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Sources: Trump May Invite Some Jan. 6 Rioters On White House; Trump, Republicans In Congress Defend Jan. 6 Pardons; Trump Dismantles Federal DEI Offices, Puts Staffers On Leave. Aired 12-12:30p ET
Aired January 22, 2025 - 12:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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DANA BASH, CNN HOST: Today on Inside Politics, get out of jail free. Sources tell CNN, President Trump is considering a White House visit for his supporters who stormed the Capitol and tried to derail the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, four years ago. We have the breaking details this hour.
Plus, seismic shifts. The new president is moving feverishly to remake the federal government in his image. His latest power move revoking decades of diversity programs across the federal government and possibly firing the men and women who ran them.
And quote, my party left me. The New York City mayor is slamming his fellow Democrats while cozying up to President Trump and his MAGA allies. Eric Adams was indicted for corruption. So, is this all part of winning a pardon?
I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.
We start with the breaking news, and that is sources telling our Alayna Treene that the Trump administration is considering inviting some January 6 rioters to the White House. Now those sources do caution that nothing has been scheduled, and it's unclear who would be invited. But it comes as the president is defending his decision to pardon those who violently assaulted police officers that day, something my colleague Manu Raju asked speaker Mike Johnson about.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Republicans have long said, you guys back the blue. How do you justifiably say that when Trump just pardoned a bunch of violent January 6 riders who attacked Capitol police? And if those rioters come to the Capitol, will you welcome them back here?
REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): So, look, everybody can describe this however they want. The president has the pardon and commutation authority. It's his decision. And I think what the -- what was made clear all along is that peaceful protests and people who engage in that should never be punished.
There was a weaponization of the Justice Department. There was a weaponization of the events the following, you know, the prosecutions that happened after January 6. It was a terrible time and a terrible chapter in America's history. The president's made his decision. I don't second guess those and, yes, you know, it's kind of my ethos, my world view.
We believe in redemption. We believe in second chances. If you could -- you would argue that those people didn't pay a heavy penalty, having been incarcerated and all of that, that's up to you, but the president's made a decision. We move forward. There are better days ahead of us.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: To get into all of this with some fantastic reporters here at the table, CNN's John King, Jasmine Wright of NOTUS, CNN's Alayna Treene and CNN's David Chalian. Alayna, I'm going to go to you first, you have this news. What more can you tell us?
ALAYNA TREENE, CNN WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Right. So, I'm told, according to two sources, we're familiar with some of these discussions, that essentially, some Trump administration officials have had discussions over potentially inviting the people that Donald Trump parted on money, the January 6 convicts.
Unclear exactly who he's thinking about, if it includes just the people he pardoned. Are also those who he commuted the sentences of, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. But there have been discussions about having them come to the visit for a White House and a potential meeting with Donald Trump.
Now, as you mentioned, Dana, it's still unclear. In my conversations, they said it's unclear if this is even going to happen. It is under consideration. We have talked about it, but it's still unclear whether it's going to happen, as well as, whether or not -- or who they would invite, invite specifically. So still up in the air. But I think the fact that these conversations are even happening is obviously incredibly notable. It just shows Donald Trump was very much committed to this.
And from the conversations I've had with White House officials and those who are close to Donald Trump since Monday, they said this is something he personally wanted to do. He personally pushed to go very far with some of these pardons. One, because he wanted to fulfill his promise of doing this on day one. But also, he truly and genuinely believes that a lot of the sentences that these people had went too far.
DAVID CHALIAN, CNN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF & POLITICAL DIRECTOR: And - sorry, it also to me shows, we talked a lot about this since November. Donald Trump feels emboldened in this moment as he takes that popular vote victory, the larger electoral margin victory than he had the last time around into the White House.
We described that through transition, and now I think we're seeing what that feeling of an emboldened Donald Trump looks like in action, because you say he really wants to do this, but it was also really clear that there was a discussion because Mike Johnson and J. D. Vance, these are not never Trumpers, his vice president and the speaker who has his job because Donald Trump blessed him to have that job.
Just on Sunday, the day before this happened, we're out there saying, you know, there's going to be a difference here, perhaps between those that committed violence against law enforcement officers and those that didn't. There was no difference. And so, it is clear that Donald Trump feels completely entitled, emboldened to go the hardest he can on.
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JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And going forward, that might be the most important point. There are -- we can debate the specifics about pardoning people who are on video, beating police officers. On video beating police officers. He pardoned somebody who used the dark internet to sell cocaine, to sell heroin, to sell murder for hire. He pardoned him because Elon Musk and some others said, this is a good idea, sir.
That's a Democratic campaign that already made against House Republicans in vulnerable districts. Donald Trump, you mentioned. This is Donald Trump saying, I'm going to do what I want. Sorry, Mr. Vice President, sorry, Mr. Speaker, sorry, Republican majority. I don't care. I'm going to do what I want.
Now the question is, can he lower prices? Can he do the border enforcement that get voters two years from now to say, OK, I'll take the bad with the good. That's the big challenge. But you already have smart move by his chief of staff, I guess, inviting some of those vulnerable House Republicans down to the White House, and they're going to say, sir, really, we're 48 hours and five minutes in, and already I'm worried.
BASH: Yeah. I want to just go to what you have reporting on about this issue that, yes, of course, it's about him feeling emboldened. But in this particular issue, this is part of revising history, whitewashing history, and about him feeling the need to kind of close the chapter on the new history that he wrote, which doesn't necessarily include the facts as we saw them with our own eyes.
And you wrote the following, quote. Anything less than a full pardon would have been widely panned by the base, said one Republican official familiar with the pressure campaign. Trump had lots of pressure from the base.
So, it's two-fold. One is his own personal view on this and potential culpability in just the notion of well, culpability is probably the wrong word. His insistence that the election in 2020 was stolen and don't do anything that suggests otherwise, whether it's in pardons or in speeches or anything else, but also the embrace from the base on that because of the way that Trump has been pushing this idea.
JASMINE WRIGHT, POLITICS REPORTER, NOTUS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there is no doubt that Donald Trump is in the driver's seat. And not only is he pushing but he's also bringing along some of his more weary or on the fence advisers who wanted maybe a more tamer partner, or less than mass pardons.
We report here that's including incoming Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. But Donald Trump is in the driver's seat, but he is also being pushed by the MAGA base. Donald Trump is a politician who we know is really in tune with his base, who talks to them a lot, who talks to people who talk to them a lot.
And so, after J. D. Vance made those comments on Sunday, they saw a lot of push back, basically saying that it wouldn't be appropriate, it wouldn't be acceptable for something less than these mass pardons. And so, I think that's why you saw Donald Trump move the way he did.
And of course, we were -- in this piece, we reported that the way that he got over some of his more reticent advisers, was after Joe Biden pardon his family. Even though, you know, I think when I've talked to these folks, they say, there's no doubt in our mind that --
BASH: It would have done in anyway.
WRIGHT: -- would have done anyway.
BASH: Yeah.
WRIGHT: But certainly, this gives them a lot of political cover. So yes, and Donald Trump making decisions, but it's also the base behind him, pressuring him.
BASH: And we cannot forget that he has never lost touch with the actual people who were involved that day. For example, we have a picture from January 10 during the transition, you know, 10 days before he was inaugurated on the phone with the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer while trying to go through a window, trying to get into and onto the House chamber.
And yet, and yet, he was asked about this yesterday. And let's play it and talk about what we think he was trying to do there.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's never acceptable to assault a police officer, right?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Sure.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So then if I can among those you pardon DJ Rodriguez. He drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer who was abducted by the mob that day. He later confessed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon?
TRUMP: Well, I don't know. Was it a pardon? Because we're looking at commute, so we're looking at --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is a pardon.
TRUMP: OK, well, we'll take a look at everything. But I can say this, murderers today are not even charged. You have murderers that aren't charged all over. No, I'm the friend of -- I am the friend of police more than any president that's ever been in this office.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BASH: Before you come in here, I just want to play Daniel Hodges. He was the officer, the metropolitan police officer in D.C. who is the image of him is unfortunately iconic, I think it's infamous, of him getting squeezed in those doors. He spoke to Kaitlan Collins last night.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANIEL HODGES, D.C. POLICE OFFICER, ASSAULTED ON JAN 6: If people know that there are not going to be any consequences for their actions, particularly their crimes, and they would like to further a certain agenda with extreme violence. All they have to know is that they've got a wink and a nod from a man in office who doesn't have any integrity, and they're good to go, right?
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: Trump says, he's the friend of the police. Do you think that's true?
HODGES: Trump says a lot of things. Sometimes lies are more reliable than truth.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KING: Again, this is going to show up in Democratic ads, the party that says, they back the blue. They have a president who, forgive me, is screwing the blue. This video of what happened to those police officers on that day, but to Jasmine's point, Donald Trump is inconsistent on a lot of things, right? And he changes his mind on certain policy issues, but he is consistent about his base.
Who stayed with him when everybody else, including J. D. Vance and Mike Johnson, said Donald Trump was a pariah and he was done after January 6, his base did. You stick with Donald Trump, he will stick with you up to a point, up to a point. Loyalty and Donald - loyalty with Donald Trump can become lonely, but to his most fervent base, he stays with them. It's hard sometimes to track where he's going to go. That is the safest thing. Where is his base. He's most likely to stick with them.
TREENE: It's also interesting too, and just going back to your point of Donald Trump, you know, engaging with many of the people who were convicted for their crimes or had some sort of role on January 6, is that he talks with them directly as well.
It's not just the base. It's the people who were there at the Capitol, who went to prison or have been in front of juries for what they did. And that's also part of what he's hearing from. I mean, you played -- you showed that video of him speaking on the phone with Ashli Babbitt's mother. He also invited her and some others to the inauguration. They didn't end up attending because it was moved indoors. But that in itself, I think, just shows Donald Trump's support of their --
BASH: And as we go to break, I just want to add one more detail, which is the new acting U.S. attorney in D.C. So, the top prosecutor for the federal government in D.C. was an organizer of the stop the steal movement. He represented seven -- several January 6 rioters. So, it's one more piece of information that shows just how integral his defense of the people who are and support for the people who attacked the Capitol that day is.
All right. Coming up, President Trump's flurry of executive orders is reshaping the federal government at a rapid pace. On the chopping block today, federal workers who focus on diversity. We'll explain after a break.
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BASH: President Trump did promise a lot of things on the campaign trail, among them, to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government. Now he's done just that. CNN's Rene Marsh is tracking all of these developments. Rene, explain what he did?
RENE MARSH, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Dana, as you said off the top, the Trump administration is doing exactly what they said they would do on his second day in office. Trump's OPM, Office of Personnel Management sent out a memo to agencies setting a deadline of today, 5 pm identifying all people within these federal agencies who work on DEI related issues and advising them to place them on paid leave.
As they begin these steps to shut down all DEI initiatives and training across the government, shuttering these DEI offices and wiping all social media and websites focused on DEI from public facing websites. They're also asking employees if they know of instances in which efforts were done to disguise any of these programs to flag that to them.
CNN reported that there were career employees inside some of these agencies who were making edits to job descriptions, to get rid of buzz words like equity, diversity over fears that this day would come. Of course, all of this is happening at a rapid clip.
Just take a look at these two websites that we saw this morning. The treasury department's website. We have a full screen of it. What it looked like. That's diversity, equity and inclusion, public facing website, and then now this morning, that is what you see there. If you go to that same website, same situation over at the Department of Labor, they have also wiped all references to diversity, equity and inclusion from their public facing website. That is what you see when you click on those links Again, the Trump administration, Dana, has said that this amounts to this being DEI amounts to racial discrimination against white people, but quite frankly, that is a skewed understanding of what DEI has been throughout the federal government. I mean, it's focused on protections for women, pregnant women, rural communities, people with disabilities.
It is a wide swath of Americans, disabled Americans, who benefit from protections within the workplace due to DEI and now here we are at a rapid clip. We are seeing the Trump administration wiping these programs out, Dana?
BASH: I'm glad you added that because there are a lot of -- sort of shorthanded terms for these programs. There's the overall, you know, notion of woke. And then if you look at DEI, and you look into exactly what it does, it's very, very broad in a lot of areas, particularly in the federal government, or it was, I should say.
[12:20:00]
Rene, thank you so much for that reporting. And back here at the table. Again, he -- Donald Trump talked about DEI at the Pentagon and the military and talked a lot about this. I would say in this particular case, it was more his allies. He talked about being, you know, woke and so forth. There's more his allies that were very focused on these programs, and yet, he's doing it because this is what his people want him to do.
CHALIAN: Well, this -- I mean, if you were on the campaign trail at all throughout the 2024 Republican primary season.
BASH: Yeah.
CHALIAN: This was a conversation that took place at every event I attended, like -- whether it was our Ron DeSantis' event or Donald Trump throwing language out, or Nikki Haley, it didn't matter. It was like this was coursing through the Republican electorate in that echo chamber with the media sources they take in that this -- the term DEI and even when you would ask voters like, what is it you're trying to get, there wasn't a clear picture.
It was just like this notion that this somehow was screwing them in some way, and that was unacceptable to them, and that it was part of this larger woke ideology and that was just an animating feature. Again, back to your points about the base. This was an animating conversation for Republicans, and he's delivering on it.
WRIGHT: Yeah. And, I mean, this is an easy layup for Trump to say, you told me you wanted this, I promise you I would do it. And here it is. And certainly, I think that this is not going to be the only time that we see it. Obviously, these folks are going to be placed on leave at five.
There's language in there, asking people within the ranks of the agencies to come forward if they know of other jobs, which is purposefully trying to expand what DEI is. Even if it doesn't say it, we're going to hear about this more and more and more. But certainly, when you talk to Trump supporters, they talk about the fact that they feel attacked by these policies. They feel attacked by woke ideology. They feel attacked by any extension of affirmative action.
And so, they wanted to see it rooted out from the government, from the tip to, you know, the full extension of. And I think that these -- what these executive orders show, and they're going to be more and more, and that, I think that there's something that the White House is really telegraphing.
KING: I think it's a crystal-clear example of you don't often see the word nuance in the same sentence as Donald Trump. Can you make a case that some of these programs maybe have gone so far -- too far? Can you make a case that in certain quarters we could recalibrate these things but still appreciate and reward diversity and make it a priority in hiring?
But that's not the conversation we're having. The conversation is, we don't like it, it's gone. Not let's fix it, not let's recalibrate it, not let's have a conversation about it. If we don't like it, it's gone, because that's how Trump and his -- you're right, his allies view, especially on these kind of issues. Just nope, don't like it, eliminate it. Don't fix it, eliminate it.
BASH: And they argue that discrimination is already illegal, and that -- what this does is, to your point, discriminates against white people. I don't -- I don't know how much evidence there is. That the other question. I mean, there's so many unanswered questions about what's going to happen now.
One of them is, what about people who were hired under those "DEI practices" but are genuinely qualified. Are they going to be worried about losing their jobs as well? So that's one thing.
CHALIAN: And you see it going into corporate America.
BASH: Yeah.
CHALIAN: And the government stance, of course, is having --
BASH: It always does.
CHALIAN: It always does into the broader culture and into corporations as well. We've seen over the last several months, years, corporate America wrestling with some of the nuance that John is talking about, how every corporate chieftain will tell you a diverse workforce enhances their bottom line that there's like, no doubt about that.
It's like, what are the most effective programs to get that diverse workforce is a nuance conversation you can have. But the intersection between what Donald Trump's doing in government and how they expect it to play out in the private sector is something to watch as well.
TREENE: One of those just really striking things I want to put a finer point on to is, one, you're exactly right about, just going back to your first point about culture. This is seeped into Republican culture, and that's also one of the things remember as well as.
This was one of the first, I mean, moments after Donald Trump was sworn in, when he went into that room. This was one of those first executive orders that he signed. I mean -- and that, I think, just puts -- it just completely underscores how much of a priority this was.
WRIGHT: And just lastly, it's not just government employees. It's not just corporate America, it's small businesses. So many of these agencies contract businesses of color, women owned businesses that enrich the small business environment. And so, it's not just these larger ideas of who works in the federal government, but who is also getting money from the federal government for their small businesses, that go back to their communities.
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BASH: Yeah. And just real quick, you spent a year talking to people who are on the fence about whether they would vote for Donald Trump. Obviously, the economy was a driving issue. But my impression, anecdotally, is that some new Trump voters also were focused on these cultural issues.
KING: Yes, whether it's LGBTQ rights, transgender rights, whether it's about DEI, and it's not just Trump and his allies. If you go into, there's a, you know, there -- I hate to tell you this, people at the table, but there's a different media ecosphere out there that certain people who vote for Donald Trump --
BASH: But it's not that suburbia.
KING: Oh, and suburbia. Yes, yes. There are a lot of people who think that who are convinced that these efforts, perhaps well intentioned the beginning have gone too far. Whether it's these DEI initiatives, whether it's some of the criminal justice initiatives, like no cash bail and things like that.
They just think well intentioned the beginning, they've gone so far, which is why I come back to the, OK, that's a fair conversation. Everything should be debatable, but those are nuanced conversations. But there are certain people, including the current president, who just doesn't like to do nuance. It's either yes or no.
BASH: All right, up next. TikTok on the clock, the grand old party could stop. We have the details, next.
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