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Colombia Quake Rescue Efforts; Interview with Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE): Several Close Aides, Joined Trump on Secret Flight Out of Turkey While Several Cabinet Members Flew on Decoy; Trump Won't Rule Out Declaring National Security Emergency for Elections; Sailor's Families Raise Concerns About USS Abraham Lincoln Conditions; ICE Officer Pulls Gun on Woman Who Denies Almost Running Agents Over; Federal Hearing in Mangione Case Fuels Plea Deal Speculation. Aired 9- 9:30a ET

Aired August 13, 2026 - 09:00   ET

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

[09:00:00]

DAVID CULVER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Did you hear the man's voice? What did the voice say? When I said, hello, yes, I'm here, I'm with a baby. Brian and several others go immediately go in. Over the course of 3 to 5 minutes they were able to pull the baby out.

Como esta el beb? (SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

And how is the baby at this moment?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Esta en estos momentos. (SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

CULVER: Stable condition right now, as well as the dad.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Desaparecio a la mama. (SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

CULVER: The only thing is that the mom is still missing.

CULVER (voice-over): More than 130 miles north, we watched on for hours as this close-knit community dragged huge slabs of concrete from this collapsed apartment in Pereira.

CULVER: All of these folks are volunteers.

CULVER (voice-over): Late in the evening, their hands reached a 32- year-old woman, clinging to life. Her stepmother held vigil there for more than 24 hours. She tells us her daughter suffered heart failure and shattered nearly every bone imaginable but says she's hopeful she'll make it. From that same wreckage, someone's beloved pet also pulled out alive.

Back here in Cali, this moment, reality, briefly surfaces for Harold.

(END VIDEOTAPE) SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, new details on President Trump's secret plane swap. Who else was on that covert flight with him after a threat from Iran while Air Force One took off as a decoy?

Caught on camera, an ICE agent pointing a gun at a driver in Virginia. The conflicting stories about what led up to these tense moments and the video that seems to dispute what the government is saying happened.

And an emergency hearing in the federal case against Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare's CEO. Could he potentially be working on a plea deal with prosecutors?

John and Kate, out today. I'm Sara Sidner in Atlanta with Erica Hill in New York. This is CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: We have new reporting this morning on the president's elaborate plane switch and secret flight out of Turkey last month because of a threat from Iran. A source telling CNN, fighter jets accompanied both the plane that Trump flew on and the Air Force One flight that was used as a decoy. Two cabinet members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, elected to stay on that decoy plane.

Meantime, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and some aides in the president's inner circle joined him on the covert flight. All of this unfolding after Israel had passed along some intelligence which suggested a specific threat from Iran targeting Air Force One, a threat involving a shoulder-fired missile. Now, some officials were reportedly skeptical of that Israeli intelligence, which was viewed as part of Israel's effort to influence President Trump's decision-making on Iran.

Joining us now, John Hudson, national security reporter for The Washington Post, who, of course, has been digging up so many of these important new details on the president's cloak and dagger flight. And you have a new byline out this morning, along with your colleagues, that the CIA specifically had low confidence, right? We talked about questions at the time in this intel coming from Israel, whether it was perhaps being used to try to influence President Trump's thinking.

What did you learn about the CIA's take?

JOHN HUDSON, NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: Yes, there was a significant degree of skepticism by the CIA in the veracity. There was low confidence in the information that the Israelis passed along about the degree of the threat facing the president. There was concern that the information may have been more intended to manipulate U.S. policymaking rather than inform U.S. policymaking. Obviously, it's a bit extraordinary to see the contrast with the level of confidence that U.S. intelligence officials had about this threat and the degree of caution exercised by the Secret Service in response to this threat.

In some ways, that this just shows that the Secret Service does have a different risk calculus that it has to deal with. There's no room for error. There were three very high-profile, near-miss assassination attempts against the president, and they didn't want to leave anything up for chance here.

Now, at the same time, you have to look at what was the incoming threat that was being reported by a top U.S. ally in the Middle East, and that's where the U.S. intelligence officials brought a degree of skepticism. They have a long history of processing and analyzing information that comes in from Israel.

[09:05:00]

They don't accept everything at face value, so they provided some context to U.S. officials about this during this Ankara Summit that was happening.

HILL: As you're excellent reporting on this story, as you're digging in on this, there were some comments from the president, I believe it was on Tuesday, that certainly raised some eyebrows. He talked about the -- and I'm paraphrasing him here -- but the flight that he ultimately ended up on, that that was actually at greater risk because he was on the flight. Have you found any evidence that the Iranians knew, that someone else who may have wanted to harm the president knew that he was on that flight at the time?

HUDSON: No, we haven't -- no. And in fact, I mean, this was an extraordinary level of secrecy. Even that there were a number of White House officials that had no idea that -- they assumed that they were on the plane that the president was, and as we know, he was actually secretly smuggled to a third plane, a Turkish catering truck.

So the idea that the Iranians knew that I haven't seen anything that led to this. This is one of the most successfully kept secrets until The Washington Post ripped the lid off the story this morning.

HILL: Yes, absolutely. John, I really appreciate you joining us this morning. Thank you -- Sara.

SIDNER: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Erica. Joining me now is a Democratic senator from Delaware, Chris Coons.

Thank you for being here. I'm going to ask you a question about that covert action to try and safeguard the president, because it left several of his Cabinet members and journalists on a plane that was potentially a target of Iran trying to assassinate the president. There is reporting from The Post and from us as well now that there was someone seen with a rocket-fired grenade in the area around NATO where all this was happening.

What are your questions that you have upon learning of this?

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE), FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE: Well, my first question to those who are on the leave behind decoy plane would be, do you realize the president just isn't that into you? So if you were Secretary Rubio or Secretary Bessent or Scott Miller, how do they feel about having been left as decoys? More importantly and more seriously, the press who accompanied the president should not have been put on a plane where there was any serious risk of a shoulder-fired surface-to- air missile taking that plane down.

I understand putting a priority on the president's security, but frankly this was just a despicable incident of disrespect for the press and for members of his own Cabinet. They should have been allowed to disembark and to fly home another way rather than taking off on the number one target in the whole region. So even if there was low confidence in the intelligence, Sara, it didn't seem like an intelligent choice to me for the president to slink away in a catering truck leaving key members of his Cabinet and the traveling press to take off in Air Force One.

And let's remember where this all comes from. President Trump extracted a $400 million gift of a super luxury jumbo jet that he will allegedly take with him to his presidential library and the Air Force has had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more to make it meet the security requirements, which it still doesn't, which is why he wasn't on that plane. This is just another of many examples of grift by the president that wastes taxpayers' money and puts people at risk.

SIDNER: I do want to ask you, and I think a plan may have changed on using that Qatari aircraft in his library eventually. But I want to ask you about something that happened over the last couple of days where the president really left the door open to potentially declaring a national security emergency and federalizing control over the November midterms and it was all about a conversation he had about the SAVE Act and wanting it to be passed. Do you think this is just bluster from the president where he is wishy-washy on whether or not he's going to do something very extreme or are you genuinely concerned about this?

COONS: I'm gravely concerned. Frankly, when President Trump makes big threats, we should take him seriously. Yes, TACO or Trump always chickens out has ended up becoming a watchword that many of us have seen in action where he does bluster and threaten whether it's new tariffs or to seize Greenland by force or to launch devastating attacks against Iran.

But this is deadly serious. The Constitution gives control of elections to the states, not to the president.

[09:10:00]

And if he cooks up some last-minute excuse to try and federalize elections, we should all be on guard for this moment because that's not appropriate. That would be an attempt to overthrow our democracy.

And by the way, this president has already once tried to overturn the results of an election by force. I voted to impeach him, to convict him during the impeachment trial for his role in the January 6th riot that very nearly succeeded in blocking the certification of the 2020 election. And I'll remind you, Sara, of his recent primetime address that many primetime channels didn't carry where he made all sorts of unfounded allegations of Chinese interference in our electoral system.

President Trump is desperate. He repeatedly says Republicans can only lose if the election is rigged. No, Mr. President, Republicans can lose because costs keep going up. Inflation is rising faster than wages. The average American is angry about how this endless war in Iran is making the cost of gas and groceries, health care and housing go up. And that's the reason you're going to lose the midterms.

SIDNER: I do want to ask you about something that has come up. Great reporting from the Stars and Stripes and the Navy Times where they're talking about the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln which has now been out to sea more than 250 days. They're reporting that there are conditions so bad, with shortages, for example, of even food and sanitary items, that there are some sailors who are trying to jump from the ship.

Can you give us some sense, if you have gotten any information on this, and your reaction to hearing about multiple incidents in which sailors attempted to jump from a ship because conditions are just simply too difficult?

COONS: Sara, this is another reminder of how the President and his team, while asking for a huge increase in defense spending for all sorts of exotic new undertakings like the Trump-class battleship or Golden Dome, are not making the investments in the daily lives and the care and the support of our sailors and soldiers, airmen and Marines that they deserve. I would support a pay increase for our troops, making sure that they are cared for, bringing home sailors who have been deployed far too long in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Persian Gulf, in the Southern Caribbean. But I don't think President Trump is listening to these alarming examples of how sailors have been pushed to the very limits.

When folks are literally talking about jumping off a battleship -- excuse me, jumping off an aircraft carrier, I'll remind you, that's a huge leap into the ocean, and that means conditions on this ship have genuinely deteriorated. That's because we've pushed our Navy to the limits. We've had unscheduled, unplanned deployments to the Southern Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific for repeated strikes against Venezuela and alleged drug boats, long deployments into the Middle East because of this now six-month war against Iran, and deployments around the world because of increasing threats.

We do need to support our men and women-at-arms, and I stand ready to do that. But everything I know about this incident is what I've heard in the press. Secretary Hegseth has recently come to brief senators, but only Republicans, and to not brief Democrats as well about the critical issues of our munition shortages, a pathway to get out of this war in Iran, or the very real pressure that our soldiers and sailors are experiencing in this high operational tempo risks dividing us in terms of our enduring support for the men and women of the American military.

SIDNER: And it's the families that have come out, the families of these sailors who are so really concerned about their well-being. It takes your breath away when you read some of the things that are missing on that ship, according to the families and the grave concerns. Senator Chris Coons, thank you so much for talking us through that this morning -- Erica. HILL: All right, Sara, thanks. We are following the developments in a very tense encounter which was caught on camera and raising concerns once again about the tactics being used by ICE across the country. So cell phone video from this encounter shows an officer pointing a gun at a driver in Virginia.

You're looking at that cell phone video now. The agent accuses Carolina Molina of trying to run over agents. She says that is a lie.

Now, before the gun was pulled, Molina says she had witnessed agents handcuffing two men. She described them as Latino men. And then her dash cam video also captured her yelling insults at the agents.

Well, Molina says she decided to leave the area, to turn around, to try to leave, and that is when the gray SUV, as you just saw there, appears to block her car. An agent jumps out with the gun already pulled. Molina was not arrested.

DHS says she could still be facing prosecution for, quote, weaponizing her vehicle. CNN's Jason Carroll following these developments for us. So two different stories that we're hearing here from DHS and Carolina Molina.

What do we know?

JASON CARROLL, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well two, as you say, two very different accounts of what happened out there in Virginia and trying to get more of an assessment of exactly what happened here. Carolina Molina says that it all started when she saw ICE agents handcuffed two people and escort them into an unmarked vehicle. She then says she rolled down her window and admitted to shouting a lot of insults at the ICE agents who were there on the ground.

She then says she turned her car and tried to drive away. That's when she says the ICE agents drove their cars in an attempt to block her and then one of them pulled out a gun.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CAROLINA MOLINA, RECORDED ENCOUNTER WITH ICE AGENTS: I think my life was in danger at that point. I don't think I processed that in that moment. It wasn't until after I was like this was a whole Renee Goode situation again.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARROLL: And when she was referring to Renee Goode, of course the mother of three that was shot and killed by ICE agents in Minnesota earlier this year, her death sparked national outrage and called into question how ICE agents operates and the tactics that they use there on the ground. The Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying in part, "While ICE was conducting targeted immigration enforcement in Falls Church, Virginia, an anti-ICE agitator began to drive her car in circles around our officers and then attempted to harm officers by weaponizing her vehicle against them all in an attempt to help illegal aliens get away. Fearing for their safety, ICE officers conducted a vehicle stop of the driver."

Now again, Erica, much of this could be cleared up if we knew that ICE agents themselves had body-worn cameras. We do not know that at this point. We do know that there is an effort to get all ICE agents there on the ground equipped with these body-worn cameras by the end of this month.

But imagine if we had something from them other than their word showing exactly what happened there on the ground, it would certainly provide a lot more clarity.

HILL: Yes, it definitely would. Jason, appreciate it. Thank you -- Sara.

SIDNER: Thank you, Erica. Up ahead, could the man accused of killing United Healthcare's CEO avoid a federal trial? New details on potential plea negotiations that may be going on in Luigi Mangione's federal case.

And Nick Reiner has now been indicted on murder charges. Court documents revealing disturbing details about what happened the night prosecutors say he killed his beloved famous parents.

Plus, a tech company rolling out new safeguards after growing concerns over surveillance and police misuse. You'll want to listen to this story. All that coming up and more.

[09:20:00]

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HILL: New developments to tell you about this morning in the federal case involving Luigi Mangione. CNN has learned about an emergency hearing set for tomorrow, and that hearing is now fueling speculation about a possible plea deal. He, of course, is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and is facing, I should note, separate both state and federal charges here in New York.

CNN reported back in June, you may recall, Mangione's attorneys had spoken with prosecutors about a potential plea deal, but they didn't reach a deal at the time. Sources said the new discussions here are fluid. All of this, though, is unfolding just weeks before the state case is set to head to trial.

Joining me now CNN legal analyst and criminal defense attorney Joey Jackson. So this was, I believe in one right, it was it was described as being hastily added to the calendar for tomorrow. The fact that this was done so quickly with this state case, right, ready to go to trial just after Labor Day.

What do you read into that?

JOEY JACKSON, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Yes, quite a bit, Erica. Good morning to you. You know, as you just noted, back in June, there were these alleged plea discussions. The defense said, What are you talking about that? This is the prosecution leaking information, poisoning the jury pool. Now it appears that it could, could be a reality, and there would be good reason for that to be.

So I read into it that the defense is really looking at what should we do next here? Are we boxed in? And what would be our defense?

Remember, initially, Erica, the defense for the state case, they were going to go, you know, sort of with a mental type of situation in terms of the defense. They had to pull that back because the feds didn't recognize the same extreme duress, emotional disturbance defense. They would have fled to that in the state court, and then it could be used against you.

So he would have done a life sentence. So I think this could be real, I think, based upon the nature of the evidence, which is quite compelling, whether it's the surveillance video that you see, whether it's the DNA evidence at the scene, whether it's the ballistics, whether it's the manifesto, it's a lot. And so you have to ask yourself, could I, as a defense attorney representing my client when in state court, then go across the street in January, state court case expected to take place on the 8th of September, then in January when again, and if you can't, then what are you doing?

And then the other notion is that, hey, if you plead guilty federally, then does that take, of course, the state case away?

HILL: And that's because of double jeopardy.

JACKSON: Yes, it is. So normally speaking, there's sort of this dual jurisdiction, and we've seen before that you can have a state prosecution, and you could have a federal prosecution because both are addressing different issues, right? In the federal case, they're addressing the stalking, right? With the resulting in death.

Those are the charges because it's across state lines. It gets you federal jurisdiction. From a state perspective, if you murder someone, then obviously that's a state crime. However, there's a law in the books in New York, which would suggest that if you plead guilty federally and it arises out of the same set of circumstances, it would be double jeopardy because the same evil that is attempted to be addressed in both the federal court murder and the state court are the same.

[09:25:00]

That would implicate double jeopardy, and it would set off a massive fight because federal prosecutors will say, hey, we already convicted him. He's good. He pled guilty.

And state would say, we still have an interest. They'd litigate that issue.

HILL: All right, we'll be watching for all of it. Joey, good to see my friend. JACKSON: Always.

HILL: Thank you.

JACKSON: Thanks, Erica.

HILL: Sara.

SIDNER: Thank you, Erica. This morning, new safeguards are being implemented for a police surveillance system that has come under some serious scrutiny for alleged misuse by officers. Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of license plate readers, is now requiring police departments to use a tool that flags suspicious search activity.

Why? Well, it comes after several dozen officers have been accused of misusing the technology to track their current and former romantic partners. A Milwaukee officer agreed to resign and pleaded guilty to improperly using the technology to track his girlfriend and search her location 124 times.

With the changes, officers will also have to enter a case number for each search. Flock says any abnormal activity will trigger an automatic lockdown pending a review. Flock is also cutting its standard data retention from 30 days to just seven.

Coming up next hour, the CEO of Flock will be on the Situation Room to discuss this further.

All right, this morning, reports of poor conditions, including a basic lack of food and supplies for sailors aboard a U.S. naval ship in the Middle East. It has lawmakers demanding answers. They want to know what is going on, on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

And Travis Kelce opening up for the first time publicly about his Madison Square Garden wedding to Taylor Swift. What he's saying about this wedding, y'all want to tune in. It's cute.

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