388 people still missing after Maui fires, national emergency alert test: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Authorities have named 388 people still missing after Maui fires.

Plus, USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison explains how co-defendants in former President Donald Trump's Georgia indictment might turn on each other, a man has been charged with assaulting officers in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot after a USA TODAY investigation, new bills would make phone calls from prison free, and USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise gives a heads up about this fall's emergency alert test.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

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 Saturday, the 26th of August 2023. Today, Maui's death toll is expected to rise with hundreds still missing. Plus, could co-defendants turn on each other in the Georgia indictment? And a man has been charged with assaulting officers on January 6th after a USA TODAY investigation.

♦

Maui's confirmed missing have been named after a devastating wildfire tore through parts of the island this month, largely destroying the historic Hawaiian capital of Lahaina. County officials released an FBI verified list of 388 people who remain unaccounted for more than two weeks after the worst of the blaze. 115 people have already been confirmed dead, a number that's expected to rise. Several people on the missing list share names, indicating that multiple members of families are missing. In one case, four members of what appears to be the same family are unaccounted for.

Meanwhile, officials say that immediate family members of missing people can provide DNA samples to help with identifying the remains of fire victims. Search crews continue to work through burned areas of Lahaina and other parts of West Maui.

♦

For former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia election fraud case, the threat of jail time is getting real for those charged, arrested, and booked this week. And what happens next might be a question of who turns on whom. I spoke with USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison for more. Thanks for making the time, Joey.

Joey Garrison:

Hey, thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So a former federal prosecutor said this Georgia case has the indicators of a classic mob case. What did he mean by that, Joey?

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, so when the district attorney brought these charges, he did so under a RICO statute in Georgia. And RICO law is traditionally the law in which the Justice Department has taken on a criminal organization like the Mafia. And actually recently, two years ago, it's the same law that federal prosecutors prosecuted the college admission scandal in which there was a large network of people paid into a scheme to illegally get their children into some of the most prestigious universities in the country. So it allows a prosecutor to combine multiple suspected crimes into one charge, racketeering.

And so that's why essentially what the prosecutor has laid out here in Georgia, there's a wide network of 19 individuals with one ringleader of sorts, and that was Trump, all different criminal activity, all for the purpose of overturning the election results in Georgia. You have attorneys who were working for the president, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. You have a publicist for Kanye West. It's a wide assortment of people who have different levels of money to fight this case and notoriety in terms of their national fame essentially.

And so the worry is that some of these people aren't going to want to continue to fight these charges and could decide to plead out in exchange for some sort of arrangement with the government. And that could lead for some of these co-defendants to turn into witnesses that could then provide other damaging information that can hurt the legal case of Trump or others. And so that's why this could be a dangerous situation, more so perhaps than even the other three indictments in terms of it really spiraling him into a difficult situation.

Taylor Wilson:

And Jenna Ellis, who served as a lawyer for the Trump campaign, is one of the co-defendants. She made a bit of a stir this week when she complained that Trump is not paying co-defendants' legal bills. Might that be a sign that she could flip on the former president? And how big of a factor will these legal fees play in how defendants decide who to turn on?

Joey Garrison:

Well, I'm not sure if it's necessarily an indicator that she will flip, but I do think it is concerned that any of these people could be showing signs that they're upset with him personally. At the same time, it should be noted former President Trump is helping raise money for Giuliani's defense. Of course, Giuliani is facing his own personal legal troubles as well and has really stood with the former president throughout his false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election.

Some of these people have more money than others, and it's very expensive to have a good legal counsel for a long period of time. And so when you have 19 co-defendants, it's hard to keep them all on the same page. And so that's why this case is, it's definitely a complicated one for the DA in Georgia, Fani Willis, to prosecute. But it's also one that's hard to defend, not knowing what your other counterpart might end up doing.

Taylor Wilson:

And you mentioned Fani Willis. Is this part of Fulton County District Attorney Willis' strategy in indicting 19 people in the first place that some might turn?

Joey Garrison:

Yes. She has shown as a prosecutor to be willing and comfortable with turning to the RICO case. So she's also used this statute to prosecute gang members. There's a rapper, Young Thug, who was prosecuted at Georgia under the same statute. And again, it's a way that you can implicate many people as part of a larger criminal operation. And so it happens to be yes, a lot of people that feed into this conspiracy network that the DA has laid out.

I suppose it certainly, I'm sure in the back of her mind, that could be to her benefit and the government's benefit to cite a number of co-conspirators. I think she ultimately settled on that number because she thinks each of those are proven in the facts of her indictment to have broken various laws. You don't list somebody as a co-defendant in this unless she thinks without a doubt that there is a burden of legal certainty that they broke the law.

Taylor Wilson:

USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison with some great insight for us here. Thank you, Joey.

♦

Joey Garrison:

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

A man identified in a USA TODAY investigation of January 6th Capitol rioters who have never been arrested has now been taken into federal custody and faces charges, including deadly assaults on police officers. That's according to an announcement yesterday from the Justice Department. 32-year-old Curtis Logan Tate was arrested this week, authorities said, and also faces other felony and misdemeanor charges, including destruction of government property.

As USA TODAY reported in March, and you heard here on the show, volunteer online sleuths, some of whom have become known as Sedition Hunters, said they had identified more than 100 people who were at the Capitol riot, using publicly available photos and videos of the insurrection combined with facial recognition software. But they said that despite providing extensive information to the FBI, those people had never been arrested or charged.

USA TODAY investigated their claims and confirmed the identity of several riot participants by reviewing online evidence and contacting some of the suspects. One of them was Tate, who the online sleuths said they first identified more than a year ago. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

♦

Phone calls from prison, they can often be the main line to the outside world for those who are incarcerated and are a precious resource for family members and friends. But they come at a cost. Shannon Ross spent 17 years behind bars and estimates his parents spent between $15,000 to $17,000 to receive phone calls from him in prison. Such costs though would disappear under bills introduced or being drafted in a dozen states, including Ross' home state of Wisconsin. The bills would allow for free or reduced calls from prison. Mounting evidence shows that maintaining family ties not only helps inmates, it improves outcomes for their children and reduces violent incidents inside prisons. According to a prison policy initiative survey, Arkansas and Michigan are the most expensive states for 15 minute in-state calls from jail running around $25 and over $22 respectively. That's despite the fact that incarcerated people and their families already tend to be disproportionately poor.

♦

This coming October, you'll hear a blaring alert message on every phone, television and radio in the country. As USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise told me, don't worry, it's just a test. Howdy Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Hey, how you doing?

Taylor Wilson:

Good, thanks. Thanks for hopping back on. So a major emergency alert test is coming in October. What exactly is going to happen here?

Elizabeth Weise:

Most people will know this. You hear that ... "Blaannh blaannh. This is a test. This is only a test..."

Taylor Wilson:

That's pretty good.

Elizabeth Weise:

"...of the emergency warning," exactly. I feel like I've heard it a lot. They're doing a national one on Wednesday, October 4th at 2:20 PM Eastern time, 1:20 Central, 12:20 Mountain, 11:20 Pacific. Alaska will get it at 10:20, and in Hawaii the alarms will go off at 8:20. If there is any kind of national emergency on October 4th, we hope that there is not, the test gets put back to October 11th because they don't want to do it in the midst of something.

Taylor Wilson:

Why is a test of this magnitude necessary?

Elizabeth Weise:

We've been doing these tests for a long time. They do them at a national level periodically, mostly because they want to make sure that we have this national alert system in place. But you have to test these things because you never know when maybe there is a problem someplace and you don't want that problem to become apparent in the middle of an actual emergency, which is why we all grew up with these tests going off. We haven't had a national one done for a while. And when they did a big national one in 2011, they actually found some places where the system broke down and messages didn't get out. And if there were a national emergency, we'd all want to know about it. So that's what this is meant to do.

Taylor Wilson:

And Beth, what's the history behind our emergency alert system and have we seen a test like this before?

Elizabeth Weise:

So this all goes back to the Cold War. This goes back to, if you've seen Oppenheimer, this is kind of right exactly what it's all about. This started in 1951, was at the beginnings of the Cold War. We were starting to worry about an enemy attack, possibly a nuclear attack. This was the whole duck and cover. The entire U.S. would be warned that an attack was imminent and we were all supposed to get under our desk to survive a nuclear attack, which wasn't actually going to work. But that's when the system came into place. And in those days, I mean it was very hands-on. There was a tone that got transmitted to radio transceivers and to radio stations.

And it's actually fascinating. When they first started doing this, one of their worries was that if enemy bombers came into the U.S., they would be able to find major cities by listening to the emanations of the radio stations. And so early on, as soon as the radio stations got the message that an attack was imminent, they were supposed to turn themselves off. And there was only a few places on the radio dial that would continue to broadcast this message and they wouldn't be out of major cities. I mean that was kind of a whole thing back then.

Over time in the '50s and '60s, this whole system was refined as there were continued fears of nuclear attack. We've been doing national tests for many decades. The first nationwide tests that also incorporated all the new electronic systems was in 2011. And they've done a couple since then, but we haven't had one for a couple of years. So it's about time.

Taylor Wilson:

And Beth, do we ever see false alarms in this system?

Elizabeth Weise:

Yeah, we do. In the early years, in the '50s and the early '60s, there were a couple of false alarms. They were all really localized, like somebody at a local radio station would grab the wrong piece of paper or something. The most recent one though was in Hawaii, and this was pretty bad.

So in 2018, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency System, they were in the middle of a shift change and somebody either incoming or outcoming selected the wrong item on a computer and it sent out an alert notification to everybody in the island that a ballistic missile was incoming to the islands. And the presumption on everybody's part was it was a nuclear missile. So for 38 minutes, people on the Hawaiian Islands thought that a nuclear attack was inbound. And then finally the statewide system realized, I think they called the mainland and the mainland said, "No, we don't see anything." And they realized it was a mistake and they got the word out. But yeah, it was going out on text messages and it was even up on some highway signs.

Taylor Wilson:

So on October 4th, it's just a test. It's not an emergency and it's not a false alarm. Beth Weise, thank you so much.

Elizabeth Weise:

You're so welcome.

Taylor Wilson:

And before we go, today is Women's Equality Day and separately also International Dog Day. The former commemorates the passage of women's suffrage in the U.S. and the latter celebrates our furry friends and encourages adoption.

Did you know that 5 Things is now on YouTube? A limited number of our specials and Sunday episodes will now be available as vodcasts. We have a link in today's show notes.

And thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can reach us at [email protected]. Dana Taylor is in for the Sunday episode tomorrow, and I'll see you Monday with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.