New Escalation 

0:01Happening now, breaking news, new escalation. The U.S. destroys five Iranian tankers. The new Flashpoint and what could be next? And new CNN investigation resurfaced videos revealing a GOP candidate's crude comments about women comparing feminist weight to whales and nuclear bombs. 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? This is Brandon Herrera, a Republican nominee for a key Texas congressional district. Allie Gordon will be coming up to share her reporting. Plus, key hearing, a case in Louisiana could end telehealth abortion nationwide.

0:44Will access be wiped out? We have the new reporting from inside the courtroom. Also inside the Clancy jury room, a jurors claim about the holdout that could reignite debate over the verdict. He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms. I was so excited. And gate change, a 180 at the airport. You can now see your family off from the gate after the security check. What you need to know about the TSA program. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Pamela Brown. Wolf Blitzer is off and you're in the Situation Room.

1:30happening now fresh escalations the u.s hits five iranian tankers after officials say iran targeted a navy warship twice with ballistic missiles over the last two days the irgc claims it struck two u.s navy vessels near the strait of hormuz which the u.s military is disputing as quote completely false in this newly released video you can see one of the ships in the gulf of Oman on fire and ultimately sinking. Iran responded overnight by sending a barrage of missiles into Jordan, targeting a key air base used by U.S. forces. The Jordanian army says its air defenses successfully destroyed 18 of the 20 missiles.

2:09The new strikes are sending global oil prices to their highest levels since July, with Brent crude hitting$100 per barrel briefly. And gas prices surged by about seven cents today to a national average of$4.22 a gallon. That's the biggest one-day increase since May 1st. Researchers say the spike in both gas and diesel has cost Americans more than$101 billion since the war started. CNN senior national security reporter Zachary Cohen joins us now. Tell us more about what is so key for the U.S. striking these tankers. Zach? Yeah, Pam, these strikes are important on a few fronts. One, a U.S. official making clear to me that the striking of these tankers was intended to send a message to Iran that the U.S.

2:56is not going to tolerate Iran trying to target U.S. Navy vessels in and around the Strait of Hormuz. And that's something that we saw from Iran for two consecutive days ahead of these U.S. strikes targeting the tankers. U.S. officials say that Iran unsuccessfully tried to sink a U.S. Navy ship that was conducting operations in those key waters where the U.S. has really built up a significant presence as part of a new strategy that's really focused on three things. One is targeting and destroying Iranian assets around the Strait of Hormuz, enforcing that blockade that's been in place now for several months, and also escorting tankers, commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in an effort to try to restore the flow of oil to somewhere close to pre-war levels.

3:42And that's something that we know the U.S. military and CENTCOM in particular has been hyper-focused on here in the last few weeks. It does represent a shift in military strategy, somewhat all geared towards this economic stranglehold that they're trying to apply to the Iranian regime. But also significant, too, because Iran is showing a willingness to escalate here by targeting U.S. Navy ships and also threatening to continue targeting U.S. bases in the region, as we saw in response to these U.S. strikes against the tankers around the Strait of Ramos, launching a barrage of missiles at a U.S.

4:13base in Jordan. So we do seem to be seeing a back and forth here that doesn't show any signs of slowing down. The question is, how far will this escalate and how far will the Iranians continue to push the envelope? Yeah, because it does seem like a significant escalation that the Iranians are using ballistic missiles now targeting these U.S. warships. I also understand you have some new reporting about construction happening at a suspected nuclear site, Pickaxe Mountain. Tell us more about that and how the U.S. could potentially respond to that. Yeah, Pam, we've heard even President Trump talk about Pickaxe Mountain as recently as last week, telling reporters that the U.S.

4:48could be targeting that site, a suspected nuclear site, very soon. Now, that's something that this is a site that's been on the radar of intelligence agencies for a while now. And it's something that satellite imagery shows, according to analysis from CSIS, that there's been a lot of construction at this site over the last year coinciding with Iran's war with the U.S. and Israel. And now this is a site where some intelligence agencies believe Iran may have moved some of its nuclear components, things that they could potentially use to preserve its nuclear program in the future. But again, this site still looms large given President Trump's promise that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.

5:26All right, Zachary Cohen, thank you so much. We appreciate it. But issues like the war with Iran, tariffs and overall affordability, they've driven President Trump's overall approval rating to just 35 percent. And in less than two months, voters will decide who will run Congress for the president's final two years in office. Now, Republicans are pushing to the midterms full force, hosting a first of its kind convention in Dallas. President Trump will head to the Lone Star State today for that two day event that will not only highlight his achievements while in office, but look ahead to the future of the party.

5:59So let's go live now to CNN senior reporter Steve Conterno, who's live for us in Dallas. Steve, the RNC is preparing for life without President Trump being front and center and at the White House. What is the message you're getting about the future of the GOP from the list of speakers and those skipping the event? Well, Pamela, there's two dynamics at play here this week in Dallas. And one is the unmistakable command that President Donald Trump still has over his party, that he can even summon them to Dallas and conceive of a midterm convention, require them all to come here. It just shows how he continues to just dominate the Republican Party and remain a central figure.

6:39This is an event that is by Donald Trump, for Donald Trump, and to keep Donald Trump's Republican Party in power beyond these midterm elections and for the last two years that he is in office. But there is also the reality that Republicans are increasingly confronting that this may be one of the last Trumpapaloozas. As soon as the midterms are over, the Republican Party will begin to think about its future. Is that person that is going to lead this party after Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance? Well, he will be speaking tomorrow night. And we're really getting that vibe from Republicans and even from Trump himself more and more that they are cognizant that his clock is ticking.

7:21I talked to Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservatives Union, who holds CPAC, and they have had to even think about already what it is like to hold those kind of events when Trump is no longer the main attraction. And he told me that even though he is in denial that Trump may soon be leaving the stage, it's something that Republicans are going to have to soon face head on. All right, Steve Conterno, thank you so much for bringing us your latest reporting there from Dallas. And happening now, these right here are live pictures from New York, where members of the Fire Department of New York and fire officers are demanding answers on newly released 9-11 air quality records.

8:01New York City released more than 170 ,000 pages of documents revealing that officials repeatedly misled residents about toxic air quality levels after the attack on the World Trade Center. Those living near Ground Zero were repeatedly reassured by officials that the air was safe, despite internal data and residents' experiences that contradicted their claims. We will, of course, monitor this event and bring you any updates as they come in. And still ahead here in the Situation Room, gambling with our lives. Another AI employee issues a stark warning right after quitting his job over safety concerns.

8:37Why he says artificial intelligence could kill us all by the end of the decade. Plus, scenes of destruction across parts of Hawaii after Hurricane Lowell lashes out at the island with powerful winds and dangerous surf. You're in the Situation Room and we'll be right back.

9:00I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We get to talk to the men's winner of the New York City Marathon. Andreas Almgren, he's a self-coached 31-year-old who was, get this, making his marathon debut. He never ran a marathon before he won it. If someone wanted to start getting serious about running, and they wanted to approach it like a data scientist like you do, how would you suggest they start? Be patient. My peak weeks, I ran like 140, 150 miles per week or something. Wow. Either increase the distance or you should increase the intensity. You should never increase both at the same time.

9:40Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

9:46As we noted earlier, leaders with the FDNY are speaking. I want to listen in to Lieutenant James Brogy about air quality reports that just came out. Let's listen. Thank you very much. My name is Jim Brozzi. I'm the president of the Uniformed Fire Office Association, and I want to thank all of you for being here today and continuing to shed light on this very tragic situation, the events of 9-11 as well, the illnesses that followed. I stand here in utter disbelief that we've lost nearly a thousand members in total, both active and retired in the fire department, over 130 people in acute cancer care, three in hospice and two funerals within the last seven days.

10:24But the greater disbelief is the revealing of these documents and what it took to get what we already knew. Gail Brewer, through her political expertise, enforced a city council provision to initiate an IG investigation against the city to force them to release these documents. They held these documents for years. We've known about them for a year after the IG requested that all documents relating to 9-11 be turned over. And what you saw in the earliest drop of these documents, 170 ,000 documents and the documents that will follow, is at the earliest time of October, the city was making a fiduciary choice to prioritize the economic stability of lower Manhattan over the health and safety of the firefighters, the police officers, the construction workers, and the children that went back to school down there.

11:13Now, people have told me, well, what did we learn that we didn't already know? What we learned was the air was as toxic as we said it was. What we learned is that we were dying with every breath we took down there. What we learned is that the city knew it and failed to prioritize, one, a public safety announcement, two, proper decon, three, preventing us from eating down there and digesting the toxins, four, not letting people volunteer to clean up, five, not letting people get a HEPA filter vacuum and get a credit for it from the government as they self-clean their own apartments. The exponential impact of that has caused four times the amount of deaths since 9-11 from these illnesses.

11:52And these deaths do not calculate the loss. They don't calculate the trips to Sloan. They don't calculate the trepidation in each member going for a test and wondering if this is the test that pops again with cancer. Or whether or not they are approved for a trial. Or whether or not an authorization comes before the hospice notice shows up at their door. It is appalling that they did this to us, despite our willingness to knowingly go into that environment repeatedly for long-term exposures long after the acute exposure of that day, to give dignity to the people that were lost, to give the greatest possible effort towards a recovery, and then hopes to put New York back on its firm footing than it was on the days before 9-11.

12:37The fact that these are coming out in piecemeal, I guess, is a process of government. But if you could see the amount of days and hours both the UFA and the UFOA spent in Washington, begging them to recognize this. 9-11 happened on 01. The Zadroga bill didn't pass until 2010, and it didn't even pass with a cancer provision. 9-11 required to be refunded in 15, 19, 22 for Shanksville, it end once again in 26. What do you think that would have taken had we had that information? How quickly could we have gotten early testing? How quickly could we have gotten proper screening? How quickly could we inform the children down there that they should enroll in a program despite not being symptomatic?

13:24Instead, 25 years later, we're on a search looking for the database of people that were down there. Because as their illnesses are happening at a very early age, they're not correlating them to their exposure while they were down here. The federal government's job is to stand, and the city municipal government, is to stand up when the tragedy is so overwhelming that the people can't stand up for themselves. When they tell you there wasn't air monitoring, we walked past the machines daily. And they were plugged in, and they were running, and they were taking air samples. It was an utter lie. And yet they never stopped making public safety announcements over the airwaves.

14:03They actually went so far as to say, come to lower Manhattan and spend money. Bring friends and family. I understand the fog of war. I understand the decisions made in the aftermath of 9-11. Once the site was stabilized, once all recovery was no longer possible, better decisions towards decon, better decisions towards screening, better decisions towards the people and the personnel you sent down there. And while people might believe this is something we already know, they have no idea the impact of not having the substantial proof when trying to get the legislative changes that we needed and the recognition for all of the people that are suffering and will suffer in the years going forward.

14:48So while I'm grateful that 25 years later, we are still remembering, I'm grateful that all of you are still turning up to still shed light on the situation. But I'm extremely frustrated on how we got here. I am extremely frustrated in the uphill battle we have all faced in proving something they knew the entire time. And for all those people that said they would never forget, they went through great lengths to making sure you did not know the totality of the situation and what they knew when they made the choice to sacrifice its residents and its first responders for what they believed was the greater good.

15:23And that is the atrocity that happened after 9-11. Thank you.

15:31We'll open up for any questions. Yeah, so what is your next step? Is there legal recourse for you? What do you do now? We're going to have to go through this. See what comes out of it. Ben Chavot, 9-11 Health Commission, they're looking into this as much as possible to see what comes out of this. Unfortunately, there's a, you know, the slow legal process of this. And, you know, a lot of the games will be playing. Is it another trip to Washington? Is it another trip, you know, another council hearing? You know, it might be, you know, It's just kind of disgusting in the end, you know. I'll add one thing.

16:10So even if you look at the earliest information, they talk about this building in John Street that still had asbestos. If you notice the date of the John Street asbestos finding, it's July of 2002. The site closed an application into the 9-11 Health Watch program, closed May 31st. Is that an injustice? Did the city do a proper cleanup? Should the cutoff been May 31st, or was that just an economic decision based on the liability of the program? How many people were left out? How much asbestos was in that Deutsche Bank building when it ended up catching fire years later? That still existed on the rooftop.

16:46How many other chemicals will we find that are more relatable to these diseases? We just had three other applications designed for autoimmune disease and for cardiac, where there was some overwhelming evidence, and to which the only justification for not adding it was the economic cost related to it. And yet the statistics were overwhelming. So I hope that the expansion of the records and the expansion of the testing and the amount of contaminants they know down there not only expands the time frame, but also expands the number of illnesses that are not necessarily in the program right now. So would that be necessarily like a class action lawsuit?

17:21I think it would probably pressure to the federal government to address them. I mean, as far as like what the city's legal liability is in relation to the Victims' Compensation Fund that already existed, I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure the city is sure. But I would say it was the basis for four administrations turning their back to all of us when we requested the documents. Thankfully, this administration did not let liability outweigh the importance of releasing the documents to the victims of that day. The meeting of documents was released 170 ,000.

17:58Like I said, my hope is that we find more definitive chemicals that were in the air that we don't already know, right? They standard asbestos, lime from the crushed concrete, things along those lines. You know, I think we all know high levels of benzene, which also have some other effects. But most diseases are correlated to specific exposures. You saw in the fire department a study produced a specific number of cancers that are in the 9-11 health care program because of the prevalence inside the fire department. Here's the other thing most people don't realize. Most of the world does not have a baseline on its own health.

18:38The fire department took the initiative in the early and mid-90s to start giving annual medicals to their members. And as a result, the year following 9-11, everyone got another physical. And you could see an immediate health decline from that baseline. I'm not sure had we not had that data, we would have been able to make that claim. I'm not sure we would have been able to convince the federal government, here is the respiratory decline in all of our young, healthy members. But we could because we already gave them a breathing test while they were employees prior to the event. Most agencies don't have the wherewithal or the money to do that.

19:14The fire department prioritizes their health in a way that I think most agencies don't. But without that information, I think we're finished. And so what I hope is, one, I'm not looking for restitution from the people that lied to us, but I would like the world to know. I would like the world to know that somebody made a conscious choice. And not only did people make a conscious choice not to tell us, they made a conscious choice to keep their own family members from the exposure. And they definitely made this choice over the economic viability. There was an insane coincidence between the day we recovered the$200 million of precious metals in the trade center and the following day we were going to reduce staffing from 300 firefighters at the pile down to 25, to which we vehemently opposed because of the manner in which they were going to grapple people out of the pile.

20:03Now, I'm not saying we wouldn't have still vehemently opposed it. What I'm saying is once we hit the stabilization of the site to that point, had they been more transparent about those toxins, we probably would have stalled recovery, got better decon, set up better facilities, set up better work rotations so that we could have limited the exposure. But instead, we used a shadow of the removal of the money, followed by the massive reduction. And us being told the air was clean, we were literally protesting. A thousand members showed up at this site to protest. Fifteen of them got arrested. Because that's how strongly we felt about the rescue and recovery of our members and all other New Yorkers.

20:46But what that meant was that site was stable at that point. And at that point, we could have taken a pause. We could have stopped and we could have properly deconned. We could have stopped putting people in city buses filled with asbestos and driving for an hour back to city, back to Shea Stadium. We could have stopped letting people get in their personal calls and take the gear home to their children. We could have stopped getting them to bring gear back to their firehouse and then work with it inside a cab for 24 hours only to return to the site the next day. So when people tell me what could have been done, everything could have been done.

21:19Would we have still incurred the same risk? Absolutely. We incurred this risk on a daily basis. And we hedge bets. We know what we got ourselves into. We know what our role is. We know what we're paid for. And we know why we took this job. And we don't do that with hesitation. But we do it with some understanding that while we're incurring insane personal risk, somebody else is watching the things we can't see. Somebody else is watching our blind side. Somebody else is saying, we will not put you in an area that we can control unnecessarily. And we won't lie to you to do it. And to be fair, they didn't have to lie to us.

21:56Because if they'd been more honest, we probably still would have done it. we would have just taken better precautions after the fact.

22:04What do you want to see happening now?

22:09Initially, I just want to see more of the documents released in a manner in which they're more searchable and easily to summarize so we can truly see what's the depths of the exposure. Before I'm, you know, I'm not calling for anyone's head. I'm not asking for any changes to the health care program. I just want to see is what we've already been able to establish through the health care program and through the Zadroga bill. Does that cover the entirety of what we were exposed to? Is there anything that can be done now? We can amend the bill. We can expand the time frame. You know, we have firefighters that are were exposed to contaminated apparatus for years after the event.

22:47They're related to 9-11, except some of those members don't qualify for the Zadroga bill. They're exposed to 9-11 contaminants through their work at the academy, through their work through a contaminated apparatus. But some of that occurred after May 31st, which excludes them from the program. So do I think this greater liability should give us the opportunity that anyone who was exposed to be covered? Yes. And when people talk about the monetary liability 25 years later, after four times the amount of people have died since that day, I don't care. They made an economic decision not to tell us.

23:20they made an economic decision to prioritize lower Manhattan over the citizens that live there and now it's time to pay the bill and to be fair like I said the litigation part is irrelevant to me it's never solved one problem my father died of 9-11 cancer I can tell you where the money he got from the trade center still sits doesn't help it has zero relevance to this argument the relevance is the dignity and people not having to go through hoops to prove that you who tried to kill them, to prove that you prioritize the health of the city over the health of their citizens. Do you, as unions now, make changes to what your organizations will do or what firefighters will do going forward when there are other toxic or hazardous events or another terror-related attack where something like this could be an issue?

24:19We've adjusted over time. You know, there's nothing that we're going to change more than we've adjusted over time. We've changed a lot from things like Ebola to COVID to a lot of different outbreaks that we've changed here. So the department has evolved tremendously. You know, we've talked about this where, you know, post 9-11 to our safety precautions have evolved. You know, our command structure has evolved. We've changed tremendously in a lot of positive ways for what we've done. But similar to what Jim said, we're still going to show up and we're still going to respond no matter what the call is.

24:49That's what we do every day. But we just hope that we're given the best resources at all times.

24:56We use the words to ever forget to remember colleagues of yours, friends, family, and also victims. But it's never forgetting a little part of this. It's never forgetting what the firefighters went through, what the first responders went through. Keep in mind that it took 25 years to get to this point to reveal such important information. Well, similar to what I said in my opening remarks, to never forget is something that we talk about for every family, that we never forget. And for September 11th, it's something like we buried someone just yesterday. And we have thousands of members, thousands that are sick, that we're going to continue to do that.

25:31So we always never forget. There's mandatory days in the FDNY. Should the city and us also? Everybody. We hope that everybody never forgets. We hope that. We hope that you always remember that sacrifice. It's something that people say, are you looking back at 9-11? I say, well, there hasn't been no look back. It's been every day. It's been nonstop. When you bury 450 people, it just doesn't stop. It just continues, and it will continue. 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.

26:07And this is a paramount, like Jim said, it's how many more people can be affected. You know, 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've 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, whip out your insurance card and pay for it yourself. That's a problem. So these are the kind of things we want people to never forget about.

26:43Anybody else? Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. 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 there officials calling on the release of more documents relating to this. Overall, there were 170 ,000 pages of previously unavailable city records relating to this.

27:30And 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. And all 453 FDNY members have died from 9-11 related illnesses. So for more on this, I want to go to CNN national correspondent Randy Kaye joining us live from the news conference. And of course, Randy, we should note this is all coming out just ahead of Friday, which is 25 years. It will mark 25 years since 9-11. 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.

28:17What 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 this 170 ,000 documents that were released by Mayor Mamdani here, which basically reveals 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.

28:56They 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 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.

29:34It 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 11th 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 1st, so in just the weeks after 9-11.

30:09And 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 error down there and World Trade Center related cancers and other illnesses. Pamela. Yeah, they say over 12 ,000 FDNY members have been diagnosed with a World Trade Center related illness.

30:46And 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 them 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. 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. Right. And he said, you know, what's interesting is they said they wouldn't have changed anything. This is what they do. This is what they train for.

31:21They would have gone in anyway. But now to fight this uphill battle, as he put it, for something that we've 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, 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.

32:00All right. Thank you so much, Randy Kay. We appreciate it. And our coverage on these 9-11 reports continue coming up at 11 Eastern. I'm going to speak with Thomas Van Essen. He is the former commissioner of the FDNY during September 11th. Find out why he says former mayor Rudy Giuliani wasn't covering anything up.

32:24Well, 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 Gonzalez, who resigned this year following sexual misconduct allegations. 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.

32:59Tell us what you found, Allison. Yeah, there was 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 Leeson and I, we dug through old YouTube videos, more recent ones, podcast appearances, social media feed, and taking that all together we tried to you know 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. You'll notice his noggin appears to already have arrived empty and is instead full of mush, much like the average Austin feminist.

33:41So when a blue hair on the news says that a semi-automatic 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 a piece or approximately four times as much as the average Austin feminist. Yeah, 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.

34:25Yeah, it is so vile what he said about her. and his team is basically trying to write this off as him joking, right? Yeah, 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, Katie 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.

35:01And 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 a political extremism expert who pushed back on that assertion. Tell us more about that. 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 Idris. 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've been consuming a lot of misogynistic online content.

35:48Whether 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. All right, Alison 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.

36:23military 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 President's Wars, 25 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. Peter joins us now. So in your view, is the U.S. repeating the patterns of the post-9-11 era? Pam, thanks for having me on. I'm certainly repeating many of the mistakes that you thought we would have learned from.

37:02So if you look at 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 need a congressional authorization. Not the case with Iran. Third, you need NATO allies. Not the case with Iran. Fourth, you might want a U.N. resolution in favor. Not the case with Iran. And finally, you want a real plan for a day after and a strategy. We seem to have, you know, 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 the state sponsor of terrorism and also to prevent it using nuclear weapons, basically the same rationale that George W.

37:42Bush used in 2003. So 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. So how has the Middle East and the regional dynamic shifted in these past two decades? Well, Pam, I mean, what's fascinating is the official US 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.

38:22They concluded Iran was the only winner of the war. You know, So talk about a spectacular own goal. Yeah. 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? Well, you know, 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. You know, I hope researchers and students have access to this archive, spend a lot of time putting it together, organizing it with the help of archivists.

39:08And then Georgetown has an excellent capacity to digitize this and make it available to researchers around the world. So, you know, 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've 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.

39:42Otherwise, we're doomed to make some of the same mistakes. What would you say are the crown jewels of your collection? Well, there are, you know, a lot of it I started collecting before the Internet was sort of, you know, widely available. So 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. There are a particular fatwa issued by a militant cleric that Bin Laden used to justify his war against American civilians that 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.

40:29And so there's a bunch of materials. You know, it's 150 ,000 pages of material, so it's hard to summarize. Interviews with a number of people who are key to this, who've since died or were murdered or have, which are now available to the public. 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. Well, coming up, it was a very happy holiday. How much money President Trump reportedly gifted his White House aides?

41:07Well, 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 % among Republicans. Here to discuss is former Trump White House Communications Director Mike Dubke, along with Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator Maria Cardona.

41:43Mark, 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? 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 Nobody's listening right now. I have paper. So in terms of taxpayers who owed last year, 97 % of taxpayers got a tax cut of an average of$800.

42:218 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%. 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'll see if it cuts through. You think that's a strong message? First of all, no. And I'll 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.

43:01He'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.

43:38And 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. 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? I mean, how many days are we out from the midterms? 55. If I was running in a very competitive race, I would be in my district.

44:18And 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've 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. 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.

44:54Texas is a ruby red state. The fact that James Tallarico 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 Tallarico, Gina Hinojosa and Democrats. The generic ballot for Democrats were up by six to ten points. A Gallup poll that recently went out there talked about how Americans are identifying 49 percent for Democrats, 39 percent for Republicans.

45:39We're up ten points. We haven't seen those numbers since 2008. And that 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 will say, but I have I have great faith in Texas being as red as the outfits that are sitting next to me. Come November 3rd. It is the day of red. Somehow I'm wearing blue. I don't really I don't really understand this. That's what I am not taking a position to be clear as a journalist. What Texas will become after November. Okay.

46:12We will see. We will see. 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 roughly 32-point margin. What does that tell you about progressives' momentum since those big upsets in New York and in Colorado and Florida? Look, what this tells me, Pam, is that, and everyone likes to divide what has going 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.

46:50They 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.

47:22Most of the times you're seeing the centrists and the moderates are the ones that are winning on our side. And I don't wholly disagree 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. All right. I believe Republicans haven't won a Senate race in 16 years for New Hampshire. So we will see what happens. We'll continue that trend in November.

47:55We'll see, as I keep saying. All right. Mike Dubke, Maria Cardona, thank you both. 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'll get reaction from the man who was the FDNY commissioner on 9-11.

48:20Happening now, key hearing on medication abortion. Right now, a federal appeals court is hearing arguments as Louisiana seeks to clamp down on access to abortion pills. And then later, jurors speak out. We are now hearing details about the contentious deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial from the very people involved. Welcome to our viewers in the United States and around the world. I'm Pamela Brown. Wolf Blitzer is off and you're in the Situation Room.

48:55This is CNN Breaking News. And we begin with that breaking news. Demanding answers. The earliest time of October, the city was making a fiduciary choice to prioritize the economic stability of lower Manhattan over the health and safety of the firefighters, the police officers, the construction workers, and the children that went back to school down there. What we learned was the air was as toxic as we said it was. What we learned is that we were dying with every breath we took down there. What we learned is that the city knew it. And for all those people that said they would never forget, they went through great lengths to making sure you did not know the totality of the situation and what they knew when they made the choice to sacrifice its residents and its first responders for what they believed was the greater good.

49:41And that is the atrocity that happened after 9-11. FDNY firefighters and officers just wrapped up this news conference and they addressed the newly released trove of tens of thousands of documents revealing just how officials misled first responders and residents about the air quality around ground zero. 453 FDNY members have died as a result of World Trade Center related illnesses, they say, surpassing the 343 FDNY members killed on 9-11. And according to a recent FDNY World Trade Center Health Program report, more than 12 ,000 FDNY members have been diagnosed with at least one World Trade Center related illness.

50:22So let's go live now to CNN's Randy Kay. And Randy, you were there listening to just the disappointment and the outrage from these fire officials really understandably. What do they want to see now? They are so angry, Pamela. They are frustrated. And there is really a move now to try and expand and the timeline for those who got sick. They want to try and identify more of the toxins that were down at the World Trade Center area to try and get more coverage. If they can identify the toxins, if somebody gets sick from that toxin and that specific cancer, they can relate it back to the World Trade Center and to the 9-11 attacks, and that would help get some of their members' coverage, because that is not what is happening right now.

51:06But again, you mentioned these 170 ,000 pages of documents that were released, And that is what this press conference was in response to. They said that the officials knew that the air was unsafe, that there were toxins, that the air quality was not safe for first responders, for people, for their children, for families, for anyone living or responding to those attacks. So that is why they came out and spoke today. And they said that for the FDNY, 9-11 did not end on September 11th. They just buried the 453rd member of the FDNY yesterday from a cancer related to 9-11. They said that 200 firefighters have died since the 20th anniversary of 9-11, and we know the 25th anniversary is coming up on this Friday.

51:51They said if there had been earlier truth, earlier screening, there would have been earlier treatment. Now, we heard a little bit from Lieutenant James Brosey there in the introduction, but here's a little bit more of what he had to say today. So when people tell me what could have been done, everything could have been done. Would we have still incurred the same risk? Absolutely. We incurred this risk on a daily basis. And we hedge bets. We know what we got ourselves into. We know what our role is. We know what we're paid for. And we know why we took this job. And we don't do that with hesitation.

52:21But we do it with some understanding that while we're incurring insane personal risk, somebody else is watching the things we can't see. Somebody else is watching our blind side. Somebody else is saying, we will not put you in an area that we can control unnecessarily. And we won't lie to you to do it. And to be fair, they didn't have to lie to us. Because if they'd been more honest, we probably still would have done it. We would have just taken better precautions after the fact.

52:52And the testing showed, according to these documents, that there was regular testing taking place of the air quality down at the World Trade Center area. And it showed that there were dangerous levels of asbestos. There was lead contamination. And yet the firefighters and the first responders were told that the area was safe for them to work. And they were discouraged from actually using respirators as well, Pamela. So what are the next steps now? What are they asking for? Well, as they put it today, they're not asking for anyone's head. They want the rest of the documents released, and they want to make sure that there is coverage for those who joined the FDNY after 9-11, people who went to the academy who maybe used gear that had been contaminated, or children who might have been living down there, or children of FDNY members.

53:44they want to make sure that they get coverage. They want to find these people and create a larger database so they can make sure that people who get sick down the road can relate their cancers to what happened at the World Trade Center. What they want is coverage, and they want a fair shake at making sure that all of their members get that coverage. All right, Randy Kay, thank you so much. And we should note the former FDNY commissioner on 9-11, Thomas von Essen, will join us ahead. Happening now, Lindsay Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, says that he plans to file a motion to stop a retrial after jurors and Clancy's triple murder trial spoke out.

54:20Those jurors told a local TV station in Boston that they were leaning towards finding Clancy not guilty for reason of insanity and not criminally responsible, but said that a single male juror prevented the panel from reaching a verdict, even after they say he admitted he had reasonable doubt. There was so much doubt. You know, the prosecution didn't have a figurative, you know, smoking gun. There was not a single moment throughout that presentation in that case that you could say, oh, yep, 100 percent, I'm certain she did it or that she didn't do it. There's too much gray area. And eventually I just felt like the only way to get justice to work for So Cora Dawson and Callen and Patrick and her parents and everyone else that was closest was to get her the help that she desperately needed.

55:13And there's no way she's getting that help in a person. All right, I'm going to go live now to CNN correspondent Jean Casares. Tell us more about what these jurors are saying, particularly about the lone juror who held out and was the reason for the mistrial, they say. Well, that's interesting because let's touch on that. But the one juror, and this is from NBC Boston, said that he had the hardest time getting off the fact that she viciously killed her children. He had the hardest time getting off of that. Interesting. WBZ, our affiliate, one of the jurors spoke to them. And she was originally leaning toward a conviction.

55:57But I want you to listen closely because she really takes the listener inside that jury deliberation room. Let's listen. So I was a majority of the people on it doesn't matter what side it was on. That was very firm and they're like stamps and their their beliefs kind of from the beginning. um you know the standalone juror was not the only one that was unwilling to to see things from the other side um so i'm gonna kind of defend that individual in a sense um there were some big personalities in that room but at the end of the day i feel like it just came down to an inability to kind of move past your convictions and you know even under that dynamite charge to be unable to self-analyze yourself and be like, okay, am I missing something?

56:57Am I failing to acknowledge or give this the weight of something like this doubt weight that it needs? That person, the majority of the room was trying to kind of sway that person from the very beginning. And then there was the foreperson who spoke out and talked about what they really assessed in that room and about that one juror who just wouldn't switch sides. Take a listen. 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? And with everybody saying she loved her children so much and everything proved she loved her children from her journals to her mother-in-law everything proved that she loved her children so she had to have snapped and he had reasonable doubt he admitted he had reasonable doubt after we watched that video of the interview I think that's what it was 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.

58:07And 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. And the three jurors there that spoke with NBC Boston, they said that they re-listened to the 911 call and that it was so horrific to hear it the first time, more or less the second time, they will live with it forever. And some jurors actually put in their earbuds. They could not listened to it. They loved Kevin Reddington, loved him, thought he was so entertaining, so compassionate to Lindsey Clancy because it was very important. And then the question was asked by NBC Boston, what points did the prosecution make?

58:50They said, we don't believe they made any points at all. Wow. All right, Jean Casares, thank you so much. That was really illuminating hearing from them. Well, happening now, the fight over abortion access is back in court. A federal appeals court is hearing arguments in a case brought by Louisiana aimed at forcing the Trump administration to limit access to medication abortion. Louisiana officials argue the current federal rules allowing women to get abortion drugs in the mail without an in-person appointment undermines states' abortion bans. CNN crime and justice correspondent Caitlin Polance is here in the Situation Room.

59:26So what has stood out so far from this hearing, Caitlin? Well, Pamela, there are skeptical judges that Louisiana, they seem to be skeptical that Louisiana could get what they want here, which is a stop to prescribers, telehealth prescribers primarily prescribing mifepristone in a way that can be mailed into the state of Louisiana for women there. Louisiana had challenged this. It has been in the courts for some time. But what is happening today is there's a big discussion over standing. Is Louisiana actually able to bring a case like this? And one of the things the Trump administration had highlighted in their arguments was that you can't allow a state just because they disagree with the regulations of another state to stop or punish behavior from another state.

1:00:19So the example the administration had given was that California, for instance, couldn't punish a firearms dealer in Louisiana for selling to somebody who was bringing a gun or getting a gun into California. The same reasoning is in this case, where Louisiana, should they be allowed to punish out-of-state providers who are prescribing to women and then having the drug being sent over the mail. There's also another part of this that has been highlighted by at least one of the judges on the panel, that the FDA, the Trump administration, they have been doing a comprehensive review of mifepristone, and one of the judges, Judge Steven Higginson, during the arguments today asked that, he said that the Supreme Court has essentially been consistent that we should be letting the FDA do its work, that this may not be a question for the courts at this time.

1:01:12something that instead the administration will need to figure out whether mifepristone would be allowed to be sent in the mail nationwide. All right, Caitlin Polance, thank you much. Always great to have you on. And still ahead, new hope in cancer detection, how routine blood testing may hold hidden clues about colon cancer. And later, fact-checking President Trump's comments about September 11th. CNN's Daniel Dale will be here to explain where the president says he was on. And after the day of the attack. You're in the Situation Room, and we'll be right back.

1:01:51Well, new CNN reporting just in. A routine blood test may hold unexpected clues into how likely adults under the age of 45 are to develop colon cancer. So let's bring in CNN health reporter Jacqueline Howard with more on this. What exactly does this research show, Jacqueline? It's interesting, Pam. The research shows that two liver enzymes in your blood known as AST and ALT, which usually get tested as part of a routine physical, levels of those liver enzymes may be associated with colorectal cancer risk. Specifically in this analysis done by Epic Research, scientists found that adults with AST levels below a measurement of 14 units per liter were associated with a 65 % higher likelihood of being diagnosed with colorectal cancer before age 45.

1:02:44And those who had ALT levels below 14 were associated with a 68 % higher likelihood. Now, Pam, AST and ALT are typically concerning when they're at high levels because higher levels can indicate liver injury or other issues with the liver or other health issues going on. So to see that low levels were associated with these cancer risks was interesting. And researchers say if you're younger than 45 and you have low AST or low ALT, there's no need to panic. There's no need to rush to get a colonoscopy. clinical guidance still says start screening at age 45. But what these numbers indicate is maybe there's a signal here for scientists to take a closer look at.

1:03:30Is there something behind these low levels that may be associated with colorectal cancer risk? When we see low levels that may be associated with lower muscle mass or a nutritional deficiency, is there anything like that going on that scientists should dig deeper into to get a better understanding of colorectal cancer, specifically at younger ages, Pam. So does this change screening recommendations at all? And what are the circumstances where you would need to get a colonoscopy if you're under 45? Right. Yeah. Again, there's no need to panic. This does not change screening recommendations. In situations where people may be recommended to start screening before age 45, is if you have a personal history or a family history of colorectal cancer, or if you yourself are experiencing symptoms, symptoms to watch for include a sudden change in bowel habits that persists over days, rectal bleeding or blood in your stool or cramping or unintended weight loss.

1:04:32Those are some of the symptoms to look out for. And a lot of times people may dismiss these symptoms, ignore them. So it's important to talk with your doctor if you do experience symptoms, get screened at age 45. And again, Pam, in the meantime, there's this ongoing research happening behind the scenes to really get a better understanding of this cancer type that we're seeing emerge more and more at younger ages. Yeah, very scary. All right, Jacqueline Howard, thank you so much. Well, up next, get ready for a foldable iPhone. Yes, you heard it right. In just hours, Apple will reveal its slate of new products.

1:05:07CNN's Lisa Adichio is following this for us. Lisa? Yes, Pam, we'll be watching for what's expected to be Apple's first foldable iPhone. It could be the biggest change to the iPhone that we've seen in its nearly 20-year history. We'll have more on that coming up soon.

1:05:31Happening now, the pressure is on ahead of today's Apple product launch event. It is the first under new CEO John Ternus, and we're expecting another first, a foldable iPhone. It will also be a chance for Ternus to articulate his vision for Apple's next era. Let's go live now to CNN Business Tech Editor Lisa Adichiko at Apple Park. Lisa, what are you expecting to see today? Yeah, Pam, the big thing we're expecting to see today is Apple's first foldable iPhone. Now, of course, we won't know for sure until the event takes place later today, but that's what we're expecting to be the big headline.

1:06:06And now foldable phones have been around for a while, but this would be the first time that Apple is releasing one. And I think the key here is really kind of seeing what Apple does to push this category forward and potentially bring it into the mainstream. Because currently, foldable phones are really kind of appealing to early adopters and those who are very into the technology, not so much mainstream folks. But there's an expectation that Apple could change that. And also, this is the first major product launch under Apple's new CEO, John Ternus. So there's going to be a lot of eyeballs on this event, not only to see what Apple has in store in terms of products, but to learn more about what Ternus's approach will be like, what his vision will be like.

1:06:50And it seems like launching an entirely new product category like a foldable phone for the first time would really send a message here that, you know, this is a very product-oriented CEO. And that's kind of what we're expecting based on turnus's background in hardware engineering there's this expectation that his tenure will kind of usher in this new era of products for apple and that's following tim cook's tenure which was really focused more on scaling the iphone and operations and of course lots of products launched under tim cook's tenure as ceo but it's been a while since we've seen a wholly new product category so i think that's why there's a lot of excitement here today and Not to mention the iPhone is Apple's most important product.

1:07:35It's its biggest revenue driver. So it's a very, very important product for the company's future as well. Pam. All right, Lisa Adichico, thank you so much. We appreciate it. And just ahead, toxic air concerns. 9-11 records reveal officials misled the public about air safety. The former commissioner of the FDNY during September 11th will join us just ahead.

1:08:02This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.

1:08:16I can hear you.

1:08:23I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people...

1:08:32And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. An iconic moment from President Bush following the attack on the World Trade Center nearly 25 years ago. And this week, we're remembering the lives lost on 9-11 and after. And this morning, union leaders for New York firefighters are demanding answers. They want to find out what government officials knew about these newly released 9-11 reports showing toxic conditions at Ground Zero. That's after more firefighters died from related illnesses than were killed on the day of the attack. 453 in total. Here now is former FDNY Commissioner of New York City, Thomas von Essen.

1:09:14Commissioner, thanks for coming on. You were at Ground Zero on 9-11. I want to play sound of you talking about the loss of firefighters that day. I can't find anybody from five rescues and seven squads. And it's just it's a devastating thing. I don't know. Well, the fire department will recover, but I don't know how. Commissioner, what is your reaction to this new report? Well, I think it's it's not a surprise. And we knew the air around our 16 acres at the Trade Center was horrible. Everybody had respirators and doing the best they could to get them in and out of there. The reports that were just released yesterday, coincidentally, you know, a couple of days before September 11th, I think, kind of shows the malfeasance of government in general, the federal, state, city administrations, 25 years to release medical documents.

1:10:16I was on a panel yesterday with some doctors from Mount Sinai, and they said that that information might have been helpful 24 years ago, 23 years ago, 22 years ago. Why it wasn't released then, I don't know. I certainly had no specific information that we didn't already know about that the air was terrible. The rest of the city, how bad it was in lower Manhattan, whether it was just smelled bad or it was actually putting carcinogens into people's bodies, that certainly wasn't, I certainly wasn't aware of it and it wasn't my role anyway. Do you hold anyone in particular accountable for this? Well, I think we ought to take a look at this stuff and ask those questions.

1:11:00I know if I, I mean, I just worked for FEMA. When I left, I sent some good information about some of the atrocities I saw in Puerto Rico to the New York Times and the Spanish caucus. You know, I think if you're a whistleblower and you did a report like that 25 years ago, shame on you for not getting it out there. Do I think that Mayor Bloomberg or Mayor Giuliani said, hide this, don't let anybody know about it, let's let more people die? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. The union is, I'm not surprised at all. The union, when we were trying to get the guys off the pile 25 years ago, we were having demonstrations saying that we only cared about overtime.

1:11:42And overtime was about the last thing we worried about. The guys wanted to be there. They wanted to look for the brothers that they worked with, for the dedication of the firefighters and the spirit. It just was remarkable at that time. It still is today. Why are you so confident that former mayors weren't hiding it? Oh, I'm not. I mean, I just worked with Giuliani every day, and I think Bloomberg is a remarkable man. When I look at the three after them, I question that. I mean, de Blasio, Adams, and this character who would release these documents three days before. He had them nine months ago, I'm told.

1:12:23Why didn't you just release them then? Why do you have to make this the subject of this year's remembrance? 25 years and you've got all the people agitated. Now they think that it was somebody new about something. Come on. It's just a disgrace. But I'm not surprised at him at all. I think he's a genius using social media and playing people. And I think that's what he's doing. I want to put politics aside here. And we also don't know when he accessed these documents. Of course, we'll be asking. But do you know when these documents were actually produced? No, I haven't seen any of these documents.

1:13:01You know, this is up to the doctors and the lawyers and people who try to find when was it done. Was it done by a reliable medical institution? Was it done by the EPA at the federal level? Was it done? I don't think the city does those kinds of intricate studies. So I don't know who did them, when they did them. This will be another Epstein files where the lawyers and everybody will be screaming about this for a couple of years, probably. Do you have concerns now that these documents are out about your own health? I know the FDNY says that more than 12 ,000 first responders or FDNY members have been diagnosed with World Trade Center related illnesses.

1:13:44Are you impacted as far as you know? Well, more than my own health, I was concerned about my guys and their families. And we took the families down there to visit and to see the site. I've had prostate cancer, melanoma, esophageal issues. I've had them all. But, I mean, I don't go around talking about it. But do you relate that to the World Trade Center and 9-11? Yes, they're all part of the world. I'm part of the World Trade Center health program. We started that before September 11th with a good baseline for firefighters having an annual medical that before me was every eight years. So, I mean, I was always concerned about safety.

1:14:25And it breaks my heart to think that we could have saved more people if we had information. in 2001 or 2002 or 2003. I don't know. I wasn't involved. I mean, we did our job. I was there four months after September 11th, and then we moved on. So, I mean, this is really personal for you. You know, you've had your own health struggles, and now you have these documents coming out talking just about how toxic the air was when publicly there were reassurance given. There was reassurance given to first responders. that it was safe? You cannot imagine how personal it is for me. I was a firefighter in the South Bronx for about 16 years.

1:15:09Then I was in the union, ran the safety program. When I got to be fire commissioner, I changed everything in safety, made more improvements than they had seen in, you know, 50 years before me. I cared so much about firefighter safety, and I was the commissioner who lost more in one day than anybody in history. So believe me, it is really personal to me. There's Nobody cared more before or after than me. But watching this show that's going to go on now between Mondami and all the people blaming people, it just makes it even harder. When I think about the widows and stuff, it's tough. But you've got to deal with it.

1:15:54I'm waiting to listen with us to the president of the FDNY Uniform Fire Officers Association and what he said today about legal liability for the city of New York. As far as like what the city's legal liability is in relation to the victim's compensation fund that already exists, I'm not sure. And I'm not even sure the city is sure. But I would say it was the basis for four administrations turning their back to all of us when we requested the documents. Thankfully, this administration did not let liability outweigh the importance of releasing the documents to the victims of that day. What is your message to first responders, especially those who work in New York as they're processing this information as you are?

1:16:43Well, I agree with them. To give this character credit, I'm not buying that part. He could have released it a year ago. But I agree that this should have been released. And what I don't understand is I'd like to see something that said that we had information that we did not release. I haven't seen that. I saw a deputy commissioner's letter or memo. I'm not sure exactly what it meant, whether it was just, you know, we're going to have issues with health and legal lawsuits and things like that. That's typical in New York City. We have lawsuits for everything. But is there a document that says, oh, my God, this air quality throughout lower Manhattan is going to kill people over the next 20 years?

1:17:25I'd like to see that document. And if it was, then I'd be ashamed of being part of the team that hit it. And I doubt very much if that's the case. Yeah. And just to be clear, Mom Donnie obviously took his oath of office this year. And we don't know when he accessed the documents, as I pointed out. We'll be asking all of that. But former Commissioner Thomas von Essen, as we look ahead to Friday, 25 years since 9-11, so important to hear your voice in this conversation and your reaction to this information coming out. Thank you. Thank you, Pamela. At an event honoring 9-11 first responders yesterday, President Trump shared this new story about his own experiences, he says, happened after the attack.

1:18:06Listen here. I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened and they were they had no hesitation everybody went down with me we went down as a big group of people wasn't too much we could do I'll be honest it was it was raw nobody seen anything like it ever we had other buildings the United States Steel Building was creaking really creaking now we thought it was going to fall down the truth is it creaked a lot it creaked it still creaks but it never came down. And I'll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen, big, strong guys.

1:18:48And I'm not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arms and said, got to get out of here. And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, fellas, I can run myself. But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. it didn't come down, the U.S. deal. And when asked for any evidence or additional details on the president's claims there, the White House did not provide any. Trump has long told false or unproven stories about his experiences on and shortly after 9-11. So on that note, I want to bring in CNN's Daniel Dale, who looked into this story.

1:19:26He joins us now. Daniel, what did you find when you looked into what Trump has said? I found that some of the president's story lacks evidence, while other parts are misleading at best. So what's misleading? I think he at least left open the impression that this supposed firefighter semi-rescue happened on 9-11 itself. We know that he was not at ground zero or in the vicinity on 9-11. He was at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. That's miles away. Now, he did say on True Social last night that of course he went down to ground zero in the following days, but I don't think that was clear in his public remarks earlier yesterday.

1:20:02Also misleading, I think he conjured the image of himself trapped in a building like so many people were trapped in the Twin Towers when he talked about firefighters saying, we've got to get out of here. We thought the building was going to come down on top of us. There is no hint of evidence that he was in this building, One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, even in the days after 9-11. Now, it is true that there were public fears that that building would collapse at some point. We know that rescue workers did rush away from it. We know that Trump was somewhere in the neighborhood of ground zero in the following day.

1:20:34So is it theoretically possible he was swept up in one of these panics? Yes, but the White House and nobody else has provided any evidence for that. And then what else lacks evidence? Well, the larger premise of the story is that he took this large group of workers down to ground zero to assist with the rescue recovery. He's told this for years now. There has never been a shred of evidence for that either. A retired New York Fire Department battalion chief told the New York Times and PolitiFact in 2019 that if there was this 100 strong crew that Trump has repeatedly said he had actually there on at ground zero, there would be a record of that.

1:21:09There would be logs of that. And also that it wouldn't make sense for a private crew like when organized by, you know, a businessman and celebrity developer to have been on the site. So no proof of that. Other parts misleading. And so this is another story from the president of many stories he's told about 9-11 that has so far at least not held up to scrutiny. Daniel Dale, thank you so much. And coming up here in the Situation Room, the eyes of the cartels, how smugglers are using drones to keep tabs on the U.S. border from miles away. A CNN investigation is next.

1:21:46new cnn reporting and analysis of hundreds of videos and state detection data reveal how cartels and criminal groups use drones to monitor u.s law enforcement and support suspected smuggling operations and why authorities struggle to counter them here with us in the situation room is cnn's priscilla alvarez with her new reporting what did you find in this investigation priscilla well Well, Pamela, our team found that cartels and criminal groups are using drones equipped with cameras to expand their smuggling operations. And this is evident just by looking at social media, where there were hundreds of videos that were recording some of these suspected smuggling operations of people or drugs.

1:22:27And what was extraordinary is that these drones don't have to be in American airspace. In fact, they can fly in Mexico and look inland to the U.S., as you see there, in that case, trying to evade U.S. Border Patrol. Now, we went to the location of one of those suspected smuggling operations. This was in Laredo, Texas, which shares a border with Mexico. And where, Pamela, on the Mexico side, there has been more than 600 percent increase in drone detections over a three-year period. Take a look at what we found. Many of the drone videos we reviewed looked like this one, capturing what appears to be an illegal crossing of the border.

1:23:09Drone flying inside Mexico is monitoring a group of people running up from the Rio Grande into a getaway car in the U.S. The car pulls up at the exact moment the group reaches the dirt road, and within a matter of seconds, the car takes off. That video happened right here. We geolocated it to the city of Laredo, Texas. We came to visit the location and within seconds of arriving, we briefly spot a drone flying overhead. You see it? This is the path that people came up in that video that you just saw. The river is behind me and Mexico is just on the other side. Current and former law enforcement officials as well as experts, they all say when there are hundreds of drone detections in an area like this, the conclusion they draw is that it is to smuggle people or drugs.

1:23:55Now we also went with the Webb County Sheriff's Office along the border to see what areas they've noticed the greatest concentration of these drone detections and also these smuggling operations. These are the nearby cartel they say has thousands of drones. The Webb County Sheriff's Office has two. Now, in a statement, federal authorities, specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said, quote, that cartels increasingly exploit drugs for drones, sorry, for smuggling operations and monitoring law enforcement and that DHS has given them counter drone authorities. But what became clear, Pamela, in our investigation is that federal authorities and local law enforcement are still well behind the way that cartels and criminal groups are using these drones across the U.S.-Mexico border.

1:24:39Priscilla Avarez, thank you so much for that important reporting. You can watch Priscilla's full piece later today on The Lead with Jake Tapper airs at 5 p.m. Eastern. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. You can keep up with us on social media at Wolf Blitzer and at Pamela Brown. CNN will see you back here tomorrow morning inside politics with our friend and colleague Casey Hunt starts after a quick break.

1:25:10Let's have I got news for your ears. The podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. We are talking about Jensen Huang's NVIDIA spy scandal. Trump goes on 60 Minutes. Stephen Miller is finally in charge. And is this curtains for Pete Hegset? Have I got news for your ears? Check us out on Apple, Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcasts. Even better, you can watch the podcast on Spotify. Thank you.