Pod Save America - “No exoneration.”

Episode Date: March 25, 2019

Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara joins to walk through Attorney General William Barr’s 4-page summary of Robert Mueller’s final report, as we talk about what it all means and what comes next. Then we discuss Kirsten Gillibrand’s announcement speech, Bernie Sanders’s big rallies and mosque visit, and Kamala Harris’s new plan to increase teacher pay. Also – Pod Save America is going on tour! Get your tickets now: crooked.com/events.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, we're going to talk about Attorney General William Barr's cliff notes version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, which is something that now exists. And because the three of us only play legal experts on Twitter, we will be joined in this conversation by the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. Then we're going to talk about the latest 2020 news, a race that is all but lost for the Democrats who have been planning on running against Mike Pence this entire time. Woe is us. Before we do that,

there are still some tickets left to our New England shows in April, which you can get at crooked.com slash events. We're also adding Pod Save America and Love It or Leave It shows in San Jose and San Francisco in September. And pre-sale for those tickets starts Wednesday, March 27th at 10 a.m. with pre-sale code Crooked. Check it out. One thing to add, Love It or Leave It was supposed to be off this week, but with And presale for those tickets starts Wednesday, March 27th at 10 a.m. with presale code CROOKED.

Check it out. One thing to add, Love It or Leave It was supposed to be out this week, but with the Mueller news, we're adding a show. So Love It or Leave It will be out this Saturday. Wow, breaking news. Buckle up. Okay, let's get to the big news. Two days after Robert Mueller submitted the final report on his investigation into the Russian attack on our elections, Attorney General William Barr released a four-page letter to lawmakers about the special counsel's report. Barr's letter quotes the following direct line from Mueller's report, quote,

The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. Barr says that this was, quote, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign, and he defines those election interference activities as the social media campaign and the theft and dissemination of Democratic emails. Barr's letter also quotes another direct line from Mueller's report with regards to whether Donald Trump obstructed justice, quote, While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him. But while Barr says Mueller did not draw a conclusion on whether the president obstructed justice, Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, quote, have concluded that the evidence is not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.

Okay, here to help us understand what all of this means, former U.S. attorney, current host of the Stay Tuned podcast, and the author of the new book, Doing Justice, A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law, Preet Bharara. Preet, thanks for joining us. Absolutely, my pleasure. Good time for your book tour, huh? Yeah, I was going to call my book, The Mueller Report, unredacted. See if it would sell well, but yes. So I want to start with the Russian election interference part of the letter before we

move on to the obstruction part. Did any of that wording raise any additional questions or red flags for you? You know, not as much as what we'll talk about next, obstruction. I mean, people have been talking about the difference between the quote from the Mueller report and the language used by Bill Barr. And, you know, they're slightly different. et cetera. And separate from that, and distinct from that, Bill Barr's letter said the special counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated. So, you know, you could have an argument about whether or not there was some quantum of evidence that suggested there was a conspiracy, but it just wasn't to the level that you might want to bring a criminal case, or to say something more negative about, you know,

that conduct that related to the coordination potentially with Russia. So I don't see it. I mean, obviously, all of this, and people should think of this whole letter as a sanitized and streamlined and shortened and highly abridged version of what is actually in the Mueller report, and take everything a little bit with a grain of salt, right? Because it seems to me a little bit of a gambit. I'm not saying any of it's necessarily in bad faith, but it looks a little bit like a gambit to put in the minds of people an imprint of an assessment

of the Mueller report that's only four pages, that's very favorable to the president, and some of it certainly is, but I don't know that it's as favorable as this letter makes out. And maybe people are hoping that there's going to be enough of a gap between this letter coming out and the full report being known to the public, if it is, that this imprint will be left in people's minds. Yeah. I mean, how likely do you think it is that Mueller's report contains evidence of other interactions between Trump campaign officials and Russians that may not have just met the bar of a conspiracy charge. Like, I keep thinking, you know, what about Don Jr. saying, I love it, when offered Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton, right? Like, do you think that the Mueller report probably talks about these issues and then just says, and here's why we couldn't prosecute on them? Or what's your expectation there? Yeah, I would expect it would. But, you know,

there's this great difference between what it appears the Mueller report says about collusion and what it says about obstruction. On the obstruction, and we're going to get to that in a second, just to draw the contrast, it appears that the special counsel sort of set forth all the bases on which you might find obstruction and all the bases on which you might find mitigating factors. So we know from that, with respect to that summary, that on the obstruction part, there was like a laying out of facts. And no, no decision, but it was all sort of set forth and unspooled. I don't know that that's happened on the Russian interference side, but I would expect it would be, because I think Mueller knows that history is going to judge how thorough he was and whether there are gaps and omissions in his analysis and his investigation. Whether we'll see all that is obviously a separate question that I'm sure we'll

talk about, but I would expect him to be thorough and it would be in the report. Let's talk about obstruction for a second. So I want to divide it because I feel like there's been a lot of conversation about what Barr meant, what Mueller actually has. So I want to talk about it in terms of substance and then process. In terms of substance, Barr basically says that what Mueller lays out, even though Mueller doesn't reach a conclusion, doesn't rise to the level of an offense of obstruction of justice. What is your interpretation of the substance of what Barr said based on what we know publicly about the lengths Trump went to obstruct justice across various investigations. Yeah, it sounds like, look, the problem with Barr and his weighing in on this,

when it's supposed to be the determination of the special counsel, that's point one, problem one, that you have a direct appointee of the president who is weighing in on this when it was supposed to be someone else's responsibility. Then point two is that Bill Barr already seems to have had an opinion of this in that famous memo that he apparently sent unsolicited to the Justice Department about whether or not certain actions, if they were within the authority of the president, could constitute obstruction, like the firing of Jim Comey. And it seems like that is his legal view. And it didn't much matter, although I can't tell, but it didn't much matter what the facts would show. And so in the absence of Bob Mueller making a determination about whether or not a crime was committed, Bill Barr, right on cue, sort of swoops in to say, no crime here, even though Mueller and his team spent 22 months investigating it,

couldn't come up with a conclusion. Barr was able to do so in 48 hours. couldn't come up with a conclusion, Barr was able to do so in 48 hours. Do you believe that Mueller was leaving the conclusion up to Barr, or do you believe that Mueller was intending the conclusion to be left up to Congress? Do you believe Robert Mueller was surprised on Sunday? I don't know how much he was surprised. I think this is really the most important question, or one of the most important questions about the whole document. My view has been that he was, the way I put it is, you know, Bob Mueller was punting to Congress because he didn't want to make this ultimate decision. And Bill Barr came off the sidelines, caught the ball and ran it into the end zone for

a touchdown for Trump, which was not what Mueller was expecting. Now, you know, you could say, I guess, once Mueller decided that he wasn't going to make a determination and just lay out the facts on one side and the other and not decide himself that he might have, he's a smart guy and his people are smart people. He might have anticipated that Bill Barr would put his own, you know, sort of spin and conclusion on it. But I'm not sure that's what was intended. It would be nice to see what was in the document that Mueller wrote. In other words, Mueller could have very easily said, we leave it to others within the department.

And it's possible Mueller said, we leave it to others, including the department or Congress. Maybe it's the case that he's totally silent on who he was punting to, but until we see the document, we don't know. So I guess I wanted to help people just step back and understand the broader context of what a declination is. My understanding is that it is not evidence of innocence per se. It means that they did not have adequate admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Is that an accurate way to understand this document? And can you sort of walk listeners through

what this thing was, the process here, kind of the criteria you'd need to meet to prosecute somebody? Yeah. And by the way, might I indulge in a brief reference to my book, because I talk about sort of how the system works and how prosecutors think about these things. There's, I have an entire chapter called walking away and the considerations that you take into account before you decide to either prosecute a case or walk away from a case. And it seems to me that what the Mueller team did, like all good prosecutors do, is you see where there's smoke and you see if there's reasons to investigate something. And remember this whole investigation with respect to Mueller, Mueller's appointment happened in connection with a concern about

obstruction. You know, obviously his first goal was to look at this collusion issue, conspiracy issue, but the only reason there is a special counsel is because all of a sudden, Donald Trump fired Jim Comey and there was this crisis and it looked like it was done for reasons having to do with obstructing the Russia investigation

and he was appointed. So his whole reason for being is because of the second element, the second component of the report, obstruction. So what happens is you go through all the evidence and you decide what favors prosecution. And remember, although it's true that to bring a case against someone with a criminal complaint or through a grand jury indictment, the standard of proof is just reasonable, I mean, probable cause. If you have probable cause, which means it's sort of more likely than not that a particular person committed the particular crime being alleged, it's okay to go and get an indictment against that person. Obviously, that's not enough for most prosecutors because eventually you have to be able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. that's not enough for most prosecutors because eventually you have to be able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. So sometimes you have enough evidence and it's just enough to sort of get your indictment, but you have severe worries that you won't be able to prove it at trial because you

don't have it beyond a reasonable doubt. That could be a reason why, in fact, you know, friends of mine have said that they think that's probably what it was. It was in the twilight zone, the sum in quantum of evidence was in that twilight zone between probable cause and really, really surefire beyond a reasonable doubt. It could be that he decided that unlike normal prosecutors in my office, for example, if I had sort of equal evidence on both sides, and it was a really close question, and maybe other prosecutors would disagree with that, given how serious it is to charge someone with a crime and how you have the presumption of innocence in court, you sort of have a benefit of the doubt idea about people who are going to be charged. And so if it's really close question, probably a lot of people would

think don't charge. And maybe if this was not the president of the United States, for whom accountability can be had through other means, accountability through Congress. My guess is that Bob Mueller would have just said, you know, it was a close question and we decided not to bring charges. He didn't do that here because there's this other option. So it's not like every other case because as we've seen before, and we saw on Watergate, sometimes the special prosecutor wants to lay out the facts for other people to make the decision. It seems to me, as we talk about this even more on day two, that Bob Mueller was really trying to lay out evidence and facts and punt, to use the pejorative, but give it to someone else, the Congress. That's what it really looks like to me.

Yeah. So just one follow-up on that and on the process here. So we had this weekend where at the end of roughly 48 hours of work, there's a four page summary of a 22 month investigation that was dashed off by a guy who applied for the job of attorney general with a memo saying the president can't obstruct justice. That seems weird to me. And then you also have him, the attorney general, deciding that he and Rod Rosenstein were the arbiters regarding obstruction of justice when that's not what happened in Watergate. It's not what happened with Whitewater. It's not what the Constitution says. So how bothered or not are you by that process? I'm kind of bothered by it, you know,

because it was also gratuitous. It seems to be a favor to the president, because as you mentioned in those other cases, so the special prosecutor sets forth facts, doesn't make a determination about whether a crime has been committed or not. It's sort of not necessarily up to Bill Barr, especially since the whole purpose of having the special counsel is to show an arm's length distance from the regular decision-making. Obviously, the independent counsel statute expired, and the special counsel has to, for constitutional reasons, be under the purview in some general way of the attorney general. But this, I think, causes a cloud to be over the whole sort of final handling of it. So I'm pretty bothered about it. And the way to get around concern about it

is to have as quickly as possible, at a minimum, the obstruction portion of the Mueller report made public and given to Congress. So Barr says that their obstruction decision is based in part on the fact that the president wasn't involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. What does he mean by that? And did that make sense to you? Look, so there's this interesting point that people keep making. And on one level, I guess it has some common sense grounding. If you're not familiar with the law, you're not thinking too deeply. And that is, if you're investigating a crime, and during the investigation of the crime, someone lies or obstructs in some way, but there's no crime,

it seems wrong, according to this theory, right or obstructs in some way, but there's no crime, it seems wrong, according to this theory, right? The bar seems to be promoting a little bit. It seems wrong to charge someone with obstructing, you know, the investigation of a crime that did not happen. And that has a very surface appeal. But that's not how the law works. Many, many people have been charged with obstruction when there has not been also an underlying crime charge. Now, sometimes that's the case, because the fact of the obstruction prevented the umpire, to use the analogy, from finding out whether a crime has been committed. So you're investigating someone for narcotics and you have a search warrant and you go into the home and the person flushes

things down the toilet and you can never prove that it was actually the cocaine, but maybe there's a cause of action. Maybe there's a criminal prosecution for obstruction. That might not be the best example, but that's an example where you see that the obstruction itself prevented the investigator from learning the truth. Now, there are other circumstances when it's not quite so clear, not so compelling as that, but think about what it would mean, as Rudy Giuliani keeps saying, that you can't have a circumstance where you charge someone for obstruction, but you can't do that if you don't have the underlying crime charged also. First of all, I'm pretty confident, haven't done the research yet, when Rudy Giuliani had my job as

U.S. attorney, I'm sure the office brought many such cases of obstruction without the underlying count. And later, under another U.S. attorney, Martha Stewart was charged in the same circumstances. But now imagine if the rule were to go forth, what the deterrence issue would be if everybody knew, well, now the cops are investigating me, but I can obstruct. And so long as they don't end up charging me with the thing they're investigating, I'm going to get away with the obstruction too. You got to be really good at obstructing, is what you're saying. If you're going to obstruct justice, if you come at the king, you can't miss. You know what I mean? You got to be really good at obstructing, is what you're saying. If you're good at obstruct justice, if you come at the king, you can't miss. You know what I mean?

You got to get all that cocaine down the fucking drain. I mean, isn't this what happened to Scooter Libby? He went down for obstruction, even though they never actually charged the underlying crime of anyone outing Valerie Plante. Yeah, because it is a separate crime in and of itself. You can't have the rule be, as you were just saying a second ago, and it was a great way to make the point, that, you know, the prosecution has to be able to prove the underlying crime. It's a separate crime to obstruct, and you can't have it. And sometimes it's the case that you can't prove it. Look, there have also been, there have been

charges brought by Bob Mueller that are sort of obstruction type crimes, like lying about something, like lying about a proceeding or an investigation. You know, Michael Flynn was charged with lying and not charged with the underlying crime that was being investigated. It happens all the time. It makes sense that it happens all the time. And the argument that's being made here in the letter, I think, holds no water. I mean, we don't even have to get, we can step out of abstraction. You know, by the Barr standard, if Trump was committed to obstructing justice just to prevent a quid pro quo with Russia,

which may not have constituted a crime, or just to prevent embarrassing information about the conduct of his campaign or his conduct in business from coming out, by Barr's standard, that isn't necessarily a crime, even though it could involve lying to the FBI, trying to tamper with witnesses, trying to suborn perjury, right? I mean, would Barr under questioning be able to defend that argument?

Well, you know, just in fairness to Barr, he has not said, like Giuliani has said on television, that in no circumstances could you charge someone with obstruction unless the underlying crime is also charged. He does say in the letter that one has a bearing on the other. And he says, as I'm looking at it, page three, I think, that on the issue of the underlying crime, he says, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence, meaning absence of such evidence of the underlying crime, bears upon the president's intent with respect to obstruction. So, you know, I don't know if these circumstances hold here because we haven't seen the report, and maybe there's lots of instances of bad things happening with respect to conspiracy.

It just wasn't enough for collusion relating to the election. But you can imagine a hypothetical in which, you know, the person being investigated, you know, really had nothing to do with the thing being investigated. It was a totally innocent bystander. And then later, it appears to have lied about his whereabouts. Um, you know, I suppose there's some connection between the person's non-involvement in the crime and proven non-involvement in the crime and whether or not, uh, the later, what looks like it's misleading

was actually misleading or was an innocent mistake. You know what I mean? That's a limited circumstance. I don't think we have that here. But he does, you know, allow for that exception. But it's also the logic seems so flawed to me because it presumes that Trump would have to know through the duration of his efforts to obstruct justice that his whole team was in fact innocent of the underlying crime. And I find that hard to believe when we know that his idiot son was meeting with Russians and sending stupid fucking emails about their attempted collusion in the process and editing statements on Air Force One about said meeting, right? So it's like, it feels like they're absolving him in a way that logically is fundamentally flawed to me.

Look, by the way, you can also, yeah, I agree. You can also have a circumstance in which, you know, it turns out that the law doesn't make something illegal, but you think, man, you think your intent is to obstruct because you think that they're going to find evidence of a crime you committed, or maybe you did commit the crime, and you lie about it because you don't want other people to be implicated in it. There's all sorts of reasons why in the absence of a charge of the underlying conduct, you could absolutely be found guilty of obstruction. And I think the most important point here is that we need, as I said over and over again, and I think people need to clamor for it, the obstruction portion of the Mueller report needs to become public. And another reason why I think that seems possible is that my guess is that all these reasons why you don't want to make things public, including grand jury secrecy information, secrecy rules relating to information and classified information. It seems to me that the first part of the Mueller report relating to collusion would be more likely to contain, you know, a hefty amount of that kind of material.

My sense of things from the reporting and using common sense, that on the obstruction side, that a lot of that information, a lot of that investigation involved voluntary interviews, doesn't implicate the grand jury, and wouldn't seem at first blush to involve classified information. It was more of a straightforward sort of shoe leather investigation. You talked to a lot of people, you looked at the public statements, you looked at some documents that maybe you got from search warrants and emails and other sorts of things. You put together your narrative and you see. And so I don't see why there's any reason without knowing more that that information can't be made public quickly. So what possible reasons would Mueller have for

not pursuing an interview with Trump, potentially with a subpoena, particularly since he comes to this conclusion that he can't make a determination either way? Well, it sounds like he did pursue on a voluntary basis. And I don't know, that's been a subject that former federal prosecutors have been debating informally the last number of days and weeks. Maybe he thought, my time is limited. I got to get this done quickly. He's not going to come without being compelled. To compel a sitting president is going to be a long, nasty fight that will end up going to the Supreme Court. I'm not going to get anywhere. And it seems, once you go down that, I'm speculating, and he might've thought,

once you go down that path, now we're not and he might have thought, once you go down that path, now we're not talking about 22 months. Now we're talking about 36 months or 48 months. And because you can't abandon it once you go down that path. That may have been the reason. It may have been he thought he had enough information otherwise. I don't know. Sometimes it's the case, if you already have a provable case, which it looks like he didn't on obstruction, at least he just thought it was a close question. You don't have to bother talking to somebody. And sometimes you want to talk to somebody so you can get their point of view and have them explain things, which would be good for doing a complete investigation. But I think there were other considerations here, and that might be why he didn't pursue it on a compulsory basis.

So one other piece of this is the fact that Mueller's not issuing any more indictments and Barr makes clear that there's no more sealed indictments. So the special counsel's investigation is wrapping up. But from the special counsel's investigation, it's thrown off a number of other investigations, particularly in the Southern District. A lot of conservatives and a lot of people in the media who want to claim that this is an unalloyed victory for Trump are saying the fact that there's no new indictments means that we're at the end of this process. We've learned all we need to know. But is it clear to you right now that there might not be more charges emerged from some of the ancillary investigations that have sprung from the Mueller investigation? Yeah, look, that could certainly be the case. And it's not just cases relating to

Michael Cohen in the Southern District. You know, one of the reasons that I incorrectly predicted that the Mueller report was not imminent was you've got Rick Gates, you know, former campaign official and right-hand person to Paul Manafort, just as recently as last week, a letter put in by the special counsel of the court saying he's continuing to cooperate in multiple investigations. So I thought, well, unless they reassign that somewhere else, like they ended up doing, Mueller's work is not done. And so a final report is not called for. So you have that. You have other things that reportedly have been assigned to the Eastern District of Virginia and the National Security Division. Of course, the things that are going

on in my old office that I just read about in the paper. Yeah. So there's a lot of potential future. And also, the Manhattan DA's office may have other things that come from their investigation and prosecution of Paul Manafort. You have the New York Attorney General. So yeah, there are a lot of other things going on. And it's hard to predict, just in the same way that some people really thought that you would have more indictments relating to conspiracy and collusion coming out of the Mueller investigation, and they were wrong. The opposite could also be true. You just don't know. It's speculative.

So are you on board with the idea that Sunday was the best day of Donald Trump's presidency or not? That combined with the prosecution of Michael Avenatti, maybe you could call it a good 36 hours. Also, ironically, by my old office. Look, it almost doesn't matter. Donald Trump, I guess, did a decent job of PR in saying over and over and over again, making the threshold question, was there collusion or not collusion? And even though, you know, in different circumstances, had there been no investigation of collusion, and you had a special counsel say, literally, in writing, on the question of whether or not the President of the United States obstructed justice, and to say in writing, you know,

anticipating, presumably, which I like, presumably anticipating the hot rhetoric that always comes out of Donald Trump's mouth, saying, you know, this court proceeding totally exonerated me. It's total exoneration. There's no collusion, even though the question of collusion was not presented. There was also no donuts. There's no collusion, also no donuts. That's not what was addressed. And so Special Counsel Mueller puts in the report, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him, almost as if he's anticipating the retort from the president. The idea that you have someone like Bob Mueller saying, I did a thorough investigation, and it seems to be the case that there's a, you know, by definition, if you say you couldn't resolve it, and it was a close question, you're saying there's an arguable case that the president of the United States obstructed justice. That should have been a low point in the presidency.

One would hope. Yeah, one would hope. I mean, you know Mueller better than we do. Like, that does seem out of character for Bob Mueller to just use the term, this does not exonerate him, if he didn't feel like it. Right? I mean, is that just us or is that a fact? No, that caught my eye also. And what's interesting,

and, you know, to Bill Barr's credit, he put that sentence in the letter. I mean, of course, I think he had to because, you know, I'm not sure Matt Whitaker would have been smart enough to do that because obviously that sentence will come out later. Yeah, Matt Whitaker is too busy doing deadlifts in the corner not reading this thing.

Can I just ask you, like, is this not a failure? Is this not a failure by Mueller, at least in the near term, to understand the political impact? Because obviously his assignment was criminal in this investigation. But I can't help but compare his silence and whether, you know, that's his fault or Bill Barr's fault is up to others to decide, versus Comey's statement where he exonerated Clinton, but crapped all over her at a press conference and then released a letter right before the election. It's hard not for me to compare the way they rolled out these decisions and the political impact of his relative silence Mueller versus Comey's explosive statements.

Well, if you take them one at a time, I think the Comey's explosive statement has been roundly criticized by most people. He had the peculiar experience of being excoriated by both sides. And then you had Rod Rosenstein actually using that, I think, as a pretextual reason for firing Jim Comey the way he, you know, he uttered disparaging information about Hillary Clinton, who ended up not being charged with anything. So that's probably not the right way to go. There's some argument that, that Mueller, you know, could have said something, you know, typically there's, there's some kind of announcement, uh, and maybe he could have decided, um, you know, to, uh, to make clear that he'd be prepared to testify before Congress. You know,

I don't, I don't know. I think, probably given the megaphone of the president and knowing the lunacy of trying to get into a fight in the mud with the president, just decided to keep quiet. I mean, it's the most silent special prosecutor slash independent counsel we've ever had in history. I've never seen anything like it. But doesn't that suck? I mean, you have a president who's a fucking lunatic, willing to lie and say anything, and he's shutting down. I mean, you have a president who's a fucking lunatic, willing to lie and say anything, and he's shutting down. I mean, look, we're speculating, but that's a very unfortunate outcome of this behavior from Trump.

No, I totally agree. But that's why we need to see the report. Mueller has spoken, you know, not at a microphone and a podium, but he's spoken through his indictments and the complaints and the court filings. And there was a lot said. And I think this report probably says a lot. I mean, I do think that Mueller will care about how history judges the investigation, how thorough he was.

He's also not going to worry that he's disappointed some people who thought that, you know, he would be the savior and deliver America from Donald Trump. But, you know, if he found stuff that's bad, I bet it's laid out in the report. And, you know, I had initially thought that if the report is overall, you know, good for the president, that Bill Barr and others would be rushing

to send it to Congress. I was wrong about that because I hadn't fully appreciated that they would have this, you know, sort of shrewd strategic move of saying the report is great for the president, writing a nice four page letter, you know, giving the highlights of why it's good for the president with, you know, one nod to a negative thing, and then delaying for a

long time while this, as I said at the beginning, while this version of the Mueller memo and report is imprinted on the brains of lots and lots of people. So when later it comes out, well, you know, it was a little bit more of a mixed bag for the president. Everyone's moved on and it's kind of old news. And I worry about that. That's why I think this stuff needs to come out right away. Preet, are there any other burning questions that you have about either the report or the process that we haven't asked you that you're looking forward to having answered? You guys are very thorough. Look, there are some odd things. I keep thinking about Michael Flynn.

Yeah, where's that guy? And the plea he got. I'm not being critical. I'm sure everything was done correctly and in good faith and above board. And sometimes it happens that you give a cooperator a good deal and you think they're providing substantial assistance, but for whatever reason you can't make some further case. assistance, but for whatever reason, you can't make some further case. But you know, there's a lot of stuff with Michael Flynn is working for Turkey, and the weirdness of the potential rendering of this Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen. And I have some interest in this because I had some interactions with President Erdogan, who before Trump became president, tried to get me

fired, all of which, by the way, is outlined in the book. But I'd like to see what happened with that. I don't know what happened. I don't know if that will be in the report. It seems like it might not be because it doesn't really address, it doesn't really fall into the category of Russian collusion or obstruction. But there are little things like that that I think are curious that over time we'll have to figure out what happened. Okay. Preet, thank you so much for walking us through all this.

The book is Doing Justice, A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law Go buy it We're always grateful to have you on this podcast Thank you so much, Preet If you buy enough copies, Don Jr. is convicted Yes, please Alright guys, I want to get into the politics of all this, but I want to start with the last question I asked pre, which is what other questions do you guys have after reading Barr's letter about the investigation?

What are some of the burning questions you're like, hey, what about that? Before we get into the politics of it all. Yeah, so. All of them. My biggest question after reading the bar letter, well, I have two questions. My one big question about the substance is why did so many people lie about all this? Yeah, that's my big one too. There's so many lies around Russia, around Russia interference, around collusion, around the Trump Tower meeting, around what happened on the plane, what happened with Roger Stone.

There's been a lot of allegations from Michael Cohen about all of this. Michael Cohen lied to Congress about this. Flynn's going to go to jail for lying about this. Manafort. So that's my big question on sort of how do all these lies – why did so many people care so much about concealing this? It may not have risen to a crime, but I'm interested in what is in that report short of a crime to explain this behavior. That's one.

My second question is Barr. views on executive power happen to align with what Donald Trump wants to happen, which is that he can't be charged with obstruction or a crime and that all power flows from him as the executive, and therefore he can do whatever he wants at the Justice Department. But that Barr's motivations may be partisan, but he's not a Trump funky. He's not some loser Trump pulled from the bottom of the Republican barrel. He's a serious adult. He's not Rudy. So he's certainly not Rudy, who's lost a step. So my assumption in reading... I don't know, Rudy Giuliani, the smartest legal mind in the game right now. Yeah, that's true.

Rudy Giuliani is the Bill Mitchell of this episode. He's a Rubik's Cube made flesh. Rehnquist meets Mitchell, yeah. So my assumption in reading this Barr letter is he is not going to write something that is dishonest is he is not going to write something that is dishonest to the point where he will be summarily embarrassed and revealed to be a fraud when we actually see the report. So my assumption is that this is defensible. But I want to understand just how much he is doing work for Donald Trump in this memo, specifically around collusion.

Obviously, he's doing a ton of work for Trump around obstruction by basically saying, you know what? Mueller didn't reach a conclusion, but guess what? I can, right? I find that strange, but you kind of, it's doing a ton of work for Trump around obstruction by basically saying, you know what? Mueller didn't reach a conclusion, but guess what? I can. Right. I find that strange, but you kind of it's all out there. But my question is, how much work is he doing to protect Donald Trump on the other matters where we don't know what evidence Mueller gathered? Those are my two big questions. I mean, I really would like to know how you prove or disprove corrupt intent if you never interview the president about the underlying facts. But his intent.

I don't, and I do not think, I understand Preet's, you know, analysis that it would be a really long, onerous subpoena process. But I mean, that is the precedent. And it seems like written questions are completely insufficient. And I think there's a lot of caveats like that, like some of the things Lovett got into, that make this report clearly a mixed bag, which is why it is deeply frustrating, although I guess not that surprising, that the media is willing to treat this as an exoneration and parrot that language from Trump. I mean, we should be clear, This thing could have said, Donald Trump did a daily conference call with Russian intelligence agents

and he would be tweeting, no collusion, total exoneration, right? Like, his spin is nonsense, but- His spin is a constant. I really, yeah, his spin is a constant. I really struggle how we are asked to take seriously a four-page summary of this massive investigation by a hand-picked member of his cabinet who applied for the job, exonerating him.

So I have a couple questions. They're smaller ones. What was with Paul Manafort handing sensitive polling information over to Konstantin Kalimnik, who the FBI has decided is linked to Russian intelligence? What is the significance of that? We heard about it. It only came up in court because Manafort lied and broke his plea deal. Otherwise, we wouldn't have heard about it.

And there was a redaction error. There was a redaction error, right? But that's in there. Why did the Trump campaign, when it was being run by Paul Manafort, seek to change the Republican Party platform at the convention in Cleveland so it was friendlier to Russia? What was that all about? Why did Jared Kushner try to set up a secure back it was friendlier to Russia. What was that all about? Why did Jared Kushner try to set up a secure back channel

communication to Russia during the transition? What was going on there? Who directed Roger Stone to reach out to WikiLeaks? We know that it said in the indictment for Stone, has been directed by a senior member of the campaign. And where's the Jerome Corsi indictment that we've been reading about?

And the Jerome Corsi thing. That was especially strange, by the way, because of ament that we've been reading about. And the Jerome Corsi thing. That was especially strange, by the way, because of a leak, we know that there was actually an agreement drafted, right? There were charges.

And Corsi leaked it. Right. So like, it seems strange to me that there was a, that they got to the point where they were literally writing up the charges

and then we don't hear anything about it. Jerome Corsi, by the way, is a fringe, creepy journalist who lies and creates conspiracy theories about Democrats for decades, including the way, is a fringe, creepy journalist who lies and creates conspiracy theories about Democrats for decades, including saying

Barack Obama is a quiet Muslim. He's a terrible person. He is. Love it. To your first question, why all the lies, you know, to offer the most generous interpretation to all of these flunkies who are going to jail, perhaps they lied because

they knew that if they told the truth, the media would make a big deal about more Trump-Russia connections. And they thought that they could just, that the more Russia stuff that comes out, the more contacts with Russia, the more they talk about, you know, working, talking to Russians,

working with Russians, whatever it may be, that it would hurt Donald Trump and it would hurt his political reputation. And so they thought they could get away with those lies. And they were stupid enough to lie, even though lying to federal officials, to the FBI, to the special counsel's office could land you in jail. I guess that's the most generous interpretation. Yeah.

And that raises another question, too, because in the Barr memo, he talks about tacit or explicit agreement. And I think we are owed an understanding based on the evidence what exactly that means, right? So there's collusion, which I think we've all seen plenty of evidence of. You know, Donald Trump gave a speech calling on there to be a hack. That night they hacked. Don Jr. saying, I love it. So there's evidence of coordination.

There's evidence of Donald Trump wanting the benefit of Russia's involvement in the election. What that technically means to Mueller, what that technically means legally, I don't think we know yet because we haven't seen the underlying description of what they gather. I've also just never understood what collusion means in a legal framework. It doesn't nothing. Right, and I think that's always been a challenge in that we are, it's something that's deeply unethical and un-American and screwed up to coordinate with a Russian, anybody,

intelligence agents, the IRA, their social media farm. But it's not necessarily legal unless you can prove this broader conspiracy, which has been challenging because it all happened in plain sight. And from a legal sense, there were just a couple possibilities with that conspiracy.

It was either a conspiracy directly related to the hacking and dumping of emails. So, you know, communication, coordination with the Russians had to be a conspiracy related to that crime, or it had to be related to the social media campaign, had to be related to that crime. The other theory that some legal scholars put out there was that it was conspiracy to defraud the United States, which went to the, you know, because it is illegal to seek assistance from a foreign government to help you in an election, and that maybe that would be proved.

So clearly, those, like you said, Tommy, it's hard to actually prove conspiracy related to the two election-related crimes, and it was clearly hard to prove one related to, you know, defrauding the United States and committing an election crime, which apparently – what we know now is that the president has only been implicated in a couple of campaign-related felonies, and those have to do with Michael Cohen. Can I just take one other point? I mean the goalposts shift so often that we don't – are we playing football?

I'm not sure. I don't remember. But we know that Trump stood next to Putin in Helsinki and said that he had gotten extremely strong and powerful denial about election interference generally. So if we're exonerating Trump in the sense that we are saying everything he said is actually accurate, the report completely contradicts him. Mueller said they absolutely did, the Russians, try to interfere with the election and he indicted a bunch of Russians for doing so. So, like, we know that there was interference in our election, period. We do. And we know that Trump lied about it. And

we know that Trump lied about it. We know that Trump was told that there was Russian interference in our election as far back as his first intelligence briefing in August of 2016, and yet he continued for months to deny that Russia had any involvement whatsoever. So, you can say that's not a crime. But and David Corn has a great piece about this today in Mother Jones. Like it is a Trump has multiple times Trump has betrayed the country for his own personal gain. He has he has put the Russians view of things ahead of what his own intelligence community has said over and over again. Including about, like, North Korean rockets. That is a fact.

That has been substantiated by everyone. Yeah, you know, it's... I think that, like, stepping back, I think the biggest question for me right now is, you know, we haven't seen the Mueller report. We've read the Barr report of the Mueller report. Right. And we've watched a lot of...

The CliffsNotes version. Right. And now we're doing the Pod Save America report on the Barr report on the Mueller report. And a lot of... The CliffsNotes version. Right. And now we're doing the Pod Save America report on the Barr report on the Mueller report. And a lot of what we'll discuss next is the Pod Save America report on the media report on the Barr report on the Mueller report. There's a lot of... Which is...

Which, by the way, spoiler alert, not a good grade. No, no. Low grade. Doesn't... You know, doesn't... Not a crime. Not exonerated. But the...

But... No exoneration. We're just going to sell yelling no exoneration here. No exoneration. But the... That's sell yelling. No, no exoneration. But the that's episode title or look, or we could say it's clearing a low bar. You know, there's a lot of options. But the but again, what we're talking about then is the interpretation of the interpretation of the interpretation of Donald Trump's conduct, which, again, will be written up, which is why we need the underlying report. But the big question I have is, look, conservatives cheering, overplaying their hand right now. The media, I think, fell into the trap of it and said, oh, look, no collusion was the big headline, right? There's a chance that this feels a little bit like how we felt on election night in 2018, which is it took weeks to discover that what we were actually looking at was,

which is it took weeks to discover that what we were actually looking at was, in the actual substance of what took place, a much better event, a much worse event for Republicans than we realized at the start. The Los Angeles County Registrar is the people digging through the Mueller report right now. Absolutely. And I think because, look, there is a chance that we'll eventually get huge pieces of the Mueller report. And it bears out Barr's reading faithfully, right, that what Barr describes is a fair rendering of what Robert Mueller lays out. However, it is, I think, a good possibility that what we end up with is a document that says, here's a ton of evidence that Donald Trump obstructed justice. And here's a ton of evidence of a huge number of incredibly despicable acts and behaviors that maybe did not rise to the level of a crime, but nonetheless rose to the level of a betrayal of the country. And oh, by the way, here's a list of all the

other people we have indicted and will indict based on this investigation, the culmination of which is a massive, successful investigation into a criminal presidency. We're into the politics, but let me just set it up here. Despite Mueller's specific intention that the report does not exonerate Trump. Trump tweeted, no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration. Keep America great. Later, he said to reporters, quote, this was an illegal takedown that failed and hopefully someone's going to look at the other side. This threat to investigate Democrats and the Obama administration was repeated by Trump's

family, Republican members of Congress, and just about every right-wing pundit in the Fox universe. Meanwhile, the New York Times ran an analysis piece with the headline, A Cloud Over Trump's Presidency Is Lifted, that says, quote, the end of the investigation without findings of collusion with Russia fortified the president for the battles to come, including his campaign for re-election. Guys, how has the political dynamic changed today and how many clouds have really lifted? I mean, look, certainly the fact that there were no further indictments in the report is good news for Trump. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like fact. But again, we don't need to put aside our skepticism. We don't need to put aside our feeling that

it is weird that all these people lied about their connections with Russia. We don't need to put aside our feeling that it is weird that all these people lied about their connections with Russia. We don't have to put aside the fact that we now know, thanks to a lot of what was learned in this investigation, that there was a major campaign finance violation committed by the president of the United States. literally the most sensitive intelligence that exists on the planet while he had done a bunch of things that have led him to be talked to by the FBI for a very long time. So I don't fundamentally think the politics have changed because the politics out in the country have not been about the Mueller report. I think that's pretty well reported, well trodden territory. In DC, the Mueller report is likely to be the beginning of a conversation about the substance of the report that we haven't seen yet. So, again, I just, it would be really great if, I know we don't live in this world where people wait and read documents before commenting on them, but if people would just take a beat and see what the thing says, and then let's decide the political impact.

What a stupid idea, Tommy. I know, I know. I ironically talk about it, but. How should House Democrats handle this? Jerry Nadler, head of the Judiciary Committee, has joined every other Democrat on the planet in demanding the full report be released. And he also said this on Fox. Quote, the job of Congress is much broader than the job of a special counsel. Right. We have to look for abuses of power. We have to look for obstruction of justice. We have to look for corruption. How hard and publicly should House Democrats be looking for these things? Some people are saying, oh, this is going to take the wind out of the sails of the House Democrats' investigations. I think it's really important that they go very hard. And I say that because I think

when I was watching the reaction from conservatives today. And when I saw the Barr letter, I was like, oh, wow, I was not imaginative enough to understand just how exactly this would play once the Mueller report happened, because it is a good cop, bad cop thing. The good cop is Barr, who's ostensibly laying out a legal rationale, who mixes in his own opinions with Robert Mueller's conclusion, right? Mixes in his views on obstruction, mixes in his views on the interpretation of what he says about collusion to provide this gloss on the report. What I was, and from that, it gets into the hands of Lindsey Graham

and people like Trey Gowdy and people like Brit Hume and people on the right who then go on television, basically say Robert Mueller finally did it. He proved that the real criminals are Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey, that they are the real villains. And so what is amazing is how quick a transition happened between Robert Mueller being on a witch hunt to Robert Mueller now being brought onto the side doing the hunting.

I thought that today, too. When Trump was asked today, do you respect Robert Mueller or do you think he did a good job? And Trump basically gives him the thumbs up today. It's like, I might wait until I read the report. I mean, that's if Trump was being prudent. Trump doesn't care. He'll read the report, and if the report's bad, he'll just be like, no, it's a witch hunt.

He's the worst. Throw him in jail. It's literally the job of Congress to provide oversight of the executive branch. Literally. It's in the Constitution. And yet there is this DC conventional wisdom that voters are somehow aware of or concerned about the number of hearings that are happening on a very, like, that would be news to the people at C-SPAN who actually air these things and get like six people watching them. So like, I think everything short of impeachment will never be noticed by anyone.

No one cared that there were 10 Benghazi investigations. And you know what? Because there were, we found out about Hillary Clinton's frigging email server. And that was the thing that changed the course of the election. So there is a precedent set by House Republicans who, you know, Devin Nunes and all these goobers demanded every single document about the Hillary investigation. Peter Strzok's texts, like all these things. That's the precedent. So we need to get a hold of all these documents, all the underlying investigative work. There will be things that are not released for sources and methods reasons that are classified, but we should push to get literally everything out and to look into any leads that

were not followed up on by Mueller because he was looking at criminal actions, not ethical, moral, legal questions. I will say one thing thing i do think it makes impeachment tougher not because of the underlying facts that may still come out but because of how the democrats handled this over the last several months i remember when um the president was in was implicated by federal prosecutors in multiple campaign felonies after cohen went down yeah thinking like this is the moment that if house democrat we don't't know what Mueller's going to come up with, right? Like at that point, we had no idea what Mueller was going to come up with. They could have said, yes, that is an impeachable offense.

If he wasn't president right now, it is very likely that Donald Trump would be indicted for what happened with those hush money payments. Very likely, because they are, it is a crime that Michael Cohen already pled guilty to. And we just, they didn't make the case. And then, you know, you had Nancy Pelosi a couple weeks ago who said, it's got to be bipartisan if we do it. Clearly, after the reaction of Republicans over the weekend, there is not going to be any, but it was probably clear before that, in fairness.

But clearly now, there's not going to be any kind of bipartisan, you know, rush to have any kind of impeachment hearings. So I do think, you know, it makes have any kind of impeachment hearings. So I do think, you know, it makes impeachment trickier now. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's also worth saying, like, you know, it may turn out, by the way, that this report is incredibly disappointing, right? It may turn out that the lack of evidence to prove even, you know, non-criminal collusion may turn out to be what Mueller found. And if so, that means this report is not as advantageous to Democrats as many Democrats would have hoped.

That said, I've seen a lot of people saying, oh, look at how flat-footed the Democrats have. They've been waiting for Mueller, that Mueller was going to be their rescue. And it just doesn't accurately describe reality. I actually think that, you know, on the other side- It doesn't even come close. It's so insane. The other side of the coin to what John said, which is absolutely true, that this idea of waiting for the Mueller report for the basis being bipartisan, for holding out until we have the Mueller evidence, I think has made, at least in the short term, this impeachment question harder to answer. At the same time, not cable news, not Twitter, elected Democrats, particularly elected Democrats in a position of power

and in a position of access to information related to these investigations have been very responsible in their discussions of Mueller. They have not said it's going to be the end of the Trump presidency. They've said wait and see. They've been very responsible about their role versus Mueller's role. And Democratic candidates

on the campaign trail have A, not been talking about it, and B, not been counting on it. That has been the case, and there have been some people who said, oh, it's because they were waiting to see the smoking gun. No, we just— Look at 2018. 2018, we just won a midterm election, and it was never about Mueller. That tells you something about how Democrats have been campaigning

and about how the next campaign will unfold. How many times have we said that here? How many times have you yelled into the microphone, Bob Mueller's not going to save us? We've said it for like fucking two years. And we did it because we wanted to be able to say this right now. We were ready. There's nothing better than blue checkmark Twitter

going back into their archives to find the one time they cast doubt on this thing and then retweeting myself. Who are you doing this for, people? Here's the other thing. A hostile regime attacked our election on donald trump's behalf the president knew about it he encouraged it he welcomed it he lied about it and then he tried to cover it up with more lies all of that is fact that is we've seen that in the indictments muller has described that that has been in reports that have gone unchallenged he also lied to the american people about having a massive financial interest in pushing a foreign policy that was favorable towards that same hostile regime.

This whole time, he was being nice to Russia during the campaign, saying, oh, my policy is going to be nice to Putin, blah, blah, blah. He didn't tell us that he had a $50 million Trump Tower at stake that could have made him $300 million, more money than any of his former projects. Lied about it the entire time. Lied about it the entire time. In some ways, whether this rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy or not, it doesn't matter. It was presidential misconduct and wrongdoing

that is out there for all to see. Exactly, which is why I've never really been concerned about the question of whether we should start impeachment proceedings or not. I don't really care about the moral obligations. I just care about the politics. And I think the House oversight committees or the various committees in the House should investigate everything they can to get more facts, to find more information. And all of it will be part of a conversation around Trump's reelection.

And that will be the important part, not what's in this thing. And look, and obviously people are going to talk about health care. They're going to talk about jobs. They're going to talk about all the issues. But weighing the consideration of whether Trump should have a second term, as voters weigh that, part of what should be in their minds is what has come out of this investigation. The president last time he ran for election told you he liked Russia and he told you just trust him. He liked Russia for all these real ideological foreign policy reasons. In reality, he was hoping to build a tower there that made him a lot of him. He liked Russia for all these real ideological foreign policy reasons. In reality,

he was hoping to build a tower there that made him a lot of money. He lied to you last election. What kind of financial interest do you think he's lying to you about this time? The president lied to us all the time. He stood, as you said, Tommy, he stood on stage in Helsinki next to Vladimir Putin, and except Vladimir Putin, the guy who attacked our election,

his findings over the intelligence community. All of this stuff is true. I don't know how this is any kind of exoneration. It's so funny. Well, yes, it's certainly not. Again, you know, you've seen a lot of people say the conservative line today, and I do think they're way, way ahead of the information, even more than usual, is to say, you know, this is that McCarthy called on Schiff to resign from

leading the Intelligence Committee. Rick Hume, you know, all these conservatives on television talking about how this is a black mark on news organizations that have been investigating whether or not the president committed a crime, something the special counsel was looking at, something I think is quite a reasonable source of journalistic inquiry. Several newspapers have won Pulitzer Prizes based on their reporting, none of which has been conflicted. To me, the sin of this weekend is the sin of the past two and a half years, which is recency over importance. This special counsel investigation has produced dozens of charges against a ton of people. It has produced an incredible amount of misconduct and other evidence of wrongdoing.

The evidence of Donald Trump's obstruction has been available to us since he sat across from Lester Holt and said, yeah, I obstructed. I was trying to stop Comey from doing his job. Right. So we are in this situation where the Barr letter is the most recent thing. It looks helpful to Donald Trump. I think we will look back on this period of time as a low watermark for the investigations, but not the end of things like impeachment. Time moves very quickly in this sort of endless Twitter present. And I will say to all the journalists out there, you have a choice right now. You can either go on record defending the dogged reporting

of your colleagues that has turned up so much information about this investigation, all of it that's been accurate, except for the stuff that's already been corrected. I think the only thing

that has gone without a correction is the fact that fucking, you know, Michael Cohen was supposedly in Prague, which wasn't right. You know, like, you can count on one hand the things that the media

has gotten very wrong about this, right? So you can either defend your colleagues and defend their reporting, which has been some of the best reporting we've seen in this country in years. Or you can give in to the fucking bad faith attacks by Fox News and the Republicans who are just based on nothing and are trying to just fight this fucking media bias war that they've been fighting for the last 20 years. But you have to go on record. You can't. You've got to take a side here. I like that.

I was laying down. You can't, you got to take a side here. I like that. Laying down arms. I mean, look, you can also, if you're Jeff Zucker, you can rethink the emphasis put on repeating news panels about the same stories over and over and over again on evening cable news programs. I think that's a worthwhile debate. when people who are at the DNC or on the Clinton campaign said that they believed that the Russian intelligence had hacked their emails and were releasing these documents via WikiLeaks. And they were treated like they had tinfoil hats on. Yes. Like they were crazy people, like they were left-wing Infowars.

And that was all proven to be true in the Barr summary of this document. So we've come a long way on the facts. There's no reason to be self-flagellating here. There's a lot more to learn since none of us have, you know, read the report. That's right. And, regardless, we just have to go win an election in 2020

and that's going to happen by organizing and talking about issues. I never trusted this Republican Robert Mueller. Never trusted him from the fucking start. Honestly, that square jaw, I don't trust it. That jaw is too square. Alright? That is up. Bright Bar is going to take this clip out of context and just play it. It's going to fucking start. Honestly, that square jaw, I don't trust it. That jaw is too square. All right? That is up. Bright Bar is going to take this clip out of context.

I can't wait. It's going to be great. No, we all accept Robert Mueller's findings. That's what we do here. We love Bobby. Let's do a quick rundown of the latest 2020 news. On Sunday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand formally kicked off her presidential campaign with a speech in front of one of Donald Trump's Manhattan hotels. Gillibrand called the president a coward and touted her legislative record on The Hill and the frequency she's pushed back on Trump's agenda. Using the theme of bravery, she said, quote, The people of this country deserve a president who is worthy of your bravery, a president who not only sets an example, but follows yours.

Guys, what did you think of the message of the speech and the strategy of giving it in front of a Trump hotel? I think she was trying to get a reaction from Trump. Poor Kirsten Gillibrand. It was a tough day. The timing is tough. The timing is so unfortunate. It's so brutal.

I think the reality is the only thing that mattered was the timing. You know, Kirsten Gillibrand, I think, has – I actually – look, as I've said before, every single announcement video works on me. I am for every candidate for five minutes after I've seen their announcement video. I'm a huge supporter of them, and they must be the nominee for five minutes. Be the nominee for five minutes. That said, you know, I think Kirsten Gillibrand shares a problem with a number of other candidates, which is they need to find a case for themselves that makes it clear why it should be them over others, why it should be them now against Trump, and a case strong enough to break through. And giving the speech on this Sunday means that nobody heard it. I don't know what the answer to that is. Even before the Mueller news broke,

and I think sort of swamped all coverage of literally everything in the world, I think that they were probably not totally enthused by the crowd size. I mean, you're going to have a lot of people comparing that crowd size to Kamala Harris in Oakland getting tens of thousands of people versus several hundred

in New York City, which is a bigger place where you should be able to get a crowd. So look, we've got a long ways to go. All these little inflection points are about getting your name ID up or getting donors to believe in your campaign so they'll give you more money or whatever you need to do. And it sucks to have made an announcement on a day when there was news people have been waiting for for 22 months. Yeah. And I also think, look, there's there's a risk in playing off Trump too much. Right. Like how you handled Trump is sort of a big question for all these Democrats.

And, you know, we've seen everything from Elizabeth Warren gave her announcement speech. And I don't think she mentioned Trump once. Right. It was just a speech that was devoid of Trump altogether. I think, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand's announcement speech was mostly about Trump. It was about Trump and, you know, in fairness, she had a lot about some of the activists who have pushed back on Trump. It was basically a speech about the resistance to Trump over the last couple years. That's sort of what her message is. And I understand that. But it was a lot about Trump. And I think then someone like Bernie Sanders was sort of in the middle of those two, Warren and Gillibrand, where Bernie was mostly about issues. But he did use this portion of the speech to talk about why he him versus Trump would be quite a contrast.

Right. So you see these candidates doing all kinds of varied ways of trying to, like, figure out how to deal with Trump. But look, you know, Gillibrand talked about paid family leave. That's her big issue. I heard her talk about that in her MSNBC town hall a couple weeks ago. And that to me is a very fruitful area for conversation, even more so than Trump. She's got this great paid family leave plan, provide all workers the ability to take three months of paid leave, whether they're a new parent, caregiver for another family member, or ill themselves. It's like, great plan. Go talk about it. Yeah. And she's also, you know, she's I think one of the appeals of the message of bravery is I think there are a number of issues where she really did stick her neck out.

Right. And I think that's true around sexual assault in the military. Right. That is a that was a difficult issue, a thorny issue to take on. Right. You are going into an organization that is one of the last organizations respected by by the American people at a time in which we have such diminishing support for institutions and saying there's a huge problem here, I'm going to take on the brass on a very difficult issue. I think that is part of a worthy case. And I also don't want to be saying, oh, you know, because she caught a bad weekend to announce it, it means her candidate, like, that is punditry. So I would say, like, you know, to anyone who didn't catch it,

everyone should go check out her speech because the truth is a lot of people may have missed it because of what happened over the weekend, but I think she still deserves... Right, there's the punditry that says, oh, people didn't see it, that will hurt her campaign, but that's what each of us should do, and each of us should go seek out what she had to say

and make a decision on our own. That's the best way to do it. Watch these candidates talk, watch their speeches, watch their events. You're going to find more from that than any kind of analysis, including ours. How dare you? I know.

I know. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders spent the weekend campaigning in California, staging rallies in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco that were quite large, an estimated 12,000 in Los Angeles, 16,000 in San Francisco. The Jewish senator also made news by visiting an Islamic center here in Koreatown in L.A., calling on Americans to, quote, stand up to hatred of all kinds and saying, your background is different than mine. What a joy it is to share that. Guys, what do you think of Bernie's big city strategy here? Not only did he do these rallies in California, you know, after he announced in Brooklyn, his next big event was a

big rally in Chicago. That's not an early state, not an early state. What do you think about his big city strategy with all these rallies and also then his visit to the Islamic Center? I'm very impressed that he went to the Islamic Center. Me too. Not that that, and I hate that I said that because it shouldn't be an impressive thing to do. Like everybody should be willing to go to a mosque or Islamic Center and speak with Muslims at a time when they're being targeted by right-wing white supremacists. But it's impressive that he did it and he did it first and he deserves credit for that. I find the strategy of going to these big cities and doing big rallies very interesting.

I still think this is going to be an Iowa first race and the early states will be, will create momentum for candidates that it's impossible to match. But it does seem like if you can go to San Francisco and collect a ton of data about a lot of people who might volunteer for you when the California primary comes around or give you five bucks to get your donor base even broader and reduce the average contribution, that's a strategy that could pay a lot of dividends down the road. So, you know, it also could pay a lot of dividends down the road. So it also gives you a sense of momentum and excitement and makes people want to be a part of a campaign. And that's a critical thing too. So it seems smart. Yeah. I mean, I think you rob a bank because that's

where the money is. He's going to these places where he has a huge base of support. It also speaks to the fact that- Are you accusing Bernie Sanders of theft? Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Come at me, excerptors of the left. Excerptors of the far left. Bernie's a bank robber. What I was going to say is, it speaks to, I think, the possibility of a long, drawn-out process

where we end up going across the country. And it speaks to the fact that at a time when there are so many candidates, when some of the candidates who are, say, below 10% are trying to break through, it is a show of strength amongst, say, Bernie and Biden, who are the two people that are at the very top trying to maintain that edge. It's something that Kamala, I think, has been proving. She has a kind of compelling argument that she will rise up there by showing that she can bring out the same number of people. So I do think it's a show of force and a way of maintaining a kind of leadership.

I think it also shows that none of these candidates, especially some of these top tier candidates, are going to concede any of these states to the candidate whose home state it is, right? Yeah, that's a silly narrative. Yeah, like California is a very big delegate prize. There's 39 million people or so yeah and um californians will start voting by mail on the day of the iowa caucuses right and so and it's also as we know it is going to be very expensive to compete in the california primary it is there is a lot of media markets it's going to require a lot of money and i think

bernie is saying i am not and just as kamala did by. It's going to require a lot of money. And I think Bernie is saying, I am not, and just as Kamala did, by the way, by going to Texas this weekend, she's saying, I'm not conceding this to Beto O'Rourke or Julian Castro. And Bernie is saying, I'm not conceding California to Kamala Harris. Like these candidates are going to compete everywhere. And that is why this could be a very long drawn out race. Also, it's just worth remembering, too, another sign of at least the thinking that this could be drawn out is one of the reasons you compete, even if you don't know that, even if you expect a home state advantage, is California is a huge state with a ton of delegates. If you compete well, even if you lose, you can get more delegates out of California than you can by winning several other states. Well, we should let people know what that is because I don't know if everyone knows this. The Democratic primary is not win or take all. In the Republican primary, there were, at least in the last election, there were still some states that did win or take all. You win the state, you get all the delegates. Here, it's proportional. And so in the Democratic

primary, it's proportional. So in some of these states, like I remember, you know, Hillary beat Obama by maybe 10 points in California, but I think she only netted a couple more delegates than us. We beat her in a caucus in Idaho and probably netted like 10 delegates

compared to what the California Hall was. What a process. We did better out of Idaho than she did in California. I don't want to talk about it. I know, but it's something that every campaign is hopefully planning for

if they are a good campaign with smart delegate people. Yeah, you damn well better be planning past the first four states or else you're going to get destroyed. Finally, Kamala Harris made headlines this weekend by holding rallies in Houston and Atlanta. She announced her first new campaign policy proposal,

an unprecedented federal investment to improve teachers' salaries across the country. Her campaign will reportedly be unveiling the details of the proposal and how she plans to pay for it this week. At her 2,300-person event in Houston, Harris said, quote, Right now, teachers are making over 10% less than other college-educated graduates, and that gap is about $13,000 a year. I'm pledging to you that through the federal resources that are available, we will close that gap.

Guys, what do we think of Kamala choosing this particular policy as her first big proposal? Her other big proposal is the LIFT Act, which is a middle and lower class tax cut. That was one that she proposed while she was a senator. So this is sort of the first policy proposal of her campaign, the first major one. I'll tell you, I want to reserve judgment until we see the proposal, right?

We haven't seen the actual details of the proposal. And teachers should be making more money. There have been protests across the country and strikes across the country about how we are underpaying teachers at a local level that runs all the way from liberal Los Angeles to conservative states in the middle of the country and in the South. So this is a big and roiling issue. making the centerpiece of their argument a policy debate around structural inequality and larger structural forces that have been developing over 30 years or longer, holding back the middle class and concentrating power in the hands of a privileged few. That is the organizational principle of both their campaigns.

They have different approaches beyond that, right? Warren says she's a capitalist, but here's what she would do to regulate. Bernie is a democratic socialist. But that is a huge argument about the nature of the American free enterprise system. I understand that paying teachers is a really, really important issue. And this may very well be a really, really good policy. But to me, it speaks to something that is very, very popular and may very well be an important and good thing to do. But I step back and I wonder, what is the ideological reason for doing this? What is the larger case you're making about the state of our economy, the state of work in this country, the state of power in this country?

And that, to me, is my reservation about a very politically popular policy like this being first out of the gate. I will say something, and it made me think of this when you talked about Sanders and Warren. Obviously, the surface difference there is she says she's a capitalist, but here are some rules that I want to put in place. He says he's a socialist. But, for example, Bernie talks about Amazon, and he said Amazon needs to pay their workers $15 an hour. We need to increase the minimum wage. Elizabeth Warren talks about Amazon, and she wants to go to the source of the problem, which is we need to break up Amazon, right? And so she has been more willing to talk about sort of regulatory changes that get to the heart of why big corporations and banks and everyone else

are screwing people over and how we can change the rules so that it's a level playing field. Bernie has been much more willing, and probably because he's a socialist, to talk about ways to spend a lot of money to alleviate inequality in this country. So she actually has a different theory that's not just capitalism versus socialism, but it's sort of a different theory of the case on how people are getting screwed there, which is interesting. And I think that – Well, it's a defense of a version of capitalism. That's right.

If we want a capitalist system to work, there needs to be a stronger social safety net at the bottom and a much stronger regulatory regime at the top. And I think most of these other candidates, as they have either put forward policy proposals of their own or endorsed other proposals that exist, have been much more sort of traditional, democratic, liberal, mainstream proposals. I think Kamala fits in that category.

I think Beto fits in that category. I think Booker fits in that category, right? All of their stuff is proposals you could have seen in in 2016 from Hillary Clinton in 2008 from Barack Obama. Right. They're very mainstream. The Lyft Act feels very much in the mainstream of Democratic thinking over the past 15 years. And it may be very popular. Sure.

I also think that teachers are a well-organized and potent base of support in an election. That's also true. The Iowa State Education Association is like 35,000 strong, I believe, in the state, based on my Googling while you two were talking. And I remember we courted teachers hard during the 2008 primary. They show up. They volunteer. They organize.

So it's a smart political move. Yeah, I think that's right. And look, I— And they've been on strike for the last two years in all kinds of different states. And I don't want to diminish the proposal before we've, you know, fully seen how exactly she lays it out, how she pays for it, because paying teachers more is a really good thing. And if the federal government can help teachers across the country make more money and attract more people to the profession, that's a really, really good thing.

That said, I mean, I don't want to argue against it, but I do want to offer some of the arguments that occurred to me when I saw it. So one of the reasons we've had to have teachers strike across the country, one of the reasons teachers are so underpaid across the country, is that, first of all, that there's been a concerted nationwide conservative effort to promote austerity at the local government and disconnect cause and effect in terms of taxes and what taxes pay for. We've seen that across the country with draconian cuts, with massive tax cuts followed by draconian cuts to services that even in conservative states, even very red conservative states have started to rebel against.

But even broader than that, we have seen a lack of confidence in local government, a lack of confidence in what we get for our taxes, in part because we do get such a low, we get such bad value for our tax dollars as Americans. Whether you think Americans' taxes should be higher or lower, we get a terrible deal for it. We pay for a massive, bloated defense budget. We pay for interest. We pay for an incredibly expensive health care system that costs more than any other country that gives us terrible results. The end result, which is a lot of people feel like they're not getting good money for their taxes. And so my question is, how can we do a better job at the local level of showing people just how important

it is that people come together as a community and pay their teachers, pay for their roads, pay for the good work that their government does to help their community? And my worry is, this is an effort to put a Band-Aid on that deeper problem. It may be a really, really good Band-Aid. It may be really, really important. But that's why I come back to these structural questions that some of the other candidates have raised. And I would say, in defense of the proposal, that a lot of these teacher strikes have been in very deep red states

where there is no hope because of the politics in those states that they are going to have any kind of significant state spending to improve the quality. Even though a lot of these teacher unions have done a fantastic job negotiating and getting themselves a better deal, at some point you have to look at the inequities in this country in education and say,

even though education is mostly the province of state government, at some point when there is a teacher shortage, when there are teachers going on strikes, that's what the federal government's there for. It needs to step in to alleviate these inequities. Well, I guess I would say the one caveat I'd add is a lot of the inequities in schooling have less to do from state to state and more rich communities and the property taxes going to schools in those neighborhoods and in poor communities where states, where localities aren't doing enough to help those people. So all of this is just a way to say we should see what the proposal has to say.

You want to privatize schools. I want, I want. I want. I want. Stop it. Cutting this shit out in the 30-second excerpt. This is the thing today. Now I'm just having fun with it. Privatize the schools.

I want everyone to learn at Koch Brothers Academy. On that note. All right. I think we're done. And we already had our guest, guys. All right. Well, thanks to Preet Bharara for joining us today. Preet. And walking us through this. You buy that book. All right, I think we're done. And we already had our guest, guys. Well, thanks to Preet Bharara for joining us today. Preet!

And walking us through this. You buy that book, all right? Listen, all right? He did a good job selling his book on the show, but we can do a better job, all right? We've got to buy Preet Bharara's book, right? Every copy of Preet Bharara's book that you buy is money people didn't spend on one of those

killing Lincoln books. One of those people where Bill O'Reilly has a ghostwriter talking about killing people. Those kind of books are flying off the shelf today. God help us. That's all we have. We'll see you later this week.