Pod Save America - “A fine mist of bullshit.”

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Trump’s lawyer argues that collusion with a hostile government isn’t a crime after reports that Michael Cohen might implicate the president, and both parties fight to define the stakes of the 2018 midterms. Then Vox’s Dara Lind joins Jon and Jon to talk about the latest developments in the family separation crisis.

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. Tommy Vitor is on his honeymoon after a beautiful wedding up in wine country. And you know what? We were very concerned about the heat. It wasn't so bad. It wasn't really an issue. Yeah, it was a dry heat. A lot of shade. It was a dry heat.

It was a dry heat. Which was the small talk you made with all the wedding guests. Absolutely. When did you get here? How did you get here? How did you get here? How about this? The weather's pretty nice. They said it was going to be hot but it's not you know it's not that bad this is terrible i'm not even doing additive small talk later in today's pod we'll talk to vox's daryl lind who's one of the very best immigration reporters out there before that we're going to talk about how donald

trump and his legal team are moving the goal posts in the muller investigation that's the nice way to say it moving the goal posts we'll get into it but i love the term moving the goalposts in the Mueller investigation. That's the nice way to say it. Moving the goalposts. We will get into it, but I love the term moving the goalposts for this. So funny. It's burning down the stadium. We're also going to talk about the landscape heading into the fall's midterms.

But before we get to the news, how was Love It or Leave It this week? We had an awesome Love It or Leave It. It's been just week after week of some of my favorite shows. Premium content. We had Naomi Ekperigen, Guy Branham, Planned Parenthood's

Don Legans, and Matt Ingebrigtsen from the show Corporate came and did a dramatic reading of Jonathan Karl's review of Sean Spicer's book, and it was a true delight. We had a blast.

Guy and I brainstormed on some ideas for the Frasier reboot, plus we talked about the news. It was a great episode. Fantastic. I'm guessing you were for the Frasier reboot. Of course I'm for it. Well, Guy was originally against it, saying, why do we need more Frasier? And the answer is, why don't we? Of course. In other CricketPod news, even though he's on his honeymoon, Tommy has a great new pod, Save the World, that will be going out on Wednesday.

even though he's on his honeymoon. Tommy has a great new pod Save the World that will be going out on Wednesday. He talked to Bassem Youssef, a doctor and comedian who was called the John Stewart of Egypt during the Arab Spring and then became an enemy of the government. Also, Chapter 6 of The Wilderness dropped on Monday. This episode is called The Big We. It follows up on last week's episode on race known as the backlash. This is all about how Democrats can build a multiracial coalition that adds up to an electoral majority. We explore the question about the non-college educated white voters, the Obama Trump voters. Can we win them back? Do we need to win them back? Do we need to win them back? You have to tune in to find out. You have to tune in to find out. I can't tell to find out I can't tell you here just take a listen

no spoilers many people are saying it's a great episode yeah you know what could have been a name for that episode what's that Mission Impossible Fallout

because you know it's about you know what I mean the fallout of the election the impossible mission of these people you know what I mean I'll take your suggestion

and I don't know what I'll do with that let's start the podcast alright let's talk about the news our country is being run by some of the dumbest criminals in the world and their cover-up is not going well on friday cnn reported that michael cohen is willing to testify that donald trump knew in advance about a june 2016 meeting in trump tower that his son don jr and son-in-law jared kushner attended with the hopes of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government.

No collusion indeed. If true, this would contradict repeated assertions from Trump and his team that he didn't know anything about the infamous Trump Tower meeting until the New York Times asked him about it last summer. Carl Bernstein, the Watergate guy, remember that? He said that the 2016 meeting was, quote, convened for the purpose of collusion. And by the way, that didn't require

Woodward and Bernstein type reporting to figure that one out. Yeah. Oh, really? Pretty easy to figure that one out. You got a deep throat on that one, Carl. Love it. Is Cohen's account believable?

Yes. And how big of a deal is this? Is it a big deal? It's a big deal insofar as Michael Cohen was on the inside and was one of the people lying on behalf of Donald Trump about this meeting and so much else for a long time. Clearly, he is facing a lot of pressure and he has turned. Now, whether or not Michael Cohen is telling the truth about this particular meeting, whether or not Michael Cohen is telling the truth about this particular meeting, the fact that Michael Cohen is no longer going to lie for Donald Trump and is in fact more concerned about protecting himself is really important, not just because

for what it says about the Trump Tower meeting, but because of what it says about what Michael Cohen can tell not only the special prosecutors, but other prosecutors on separate investigations looking into the Trump organization about what went on behind the scenes. And that, to me, is a big deal. It's not just that he changed his tune on this one story. It's that if he's willing to be this disloyal, he has a lot to talk about. Yeah, I mean, our own Brian Boitler had a piece about this, I believe on Friday when the news came out, and made the point that there's really only three options here. One, Cohen is volunteering to perjure himself against the testimony of the several others he claims can corroborate his story. Two, Cohen is willing to accuse several others of perjuring themselves while he's under oath. Or three, the most likely scenario, some of the

others have already told prosecutors the truth and Mueller already knows. And one of the reasons that Cohen is saying this publicly, as opposed to keeping it quiet and just telling Mueller, is that he knows and Lanny Davis, his lawyer knows that this, that Mueller already knows that this meeting happened and that Trump knew about the meeting. Lenny Davis. This is a story with no heroes. No heroes. It is alien versus predator out there. Whoever wins, we lose.

And next question. Well, and aside from Cohen now saying this, we also know that Steve Bannon, remember him? One of the many things he told the writer Michael Wolff, speaking of no heroes, for his book was the chance that Don Jr. do not walk these Jumos, read Russian agents, up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero. Two months after that, another former Trump advisor, Sam Nunberg, told CNN he believes that when Trump says that he didn't know about the meeting, he's lying. And we also know... Nunberg of the above, you know. We also know that Trump Jr. received calls from a blocked number before and after the meeting, and the House Republicans, for some reason, didn't want to subpoena the records to find out

who that blocked number was. Yeah. We know who it was. We know know it was his father we know that donald trump's uh phone uh in trump tower calls with a block number um listen just we're out there in the world we've all gotten calls from block number sometimes you answer it usually you don't because you think there's nothing good has ever come from a number. I may be unprepared for this call. If you answered a blocked number once and then went into a meeting and then came out and got a call from a blocked number and answered it again, it means you know who it is and you weren't disappointed when you answered it the first time.

Especially when the meeting was about getting dirt from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton. Look, yes. And the reason we know Don Jr. answered the block number call is because he knew it was his dad. And every single time that phone rings, there is a chance it ends with an I love you. And one day it will. Maybe it has. Maybe it has.

Maybe it hasn't. Or at the very least, some sort of compliment, something resembling a compliment. I'm proud of you, son. I'm glad I gave you my name. You didn't do worse than Eric today. So the CNN story comes out on Friday. And of course, Trump and Rudy Giuliani, who seemingly only plays a lawyer on television, make everything infinitely worse by opening their mouths.

The president responded by attacking Michael Cohen, Cohen's lawyer, Robert Mueller, the Clintons, the Democratic Party, the media. He was on a whole tear this weekend.

His Coke dealer. Then on Monday, Giuliani did a round of interviews where he actually said the following. I don't even know that it's a crime colluding with the Russians. Hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack. He didn't pay for the hacking.

But then it actually got better. Rudy went on Fox News to try to clean this up, realizing that he may not have said the most helpful thing in the morning on CNN. And we do have a clip of him calling into Fox News. Do you want to first start off with a statement? Because we certainly want to talk about what looked like a shift this morning. So take it away. Yeah, let's begin with that.

So when I said today that there was no collusion and therefore, and that collusion also is no crime. I've been saying that from the very beginning. So to jot down, it's a very, very familiar lawyer's argument that the alternative, my client didn't do it, and even if he did it, it's not a crime. And I have said that over and over again. Collusion is not a crime. The only crime here is hacking, and it's ridiculous to think that the president hacked. John, what does it say about the strength of Trump's case that his new argument is collusion isn't a crime it's fascinating john because so you know it's so hard rudy giuliani if you i've been watching

rudy giuliani a little bit more intently than i usually would like i've just been tuning in because i've been fascinated by it because i I started when the Cohen Report came out on... Because it's interesting to watch a man have a sort of a career breakdown on national television day after day. It honestly looks like he walked out of Studio 54 the last night it was in operation. It was sunny out.

He thought it was going to be dark out. And he got a call that said, you're the president's lawyer and you've got to be at CNN in five minutes. That's what it looks like i really i mean you expect it to just be like someone splashed cold water on his face he's not a criminal and if he were a criminal he's the best criminal anyway where am i so but but so so what's really... Lovett has allergies. I have allergies. So does Rudy.

So you watch him do this and it's really confusing. It's, it's, and it's, and you can't tell. It's like, are you being really unclear about a clear message you're trying to deliver? Or are you actually being very clear about trying to make everything seem complicated and hard to understand? Being very clear about trying to make everything seem complicated and hard to understand. Right, because before he was a goober on television for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani was a prosecutor for decades. A famously aggressive prosecutor. Right. A prosecutor who, as a U.S. attorney, tried his own cases. Who one expects would be, have a passing familiarity with the U.S. criminal code.

Yeah, it does seem like he has lost a step. But also, you know, it's interesting too, because he's going on television saying Michael Cohen is a liar and Donald Trump is credible, which is amazing because his evidence of Michael Cohen being a liar is, look at how much lying he's done on behalf of my client for so many years, the credible one, right? It all just feels like he goes out there, he has one sentence he needs to deliver, which is moving the goalposts in one way or another, just attack Cohen, attack the

press, attack Mueller, and then slide in. Plus, where's the crime? I've checked the registry, can't find a crime on it. And he just slips that in and he moves on to the next cable press hit where he just bloviates until he's gotten that one line over the transom. Well, let's talk about this sort of sleight of hand here, because obviously, if you look through the criminal code, you will not find the word collusion as a crime. So what is the crime here? Do we need to be more specific about this? We were quoting this person the other day, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Ellie Honig in the

Daily Beast, wrote on Monday, a conspiracy is simply any agreement to break the law. It doesn't necessarily have to be secretive or successful. If Trump Jr., Kushner, Manafort expected and agreed among themselves or with the Russians to obtain campaign-related dirt from the Russians, and that dirt had a modicum of financial value, meaning it could affect the campaign in a good way, it could be a contribution to the campaign, then we have a criminal conspiracy to violate laws prohibiting foreign campaign contributions. If it involved hacking, which now we know that they were hacked stolen emails, then we have another federal conspiracy to accept stolen emails and stolen information.

If Donald Trump, if the president knew about the meeting in advance, he could be a co-conspirator in this crime. And Trump Jr., by the way, who testified to Congress that the president did not know about this meeting, will have committed perjury. And so would Jared Kushner, who said that he did not know when he stepped into the meeting that it was about colluding with – that it was about getting dirt from the Russians, even though now we know that there was a meeting beforehand planning. A pre-meeting, a pre-collusion meeting. Right. Yes. A pre-meeting, a pre-collusion meeting.

Right. Yes. So that's something that Josh Marshall was writing about at TPM, which I thought was interesting, that Rudy is letting slip the idea that there was this previous meeting getting everybody ready. A collusion collusion, if you will. A collusion collusion meeting. Yes. So basically what happened here is it appears that two days before the meeting, the famous meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians, Giuliani is now saying, is now admitting that there was a planning meeting to prepare for the meeting with the Russians that involved Don Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, the deputy campaign manager who is now a cooperating witness with Robert Mueller. And in that meeting, they were now planning to get ready for the meeting. And obviously that has all sorts of implications. Right. It tells us a lot. First

of all, it's also worth remembering how far we've come in a year of bullshit about this meeting. If you remember, this began as a meeting that wasn't a big deal, that wasn't on anybody's schedules, that nobody cared about, some rando showing up to talk about adoption. Now we know that it was a meeting with Russian agents about colluding to sabotage the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was important enough to the campaign that not only was Don Jr. briefing his father before and after, but also they were planning for this meeting two days before. That is a very big deal. It exposes them in a lot of lies. But it also goes to your point that what we are seeing is not just the happenstance of receiving the benefit of Russian

interference, but a coordinated effort with the Russians to win the election, which is why I think ultimately Rudy is changing his tune and why he goes on television and calls Michael Cohen a liar while in the next breath saying, and even if everything Michael Cohen says is true, what's the difference? Because what Rudy knows, because he's clearly talking to the special counsel on behalf of his client, he knows what's coming. He knows what else Robert Mueller has, or at least he has an idea of what else Robert Mueller has, because, you know, when the cameras are off, Rudy is still probably 90 percent of the prosecutor he once was, maybe 85 percent. No, I do think it's important to for everyone, you know, whether it's Democrats, reporters, people to start telling the truth about this, which is maybe we have been a little sloppy

with the word just collusion and this is by and this is trump's hope and this is the trump people's hope that we everything just falls under collusion but the fact now you see republicans saying like dana dana roerbacher you know russia's favorite congressman saying uh if anyone tells you they wouldn't accept dirt from a foreign government in a campaign that's crazy anyone in this town would have done that i've been doing it for a decade and a half. I also accepted a boat. It's like, I don't care if anyone would do that. It's a crime. It's a crime to do this.

And we have to start saying that it's a conspiracy to defraud the United States. And that is what Mueller has been, that is the spine of the case that he's been building. That is some of the charges that he's leveled against Paul Manafort, against various other people who he's indicted as well. And so this idea that, and this is why, this is also why Mueller has been building the case from the outside in.

First, he indicts the Russians for their social media campaign. Then he's indicted the Russian hackers for the theft of the emails, right? So he's trying to first lay out the fact that there were crimes committed against the United States. And then the second move is, which people within the United States were willing to aid and abet those crimes from happening. That is a conspirator. That is a crime.

Right. So there's two pieces to this. One is, it's morally reprehensible to collude with a foreign adversary to interfere with our election. Exactly. But we're not even talking about that. This isn in a situation

where Trump got Putin on the phone and said, hey, would you help me with some polling in Wisconsin? Would you help me brainstorm on some slogans I should use? The Russians came in and committed a bunch of fucking crimes.

Right. So it's not only did they collude, they colluded on doing a bunch of illegal shit. So it is both immoral and a crime. They have just embraced the fact that they're going to have to make a case that this wasn't immoral, right? They're trying to get away with saying that collusion is not a crime and so what? And the next – so it starts with no collusion.

Now we're at collusion is not a crime. And then the final step is would you rather feel like Clinton? We did this to save the country from that woman with the emails. The Watergate burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The Russians broke into the Democratic National Committee's email system, broke into Hillary Clinton's email system, stole a bunch of information, and used it to sabotage the election. And ironically, both those groups of people are now basically running the NRA. Right. I mean, it is the same idea, only this time it was a foreign government.

And the Trump campaign welcomed that help. They knew about the help. Oh, the other thing that we learned is the day that they had the collusion planning meeting, as you call it, the collusion collusion meeting. planning meeting as you call the collusion collusion meeting after that meeting was happened to be the same day that trump gives a speech on one of the primary night election speeches and says oh by the way i'm gonna give a big speech in a couple weeks about all this new dirt on hillary clinton he bragged about it he was so excited about the collusion that he bragged about a little fucking kid who couldn't wait to open up his presents, ran down the stairs early, opened them up. There it was, Hillary's emails.

I mean, so yeah, Rudy also told Axios he wants Mueller to, quote, put up or shut up. Why don't you write a report and show us what you have? Because they don't have a goddamn thing. I love that. You were just saying this, like, so do we think that Rudy Giuliani does know what Mueller has and he's trying to get ahead of it and make up all these new excuses? Like, there's all collusion, is it a crime thing?

Or do we think he genuinely doesn't think that Mueller has anything? Like, why say something like that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great question, John. So I think basically, you know, on like Windex, you can set it to a kind of tighter spray. Yeah. And then more of a fine mist. I always like the mist. I don't understand who's doing the tight spray.

Yeah. Rudy loves a fine mist of bullshit, right? He's spraying and it's sort of diffuse and wide. I think a lot of this is getting through the next day. There's nothing Rudy Giuliani can say today that will make That will make that report which we will get at some point Seem better, but what he can do today to get through today is make a case that Muller has nothing. It's all bullshit He's conflicted. He's corrupt the investigation started the dossier and just keep keep churning up the water and try to keep as much Turbidity in the water so that when this report eventually does

come, he's already laid the groundwork for people to just not accept it. How should Democrats handle and talk about this ongoing conspiracy between the Russian government and the Trump administration since Trump's own intelligence director says that Russia plans to attack us again. The Daily Beast reported last week that they've already tried to target Claire McCaskill's campaign. There was some reports today that they tried to target Jean Shaheen's campaign as well, and not just election interference now. They're also trying to target private electric companies and utilities. What do we, I mean, because there was all this, you know, so much of the argument or the debate has been like,

oh, Democrats shouldn't focus so much on Russia, we should focus on other issues. But that's when it was all in the past, right? Now we know there was an ongoing threat to the 2018 elections about Russia doing this again. And the Trump administration, at best, doesn't want to do anything about it. At worst, is actively helping them. How should Democrats talk about this? It's a hard question. I think you have to divide Russian interference into two baskets. One of them is the sometimes legal, sometimes illegal effort to sway the electorate itself,

whether by hacking emails and releasing them, putting fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook, and just trying to stir the pot, get people hating each other, get people confused to try to affect the outcome of elections. I think that's something we need to be vigilant about, point out, talk about, while recognizing that having been through this before, we learned some lessons about what to be vulnerable, what not to be vulnerable. Hopefully campaigns are being more careful about their information, more careful about even what they're putting down in email to begin with. But that actually worries me less than the more sinister threat, which is infrastructure.

Going after the electric grid, going after then more specifically our registries of voters, voting system. And that to me is something we do need to talk about because it's a threat to the foundation of our system and we're not taking it seriously enough. And you read these articles about, you read these reports on what is happening with these election systems, and you read that, oh, a lot of this has been privatized. You read that Republican secretaries of state don't take it seriously enough. And you have this strange feeling, which is, wait a second. This is really important. This is a big deal.

And what's sad is what makes me worried, what reminds me of what made us vulnerable to Trump and the Russians to begin with, is you have these twin senses. One, that this is the most important threat to our democracy right now. And two, the feeling that not only will we not do anything about it, but the sense that it's not possible to take these things seriously anymore, that things are too partisan and broken. to take these things seriously anymore, that things are too partisan and broken. And to me, ultimately, that's part of what makes this election so important, because we need to demonstrate that we can elect people that will care about this issue, that will, not just at the congressional level, but the Secretary of State level, the governor level, shore up these election systems because they believe it's important and they don't care. Because in these situations, it's not just about win or lose. It's about making sure that people trust the outcome of the elections.

I mean, I think the Democrats should make a very old argument that Republicans make against Democrats all the time, which is the Republican Party doesn't want to protect America right now. The Republican Party under Donald Trump is in bed with a hostile foreign power who now wants to not only attack our elections, but attack our electricity grid, attack us in all kinds of different fronts. And this party, because they would rather win an election, they would rather win an election than protect this country, protect the security of the United States of America, our infrastructure, our elections, our democracy. They would rather win than protect us. Democrats should start making the case, Yeah. You know? Um, so let's talk more about the midterms and Trump's political strategy, if you want to call it that, uh, heading into the fall. On Sunday, the president... I think we just talked about Trump's political strategy, honestly. On Sunday... Blackouts in cities. That is the strategy. That's it. Uh, on Sunday, the president

threatened to shut down the federal government if Democrats don't fund his border wall and make changes to federal immigration policy. republicans are already throwing cold water on the idea uh which would shut down the government just weeks before the midterm elections in october uh so yeah a number of republicans aren't too happy about this oklahoma's tom cole told the new york times quote i don't see how putting the attention on shutting down the government when you control the government is going to help you. That seems reasonable from Tom Cole. Hey, Tom. Hey, Tom.

What are you doing? All right. We got a plan here is to shut down the government and blame three Democrats in Ohio. I mean, Republicans in Congress are saying to reporters, don't listen to this. This is an empty threat. Trump's really not going to do it. We've got McConnell's like and Ryan are both like, we've got it under control. Yeah, yeah.

We got our spending bills. Like, do we think they'll be able to talk him out of this if he wants to do it you know i talk trump out of thing i don't know if anyone's ever successfully talk trump out of things you can distract them with a piece of chicken uh yeah i don't know the thing to remember too is, is, as always, Trump shoots the hostage, right? So when he says, give me my border funding or I'll shut down the government, let's also remember we've agreed to this before. We agreed to pay for the wall if Donald Trump would agree to protect DREAMers.

He even said that that was the deal he wanted. We came to him. We said, here we go. We're ready to do the deal. And of course, he walked away because the hardliners in his administration in Congress chased him off of it. The thing is, this isn't just about the border wall. This is about restrictions on legal immigration, which is always the piece of this that doesn't get enough coverage because he's made the wall of the centerpiece. But what Donald Trump really wants is he wants

billions for the border wall. He wants restrictions on legal immigration and he wants no compromise on behalf of DREAMers, separated families or any of it. And Democrats can't go along with that. And we're not in charge of the government, but we have a set of priorities. We've already said, you know, Schumer's gone back and forth, but we've already said, really, let's, you know, we can pretend we're negotiating, but we've already said you can have your wall if you protect the Dreamers. And, you know, he won't take a good deal when it's handed to him. So, yeah, maybe he will, maybe he won't. I don't know.

I mean, one thing I was wondering is, you know, today everyone was greeting this news by saying, well, look, Republicans control the White House. They control Congress. Obviously, if he goes through with this, it's the Republicans' fault and everyone knows this. They control Congress. Obviously, if he goes through with this, it's the Republicans' fault and everyone knows this. But what happens when a bunch of Republicans in Congress say, oh, shit, he's actually going to go through with shutting down the government over the wall? We're obviously not going to give him his cuts to legal immigration. But let's just give him his $25 billion for the wall because otherwise we're going to have a government shutdown right before the midterms.

That could hurt us. So let's just give him as much money as he wants. And then when Democrats in the Senate say, abso-fucking-lutely not, we were going to do this when maybe you would protect the Dreamers and now you just want the funding? No, we're going to stand against this. And now all the Republicans are saying, Democrats in the Senate are standing, they're blocking this funding bill that would keep the government open.

Open borders, open borders. I would say no one will be able to play out the consequences. They will be messy and hard to understand. The fact that Republicans control the White House and both branches of Congress is enough to make the fight worth having because we know what the right thing to do is. The right thing to do is do not give in on border funding unless you protect the dreamers. And I think we should hold the line on that again. Look,

this is something we have taken as our position at Crooked, right? We've made that argument that you cannot give him concessions without getting anything. The concession can't be keeping the government open. Everybody wants the government open. That's a lesson from the debt ceiling during the Obama years. That's a lesson from every shutdown we've had. If they want Democratic votes, Democrats need to get something. And if they don't, that will not help them with the people they need to come out and vote for them. So if they're going to be too, they are so afraid of their own shadows that they can't stand up for the simple idea that we will give you your border funding, but you have to give us the big thing we've been asking for that you said you were okay with, that you yourself said you were behind for two years now, then no. And it's clear the reason why, or one big reason why they don't want to give us that and why he wants the shutdown over the wall. And that reason is the

map in 2018. So there was a great New York Times piece by data guru Nate Cohn on Monday about how the fight for the House is going to be fought on terrain that's a bit different from the conventional wisdom. So it's not just well-educated suburban districts that voted for Hillary in 2016, like the Crooked Eight that, you know, we have here in California, but there's a lot of working class and rural districts that went for Trump. In fact, apparently the 60 most competitive House seats are whiter and more pro-Trump than the country as a whole. 49% of the electorate in those seats voted for Trump in 2016, and only 46% voted for Clinton. What does this say about the Trump

Republican strategy this fall? I don't know. What do you think? I mean, it's clear that the reason they, I mean, because we could laugh at them by saying, oh, you know, their base is too small to win this election. So how can they do that? But it's, and we know that they have this sort of institutional structural advantage because of gerrymandering and the way the map is. But it's also now that the seats that are up happen to be a little wider and more pro-Trump. So they're thinking, as long as we rev up the base, we can do this.

So the good news is the special elections we've had so far in 2018, in 2017, Democratic candidates have been running further ahead of Clinton in the Trump districts than in the Clinton-friendlier districts. So, for example, like in the Ossoff race, that was a seat that Clinton won that district, even though it was a Republican district for years and years and years. So just let's just make sure it's clear what that means. What that means is like, so across the map, we see this Democratic advantage. The Democratic advantage is oddly more concentrated in Trump districts than Clinton districts, which makes sense when you think about the fact that in a lot of ways, this election is like arbitrage between people's revulsion to Trump and their natural partisan

inclinations, right? That there are lots of soft Trump voters in these places that are clearly gettable, which to your point makes sense, which is why we would end up talking about immigration. Well, and that's, and we saw this at the end of the 2016 race, right, which is the Clinton campaign. They were really counting on the Romney-Clinton voter, or that was a big constituency. And they thought that a lot of these people who voted for Mitt Romney, who were Republicans, would say, we are so repulsed by Donald Trump that we will vote for Hillary Clinton. And it turns out that their partisan leanings, the fact that they were Republicans who get all their information from Fox News and the entire conservative media propaganda atmosphere, meant that at the very end, they decided that their hatred for Hillary Clinton was greater than how much they were repulsed by Donald Trump.

And they turned out to end up, you know, the Clinton-Romney voters were a very small portion of these swing voters. The larger group were these Obama-Trump voters who voted for Obama in 08 and 12 and ended up voting for Trump. And in those districts, in these districts that are heavier with Obama-Trump voters, that's when we're seeing these huge swings back towards the Democrats.

The Conor Lamb race is a big one. There were a lot of Democrats in that race who had voted for Donald Trump, but then just came home and came back to the Democratic Party and voted for Conor Lamb. And I do think that has implications. So on the Republican side, they're thinking to themselves, well, we will get them back by making this all about immigration and making this and sort of just fighting these culture wars, whether it's about the

National Anthem or whatever else. And I think the Democrats and Democrats like Conor Lamb, Democrats in a lot of these districts that we've seen be successful, they're thinking to themselves, we will make it about the economy. We will make it about populism, real populism. We will say that this is an administration that has only cared for the rich and is trying to take away your health care to give tax breaks for billionaires. And we're going to be different than that. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think that's right. And then now, but the key thing is,

okay, so we know that Donald Trump is going to want to make this election about immigration and he may shut down the government to do it. Now you can do one of two things to that. In response to that, you can say, well, then we better capitulate so that we can get back to the topic at hand. Or we can do the harder thing, which is actually the right thing,

which is fight him on immigration and fight for what we believe in while being disciplined enough and thoughtful enough to make sure that we're not allowing MS-13 and the nonsense Trump will be spewing for the next three months to drown out the larger message around jobs, health care, education, the economy, the corporate tax cut being for the rich and not for you, efforts to undermine Roe and pre-existing conditions and all the rest. And I think the good- And to call out the game. And to call out the game. This is what he's doing there. So I think it's really important to cut out the game, call out the game. And I think the good news is if you look at Virginia, you can look at Virginia as a place where this theory was tested to the max. Northam and everybody on that ballot ran in a situation where Republicans quickly realized that they had no choice but to run on MS-13. They called out the game, they fought on the issues they wanted to fight on, and voters came along. Yeah. And the only trickier thing

in 2018 is Virginia is a place that Hillary Clinton won by five points. These districts that we just mentioned, Trump won by three points in 2016. But Northam won by nine points. But Northam won by even more than Clinton. But that's why this is a competitive election. But I do think for Democrats, right before we started recording today, we saw this New York Times headline.

The Trump administration is now considering bypassing bypassing congress to cut capital gains taxes for the rich by another hundred billion dollars a hundred billion dollar tax cut for the super rich by executive order this is what they're doing now that is they're getting so close to just basically inviting people in a certain tax bracket to the treasury with bags. Just bring any bag. Everybody can bring one tote and just fill it with fucking money and go home. And here's the answer for Democrats to almost every question you're asked between now and Election Day. Oh, the Trump administration wants a unilateral tax cut for billionaires.

They want to just raid the treasury we got teachers with their hats out on planes to get money for school supplies and Trump is sending nukin out to hand out doubloons to everybody on Wall Street but what do you think about this national anthem controversy I think that the Trump administration is mulling a hundred billion dollar tax cut

for the ultra rich on their own what do you think about MS-13 taking over our towns? Yeah, I think $100 billion is going to fucking rich people. They're just stealing it from the treasury. Hey, Rudy said that Robert Mueller is a terrorist. What do you think of that? Un-fucking-believable.

Put it on a bumper sticker. It's ridiculous. We gotta tighten it for the bumper sticker. Yeah, we do have to. Tweet suggestions for the bumper sticker about the hundred billion dollar tax cut. They're just the lawless tax cut. The lawless tax cut. Think about all the shit that Barack Obama got for executive orders. Yeah.

Barack Obama. Maybe I wasn't on the level. Yeah. Barack Obama. Maybe I wasn't on the level. Barack Obama had the audacity to use his executive power to try to keep children who knew no other country but America here. And Donald Trump saw that power and he's like, I think I can write my friends some, I can get some cash out of this. his executive power to try to keep children who knew other no other country but america here and

donald trump saw that parent is like i think i can write my friends some i can get some cash out of this um but so yeah avanka stopped her her uh her clothing line we got to do something uh so democrats are you know the ones who've been successful in these special elections have been focusing on this economic message and economically populist message they've been focusing on the tax cuts they've been focusing on health care um one place where this is going to be tested is the Ohio 12th. We talked to Danny O'Connor, who's the Democrat running in Ohio's special election on August 7th on a pot last week. Trump won his district 53 to 42. It has a Cook Political Report score of R plus seven. But Dems have been over over performing swing districts like that one by

an average of eight points so this is right on the edge they just moved this to a toss-up it was lean republic people did not think democrats had a chance in here much like the connor lamb one um so you know this will be a very tight race so that is um tuesday august 7th uh that race that we're watching another close race on august 7th is the gubernatorial primary in Michigan between Gretchen Whitmer and Abdul Al-Said. We had Abdul on the pod when we went to Ann Arbor in Michigan, and we love him. We love him. I have to say, he's one of the more inspiring candidates that I've encountered over the last couple of years since Trump became president. He'd be the first Muslim governor of Michigan. He's very progressive. You know, he's for Medicare for all. His opponent wants to strengthen ACA and further expand Medicaid. But

Abdul has come out with this big, huge proposal of Medicare for all in Michigan, $15 minimum wage, these very big progressive ideas. So, you know, I'm pulling for him in that primary. It's a long shot, but we've seen a lot of long shots win. That's right. And speaking of that, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been there campaigning with him. So that's pretty exciting. And then, you know, after that, after next week, after those primaries and elections, we don't have many more before the big ones. No, no.

Just the one day on which America's future will be determined. Stay tuned. When we come back, we'll talk to Vox's Dara Lind. On the pod today, we have Dara Lind from Vox. Dara, I have to say, every time something happens regarding immigration, you are the very first reporter I turn to. You've done fantastic reporting on immigration. And unfortunately, you've had to do quite a bit of it in the Trump era.

Yes. The good news is that I know I'm never going to get shifted off the beat right right right um so there was a deadline last week for the federal government to reunite families separated at the border under the president's zero tolerance immigration policy um federal authorities say that they met the deadline and have reunited the last of the eligible quote-unquote eligible families What have you learned from your reporting about what's been done so far and the questions that still remain about the government's policy? So, you know, the government did do a lot more than it looked like a few weeks ago they were

going to be able to do. If you remember a few weeks ago when they had the initial deadline to reunite kids under five, it really looked like they were struggling to get anybody reunited at that point. And so, you know, we as reporters all went, gee, they're about to have to reunite a couple thousand more kids in two weeks. This really doesn't look plausible. And they did reunite a lot of children with their families, you know, something on the order of 1,500 or so. They then turned around and said that 700 kids were not eligible for reuniting. So, you know, they said, well, we they kind of defined success down and then said, hey, we succeeded by saying that children whose parents had already been deported, of whom there are about 450,

weren't eligible by saying that parents who were still in custody weren't eligible. You know, in some cases, they just hadn't found the parents because they had already released them from ICE custody. So, you know, there's kind of the question of what's going to happen because the judge doesn't particularly appear to believe that it's okay to just like let those families not get reunited. And so one of the questions right now is whose responsibility is it to do what needs to be done to find parents, to reunite families?

And then the other question is what happens to the families who have been reunited? Because at this point, about a thousand parents who have just been reunited with their kids have already – like their court cases have already ended. They have already lost legally any chance they had to stay in the U.S. They've been ordered deported. It's just that that order hasn't been acted on yet. So legally, they kind of face the difficult question of whether they're supposed to stay with their children and have everybody go back to their home country and reduce any chance that that child has to stay in the U.S. himself or accept to be separated again, which like is a choice that, you know, the ACLU has said that parents of, say, 17-year-olds are going to be more comfortable making that choice than taking them back to a Central American country where they could be, you know, victims of gang violence. The problem is that over the weekend, the ACLU or a pro bono lawyer, you know, testified on their behalf that several

parents had been kind of coerced into taking the take your kids with you option that they had been told there isn't, you know, that that's the option you have to sign on the form. One parent was given the form with that option checked off in pen already. They were yelled at if they said, no, I want to be deported, but let my child stay in the US. And then they were told that they, you know, okay, fine, you know, get off the bus, get your stuff, and that they couldn't see their kids and say goodbye to their kids again. So they were effectively re-separated without any chance to say goodbye, like watching their children, you know, ride off on the bus without them. If that, if those allegations are true, and again, the signed allegation in

court is from a lawyer, so she's under penalty of perjury, but theoretically, people might be lying to her. But if that's not the case, then we have really suggestive evidence that the government is trying to coerce people into withdrawing their children's court cases so that they can deport thousands and thousands of people instead of just kind of on the order of hundreds over the next few days. So I feel like we would take these sort of separately. One is the families have been reunited, but to these children that are still separated, this term eligible is a pretty sinister bureaucratic term, right? Because, you know, these are children with families. To say they're not eligible to return to their families is a,

sort of, if you break it down, is pretty despicable. How do you, so how do you break down those groups in that 500? Some of them are children of parents who have been separated. Some of them are children of people who couldn't prove that they were parents or in some other ways weren't here with their parents. Some of them are children that may have been trafficked, right, which is something that the Trump administration has suggested has been part of this all along. Do you know the breakdown within this 500? And then amongst those that have been truly, you know, basically kidnapped because they've been taken by the U.S. government and their parents have been sent to another country, what do you think

the hopes are of getting them back to their families? So it's worth noting that the government has been doing this shell game on definitions. It's not officially saying, and it's 700 at this point, it's not officially saying that there are 700 who are ineligible, period. They're saying that they were ineligible or weren't available as of Thursday. So it's not totally clear which of those two categories any given group is in. But, you know, that includes the largest group. And it was 430 as of when they totaled it up at the end of last week. They've since said it's more like 450 parents who have been deported.

The government just went to the judge and said, look, we're definitely not going to be able to find these parents by the deadline. We're just going to try to reunite the families that we know where they are and they're in the U.S. first. So, you know, kind of the big question right now and the judge in the case literally on Monday said, you're going to have to put you're going to have to send me and the ACLU a plan for how you expect to reunite these kids with their parents. for how you expect to reunite these kids with their parents. But there's also 120 parents who have already waived reunification, is the phrase that they use. They've agreed to be deported on their own without their kids for exactly the reasons that we kind of just laid out. The judge has been especially skeptical that any parent would be okay with that,

that they would willingly sign that form. So there's been a lot of pressure on the government to go back to parents who have waived reunification and say, skeptical that any parent would be okay with that, that they would willingly sign that form. So there's been a lot of pressure on the government to go back to parents who have waived reunification and say, are you sure? Were these options explained to you? Were they explained to you in Spanish? Did you have time to talk to your child before you did that? Of course, with what has happened over the weekend, it's possible that that kind of are you sure pressure might be happening for parents who didn't waive reunification as well. But, you know, there are also some cases where it's pretty clear that the government is planning to just refuse, right? They said in 21 cases there was a red flag for the adult from the background check or 46 from another case review.

six from another case review. Those are parents who may have passed criminal records, who there was one case from the younger children where the parent was living with someone who had a domestic violence conviction. And so they said, we're not going to release the child to you until you get, you know, you fix your living situation so that it's safer. They haven't said for sure, like, so these children were trafficked. They didn't come with who they say they came with. They haven't been able to turn numbers out that have suggested that many children are being trafficked. But it's probably going to be a pretty, you know, individual going down the list process with the government, the ACLU and the judge to kind of figure out what the situation is for each of these families. And that may not be something that the public is privy to. The ACLU has done a pretty solid job of working with the government behind closed doors. There's only been one point where negotiations

have broken down. And at that point, they've kind of come out to the public and said, here is what we think is going on. So, you know, I would, I would urge people who might be skeptical of the government's representations about whether it's reunited families to, you know, trust where the ACLU is going on this, because they are not signing off on representations that people have been reunited, or that people shouldn't be reunited without having decent evidence. You wrote a piece last week saying that there's evidence that suggests that Trump's border policy hasn't just been cruel, but ineffective. What evidence suggests that? Why do you think that might be the case?

So of the many reasons that various Trump administration officials offered for why they were doing this, one of them was that they were going to stop people from trying to come to the U.S. to begin with to seek asylum. That, you know, it was either they were trying to make a sympathetic argument that it was a dangerous journey, which was the argument that, you know, the Obama administration made in 2014 when it had a surge in families crossing into the U.S. Or they were just saying people shouldn't be coming to the U.S. You know, they should be just staying in Mexico. We have two generous laws.

Therefore, we're going to crack down. We're going to stop them from coming. There isn't evidence that cracking down on how you treat people once they get here stops more people from coming in the future. They weren't operating on very good evidence when they started the policy. on very good evidence when they started the policy. The only internal statistic or the only statistic they cited internally was about a pilot program that they ran along one sector of the border last summer. And that statistic bore no relation to the actual numbers for what was happening in that sector of the border last summer. And furthermore, if you look at that pilot program and also at the Obama administration's

use of family detention, which is what the Trump administration has said they would rather be doing as plan A, but are prevented from doing by the Flores court decision, neither of those resulted either at the time or even if you assume it takes a few months for this effect to show up, they didn't result in any changes in people coming in that were distinct from what you would normally expect seasonally. So like, normally, you have a lot fewer people coming in July and August than you do having in April and May. So if you change policy in, say, May or June, and then say, oh, there are fewer people coming in, it's easier to make it seem like it worked. But actually, that's just the normal seasonal change that you're taking advantage of. Once you take that out of the equation, and the analytical

work on this was done by Tom Wong, who's a political scientist out at UCSD, that you basically cannot see any difference depending on what policies the U.S. government is pursuing and who's coming in. So just stepping back, we now know that this policy may be ineffective. Beyond that, it has been months of scandal and evidence of human rights abuses on television. There's been condemnation from Democrats and even Republicans. This is a policy of family separation that began with sort of a goal of cruelty from the White House and an ideological aim. But it seems like even they were surprised by just what happened when sort of the bureaucracy went about implementing this and the consequences unforeseen of what happened. So we're here now, you know, there are still children separated. The Trump administration is still unwinding this decision. What do you think they have learned in their,

you know, we're about to head into another immigration battle. Trump today said he wants to shut down the government over immigration. What do you think they learned from their experience of implementing this cruel policy? I do not have any intention of speculating one way or the other on that just because we haven't seen what has been learned, right? Like, you can see a world where the conclusion from this is we can't get to saber-rattling in our rhetoric because then we'll engender a massive backlash. You can see a world where they look at this and look at the implementation of the first travel ban back in January and go, wow, we really need to actually

train people in what they're doing and have a plan in effect before we implement the policy. Because one of the things that's become incredibly clear on family separation is that they knew exactly what they wanted to do in separating families. They don't appear to have concluded that they didn't want to reunite them, but they just didn't bother to have any plan in place for what happened after they were separated, to the point where literally in the record-keeping software that Border Patrol used, there was no category to put a person who had been a member of a family unit who was then separated. They had to create this category called deleted family

units, which is not the sort of thing that you want to come out in the press. Deleted family units is, I would say, among the most disgraceful bits of bureaucratic horror that I think we have ever seen. Yeah. Not a great phrase. It's a lot. And it's not clear whether they're looking at that and going, gee, we did that badly. You know, we shouldn't have done that. We shouldn't have pursued that policy.

Whether they're saying we should have pursued that policy but had better plans in mind or whether they're saying, you know what, this problem started when people freaked out about a statistic about prior children who had come unaccompanied and been lost in the system. It got worse when they didn't let senators into detention centers. It got much worse when they started letting the press into detention centers and people started coming out with video and audio. Maybe the lesson here is don't do anything that the public might be able to see or don't do anything within U.S. territory. Like one of the big priorities for the Trump administration right now is getting Mexico to sign a safe third country agreement, which would basically prevent the U.S. from having to take any asylum seeker who had been in it would cross through Mexico. Like that is a great end run around a lot of the political problems that the Trump administration has been facing. The question of whether it's a superior strategy depends on

whether you're more concerned about how people are treated as asylum seekers or whether you're more concerned about the kind of prospects that they have of ultimately getting legal status. I want to talk a little bit about the Abolish ICE movement. The Democrats, some Democrats who've come out against this have basically made the argument that what's truly needed, the most effective policy here would obviously be comprehensive immigration reform that would, you know, offer a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people in this country. And that would sort of take care of a lot of these problems.

To me, I've always thought, and this is partly due to our experience in the Obama administration, remembering that when Obama tried to reprioritize ISIS enforcement goals, they dragged their feet to say the least um do you think yeah no that was a a lesson in bureaucratic culture well right so their books should be written about yeah so my my thought is of course democrats should push for comprehensive immigration reform like we have been and that's obviously the most effective policy goal here. But it doesn't seem like doing so would necessarily fix all of the problems. And now, as we've seen in the Trump era, even more abuses that are committed by ICE. I mean, what do you think of, I guess, both the, you know, abolish ICE or reform

ICE as a policy and also, you know, what's causing ICE to commit some of the abuses that they've been committing? I think the real question that I would love to see people kind of drill down on on this, which is what I'm going to offer you in lieu of an answer, because I believe that as a Jewish podcaster, it is my prerogative to answer every question with a question. But what I really want to see is how you're right that a lot of the criticism of ICE comes down to the kind of institutional culture of it. Right. The fact that when there was an administration that was trying to be more dovish on immigration enforcement, it got massive pushback from rank and file agents saying that is not our job. Our job is to have a wide degree of latitude. We are supposed to be the ones deciding who to deport. You are keeping us from doing our job.

I don't know how much that is baked into the institutional culture of an immigration enforcement agency, period. I don't know how much that's baked into an agency that hired during a relatively hawkish administration or at least a Republican administration that then turned relatively hawkish. I don't know how much of that is just that like when you get rid of – I've heard one theory that when the Immigration and Naturalization Service was under DOJ, the people who had to sign off on everything were lawyers because DOJ. And then when you moved it under DHS, you know, the lawyers weren't in the chain of command anymore. And so they didn't feel as much need to justify things. You know, there are lots of kind of levels on which this can be a problem that all have different remedies, right? Like, I don't know if the model here, if you're talking about reform, is something like a consent decree like you have in local police departments where there is judicial oversight and a lot of your internal processes get kind of, the guts get opened up for monitoring. That is a possibility if you think that there is

something rotten in the institutional culture, but that there is something worthwhile about the mission statement. I don't know, on the other hand, what happens if you say we do not want to have an internal immigration enforcement agency now that we already have one, right? Like now that people know that there are 11 million people without authorization in this country, a lot of local cops are now used to being able to arrest people and send them over to get deported. You know, if you just kind of take that out of the equation, especially if you're still leaving those people unauthorized, I don't really know if something then steps in to kind of fill

that gap around the edges because the government still does have deportation power. Or if people just kind of go, oh, okay, well, that's a nice thing. If hawks go, that would be a nice thing that we could do, but I guess we don't have the resources to do it anymore. Well, presumably in situations where people have been arrested for crimes, violent crimes, right, they're now in the system and can be put through deportation, even if they were never arrested by ICE? I mean, you do have to... Is that not right? You have to put them through a separate immigration court hearing, right?

You have to find deportability. So even once somebody has been convicted, they still have to go through the civil immigration court process to get their final order. And there needs to be some entity there in between people who have been... You know, the argument is we have police there to enforce laws against crimes. And if someone is arrested for committing a violent crime or crime, and they are here illegally, there can be a process for deportation after that. And you're

saying there still needs to be something to close that gap between local law enforcement and the role that ICE currently plays. Yeah, you still have to have somebody who's like making sure that people show up for their immigration court hearings, who is taking them into custody once they have final orders, etc., etc. If you're going to have, you know, ICE is responsible for deportations. If you're going to have deportation and you're not going to have an agency doing it, it's going to be really hard to draw the lines of whatever replacement agency, you know, is supposed to kind of fill in the gaps. Makes sense. is supposed to kind of fill in the gaps. Makes sense.

Last question for you. You've got a story out today about the president's travel ban and about a new lawsuit alleging that the administration's waiver system for worthy families looking to come into the United States is essentially a sham. Who are the families who filed this suit and what are they saying happened here? So this is about a few dozen people, and it's a mix of U.S. citizens and permanent residents who are petitioning for family members, some of whom are living in the U.S., some of whom are actually like one U.S. citizen I talked to has now moved to Djibouti to be with his wife because his wife can't be brought to the U.S. because she's Yemeni. And so he's been living with her. Their son was born there. Their son's a U.S. citizen by birth, but he's never been to the U.S. And they're just kind of borrowing money from friends and waiting to come back over.

There are some people in the case who should have been able to come over on the investor visa. They've invested tens of thousands of dollars in U.S. businesses. They are helping to manage the businesses, but they can't come over to do it because they are from affected countries, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria. No, Yemen is in there. I believe that one of the others is not. I just want to say that you have made us feel embarrassed for having you on the show. Yes, no, it is absolutely the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire public career as a journalist. I will justify this by saying that the criteria have changed several times. But anyway, all of these are families or people who think that they should theoretically be able to qualify for waivers because the Trump administration said that in particularly sympathetic cases where there was undue hardship to somebody or where the U.S.'s national interest was to let this person into the country, that they should be able to just sign a waiver and let the person come in.

just sign a waiver and let the person come in. But the people in this case, either they've just been flatly denied, or they were said, yeah, your waiver, we're considering you for a waiver, it's pending. And it's been like seven months, and they haven't heard anything. And because the Trump administration, A, has never actually created an application process for the waiver, they just say, oh, at your visa interview, the consular officer will figure out if you deserve a waiver or not. And B, they've never defined what the actual standards are and how, say, not being a threat to national security is different in a waiver case than the fact that they're justifying the travel ban by saying this country doesn't provide us with enough information to say whether anyone is a threat to national security. There are lots of unanswered questions about the process. And so the hope with this lawsuit is that rather than kind of striking

down the travel ban entirely, like the last round of litigation was about, that this will, you know, go through discovery and force the government to actually lay out, here is what we were thinking when we put together this process, here is how it actually works. And if they can't answer that question to a judge's satisfaction, have the judge order them to put together the process that they say exists now. Right. I have a feeling that what they were thinking was nothing and what they will have to be ordered to do is begin thinking. Seems like maybe this policy wasn't really connected to national security, but that's just a guess. Malevolence and incompetence all the way down. Dara, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

And thanks for all the great reporting you're doing out there. Thank you, team. That's our pod for today. Thanks to Dara Lind for joining us. And on Thursday, I will be on vacation. Oh, yeah. Tommy will still be on his honeymoon. And so...

It's a Jetsons Flintstones. John Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer coming to a pod near you. It's going to be great. Dan and I are going to catch up. I'm going to find out what his last name is. I'm very excited about it. We'll see you then.