Morning Wire - Biden Asia Trip & Special Counsel Trial | 5.23.22

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Biden takes his first trip to Asia amid heightened tensions with China, special counsel trial brings new claims about Hillary Clinton’s role in promoting the Russia collusion narrative, and enrollment in public schools plummets around the country. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Facing his lowest approval numbers to date, President Biden embarks on a diplomatic trip to Asia to shore up economic and security partnerships with South Korea and Japan. Were any new deals made? And what does the Asia trip mean for our relationship with China? I'm John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Monday, May 23rd, and this is Morning Wire.

The Sussman trial is presenting new claims about the role Hillary Clinton and her campaign played in the false Russia collusion narrative. We'll discuss the latest, from the trial. And public school enrollment has dropped by more than a million students since 2020. What's driving the public school exodus? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. This show is sponsored by Alto IRA. When you do anything in life, there's one way to do it, and then maybe there's a smarter way to do it. You might already be

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This week, President Biden traveled abroad, meeting with the leaders of South Korea and Japan, completing his first trip to Asia since taking office. Here with more on what the president tried to accomplish during the trip and what it could mean for China-U.S. Relations is DailyWire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips. All right, Cabot first, give us a brief overview of this visit. Yeah, President Biden hasn't taken too many diplomatic trips like this, so it is definitely significant when he does.

On Friday, he landed in Seoul, South Korea, where he spent two days focusing on a military and economic partnership, as well as options for combating North Korean nuclear expansion. Remember, there was some hope that North Korea might be willing to make some concessions after President Trump had secured a series of negotiations with Kim Jong-un during his term. But it does appear that Biden administration is kind of taking a more indirect approach to North Korea. The talks this weekend focused on joint military operations between the U.S. and South Korea as a show of force against the Kim regime with the hope of deterring further nuclear expansion.

And while President Biden did express a willingness to make, meet with Kim Jong-un, the regime has given no response since Biden took office. With regard to whether I would meet with the leader of North Korea, there would be depend on whether he was sincere and whether it was serious. The president also met with South Korean companies that sell their products in the U.S., like the car company Hyundai, and encourage them to move production directly to the U.S. And what about Japan? What are the main focuses there? Yeah, the president is meeting today in Tokyo with leaders from Japan, India, and Australia.

Australia. The main focus will be economic as the countries are rolling out the so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity. The plan will try to standardize supply chain and manufacturing regulations to increase trade in the region, but the main goal for the agreement is undoubtedly combating the rise of Chinese influence in the region. Right. What sort of role does China play in all of this? Yeah, it's huge. Foreign policy experts say a main reason for the timing of this visit right now is to try and show China that the U.S. is capable of engaging on multiple foreign policy fronts and that while our focus right now might be turned to Ukraine, we still have not forgotten about the looming threat China's posing in the Indo-Pacific region. Now, critics say the

president has been too soft on China and that actions like this might be a step in the right direction, but they're still too passive. They like to see them stand up directly to China, as opposed to working around them in the region. But regardless, it is a sign that the U.S. government has not forgotten about the threat the Chinese pose, even though much for our focus has shifted to the threat of Russia. To that point, what's the latest on Russia and Ukraine? On Saturday, the president signed legislation that will send $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. That is the largest foreign aid package in over two decades and now brings the total U.S. spending in Ukraine to around $54 billion. This latest package includes $20 billion for military assistance,

$8 billion to support the Ukrainian economy, and another $5 billion for food shortages in the country. And while the spending package passed Congress overwhelmingly at its final vote, it is worth pointing out there was a heated debate among Republicans before it was finalized. That overwhelming vote one way is not indicative of how contentious this was. Tell us about that. Who did pushback? Well, among the 11th Senate Republicans who ended up voting no were high-profile members, like Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Marsha Blackburn.

They claimed there wasn't enough transparency in the bill about exactly where the money would go and also argued that $40 billion should be used to address things here in the U.S., like the baby formula shortage and inflation concerns. Minority leader Mitch McConnell obviously disagreed. He actually went to Ukraine this week to rally support for the aid package and also, quote, diminished the number of votes against the package. He said the money was crucial to Ukraine's defense efforts, and that's important for America and Western nations to display a united front against Putin.

But zooming out, looking big picture, President Biden is struggling right now. He's got his lowest approval ratings to date. And a big part of that is due to domestic struggles with inflation and supply chain shortages. So it's clear that he's looking to turn the focus outward. And he's hoping for a foreign policy victory to kind of turn things around. Yeah, it makes sense. Well, we'll see how much of an impact this trip ends up having. Cabot, thanks for the report.

Anytime. That's Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Coming up, a former Clinton ally provides new details in a high-profile special counsel trial. This show is sponsored by Birch Gold. Have you considered what could happen in the stock market if our economy stalls out? Don't wait until it's too late to solidify some of your investment portfolio with gold from Birch Gold. Throughout history, gold has maintained its value better than any other investment in the world. Text wire to 989898 today for a free zero-obligation info kit on holding gold in a tax-sheltered retirement account.

Again, text wire to 9898-98 and secure the gains you've made, while you can. The criminal trial of former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussman just wrapped up its first week on Friday with some new information about Hillary Clinton's role in false claims involving former President Donald Trump and Russia's Alpha Bank. Clinton's 2016 campaign manager Robbie Mook testified that Clinton approved a campaign effort to push later debunked claims of a secret communications channel between the Trump organization and the Alpha Bank to the media.

DailyWire's Tim Pierce is here to tell us more. So Tim, what have we learned so far from this trial? Well, Mook testified that Clinton knew of the false Alpha Bank claim and approved a campaign effort to push that claim to the media. As far as Sussman's trial goes, Mook's testimony speaks to the prosecutor's charge against Sussman that Sussman met with the FBI in September 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign to push the Alpha Bank allegation.

The prosecution says Sussman presented the Alpha Bank story to the FBI in the hopes of triggering an investigation that would in turn make the story more palatable. to the media. Now, Sussman is on trial for allegedly lying to the FBI and hiding the fact that he was working for the Clinton campaign during the September 2016 meeting. Now, what evidence is there of this that Sussman hid his connection to the campaign? Well, first of all, we know that Sussman was involved in the campaign's broader efforts to push the Alpha Bank story because of emails showing him shopping the story to reporters. Sussman also actually billed the Clinton campaign for the time he spent

presenting the Alpha Bank claim to the FBI's top attorney. Sussman, however, denied that he ever lied to the FBI. And his legal team appear to be trying to argue that although he may have technically been working for the campaign, his meeting with the FBI went against the campaign's interest because the campaign explicitly did not want the Alpha Bank story given to federal investigators. Now, according to prosecutors, Sussman attempted to politicize the FBI by secretly pushing Clinton campaign oppo research on the bureau. Exactly. And at the same time, Sussman was trying to convince the New York Times to write about the Alpha Bank claim. The Times in the FBI both looked into the data that Sussman had fed them, and they had both separately decided that

the Alpha Bank claim being pushed by the Clinton campaign was unsubstantiated at best. One of the FBI agents that looked into Sussman's evidence testified that the data didn't make sense. That same FBI agent said of a white paper Sussman passed along, I thought the person who had drafted this document may have been suffering from some mental disability. Now, a Clinton tweet from October 2016 has come up in this trial. The judge had previously blocked the tweet from coming in as evidence, but what happened there? Yeah, Clinton sent a tweet on October 31st, 2016, promoting a story that was just published in Slate, reporting on the supposed link between the Trump Organization and Alpha Bank. Durham's team had tried to enter that tweet into evidence

before the trial started, but Judge Cooper blocked it, saying it was duplicative of evidence already entered. Okay. Muck, who was a defense witness, by the way, gave prosecutors the chance to bring the tweet in through other means and fill out their theory of the case. All right, so how does this all play into Durham's larger investigation into the origins of the Russia collusion narrative. Well, the evidence presented so far will likely come up again in Durham's eventual report on the origin of the false narrative. That narrative hounded former President Donald Trump will into his presidency, so for all that to come from what may have begun as a political hit job would be alarming. Indeed. Tim, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That was DailyWire's,

Tim Pierce. While students across the country welcome the coming of summer, many public schools are facing a harsh reality. Student enrollment has sharply declined and doesn't appear to be turning around. The result, some schools are reaching a financial crisis point. Here to give us the details is Charlotte Pence Bond. So Charlotte, how many students have left the public schools and over what period of time? Right. So since 2020, public schools in the U.S. have seen over 1.2 million students drop. That's according to a recent national survey tracking such numbers. Keep in mind, there are around 50 million students in the public school system across the country. So that's about 2%. Now, is this being seen everywhere in the country or certain regions? Yeah, it's everywhere. But if anything, the trend is concentrated

in major urban areas. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District's non-charter schools saw around 43,000 students leave over the past two academic years. And enrollment in Chicago schools has gone down by around 25,000 in that same time period. Over the past two years, New York City has seen around 50,000 students leave the public school system, but cities aren't the only places grappling with this. One district outside of Kansas City, Olathe had over 1,000 of its students leave in 2020, and that's out of around 33,000. And maybe even more interesting is that only around half of them returned for this school year.

But rural areas are also seeing this trend, for example, in Woodbury, County, Iowa, student enrollment in the Westwood Community School District went down by over 5% during the last two years. It dropped even though the superintendent, Jay Lutt, pointed out that the community saw an influx of new residents coming from larger cities during COVID. In Michigan, enrollment is still more than 50,000 lower than numbers from before the pandemic. This is also being seen in other areas like Orange County, California, which has historically been a destination for great public schools. But enrollment went down for the second year in row. And across California, over 250,000 students have gone off of the state's public school

rules since 2019. Now, do we know what's causing this? This was already kind of a trend before the pandemic, in part because of low birth rates and less immigration, but these declines in enrollment far exceeded what could be explained by those factors. So it's likely that school closures and parents' frustration with a lot of the issues that came out of schooling during the pandemic exacerbated it. But there's also this dark reality that a lot of kids probably just left school altogether because of how much stress the school lockdowns brought on families. And what's the evidence for that? Well, we saw very little public school attrition in states that did not lock down schools. In Florida, for example, public school enrollment has stayed strong despite huge gains

in homeschooling in the state. That suggests that new students are filling the spaces of those who left. Data from the American Enterprise Institute's analysis also showed that remote learning affected enrollment. It found that in fall 2021, enrollments rebounded in districts that spent 2020 to 2021 mostly in person. Those that stayed remote longer, it said, saw even more students leave. Interestingly, enrollment also went up in rural resort locations since a lot of people started working from remote areas. And of course, only time will tell how many kids fell out of the education system entirely over the pandemic closure period. Right. And we'll definitely be following that. Charlotte, thanks so much for bringing us this story. Thanks for having me.

That's Daily Wires, Charlotte Pence Bond. Other stories we're tracking this week. On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration from lifting Title 42, a Trump-era CDC provision allowing border patrol to quickly expel migrants. The Department of Justice has filed an appeal, claiming that the administration does have the right to lift the provision. The U.S. Air Force's Operation Fly Formula is expected to deliver approximately 1.5 million eight-ounce bottles of hypoallergenic baby formula over the next few days. Over the weekend, deliveries from a base in Germany included 71,000 pounds of formula. And the first U.S. case of the monkeypox virus has been identified in Massachusetts in a patient who recently traveled to Canada. There are currently at least

23 suspected cases in Spain, 20 in Portugal, and at least 15 in Canada. Historically, monkeypox outbreaks have been limited in size because the virus does not spread easily. The smallpox vaccine has been shown to be effective against monkeypox in the past. Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend. That's all the time we've got this morning.

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