Tsunami waves reach Hawaii, West Coast hours after magnitude 8.8 earthquake

USA Today

3 days ago

On Wednesday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Tsunami waves reached Hawaii and parts of the West Coast after one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history. USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Aysha Bagchi breaks down Ghislaine Maxwell's conditions for Congressional testimony. The EPA will repeal the finding that climate pollution endangers human health. The U.S. sets a new electricity consumption record amid summer heat. USA TODAY Senior National Political Correspondent Sarah D. Wire breaks down what's next for library funding as E-books are on the line. We remember the victims of this week's New York City shooting.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. 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.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Wednesday, July 30th, 2025. This is USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
Today, one of the strongest recorded earthquakes ever sent tsunami waves to Hawaii. Plus Ghislaine Maxwell lays out conditions to testify before Congress and eBooks are on the line at local libraries.
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Tsunami waves reached Hawaii and the mainland west coast after one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history. A magnitude 8.8 struck off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula overnight and triggered alerts across the Pacific, Alaska and other parts of the Western U.S. The waves began arriving in Hawaii after 7:00 PM local time, but initial observations were encouraging to officials. Governor Josh Green said so far they had not seen a wave of consequence. Shortly after the initial tsunami warning sirens went off at around 3:00 PM local time in Hawaii, the streets of Honolulu, including the tourist hub Waikiki, were congested as people quickly tried to move to higher ground and away from coastal evacuation zones. Some reported long lines at gas stations as sirens continued to go off. Others felt desensitized to the warning following the 2018 false missile alert, when residents woke up to an emergency alert notification that a ballistic missile was headed their way. Residents across the island scrambled to find shelter then before learning it was sent as an error. You can stay with usatoday.com throughout the day for the latest.
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Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell says she will talk to Congress, but there's a catch. I spoke with USA TODAY Justice Department correspondent Aysha Bagchi for more. Aysha, thanks for stopping by.
Aysha Bagchi:
Thanks for having me Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So Ghislaine Maxwell is willing to testify before Congress, but what are her conditions here?
Aysha Bagchi:
One of her prerequisites is she wants immunity if she's going to testify. This is someone who is serving a twenty-year prison sentence right now for very serious criminal convictions. She doesn't want testimony that she gives before Congress to expose her in some sort of way in criminal proceedings. So she's specified that she wants immunity. We don't know what form that would take if Congress would grant her any in order to let her testify, but we do know that she got some sort of limited immunity, there were reports of that anyway, when it comes to discussions she had with the Justice Department last week. In addition to that, she wants to wait to give testimony before Congress until an appeal that she has pending at the U.S. Supreme Court right now has run its course. The court is set to decide as soon as sometime in September, potentially, whether it wants to take up her case or not. And she said she'll have some other appeal coming in some court in addition to that one. And she wants those things wrapped up first.
She also wants to get the questions in advance. That's kind of an interesting prerequisite that she is trying to set for giving any testimony before Congress. She wants to be told what questions she's going to be asked. She said that'll give her a chance to prepare. Surely that'll be preparation alongside her lawyer. Then she said it'll let her come up with documents to corroborate the things that she wants to say. Those are the rules that she's setting in place she says when it comes to this testimony, but she also said she would love clemency from President Donald Trump. He can pardon her fully. He can commute her sentence. She said she'd be willing and eager to testify if she got that. That's no surprise. But she didn't set that as a rule in order to testify before Congress.
Taylor Wilson:
Okay. And Aysha, what does Congress really hope to get out of such testimony?
Aysha Bagchi:
The Congressman Chairman James Comer, he's the one who issued this subpoena. He heads one of the committees in Congress, an oversight committee. He said that there are basically two things that the committee is interested in when it comes to her testimony. One of them is looking at the enforcement of sex trafficking laws. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in her trial that concluded in 2021. The person that she was basically convicted of being a co-conspirator with was Jeffrey Epstein. And the second thing is he said that he wants to look at plea agreements when it comes to cases like this. That's probably a reference to the really sweetheart plea deal that Jeffrey Epstein got in 2008. He was able to plead guilty to two Florida state prostitution offenses, one involving minors. And under that plea deal, he was told by Florida federal prosecutors and state prosecutors that that would clear this case for him. He had an 18-month sentence. He didn't have to serve that full time and for much of the time he was able to be let out for several hours of the day in a work release program.
So the congressman said that the committee wants to look at that kind of plea deal, and that's actually a basis for Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal right now. She's arguing to the Supreme Court that federal prosecutors in New York shouldn't have been able to charge her, prosecute her in her own case because a provision of that plea deal not only protected Jeffrey Epstein, but also purported to protect any potential co-conspirators of his. So far Ghislaine Maxwell has lost in her argument that that meant she couldn't have been prosecuted. Some courts have said that New York Federal prosecutors were still free to go after her, but that's something that the committee in Congress seems to want to look at.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow, interesting. Well, Maxwell spoke with Justice Department officials last week. What do we know, if anything, about those conversations?
Aysha Bagchi:
We don't know much. Most of what we've heard has come from Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer, not from the government itself. He said that Ghislaine Maxwell answered lots of questions. This took place over two days, not just one day. So it seems to have been quite a lot of interviewing her. He said that she went over 100 people. We don't know what the content of that was. What does it mean for her to have referenced 100 people in relation to Jeffrey Epstein? But we have heard reports that she was given some sort of limited immunity in exchange for this sort of interview. And potentially the idea that Justice Department officials have in mind is to see if she can provide any investigative leads that would actually open up a line of investigation and potential criminal charges against anyone else associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
When the Justice Department chose not to release its Epstein files, it said in its announcement about that, that it didn't uncover anything in the files that would merit opening an investigation, a criminal investigation into someone else. So maybe this interview is an opportunity for the Justice Department to look at that again and see if it can open up an investigation into someone else and maybe satisfy kind of the public outrage that has boiled over, including from many of President Trump's own supporters, about this case and questions that sort of linger about potential mysteries surrounding this case or whether the government really has tackled everyone it should tackle when it comes to its evidence surrounding sex trafficking and Jeffrey Epstein.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, Aysha Bagchi covers the Justice Department for USA TODAY. Thank you, Aysha.
Aysha Bagchi:
Thanks Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Environmental Protection Agency will rescind the finding that greenhouse gas emissions put human health in danger as well as tailpipe emission standards for vehicles. President Trump's pick to run the EPA, Lee Zeldin, announced the agency's plan to rescind the endangerment finding on the Ruthless podcast yesterday, saying it'll save Americans money and unravel two decades of regulation aimed at reducing carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases from cars, power plants, oil production, and other sources. In 2009, the EPA under former president Barack Obama issued a finding that emissions from new motor vehicles contribute to pollution and endanger public health and welfare. It was upheld in several legal challenges.
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Americans cranking up the air conditioners and fans over a single hour this month consumed more electricity than ever before as heat spread from the Midwest to the East Coast. The Federal Energy Information Administration said that from 7:00 to 8:00 PM Eastern Time on Monday, Americans consumed more than 758,000 megawatt hours of electricity, a new national record. And while the numbers are subject to change, the EIA said Americans might consume even more power as the summer continues. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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E-books and more are on the line as Congress considers the future of library funding. I discussed with USA TODAY senior national political correspondent Sarah D. Wire. Sarah, as always, thanks for joining me.
Sarah D. Wire:
Thanks for having me.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, so let's go back to March Sarah, when Trump issued an executive order eliminating huge parts of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Can you just start by reminding us what happened here and what's happened since?
Sarah D. Wire:
Back on March 14th, the president issued an executive order that eliminated most of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. He ordered that it be reduced to its statutory functions. Basically meant that it should be brought down as far as possible. And so suddenly, pretty much the entirety of the Institute's staff were laid off and then really abruptly, three state libraries were informed that their grants had been canceled. Now, state libraries receive between 30 and 50% of their funding through these state grants. And so to have that big cut was panic-inducing for a lot of these states. And then about half of the states in the country sued over losing this money and the judge placed an injunction that ordered the Institute to reinstate the staff, reinstate any cut grants, and that's kind of where things stand there.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, what is Congress now considering about the future of library funding?
Sarah D. Wire:
So when the president put forward his budget proposal, he only suggested $5.5 million for the agency with the agency saying that that money was enough to sunset or end the agency. That's a big drop from the nearly 300 million the agency normally receives. We haven't seen any pushback on this from Congress yet, and this Congress has been very willing to back what the president wants. He tried this during his first term. He tried getting rid of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, then Congress pushed back and said they weren't going to do it. There's a big piece of legislation that has to be renewed in September, and we've seen absolutely no movement on that. But that has to be passed in order for the agency to continue existing.
Taylor Wilson:
Okay, makes sense. And you focus a lot on e-books in this piece, Sarah. How might this action or whatever happens over the next few months impact e-books and what's at stake when libraries and library patrons lose that kind of access?
Sarah D. Wire:
Every state gets to choose how they spend this federal money, and a lot of states use it to provide e-book services for the entire state. Libraries are leasing e-books instead of buying them outright and often at three to five times the normal cost. And so that cost is just too much for small libraries to bear on their own. So if they lose the federal money, the states can't provide this to local libraries, which means a lot of people are no longer going to be able to check out e-books from their library.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Sarah, you're right about a nonprofit that organizes grassroots campaigns for library funding and also blocking book bans. Tell us a bit about this group and what other recourse is there. Can states really filled the gap here?
Sarah D. Wire:
This organization called Every Library has had a petition drive going on, trying to convince both federal lawmakers and states to prevent the Trump administration from doing this. Some of the state libraries I spoke to said they're worried that states aren't going to be able to step in and fill the gap. It might not seem like a lot. California is the biggest recipient of this money. They receive about $15 million a year, but to fill that gap is not something that they can just dig through the couch cushions and do. But it's also asking a lot for the state to find that money when the state is bringing in less revenue, but they're also having to take on new responsibilities that the federal government has handed down, including more responsibility for Medicaid and paying for a portion of SNAP for the first time.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Well, going back even to March, I mean, I just want to get a sense on the Trump administration perspective here, Republican congressional perspective. What is the argument on that side of the coin? Is this just a continued push for getting rid of government bloat?
Sarah D. Wire:
Yeah, the White House told us back in March that this was an effort to streamline government and get rid of superfluous agencies, but they haven't talked about waste or fraud specifically when it comes to this agency.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, and what's next going forward? You mentioned this September timeline in terms of how congressional leaders are going to tackle this.
Sarah D. Wire:
This isn't one of the appropriations bills that Congress has to pass before the end of the year. Congress will probably start taking a look at it when the House and Senate resume in September.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Sarah D. Wire covers national politics for USA TODAY. I appreciate you stopping by Sarah.
Sarah D. Wire:
Thanks for having me.
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Taylor Wilson:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said preliminary investigations show the gunman in yesterday's Midtown Manhattan shooting may have intended to target the NFL, but took the wrong elevator. The suspect left behind a three-page note claiming he had chronic CTE from playing football police said. CTE is a brain condition experienced by people who have repeated blows to the head, often through contact sports like football. An NFL employee was reportedly injured in the shooting. We're also learning more about the victims who were killed in the violence. They include Blackstone investment firm employee Wesley LePatner, security officer Aland Etienne, police officer Didarul Islam, and Julia Hyman an associate at Rudin Management.
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ICE agents or law enforcement working in that capacity have been recorded arresting people across the country in full masks without any identifying clothing or even telling people who they work for.
Mike German:
What many studies, going back to the civil unrest during the 1960s and '70s, showed that when law enforcement engages in arbitrary or poorly targeted violence, that often creates more violence. In other words, if they attack a crowd indiscriminately, the crowd will become more violent.
Taylor Wilson:
That was former FBI agent Mike German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. My colleague Dana Taylor sat down with Mike for a conversation about the trend of mass ICE agents and what it means for democracy. You can hear that conversation right here today, today beginning at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.