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Investigators Focus on Messages Tied to Kirk Shooting Suspect; FBI Director Kash Patel Testifies on Capitol Hill; White House Vows to Crack Down on "Left-Wing Terror." Aired 6:30-7a ET

Aired September 16, 2025 - 06:30   ET

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

AUDIE CORNISH, CNN ANCHOR: -- that those things were deemed wrong and the administration shouldn't do it or that now a new administration should do something similar, but to people who it also feels is violated.

ROB BLUEY, PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE EDITOR, THE DAILY SIGNAL: I'm just saying like, let's -- let's call that out as well. If we're -- if we're going to criticize the Trump administration, we should also point out that the Biden administration came under fire for what it was doing.

And as it pertains to some of those organizations, one of them, the most prominent is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has a hate map that put Charlie Kirk's organization, TPUSA, on that map. It was in 2012 that an individual went to the Family Research Council with that hate map in hand and tried to attack that -- that organization. And so we know that these groups, when they do these types of things, do have consequences, real life consequences that target conservatives.

CORNISH: Yeah. And we know on the right there have been watch lists, so to speak. I guess what I'm wondering is, should the government go after specific groups on behalf of a staked out political position? Or can the government break apart some of the ways we are using to go after each other? Meaning, should anyone have a list of anyone else? It is that right to do.

I don't actually want a new list to be given to someone else. I want to know what the policy will be to address the fundamentals of the attention economy you're bringing up.

CHUCK ROCHA, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Right. And I think that that's the whole key of this, is that at some point, it's not going to be about his list or my list. It's got to be about, like -- especially when somebody dies, or when somebody almost dies to say, OK, boys and girls, let's sit down together and figure this out. Because if we continue to do a tit for tat or do hate against hate, we're just going to continue down this road, especially when people on the Internet are making money off of it. This is the key, I think.

CORNISH: All right. You guys stay with me. We've got a lot more to talk about. And I appreciate you guys talking about this. Straight ahead on CNN This Morning, a rare second state visit to the

U.K. for President Trump, complete with a carriage procession and high stakes meeting with King Charles. And decoding, the Internet memes etched on the bullets that killed Charlie Kirk.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:36:44]

CORNISH: Good morning, everyone. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for joining me on CNN This Morning. It's 36 minutes past the hour, and here's what's happening right now.

President Trump heads to London today for a rare second state visit. He'll be greeted with royal fanfare and a carriage procession through the Capitol. He's set to meet King Charles and Prime Minister Starmer with talks expected to focus on trade, defense, and global security.

FBI Director Kash Patel heads to Capitol Hill today. He's set to appear before the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. Patel is facing bipartisan scrutiny over his handling of the Charlie Kirk investigation, along with a wave of politically charged firings at the bureau.

And the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk makes his first court appearance. Tyler Robinson will be arraigned today in Utah. He faces capital murder charges and could face the death penalty.

Now, when Robinson makes his first court appearance today, prosecutors are expected to present their evidence against him, including writings found on the shell casings. Those writings are something we actually first learned about on Friday when the Utah governor was reading them during a press conference.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. SPENCER COX (R-UT): Inscriptions on the three unfired casings read, "hey, fascist!," exclamation point, "Catch!," exclamation point, up arrow symbol, right arrow and symbol and three down arrow symbols. A second unfired casing read, "Oh, Bella, ciao, Bella, ciao, Bella, ciao, ciao, ciao." And a third unfired casing read, "If you read this, you are gay, LMAO."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: So, over the weekend, the governor was still trying to make sense of the meaning of those inscriptions.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

COX: These -- these other dark places of the Internet where -- where -- where this person was -- was going deep and you saw that on the on the casings, I think I mean, I didn't have any idea what the -- what those inscriptions, many of those inscriptions even meant, but they are, you know, certainly the memification that is happening in our society today. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Joining me to talk about that memification is Makena Kelly, Senior Writer at WIRED. Thank you so much for being here.

MAKENA KELLY, SENIOR WRITER, WIRED: Yeah, of course. Happy to be here.

CORNISH: I was actually shocked when I heard that moment in the press conference because I felt like we are being trolled. We are being trolled by a suspect in a political assassination. Hearing that aloud, obviously, is some kind of joke. Am I -- is this like an anchor's overwrought response? Or how did you hear that moment?

KELLY: I mean, I had the same thoughts. This isn't even the first time that we've had a shooting reference. These kind of apolitical, edgelordy memes online. Just the other most recent one, the Annunciation Catholic School.

Also, a variety of strange memes from, you know, darker, deeper places of the Internet. Not necessarily that these memes are political, right or left, but it shows someone in the case of Tyler Robinson, for sure, someone who was deeply online, spending so much time on the Internet and maybe, you know, devoid from reality in some cases.

CORNISH: Can you give an example of, say, a video game reference?

KELLY: Yeah. So, the big one was this up, right, down, down, down arrows. That isn't an anti-fascist -- it could be an anti-fascist symbol. That's what a lot of folks said at the beginning when they were starting to decode these things. But once we found out that there were two arrows before the three down arrows, that's a Helldivers 2 reference. That's a video game that was really popular last year.

[06:40:13]

It kind of basically broke Steam, which is a platform where you can download video games. And it's a satirical take on kind of like a Star Trek troopers video game where --

CORNISH: It's like fascist against fascist --

KELLY: --fighting, fascist, yes.

CORNISH: Yes, which I only know because I tried to go down the rabbit hole on Reddit and the mods had shut down the Reddit for Helldiver 2 because they were like, look, we don't want to be involved in this.

KELLY: Exactly.

CORNISH: That brings me to another thing. Health Secretary RFK Jr. recently made a connection between video games and high-profile shooting. And for someone who grew up with Columbine, that's sort of my vintage. I remember that time when the moral panic became, it's the movies, it's the video games. We have to go after it. Can you talk about what experts say is the difference today in terms of how these things make their way from online gaming communities to these other communities where people would be plotting or thinking about things like this?

KELLY: Right. So it's not necessarily the video games themselves. You know, for decades now at this point, we've been talking about Call of Duty, inspiring people to take to violence or things like that. And that's not necessarily the case. You know, when you talk to experts, it's more so about the communities that people find themselves in when they play these games.

It isn't Discord, the platform itself, right? It's the people that people are speaking to on Discord. It's the games that people are playing. It's the people that they're playing these games with, right?

And when you get these insular niche communities online, they end up, you know, poking them. You know, they end up encouraging people to do edgier, stranger things. And that's what we see, you know, with the past couple of shootings. People taking inspiration from Anders Breivik, other mass shooters, ascribing their intentions to something that's already been done like that and those shooters and playing off of each other.

CORNISH: And that the performance is part of the violence.

KELLY: The performance is part of the violence. It becomes a meme and it travels even farther.

CORNISH: All right. I want you to stick around because we're going to talk about this investigation and there's some angles of this that the FBI Director has brought up. Kash Patel is actually going to be on Capitol Hill today and people are questioning his handling of the Charlie Kirk assassination investigation. And despite a fierce mega backlash, he does have the backing of the president. Quote, "A senior administration official told Axios that Kash's job is safe, that the president is happy."

Now, this comes after Patel prematurely announced that a suspect in the Kirk killing was in custody. That post also came on the same day that three fired FBI agents filed a lawsuit against Patel. They claim retaliation and that Patel was too focused on sharing FBI wins on social media.

Here's how Patel is defending himself.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KASH PATEL, FBI DIRECTOR: The job of the FBI is not just a manhunt, the actual suspect who did the killing or suspects, but it's also to eliminate targets and eliminate subjects who are not involved in the process. And that's what we were doing. Could I have worded it a little better in the heat of the moment? Sure. But do I regret putting it out? Absolutely not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Group chat is back. And Makena stayed with us because that part about social media, that criticism that like, look, this is not what you should be doing. And it's funny. I mean, at WIRED, you guys have also watched how Patel is performing as well. What's your context for it?

KELLY: Sure. I mean, when I look at Patel or someone like Dan Bongino, also at the FBI, I see their background as a podcaster, right? People who them -- they themselves are content creators. When we see, you know, the follow up -- the immediate follow up of what happened with Charlie Kirk in the -- in the shooting, they -- they took to social media very quickly trying to ascribe motive and intent. And I think that goes to, you know, their backgrounds and creating content and, you know, trying to get engagement online and first going there, right? Rather than maybe taking a step back.

CORNISH: Yeah, but also part of their culture of transparency, right?

KELLY: Yeah.

CORNISH: I'm talking, I'm dialoguing with my audience. Zolan, do you -- what do you see in this moment?

ZOLAN KANNO-YOUNGS, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I mean, I got text messages from a bunch of federal law enforcement officials, former federal law enforcement officials who were criticizing this use of social media in the early hours of the investigation, saying that it risks causing alarm, confusion. And we did see some of that happen as well.

Kash Patel brings some baggage to this moment as well. I mean, just when this happened, you had a lawsuit filed by former federal, excuse me, five former FBI agents who say they were illegally fired and that Kash Patel has been politicizing this agency too. You can expect him to get questioned about that as well as he heads to Congress as well.

CORNISH: Not to be that person, but someone is going to bring up Epstein as well. I feel like that is sort of part of, oh, are you nodding? Do you think so?

BLUEY: I absolutely think the Democrats --

CORNISH: I thought that this would kind of blot out the sun. There would be no other conversation, but you think other things could come up?

BLUEY: I do think that the Democrats will look at it as an opportunity to bring up Jeffrey Epstein, certainly. And I expect that Republicans will, by and large, defend Kash Patel. Maybe there'll be some tough questions regarding him.

[06:45:07]

But as we've talked about in the past, Audie, whether it be Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or other cabinet secretaries, President Trump, he's the person that is most important in this conversation. As long as they have the backing of Trump, they will be safe in their job. And in this particular case, I think that Kash Patel recognizes that Trump wants to see things done differently at the FBI than have been done in the past. And that's why he's given him his endorsement.

CORNISH: Also, given his legislative background, if there's one thing Patel understands, it's a legislative hearing and what that performance is about. So, how do Democrats even spend their time?

ROCHA: I think that Democrats want transparency at all the agencies that we can have. And I think him trying to shake things up from this Democrat's a good thing. But to my friend's point from WIRED, he knows one thing, and that's feeding the beast we talked about in the last segment of giving content, and giving content to groups of followers that have made him rich, because the more followers he had, the more money he had. Not saying that he's getting rich off the government now, I'm not accusing him of anything. I'm just saying he knows one way to do business, and you saw it immediately after the shooting of, I've got to be the first one out there where this is 100% right, under the auspice of transparency, which I think will come back to haunt him.

CORNISH: OK, Makena Kelly, you -- you spoofed up the chat, I mean, people are really, you really helped us out here. Makena is a Senior Writer at WIRED. Thank you so much for being here.

KELLY: Yeah, of course.

CORNISH: All right, next on CNN This Morning, a dire warning from civil rights advocate Stacey Abrams, why she believes America has already reached a dangerous tipping point. And is the U.S. too divided to heal? One lawmaker tells CNN we may be too far gone.

We want to know what's in your group chat. Send it to us now on X, we're going to be talking about ours after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[06:50:54]

CORNISH: In the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump is vowing to target left wing groups. He claims their activity has led to violence.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization?

DONALD TRUMP (R), U.S. PRESIDENT: Well, it's something I would do. Yeah, I've been speaking to the attorney general about bringing RICO against some of the people that you've been reading about that have been putting up a millions and millions of dollars for agitation.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Now, the suspect is due to appear in court today. So far, there's no evidence that the assassin was working with any type of larger network. So, when is the line crossed between rule of law and autocracy? Democrat Stacey Abrams recently coauthored an essay titled, "We Can Stop the Rise of American Autocracy." She's also launched an education campaign warning about it. Stacey Abrams joins me now. Welcome.

STACEY ABRAMS, (D) FORMER GEORGIA GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE: Thank you for having me.

CORNISH: So, we wanted to talk to you because you're among the folks who you do put money right behind liberal causes, your concerns about voter suppression. What are your concerns about the White House talking this way about what they're calling radical left groups?

ABRAMS: I think it's important that we begin understanding that this is not about left versus right. This is about American autocracy versus American democracy. And if we allow ourselves to get pulled into this false flag conversation, what we risk is losing access to the democracy that gave us free speech, that will also invoke the rule of law to hold accountable anyone who undertakes the act of political violence.

But we cannot allow this heinous murder to be exploited as an excuse for the advance of authoritarian rule, which is what we are watching happen. That is step nine in the playbook of autocrats around the world, that you take advantage of political violence, that you normalize it, but that you also use it as an excuse to justify an expansion of executive authority. And that should not be allowed to hold.

This is a tragic moment, but that moment cannot be used to justify the overreach that we are watching play out right now in real time.

CORNISH: We have been hearing this word autocracy, fascism. We've been hearing this language a lot from Democrats. And I want to play for you something from Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, because he's basically been warning the party against this kind of talk. He thinks it's too close to the argument made during the Biden administration about democracy. And here's how he explains it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA): You just don't ever, ever compare anyone to Hitler and those kinds of extreme things. We can't compare people to these kinds of figures in history. And this is not an autocrat. This is a product of a Democratic election. He's definitely different, but that's what America voted for. Again, I don't agree with many of these things, but that does not make him an autocratic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: Your response?

ABRAMS: I think it's important that we understand what authoritarian rule looks like. It means the expansion of executive authority beyond what is generally understood as not just norms, but what is permitted. This is a president who has faced multiple lawsuits that he's lost because he is overreached.

It's the installation of loyalists. And you all in your earlier segment talked about the fact that the FBI is being run by a podcaster, that the Department of Defense is being run by another podcaster, that we have watched people who know how to do their jobs be summarily dismissed and replaced by loyalists who have vowed only to hold the authority of the president and not the people as their central responsibility.

But let's be clear. Autocracy didn't end in 1945. Viktor Orban is an autocrat. We know that that Putin is an autocrat. We know that Erdogan is an autocrat. Autocracy takes hold whenever any democratically elected official exceeds their power, weakens the competing powers of Congress, of the courts.

[06:55:04]

CORNISH: Yeah, I think in a way --

(CROSSTALK)

CORNISH: Let me just interrupt here for a second. In a way, what Fetterman is arguing is that maybe there's a kind of chicken little effect also, that having talked about Trump as an existential threat for so long has had diminishing returns on the public. And now that you actually plan to go out and spend money and -- and educate people, as you say about this, how do you plan to do this differently to people who have said, I got it. I've heard this for a while now.

ABRAMS: Because before we had the theory of what could happen, now we're watching it play out in real time. We've watched Americans be kidnapped off of the streets of this country. Washington, D.C., is under military occupation. We just had the U.S. Supreme Court restore us to a moment when racial profiling is now a permissible activity by a militarized police force known as ICE that can go masked. Those are examples that in any other country would very much raise the alarm bells of any member of the U.S. Senate. But because it's happened in America, we have this naivete that we believe we are immune to what autocracy looks like. And that's my point. We are not as far in as deep as other nations are, but we are already there.

Scholars have pointed out there are 10 steps. We have hit all 10 steps. We just watched this administration, but also this political party, decide that it was OK to redistrict in the middle of the decade in order to explicitly seize more power. That's authoritarian. It is not about comparing people to heinous figures of the past. It's about acknowledging the present, that people feel real harm, are feeling very scared and are legitimately worried about whether our democracy can hold when the president of the United States, suborned by his political party, announced that he intends to eliminate access to voting rights in this country, that he intends to go after his enemies in this country.

CORNISH: Yes.

ABRAMS: That's authoritarianism under anyone's guise.

CORNISH: And you've also been talking about people not seeing the midterms as somehow something that's going to solve all of this. And it's going to be interesting to watch you try and make your mark on this election.

Stacey Abrams, thank you so much.

ABRAMS: Thank you.

CORNISH: Now, we've talked plenty about the political divide left versus right on the streets and even at the dinner tables of America. So, how do you get out of a cycle like this? Well, this question was actually put to Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett. And here was his response.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. TIM BURCHETT (R-TN): It's never going to change, ma'am, until we have a real revival in this country and -- and that hopefully would happen someday. But -- but right now it looks like it's going to be more of the same. It's clickbait. It's getting reelected. It's red meat. And that's what politics is about today. And that's frankly what it's always been about.

We can have these talks and we can have these professors come on and of political science and -- and sociologists and all this and talk about that. That's not what's going to happen, ma'am. America is so tone deaf to all that. They want -- they want the heat. And that's what politicians bring.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CORNISH: OK, this is the right group chat to talk about this with you, really, because this was as someone who likes to bring on a good professor or sociologist to say, how can we make a difference? This hit me hard.

ROCHA: This is on the opposite of everything you just described on the professor part. I run campaigns for a living and there's a reason why this is happening. And the congressman kind of alluded to it. There is nothing driving people to find commonality because of how our elections are run. There's 435 congressional seats. I've said this here before, 400 of them are very safe Republican, are very safe Democrat. They can never, ever been beat in a in a general election.

So, they have to only take opposition from somebody within their own party to be as far left. If you're a Democrat or a far right, because you can only be beat in your primary. And every year we eliminate more and more marginal seats, making more and more safe seats, which makes us be more divided.

CORNISH: But he also is pointing it to us. He's saying bring the heat. That's what people respond to.

BLUEY: Sure. And I think that he also makes the point that this is probably something that we've seen throughout American history. I think back, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, right? I mean, there have been political disputes and fights throughout the course of the 250 years that our country has existed.

I think ultimately what I'm hopeful for, Audie, is what you saw on Sunday and outpouring of people going to church, sometimes for the first time, sometimes returning to church for the first time in a decade or longer, bringing their kids to church. And I think that that's ultimately how we find some of that -- that common Ground --

CORNISH: Yeah, although, there is a preacher right now gone viral for the -- his conflicted emotions about Kirk's assassination. I think we've heard a lot. And it reminds me of something that the governor said. I think it was the phrase "conflict entrepreneurs." It is indisputable that people are rewarded for rage clicking, et cetera.

KANNO-YOUNGS: Particularly online, right, which just encourages confirmation bias and seems to deepen these fractures that we have in society. And look, academics and studies have shown there's some really scary findings about the -- just how divided this country is right now, but also the growing acceptance in both parties of heated political rhetoric and political violence at this point.

[07:00:15]

CORNISH: Right. And we are at a point where we are in control of our clicks. You can pull back. You can touch grass. We encourage it. Thank you to the group chat. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you for waking up with us.

I'm Audie Cornish. And "CNN News Central" starts right now.