Trump removes Joint Chiefs chairman in purge of military leaders | The Excerpt
On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: President Donald Trump shakes up leadership at the Pentagon. Paste BN Network Florida State Watchdog Reporter Ana Goñi-Lessan discusses recent ramped up efforts by ICE in northern parts of Florida to track down immigrants who have entered the country illegally. A judge indefinitely delays New York City Mayor Eric Adams' corruption trial. The Supreme Court declines President Trump's emergency bid to immediately fire the head of a government ethics watchdog agency. Plus, a judge blocks Trump's ban on DEI for federal agencies and contractors. Maine governor Janet Mills and President Trump clashed in a tense exchange at the White House over the president's threat to withhold federal funds from states that allow transgender athletes to play in girls and women's sports. In this week's edition of Editor's Note, Paste BN Politics and Washington Managing Editor Holly Rosenkrantz takes us behind the scenes at how her team is covering some of the latest news out of Washington and beyond.
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, February 22nd, 2025. This is The Excerpt.
Today, Trump has shaken up major leadership positions at the Pentagon, plus how ICE and police are targeting Florida Panhandle towns with traffic stops, and Trump clashes with a governor over a threat to withhold federal funds from states that allow transgender athletes to play in girls and women's sports.
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President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced yesterday they are replacing several senior military officials that the Trump administration has linked to Biden-era diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Among those targeted, Air Force General CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's most senior military officer.
Trump announced he is nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine to replace Brown as Joint Chiefs chair. The move came after Hegseth foreshadowed the change at his first town hall meeting with Pentagon staff. Hegseth began the session with remarks disparaging DEI and promise accountability for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021. You can read more about these changes with a link in today's show notes.
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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement officials in the Florida Panhandle are using traffic stops as part of ramped up efforts to track down immigrants who have entered the country illegally. I spoke with state watchdog reporter, Ana Goñi-Lessan, from the Paste BN Network in Florida to learn more. Ana, thank you so much for hopping on The Excerpt today.
Ana Goñi-Lessan:
Oh, thank you so much for having me on.
Taylor Wilson:
How is ICE targeting Florida Panhandle communities? What have we seen, especially in recent days?
Ana Goñi-Lessan:
So there's just been a lot of reports on social media. I'm from Tallahassee, so I know the community pretty well. And so people are saying, "Hey, here's Florida Highway Patrol. Here's some unmarked cars here," or they're in this parking lot or that parking lot.
And so the reports have been just kind of all over the place, really, and some of them have not panned out. Some of them are not real, and some of them are, and these are real. What we saw this week is definitely a ramping up of law enforcement going out in this rural community doing traffic stops, checking on people who are driving up and down the different rural highways, then that's kind of what we're seeing right now.
Taylor Wilson:
Ana, any of this surprising? I mean, how has Florida really overall positioned itself to be one of the toughest states on immigration enforcement in the country? And also, are you really seeing a shift? We've heard about this nationwide under this kind of Trump 2.0 era. Are you seeing this shift from the Biden-era to the Trump-era?
Ana Goñi-Lessan:
Oh, I mean obviously the rhetoric is completely different whether it's a Republican president, Democrat president. I think we should also remember that Obama deported a lot of people; deporter in chief, as lots of people like to call him.
But right now with Trump in office and how he's been very transparent and candid about what he wants to do, Florida legislature, the governor, Ron DeSantis, they've really backed him. They've said, "All right, what do you need from us?"
And so I am looking out the window right now and seeing the capitol from the office, and I was there last week. I've been there for all these special sessions where they've been trying to enact legislation that's going to help Trump succeed in what he wants to do, which is really crackdown on illegal immigration.
The difference here is the rhetoric is changing, right? Because before it was: bad guys, these bad hombres. Now, it's kind of... According to the governor, you are breaking the law if you cross into the country illegally.
Taylor Wilson:
And experts taking a look at all this, Ana. I mean, do they feel that what's happening in Florida is legal?
Ana Goñi-Lessan:
You can totally pull someone over for probable cause. If you have a tail light out, right, that's illegal. Now what they're doing in Gadsden County is you have local law enforcement pairing up with ICE.
Basically, you have ICE agents working with local law enforcement to try to target these areas where they want to detain immigrants who are here legally, who also have criminal records. It's working. I mean, they are arresting people.
Taylor Wilson:
Ana Goñi-Lessan is a state watchdog reporter with the Paste BN Network in Florida. Thank you, Ana.
Ana Goñi-Lessan:
Thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
A federal judge yesterday said that he would delay New York Mayor Eric Adams corruption trial indefinitely before making a decision on a controversial Justice Department motion to dismiss the charges. District Judge Dale Ho said in his ruling that he would select an independent lawyer to present arguments against the prosecutor's bid to dismiss to help him decide...
He wrote that he was appointing Paul Clement, who was a solicitor general under President George W. Bush. Because Adams and the Justice Department are aligned in their positions, and the motion to dismiss has not undergone adversarial testing.
Adams was charged with accepting illegal campaign contributions and free travel from Turkish officials and business leaders. Prosecutors say Adams, who's now running for reelection, responded with favors like expediting safety inspections at a 36-story consulate building.
The Justice Department's decision to drop the charges prompted multiple federal prosecutors to resign and sparked accusations that Adams agreed to cooperate with President Trump's immigration crackdown in exchange for helping get rid of his legal troubles.
And be sure to tune in tomorrow when my colleague Dana Taylor asks, what happens when one of the three branches of government overreaches and seizes power and authority from another? Critics of President Trump are calling it a constitutional crisis. Dana will be joined by Paste BN White House correspondent Bart Jansen to share his insights.
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Meanwhile, Trump is facing a number of headwinds in courts. The Supreme Court yesterday declined to let him immediately fire the head of a government ethics watchdog agency while a challenge to the firing moves forward. That marked the first time the high court weighed in on the dozens of lawsuits challenging the slew of actions Trump has taken in his first weeks in office as he tries to reshape the government and consolidate power.
And elsewhere, a federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked Trump from implementing bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at federal agencies and businesses that contracts with the federal government.
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Trump and Maine Governor Janet Mills clashed yesterday at the White House over the president's threat to withhold federal funds from states that allow transgender athletes to play in girls and women's sports.
President Donald Trump:
You better comply because otherwise you're not getting any federal funding.
Governor Janet Mills:
See you in court.
President Donald Trump:
Every state... Good, I'll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.
Taylor Wilson:
Speaking to the National Governors Association, Trump singled out Mills while talking about his executive orders signed this month banning transgender women from women's sports.
Trump has put schools and states on notice that they could lose federal funding if they don't follow it. The Maine Principals Association, which oversees high school sports in Maine has said it will not comply with Trump's order because it conflicts with state anti-discrimination laws protecting transgender people.
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I turn now to our weekly edition of Editor's Note, where we take you behind the scenes to hear directly from our editors on how they're covering the news. This week we're speaking with politics and Washington managing editor Holly Rosenkrantz. Hello again, Holly.
Holly Rosenkrantz:
Hi, how are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good. Thanks for hopping on on this week's edition of Editor's Note. So I want to start, Holly, with your team's coverage of really an unprecedented sea change in government, beginning with the workforce. We've seen thousands of firings.
And you know Holly by themselves, they're just numbers, right? And don't really tell readers much. How did you guide your team's coverage to give readers the right context to understand the impacts, not just to the individuals, but to the agencies and the Americans who those agencies affect?
Holly Rosenkrantz:
We really focused on deep reporting, personal stories, and documentation wherever possible. And that's how we kind of distinguished ourselves and gave our audience stories that are accessible to them.
So the day after the big firings, they all began on Friday night, the 14th; our reporters just fanned out around the country on Saturday trying to interview every fired worker we could. A, to collect personal stories; B, to get copies of their firing notes. And that's how got into the whole issue of the probationary employees and who was being picked for this.
See, we were trying to get numbers, how many, what the impact of those numbers are going to be, tapping our network of national sources, your sources in the agency, sources on the ground. Just to put context on these stories.
Taylor Wilson:
You know, Holly, we've seen these loyalty tests time and time again as it pertains to President Trump, and his kind of quid pro quo deal-making is even bleeding over to local and state levels.
We saw one recent example with the Justice Department motion to dismiss corruption charges that were swirling around New York City Mayor Eric Adams, still are. How is your team approaching this story? Seemingly at the intersection of so many different lanes, the White House, local politics, and DOJ?
Holly Rosenkrantz:
It is a kind of confluence of reporters and different teams. We are really lucky. Bart Jansen was our Justice Department reporter for a long time and now he's moved to our White House bid.
So he has long sources in the kind of a DOJ pipeline of a US attorney, his offices, different attorneys and lawyers that are involved in all these kind of dealings, but he's also stationed at the White House.
So he's plugged into when the action is going to come. I mean, obviously a lot of these things happen behind closed doors and it's hard to get the information easily, but it's really about relying on sources. We also have reporters that are very well-connected in New York City and New York City politics. So it was really a national story and also a New York story.
The interesting thing about the Eric Adams story is as this has kind of developed over the past few months, it sometimes felt like a local New York centric story that didn't have national implications.
But as this unfolded this week, we found that there was a wider interest around the country from people who were really interested in what this meant legally, what this could mean perhaps in other cities. What actually happened? It was a very interesting and curious arrangement.
Taylor Wilson:
You know Holly, you and I spoke a few weeks ago. All of us felt, I think, a little like we were playing just constant catch up with the amount of news out of Washington each day. I'm curious, Holly, are you still feeling that same pressure each day? Has the dust settled at all?
Holly Rosenkrantz:
I'm not sure the dust is ever going to truly settle, but it does get better every day in the sense that the administration really wanted to hit the ground running on day one with a lot of action. Now that there's been a flurry of action, sometimes it's the administration and the president just talking about what they're doing.
We're becoming selective in our story choices. We are more likely to focus on actions that are being taken and less on commentary or quotes or posts on Truth Social. You could cover every word that the president says, but we try to provide context and show the impact of the actions, and that's where we're focusing our attention.
It's not easy because oftentimes the president will drop a whole bunch of executive orders late in the day on Friday night, but we just, every day, have to assess the news and look at maybe the 10 things that happened and decide where we're going to put our reporters, where we're going to pull wires, and where our audience may not be interested in this particular story.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Holly Rosenkrantz, Paste BN politics and Washington Managing Editor. Thank you, Holly.
Holly Rosenkrantz:
You're welcome.
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Taylor Wilson:
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 Monday with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.