Return to Transcripts main page

CNN News Central

New Hampshire Primary Voters Pick Senate Nominees; Paxton Releases AI-Generated Ad Against Rival Talarico; Trump has Told Different Stories in Past About 9-11 Experience; NYT Op-Ed: We've Forgotten the Most Important Lessons of 9-11. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired September 08, 2026 - 14:30   ET

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

[14:30:00]

JAY BUSBEE, SENIOR WRITER, YAHOO! SPORTS: ... Get him out.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Yes, because talk to us about the response time of emergency responders versus really how much time he had here before it was going to be a really bad situation.

BUSBEE: Yes, I mean, you hope that they're there within just a few seconds. But when you're talking about a massive track like this, you have there's a certain amount of time, even if they're right in position, and then all of a sudden, you've got a situation where the emergency crews are not able to respond. You hoping that this thing kind of thing doesn't happen is not a strategy.

But that appears to be at least somewhat what was the case here, as if we're to judge by what the drivers had to say afterward.

KEILAR: Yes, well, really amazing. And it'll be very interesting to see what this kind of attention to this moment does to perhaps change the safety in the sport. Jay Busbee, thanks so much for being with us.

BUSBEE: Thank you.

KEILAR: Next, why Democrats are suddenly sounding the alarm when it comes to New Hampshire.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Today's New Hampshire primary spotlighting a rarity for Republicans this election season, a chance to pick up a Senate seat. Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen is retiring, and the competition to replace her has tightened for both parties. Democrats are choosing between Congressman Chris Pappas and Democratic Socialist Karishma Manzur.

It's the final race of the year between the establishment and the far left.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: And Republicans are picking between two former senators, John Sununu versus Scott Brown. Sununu has the backing of President Trump. Let's talk politics now with Democratic strategist Joel Payne, a senior aide on the 2016 presidential campaign for Hillary Clinton, and also Pete Seat, who served as White House spokesperson in the George W. Bush administration.

Appreciate you both being with us. First, Joel, I want to start with you. What are you watching for on the Democratic side of this New Hampshire primary?

JOEL PAYNE, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Well, obviously, this is maybe like the last chapter in the establishment versus the progressive fight. And I know that a lot of Democrats are anxious about these types of things. I think this is healthy.

These are the type of fights that Democrats need to be having right now in 2026 to figure out where the soul of the party is, where's the heartbeat of the grassroots. I think Pappas is a pretty clear favorite today. But would it surprise you if you saw a much closer result than you're expecting?

No, just looking at the rest of this cycle. And I think, obviously, on the Republican side, you'd expect Sununu to advance. And then Sununu versus Pappas are two known names in New Hampshire.

I think Democrats have a slight lean. But this race has kind of snuck up on Democrats in the last couple of weeks. You know, Sununu has been polling a little bit closer than Pappas. So Democrats got some work to do.

KEILAR: Pete, was this even on your map?

PETE SEAT, FORMER WHITE HOUSE SPOKESMAN, GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION: Not really. And not only has Sununu gotten closer to Pappas, but he has overtaken Pappas in the most recent polling. And that's because candidate quality matters now more than ever.

You know, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Majority Leader John Thune, they initially tried to get Chris Sununu, John's brother, who was governor up until 2024 when he decided not to run again. When Chris declined running, they then looked at John Sununu himself, a former senator, a former congressman, and the brother and son of former governors. And he's got a couple things going for him in this race, which is why I'm blowing past today and already looking at the general election.

And the first thing is a long tenured familiarity with voters in New Hampshire. There tends to be a lot of musical chairs, politically speaking, in that state, which I think bodes well for him. And the other thing he has going for him is he lacks the stench of Washington, which is what Chris Pappas has on him because he's a sitting U.S. congressman. Those two things put together, I think, are putting John Sununu in the driver's seat in the final two months of this campaign.

SANCHEZ: Maybe because Pete is in Indianapolis, but Joel, do you smell that stench of Washington that he's describing? You had a reaction to what he said.

PAYNE: I don't want to accuse anybody of a stench, but I would say this. The Sununu name, yes, is very known in New Hampshire. It is also a name that's associated with kind of the traditional Bush Republican wing of the Republican Party.

So it's a known name. It's a very establishment Republican name and a very anti-establishment moment in the Republican Party, anti-insider moment. So I don't know if I agree with that analysis.

What I would additionally add here is I think that the unpopularity of Donald Trump still weighs in heavy here. I mean, the only Republican in the Senate right now is Susan Collins from the Northeast. So it's still an uphill battle for any Republican that's vying for that seat.

But if Pete wants to, you know, go and get excited about this race, go for it. I encourage Republicans to spend a little money there as opposed to in Texas and Georgia and some other places.

KEILAR: Well, let's talk about Texas because people are really watching the race there. Democratic nominee James Talarico has vastly outraised the Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by nearly $60 million, a huge amount of money. Paxton put out a new ad.

Here's part of it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the beginning, God was non-binary and he wasn't a Christian. And God said, let there be six genders.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Joel, does that ad worry you?

PAYNE: Not really. I mean, it worries me about the state of our politics that that type of like out of context and really like non- sequitur argument Republicans will be offering. I mean, when people can't afford their groceries and can't afford basic needs and Republicans are focused on those types of things. It's one of the reasons why Talarico is running so close to Paxton in this race.

One, Paxton's a bad candidate. Two, Republicans don't have a good pitch to make to Republican voters all across the country and in Texas.

[14:40:00]

It's a reason why Texas, which is usually a reliable red state, is very much in play this cycle.

SANCHEZ: Pete, what did you think of the ad and that approach from Paxton?

SEAT: Well, I'll say exactly what I said on New Hampshire. Candidate quality matters. And unfortunately, the Republican candidate in the state of Texas is not a great candidate.

And it's going to cost a lot of money. The Republican committees are going to have to throw hordes and hordes of cash into Texas to keep what should be a gimme seat for the party. So thankfully, Elon Musk and his super PAC are targeting the state, going to get voters out to the polls to hopefully overcome what has been a lackadaisical campaign effort on Ken Paxton's part.

He's not out there pounding the pavement, pressing the flesh the way he should be. And that's causing a lot of consternation on my side of the aisle.

KEILAR: All right, Pete, Joel, thank you so much for the conversation, both of you. We appreciate it.

Ahead, President Trump marking 25 years since September 11th and sharing a story where he says firefighters literally lifted him and ran him to safety following the attacks. We have that next.

[14:45:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Today, President Trump paid tribute to the victims of September 11th and the first responders who rushed to ground zero on that terrible morning. And he recalled his own experience on September 11th with a story that was unfamiliar to some in the crowd. This is how the president described it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were -- they had no hesitation.

The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked.

There's still creaks, but it never came down. And I'll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen, big, strong guys -- and I'm not the smallest guy in the world -- they grabbed me under the arm and said, got to get out of here. And they literally lifted me up.

This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me.

I said, fellas, I can run myself, but they were amazing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: CNN senior reporter Daniel Dale is with us. All right. I mean, Daniel, have we heard the president talk about this moment before?

DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: At least once, you know, the president has told a whole lot of stories about what he supposedly saw and supposedly did on and after 9-11 that are false, that are dubious or that are unproven. This one is at very least unproven. It is possible there are some elements of truth, but other elements are at very least misleading. So first things first, I think he at very least left open the impression that he was personally at ground zero, right, or somewhere right near the Twin Towers, shortly after the 9-11 attacks. That is not the case. He was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, that is hours away from lower Manhattan, when the attacks happened.

So he was not right nearby. Now, the possible element of truth is that there was a panic about the possible collapse of a nearby building known as One Liberty Plaza, formerly known as the U.S. Steel Building. And a couple days after 9-11, there were rescue workers rushing away from there because of this unfounded rumor.

We know Trump was somewhere in the neighborhood, though not at ground zero at the time. So is it theoretically possible he was swept up in this rush? Yes, but I think his language saying, you know, we feared it was coming down on top of us, firefighters said, we got to get out of here, made it sound like he was actually in the building, he certainly was not.

And then the larger story he keeps telling, he's told for years, is that he personally organized a crew of his workers to be involved in the, you know, search and recovery, the rescue effort that he personally helped in the rubble. There has never been any evidence of that whatsoever. He kind of alluded to it this time rather than saying it explicitly, but no proof in the slightest.

Now, I did ask the White House about all of this, and they told me he was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented. So take that for what you will. And I'll just add one thing about how hard it is to take President Trump's word about even the smallest matters.

He said in the course of the story, he said, this building still creaks. When Liberty Plaza reopened in October 2001, just like a month and a half after the attacks, it has been occupied by numerous companies for 25 years. It is not creaking today.

So I think, you know, whether or not there are elements of truth to the story, the president's general habit of exaggerating and fabricating certainly makes it hard to trust -- Brianna.

KEILAR: Yes. Daniel Dale, thank you -- Boris.

SANCHEZ: As President Trump said today, we will never forget the lives lost, but a new op-ed in the New York Times today argues that we've already forgotten some of the most important lessons from that day and the decades of war that followed. With us now the author of that piece, CNN national security analyst, Peter Bergen, who began studying jihadist terrorism after the first world trade center attack in 1993 and actually interviewed Osama bin Laden four years before 9-11.

He's also the author of the new book, All the President's Wars, 25 Years of America's War on Terror. Peter, thank you so much for being with us. You argue that many of the vulnerabilities that Al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden revealed are still with us. What are you referring to? PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Boris, thanks for having me on. Well, I would say one thing that, you know, our overreaction, um, you know, we have really created a kind of an imperial commander in chief. George W. Bush, of course, had his preventive war against Iraq. President Obama expanded the drone program in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia. He went to war against Gaddafi without a congressional authorization.

And here we are now with the Iran war, no congressional authorization, no NATO allies, no U.N. Resolution, no imminent threat, no public buy in.

[14:50:00]

The only mistake that we haven't made from the previous set of wars is sending large numbers of troops into Iran. So, you know, the Iran decision by President Trump, Boris, didn't come out of a vacuum. There's been a gradual accretion of power by the American commander in chief over the past 25 years.

SANCHEZ: You also argue that there's much to be learned about bin Laden's religious motivations to specifically the roots of his extreme interpretation of Islam. Wahhabism, ironically, being in a close ally of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Why do you think that is important for us to address?

BERGEN: Well, the good news, Boris, is one of the sort of less heralded kind of advances in the last several years. Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. He does run a sort of sort of dictatorial regime that tolerates 100, but no dissent at all.

But he has put the religious police back in their barracks. You know, Saudi Arabia today is a very different country than the one I visited two decades ago in terms of kind of social liberalization. So that's a good thing.

But, you know, the Saudis, there's an estimate that they spent $100 billion exporting their hardline Wahhabi ideology around the world. And we're still sort of living with that. And certainly bin Laden came out of that milieu.

SANCHEZ: MBS has denied that there was any Saudi state involvement in 9-11. He previously had called bin Laden an enemy of Saudi Arabia. Do we have a clear understanding, as many of the families of 9-11 victims have sought answers about what Saudi officials knew before the attacks?

BERGEN: Well, there is a particular Saudi official that we know a lot more about as a result of the lawsuit by the 9-11 families, who wasn't just supporting two of the hijackers. He appears to have made a casing video of the U.S. Capitol, which was one of the targets. He had equations in his apartment to do with planes flying into large landmarks when they were finally examined by an aeronautical expert.

So that's a Saudi official. That doesn't mean a Saudi government was behind it, but it does show that there were Saudi officials who were sympathetic to al-Qaeda. And there were a bunch of Saudi charities that were sort of dual use.

They probably were doing charitable work, but they were also being used by al-Qaeda to either as cover or to kind of facilitate their ability to work in different countries.

SANCHEZ: I also want to get your reaction to CNN reporting that the military and intelligence community has been discussing shrinking the American footprint in the Middle East once the war with Iran ends. A presence that obviously multiplied after 9-11. What would that mean for U.S. foreign policy?

BERGEN: Well, you know, I think there's an agreement on the left of the Democratic Party and the right of the Republican Party that the absence of American troops somehow produces peace. I wish that were true, because we've seen with the pullout from Iraq in December 2011, three years later, ISIS was always marching to Baghdad. So, you know, I mean, we should, of course, examine our overseas presence.

You know, it doesn't make sense. Is it right size? But the absence of American troops doesn't necessarily produce magical outcomes.

I mean, you know, we pulled out of Afghanistan. We got the Taliban more radical, better armed than they were when they were in power the last time around. So I think people should be careful about assuming that reducing the American presence in the Middle East somehow is in our national interest.

SANCHEZ: So if that presence to begin with is part of what led to the events of 9-11 and your argument is that reducing that presence may not necessarily lead to peace, what do you see as the right roadmap to create progress in the Middle East and maintain American security?

BERGEN: It's a great question, Boris. I mean, look, the countries that we're in, we're there with the host country's permission. We're about to pull out of Iraq at the end of this month.

Finally, the Iraqi government wants us to leave and we want to leave. You know, let's see if that actually, you know, we certainly don't want a return of ISIS. So, I mean, you know, in countries where there's a U.S. military presence, there's a status of forces agreement that's done with the say so of the host government. And, you know, that's as it should be.

SANCHEZ: Peter Bergen, we have to leave the conversation there. Appreciate the piece. Appreciate your work and your time.

BERGEN: Thank you, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Of course.

Up next, save just seconds before disaster. You're going to want to see this. That kid running into the road. Rescue just in time.

Stay with us.

[14:55:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: Now to some of the other headlines we're watching this hour. Four bodies have been recovered after a plane carrying a couple and their two grandkids went missing on Monday. A Florida family was flying from the Bahamas to Miami when the plane suddenly lost contact.

Flight radar shows the small plane circling about 18 miles off the island's coast before disappearing from radar just before 11 a.m. There were heavy thunderstorms in the area at the time, though it's unclear whether weather may have played a factor.

Also, some heart-stopping footage showing the moment a child is saved after running into traffic. This happened in Pueblo, Mexico. You can see a woman initially running after the toddler until she falls.

That's when a store employee steps in, grabbing the child just seconds before running into the path of an oncoming car. Quick thinking.

KEILAR: My goodness. And they grow up so fast. Prince George is off to boarding school.

The future king and queen of the U.K. dropping off their eldest child at the prestigious Eton College this morning. George's dad and his uncle Harry both attended the school. In fact, here's a flashback of the morning that Princess Diana dropped off Prince William 31 years ...

END