Pod Save America - "Last call for democracy.”

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Trump hits a new low by tearing infants away from their parents at the border, and looks for new ways to obstruct justice as his campaign manager goes to jail. Then Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Fahrenthold talks to Tommy about his reporting on the Trump Foundation. To learn what you can do to help fight the separation of families at our border, pitch in here: go.crooked.com/families

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Tommy interviews Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Fahrenthold from the Washington Post about the criminal enterprise known as the Trump Foundation. Turns out he's a great reporter and he's very funny. And that was Jon's second take of saying the word Pulitzer. We're also going to talk about the latest on Trump's family separation policy

and his continuing attempts to obstruct justice. We are on tour this week. Yeah. Which is exciting. Lovett is back from vacation. I am. Good to obstruct justice. We are on tour this week. Yeah. Which is exciting. Lovett is back from vacation. I am. Good to have you. Good to be back here in the barrel of screams with you guys.

Back on Morning John with a few guys here in the studio. Sure. Anyway, we will be in Atlanta on Thursday evening doing a show. Where else? Stacey Abrams will be joining us. Future governor, Stacey Abrams. Future governor,

Stacey Abrams. And Friday, we'll be in Nashville for two shows, Pod Save America, then Love It or Leave It. I think there's still some tickets for those.

Those love it. Second attempt to say that. And then on Sunday night, we'll be in Durham, North Carolina with Governor Roy Cooper and Reverend William Barber. Also,

Dan Pfeiffer's book is out. The wait is over. Yes, we still can. It's on bookshelves now. Do people get things from bookshelves? I've got to be honest, with all this pre-release stuff, I feel like they released it in like 2017. Yeah, no, today is the day. If you haven't bought Dan's book, what are you waiting for? Yes, you still

can buy the book. And, Love It, you can listen to an exclusive audio excerpt a full chapter on cricket conversations where love it interviews dan at the beginning of the cricket convo yes i talked to dan pfeiffer finally he and i got a one-on-one that's actually the first one-on-one conversation we've ever had dan and i have never eaten a meal together one-on-one that's something that i'm trying to get on the books but it's hard to schedule he's playing me the baby but he didn't have a baby for a long time you know anyway it was a really good conversation so you should check it out uh

because i think dan is one of the smartest human beings talking about politics today and now he's gonna book out all we do here is we we hawk our friends books yeah um and mattresses you say like that we love them they're great books you should read them okay let's get to the news it is uh awful news all around um yeah we're punchy because we're angry yeah so i want to start by talking about what is a humanitarian crisis um i saw a tweet from senator chris murphy today that i thought pretty accurately sums up the situation at the border he said quote the president of the united states has stolen 2000 little children from their parents and locked them in cages to be released only if Congress gives him money to build a wall with Mexico.

That tweet is not really an exaggeration. Yeah. Pretty much what's happening. At this point, I don't think it's too much to say that Donald Trump's administration is committing human rights abuses at the border. This is from a statement released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about our country, that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting abuse on children is unconscionable. He then quoted from

the American Academy of Pediatrics, which calls the practice of forcing parents to part with their young children, quote, government sanctioned child abuse, which may cause, quote, irreparable harm. Government-sanctioned child abuse, which may cause, quote, irreparable harm. To me, the worst previous moments of the Trump administration were Muslim ban in Charlottesville. I think this is a new low, not just in the Trump administration, but in our country's history, it's up there. I mean, it's getting up there with Japanese internment for me. You know what I'd slide in there is when he decided to kick around U.S. service members who happen to be transgender for absolutely no reason. It speaks to his tendency to find people that are treated the worst by our society and then kick the shit out of them for no reason. It's cruel.

Yeah. And it's, you know, usually you can divide the buckets of the worst actions of Donald Trump into the worst things he's ever said and the worst things he's cruel yeah and it's you know usually you can divide the buckets of the worst actions of donald trump and into the worst things he's ever said and then the worst things he's ever done but usually the worst things he's ever done are are previewed by the worst things he's ever said so that debate we had about who he was referring to as animals i think that that trump has answered that debate with his actions there's that. There's the time he said maybe he would have supported Japanese internment. Yeah. He had said before he wants to cut down on asylum seekers to this country. Shithole countries. Donald Trump has told us many times exactly who he is, what he believes, and what he wants to do.

Seriously, not literally, right? I was about to say. Still the most frustrating thing ever reported. Yeah. Turns out we should have taken them literally and seriously. So, ProPublica, who's been doing some outstanding reporting about this, actually got

a recording of what it is like in some of these detention centers. And we thought we'd play a quick clip of it for you because it'll help you understand what's going on better than anything we could say. Mommy! Mommy!

Mommy! So they have been apprehending about 250 children per day. They've said that they're trying to get up to 30,000 by the end of summer, they think they can get. A Border Patrol agent actually said, quote, we are trying to build to 100% of prosecution of everybody that is eligible. We're not there yet, but that's our intent. What's your reaction, guys? Reading the news today, reading the news over the last couple of days. So the one thing that I was thinking as I saw it is Donald Trump could not even have done this at the very start of his administration. It took a year and a half of grinding down Republican politicians, grinding down the media,

and then grinding down the last vestiges of normal, sane, humane politics from the Republican base that watches Fox and that likes him, that you have to work your way to this moment to build a coalition of people willing to either A, support this, or B, look past it. Yeah. Tommy, what do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's unspeakably cruel. It is deliberate. I mean, his team is on the record saying that they are punishing children as a deterrent

to prevent parents from sending their kids north of the border or from somehow using kids as a means to exploit a loophole to get asylum when they might otherwise not have gotten asylum. But like taking away the my wildly emotional reaction, which, you know, was how I've responded to most of the footage I've watched. I'm also struck by how fundamentally stupid and flawed the policy is. If you're fleeing MS-13, or, you know, actually seeking asylum, which the Trump administration says MS-13 could overrun the country someday, this policy will not deter you. If we're really worried about human trafficking or smugglers, why are we punishing the victims potentially of human trafficking or smugglers? It is so vindictive. It is so ill-considered. It is so stupid that it's hard to fathom how we got here. And then to watch his team, not just lie about it a few times, repeatedly, enthusiastically,

repeatedly, enthusiastically, angrily denounce the news media and lie. It's like, we are not stupid. I am not going to sit here and listen to Secretary Nielsen pretend she doesn't know what's going on. For starters, because fucking John Kelly, the chief of staff, Stephen Miller is on the record in the New York Times, and Jeff Sessions are all out there explaining exactly what they're trying to do. But like, these people are insulting our intelligence. They are trying to play games.

And this is maybe the first time in a long while where there is absolutely roadblock news coverage of the lie itself and of the cruelty of what they're doing. And his spin is not working. And that's the little glimmer of hope I'm seeing in this horrendous time. And look, I mean, we've said this before, and we've talked about this issue on the pod, but like, immigration, and especially crossings at the border, it's an incredibly complicated problem, given it was an incredibly difficult problem to deal with in the Bush administration, in the Obama administration, we in the Obama administration, we dealt with unaccompanied minors. These are 16, 17, 18-year-olds who are coming across the border

themselves, an influx. And there wasn't enough beds. There weren't enough places to house them all. They were trying to connect them with families, but they couldn't. And so they were in some horrible conditions, right? And every administration has to deal with that. What the Trump administration is trying to say, this is more of the same and you just didn't cover that, is false. It is false in every way possible. Previously, the Justice Department rarely targeted families for prosecution. This is from HuffPost. Instead, what happened was authorities routed migrant families who come over to immigration courts. And they were released from detention

after three weeks. People with credible fear of being returned to their native countries were often sent to immigration court as well. And some people now who are trying to initiate asylum at claims at ports of entry are being turned away. So what they have decided to do now is instead of saying, okay, when a family comes, and especially if it's a family seeking asylum, we'll send them to an immigration court and they can deal with it and they'll be together until we figure out whether to deport them or to keep them here. Now they're saying every single border crossing has to be criminally prosecuted. And because it's criminally prosecuted, that's when they're saying they're going to take the children away from parents. That's what's different. And that has never happened before. And it's, we're not going to do anything to anyone who

hasn't broken the law. We're just going to do anything to anyone who hasn't broken the law. We're just going to make it impossible to seek asylum without breaking the law. That's the other thing. And we are going to declare simply the act of crossing illegally as enough of a violation to justify separating children from parents. They're doing this because they believe that it is a greater injustice to allow people into the country illegally, some of whom may not be valid asylum seekers, than it is to rip children away from parents and house them in cages. Because they have downplayed the humanity of these people and they have created in their minds and in their policy apparatus and in their politics a crisis in immigration that doesn't exist. We have an immigration problem. There is a problem at the border. There is a problem we need to solve. There's a problem Congress has

failed to solve for a very long time. But to look at America today and look at all the ways in which America is threatened and look at all the ways in which we have to fix things in our economy and fix things that are broken to make sure that that that our country does well to look at that and say this is this is the crisis we'll focus on and we care about it so much we're willing to visit hell on children is completely and totally unjustified and every once in a while they give up the game you know like Trump this morning said the U.S. will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. That is like he's had a lot of crazy tweets over the last couple of days.

That statement that he made today was maybe one of the worst because that is directly from fucking Stephen Miller and all those assholes. So I want to talk and you sort of get into this, Tommy, the lies in the administration here. There's basically two conflicting explanations for all of this. here there's basically two conflicting explanations for all of this on one hand you've got sessions john kelly santa monica fascist stephen miller out there owning the policy saying it's a new policy celebrating the policy jeff sessions announced it on may 7th with great fanfare with the guy that runs ice who's fucking criminal um and they've and and they said that it was going to be a new policy and then you have donald trump and homeland security secretary kirsten nielsen nielsen and some of the other lackeys like your kelly ann conways and your other and sarah huckabee

sanders and hogan gidley and all them who are all saying no no no it's not a new policy um it's the law that that's making us do this what how are they getting away with the two conflicting explanations and why can't trump and the other ones just own the policy well the good news is they're not getting away with it yeah i think that's right you have secretary nielsen tweeting we do not have a policy of separating families at the border period first of all madam secretary way to to echo Sean Spicer's most ridiculous mocked lie. That is a great way to approach this. Second, it's again, it's like them trying to this Orwellian bullshit of saying, no, we don't have a Muslim ban.

We're just banning all immigration of people from Muslim countries. Like you don't get to pretend or shirk responsibility for the practical impact implications of your policy choices, especially when, as you mentioned, John Kelly was bragging about the deterrent effect of these policies. Stephen Miller is taking credit in the New York Times for, you know, pushing Trump on these choices. So I'm glad to see that the press corps has shifted this story into a place we've all wanted it to get, which is the lie is the lead. And then his claims are coming second. I do think like today's White House briefing was deeply frustrating because there are these on-the-record contradictory statements

from senior administration officials. And no one just read those back to Secretary Nielsen and said, how do you explain that? They let her do this performance that was just deeply frustrating to watch. There's a clip that's been going around. Wolf Blitzer, John Kelly, when he was the head of Homeland Security, and Wolf said, are you considering a new policy that would separate children from their parents at the border? And then Kelly started saying it, and he goes, I'm actually proposing exactly that.

In order to deter more movement. And think of what that means as a deterrent policy. It's saying, we're saying to people who want to come to this country, many of them because they're fleeing violence, do not come here or we will take your children away indefinitely. And that's the policy. And it is, again, because they view the harm of undocumented people trying to get here as greater than the moral harm they're inflicting on these kids. I think you can divide these two responses, these sort of contradictory responses into the two camps. There are people who care what the policy is, but not what it looks like, and people who care what the policy looks like and not what it is. One of the camps are the

Stephen Millers who are ideologically convinced and nationalist and who believe they're right, and it doesn't matter what anyone says or what damage they do. And the other half are the craven people like Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Sanders who just want to get out of this thing and don't really focus that much on what's actually going on, simply how they can sell it and how they can get away with it. Trump is in both camps. Depending on how you catch him, depending on the mood, depending what was on his TV, he is in both camps. Which has been the case with him in immigration from the very beginning. This is how he was on DACA with the Dreamers. This is how – first he feels really bad for the Dreamers and then it's fuck you i'm not going to do anything um i do think

we were just saying this like the media except for i i really wish in the press briefing today there were a couple more reporters who knew immigration policy and pressed me too nielsen and i tweeted something and i got some annoying defensive lame response from a not on twitter a little buzz here It's like the... They didn't do a good job. Kristen Welker did a good job. There were a couple people that rose to the moment. Yeah.

The whole room, again, if there was just a little bit of collective action, if one person just asked a simple, basic question, how did no one play for Sarah Sanders the audio of the children crying? It had been out. They were listening to it in the briefing room. Play it for her. I think Olivia Nuzzi said she played it in the back, but I don't know if anyone heard it or anything. But again, the questions were all over the place. There was no it for her. I think Olivia Nuzzi said she played it in the back, but I don't know if anyone heard it or anything.

But again, the questions were all over the place. There was no coordination with her. And we're not saying that the press has some magic key that will unlock their capitulation. No. But make it harder for them. Push at them harder. There's hard questions to answer and there's easy ones.

I have some experience with this, and a lot of the questions were pretty easy. But I will say overall, the media overall has done a fantastic job keeping this in the news, in the headlines. I mean, when we were preparing for the pod last night and I was like looking through what news stories we should talk about, it was only this. This was everywhere. I mean, this has now broken through in a way that the Muslim ban did, that the ACA repeal fight did, that Charlottesville did. I mean, this is now up there

with all of that, which I guess, you know, is a good thing. But I just, I think at some point, the members of this administration will, and Republicans in Congress, especially, which we'll get to, are going to have to be confronted with these stories of these children. I mean, like, Congressman Joaquin Castro said he saw an eight-month-old who's been separated from his family for over a month. A month. Eight months old. There was a pro-publica also reported that there was one man who was at one of the shelters in Arizona. He quit in protest.

And he said during his time there at the shelter, children were running away, screaming, throwing furniture. And he saw one attempt suicide. So there's some polling out today. There's actually a number of polls by now. There's Quinnipiac, CBS, all of them. Basically, Americans oppose this policy 66-27%. That was Quinnipiac. That's basically the same number in all the polls.

Overwhelming. Overwhelming. Democrats, 91-7. Independents, 68-24. Republicans in just about every poll support the policy. Now, it's a smaller margin. It's 55-35 in Quinnipiac, and it's around that in some of the other polls. I don't know what you guys

thought about the poll numbers. I was actually a little surprised that that many Republicans opposed it. I would, no, I'll be honest, I was surprised it was that popular amongst Republicans. It caught me by surprise. I'm not going to pretend that I wasn't a little naive yet again. You know, every once in a while a little bit slips back in.

I wonder if that will shift over time as they see these images and they hear this audio and it's spelled out. Because you have faith leaders, like Franklin Graham denounced the policy. Just a Trump kiss ass, just an evangelical as cheap a date as you could imagine. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there does seem to be a, Will Hurd, a congressman from Texas who is one of the most vulnerable members of Congress up for reelection that came out against it. So you're seeing some cracks

in the unanimous Republican opinion, but there's still this issue of these guys fearing primaries far more than they fear a general election campaign. I would bet, I wish someone would do this poll. If you're a registered Republican and your news media diet does not only involve Fox News, if you're even reading the Wall Street Journal, if you're reading the New York Times, if you're catching CBS or ABC,

I bet you oppose this policy because you see those images. But if you look at fucking Fox News, already, they're already on board with defending this president over this. Already, from Fox and Friends to every single program on that network, they are just lying just like the administration and covering the whole thing up. Yeah, it's so bad that people are doctoring photos of these children, right, to make them look more menacing. Yeah, Drudge had a picture up early when they – under the headline about this story where they had a bunch of kids and they were like holding toy guns. That's cool. Holding guns because that's what they wanted to show. And then they – even Drudge.

It was too bad for Drudge. They had to take it down after a couple hours. Yeah, when I saw the numbers, it was shocking. I guess it's not surprising, but we have to get over the idea that what the Republican Party is is a conservative party with a nationalist fringe. That is not what these polling numbers tell us.

That is not what Trump tells us. That is not what Fox tells us. It is a nationalist party with a conservative fringe. And the conservatives who have the platforms and the voices and they're the ones trying their best to pretend it is otherwise. But when you look at what Trump is doing and look at what 55% of this party is willing to support, it tells you about just the damage Fox is doing on a daily basis, the incredible damage it is doing to this country every single day that could get people to this point. And it is alarming, and it should tell you just how far this could go. Let's talk about

what can be done about this. In the Senate, Dianne Feinstein has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to separate family members who are entering the country. Every single Democrat is on board, even Joe Manchin, even Doug Jones, even all the ones who are up in 18, they're all on board. Joe Manchin took a second. He took a second, yeah, obviously. But not a single Republican supports it. Not a single Republican in the Senate supports this bill. Susan Collins said it's too broad and would prevent arrests of people who commit crimes

within 100 miles of the border, which seems insane. Or if she has a problem with it, propose something, propose some fix if you want. She hasn't done that. In the House, there's one bill that claims to address family separation, but it actually doesn't. It merely would give the Department of Homeland Security the option of not separating children from their parents, which they already have. So now the question is, what are the chances of something passing? What can we do here? Look, my view is, is yeah it seems unlikely that republicans are all going to get on board but as you were just saying tommy like will heard there's a couple republican house members right now that are speaking out against it in the senate fucking

ted cruz just said he wanted to sponsor legislation to do something about it because he clearly saw beto o'rourke exactly lead a march to the border over the weekend beto o'rourke is already moving to the left yeah yeah he's he's playingo O'Rourke is already moving Ted Cruz to the left. Yeah, he's playing Cynthia Nixon to his Andrew Cuomo. But look, I do think there's some chances. I mean, we're seeing Republican opposition that we haven't seen since the Muslim ban, since the early Trump days. You've got Laura Bush wrote an op-ed. Mitt Romney said something.

Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush. Franklin Graham, you said. So we are seeing sort of a unique array of people aligned against this. It is Fox. Fox and Breitbart have become the same thing, basically. I guess they might have been for a long time. Fox didn't label a section on its website black crime, but certainly it was the focus of a lot of their reporting.

That's a very infamous racist Breitbart thing. But you do have those Breitbart journalists are out there defending the policy, saying these aren't cages, these are just woven metal enclosures for comfort. It's not a cage. It's metal mesh. The degree to which

the far, far right is flailing to defend this, I think does help you understand how perilous the White House's position is on this. And that's why I do think it like opposition to this is incredibly important to voice your opposition to this, call your members of Congress, flood Congress, protest Congress. Like, I think there are quite a few Republicans, particularly all the Republicans in the House that tried to sign, get the discharge petition going for immigration, all the Republicans in the House that tried to sign get the discharge petition going for immigration all the moderate Republicans in all these districts that are

afraid of losing they're all going to be on board with a fix you know they're going to get to this point where just like in with DACA you have people who say who say they're against it but when rubber meets the road are you actually going to vote for a bill that stops the policy right so I think you've seen this sort of intellectual response from certain parts of the Republican Party, Ben Sasse, Rich Lowry in National Review. There's something obvious to be said here, which is stop this, right? This is morally repugnant. And they say that part, but then they say, but. And the but to me is what tells you about this sort of dynamic between Trump and Republicans in Congress, because it's this intellectual Zamboni that follows Trump around. So conservative intellectuals, they say it's wrong, but also it's

a consequence of a broken Congress, lax enforcement, people taking advantage of the system. And it gives then Republicans in Congress, like Marco Rubio, like Paul Ryan, to claim they want this to stop, and to claim that children should be used as hostages, while at the same time saying, and therefore let's pass this legislation because these children hostages must be freed. So they turn around and say, children should not be used as hostages. But there's only one thing we can do. Give the hostage takers their money so that we can get these kids back. So Marco Rubio says we should address the issue. Same thing with Ted Cruz. Same thing with Ben Sasse. Even Susan Collins is like, I don't want to see this happen. Therefore, we should pass comprehensive immigration reform.

What fantasy land are you living in? That after you tried to get him to help the Dreamers by paying for his wall, he couldn't show compassion then. He responded by putting kids in cages. You think now is the time where he's going to find that he's going to go along with your compassionate other half of this problem? These guys are always the victim of their own choices, their own policies. They're always the aggrieved party. Like even Nielsen today, like she acted like, oh, can we just spare a minute, please, for the poor DHS employees? That was fucking weird. Fuck you.

I mean, let's also be clear about what the ransom is here. They want a package. When they say immigration reform, what they want, what Stephen Miller wants, what Donald Trump wants, what John Kelly wants, are deep, deep cuts in legal immigration down to 1920s levels immigration in this country. That's what they want. They're not talking about a package that protects the dreamers, beefs up border security a little bit, helps the family separation thing and call it a day. That's not what they're talking about. They want deep cuts to legal immigration and he wants his fucking wall and this is what they want and so and it's interesting too that even they also call this leverage leverage over who right because uh republicans are on board for donald trump's right-wing restrictionist immigration agenda yeah okay so it's leverage over over democrats to come with that, which they would never do.

Now, there's another form of – It's leverage over people who don't want to see children in cages away from their parents. That's what it is. And this is why it's sort of – You don't want to see that? Then agree with my policy. Which is why I think we should hold Republicans, including the Republicans who claim they're against this, to account for the ways in which they're participating in this kind of good cop, bad cop thing. Because it's not good cop, bad cop.

It's like craven cop, monster cop, because Trump isn't pretending. He doesn't care if the kids rot in cages. He's not doing this for leverage. This is what we saw on DACA. It's what we saw on climate. It's what we saw on Iran. It's a— Once—

Destruction isn't the leverage. It's the goal. And also, once he decided that he cannot be shamed by anything that happens, then all he has is his power to do whatever he feels. The only check on that power is a fear or

a shame that you're going to be kicked out of office, or that you're going to be publicly embarrassed, or that people aren't going to like you. Or human empathy. Well, he doesn't have that. But he clearly doesn't have shame either, and so therefore, or that you're going to be publicly embarrassed or that people aren't going to like you. Or human empathy. Or human empathy. Well, he doesn't have that. But he clearly doesn't have shame either. And so therefore, he is going to use his power

to do whatever he feels he needs to and wants to until he's out of office. Right. And the so-called leaders of the Republican Party, like Paul Ryan, have forgotten about what shame feels like or they prefer to ignore it. Like he ducked questions about Scott Pruitt. Or they lie.

Or they lie. I'm sure he'll duck questions about this. They're scared to stand up to him. They've been conditioned like a puppy that was beaten to not speak out or do anything or ever stand up to him. They have let this happen to themselves. And the fundamental problem in immigration is not that there weren't enough children in cages to get something through Congress. The problem was the Venn diagram of something evil enough to get through the House does not overlap with the Venn diagram circle of something compassionate enough to get through the Senate. That has been true. Evergreen sentence for everything for the last 10 years.

Yeah, basically. When Obama was president, it was the same thing. You know, Democrats have been in favor of all the things Donald Trump claims to be in favor of, except these restrictions on legal immigration. They gave him the wall. They gave him what he wanted just to help the dreamers. And he said no and responded with this. That tells us everything we need to know about how good faith these negotiations are. And in case we didn't think this was an entirely manufactured crisis by the Trump administration, sources now tell Politico that Trump's aides are planning additional immigration crackdowns before the midterms. They want to keep this going.

They want to tighten rules on student visas and exchange programs. They want it on agricultural workers, on everything else. One other just point about this, because I think it goes to just how just the way that racism infuses this. They have a different view on how much immigration there should be in this country. And it's racially motivated. It's this nationalism. Right. But there's a lot of ways you can go about convincing people not to come to America. One of them would be to go after business that employs people who are undocumented.

But you never see that as part of the crackdown. The pain is always visited on the people who are desperate to come here for safety, for relief, for jobs. The pain is always visited on the people we told for a generation to come here because there were jobs for them here. And there's a reason for that. Hey, a little real-time good news. John McCain just tweeted that the administration should rescind the policy now.

So he stopped short of co-sponsoring the bill that would do exactly that. But it's good to see him putting out a statement. I mean, look, you know, if Susan Collins and John McCain, if they don't like something about Dianne Feinstein's bill, if they think it's going to be too broad for something, then propose some kind of a fix. Give her a statement. I mean, look, you know, if Susan Collins and John McCain, if they don't like something about Dianne Feinstein's bill, if they think it's going to be too broad for something, then propose some kind of a fix. Give her a call. Narrow it down. You know, like there is a way to do this. We had this policy. It was working just fine until Jeff Sessions announced the new policy in May. So go back to that. Once again, it's also just, God, even now, only Democrats are acting in good faith. I'm just sitting here saying, like, I don't know, God, even now, only Democrats are acting in good faith.

I'm just sitting here saying, like, I don't know, fucking get Ted Cruz on the blower. Combine the Feinstein thing and the Cruz thing. I don't give a shit. You know, like, do something. Do something. Democrats will do something. We gave into the fucking wall. We will pay for the wall.

Just, it's like, how many times will he not take yes for an answer? It's the same thing that we dealt with with the Dreamers. Exactly the same. Once he said no to that after saying yes to it many times, and once Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and the rest of the fuckers went along with it, that was the message on what they were going to do on immigration. And what they're going to do is they're using it as a campaign issue to stir up nativism and racism from now until November because that's their only chance of winning. And if you think Donald Trump wants to solve this problem and get it off the front pages, you've not been paying attention. That's right.

So we have to fight. If you want to help, we've talked about this before, you can donate. There's all kinds of great organizations that are helping to fund legal assistance, help try to reunite some of these families with children. You can go to go.crooked.com slash families, and you can give there. We have this up on our site now.

It's go.crooked.com slash families. You should also call your representative, senator or house member, get your friends to call theirs and tell them to sponsor the Keep Families Together Act. That is the Feinstein bill. That's the only legislative vehicle right now that could change. And protests.

Mark your calendars for June 30th. Folks at MoveOn and a bunch of other organizations, including us, we're all supporting some very big protests. They're going to be in D.C. and we hope nationwide in cities around the country. So we're going to be organizing for that. So we're going to keep fighting this and we'll keep talking about it here. Let's talk about the Trump investigation. Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is now in jail. He is in jail because a federal judge revoked his bail on Friday after Manafort was caught tampering with witnesses. Before we get to all the details of what he did and why he did it.

That was it. He just tampered with a witness. No, no. But one of my favorite sentences that's been uttered in the past two years was said at Manafort. And it was when Manafort's lawyer says, well, just let him stay home, but he won't contact anybody. He won't talk to anybody. And the judge said, this isn't middle school. I'm not taking away his cell phone. And that just made me so happy.

And I think we deserve to feel a little, what's the word? Happy that Manafort's in jail? Schadenfreude. Happy that he's in jail. Germans, what do you do? Yeah. Anyway, of of course it caused Trump to complain on Twitter about it. Rudy Giuliani, of course, went out and started

dangling pardons to the first reporter he could talk to to send a message. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported this weekend that another person close to Trump, Roger Stone, neglected to tell investigators about contact he had with a Russian official who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton

during the presidential campaign. Why did he not accept the dirt? They wanted $2 million for it. And he said that Trump doesn't pay for anything, which is revealing. So funny. And potentially a true statement.

Was there somebody who had accessed all these Google calendars that was just filling in spaces with Russian meetings? There are so many meetings with Russians and There are so many meetings with Russians, and there are so many meetings with Russians that these people forgot. And for him to claim that he actually forgot this meeting,

I mean, you do not forget a Russian guy offering you, demanding $2 million for a whole bunch of dirt on Hillary Clinton. It's impossible to forget that. He said 2016 was a busy year. Yeah, well, join the club, asshole. Like, maybe your memory gets jogged when there's a massive investigation into what's happening through all sides of Congress and Bob Mueller. And all this news broke during a week where there were several stories that reported that Michael Cohen is getting closer to cooperating and just thrown in the towel. He recently changed up his legal team.

Changed up his legal team, changed up his legal team, and apparently he's feeling alienated by the distance Trump is keeping from him. Yeah, he's just a guy with a couple taxi medallions and nothing left to lose. Dared his name. What is it going to take to get Paul Manafort to flip? I am no legal expert,

but I have never heard of a situation where a prosecutor has leaned on someone as much as bob muller has leaned on paul manor for he's got the guy in jail he's got like 40 indictments on the guy like we have to be ready for the answer being to be he doesn't have anything to tell him yeah that could be you know that could be like i'm very sick of getting uh chastised by various people on twitter that donald trump's not going to get frog marched down to the prison and yada yada. Like, clearly some people on his campaign did some terrible things. I think it is inconceivable that Don Jr. took a meeting with a bunch of Russians in Trump Tower and didn't sprint to tell daddy about it.

But that is the most frustrating scenario with Manafort. I mean, I guess that's a possibility. It seems very unlikely at this point. Well, let me say this. We don't know what Manafort has to offer about Donald Trump himself. It does certainly seem like Manafort's crimes are now far beyond not registering as a foreign lobbyist.

And it seems like if there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians, the nexus of that was Paul Manafort, Gates, his deputy, Stone. I mean, they were talking with Russians. Now we know that he was talking with Russians about some of the dirt on Hillary Clinton, some of the hacked emails

that Manafort was having these discussions, that Gates was having these discussions. So we clearly know stuff that he's not giving up. The other option is, of course, he's more scared of the Russians than he is of Donald Trump. Look, yeah, it's just, you know, there's two baskets of Manafort crimes. One is just the, you know, legacy financial, legacy financial fraud and criminality run of the mill white color classical global let's call those let's let's call those personal time crimes right and those are legion and those seem to me those seem to be something that there's a ton of evidence

about now what we don't know very much about what are the campaign time crimes we don't actually know a lot but evidence of absence of evidence not evidence of absence we don't actually know a lot, but absence of evidence, not evidence of absence, we don't really know. But I think what we can say right now is the amount of crime that Manafort has been charged with is asymptotically approaching infinite crime. He is approaching, there's no, like, oh, you're adding more to my crime list? Okay, I've indicted so many times. Think about how much you would remember being indicted in federal court. Now imagine having it happen so many times, you can't remember them all. So, but just, we have to assume that Manafort is just, as he hits infinite crime, infinite liability, what are the reasons he isn't flipping?

Well, one is that he is counting on Donald Trump to pardon him and counting on the fact that he will ultimately not pay for those crimes. So to me, one of the most important things that can happen is New York State can charge him with crimes that Donald Trump can't pardon for. And I think that would happen. And Virginia has a case as well. When that happens, all of a sudden, I think Manafort's smile will lower a bit when he's walking into court. Yeah. So it's also patience. The other thing that's worth noting, and I talked with David Farenthold about this a bunch, is every time there has been smoke, we have gotten to a fire eventually.

That's true. David Farenthold spent two years chasing down a portrait of Donald Trump at a golf course. And that incredible work led to the New York Attorney General filing a civil suit that accused him and his family of serious wrongdoing. And they have tools to get documents and emails and records that no journalist could get. So, you know, we have to sit and wait for Mr. Mueller to figure this out. If Donald Trump's campaign were a cartoon villain in a trench coat, you would turn him over and like rubies would come out and a safe would come out and a grand piano would fall out. You know,

you know what I mean? I know. I can see it. John, do you know what I mean? I think I got it. Did you get it? You did a hand motion.

So now you were dumping them upside down. I imagined like a combo of the spy versus spy guy and like an inspector gadget. Is that where, what's in your head? I'm thinking more like a beagle boy from, from,tales but oh oh ducktales um anyway uh so anyway while we're waiting for all these people to flip um the trump people are not waiting they are continuing to try to obstruct justice in any way they can uh they're now using a new inspector general report

about the fbi's investigation of hillary clinton's emails to lie about how trump's been exonerated in a separate investigation into russia um so the ig report this came out late last week we didn't get a chance to talk about it um it's very critical of several people including the most righteous james comey um who's basically accused of being insubordinate and how he handled the Clinton email investigation when he directed the FBI. Oh, you noticed that, Mr. IG? Yeah, good call on that. Got a magnifying glass, a couple of fingerprints at the

scene of the crime. A couple of tweets from an Iowa cornfield. Yeah, we got it. But it finds there was no evidence that the decision to clear Clinton was polluted by political bias, and it doesn't say anything about Robert Mueller's investigation. Of course, this doesn't matter to Trump and his legal team. Trump went on Vox and Friends on Friday and said people at the FBI were plotting against his election.

He hasn't stopped tweeting about the behavior of two FBI agents involved in the Clinton investigation, the ones that were sexting each other the whole time. Man, I gotta tell you, never could anyone have imagined, if you would have told them just how much blowback they would have gotten for those sexts, they would have never imagined it. Man, the sexts are around the world. And the ones we saw, they were not even sexts. It's just like, Martin O'Malley's a douche. That was one of them.

And like, I hate Donald Trump. Martin O'Malley's a douche. I don't like Eric Holder. He drives me crazy. I guess you have just a different version of foreplay. Oh boy. All the Republicans, not just Trump, Fox News, and again,

the serious conservatives. Oh, you were gone on vacation. So many think pieces, Lovett, from some of our favorite quote-unquote never-Trump conservatives about how this IG report shows that the two FBI agents single-handedly were out to bring down the Trump presidency, which they did a pretty shitty job of

because he's sitting there in office right now. There's nothing that a certain clique of the never-Trumpers like more than saying, well, these liberals have lost their mind, these Trump people lost their mind. There's only us. There's only us, the right-wing but not Trump wing of the conservative media

echo chamber funded by a certain class of billionaire. It's just us. Just want our tax cut and to be righteous. I could absolutely understand how any right-minded person could read those texts and think, wow, those people are biased against Donald Trump. It's a leap to them having done something or taken

some action to harm Donald Trump's campaign. There's nothing, no evidence of that. And it's actually undercut by the facts, which is that they didn't leak that there was this massive, massive ongoing investigation. They just put down their opinions in text, but people have opinions all the time and they are allowed even if they work at the FBI. Yes, exactly. They are allowed. But also what is deeply frustrating about this is right before the campaign ended, Rudy Giuliani was going on TV and telling us how his buddies in the FBI were saying that they all hated Hillary Clinton. They wanted to go after her. There's comments in the same IG report where you have people talking about

how it's their duty to keep going after Hillary Clinton, like someone overheard this discussion, like a bunch of the FBI is mostly white guys on their very law enforcement focus. That is a very Republican organization. The notion that they're in the tank for Hillary Clinton, someone that we now see they didn't like very much, is ludicrous. And yet, again, we have to take these arguments on their face and debate them for weeks and weeks and weeks when David Fahrenthold's reporting is leading to actual major legal action being taken against the president. I mean, it's not like Rudy Giuliani was hiding this. He said all this right before he opened an umbrella, put out a bunch of fog, and then quacked his way out of the fucking studio.

You know? Because he's the penguin. And again, I will say, we were just saying how the media has done a great job of covering the family separation policy. The IG report was not their finest moment because this is a report that basically said Jim Comey acted wrongly in both going out to announce the results of the Clinton investigation himself instead of letting Loretta Lynch

do it, and then fucked up again when he announced the anthony wiener laptop thing right before the election and so things that probably could tip the election to donald trump that part was so undercovered all that we got was well there's these two fbi agents texted that they didn't like donald trump and so there that must be something there they didn't like donald trump no evidence that they did anything about it. No evidence that they acted wrongly. Zero. But there is evidence that there was bias against Hillary Clinton at the New York City office. Coincidentally, the people that Rudy wants to take over the Mueller investigation.

What a surprise. And it's like Rudy's sitting there with this woman who dresses up like a cat and also this scientist who loves puzzles. And the three of them have all kinds of ideas, and I think this new legal team is up to no good. Plus there's this former prosecutor that's actually working with Rudy, and the crazy thing about him is half his face got ripped off. Oh, that guy, yeah.

And he makes his decisions by flipping a coin. Always flipping. Thinking about what you're doing here. So there's a story in the Washington Post over the weekend about all of the IG stuff. And the headline was, Prepared for War. And it's got Rudy Giuliani saying,

we want to see if we can have the investigation and special counsel declared illegal and unauthorized based on this IG report. Now, whether it's the IG report, whether it's the FISA warrant, whether it's the IG report, whether it's the FISA warrant, whether it's the release of the memo, I mean, it's like they will not stop. They have conspiracy after conspiracy after conspiracy,

and all they are looking to do is the moment when Bob Mueller issues a report on obstruction, and if that report happens to say that Donald Trump is guilty of obstructing justice or has tried to obstruct justice in some way and recommends impeachment, then things are going to get bad. I know. I guess my question is, how important is it for Democrats to win the war of public opinion when this report comes out?

Because we know, we've said a million times, this Congress is certainly not going to impeach Donald Trump no matter what happens. No, we've said a million times this Congress is certainly not going to impeach Donald Trump no matter what happens. But like, you know, what do we owe the public when this report comes out and everyone at Fox and Rudy and all the rest of them say this is illegal? Mueller should be fired. I think there's two questions embedded in that. One is, should we fight to win the war of public opinion generally? The answer there is obviously yes. They're launching a despicable misinformation campaign to undermine our institutions. The good news there is the American people that aren't a subset of the Americans who watch Fox News,

Fox News every day, they get that. They want to see Mueller complete his work. Poll after poll shows that people want to see this come to its conclusion. And I think people are, you know, I think people respect this process and ultimately respect Robert Mueller. Then there's, I think, a second question is what do we do about a misinformation campaign being run through Fox and Breitbart and Republicans in Congress like Devin Nunes? And I think the truth is we don't have a good answer for that. We don't really know how to combat misinformation from Fox to people who watch Fox.

I think it's one of the great challenges because if we knew the answer, Donald Trump wouldn't be president. And the other thing that keeps happening here is this misinformation campaign keeps getting packaged up as process story, which gets told to the Washington Post. And like, more power to them for reporting it out. It's a very legitimate, important story. But it's a vehicle for how they launder the fact that they're planning to lie and distort what happened and politicize what could be the most serious findings ever found against a sitting U.S. president in the history of our country, at least since Nixon, as a political fight. And we can't allow that frame. But also, I think the media needs to say, you know, those are not the terms on which this is going to be fought. This is going to be about what he did or didn't do. And this is incredibly

important. I'm not worried about the Fox viewers. I mean, I am worried about them because they're destroying our country. But their electoral choices are destroying our country. With golf course views, they destroy the country. Yeah, exactly. They're fine, but they're electing people who are really ruining things.

But there's independents. There's wavering Democrats. There's wavering Republicans. And you do worry that the more the media feels the need to put out both sides of this debate, quote unquote debate, between Trump and Giuliani and Nunes and Fox News and the rest of the country, that there's some people who are like, well, I think Donald Trump might have obstructed justice. But also maybe those FBI agents were out to get him. Who knows? Or maybe they shouldn't have. Maybe the administration shouldn't have wiretapped that guy. Maybe that was illegal. You know, like you start wondering what breaks through.

One thing that I was thinking about because I was kind of disconnected for a week because I was on vacation, you know. Great. Good for you. One thing that was actually hard was when I came back, I was like, what is happening? Oh, yeah. What was that like? It's really, really hard. What is an IG report what is an ig report what happened in the ig report what which is like you know and and i think a lot of times especially the kind of liberals on twitter get bogged down in this debate

over whether maggie haberman calls something a lie and honestly you know you spend your time how you want to spend your time but i i don't i'm not gonna spend my time doing that but uh i think one thing that i would like to see us concern ourselves more with is less policing the specific words The journalists use and asking a larger question Did people at the end of this day understand what happened by reading and watching the news? And I think some days the answer is yes I think today the answer is yes Yeah

People who turned on the news who read briefly who just dipped in a little because they were busy I think you got a sense that what the Trump administration is doing is inhumane and that they're lying about it. I think that comes through. But when it comes to the IG report, when it comes to more complicated legal matters, when it comes to more debatable questions that aren't directly around things people understand like healthcare, it's really, really hard to understand what's going on. And so I think we should spend a little less time worrying about word choice

and a little bit more time worrying about whether the actual facts are getting out there or we're already into the second meta debate and the third meta debate. Also, though, just one quick other note about Fox. I mean, if you were watching Fox, you saw Ann Coulter turn to the camera, address Donald Trump directly and say the crying immigrant children are child actors and that he should not fall for it. So like that dystopian crazy reality is happening on one network watched by millions of people. And it's like, we, we, there's no end to the damage that is causing. There is no end. I do think to what you were just saying, Levitt, the reason there is a difference between the family separation policy and the Mueller

investigation is the Mueller investigation is never going to be a level playing field because on one side, you've got Trump who runs the entire federal government and Congress and now he runs Congress because Devin Nunes is his errand boy. And so he's got Congress on his side and he's got an entire propaganda network. And they can get their message together and talk all day long. Mueller is not supposed to be saying anything. So it's all secrets. It's all, you know, the investigation's going along.

No one knows it. There's been, it's been fairly leak-free from Mueller's end. And so there's so many things that they can't say. They can't defend themselves when they need to. They can't put a message out about the investigation. So they're always going to be at a disadvantage. And the Trump people know that. And they're playing that game.

Yeah, one thing I was thinking about was just the fact that one person who has been successful at fighting that kind of a battle over legal matter is michael avanadi right because he's such a cool and like seemingly perfect guy uh he's like an us weekly came to life and became a lawyer yeah yeah us Weekly went to – It's worked for him. He's winning with the tabloid antics. It's weird. It's kryptonite. Yeah, but what I was thinking is that Trump can succeed in some of these arguments because he is relentless.

He's a hustler. He's a liar, and he'll out-endure you. He will just keep going, and people run out of steam. And there's no one Democrat who says, I'm the guy that speaks in defense of this investigation. I'm the person who will go out and fight every single day and push back on every single one of these things. There's no, and it can't just be a spokesperson. It would have to be a senator who said, I'm taking this on just because I want to and just because I care and I'll never stop. And it would be great if we had somebody

willing to step up and do that. Ideally someone not up for a while. But I do think that voice is missing. Not someone who's like the leader of the party, but a person who's like – Adam Schiff does a pretty good job of it. Adam Schiff does a fantastic job. But he's got a bunch of answers to their questions and real responsibilities. And he can't say everything that he knows. Same thing for Mark Warner.

Same thing for a number of other senators. But I think there could be somebody – Chris Murphy could be somebody who could do this. Many others could do this. Senator Schatz is doing who could do this. Many others could do this. Senator Schatz is doing a pretty good job. Schatz could do this. But like somebody said, and it would be their colleagues saying that they're for this too, that when there's a Mueller question, you go to this person and they are, we are in a campaign.

Trump is in a campaign. He started his campaign right after the election was over, which is unprecedented. They are in a campaign mode every day. And Democrats are in their own campaigns, but we are not in a national campaign. And maybe we should start on the Mueller issue issue start thinking a little bit more that way and look and that's what trump's going to try to do on this family separation policy too this is his whole thing he is he's trying he tries to wear us down yeah he knows i will get a lot of shit for it i'll get awful coverage but i will just keep going i will not back down i'll keep

tweeting about it i'll keep lying i'll have my administration lie i'll have the fox people lie and i will just keep on fucking going and I will wear them down and we cannot be worn down moves the Overton window on the issue and we are all ground down

and we are okay with getting rid of the diversity lottery now or paying for the wall all these positions we didn't hold two years ago based on the political reality and because he's

fucking relentless and it sucks yeah that you will move on before I'm finished lying and when I'm finished lying. And when I'm the one lying, no one else will be here. I'll be the only one standing.

And that's why we can't give up. That's why you got to keep going. That's why, yeah. We sound like broken records, but that is why the only answer to all of these problems is kicking his ass in the midterms in 2018. If we don't show a political cost to Trumpism, it will never go away. Last chance for democracy, November 2018.

Trains leaving the station. That's my new slogan. Let's say second to last chance. That was almost John's new podcast name, but final call. Last call. Last call for democracy. Last stop. This train is going to the depot. Call for democracy. Last stop.

This train is going to the depot. Up next, we will have Tommy's interview with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Farenthold. I am thrilled to have on Pod Save America today David Farenthold, who is a reporter for The Washington Post. He recently won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2017 for his reporting on the Donald Trump and Donald Trump Foundation. We here at Pod Save America have been huge fans of your work for a very long time. So it's great to finally have you on the show, David. Hey, thank you for having me on. Have you ever gotten confused for Blake Farenthold when booked and then done the whole interview in, you know, just sort of in a character? It has. No. First, the first question, yes. Second question, no. Several times I've gone to do a TV appearance and there's a picture of Blake Farenthold, you know, warning the crew to be on the lookout for this man.

Or people have said to me, like, oh, thanks for coming on, Congressman. Unbelievable. But no, it's the Blake Farenthold ethos is hard to fake. And I haven't wanted to do it wrong and do it injustice. Blake Farenthold, if you Google him, you will find a photo of him in pajamas at a party. He is now disgraced, a former congressman turned lobbyist. But enough about your unique last name. You spent the better part of two years digging into Donald Trump's charity, the Trump Foundation. And you did it in this really cool, like open sourced or crowdsourced kind of way that was totally new

and radically transparent in the Twitter age. Why did you start to focus on the Trump Foundation? And you can you take us through what you found, I guess now several years ago? Yeah, I didn't think when I started this, this was going to be any sort of big deal. I didn't I thought it was going to be a couple of days story. So when I was in Iowa, I didn't think when I started this, this was going to be any sort of big deal. I thought it was going to be a couple of days story. So when I was in Iowa, I was following Trump around Iowa, covering him for the Post and on Iowa caucus day. And one of the appearances he did in Waterloo, Iowa, he did this really odd thing. He stands up on the stage in the middle of his campaign rally and he says, OK, stop the rally. I'm going to give away some money.

And he brings this charity, the officials from this local veterans charity in Waterloo, up on the stage. And he brings out this giant kind of golf tournament looking big oversized check. Publisher's clearing house. Right, exactly. And it says Donald J. Trump Foundation as sort of the payor of the check. And on the bottom it says, make America great again. So the campaign slogan on the bottom, the charity slogan on the top where the payor's name goes. He gives them this $100,000 check.

They say, oh, Mr. Trump, you're so generous. Thank you so much for this. They sit down, and the rally resumes. And I thought, well, that's weird. I've never seen anybody do that before, give away charity money during the middle of a presidential campaign. The reason is basically because it's illegal. That's what no one did. Totally illegal.

Blatantly illegal. You might as well have stamped on the check, this is an illegal contribution. Right. One of the bedrock, I didn't know this before I started this, but one of the bedrock principles of American charity law is that you can't take the money in your charity and spend it to buy things for yourself. And you can't take the money in your charity and use it to help a political campaign, much less your own political campaign. So I got interested in that just because there was money involved and it was sort of concrete.

You know, so much of covering Trump is like, well, he said that. Did he really mean it? Will he say it again? Does he know what he's talking about? In this case, I like the concreteness of the money. So I wanted to know, you know, where did he get that money? You know, where did it come from? Who else has he been giving money to?

And I thought, again, this would just be a couple of days. It turned out that Trump had had this fundraiser. He was having this feud with Megyn Kelly. So this is kind of hard to imagine now in retrospect, but he was feuding with Fox News. So he skips a Fox News debate in Iowa. He has a televised fundraiser, kind of a telethon kind of thing for himself where he says he raises $6 million for veterans. That's where the money that I saw him give away had come from. It was other people's money that had come into his foundation through that telethon. And I thought, well, you know, I'll just ask where the rest of the money went. We'll learn something about Trump from seeing who he gave this $6 million of other

people's money to. And it turned out that was not a short story. That was the beginning of a very, very long saga, trying to get the answers first about those veterans donations and then about a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. And just again, just to set a little more context, most of the money donated to the Trump Foundation was from other people not named Donald Trump. Right. I think people you see, oh, rich guy with a foundation and must just assume it's his cash. But that's not the case here. Right. One of the things that Trump that you learn about Trump through this whole line of coverage, and we've learned more about him since he became president, is that he he looks for honor systems and exploits them. He finds places where people obey the rules, not because they're forced to by the cops or something, but because everybody else obeys the rules. And it would be seen as a loss

of face not to obey the rules. And he's willing to accept that loss of face for the benefit that comes from breaking the rules. So one example of this is the Donald J. Trump Foundation, right? So everybody else in Palm Beach or New York, wherever you hang out, if there's a rich guy with his name on the foundation, it's his money. He gives the money to the foundation, the foundation gives the money away. But it's all originally his. Because who would do otherwise? Who would give away somebody else's money with their own name attached?

That would be shameful. And so Trump exploited that often during the campaign and before to where he took in money from other people. As you said, during the campaign, it was from these other donors from this telethon. Before then, oddly, it was from Vince McMahon. The biggest donor to the Trump Foundation for many years had been Vince and Linda McMahon. They had given $5 million. So for years, Trump was giving people Vince McMahon's money with his name attached,

with Trump's name attached, and people thought, hey, I got a donation from Donald Trump. Yeah, and lucky for Linda McMahon, she was made head of the Small Business Administration by Donald Trump. So not a bad payoff. Okay. So fast forward a little bit. The New York Attorney General filed a suit against President Trump and his three eldest kids. And to a lay person like myself, this sounds pretty serious. The New York AG accused Trump and his kids of, quote, persistently illegal conduct. We know that Trump was personally directing charity money to be used to pay off a legal settlement at Mar-a-Lago. She asked that the charity be dissolved and that Trump be banned from leading any other charity in New York or nonprofit in New York for 10 years.

Can you help us explain, understand the allegations and how serious they are? Sure. These are very serious allegations. One thing to say at the beginning is that the New York AG does not actually have jurisdiction to bring criminal charges in a case like this, a case involving nonprofit law. So this is sort of as hard as she can go at somebody for misusing their nonprofit. And when I've talked to nonprofit experts about the allegations laid out in this lawsuit, they say, look, basically every way you can misuse a nonprofit, every category of violation, Trump basically hit all of them, and there's only a few that he missed. What she did looking back was to see that for years, even though the foundation, the Trump Foundation is a tax-exempt charity, by law, it's independent, has its own directors, it has its own goals, it's an independent entity, He had treated it like his own pocketbook. He had treated it sort

of as another pocket of his wallet. If Trump wanted something that a nonprofit had, he paid out of his foundation, even though that's not how it works, right? He used the money in his foundation to, as you said, pay off a couple different instances where his for-profit businesses had gotten into legal trouble and the for-profit businesses, it was Mar-a-Lago in one case, it was a golf course in another, those for-profit businesses had said, okay, fine, to settle this legal trouble, we'll make a donation to a charity. And instead of the for-profit business doing it, the nonprofit, Trump's foundation, paid instead. And so I think in Trump's mind, his excuse has been, well, look, a charity got paid in the end, so how

could this be bad? But look, in those cases, the charity was going to get paid anyway. The question is whether the business was going to do it or Trump's foundation was going to do it. And so in those cases, Trump's foundation steps in and saves his businesses $258,000. Yeah, that's a lot. And then one example that I always come back to because it's so funny is this portrait, this missing portrait. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so in the course of my reporting in 2016,

we found this instance where Trump had used, there was such a charity auction at Mar-a-Lago where they were auctioning off art. And I think people had figured out that if you want to sell art during a gala at Mar-a-Lago, you should paint a picture of Trump and bring it because there's no way no one else is going to buy it. And if Trump doesn't buy it, it will go unsold.

And what a great loss of face that will be that no one wants to buy Donald Trump's face in Donald Trump's own house. Yeah, because it looks like the painting from Ghostbusters 2 or maybe it was Ghostbusters 1, Zool or whatever. Anyway, sorry to interrupt. So Trump in this case, it happened twice, but in the case we're talking about now, Trump pays $10,000 for this portrait of himself, which is fine. He uses his charity's money to pay for it, to pay the $10,000. Now, the underlaw, the charity owns that painting, and the painting must be used for a charitable purpose. So, okay, I was trying to imagine, what would a charitable purpose be

for a giant portrait of Donald Trump? Maybe it's in a hospital someplace. Maybe it's in a charter school. I don't know. Who knows what kind of – that would have been maybe a questionable aesthetic decision, but it would have been okay by the law. I need to know where that portrait is. And the Trump people wouldn't tell me. I asked them all kinds of different ways. They wouldn't tell me where it was. So I just basically asked people on Twitter, look, here's a picture of what

I'm looking for. I need to know where it is now. And a reader of mine, Alison Aguilar, had this idea. She said, she looked at it and she said, look, this painting is too ugly to be hung in Trump's own house. He's going to inflict it on the public. And so she starts looking at the TripAdvisor page for Doral, this golf resort Trump owns outside of Miami. And she sees, okay, you know, there's like 400 pictures of everything. The buffet, people's bathrooms. I mean, you would not believe the stuff people had posted, the, like, user photos of Doral. 300 photos in, she finds a picture of this portrait that I'm looking for.

Incredible. like user photos of Doral. 300 photos in, she finds a picture of this portrait that I'm looking for hanging on the wall of the sports bar at Trump's Golf Club, decorating the wall of the sports bar, which is definitely not a cherry. No, no. She is a genius. That anecdote, I think, outlines the genius of the open source reporting strategy because there's no way you could have gotten into every single one of these locations, right? I mean, they're mostly private clubs. No, mostly they're private. Yeah, so I would have sent freelancers to all these places and maybe we would have found it, but it would have taken a couple of days. And then a lot of the

places are, the clubs are private. So you could never be sure if you didn't find it, that it wasn't someplace you just couldn't get into. So yeah, that was genius. It was like, I felt sort of lazy because I put this question out there and then basically other people solve the entire mystery while I was just watching it happen on Twitter. Hey, that's called leadership. So let's dig into some of these allegations because the great thing about an attorney general investigation is they can get access to documents that you can't. One of them, one of my favorites,

is an email from Corey Lewandowski, who we all know and love, that basically says, hey, can we distribute some money this week in Iowa right before the caucuses? I see that and I think that is about as obvious a campaign finance violation as it gets. And it certainly fits a pattern of misuse of these funds for political candidates. He improperly sent the Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi, $25,000 back in the day and had to pay a fine for that.

But you made a very important point earlier about jurisdiction. Now, the New York Attorney General cc'd essentially the IRS and the FEC, the Federal Elections Commission, on this complaint. Is this all now in the hands of an FEC that has been totally defanged? Or what do you think the future lies for more charges potentially coming in this case? Well, you're right about that. So this is now the IRS court and the FEC's court. The FEC is kind of dysfunctional by nature, but especially dysfunctional now.

They have to all get together, Republicans and Democrats, to do anything, and it seems like they aren't doing very much. The IRS was interesting to me. So if you read the referral, the lawsuit that the New York AG gives to the IRS, she basically, in tax lawyer terms, telegraphs, look, I think this is criminal conduct because tax law is different than other kinds of law. You don't have to prove – if I rob a bank, you don't have to prove that I knew it was illegal to rob a bank.

You can just prove that I robbed the bank and that's enough to convict me. Tax law is so complicated. You have to prove to the jury that the defendant understood tax law, knew what the infraction was, and then did it anyway. That's called willfulness. Was the conduct willful and knowing? And in the lawsuit that the New York AG lays out, she describes Trump's conduct as willful and knowing and lays out, you know, he signed this paperwork showing that he understood the rules even after he broke them. That's, you know, trying to hand the IRS as much as she can in a silver platter a criminal case. Now, we know the IRS has been decimated by budget cuts after the Lois Lerner scandal a few years ago.

And it would not just be the IRS. It would be the DOJ that would have to charge Trump. So there's a lot of steps down the road. I still think it's extremely unlikely. But the AG was trying to tell them, look, I have made this case for you. The evidence is there. Yeah. A former IRS official told the New York Times that there were several cases where people were criminally prosecuted for filing false charitable tax returns. And the difference with Trump here is that those cases were, quote, all less egregious.

Yes, exactly. I mean, do we need better laws? Do we need to – how is it possible that there may not be any additional follow-up on this from a legal perspective given that kind of quote? Well, I don't want to prejudge it because we don't know what's going to happen here. One thing that really surprised me about dealing with the IRS in this story in general, even before Trump was elected, was how we all are afraid of the IRS. And if you know anybody, my wife's family has a small family foundation, and they do everything by the book. They meet every year, and they go by Robert's rules of order. And the IRS is hanging over all of that, right? They want to dot every I, cross every T to make sure everything is perfect

because they don't want to run afoul of the IRS. It turns out the IRS is not watching a lot of the time. The honor code enforces a lot of the law, and the IRS is not watching a lot of the time. The honor code enforces a lot of the law and the IRS is not really spot checking very often. So it's not surprising to many people that Trump got away with this stuff for so long because the IRS just doesn't check up on people, except in really, really big cases. And Trump's foundation was never that big and never had that much money. So certainly their enforcement has been cut back. I don't want to prejudge it and say they're not going to do anything, But certainly they are. They've never been as omnipresent as we thought they were. And now they're even less and less aggressive because they have fewer people. It's a Vodka because they were all on the board and they were supposed to provide some sort of oversight of all its donations and spending.

That board has not met since 1999. One guy quoted said he didn't know he was on the board. He was one of the most important members of the board. He was completely unaware he was even on it. Like I'm laughing because that's all I can do now and not cry. But how big a deal is that element of this? The total like lack of giving a shit about, you know, the board you're on. Yeah, that is the heart of the Trump Foundation is that they,

as I said, they treated it as basically just another checkbook for Donald Trump to write checks out of. And they, because the IRS requires him to file annual reports on the annual reports, they, they acted like a regular charity. They listed, as you said, Don Jr., Eric Ivanka as directors. In some cases, they said they worked half an hour a week on it. They listed this guy, Alan Weisselberg, who you talked about earlier. He listed him as the treasurer. On paper, they checked off all the boxes that they were doing the things that a normal foundation did. In practice, they did none of it. They didn't have a board meeting since 1999. Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka. The idea behind all this is that this is not, you know, this foundation is not a possession of Donald Trump. It is an independent entity with its own goals. And so the directors are supposed to make sure whoever's running it, in this case Trump, is not just misusing it for his own purposes.

And they seem, according to that lawsuit, were, you know, completely asleep at the wheel. Do you think the board didn't meet because of Y2K concerns? It's never too early to come back. Our data could crash. It wasn't even the same people. I mean, Eric and Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka weren't even on the board back then. It was some other set of people. So as far as I know, they never met.

They were never, you know, their board never met. That joke just alienated all of our millennial listeners. their board never met. That joke just alienated all of our millennial listeners. Okay, so I read your reporting, you know, for years that I read, you know, the reports based off this AG's letter or filing and thought, this is blockbuster stuff. The president and his family are accused of serious illegal conduct. But somehow, we've fallen right back into a conversation about Hillary Clinton's fucking emails and a text sent by some, you know, FBI guy. Does that drive you crazy? Have we lost the ability to sustain focus on complicated investigative journalism like the stuff you do?

It's just a different environment. I mean, there's so many other stories out there. I mean, when I used to imagine the person reading my stories, you know, when I started in the business, it was like somebody sitting down at their desk with a cup of coffee and they're reading the, you know, they're shirking work and reading my story on their desktop. And I had their undivided attention, right? Now I imagine, you know,

there's a scene in one of the Superman movies where Superman's father gets picked up by a tornado. I imagine someone who's been spit out of a tornado. You know, they're like covered in garbage, disoriented, you know, and so I feel like it's my job to try to reach people where they are, right? I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on. So I'm trying to do things that will let people follow my thread of reporting, you know, today, even when I'm not writing, and I'll have an

individual story in the paper. To me, that also means like getting other people to write about, I'd like to have more people writing about these stories and have been recently, just because that helps sustain people's focus and help people sort of grab onto that thread and hold onto it even when they're in the tornado. Yeah. I mean, you were like – you were so good at – you smelled some smoke and you assumed there was a fire and you just chased it down until you found that fire or you had some – finally some legitimate oversight from New York officials to help you find the fire. You've also been writing on the Trump organization, which is his family business. And you were a part of the reporting team at the Post that took a deep dive into how after decades of using debt to finance big purchases, Trump started spending hundreds of millions of dollars in cash in the decade or so before he became

president. What do you think we're going to learn from that story? Is there, is there another iteration of that kind of reporting to figure out why he started throwing cash around? Because people are saying that it looks like money laundering. There's all sorts of not entirely substantiated allegations, but certainly again, there is some smoke here, right? For us, the next step is to try to check out what Eric Trump, so Eric Trump gave an explanation of why they switched from, you know, years and years and years of borrowing – doing what – for years they did what – a sort of extreme version of what other real estate companies do. You buy big things and you borrow money because it allows you to buy bigger things.

There's a whole industry built on the idea that you borrow money to buy buildings. And then they stopped. They started buying things in all cash, which nobody does. And there's a lot of reasons why it's riskier. You know, you can't buy as many things. So they stopped doing this, started buying things in cash from 2006 to 14. And Eric Trump's explanation when you ask him is, well, we have so much cash. We were rolling in cash from our existing businesses.

They just turned off so much cash every month. We didn't need to borrow. You know, we wanted to just take money out of the monthly cash flow and spend it on these buildings. And so what we're doing now is trying to check that out. Does anything about the Trump's finances, assets in that period lend credence to his theory that they're like Scrooge McDuck, that they have so much cash coming in every week that buying things in cash is no big deal and is more convenient? Why get a loan if you don't need the money? That's the story we're trying to sort of understand now in that period

from 06 to 14. Yeah. I mean, if anyone could concoct a reason to turn away from historically low interest rates to start using all cash, I guess it's Eric Trump, noted genius. The other smoking story that I've been reading about in the Washington Post is that Ivanka and Jared made $82 million in outside income in 2017 while they were still serving in the White House itself. You know, it seems quaint to remember when we were talking about various provisions in the Constitution, like the Emoluments Clause that prevented the president from taking money from foreign entities. But there's also basic conflicts of interest. Is that another avenue that you think reporters will start to run down when there's talk of you know Ivanka getting trademarks or hotels

opening overseas etc yes I mean we are the part that I know about better is the is the main Trump organization I don't know that much about Ivanka and Jared but there's been a lot of scrutiny on that because as you said there's uh you know I don't see I don't have any evidence that what she reported was illegal but we have to understand the connections that she and Jared have to companies overseas, to companies that may be tied to national governments, especially in the Middle East, the UAE, the Saudis, they all control an enormous amount of money. Jared's company is in the real estate business, someplace where huge amounts of money kind of come and go to understand the connections he has to players in those countries. I'm sure the people involved in the Middle East conflict are trying to understand it. It's going to shape the way they see Jared. So I'm trying to do the same thing.

My final question for you. I have never seen an administration lie like this one. Trump is out there blaming these horrific immigration policies on Democrats. Scott Pruitt is as corrupt as they come. Steve Bannon was on ABC yesterday and was allowed to say that he doesn't think Trump has ever lied. How do you deal with an administration that doesn't give a shit about the truth? And what ways are you guys trying to cut through that spin and just get to facts? I think the sort of coverage of what's happening at the southern border where families are being separated by the Trump administration has been a really – like I think you've seen a real evolution just in the last few days of the way we've covered sort of persistent falsity from the Trump administration. days of the way we've covered sort of persistent falsity from the Trump administration, or in some cases, persistent, you know, conflicting stories from, you know, one part of the administration

saying it's Democrats fault, one part of saying, it's our fault, we like it, this is the right thing to do. Kristen Nielsen yesterday was saying it wasn't, it wasn't even happening. I think you've seen some really encouraging to me trends, one, people sending reporters out to ground truth what's going on, to learn as much as they can from the people down there, you know, not relying on the administration as the arbiter of facts about this, you know, going out and finding the actual facts and making that the headline, making that the story. And then whatever Trump says about it, if it's at variance with whatever the facts actually are, goes down in the story, goes below. And then there's been times,

I think the New York Times, to praise a competitor, has done a good job with this, especially the last few days. When Trump says something, you know, the headline is not Trump says X, and then the secondary head is, but X is false. It's Trump falsely says X. They did that this morning with his false claim about the crime rate in Germany. Like it's becoming to where the falsehood is the first thing you see, which I think in certain cases is absolutely warranted. If what he's telling you is known by everyone to be false, say that first. Otherwise, you risk passing on something that people will just read part of and think that Trump is telling the truth. Yeah. I think willful lying by the president of the United States is the main story of this era at the moment. Because facts matter, I just want to clarify that the painting is Vigo the Carpathian

from Ghostbusters 2. Fantastic movie if you haven't seen it. David Fahrenthold, you are one of the best in the business. Everyone should subscribe, pay money

to get the Washington Post to get your great work and get you guys more people on your team and another Pulitzer and thank you for all you're doing to help us understand

what the hell's going on. Hey, thanks, man. I'll talk to you soon. All right. Last call for democracy. Next stop, Venezuela. Thanks, Dave and Ferenhold for joining us today. And we'll be on the road at the end of the week. And you guys will hear us Friday morning. You'll hear the Atlanta show. Cool. Talk to you then. You'll hear the Atlanta show. Cool. Talk to you then. Bye. Trains are cool. you