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RNC Training Special Monitors to Scrutinize Voting Machines; China's Xi Ends Trump Visit With Plans for Future Meetings This Year; Flynn Trial, New Testimony From FBI Special Agent. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired September 25, 2026 - 13:30   ET

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

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[13:32:15]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": There are only 39 days until the final votes are cast in the midterm elections, and CNN is learning the Justice Department is mobilizing what a top official is hailing as the, quote, "biggest DOJ election observer effort in history."

More than a thousand monitors will be deployed to the polls on November 3rd. That's hundreds more than the Biden administration sent out in 2024. CNN's Gabe Cohen has this new reporting for us.

So, Gabe, what does this mean for voters when they cast their ballots?

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, at this point, the short answer is it shouldn't have an impact on them at all. There is no evidence as of now that there will be any disruptions at any polling locations or that anyone will not be able to cast a ballot. There is a long history of both party -- partisan observers at polling locations as well as federal monitors.

But you mentioned what the administration has said is this is going to be the biggest federal election monitor effort in history. And now, we have reviewed these new records that indicate that some of the DOJ monitors who were deployed during the primaries have ties. They are newly hired attorneys within the administration who have ties to past legal efforts to either challenge or even to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election in states like Georgia and Wisconsin, including those efforts to cast electoral votes for President Trump, even though Joe Biden had won that election.

We also have learned that one of those DOJ monitors also hired under this administration is a man named David Levin, a conservative attorney who pled guilty to two misdemeanors and served 20 days in jail because of an incident in 2016 where he was accused of essentially using a cyber attack in order to get into a county elections website. Now, again, we don't know that there are going to be any widespread disruptions. There's no indication of that.

And we've spoken with election officials, election leaders in some of the counties where these monitors were sent during the primaries who said it was really business as usual. It was no problem. But we did see this incident in Wyoming where Republican officials in the state accused the two federal monitors who were sent there of really aggressively trying to interview voters, trying to get information from poll workers on their training and on voting machines. And they were very critical of the operation that the Department of Justice is leading here.

The Republican county election director in Laramie County, Wyoming, said in a statement, quote, "My advice to my fellow county clerks in Wyoming and to election administrators in other red states is don't think this won't happen to you." A lot of concern there.

[13:35:00]

Now, the DOJ has defended its operation. It has defended those monitors in Wyoming, saying that they are going to obey the law. They said DOJ staff are expected to do their job consistent with all legal and ethical obligations, no exceptions. To imply that our team will act improperly based on nothing more than speculation would be dishonest. Brianna?

KEILAR: And Gabe, what have you learned about new monitor efforts from the RNC?

COHEN: Yeah, so this is interesting, again, totally separate from the federal monitors that we're talking about. These would be party observers. But what we have learned through these training materials that we have gotten and reviewed from the RNC in Wisconsin is that they've been training this new class of what they're calling special monitors, who are really focused on scrutinizing voting machines, who have been directed to be present during pre-election testing of voting machines going into Election Day and the days beforehand, and then tracking how those voting machines are then used on Election Day, trying to obtain seal logs, basically documenting the chain of custody of those machines, and then potentially trying to get information on the vote tabulations, the actual votes that go into the machine, to make sure that they line up with how many voters were present that day and signed in.

And one of the reasons, Brianna, that is so notable is because we know that voting machines have been heavily scrutinized by Trump and his allies for years now as being potentially rife with fraud, that they're hackable, especially because they have foreign components inside them. There have been calls by some, even in the administration, to either heavily restrict them or even ban them.

And now we have these observers for the RNC who are going to be in there specifically focused on these voting machines, on top of the volunteers who are in there and who have been in there for years and years now, who are watching more of the standard Election Day operations within a polling location.

KEILAR: All right. Gabe, great reporting. Thank you so much. Boris?

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN CO-ANCHOR OF "CNN NEWS CENTRAL": Before voters hit the polls, the White House is airing a new T.V. ad that says it's paid for by the U.S. government. Watch this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Together, we will defeat communism, socialism and Marxism in America.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Love me. Love me. Love me. Love me.

You're the toughest, most resilient person that I've ever met.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANCHEZ: An interesting message, given that the president has spent the last couple of days at the White House wooing China's communist leader. Let's talk about this and more with Anthony Scaramucci, who served as White House Communications Director in Trump's first term. He also wrote the brand new book, "All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump."

ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI, FORMER WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Thanks, Boris.

SANCHEZ: Anthony, thank you so much for being with us. The timing of the visit by Xi is coincidental because the first wrong move you highlight in your book goes back to the '90s and increased openness to China by the United States, allowing them to join the World Trade Organization. The belief that trade would inevitably lead Beijing toward democracy, which has not come to fruition.

So how do you connect that to Trump?

SCARAMUCCI: Well, again, the book is designed to be nonpartisan. I tried to look at everything objectively through the lens of the economy, our history and also good intentions by presidents. And so in that case, like you said, we thought their market was going to open 1.3 billion new consumers and we thought they would perhaps have more openness to their political system.

Neither of those things happened. And so it caused some level of wage stagnation. Now, some people could push back and say we were going to probably lose some of our manufacturing anyway as a result of NAFTA, et cetera.

But in this case, by not checking China, meaning allowing them to have those economic privileges, when they got to be the size and scale of, say, the German economy, they still were treated as an emerging nation. And that sort of gave them a leg up on the other countries, and it hurt him. It hurt the American standing on wages.

And so where we are now, to use the president's own words, he doesn't have a lot of cards, which is why he greeted President Xi at Joint Base Andrews while he is sending all of these sycophantic messages out on Truth Social related to President Xi, because he needs the rare earth minerals. He needs the trade truce.

We're in a little bit of an economic perilous situation with the Iranian war and the cost of the tariffs, the affordability issue and the fact that rates are up this month and likely to go up again next month. And so, you know, we're dependent on China, whether we like it or not. Way back then, 27 years ago, we had all the cards and we could have managed that process better.

[13:40:00]

But again, Boris, I would have gotten that wrong myself. I start the book with, "I got this wrong. Here's what I got wrong as a consensus thinking Wall Streeter way back in 1999."

SANCHEZ: Yeah, it was a widely held view. And Trump was arguably the first American politician about 15 years ago to make the case against China, more directly about challenging China that received, you know, popularity. He elevated himself all the way to the White House, largely on this message about bringing manufacturing back to the mainland, about taking on China. But he hasn't really done that, especially the way that he promised to do so.

So what is his next move? Is there a path toward, you know, fighting Beijing's ascendancy?

SCARAMUCCI: Well, again, at this point, we should be more focused inward on ourselves and coming up with the right tax policy to improve manufacturing, jobs training, et cetera, and try to create more aspirational living standards for the working class people. There's a lot of things we could do. There's earned income tax credits. We could probably take our gas off the tariffs, which you and I both know, Boris, that tariffs are regressive taxes. They hurt the working poor more than anybody.

So there's a number of steps that we could do to help these people. I think the first thing we have to do is you have to examine what happens. So you have the combination of China hurting wages, our massive deficit spending, which really starts as a result of the two wars that we prosecuted in Afghanistan and Iraq, which weakens the dollar, weakens our ability to purchase things.

And then when we bail out the banks, we make everybody sore because the fat cats got the money at the banking level. 5,000 people in the banking industry got paid bonuses of $1 million or more a year while their fellow neighbors were suffering. So that combination of things has made 30-plus percent of the people in the United States feel left out of the system.

And whether you like Donald Trump or not, he responded to that and they've lent him their support. The only thing is he's not doing a lot to help them and he's gone against some of his campaign promises in 2024.

SANCHEZ: You devote a chapter to what you say are structural threats that you see to the republic and potentially whether Trump or another president, a leader who will eventually use the levers of government to consolidate unaccountable power.

You lay out a playbook for effectively how to steal elections. Now that we're six weeks out from the midterms and the White House has been airing that ad that was apparently paid for by taxpayers. You heard the reporting about special monitors at polling sites.

Are you concerned about the moves that you're seeing? Is that what you're warning about?

SCARAMUCCI: I'm warning about that. But I -- again, just to be objective, the courts have done a pretty decent job of containing the president. They contained him on the press kerfuffle this week. The Supreme Court also rendered a decision, I think appropriately, as it related to mail-in ballots. And so we are containing him. But just go back to Project 2025 and look through the list.

These guys believe that they want to flex more at the executive branch level and they want to liquidate elements of the democracy. And if you think about political philosophers like Curtis Yarvin, somebody -- and Curtis Yarvin's acolytes include Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance. These guys don't like the democracy. They think it's very messy.

And so what I'm stating in the book is we have to protect that democracy and the checks and balances because the great decentralization of the government has really unleashed innovation, unleashed economic growth. And what we find where you have crony capitalism or heavy concentrations of wealth at the top of a system, a lot of people feel like they can't get ahead.

And once you lose that hope in a society, that's where things become dangerous. Because, you know, Henry Ford had a great line. Whether you liked Henry Ford or not, it was a great line. "If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." And so one of the things we have to do in the country is reestablish hope for working class families as they seek aspiration for their children and grandchildren.

And frankly, we're not doing a good job of that. I explained how we got into the problem. And again, try to explain it objectively. And I'm saying to people, well-intended people made these mistakes. I too would have likely made them myself. But here's some of the things we can do to fix it.

SANCHEZ: It is a fascinating read. I was honestly surprised by some of the takes that you had in it. It seemed counterintuitive for a Wall Street guy, such as you call yourself. I do wonder before we go, the White House has an opening for press secretary.

[13:45:00]

SCARAMUCCI: Yeah.

SANCHEZ: I wonder who you think would best fit that role.

SCARAMUCCI: You know, there's a lot of people been talked about, obviously, one of your colleagues, Scott Jennings has been talked about. I just don't think the president's going to fill that role. I think he likes the rotation of people and I think he likes being his own spokesperson. But I do think and I said this to Jake Tapper the other day, knowing Karoline Leavitt. Remember she was there as an intern when I was communications director. She's a pretty tough person. She would have gone to the president and told him, listen, don't do that. She would have pushed back on him.

So I'm just wondering if he needs a press secretary in that role that he trusts that won't be another yes person around him in the White House because I think she would have saved him from the, you know, the judge's decision this week and the embarrassment of the whole thing of pulling your and Politico and MS NOW's press credentials.

SANCHEZ: Anthony Scaramucci, we'll leave the conversation there. Appreciate you joining us.

SCARAMUCCI: Good to be on.

SANCHEZ: Coming up new testimony in the murder trial of a former American Idol contestant accused of killing his wife when an FBI special agent told prosecutors about a tip he received on a murder for hire case, when we come back.

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[13:50:40]

KEILAR: We're following the latest from Ohio in the murder trial of former American Idol contestant and church worship leader, Caleb Flynn. Flynn is accused of killing his wife, Ashley, earlier this year and staging the crime scene to make it look like she was killed by an intruder Today, an investigator testified about internet searches found on Flynn's laptop in the days after the killing.

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JOSEPH WILHELM, SPECIAL AGENT, OHIO BUREAU OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: I found Google searches were conducted on February 18, 2026 of the format do Fire Sticks have cameras, can an iPhone record video with the screen off? If an iPhone is off and charging could it record video?

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KEILAR: CNN's Jean Casarez is with us now. Jean, tell us a little bit about that and also what else happened in court today.

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, that was interesting because that was after the fact and he searched to just some of these technology terms and you know, the whole aspect of Flynn and his girlfriend was to delete, delete, delete, anything you could find to delete. But they were able to recover quite a few things. One of the things that Caleb Flynn told his mistress, right when they were starting, he said, look, my wife cheated on me and because of that, I feel that I have a license to do this too. And he kept saying that throughout their extramarital affair.

Well, when Andrea Kinzig took the stand today, the FBI Special Agent, she had Ashley Flynn's phone and she did a search on that phone for many years and there was no evidence at all of any extramarital affair. But there was a conversation on that phone, a texting conversation. It was about one month before Ashley Flynn was killed, murdered by someone. Listen to that conversation between Ashley and her husband, Caleb Flynn.

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ANDREA KINZIG, FBI SPECIAL AGENT: There were some messages that indicated this, Ashley Flynn had some frustrations with Caleb Flynn. For example, on or around January 21st of 2026, there was a message where Caleb stated that he was worshipping and that he would call Ashley back later. And Ashley responded, you can be honest. Is it her?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CASAREZ: All right. Now, here's one other thing that just came out minutes ago and this is something -- it's three days before she was murdered, so it was February 13th of 2026. She had a text exchange with her husband. So this is the day before Valentine's Day of this year. Remember, it's all this year. She said to him, I have three questions. First of all, did he decide which restaurant we're going to go to? Second, what would you like me to wear? And number three, hot tub? And Caleb responds I'm excited, surprise me.

And three days later, she was killed by someone and the defense is saying it was an intruder. It was not Caleb Flynn.

KEILAR: Yeah, and so when do you think the prosecution is going to rest here?

CASAREZ: Well, they are they are going that direction. There's no question about it. They have put a lot of witnesses on. This afternoon, a lot of forensic witnesses right now, Detective Sergeant Mike Morgan He's with the Tipp City Police Department, a detective, they are putting on the stand right now. They have brought out so much and I would say that it is it is sooner than later. And then we will see the defense. Will they have a case? Will they present a case? Who will they have? And will the defendant himself take the stand? We've got to watch for that.

KEILAR: All right, we'll be watching for that. Jean, thank you so much.

Still ahead, a music festival with an all-star lineup to help support American farmers and their families. We talk to country singer and songwriter, Margo Price, later on "CNN News Central."

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[13:59:20]

KEILAR: New CNN reporting on how intelligence from groups in China could be aiding Iran's increasingly effective targeting of U.S. sites as China's leader wraps up his state visit to the U.S.

And a warning about a paradise of machines, the Pope speaks out about the dangers of A.I. and says he's concerned about losing our humanity in the rush to the future.

SANCHEZ: And bracing for a month's worth of rain, cities along the East Coast beginning to feel the impact of an early season nor'easter.

We've got your forecast as we follow these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to "CNN News Central."

KEILAR: It was cordial, but did it accomplish anything?