February 28, 2025 • 27 mins
ABC News national reporter Jim Ryan joins the show to speak on Gene Hackman and his wife’s death now deemed “suspicious.” Here’s the latest. Mass firings at NOAA ignites fury. Scientists worldwide worry there will be immediate harm to Americans. How Elon Musk is disrupting the traditional federal bureaucracy.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listen Saints KPI AM six forty. The Bill handles
show on demand on the iHeartRadio. F February twenty eighth,
it is Foody Friday, which means at eight o'clock, Neil
and I start talking food.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Of course, his show is two to.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Five tomorrow and he is broadcasting tomorrow from the Academy
Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences Museum, and that's on Wilshire Boulevard.
I mean he's at Fanny's Restaurant, the best part right there.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, so that sounds like see us through the glass, like.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yes, you animals, Yes, you press your Yeah, go ahead
and just press your nose. Or if you're really clever
and want to affect him, what you do is you
moon him and press your butt to the glass. They
call that the pressed hams.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Jim Ryan, who is with u ABC News correspondent talking
about Gene Hackman, Jim, have you ever done the pressed
hams by the way to somebody?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh, gosh, I hope not. Okay, I don't think so,
but I wouldn't be surprised. It sounds like I wouldn't
put it past me, but I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Fair enough, now, yesterday we talked about the story that
broke Gene Hackman and his wife dead in New Mexico
at their very impressive house, I might say, and it
just smelled weird from just the minute that their bodies
were discovered.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
I know you're covering the story. Share with us the latest.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Well, there is no latest really beyond what we heard
yesterday from the investigators on this case. The Sheriff's department
and the state troopers went into the house after getting
a call from the groundskeeper, the maintenance man who went
out there, and he said, the maintenance man that he
hadn't heard or seen the couple in some time, but
that's not unusual because normally he just contacts Betsy Arakawa,
the wife, through text messaging, they make the appointments or
(01:52):
they've set up a maintenance and they wouldn't even see
Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, so it wasn't unusual that
they wouldn't have. But this time one of the men
looked through a window he saw the two bodies in there,
kind of panicked, I think, and called nine to one one.
If you've heard the nine to one one call, Bill,
he seems rattled and who wouldn't after seeing this. So
(02:14):
the the affidavit shows that investigators went in. They by
the way, first they called the gas company gas company
to come out and make sure that there wasn't some
kind of gas leak, on the assumption that maybe that's
how they died. There was no gas leak, and so
the investigation continued. We're not going to have any firm answers,
probably bill for a few weeks until the toxicology report
(02:37):
comes back.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Now there's a from what I understand, there is a
preliminary report from the corner's office that there doesn't seem
to be foul play or he can't see the foul play,
and the argument about carbon monoxide maybe because that's was
my guess. I saw a report on ABC as a
matter of fact, where if there was carbon monoxide, it
(03:02):
may have dissipated by the time the bodies were discovered.
So it's too weird, no foul play. Yet he's found
somewhere in the house. She's in the kitchen, he's in
the bathroom, right, she's in the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Whereas the other way around, he's in a mud room.
Kind of oh, okay, keep your umbrella and stuff in there.
She's found in a bathroom.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Right, Andy, and one dog is dead and to the
other two dogs survived. And at first it was just
no foul play, that's it. Conversation over and then I
would assume the uproar was where the optics were such
that Okay, there's a here here.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Well, yeah, I think you're right. I mean, they're still
not saying that there's foul play. The first email from
the sheriff said no foul play was evident there, and
later then the investigators said that it looked suspicious. Now
I think those two can kind of coexist. If suspicious
means that they just don't know what the cause was,
if it's just a mystery at this point that there's
still no suspicion of foul play, no bludgeon marks, nothing,
(04:07):
no sign of forest entry. In fact, one door was open,
and that kind of dispels the carbon monoxide poisoning theory.
Again if the door was opened at the time, if
there was, you know, they would kind of vent out
and they would probably be able to escape. So, you know,
I think you're looking at two different things here. No
indication that they were murdered, but still no indication of
(04:31):
exactly how they did die.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, so that now, excuse me, Now that leads to
logically is some kind of a suicide, is the way
I would think it.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I'm just guessing.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I'm not anything other than a guy behind a microphone guessing,
which I do regularly, including Saturday mornings, by the way,
eight to eleven o'clock, where I do nothing. But yes,
so is that being bandied about that this may be
a suicide.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, I think all options are open, you know, then,
because certainly this prescription pill bottle was found in the
bathroom near Betsy Arakawa, some pills scattered around. The affidavit
doesn't say what those pills were exactly, and we won't
know for a few weeks whether any of those pills
were in our system or in Gene Hackman system. So,
(05:18):
you know, I think the whole thing now hinges on
the toxicology report. Here's my thinking, Bill, and this is
me just taking a stab in the dark. They're going
to do a post mortem on the dog. The dog
was discovered dead in a kennel, locked up in a
dog cage in a closet. Now, if the dog died
just starved to death, right, was in that thing tragically
(05:41):
and sadly for two weeks or three weeks or whatever
and starved to death. Then all bets are off as
to what killed Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa. If the
dog died of carbon monoxide poisoning, they probably did too, right, So,
but that's me just speculating.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
An again, it makes sense.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
We just won't know for a.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
While, all right, Jim, thank you always, good stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Jim Ryan, ABC News correspondent who reports for us on
a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
A quick word about what is trending right now. It
just came in.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Ukrainian President Zelensky meets with the President Trump about eight
o'clock our time. That's what the President said, and they
are going to discuss the rare earth mineral deal. Zelensky
has a greed that a deal will be cut or
has already been cut, between the United States and Ukraine
(06:36):
for rare earths, and this is what Trump has been
asking for. Zelensky wants in return some kind of security.
Continuing on with weaponry, you have both Sturmer, who is
the Prime Minister of England, and you had Macron a
few days ago. Effectively, would I argue begging no, strongly
(06:58):
asking the United States to maintain its support of Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
And we're going to see Zelenski is coming hat in hand.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
He really has no cards here, and the President has
said exactly that he has no cards. And that puts
President Trump in a position where he can almost mandate
what's going to be happening.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And so we'll report.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
More on that and we'll see if anything big comes
out of it. Amy's going to be following that for sure.
All right, As these firings are taking place across the country,
people working for various federal agencies, and Musk is doing
and there and the government are going through like well
a hot knife through butter with this. And coming up
(07:44):
next segment, I'm going to explain exactly how it all happened,
how this came together, and how Musk got this.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Kind of power.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
There is a firing or mass firings at the National
Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National
Weather Service.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And this is a tough one. I mean, this is
throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Firings of employees across the FEDS, federal programs, you know,
some of it as horrible as it is not going
to change your life. If it turns out that you're
not going to go to a national park this summer
because there aren't enough people there, it's going to ruin Granted,
it's going to ruin your vacation. Now, is it going
(08:31):
to affect me, No, not really. Is it going to
affect someone who is not going?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Not really. But let's talk about an agency that.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Affects every single one of us every day, and that
is the National Oceanic Oceanic administ Atmospheric Association. Under that
National Weather Service and what does what does NOAH do well?
It provides for free to Americans, business, entire world, actually
(09:02):
accurate forecasts, weather forecasts, severe weather alerts, emergency information. And
it's being dismantled now. You know, getting weather, I would
think is pretty important. Making sure that let's say, we
(09:22):
hunker down for a hurricane or the wildfires are coming.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Not that we were prepared for this level.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
But it came out of the National Weather Service that
the wins that were coming prior to the big fires,
we're going to be life threatening. The National Weather Service
will tell people hurricanes are coming, be prepared, it's going
to be a category.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Three or four. This is all done under Noah now.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Susan Buchanan, a spokesperson for Noah, wouldn't comment on the cuts.
What she says is NOAH remains dedicated to its mission
providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American
public and ensure our nation's environmental and economic reliance. We
continue to provide whether information, forecasts, and warnings pursuant to
(10:14):
our public safety mission. The question is going to be
by firing a good part of the Noah staff, is
this going to be is this waste? Is this a
bloated agency? We're only talking about a few hundred, maybe thousand.
People don't know the answer to that, but I have
always said, since the firings have commenced, I think you
(10:36):
can't have two point three million employees without having some
kind of abuse, some kind of bloating.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's impossible.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
However, do you go in and fire everybody before investigating.
Let's say there is a theft here at KFI, right,
and there's well, there used to be a video of
me taking some equipment out, but I was able to deleted.
So here I am taking equipment out of the radio station.
(11:05):
So instead of really sitting down and investigating all of
us get fired, all of us, the entire programming Department,
And that's effectively what's happening here. Maybe not to that
great extent, because there's still a skeleton crew there, but
environmentalists and scientists across the globe, because you've got entire
(11:26):
countries and the industry and people look at what the
weather conditions are and it's given to us by Noah.
And we're talking about weather forecasters, mariners, farmers, emergency responders,
(11:47):
businesses and all of us, and we really don't realize
exactly how dependent we are on this agency. Now, the
argument's going to be, and maybe this is gonna come up.
I don't know the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It's free information that's being given to Americans anybody who
wants it. It's out there, it's on the website, and
then news outlets pick it up when there's a real
severe issue coming down. Maybe the answer is going to be, Okay,
we charge know what charges for information? I mean, that's
(12:25):
what happens when news outlets give you news from the
AP or Reuters. You know, these news outlets pay for Reuters,
they pay for AP, they're under contract, and that's hard news.
And people rely on that, and especially when you're talking
(12:45):
about international news. I believe we have a contract with AP,
don't we amy we do pay for a p so
the same argument can in fact be used. And maybe
we're gonna come up with that saying yeah, sure we're
gonna provide weather information. If you're a news outlet, you're
going to pay for it. And if you're a business,
you are you can subscribe and we'll give you the information.
(13:07):
The problem is it is absolutely free because it is.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
So important to everyone.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
We're talking the weather, we're also talking pollution, measuring pollution
across the world. We're talking about just not only the
weather locally and what's going to happen the next day
or two, but studying whether events all over the world
and doing data and keeping the logs.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well, you know, I think that's pretty important stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
And is it going to turn out that the Trump
administration realizes, okay, maybe this one. They already did it
with the park federal park employees they let go of
I don't know oneenty twelve hundred. Then someone realized at
the federal level that means that national Park is going
(13:58):
to shut down. No one can go, okay, we're not
going to do that, and so they were rehired the
next day. Same thing with the security at the nuclear
facilities weapons facilities.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Oops, okay, maybe we need.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Some safeguards at these facilities so our nuclear weaponry is safe.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
So this is moving just so quickly.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And I think the bottom line is and this is
one thing that the Trump administration is saying, Americans want this.
Americans like the idea of removing the bloat, removing the waste.
And is there of course there is, and should there
be investigations? Of course there should this quickly. I don't
(14:44):
know now the Elon Musk story, DOGE, Department of the
Energy or the government efficiency. This didn't just come out
of the blue. And I want to explain how this
actually happened. And it's a really interesting story. It actually
(15:05):
started at a twenty twenty three dinner party.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And Musk was.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There and he was describing to everybody because he sort
of takes over the room, takes over the oxygen, our rooms,
kind of that kind of guy. He talked about how
he would get the federal bureaucracy and the plan for
DOGE was mapped out in Palm Beach, Florida. The series
of very closely secret meetings held in Palm Beach prior
(15:34):
to well just after the nomination of Trump and certainly
prior to coming into office. And here is what's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
About Musk.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
How do you go about redoing the bureaucracy? Do you
do it simply at looking and say here's bloat? How
do we get there? How do we investigate this? How
do we figure out how to get into agencies and
find out who does what? And Musk said, it's through technology.
(16:07):
That's how we're going to do it. We're going to
do it as a technological effort because that's what he does.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
His brain is all about technology.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
So what he did, and by the way, this is
so unusual without seeding control of his companies. His companies
still have multi billion dollar contracts with the federal government.
He embedded his engineers and aids inside the government's critical
digital infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
That's how he did it.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
We enter into government digitally, don't go there and say
what are you doing? Asking people interviews, none of that.
It's let's get in so repetitiously, not hacking, but sort
of the same methods that hackers use. So on that
last Friday of September twenty twenty three, Musk goes to
(17:01):
this dinner party and he told the guests first of
all that he had to be careful about supporting anyone
in the Republican nomination fight. Right, this is twenty twenty three,
and it's before the nomination.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
And you know who's there, vivid Ramaswami.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And when doge first started, did you notice that Musk
and vivid ram Ramaswami who ran for the presidency. He
ran for the nomination and got nowhere, and then was
one of the first to turn around and endorse Trump,
which guaranteed him an important position in the government. And
(17:42):
is an entrepreneur and did it with technology. At that dinner,
and Trump brought his well not his wife, but I
guess his girlfriend, Grimes, the mother of three of his kids.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That was a dinner for m. Ramaswami.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So now Trump starts lecturing everybody about his ideas, and
they pay attention. When he got the richest guy on
the planet talking about his ideas, you pay attention. So
Trump was talking on a variety of topics his visit
that week to the US Mexican border, talked about the
war in Ukraine, talked about his frustrations with the federal
(18:27):
government and the regulations hindering space X.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
He and Biden didn't get along.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Biden did not get along with this guy who said
with Musk, who said, it's Biden who's getting in the
way of me successfully launching that's the policy.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And I don't like it.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
And of course Trump is gone the other way, where
the contracts are going to keep on flying. And you
talked about Ramaswami's highest priority, the dis manteling of the
federal bureaucracy, and Trump made it clear that night that
the gutting of that bureaucracy, as I said, was very simple.
(19:12):
It's a technology. It's just a technology challenge. Give me
the passwords, and I'm going to make the government fit
and trim. You let me have access to everything, and
I am going to make all of this work. And
so it started as this discussion at that dinner party
(19:35):
evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. And
no one expected it to be this quick, but it is.
And there's a spin on this quick. And as I said,
what he looked at in terms of the gutting of
the federal bureaucracy as simply a technology challenge.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Get into the technology of the government and then got
to work, and no one's done that before. At the
twenty twenty three meeting where he had dinner and this
sort of all came into being, he said, just give
me the passwords and I will make the government fit
and trim. And at that dinner we're talking about, before
(20:20):
Trump was even nominated, it all evolved into a radical
takeover of the federal bureaucracy. So here's what happens after
the president is elected President Trump. Trump embeds his engineers
and aids inside the government's critical digital infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
That was super important.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
And what he did is he inserted himself in more
than twenty agencies. By the way, this story comes out
of the New York Times, all these facts so and
the way they report is they talked to a whole
one people who were there and know about this and
corroborate everything. So I'm pretty comfortable with telling you what
the New York Times says. And so the strategy was twofold,
(21:13):
grab control of the government's Human resources agency, the Office
of Personal Management that deals with all federal employees. Grab
the email systems to pressure civil civil service employees to
quit so he could call the workforce. I mean, keep
in mind, how do you get emails to two point
(21:35):
three million people?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Just the physical aspect.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Of this, I mean, do you write an email and
have a list of two point three million people that
you're sending copies to? Of course not so who keeps
all those records? The Office of Personal Management has the ability.
And he told civil servants you either quit, take the
(21:58):
buy out, so you until September, or we're going to
fire you. Even to the point where mus said, if
you don't respond to the demand that you tell us
what are the five things you did last week. If
you don't respond, I'm going to look at this as
your resignation. So he first did that, burrowed into the
computer systems across the bureaucracy. We're talking about doge tracing
(22:23):
how much money was coming out of the administration, so.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
It could be cut off.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Not at the top, but at the bottom where the
money was coming in from. It's like a funnel.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
It sucks up money. So so far musk staff.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Members and only about forty of them, and half of
them are nineteen years old. I mean, these are his
guys that he expects eighty hours, one hundred hours a week,
because that's just the way he thinks. And if you
don't work one hundred hours a week for his companies,
you're out the door. So he wanted to and he
did get access to at least seven sensitive government databases,
(23:02):
including the IRS where there are firewalls up and down
that bureaucracy, the Social Security Administration again, firewalls all over
now Doge.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And this is a casual notion that came out of
a dinner party.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Coming into this powerful, powerful weapon can only happen in
the Trump era. Why because it involves wild experimentation, which
a lot of people like sometimes it comes to that point.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
FDR did that during the depression.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I mean he was coming up with stuff that no
president had ever come up with, wild experimentation. And in
the case of Doge, following the cost cutting that Musk
used to upend Twitter, he followed his Twitter model cut
(23:55):
cut cut. What is it that I don't know how
many employees were a Twitter, but didn't he release seventy
five percent of him the moment that he bought Twitter.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I don't even know if it's making money. It might
very well be.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
And so political risks, impulsive decision making sounds like the president.
So the two go hand in hand and this stealth approach,
and that's how it's being described Stunned Democrats, Republicans, civil service,
conservative operatives like Stephen Miller, who is in the administration
(24:29):
and one of the chief architects of Project twenty twenty five.
Russell Vought sat down and educated Musk about the workings
of this bureaucracy. And so what he did is he
went into a unit of the government US Digital Service.
Barack Obama set this up in twenty fourteen after the
(24:50):
batch rollout of healthcare dot gov.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Now this unit, the US.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Digital Service was put there to fix problems, to go
into agencies when they have issues, when the computer systems
don't work. So you go to this particular agency and
they have their cyber experts. It wasn't designed to go
(25:18):
in and grab and be these tentacles that walk into
federal bureaucracies that you can do what Musk has done.
And when did this start happening? Well, even when Biden
was still in office, before the inauguration, this all started.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It was planned.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
So by the day day one, this has already started.
So allies, employees of Musk. Now, employees of DOGE fanned
out across the government as part of their transition, extracting
intelligence from computer.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
System contracts, personnel.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And this thing is moving so quickly that it may
be hard to unwind this whole thing, even if ultimately
constrained by the courts. I mean, this may be already
set in stone by the time this happens, and to
unravel it may be well, maybe impossible. So I mean
pushing out workers, ignoring civil service protections, tearing up contracts,
(26:21):
shuddering that entire agency established by contract by Congress, the
US Agency for International Development, where money is given from
the United States to countries, for example, for vaccinating populations,
for helping with water systems filtration, all gone.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I tell you, it's you know, we're into a new world,
that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
And Trump loves what Musk is doing, is backing him up.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
As a matter of.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Fact, he has said that Musk is not aggressive enough.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He wants this to go faster.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
As the nomination happened and as Trump won the election,
the first thing I said is we are in for
the ride of our lives, of our presidential lives. And
that is exactly what's happening for the good, for the bad.
I mean, I look at a lot of the bad,
but at the same time, Trump wants rare earth minerals
from Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Because China now controls the rare earth minerals the world supply.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Trump is getting what he wants and that is to
the benefit of the United States. No argument there. I
just enjoy the ride. I'm sure going to KFI am
six you've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch
My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listen Saints KPI AM six forty. The Bill handles
show on demand on the iHeartRadio. F February twenty eighth,
it is Foody Friday, which means at eight o'clock, Neil
and I start talking food.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Of course, his show is two to.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Five tomorrow and he is broadcasting tomorrow from the Academy
Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences Museum, and that's on Wilshire Boulevard.
I mean he's at Fanny's Restaurant, the best part right there.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, so that sounds like see us through the glass, like.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yes, you animals, Yes, you press your Yeah, go ahead
and just press your nose. Or if you're really clever
and want to affect him, what you do is you
moon him and press your butt to the glass. They
call that the pressed hams.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Jim Ryan, who is with u ABC News correspondent talking
about Gene Hackman, Jim, have you ever done the pressed
hams by the way to somebody?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh, gosh, I hope not. Okay, I don't think so,
but I wouldn't be surprised. It sounds like I wouldn't
put it past me, but I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Fair enough, now, yesterday we talked about the story that
broke Gene Hackman and his wife dead in New Mexico
at their very impressive house, I might say, and it
just smelled weird from just the minute that their bodies
were discovered.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
I know you're covering the story. Share with us the latest.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Well, there is no latest really beyond what we heard
yesterday from the investigators on this case. The Sheriff's department
and the state troopers went into the house after getting
a call from the groundskeeper, the maintenance man who went
out there, and he said, the maintenance man that he
hadn't heard or seen the couple in some time, but
that's not unusual because normally he just contacts Betsy Arakawa,
the wife, through text messaging, they make the appointments or
(01:52):
they've set up a maintenance and they wouldn't even see
Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa, so it wasn't unusual that
they wouldn't have. But this time one of the men
looked through a window he saw the two bodies in there,
kind of panicked, I think, and called nine to one one.
If you've heard the nine to one one call, Bill,
he seems rattled and who wouldn't after seeing this. So
(02:14):
the the affidavit shows that investigators went in. They by
the way, first they called the gas company gas company
to come out and make sure that there wasn't some
kind of gas leak, on the assumption that maybe that's
how they died. There was no gas leak, and so
the investigation continued. We're not going to have any firm answers,
probably bill for a few weeks until the toxicology report
(02:37):
comes back.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Now there's a from what I understand, there is a
preliminary report from the corner's office that there doesn't seem
to be foul play or he can't see the foul play,
and the argument about carbon monoxide maybe because that's was
my guess. I saw a report on ABC as a
matter of fact, where if there was carbon monoxide, it
(03:02):
may have dissipated by the time the bodies were discovered.
So it's too weird, no foul play. Yet he's found
somewhere in the house. She's in the kitchen, he's in
the bathroom, right, she's in the kitchen.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Whereas the other way around, he's in a mud room.
Kind of oh, okay, keep your umbrella and stuff in there.
She's found in a bathroom.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Right, Andy, and one dog is dead and to the
other two dogs survived. And at first it was just
no foul play, that's it. Conversation over and then I
would assume the uproar was where the optics were such
that Okay, there's a here here.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Well, yeah, I think you're right. I mean, they're still
not saying that there's foul play. The first email from
the sheriff said no foul play was evident there, and
later then the investigators said that it looked suspicious. Now
I think those two can kind of coexist. If suspicious
means that they just don't know what the cause was,
if it's just a mystery at this point that there's
still no suspicion of foul play, no bludgeon marks, nothing,
(04:07):
no sign of forest entry. In fact, one door was open,
and that kind of dispels the carbon monoxide poisoning theory.
Again if the door was opened at the time, if
there was, you know, they would kind of vent out
and they would probably be able to escape. So, you know,
I think you're looking at two different things here. No
indication that they were murdered, but still no indication of
(04:31):
exactly how they did die.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, so that now, excuse me, Now that leads to
logically is some kind of a suicide, is the way
I would think it.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And I'm just guessing.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
I'm not anything other than a guy behind a microphone guessing,
which I do regularly, including Saturday mornings, by the way,
eight to eleven o'clock, where I do nothing. But yes,
so is that being bandied about that this may be
a suicide.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Well, I think all options are open, you know, then,
because certainly this prescription pill bottle was found in the
bathroom near Betsy Arakawa, some pills scattered around. The affidavit
doesn't say what those pills were exactly, and we won't
know for a few weeks whether any of those pills
were in our system or in Gene Hackman system. So,
(05:18):
you know, I think the whole thing now hinges on
the toxicology report. Here's my thinking, Bill, and this is
me just taking a stab in the dark. They're going
to do a post mortem on the dog. The dog
was discovered dead in a kennel, locked up in a
dog cage in a closet. Now, if the dog died
just starved to death, right, was in that thing tragically
(05:41):
and sadly for two weeks or three weeks or whatever
and starved to death. Then all bets are off as
to what killed Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa. If the
dog died of carbon monoxide poisoning, they probably did too, right, So,
but that's me just speculating.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
An again, it makes sense.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
We just won't know for a.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
While, all right, Jim, thank you always, good stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Jim Ryan, ABC News correspondent who reports for us on
a regular basis.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
A quick word about what is trending right now. It
just came in.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Ukrainian President Zelensky meets with the President Trump about eight
o'clock our time. That's what the President said, and they
are going to discuss the rare earth mineral deal. Zelensky
has a greed that a deal will be cut or
has already been cut, between the United States and Ukraine
(06:36):
for rare earths, and this is what Trump has been
asking for. Zelensky wants in return some kind of security.
Continuing on with weaponry, you have both Sturmer, who is
the Prime Minister of England, and you had Macron a
few days ago. Effectively, would I argue begging no, strongly
(06:58):
asking the United States to maintain its support of Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
And we're going to see Zelenski is coming hat in hand.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
He really has no cards here, and the President has
said exactly that he has no cards. And that puts
President Trump in a position where he can almost mandate
what's going to be happening.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
And so we'll report.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
More on that and we'll see if anything big comes
out of it. Amy's going to be following that for sure.
All right, As these firings are taking place across the country,
people working for various federal agencies, and Musk is doing
and there and the government are going through like well
a hot knife through butter with this. And coming up
(07:44):
next segment, I'm going to explain exactly how it all happened,
how this came together, and how Musk got this.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
Kind of power.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
There is a firing or mass firings at the National
Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National
Weather Service.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And this is a tough one. I mean, this is
throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Firings of employees across the FEDS, federal programs, you know,
some of it as horrible as it is not going
to change your life. If it turns out that you're
not going to go to a national park this summer
because there aren't enough people there, it's going to ruin Granted,
it's going to ruin your vacation. Now, is it going
(08:31):
to affect me, No, not really. Is it going to
affect someone who is not going?
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Not really. But let's talk about an agency that.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Affects every single one of us every day, and that
is the National Oceanic Oceanic administ Atmospheric Association. Under that
National Weather Service and what does what does NOAH do well?
It provides for free to Americans, business, entire world, actually
(09:02):
accurate forecasts, weather forecasts, severe weather alerts, emergency information. And
it's being dismantled now. You know, getting weather, I would
think is pretty important. Making sure that let's say, we
(09:22):
hunker down for a hurricane or the wildfires are coming.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Not that we were prepared for this level.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
But it came out of the National Weather Service that
the wins that were coming prior to the big fires,
we're going to be life threatening. The National Weather Service
will tell people hurricanes are coming, be prepared, it's going
to be a category.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Three or four. This is all done under Noah now.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Susan Buchanan, a spokesperson for Noah, wouldn't comment on the cuts.
What she says is NOAH remains dedicated to its mission
providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American
public and ensure our nation's environmental and economic reliance. We
continue to provide whether information, forecasts, and warnings pursuant to
(10:14):
our public safety mission. The question is going to be
by firing a good part of the Noah staff, is
this going to be is this waste? Is this a
bloated agency? We're only talking about a few hundred, maybe thousand.
People don't know the answer to that, but I have
always said, since the firings have commenced, I think you
(10:36):
can't have two point three million employees without having some
kind of abuse, some kind of bloating.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
It's impossible.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
However, do you go in and fire everybody before investigating.
Let's say there is a theft here at KFI, right,
and there's well, there used to be a video of
me taking some equipment out, but I was able to deleted.
So here I am taking equipment out of the radio station.
(11:05):
So instead of really sitting down and investigating all of
us get fired, all of us, the entire programming Department,
And that's effectively what's happening here. Maybe not to that
great extent, because there's still a skeleton crew there, but
environmentalists and scientists across the globe, because you've got entire
(11:26):
countries and the industry and people look at what the
weather conditions are and it's given to us by Noah.
And we're talking about weather forecasters, mariners, farmers, emergency responders,
(11:47):
businesses and all of us, and we really don't realize
exactly how dependent we are on this agency. Now, the
argument's going to be, and maybe this is gonna come up.
I don't know the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Right now.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It's free information that's being given to Americans anybody who
wants it. It's out there, it's on the website, and
then news outlets pick it up when there's a real
severe issue coming down. Maybe the answer is going to be, Okay,
we charge know what charges for information? I mean, that's
(12:25):
what happens when news outlets give you news from the
AP or Reuters. You know, these news outlets pay for Reuters,
they pay for AP, they're under contract, and that's hard news.
And people rely on that, and especially when you're talking
(12:45):
about international news. I believe we have a contract with AP,
don't we amy we do pay for a p so
the same argument can in fact be used. And maybe
we're gonna come up with that saying yeah, sure we're
gonna provide weather information. If you're a news outlet, you're
going to pay for it. And if you're a business,
you are you can subscribe and we'll give you the information.
(13:07):
The problem is it is absolutely free because it is.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
So important to everyone.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
We're talking the weather, we're also talking pollution, measuring pollution
across the world. We're talking about just not only the
weather locally and what's going to happen the next day
or two, but studying whether events all over the world
and doing data and keeping the logs.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Well, you know, I think that's pretty important stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
And is it going to turn out that the Trump
administration realizes, okay, maybe this one. They already did it
with the park federal park employees they let go of
I don't know oneenty twelve hundred. Then someone realized at
the federal level that means that national Park is going
(13:58):
to shut down. No one can go, okay, we're not
going to do that, and so they were rehired the
next day. Same thing with the security at the nuclear
facilities weapons facilities.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Oops, okay, maybe we need.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Some safeguards at these facilities so our nuclear weaponry is safe.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
So this is moving just so quickly.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
And I think the bottom line is and this is
one thing that the Trump administration is saying, Americans want this.
Americans like the idea of removing the bloat, removing the waste.
And is there of course there is, and should there
be investigations? Of course there should this quickly. I don't
(14:44):
know now the Elon Musk story, DOGE, Department of the
Energy or the government efficiency. This didn't just come out
of the blue. And I want to explain how this
actually happened. And it's a really interesting story. It actually
(15:05):
started at a twenty twenty three dinner party.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And Musk was.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There and he was describing to everybody because he sort
of takes over the room, takes over the oxygen, our rooms,
kind of that kind of guy. He talked about how
he would get the federal bureaucracy and the plan for
DOGE was mapped out in Palm Beach, Florida. The series
of very closely secret meetings held in Palm Beach prior
(15:34):
to well just after the nomination of Trump and certainly
prior to coming into office. And here is what's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
About Musk.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
How do you go about redoing the bureaucracy? Do you
do it simply at looking and say here's bloat? How
do we get there? How do we investigate this? How
do we figure out how to get into agencies and
find out who does what? And Musk said, it's through technology.
(16:07):
That's how we're going to do it. We're going to
do it as a technological effort because that's what he does.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
His brain is all about technology.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
So what he did, and by the way, this is
so unusual without seeding control of his companies. His companies
still have multi billion dollar contracts with the federal government.
He embedded his engineers and aids inside the government's critical
digital infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
That's how he did it.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
We enter into government digitally, don't go there and say
what are you doing? Asking people interviews, none of that.
It's let's get in so repetitiously, not hacking, but sort
of the same methods that hackers use. So on that
last Friday of September twenty twenty three, Musk goes to
(17:01):
this dinner party and he told the guests first of
all that he had to be careful about supporting anyone
in the Republican nomination fight. Right, this is twenty twenty three,
and it's before the nomination.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
And you know who's there, vivid Ramaswami.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And when doge first started, did you notice that Musk
and vivid ram Ramaswami who ran for the presidency. He
ran for the nomination and got nowhere, and then was
one of the first to turn around and endorse Trump,
which guaranteed him an important position in the government. And
(17:42):
is an entrepreneur and did it with technology. At that dinner,
and Trump brought his well not his wife, but I
guess his girlfriend, Grimes, the mother of three of his kids.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
That was a dinner for m. Ramaswami.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
So now Trump starts lecturing everybody about his ideas, and
they pay attention. When he got the richest guy on
the planet talking about his ideas, you pay attention. So
Trump was talking on a variety of topics his visit
that week to the US Mexican border, talked about the
war in Ukraine, talked about his frustrations with the federal
(18:27):
government and the regulations hindering space X.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
He and Biden didn't get along.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Biden did not get along with this guy who said
with Musk, who said, it's Biden who's getting in the
way of me successfully launching that's the policy.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And I don't like it.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
And of course Trump is gone the other way, where
the contracts are going to keep on flying. And you
talked about Ramaswami's highest priority, the dis manteling of the
federal bureaucracy, and Trump made it clear that night that
the gutting of that bureaucracy, as I said, was very simple.
(19:12):
It's a technology. It's just a technology challenge. Give me
the passwords, and I'm going to make the government fit
and trim. You let me have access to everything, and
I am going to make all of this work. And
so it started as this discussion at that dinner party
(19:35):
evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. And
no one expected it to be this quick, but it is.
And there's a spin on this quick. And as I said,
what he looked at in terms of the gutting of
the federal bureaucracy as simply a technology challenge.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
That's it.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Get into the technology of the government and then got
to work, and no one's done that before. At the
twenty twenty three meeting where he had dinner and this
sort of all came into being, he said, just give
me the passwords and I will make the government fit
and trim. And at that dinner we're talking about, before
(20:20):
Trump was even nominated, it all evolved into a radical
takeover of the federal bureaucracy. So here's what happens after
the president is elected President Trump. Trump embeds his engineers
and aids inside the government's critical digital infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
That was super important.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
And what he did is he inserted himself in more
than twenty agencies. By the way, this story comes out
of the New York Times, all these facts so and
the way they report is they talked to a whole
one people who were there and know about this and
corroborate everything. So I'm pretty comfortable with telling you what
the New York Times says. And so the strategy was twofold,
(21:13):
grab control of the government's Human resources agency, the Office
of Personal Management that deals with all federal employees. Grab
the email systems to pressure civil civil service employees to
quit so he could call the workforce. I mean, keep
in mind, how do you get emails to two point
(21:35):
three million people?
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Just the physical aspect.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Of this, I mean, do you write an email and
have a list of two point three million people that
you're sending copies to? Of course not so who keeps
all those records? The Office of Personal Management has the ability.
And he told civil servants you either quit, take the
(21:58):
buy out, so you until September, or we're going to
fire you. Even to the point where mus said, if
you don't respond to the demand that you tell us
what are the five things you did last week. If
you don't respond, I'm going to look at this as
your resignation. So he first did that, burrowed into the
computer systems across the bureaucracy. We're talking about doge tracing
(22:23):
how much money was coming out of the administration, so.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
It could be cut off.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Not at the top, but at the bottom where the
money was coming in from. It's like a funnel.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
It sucks up money. So so far musk staff.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Members and only about forty of them, and half of
them are nineteen years old. I mean, these are his
guys that he expects eighty hours, one hundred hours a week,
because that's just the way he thinks. And if you
don't work one hundred hours a week for his companies,
you're out the door. So he wanted to and he
did get access to at least seven sensitive government databases,
(23:02):
including the IRS where there are firewalls up and down
that bureaucracy, the Social Security Administration again, firewalls all over
now Doge.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
And this is a casual notion that came out of
a dinner party.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Coming into this powerful, powerful weapon can only happen in
the Trump era. Why because it involves wild experimentation, which
a lot of people like sometimes it comes to that point.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
FDR did that during the depression.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I mean he was coming up with stuff that no
president had ever come up with, wild experimentation. And in
the case of Doge, following the cost cutting that Musk
used to upend Twitter, he followed his Twitter model cut
(23:55):
cut cut. What is it that I don't know how
many employees were a Twitter, but didn't he release seventy
five percent of him the moment that he bought Twitter.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I don't even know if it's making money. It might
very well be.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
And so political risks, impulsive decision making sounds like the president.
So the two go hand in hand and this stealth approach,
and that's how it's being described Stunned Democrats, Republicans, civil service,
conservative operatives like Stephen Miller, who is in the administration
(24:29):
and one of the chief architects of Project twenty twenty five.
Russell Vought sat down and educated Musk about the workings
of this bureaucracy. And so what he did is he
went into a unit of the government US Digital Service.
Barack Obama set this up in twenty fourteen after the
(24:50):
batch rollout of healthcare dot gov.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Now this unit, the US.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Digital Service was put there to fix problems, to go
into agencies when they have issues, when the computer systems
don't work. So you go to this particular agency and
they have their cyber experts. It wasn't designed to go
(25:18):
in and grab and be these tentacles that walk into
federal bureaucracies that you can do what Musk has done.
And when did this start happening? Well, even when Biden
was still in office, before the inauguration, this all started.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It was planned.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
So by the day day one, this has already started.
So allies, employees of Musk. Now, employees of DOGE fanned
out across the government as part of their transition, extracting
intelligence from computer.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
System contracts, personnel.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And this thing is moving so quickly that it may
be hard to unwind this whole thing, even if ultimately
constrained by the courts. I mean, this may be already
set in stone by the time this happens, and to
unravel it may be well, maybe impossible. So I mean
pushing out workers, ignoring civil service protections, tearing up contracts,
(26:21):
shuddering that entire agency established by contract by Congress, the
US Agency for International Development, where money is given from
the United States to countries, for example, for vaccinating populations,
for helping with water systems filtration, all gone.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I tell you, it's you know, we're into a new world,
that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
And Trump loves what Musk is doing, is backing him up.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
As a matter of.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Fact, he has said that Musk is not aggressive enough.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
He wants this to go faster.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
As the nomination happened and as Trump won the election,
the first thing I said is we are in for
the ride of our lives, of our presidential lives. And
that is exactly what's happening for the good, for the bad.
I mean, I look at a lot of the bad,
but at the same time, Trump wants rare earth minerals
from Ukraine.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Because China now controls the rare earth minerals the world supply.
Speaker 1 (27:32):
Trump is getting what he wants and that is to
the benefit of the United States. No argument there. I
just enjoy the ride. I'm sure going to KFI am
six you've been listening to the Bill Handle Show. Catch
My Show Monday through Friday, six am to nine am,
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