, is that even though we're putting more money into new factories, we are going to have a gap between when the new missiles start rolling off production lines, and some of these won't start rolling off until 2029. That's a problem.

JIMENEZ: Yeah.

SANNER: That means that whoever comes into the White House in 2028 could be facing a scenario where we cannot deter China because we don't have enough weapon systems to defend our bases. And that's what the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that's behind Project 2025 fame, they just said we have basically now 10 percent of what we would need in our air defenses to deter China.

JIMENEZ: You know, when you look at just sort of the U.S. and Iran for right now, it seems we are so far from diplomacy, but yet diplomacy, there are still attempts happening in the background.

SANNER: Totally.

JIMENEZ: For example, the Tehran and trying to finalize a deal with Oman for movement of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. But I can't imagine any deal between those two countries or governments and the Strait of Hormuz is enough to fully open the Strait of Hormuz. How are you reading the role of a country like Oman, for example? SANNER: So Oman is definitely the closest of all of the Gulf states to Iran. People call Oman Iran's lawyer. They would be the ones that would come out and kind of help negotiate on Iran's behalf almost. But they're also an ally of the United States. And so it's a complicated situation, but you're talking about the two countries that are closest together here. And so how this goes, you know, they're going to come up with a deal that works for them.

Will this meet the United States' standards? Unclear. And certainly, Iran will demand that we end the blockade in order for this to go into effect. So I think we have a lot that we don't know about what is happening here and what's coming up.

But, you know, it's probably not as imminent as it looks. And it's going to be a process.

JIMENEZ: And, you know, the -- what is felt like an infinite back and forth is who gives up potentially what leverage, is it the U.S. naval blockade lift or does the Strait of Hormuz fully open from the Iranian side? And I wonder --

SANNER: Yes.

JIMENEZ: Is that how you see it?

SANNER: Yes, it is, because I think we are in a position right now where we have to recognize that Iran has shifted its strategic calculus. Now, those are kind of complicated words. But what I mean by that is that Iran is the one controlling escalation and de-escalation right now. When we were in this truce, President Trump was shocked that that Iran fired five ballistic missiles at Jordan.

They didn't care that we were -- that we were talking. When we declared we weren't going to attack Iran over this last Friday, Iran attacked a ship that was defying it by transiting the Omani route. Iran is pressing its game with a boldness that is different than at the beginning of the war.

And they are going to keep pressing until they get what they want in the Strait, because this is their goal. And no matter the disunity in the Iranian government, whatever, this is one thing I believe they're all united on.

JIMENEZ: Something to watch moving forward. We will see if there's any breakthrough on the diplomatic front. But to this point, it hasn't seemed like anything major. Beth Sanner, I appreciate you being here. Thanks for taking the time.

All right. Coming up for us, Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin warning Haitian migrants either self-deport or we'll come after you. Temporary protections are now ending, leaving hundreds of thousands of Haitians at risk of deportation. We'll talk about it, coming up.

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