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The Situation Room

Trump Meets With Canadian Prime Minister; Pam Bondi Testifies on Capitol Hill. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired October 07, 2025 - 11:30   ET

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

[11:30:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:32:54]

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: All right, we have been watching Attorney General Pam Bondi's testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Let's listen in, as you see Senator Blumenthal questioning her.

(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-CT): ... everyday Americans.

PAM BONDI, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: Senator, you...

BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you about particularly...

BONDI: Boy, you just listed -- you just gave a list of many mergers.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, let me just finish. I have a question for you.

BONDI: Can you talk to me about the issue with these mergers?

BLUMENTHAL: I do have a question.

In the merger that took place...

BONDI: Which merger. You have listed many.

BLUMENTHAL: ... involving American Express GBT, I understand that Brian Ballard, longtime backer and head of the law firm where you were, was instrumental in lobbying the Justice Department to drop that lawsuit. It was dismissed, so it's not subject to a court review.

What conversation did you have with Mr. Ballard?

BONDI: Senator Blumenthal, I -- I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety, when you lied about your military service. You lied. You admitted to be lied to be elected a U.S. senator. You lied. How dare you? I'm a career prosecutor.

BLUMENTHAL: I'm not accusing you of impropriety. I'm asking you about conversations with Mr. Ballard.

(CROSSTALK)

BONDI: Don't you ever challenge my integrity. I have abided by every ethics standard. Do not question my ability to be fair and impartial as attorney general and anything with my former firm Ballard Partners.

BLUMENTHAL: You will answer that question to another of my colleagues. Thank you.

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY (R-IA): Senator Lee has asked for the chair...

(CROSSTALK)

SEN. MIKE LEE (R-UT): Yes, just wanted the note for the record the Paramount merger that he referenced was not within the Department of Justice's ambit. That was at the FCC, not the Department of Justice. Attorney General Bondi would have nothing to do with it. Thanks.

BONDI: And that was why I asked, Senator Lee. He didn't know that. He was reading off a script.

GRASSLEY: Before I call on Senator Kennedy, it's kind of laughable about my Democrats, friends expressing fear and concern at the Justice Department's recent attempts at holding parties responsible for their actions.

[11:35:08]

I can only ask, where have they been in the last few years? They had no problem watching the Biden administration and its White House use all of its might and power to attack Trump and associates. And now even Republican senators have been selected to have their telephone records made public -- or not public, but that -- well, I guess they're public now.

But Biden weaponized our institutions and didn't hear a peep from the other side. Now every investigation and prosecution under this administration, people are going to be held accountable for their actions.

Senator Kennedy, or...

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): I want extra time, Mr. Chairman.

GRASSLEY: OK.

KENNEDY: I mean, this is -- enough is enough.

GRASSLEY: Cruz was next, but he wasn't here.

KENNEDY: Senator Cruz was next.

GRASSLEY: OK. Senator Cruz, if you're ready, go ahead.

SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): Well, thank you, but I will welcome Senator Kennedy providing color commentary throughout my questioning.

KENNEDY: I will be happy to.

(LAUGHTER)

KENNEDY: If we ever finish this hearing this year.

CRUZ: And I will point out Senator Kennedy has a new book about testing negative for stupid. So I hope I test negative for stupid. I hope I meet the threshold of you.

KENNEDY: You do meet it. And I talk in the book about the tattoo of the Backstreet Boys on your back.

(LAUGHTER)

CRUZ: Look, I can't help that you don't want to reach young people. I think young people are the future, damn it. And I will do whatever steps...

KENNEDY: The Backstreet Boys?

(LAUGHTER)

BONDI: That would be on Vice President Vance's playlist, I heard, that got hacked.

CRUZ: General Bondi, welcome. I apologize for injecting you in the middle of Senator Kennedy's antics. We can't help him.

Thank you for the job you're doing. You are doing a tremendous job keeping this country safe. And our families are safer because you are on that wall. Our families are safer because you are returning the Department of Justice to its core function, which is enforcing the law and locking up bad guys.

We saw for four years, under the Biden administration, we saw the Department of Justice politicized and weaponized. And we saw them refuse to do their core function. More than 12 million illegal aliens flooded into this country, and the Biden Justice Department seemed to think its job was letting murderers and gangbangers and rapists go.

And the results in just a few months that you have been able to produce are tremendous. Arrests of violent criminals are up 125 percent since the Biden administration. Fentanyl trafficking prosecutions have risen 42 percent since fiscal year 2023.

DOJ has coordinated with DHS to remove over 220,000 criminal illegal aliens this year alone. Under your leadership as attorney general, you have helped rescue 4,000 children from predators and helped arrest 1,300 child predators and 285 human traffickers.

In my home state of Texas, Operation Soteria Shield resulted in the rescue of 109 children. Thank you, Attorney General Bondi. Texans are safer because you are serving. Americans are safer because you are serving. You have a big task, cleaning up the messes of the Biden DOJ. One of

the most egregious failures of the Biden Justice Department was its refusal to protect judges and Supreme Court justices. As you know, in May of 2022, an unknown individual leaked to Politico the draft of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the opinion that finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

That leak was a crime. It was a theft of government property under 18 USC Section 641, and it was an unauthorized disclosure of confidential information under 18 USC Section 1905.

General Bondi, do you agree that leaking that opinion was a criminal act?

BONDI: Senator, I can't discuss anything regarding that matter. That should answer your question.

CRUZ: Well, I will say this. The leak occurred in 2022. So the five- year statute of limitations has not expired.

[11:40:02]

And I'm going to ask you, if it is not happening already, to direct the FBI to investigate and find the leaker. The leaker has not been exposed. The leaker has not been identified. And the FBI has far greater investigatory tools at its disposal than does the Marshals Service.

And when it comes to defending the rule of law, when it comes to the integrity of our court system, having partisan law clerks -- and I believe, in all likelihood, it is a law clerk who leaked it -- leaking opinions designed to try to pressure the court politically is a gross subversion of the integrity of the court.

And so I would ask you as attorney general to direct the FBI to use every resource possible to investigate, to find the leaker, and, when you identify the leaker, to prosecute the leaker for that criminal context.

BROWN: All right, we have been listening to testimony with Attorney General Pam Bondi. You heard there Senator Ted Cruz questioning her.

Joining us now to discuss all of this is CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez from Capitol Hill. We have former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori. And still with us, our CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams and CNN legal and national security analyst Carrie Cordero.

Ankush, I want to go to you first, because you did a forensic analysis of sorts of Pam Bondi and her role as attorney general. And I'm wondering how -- if what you found in your work aligns with what we're seeing today from her there. I mean, she has been combative. She has been partisan. She has been launching personal attacks against Democratic senators.

It appears she has some sort of sheet of oppo research against the Democrats there in that hearing. What do you make of that?

ANKUSH KHARDORI, SENIOR WRITER, POLITICO: I am not surprised. She has been doing this all year. She did this in her -- in the oversight hearings on the DOJ's budget, all of this. Actually, this is worse. She's more aggressive, I think, because the DOJ is under more public pressure. She's just putting up more of a show.

But it was the same stuff. Like, she will respond to criticism from Democratic members with vitriol and non sequiturs, right, say, well, why don't you care about this crime that happened on this date? And she pulls from these notes and stuff that she has in her little book. At the same time, she goes around accusing other people of reading from scripts.

It's a little ridiculous and going on about Senator Blumenthal,. This is worse than I have seen. I'm not surprised that the core elements are still there, an intensely partisan attorney general, someone whose objective seems to be, first and foremost, to serve the interests of President Trump and the Republican Party and to really, really see herself as serving one man, who she effusively praises at every available turn, the president, and the interests of the Republican Party.

I mean, this is an extraordinary shift and change in just eight months in the public profile and posture of the nation's top law enforcement official.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Elliot, I want you to come into this. Elliot Williams is with us as well.

This is the attorney general's first appearance before a Senate hearing since her confirmation hearings before the Senate, as you all remember. Here's what she told lawmakers back in January. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): What would you do if your career DOJ prosecutors came to you with a case to prosecute, grounded in the facts and law, but the White House directs you to drop the case?

BONDI: Senator, if I thought that would happen, I would not be sitting here today. That will not happen, will not happen.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: So what do you think, Elliot, on that specific exchange?

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Sure.

I think the challenge is that she's not answering whether that's the case. She's gotten pointed questions a few different times, Wolf, from different senators about, have you been directed by the president to take particular actions or have you been directed by the White House?

She says, well, I'm not going to talk about personnel matters or I'm not going to talk about pending cases or whatever else. It is entirely a fair question, based on everything that has been reported about this Justice Department and everything, by the president's own admission, his own public statements, for members of Congress to be asking these questions right now.

And in a normal time, were this 25 or 30 years ago, senators of both parties would be asking that very question, because it ought to be troubling to many of the people. So do we have reason to believe that that -- that there's a disconnect between that answer she gave and what she's saying today? Yes, but she's just not saying what the truth is.

BLITZER: Is she different as attorney general, Carrie, than previous attorneys general in terms of the exchanges that she's been having with these senators? She's really blasting them.

CARRIE CORDERO, CNN LEGAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Yes, I think we can definitely characterize this as a different approach for an attorney general to take before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Elliot and I both have prepared former government executives and leaders of the department for testimony before Congress. I have testified before Congress several times. For an attorney general to be this combative, to have sort of in her notes specific points of political attack that she is going to lob against the senators who are asking her questions in their oversight capacity, it's something that I can't remember seeing before and certainly haven't observed in the last 30 years or so in Washington.

[11:45:28]

It's a different kind of thing, but it is effective in some ways, in that it is keeping the senators from pressing her on what is really a fundamental change in the department's priorities and activities in the last quarter-century.

BLITZER: You agree?

WILLIAMS: You know, I do.

It's funny. I was thinking back to -- I was staffing Attorney General Holder. There was a time when he got into an exchange with a member of the House Judiciary Committee and said, don't go there, buddy. And we all thought, oh, God, the attorney general argued back. It was in the context of talking about Fast and Furious, which was a very -- what a big screw-up by the Justice Department, let's be clear, and also a very contentious time in Justice Department and congressional history.

And we all thought, everybody in the room thought, oh, my goodness, the attorney general just attempted to argue with a member of the House of Representatives. This is something sort of far more than we have seen. Now, I guess the question is, is that decorum that Congress had for the first couple hundred years all sort of quaint and fake to begin with?

And maybe this is the point that we were all leading to all along. I don't know. That's not great. What we're seeing is not great because we're really not getting to the heart of important questions that senators of both parties should be asking, Democrats and Republicans alike.

BROWN: I want to bring in Evan Perez.

Evan, you have been covering DOJ for many years. We once covered it together. And I'm curious what stands out to you, particularly the exchange that she had with Senator Durbin about sending the National Guard into Chicago and the strong language she used with the senator.

EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, look, I think some of the other people on the panel there have covered a little bit about how unusual this hearing is.

We expected her to go in with a little bit of fire. She has been very disciplined. She is refusing to talk about any discussion she's had with the president on, for example, the issue of the -- bringing in the charges against James Comey, on whether the Justice Department has given legal advice authorizing these extrajudicial killings of people accused of carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea.

But this exchange with Senator Durbin really kind of illustrates how she has decided to basically turn every question that she doesn't like on the questioner, especially the Democrats. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BONDI: I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump. And, currently, the National Guard are on the way to Chicago. If you're not going to protect your citizens, President Trump will.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PEREZ: And that gives you a flavor. She certainly said this a couple of times.

She's also pointed out when Democrats have pressed her that there is a government shutdown and she blames this on the Democrats and why federal agents are now working without pay. So we expect this to continue over the next couple of hours. Certainly, the level of anger that you see going back and forth is quite there.

BLITZER: Each senator has about 10 minutes for questioning the attorney general of the United States. By my count, there's at least another dozen Republican and Democratic senators who have still not asked questions. So this is going to go on and on and on. We're maybe halfway through right now.

We will take a quick break, resume our special coverage right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[11:53:17] BROWN: Happening now, President Trump is expected to greet the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, at the White House ahead of their bilateral meeting at any minute, and at the top of the agenda, trade and tariffs.

With Canada's economy faltering President Trump's tariffs on cars, steel, and aluminum are making matters worse for Carney.

BLITZER: Let's go to our Alayna Treene over at the White House. She's getting ready to monitor this important meeting that's about to take place.

What are we expecting from this meeting, Alayna?

ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Well, frankly, Wolf and Pamela, I actually think the expectations are pretty low. And more of the political pressure is on Mark Carney to see what he can get out of this.

But, again, I don't think many people, at least in my conversations with folks here in that building behind me, are expecting any major announcements today. But I'd remind you that Canada is in a tough position. They are the only G7 country right now that does not have some negotiated trade deal with the United States.

We have the -- and just to walk through all of the tariffs that are on Canada that are making this such an important day, particularly for the Canadians, they have a 35 percent tariff on all Canadian exports. That is due to what the president has claimed is fentanyl and drugs coming into the U.S. from the northern border, although I should note that the data, if you look at the data, it doesn't necessarily support that.

There's also tariffs, as you mentioned, on automobiles, steel, aluminum, and lumber. And one exception as well for the 35 percent tariff that I mentioned that's on all imports into the United States, the products that were agreed to by the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreement, the USMCA, which was negotiated by the president during his first term. Anything that's covered by that, there is an exception in that for that 35 percent tariff.

[11:55:00]

And just bringing up USMCA, I do think that will also come up today. It's actually due to have a review.

Oh, it looks like actually, excuse me, the prime minister is driving by now right behind me. So he's going to be meeting with Trump momentarily. You're going to see the president standing under -- you can see him there standing right outside the entrance of the West Wing to greet the prime minister of Canada. And then they're going to head inside for a bilateral meeting and a lunch.

But, as I was saying, the other agenda item is also this review of USMCA that is due next year. That will likely come up as well, particularly as the president, President Donald Trump has to decide whether or not he wants to continue that, potentially negotiate two other bilateral agreements directly with Mexico and Canada.

But, here, let's see if he says anything.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Thank you very much.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

TREENE: It appears he was asked a question, Wolf and Pamela, about Israel. The president didn't bite. He just said thank you. So we will stay tuned to see what more we can learn from the behind-the-scenes details of this meeting between President Donald Trump and Mark Carney.

BLITZER: We will see if they take questions at their bilateral meeting inside the White House. That's going to be coming up fairly soon as well. So we will see what these two leaders have to say.

Alayna Treene at the White House for us, thanks very much.

And, to our viewers, thanks very much for joining us on this important morning. We will see you back here tomorrow morning, every weekday morning, 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

BROWN: "INSIDE POLITICS" with Manu Raju is back after a short break.