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Rep. Max Miller Denies Abuse Claims, Won't Drop Reelection Bid; Ukraine Accuses Russia Of War Crime Over Drone Attack; Two Senate Democrats Call For Probe Into Trump Meme Coin. Aired 4:30-5a ET

Aired August 05, 2026 - 04:30   ET

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

[04:30:00]

POLO SANDOVAL, CNN ANCHOR: "The seventh level of hell" for his entire family. Miller has also denied allegations that he abused ex- girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, who's a former White House communications director. Grisham has just filed a temporary restraining order against him as part of an ongoing suit.

And earlier, CNN's Jake Tapper asked Miller about these allegations. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MAX MILLER (R-OH): I then played Lauren Fox three separate audio videos, three separate audio videos of my daughter saying, I do not want to go to mommy's, I do not want mommy's, and I do not feel safe.

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Now, your ex-wife stated to police that your child told her in the days leading up to the discovery of the injury, "daddy kill you." And your ex-wife also said your child had said, daddy angry, and daddy's house is scary. Now, according to your wife, your daughter articulated these statements to Children and Family Services.

MILLER: I wish you could talk to my beautiful baby girl. She can't string together sentences like that. She's two and a half years old. She doesn't have the ability to articulate any of what you just said.

TAPPER: You just told me that she had said that she was scared to go to mommy's house.

MILLER: She is, and I have video of it.

TAPPER: But now you're saying that she's not capable of saying daddy kill you? I mean, it seems like she's either able to say one, but not the other. That doesn't make sense.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANDOVAL: Here to dive deeper into all of this is attorney and political commentator Madeline Summerville, who joins me live from Atlanta. Madeline, thank you so much for either staying up late or getting up early for us.

MADELINE SUMMERVILLE, ATTORNEY & POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

SANDOVAL: Listen, I want to get your thoughts on what's happening right now in Michigan as the vote count continues. But first, just off that last story that you just listened to, I wonder if I can get your thoughts on this pressure that seems to be mounting against Ohio Representative Max Miller.

He says he's determined to stay in his reelection bid, but he also said in his conversation with my colleague Jay Tapper that President Trump spoke to him earlier this week and said that the President acknowledged that this would be a tough election for him because of these mounting abuse allegations. So in your view, do you see President Trump or perhaps House Speaker Mike Johnson stepping in and forcing him to step aside for another candidate because the stakes are so high?

SUMMERVILLE: The stakes are so high. And I think it's particularly an issue because of what's just happened with Graham Platner for the Democrats. I think it's not a good look and it's quite hypocritical for the Republicans at this time to take this issue with Max Miller and set it aside as if there isn't any real allegation to pay attention to. I think, however, in the past, with, for example, President Trump, it hasn't played a major role in whether or not voters actually turn out to vote for them. There's this perception on the Republican side that something like, you know, the Democrats will only agree, will always agree with somebody who's making an accusation, but that's not the truth, right?

In this particular case, there were three women who came forward, just like with Graham Platner. There were three women who came forward and you assess their credibility just like you were at trial and you make a decision. And the Republicans in the past have decided to, you know, kind of void that process and only look at the political aspects of it. So I think it's really a toss up right now, but either way, it's not a good look.

SANDOVAL: And as an attorney, Madeline, I'm just curious on your thoughts about what was also discussed in this conversation with Jake Tapper, which was that Miller's own attorney had admitted to sharing what's been described as a sensitive photo of Miller's little girl. I mean, how does all that play out as the investigations continue? And of course, as he maintains, as Miller maintains that, you know, that no wrongdoing.

SUMMERVILLE: Yes. So I'm an attorney and I also worked on policy for DFCS in Georgia, which is the Department of Family and Children's Services, the equivalent of which is involved in this particular investigation. When it comes to sensitive material like that in particular, and when it comes to elections too, it triggers people. It triggers people who have experienced something like this in their lives. It triggers people on both sides.

On the right, people are thinking about issues of grooming, and on the left, people are thinking about instances of sexual abuse that people have been too afraid to come forward about. And perhaps people on the right are thinking that too, but regardless, it's a political issue on both sides. And particularly the one thing that we can come together on in this country, right, is that nobody wants children to be hurt.

And I do think that you cross a special line when it comes to exposing your child to danger like this, and a lack of care and a lack of sensitivity. And in a political race like this, you can't afford to make a mistake like that.

SANDOVAL: Yes, it's absolutely disturbing that that was even allowed to happen, even though it's just on for a short amount of time.

SUMMERVILLE: Yes.

SANDOVAL: Let's pivot now, if we could, to politics or another side, another angle of politics, which is, of course, the elections and the election results that are coming in. Let's bring that up for our viewers while I get just your take on what your reaction is to some of these numbers. I mean, we had -- we're expecting, according to several polls, a double-digit lead for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, yet here we are with 94 percent of the vote in and only about just under 21,000 votes separating him and Haley Stevens.

[04:35:23]

SUMMERVILLE: So there's a tremendous amount of energy that's around this race, and for a good reason, right? We understand that this is a swing state, and it's the ultimate test of whether or not somebody who bears the moniker socialist, right, in whatever form it is, Democratic socialist here, has a chance, whether they have a real chance of coming up against anybody.

And one of the major tests that we needed to see here in looking at these four most important counties, and those would be Washtenaw, Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne counties, right? There's -- it's a wide swath of people, right? We've got people from different socioeconomic statuses, different races, and ultimately what we've been able to decipher from all of this is that in a swing state, a socialist has a chance, even if it's not a wide-margin lead, which we did. You're absolutely right. People thought that it was going to be a much wider margin, but the fact is that he's in play.

And the major obstacle, I think, that El-Sayed had to overcome in the beginning was the same one as Mamdani, which is that folks who are in less affluent positions, right, or folks who have a lot to lose if a Republican wins felt like perhaps they couldn't maybe afford to take that risk, to vote for somebody who might not win, right, because they bear that socialist moniker. But what we're seeing now is that, actually, that's not nearly as much of a risk as people think it is, or that they're just so tired of all the hyperbolic politics that they're ready to set that aside and vote their conscience.

SANDOVAL: What do you think drew voters to Haley Stevens as well, given the performance that we saw Tuesday night and into Wednesday? SUMMERVILLE: Yes, so a lot of people thought that this election in particular was going to be a referendum on the issue of Gaza and the State of Israel. And on the left, right, this is our culture war. So I think last year, right, the big culture war was related to trans issues. Now it's about fundamentally the same thing, which is assigning human dignity to each person, regardless of where they're from or who you're supposed to support.

And I think in this particular case, right, when it comes to AIPAC being involved or when it comes to El-Sayed speaking up about it, I think the point is that people are going to vote their conscience at the end of the day. People have the courage to be able to do that. And that Stevens' support from AIPAC wasn't definitive here.

And I think that Stevens also offers a safe choice, again, for those folks who can't afford to perhaps lose to a Republican. People will think that she has a greater chance of winning against a Republican in the general once more people come out to vote.

SANDOVAL: Madeline Summerville, thank you so much for all that analysis as we continue to watch those voting results come out of Michigan. Thank you and have a good day.

SUMMERVILLE: Thank you.

SANDOVAL: President Trump says that he hasn't determined yet whether U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro will remain in her role. Trump confronted Pirro in a tense meeting this week over her conclusion that the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was botched. But Trump has insisted that the damage was caused by vandalism, not on construction problems. CNN's Kristen Holmes has more from the White House.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: President Trump laid into U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro at a meeting at the White House over that court filing that said that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was over shoddy workmanship and not because of vandalism. But we are also told that in this heated back and forth, this meeting that lasted nearly an hour, Jeanine Pirro also brought her own receipts. She brought both a file box and what seemed to be a briefcase filled with documents that she said supported her claims that this was an actual problem with the workmanship and not because of vandals.

Now, this episode has caused a huge rift between Pirro and the secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who was also in that meeting. Pirro has blamed his department, has blamed him personally, saying that they did not provide her with enough information before they brought the charges. Now, behind the scenes, President Trump has been raging about Pirro, talking about potentially firing her.

But when it came to this actual meeting, he stopped short of actually firing her or asking for her resignation. Now, what is clear is there's a growing, deepening divide between Burgum and Pirro. And it doesn't seem as though this episode is over yet. It is unclear what President Trump's reaction to Pirro was in regards to Burgum, but she certainly made her case in front of him. It seems as though her job is safe, at least for now.

[04:40:12]

Kristen Holmes, CNN, the White House.

SANDOVAL: Ukraine is accusing Russia of using drones to target individual civilians and accusing Moscow of committing new blatant war crimes. We'll have the details on the way.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANDOVAL: Ukraine is accusing Russia of committing a war crime, one that was caught on camera. Police releasing the video showing a Russian drone chasing down a vegetable vendor in Kherson. Eventually, in the video, you could see that he does stuff for cover before that drone explodes. Moscow insisting that it does not target civilians. But Ukraine says that the footage proves otherwise. Clare Sebastian has the details, and a warning that the video that you're about to see is disturbing.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CLARE SEBASTIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At first, it looks like a game. The man, a vegetable seller, tries to duck behind his van, the drone whining ever closer. But this, Ukraine says, is how Russia likes to spread fear in the frontline city of Kherson. Unbelievably, the 52-year-old victim survived with injuries, and hours later was able to recount his experience.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE (through translator): My wife started running away, and it started circling over the car. I gestured to it. Look, these are vegetables, but it started charging at me. So I started running around the car. Then we were side by side. It hit me, and I just fell. My back is all torn.

SEBASTIAN (voice-over): CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment. Moscow regularly claims it doesn't target civilians.

Three and a half years on from these euphoric scenes as Kherson was liberated from Russian occupation, daily life in Ukraine's largest frontline city is increasingly dangerous. Of the 32 civilians killed here in July, 29 died in drone attacks, authorities say.

[04:45:14]

This from late July shows a near miss. Anti-drone nets covering streets, now the new normal here. And so-called human safaris, Russian drones seeming to hunt down civilians in the open, a tactic first used at scale in mid-2024, are happening now on a daily basis here, President Zelenskyy said Tuesday. This, a lucky escape in a war where civilians are paying an ever higher price.

Clare Sebastian, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE) SANDOVAL: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is speaking out for the first time since the U.S. said that it reached a disarmament agreement with Hamas.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER (through translator): President Trump and his team believe they can bring about Hamas' disarmament and the demilitarization of Gaza. We are examining that. They have sent us a draft. We did not agree to it. It is not our draft. We sent them our comments. In fact, we sent our comments before the media campaign on this issue began.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SANDOVAL: That video posted on Prime Minister Netanyahu's account, he is seeking to reassure Israeli voters that President Trump's latest push in Gaza is far from final. However, Netanyahu is facing mounting pressure from the White House to fully end the fighting in Gaza and support Hamas' commitment to disarmament.

And still ahead, growing calls for an investigation. Two Senate Democrats are demanding answers about a Trump meme coin that lost billions of dollars in value. What we know about the case.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[04:50:41]

SANDOVAL: NASA has been watching closely for the impact of a part of a SpaceX rocket that was supposed to crash into the moon. In fact, it was projected to collide with the lunar surface a few hours ago, but no update from NASA, at least not yet. The Falcon 9 rocket carried two robotic commercial lunar landers into space. Its first stage returned safely to Earth, but instead of burning up in Earth's atmosphere, the upper stage was pulled onto a collision course with the moon. Scientists are now hoping to study the incident to learn more about the moon and also how to better shield their astronauts for future NASA missions to the lunar surface.

In a surprising example of artificial intelligence going rogue, the most advanced A.I. models from Anthropic and OpenAI went to new lengths to deceive real people during testing by Britain's A.I. Security Institute. It was done in a lab control environment with intentionally relaxed security protections. A researcher say that the models created multiple fake identities and repeatedly tried persuading real people to insert malicious code into an online file transfer service. Both Anthropic and OpenAI say they're investigating.

The White House reportedly told top artificial intelligence companies that it will not safety test some advanced A.I. models. CNN Tech Editor Lisa Eadicicco with more on the meeting.

LISA EADICICCO, CNN TECH EDITOR: Top A.I. companies, including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic, are meeting with the White House to discuss a framework that would allow the government to review advanced A.I. models before they're released publicly. This is part of an executive order that the president signed in June, but the discussions come after OpenAI and Anthropic have said they found instances of their models breaching other companies' systems. This has heightened cyber security concerns and also raised more calls for there to be more control around the advancement of A.I.

The framework will be voluntary and the details of it will not be made public, and a lot of questions still remain about the execution of this framework, including who in the administration will be steering this initiative and how the government will decide what is considered a frontier A.I. model. Back to you.

SANDOVAL: Well, now to a CNN exclusive. Two top Senate Democrats are demanding an investigation into President Trump's so-called meme coin cryptocurrency, the meme coin cryptocurrency. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, they are now calling for the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into this matter. Here's CNN's David Goldman with more.

DAVID GOLDMAN, CNN BUSINESS SENIOR REPORTER: So two Democratic senators, Senators Warren and Blumenthal, both are saying that the President might have been involved in a scam involving his meme coin. So what's the argument here? Well, more or less, the value of this meme coin that the President sold through his company, the Trump organization, along with his family, went from $9 billion to around $400 million. And the folks who invested in it, well, they lost close to $4 billion.

Meanwhile, the President and his family, they made off pretty well. They've made more than $600 million. That's according to the President's own financial transactions that he revealed as part of his annual financial revelations that he has to make as president. And, you know, that sounds on the surface like a scam, right? Well, not necessarily.

So the President here, irrespective of anything that the coin did, whether it went up or down in value, was always going to make money on this. And that's because President basically invented a coin out of nothing. And every time that someone bought or sold the coin, he gets a licensing fee and a transaction fee. But then the people who decided that the coin was worthless, well, they ended up holding the bag.

And so the President would have made a ton of money if the coin maintained its value. But even if it didn't, he gets all of those transaction fees and licensing fees. Now, this is actually something that's fairly common in meme coins. They're valueless. And yet there is something called a rug pull, where people say, hey, buy my coin. And when it goes up in value, they say, never mind. And they take all the money and run.

[04:55:17]

That's not really what happened here, though. The President made money on the transaction part of it. But there's not really a ton of evidence that this was a scam. It's just that it was a meme coin, which is inherently valueless. And if people don't think that it's worth anything, the value goes down. So the two Democratic senators are going to investigate this. We'll see if anything comes of it. In the meantime, it's not great for the people who invested in it. It's pretty good for the President, though.

SANDOVAL: David Goldman, thank you.

An engineering professor turning her childhood vision for jumping ropes into reality. Tahira Reid Smith, she developed a machine that can turn Double Dutch without the need of two people. The app- controlled prototype is called Jump Dreams. Double Dutch is a strategic activity, and that requires coordination, timing, and agility to keep pace with the ropes. Smith says that her next dream is to get her invention into production.

Now a quick last check of the vote count in the crucial battleground state of Michigan. The number of precincts reporting now up to 94 percent. The 94 percent of the vote, it's now showing that in the state's Democratic primary. It's now been a close call for hours between progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed and House Democrat Haley Stevens, who have both touted a new path forward for Democrats in the state. The winner of this going on to face Republican Mike Rogers in that critical midterm election.

Stay with CNN for continuing coverage out of Michigan. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Polo Sandoval in New York. CNN Headline Express is next.

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