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--:-- Steve Inskeep: Welcome to Up First. I'm Steve Inskeep, and this is A Martinez.
--:-- A Martinez: Good morning.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We've got a lot to get to today. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has struck a plea deal with the U.S. government.
--:-- A Martinez: That's right. He's agreed to plead guilty to one charge, conspiracy to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And he's likely to enter that plea in a U.S. federal court in the northern Mariana Islands later this week. Carrie Johnson, NPR's justice correspondent, has been covering this case for years. Carrie, good morning.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: Good morning, Steve.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So, what's the deal?
--:-- Carrie Johnson: Assange has agreed to plead guilty to one charge, conspiracy to obtain and disclose information related to the national defense. And he's likely to enter that plea in the case in a U.S. federal court in the northern Mariana Islands later this week.
--:-- A Martinez: This is a case that outraged a lot of Americans, particularly Americans in the government, Americans who were named in many of the documents that he published.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: That's right. The indictment from Virginia accused Julian Assange of working with military private Chelsea Manning to get records related to the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And Assange also published hundreds of thousands of sensitive cables from the State Department.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: That's right. Prosecutors and intelligence analysts said Assange failed to black out the names of American informants, and they said that put American lives and foreign lives at risk.
--:-- A Martinez: Okay, and if that's the case, why would the United States finally make a deal?
--:-- Carrie Johnson: Well, Australian leaders had really been lobbying the White House for years. They pointed out that then Obama shortened the prison sentence for Chelsea Manning, and the Assange case just kept dragging on for years.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Julian Assange is a native Australian. He's expected to go back there after his court proceeding ends.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: That's right. And President Biden actually got a question about this back in April at a news conference. Biden said at the time he was considering the request from Australia to send Assange home.
--:-- A Martinez: And of course, the United States wants to be very close allies with Australia, so they had a little bit of leverage here.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: That's right. But what are some of the reactions? WikiLeaks put out a statement on social media saying it had published groundbreaking stories of corruption and human rights abuses for which Julian Assange paid a high price.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: He's soon expected to reunite with his wife and children.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: It's worth noting that while he has few fans in the Justice Department or the State Department here, human rights groups and media groups have been vocal supporters of his.
--:-- A Martinez: They've been arguing these charges against Assange could have broad implications, and it could allow a future Justice Department to charge journalists with crimes for publishing national security secrets.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: The Obama DOJ never filed charges against Julian Assange. It was the Trump Justice Department that finally took that step.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm just reminded of the debates over this man's case and the question of whether he was a journalist who was just publishing stuff he was given or whether he should be treated more like a spy.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: Yeah, and that debate may end soon with this plea, but it may not be the end of this kind of bizarre saga that started with a run-in with Swedish authorities and led him to holing up in an embassy in London for seven years.
--:-- A Martinez: Carrie, thanks for the insights. Really appreciate it.
--:-- Carrie Johnson: My pleasure.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: A Florida judge hears arguments today in one of the criminal cases against former President Trump.
--:-- A Martinez: Yeah, this is the case of classified documents the FBI recovered from Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The case is before Aline Cannon, a judge Trump appointed, and she's been hearing defense motions challenging the case.
--:-- A Martinez: Trump's lawyers want to make a case today that the search was illegal.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Josh Gerstein is covering this. He is senior legal affairs reporter for Politico. Josh, welcome back.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: Hey, Steve, good to be with you.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So, I'm just thinking about this. A special counsel was appointed in this case to be a little more independent and avoid any appearance that Trump was being prosecuted by a political opponent, arguably to his benefit.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So, why would that be illegal?
--:-- Josh Gerstein: Under the Constitution, the most senior officials in the government are supposed to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And Trump's lawyers are claiming that special counsel Jack Smith is wielding so much power and that he's really not under the supervision of the Justice Department and therefore that he, too, should be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate and that therefore he's acting illegally.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right. And of course, this argument is in some tension with things Trump himself has been saying publicly, where he claims that Garland is directing Smith to carry out a political vendetta and that he's acting specifically to advance the agenda of President Joe Biden.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: So, you said that the argument was that this should go before the Senate like a regular nomination for a cabinet post.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right. There should be a confirmation hearing of some kind.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You heard two days of legal arguments about that.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What's the pushback?
--:-- Josh Gerstein: The pushback is that this is a mechanism that the Justice Department set up in the wake of the expiration of the independent counsel law that some of the older listeners might remember was in effect in the 80s and 90s.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, so just so I understand this case, Jack Smith, this is being done under Justice Department proceedings.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right. It's being done under 25-year-old regulations that were put in place at the end of the Clinton administration that allow attorneys general to appoint special counsels when they think it's a case that may present some kind of conflict of interest for the department.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, and we will continue listening today as there are arguments over the legality of the search of Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago.
--:-- Josh Gerstein: That's right.
--:-- A Martinez: The upper Midwest is facing catastrophic flooding after days of heavy rain.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Parts of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa are hardest hit.
--:-- A Martinez: And for some neighborhoods in the region, this is the second major flood in just five years.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Rebecca Hersher of NPR's Climate Desk is here with more. Rebecca, good morning.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Good morning.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Okay, so if we just look at a map, this is an area with a lot of rivers that feed into the Mississippi River.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: That's right.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: What caused them to rise so much?
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Honestly, it's just bonkers amounts of rain last week and into the weekend.
--:-- A Martinez: Seven inches of rain fell in just two days in parts of South Dakota. That is the most rain ever recorded in 130 years there.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: And that caused these rivers to swell.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: You know, a disaster like this can unfold kind of slowly because it takes time for all the stormwater to collect and flow downstream.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: So over the last few days, as the water has crested, we've seen the real damage.
--:-- A Martinez: So homes destroyed, bridges and dams broken, levees overtopped.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: And unfortunately, all of this is exactly what scientists expect will happen more and more in this part of the country as the earth heats up.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: OK, so what is the connection between climate change and this type of flooding?
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Some people will have questions because there have always been floods. There have always been floods.
--:-- A Martinez: Heavy rain, though, is getting more common in the upper Midwest.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: So in the last 60 years or so, scientists have noticed that when it rains really hard, more water is falling than in the past.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Like 25 to 45 percent more water.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Not a little bit more rain, a lot more rain.
--:-- A Martinez: And the other thing that scientists have been warning about for decades is that heavier rain means more frequent major floods.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: So floods that used to happen every few decades instead are going to happen every few years.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And we're definitely seeing that on display as well.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: You know, this part of the country also had a record-breaking flood in 2019.
--:-- A Martinez: And again, now just, you know, five years later.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Although this is also a part of the country that has tried to adapt to floods.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: If you go to rivers in this area, there's often like parkland, open space near the river.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: There are levees. There are flood zones.
--:-- A Martinez: Is this not enough?
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: You know, it's not enough. Some of that infrastructure was able to keep up with all this water. But in many places, the existing levees in particular are just not high enough to handle record-breaking rain.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And I spoke to hydrologist Nicholas Pinter about this.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: He says levees are built to protect against the floods of the past, you know, but today's climate is not the climate of the past.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The current flooding in the upper Midwest is a reminder that we put a lot of eggs in the basket of protection by levees.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: And it's a brittle protection. So your levy holds until suddenly it doesn't.
--:-- A Martinez: And the result is often catastrophic and sudden flooding.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: And that's what we're seeing right now.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Now, modernizing flood protection in places like the upper Midwest will take a lot of money.
--:-- A Martinez: And some of that money is actually starting to be doled out.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: There are billions of dollars for this kind of work in the bipartisan infrastructure law that Congress passed just a couple of years ago.
--:-- Rebecca Hersher: Rebecca, thanks for the update. Thanks so much.
--:-- A Martinez: That's Rebecca Hersher from NPR's Climate Desk.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: All right. Before we go, we have some hockey news.
--:-- A Martinez: Yeah, that's right. The Florida Panthers became Stanley Cup champs last night for the first time in their history.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: In a nail-biting Game 7 thriller, Florida won 2-1 over the Edmonton Oilers, giving them a 4-3 victory in those finals.
--:-- A Martinez: Florida coach Paul Maurice has spent 26 years coaching in this league, and he referred to his dad as he spoke about the victory with Canadian TV Network Sportsnet.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Hey, dad, your name's going up with your heroes.
--:-- A Martinez: Bellable Richard Howell Lindsey Maurice.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: The team got a star performance from goaltender Sergei Brobovsky.
--:-- A Martinez: He repelled 23 out of 24 Euler shots, including one that nearly tied the game in the final stages.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Now, despite his team's loss, Edmonton's Connor McDavid scored the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the entire Stanley Cup playoffs.
--:-- A Martinez: And that's Up First for this Tuesday.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: I'm Steve Inskeep.
--:-- A Martinez: And I'm A Martinez.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: How about listening to Consider This from NPR?
--:-- A Martinez: Now, we hear it up first, give you the three big stories of the day.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Our Consider This colleagues take a different approach. They dive into a single news story and then tell you what it means to you in about 15 minutes.
--:-- A Martinez: So listen now on the NPR app or wherever you get those podcasts.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: Today's Up First was edited by Krishnadev Kalamer, Ali Schweitzer, Neela Banerjee, Olivia Hampton, and Lisa Thompson.
--:-- A Martinez: It was produced by Ziad Butch and Chris Thomas, along with Nina Kravinsky.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: We get engineering support from Carly Strange, and our technical director is Zach Coleman.
--:-- A Martinez: Join us tomorrow.
--:-- Steve Inskeep: [Theme music starts playing]
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