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doj career officials who prosecuted trump got the ax. effective immediately. and now investigators are some january 6th cases now find themselves being investigated. plus, president trump talks up his immigration crackdown as agents are now being told to be camera ready for raids when it comes to past deportations under other presidents. is this political deja vu or something entirely new? tonight on laura coates live. it was seven months ago, seven months ago, that donald trump claimed sometimes revenge can be justified. well, tonight he's trying to justify it. and further gutting the department he thinks has totally wronged him. now, this time, it involves pink slips for the prosecutors

who investigated trump himself. we're learning more than a dozen doj officials who worked with special counsel jack smith are bringing special charges and criminal cases against trump. they've now been let go, as in fired. this is letter that they got from the acting attorney general. part of it says this, quote, the proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust. superior officials place in their subordinates. given your significant role in prosecuting the president, i do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implementing the president's agenda faithfully. now, there are a lot of questions here, including who's agenda. but is this even legal? is first and foremost, if any of the prosecutors who got fired are career government officials, they are likely entitled to civil service protections. yep. due process. heard of that. that can also apply to them. second, once he's done with the career prosecutors, will trump go after

jack smith himself? remember he closed up shop, left the doj before trump actually reentered the white house. but he did not get a preemptive pardon from former president joe biden. we don't actually know why that was the case or whether it was entertained. what about merrick garland? he also didn't get a pardon. did he want one? will he need one? third is trump undercutting the doj's ability to actually carry out what it's supposed to be doing? it might surprise you, or not at all, to know that cases that involved trump are like a mere fraction of the case. the doj has worked over in the last four years, let alone eight years, and the career prosecutor is getting fired or reassigned, wore many, many hats. they had institutional knowledge on how to prosecute complex cases. that expertise now is quickly going to be thinning out. on top of the firings and the reassignments, tourists tell us that president trump and the

administration now want to investigate prosecutors in those january 6th cases. call it investigating the investigators. the interim u.s. attorney here in d.c., ed martin, says that he wants a review of all the cases that brought those obstruction charges. remember, the supreme court last year limited a certain obstruction charge that had been used on hundreds of capitol rioter defendants, and now martin says he wants the documents. he wants the notes. he wants the emails, all the files related to those charges. you know, he will probably get them all. those would be work product of the department and belong to the doj itself, not the individual prosecutor. i should mention, of course, that martin himself was an organizer for the stop the steal movement. well, joining me now, former federal prosecutor shan wu, under the clinton administration and justice and fbi reporter for the new york times, devlin barrett, who i'm sure is very busy these days. uh, be with you, shan, on this point because

career prosecutors, they are supposed to serve. doesn't matter who is the president of the united states. they are there for the independent function of it, and they don't really have a lot of work to do on behalf of or at the pleasure of the president of the united states. but to say that they now cannot be trusted to faithfully implement his agenda is strikingly odd. retribution. and the reason? >> oh, absolutely. and i'm so glad you zero in on that particular language, because that's exactly what they shouldn't be focused on as career prosecutors not carrying out the president's agenda, but carrying out the agenda of the american people to do justice. so to say that we don't trust you because you won't carry out the president's agenda is exactly what the problem is in this type of retribution. i mean, policy is one thing. the administration new ag comes in different policy initiatives. you need to carry that out. but making it this blatant, right. saying it right out loud, we don't trust you because we don't think you will do the president's bidding.

that's just ridiculous. >> there's a whole hell of a lot of prosecutors who don't didn't vote for whatever president it was going back. republican presidents, democrat president doesn't really matter. their job is to prosecute on behalf of the victims of the jurisdiction and the entities themselves. so we'll see how that goes. devlin. trump is also sidelining some of the doj career officials as well. he is either moving them to much less powerful positions or constructive demotions, frankly, and trying to maybe force the hand out of it. so who is going to fill those jobs? we have any idea? and is he trying to get him to quit? >> i think there is an expectation that a bunch of these people will quit because they've been reassigned to tasks. they don't have legal expertise in, taken out of the things they do have legal expertise in and in the building. it's understood, like these are essentially you're being put on a shelf. um, i think i think one way to think about this is that is the trump administration is in a way we

have never seen before, reaching deep into the mechanics, into the into the engine of the justice department. and it's not this is no longer about changing the leadership of the department. we're way past, you know, any sort of argument about politicization at the top of the department. this is about touching the career officials who have authority in the building and in the organization to make tough decisions. the top ethics official at the department has been reassigned. that person has 30 years in the in the department and knows the department inside and out. the top. uh, corruption prosecutor resigned rather than be reassigned. and because he doesn't want to be in that, he doesn't want to take that role and he understands that, you know, this is functionally a demotion, right? um, this is this is reaching down into the machinery and changing the actual machinery of the department. >> and you know, whose hands get to be clean here. so far, it's

the person nominated to be the attorney general of the united states. pam bondi who i remind people, i think we have that clip, actually, of of her saying prior to now that back in 2023, i think it was that they would prosecute the bad prosecutors, they would investigate the investigators. listen to this. >> the department of justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted. the bad ones, the investigators will be investigated. >> no one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent. >> so that's quite a split screen. and thinking about then to now. and she tried to say that at the confirmation hearings. well, that was before and a very different role. and here's her. there's not going to be an enemies list now, but she can still abide by what she said in the confirmation hearings and go into a cleaned out house of the doj and say, it wasn't me. that's political cover. >> that's right. absolutely. and it's interesting in that clip where she says the investigators will be investigated, the earlier one,

she has a little caveat. the bad prosecutors get prosecuted. why do you need to investigate investigators unless there's something wrong, unless they're bad investigators? >> well, they think this this person from the u.s. attorney's office thinks that they're bad. i guess because the supreme court said that you should not have been able to bring a case involving obstruction related to the enron cases, but that took the supreme court to find that. right. that makes a difference. >> absolutely. and it was quite complicated as the supreme court, you even had amy coney barrett switching sides kind of from the conservatives. and ketanji brown jackson switching sides in the majority. it was a complex legal decision. and most importantly, it had nothing to do with the process of bringing a charge. the current u.s. attorney in d.c., he can grab all the notes he wants. it's not going to be about the legal ins and outs of section 18, u.s.c. 1512. it's going to be about gathering the evidence. can we prove this beyond a reasonable doubt? it's not going to show some some kind of politicization and the damage he's doing to

the office. incalculable. >> and if you wanted to do look, it's fine on some level to investigate investigators. that happens all the time in the justice department. that's why you have an inspector general. that's not what this is. this is about the the temporary political leadership of the department going after the career prosecutors in the department. that is a very different animal. it's a little hard, i know, for non-lawyers and non-nerds to sort of like process what's different here. but it is very different than what we've seen before. >> well, i am a lawyer, but nerd, i think it was a little bit harsh, but inspectors general, you say, let's go right there because there is growing fallout over president trump's late night dramatic purge of more than a dozen of those those people who were tasked with rooting out waste and fraud from federal agencies, the administration, citing changing priorities. trump saying some were not doing the job well tonight, one inspector general fired by the

president disputes that. >> over the past five years, we've returned physically to the treasury. close to $40 billion, and we have we have thousands of of arrests, thousands of ongoing investigations. we have done a stellar job. >> i want to bring in former inspector general for the u.s. government publishing office under the george w. bush administration. greg brower, thank you for joining us today. i mean, this is ongoing. we know it's happening with the freezing of the civil rights division cases. we know about the prosecuting, the prosecutors discussions and the investigating of the investigators. but the inspectors generals now are the ones who are the most vulnerable. you just heard someone who was an ig saying $40 billion was returned to the government. so why do you think trump is firing at least these 18 inspectors general now? >> well, on one hand, laura, and

thanks for having me on. it's because he can the president appoints these inspectors general. some are appointed by agency heads, but most are appointed by the president. and as a result, they serve at the pleasure of the president and he can remove them. the problem with the ig's, though, as opposed to other presidential appointees, is that there is a federal law that requires a president, any president, when he wants to terminate the employment of a federal ig, he has to give notice to congress and provide a reason. and in this case, anyways, president trump did not do that. now, there are some legal scholars who dispute the constitutionality of that particular law, but it's never really been tested. but this is unprecedented. and obviously, for the president to give notice to congress is not a hard thing. no one would suggest that every inspector general ever appointed by the president should have his or her job for life. there should be a mechanism for a president to remove an inspector

general, but this is not the legally correct way to do it. and moreover, as has been discussed, the inspectors general do a lot of important work and they do it for congress. really? so what i will be interested in seeing and watching is, is how congress reacts to this, because the inspector general provides semiannual reports to congress reporting on their work. it's really a role and a function that is for the benefit of congress to provide oversight that congress itself cannot do. and so this should concern members of congress. senator grassley, in particular, has been a great champion for the inspector general community. and so it will be very interesting to see how congress reacts to this. >> i just interviewed congressman pete sessions this morning on my sirius xm show about this very notion. he's a part of the subcommittee that looks at igs and the idea of not having the notice in advance. and i'm paraphrasing him, the concern was, well, congress could have given some insight as to the categories of igs that

would have been perhaps most helpful in identifying as opposed to having a reactive notion at this point in time. but that didn't happen here. and you're right. it is his prerogative to nominate the igs that he wants to replace these people. but if you've got this fear, this sword of damocles, that you serve at the pleasure and the pleasure of the president is mercurial, do you have confidence that the replacements will actually have independent oversight and act independently of that fear well, that's you've hit on the concern, i think, and this is a concern congress should have, and that is that if the inspectors general, who may be appointed to replace those who have been removed, are not truly nonpartisan and independent, it begs the question, are they really doing the work that congress and the american people need them to do? >> so we'll see how the president handles this. we'll see if he does make replacement appointments and who those people

are. but the work has always been done in a nonpartisan, independent way, and the tradition has been for new presidents to allow inspectors general to remain in place, assuming they're doing a good job and to replace them only for cause and again, with proper notice to congress. so a lot remains to be seen in terms of what the president will do next. but again, congress will be watching closely, i assume. >> and really quick, greg, is there then an acting ig that will automatically replace these now fired igs and they haven't already a seniority. it goes on. >> well, there will be, although it remains to be seen who exactly within the the oig will become the acting. we've seen with respect to the u.s. attorneys offices recently. as you know that the first assistants who normally would step in as the acting have not been allowed to be the acting in some districts. and so we'll

have to see how this new administration administration handles the the role of acting igs, where there is not a presidentially appointed ig at this time. >> greg brower, thank you so much for joining. >> thank you. >> still ahead tonight, trump era deportations are well under way, with president trump reportedly asking agencies to make sure they're, quote, camera ready when when they carry out the raids. now, how much of this is an escalation and how much is just business as usual? plus, we'll take you inside an illinois church promising to house undocumented immigrants and keep them safe, even if it means risking arrest. the pastor joins me live straight ahead. >> hey, folks, chris counihan here with lee filter, america's largest gutter and gutter protection company. lee filter has over 150 locations and has been installed on over a million

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your groups with high quality custom apparel, accessories and promo products, all backed by our guarantee at custom inc.com. >> all there is with anderson cooper. listen wherever you get your podcasts. >> tonight, president trump's border czar warning anyone living in the united states illegally should leave before agents deport them. and he had a strong message to anyone trying to hide them. >> i've seen many pamphlets from many of the ngos. here's how you escape i.c.e. from

arresting you. here's what you need to do. they call it know your rights. i call it how to escape arrest. >> more than 3500 migrants have been arrested through trump's first week. some of them have already been deported. cnn was there when planes carrying migrants landed in guatemala today, one migrant vowing he will try to cross the border again. >> you have a four year old daughter and a four month old son. >> yes, i live there. >> and they're in with your wife in the u.s.? >> yes. and i'm scared. because now the trump, they say they have to go, you know, go with a criminal. but we're not a criminal. you know. >> but you have a trespassing conviction. >> yes. but for me it's not like that. >> do you. it's not as serious crime. >> yes. i'm not. >> or do you think you'll go back? >> i have to go back for sure. >> you'll find a way back. >> yes. >> how does all this compare to what past presidents have done?

where you discuss john sandweg, former acting director of ice during the obama administration. john, glad you're here with us. look, in biden's last year in office, he averaged i think i read about 300 arrests per day. that's up to about 700 a day under trump. is that on par with what other administrations have done? >> you know, it varies, laura, the types of operations they're conducting now are certainly operations we've seen really since the creation of i.c.e., something we used a lot during the obama administration. we're using the biden administration. there are key differences here. however, the main difference is in the targeting, identifying which types of migrants to go after and how serious of a crime are you going to prioritize versus, you know, people might have been charged with traffic offenses or low level misdemeanors. so those are the primary functions in terms of the volume, though. one is obviously when you expand your target list, you're going to increase a little bit the number of arrests you make. but two and more critically, are what we call collateral arrests. when you go to a home where you've identified one of your primary target lives, oftentimes you

find they're not the only undocumented immigrant living in the home. they might have family members who are undocumented. they might be in a group home with other migrants in the biden administration or obama administration. you don't take those people into custody unless they also pose a threat to public safety. you know, have a criminal conviction or there's some other, you know, they're a gang member or something of that nature. under the trump administration, they've been very open that they're going to arrest everybody in the house. that does drive up the number of arrests. but of course, those are individuals who really don't have a nexus to public safety. >> so how are they identifying which locations to specifically target? >> well, what they'll do is they go through criminal justice records, looking at court records, looking at jail bookings, looking at probation and parole records, and looking for those migrants that i.c.e. did not get on the front end. now, i.c.e. is actually very good at identifying people when they're booked into jail or prison, putting what's called a detainer on them and taking custody of them there, because that's a secure environment. but sometimes people get out. and then, to be fair, with some of the administration's rhetoric in a sanctuary city, there's less likely to give ice agents

access to the jails. so that does increase the number of targets that are out on the street. but that's the primary tactic for the targeting piece of this. >> so a source was telling cnn that federal agents have been given various quotas to beat the number of arrests that they made last year. now, i should note the white house border czar, tom homan, has denied that there are quotas. but is that a common practice to have these, if not quota targets? >> laura. no, it's not. and the problem when you start putting in place quotas and you start really driving the quantity of migrants instead of the quantity, you start slipping. look, the criminals, there are far fewer targets out there. if you look at trump's 2019 data, i mean, they arrested 123,000 people that they labeled a criminal, and those were people they were charged with or convicted of a crime. but when you start breaking that data down, it's 63,000 or so were accused of traffic offenses, not necessarily even convicted of those traffic offenses. so the problem becomes you start running out of these targets very quickly. and i think one thing we're all going to need to keep an eye on here is what

is the administration going to do when they run out of these easy targets? right now, they are able to emphasize, hey, we have a nexus to public safety, even if it's a very broad definition of public safety threat. but again, those targets will be exhausted quickly. and it's going to be very interesting how they feed this machinery they're building for the mass deportations, especially when they run out of these criminal targets. >> certainly if you lose or run out of those targets, the idea of the fourth amendment and racial profiling then could quickly replace that. we hope not. john sandweg, thank you very much for joining. >> yeah, thank you. >> a religious group is already suing trump for allowing immigration enforcement at sensitive areas like churches and schools. the quakers argue, reversing that long standing policy. quote, deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities. so far, no comment from homeland security. this all comes as a pastor of a church outside of atlanta says an undocumented man was taken into custody while

attending service yesterday. it's raising new concern for churches like lake street church in evanston, illinois, just outside of chicago. but the pastor says it will keep serving as a sanctuary for immigrants, setting up cots like you're seeing here. it's already served as home for a family from el salvador for a decade, the pastor of lake street church, reverend doctor michael wolf, joins me now. reverend, thank you for being with us this evening. you are protecting a family that that ice could deport if they so choose. what is that like for you and for that family? >> well, you know, they are part of our communal life. we have a commitment to them and they are certainly important to us and an important way for us to live out our faith, but also, um, we are we're worried about them and about other folks who could be caught in this web of increased enforcement that doesn't really seem to care about what the impact it seems to be. again, the cruelty is the point. so

obviously there's fear, there's trepidation, but we continue to be dedicated to providing sanctuary. >> we know that ice agents can now come to places of worship to deport people, but you say that you will not step aside. what could you do to stop it? >> well, i think that really the only thing that people in my situation, pastors or churches or other houses of worship, what they have to leverage is what the original sanctuary movement had in the 1980s. they did not have ice memos or in his memos at that time to protect them. what they had was the indelible sort of privilege that american religious institutions have. and if people like me and other churches and other leaders that i'm talking to and other faith communities are willing to put that privilege on the line to leverage that privilege to put their bodies and privilege on the line. i think that there are ways that we can at least delay. success is not a name for god.

and so they're not all the time linked in quite the 1 to 1 way. but certainly there are things that we can do, and there are steps that we can take. >> you'll risk being arrested. >> sure, absolutely. because this is something i believe in very deeply is a core part of my faith. because to be honest with you, sometimes i don't connect so well on the prayer front. but what i do know, when i open the bible and i look at scripture, what i see repeatedly is that the people who are most vulnerable in our midst are not simply god's favorite people. they are god's presence on earth and what we do for them or withhold from them, is what we do for or withhold from god. and for me, that is a direct line of direct connection that is really important to me, and is probably the most important thing that i do with my life, is how i respond to the most vulnerable. and in this case, at this time, is certainly people who are fearing deportation are the most vulnerable in our midst. >> there are some americans, many people, who

support the idea of deporting those who have preyed upon the most vulnerable among us, violent criminals in particular, and wanting to deport violent criminals first, who are also undocumented persons. many americans support that in terms of the hierarchy of priority. how will you vet any migrants who show up seeking sanctuary? will that be a criteria you even look for? >> yeah. so i mean, obviously if we're talking about violent crimes, we're going to ask people and we're going to ask them to self attest. we are not going to be able to screen people. and i'm not a big believer of our prison system either, and its capacity to explore justice, as you were just saying in the segment previously, right? this is not we're talking about violent crime, and that's what people are talking about. but the real intent is to sweep as many people up as possible. the man from guatemala had a trespassing conviction. that doesn't qualify for me as something that i'm worried about. but certainly we will ask about that. we

definitely do not want to to provide safe harbor to people who are who are violent and who are perhaps guilty of major crimes. yes. >> pastor michael wolff, the position you're in not enviable. i understand your stance. thank you so much. >> thanks for having me. >> ahead, president trump reshapes the military by signing a flurry of new executive orders. what he's cutting and who he's banning next. plus, trump gives an urgent plea to republicans in congress, even as some have signaled they won't play along. >> everything is so hard. we always have two or 3 or 5 or something. people that just don't want to do it, and you just got to do it. >> this part changed my life. >> superman crazy. just that simple little thing over the horse. >> chris wanted to change the world. >> people are literally walking because of him.

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instantly. >> and deep wrinkles reduced in four weeks. it's clinically proven. >> kobe the making of a legend saturday at nine on cnn. >> the lawful orders of the president of the united states will be executed inside this defense department swiftly and without excuse. >> defense secretary pete hegseth promising swift action on the president's orders today on his very first official day on the job. and tonight, president trump not missing a beat in his effort to reform the pentagon with the stroke of a pen, he is calling for the construction of an iron dome, a missile defense shield for the united states, banning transgender people from serving in the military, ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the armed services, and reinstating troops who were discharged for not getting a covid 19 vaccine. i want to bring in senior political correspondent for pac, tara palmeri, democrat chuck rocha and republican strategist erin perrine. i'm glad you guys are all here with me. erin, begin

with you because these orders are focused on a lot of cultural lightning rods that we have seen on the campaign trail. and of course, now for the military this time, and despite the barrage of executive orders that we're seeing, we're not seeing the focus on some of the plans to combat inflation, for example, they're really focused on these areas. why? >> one, i think it's about the quickness with which they can get things done. i think that the executive actions that they've lined up on the front end here is trump using the authority he has vested in him to start things moving as quickly as possible. now you're seeing house republicans are at their retreat right now down in doral in florida. they're setting forward the legislative agenda to make sure that not only because donald trump's doing such sweeping executive actions, you live by the pen, you die by the pen. they are now setting up the legislative agenda to make sure that that can stay in perpetuity and become law. so if they can get to the economy, they can get back to building the dod, and they can get back to the priorities that they told the american people that they were going to deliver. >> the heavy lift, given they've

got a lot of cans already kicked down the road till march, for example, on the funding of the government. now they're going to add on trying to codify executive orders. >> i would also like to add that they're down in miami, where it's really warm at the trump doral, doral, whatever they call that thing down there where they're at the hotel. i mean, that not just that they're at trump's hotel, but they're going to do everything they can to appease him. they're scared to death of him. they have the midterms coming up. and to aaron's point, they're trying to move very, very quickly and they're moving quickly. and they will be judged in the midterms. like this was a change. elections. i'm a democrat who will openly admit that folks voted for change, but how much change? and did they really want to vote for these kind of things? we will see. maybe they're right. i think a lot of maga base and a lot of new people who had never voted before for donald trump showed up for these reasons. will they show up in the midterms? is what i'm waiting to see. >> i mean, this so-called mandate that may be in place, i always say so-called because no one ever says because after you make your actual vote on the actual ballot. but we'll see. but he has a lot to do on his to do list, tara. and he is urging

republicans to stay united. listen. >> the republican party has to stick together. we just can't have people going, you know, one, two, three votes and we don't have that luxury. you can be assured that you have certain philosophies that if you're going to have most of the people, almost all of them voting for something, you really you're going to be okay. it's not going to be bad. you have to stick together. >> so sticking together or rubber stamping, which will it be? >> i mean, obviously he wants rubber stamp. it's donald trump. but, you know, hardliners have already made it known that they want to bills to cover his energy, his immigration. and, you know, his tax bill. others say one big, beautiful bill, which is what trump originally wanted, but it's unclear if they would go for that. the senate also wants two bills. trump knows it's going to be really complicated. he can only lose three votes, as he said. so of course he wants everyone to stay in line. i mean, and whoever doesn't stay in line, i

think they're going to be bullied. i think you're going to see a lot of like elon musk on twitter attacking threatening primaries for these hardliners. but it's hard to threaten a hardliner, especially the ones who are coming on the right arguing that they don't want to increase the national debt, because isn't that what the party is supposed to be all about? right. so, you know, but he also has some republicans coming from like d plus four districts saying to him, hey, we need to cap salt. and how are they going to sell, you know, a tax cut for corporates to americans, right. that's another big thing they've got to deal with. >> i feel like he's talking about unity as well as that. with these confirmations. the three i think of them are three. i think of mitch mcconnell, murkowski and collins as being the three people that are probably on his list as well. and you've got kash patel, rfk jr., tulsi gabbard all coming up this week. the idea of keeping the party united to get them over the hurdle. do you think he's talking about that as well? >> i'm sure it's part of what he's talking about. but when it comes to those three senators, they're going to do exactly what they want to do, and they represent their states in a way

that if if you do. to your point here, i believe that they're going to be like public bullying by maga for members who don't fall in line. those are three that aren't going to care either way. to be completely honest with you. but one thing i would encourage republicans on the hill to consider yes, donald trump wants one big, beautiful bill, but to be given the opportunity to do two reconciliation packages, to be able to pass stuff on the 50 vote threshold on budgetary matters like this, that is a rarity on the hill. you should not give away that kind of political power just because you want it all in one big bill. use the resources at your hands to get the most done. >> so form receptions. >> they they need to get. why would you not give both bills. but it can absolutely be substance. you have two reconciliation vehicles. that's the opportunity for the simple majority for them to get taxes done, to get big energy infrastructure done, to get a whole host of things done. you have two strikes at that apple because of the budgets and the way they work. there are two available for this congress. don't give away that power. >> pay attention to the senate map politically. again, talking about your political consultant here who's always worried about

the next election in two years in the senate, democrats have lots. again, a horrible map for us. this is the third horrible map in a row. and that means that we have democrats that we have to defend in georgia, a state that donald trump won. we have to defend democrats in michigan, a state that he won, and also new hampshire, where a very popular governor is talking about former governor running. so it could be anything there. so look, those look at those elections. when you look at the democrats in the senate. >> and yet people are looking at the right hand man of trump as opposed to what you're talking about or the details of the economy and beyond, because you've got somebody very close to him, elon musk, who made some controversial statements today, to say the least, when he was encouraging germans to get over past guilt during surprise remarks. listen to what he said. >> i think there's like, frankly, too much of a of a focus on on past guilt. and we need to move beyond that. um, people, you know, children should not be guilty of sins of their parents or even let alone their parents, their great grandparents, maybe even, um,

and we should be optimistic and excited about a future for germany. >> by the way, he also spoke about pride in german tradition, said that multiculturalism dilutes everything. why are we not hearing more? people call this out, especially given that there are the cultural issues we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. why are we not hearing from more republicans about this? >> well, it just happened to elon. is not the president. so having to speak for somebody who's not an elected official and doesn't have an actual official federal government role is something republicans are probably going to skirt. >> away, we might have a huge role. i mean, head of doge. >> i mean, he could, but also right now he's not an elected official, so they don't have to worry about that for them. they why would they have to weigh in on that? they don't feel the pressure to. but you have heard a few of them start to speak up about this and you're going to continue to. i think this is a learning curve for elon musk. this is a new geopolitical reality that he is having to learn of what it's like to be at this level, and the media is learning it, too, and how to

cover him, because he has never been at this level or worked in this way. so it's going to be a steep one. >> i just think that they're keeping their mouths shut because he is the biggest sponsor of their party right now. he is the biggest donor. they don't want to him off when he gets in that h-1b visa. you don't hear anything from stephen miller charlie kirk or any of the other people. they're staying away from elon musk because he's got the money and that's how it works. >> he gave $1 million a day away in pennsylvania during the presidential election to make terrorist case like that's nothing to him. $1 million is like me losing a ten. it's $1 million. and like, he's got plenty of money. >> but let's be honest, democrats had the most dark money in the last election cycle. >> $1 million, that's all i'm going to say. >> well, i accept all of your funds right now on the break. thank you everyone so much. ahead, a big a.i. advancement in china sends markets tumbling here at home. and dethrones chatgpt from the top of the app store. now silicon valley is asking, is the u.s. falling behind in the a.i. race? that's the question for andrew yang. next.

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old. but that's not all. the company says they were able to train their a.i. using a fraction of the compute power, as other a.i. companies. some of the leading a.i. firms use 16,000 chips or more to train their systems, according to the new york times. but deepseek engineers say they only needed around 2000. they say they spent just 5.6 million bucks to train their software. compare that to the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars that american companies are spending to train their models. now, this disruption causing such massive waves that even the president weighed in today. >> i've been reading about china and some of the companies in china, one in particular, coming up with a faster method of a.i. and much less expensive method. and that's good because you don't have to spend as much money. i view that as a positive, as an asset. the release of deepseek a.i. from a chinese company should be a wake up call

for our industries that we need to be laser focused on competing to win. >> let's get right to andrew yang. he's the founder of the forward party. he ran for president as a democrat in the 2020 race. andrew, good to see you. i'm eager to hear your take on this because a famed investor and backer of president trump, i'm talking about, marc andreessen, is referring to deepseek as a.i .'s sputnik moment. how do you see it? >> that's possibly. >> not an exaggeration, laura, because you're talking about an a.i. model that's open source and consumes less energy. it was free to users until i think deepseek now just made it available to folks with a chinese phone number. but you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the relative costs, not just of the development, but of utilizing these models. if a chinese model

is lower cost, consumes less energy than it would be a no brainer. for example, for european consumers, for latin american consumers, for african consumers who are going to end up being the the people that you're competing for in this, a.i. competition. >> so does this mean that this this advantage they presently have has staying power? or will the rest of the industry sort of build off of deepseek innovations to make their own training a.i. systems even cheaper? >> well, laura, what you have to keep in mind is that these developments have kind of piggybacked on each other, but the chinese situation is that they've been denied some of the nvidia high powered chips, so they've had to try and find other ways to develop these models that are less energy intensive, less cost intensive. and, you know, they say necessity is the mother of invention. and so what's happened is that the chinese firms have been placed in a position where they had to figure out other paths to get to

the same goal, or actually, in this case, maybe even surpassed the original goal. and i don't think that's going to end here. this isn't just like a step function where, oh, american firms then take another step. they figured out a new way to develop these models, and that's just going to build on itself. >> i am stunned by just the fraction of the cost for one versus the other. but there is something that deepseek deepseek excuse me, does have one particular feature that other a.i. chatbots don't have censorship. chinese censorship. can you tell me what the global implications would be if china is the winner in artificial intelligence? >> well, i was referring to this global competition and it has far reaching implications because if the world ends up using chinese a.i. tools and then those tools end up funneling certain information and censoring others, then you have a global narrative, an

entire generation that would then be operating with a certain reality. but that is the situation that we could be heading towards because consumers in other countries are going to be focused on what can do the job, the lowest cost. and again, because china has made this open source, it's going to be vastly appealing to international consumers politically. >> as you know, a.i. investment was one of president trump's earliest moves in his new term. is this a kind of, you know, egg in the face moment for the administration? >> it really could be seen as that, laura, because they just announced $500 billion investment in compute infrastructure. and it begs the question, wait a minute. if china did this on a small fraction of the cost, is that a wise investment? does it make sense for microsoft to be throwing $80 billion down on this compute infrastructure? maybe the american way of training these models is unduly

costly and energy intensive and cumbersome, and we're investing in the wrong ways. that's a very, very real, uh, reckoning that we should be facing, because what's happened, in my view, is that the chinese firms have taken the american developments and then just kind of found a shortcut to build upon them. um, that will be very, very consumer friendly. so do you really want american firms spending tens, hundreds of billions of dollars just for the chinese to be able to layer in efficiency uh, essentially, like larry, uh, efficiency, um, addition on top of it. i mean, that that is what you could be looking at here. >> in a word, no. andrew yang, thank you so much. >> thanks, laura. >> still ahead, a story that gives new meaning to the saying, for the love of the game, the lady vols coach getting a

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>> closed captioning is brought to you by skechers men's beach casual footwear. >> you love this style of shoe. now they come in hands free. sketcher slip ins just slip in and go with no bending down and no touching them. try hands free sketcher slip ins in case you missed it, one week, just one week after giving birth while she was sick with the flu. >> mind you, the head coach of university of tennessee women's basketball team, she was back on the court tonight. seriously? tonight, coach kim caldwell was back on the sideline tonight to coach her team against the defending champions. number two south carolina. and the crowd. well they showed up to giving her a booming standing ovation as she walked in. >> what did that mean to you? with the way the fans received you after coming back? >> yeah, i definitely wasn't expecting it. i tried to sneak in. that's why i sneak in the back. um, i always try to go unnoticed, but it made it worth

it. it made coming back worth it. >> she did not go unnoticed at all, and while tennessee ended up falling short to south carolina, caldwell spoke to reporters afterwards about why it was so important for her to return so soon. >> coach dawn staley said women had the strength of ten men and yeah. >> i love this team. i asked a lot from them, so i'm going to give them everything i have. >> wow. well, we wish coach caldwell and her baby boy all the very best. thank you all for watching. anderson cooper 360 is next. >> tonight on 360. >> breaking news a purge at the justice department officials who prosecuted president trump are out. new