The Excerpt podcast: Colorado Republicans appeal decision disqualifying Donald Trump from 2024 ballot to the Supreme Court

On today's episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen takes a look at Trump's complicated legal calendar. The U.S. sends more military aid to Ukraine, but it might be for the last time. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright breaches. USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes looks at some of the frustrations of electric vehicle charging. It's the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. 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 Thursday, December 28th, 2023. This is The Excerpt.

Today, what's on tap for Trump and his legal issues in 2024? Plus the US is sending more weapons aid to Ukraine. And as a growing number of Americans drive electric vehicles, there are new frustrations over limited charging options.

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The Colorado Republican Party said yesterday that it had asked the Supreme Court to review the bombshell decision from a Colorado court that could keep former President, Donald Trump, off that state's ballot for 2024, surrounding his actions related to the January 6th insurrection. The appeal now formally puts the issue before the nation's highest court just weeks before the nation's first primaries. I caught up with USA Today, Justice Department correspondent, Bart Jansen for a look at Trump's upcoming legal calendar and some of the complications as it pertains to the 2024 election year.

Bart, thanks for making the time.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So, Bart, Trump faces a heavy legal agenda across the board in the new year. The Colorado Supreme Court decided to disqualify him from the state's ballot next year, and an appeal to that decision was just filed by the Colorado GOP yesterday. Meanwhile, that same day, the Michigan Supreme Court threw out a similar attempt to disqualify Trump from its ballot. How might that initial ruling in Colorado play out?

Bart Jansen:

The Colorado Supreme Court postponed the impact of its own decision. So he basically should be on the March 5th ballot. He's racing to the Supreme Court to say, "This shouldn't have happened at all. You need to overturn this state court decision." And there's some expectation among legal experts that the Supreme Court justices will try to do something on this urgently because of those very fast approaching deadlines, and then perhaps have a longer debate about what ought to happen with him on the ballot because other states are also considering whether to remove him from the ballot.

Taylor Wilson:

Also on the federal level, Bart, Trump faces this classified documents case. Is this still on schedule? What's the latest here?

Bart Jansen:

Trump is charged with retaining hundreds of classified records down at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House. The schedule right now is for a trial in Florida in federal court on May 20th. But the concern among legal experts is that Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the case, held off on making decisions about how they deal with classified records in the case. There's going to be a fuss about how the documents are shared and how the defense can review them so that they can mount their own defense. And some of this was debated in November, but she put off a meteor hearing until March. Of course, in March you're only two months away from the actual trial. So if there are still disputes, if there are still uncertainties, there's some expectation that that documents case may well postpone. And the concern then is the Justice Department has an informal policy of not holding trials that are politically sensitive within two or three months of an election in an election year.

So the idea is that you want all the federal trials either done or postponed maybe by the time you get to August. And so if the January 6th trial slips a little bit and maybe gets postponed a couple of months, that might take the place of the classified documents case in late spring. By the end of June, say. The documents case may push later than that and potentially could get pushed until after the November election. And of course, that's what Trump's goal has been all along. But Jack Smith would prefer to try both of those cases before the election.

Taylor Wilson:

Right. And Trump has legal issues in Georgia, New York. Might federal prosecutors in these states leapfrog the federal cases?

Bart Jansen:

Well, that's the thing. They've been deferring so far to having the federal cases first. Fulton County District Attorney, Fani Willis, was prepared to go to trial against all 19 of the co-defendants in that case, Trump being one of them. Instead, the judge separated two of the defendants. They wound up pleading guilty, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro. So they got resolved in October, but she said she was ready. They expect to call more than a hundred witnesses. They've got many, many exhibits and there are so many defendants. The jury selection looks to be a real hornet's nest. And so she has proposed to start her trial August, 5th. That would be behind the current schedule for both federal cases. The result though is that if it's a four or five month trial, it would be an ongoing trial on election day. Trump's lawyer, Steve Sadow, has said that that would just be a mistake that they already think these cases are election interference and that the idea of keeping him at a defense table instead of campaigning in the final months of the presidential campaign would be untenable.

No date has been set yet. The judge down there, Scott McAfee, is continuing to decide when to do it. But a couple of legal experts I talked to said, "Well, maybe she could slip in in February and get a trial over with before the federal ones are held." She has said that she is ready. Trump has argued that he needs more time to prepare. In addition, New York is waiting in the wings. They've got a case accusing Trump of falsifying business documents to pay hush money to women who claim to have had sex with him before the 2016 election. That Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, has not yet really stepped up to the plate. But his case is a very simple case. It's just documents that appear to be fraudulent and that it could be a much shorter trial than any of the others we've been discussing.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Should be a fascinating next year and beyond. Bart Jansen covers the Justice Department for USA today. Thanks so much, Bart.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, earlier this month, sidestepped the question of whether Trump may claim immunity from criminal charges tied to his alleged interference in the 2020 election. But the same case will likely return to the high court in the coming months.

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The US, yesterday, announced a new weapons package for Ukraine amid the ongoing war. Officials have indicated it might be the final military aid package for the country unless Congress approves additional funding. This time around, the weapons are worth up to $250 million including air munitions, anti-armor systems, medical equipment and more. The aid will be taken from Pentagon stockpiles. But Marine Lieutenant Colonel Garron Garn, a Pentagon spokesman said that there's no more funding to replace weapons taken from department stocks. President Joe Biden is urging Congress to pass an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and more, worth $110 billion.

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The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. In the civil suit filed in federal district court in Manhattan yesterday, the organization claims that the technology companies use the newspaper's content to train its artificial intelligence, breaching copyright protections. The Times does not ask for a specific dollar amount, but says that the suit seeks to hold the defendants responsible for the billions of dollars in damages they say they're owed for unlawful copying. Neither company has responded to the suit publicly. It comes at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence with the tech proliferating in recent years. OpenAI is best known for its chatbot called ChatGPT, which launched late last year. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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As a growing number of Americans drive electric vehicles, they're changing how they think about filling up, but there are still frustrations around relatively limited charging options. I spoke with USA today, national correspondent, Trevor Hughes, to learn more.

Trevor, thanks for making the time.

Trevor Hughes:

Hey, glad to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So, let's start here, Trevor. What is this concept of range anxiety as it pertains to electric vehicles?

Trevor Hughes:

Well, some people let their cell phones run down really low, and some people are really good about keeping their batteries charged. And honestly, it's the same kind of thing with an electric vehicle. In our current society, most people charge at home or at work and there aren't that many chargers around. And so folks who have electric vehicles sometimes find themselves worrying, "Do I have enough electricity to get me through all of the errands I need to run each day?"

Taylor Wilson:

And overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are people with electric vehicle charging these days?

Trevor Hughes:

Well, this is what's fascinating to me, is that the first people who bought electric vehicles, they understood what they were getting and they knew that EVs take time to charge. And in many cases, they were wealthy enough to install chargers at their own houses. But what we're seeing as more people buy electric vehicles, the satisfaction with the time that it takes to charge them is actually going down. People are grumpy about it. And so there's a push on to improve the electric vehicle charging experience across the country.

Taylor Wilson:

Can you talk about this chicken and egg situation when it comes to electric vehicles and the amount of charging stations that are out there?

Trevor Hughes:

I imagine this was something we went through as a society as we developed gas powered vehicles. But what we're finding is that private companies, your service stations, gas stations, they don't want to necessarily spend the money to install fast chargers for EVs, which can cost $20,000 a pop because there aren't that many people to use them. And at the same time, the people who are considering buying electric vehicles don't necessarily want to buy one if there's nowhere to charge. And so you're finding yourself in this situation where no one wants to take that first move except for the very bold folks, again, who are able to afford chargers to install at home.

Taylor Wilson:

Trevor, so going forward, what are we seeing on the legislative front or from the companies themselves when it comes to building a better or bigger network of EV chargers?

Trevor Hughes:

There's been a couple of really important developments just in the last couple of years. The first is, the Biden administration is putting something like $7.5 billion into the economy to build charging infrastructure across the country, and most of that money is actually going to be to put high speed chargers every 50 miles along major roads and interstates. The idea being that you can do a road trip and not ever have that range anxiety. Now the reality is most people don't actually drive that far every day, so this range anxiety concept is really more of a concern than an actual fear that exists.

But that being said, there's also this development where Tesla has agreed to open up their chargers to a lot of other companies. And so for years, if you had a Tesla, you could charge at a Tesla station, but if you drove a different EV, you could not charge at a Tesla station, and they're changing that. And a lot of these big automakers are now adopting the Tesla charger. So over the next couple of years, I think you're going to see a real shift in how easy it is to charge an electric vehicle if you choose to buy one.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Trevor Hughes, great info as always. Thank you, sir.

Trevor Hughes:

You bet.

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Taylor Wilson:

Today marks 50 years since the US passed the landmark Endangered Species Act. In signing the measure, president Richard Nixon said, "Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed." The law was a bipartisan success story as Democrats and Republican legislators came together to make it happen, give a roadmap for protecting vanishing species and their habitats, and in the years since more than five dozen species have recovered, including peregrine falcons, another type of bird called Kirtland's warblers, a type of gecko in Puerto Rico and wild flowers in California. Still other species remain on the brink of extinction like the Florida panther, and the dangers of a warming climate are adding urgency to calls for more funding and protections for species across the country.

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Be sure to stay tuned to The Excerpt this afternoon when my colleague Dana Taylor, looks back at the year in film with Ralphie Aversa, host of USA Today's Entertain This. You can find the episode right here on this feed starting at 4:00 PM, Eastern time. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you use a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. If you have any comments, you can always find us at podcasts@usatoday.com. I'm back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Excerpt podcast: CO GOP appeals decision disqualifying Trump