Pod Save America - “Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!”

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

Rudy Giuliani potentially incriminates Donald Trump during his first television appearance as the President's new lawyer, Mueller has many questions about crimes of collusion, and Marco Rubio and Tom Price cut a few very effective ads for Democratic campaigns. Then Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow joins Tommy Vietor to talk about his new book, “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence."

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, we're going to hear a selection from Tommy's Pod Save the World interview with Pulitzer Prize winning writer Ronan Farrow, who has a new book out, The War on Peace, The End of Diplomacy, and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan and Tommy had a great event right here in LA on Sunday. And you can also hear the full interview on Tommy's Pod Save the World episode this week. So check it out.

You can also listen to Keep It. Kara and Louis and Ira had a great episode this week where they talk about this entire Kanye West situation as well as the Michelle Wolf kerfuffle, which I think both things happened three or four years ago. Is that right? Yes, I think Barack Obama was president, yes. But today, Dan, we begin with quite an update on the United States versus the Trump family crime syndicate.

on the United States versus the Trump family crime syndicate. Last night, America's mayor, who turned into a raving lunatic, Rudy Giuliani, decided to sit for an interview with Sean Hannity as President Trump's new outside counsel, and boy, did he knock it out of the park. Why don't we play a clip from the interview with Sean? I think Rich has one for us. That money was not campaign money. Sorry, I'm giving you a fact now that you don't know it's not campaign money no campaign finance violation so they funneled it through the law firm funnel through law firm

and the president repaid it oh i didn't know he did yeah there's no campaign finance zero so the president like every sean so what this decision was made by everybody everybody was nervous about this from the very beginning i wasn't i knew how much money donald trump put into that campaign i said 130 000 he's gonna do a couple of checks for $130,000. Rudy, Rudy. So Rudy Giuliani admitted on national television that the president personally repaid Michael Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to keep Stormy Daniels quiet about their alleged affair. For those who haven't been paying attention, the president previously told reporters he knew nothing about the payment. Dan, what was he thinking here? He wasn't thinking.

I mean, it is so... I was watching the basketball game, and then I went to dinner, so I was not... Unlike my usual practice, I was not watching Hannity Live, and so I was just sort of following the tweets. And so as I saw what he said, I assumed he was answering a question about this very topic, a question as simple as, did the president know? That's not what happened. different subject, which then calls Rudy Giuliani to just take a sharp right turn and admit a bunch of crimes and tell the American people that the president, his press secretary, his attorneys have all been lying for months. And I mean, it's truly mind boggling. Like we made jokes

about how absurd it was that Trump was hiring Rudy Giuliani to be part of his legal team. But the reality is so much more absurd than the jokes. I mean, it's really mind-boggling. I mean, thank you. Do interviews. Rudy Giuliani, if you're listening, we would let you live stream from the Crooked Media headquarters for six straight hours if you want to. Just talk.

Just keep talking. Don't stop talking. Keep doing what you're doing. Someone pointed out, a couple people pointed out that the last time that rudy giuliani tried to explain a complicated legal matter on behalf of the president it was when he said donald trump called him up and said hey we got to do this muslim ban but how do we do it in a way so it doesn't seem like a muslim ban basically and rudy's comments were then used by lawyers in court to argue that trump's muslim ban was religiously discriminatory and so he did such a good job with that he was brought back and then just stepped on many rakes starting last night on Sean Hannity's program until today on Fox and Friends.

So in response to all this, Rudy talked to a couple of different reporters and tried to say that this whole thing was planned out. He said the president was very pleased. We discussed this revelation in advance. Does not expect to be fired. That's what Robert Costa reported after talking to him. Does not expect to be fired. My favorite phrase. What more job security can you hope for than him. Does not expect to be fired. My favorite phrase. What more job security can you hope for than to not to be expect to be fired?

So I guess the question is, is there a world where you see that Rudy and the president did talk about this in advance that he was going to bring this up at some point? And why? What is the upside to Rudy Giuliani disclosing this information to the public? There is no world where they plan this out. This is idiotic. It's a bad idea. It's poorly executed. Every part of it, it drips in stupidity and arrogance. It's I mean, it's just it's so. But there has to have been some rationale

in rudy's head for why he should do this which i and i think it goes to the legality of or at least how they interpret the campaign finance laws which is seems quite different than how the laws are actually written they believed that the problem with michael cohen paying 130 000 for this was that he's not supposed to make an in-kind contribution that large because there are campaign contribution limits. And thus, if they announced that Trump himself actually made the payment, that's okay because Trump is allowed to contribute unlimited funds to his own campaign. unlimited funds to his own campaign. What they have not realized is that on the campaign limits, contribution limits, that may be true. But even if you contribute money to your own campaign, you still have to report that money. And if you don't, that's a violation. And if you willfully and knowingly don't report that, then that could be a felony. And they don't seem to have grasped that part of the law. Yeah.

Rudy may have read the first page of the legal memo prepared by an attorney, but he did not read the second page. And so it is so – there's something much bigger than the campaign finance law, which we can get to. But if you were to reverse engineer a strategy to this, like there is no strategy. He does not seem to be particularly sharp. The reason he was talking is because there was a camera in front of him, which has long been his habit. And he has verbal diarrhea. It's not a legal strategy. And if there were a strategy,

it is within the context of the Cohen investigation or Mueller's investigation of Trump, they know the truth. So the truth is eventually going to come out. So you want to put it out on your terms. If there were competent people working on this complicated problem, that would be a way in which it would happen. This is not how you would do it. You would come out with this plus a well-organized, well-thought-out legal argument as to why it was not a crime. They did not do that. They mumbled some things and then had no answers to the next 17 questions. But eventually, I think they know that Mueller knows this and they know that from the questions and therefore

eventually it's going to come out so you should put it on your own terms but on your own terms is not Rudy Giuliani babbling on Sean Hannity that's not a way any comedy communications professional would do this well and there's also plenty of evidence that they did not plan this for at least the Hannity interview because Hannity as you all heard on that clip clearly caught off guard oh oh the only my only real disappointment is that the camera was not on Hannity when he reacted so we can't see his face because it's on Giuliani but you just hear off screen Hannity oh oh I didn't know that soannity was surprised which normally that would be you'd expect the journalist asking the questions to be surprised but since hannity is a shadow

chief of staff for the white house you thought that he would have been probably read in on the strategy before giuliani went on and also a number of white house aides are all telling reporters this morning that they had no idea this was going to happen uh so clearly they also lied about it being a strategy to do that last night the hannity thing is so great because hannity's sitting there going i'm here i'm doing my job i am doing propaganda for the president and then all of a sudden he stumbles into journalism and is like holy fuck what do i do cut the cameras it's so good so so after all that uh rudy wakes up this morning and thinks why don't i go do fox and friends let's go back and try to just step on another few rakes so he goes he goes back on fox and friends and um i think we actually we have a great clip of uh of what he said there too

you're saying that stephanie clifford made these allegations told donald trump's lawyer you know look i'm denied the public and denied them and then said it wasn't true however imagine if that came out on october 15th 2016 in the middle of the you know last debate with hillary clinton so to make it go away they they made this call he didn't even ask cohen made it go away. He did his job. This is what the fucking mob talks like. Also, so here's the important thing about that revelation. The entire law, whether they broke the law now, hinges on whether this payment was made in a way to influence the election. And Rudy on Fox and Friends was trying

to say this had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with, you know, protecting the first lady and the president's own reputation, etc, etc. And then he says that. Imagine if this came out during the debate, which shows that, of course, the payment was meant to influence the election. It was meant to protect Donald Trump's reputation in the last days of the 2016 election. Therefore, it was an in-kind contribution. Therefore, it should have been reported to the FEC. It was not. Therefore, it is a felony.

A felony committed by now Michael Cohen and possibly the president of the United States. And also, we know that Michael Cohen believes that he's probably in legal trouble over this because a couple days ago, he pled the fifth. He pled the fifth saying that he did not want to speak about the Stormy Daniels thing because he did not want to incriminate himself because he committed crimes. I mean, we should note, as many people on legal Twitter point out, that pleading the fifth does not mean you're guilty. It is your legal right as a citizen. Of course. But we have to analyze this in the context of everything else, right? Which is, this is the attorney for the President of the United States.

This is a legal context. It was also a political context. And then there was also just the rank hypocrisy of everyone in the Trump orbit claiming that anyone who pleaded the Fifth was guilty, which was their argument about various people related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation. So everyone is full of shit. These people do not get the benefit of the doubt, at least in the court of public opinion. The court of law can figure it out. There are some other legal elements here too, that are worth noting, which is it's not just campaign finance law, because the president then also, according to this, I get this from the Twitter feed of Walter Schaub, who was the head of the Office of Government Ethics before he was ceremoniously pushed out by the Trump administration due to their anti-ethics position, is that he also – if this was part of a deal with Cohen,

then he owed Cohen money, which is a liability that should have been reported on his financial disclosure form, something that you sign under penalty of perjury that you're attesting to that you know to be true to the best of your ability. So then Trump also lied on his financial disclosure form. So there are multiple potential crimes here, all of which because Rudy Giuliani did an interview that we are now aware of. So thank you, Rudy Giuliani, for your first piece of public service in 17 years. And then this morning, Trump had three tweets that all looked like they were written by lawyers, except he spelled the word role like Giuliani's role or Stormy Daniels role as R-O-L-L, which is pretty funny. So even his even his lawyers have typos. where he talked about how Cohen was paid out of his retainer and this agreement was made because Stormy Daniels was leveling false accusations about Trump and blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah. It all seemed fairly confusing and like it didn't fix anything whatsoever. Yeah. It's the, I mean,

the tweets are just so great because there's no like random that never says witch hunt. There's no exclamation point. There's no random parentheses point there's no random parentheses it's like it is a sign that they realize that they truly fucked this up and that someone who had practiced law in the last 17 years had to do something to try to write the ship here like Giuliani did not write those tweets he was too busy talking to Bob Costa the Washington Post at three in the morning.

So the question is, like, what happens now? I guess on the legal front, Mueller and whatever prosecutors are dealing with the Cohen case may or may not move forward on additional charges, or certainly they got some new information last night. And then I guess in the court of public opinion, I mean, this morning, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about this. Why did the president lie to us for so long? And now she's using the excuse, I can't comment on ongoing litigation, even though that was not the case a few weeks ago when she said that the president knew nothing about these payments. So she's a straight shooter, as we always knew. I mean, it's just, it seems as though the White House has now been caught in some pretty huge lies over this last week, in addition to lying about knowing about the payments to Stormy Daniels.

We also had the story this week about Trump's doctor, President Trump's longtime personal doctor, Harold Bornstein, this week said that Trump dictated to him what to write in a 2015 letter that stated he'd be, quote, the healthiest individual ever elected to the president. Which is, the letter, let me tell you, is a lot funnier when you have in your mind that Trump actually dictated the entire thing. Bornstein also said that Trump's bodyguard raided his office and retrieved Trump's medical records. This is pretty serious allegations here, right? They're not allegations, it's the truth, I guess. That the letter was phony about Trump's health.

Not allegations, the truth, I guess, that the letter was phony about Trump's health, that Trump's entire medical records and that whole the clean bill of health that his doctor gave him was completely bullshit during the campaign. At the same time, his entire campaign was trying to tell everyone that Hillary Clinton was on her deathbed. So two pretty big lies this week. Let's talk about Sarah Huckabee Sanders for a second because some people referred her as the press secretary. I referred her as the martyr of American comedy. She has gone out. She is the spokesperson for the president of the United States and the entire government. As you and I know from traveling with our press secretary friends, Jay Carney, Robert Gibbs, and Josh Earnest, they are very prominent, famous people that everyone recognizes. They are supposed to speak to the country in times of great crisis and need to

brief the country on what the president's doing to respond to those crises and needs. And she has gone out and lied for months about this. Now, there are two ways to think about this. One is she was telling the American public what the president told her, and I'm willing to believe that interpretation. to have believed that someone with a long history of lying and would not have given herself some wiggle room here instead of just repeating his lies. But even if she did believe it, then she should resign today in protest because he made an absolute fool of her in front of the nation and the world by sending her out to lie about this. And any press secretary worth their salt would resign over this. Or, which is also believable, is that she knew she was lying and didn't give a shit because she does not believe that truth is a thing that matters. Truth is an obstacle to a political means, not an end in and of itself. And this – like we should not gloss over this as a political media culture.

We should not gloss over this as a political media culture. The New York Times, who has done great journalism – so this is not in a – Pulitzer Prize winning journalism, I'm told. But their Twitter account today said in announcing and breaking the news that Rudy Giuliani has now informed the people that Trump has been lying, they said, based off Trump's tweets this morning, that President Trump reversed his position on whether he paid Michael Cohen back. You reverse your position on cutting Medicaid. You reverse your position on tax deductions. This is a lie. There is a debate, I have strong feelings on it, other people feel the other way, about whether reporters should call out lies. Is it a lie when Paul Ryan says that the tax cut is going to pay for itself? I think yes. Others would say, I know yes. Others are wrong, but they would say, well, he believes a different view than you do, right? But you don't, this is a lie. This is just a lie. Trump knew he paid Michael Cohen and he told the people that he didn't, full stop. And don't be afraid, like there are some lies that

have to be called out and we're treating this like it's a policy disagreement. We can't do that. Hi, I didn't rob the bank. Oh, really? There's video of you actually robbing the bank. Oh, I reversed my position on whether I robbed the bank. Yeah, it's just have some courage. So they're all liars. I guess the New York Times is afraid that Matt Schlapp would get in a limo and tweet

at them or something. I don't know. Yeah, no. I'm sure the White House Correspondents Association will release a new statement about how upset they are that the administration has been lying to them about the president's health and whether he paid off former mistress's hush money for the last year. That's probably something they're going to be very upset about. I don't know if that's – maybe it still is in the spirit of unity with all that dinner. I have been sitting on my White House Correspondents Association dinner takes for a week now, and I'm not going to let them out now because there are more things to discuss. But I will make one point, which is the less the lesson here and always is do not

associate yourself with Trump and his minions because you will always end up being embarrassed. All those people who rose to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' defense because Michelle Wolf was mean to her now look foolish because she has been lying to them, which was at the crux of 98% of Michelle Wolf's riff on Sarah Huckabee Sanders, which is she's a liar,

and we are proved yet again that she is a liar. Don't tweet. Don't feel a need to appease them. Just keep your mouth shut. And you will find out once again that they did something wrong. Well, look, I'm sure because they rose to her defense that the White House isn't going to call them fake news anymore. I'm sure they've, you know, they're embraced now by the White House, and they're all going to be friendly. Okay, so this whole Giuliani story happened right after the news that Trump scrambled his legal team, hiring Clinton impeachment lawyer Emmett Flood to replace Ty Cobb, who reportedly was an advocate for cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller. This happened the same week that the New York Times reported on the list of questions that Trump's lawyers wrote down after talking to special counsel

Robert Mueller about a potential interview with Trump. So this is important because originally the report was, was this a list of questions that Mueller had for Trump? In reality, in order to try to convince Trump's lawyers to have Trump sit down for the interview, Trump's lawyers were invited to Mueller's office. And then Mueller and his prosecutors talked. Trump's lawyers were invited to Mueller's office. And then Mueller and his prosecutors talked to Trump's lawyers about some of the topics that they wanted to discuss with Trump in an interview. And then the lawyers tried to write down all those questions. And then those questions were leaked to the New York Times, probably either by the lawyers or by someone outside the legal team with ties to the White House dan what did you think of the questions the 49 48 whatever they were questions i would say the fact that ty cobb quote retired is so funny

it's like i have i have done my job my work is done here it is time for me to ride off into the sunset my client is protected we have solved the mystery. It's so good. Matlock solves another one. Some people retire to spend more time with their families. Others retire to spend less time with their dangerously unfit client. It's so good.

Alright, let's talk to questions. The questions are a reminder that for all of the ink and tweets and airtime that is spilled on collusion and the Trump campaign and Russia and all of that, we only know a fraction of what Bob Mueller knows. He knows so much more about everything than we do. And you can see hints of that in the questions where he wants to ask. For months now, it feels like years, we've been saying the argument from the Trump propagandists, staffers, has been Paul Manafort has been charged with crimes that are unrelated to his time with Trump. But now we get a hint. That is not true.

Not true. American political consultant with close ties to Putin under massive amounts of debt may potentially have reached out to his friends in Russia to trade access for money and help the Trump campaign. There is a hint of that there. We don't know what to be the case, but there is a suggestion that Mueller knows a lot more about what Paul Manafort has done, and that should be very worrisome to the Trump people. Yeah. And so the question that you're referring to that and now this is a question phrased by now we know by Trump's own lawyers wrote this down after sitting down with with Robert Mueller and his people. The question is, what knowledge did you have, you being Trump? What knowledge did you have of any outreach by your presidential campaign, including your former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to Russia about possible assistance to the campaign? I saw that question. I was like, boy, that to me is, that's a big one because it has not been reported a lot. Most of the questions have been reported in some form or fashion by, you know, the New York Times or the Washington

Post and one of their many excellent investigative stories about this but that question about manafort actually reaching out to russia about possible assistance and potentially other members of the trump campaign as well um that tells you that they are very much focused on collusion as the heart of this investigation. And we also heard that yesterday when Michael Caputo, remember him? He came out of an interview with the special counsel office and obviously talked to reporters because that's how he rolls and told them that, yes, the special counsel is very focused on collusion, that the House and Senate committees, that they were sort of all over the map, but the special counsel, they know exactly what they're doing. And this is from a former Trump advisor. Michael Caputo is such an interesting historical footnote because he's the only person who was

fired from Trump's orbit for doing the sort of thing that would get you for like a normal workplace violation. Because if I remember correctly, he was fired that on the day Corey Lewandowski was fired, he tweeted ding dong, the witch is dead or something like that. And so they tossed him for that. Well, everyone else is just lying, committing crimes, double dealing and getting to keep their jobs. You're like, he got fired from the Trump campaign for sending an intemperate tweet, which is just, it's like getting fired from the Obama campaign for being too hopeful. for being too hopeful.

Some of the other questions that caught my eye were questions about the real estate deal, Michael Cohen and a real estate deal with Russia during the campaign or during 2013. Questions about Jared Kushner and his setting up a possible back channel to Russia

during the transition. The Don Jr. meeting in Trump Tower. Now, one point on the Jared Kushner thing, Rudy Giuliani, in his interview with Sean Hannity, they were also talking, Sean Hannity at one point gets very outraged, and he's like, you know, I read this thing that they're going to go after Ivanka Trump next. How could they do that? And Giuliani said, oh, I don't think Mueller would ever go after a fine woman like Ivanka, you know, and Hannity's like, well, they're going after his would ever go after a fine woman like Ivanka, you know. And Hannity's like, well, they're going after his son-in-law.

They're going after Jared. And Giuliani goes, yeah, well, some people are expendable. Men are expendable. And I will tell you, it certainly seems like from the questions that they believe Mueller wants to ask Trump that Jared and Don Jr. could be in some serious shit. It does seem that way. Does Jared still work in the White House? It's been very quiet lately. Yeah, very quiet.

Probably because he's the target of a federal investigation, probably. Oh, and he solved the Middle East peace thing, so he's probably just resting on his laurels. He did solve the Middle East peace thing. But yeah's probably just resting on his laurels. He did solve the Middle East peace thing. But yeah, so the questions were in a couple of categories. Questions about Michael Flynn, questions about the firing of Jim Comey, questions about trying to fire Jeff Sessions multiple times and being mad about Jeff Sessions' recusal from the case, and then questions about campaign coordination with Russia. So why do you think the Trump people would leak these questions, Dan? What was the strategy here? See my earlier comment, there is no strategy. The Trump attorneys, and I use

attorneys, if this was on audio medium, you'd see that I was air quoting attorneys, because like Giuliani went to law school, as far as I can tell. He was once an attorney, but he is not a practicing attorney. He has been selling access under the guise of a law firm since the day he walked out of the mayor's office. He's not trying cases. He's not in there like – He's almost like Michael Cohen. Exactly, like Michael Cohen. He has been a fixer mostly for sketchy foreign interests for more than a decade now. And they are not loyal to Trump. That's not the thing.

To think, how does this help Trump suggest that people like Rudy Giuliani have Trump's interest at heart? They do not. They have their own. Rudy Giuliani joining the Trump legal team is basically the equivalent of signing a TV contract. This is a guaranteed way to get on TV for the next six months, 12 months, 18 months. And that's why he's doing it because he likes being on TV, being on TV and fighting for

Trump will endear him to the Republican base, which will endear him to more clients so he can get richer off of it. And so they leak these things. So they leak these things. Like, you know, these are the things that are going through his mind. That's amazing and disgusting. They, like, they're doing their relationships with the New York Times as much as they're doing their relationship with Trump here. And so they can't stop themselves.

They cannot stop talking. What do we think about Emmett Flood as the new head lawyer? Norm Eisen was on Twitter saying he's one of the best and this is going to be a fight for the ages now. I mean, I assume he must have a very angry relationship with his own reputation. Like, I don't know. Why the fuck would you do this? This is crazy. I was looking into his background.

I'm like, oh, so he was the impeachment lawyer for Bill Clinton. And then he was Dick Cheney's lawyer during those investigations in the Bush years and now he's Trump's guy I'm like what of course like typical Washington very respected Washington lawyer yeah I guess I guess that earns you respect I guess that's like bipartisan and unifying that you can be impeachment lawyer for fucking Bill Clinton and Donald Trump very I mean I no idea don't really know what he's doing. Don't know why he would get involved. I mean, look at all the other well-respected attorneys who've gone to work for Trump and have left as shells of their former selves.

John Dowd, Ty Cobb, Don McGahn. Maybe he doesn't have access to the internet. I don't know why he would do this. It seems like a really bad idea. It just really does. I can't know why he would do this. It seems like a really bad idea. It just really does. I can't even possibly fathom it. Maybe he wants to up his Twitter followers? No idea.

Perhaps, yeah. So Trump responded to all of this news this week by freaking out on Twitter and threatening his own Justice Department, which, you know, again, how he rolls. You know, so he's tweeted the usual bullshit about the special counsel investigation being a witch hunt and a hoax uh he threw in there there was quote no obstruction of justice in parentheses that is a setup and a trap uh later he tweeted it would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened witch hunt dan he seems confused about how obstruction of justice works yes perhaps that's why he committed this crime in the first place. Yes.

Unlike Rudy Giuliani, you and I are not esteemed legal scholars who have written law review articles and tried cases from the Supreme Court. We're just people who read Twitter and watch legal shows on television. But Trump, assuming repeating something that probably someone on Fox News said, actually not an attorney, he's wrong. You can't obstruct justice. There does not have to be an underlying crime to obstruct justice. That is in and of itself illegal. It does seem like a pretty big cell phone if you've obstructed justice when there isn't a crime. I'll tell you that.

I committed a crime to stop an investigation into a crime I never did. Fuck! Shouldn't have done that. Yeah. Yes, you know. It is. You know what they say? It's the cover-up, not the crime.

This is what they mean. It's just so. I did a cover-up and there was no crime. Oops. Yes. Here's the thing. This is what this all truly boils down to is maybe Trump didn't collude. Maybe he was too detached, too just not competent enough to he himself collude.

We know others on his team were engaged in collusion. And Robert Mueller and theoretically a jury will find out if that was a crime. But we know that people wanted to collude with Russia. Maybe Trump didn't. But Trump is definitely obstructing justice in the Russia investigation to prevent people looking into other criminal activity of his, which is why he is panicked about the Michael Cohen investigation so much to the Michael Cohen investigation, so much to the point that in, I think it was in the New York Times or the Washington Post, it was reported that Trump's own attorneys do not know how to respond to the Cohen investigation

because Trump will not tell them what might be in Michael Cohen's papers. That is suspicious. That is quite suspicious. So he may have obstructed the collusion investigation to cover up other criminal activity, the sort of criminal activity that was outlined in that Adam Davidson piece in The New Yorker a few weeks ago. Yeah. I mean, every once in a while, I try to think to myself, what if this investigation ends and it's clear that trump you know tried to obstruct justice maybe not enough that it's an actual crime who knows but it's clear he tried to obstruct justice but there is no other crime at the heart is that muller doesn't find anything else and i was i just keep every once in a while i'm like why would trump be doing all this if he

was actually innocent and i guess the only thing i can come up with is, like, is it possible he's so paranoid and conspiratorial that he believes that the Justice Department and the FBI and Mueller and Comey and all these people would get him even if he's innocent? And all he does, he has no choice but to fight back and to try to shut this whole thing down because they're going to get him even if he hasn't done anything. Like, I wonder if like that's in his head. But then I realize, no, he's probably just guilty. Like, the only way that you would act like this, because Tommy brought this up last night. He was like, you know, is Trump's strategy that this is all just a political fight, that everyone's against him, that everyone's and what muller finds doesn't matter is that really working is that his best strategy and i thought about this and i was like it's his best strategy if he is indeed guilty if he has committed a crime and he thinks he's committed a crime then the best strategy here is to try to

fight this investigation try to shut it down and in the court of public opinion try to fight this investigation, try to shut it down, and in the court of public opinion, try to get people to believe that Mueller, Comey, the FBI, the DOJ, that they're all biased against him, that they're all liberals or Obama holdovers, that it's all fake news, and that this is just a plot to take down the president. That probably is his best strategy. Yeah, I think that's right. It is. I mean who knows what is in Trump's head because it seems to be – like he lives in one of the most dangerous filter bubbles that any American, let alone the president of the United States, could live in. You add that to the fact that he has a long history of believing pretty kooky conspiracy theories. And then you add the fact that he is an incontrovertible narcissist. It's like hard to divine what he's actually thinking. There is never strategy.

There is no whiteboard anywhere in Trump world with a plan. There is just what comes out of his mouth next. But his strategy is not not working, right? Like we are every day, we get more information that makes it more clear that Trump is at least crime adjacent, if not committing crimes. And the polling doesn't change. It's exactly the same. It is a fucking straight line from the day after the election to the day on all these things. And the people, the American people hold a certain set of views. They think that Bob Mueller should be able to finish his investigation. They have faith in Bob Mueller. Many of them think that Trump was involved in collusion. And Trump supporters don't

give a shit. And Trump has a different approach to presidential communications than any previous president. And that Trump isn't talking to anyone but 38% of the American people. He just wants to convince them the truth. And so if he thought about other people beyond that, then you would take a different strategy. But that's not – he just cares about that group of people. And if the end of the day, the consequence for whatever actions is, the United States Congress, which whether Democrats are in charge or not, will still contain nearly 50% Republicans. Congress has to act to impose a legal penalty, a political penalty for Trump's actions, then Trump's strategy is working because it is dead fucking silence from the rest of these people. What's starting to really worry me is what happens when we get towards a genuine constitutional crisis. And to me, that's not just, though it could include, Mueller issuing a report that seems like Trump has committed impeachable offenses and Congress doesn't act because they're all a bunch of Republican hacks. But it could also be like this whole issue around whether Trump sits for an interview with Mueller.

And the way this is framed in the press right now, it's like, you know, should Trump say yes to Mueller? Should he not? Will he sit with him? Won't he sit with them? And it's really not up to Trump here. Like, Trump is probably going to refuse to sit with an interview with Mueller. It seems like that's the strategy right now. Or, you know, Giuliani saying, well, maybe if he does, it'll be an hour or two and we'll limit the questions and all that shit. And Mueller's not going to go for that. Mueller's going to say, I want to do what I want to do here. If Trump refuses that, Mueller's next move is to subpoena Trump. So then he gets a subpoena. Then Trump has to decide, do I accept the subpoena and sit with him or not? Bill Clinton initially

didn't want to accept the subpoena, but then finally said, okay, now I agree and I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do a videotaped testimony for a grand jury. So if Trump says, no, fuck it. I still don't want to accept the subpoena. I'm going to ignore the subpoena. Then Mueller takes it to the courts and it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, presumably. Now what happens if the Supreme Court rules that Trump needs to sit down for an interview with Mueller and Trump says, fuck it. I'm not going to abide by what the Supreme Court does, then we're in a real constitutional crisis. That's the one that I'm thinking. I'm like thinking down the road here. Now, maybe before that, at some point, someone gets to Trump and tries to get him to cooperate with Mueller and sit down and they figure out the contours of an interview.

But it does seem like this could escalate rather quickly. And I don't know how that ends. I think that is, your point is right, that that is a larger constitutional crisis than the question of whether, if there are any consequences for the president firing Mueller. And everything comes back to the unprecedented act of constitutional theft when McConnell stole the Supreme Court seat from Eric Garland and gave it to Neil Gorsuch because you're looking at a 5-4 court with a Trump appointee being the potential deciding vote on whether the president is subject to a subpoena or not. Now, look, there is a legitimate – I don't understand it, but there's a legitimate

legal debate about what the founders intended in terms of the ability to criminally prosecute a president outside of the context of impeachment. And I understand the fear of all of a sudden, we're going to start criminally – like if you're going to have an apolitical process to essentially reverse an election, right, or nullify an election. And that there is a slippery slope there. The problem is, as with so much else in our politics, is that it assumes a functioning political process, that there are actually checks and balances. And there aren't because Trump is currently operating under immunity by congressional majority, and there is no crime that will be punished. All of this goes back to the thing we say all the time, which is if you do not want Trump to be president, if you want him to, if you want there to be consequences, political or otherwise, for his offenses, legal, political,

and policy-wise on the country over the last 15 months or so, then Bob Mueller is not going to solve the problem. The Supreme Court is not going to solve the problem. The Supreme Court is not going to solve the problem. Sure as hell, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are going to solve the problem. The only thing to do is vote Democrats into office. That is the only thing to do. It's the only way that there will be any sort of true congressional oversight, true checks and balances, and then defeat Trump. We, we can't wait around for Bob Mueller to do our job for us. No, and look, and the other possibility that Jeffrey Toobin noted in The New Yorker is that Trump could eventually decide to sit down for an interview

with Mueller and plead the Fifth. Now, certainly in the court of public opinion, outside the 35% of the country that would, you know, be with Trump, even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, you know, people would say, oh, he's pleading the Fifth. He doesn't want to incriminate himself. He's probably guilty of something. But in Trump world, he's just going to say, whatever, fake news, witch hunt, take a day of bad press and then move on. And then where are we? We're right back where we are, which is we need a Democratic majority in the House and Senate to do anything else. So any way this ends, Trump can eventually plead to the court of public opinion and protect himself, at least the court of public opinion in Trump world, and then protect himself, like you said, because he has immunity by congressional majority. Not great, Dan.

No, we are in dangerous times. The founders did not anticipate this level of breakdown in our system. And it's not irreversible, but if we wait too long, it may be. So two other people in the Republican Party have made Democrats' jobs a bit easier in the task to take over Congress. Marco Rubio and corrupt former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price both scrambled this week to undo candid comments they made, admitting that the recent Republican tax plan has actually screwed working people. Let's start with our friend Marco Rubio. Rubio gave an interview to The Economist in which he said there's, quote, no evidence whatsoever that the money from the tax cut has been massively poured back into the American worker. It's also worth noting that The Economist

actually used a sub-headline in this piece that said, Big moment for little Marco and the very serious economist, which I very much appreciate. Rubio then tried to do damage control by writing a piece for the National Review about how great the tax cut is. He also tweeted a Politico article about how he was walking back his comments that for no reason whatsoever took a dig at an intern reporter at Politico, which is very classy. He wrote, although written by intern at Politico, this article is a reminder of how difficult it can be to discuss public policy in the political press. Not only did I not back down on tax cut, I doubled down and added detail for rationale.

Okay. Poor Marco, taking a task by an intern. Marco Rubio had spent one tenth the energy making a coherent and aggressive case against Donald Trump that he has in trying to defend, trying to walk back his comments, we might not be in this mess as a country. I mean, it is. I mean, Rubio is just he's always Marco Rubio. He can't help himself. It is. He feels the need

he feels the need like inside in his gut that just he's uncomfortable with the way things are going he is going to speak truth because in Marco Rubio's mind Marco Rubio is the guy who speaks truth to power and he does it and he says something true

and honest and should be applauded for that for the 14 milliseconds while it remains operative until under the slightest, tiniest bit of political pressure. He reverses himself so far back from what he said, negating everything he said and further. It always ends with Marco Rubio embarrassing himself. Like Marco Rubio ends every exchange, interaction, moment in public life a little bit smaller than when he began. Now, what Marco Rubio is trying to say, if you get inside Marco Rubio's sad mind, is, okay, well, I do think that the tax cut helped working people because cutting the individual rates for people, doubling the deduction, that helps some people. But the trillion dollars, the trillion dollars we gave away to corporations didn't do anything. So the tax cut was about a trillion and a half dollars. So the large majority of the tax cut was for

corporations. So basically, even in Marco Rubio's walkback, he is still admitting that they basically wasted a trillion dollars on companies and the wealthiest people in this country and that they could have done better. Which, of course, everyone knew when they passed the tax cut, but no one wanted to speak up about it because they're all fucking liars. And they wanted their donors to contribute to their campaigns in 2018. And that's not a conspiracy. That's what they said out loud. It's all a lie. The entire Republican Party ideology, to the extent one still exists, is a lie. They want to give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy people under an economic theory, one that's been disproven every time it's been tried, that such money will trickle down.

But they can't say that, so they lie about it. And then after it happens, it is a constant mess because they're trying – they can't even remember what lies they've told. And the same thing is true of healthcare and everything else is that they are unwilling to publicly discuss their actual positions. So they must lie about them no matter how ridiculous that lie is. And then they must adhere to that lie whenever you can. And if you break from that lie for one second, if you just slip up and tell the truth, then you must quickly reverse that position or you will be drummed out of the tribe for time memorial.

Yeah. And Tom Price had a similar situation. He said this week that the tax law would raise the cost of insurance for some Americans because it removes the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. Again, something that everyone said before Trump included the repeal of the individual mandate in the tax reform. That's something that Susan Collins worried about even though she voted for tax reform. That's something that a lot of Republicans worried about before they all fucking voted for tax reform. Because all they wanted was the tax cuts for the rich people. Now, to me, this is what Democrats should be running on in all these races.

You know, like, forget all the Mueller stuff we talked about at the beginning here, right? This is, it's clear from all these special elections that what's driving people to the polls in these races, what's driving Democrats to the polls, and independents, and some Republicans to vote Democrat, is number one, healthcare, and number two, the tax law and the economy writ large.

And we've talked about this a million times on this podcast, but this idea that for the last year, when they've been in power, Republicans have done everything they can to enrich and protect their very rich friends. And the biggest examples of that are a tax cut that gave a trillion dollars to the biggest companies and richest people in this country,

while at the same time, raising the cost of healthcare, raising premiums on people who desperately need it and desperately can't pay for their healthcare. That's what they did while they were in power. And that's going to piss a lot of people off because that actually affects their lives because people are dealing with higher premiums and they're dealing with, you know,

not being able to stay on their insurance when they have, you know, preexisting conditions and all the other shit. And they're watching Wall Street banks say that oh we just saved three billion dollars in three months from the fucking tax cut well i can't even fucking pay my rent so that's it that's the campaign i mean it is because it's also it's how it affects people but it's also even if like the republicans and paul ryan and others will point to well these some people got more money in their paychecks.

And that is true. But there is an underlying unfairness to the policy that bothers people. Which is there are experiments in psychology and sociology where people will refuse $25 if they find out the other person is getting $75 in a two-person exchange. And what is wrong and mind-boggling to people, and we have to explain it to them and sell it with the relentless discipline that wins campaigns, is that Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe that the wealthiest Americans should have huge tax cuts paid for by cutting Social Security and raising insurance premiums on working class Americans. It's that simple.

Just do that. Don't stop. The news will cover Russia. This podcast will cover Russia. People will talk about Russia. We cannot change that, nor should we, frankly. It's a real legitimate news story. But in your ads, on the the campaign trail in conversations with voters at the doors on the phones do that non-stop the russia stuff will take care of itself and now you can add don't take my word for it listen to republican senator marco rubio listen to donald trump's former health and human services secretary tom price they agree with the democrats devastating it's so great that's so good thank So good. Thank you, Little Marco. Thank you, Little Marco.

Thanks, Little Marco. Thanks, Tom Price. Go treat yourself to some first-class flight that you have to pay for yourself instead of charging it to the taxpayers. Appreciate it.

We've had so much content today. There's so much to discuss that I'm just going to table the Paul Ryan rant that I had teed up for today. So just everyone know it happened in my head. There will be further opportunities in the future.

For more on Paul Ryan from Dan Pfeiffer, check out Twitter. Yes, yes. Please see my tweets of the last year and a half. All right, when we come back, a portion of Tommy's conversation with Ronan on Sunday about Ronan's new book. We'll be back.

The politics around peace and around negotiations hasn't gotten easier. You look at the Iran deal. Trump's own Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, who is known as being very hawkish against Iran, believes it's in her interests. But support for the deal is a partisan issue. Trump wants to get rid of it. How do we fix that? Why are the politics of peace so much harder than the politics of war? Why do politicians have an easier time rallying the country, rallying Congress to invade places than they do to pass an imperfect peace deal, for example. Things going boom is easier to understand. And we have a very deeply entrenched,

correctly, culture of celebrating the heroism of our war heroes, but not as much of a cultural understanding of what our peacemakers and negotiators do. And one of the things I hope people understand when they read this book, which is told through the lens of the personal stories of these brave men and women who strive year after year with shitty pay in dangerous places to make our world safer

and American influence more robust. I hope people see those stories and understand that it's incorrect when people on the campaign trail kind of denigrate them as dusty bureaucrats who don't get anything done. To be sure, the State Department, like a lot of government bureaucracies, is out of date and needs reform. And, you know, we've been there before and successfully reformed it. That happened around and after World War II, and it was very effective that we poured new resources into the State Department and fixed it and cut a lot of the fat and created new offices

that adapted to the changing world. That needs to happen again. And instead, we are throwing it out. There is this purge of the department under Trump and this profound misunderstanding you allude to where people don't really get what these guys do. And so we are giving up what they do. And it is critically important. Right. So, I mean, you worked inside the State Department in several roles. You know where it works well or where it does not. And for the book, you interviewed every living

Secretary of State, including Rex Tillerson. Insert joke about Rex Tillerson there. I was struck by a few things about the Tillerson interview. First of all, just how naive he was about the budget process and the basics of how Washington works. I thought he was this competent business guy who might come in and figure stuff out. He did not. Second, how little time it seems like he spent actually doing the job as opposed to

fighting with, say, Jared Kushner. One example in the book is, I couldn't believe this, Trump decided to launch strikes on Syria the first time without telling our allies, and the State Department Ops Center, which I'll have Ronan explain what that is, got a flood of calls from countries asking, you know, what is going on. Instead of answering them, Rex decided to go home for a long weekend. What did you make of Rex, your time with him, and his brief but pathetic tenure at the State Department? Not that I have an opinion on the subject. To Rex Tillerson's credit, he gave a fair amount of access and was pretty candid. I mean, I think the most candid we've ever seen him here in this very, you know, late in his tenure interview. And I think he knew at this

point that the end was coming, although he was still furiously denying that it was the case. And so there's a bit of an opening of the books here. You know, he does say that he was naive. You know, he doesn't use that word, and I don't think he would, to give you an example of the kind of personality we're dealing with here. I said, does it make you anxious that there are all these ambassadorships that are unfilled and all these jobs across your department that there's no one in them? Things are not getting run because it's an empty building. And he sort of puffed up his chest and said, I don't get anxious. And I'm like, well, that's one of us.

I wish that were true for me. But he does admit that he was inexperienced. He said, when I first started defending these 30% cuts to the State Department budget, I was a month or two into the job, and I didn't really know that when you run a government agency, you're supposed to ask for more money, not less, which, you know, every living Secretary of State is on the record in this book, and not one said, yeah, that rings true. That's how you do budget advocacy. Yeah, I mean, you've interviewed all these former Secretaries of State, these diplomats. Their responses tend to be, surprise, surprise, diplomatic. That was not

the case when you started asking them about Tillerson's decision to gut the State Department budget. Why does that worry them more than seemingly anything else he did over there? Well, so for any leader of our diplomatic corps that cared about the people, right? These men and women doing a very brave and important thing. This is a moment of heartbreak. Colin Powell is the example that we've talked about before and that really leaps to mind because he was so candid. And he said, you know, we are ripping the guts out of the State Department. We are mortgaging your future. out of the State Department. We are mortgaging your future.

And for someone like him, who I think really believed in that workforce, to see them so sidelined and so denigrated and the State Department so empty, the concern is not just the effect that that has now, it's that we have hobbled the foreign service. And when you do that, the flow of talent into it dries up too. So John Kerry talks about this at length. The problem is not the short term.

You can get a next administration that comes in, and as the Obama administration kind of did in the second term, there was a course correction, and they spent a few good years saying, okay, diplomacy matters, and you wind up with the Iran deal for all its controversies. It is a substantive diplomatic accomplishment. You know, the thaw in relations with Cuba, the Paris climate change accord, all of which is under threat now, but that's another matter. The fact is you can spend a few years investing in diplomacy and get large scale accomplishments. The problem, though, is you

won't have anyone to affect those goals if in 20 years the people who should be becoming ambassadors then just don't exist. And if you look at the numbers, that's what's happening. No one is joining the Foreign Service, let alone the best and the brightest, which is what we need. Right. I think about this a lot, which is the military does big, flashy branding. They have flyovers at NFL games, despite the current president's takes on the NFL. The CIA, as difficult as the intelligence community jobs are, they end up getting sort of lionized in movies and TVs. They're portrayed as cool and smart and sometimes crazy in Homeland. But at least it seems like an exciting job.

Diplomats, State Department officials, are kind of absent from that conversation. What, you don't watch Madam Secretary on CBS? Oh, man. I literally just found out that that show is still on. Incredibly successful show. So, Ronan, you're cool. You're young.

Like, how do we make this... Thank you, Tommy. You too. You decided... You went to school... You went to college when you were like eight years old and you graduated and you could have done whatever the hell you wanted.

Please, Tommy. I was 11. And you're 11. And you went to the State Department. Like, why did you do that? How do we get the best and the brightest, as you said, the history of that term, notwithstanding, to go into government? I hope that there is an understanding as we exist in a more and more

militarized world that we all suffer if our first resort is military action. And we all suffer if the entire conversation about solutions to problems is affected by people who only know military solutions. And that's not a knock on our brave servicemen and women. I think effective diplomacy requires military might. But there is a universe in which these two important tools that the United States has at its disposal counterbalance each other. And all I can say is I hope that the upshot of it getting so bad, of it becoming a real crisis

right now that it will get more and more difficult to pull out of, is that we start realizing we've gone too far and pull out of the nosedive. And Mike Pompeo, I think, despite the track record as a dyed-in-the-wool hawk, despite the fact that he, by the president's own retelling, has been selected because he's much more lockstep with the president than Rex Tillerson was, hope springs eternal. When you ask any whistleblower in this book, I think they are all praying that he pulls out of the nosedive.

Yeah, because you can't teach someone Arabic in a couple months. Yeah, some time. Yeah, that's right. Building up capacity is a hard thing and restoring the integrity and prestige of a profession is a hard thing. And that requires real leadership. Yeah. So there is this seemingly real diplomatic effort happening right now with North Korea. The recent actions and comments by Kim Jong-un seem unequivocally hopeful. They could be trying to play us. They've done this before. But, you know, I think we all want to lean into this.

There are probably meetings happening right now with John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, Jim Mattis, Secretary of Defense, about what to do. What do you think Richard Holbrooke would tell them to do if he were in those meetings right now? How would he attack this negotiation and get it over the finish line? Well, I'm not going to speak for the ghost of Richard Holbrooke. The legacy of what he achieved in Bosnia and what he tried to achieve in Afghanistan would be apt for the challenges we face in the Korean peninsula. So yes, is it possible that this leader-to-leader meeting pays off and is a great thing and nothing but? Sure. It's a complete gamble. And that's the problem. We are flying blind because that meeting is not embedded in any kind of expertise or strategy.

So it could pay off, or we could get played terribly, and North Korea could get validated as a nuclear power, which is their fondest ambition. This is one of the wiliest diplomatic opponents in the world. They have lied to us before about these very same points that they're making sunny promises about now. I profoundly hope that we don't get played. But the way to prevent getting played is to have the infrastructure we had set up around North Korea during the Bush administration when we last tried this,

where you have a unit of experts who are steeped in the region and go back and forth all the time and know the pressure points and know the long-term ramifications when you say something. These are conversations where you deal with coded language that has to be very, very precise, where you have to know what they've deceived us on before so you're aware of the pitfalls. All of that, every expert I talk to about Korea in this book this book says is absent and we need it now more than ever yeah it'd be good to have an ambassador to south korea it'd be nice if tom countryman one of the people who's in the beginning in the very end of the book book ends the book

uh so to speak was an expert on non-proliferation uh it would be nice to have some of those folks in the room yeah it would be better than nice. I think it's essential. And then a guy who flips condos. Get that in the mix. One of the great surprises is that the art of the deal ethos doesn't lead this administration to value the deal

makers. Why are we firing all the deal makers if your whole brand is making deals? John Kerry has a spicy line in this book about how... You don't hear that a lot. He's like dictating it to an assistant while

windsurfing. Where he says the art of the deal, he's giving up all the deal makers. This is a guy who declared bankruptcy X number of times. I guess now we know why. When you look at the State Department and the condition it's in. I mean, I took a, I poke fun at Secretary Kerry, but I mean, you have an amazing chapter in the book about the

frenetic, unrelenting pace of the Iran deal talks. This was not easy. This was seven years of sanctions. And then what, 16 days locked in a hotel in Vienna, and Kerry started screaming at the Iranians so loudly that people were hearing him in the lobby. I mean, this was intense stuff. It was intense stuff. I explain why many of the questions around the Iran deal are very justified. It is, by design, an imperfect deal, and this goes back to a theme we've been talking about. deal, and this goes back to a theme we've been talking about, you know, diplomatic accomplishment often looks imperfect. In the case of Iran, we decided, yeah, it's a rogue state. Yeah, they have non-nuclear missile tests going on, and that's bad. You know, yes, there are kidnapped citizens from all around the world there, but none of those issues get better if you also have them

as a full-fledged nuclear power. So let's just take that one thing off the table for a while. And as imperfect as it is, by all accounts from our allies, it has done that. So I hope when people read the story of, you know, John Kerry breaking a femur and Wendy Sherman breaking like four bones, and I'm not really sure why, but, you know, they understand how much sweat and blood, literally blood, went into that deal and goes into deals like that and how we need more of that, not less. Thanks to Ronan for sitting down with Tommy to talk about the new book. Go check it out in bookstores now. And we'll see you all again next week.

Go Sixers. Fuck you. Go Celts. I don't know. you