Meet the Press NOW — December 30

Welcome to Meet the Press Now. I'm Garrett Hakin in Washington. As the clock is ticking down to the start of a new year, which this year also marks a critical deadline for millions of Americans as Affordable Care Act subsidies expire when the ball drops at midnight tonight. Remember, Congress left town this month after failing to come up with a plan to address the expiring ACA tax credits.

And that means as many as 22 million Americans will now see their health insurance premiums skyrocket by an average of 114 percent, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Now, those Americans, including many dealing with preexisting conditions or terminal illnesses, must decide whether to pay those higher premiums, if they can, or go without health insurance. We've been dealing with cancer for 10 years now, over 10 years now. I have to see physicians monthly.

I go for infusions at the cancer center. The cost would be exorbitant without insurance and next to impossible for most of us. It was a pretty aggressive cancer. Yeah.

And so I think it's just highly likely that, you know, my outcome wouldn't have been good had I not had access to that care. You know, it would have been really difficult. You know, I would have seriously been contemplating my own mortality. For one party to have the current plan, which everybody admits is not great, and the other party saying, well, you know, it's terrible, but not offering a solution.

You know, sitting on the sidelines, you're kind of like, well, what the hell? Let's figure this out, guys. This is important to everybody. Despite promising to unveil a new health care plan, President Trump has remained vague about any solution to address the rising premiums.

Americans are now bracing for their premiums to skyrocket. Are you going to let this happen or will you raise your hand? It will skyrocket because it was never any good. I want that money to go to the people directly and let the people buy their own health care and they'll get much better health care than they get with the Affordable Care Act.

Both Senate Majority Leader Soon and House Speaker Mike Johnson have signaled Congress will take up the health care issue with lawmakers returning in January. But there's no consensus on what that plan would look like. There will be a vote in the House, at least to extend those Obamacare tax credits for three years after four Republican moderates took the extraordinary step of joining forces with House Democrats and maneuvered a bypass House Speaker Mike Johnson entirely and force a floor vote sometime after the new year. Before leaving for the holiday recess, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed their frustration on the lack of a health care deal and raised concerns about political ramifications.

Once January 1st occurs, as I've said over and over again, the toothpaste is out of the tube. January 1st, it expires. Once that happens, millions will be without health care. There'll be no ACA credits.

People have already received their notices in terms of how much they're going to be billed from their insurance companies. And so is it too late? It's too late to avoid the shock factor. Everybody has a responsibility to serve their district, to serve their constituents.

You know, it's funny. Three quarters of people on Obamacare are in states Donald Trump won. So maybe, just maybe, everybody should look at this and say, how do we actually fix the health care system? Joining us is NBC News Capitol correspondent Melanie Zanona and NBC News senior business correspondent Christine Romans.

So, Mel, I'll start with you. When do we expect to see that vote in the House on the tax credits? And is there any indication that Congress will act with urgency to tackle this issue now that, as Leader Schumer put it, the toothpaste is out of the tube? Well, we could see a vote in the House actually as soon as next week.

And that is because the discharge petition, that's the tool that they use to force this vote, requires that the Speaker schedule a vote in the House within seven legislative days. And two of those days have already passed. So certainly this is going to be at the top of their agenda when they return to Washington next week. And we are expecting this measure to pass again.

It is a three year clean extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. But the Senate already rejected almost an identical proposal earlier this month. So the real question is whether they can come together and find a solution that both parties and both chambers can agree on. And that is an extremely tall task.

And so I do think there is some hope right now that as more Americans start to actually experience these impacts of these health care premiums going up, that will keep the pressure on Congress to act. But there's still a long way to go here. So if door number one is that clean three year extension, what's door number two? Is there a potential for a compromise proposal to even know what that would look like in an outline?

Well, it would have to be a compromise in order to actually get on President Trump's desk. And so theoretically, what that will look like is for Republicans, they're going to have to agree to an extension in the first place of these subsidies, something they've been adamantly against. And for Democrats, that means probably agreeing to a shorter extension than what they would prefer. Obviously, they're pushing for three years.

It's probably not to be shorter than that, as well as some additional reforms. But there are a couple ideas floating around, some bipartisan proposals. There's also been a group of senators who've been keeping in touch over the break. So I think that's a good sign.

There is clearly some goodwill here. But like I said, there's a reason why they haven't been able to come together so far on this deal. Right. I mean, this stuff is hard.

Congress, of course, faces another government funding deadline in January. What do you think the likelihood is that we see the health care issue wrapped up in the funding fight again? Debbie Dingell on with us yesterday said she does not want to see another shutdown over this issue. Yeah, I think that's probably the sentiment among most Democrats right now.

There seems to be very little appetite among Democrats to force another government shutdown. And in fact, some of the key players in the last fight have distinctly said that they now view these two issues of government funding and health care as on very separate tracks, which is different than what we saw in October when they forced that first shutdown. That being said, though, Garrett, this is one of the only leverage points left for Democrats. And so if they feel like Republicans aren't negotiating in good faith or they aren't getting anywhere and this becomes an extremely dire situation, we could absolutely see those two issues linked back up again.

Is there any sentiment among Democrats that it's time to just hang this issue around the necks of Republicans and punt it as a political issue to the midterm? Yeah, we're certainly already seeing signs of that. I mean, Chuck Schumer has said this is going to be the albatross around the necks of Republicans in the midterms. And so if they fail to act, no doubt this is going to be a huge centerpiece in the midterm elections.

That's why you've seen so many Republicans in those swing districts breaking ranks, signing on to these discharge petitions and urging their own Republican Party leadership to do something to not let these subsidies expire. All right, Melanie Zanona watching Congress for us while they're away. Thank you, Christine. I'll bring you in now.

Take us through these numbers. We said at the outset of the average that some of these premiums could go up is one hundred and fourteen percent. And that's an extraordinary number. And look, this is a political fight that gets personal at the stroke of midnight.

And you're talking about 22 million Americans whose premiums will rise. And you're talking about eight hundred and eighty eight dollar premiums will now be maybe 19 more than nineteen hundred. That's the that's the average. That's a significant, a significant jump.

Some premiums could rise by one hundred and fourteen percent. And who are we talking about? We're talking about small business owners, their employees, middle income consumers, early retirees who maybe people who are in their early 60s or late 50s and they don't qualify yet for Medicare, small business owners and sole proprietors who go on the Obamacare exchanges for their families and now are facing some some considerable, considerable higher prices. And obviously there could be millions of these people of those 22 million who just say this is too expensive for me entirely.

I'm out. What does that do to this sort of fragile marketplace that people simply decide they're not going to pay those premiums? They've already gone through the open enrollment process, so they've seen this sticker shock. Right.

And many people have been holding out for some sort of a congressional rescue that hasn't happened here. You could see people who just leave the system entirely and are now uninsured, which is not good for anyone. Remember the point of Obamacare, the point of the Affordable Care Act was to give these subsidies so everyone had incentive to get into the insurance market because when everyone's in it, it works better and more efficiently. A reminder, these were temporary subsidies meant to be temporary during COVID.

They were extended and now they're expiring. You will hear some Republicans who say, look, this was this was extra money. It was never meant to be part of the part of the calculus for American families. And this just reveals the weaknesses of Obamacare.

But for millions and millions of people who rely on it to, you know, for health care, health care for the family becomes real, becomes really real in just a few hours. Right. A whole system built on top of temporary fixes is not a great system, clearly. But when it's sort of baked into the cost, people depend on you.

You end up in these complicated situations. Christine Romans, I know you'll be all over this for us. Thank you for your reporting. And joining me now is our panel for Jessica Chambers, White House correspondent at USA We said during the shutdown he was ready to invite Democrats to the White House.

He was ready to have this conversation. That has not happened. Do we expect to see the president step more directly into this fray going forward or are we just going to see more true social posts? We'll be mostly seeing him defer to Senate Republicans and say, well, look, Bill Cassidy essentially put forward this bill that essentially does what I wanted to do.

Notably, Cassidy, even after the vote had failed before, said that he still thought that there could be some sort of a deal between Democrats and Republicans on this. And so whether or not something like that emerges at the top of the year in the Senate, tough to say. Do you expect to see the president get more involved here, T.W.? I mean, there's been so much discussion.

You heard from Marjorie Taylor Greene recently, this idea that it is Donald Trump's House of Representatives, to a lesser degree, the Senate. But does he need to come in stronger with more than just through social posts and say, this is what I want? His hands are going to be forced on that. I think, Megan, you are right.

People aren't going to care about what got them to this point when their prices go up. That's going to be the sticker shock when it comes out of their pocket. That's going to be tough thing. But those polling numbers will eventually come back and it will trickle into the White House and he will start to see that he's losing ground because of the health care issue.

The health care issue will bog down the administration. We need a pathway forward. There are areas that we can work in a bipartisan way, different provisions that have popularity on both sides of the aisle. We need to find those and come together and move the ball forward.

I don't know if the Democrats are going to want to, though. Megan, I want to ask you about our other, we had an actual honest to goodness political story happening today. We're going to have a new mayor in New York City tonight, Zora Madani, who's become, in some corners, the face of the Democratic Party. How much pressure is he under to make good on some of those big campaign promises that we saw?

He is the new face of the party, at least in this moment. I don't think he's under pressure. I think he's under pressure to actually govern. I'm not sure he can deliver on some of the promises that he made because, as Donald Trump knows, governing is much harder than campaigning.

So I just, I mean, and the Republicans try to make him the boogeyman and Donald Trump took that completely away when he welcomed him to the Oval. So I just, I think that kind of took a lot of the air out of the balloon for the Republican Party with his needing to deliver. I think that he needs to deliver on picking up trash, getting the snow removed and doing some real basic things that are needed in a city before he starts to tackle some of his bigger plans. Yeah, when you talk to mayors, they say if your trash pickup doesn't come, nobody cares what party you're in.

T.W., what do you make of the degree to which the president kind of nerfed the criticism of Madani by embracing him so much in the Oval Office? How long do you think that lasts? I think he was being a gracious host. Look, it will last so far until Madani takes a swing at him or tries to step in the way of what Trump wants to do.

So it's a wait and see sort of deal. The bigger thing, I think, is the leftward lurch of the party, the Democratic Party. I think you're going to see a Tea Party-esque style 2026, just like you did in 2010. And I think that's going to hurt Democrats.

Francesca, do you think Madani is going to be a campaign? The first couple months of his mayorality will be a roadmap for Democrats or a cautionary tale. I mean, if you're out there running for one of these contested seats, are you looking at New York City's mayor and saying, there's things here I should copy and things I should ignore? But also his relationship with the president.

I mean, he came in there and he did what we see many world leaders do as well, which is, to your point, be very polite, but also to flattery to a certain extent, right? And we've seen that work very well with the president of the United States. And so potentially, you know, this could continue. Maybe he'll come up with an award to give him.

Thank you all for coming in. Happy New Year to you guys. I appreciate you working today. And coming up, Democrats on Capitol Hill ramp up pressure on the White House, demanding more information on the strike the president Trump said targeted a dock inside Venezuela.

Plus, the Trump administration says it's cutting off all federal child care payments to the entire state of Minnesota after allegations of fraud at daycare facilities went viral. You're watching Meet the Press now. Welcome back. New fallout today and many unanswered questions about that U.S.

land strike on Venezuela. House Democrats are now requesting a briefing for all relevant committees from the Trump administration on the strike. The White House did not seek authority from Congress ahead of the strike and remains tight lipped about the target. But two members of Venezuela's indigenous community in northwestern Venezuela tell NBC News they saw some kind of explosion on December 18th that destroyed a hut possibly used for storage.

It's not clear if that's the same strike President Trump referred to as a major explosion in the dock area earlier this week. NBC News White House correspondent Monica Alba joins me now on set. And also with me is Will Freeman, fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. So, Monica, you have the unenviable task of answering this impossible question.

The White House has not shared almost anything about this. What more are we learning about what even was the goal here? The only person talking about this, Garrett, is President Trump. He's the one who revealed it in that radio interview.

And then when he was asked by reporters to share more information, he's the one who has given these tiny details. We haven't gotten any other kind of confirmation. We can't even say for certainty when it took place or exactly where, even though we do have those eyewitness accounts that point to that. We also don't know.

And what we need to find out is, is this the only strike that has occurred on land in Venezuela? Could there be others? Could this have been a covert operation so that it doesn't appear it was done by the U.S. military, at least in the same way that the Trump administration has been putting out videos when they do hit those alleged drug boats?

So that's another major, major question. And simply the White House right now is not wanting to give any of those other details, just saying that they still plan to continue this overall operation. And we know from the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, she has said that the plan here is to continue to hit these boats or to continue with these operations until, quote, the leader there, Nicolas Maduro cries uncle. So the strategy seems to be clear.

We're hearing about that from the president of the administration. But the way they're carrying this out is still a little bit unclear. And certainly that's why lawmakers are raising these questions about what happened with this strike and maybe it'll happen again. And interestingly, we've not heard anything from Maduro on this either.

Is the forcing mechanism here then getting called before Congress? Do we know if the White House is going to provide anybody to brief? That's the question. We know that certainly House Democrats are calling for that.

The White House has not said today when we asked them whether they do plan to do that. In the past, when they have been asked about this, they have pointed to a series of briefings that they have done for the relevant committees. And so I think they would likely say that that has been a regular occurrence and one that they will say will likely continue. But since it seems to have moved into a different phase with this land operation of the drug facility that was on the shore, I think lawmakers are still going to be asking for one sooner rather than later.

We don't know when that will happen. The second time this week, we got new sanctions from the Treasury Department on organizations or companies linked to Venezuela. What can you tell us about this new round? Yeah, and I think this is something you have continued to see, which is just another tool in the toolkit when it comes to the pressure campaign.

So you have the military one, which has been very clearly laid out. And then you have the economic one. And certainly in the last couple of weeks, we've also seen those oil tankers become a bigger part of this, a bigger part of the strategy. So the sanctions are something that will continue, though they haven't seemed to at this point have any major effect.

Right. They haven't seemed to be something that has worked. So it's just continuing to add to it. But this is, I think, a lot about the messaging.

And remember that the president has said that there could be strikes on land that continue in Venezuela. But he also has rolled that out for other countries in the region as well. And that continues to be the risk here of a larger escalation. It's a similar situation like we have with Russia.

There's been so many sanctions in place for so long. You kind of wonder what else you're doing here at the edges. But, Monica Alba, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your reporting.

I'll turn to Will now. So, Will, Monica talked about some of the things in the president's toolkit here that he's used so far. How concerned are you that he might up the ante and kick out a bigger weapon from that toolkit? And we might see something like a full-blown war in Venezuela.

Well That's right. That is what this is. And so the House Judiciary has a couple options here. One of the things they can do if they want is to bring a referral to the Department of Justice if they believe Jack Smith actually did commit any criminal wrongdoing here.

Is there anything in the questioning that makes you think they believe that they have the evidence to get that? Nothing in the questioning and nothing in the answers either. There was nothing that seemed criminal in the 255 pages that we reviewed over the past several hours that said Jack Smith did anything wrong, that anybody that worked with Jack Smith did anything wrong. And to that point, he did mention some emails that were sent by one of his associates about January 6th.

He found out about it and dismissed that guy. So we do just talk about how nonpartisan his committee or his work was. So when I hear that, I combine that with the fact that we're talking about this on New Year's Eve. Does that suggest anything to you about the state of this investigation or at least the way that the House Republicans are viewing the state of this investigation?

As a former Capitol Correspondent here, you know that Jim Jordan knows how to make news when he wants to. And by submitting something like this and making it public with video and with transcripts on December 31st, when it's you and I and a couple other people in this newsroom, he knows this is not going to get the attention that perhaps if it was a doozy, he would want it to. I think that's a prudent analysis. Gary Grumbach, thank you for looking into all this for us.

And turning now to the Justice Department's ongoing release of Epstein related files, which is now set to stretch into the new year. We're learning today that the number of documents involved is far greater than previously known. A source familiar with the Department of Justice's operation here told NBC News that the DOJ is now reviewing roughly 5.2 million documents. Two sources say the DOJ is looking to enlist about 400 employees to conduct that document review, which will begin in earnest on Monday and run through January 20th.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche posting today, quote, It is truly an all hands on deck approach. We're asking as many lawyers as possible to commit their time to review the documents that remain. NBC News legal analyst Danny Savalas joins me now with more. Danny, I cannot imagine this is how many attorneys at the Department of Justice wanted to spend their time.

I'm just struck by this idea of how it's even possible that the government simply didn't know it had all of these documents until this week. On the one hand, you're absolutely right. I mean, the government should at minimum, even if they didn't comply with the statute that required them to release by a certain date and as opposed to a rolling release and will release them when we're ready. But on the other hand, this is and I'm thinking about this from the perspective of a criminal defense attorney handling a federal criminal case.

One set of files nowadays, the modern criminal case can be terabytes of documents. This presumably is everything DOJ has ever gotten its hands on related to Epstein, which spans several different cases. And don't forget things like emails that are not normally part of criminal discovery, but internal DOJ emails that itself could be terabytes of data. So while I'm not surprised the number keeps rising, I am somewhat surprised that DOJ didn't at least have an idea of what the universe was, a rough estimate of its size from the outset.

Especially when you consider how confident the attorney general was talking about the file early on in the administration and so all of this had been reviewed. So given that, Danny, and what I have to think is a lot of probably duplication in all of this, how arduous of a task will this review be over the next couple of weeks? I can't even imagine it. I mean, 400 employees doesn't seem like enough.

In my experience with document review and document production, both on the civil side and the large corporate scale side and the criminal defense side, almost anything makes its way into the modern file. And that's for one discrete criminal cases. We're talking about investigations going back to the mid 2000s and beyond just the investigations and the files and arguably anything DOJ ever got its hands on. It could be a post-it.

It could be a takeout menu that found its way into the workroom. And when it comes to emails, every email begets more emails. Reply all. I mean, you can imagine this in any of your normal regular lives.

One email can be get the next email, several more emails. And before you know it, you have reams of pages of documents. And to some degree, maybe DOJ didn't appreciate in terms of what it had in data, how that would translate to pages because the modern case exists mostly on the computer and not in printed out pages. But again, it's the kind of thing that at minimum, if they weren't going to comply with the deadline, DOJ probably should have at least known what they actually had, even if they couldn't turn it over right away.

The other thing that confuses me or intrigues me about all this is the idea that the DOJ stated so definitively over the summer that they were not releasing these files because they were convinced that there was nothing else to even investigate, let alone charge as relates to Jeffrey Epstein. Now they're finding these millions of more pages. Do you think that claim likely still stands? What do you think the relative odds are?

I understand this is almost an impossible question that there's more meaningful information in the millions of documents that suddenly they have access to that might suggest more criminality or at least more worthy of investigations than the DOJ thought they had on their hands six months ago. Yeah, I think the Epstein files release has tested a lot of traditional ideas about production of documents and transparency. And one of those, one of the lessons we learned from the Epstein files is that what is relevant and what is germane and interesting and might lead to an investigation is entirely in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder is usually at DOJ.

And if the beholder has some loyalty to the head of the DOJ or to the president, then maybe their view is a little more subjective than other people's view might be. Another thing I think we may the takeaway may be that there might be a good reason why a lot of documents are simply not released during a criminal investigation, because if nothing else, this has been a chaotic experience as we sit through now, what looks like millions upon millions of documents. That's the understatement of the day. Danny Savalas, thank you for coming on.

And up next, counting down to 2026, we'll get the view from Times Square where preparations are underway as revelers prepare to ring in the new year in New York City and across the nation. Keep it here on Meet the Press Now. Welcome back. President Trump took to social media today to further amplify allegations of widespread fraud in Minnesota, blaming the Somali community and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for the alleged fraud without any evidence.

It comes after a conservative video from conservative YouTuber named Nick Shirley went viral in it. Shirley claims he visited 10 daycare centers in Minnesota that were receiving state and federal funds and that he didn't see any children at the sites. State officials say many of those centers were previously investigated and no fraud was uncovered. And now the Department of Health and Human Services says it's freezing all federal child care payments in the state of Minnesota and implementing new requirements for child care programs nationwide.

And the senior Homeland Security correspondent, Julia Ainsley, is with me now. She's been covering this all week. This is all landing in Governor Tim Walz's lap. What's his response today?

Well, he did put out a tweet today saying that this is essentially Trump's long game here. He says that we've spent years cracking down on fraudsters and it's a serious issue. But this has been the plan all along. He's politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.

Of course, this is Republican catnip to be able to go after a Democratic governor, one who was running as a running mate against Trump in the last election. And there has been widespread fraud in Minnesota for some time. The governor's asked the state legislature for more help in being able to crack down on fraud. He says he hasn't gotten it.

But at the heart of this is what's happening with these daycare centers and how they've been thoroughly investigated either by federal investigators or state investigators to a point where they can be comfortable either allowing them to continue to run as the state is or cutting off all funding like the federal government is. Seems everyone's jumping into their camps here before actually doing their research. It is wild to me to see this much federal interest on 10 daycare centers. I've not seen a dollar figure attached to this funding freeze.

How big of a deal is that potentially for Minnesota to have this money cut off? It is a big deal. I mean, it could get into the millions, if not over a billion dollars. And this would be really catastrophic for daycare centers that are serving underprivileged children.

That's exactly why they pull on this funding. There is still some state funding there for them through the C-CAP program, but definitely they use this federal funding. And nationwide it can have an impact as well because now they have a new requirement for people to be able to prove that they are a daycare center. That's in operation.

They're putting a new DOG component on it called Defend the Spend. But a lot of that's nebulous and exactly where they'll draw the line and what kind of evidence people have to provide and whether or not they'll have visits before that funding comes is a little up in the air. I think there are a lot of people concerned about this across the country tonight. Well, and they should probably start being concerned about California or in California.

The president posting there's more fraud in California than there is in Minnesota. If that's even possible. He complains about two I want to be remembered for having helped people to understand the true nature of animals, that they do matter as individuals, that they do have a part to play in the scheme of things, and they're not just objects, they're beings. These are civil rights issues, and there's one group of people in this country that is not regarded equal under the law.

There will be gay marriage in this country, without question, because we cannot look at our fellow citizens and say that they deserve less than we in the heterosexual community. One single thing about which I have learned more since I've been out of the White House is how we can, potentially at least, help to elevate the life and the hope of people who pray for peace, who pray for freedom, who pray for human rights, who pray for the alleviation of their own suffering. And we now pay very little attention to them. And we'll be back next year with more Meet the Press now.

And for all of us at the Meet the Press family, we wish you and yours a happy and healthy new year. Hey, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor and host of The Drink. This month, Demi Lovato is my guest. The global superstar tells me that she is the happiest she's ever been right now.

But getting there, it wasn't simple. Demi opens up about starting in Hollywood young and why she now thinks she may have started too soon. She talks about recovery, her new marriage, and the deeply personal reason behind her new cookbook. The Drink is always about the journey to the top, and this was an honest conversation about what that takes.

Hope you'll listen and follow The Drink wherever you get your podcasts.