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Iran Launches New Attacks; Trump to Headline Republican Midterm Convention; Republican Texas Congressional Candidate Under Fire; FDNY Speaks Out on 9/11 Air Quality Documents. Aired 10:30a-11a ET

Aired September 09, 2026 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

ROBERT EUSTACE, PRESIDENT, FDNY UNIFORMED FIREFIGHTERS ASSOCIATION: So it's something that we hope people realize that this is not 200 people in the last five years. That's a lot. It's a lot of people. This is something that continues to go on. And this is a paramount -- like Jim said, it's, how many more people can be affected?

If you get cancer and it's not 9/11-related, the city tells you, you're on your own. That's what they tell you. So it's a big difference if it's covered. So if you have been contaminated, if you were exposed to toxins because you went to the Fire Academy because you wanted to proudly serve the FDNY, and you were hired in 2002, but you were outside of that timeline, and now you have cancer, and the city tells you, well, what about your insurance card?

Pay for yourself. That's a problem. So these are the kind of things we want people to never forget about.

Anybody else? All right.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.

EUSTACE: Thank you very much.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Thank you.

LT. JAMES BROSI, PRESIDENT, FDNY UNIFORMED FIRE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION: Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nice job.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN HOST: All right, you're just listening to FDNY leaders who, as you see there, are fired up in the wake of Mayor Mamdani of New York City releasing these documents showing that the air after 9/11 was toxic, that the firefighters there, the first responders, others who were living in the area were exposed to toxic air and the air quality was bad.

And it also examines the government response at the time. You heard their officials calling on the release of more documents relating to this. Overall, there are 170,000 pages of previously unavailable city records relating to this. And you heard the argument there from the leaders that they were prioritizing, the government in New York was prioritizing the health of the city over the health of these first responders. In all, 453 FDNY members have died from 9/11 related illnesses.

So, for more on this, I want to go to CNN national correspondent Randi Kaye joining us live from the news conference.

And, of course, Randi, we should note this is all coming out just ahead of a Friday, which is 25 years. It'll mark 25 years since 9/11.

RANDI KAYE, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, Pamela.

And just listening to these two FDNY members talking about they have lost 200 firefighters since the 20th anniversary of 9/11. What they had to say today was very powerful, just about how much they have suffered, how much illness there is among this group, how sick they are, and what it has been like to bury so many members, as you said, 453 members of the FDNY.

They said that they just buried the 453rd member just yesterday. And this is all coming in response to those 170,000 documents that were released by Mayor Mamdani here, which basically reveals that they -- that officials for years have been hiding the toxic effects and not being forthcoming with the toxic effects of the dust that was there at the World Trade Center area after 9/11.

They had been testing it and they had been withholding that. As they said today, they said that: "We were dying every breath we took down there. They made a fiduciary choice over our health and safety."

We know from these documents that were released, Pamela, that they withheld information about the dangerous level of asbestos. They withheld information about lead contamination. They didn't mandate that these firefighters and first responders wore more respirators. In fact, they discouraged that.

And these firefighters and first responders took their gear home. They brought home all of the dust that was on the gear. It would be in their cars. It would be at their homes. So many more people than even just people who were down at the site, at the pile, as they called it, got sick.

As we heard today, 9/11 did not end on September 11 for the FDNY. People deserve to know the truth about what was in the air, and they said that if there had been earlier truth, that would have led to earlier screenings and then hopefully earlier treatment is what they had to say.

And, just finally, they said that they would walk by the testing machines daily. They knew that they were testing the air there as early as October 1, so in just the weeks after 9/11, and they were picking up asbestos and dangerous contaminants, and they still were encouraging -- at least they said today they were encouraging people to come to downtown, spend money, bring their families without really knowing what was in the air. And so it remained on their pets, on their clothing and their

windowsills, and now many, many people are sick. Thousands of people have gotten sick and died as a result of the air down there and World Trade Center-related cancers and other illnesses, Pamela.

BROWN: Yes, they say over 12,000 FDNY members have been diagnosed with a World Trade Center-related illness.

And it was interesting he pointed out that they would receive yearly wellness checks or physicals, and that that gave them a baseline to be able to use to compare to then what happened with their health. And he brought up the point that they would have had to likely fight even harder had they not had that baseline.

[10:35:05]

But, even so, he talked about the fact that these members really had to fight to prove that their health was suffering as a result of their work around 9/11.

KAYE: Right.

And he said -- what's interesting is, they said they wouldn't have changed anything. This is what they do. This is what they train for. They would have gone in anyway.

But now to have to fight this uphill battle, as he put it, for something that we have known -- that officials have known for years, fighting to get this information, and those doctor's appointments, and how downright scary they are really for a lot of these members, wondering, is this the day that they're going to tell me I have cancer?

And just also he talked about how the people who were never there is, as he said, were the children or the spouses or new firefighters at the academy who were using the contaminated gear and how sick they were and how some of them might not even be covered because they weren't technically down as a first responder on the pile.

BROWN: All right, thank you so much, Randi Kaye. We appreciate it.

And our coverage on these 9/11 reports continues. Coming up at 11:00 Eastern, I'm going to speak with Thomas Von Essen. He is the former commissioner of the FDNY during September 11. Find out why he says former Mayor Rudy Giuliani wasn't covering anything up.

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[10:40:53]

BROWN: Well, CNN has new reporting about crass and sexually degrading comments about women made by a congressional candidate in Texas, 30- year-old conservative YouTube creator Brandon Herrera.

Herrera is running to replace GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales, who resigned this year following sexual misconduct allegations. And given the razor-thin margins in the House of Representatives, Democrats are hoping the controversy surrounding Herrera may help provide a path to victory in this red-leaning district.

Joining us now is Allison Gordon with the CNN Investigates team, who looked into Herrera and what he has said in the past.

Tell us what you found, Allison.

ALLISON GORDON, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Yes, there is a lot, Pam.

So, Brandon Herrera is a longtime conservative creator. He has more than four million fans on YouTube, very popular. And the content was voluminous. So my colleague Morgan Leason and I, we dug through old YouTube videos, more recent ones, podcast appearances, social media feed.

And taking that all together, we tried to get a very clear picture for this story in order to tell it properly. Let's take a listen to just some of what we found.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRANDON HERRERA (R), TEXAS CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE: You will notice his noggin appears to already have arrived empty and is instead full of mush, much like the average Austin feminist. So, when a blue hair on the news says that a semiautomatic AR-15 is an assault rifle, she is both fat and wrong.

But what if, out of self-defense, you had to take down something a lot bigger, like an elephant or a killer whale or an angry blue-haired Austin feminist?

These things weigh in at about 6,500 pounds apiece, or approximately four times as much as the average Austin feminist.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GORDON: Yes, so that's just a little bit of what we found.

And we also found examples of Herrera using sexually suggestive slang to describe women, making degrading jokes. And, in particular, he insulted a female gun safety advocate, Shannon Watts, and her children, just using really vile language that I'm not going to repeat on air.

BROWN: Yes, it is so vile what he said about her.

And his team is basically trying to write this off as him joking, right?

GORDON: Yes.

When I reached out to his campaign, they again characterized these past comments about women as jokes, and then they also directed me to his opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, who's a Democrat, citing her involvement in a domestic violence case as an attorney in San Antonio.

And then when I went to Stout's campaign, they said that she was just doing her job as a court-appointed appellate attorney, and that Herrera needs to take more accountability for his past comments about women.

BROWN: And he's been pressed on controversial comments in the past about Nazis and about veteran suicide before. Again, he has said those were jokes.

But you spoke with apolitical extremism expert who pushed back on that assertion. Tell us more about that.

GORDON: That's right, Pam.

This is not the first time that this candidate has been looked at for past comments. And he's continued to maintain that these were jokes. But I spoke with Cynthia Miller-Idriss.

She runs a political extremism research lab at American University, and she really pushed back on that assertion, because, in her research, she found that when folks -- when looking back at folks who commit political violence and extremism, if you look at their search history on the Internet, it's often because they have been consuming a lot of misogynistic online content.

Whether that be on YouTube, podcasts, or social media, there's often that connective through line. And she described Herrera's comments to me, particularly when he compared women's weight to that of animals like elephants or killer whales as hallmark Internet misogyny.

Again, Herrera characterized his past comments as jokes, and he rejected that assertion.

BROWN: All right, Allison Gordon, thank you for bringing that reporting to us. We appreciate it.

And happening now: fresh escalation of fighting in the Middle East. Iran is retaliating for strikes on five tankers, firing a barrage of missiles toward Jordan, targeting U.S. military assets. More than six months into the war with Iran, there is no clear end in sight.

We are joined now by CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen. He is out now with a new book, "All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror." And, in 1997, for CNN, Bergen produced Osama bin Laden's first television interview. And for the first time in that interview, the al Qaeda leader declared war against the U.S. to a Western audience.

[10:45:17]

Peter joins us now.

So, in your view, is the U.S. repeating the patterns of the post-9/11 era?

PETER BERGEN, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Pam, thanks for having me on.

Certainly repeating many of the mistakes that you'd thought we would have learned from. So, if you look at what -- the Iran war, what would you need in an ideal set of circumstances? First of all, you'd need a real imminent threat. That was not the case with Iran. Secondly, you'd need a congressional authorization. Not the case with Iran.

Third, you'd need NATO allies. Not the case with Iran. Fourth, you might want a un resolution in favor, not the case with Iran. And, finally, you'd want a real plan for a day after and a strategy. We seem to have kind of replicated many of the mistakes that we made in the previous conflicts in the post-9/11 era.

And, of course, Pam, it was framed as a war against a state sponsor of terrorism and also to prevent it using nuclear weapons, basically the same rationale that George W. Bush used in 2003. So, we -- unfortunately, we didn't get -- we've got some things right, but we've also got a lot of things wrong in the post-9/11 conflicts.

BROWN: So how has the Middle East and the regional dynamic shifted in these past two decades?

BERGEN: Well, Pam, I mean, what's fascinating is the official U.S. Army history of the war in Iraq, which is really the only official account we have because there was no Iraq commission like the 9/11 Commission, said that the sole winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which is a pretty astonishing statement, if you think this is not some bunch of war critics.

This is the official Army history of the war in Iraq. They concluded Iran was the only winner of the war. So talk about a spectacular own goal.

BROWN: Yes, and coinciding with the 9/11 anniversary.

We should note that you are donating your archive to the Georgetown University Library. It includes more than 150,000 pages of documents detailing the rise of al Qaeda. What do you hope people can learn from this?

BERGEN: Well, Georgetown has a great set of terrorism scholars. My mother was there briefly at the School of Foreign Service, one of the first women to go.

I hope researchers and students and -- have access to this archive. Spent a lot of time putting it together, organizing it with the help of archivists, and then Georgetown has an excellent capacity to digitize this and make it available to researchers around the world.

So, this is an epoch in American life, like the Cold War. The stakes were not existential like they were in the Cold War, where there was mutually assured destruction. But, clearly, even as you -- just the segment we have been hearing about from the firefighters in New York, 9/11 has a very long tail, both domestically and also foreign policy and national security-wise. And the students I teach, some of them weren't alive on 9/11 or were

very young children. And it's important for people to understand our own history. Otherwise, we're doomed to make some of the same mistakes.

BROWN: What would you say are the crown jewels of your collection?

BERGEN: Well, there are -- a lot of it, I started collecting before the Internet was sort of widely available. So there are -- there are a lot of hard copies of materials that al Qaeda or parts of al Qaeda were generating, their sort of in-flight magazine, before they really renamed themselves al Qaeda, their -- a particular fatwa issued that -- by a militant cleric that bin Laden used to justify his war against American civilians.

Most Islamic clerics would never issue such a fatwa. Bin Laden himself was not a religious cleric, so he knew he needed kind of clerical cover for his planned attacks on American civilian targets, which, of course, he actually got from this particular cleric.

And so there's a bunch of materials. It's 150,000 pages of material, so it's hard to summarize...

BROWN: Yes.

BERGEN: ... interviews with a number of people who were key to this, who've since died or were murdered or have -- which are now available to the public.

BROWN: All right, Peter Bergen, thank you so much for bringing all of your reporting to us, and we look forward to reading your book. We appreciate it.

BERGEN: Thank you, Pam.

BROWN: Well, coming up: It was a very happy holiday. How much money President Trump reportedly gifted his White House aides.

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[10:51:35]

BROWN: Well, happening now: President Trump is set to depart the White House for Dallas soon for the first ever Republican National Midterm Convention, the high-stakes elections now just 55 days away.

The president will rally Republicans in a traditionally ruby-red state that has an incredibly close Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton. And it comes as the president's approval is at an all-time low, 78 percent among Republicans.

Here to discuss is former Trump White House Communications Director Mike Dubke, along with Democratic strategists and senior political commentator Maria Cardona.

Mark -- Mike, I want to start with you, because it is no secret that Americans overall are pessimistic about the economy, in part because of the ongoing war with Iran, as well as the escalating trade wars going on with Canada and so forth. Is there anything the president can say tonight to calm those concerns?

MICHAEL DUBKE, FORMER TRUMP WHITE HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: I actually think there's a lot the president can say tonight, and I actually wrote it down because I knew I would not get all of this just straight.

You have paper.

(LAUGHTER)

BROWN: You're hoping he's listening right now.

DUBKE: I have paper.

So, cost of -- in terms of taxpayers who owed last year, 97 percent of taxpayers got a tax cut of an average of $800. Eight million filers filed no tax on tips; 29 million filed no tax on overtime; 35 million seniors claimed the enhanced senior deduction. Refunds were up 11 percent. There's more to this list.

My point is, there are a lot of things that the president can say, and others in the Cabinet who will be speaking tonight and tomorrow night can say, and hopefully they will about the cost of living. So there is a good message. We will see if it cuts through.

BROWN: You think that's a strong message, Maria?

MARIA CARDONA, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: First of all, no. And I will tell you why. But even before that, I doubt the president will say any of that, because we know he's so bad at staying on message.

He's going to talk about himself, and then he's going to try to paint the Democrats as all socialists. None of it will land, because even, of this beautiful list that Mike just talked about, Americans are not feeling it.

What they are feeling is huge prices at the pump. What they are feeling, the cost of groceries skyrocketing when they try to go buy meals for their families. What they are feeling, the lack of health care coverage that was ripped from them by the big horrible bill that Republicans passed last summer.

And all of these things land at the feet of Trump and at the feet of Republicans. And Republicans know it, because they are panicking about these midterm elections. A lot of them aren't even showing up to this convention.

So I hope Donald Trump continues to talk about what he loves to talk about, which is himself. That will remind Americans that his -- all of his policies are to blame for all of the hardships, the economic hardships that they're going through.

BROWN: Axios is reporting that more than 100 Republican lawmakers are expected to skip this convention. What do you make of that, Mike? What signal does that send?

DUBKE: I mean, how many days are we out from the midterms?

BROWN: Fifty-five.

DUBKE: Fifty-five. If I was running in a very competitive race, I would be in my district. And I think if you look at that list of the people that are not going to be there, several of them are not there for multiple reasons. They have a debate to go to.They have campaign events that they have previously scheduled.

So this is a strange time to be having this convention. Most conventions on the -- even in the presidential years, if you remember, are in July and August, not September, I think particularly for this reason, because we're post-Labor Day, and we're hot and heavy into the campaign season.

[10:55:13]

CARDONA: But you know what's interesting is, it's happening in Texas. Texas is in play, which kind of tells you the political environment that we're in.

Texas is a ruby-red state. The fact that James Talarico has been ahead in a lot of the polls, and even Gina Hinojosa, who's running for governor, is tied with Greg Abbott, that speaks volumes about where not just the whole country is, but voters in Texas have had it, independent voters, moderate women, Latino voters.

Trump is tanking with Latino voters, and they are enthusiastic about coming out to vote for James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, and Democrats. The generic ballot for Democrats, we're up by six to 10 points. A Gallup poll that was -- recently went out there talked about how Americans are identifying 49 percent for Democrats, 39 percent for Republicans. We're up 10 points.

We haven't seen those numbers since 2008.

DUBKE: And yet Republican registrations are up and all of that. So we could go across the country, and you know what? God bless, keep sending money to Texas, because that's where Democrat dollars go to die. And I...

CARDONA: We will see.

DUBKE: We will see. But I have great faith in Texas being as red as the outfits that are sitting next to me come November 3.

(CROSSTALK)

BROWN: It is the day of red. It's not intentional.

(CROSSTALK)

DUBKE: Somehow, I'm wearing blue. I don't really understand this.

BROWN: I am not taking a position, to be clear, as a journalist.

CARDONA: This is what Texas will become after November.

BROWN: OK. We will see. We will see.

(LAUGHTER)

DUBKE: We will see.

BROWN: I want to talk about another race, and that is in New Hampshire, because last night you had the moderate Democratic Congressman Chris Pappas beat the progressive challenger to replace retiring Senator Shaheen by a roughly 32-point margin.

What does that tell you about progressives' momentum since those big upsets in New York and in Colorado and Florida?

CARDONA: Look, what this tells me, Pam, is that -- and everyone likes to divide what has gone on in the Democratic Party between progressives and moderates and centrists. What this tells me is that voters are going to vote for the person that they believe is fighting for them.

They don't care about labels. They don't care what you call yourself. They don't care what the media calls you. They care about what you are doing for them. If you are an incumbent, they're going to care about your record. If you have a good record about standing up for your voters, about putting out their solutions, about standing up to the craziness and the chaos and the corruption of Donald Trump and Republicans, then they're going to vote for you.

If you energize and mobilize your voters, you're going to win. Sometimes, we have seen the progressives are the ones that were doing that, and they won. Most of the times, you're seeing the centrists and the moderates are the ones that are winning on our side.

DUBKE: And I don't wholly disagree with the -- with your analysis of this. I will point out that New Hampshire, unlike -- is slightly different than the rest of New England.

So I'm not surprised that a Democrat socialist didn't succeed here, but this is a sleeper race, I think, for Republicans with Sununu on the ballot. This is a place where Republicans can make some inroads.

BROWN: All right, I believe Republicans haven't won a Senate race in 16 years for New Hampshire, so we will see what happens.

(CROSSTALK)

CARDONA: We will continue that trend in November.

BROWN: We will see, as I keep saying.

CARDONA: That's right.

DUBKE: We will see. BROWN: All right, Mike Dubke, Maria Cardona, thank you both.

CARDONA: Thanks, Pam.

BROWN: Still to come: Firefighters are demanding answers this morning after a new report reveals there was toxic air at Ground Zero following the 9/11 attacks. We will get reaction from the man who was the FDNY commissioner on 9/11.

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