Trump indicted in 2020 election probe, Fitch downgrades U.S. credit rating: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: 'Unprecedented assault' on democracy: Trump indicted in Jan. 6 case

USA TODAY National Political Correspondent David Jackson on new Donald Trump indictment. Plus, Trump allies are charged in connection with conspiracy to breach voting machines in Michigan, Yellow trucking company is headed for bankruptcy, Fitch downgrades U.S. credit rating, and USA TODAY Education Reporter Alia Wong on new research that shows college students are left with unmanageable debt.

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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.

Dana Taylor:

Good morning. I'm Dana Taylor and this is 5 Things you need to know for Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023. A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump for conspiring to steal the 2020 election. Trump allies were charged in connection with conspiracy to breach voting machines in Michigan, and Fitch downgrades the US credit rating.

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A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald Trump for a third time Tuesday, this time accusing him of organizing a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from President Joe Biden. Here to help us unpack the news is National Political Correspondent David Jackson. David, thanks for hopping on the pod.

David Jackson:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

So David, what's in the indictment?

David Jackson:

It's a whole lot of details about who Donald Trump talked to and who he dealt with in his effort to basically overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden. He had associates in the White House and elsewhere trying to get different states to basically invalidate Biden's win in those states and the electoral votes that accompanied them.

Dana Taylor:

So this is former President Trump's third indictment. How serious is this one?

David Jackson:

Probably the most serious because it actually deals with something that he did while he was president. His first indictment was in connection with a payment of hush money, and that happened back in 2016. The second indictment deals with things he did after his White House years in terms of keeping classified documents and blocking them from going to a grand jury. This indictment deals with his actions as president and they were unprecedented actions in a bid to hold onto power even though he had lost the 2020 election. So, I would say it's the most serious indictment and the most historical one he's had yet.

Dana Taylor:

Now, there were no co-defendants in this indictment. Why was that?

David Jackson:

That's a good question. Some reporter yelled at Special Counsel Jack Smith during his brief news conference today and he ignored it. So we don't know why others haven't been indicted yet, but we suspect that that may happen. The indictment does reference six co-conspirators who helped Trump in this endeavor, but they didn't identify them by name, they just described them. There were attorneys, justice department official, and a couple of campaign advisors. We're basically guessing as to who these folks are. We think we know who some of them are, but so far they haven't been charged criminally, but it wouldn't surprise me if that didn't happen down the line.

Dana Taylor:

So what does the indictment say about Mike Pence?

David Jackson:

Basically very deferential to Pence. It says that he was the victim of what sounded like an extortion attempt from President Trump. Trump was adamant to try to get him to throw out these electoral votes that Biden had won in six states. This happened on January 6th, 2021 right before the insurrection and the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Congress that day met in order to ratify Biden's victory in the electoral college, and Mike Pence, who serves as President of the Senate, was the presiding officer of that meeting. So Trump's effort was to try to get Pence to assert his authority and basically spike the electoral votes in states that Trump was protesting. And what that would've done was reduce Biden's total and basically hand the election back over to Trump.

Pence said he had no legal authority to do that, and he doesn't, and he took quite a bit of heat from Trump and from Trump's supporters. I mean, some of the people who broke into the Capitol that day were chanting, "Hang Mike Pence." So the indictment goes through all of these efforts that Trump made to try to pressure Pence into doing his bidding. And it's an extraordinary situation because as you know, Pence is running for president in 2024 against Trump, and he may be put in a position where he'll have to testify in a trial against the former president.

Dana Taylor:

So David, what's the biggest surprise for you in the indictment?

David Jackson:

They're not too many surprises for me. I've been following this pretty closely. And I don't know if I'd call it a surprise, but the thing I wonder about is why now. And Trump himself is asking this question. I mean, a lot of the events that are described in this indictment happened more than two and a half years ago, and of course the January 6th incident happened in early 2021. So, we've had more than two years to look at and study this stuff, why are we just now getting around to this indictment? I don't think that question has been adequately answered, but I'm sure it's one that's going to keep coming up in the weeks ahead.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So tell us what's next for Trump, is he going to make a court appearance and be formally arraigned?

David Jackson:

Yeah. At some point, yes. I don't know when, but what happens is the case will be assigned to a certain judge and he or she will schedule an arraignment for the former president. It'll probably be early next week, and then the judge will work with the attorneys to try to fix a pretrial schedule where they'll discuss some of the issues that will be hashed out in the trial. That's another thing about this. I think it's a 45-page indictment, it's pretty complex stuff. It's very hard for me to see how this becomes a trial in a year's time, and at a year from now, Donald Trump could be the Republican nominee for president. So bottom line is it's very hard for me to see how this gets adjudicated before the next presidential election, which is on November 5th, 2024. So, we have a long ways to go, but it will start with an arraignment sometime in the next few days.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. And this still might not be his last indictment. Who else might file charges in the coming weeks?

David Jackson:

Well, he's got one more investigation pending and it's in Atlanta and it's basically the same allegation. It's just specific to the state of Georgia and it's being conducted by local prosecutors in Atlanta. And they're looking at another conspiracy case alleging that Trump and his allies conspired to deprive Biden of his victory in Georgia itself. So that case is different in the fact that it's focused on one particular state, and it's also a state case, and will be using the state conspiracy laws. And that would set up a whole new set of legal challenges for Trump and his team. We expect the Atlanta grand jury to act on this case sometime over the next two weeks.

Dana Taylor:

Thank you so much for your top-notch reporting here, David. Appreciate all the info.

David Jackson:

Thank you.

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Dana Taylor:

Suffice it to say, Tuesday was not a good day for former President Donald Trump or indeed his allies. In an unrelated case, former Michigan GOP attorney general candidate Matt DePerno and former state Rep. Daire Rendon were charged with violating Michigan election law in Oakland County Circuit Court according to the court's docket. The charges they face appear to stem from a special prosecutor's investigation into an alleged conspiracy to breach voting machines orchestrated by allies of former President Donald Trump who fought the result of the 2020 election. Oakland County Circuit Court's docket did not indicate charges filed against any of the other individuals referred to the special prosecutor for investigation. Although pro-Trump attorney Stefanie Lambert Junttila indicated last week that she was a target in the election probe. DePerno and Rendon did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The charges marked the second-high profile prosecution stemming from the actions Trump allies took in the wake of the 2020 election. Attorney General Dana Nessel last month charged a group of 16 Republicans accused of trying to overturn the last presidential election with a phony certificate pledging the state's Electoral College votes to Trump.

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Yellow Corp, one of the largest trucking companies in the U.S., has halted its operations and is filing for bankruptcy, according to the Teamsters Union. That closure threatens the jobs of nearly 30,000 employees at the century old freight delivery company. The company had been generating about $5 billion in annual revenue. After a standoff with the Teamsters, Yellow laid off hundreds of non-union employees on Friday before ceasing operations on Sunday, according to the Wall Street Journal. The trucking company, whose 17.5 million annual shipments made it the third largest in the U.S., had an outstanding debt of about $1.5 billion as of March and has continued to lose customers as its demise appeared imminent. With bankruptcy looming, the company had been battling against the Teamsters Union for months.

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Citing repeated debt limit political standoffs and mounting U.S. red ink, Fitch Ratings said Tuesday that it has downgraded the nation's credit rating to AA+ from AAA. In early June, Congress passed legislation to raise the nation's debt ceiling while cutting spending over the next two years after a prolonged standoff between the White House and Republicans. A new standoff looms in September when Congress returns. Fitch also pointed to steady increases in the nation's debt over the past decade that it attributed to economic shocks, tax cuts, new spending initiatives, and the government's lack of a medium term fiscal framework. A lower credit rating can raise interest rates on treasury bonds, which in turn can push up rates on everything from mortgages to corporate bonds.

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Despite fierce debates over the student debt crisis, Americans still tend to believe that going to college is worth it. And the vast majority of people who have undergraduate degrees are better off financially than they would've been had they not attended college. But what about graduate degrees? Here to help me dig into it is Education Reporter Alia Wong. Alia, thanks for joining me.

Alia Wong:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

So generally speaking, don't graduate degrees lead to better paying jobs?

Alia Wong:

Yeah. Generally speaking, graduate programs tend to stay true to their value proposition that getting a master's degree or some sort of professional degree will get you a higher paying job. That's evident in fields like medicine or law or business administration, education. Generally speaking, going to graduate school will get you a better paying job. But many programs, hundreds potentially, have programs that are leaving graduates with more debt than they can afford. So they're basically trapping students in debt and landing them in jobs that don't necessarily earn them the incomes that would allow them to pay it off.

Dana Taylor:

So why does graduate school debt tend to snowball?

Alia Wong:

Usually people with graduate degrees tend to make enough to basically pay down at least some of their loans soon after completing their program, but it snowballs when people aren't making enough to pay off their principal, so the interest balloons. And one thing that's really important to note is that federal graduate student loans come with higher interest rates than do those loans for undergraduate students. And another thing that's important to note is that as of about a decade ago, a rule was basically passed that allows people to take out unlimited amounts of student debt to go to graduate school. The idea is to help Americans pursue advanced degrees at a time when the economy was really struggling. But one result is that a lot of people have been taken advantage of and taken on more debt than they can afford, and the issue has just become more compounded in recent years.

Dana Taylor:

So Alia, is the debt evenly split between non-profit and for-profit institutions, and if not, why?

Alia Wong:

So my recent reporting is based on new research that's out, and it analyzed data of about a little more than 1,500 higher education institutions and found that about a third of them have programs that are producing students who owe more on the loans than the amount they originally borrowed, and that was five years after repayment. And one common denominator across those schools where the students really owe huge amounts of interest is that these are for-profit colleges that are luring students with the promise of a graduate degrees that will lead them to very lucrative salaries, but then just aren't showing the outcomes that they promised.

Dana Taylor:

So I want to circle back to this. How much does the graduate focus impact debt? I'm guessing that getting a degree in an academically focused subject like English Lit might not pay as high a dividend as say a law degree, but how can potential students ensure that a degree will be worth the investment?

Alia Wong:

So generally speaking, certain fields really make sense for a graduate degree and in fact just kind of require it, it's basically a prerequisite, again, medicine, law. But when you look at the schools and the programs that are producing these really high debt-to-income ratios - so basically students owe huge amounts of debt and are just not making incomes to match it - they're pretty broad ranging in terms of the discipline, in terms of the type of program. One of the highest debt-to-income ratios was for a program that was a dentistry program, which you usually associate with kind of a higher paying job and sort of a lucrative trajectory. Prospective students, when deciding whether to pursue a master's degree or professional degree, it's really important that they do the research on each institution, look at the data on the outcomes. That data can really tell you whether a program is producing the income that it promises, or really just promoting false promises.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for your great reporting here, Alia.

Alia Wong:

Thank you so much.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us seven mornings a week on your favorite podcast platform. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Any comments, you can reach us at [email protected]. Catch up on all the news you need to know throughout the day at usatoday.com. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.