DOJ fires employees who worked on Trump prosecutions under Jack Smith | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: The Justice Department has fired employees who worked on Donald Trump prosecutions under special counsel Jack Smith. Paste BN Senior National Political Correspondent Sarah D. Wire takes a closer look at Kash Patel - Trump's pick to lead the FBI - and his role in Jan. 6 misinformation. Trump pledges sweeping tariffs on steel, semiconductors and other imports. Plus, Trump is ending DEI in the military and reinstating troops who refused COVID-19 vaccines. Paste BN Money and Personal Finance Reporter Medora Lee explains how news over a Chinese startup's AI model rattled markets. What's next for California wildfires after rain relief?
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 Tuesday, January 28th, 2025. This is The Excerpt.
Today, firings at the Justice Department for employees who worked on Trump prosecutions under Jack Smith. Plus, a closer look at Trump's pick to run the FBI and his role in helping reframe January 6th. And what's next for tech stocks after Chinese AI news sent a ripple through the markets?
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The Justice Department under President Donald Trump is firing more than a dozen officials who assisted Special Counsel Jack Smith in prosecuting Trump before he won the 2024 election according to a Justice Department spokesperson. Ahead of his November election victory, Trump told radio show host Hugh Hewitt that he planned to fire Smith. The special counsel led two prosecutions against Trump that have been dropped in the wake of Trump's election, one alleging he unlawfully tried to overturn the 2020 election results and a second alleging he mishandled classified documents after his first presidential term.
Smith resigned earlier this month ahead of Trump's inauguration in a report on the election interference case that he submitted to then Attorney General Merrick Garland before stepping down. Smith argued that there was enough evidence to convict Trump. Several Justice Department officials have also been reassigned in the wake of Trump's return to office in order to help align the department with the administration's priorities, especially on immigration.
Meanwhile, the acting US attorney for Washington D.C, Ed Martin, has also opened a probe into the Justice Department's decision under the previous administration to bring felony obstruction charges against hundreds of individuals who were allegedly involved in the January 6th attack on the Capitol according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Martin asked prosecutors in an email yesterday to turn over files, documents, emails, and notes related to the cases according to the reports. He referred to his probe as a special project and described the obstruction charges as a failure.
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As Republicans take on the January 6th insurrection shifted from disapproving to defensive, President Trump's pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, played a role in reframing their position. I spoke with Paste BN senior national political correspondent Sarah D. Wire to learn more.
Hello, Sarah.
Sarah D. Wire:
Hi.
Taylor Wilson:
So let's just get some background here for folks who are coming to this fresh maybe. Who is Kash Patel? How did he get to this point where he got this nod?
Sarah D. Wire:
So most Americans might've heard about Kash Patel during Trump's first term during the Russiagate investigation. And he was the person who wrote Republican's rebuttal of what Democrats found when it came to whether the Trump campaign had worked with Russia to win in 2016. That caught the eye of Donald Trump. He was moved over to the White House and held a variety of positions in foreign intelligence while he was there.
Taylor Wilson:
So let's talk about January 6th and Patel. I mean, how does he view that day and really the conversation around the insurrection?
Sarah D. Wire:
So he is a big proponent of what's called the Fed's erection theory, which is the idea that the FBI and the federal government knew that there was going to be violence that day, that they placed operatives to specifically cause violence or caused the mob to become violent, that the FBI played some kind of major role in there being violence that day.
Taylor Wilson:
I know you note in this piece, he's financially helped folks from that day too. Could you talk through that a bit?
Sarah D. Wire:
He's always talked about this kind of loosely, so we don't have a very firm idea of how much money he's provided. But he does sell branded items online and he says the money goes to help among others. Some of the defendants who are charged in relation to January 6th. He's never provided a firm answer of how many people have gotten money, how much money has been provided, but we can estimate based on their tax filings for the last four years, it has to be in the hundreds of thousands.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. So then how, Sarah, has he helped Republicans really reframe the narrative around January 6th and its aftermath? You touched on this a bit, but how has he been kind of a central figure as part of this?
Sarah D. Wire:
He has spent a lot of time over the last four years talking first on far right social media and then more mainstream media outlets spreading some of these conspiracy theories. And as recently as last March, he was suddenly saying that Democrats knew that this was going to be violent and wanted the imagery of that day so that they could crush Donald Trump forever and allowed it to happen and then called for Abrams tanks to be in the streets of Washington.
Taylor Wilson:
And as for Trump himself, we know we saw these pardons last week, I mean, how have his views shifted on the day, if at all? Where does he stand kind of writ large right now?
Sarah D. Wire:
In the weeks after January 6th, he really said that there's no room for this kind of violence, for this kind of behavior, this shouldn't have happened. But his view on January 6th has really echoed Patel's and it's changed over these four years. He's built a relationship with the families of some of these January 6ers. He's had fundraisers at his properties. And he went from saying that this was unacceptable to calling these people patriots and hostages who were mistreated by a two-tiered judicial system.
Taylor Wilson:
What might it mean, Sarah, for justice in America in general to have someone with these views running the FBI?
Sarah D. Wire:
Now, the experts I spoke to for this story really reiterated that this would normalize the idea of political violence as a way to get what either party wants, and that having someone lead FBI who has floated these conspiracies really heavily for so long, it raises doubts about the mission of the FBI and American's eyes and really raises, I guess, doubts is the best word, that if the head of the FBI is saying there's a two tiered system of justice, people are going to believe him.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, in terms of what's next here, Sarah, I mean, what's the expectation for his confirmation hearing? Do we expect smooth sailing? Do we expect any hiccups?
Sarah D. Wire:
So his is one of the few nominations that we expect that could potentially be in trouble, but he is well-loved on the far-right. He has the full throated support and backing of President Trump. No, Republicans have come out and said they will not support him. But we don't have every Republican saying they will. Democrats really intend to focus on his financial ties to Trump as well as these January 6th conspiracy theories when he comes before them on Thursday.
Taylor Wilson:
Sarah D. Wire, Paste BN senior national political correspondent with some great insight for us as always. Thank you, Sarah.
Sarah D. Wire:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
President Trump said yesterday that he plans to impose sweeping tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper imported to the country as well as on goods like computer chips, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals in a push to increase US production of the products. Economists warned tariffs or taxes on foreign imports can lead to higher prices for consumers. Trump campaigned on promising to bring down inflation. But early into his second term, he's shown he plans to use tariffs, a hallmark of his first term as a way to achieve both his foreign policy and domestic goals. Trump early this week has also signed executive orders to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from the military, and he reinstated military members who were kicked out for refusing to take Covid-19 vaccine according to the White House.
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The Nasdaq and S&P 500 indexes slumped yesterday after a competitive artificial intelligence model from a Chinese startup called DeepSeek sowed doubts about the US approach to AI. I spoke with Paste BN money and personal finance reporter Medora Lee for more.
Medora, good to hear from you. How are you today?
Medora Lee:
I'm good despite the drop in the market.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, tough news. I just wanted some basics first, Medora, on this new AI model from a Chinese startup. What can you tell us about the technology here?
Medora Lee:
So basically, this Chinese startup called DeepSeek, released on January 20th, a new AI model that is actually pretty competitive with the ones that are known here in the US, OpenAI and ChatGPT.
Here is what roiled the markets. It is considered very cost-efficiently done using a fraction of the computing power that the other models use. And so this is important because what has fueled a lot of the semiconductor chips, including Nvidia and Broadcom and those types of semiconductor companies, has been the idea that we need so much computing power to fuel AI. And so now suddenly now this startup in China says it's done it with a lot less computing power, and that's brought down the cost of developing this AI model to what its claims is less than $6 million to train it versus the US companies that are spending millions and billions of dollars building up their infrastructure and their models.
So that's what kind of made everybody pause because suddenly if we can do this in a cheaper way, maybe the spending that all these companies have been doing on AI and powerful semiconductor chips doesn't need to be spent. So what happens to these companies, right? So that is why big semiconductor shares dropped.
Taylor Wilson:
I just want to get a little bit into those specifics in terms of the market response, Medora. I mean, what did we see? Was this just specific to the chip stocks? Was this across the board in the entire technology sector? What did we see in the markets?
Medora Lee:
It was kind of like everything related to AI. So it was Nvidia and the chip stocks are probably first in line, but then we also have the infrastructure companies and the data centers and all of the energy that it was supposed to be using. So all of those companies that were seen as contributors to this whole AI universe saw declines in their stock as well.
Taylor Wilson:
And in terms of going forward, I know there are some big tech companies that are due to report their latest quarterly results later this week. Will that have any impact on where the markets go over the next few days? And just generally more broadly, where do we go from here? What does this mean for I guess the year beyond the next few months?
Medora Lee:
Because of all this attention around DeepSeek's AI model, it comes at an interesting time because a lot of these big tech companies are going to be reporting earnings this week. So-called Magnificent 7 members: Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Apple are all due this week. And so you're probably going to see, no matter what their results are, a lot of questions from analysts during their calls, what they think of DeepSeek, where they see AI, what kind of spending they expect to put out there to develop their AI spaces or products. That's going to bring a lot of questions and a focus this week on those earnings reports and earnings conference calls. So that's something to really watch this week.
I talked to some experts and I said, "This big AI, is this like the AI bubble burst that's going to bring down the market? We've had such a great long bull market for so many years now. Is this the end?" And surprisingly, experts say no. They think that DeepSeek is only one factor in the entire market, and they don't think that this is going to bring down the market. In fact, some people say that this is going to open up some opportunities in the market for other companies to emerge. Smaller startups that thought perhaps they couldn't afford to compete with the big techs like Meta and Alphabet in terms of spending on AI may suddenly find that a cheaper way to get in. So that's the good news.
Taylor Wilson:
I appreciate a little bit of good news amid a rocky start to the week here. Medora Lee covers money and personal finance for Paste BN. Thank you, Medora.
Medora Lee:
Thanks so much.
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Taylor Wilson:
Residents in parts of Southern California were relieved to get rain in recent days after weeks of wildfires, but residents may be wondering how long they're safe from the kind of fires that have ravaged Los Angeles County neighborhoods this month. The approximate answer, maybe a week. That doesn't guarantee such devastating wildfires will return in early February. Only that the weekend's precipitation was not strong enough to fully soak the region and eliminate fire danger.
The National Weather Service said three-day rainfall totals reached 2.23 inches in one Santa Barbara County location, but most were closer to an inch in the coastal and mountain areas of LA County. It was a bit less in Ventura County to the Northwest. That still helps firefighters increase containment percentages to the mid-to-high 90s in the destructive Palisades, Eaton and Hughes fires. AccuWeather meteorologist Alex De Silva told Paste BN that some of the best news for local residents is that the warm dry Santa Ana winds that fueled the blazes, particularly the Palisades and Eaton fires, are nowhere in sight for at least 10 days.
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And today is International Lego Day, marking the anniversary of the first patent for the iconic Lego brick.
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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 Paste BN.