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Judge Pauses Deadline For Fed Workers To Accept "Buyout" Offer; FBI Gives DOJ Names Of Employees Who Worked Jan. 6 Cases; Some California Homeowners Struggle As They Seek To Rebuild. Aired 11- 11:30a ET

Aired February 07, 2025 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[11:01:02]

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Well, good morning to you. You are live in the CNN Newsroom. I'm Pamela Brown in Washington.

On day one of his presidency, Donald Trump voted, vowed, we should say, to terminate many policies of his predecessor. But just 21 days later, the domino effect of that promise.

A federal workforce upended and billion dollar government agencies grinded to a halt. Two million federal workers will head into this week and not knowing if they will have a job come Monday. A source tells CNN, of the 10,000 USAID personnel stationed at war zones and disaster recovery projects, about 300, only 300 will keep their jobs.

All of this at the direction of an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk. And as critics fear he is just getting started. Democrats say none of this is even legal.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. ED MARKEY (D-MA): The courts, if they interpret the Constitution correctly, are going to stop Musk, are going to stop Trump.

SEN. CHRIS MURPHY (D-CT): Elon Musk is running our foreign policy today. He's running his foreign policy in order to enhance his personal financial interests.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD): We don't have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: So that's what the Democrats say. Lots of lawsuits are going on right now. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of employees at the CIA, EPA and other agencies were just given an extension to decide whether they will take this so called buyout from the administration. More than 65,000 employees have already accepted the offer. A judge paused the deadline at least until Monday when a hearing will be held. The American Federation of Government Employees was part of the lawsuit behind that extension and it's the largest union for federal workers in the country. Joining us now is Eric Bunn senior -- the national secretary treasurer for the AFGE. Eric, first of all, tell us what's going on with your members. What are they feeling? This must be such an unsettling time for so many.

ERIC BUNN, NATL SECRETARY TREASURER, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVT. EMPLOYEES: Our members are confused with this chaos. And what I mean by that is there's been so many e-mails coming from the administration, coming from a particular agency and not giving a clear picture of what this buyout, we don't call it a buyout, this pro -- program or what they plan to get these employees to take. So they're really confused about. I mean, if you had to make a life decision -- decision in eight days, determine if you're going to have a job or retire or whatever, it -- it's really not how you run a government.

BROWN: What kind of impact is this judge's decision to delay that decision?

BUNN: Well, we're -- we're glad for the delay. We -- we welcome delay. That's why we did the lawsuit. OK. Because we need to get answers from OPM that we have not been able to get. Our employees have not been able to get the answers. Is this legitimate? OK. Or is this going to be similar to what happened at X where Elon Musk offered money to these people and they left and didn't pay them?

Money's not -- the money for the federal government is only good to March 14th. It has not been extended to continued resolution as of yet. So there's a lot of legality, things we need our members to understand.

BROWN: So what do you say to that, I believe the last check was 65,000 workers who have accepted the resignation offer or buyout, whatever you want to call it.

BUNN: We have 65,000. The federal government loses about 10,000 members of -- of employees a month. So some of this is going to be through normal attrition. OK. So again, not knowing certainty where what -- what their employment is going to be. Some of our senior people who have already got 25, 30 years are taking this buyout. Some of them are scared, all right, and not -- not to know what's going to happen because some of these buyouts are not even -- they're not being consistent. But they took them. OK. Because they don't know what's going to happen if they're going to be threatens a rift of cutting this government workforce down to 70 percent.

BROWN: Right. Because the Trump administration has said if you don't take this buyout where you could be paid, emphasis on good through September, then you could just be fired.

BUNN: Correct. Right.

[11:05:00]

BROWN: So some of them want to take that risk. BUNN: That -- that's right. Right, right. So some of them have taken it.

BROWN: So are there any assurances that -- that Musk or the Trump administration could give you that would, you know, make you feel better about all of this?

BUNN: Well, first we want to know if it's legal. OK. And if we can get a clear definition understanding what -- what you're trying to do. First of all, it's already unlawful to have somebody administrative leave more than 10 days. So you're going to -- you -- you -- you'll be not applying for the regulations of OPM. How do you get around that? OK. Is this a true buyout? We got one employee who had actually resigned and said he wanted to take the buyout. Come the agency come back and say, well, we'll accept your resignation, but at this point in time, we're not going to offer you the buyout. So clearly there's misunderstanding what's going on. But they took that employee's resignation.

BROWN: Oh, really?

BUNN: Yes, they did.

BROWN: Federal department leaders received this memo, it was yesterday, asking for details on all workers who received less than, quote, fully successful performance ratings over the last three years.

BUNN: OK.

BROWN: What do you say to that?

BUNN: Well, that's first. I'm just hearing it.

BROWN: OK.

BUNN: OK. All right. Well, I would think they would probably use that as a tool to probably say what employees they want to get rid of. OK. So this is brand news to me that you're going to go back three years to find out who received the unsettled. But even with the unsettable performance rating, what happened in three years? Have they improved their performance since then? Because normally you get put on a PIP and you get opportunity to work with management to address those deficiencies you have to better improve yourself in the job performance.

BROWN: Just -- just as we wrap up, you know, look, Trump in large part ran -- ran on many things and one of them was government efficiency and so forth, right? And Elon Musk made that clear. He's head of DOGE. There -- they basically have sent this message out about the federal workforce. You know, some of that messaging federal workers I've talked to feel like is -- is, you know, trying to indicate that they're lazy or they're not doing their jobs or they're -- they're just not useful. What do you say to that?

BUNN: Oh, that's a lie. OK. Basically, we have a dedicated, patriotic workforce that's been understaffed trying to provide services to -- to the American citizens. Just in VA at one point in time, we had 50,000 doctors and -- and nurses were not able to hire. We're trying to provide the best services with the resources we have. So, you know, the point of him trying to say they're lazy. This whole thing is a privatization move.

If you can't provide the service to the residents, then you want to come back and say, want to privatize this thing. And with improvisation, it always costs us more to do privatization of this job than it does for the government.

BROWN: All right, Eric Bunn, thank you.

BUNN: Thank you.

BROWN: Appreciate it.

Well, the FBI is giving the Trump Justice Department the names of thousands of employees who worked on cases related to January 6th. And that includes investigations of not only the attack on the Capitol, but those related to President Trump. And it ends days of back and forth between FBI and Justice leadership over protecting staff identities. CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, John Miller, joins us now. So, John, with those names now in the hands of the DOJ, what happens next?

JOHN MILLER, CNN CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: Well, that is the question. Remember, Pam, this is where the FBI was asked to provide this information instead of providing names because they were concerned of what would occur with these identities. They provided the unique employee identification numbers so that if there was some matter that made them want to need a specific name, that number could be run. But now, now that they've turned over the names, the question is, what does happen next?

In other words, the executive order for ending weaponization of the government says that this information is supposed to be gathered, processed, and sent to the deputy chief of staff at the White House, not the attorney general, not the inspector general of the Justice Department. So from a political standpoint, what are their operators going to do with it? Are they going to run the names of 5,000 FBI employees against voter registration records to figure out who's a Republican, who's a Democrat?

Are they going to use those names to search social media to figure out what someone said within their First Amendment rights in a post? Nobody knows the answer to that. But to be fired or to have sanctions taken against them in their jobs, that has to go through a process which they have delineated none of. So that is the question.

BROWN: And the Justice Department, for its part, has said that it will not fire agents who acted in, quote, in an unethical manner. But clearly the fear of retaliation hangs over thousands of employees. I want to share an open letter from an anonymous FBI agent. CNN just obtained it, and we've added the voice to that agent's words.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Currently, there is an effort to cull a significant number of career special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is an unthinkable action that will gravely undermine the security of the nation well beyond what many of our citizens are aware.

[11:10:10]

Something else about me, I was assigned to investigate a potential crime. Like all previous cases I have investigated, this one met every legal standard of predication and procedure. Without bias, I upheld my oath to this country and the Constitution and collected the facts. I collected the facts in a manner to neither prove innocence nor guilt, but to arrive at resolution.

I am now sitting in my home, listening to my children play and laugh in the backyard, oblivious to the prospect that their father may be fired in a few days. Fired for conducting a legally authorized investigation. Fired for doing the job that he was hired to do. I have to wonder, when I am gone, who will do the quiet work that is behind the facade of your average neighborhood?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: Wow. You can't help but -- but feel the sense of betrayal there.

MILLER: Well, and you can't. But let's look at that from the human standpoint, which is these people showed up to work every day. A lot of these people are lawyers, have master's degrees and so on. They could probably be making more and doing more in any other field of life. But they came to the FBI to provide a service. They were assigned to these jobs. They carried them out within the Domestic Intelligence Operations Guide, the DOJ guidelines, the law. How do we know that? We know that because cases were brought to grand juries who found probable cause a crime was committed. Cases were taken to trial. Sixteen hundred investigations for January 6th alone, where 1,000 people ended up pleading guilty in rough numbers.

So the process was carried out in a very legal way. Here's one of the great ironies of this, which is the Deputy Attorney General, the Acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States of America, who is supposedly one of the top people in an independent Justice Department, is pressuring the FBI for names of people who did what. And if you look at the questionnaire, did you provide analytical support? Did you pra -- did you approve documents? Did you participate in arrests or were you on an arrest team? Were you assigned as the case as a supervisor?

Emil Bove, the Acting Deputy Attorney General who is the driver in the Justice Department being pushed by the driver in the White House, was the Deputy Chief of the National Security Branch in the Southern District of New York. When I was working on the New York Joint Terrorism Task force after the January 6th case, and my detectives and -- and the FBI agents working with us went across the street to the prosecutors to get search warrants, subpoenas, court orders, Emil Bove, was the deputy chief of the section that was actually approving all of those. So his name should be somewhere on that list, too. And I don't think a lot of people know that.

BROWN: That's really interesting, actually. And he was the one that sent that initial request with the subject line termination, right?

MILLER: Exactly.

BROWN: Yes. John Miller, thanks so much.

[11:12:58]

In California, thousands of homeowners faced with a difficult choice in the wake of those devastating wildfires. And some of you may have heard my interview with Governor Newsom yesterday, but we're going to follow up on that. These residents who are there, they're -- they're questioning whether to stay and rebuild or leave the state. I'll speak with a man who is navigating the unknown. You're in the CNN Newsroom.

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BROWN: It has been a month since the start of the devastating Palisades fires in California, so we wanted to check in. As you know, the devastating fire swept through the region, reducing entire communities to piles of ash and forcing homeowners to reconsider their futures. One of them is Chris Wilson, and he joins us now. He and his wife lost their Altadena home in the Eaton wildfire that killed at least 17 people and burned thousands of structures before officials declared it fully contained last week. Chris, thank you for coming on. And I believe your wife is pregnant, right? So you're like, how do you --

CHRIS WILSON, LOST HOME IN EATON WILDFIRE IN ALTADENA: Oh, yes, yes. She's --

BROWN: Go ahead.

WILSON: She's going to be excited to know that got announced on CNN. Yes, she's six and a half months right now.

BROWN: Sorry. Sorry.

WILSON: No, no, it's OK. I -- I --

BROWN: I read it in an AP article so -- about this.

WILSON: It is. Yes.

BROWN: So I figured that that would be OK to say because it was already out there publicly.

WILSON: Yes. It is.

BROWN: But I think that's important because it's like you're, you know, about to welcome a child into the world and you're just -- you don't even have a home right now, and you're trying to figure out where you're going to go next. You bought your home in Altadena five years ago.

WILSON: Yes.

BROWN: Tell us a little bit about why you chose the area over others and what your experience has been like in terms of insurance.

WILSON: So in 2019, actually, even before we are married, we decided that we should get a home together. The opportunity was right. I had been living in Altadena since 2011 as -- as a renter, and I just love the town. I'm a mountain biker and my work is in Altadena. And so, you know, I could ride my bike into the mountains. She really liked it. And in looking around, we found this, like, really cute James cottage that had, like, a surprisingly long backyard where you could, you know, have a garden and stuff, which actually really helped out during the pandemic.

[11:20:11]

We had spatially distanced, you know, little group -- groupings back there sometimes with people. And yes, it was nestled right in the foothills. It's kind of like one of the rare like middle class communities I think in L.A. where you feel like --

BROWN: Yes.

WILSON: -- you have a little space and it's quite quiet I guess compared to some of the other towns --

BROWN: Yes.

WILSON: -- around L.A.

BROWN: And now we're looking at pictures that you gave us, it's just reduced to rubble. Yes, yes.

WILSON: Yes.

BROWN: Just, you know, because I was reading in this AP article that you basically couldn't get private insurance or you had it but they wouldn't re up it, but your neighbor did have private insurance --

WILSON: Right.

BROWN: -- and got tons of money, you know, to help rebuild after the fires. It's just been such a different experience and that you've had some trouble --

WILSON: Yes.

BROWN: -- getting through with the FAIR Plan.

WILSON: Yes. It's -- it's really -- I'm starting to get the whole picture now. It took weeks to really figure out because everything was so chaotic. Yes, we had private insurance up until last May and then were non-renewed for what I believe is spurious reasons. And so I feel like they're just looking for an excuse to -- to get out of California and -- and get rid of homeowners. And, you know, we searched and searched for private insurance and tried it, you know, all the different major carriers and everyone had different reasons why they couldn't insure us.

And so were forced onto the FAIR Plan because we have a mortgage. You have to have some insurance and then that's only for fire, so you had to actually have a secondary insurance for everything else. And our insurance rates tripled at that point, so our premiums went up by three times.

And in the AP article it highlights how I got basically about a third of the coverage in terms of things for like loss of use and personal property compared to my neighbor who has the exact same house. Both our houses were -- are identical. They're built in 1925. And yes, and the FAIR Plan, not only is it, you know, the -- the coverage isn't great, but it took me two weeks before I even heard anything from them.

The e-mails that -- that people had given me, they bounced back. They didn't work. Their -- their phone number, which was just to a customer service, you know, didn't provide anything. I had to -- if -- if it wasn't for the California Insurance Commission having kind of this fair at a college, I don't know if I even would have any information from them now at this point, like I -- I was able to find a FAIR Plan employee at this fair, sorry to keep using the word fair, but -- but, yes, it -- it was where I found them there to even get any information at that point.

BROWN: I actually had Governor Newsom on the show yesterday and I asked him about this and some of the issues that people like yourself are having with it. Let's listen to what he said.

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BROWN: It's really confusing.

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Well, fair is not a state plan. It's not a taxpayer funded plan. It's a syndicate pool run by the insurance market itself and it's the insurer of last resort and it's existed back to Ronald Reagan in 1968. As it relates to that plan and their exposure, they have reinsurance, significant amount of reinsurance. We feel strongly at this moment. And again this is -- this changes in real time that the plan will be able to absorb the losses ultimately.

Now as it relates to the larger issue of the insurance market, not unique to California by any stretch of the imagination, what's happening with insurance. And this is the reality, the new reality of extremes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BROWN: So what do you think about what he said? And given that reality and given your struggles with insurance, with your -- your past home, do you want to rebuild where you were or are you all considering going elsewhere? WILSON: I -- I do want to rebuild if I can get private insurance. My -- my understanding is that the insurers were leaving because there was caps. They weren't allowed to raise rates to reflect the true nature of the -- the risk that they were taking. You know, I would gladly have paid more in premiums to stay on a private insurance plan. And I was already paying more in premiums just for the FAIR Plan to get a lot less coverage. It also doesn't provide the same amount of rebuild coverage that other plans do. Other plans have something called replacement cost, which is basically the price to rebuild. Where in the FAIR Plan it provides what's called actual cash value, which is the -- the price the dwelling was worth minus depreciation at the time it burned down.

And so it just not being able to reach them and then not being sure about if I'm even covered to rebuild or the other thing is, do I have enough money to actually pay rent for the entire rebuild process, right? You know, my current calculations are I have enough to get me through like one year eight months maybe and stuff. And people are saying anywhere from two to four years. So, I mean, I love the town. I do want to rebuild, but it's -- it's tricky.

[11:25:16]

BROWN: Yes.

WILSON: I don't know.

BROWN: Yes.

WILSON: There's going to have to be, you know, we're going to, you know, I'm trying to use my personal property coverage to pay for my rent or have a -- have it like kind of in -- in -- in the bank if we have to stay here longer than what we can afford.

BROWN: Gosh. That is tough reality.

WILSON: Yes. And so.

BROWN: Yes. Very tough reality. Well, listen -- oh, go ahead.

WILSON: I was going to say it's, you know, it's better than having nothing. But the FAIR Plan is -- it was -- it's basically there to base, you know, to satisfy your mortgage requirement. And it's -- it's not really meant to be used. And there's a lot of people -- people after the AP article are reaching out to me, and there's a lot of people in pretty bad situations --

BROWN: Yes.

WILSON: -- who are on the FAIR Plan that -- that I've been hearing from.

BROWN: Well, Chris, I'm sorry that you've had to go through all of this with your wife, and we just wish you the best on your journey and we'll continue to check in with you as well. Thank you so much, Chris.

WILSON: OK. Thank you very much.

BROWN: And still ahead, how are Americans viewing what is happening here in Washington as both President Trump and Elon Musk attempt to remake the government? We sit down with two radio hosts in a new series called "Your Voice" to better understand what listeners across the country and their communities are saying. And we'll also have David Axelrod and Van joins -- Van Jones join us after that for a broader discussion. We're back in a moment.

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