Top Hezbollah commander among those killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon

On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Tensions continue along the Lebanon-Israel border, as Israel strikes Beirut. USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen discusses what the Secret Service says it got wrong in the July shooting of former President Donald Trump. Donald Trump is making a renewed effort to secure a Nebraska Electoral College vote that could decide who wins the White House in November. The Federal Trade Commission sues pharmacy benefit managers over high insulin prices. USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé breaks down polling that shows Americans agree there’s a retirement crisis – regardless of political party.

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 Saturday, September 21st, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today, Israel has killed a top Hezbollah commander as tensions grow along the Israel-Lebanon border. Plus, the Secret Service admits failure in the July Donald Trump shooting, and Republicans and Democrats agree America faces a retirement crisis.

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Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander and other senior figures in the Lebanese movement in an airstrike yesterday on Beirut. The Israeli military and a security source in Lebanon said Ibrahim Aqil had been killed with other senior members of an elite Hezbollah unit in the strike. Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States over his link to the deadly bombing of Marines in Lebanon in 1983.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry said at least 14 people died in the strike, and the toll was expected to climb. Hezbollah called the incident a treacherous Israeli assassination.

Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said this week that Israel is launching a new phase of war on the border with Lebanon. He posted on X that the new phase will continue until their goal is achieved, the safe return of the residents of the North to their homes.

Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from homes on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border since Hezbollah began rocketing Israel following the Hamas October 7th attacks in Israel, and Israel strikes in Gaza. Israel has said it will use force, if necessary, to ensure its citizens can return to Northern Israel.

The latest strike put another blow on Hezbollah after two days of attacks that saw pagers and walkie-talkies used by its members explode, killing 37 people and wounding thousands. Those attacks were believed to have been carried out by Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its role.

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The Secret Service yesterday admitted failures surrounding the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July. I spoke with USA TODAY Justice Department correspondent Bart Jansen to learn more.

Bart, thanks for hopping on today.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So Bart, what specific failures did the Secret Service acknowledge yesterday related to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump this summer?

Bart Jansen:

One of the major flaws was a communications gap because just fundamentally they had different headquarters, different command posts set up for the Secret Service, and then for the local law enforcement folks there in Butler County, Pennsylvania. So they’re not in the same room. They’re not elbow-to-elbow talking about whatever they’re seeing, whatever they’re finding, and that was considered quite a hindrance in just having awareness about what each other was doing.

In addition, in the lead-up to the event, the Secret Service work with local law enforcement. They said, “All right. Well, you guys can take care of this one building,” that was a couple of hundred yards away from where Trump was speaking. The local people did do that in a cooperative way, but there was a glitch in how they understood how much they should do to protect that building.

The Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was saying it’s the Secret Service’s responsibility. They can’t lay it off on the locals, that they should have looked closer about what were they going to do to basically stop somebody from climbing onto the roof of this low-slung building and have a direct line of fire toward a former president. He said they should’ve perhaps pushed them a little harder or been less deferential to the local folks.

Taylor Wilson:

You know, I think we’ve been asking these questions for a few months, Bart, but will there be any punishments or consequences in light of all this?

Bart Jansen:

They are absolutely considering discipline against Secret Service staffers. Director Rowe would not say how many people have proposed discipline. He said that he has not asked for anyone’s retirement.

So that sounds like the discipline will be short of ousters, but he said that the Secret Service has one of the most robust disciplinary programs in the entire federal government, and that people will be held accountable.

Taylor Wilson:

Bart, did the Secret Service address the second apparent assassination attempt on Trump from last weekend?

Bart Jansen:

They had a couple of dozen reporters in a room at the Secret Service headquarters, and they assured us everyone would get a question. So many of the questions turned to the apparent assassination attempt on Sunday at the Trump International Golf Course. A lot of the questions focused on how does a guy get into the foliage on the outskirts of the course without the Secret Service noticing that? Is there enough redundancy? Are there enough people to respond to this sort of thing?

Rowe assured the reporters that Trump is now getting the same level of Secret Service protection as the president. They have switched their standards so that party nominees will be treated the same under Secret Service standards as the incumbents. So that’s a change. It’s going to require more resources, more personnel. He says they’re being stretched a little thin right now, but that he sees that as probably the standards going forward because the threat environment remains so tremendous that he just sees it going on in perpetuity.

Some of the things that he mentioned, though, is he thought the agents on the scene and their supervisors responded according to their training. He basically was saying that it went well, that the initial agent spotted the intruder, fired shots, immediately contacted other people by radio to say shots had been fired. The protectors around the president immediately got the president to a safer location to hide in place as they determined whether this was just the first wave of a bigger, more comprehensive attack. Then once that was resolved, it appeared to be just this one person, that they hustled him away to safety, that he was protected by technology that isn’t described and also ballistic protection.

So he says that the agents and their supervisors responded quickly and that they appeared to respond correctly, although they are going to continue to review that incident as they have the Butler shooting.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Bart Jansen covers the Justice Department for USA TODAY. Thank you, Bart.

Bart Jansen:

Thanks for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

Former president Donald Trump is making a renewed effort to secure one of Nebraska’s electoral college votes, which could decide who wins the White House in November. The Republican nominee is speaking to Nebraska state legislators in a second attempt to usher a bill through the legislature that would change the state’s electoral vote allocation system, and take away Vice President Kamala Harris’s chance to win one of the state’s five votes, according to the Nebraska Examiner and other outlets.

If successful, that move could alter the electoral map, forcing Harris to carry another state in order to win the presidency. Nebraska and Maine are the only states that do not follow the winner-take-all system for electoral votes. In Nebraska, two of the five electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide. The other three go to the winners of each of the state’s three congressional districts.

Now Nebraska is a Republican-leaning state. Its second congressional district, which surrounds Omaha, has sometimes gone for Democrats in recent presidential elections, including to former President Barack Obama in 2008 and President Joe Biden in 2020. That one electoral vote could be Harris’s key to getting the 270 she needs to win. If she carries the blue wall battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she could win an electoral college majority with the one vote from Nebraska. You can read more about Trump’s efforts and the election math with a link in today’s show notes.

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The Federal Trade Commission sued the country’s three largest pharmacy benefit managers yesterday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies. The case accuses United Health Group’s Optum Unit, CVS’s Caremark and Cigna’s Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

The FTC said such conduct hurt patients like those with co-insurance and deductibles who were not eligible for the rebated price. The three companies jointly administer 80% of all prescriptions in the US, according to the case.

CVS spokesperson David Whitrap said in an emailed statement that the company has worked to make insulin more affordable for Americans and describe the FTC as being simply wrong. Cigna chief legal officer, Andrea Nelson said the FTC was interested in scoring political points, and Optum spokesperson Elizabeth Hoff called the action baseless and said that through negotiations and additional actions, the company has lowered insulin costs for its health plan customers and members to an average of less than $18 per month for insulin.

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Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on something, America faces a retirement crisis. I spoke with USA TODAY personal finance reporter Daniel de Vise for more.

Daniel, thank you for hopping on The Excerpt today.

Daniel de Vise:

It’s a pleasure.

Taylor Wilson:

So Daniel, what did this survey find and really how did these responses cut across political party lines?

Daniel de Vise:

Well, the thing that impressed and surprised me about this BlackRock survey is they went after registered voters by party and asked them about their thoughts on retirement security. We hear a lot about retirement security, but it’s not usually by party.

BlackRock, the global investment firm, surveyed a thousand registered voters and broke it down by party lines, and the sort of top line response is, is there a retirement savings crisis in this country? That’s the main question they ask. 93% of Republicans said, yes, there is, joined by 86% of Democrats.

Now, if I parse that a little, I’m going to say Democrats, because their guy is in office, might be a little less likely to say there’s any kind of crisis because they might be feeling protective or defensive of the president. But that’s a very high rate of people saying there is a retirement savings crisis, and those groups were joined by 94% of Independents.

Taylor Wilson:

How much money do folks feel they need to retire, Daniel? And really how does that compare with how much they actually have saved up, according to this poll?

Daniel de Vise:

The responses were remarkably similar by party, and that’s the thing that I thought was really interesting. So even though people think they should save about 2 million bucks, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, the actual amount people have saved is way lower than that.

And this cuts again across party lines. About half of Democrats and about half of Republicans and half of Independents all say they have less than $150,000 saved now toward retirement, which, of course, is way short of $2 million.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So Daniel, what do the experts say here? Were they surprised to see these responses?

Daniel de Vise:

No. You know, I spoke to Catherine Collinson who runs the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, and she said retirement security cuts across party lines. It’s an everybody issue.

She mentioned legislation for retirement security has generally enjoyed a history of bipartisan collaboration. There was something called the Secure Act 2.0 in 2022, and that rewrote a lot of the rules of retirement savings. It’s a lot of little stuff that adds up to some pretty big changes. That had pretty good bipartisan support, especially in the senate, I think less so in the house, and the goal of that bill was to boost retirement security.

AARP says the same thing. Democrats, Republicans, both are worried about whether they’ll have enough money in retirement.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So Daniel, we’re putting this in kind of a political context here in this election year. How have the candidates themselves in this presidential election approach some of these issues around retirement, including social security? What are their plans on this?

Daniel de Vise:

Yeah. You know, you don’t find a whole lot of this in the big newspapers, but Kamala Harris has talked about the idea of strengthening social security and Medicare for the long haul by quote, “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”

That probably means following the lead of President Biden. President Biden, as you and I have discussed, has vowed to raise new revenue by going after wealthy tax cheats and by raising tax rates on the wealthiest people in corporations.

I should stress that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are talking about raising taxes for everyone, but the Democrats are talking about raising taxes for the wealthiest people.

Kamala Harris could also be talking about the idea of raising the social security payroll tax to a higher earnings limit. Right now, if you earn more than $168,600, you don’t pay social security on anything above that. They could raise that limit and that could raise money.

Now, Donald Trump, according to an analysis I read from Bankrate, has taken a more ambiguous stance on social security. So the official platform for the Republican Party is a pledge to, quote, “fight for and protect social security and Medicare with no cuts,” so that’s important, “including no changes to the retirement age.” But former President Trump, he’s made a case that economic growth and job creation would naturally shore up social security by boosting payroll tax revenues.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Great breakdown for us, as always. Daniel de Vise covers personal finance for USA TODAY. Thank you, sir.

Daniel de Vise:

Thank you, sir.

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Taylor Wilson:

Journalist Connie Chung has been a ground-breaker, becoming the first woman and the first Asian American to co-anchor the evening news. But it wasn’t easy from sexual harassment to what she calls the big shot-itis of most male anchors. In her new memoir, Connie, she reveals how she would discover decades later how consequential her legacy really was.

Hear her conversation with USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page tomorrow, beginning at 5:00 AM Eastern Time, right here on this feed.

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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, and I’ll be back Monday with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hezbollah commander killed in Israeli strike on Lebanon | The Excerpt