Speaker Mike Johnson pushes Ethics Committee to keep Matt Gaetz report secret | The Excerpt
On Saturday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says he will request the House Ethics Committee not release a potentially damaging report on the conduct of President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for attorney general - former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz. Trump's Defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth was involved in a 2017 sexual assault probe. Paste BN Congress and Campaigns Reporter Savannah Kuchar looks at what's next for Democrats after a rough November. Jake Paul defeated Mike Tyson by unanimous decision in their highly anticipated boxing bout. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses how scientists revived frogs in Yosemite lakes.
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, November 16th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, the House speaker pushes the ethics committee to keep a Matt Gaetz report secret. Plus what's next for Democrats after their rough November. And how scientists helped revive frogs at Yosemite National Park.
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Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said yesterday he will request the House Ethics Committee to not release a potentially damaging report on the conduct of former Florida Congressman, Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Attorney General. Johnson told reporters and comments first reported by Politico and CNN that releasing the report would be a terrible precedent to set. Gaetz, a firebrand, conservative and trusted Trump ally resigned Wednesday from Congress shortly after his nomination to lead the Justice Department and two days before the Ethics Committee was set yesterday to consider the release of a report on the panel's three-year investigation into Gaetz.
The probe, which effectively ended with Gaetz's resignation covered allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, accepting improper gifts, and giving out special favors to individuals with whom he had relationships. Johnson said he plans to talk to House Ethics Chairman, Republican Congressman Michael Guest about the matter according to a CNN report. Gaetz has said he does not plan to make the report public. President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Defense Secretary was involved in a 2017 sexual assault investigation, police have confirmed. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran was nominated this week to lead the nation's military.
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Thursday evening, city officials in Monterey, California released a statement confirming his involvement in an investigation into an alleged sexual assault. Fox News did not immediately respond to Paste BN's request for comment. Attorney Timothy Parlatore who identified himself as representing Hegseth, said the police department's news release shows, "There was an allegation that was fully investigated and Mr. Hegseth was cleared of any wrongdoing." In response to a Paste BN inquiry about the alleged 2017 incident, the Trump campaign yesterday defended the President-elect's administration's election as high caliber. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries yesterday held a press conference where among a number of issues, he discussed the future for Democratic lawmakers in the next Congress.
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Hakeem Jeffries:
House Democrats in the new Congress will work to find bipartisan common ground whenever and wherever possible with the incoming administration in a manner consistent with our values, but at the same time, always push back whenever necessary against far right extremism that will hurt the American people.
Taylor Wilson:
After losing the White House and both chambers of Congress this month, Democrats on Capitol Hill are looking for a way forward as the minority. I spoke with Paste BN Congress and Campaigns reporter Savannah Kuchar for more. Hello Savannah.
Savannah Kuchar:
Hi.
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for popping on today. So Democrats are trying to put this election loss in the rearview mirror as we look toward next year, Savannah really, who are the leaders for Democrats as we move to 2025?
Savannah Kuchar:
Yeah, so that's a great question and some of the people I talked to, some democratic strategists say they're still trying to figure that out. 2024 was a pretty big loss for them kind of across the board. And so yeah, in terms of who's going to be the leadership next year, you do have, of course in Congress still current Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries expected to continue in that role. But in terms of the party at large, President Joe Biden will be leaving office in January along with Vice President Harris being kind of seemingly sidelined, by her recent defeat, it leaves to the leadership vacuum. So we'll have to kind of see what happens there.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, in terms of the current stars of the party, I mean, who do we look to and who are the kind of young up-and-comers that Democrats might be circling?
Savannah Kuchar:
Yeah, so there are a few names definitely being kind of tossed around, like you said, specifically young up-and-comers. Some people I talked to said this is really a moment for younger lawmakers to step up and take the spotlight in some respects. Some are names we've already been hearing, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Representative Maxwell Frost, who was the first Gen Z member of Congress ever elected. And people like that are going to be people to watch as they return for another term and potentially grow their national profile.
Taylor Wilson:
Savannah, Republicans have this full trifecta control in Washington next year. I'm curious how important it is for Democrats really in this short, medium term to have folks who can play ball with Republicans considering the GOP will have this full control in Washington.
Savannah Kuchar:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going to be important. They are the minority in both the House and the Senate now, but I think the real question will be, do they try to strike compromises and find deals with Republicans? Of course, that would be the goal of finding common ground to get legislation forward, but it'll be a question of where and when and at what point do they push back against the Republican majority. And that's something that I think Democrats that I talked to are still kind of looking at for the future as far as the path forward in that respect.
Taylor Wilson:
Savannah, you had an interesting quote from Senator Bernie Sanders in this piece. He said, "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."
I'm curious what this reflects about the Democratic Party right now, if it was surprising to hear Sanders say that. And just kind of what this tells us about Democrats going into 2025.
Savannah Kuchar:
Yeah, so Senator Sanders had that scathing commentary coming right off the results of the 2024 election. He put out from a lengthy statement giving his review of what happened with Democrats this year. And it is probably one of the strongest comments to come out from the left. Yet as far as the Democratic Party at whole, what it means for them, lawmakers I talked to said that they're still focused on working for Americans. They still have their priorities, including working for working Americans and working families and still have those priorities. But I think a lot of this is still just unclear as Democrats try to figure out what their path forward is.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. More questions than answers for now. Savannah Kuchar covers Congress and campaigns for Paste BN. Thank you, Savannah.
Savannah Kuchar:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
Jake Paul beat Mike Tyson by unanimous decision last night in a boxing bout live-streamed by Netflix and held in front of more than 70,000 spectators at AT&T Stadium in Texas. The fight was something of an oddity featuring one of the sport's legends, Mike Tyson up against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul. And of course there was the crucial wrinkle, Tyson is 58 years old while Paul is 27. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul beat Tyson, though somewhere surprised Tyson was able to last the full length before losing on decision. It was Paul's biggest moment in a boxing career that started less than five years ago. He improved his career record to 11-1, Tyson's career record falls to 50-7.
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Frogs in Yosemite National Park were dying, but scientists revived them. I spoke with Paste BN national correspondent Elizabeth Weise to find out how. Howdy Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Hey, how's it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for hopping on today. So let's just kind of run chronologically through this interesting piece here, Beth. I'm curious what has happened really in this region, in this part of Yosemite National Park over I guess the past century with non-native fish and this kind of fish stocking in these lakes.
Elizabeth Weise:
So you go to these lakes and they are so beautiful. Oh, my goodness. And you think, wow, I'm looking at this vista and nothing has changed here in a thousand years. But if you were to stick your head underwater, a lot has changed. So it turns out that these lakes are naturally fish-free. Like high Sierra lakes, way high Alpine lakes, these lakes don't have fish in them. They never have. What they had was a ton of Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs. However, it turns out during the gold rush, of course, all these Westerners arrived in California and they were up there looking for gold and they were hiking around, and a lot of them came from Europe.
So Europe has a lot of alpine lakes as well, and many of them also did not naturally have fish, but people who've been stocking those lakes with fish for centuries. So they just thought, there are these beautiful lakes that don't have fish in them. Why don't they open fish in them? We want to fish here. And so they started bringing up fingerling, mostly different kinds of trout and stocking the lakes so that the lakes would have fish in them so that they could fish there.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Beth, you mentioned these frogs. What happened next? How did this affect the frogs and really the overall ecosystem?
Elizabeth Weise:
You have this lake ecosystem that has evolved not to have fish in it, but there are these Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frogs, tens of thousands of them. I mean, we've got early settlers writing about how you'd walk up to one of these lakes, there'd be all these frogs around the edges sunning themselves, and as you walked up, they would get scared and there was just this kind of avalanche of frogs jumping into the water. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of frogs everywhere. And they were the top-level predator in these lakes, these frogs.
Taylor Wilson:
So another interesting twist of this story is when fungus comes into the tail, what happened here and how did this affect the frogs and make things even worse before I guess they got better?
Elizabeth Weise:
Exactly, yes. And it's kind of this double whammy. So first we had the introduction of non-native fish species into these alpine lakes starting in the 1870s, and they killed off a lot of the amphibian species that existed in these lakes. And then just as we were starting to figure out, oh, maybe we should stop putting fish in these lakes and let the native frog species come back, this highly virulent fungus, it's called the Amphibian chytrid fungus shows up. It has really harmed frog and other amphibious species around the globe. It's kind of everywhere. And we're seeing huge die-offs of frogs and amphibians globally. It got to the Sierra Nevada in the '90s, the few yellow-legged frogs that hadn't been killed off by the fish suddenly started dying off because of the fungus.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so in comes Roland Knapp and a bunch of other scientists over the last few decades, tell us about this work that he and his team have done and really just finding some of these remnant populations. And there's another twist here, Beth, may be fungus resistant as well.
Elizabeth Weise:
These poor biologists who were just so depressed because they like the frogs and they like the ecosystems and they're just kind of dying in front of them. But they're up there, they're recording what's happening, and they think they're kind of recording the extinction of a species. And instead, they started to notice that in the very few lakes where there weren't fish, so there was no fish to eat the frogs, and there had been frogs, the population of these yellow-legged frogs, which they can get big, I mean, they could fill up your hand, started to slowly, slowly increase. And they went in and they did genetic testing. And what they found is that slowly, slowly over time, the frogs were beginning to develop immunity to the fungus. Like each generation, a lot of the ones would die off, but a few that survived were ones that genetically were a little more able to resist it. And eventually you got these fungus resistant frog populations that could actually survive because the fungus didn't go away. It was still there, but the frogs could survive even if it was there.
Taylor Wilson:
It's so awesome. So what's that now doing, Beth in the, I guess, recent years to these lakes and the broader ecosystems?
Elizabeth Weise:
Yeah. And that's kind of the happy part of the story. So we've got California Fish and Wildlife and US Forest Service and the Yosemite National Park. They've stopped stocking fish in some of the lakes, not all of the lakes, because fishermen love those lakes. But in some of the lakes they've stopped stocking fish. So we are starting to have fish-free lakes, and then these researchers have been reintroducing the fungus resistant frogs to these lakes, and the frogs do great. And then in a couple of years, you're back to a lake that is teeming with frogs. All these things happen that you wouldn't have realized had not been happening. It turns out bears love to eat yellow-legged frogs, as do coyotes, as do garter snakes, as do all these different kinds of birds. And so you had this lake, which was gorgeous before, and it's suddenly teeming with wildlife that wasn't there. And we didn't realize it wasn't there because the frogs had been gone for generations of humans, and suddenly we're like, oh, that's what it's supposed to look like.
Taylor Wilson:
Nature is a fascinating, beautiful thing, Beth. Elizabeth Weise, a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you so much, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Happy as always to help out.
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Taylor Wilson:
From enacting tariffs on foreign goods to slashing taxes for both individuals and businesses, Trump's vision of economic populism is about to be put to the test. How might the Trump administration impact the economy in his second term? Paste BN money reporter Medora Lee joins my colleague Dana Taylor to decide what his various proposals might mean for the economy. You can find the episode right here on this feed tomorrow.
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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 Monday with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.