On (day of week)’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: President-elect Donald Trump continues sketching out what his next presidency will look like. USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless discusses Donald Trump’s promises about pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, and what such pardons would potentially mean for the far right movement. A New York court suspends all current deadlines in Donald Trump’s New York hush money case. USA TODAY Supreme Court Correspondent Maureen Groppe looks at the future of several issues circling the high court. The Pentagon classified document leaker has been sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning, I’m Taylor Wilson and today is Wednesday, November 13th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.
Today, a look at some of Trump’s latest cabinet picks plus what Trump’s promises about pardoning January 6th insurrectionists might mean for the future of the far right movement. And we take a look at what’s next for several major issues circling the Supreme Court.
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President-elect. Donald Trump continues to build his next administration, tapping trusted allies to serve as advisors and cabinet members. In one of his latest moves Trump announced he’s nominating former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as his U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee is a Baptist minister and former Fox News host who has run for the Republican presidential nomination twice, unsuccessfully. Senator Marco Rubio is expected to be named the next secretary of state according to the New York Times and CNN. Rubio is the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was a finalist to be Trump’s running mate. He would be the first Latino to serve in the position.
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Meanwhile, Trump said yesterday, he’s tapped tech billionaire, Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and former Republican presidential contender, Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a new department of government efficiency that will work to slash federal government spending, waste and regulations. In other roles, Trump has appointed Tom Homan to oversee deportation policy and aviation security. Homan was a border patrol agent for 34 years and served in Trump’s first administration as acting ice director. He drew controversy for strict immigration enforcement, including the zero tolerance policy which separated families of undocumented immigrants. And Trump has appointed Lee Zeldin as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA. Trump today will make his first visit to Capitol Hill since winning the White House, for a meeting with congressional GOP leaders and he’s expected to meet with President Joe Biden. For more on Trump’s preparations for another term, check out a link in today’s show notes.
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Donald Trump has promised to pardon January 6th insurrectionists and experts say that would send a strong signal of support to America’s far right movement. I spoke with USA TODAY national correspondent Will Carless for more. Will, thanks for making some time on this.
Will Carless:
Thanks for having me on.
Taylor Wilson:
So Will, let’s just put this kind of in context before we get to the Trump part of this. How many people have been convicted and jailed for their actions on or related to January 6th, 2021? What have we seen in recent years?
Will Carless:
So the number of people charged is over 1500 at this point, a lot of which have made plea deals or been convicted. A handful have been acquitted, but the final figure that I got from George Washington University was 663 people who have been jailed for January 6th, and there are still, as of today, 200 sitting in federal prisons. And that doesn’t count people who have been sentenced to prison but haven’t yet been assigned a facility or actually shown up for their sentence.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. Okay. So what has President-elect Donald Trump then said about pardoning some of these folks?
Will Carless:
Well, his rhetoric has become stronger and stronger in this regard. He’s done his Trump thing where he’ll sort of take it on and respond to questions, but never quite fully answer the question. So, for example, he was asked in August at a conference of black journalists whether he would pardon the January 6th rioters and he said, “Absolutely I would.” And then he sort of added, “If they’re innocent, I would pardon them.” We of course, asked the Trump campaign, I’ve asked them twice, to sent them pretty detailed questions about who would be pardoned and why, and they’ve sent me back the same one sentence response in both cases, which simply says that “President Trump will make decisions on a case-by-case basis.” So not quite clear. I mean a lot of people think that he might be pressured into pardoning all the January 6th rioters. He may only do a handful, he may not do any, but he’s certainly edging towards pardoning more rather than fewer, I would say.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. Well, will we know Trump rhetoric and action can be two different things. I mean, do we expect this as a reality during his administration? Can he do what he’s claimed here? I mean, what do the legal experts say on this?
Will Carless:
Well, I’ll put my analyst hat on for a second, but I think in this case I will sort of conglomerate what I’ve been told by people I’ve been talking to, and nobody’s quite sure, but people do agree that he is in a pretty sticky situation if he chooses not to pardon anybody. Remember that Trump himself has spent the last, really four years, trying to rewrite history when it comes to January 6th, along with a slew of conservative talk show hosts and news anchors and influencers who have tried to pretend that January 6th was this sort of peaceful meeting of the minds and this protest that has been unjustly prosecuted by a biased FBI. As somebody who was there that day, I can tell you that’s complete nonsense. You can watch the videos for yourselves. More than 150 police officers were injured. But nevertheless, that is the line. That is the story that Trump and others have spun up around the January 6th insurrection.
And so if you follow that to its logical conclusion, here’s a man who has power to pardon these people. His claim has been that they’ve done nothing wrong and that they’ve been impacted by an unfair judicial system and legal system. It stands to reason that he would follow through and say, right, we’re going to let these people out. But as one of the people I talked to, Rachel Carroll Rivas, who heads the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out, there’s a big difference between what politicians say on the campaign trail and what they actually enact once they get into power. And so it’s possible that more moderate voices get to Trump and he decides not to do this. If he does pardon them then, as Rachel said, it really gives a strong indication as to how he plans to govern moving forwards if he lets all of these insurrectionists out of prison
Taylor Wilson:
Will, if he were to undergo mass pardons in this way surrounding January 6th, what would this mean for the country’s far right movements more broadly?
Will Carless:
That’s the real gist of my story, is that this is a movement that has had a lot of the oxygen sucked out of it over the last two or three or four years. Really, January 6th was a serious reckoning for America’s far right extremist movement. You saw leaders from the movement, the really big powerful leaders, put in prison, a lot of them. And you saw what I like to refer to as the brands of the far right, particularly the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. You saw those brands lose a lot of their cachet and a lot of their power in the months and the years after January 6th and the prosecutions. And you also saw the far right in general really center a warning shot. Look, if you come out in public and you behave badly and you break laws, then the Justice Department will come after you federally and you will go to prison.
So a pardon or a series of pardons and sliding scale as to how big those pardons are and how many there are, would have many people think a corollary effect on that movement. It will send a message to America’s far right that look, whatever you do, whether it’s right down to seditious conspiracy and you’re sent to prison for 22 years, it can be pardoned and we’re okay with it and we are sending a message that we are supportive of that sort of action. And that is of serious concern to scholars and to watchers of America’s far right, that they could be really emboldened by these pardons
Taylor Wilson:
Will Carless covers extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. Thank you Will.
Will Carless:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
A New York Court has suspended all current deadlines in Trump’s New York hush money case, including a scheduled November 26th sentencing on his 34 felony convictions. Judge Juan Merchan was scheduled to issue a decision yesterday on whether the Supreme Court’s broad presidential immunity ruling means Trump’s felony convictions must be tossed out. But the pause on the case until November 19th, which was made public yesterday, means that ruling will not come this week. It’s unclear what the new decision to pause the current deadlines means for whether Trump will ever be sentenced. Merchan ordered prosecutors to provide an update on their views of how to proceed in the case in light of Trump’s presidential election victory.
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A new Trump administration could change course on a number of Supreme Court cases. I spoke with USA TODAY’s Supreme Court correspondent, Maureen Groppe, to break them down. Hello, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Hello, how are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. Good. Thanks for hopping back on The Excerpt today. So Maureen, we’re beginning think about what a Trump win might mean for the Supreme Court and surrounding some key issues. Let’s start with transgender care. What’s the latest around some of these issues in the courts and how do we expect a new Trump term to influence them?
Maureen Groppe:
Well, one of the most high profile cases the Supreme Court is considering this term is the constitutionality of measures that about half the states have taken to prevent transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy. The Biden administration challenged Tennessee’s ban and the Supreme Court is set to hear all oral arguments in that case next month, but it could be months after that, before the Supreme Court issues its opinion. And before they do, the Trump administration could tell the court that the Justice Department has changed positions. That would be unusual to happen after the case has been argued. But Trump made opposition to transgender rights a central theme to his campaign so we’ll have to see what he wants to do about this.
Taylor Wilson:
Maureen, we know the issue of abortion has become a major debate across the country. It could be headed back to the justices. What’s the expectation here?
Maureen Groppe:
One abortion issue that could come back to the court is the Biden administration’s challenge to Idaho’s strict abortion ban. The administration says that that ban conflicts with a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing care, which includes abortions if those are needed to prevent serious health consequences. This issue came before the Supreme Court earlier this year, but the justices sent it back to the Appeals Court for further review. And if the Appeals Court sides with the Biden administration, the Trump administration could just drop the challenge if Idaho appeals that decision to the Supreme Court
Taylor Wilson:
And as the country continues to grapple with gun violence, so-called ghost guns have been at the center of a lot of debates. What’s next here, Maureen and what might be the Trump administration’s influence?
Maureen Groppe:
So the ghost guns are weapons that are put together from kits that don’t have serial numbers. And people who buy the kits don’t have to pass background checks, or at least they didn’t have to do that the way they do with the fully manufactured gun until the Biden administration changed that. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to those regulations last month. And this case is not about the Second Amendment, but whether the administration correctly applied existing law to regulate these weapons. And it actually sounded like the justices might be willing to uphold the rules, but even if they do, the Trump administration could just repeal the rules once Trump takes office. We don’t know if he’s going to do that or not. The gun rights groups are expecting him to do that based on promises that they say that he made to them about undoing various gun regulations. But we don’t know for sure what the Trump administration will do.
Taylor Wilson:
As you outline in this piece, Maureen, we’ve already seen this kind of whiplash in the courts across the last few administrations from Trump to Biden. Now we’re going back to Trump. How has this played out and what might this tell us about the next four years?
Maureen Groppe:
This change of positions doesn’t happen on every case, but it can happen on some big ones. And the last time Trump was president, his Justice Department reversed positions on several issues and they still won those cases. The Biden administration did some of its own reversals when it took office. What we don’t know is how much these switching positions matter. In other words, do the justices take them into account when they’re deciding a case or would they make the same decision regardless? That’s something we can’t peek behind the curtain to know.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Maureen Groppe covers the Supreme Court for USA TODAY. Thank you, Maureen.
Maureen Groppe:
Thanks for having me.
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Taylor Wilson:
A Massachusetts Air National Guard member was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in prison for violating the Espionage Act by sharing hundreds of classified documents on social media. The security lapse led to punishment for 15 service members. Twenty-two-year-old Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira pleaded guilty in March to six counts of willful retention of defense records for sharing classified documents through the social media platform Discord. The leak’s exposed embarrassing secrets and analysis from across the U.S. intelligence community involving Russia’s War in Ukraine and North Korea’s race to develop nuclear weapons.
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While the U.S. is on the whole, a wealthy country, currently one in eight Americans is food insecure. Meanwhile, more than a third of food produced goes uneaten or unsold, and most of that ends up in landfills where it becomes a big contributor to climate change. Is there a way to solve these two problems together by simply using the food surplus to feed more people instead of sending it to landfills? ReFED, president Dana Gunders joins my colleague Dana Taylor this afternoon, beginning at 4:00PM Eastern Time to dig into the issue.
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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you’re on a smart speaker, just ask for the Excerpt. I’m Taylor Wilson and I’ll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.