Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Trump, Cuba Gooding Jr. avoids jail time: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Trump

Hear other takeaways from yesterday's hearing. Plus, health reporter Karen Weintraub explains how human cells in rats' brains may help scientists better understand certain diseases, five people are dead after a Raleigh mass shooting, money reporters Terry Collins and Swapna Venugopal say homebuyers are rejecting more offers than ever for small issues and Cuba Gooding Jr. avoids jail time in a forcible touching case.

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Hit play on the player above 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.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Friday, the 14th of October, 2022. Today, a recap of the latest January 6th committee hearing, plus what tests with human brain cells and rats can tell us and more.

Here are some of the top headlines:

1. Parkland school shooter, Nikolas Cruz, will not get the death penalty. A divided jury could not agree, so he'll now head to prison for the rest of his life for killing 17 people in the 2018 mass shooting.

2. The Supreme Court yesterday denied an emergency appeal from former President Donald Trump. He asked the court to allow an independent special master to review classified documents taken from his Florida estate.

3. Stanford University has apologized for limiting the admission of Jewish students in the 1950s. A task force commissioned by the school found records that show university officials excluded Jewish students for years.

♦

The House Committee investigating January 6th held what was possibly its last hearing of the year yesterday, and it ended with a subpoena of former President Donald Trump for his role in the Capitol attack. For most of the hearing, lawmakers focused on how Trump acknowledged he lost the 2020 election but did not try to stop violence from his supporters. Committee Chair, Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson.

Bennie Thompson:

What Donald Trump proceeded to do after the 2020 election is something no president has done before in our country. In a staggering betrayal of his oath, Donald Trump attempted a plan that led to an attack on a pillar of our democracy.

Taylor Wilson:

The panel also showed Secret Service messages and video footage showing how worried agents were about armed Trump supporters storming the building. And new video was shown of congressional members phoning officials for help during the siege. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer here is calling then Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Chuck Schumer:

I'm going to call up the effing Secretary of DOD. We have some senators who are still in their hideaways. They need massive personnel now. Can you get the Maryland National Guard to come, too?

Taylor Wilson:

Yesterday's biggest move though was a subpoena for Trump himself. The panel voted unanimously to bring the former president forward at a future date. Republican congresswoman and Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney:

But a key task remains. We must seek the testimony under oath of January 6th's central player.

Taylor Wilson:

Several former Trump aides said Trump admitted he lost the 2020 election while publicly rallying with false claims of election fraud. Video testimony from former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said that aides told Trump, "The odds of us prevailing were very small."

Former White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, also said that a week after the election was called, Trump said, "Can you believe I lost to this f-ing guy?" The panel also showed that a report from the Secret Service field office showed a tip was received by the FBI that the Proud Boys planned to march into Washington and outnumber police.

For more from day nine of the committee's hearings, and what happens next, head to USATODAY.com.

♦

A Stanford researcher believes that his work, which tests human brain cells in rats, will eventually help scientists learn more about autism and schizophrenia. Producer PJ Elliott spoke with health reporter Karen Weintraub to find out more.

Karen Weintraub:

In this new study, the researcher took rats and implanted in them what he calls organoids, human brain organoids. He takes cells from healthy people and also people with conditions like schizophrenia or autism. Other people do it with Parkinson's disease or other conditions.

They add a few chemicals and they can revert them back in their own history to embryonic cells when they could become any cell in the body, and then they move them forward to become neurons. You don't have to access somebody's brain to understand how their brain cells work because the genes are the same in all of those cells.

Then he takes these clumps of cells and he implants them in the brain of a rat on one side. It's about one third of the brain of that side in the cortex, which is the front of the brain. He sees what happens and they weren't sure if the rats would die, if the rats would act weird, and basically found that the rats were totally normal. They acted like rats. They did ratty things. They did not have any superior intelligence.

But they were able to show that the human brain cells integrated with the rat ones. They showed this by the rat could only learn how to get some water for itself if it used the human cells, and they showed that it did in fact learn how to get the water. They also were able to show that these human cells activated when the rats did certain things.

The cells integrated in the rat brains, but they didn't take over and the rats did not become humanized in any way. But the idea is that they can then see how these brain cells operate differently. The brain cells of people with autism or schizophrenia or other conditions operate differently. Sometimes the signaling is faster or slower or different in some way, and they can't tell because again, they don't take the cells out of somebody's brain to see how they're functioning.

This is a way to understand that they've tried it in lab dishes for years, but it just doesn't recapitulate what happens in the living brain. That's what they're doing, trying to solve the problems of lab dishes basically by putting these cells into a living brain.

The main innovations of this work at the moment are, again, that they showed that these human brain cells could survive within the rat and not kill it or distort its behavior. They also inserted these cells early in the rat's life, not after it was born, but while it was still very young, and so that helped integrate these cells and that's something that other researchers will probably now try to mimic.

Taylor Wilson:

Check out Karen's full story with a link in today's show description.

♦

Five people are dead after an hour's long shooting yesterday in a residential part of Raleigh, North Carolina. One of those dead was an off-duty police officer. An investigation is ongoing, but officials say there is no longer an active threat. Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin.

Mary-Ann Baldwin:

This is a sad and tragic day for the City of Raleigh. Just after 5:00 p.m. today, multiple people were shot on the Neuse River Greenway. At this time, what we can report is that RPD has confirmed five fatalities. One of them was an off-duty Raleigh police officer. We must stop this mindless violence in America. We must address gun violence.

Taylor Wilson:

The violence was the 25th mass killing this year where victims were fatally shot, according to a database from Northeastern University, USA TODAY and the Associated Press. A mass killing is defined as when four or more people are killed, not counting the perpetrator.

♦

Home buyers are rejecting more offers than ever for small issues. So what can sellers do? PJ Elliott and money reporters, Terry Collins and Swapna Venugopal, consider.

Swapna Venugopal:

One of the biggest things is the rising mortgage rates. It's closing in on 7% now, and that's making it difficult for home buyers to really make offers, and so you have fewer people looking for homes, and that means home sellers don't have the same thing they had last year, which was multiple offers, multiple bids and things like that.

They have to work with the limited buyers that come to them and they have to make adjustments on whether it's closing costs or whether it's repairs that are being demanded by the limited number of buyers. Basically, it seems to be shifting to a buyer's market now.

Terry Collins:

Yeah, indeed. The tide is turning and buyers seem to have a little more leverage than they've had maybe in the last, I'd say three, four years maybe. Right now with a little bit more supply, buyers can be select on what property they may want and if they're interested in one, maybe they can get a punch list together of some of the things they may want done after they've gone through inspections and a bit of a checklist in order to buy that property. It's putting the sellers a little bit more on guard that they can't just sell their property in some cases as is.

PJ Elliott:

What can sellers do to try to sell their house in a reasonable time?

Swapna Venugopal:

A seller needs to make sure that all of the obvious basic repairs are done because buyers, unlike last year, are not willing to waive any of those things. Because first of all, the mortgage rates are so high that leaves very little money for them to spend on these kinds of repairs to expect sellers to take care of that.

Terry Collins:

Where it was just as Swapna said just a few months ago, some buyers were waving their contingencies. They were taking the properties as is, and now that's all changed. Sellers need to be prepared that they might get a list of fix it, a punch list, so to speak, of items that they may need to take care of in order if they want to get the deal that they want for their property.

Otherwise, if they're not wanting to be as flexible and such, they may just have to be patient and wait to find that buyer who will take their property off their hands, and given the market right now, well, that could be a while.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. will not serve jail time after being accused of forcible touching, including groping, unwanted kissing and other inappropriate behavior. Some of the dozens of women who accused him are criticizing the outcome as a slap on the wrist. AP reporter Michael Sisak has more.

Michael Sisak:

Cuba Gooding Jr. was matter-of-fact as he went through this process today resolving his forcible touching case. The courtroom was sparsely attended, there were reporters and some observers, but not packed like you would typically see for a celebrity case.

Cuba Gooding Jr. spoke briefly. He pleaded to a lesser charge and in that admitted that he did kiss a waitress at a New York City nightclub back in 2018. He also heard from three of the victims, people who say they were victimized by him in cases, two of which were not ultimately brought as part of the plea agreement. A prosecutor read a statement from the waitress that he kissed, and then one woman appeared by video and another addressed the court directly.

Those victims were upset with what they say is a two-tiered system of justice, rewarding a celebrity and giving him what they said was a slap on the wrist. Whereas other people who are not celebrities would be brought to trial and would face jail time for these charges.

Cuba Gooding Jr. was initially arrested in the summer of 2019. It's been a three plus year process. He was accused initially of forcibly touching, groping, kissing three women. Prosecutors ultimately decided to drop two of those cases and went ahead with a plea deal involving just one woman. That was struck in April.

Part of the plea agreement was that Cuba Gooding Jr. had to stay out of trouble and he had to attend what they called alcohol and behavioral management, behavioral therapy. He's been seeing a therapist according to prosecutors, he's been fully compliant and the therapist gave positive reviews, and that Cuba Gooding Jr. according to the prosecutor, will continue in therapy beyond that six month window that was required as a part of this agreement.

It is an interesting coincidence that this case is being resolved right around the five year anniversary of the #MeToo movement. That movement started with Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who in this very courtroom in 2020 was convicted of rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison. There have been though some concerns that the #MeToo movement is losing steam, that you see results like today where Cuba Gooding Jr. gets no jail time. The vacating of Bill Cosby's conviction in Pennsylvania a few months back and other matters that have gone away.

We asked attorney Gloria Allred about this, and she said that while some of those developments are disappointing, women are still resolved to hold men accountable. What happened today, if you ask Cuba Gooding Jr.'s defense lawyers, if you ask prosecutors, was that they did not see a clear path to a conviction on some of these allegations.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every morning of the year right here, wherever you're listening right now. Thanks to PJ Elliott for his great work on the show, and I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jan. 6 panel subpoenas Trump, mass shooting in Raleigh: 5 things podcast