New evidence: How Trump's Jan. 6, 2021 rally was funded | The Excerpt

Oct 23, 2024

On Saturday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: New evidence has been unsealed into how former President Donald Trump's Jan. 6 rally was funded. USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless looks back on a busy week in extremism. A drone found Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. His DNA showed he hid with hostages. USA TODAY Economics and Jobs Reporter Paul Davidson talks about a slowdown in hiring and how some employers are asking their current employees to do more.

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 Saturday, October 19th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, new evidence unsealed of how Donald Trump's January 6th, 2021 rally was funded. Plus we take a look back on a busy week in extremism news, and why companies are hiring less.

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New records released in the federal election interference case against former president Donald Trump described how money was spent on Trump's Stop the Steal rally near the White House on January 6th, 2021. The revelations were among 1,900 pages of evidence for federal charges against Trump that he tried to steal the 2020 election. The evidence also includes details of how his supporters spent election night at the White House, and how Trump reacted to the riot at the Capitol. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan is weighing the evidence to determine whether Trump is immune to federal charges based on a Supreme Court ruling in July. Trump opposed the release as an example of prosecutors publishing cherry-picked materials that would prejudice potential jurors and endanger potential witnesses three weeks before the election. B`ut Judge Chutkan ruled that keeping the documents confidential could also be considered election interference. The newly released documents show that an unnamed organization budgeted as much as $3 million on the January 6th rally and related events, including for bringing VIP guests and protesters to Washington, and ad buys for a show of force. You can read more with the link in today's show notes.

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It's been a busy week in the news when it comes to extremism in America. From a California State House candidate's past spreading an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to findings about US military members increasingly turning to extremism. I caught up USA TODAY National Correspondent Will Carless to discuss. Will, how are you today? Thanks for hopping on the show.

Will Carless:

Doing good. Thanks for having me on.

Taylor Wilson:

So Will, another busy week in the news of extremism. Let's start with Denise Aguilar. Who is she, what's she running for in California, and really what's this controversial history?

Will Carless:

I first found out about her a few months ago when I was contacted by members of the Sedition Hunters, that's the volunteer sleuths that are hunting down people who were at January 6th and who went into the building. And they claimed that they had identified this lady, who is now running for a state assembly seat in Los Angeles. And she's the GOP front-runner. She's going up against her democratic rival in November. She's not expected to win, but she could win, and she's a, gosh, how do you describe Denise Aguilar? She's essentially a right wing extremist, I think it's fair to say. She's been a COVID denier, she was involved in a militia, and as our reporting found out a couple of months ago, she also went into the capitol on January 6th, and then we just learned some new stuff about her this week as well.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, in terms of that new stuff, what are we learning about her history spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

Will Carless:

So the left-leaning think tank, Media Matters for America, found a video of Aguilar's from 2019, where she claimed that part of the power grid in California were turned off in 2019, not to prevent fires that were raging at the time, but actually to stop the Rothschild's, a very famous prominent Jewish family, from trafficking children. It's obviously complete nonsense. It's utterly ridiculous. It's the sort of thing that gets passed around far right extremist message boards. But it just shows the milieu that this lady has been acting in over the last few years.

Taylor Wilson:

And meanwhile, Will, we also heard this week that members of the US military are increasingly turning to extremist ideologies after they've served the country. What did we really learn from this Associated Press reporting, and did this surprise you?

Will Carless:

Definitely didn't surprise me. I mean, this is a story that we've been covering for the last two or three years, really since January 6th. As soon as it was clear how many people who were involved with January 6th had military backgrounds, and I believe the numbers about one in 10, we've done a lot of reporting on this. I spent much of 2023 looking at the military's response to this. In the wake of January 6th, the new defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, put out a call basically calling for all sorts of reforms. He started a working group to come up with all sorts of solutions and recommendations to try and stamp out extremism. And as my reporting showed in 2023, almost all of that didn't happen. And so a lot of these reforms that were promised never came about.

What the Associated Press story does is it looks in a new way at a set of data, compiled by researchers at the University of Maryland, and shows that the rate at which people are becoming involved in extremism is more amplified if people have a military background. And that really reinforces past research that shows that there's a pretty strong correlation between people who get involved in extremist groups and people who've had military backgrounds. I don't, for the first minute, want to say that the millions of people who serve this country are overwhelmingly involved in extremism. Of course they're not, it's a fraction of the people who serve in the military, but of the people who get involved with extremism, there is a strong correlation with having a military background.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. And separately, Will, this week comes on the heels of a disturbing story out of Florida from last Sunday, when a boat joined a floating Trump rally, carrying, I guess swastika flags. What exactly happened here, Will, and how did others at the event respond?

Will Carless:

This is a group that is always doing things like this. Every few months, they will pop up and they'll do a rally or a march carrying swastika flags, they'll shout anti-Semitic slogans, they'll shout things like, "White power," and, "See Kyle," and things like that. They do it to get attention. I don't want to name them, people can read about it if they want to, but this group showed up at a floating Trump rally, a boat rally, with hundreds of boats where they flew both Trump flags and Nazi swastika flags. I think it's important to note that they were immediately reviled and shouted at and even splashed by other members of the Flotilla. Also, an organizer of the event called them scum in a Facebook page. So very clear that they weren't welcome, but nevertheless, they wanted to get their white supremacist viewpoint across, and they got a lot of headlines by doing so.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, another busy week on your beat. You cover extremism and emerging issues for USA TODAY. I appreciate the care that you bring to these stories and the info, Will. Thanks so much.

Will Carless:

See you again soon. Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Almost two months before Israel's military accidentally located Hamas's leader with the help of a drone, then killed him. Yahya Sinwar had been hiding in southern Gaza with six Israeli hostages, one of them an American citizen. The bodies of the hostages were recovered by Israel's military in late August, after they were executed by their captors in a near-miss rescue effort by the Israel Defense forces. That incident set off a wave of protests and widespread criticisms of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including from inside his own country. The revelation first reported this week by Israel's Channel 12 broadcaster, and confirmed to USA TODAY by a person familiar with the matter yesterday, comes amid intense speculation over who might succeed Sinwar as the leader of Hamas, and ultimately what impact his death will have on the pace and intensity of the war in Gaza, including whether it will accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire and hostage deal. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas's political wing, said yesterday in a statement that Sinwar's death did not mark the end of the organization, and that the group cannot be eliminated. Hamas's Lebanon-based ally, Hezbollah, vowed to escalate its fight with Israel after Sinwar's death. And Iran, which backs both groups with finance and weapons, said Sinwar's death would strengthen regional resistance to Israel.

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With the economy cooling, companies are hiring less and asking employees to do more. I rang up USA TODAY Economics and Jobs Reporter Paul Davidson to discuss. Paul, thanks for making the time today.

Pau Davidson:

My pleasure.

Taylor Wilson:

So Paul, it's clear that companies are hiring less. Really, what do the numbers say here?

Pau Davidson:

The companies are hiring, it looks like about 5.3 million workers, which was August, and that's actually below pre-pandemic levels. If you think about the great resignation, you think about the hot economy following the pandemic, people were hiring like crazy. Hiring I think was near record levels, way above pre-pandemic levels. And then the economy's cooled, sales have cooled. Meanwhile, costs are still pretty high for businesses. Labor costs went up a lot last few years, material costs, inflation was very strong, so they basically had to pull back hiring, both because demand has ebbed some, and their costs remain high. Hiring is, it's not bad, it's not historically at a very, very low level, but it's below pre-pandemic levels, which is noteworthy.

Taylor Wilson:

And Paul, as you write, lots of businesses grappling with some of these issues are really instead training existing employees to handle new tasks instead of hitting the job market and bringing new folks in. I'm curious what impact that's having on the workforce, and what do we hear from workers?

Pau Davidson:

They feel like they have workers there who are already doing the job, and in some cases doing jobs that were related to the jobs they're trying to fill. And so in a lot of cases, they're just saying, "Hey, you used to operate the CNC computerized factory machine, and you used to have another person bringing you the tools and setting the tools for you in the machine. Why don't you now supply your own tools to the machine, because the guy or the gal who's supplying you those tools has now left? And rather than us filling that role, our profits are squeezed, can you please do this job?" And so they're training them to do those sorts of things. That's just one example.

In most cases, workers, if you look at the employers I talk to, they're pretty amenable to doing it. I mean, at least that's what I'm hearing. In other cases, I've heard that there are issues in a manufacturing environment where your workforce is unionized. In some cases, unions are raising some issues. At least in some cases, employees are also not thrilled with the idea of, "Hey, you're going to give me a bunch of stuff to do, but you're not, at least right away, raising my pay." So I know of at least one case in a manufacturing environment in Indiana where the employees really didn't want to take on these new tasks, so they got laid off.

I think in a professional services environment, it's a little more informal, maybe more collegial, and I think the employees are taking on these tasks. I think a lot of times they look at it as, "Hey, I'm beefing up my resume, I'm learning a new skill, and it can help me advance in my career." They're doing it even if they don't necessarily get a pay increase right away. They think that's going to come. And meanwhile, they're expanding their knowledge base and maybe helping them down the road.

Taylor Wilson:

What's the expectation for what's next in terms of hiring and firing in America moving into the new year?

Pau Davidson:

The job market is supposed to continue to cool for a while. You have inflation come down, but still prices are up there. Meanwhile, consumers and workers, they've had all this pandemic money. They had stimulus checks, they had money they saved up from not going out during the pandemic. All that is sort of dissipated, and inflation is still kind of high. So consumer spending is not bad, it hasn't tanked, but it was really growing a lot and now it's growing a lot less strongly, and for low-to-middle-income consumers, they have really high debt levels. If you're a higher income person, hey, you're still spending pretty strongly, but if you are low to middle income, you got all this debt, delinquencies are at about a 12-year high, mostly because of those low-to-middle income.

Now, the Fed is cutting interest rates, right? So that's a major factor there that should be helping, because high interest rates, that means you drive up cost of car loans, of credit card bills, mortgages. As those start to come down, that should be helping. Monthly job growth has been running, I think, around 200,000 the last few months. It's down from where it was. It's going to continue to fall maybe to around 100,000 into next year. So it's going to be this kind of a situation for a while before it starts to pick up, hopefully maybe by the second half of next year, as interest rates really significantly come down. And that should give another jolt to the economy to things like home buying and buying cars and things like that.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Paul Davidson covers economics and jobs for USA TODAY. Listeners can find a link to more of Paul's work in today's show notes. Thank you, Paul.

Pau Davidson:

My pleasure. Thanks, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

America's job market bounced back last month as US employers added 254,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number was higher than the average monthly gain of 203,000 over the previous 12 months, according to the bureau, and the strongest reading since March.

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College football's popularity is skyrocketing. And so too, is coaches' pay. Georgia Football Coach Kirby Smart is now the highest paid, raking in $13 million a year. How can universities afford such exorbitant paychecks, and what ethical questions does this raise? USA TODAY Sports Reporter Tom Schad joins me tomorrow on The Excerpt to discuss. You can find the episode beginning at 5:00 A.M. Eastern Time, right here on this feed.

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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. 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.