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CNN Headlines: Two-Day Republican Convention Kicking Off In Dallas; Jurors In Lindsay Clancy Trial Talk Deliberations, Holdout Juror; Hurricane Lowell Turns Deadly; NTSB: Pilots Applied Full Power Seconds Before Crash In Miami. Aired 5-5:30a ET

Aired September 09, 2026 - 05:00   ET

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

[05:00:27]

BRAD SMITH, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump on tap to headline the first- ever GOP midterm convention in Dallas. Why a number of candidates in key races will not be there.

And --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RONI CARLSON, JURY FOREPERSON: He had reasonable doubt. He admitted he had reasonable doubt after we watched that video of the interview. I think that's when it was. He admitted he had reasonable doubt.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Lindsay Clancy jurors speaking out for the first time. What they had to say about that dramatic mistrial. Plus, what could come next for Clancy.

And SEC drama. LSU could be getting the boot from the conference. What this NFL battle is all boiling down to. And you got to take a look at this.

A sinkhole swallows up a driveway in California. What could have caused the massive collapse? We've got that coming your way.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Brad Smith. This is CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS. Glad that you're with us this morning.

Let's get this started. Happening today, President Donald Trump's Republican midterm convention. It runs today and tomorrow in Dallas, Texas, and the president plans to speak both nights. The president is pumping up the event on social media, calling it, quote, really hot and totally sold out.

But a number of candidates in key races have said they're skipping the convention. At issue, some worry that the event doesn't strike the right tone as Americans cope with tight budgets, and others question the wisdom of spending time away from campaigning just weeks from Election Day. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the president hosted a 9/11 ceremony near the

White House, honoring first responders on that fateful day 25 years ago, but then shifted to a more political tone. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our law enforcement holds our country together in light of some threats. We have some very real threats right now. We have people that want to go a different way. They want to go a communistic way. Well, that's not going to work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Service members, Gold Star families, and the families of fallen first responders gathered at the event held on the Ellipse, standing before a 21-foot, 14,000-pound steel beam that was recovered from the World Trade Center.

Three jurors from the Lindsay Clancy murder trial are now speaking out in an interview with CNN affiliate WBTS. They described the emotional toll of the evidence and the lone holdout juror who kept them from reaching a verdict. Here's what they said about what happened behind closed doors.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RONI CARLSON, JURY FOREPERSON: We weren't trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did, and she's admitting that. We're trying to figure out, did she know right from wrong at that time?

INTERVIEWER: How did you react to the 911 call?

KELLIE FARINA, JUROR: It's something that I will never not hear if I think about it. It was the most horrific thing. And when we heard it again in the jury room, we were crying again. We were just like, my God, the desperation, the despair in his voice was -- again, it's something that I -- will stick with me.

And I felt that it was genuine. It was absolutely genuine. There's no doubt about that.

PAULA DEVLIN, JUROR: He was very arrogant. He really did not take anything that anybody said.

CARLSON: He admitted he had reasonable doubt, and I started filling out the forms. I was so excited. I actually -- there were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one, and then he said, but I'm still not going to say that she's not guilty by reason of insanity.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: You can tell the civic duty that they were serving certainly seared into their minds. Meanwhile, an attorney for Clancy's ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, is

threatening legal action to stop what they call an escalating campaign of misinformation and defamation. The attorney is accusing so-called influencers and conspiracy theorists of publishing falsehoods that suggest Patrick Clancy was somehow involved in the deaths of his young children.

The Illinois woman who prosecutors say texted her friends about the Lindsay Clancy trial before allegedly murdering her two-year-old son, she will remain in jail. The judge denied Corie Walsh's request for release, citing compelling reasons to detain her.

[05:05:03]

Walsh is accused of strangling her toddler at their home near Chicago. Even though her son was the only victim, she faces three counts of first degree murder under three different legal theories. Court documents say that she called him the devil and the antichrist. Witnesses told police that Walsh had become very interested in the Lindsay Clancy case. Her attorney called that suggested connection, quote, "sickening" and said that Walsh was experiencing psychosis.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDREA LYON, CORIE WALSH ATTORNEY: That speculation that this has anything to do, that it's a copycat or anything like that is baseless and cruel.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Authorities say that Walsh's three other children were not harmed. Her husband was out of state at the time. Her attorney requested that her client received 24-hour psychiatric care while in custody.

At least one person has died in the aftermath of Hurricane Lowell, which Hawaii's governor says has left a devastating impact there, and it left an impression on the mayor of hard-hit Kauai.

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MAYOR DEREK KAWAKAMI, KAUAI: Phenomenal, the power of Mother Nature. I never, ever saw that type of storm surge, and I love to be in the ocean, and so that's saying something.

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SMITH: And you can take a look at some of the major damage debris everywhere. This house was moved by the storm as it tracked less than 50 miles from the westernmost islands. It is the strongest storm since 1992 and had monster waves, powerful winds and knocked out power to much of Kauai. Crews are contending with mudslides and washed out roads while people cope with their homes damaged by wind and storm surge.

And in California, this -- a giant sinkhole. It swallowed a driveway in the coastal community of Malibu and you can check out the scene from up above here. Look carefully and you can actually see the waves through the collapsed ground. Crews are working to stabilize the area and the gas line has been shut off, according to firefighters. Coastal erosion along the bluff may have caused the collapse.

We take you out of Florida. That's where federal investigators say that the pilots of an Amazon cargo plane applied full power just seconds before Sunday's deadly crash in Miami.

Officials with the NTSB, they plan to interview the pilots and the crew of the plane in the coming hours. Earlier, authorities identified the five people killed when the plane overshot the runway and struck their van. They were between 47 and 75 years old and worked for a contract cleaning crew. Five other people were injured, including the plane's two pilots.

Here's CNN's Pete Muntean with the details.

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PETE MUNTEAN, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT: The biggest new details here are coming from the plane's black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder that were pulled from the plane on Monday, analyzed at the NTSB's lab in Washington on Tuesday.

The NTSB says the flight data recorder shows that 15 seconds before impact, the pilots of this plane applied full throttle as if they were going to take off again and then the throttles back to idle only four seconds later.

The NTSB says it also has good audio from the cockpit voice recorder, but still is stopping short of releasing what was on the voice recorder until they get more context from interviews with the pilots. Those are scheduled for Wednesday.

Listen.

JENNIFER HOMENDY, CHAIR, NTSB: The cockpit voice recorder contained more than two hours of good quality audio. Now we're interviewing the pilots tomorrow. And we want to hear their account of the accident before we release a readout of the cockpit voice recorder.

CHIHOON SHIN, NTSB INVESTIGATOR IN CHARGE: Crew accounts and crew interviews will help fill in some of the blanks that the crew remembers in terms of actions that they might have done but not verbalized. And so that's something that we need a complete understanding of before we're to analyze what happened with the throttles in this case.

MUNTEAN: The NTSB also plans to interview the chief pilots of 21 Air. That is the contractor that was operating this Boeing 767 cargo plane for Amazon. Of course, there is the sad human toll here. All five killed in that van on the airport perimeter road were Latino men working for an airport aircraft cleaning contractor, the oldest, 75 years old.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy says it's an unthinkable tragedy.

Pete Muntean, CNN, Miami International Airport.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SMITH: In New Hampshire, voters went to the polls to cast their ballots in the US Senate primary. CNN projects that Congressman Chris Pappas will win the Democratic nomination. The four-term congressman defeated a Democratic socialist.

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CNN also projects that Pappas will face off against former Senator John Sununu, who will take the Republican nomination. Both are vying to take the place of retiring Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen. That seat could be vital to either party when it comes to controlling the Senate.

We've got much more to come on CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS. A new report accuses officials of misleading New Yorkers about the air quality around ground zero after 9/11. We've got those details straight ahead.

Plus, the retrial of South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh gets a change of venue.

And questions now surrounding $45,000 cash gift President Trump gave to some White House employees. We'll get into it on the other side of the break.

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SMITH: New this morning, we're learning that President Trump gifted $45,000 in cash to each of three White House employees for the holidays. Those employees are Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp, communications advisor Margo Martin, and deputy director of Oval Office Operations, Chamberlain Harris. That's according to annual executive branch financial disclosure forms released by the White House. All three women describe the payments as a, quote, "cash gift for the holidays on the forms".

The gifts totaled about one-third of their $150,000 salaries. The gifts are raising some ethical questions, but it's unclear if the payments represent any violations of federal statutes.

The White House Press Office issued a statement. It says, quote, "The president has a longstanding practice of giving Christmas gifts to people in his orbit, including at times employees and aides, both in government and in his time in the private sector."

The gifts that issue here have nothing to do with any of these individuals' official government duties and therefore are entirely permissible under relevant legal and ethical standards. The three employees haven't commented. Drug smugglers are now using drones along the U.S.-Mexico border. CNN

reviewed hundreds of videos, analyzed state drone detection data and traveled to the border to investigate how cartels and other criminal groups are using the technology.

Here's CNN's Priscilla Alvarez.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PRISCILLA ALVAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Mexican cartels and criminal groups are using drones equipped with cameras to expand their smuggling operations across the U.S. border, and videos posted online show how. This one appears to show an illegal crossing on the Texas-Mexico border. A drone flying inside Mexico is monitoring as a group runs up from the Rio Grande and into Laredo, Texas. A getaway car pulls up at the exact moment they reach the dirt road. Seconds later, the car takes off.

ALVAREZ: This is the path that people came up in that video that you just saw the rivers behind me and Mexico is just on the other side.

ALVAREZ (voice-over): Data we obtained from the Texas Department of Public Safety shows that since 2021, there have been thousands of drone detections in the area just across the river from us. The data does include drone flights for legal purposes too, but large clusters of flights above known smuggling paths like these can point to illegal activity.

And it's not just this area. It's all along the border in Laredo where in a three-year period alone, drone detections on the Mexico went up more than 600 percent, according to a CNN analysis.

The videos posted online often show how cartels and criminal groups are using drones to find and avoid U.S. law enforcement, making it easier to smuggle humans or drugs across the border. And beyond the border, inside Mexico, the use of drones by cartels has turned deadly. Cartels have attached homemade bombs to drones and dropped them on their rivals, law enforcement, and even civilians, like in this video, where you can see the drone drop ammunition above a target. It appears to have a tail fin made from a plastic cup, and it floats down to the ground before exploding near a 10.

For now, the cartels are only using that kind of violence inside Mexico, knowing it would be a bad idea to provoke U.S. law enforcement with an attack. As cartels and criminal groups continue to expand their drone capabilities, law enforcement officials say they don't see any sign of the problem slowing down.

CHIEF TIMOTHY TUBBS, WEBB COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE, TEXAS: Under the current operations, we'll never stop their drone operations. They went from having Drones that maybe you'd see once a week now, you're seeing several flights a day.

ALVAREZ (voice-over): In a statement to CNN, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that cartels increasingly exploit drones for smuggling operations and monitoring law enforcement, among other activities. Department of Homeland Security has approved counter-drone authorities for CBP under congressional authority.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SMITH: That's quite the development.

Still to come on CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS, the SEC is threatening to boot LSU out of its conference. More on the ongoing drama unfolding over LSU's plans to use former NFL players on their college roster.

And the TSA is bringing back a perk for travelers. Details on that when CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS returns. Stay with us.

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SMITH: This week marks 25 years since the September 11th terror attacks, and now newly publicized documents reveal the full extent of the health hazards around Ground Zero. New York officials have released thousands of previously undisclosed records showing that city leaders knew air quality in the area was not safe to breathe, but still assured the public it was.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI (D), NEW YORK: It would be one thing if government had stood alongside survivors and provided them with everything they needed at every step of the way. And yet we know that could not be further from what actually happened. People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air. And then when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm's way was nowhere to be found.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SMITH: Nearly 3,000 people died in the attacks that day, but New York's mayor noted even more died due to 9/11 related illnesses.

The TSA is bringing back a perk from what it calls the golden age of travel.

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If you have TSA PreCheck, you can now get through security without a ticket at some airports. That means that you can walk someone to their gate or meet them for a layover. It's only available at 13 airports, but more could be added. You have to sign up online one to three days beforehand and get approved.

Straight ahead on CNN HEADLINE EXPRESS, tragic news for a missing Florida family whose plane went down after leaving the Bahamas, we have the latest coming up.

And a juror from the Lindsay Clancy murder trial speaking out what she's saying about the deliberations that led to a mistrial. That's all straight ahead.

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