Special counsel appointed for Biden's classified documents, inflation slows: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Attorney General Merrick Garland appoints special counsel to investigate Biden's classified documents

USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison has the latest on Biden's classified documents. Plus, USA TODAY Politics Reporter Ella Lee recaps the first day of the Proud Boys trial, the Los Angeles Police Department is being criticized for edited bodycam footage. USA TODAY Director of Photo and Video News Gathering Andy Scott explains, and inflation slowed again in December.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.

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 13th of January, 2023. Today the latest from Washington surrounding President Joe Biden and classified documents, plus opening arguments in the trial of Proud Boys leaders and inflation slows down.

♦

A second set of classified documents discovered by aids to President Joe Biden were recovered in the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware home where he keeps his Corvette. The records were recovered after Biden's lawyers conducted searches of the president's two Delaware residences following an initial discovery of classified records at a former Biden office in Washington DC in November. At a press conference to talk about inflation, the president was asked about the documents.

President Joe Biden:

I'm going to get a chance to speak on all this, God willing soon, but as I said earlier this week, people... And by the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage, okay? So it's not like they're sitting out in the street. But anyway-

Reporter:

So it's in a locked garage?

President Joe Biden:

Yes, as well as my Corvette.

Taylor Wilson:

Meanwhile, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said that lawmakers would investigate the Justice Department over the document revelations. He contrasted the FBI search last year of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate for records, including classified documents, with Biden's revelations about two sets of classified documents.

Kevin McCarthy:

Another faux pas by the Biden administration, but treating law differently based upon your political beliefs, treats one President Trump one way, but treats President Biden a whole different way.

Taylor Wilson:

And following the appointment of Chicago US attorney John Lausch on November 14th to the initial investigation, yesterday General Merrick Garland announced that Robert Hur would be appointed as special counsel to further review the handling of the documents in Washington and at the president's home in Delaware.

Merrick Garland:

This appointment underscores for the public the department's commitment to both independence and accountability and particularly sensitive matters, and to making decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.

Taylor Wilson:

For more on this, producer PJ Elliott talked with USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison.

PJ Elliott:

Joey, thanks for joining the podcast.

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

PJ Elliott:

So how does President Biden justify having classified documents and not one but two separate locations while just months ago he criticized former President Trump from having his own classified documents at Mar-a-Lago?

Joey Garrison:

Well, the White House is saying... The legal counsel of the president is saying that this was an inadvertent mistake, that these have been popped up now at two places. First it was the Penn Biden Center, which is about a mile and a half from the White House where the president previously had an office after he was vice president, and the second revelation is at his Wilmington home. And again, that also applies to this home, that there was a mistake and that he was surprised to learn about the existence of these materials. So allies of the president have contrasted that with President Trump, who has argued that he knew which documents he was taking, that he had declassified those and that he allegedly... Or there's evidence according to the Justice Department of a possible obstruction. If you recall, the Justice Department and the National Archives for a year was trying to get back these documents. He refused. Ultimately the DOJ got a search warrant that led to them seizing those documents at his Mar-a-Lago home.

PJ Elliott:

What are the political implications of these documents being found?

Joey Garrison:

Well, I think there are big implications for the president on the short term of this just being a headache for him. On Thursday, the president was celebrating what's been improved inflation numbers for several months now, but that was overshadowed by questions about the existence of these documents. And as we move into a congressional session with a new Republican majority, you can bet that these documents are going to be front and center and we'll see how long the... Attorney General Garland, like he did with Trump, he appointed a special council. It'll be led by Robert Hur, who was the former lead US Attorney in Maryland, he's going to be conducting the special counsel on President Biden. We'll see how long, it's unclear how long that investigation will take place, but until there are more answers to some questions out there, this is going to continue to drag over the President's head.

PJ Elliott:

Do you think President Biden will actually talk to the special counsel?

Joey Garrison:

That's a good question. I would assume that they will want to talk to him, but it's unclear at this point whether it would be Biden's lawyers speaking to them or Biden himself. Although the White House has argued from the beginning that he said he's being completely transparent on this and he didn't know that these documents were at these various sites, and so I don't know why he wouldn't say that same thing to the counsel if they do ask for an interview,

PJ Elliott:

How does the White House move on and put this behind them?

Joey Garrison:

Well, I don't think they're going to be able to move on quickly, there's still several unanswered questions. One that many people have is President Biden, while he was in Mexico City earlier this week, was asked about the existence of these documents in his private office, but he didn't refer to the fact that there had also been documents found December 20th at his Wilmington residence. So I think there's a lot of questions about transparency there. The White House was asked about this and said that, well that's because the search wasn't concluded. And so we're left, though, with... As reporters here covering the White House with still some several more of those timeline questions that I don't think have been adequately answered that are going to be... the White House is going to have to field here in the coming days.

PJ Elliott:

Joey, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Joey Garrison:

Thanks PJ for having me and I'll be on soon.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

Both sides gave opening arguments yesterday in the trial of five Proud Boys leaders connected to storming the Capitol on January 6th. For more, I'm now joined by USA TODAY Politics Reporter Ella Lee. Ella, thanks for hopping on the podcast.

Ella Lee:

Thanks for having me on today, I appreciate it.

Taylor Wilson:

So the jury trial for five Proud Boys leaders has begun. Before we get into the trial's first day though, could you tell us what are the charges that the defendants actually face?

Ella Lee:

So there are five Proud Boys on trial, the one that people have heard of the most is former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, but then there's also Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. These men are charged with 10 counts, the most severe of those counts is seditious conspiracy, which is essentially plotting to forcibly oppose the authority of the federal government. And then another charge is halting the certification of President Joe Biden's 2020 election win.

The seditious conspiracy, it's a pretty rare charge. It came into focus last month when two leaders of the right wing extremist group, the Oath Keepers, were convicted of sedition. This was the first sedition conviction in more than a decade. What they face now obviously with the Proud Boys is cementing that it wasn't just one group, but two of these extremist groups who played a planning role in January 6th.

Taylor Wilson:

So what did we learn from this first day of the trial?

Ella Lee:

Prosecutors essentially sought to paint a picture that the Proud Boys on trial weaponized an already inflamed pro-Trump mob to achieve this purported goal of stopping the peaceful transfer of power from President Trump to President Biden. And so one of the key points that they hammered in is that the Proud Boys, "took aim at the heart of our democracy." So this is really going to the core of democracy and this is something we saw in the Oath Keepers trial as well.

Defense attorneys pretty much argued the opposite, suggesting that the violent storming of the Capitol wasn't their fault, wasn't the Proud Boys' fault, also in particular wasn't Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio's fault. Enrique Tarrio's attorney argued that it's actually Trump's fault, which is new. That was something that wasn't allowed in the Oathkeepers trial.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. Ella, I'm curious, were you surprised by the Proud Boys' defense pushing the blame to Trump in this way?

Ella Lee:

I think so, just because of the fact that we haven't heard it before officially in court. This is something that obviously has been mentioned in other January 6th trials, that the defendants were moreso cogs in the machine than the machine itself I guess. But I think that that was mostly what made it surprising, just that this is a very high profile case, obviously. Tarrio and other Proud Boys have long considered themselves Trump allies and so that blatant distancing, or even to go so far as to say condemning of the president, is surprising.

Taylor Wilson:

So the trial's underway, what happens next? What can we expect in the next few days and weeks of this trial?

Ella Lee:

The government will start its case. So we heard they're probably going to start with something not super interesting, just laying out the Capitol grounds, where things are, what was off limits. And then the government will take a couple weeks to go through its case before we flip flop. And the defense, there are five defense teams. They'll each get to present their own cases. We're expecting the trial to last about six weeks, but there have been many delays already and so it's very possible that the trial will take longer than six weeks.

Taylor Wilson:

Ella Lee covers politics for USA TODAY. Ella, thanks so much for making the time, really appreciate it.

Ella Lee:

Thank you.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

The Los Angeles Police Department is being criticized for edited body cam footage of three incidents this week. LAPD Chief Michael Moore said at a news conference that police repeatedly used a stun gun on a man hours before he died at the hospital, 31-year-old Keenan Anderson, the cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Coolers, went into cardiac arrest four and a half hours after a struggle with officers on January 3rd. A preliminary toxicology report from police found cocaine and cannabis, but the coroner's office has not yet ruled on the cause and manner of Anderson's death.

The incident began with a car accident that Anderson was accused of being involved in, the video shows that Anderson initially complied with the officer's commands but then fled before being restrained by officers. But according to Andy Scott, USA TODAY'S director of photo and video news gathering, the timeline of the released video from the police department may have holes. Producer PJ Elliott spoke with Andy to find out more.

PJ Elliott:

Andy, thanks so much for doing this and joining the podcast.

Andy Scott:

Sure, absolutely. Happy to join.

PJ Elliott:

Your team was able to access a video provided by the LA police division that initially responded to this call. And the video - I just watched it, very hard to watch - Can you talk about what was in that video?

Andy Scott:

So basically there were three videos that were released, but the one that we're talking about right now is the one that contained the incident with Keenan Anderson. And he apparently was involved in some sort of car accident and that's where the video picks up on what we could see from when an LAPD motorcycle officer arrives on the scene and talks with him for several minutes and then calls for backup, and then the incident escalates with multiple officers detaining him and tasing him before the incident was over.

PJ Elliott:

So how is your team trying to use the body cam footage to help make sense of what happened and what have you learned?

Andy Scott:

So normally in these instances, and unfortunately this happens all too frequently, we try to look at the totality of the video footage that's available and reconstruct a timeline to be able to show a perspective and to give some perspective on what happened in the incident. And with these three videos that were recently released, these were very highly produced by the police department. They have a lot of stock footage, there's a lot of front loading at the top of the video explaining what a taser is, explaining what body cam videos are, and there are gaps in the footage that we see from three different officers and from a bystander cell phone video.

PJ Elliott:

So I've been told that your team has decided not to publish the video in full, why is that?

Andy Scott:

So we have a request, and the USA TODAY and Gannett has put in a request with the department to get the full unedited video clips from the body cam so that we would have the opportunity to look at the full incident from beginning to end from each officer's perspective, right now we don't have that. We've produced a video and a story that explains that these three videos were released, they're highly produced. The LA mayor Karen Bass has expressed strong concerns about the content of those videos that were released, and so this is obviously an evolving story that we're still trying to gather all the material that we can to really paint a fuller picture.

PJ Elliott:

So I want to go back to something that you said earlier, that this happens all too frequently and I feel like we've grown this callous on these type of videos as a society. Why is this case one that stands out and garners the attention more than others?

Andy Scott:

Boy, that's hard to say because sometimes they rise up just to the nature of the circumstance, the timing. I think in this case, the fact that we have three of these from the same department within the course of a couple days that are all released on the same day, that certainly gives pauses to okay, what's happening in that department that you have that frequency of incidents like this? And it deserves a closer look. I think it's a double-edged sword, a lot of departments have taken to using body cam footage, and it probably protects the officers too in a lot of ways, good officers that are doing good work, that body cam can validate that work. But when you have incidents that go bad, you have a more true, historic record of what happened as opposed to a recollection that may be clouded by adrenaline or other issues on the scene. We saw that with George Floyd, that story was broken out really because of a bystander video. It's like the advent of the cell phone camera in the past 10 years has obviously shed a tremendous amount of light on this as a societal issue that's pretty broad based and affects almost every community in the country and it is the democratization of those visuals, that they are captured pretty much all the time now.

PJ Elliott:

Thanks so much, Andy. Appreciate it.

Ella Lee:

All right, thanks a lot.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

Inflation slowed again for a third month in December, according to the Consumer Price Index. Consumer prices increased 6.5% from a year earlier, down from 7.1% in November and a 40 year high of 9.1% in June. Americans have been struggling with a historic inflation spike since the spring of 2021, when an easing pandemic stoked consumer demand, while supply chain issues created product shortages. The Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to try and fight back against inflation. Patrick Harper, president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, told the New York Times that he expects the Fed will raise rates several more times this year, but likely by less significant margins.

♦

The mayor of Los Angeles recently declared a state of emergency on homelessness. The city is home to the largest homeless population in the country. Producer Shannon Rae Green spoke with the team of reporters USA TODAY sent there to cover this growing crisis.

Kayla:

We're not here because we're lazy, we're not here because of we just gave up on life.

Shannon Rae Green:

That was Kayla, a 28 year old transgender woman living on the streets of Los Angeles, a city with 70,000 homeless people. Kayla has been one of them for the past three years. She's also HIV positive and was recently diagnosed with monkeypox. More than half a million people are homeless in the US and this year the crisis has reached a tipping point. Some cities like LA and San Francisco have overcrowded shelters and sidewalk encampments that have taken over street corners. Many have serious physical and mental health challenges that are the root cause of their situation. For the sixth episode of States of America, a documentary series streaming on USA TODAY'S digital channel, we take a deep dive into the problem of homelessness from the perspective of those experiencing it. USA TODAY reporter Zulekha Nathoo was in LA for the story.

Zulekha Nathoo:

The unhoused population is often seen as an other kind of problem - them, it's not us, we don't want them in our neighborhoods. Even if the only thing that you care about is your pocketbook, reducing hospital visits and trips to the ER for the homeless can save taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. And so this story and the examples that we show just exemplify a real interconnectedness that I think you might not think about when you walk by someone sleeping on the street, but it's definitely there.

Shannon Rae Green:

Kayla, the transgender woman you heard from at the top of the story, wants people to know that she wants to feel seen.

Zulekha Nathoo:

Kayla is college educated, she grew up in a suburb just outside LA and she says she left her home when her family didn't accept her as transgender. She wants to ideally get into housing and become a creator, a singer. She wanted to make it really clear that we as a society shouldn't be so quick to write people off who don't have housing because everyone is going through something that needs to be addressed.

Like she gave the example of a man walking by one day and she asked him for the time and he was looking right at his phone, where the clock is and said, "I don't know," and just walked right by, didn't look up or anything. Many of the people said they don't feel like they're respected and that can come with the number of people that have side conversations that they can still hear or that they pick up on, conversations that are had at clinics and hospitals between staff that are criticizing them or just making them feel uncomfortable. And what they wanted to remind people of is that they are people, they're human beings, and they deserve to be treated as such.

Shannon Rae Green:

In the encampments USA TODAY reporters visited, treating the homeless like human beings was a critical element of the care given by a street medicine team called Healthcare in Action. The group sends medical professionals out every morning to offer desperately needed medical care, but what they deliver is so much more. USA TODAY executive producer, Yasmeen Qureshi, shared her impressions.

Yasmeen Qureshi:

When you hear about a big issue like homelessness, you think, oh my God, there's nothing we can do about that, there's no way that we can end homelessness. These medical professionals felt that by providing street medicine, they could actually help people get off the streets, which initially I was surprised by. It didn't really seem to make sense. But what they explained to us was that by providing mental healthcare support or addiction support, and just even being somebody that these patients could trust, that they realized was a friend that had perhaps their best interest at heart, that they could then start to have the conversation about being housed.

They've actually helped 50 people get off the street in one year. And I was really quite blown away by that number. We actually met one young man named Oscar, who just by fluke met the Healthcare in Action CEO Dr. Hawkman. He'd been stabbed and he was at a local hospital and he needed healthcare. He was on the streets for nine years. A few months ago he met Dr. Hawkman and he's been able to turn his life around. And that was really unbelievable for me, standing there looking at this young man who clearly had a lot of potential on the life ahead of him, and it was just really interesting.

Shannon Rae Green:

So how is this miracle program paid for? You might think it's funded solely by generous donors with big pockets. But roughly half comes from the government program Medicaid.

Yasmeen Qureshi:

The way it works is that there's a special program in California that allows medical professionals to be reimbursed at a higher rate for serving vulnerable patients, patients like people that are homeless. What the team explained to us is that in the long run, they really see it as a huge benefit for the Medicaid system or the healthcare system as a whole, because homeless populations are at high risk for going to the ER or being admitted to the hospital. And even if it costs more on the front end, they felt like they could really prevent the system from having to spend more money on the back end. They do things like wound care, they're also giving out vaccines to try and prevent communicable diseases, all kinds of things that a vulnerable person might have to go to the emergency room to get cared for.

Shannon Rae Green:

I asked Yasmeen what the most surprising thing she discovered in reporting this story was.

Yasmeen Qureshi:

I would say the most eye-opening thing for me was hearing the stories of the people on the street and how they got there, and just realizing that anyone could just be one bad decision away or one unfortunate event away from living on the street. And it was really an opportunity to empathize with them, and I think as journalists, I read a ton and I rarely hear interviews with people that are homeless. There's always other people talking for them, and I just thought it was so great to be able to sit down and have a conversation with them and understand where they're coming from.

Shannon Rae Green:

The story about Healthcare in Action is just one of several featured in this USA TODAY documentary, highlighting how individuals and communities are coming together to help those most in need. States of America is an original series that amplifies original journalism, investigations, enterprise reporting, and expert commentary across Gannett. The episode premieres tonight at 8:00 PM and 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on USA TODAY Network's streaming channel. For a full list of platforms offering our free streaming channel, follow the link in our show description. The episode can also be found on USA TODAY's YouTube channel.

Taylor Wilson:

And before we go today, Lisa Marie Presley has died. The singer songwriter and only child of Elvis was 54.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every day of the week right here, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden's classified docs, LAPD's edited bodycam footage: 5 Things podcast