PBS News Hour - Full Show - November 15, 2025 – PBS News Weekend full episode

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Saturday on PBS News Weekend, President Trump lashes out against a MAGA ally with a looming House vote to force the Justice Department to release its Jeffrey Epstein files, scientists search for why a man with a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's seems to be protected from it and a look at how sanctions on members of the International Criminal Court may be jeopardizing its ability to function. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Tonight on PBS News Weekend, with a House vote looming on forcing the Justice Department to release its Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump lashes out against a MAGA ally who says his opposition is a huge miscalculation. Then scientists search for why a man with a genetic predisposition for Alzheimer's seems to be protected from it. and how sanctions against members of the international criminal court may be jeopardizing its ability to function. It's really hard to imagine a world where we don't have this institution. The U.S. is a very large, very powerful country with a lot of interests, and I think that makes it very difficult when it's actively hostile towards you.

Good evening. I'm John Yang. President Trump continues to be dogged by a man who's been dead for more than six years, Jeffrey Epstein. Late yesterday, the president broke with Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, a one-time staunch ally, who was among four House Republicans who joined all 214 Democrats to force a vote next week on releasing the Justice Department's Epstein files. In a truth social post, Mr. Trump called her a ranting lunatic. and said, all I see wacky Marjorie do is complain, complain, complain. Mr. Trump left Washington late yesterday, but couldn't escape the controversy. A board Air Force won, he sought to deflect attention onto political opponents. It's really what did he mean when he spent all the time with Bill Clinton with the president of Harvard, you know, that is Summers, Larry Summers, whatever it is. And all of the other people that he spent time with. There haven't been any allegations that either former President Clinton or Larry Summers did anything wrong.

Jonathan Lemire is a staff writer at the Atlantic. Jonathan, we should start off by saying right off the bat, there have been no allegations of wrongdoing against the president either in this. But this story got a little gas this week because of new material that was released. Remind us what was it and what did we learn new about the president's relationship with Epstein? Well, we've been hearing about these so-called Epstein files for years. now. And that's not what we got this week. But what happened was a few emails were released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee that shed some new light on the Epstein-Trump relationship. We've certainly known that they're friends. These emails, though, suggest perhaps

closer friends than the president would like the public to know. And then in response to that, the Republicans put out 23,000 emails, sort of an effort to flood the zone, to distract from the damaging ones that came out, although I don't think it really worked because some of those emails also, a lot of them, mentioned Trump and some of them make clear that Epstein and Trump, you know, were friends and spent a lot of time together, even though they did later have a falling out. What's so striking about this is that it's a rare moment where Republicans are willing to defy him. Some of his most loyal allies have rebuked his calls to let this just go away. And now we seem barreling towards a vote on the House floor in the coming days.

Given that material that was released, the discharge petition to force the vote, what do you make of the way the president is reacting and responding to all of this? Well, as I wrote for the Atlantic this week, even some of his closest allies are puzzled by his approach. As one said to me, that this is not how you act if you don't have anything to hide. It's been a major cause for so many on the right for so long to unearth the so-called file. So it does seem like the House has enough votes to pass it next week. Then it'll move to the Senate. As I've reported, Trump is considering trying to pressure senators. So perhaps it

will be killed there in the upper chamber. If it were to pass there too, well, then he'll be left with the choice to veto. You'd assume that he would. But even that would just raise more questions. What exactly is he trying to hide? This is sort of the number one, you know, sort of mystery in Washington right now. Given all that, what effect is this having on the president, on his political standing, on his standing with Congress, with members of his own party? It's come at exactly the wrong time for Trump. It comes now at a time when the president is already at the weakest moment of his second term. His party, of course, just suffered pretty lopsided defeats in the elections earlier this month. Polls suggest that not only does the public blame Trump and

Republicans more for the government shutdown that just ended, but also they say that Trump is really out of touch on issues like affordability and prices, the things he was really elected on last year. As with the midterms now less than a year away and Trump desperately trying to not be perceived as a lame duck and trying to keep Republicans in power so he doesn't have to face a Democratic majority in the House, let's say, which would have subpoena power. You know, he's flailing and really struggling here to come up with an acceptable response to the Epstein matter. There were only four House Republicans who defied him, but there are still a lot of MAGA supporters were talking about the Epstein files during the campaign. Is there any sense of any tension or any

cracks in the broader MAGA coalition? I think there are. I think this is something where, you know, we're so used to the MAGA base basically cheering on everything President Trump wants and does. and if he were to say to them, like, this isn't important, they would listen and they'd move on. But that didn't really, has not really happened here with the Epstein matter, because it's been, for some on the right, this has been a core belief of theirs for a long time. Jeffrey Epstein, you know, died under mysterious circumstances, that he's, his, the list, if you will, is going to bring down powerful people and institutions, you know, largely Democrats, they think. So that's a hard thing to ask your voters to give up. And I think now that some Republicans, you know,

the four in the House have taken a stand. I suspect there'll be some in the Senate who do as well. It could very easily be interesting to watch whether this really springs to life again as an issue in the sort of conservative media because it did earlier this year. A lot of the Magasphere, the podcasts, the blogs, even some cable shows really seized on the Epstein matter and questioned President Trump. They largely stopped when he asked them to, but now perhaps those questions will be revived. Jonathan Lemire of the Atlantic. Thank you very much. Thank you. In the day's other headlines, federal agents are making arrest in Charlotte, North Carolina

as part of the administration's expanding immigration crackdown. Homeland Security confirmed that the operation is underway after videos of masked agents detaining people were shared on social media. In recent days, local politicians have reaffirmed their support for the city's immigrant community. It's not clear how many people have been detained. In a Another sign, things are recovering from the government shutdown, air travel is rebounding as the FAA eases restrictions on commercial flights at 40 U.S. airports. The agency said airlines needed to cancel only 3% of their flights today as more traffic controllers return to work after getting 70% of their back pay. Airlines say they're confident that they'll be back to normal by Thanksgiving week. More than 22 million Southern California residents are under a flood watch this weekend as a slow-moving, unusually strong,

storm drenches the region. As much of six inches of rain is predicted to fall through Sunday. Forecasters warn of flooding, mudslides, and debris flow, especially around areas that were affected by this year's wildfires. Experts say Los Angeles could record its wettest November since the 1980s. In Gaza, heavy rains are making conditions worse for the thousands of displaced Palestinians living in tents. Some are seeking refuge in the ruins of destroyed buildings. In one camp, rain dripped through makeshift shelters and soaked belongings, despite the trenches created to drain the accumulated water. From the first day of rain, we have experienced terrible conditions. The water has seeped into our mattresses, our clothes.

Water is leaking and dripping everywhere, flooding everywhere. This is just the first day. Who knows what is coming during the winter season? As winter approaches, aid groups say that. the current supply of blankets and tarps isn't enough, and much more help is needed. And it was movie day at the Vatican. Pope Leo welcomed Hollywood filmmakers and stars

to celebrate cinema and its ability to inspire. Those invited included actors Chris Pine and Kate Blanchett, and director Spike Lee, who gave the Chicago-born Pope a New York-Nex jersey. Ahead of the event, the Pope revealed his favorite four movies. It's A Wonderful Life, The Sound of Music, ordinary people, and life is beautiful. Still to come on PBS News Weekend,

the story of one man who's defying his genetic destiny and avoiding Alzheimer's and how sanctions imposed by President Trump are taking a toll on the international criminal court. This is PBS News Weekend, from the David M. Rubinstein studio at WETA in Washington, home of the PBS News Hour, weeknights on PBS. Nearly 7 million Americans currently live with Alzheimer's, and by 2060, experts say that number could be as high as 14 million.

Scientists are trying to find out why one man has been able to stave off Alzheimer's for nearly 25 years, despite having a rare genetic mutation that doctors say essentially guaranteed he developed the disease by his late 40s or early 50s. Allie Rogan spoke with Pam Bellick, Health and Science Reporter for the New York Times. Pam, welcome back to the program. Who is this one man? And why is he proven to be so essential to Alzheimer's research? So Doug Whitney is a 76-year-old who lives near Seattle. And he comes from a family where a lot of members of the family have inherited a rare genetic mutation. And the reason why Doug Whitney is so important is that he also has the mutation, but he has not developed Alzheimer's.

And he is about 25 years past the age where it would have been expected for him to do so. So scientists at Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis who study people with these rare mutations, they have been following him for 14 years. doing all kinds of tests on him, trying to figure out what's his, you know, biological secret sauce that is protecting him. And what have they found out so far? You mentioned they've been studying him. They've been running all kinds of tests. They've gone down some avenues.

What has become clear so far? The interesting thing about him is that Alzheimer's disease, not only the rare kind, but the kind that, you know, is much more widespread, has. sort of two proteins that are hallmarks of the disease. One is called amyloid. That's the protein that clumps into plaques in brains of people with Alzheimer's usually forms about 20 years before symptoms emerge. And the second protein is called tau. And that's the thing that forms these kind of sticky tangles. And that's much more connected to kind of symptoms of cognitive decline. So what they've learned about Doug Whitney is that he has a whole lot of amyloid in his

brain. He has amyloid levels that should suggest that he would have Alzheimer's many years ago even. But he has very, very little tau. So something in his biology has interrupted that progression from amyloid protein to tau protein. And that's what they want to zero in on. They have discovered some clues. They don't have the exact answer. They haven't found, you know, the Eureka moment yet, but one of the most interesting things that they found is that he has a very high level of a different kind of protein called a heat shock protein.

And these are proteins that, as the name, you know, suggests they form in response to exposure to high heat. And they serve a purpose of. keeping other kinds of proteins that tend to sort of go out of whack in neurological disorders in the right formation. Doug Whitney has a whole lot of heat shock proteins. One reason might be that for about a decade, he was in the Navy working in the engine room of a steam-powered ship for many, many hours a day and exposed to such high heat that, you know, he had to be hosed down daily, and they think that that may have driven his accumulation of these heat shock proteins. And if that's protecting him, that would be

really instructive. And so then how are scientists looking to translate what they've learned about this kind of superhuman yet everyday guy into broader, you know, progress in the field of Alzheimer's research? Right. So first, they're trying to learn more about, you know, what else might be going on in his biology? So they're going to be looking at, you know, if you, are there other people with lots of heat shock proteins that also have delayed Alzheimer's? Can you recreate these kinds of effects in a lab, you know, in cells, in animals? Can you figure out what exactly is the thing that's cutting off the progression from those amyloid proteins to the tau proteins? If they do,

that, that would really be huge because it could help inform the development of treatments that could do exactly that long before people develop symptoms of dementia. We only have very few drugs for Alzheimer's and they all work on a certain path. They all knock down your amyloid. But so far they've been shown to only do a little bit, maybe slow down the disease. disease progression for a relatively short amount of time. So if we can find a way to say, you know what, amyloid accumulation, we don't need to worry so much about that. But what we really need to do is cut it off before it spreads into a towel accumulation. And they can figure out a drug to do that. That would be a tremendous achievement. Pam Bellick with the New York Times.

Thank you so much. Thank you. The International Criminal Court, or ICC, is known as the Court of Last Resort. It only intervenes when national courts can't or won't prosecute crimes like genocide and crimes against humanity. This year, the Trump administration sanctioned several members of the court, saying it targets the United States and Israel. And now Americans try to prosecute some of the world's worst crimes at the United States. ICC are discovering that those sanctions are preventing them from doing that. Special correspondent Kira Kaye has the story. In the city of Gulu in northern Uganda, residents gathered in September to witness a scene

20 years in the making. Criminal charges presented against warlord Joseph Kony, accused of murdering and kidnapping thousands during his decades-long insurgency in the region. The police of the North of Uganda has been particularly grave. The prosecutor is thousands of miles away at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, also known as the ICC. Kony himself is not in the courtroom. He remains on the run, even despite a six-year mission by U.S. Special Forces to hunt him down. The war was unbearable. unbearable, finding your way between bullets and dead bodies. We walked on thorns until our legs were torn.

Nancy Akello was one of Coney's victims, abducted at age 12. Now she hopes Coney will turn himself in. If our voices reach Coney where he is, he should listen humbly and return home. That way the person defending him can work more easily on his behalf. Joseph Coney's was the first ever in absentia hearing in ICC history, as it tries to make sure the case doesn't stall indefinitely. But the tribunal has faced criticism since it was created in 2002 of being slow and selective in its cases, so far only convicting Africans.

Molly Quell covers the ICC for the Associated Press. It has not convicted that many defendants for all of the money that has been spent and all the time that has passed. However, for all of its flaws, what victims want is some sort of justice. They want to feel that the wrongs that have been done to them are going to be punished in some ways. More than 120 countries agree and are members of the ICC, but the U.S. is not one of them. It fears the court could prosecute Americans. Despite this, many U.S. citizens still work there. A number of senior trial lawyers are U.S. citizens. You go to the court, you hear a lot of American accents.

When it benefits U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. has been a big fan of the court in a lot of ways. And when it does not benefit U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. has not been a big fan. American human rights workers also assist the court, like Matthew Smith. He runs an organization that investigates abuses, including brutal attacks against the minority Rohingya of Myanmar.

I was there at the time on the Myanmar-Bangadesh border, The military was burning hundreds of villages down. Men, women, and children, they were burning bodies alive. The former prosecutor at the ICC launched an investigation not long after these attacks against the Rohingya community. But those efforts are now in jeopardy as the ICC itself has come under attack from the Trump administration. The ICC has engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally, Israel. Today, I'm filing applications for warrants of arrest. The court has indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense

minister for alleged crimes in Gaza. The ICC recognizes Palestine as a state member of the court and says it can prosecute crimes that happen there. But just 18 days into his presidency, Trump declared that the ICC had abused its power by charging non-member state Israel. This malign conduct threatens to infringe U.S. sovereignty and undermine our critical national security and foreign policy work. The U.S. Treasury Department then imposed economic sanctions on nine ICC personnel, six

judges, two deputy prosecutors, and the court's top prosecutor. All were either working on the Gaza case or had once investigated American troops' actions in Afghanistan. The sanctions are unprecedented, says Molli. Well. Economic sanctions are extremely harsh penalties that are usually reserved for, you know, extremist groups and hostile governments, and it makes it very difficult to get bank accounts and you cannot travel to the U.S., and it creates all sorts of problems. Ground zero of the sanctions impact is the Office of the Prosecutor. Microsoft cut off the

chief prosecutor's email, likely fearing fines. His bank accounts were also frozen. Cases are now caught in the crossfire as staffers grapple to work around the sanctions. Does providing material support include doing research for legal briefs that he is going to sign off on and give him ideas for an investigation that you're working on? Because so much of this has never been done before, I think people don't really have a clear understanding of how these secondary sanctions are going to be pursued by the Trump administration. Matthew Smith was about to bring new evidence to the ICC when the sanctions hit. We have come into contact with somebody who was in the Myanmar military and who has since defected who was on the ground during these genocidal attacks back in 2017.

And so we're taking that evidence, we're sharing that evidence onward. And if we can't do that, if we can't speak freely, we can't do any of our work. Smith filed a federal lawsuit in his home state of Maine with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union. He claims the sanctions are a violation of his First Amendment rights and put him at risk. I face severe penalties for doing the work that I do. That could involve up to a million dollar fine, prison sentences up to 20 years, and to simply sit back and stop that work because the White House says we need to do that is just unacceptable. Joining him in the suit is lawyer Akila Radha Krishnan.

She facilitates gender-based violence charges at the ICC, but says the sanctions have ground her work to a halt. Most recently, I've been working with women from Afghanistan. There's no women's rights crisis in the world that looks like what Afghanistan looks like right now. I was there at the court in December with a group of women who were seeking justice, and I can't work with them on that anymore. You have to wonder how this is not going to cause paralysis across the entirety. of the system of those working with the court. It is critical. Within the ICC, the sanctions have driven some employees to quit,

including the top investigator in the Gaza case. He has children who live in the U.S. Others have sued to receive waivers from the Treasury Department to be allowed to work with sanctioned individuals, but are still barred from working on the Gaza case. At a United Nations meeting in July, the State Department's legal advisor suggested broader sanction, could be coming.

We expect all ICC actions against the United States and our ally Israel to be terminated. If not, all options remain on the table. The assembly of member states of the ICC says the court has acted within its legal mandate and cannot reverse charges that have been filed. But there are mounting fears that the court's ability to function may be in jeopardy. It's really hard to imagine a world where we don't have this institution. But I, you know, I think what can be done is very unclear. I mean, the U.S. is a very large, very powerful country with a lot of interests,

and, you know, I think that makes it very difficult when it's actively hostile towards you. Back in Uganda, court representatives explain that the 39 charges against Joseph Coney cannot advance to trial until he is actually found. The people gathered here know it could be a long wait before their justice is delivered, if ever, Still, they see the ICC's work on behalf of their community as a critical step forward. The fact that they're already being hard and people are getting to know what they went through, this is already justice. For PBS News Weekend, I'm Kira Kay. Saturday. I'm John Yang for all of my colleagues. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow.