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White House Orders Freeze On All Federal Grants And Loans; Assistance Pause Could Impact School Breakfast & Lunch Programs; Justice Department Fires Officials Who Investigated Trump; Trump Picks His Criminal Defense Attorneys For Key DOJ Posts. Aired 12-12:30p ET
Aired January 28, 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, a unilateral upheaval. Donald Trump is making fast, furious and frenetic changes to the federal government. His latest move ordering the suspension of trillions of dollars in federal aid, loans and grants, which could impact millions of Americans.
Plus, the Justice Department fires more than a dozen career attorneys who played key roles in prosecuting President Trump when he was out of office. It's just the latest example of Trump's effort to reshape the DOJ.
And we have new CNN reporting on Kash Patel detailing his years long feuds with the intelligence community. He'll be expected to work alongside if confirmed as the next director of the FBI.
I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.
Donald Trump is a disrupter. He promised to reshape the federal government. His rhetoric was about retribution and rooting out what he and his allies call the deep state, or what others call career specialized public servants.
At 5pm eastern today, that's five hours from now, a new directive to freeze federal programs and grants will go into effect. The realities of that order will go far beyond what many people took away from his campaign promises.
The White House is offering up very few details on the scope and the details of its order. So, there is a lot we don't know, but there are some details we do know about the impact programs that are a part of this order, how it could impact Americans across the country?
CNN's Tom Foreman will break some of that down. Tom?
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Dana. You're right. We do not know a lot about this. From what we do know until the White House specifies otherwise, is that millions and millions of people who voted for Donald Trump could be on the chopping block in these in some fashion. School breakfast and lunch programs, for example, are among the things that are being potentially impacted by this. Section 8 rental assistance, that's not just for poor people, but it's also for senior citizens. It is for disabled people. Title 1 education grants, that's to help struggling schools and struggling neighborhoods that can be cut back on temporary assistance for needy families, state grants for childcare.
Head start a program to help with the education of children up to the age of five, not just their education, but also their mental health, their physical health, their -- you know, all the things they need to start off life in a productive way. Special supplemental nutrition programs for women, infants and children. HUD's community development block grant programs. EPA grants to states and localities for clean water.
All of these are potentially up for grabs here. In addition, there are advocates out there who are saying programs like suicide help lines, hotlines. You could have women who are abused by their husbands tonight and who go to a shelter and are told, you can't come in here because we can't be open because of this cut. Same could be true for homeless people out there.
There are all sorts of programs out here that are potentially affected, again, millions and millions of people, many of them the people who voted for Donald Trump, maybe, Dana, they will not be affected, but the White House has so far refused to offer any details about what this really means.
And yes, you can look at a program like head start. There was just a recent government study that said there are endemic problems there that need to be studied. Maybe that's what this aims at as it's trying to solve all those problems.
But until we have more details, Dana, all we know is that communities all across this country who may not think they're going to be affected literally within hours, could be feeling tremendous impacts from what is being done.
BASH: Thank you so much. That is so important to lay out, and that is just some of what could be impact some of the people, some of the programs, some of the needs across the country, and down to the most local of communities. Tom, thank you.
FOREMAN: Welcome, Dana.
BASH: Now whether or not Donald Trump or any president has the power to do what Tom just described, to freeze grants and programs approved by Congress and signed into law. That is an open question. What is not an open question is what the constitution says about checks and balances and which body is in-charge of how taxpayer dollars are directed to be spent. That is traditionally seen as a congressional prerogative.
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And that comes from Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution, no money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law. In more common parlance, Congress has the power of the purse. Donald Trump and his allies clearly want to test this in ways that affect those many aspects of everyday American life.
I'm lucky to be surrounded here by a talented group of reporters to help break all of this down. CNN's Phil Mattingly, Akayla Gardner of Bloomberg and Molly Ball of The Wall Street Journal, I have the benefit of seeing your emails, Phil Mattingly, trying to make us all smarter here at CNN. So, why don't you impart that to our viewers?
PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: Can I actually start by taking a step back for a second --
BASH: Please.
MATTINGLY: -- because I think it's important to watch what's been happening over the course of the last seven or eight days, and not think that these things are happening in isolation, right? And this is a really good example of it.
Donald Trump campaigned on impoundments. Campaigned on being able to take away Congress's power of the purse. He didn't think that that -- like that's wild, that he's campaigning on something that is illegal because of a 1974 law signed by Congress that banned presidents from withholding congressionally appropriated funding.
He campaigned against that and said explicitly he was going to do it. His nominee to be budget director was on Capitol Hill testifying just a few days ago, saying he agreed with the president that this thing that is law is unconstitutional.
BASH: They want to test it.
MATTINGLY: They want that fight. And so, when you see things like the birthright citizenship executive order. They want that fight. They know that that fight is coming, and they believe, based on the reality that currently surrounds them, which is so dramatically different than it was in 2017 that they can win that fight.
And if they don't win that fight, there will be no other repercussions, other than they just get it struck down. There are no lawmakers on their side of the aisle, which they told both majorities of the House or of Congress that are going to fight them on this or punish them for what they're doing, which is wild by the way that appropriators on the Republican side are not going bonkers right now.
Chairwoman Susan Collins hasn't put out a statement yet. It's wild to me. They believe that the courts, particularly in the wake of what the president did in his first term with the circuit court judges and the 63 Supreme Court majority, largely is a very different environment than they're facing in the first term.
They want the fights, and they're willing to not just wait and see, like this is the process. We're not supposed to do this. We'll wait and see how this happens. Maybe we'll get there after we try everything else. No, they're doing it now right off the bat, because they want the fight.
BASH: I'm so glad you said that. I want everybody to clip and save and send that around, because what you just said is critical to the way that we need to approach this. Number one, we are starting with real people, and whether they want the fight or not, whether they want to make a constitutional or a legal point or change the way that all of this is done, that is clearly what their goal is, as you just laid out.
In the short term, though, a lot of people, including those who voted for him are struggling with how this memo -- which I'm just going to read part of it, how this memo affects their communities, whether it's firefighters or local law enforcement, never mind the food and sustenance that a lot of people who are in need get from these federal programs.
OK, the memo. Let's just talk about where this came from. This is the memo that went out overnight. Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or dis-imbursement of all federal financial assistance, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the Green New Deal.
First of all, just keep that up. The Green New Deal is not a thing that is the law. At the beginning, I -- you know, kind of I'm following. DEI certainly is a list of programs, but woke gender ideology, I mean, some of this is just MEGA Mad Libs.
MOLLY BALL, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Well, I mean, I think that the administration would argue that many of the policies the Biden administration implemented amounted to codifying what they would term woke gender ideology.
Certainly, the Biden administration had executive orders enshrining rights for transgender people in the executive branch and same with the Green New Deal. They would argue that the aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was actually a big spending bill for green energy, was a sort of backdoor Green New Deal.
BASH: Which was passed by Congress.
BALL: Which was passed by Congress.
BASH: Right.
BALL: Which you know, but which, you know, was implemented through the executive branch in various ways. So, it's not just MAGA Mad Libs. I mean, if it were, then wouldn't have any effect, right? If there wasn't anything, it was actually --
BASH: I guess my point is, is that the way it's written, it does seem to be intentionally vague and intentionally not entirely clear to the people who are trying to figure out, again, on a local level all across the country right now. If the programs that they are involved in that help their local communities are still going to be functioning at five o'clock. It's that plus sending a message to the base with the language that they're using.
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BALL: Absolutely. And look, I mean, the effect of this on the civil service, on the existing employees of the executive branch is like Obama went off, and as Phil was saying, that's intentional. The point is to put the fear of God in a lot of these civil servants.
The point is to give latitude to a lot of the new political appointees and cabinet heads that Trump is installing, to give them the room to operate, to root out all of the things that they see as problems in all of their different agencies and departments.
And I think what remains to be seen is what are -- how does this all go over with the American people? How do people like it? You know, there was a surprising finding in our Wall Street Journal poll. A couple weeks ago, we asked people whether they supported the president getting rid of thousands of civil servants to replace them with his own appointees.
It was surprisingly unpopular. You know, I would have thought that, you know, people don't like government bureaucracy, but actually only 31 percent approved of that, and 61 percent opposed it. So, the federal government is more power -- is more popular than you might think.
And I think it's going to take a little bit of going through this sort of shock and awe period before we get -- start to get a sense of, you know, our Republicans on Capitol Hill hearing from their constituents about this. Is there a widespread public backlash and uproar, or do people sort of look at this like a temporary government shutdown and things will get better afterwards?
AKAYLA GARDNER, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, BLOOMBERG: Well, I think that calls that you mentioned, including, but not limited to shows how vast this could be. OMB says the total funding that we're looking at is about $3 trillion and we know that Doge is targeting $2 trillion.
And the thinking had been, if you don't touch social security, if you don't touch Medicare, which this clause says that it's not going to do that they would never be able to get to that goal. And this shows that they're really willing to go outside of the bounds of what was previously thought as being on the table in terms of cuts to potentially get to that $2 trillion goal.
MATTINGLY: Can I just bounce off something you said, which was the memo itself was like contradictory, convoluted and nonsensical, as you went, graph by graph, like the actual amount that the government spends, which they pegged at 10 trillion is known to be 6.75 trillion, not like the numbers were wrong. How it was supposed to work was wrong, how it was laid out was wrong, and that caused significant disruption.
Last night, I was talking to a federal program administrator. Last night, I called saying, you know, what does this mean? I don't quite understand. It's so vague. There's so much ambiguity in it. Had no idea. We're trying to figure out, like, does this just mean DEI, climate programs, those types of cultural issues, or is this everything?
And it took, really, until this morning, until folks started to realize, oh, this is -- this is everything. We're really saying everything right now, and that -- that's wild to me, that they weren't really fulsome. And how they were explaining this really dramatic action, even though they very clearly had planned to do it.
BASH: You know, you mentioned the president's nominee to be the director of the Office Management and Budget, Mr. Vought. He is known to a lot of people, particularly in the political world, as one of the, if not the main author of Project 2025, which was something that maybe became a campaign 2024 buzz word but is a very thick.
Now it looks like more and more, as Democrats did warn, roadmap to what Donald Trump is doing. Just some examples. This is what it says in that Project 2025 treatise. Rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs, implement a hiring freeze for career officials, maximize hiring of political appointees, the next conservative administration should scale back on USAID's global footprint, and time and time again, Donald Trump said the following about Project 2025.
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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Nothing to do with Project 2025. That's out there. I haven't read it. I don't want to read it. Purposely, I'm not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together. They came up with some ideas, I guess, some good, some bad. But it makes no difference. I have nothing to do it.
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BASH: So, he purposely didn't read it, which is, you know, very likely true, but it's still also true that the people who are doing what we're seeing and what we're reporting on right now, not only read it, lot of them wrote it, or at least parts of it.
BALL: Well, it's convenient that he didn't read it, because he never had to say what it was. He didn't like about it, right? So, he --
BASH: More than he like.
BALL: -- over that, he announced it and said, I have nothing to do with it. I think it's terrible. But he never said, what about it was terrible. And so, now he can say, well, we just happened to agree on all of these things. I just happened to like all these ideas that I didn't even know that they had.
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But because we don't know what his objections to it might have been in the first place. He can then say, well, you know, that's not where I'm getting this stuff or whatever. But yes, I mean, it was always clear that, you know, the reason they wrote Project 2025, was in order to help the new administration, have a menu of conservative ideas that they could then use to implement over the course of the transition and over the course of the new administration, so that they could hit the ground running in exactly this way.
So, you know, heritage has been producing this type of document for a generation for exactly this reason, and they've helped multiple Republican administrations in exactly this way. And this is exactly what it was intended to do.
BASH: And we haven't even gotten to the foreign aid programs that were also frozen, which we're going to try to do later in the program. I guess, again, this is strategic.
MATTINGLY: Just quickly add.
BASH: Yeah.
MATTINGLY: You know, it hasn't been confirmed yet --
BASH: Brass bot.
MATTINGLY: We talk about who has power and leverage, and can they swing the pendulum back? If you're a lawmaker and you're a Republican, you're hearing from constituents, you're concerned about this, or you're an appropriator who doesn't like the idea of losing some of your authority, they have a lever, but this will be a test.
BASH: That they are the Republican.
MATTINGLY: Yes, yes.
BASH: So, we'll see. It's a really good point. Thank you, Phil. Coming up, Donald Trump told us to expect revenge.
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TRUMP: Well, revenge does take time. I will say that it does, and sometimes revenge can be justified, though, I have to be honest.
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BASH: And now he's doing it. How his team is justifying purging more than a dozen of the president's perceived enemies. That's next.
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BASH: You're fired. More than a dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on Jack Smith's team were removed from their positions yesterday. It's one more move by the White House to bring the Justice Department more fully under President Trump's control.
As the great CNN Oracle's Stephen Collinson put it, the president is wasting no time in following through on his frequent campaign trail vows for retribution. Trump's sending a chilling message through the U.S. government, officials who cross him, investigate his alleged abuses of power, or join his critics once they leave office must be aware of his fury.
My panel is back along with our senior justice correspondent Evan Perez. Evan, you have been talking to your sources in that building, those who are there and maybe those who aren't. I won't ask you to reveal but what are you hearing about the actual reality of what we saw?
EVAN PEREZ, CNN SENIOR JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, look, I mean, it's clear that there was an enemies list for the people who were coming into the Justice Department, and they went in and targeted, especially in this latest round, it were the people who had anything to do with prosecutions of Donald Trump.
And one of the things that is really remarkable is the wording of the letter from James McKinney, who's the acting attorney general. And he says that, in essence, that the reason why is because you played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump, which, again, these people were doing --
BASH: Here it is on the screen, Evan.
PEREZ: Right, right. And he says that, you know, I do not believe you have the -- leadership can trust you to carry out his agenda. Look, the Justice Department is part of the executive branch. They are -- they have a political role.
But the reason why, traditionally, people believe that you need to have an independent Justice Department is because it gives the imprimatur of non-partisanship whenever you do bring a case right, and that stuff matters. It matters to juries. It matters to judges. It matters to the public at large.
And so, these people who they targeted, I mean, one of the people that they've targeted is Brad Weinsheimer. He is a, you know, the top- ranking career official, and he is the type of person who might stand up when you want to bring a case, for instance, that might be highly partisan. And he would be one of the people who would say, no, you can't do that. And traditionally, in the Justice Department people listen to him, these guys are saying, not so much.
BASH: Not only not so much. You're out of here. You're out here. What were -- they were moving him. I mean, that's a key example. And he was put in that job, by the way, by --
PEREZ: Jeff Sessions.
BASH: Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump's first attorney general.
PEREZ: And I should add, right, you know, he is not -- like he was not beloved by the Biden administration. He, after all, signed off on Rob Hur's report that called President Biden an elderly man, well-meaning man, right? I mean, so that's the kind of -- yeah -- BASH: Forgive me, but this is really the key. And I just want to
underscore one point that you're making. That this letter from the acting Attorney General, James McHenry saying, we're going to remove you because you don't support what the president wants. You don't support his agenda.
And we are not talking about political appointees. We're not talking about people who come and go with each administration because they support any president's agenda. We're talking about the career people who tried to deal with law and justice in the federal government --
PEREZ: In a nonpartisan way.
BASH: In a nonpartisan way. And they were basically told because you were involved in prosecuting the president -- now president again of the United States, that is inherently partisan, whereas they were like, you know, doing their job potentially, and following the law and following the orders of Jack Smith.
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MATTINGLY: What's so striking, and I feel like this has been a theme throughout the course of the first week and a day. They're just saying it out loud, right? Like there's no caution. There's no subtlety. There's no trying to politically message or massage actions that they're taking. They're just saying it out loud.
And I think that just goes to the idea of they feel very unencumbered right now, both because they're experienced, because they've learned a lot of lessons, but they don't feel like there's any kind of crack back that they're going to face for doing what they're doing.
And I think there's a broader element here, which this has a dramatic effect across the government, right? We're reporting on the OMB stuff last night, the number of people who are scared to talk to reporters, the number of people who are scared to raise major issues because they've seen colleagues that have gotten hit or gotten kind of moved. They're trying to get people to quit.
What happened at USAID with their lawyers or legal counsel's office that was trying to shift funding around when it was frozen, and dozens were removed reportedly. Everybody's seeing that, and I think it's certainly the case at DOJ as well with careers, where everyone there is seeing what's happening and are trying to figure out how they fit into this new kind of reality.
BASH: And it's -- so it's the people, it's the cases that they rose -- civil rights cases. They said, we're not doing this anymore. And by the way, the attorney general hasn't even been confirmed yet, Pam Bondi --
PEREZ: And it's on purpose, right?
BASH: Yeah.
PEREZ: I think they're doing all of this before she gets there, so her hands are clean.
BASH: Yeah. Well, but there are other people that I don't want to lose sight of, and they are others tapped to lead the Department of Justice. Todd Blanche nominated to be deputy attorney general.
He, of course, was Donald Trump's attorney in all of these cases, on the defense side of the federal government cases against Trump and Emil Bove same thing, principal of associate attorney general, who by the way, was running around being part of the raids over the weekend, the immigration raids. And John Sauer, nominated to be U.S. Solicitor General.
BALL: Look, I think, to Phil's point before, this is something that Trump campaigned on very explicitly, and it was always very clear that one of the first things he was going to do when he got into office was eliminate that tradition independence of the Justice Department from the president.
It was a norm. It was not a law, and it is something that he objected to very strongly. And of course, they would argue that he wasn't the one who politicized the Justice Department, that that was his predecessor in choosing to prosecute him. Now, be that as it may, I thought that your point about the credibility of the department was really interesting, right.
Are we going to now see when they try to bring cases a wave of defense lawyers using this, they will say, and that's and that happened during Trump's first term as well, when he was interfering in Roger Stone's case and others, where you would have defense lawyers saying, this is the president's Justice Department, and he's picking on people, and they're saying it out loud. So, is that going to actually make the department less effective in its crime fighting.
BASH: I just want to quickly allow you to weigh in on this.
GARDNER: Yeah. I mean, there's a reason why President Biden issued those preemptive pardons, because there is a real fear that anyone opposed Donald Trump, whether it's January 6 or any of the legal cases, that they could be targeted. And I think you all make a great point that it's not just loyalists in these political positions, it's also loyalist in these civil servant positions. And I think we're going to see that across the federal government.
BASH: OK. Everybody standby. Coming up, Donald Trump's pick to run the FBI Kash Patel has spent years feuding with the intelligence community. We have brand new reporting on the battles that he has picked with the officials he now wants to work with side by side. Stay with us.
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