On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: ‘Old-fashioned embezzlement’: FTX CEO testifies to Congress. Plus, USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Erin Mansfield explains what she learned from the hearing surrounding FTX, USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page looks at former President Donald Trump’s drop in support in an exclusive USA TODAY Suffolk University poll, visiting professor at NYU Shanghai, Ray Suarez, gives a report from China on the country’s rising COVID-19 cases amid relaxed restrictions, USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise explains why scientists’ fusion energy breakthrough is a big deal, and Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Rob Cox remembers the Newtown shooting ten years later.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 14th of December, 2022. Today, what we learned from a congressional hearing surrounding FTX and crypto, plus how former President Donald Trump’s support has plummeted, according to a new poll, and we’ll hear the latest from China, where COVID-19 restrictions are being eased but cases are rising.
♦
Bankrupt crypto baron Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested just hours before he had planned to testify in front of Congress about the downfall of his company, FTX. But as they say, “The show must go on.” During four-hour congressional testimony yesterday, the cryptocurrency exchange’s CEO, John J. Ray, gave a scathing appraisal of the company and how it was run.
John J. Ray:
This is really old-fashioned embezzlement. This is just taking money from customers and using it for your own purpose.
Taylor Wilson:
Producer James Brown and USA TODAY investigative reporter Erin Mansfield discuss what she learned from the hearing.
James Brown:
Erin, welcome back to 5 Things.
Erin Mansfield:
Thanks so much for having me.
James Brown:
Tell us about John J. Ray. He spoke at the hearing on Tuesday.
Erin Mansfield:
He’s an insolvency expert. He takes over companies and handles them while they’re going through bankruptcy, and he was the CEO of Enron when it was going through bankruptcy. Of course Enron was the company that… it went bankrupt because of some pretty major accounting fraud and it’s quite a feather in his cap, so when he comes in and says something is not looking good, this is someone who looks at these things for a living.
James Brown:
What was interesting about the testimony? What stood out?
Erin Mansfield:
So there were a couple things. One is that he’s very frank about the facts he has. He talked about how the company had pretty much no financial controls. If you think of a financial control, like if you’re a cashier at a supermarket, when you turn it in for the night, someone else has to count the money. That’s a financial control. It’s where you make sure money doesn’t get lost or misused. And at a multi-billion dollar company, granted, there are much more complex ways to do that, but at the end of the day it’s about making sure you don’t lose misplace or misuse money. He said that while a lot of these companies have things in common when he goes in, this one had a huge dearth of documentation. People were approving invoices over Slack, which is basically a type of chat room, and he says they’re constantly looking to try to find wallets, essentially customer money.
James Brown:
All of that raises the question of regulation. Did anything happen in the hearing that foreshadowed that that may be around the corner?
Erin Mansfield:
Their witness didn’t really want to comment on regulation. He was like, “That’s not my bailiwick.” He really was more of a fact finder in this case. I think the biggest hint we got was probably from representative McHenry at the beginning, where he said he looked forward to calling back Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, basically repeatedly in the next year.
James Brown:
Wow. Erin Mansfield from USA TODAY. Thank you for joining me.
Erin Mansfield:
Thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
You can read more about FTX and what happens next in the world of crypto on usatoday.com.
♦
According to an exclusive USA TODAY Suffolk University poll, Republican support for Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2024 has cratered, and by double digits. Producer PJ Elliot spoke with USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page to find out more.
PJ Elliott:
Susan, thank you so much for doing this.
Susan Page:
You bet. My pleasure.
PJ Elliott:
What does this poll say about former President Trump and his possible future in politics?
Susan Page:
One of the things we’ve seen about Donald Trump since he first came on the scene was the durability of his support, the way his supporters really stuck with him through all sorts of controversies, but what we found in this new poll is erosion of that. For the first time we saw a significant number of Republicans and Republican leaning independents saying that they like Trumpism, but they’re no longer so crazy about Trump, and they would prefer somebody else to be the party’s nominee for President in 2024.
PJ Elliott:
Do they have somebody in mind?
Susan Page:
They do have somebody in mind. We ask about Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who just won a second term. He’s been clearly interested in perhaps pursuing the Republican nomination in 2024. We found that two thirds of Republican voters said they want him to run for president, and when we did a head-to-head of DeSantis versus Trump, DeSantis led by double digits.
PJ Elliott:
Do people know enough about DeSantis to make him a serious potential candidate, and would he play in a national stage?
Susan Page:
It’s a fair question because of course everybody knows about Donald Trump, but there seemed to be a pretty high level of awareness about Ron DeSantis among Republicans. We found that two-thirds wanted him to run, about one in four did not want him to run. Only 12% said they didn’t have an opinion, so that indicates that people feel like they know enough about him to have a perspective on whether he should run or not.
PJ Elliott:
At what point did Trump become less favorable to the GOP voters?
Susan Page:
We’ve done polls recently in July, in October, and again here in December. We saw some erosion in his support from July to October, but really the big movement happened with this December poll, and I think one reason these disappointing midterm elections for Republicans… and Donald Trump got some of the blame for recruiting candidates in winnable races who were outsiders, who were controversial and who ended up losing. We’ve also seen him have all kinds of legal problems. We’ve seen him suggest perhaps we should suspend the Constitution, his unfounded grievance that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and perhaps he’s just wearing out his welcome with a significant number of Republican voters.
PJ Elliott:
Susan, great stuff as always. Thank you so much.
Susan Page:
Thank you.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
COVID-19 cases are rising in China. The surge comes as the country eases some of the tightest COVID restrictions in the world. Ray Suarez is a visiting professor at NYU in Shanghai, and spoke with producer Shannon Rae Green about what it’s like there now and how officials are responding.
Shannon Rae Green:
Ray Suarez, you’re joining me from Shanghai. Thank you so much for being here.
Ray Suarez:
Great to be with you.
Shannon Rae Green:
China backpedaled on its zero-COVID policy a little over a week ago. Now there’s reports of a COVID surge. Ray, what’s it been like on the ground there?
Ray Suarez:
Everybody has to figure out for themselves how much risk they’re willing to take. The decision that the government made seems to be, “Look, we can’t do this forever, so once we have an idea that the latest variant is not that virulent, we might have to just let this spread some.” The government has been giving health messages to people, reassuring them that the latest COVID variant is not too terrible and they are counting on large numbers of new cases.
In a city like Shanghai, 23 million or so people, that’s got to really worry you a little bit, because the system here would simply be overwhelmed if a highly contagious strain started to really pass quickly. There’s just so much that isn’t known, and the government really can’t guarantee what’s going to happen. People got used to watching the rest of the world suffer from this thing and not having runaway case numbers here, but it was only because of the high levels of restriction that they were able to pull that off.
Shannon Rae Green:
Ray, do you think that leaders in China are responding to economic pressure that’s been building and that the choice to ease restrictions was due to that, or was it something else?
Ray Suarez:
Well, it could be any one of a number of things. The public was getting tired of it. Industry was complaining about it. The stock market was wavering and softening, because after it was announced that the COVID restrictions weren’t going to change in the coming year during the recent Communist Party Congress, the markets went down significantly because people just wanted this to be over, and there were significant economic costs to be paid for keeping those restrictions in place.
Shannon Rae Green:
At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, we did see supply chain hiccups. Are we likely to see a resurgence of that now?
Ray Suarez:
It’s really hard to know because a lot of places are going to be more routinely back at work. One of the reasons why they are lifting the restrictions in so many ways is to get people back to work, get them out of furlough, get them out of quarantine, get them out of massive lockdowns in apartment complexes where if one person turned up positive you would lock down an entire 35-story building with 12, 14 apartments on every floor. Those days seem to be over and China seems to be cautiously, bit by bit, getting back to normal.
Shannon Rae Green:
Ray Suarez, thank you so much for joining us on 5 Things today.
Ray Suarez:
Great to be with you.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
The Department of Energy announced yesterday that California scientists have achieved a major advance in fusion energy, a technology that could potentially provide clean carbon-free power in the years to come. Producer PJ Elliott and USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise have more.
PJ Elliott:
Elizabeth, thanks for joining 5 Things today.
Elizabeth Weise:
Happy to be here. It’s an exciting day.
PJ Elliott:
Yeah, it certainly is in the scientific world. For those that don’t know, what is fusion energy?
Elizabeth Weise:
Fusion energy is different from fission energy. There’s two kinds of nuclear energy. There’s the kind we’re used to, the kind that makes nuclear bombs and that powers nuclear power plants. That’s fission. That’s where you break atoms apart. When you break atoms apart, a whole lot of energy is released. Fusion is where you fuse atoms together. And interestingly, when you fuse atoms together a whole lot of energy is released, too, but much less dangerously. It doesn’t create a ton of radioactivity. There’s not the risk of meltdowns like we saw in Chernobyl or in Kushima. It’s a kinder, gentler form of atomic energy.
PJ Elliott:
So just how big of a deal is this?
Elizabeth Weise:
It’s a big deal. I’ve covered science a long time and this has always been the holy grail. Someday… No, nobody thought it was technically impossible, but it was a really hard problem and they solved it. And what’s breakthrough about it is that it makes a lot of things that scientists have been talking about since the ’50s suddenly possible. This idea that you could fuse together atoms and create energy and you would be creating a clean, carbon neutral, safe, hopefully cheap energy source, that didn’t exist before.
PJ Elliott:
Elizabeth, I’m wondering if there is a realistic timeframe here for fusion energy becoming a source of energy that we can all use?
Elizabeth Weise:
Nobody’s willing to say, “Oh yeah, in 2033 we’ll bring the first plant online.” I give it a decade, probably more. Maybe two decades, maybe a decade and a half. The interesting thing is that a ton of money is pouring into this, not necessarily from government sources but investors and businesses are suddenly… for the last couple of years as the science has gotten closer there’s been a lot of investment. And that’s great because really big gnarly science problems like this require a lot of money and they require a lot of engineering. This is a tremendously complex engineering problem. It will be a game changer, yeah.
PJ Elliott:
Great stuff as always, Elizabeth. Appreciate your time.
Elizabeth Weise:
Perfect. Thanks so much.
Taylor Wilson:
You can read Elizabeth’s full story with a link in today’s show notes.
♦
Today marks 10 years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The massacre left 26 people dead, among them first-graders and their teachers. Rob Cox is from Newtown. With his neighbors, he helped co-found Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit working to address the root causes of such a horrific event. Producer Shannon Rae Green spoke with Rob as we remember those lost a decade ago.
Shannon Rae Green:
Rob Cox, thank you so much for joining us today.
Rob Cox:
Thanks for having me.
Shannon Rae Green:
Rob, you were one of the people who was living in Newtown, Connecticut when the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary took the lives of 20 students and six educators. Can you tell me what you feel now, 10 years later?
Rob Cox:
I never could have imagined 10 years ago as a few of us huddled in the basement of the Newtown Library to figure out what we could do, anything we could do, that the platform that we would pull together in those dark weeks after the shooting would eventually become the Sandy Hook Promise, which is an extraordinary platform today. It is one of the most important voices in the anti-gun violence movement. It’s not just about trying to get rid of assault weapons. It’s looking at things like, in schools, how do you see the warning signs? How does teachers, how do colleagues and peers help to prevent these kinds of things? How do you help with socio-emotional learning, trying to help kids who might feel isolated?
Shannon Rae Green:
Rob, you spoke about progress. Do you think enough progress has been made in the fight against gun violence, and where does it stand right now?
Rob Cox:
I think empirically you cannot say that enough progress has been made. We still have, gosh, I can’t even keep track of the mass shootings and just the number of gun deaths in America, whether it’s suicides, which are a large part of it, and then just these random acts of senseless mass violence. I’m in Switzerland. This is a country where for militia purposes people have guns, and this doesn’t happen. Around Europe, it doesn’t happen. It’s not because there’s some sort of difference in mental health or the DNA of the human beings that reside here. We have a problem, and the fact that we have more guns than we have people certainly is one of the defining elements of that.
So to say that we have enough progress would be wrong, but a lot has been made. This is an important issue people are talking about. It’s winning and turning elections. You look at the kids from Parkland, what they did to elevate the issue with the youth. I think it is going to become more of a millennial, and younger people will be the ones who win this battle.
Shannon Rae Green:
The shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas happened just a little over six months ago. Does an event like that bring it back? Is it re-traumatizing?
Rob Cox:
I think for everyone it reopens the old wounds, and even if you’ve got scar tissue, which everyone does on these things, no question that all of us are like, “Okay, we know what it’s like. We know what that community’s going through and we empathize,” and in many cases so many of the folks who are most involved, like the folks at Sandy Hook Promise, will reach out to those families.
10 years ago we thought, “Oh, we should have a playbook. There’s no playbook for this.” We were thinking maybe that’s what we can do. That’s the contribution we have, and then we thought well, that’s almost like normalizing these things. We don’t want to normalize it. There shouldn’t be a playbook for this. Actually what we should do is dedicate ourselves and the mission and the platform and those who are going to take it forward to actually ending and preventing the gun violence itself, not figuring out, “Oh, when this happens in your town this is what you should do.” No, it should never happen in your town. That’s what we should be focusing on.
Shannon Rae Green:
Rob, I understand your children have been involved in supporting this community. What has it been like for them?
Rob Cox:
I actually took my now 24-year-old son to the gala with President Obama and Matthew McConaughey and everybody last week. He was our first, if you will, social media director. I think we first called ourselves Newtown United or something like that. We said, “Oh, can you create a Twitter handle, a Facebook page,” and we looked to the 14-year-old and say, “Hey, can you do that?” and he pulled it together. And that was how people contacted us in those first heady weeks, so it was formative for him. It taught him how to be involved. He watched his mother, he watched his father, he watched all of his parents’ friends stepping up, doing something and feeling emotionally connected and real, right? It was a really real moment for a 14-year-old.
And my other son, who was 12, was part of the choir that did a song that we then used to help the nonprofits in town to raise money, so he was viscerally involved. Music was his way of coping with it and I think if you look at that generation of kids in that town, in Newtown, I think they are extraordinarily emotionally intelligent as a result of it, connected to reality and extraordinarily resilient as a result of it. You wouldn’t want this for any of your children, your 12-year-old, your 14-year-old, your six-year-old, any of them to be in that, but it is what it is and I think it’s created a group of extraordinary young men and women.
Shannon Rae Green:
This will be my last question, and I think it’s one that parents ask of themselves a lot. How do we as parents in America keep our children safe?
Rob Cox:
Well, okay, I don’t… I’m not sure I have an answer to that. I don’t want to answer that one. I don’t really… I feel like it would be preachy of me to answer that and it’s too big an issue for me, if I’m honest. What do I say? Wear flak jackets and… I can’t really…
Shannon Rae Green:
I want to thank you so much for coming on today and for talking about your connection to this on the anniversary of this tragic event.
Rob Cox:
Thank you very much for having me, and my heart goes out to all those people who are reliving or thinking about this day, and we shouldn’t forget it, ever.
♦
Taylor Wilson:
And if you’re looking for an excuse to get outside and go for a walk this winter, today is the beginning of the nationwide Audubon Christmas bird count. The 123-year-old tradition brings bird-watchers of all stripes together to help catalog bird species in their area.
And thanks for listening to 5 Things. We’re here every day of the week, wherever you get your podcast. We also ask for a five-star rating and review if you have a chance. I’m back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.
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