RFK Jr. suspends campaign; endorses Trump | The Excerpt
On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: RFK Jr. has suspended his campaign for president. A judge has reduced charges against former officers in the Louisville raid that killed Breonna Taylor. Paste BN Breaking News Reporter Claire Thornton discusses how evictions for making too many 911 calls happen. Fed Chair Jerome Powell says the 'time has come' to lower interest rates. College football Week 0 is here!
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 am Taylor Wilson, and today is Saturday, August 24th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, RFK Junior says he's suspending his campaign, plus a judge has reduced charges against former officers in the Louisville raid that killed Breonna Taylor. And we discuss a common landlord practice around 911 calls.
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Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Junior says he will suspend his campaign in the 2024 presidential race and support Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
This decision is agonizing for me because of the difficulties it causes my wife and my children and my friends, but I have the certainty that this is what I'm meant to do.
Taylor Wilson:
Kennedy's support stood at 4% in an Ipsos poll taken this month, and his campaign appeared to be running out of money, according to Federal Election Commission filings published this week. At the end of last month, Kennedy's campaign owed close to $3.5 million and had only $3.9 million on hand. In a virtual address yesterday, Kennedy clarified that he plans to remove his name from the ballot in about 10 battleground states where his presence would be a spoiler, a process he has already begun in states including Arizona and Pennsylvania. For much of the election cycle, Democrats labeled Kennedy as an election spoiler whose candidacy was meant to help Trump by peeling votes away from President Joe Biden. But after Harris took over as the party's nominee, polling started showing that Kennedy was doing the opposite, hurting Trump more than the Democrats. You could take a closer look at some of the recent polling with a link in today's show notes.
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A federal judge has lessened the charges against two former Louisville Metro police officers accused of falsifying information to secure a warrant for the botched 2020 raid that killed Breonna Taylor. The 26-year-old black woman's death sparked national outcry over police brutality. In August of 2022, the Justice Department charged Joshua Janes and Kyle Meany in connection with preparing and approving a search warrant affidavit tied to a narcotics investigation that allegedly contained false and misleading statements, omitted key facts, and was not supported by probable cause. On Thursday, a judge dismissed felony deprivation of rights under the color of law charges against the pair. While the original indictment stated the offense involved the use of a dangerous weapon and resulted in Taylor's death, which would've bumped up the potential penalty to life in prison, the judge ruled that part of the indictment be stricken. Now if convicted of that count, the former officers face no more than a year in prison. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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Evictions for making too many 911 calls happen. The Justice Department wants the practice to stop. I spoke with Paste BN breaking news reporter Claire Thornton to discuss. Claire, thanks for hopping on.
Claire Thornton:
Hey Taylor. Of course. My pleasure.
Taylor Wilson:
So starting here, Claire, what are crime-free and anti-nuisance ordinances?
Claire Thornton:
They apply specifically to rental properties like an apartment building. If someone at this apartment building is calling 911 more than what's average for this neighborhood, the police and the local government are going to come down really hard on that landlord and say, "What's going on with your tenant? This building is getting too many 911 calls. They need to leave or they need to stop calling 911 so much."
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. So what do experts say about some of the issues these ordinances cause, and really, Claire, who do these rules actually hurt?
Claire Thornton:
So if you even stop to think about these ordinances for a little bit, you can realize that they could apply to lots of people and they could be enforced very unfairly. The problem with them, according to experts, is that people who are calling 911 are getting kicked out of their apartments for doing so. Or if they refuse to leave, the landlord could come down on them with an eviction that's going to be on their record and make it so much harder for them to get new housing. These ordinances had a discriminatory effect. They were disproportionately targeting black renters, black families with children, and experts say that people calling 911 because they're having a personal emergency with their family or they are facing domestic violence from a partner have had to make the choice between calling 911 and possibly facing the effects of a crime-free ordinance, or dealing with their problems themselves.
Taylor Wilson:
It's absolutely crushing. Claire, do we hear any arguments from anyone, the landlords, the government, for why this practice might be necessary?
Claire Thornton:
The arguments from the landlord side and the police officer side of this is, "Yeah, we want to reduce crime. We want to make buildings safer." And in some cases landlords say it is very important to screen potential tenants for a conviction record to avoid possible risk to their business. But people on both sides have said that when you are making decisions based on the number of 911 calls connected to a certain rental unit, that is really taking this whole crime-free model way too far.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. So we know the Department of Justice recently condemned these ordinances. What did the DOJ outline in this letter, and Claire, going forward, how do we expect the DOJ to actually enforce some of what's in this letter?
Claire Thornton:
Many of these ordinances across the country may be in violation of the US Fair Housing Act, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. So local governments across the country need to look at their crime-free and nuisance ordinances ASAP, and determine if they're complying with civil rights laws, and if not, they need to repeal them, or else the Justice Department could very easily be on the other end of a lawsuit against the city.
Taylor Wilson:
Great explainer here. Claire Thornton covers breaking news for Paste BN. Thank you, Claire.
Claire Thornton:
Thank you, Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said yesterday that the time has come for policy to adjust. Noting that inflation is easing while the job market is weakening, he provided the strongest signal yet that the Central Bank plans to begin cutting historically high interest rates next month. He gave no clues on how much the Fed would lower its key rate, but most forecasters expect a quarter point reduction. Powell said at the Fed's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, "My confidence has grown that inflation is on a sustainable path back to 2%." That's the Fed's inflation goal. For months, the Fed had said it would not lower its key rate, now at a 23-year high of five-and-a-quarter to five-and-a-half percent, until officials were confident inflation was on a sustained path to 2%.
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The college football season is here, kind of. The sport's so-called Week Zero kicks off today when just a handful of teams start their seasons early. Today, four games are on tap, starting with number 10, Florida State, taking on Georgia Tech at noon eastern time, and the game is taking place in Ireland, followed by Montana State at New Mexico later this afternoon. You can find the full slate and previews of the upcoming college football season from Paste BN Sports.
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2024 is the year that Beatlemania turns 60. Tune in tomorrow when music historian and Beatles scholar Martin Lewis joins my colleague Dana Taylor on the excerpt to discuss the role of the Beatles in the 1960s counterculture movement and how they went from being relative unknowns in the US in 1963 to global icons in 1964. 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 pods, and 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.