Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trump Inauguration Debrief; January 6th Pardons; Day One Executive Orders; Biden Pardons His Family; College Football National Champs
Tue, 21 Jan 2025
The Money Rehab guest hosts this week are Mosh Oinounou and Jill Wagner, journalists and cohosts of the independent news podcast Mo News. All week, you'll hear their non-partisan, conversational breakdown of the top news and breaking news stories. Today, they cover: – Welcome to Mo News (00:00) – Trump Sworn In As 47th President (02:45) – Who Was In The Room Where The Inauguration Happened – Trump Pardons Roughly 1,500 Criminal Defendants Charged In The Jan. 6 Capitol Attack (18:00) – Trump's Immigration Executive Orders: What to Know (19:00) – Trump Declares A 'National Energy Emergency’ (25:10) – Trump Signs Executive Orders Proclaiming Only Two Biological Sexes, Halting Diversity Programs (28:25) – Trump To Rename Gulf of Mexico, Mount Denali (31:00) – Biden Issues Preemptive Pardons For Trump Critics And Biden Family Members (34:50) – Ohio State Wins College Football Playoff National Championship (40:00) – On This Day (41:15) — Mosheh Oinounou (@mosheh) is an Emmy and Murrow award-winning journalist. He has 20 years of experience at networks including Fox News, Bloomberg Television and CBS News, where he was the executive producer of the CBS Evening News and launched the network's 24 hour news channel. He founded the @mosheh Instagram news account in 2020 and the Mo News podcast and newsletter in 2022. Jill Wagner (@jillrwagner) is an Emmy and Murrow award-winning journalist. She's currently the Managing Editor of the Mo News newsletter and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News, Cheddar News, and News 12. She also co-founded the Need2Know newsletter, and has made it a goal to drop a Seinfeld reference into every Mo News podcast. Follow Mo News on all platforms: Website: www.mo.news Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mosheh/ Daily Newsletter: https://www.mo.news/newsletter Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@monews Twitter: https://twitter.com/mosheh TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mosheh Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoshehNews Snapchat: https://t.snapchat.com/pO9xpLY9
Chapter 1: What happened during Trump’s inauguration?
Also, they're Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla. We've noted that Zuckerberg also donated to the inaugural fund.
And has made a point of making some moves in recent weeks to try to engender goodwill with the new administration, including dropping fact checking, putting a couple of Trump buddies on the meta board, doing the interview with Joe Rogan, where he went after Joe Biden, among several things.
Also there are the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, the Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, the TikTok boss, Shouze Chu, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Allman, again, sitting in the row in front of the cabinet, like Marco Rubio had a worse seat than Jeff Bezos, if you looked behind him. Also notable, a number of top donors, Mary Madelson, the casino magnate, wife of Sheldon Adelson, who passed away.
Mary Madelson, I think, gave more than $100 million, if not closer to $200 million, for the campaign here. So she had a very prominent seat there. Now, we've always seen sort of prominent CEOs and business leaders potentially attend inaugurations here, but never seated like this, this prominently.
In that cabinet row, you did see the number of cabinet nominees there, including those were still waiting for a hearing, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi was nominated for AG, Kash Patel nominated for FBI director, Doug Burgum, among several others there.
And then there were like the overflow rooms in the Capitol where even governors and spouses of members of Congress, etc., were seated there. And then Trump went to go visit with them. But the fact that these tech CEOs, some of these donors, et cetera, were in the room where it happened, pretty remarkable given that there was just a couple hundred of them in there.
A reminder, we haven't seen an indoor ceremony like this since 1985, since the second Reagan inaugural. You noted the cold temps. Jill, you know, it was cold, but like, was it as cold as Obama was in 09? Sure. It is leading to questions as to whether crowd size was really the issue here, given that a number of hotels were not even fully booked here.
And so whether, you know, we had mentioned security is a potential issue. Haven't seen more on that. A crowd size weighing potentially here on Trump, even though he won't admit it openly, you know, especially given how cold it is. How many people were he going to have on the mall? We know how important crowd size is to him.
There were the comparisons between the Obama inaugural and the first Trump. This is now the second Trump. There wasn't that much buzz. The feeling even among Republicans and Trump supporters as I spoke to him was like, yeah, this is probably a crowd size thing.
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Chapter 2: What executive orders did Trump sign on his first day?
Right. And is this just going to be the new norm that any president can feel?
Trump on his way out, like now every president is going to just pardon all their family members preemptively. Or anybody.
Forget it. Not even their family members, like members of their administration, like their cabinet.
Because there is a process for pardons. You'd have to go through the Justice Department. They got to determine. Typically, you've committed a crime to go through a pardon. So this whole like anything they might have done since 2014, like pardon, like the pardon authority in the Constitution is pretty open ended. And the Supreme Court's been differential on it.
But there's a lot of concern about the precedent that Biden has opened up because, by the way, Jill, it wasn't even his it wasn't just his family.
That's right. He also issued preemptive pardons for General Mark Milley, Dr. Fauci, members of Congress who served on the January 6th, the 2021 committee. This move is aimed, he says, at protecting these individuals from potential revenge by Trump. Among those pardoned, former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, who is a vocal Trump critic. She has been targeted in his calls for retribution.
General Milley retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 2023 and has faced GOP criticism over the Afghanistan withdrawal. Dr. Fauci, a longtime government scientist, became a polarizing figure because of the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The people here apparently didn't get a heads up that Biden was giving them these extra pardons. Fauci says, I really, truly appreciate the action President Biden has taken on my behalf. Let me be perfectly clear. I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation against me.
Milley said that he was grateful, but again, didn't know about this in advance. The New York Times writes that in issuing the preemptive pardons here, Biden has effectively turned the constitutional power the president has of forgiveness into a protective shield. against what he maintains would be politically motivated vengeance.
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Chapter 3: What were the details of Trump’s pardons related to January 6?
Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching our coverage yesterday. And stay tuned. It's going to be a news-packed Week, month, year. Go. Four years? Four years.
All right. Bye, everyone.
Thanks for listening to the Mo News Podcast.