Pod Save America - “The Committee to Defraud America.”

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

Hope Hicks is out, Jared Kushner is in trouble, Jeff Sessions is beleaguered, and Donald Trump is so angry he just might…implement tariffs on steel and support gun control measures? Then the Atlantic’s Natasha Bertrand talks to Tommy about the latest in the Mueller investigation. 

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, we have The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand, who will be talking with Tommy about her latest reporting on the Mueller investigation. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Sign up for What A Day, our newsletter. It's launching on Monday. A brand new... Product. Product newsletter. It's launching on Monday. A brand new product from

your friends at Crooked Media. Content fresh out of the oven. Information. End of the day. You're going to read this thing. Either you'll read it before you go to bed. You'll read it when you wake up. It'll give you a whole rundown of what happened and why it mattered. It's getting real good. You'll be smart. So just go sign up.

Sign up. Great keep it this week just go for the amarosa takes from ira and the gang just listening to poor cara have to listen to amarosa in real time was my favorite thing that happened this week it's hilarious go please go sign up for this podcast um keep it as my weekend activity do both these things as hope picks because she's gonna need a new way to get information and she's going to have a lot of free time. There you go. Sign up for some podcasts, Hope. Pod Save My Soul is still available.

Sean has not taken it yet. Hope. Also, we're going to Texas next week. And there are still tickets to our San Antonio show available. So if you're going to be in the San Antonio area, go get some tickets. Don't miss the magic. Yeah. Check out the Alamo.

And then come see us talk about politics. Let's talk about the latest White House hope opera. Love It. That was yours, Love It. That was Love It. It's a great joke. Thank you for using it. Love It used it as the title for our beta newsletter last night and I figured, why waste

it just among the small group of people who got that newsletter? Yeah. This is content for more than friends and family. So anyway, I want to talk about Hicks. more than friends and family so anyway i want to talk about hicks i want to talk about jared i want to talk about sessions let's do it big night in the boardroom yesterday trump is reportedly angrier than ever and he might do something crazy like slap tariffs on foreign steel how many times have we heard that he's more angry than ever before more angry than ever before and he might he's his maybe he's an angry dick he's got an itchy tariff uh finger the idea

that you would change america's uh international economic policy because you're mad about the news and everyone's reporting this today like it's completely normal like oh he's really pissed he might do those tariffs because he's mad at. Because he's mad at Jeff Sessions. My dinner was terrible. Raise interest rates. Like, what are you talking about? What is happening? It's absurd.

It's absurd. The other thing that was part of this Trump fit of peak coverage is dangerous moment. Trump has lost the people closest to him. He's steaming and wandering around the building all alone. Yeah. Everyone is just... There's competent professionals who always pulled him back from the brink. Yeah, without Lewandowski and Seb Gorka around the man's loose.

His former bodyguard is the other one they keep naming. Yeah, where is Keith Schiller? He's just being paid out of a slush fund from the RNC right now. Okay. Great white ass. Let's start with Hope, who quit yesterday after being one of Trump's closest and longest serving aides, as well as his fifth communications director. The White House is publicly and privately telling reporters that Hicks had been considering leaving for several months, but she ultimately picked the day after admitting to the House Intelligence

Committee that she told white lies for the president's. Guys, coincidence? What do we think? Do we care? So Maggie Haberman was arguing with people about this on Twitter saying, yeah, the hearing the day before Hope left was not the reason she decided to leave. I believe Maggie because I'm positive that Hope teed up this story with Maggie days and days in advance of that hearing occurring. So on that literal question, it's true. But I mean, one, Hope should be smart enough as White House communications director to know that you probably shouldn't announce the day you're leaving after you spend nine hours testifying in front of a congressional committee to, of course, the Mueller stuff is undergirding all of this. It sounds like the most miserable place in the world to work in this administration. It's a tough job anyway, but she's under real legal risk, real serious legal risk.

And I would want out of there, too, because every day she hears Donald Trump talking about hating sessions or whatever. She's further exposed. Yeah, I would say whether or not it's a specific coincidence around her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. What is not a coincidence is that every single day she has worked as communication director for this president has been some combination of personal scandal, professional scandal, or legal scandal that has gotten worse and worse and worse. The other thing, as part of this hope coverage, which has been bugging me is there is something inherently sexist in the way she is covered that because she is young and pretty and a woman, there's this baseline assumption that she lacks agency,

that she doesn't have the same power or authority or responsibility as a man, and that she's just a passenger on the Trump criminality train, but she's not. And so even if there is this baseline sexism in the way that she's discussed publicly, her legal culpability is not affected by the fact that coverage doesn't treat a young woman as being as responsible as a man. Yeah. I mean, let's remember it was only about a month ago that former Trump legal team spokesman Mark Corallo quit and said that one of the reasons he left is because he believed that Hope may have obstructed justice when she said that the Don Jr. emails from the meeting, the, you know, if it's what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer emails, when she told everyone, those emails will never get out, so not to worry. So continue to write a statement with the President of the United States aboard Air Force One saying that the meeting was about adoption. So she is possibly in legal jeopardy for that reason as well.

In addition to what Lovett was saying, it's weird that she's always described as the person who understands him the best, the person who had his best interest at heart, a true believer in a world where you have true believers and like gross DC operators, like the Gary cones and the mooch and the spicers. I'll take them over the people that see him talking about like Charlottesville

or the Muslim ban and think, you know, at heart, he's a good guy. He's trying to do the right thing. I'm in it for the right reasons. The right reasons are deeply fucked up. And if she doesn't get that, I don't know what to do for her here. Yeah, I will say it is. Oh, you know, she's like a daughter. She's part of the family.

Oh, you know, she's like a daughter. She's part of the family. I will say there's nothing more familial inside of Trump world than saying out loud or putting in an email. No one will ever find out about this. That is almost hereditary to what these people do. Yeah. Also, but that's like at least for Ivanka, you can say she hasn't chosen to be part of the family. She's just part of the family.

It's Hope's chosen to be part of this family. Now she thinks part of the family. Hope's chosen to be part of this family now. She thinks it's fucking great. Yeah, it's like one thing to be born into Scientology, but you signed up for it. You went in and took the courses. Trump's an asshole to her. Corey Lewandowski put in his book that Trump would make her steam his suits while they were on when they were on the road. That's not a cute, funny, quirky anecdote from the trail. That's a weird thing to do to the young, like late 20s female staffer on your plane. He also apparently Trump also told Corey or told Hope that she was, quote, the best piece of tail Lewandowski ever had.

That was in the Michael Wolff book. That's a disgusting thing to say to someone who is called your second daughter. So it's all weird. Well, so CNN also has an unnamed Trump ally who said that Trump was pissed about the white lies comment uh quote trump asked hicks after the testimony how she could be so stupid and that was apparently the final straw for hope hicks so i mean i think it could be true that what maggie said that you know months ago hope was first considering leaving and then there were certain things in the last couple weeks that sort of pushed her over the edge i don't know why everyone's it doesn't matter it doesn't matter the hope exit timing's fighting. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The Hope exit timing doesn't matter.

It just doesn't matter at all. Apparently CNN said that Mueller's team is also asking about Hope Hicks' comment to the New York Times two days after the election when she said, we're not aware of any campaign reps that were in touch with any foreign entities before yesterday.

Which we now know is not necessarily true. Was that a white lie or was it bigger? Who knows? Who knows? Bye, Hope. You know what, though? There's no such thing as a white lie at the White House. I'm sorry. There's no such thing as a white lie. You're a spokesperson for the president of the United States. As we've learned, Bob Mueller makes all lies pretty big deal. Well, yeah, they were. Even when they're not lies that will land you in a massive criminal probe that goes to the heart of

the foundations of American democracy, it is still not okay to lie to reporters on behalf of the president. Yeah, so we'll see hope again in the reunion episode. But for now, there'll be... It's interesting. She'll be on Big Brother. She'll be on Big Brother with Omarosa. All right, next. Guys, I hate to tell you this, but I think our friend Jared is in a lot of trouble.

No, not our Jared. Not the dimpled one. So in the last 48 hours, the White House chief of Staff has stripped away his top-secret security clearance. He lost his PR person. And the Washington Post ran a story about how foreign officials have talked about how to get whatever they want out of Jared by taking advantage of the fact that he's billions of dollars in debt, probably has business interests in their countries, and is generally a fucking moron. That was all topped by last night's New York Times story that revealed Jared

met multiple times in the White House with leaders of at least two financial institutions that then made large loans to Kushner's family real estate business that he still partially owns. My first question, what does this mean for Middle East peace?

We'll get there later. mean where do you want to start apollo global management lent him 184 million dollars after taking a meeting with jared jared apparently floated the ceo a job opportunity by the ceo i mean the like the utter lack of judgment it takes to take this meeting and to allow this loan to go through is staggering. Can you guys imagine Dan Pfeiffer, who had Jared's job, taking a meeting and then accepting a $184 million loan to fund his Trust the Process t-shirt scheme or something? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard. And then the Kushner Company statement said, Kushner Companies did not have any conversations nor interaction with the White House visitors mentioned in the Time story. Okay. So then the loans magically appeared?

Yeah. Jared greased them, or something happened here? There's a loan. So many coincidences in this White House. Yeah. So there's two sides to corruption. Here's how it helped Jared, and here's how it hurt the rest of us. It's pretty clear how this helped Jared, right? Jared's businesses are in serious problem. You know, he bought a building on Fifth Avenue and he couldn't make it work. He's got a lot of debts. He's racing around the world to try to refinance and finance his debt. Fine.

That's clearly what he's doing here. But how does it hurt the rest of us? Donald Trump did an about face on a carried interest loophole that benefits all of these people that Jared has been seeking money from. And it was actually remarkable when Trump flipped on this, right? If you remember, he was one of the people on the camp. He was a populist. And he was like, we're going to make sure that these wealthy Wall Street types, they don't pay a lower tax rate than teachers, right? That's sort of the argument that was always part of the plan. And then it just never was part of

the plan. It never went into Trump's tax plan. And so what happened? Well, they have to get the money from elsewhere. So it means higher taxes for middle class people. It means fewer deductions for normal people, all because there was a culture in the White House in which Jared clearly could not piss these people off because he was so desperate. You're like, who is the culprit for the flip on the carried interest loophole? Could it be Jared meeting with financial institutions? Could it be the fact that he has the head of Goldman Sachs running his economic policy? Could it be Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell who laughed when they heard about the carried interest loophole? Fuck no, we're never going to do that. It could have been any of them. Corruption clue. Yeah, no, it's murder on the Orient Express. The carried interest loophole, they all did it.

Spoiler. There's a lot of focus on like, so is Jared losing security clearance? Is he going to step down? Is he going to stay? Is he mad at John Kelly? Is John Kelly mad at him? But like all that aside, it seems like Jared could be in some real legal trouble with Bob Mueller here. I mean, Marcy Wheeler wrote a piece in the New York Times asking if Jared's going to

be the next indictment on a conspiracy to defraud america charge which is the charge of choice for bob muller um and also it's just so predictable yet this is why you don't go into a white house job without just getting rid of all your companies and business interests and why you when you have massive debts it's seen as a liability for, say, a security clearance process or, you know, like these things are all disclosed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just there's so many pieces of this that are hard to understand. We can't trust any decision that these people make. You know, there was a story that Rick Perry is jetting off to meet with the Saudis because, oh, we're going to help the Saudis get nuclear reactors. And when it's in a big problem, well, how does

this fit in with Donald Trump's business interests? how does this fit in with donald trump's business interests how does this fit in with with jared kushner's business interests did any of this stuff come up when when jared was going over to saudi arabia when we know that these are some of the people he's seeking loans from to buoy up his business so he doesn't run out of money while he's sitting in the west wing i mean remember manafort and gates were charged with the conspiracy it was that in the guise of pursuing foreign policy on behalf of the United States, they were actually serving the interests of themselves and foreign governments. And that is now what Jared's involved in is the Washington Post story too. Like he has been conducting foreign policy both before the administration started during transition and

since then. And the question is, if he was doing that in the guise of helping America, but actually helping his own family's interests or helping a foreign interest because all these other countries now think they can trick him, then he's going to be in really fucking big trouble. And we already know that his sister was out there hawking visas for a $500,000 investment. No immigration to the United States unless you can pay Jared. That's a clear policy. We want to cut immigration except if you have five hundred thousand dollars and you're a chinese investor who wants to pay the cushioners off then you can come here you are not a shithole country in that scenario unbelievable it's um can he just on the security

clearance thing tommy like so we haven't talked about this yet like can he can he do his job without a security clearance was he ever doing his job i I don't think so. I mean, as far as I can tell, his job are he's the Middle East peace envoy, LOL. He deals with relations with Mexico, which is a big security relationship. He deals with China in some form or fashion. And he's like a floating big shot advisor who likes to go to the PDB and demand intelligence. go to the PDB and demand intelligence. If you've been downgraded from a TSSCI clearance, a sensitive compartmented information clearance, to a secret level, you can't do any of those things. You can certainly go into a room and have a negotiation and talk about technical details. But most of the time when you go into negotiation with any country, you've been given every piece of intelligence

about the person you're meeting with, what they've been saying, what their position is, what they think their position is, ways to convince them. And if Jared can't access that stuff, it's a huge problem. Well, this is a bit, you know, look, this is like the Princess Bride. Jared is a master. And basically what he's going to show all of us

is that he can do this left-handed. He doesn't need the information. He's a gut guy. This is a guy that sits across from a table. He sees inside of our adversaries. And he knows what they want. He knows how to get them what they want while getting America what America needs. He's a guy that sits across from a table. He sees inside of our adversaries, and he knows what they want. He knows how to get them what they want while getting America what America needs. He's a track record of success.

Absolutely. I mean, this is a person, at every phase of his life, at every phase in his life, he has defied the naysayers, defied expectations. That is true. That is true. I rate that as true. Just one more point on Jared.

I do in some way feel bad for him because none of this would have happened if he hadn't had the resources to buy a spot in Harvard, which ultimately led him on a path to be in positions where he was too stupid and ill-equipped to do the crimes he needed to do and get away with them. If he wasn't so damn arrogant, he could have just stayed out of the White House, stayed on the outside, been a grifting little schmuck, not on the government dime and gotten away with all of this. Yeah, he could have been the guy trying to get 500K for visas in China and then gone to the U.S. Open and whatever the hell he likes to do. But he needed more. He needed more. Our beloved Attorney General, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III, is besieged once again. Yesterday, the President of the United States called him disgraceful via tweet and attacked Sessions for not investigating the Justice Department that is investigating Donald Trump.

The Washington Post says that Trump derisively refers to Sessions as Mr. Magoo because he is elderly and bumbling. I laughed. That was a good one. So much news happened on Wednesday that the Trump tweet about Sessions in the morning sort of faded away by the end of the day.

Seems like a pretty big deal though guys seems like possibly a bigger deal than hope hicks leaving of course who can forget the episode of mr magoo where uh he tried to stop civil rights groups from helping black people vote i think that deserves a closer look a little re-examination sorry tommy what were you gonna say no i was i am are we in the position of rooting for jeff it's funny like okay trump calls him disgraceful in a tweet and then jeff section just goes out to dinner with hot rod rosenstein and the number three of the doj general yeah and and the whole uh dc establishment it's like oh look at this burn it's a signal is it a signal maybe they're just fucking dinner they're telling trump that this is what he has to

deal with. He doesn't care. He's not a rational actor in this. He's going to spout off and fire whoever the fuck he wants to fire. Apparently Sessions hit back in the D.C. term by releasing a statement that was like, I will continue to do my job with integrity. But then the reporting is that Trump saw that and got even angrier at Jeff Sessions. I mean, we laugh, but it's like... It's an abusive relationship.

I wonder sometimes, like, we keep... You know, there's all these periods where everyone's like, he's going to fire Mueller, he's going to fire Mueller, and then he doesn't, and we move past it, and you think, okay, now we're safe. But it does seem like at any moment he could say, maybe not fire Mueller, but fire Sessions, or fire Rosenstein, like, and just, you know...

Yeah, I don't fully understand the three-dimensional chess Donald Trump is playing with Jeff Sessions. But the good news is I don't think Trump understands it either. You know, the fact that we're at a point where the attorney general is getting dinner with other Justice Department officials. And this is seen as a rebuke to the president. It's quite a place to be. A couple of fucking chair plates. And these guys are to the barricades. Yeah. I mean, I guess guess like to to continue your metaphor like the the chess that trump is playing

is that he knows that his queen is that no matter what he does paul ryan will just pull the covers over his head and hide from it and pretend it never happens so there will be no accountability if he fires the whole goddamn justice department yeah no he's got to back up but fortunately uh bob muller soldiers on we're starting to get more leaks about the investigation this week. Yesterday, we learned that Mueller has questioned witnesses in detail about Trump's private comments and state of mind over the summer when he tried to publicly bully Sessions into quitting because Mueller thinks perhaps that might be obstruction of justice. Perhaps he wants his attorney general to quit so he can replace him with someone who will shut down the Russia investigation. Why do we surmise that? Maybe because he's told us multiple times in public to Lester Holt. Lester Holt's deposed. To a bunch of Russians that visited the Oval Office.

To anyone who will listen. I don't know. Seems like an airtight case to me. It's amazing. What is there even to say? Yeah, of course he's looking into this. He's also, apparently Mueller's also asking witnesses about whether Trump was aware that Democratic emails had been stolen before that was publicly known. This goes back to, again, why was Mueller asking that question?

Perhaps because in late July, Trump got up at a press conference and said, Russia, if you're listening, go find all of Hillary's emails. Yeah, he was kidding, John. And also Roger Stone, who had said Pod Hillary's emails. Yeah, he was kidding, John. And also Roger Stone, who had said, Podesta's time in the barrel is coming soon. Time in the barrel. This is another place where Mueller's prerogatives and the media's prerogatives are different. Similar to Hope in that there may be inherent sexism in how Hope Hicks is treated, there's also an inherent bias towards newness and how the media, newness, not newness, newness and how the media treats these stories. And again, Robert Mueller doesn't care that Trump wanting to obstruct justice or asking the Russians to hack is not new or that

he did it publicly and it doesn't need to be uncovered via some sort of investigation. It goes to the legal issues, not the interestingness for DC reporters. Yeah. And if you can't see the line now between like Papadopoulos finding out that the Russians had a bunch of stolen, hacked emails that they're going to disseminate, which we now found out from the Schiff memo that it was not just him knowing about emails, but knew that the

Russians were going to disseminate them, and that he didn't go back to the campaign and tell them, and it didn't get back to Trump, and then Trump is now hiding from the federal government the fact that Russians are about to hack and disseminate emails and then tries to obstruct the investigation into it. Like, that's the crime, guys. That's conspiracy to defraud.

That's obstruction of justice. That's everything. Yeah, I mean, the gun was smoking. The gun was fired so long ago that the smoke has cleared, but Mueller saw the smoking gun. The gun was smoking. And to tie a little bow on the smoking gun, the NSA director is at a hearing like, yeah, Trump hasn't given me the authority to go after Russia to try to deter this. I mean, what are we doing?

And meanwhile, after he gets into office, his whole administration is just grifting every single day. Ben Carson's decorating his office with $31,000. He's got a restoration hardware going over at HUD. I mean, it's just like the corruption, it runs deep. You don't have to be a voter who cares about the Russia investigation itself to believe that this administration is deeply corrupt and taking advantage and wasting taxpayer money and taking advantage of their power while everyone else is struggling to get higher wages.

There you go. There's the center for bearing a promise to my right. There you go. Well, all I was going to say before I was looking at a message document from the party is another bias that Mueller doesn't have to have is this all doesn't need to connect into one grand story that goes A, B, a b c d all the way to z there are many interlocking behaviors on the part of these people that could be different and unrelated crimes right i mean we have a ton of financial shit going on with jared we have the manafort

stuff we have the flint stuff we have the trump collusion stuff we have the obstruction of justice stuff we have what don jr was doing in the meeting these are all different things they don't need to all it doesn't have to be one super crime yeah right they don't need to assemble into one super bot you know whatever that's right and it just flows from the top of a president who refused to divest from any of his business interests who wouldn't release his tax returns who didn't take any of the basic ethics steps or or disclosure steps or transparency steps that are required of a president everyone took their cue from trump and his utter indifference to ethics and rules and norms and acted accordingly yeah i i that that is the super crime i disagree i think it is all one thing it's all corruption it is all like the

russia the business interest this fucking spending money on your office it's all it's all one right it's all one we're all trying to defraud America. Yeah, absolutely. But like Flynn trying to kidnap a green card holder out of Pennsylvania. That's just a fun side project. Manafort's rug shit. Jared desperately needing loans. You could get rid of all of that. And there's still a whole other basket of Trump-related crimes. It's the Committees of Defraud America.

Committees of Defraud America. It's a treasure trove of crimes. That's what you're trying to say. Anyway, best of luck, Bob Mueller. I know we don't predict, but how does Jared survive this? He doesn't have a clearance. He can't do his job.

John Kelly hates him. These loan... This is like staggering corruption. No, if you're... I mean, if you're Jared, you wait for... And you don't get tripped up by any more stories

or Bob Mueller or John Kelly. You wait for a couple weeks or a couple months from now when things are quiet and you say, Ivanka and I are heading back to New York. And that's that. And also, he's a PR guy, just resigned two years ago, too. All of this is part of a larger story in which Paul Ryan has not done anything to hold these

people accountable because the reason he shouldn't survive is once a story like this breaks, there should be, what do they call them? These things they used to have in Congress called hearings. Hearings. They would call hearings and oversight. He'd be subpoenaed. There'd be an investigation. So you wouldn't be able to just hide from the news.

Well, speaking of which, there was a story right before we started recording that apparently we found out now that the House Intelligence Committee, led by dumb Devin Nunes, decided to leak Mark Warner's private text messages to Fox News to try to impede the Russia investigation. These were text messages with Christopher Steele that wrote the dossier,

which the Republican head of the Senate Intel Committee knew about. Everyone knew about it. It was not a scandal, which, you know, good enough for the Republicans. Marco Rubio, Burr all came out and said, no, this is ridiculous. This isn't a scandal at all. And now we found out that the House Committee, Nunes actually leaked these to Fox News. And so Richard Burr, Republican of the Senate Intel Committee, and Mark Warner have a meeting with Paul Ryan to tell him, can you fucking believe that your guy who's running the House Intel Committee leaked private text messages of a U.S. senator to Fox News?

And Paul Ryan's response was, well, I don't run the committee. Yeah, Paul Ryan took the form of a squirrel and ran up an oak tree. I just, yeah, we're not getting any, another, it's a good reminder that no matter what Mueller does, we're not getting any oversight or help from Congress until we flip it. No, I mean that

is there. Until Democrats take over in 2018. Yeah, like whenever you have this feeling of like, how can this be going on? How could nothing be happening? How does he get away with this? How does he get away with it? He doesn't get away with it because of some intrinsic quality of the presidency or the press.

He's getting away with it because Paul Ryan has made a choice. Mitch McConnell has made a choice about how to run the Congress. And it has been to just let Trump do whatever. I mean, you're seeing in the Senate side, you're seeing Warner and Burr act in a pretty collegial way. I mean, that committee historically in the Senate side, you're seeing Warner and Burr act in a pretty collegial way. I mean, that committee historically is bipartisan because intelligence is important and it shouldn't be politicized. And yes, we're imperfect in these goals, but they do a pretty good job of it.

Devin Nunes has been allowed to run wild by Paul Ryan, and he's humiliated himself time and time again. And yet we still let him drive news cycles, leak, create bullshit memos, leak messages that were disclosed to him by Mark Warner. Like there's no there's nothing untoward about Warner trying to reach out to have conversations with a potential witness. Devin Nunes dispatched his own lawyers to London to harass Christopher Steele. So I don't even get what the issue is. Well, they're trying to make everything. It's a strange thing where anything Obama did to investigate what is an incredibly

important issue, which is Russian interference on democracy, is now seen as partisan. Anything Mark Warner did to investigate is seen as partisan or inherently wrong. The head of the House Intelligence Committee currently conducting an investigation is trying to make any kind of investigation into Trump look somehow nefarious. And we should say that it's not working in the public. It's working among Republican voters very, very well. But polls polls out the last couple weeks show that independents and democrats if you ask them like do you trust do you just trump or do you trust bob muller on this one bob muller wins and he wins among independents in a big way too so it's just the uh the republicans and their cocoon of fox news that don't don't believe this waste news cycles. America loves a square jaw, John. They love a square jaw.

A foreign hand of a guy just working. That's not the tie knot of a prince or a dilettante. The tie knot of a working investigator. I want to talk about something else that happened yesterday. No Windsor for Robert Mueller. Not even a half Windsor. Leave it in. Let's move on.

All right. Robert Mueller, not even a half Windsor. Leave it in. Let's move on. All right. So as you guys know, Trump enjoys televised meetings with lawmakers because he gets to play the big independent deal making asshole from The Apprentice. But to the rest of the world, including the people in the room, it ends up looking like a bunch of politicians explaining the basic issues of the day to someone that they just met at a senior center and that's what it looked like yesterday with this gun meeting so they have this meeting about guns with in the cabinet room with trump democratic lawmakers republican lawmakers and trump basically agrees to every gun control measure that democrats proposed in the meeting comprehensive background checks raising the purchasing age to 21, banning bump stocks, even seems like he's open to the assault weapons ban, something that made Dianne Feinstein literally almost jump out of her seat. I'll tell you, John, by the end of the meeting, when Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar, and Donald Trump laid down in front of the NRA to do a Dianne, I was like, wow, wow, what a deal-maker.

He also said about making sure that people with mental health issues don't get guns, quote, take the guns first, due process later. Not how due process works. Interrupted Mike Pence. Mike Pence is like, obviously, due process, but we've got to make sure people don't get those guns. He's like, Mike, we don't need due process works. It's interrupted Mike Pence. Mike Pence is like, obviously, due process, but we got to make sure people don't get those guns. He's like, Mike, we don't need due process. It's a literal NRA fever dream. Like, this is their worst nightmare.

Just a gun grab without any restrictions. And you can see it on, like, Breitbart's website looked like an Edward Monk painting. They were just, like, screaming into the void. All cabs and websites. Trump the gun grabber. Steve Bannon still lives in the house by the way where Breitbart is writing

all this stuff. So people were losing their minds. I also just to say yeah why don't we flip the order. We'll take the liberty and property

then do the due process. He has no doesn't even get it. It's so like the intersection of like obviously totally changing his position based on what the NRA wants but also just being incredibly stupid about the meaning of these terms like i

would love for someone to turn to trump and just be like what is due process what is it what do you think it is you know so there were some people yesterday on twitter and obviously like he did this before he did this in an immigration meeting months ago in multiple immigration meetings where he said you know i love the dreamers i love daca we're gonna fix it and then you know now he's never gonna do anything about it but you know there's some people like why why televise these meetings and this is bad and blah blah blah but like i actually think reporters handled yesterday pretty great everyone watched that meeting and we're like it's pretty extraordinary what's happening in this meeting but not one person thought that anyone should give a shit about what that was actually happening

that meeting because everyone knew that republicans give a shit about what was actually happening at that meeting. Because everyone knew that Republicans and the White House staff was going to walk everything he said back immediately after the meeting, which they did. Republicans in the Senate all interviewed after the meeting. They're all like, no, no, no, no, no. We're only doing stuff that gets 60 votes. I don't know what he was talking about, blah, blah, blah. Like, it's just crazy. They ignore him.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's the part in which obviously Trump is not a good faith actor. You know, I don't think, it's crazy. They ignore him. Yeah. Yeah. So there's the part of which, obviously, Trump is not a good faith actor. You know, I don't think. That's true. We don't know how much of what Trump is saying he really thinks at the time or he wants to put on a good show and just be a pleaser and knows that when he gets back, you know, Kelly and the rest of the goons at the White House will tell him why he can't do what he actually

said he would do. And he knows that's going to happen versus Donald Trump is in a cycle where in the moment he doesn't have any policy positions and he thinks that sounds smart, that sounds reasonable. He may like he did not just come to this meeting with the kind of bromides he came to the dreamers meeting with. I mean, he was in the details of a policy, at least by his standards. He said, if an 18 year old and a 19 year old and a 20 year old can't buy a handgun, why should they be able to buy an AR-15? That is a very reasonable question, right? That is a question born of

having thought about the issue for a few minutes. At least watching people on the news talk about the issue. But it's better than usual, right? It was more nuanced and thoughtful than he's ever been on any other issue. So I don't know what you do when you have a guy that seems amenable to these things, but then is captured after by the news he watches and the people around him. I know what you do. You win back the Congress because I started thinking to myself, what does that meeting look like? Or what does the aftermath look like in a world where Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are running Congress?

And he says these things in a meeting and they go back and say, cool, we're going to pass those bills. And then they send him to the desk. Now, he still has the White House crew around him, John Kelly, to like take the bill away. But John Kelly, John Kelly is much more of a hardliner on immigration. The problem with John Kelly was always, oh, he's a general, he's an adult, but an immigration, he's pretty right wing. You know, he doesn't seem to come to the table with the same set of assumptions on guns that he came on immigration. That's I was thinking that, too. I mean, you have like Stephen Miller and John Kelly

who are hardcore like anti-immigration on every level and that killed everything to do with DACA. I just think like in this instance, you might not have those personalities that we know that are super pro-NRA or pro-gun, but they're all political hacks and they're smart enough to know that this would crush them with their base

if they actually did something meaningful. So I think they'll grab it all back from i agree with that too i think but yes but the point is that the real villains on gun control are not even it's not even donald trump in this case it is mitch mcconnell and paul ryan because they will and watch congress in the next couple weeks they will prevent anything meaningful from coming to the floor. They might not even do a bump stocks thing because they're going to say, oh, ATF can do that. He can do that with executive order, even though ATF is saying maybe they can't. So they'll maybe do that.

And maybe this fix NCIS thing. Fix NICS? Fix NICS, yeah, basically improving the background system without actually closing the gun show loophole. Sort of. So it's like the most modest improvements possible. It's not great. So anyway, they're not going to do anything.

And so you have to fix the Congress. You know, I mean, that's the first step here because those are the people blocking this. I guess that's it. We talked about a lot of stuff today. Wow, wow. Yesterday so much happened. Is Thursday always like this?

There's so much news. Isn't it? Thursdays. Thursdays. We didn't even tell everyone. I was going to say to the top and then you moved on. Isn't it? Thursdays. Thursdays. We didn't even tell everyone. Oh, yeah. Dan's. I was going to say to the top, but then you moved on.

Oh, I forgot about that. I just thought it was Monday. John has no data. Anyway. This is what it's like to do Pod Save America in the studio on Thursday. Dan's on vacation. Spending some of that. Basically, when he was in the White House, he did a sweetheart loan with a couple of banks and he's just spending it.

So yeah, so John and Tommy are here stepping in on Thursday. A lot of news. See, this is what it's like on Thursday, guys. So much news. So much news. Okay. Well, when we come back, we will have Tommy's interview with Natasha Bertrand. Welcome to the pod, Natasha Bertrand. She's the staff writer at The Atlantic and covers national security and the intelligence community issues near and dear to my heart. So I'm very excited to geek out with you today. Natasha, thanks for doing the show.

Thanks for inviting me. Okay, so literally as we were getting connected to record this, the New York Times broke a story that says the Senate Intelligence Committee bipartisan leadership has just figured out that the text messages from Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, were leaked by the House Intelligence Committee Republicans. What do you make of this? I mean, this is a committee that historically has been more bipartisan than almost any part of Congress because of the sensitive nature of intelligence, because there's an effort to try to leave partisanship at the door, even though we often fail when it comes to national security issues.

What do you make of this? I mean, it's just absolutely mind-blowing. So the Senate Intelligence Committee, I presume, was trying to be transparent with its House counterpart. And a staffer for Nunes, for Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intel Committee, asked for a copy of these text messages, I guess, that somehow they caught wind of the fact that Mark Warner had been communicating with a lawyer who represented a Russian oligarch and who had ties to Christopher Steele, because, of course, Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intel Committee, was trying to arrange a meeting with Steele. So the House Intel caught wind of these text messages, asked for a copy of them, and then immediately proceeded to leak them, which completely kind of breaches the norms of how these committees operate.

You know, it's kind of understood that if you share information between the committees, that it won't get leaked. It's one thing, and there's been a lot of criticism of the Democrats for leaking about Hope Hicks' testimony, for example, about the Democrats on the House Intel Committee kind of revealing that she said during her testimony that she sometimes tells white lies for President Trump. This was, of course, before she resigned yesterday. But it's different when you have one committee giving material to another committee, and then the Republicans on that very, very partisan committee, which has basically been a complete circus over the last year, proceeding to leak it to Fox News.

Yeah. And I also, I guess I don't even get what the goal of the leak was, because it's not like notorious idiot Devin Nunes hadn't sent his own staffers to try to meet with Steele. He dispatched a couple aides to London to try to hunt him down and have a conversation. It's like, I don't totally get what the allegation is here. Do you? Right, exactly. So the allegation is that Mark Warner was trying to do this secretly, that he didn't want to leave. At one point, he did send a text message saying that he didn't want to leave a paper trail that would be able to tie him back to the fact that he was trying to meet with Christopher Steele. But the thing that I think Fox News buried or either buried or failed to mention in that article is that Richard Burr, the Republican leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was aware of what Mark Horner was doing while he was doing it because they were both trying very hard to get Steele to come and talk to the committee. And they have been for the better

part of a year now. So the premise of the article, which is that this is something that Mark Warner was going rogue on, that he perhaps was trying to get in touch with Steele to maybe get more dirt on Donald Trump, maybe get more information about his Russia ties, and that he was kind of going at it alone, is completely undermined by the fact that this was a completely bipartisan effort. And of course, the text messages themselves were later shared with the full committee. And then you saw Marco Rubio come out and immediately defend Mark Warner's efforts to get Steele to testify. Bizarre. What a weird story. Well, this is developing. Switching gears a little bit, you had a big scoop in The Atlantic, this piece, where you obtained transcripts that showed Roger Stone, who is a decades-long informal advisor

slash creep to Donald Trump, has been in direct touch with the WikiLeaks team. A couple questions about this. First of all, it's almost too perfect that someone leaked the WikiLeaks Twitter DMs, but we'll leave that aside. But who runs the WikiLeaks Twitter account? Is this sad Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London talking to Roger Stone? So it's widely understood that Assange is the one who runs the WikiLeaks account. He obviously has the bulk of the control over it. That being said, he does share it with some WikiLeaks staff.

We don't exactly know who they are, how many people have access to the account, but the prevailing understanding is that he is the one who exercises the most control over it. Got it. And what was Roger talking about with these guys? What did the DM say? You know, it's interesting. So I actually obtained a screenshot of a conversation that they had beginning on October 13th, 2016, in which Stone reaches out to Assange or WikiLeaks in this case and says, hey, why are you guys attacking me, basically? Because WikiLeaks, of course, had kind of gone on this PR campaign to distance themselves from Roger Stone and from the Trump campaign and from any suggestion that they were coordinating

in any way, because that, you because that kind of undermined the impact of their publications. It undermined the impact of the DNC leaks. It may have undermined the impact of the Podesta leaks. So Roger Stone kind of reached out and said, hey, quit it because I'm really one of your only allies here. And WikiLeaks responded and said, well, your claims of false association are really damaging to us, kind of implying that there was no strategic coordination between them before that point. And Roger Stone writes back and says, well, you know, you really need to figure out who your friends are. Again, implying that he was one of their only friends at that point, which, to be fair, they were not very popular towards the end of the presidential election.

But the most interesting part of that entire kind of screenshot that I obtained, which Roger Stone did confirm to me was authentic, is on November 9th, the very day after Donald Trump won the election, WikiLeaks writes to Stone again and says, are you happy now? We're more free to communicate. Yeah, you're welcome. Exactly. So I asked Stone if this was kind of the entirety of the conversation. And he said that he Yeah, you're welcome. even more to that WikiLeaks conversation than just what I had obtained. Now, of course, when I asked him for the rest of that conversation, so I could put it more into context, if that's what he wanted, he declined to provide it to me. Yeah, I think there is a 0% chance that there aren't a bunch more messages between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks via Signal or some other encrypted app that we

can never ever get our hands with. But stepping back a bit, it's so weird. Like when I was in the White House and WikiLeaks first started dumping out cables and other things, they were widely seen by Republicans, Democrats, the foreign policy establishment, almost everyone as an enemy of the state. And that may have been a little silly and overstated at the time, but that was kind of the zeitgeist. Fast forward, you have Roger Stone connecting with WikiLeaks. You have Donald Trump Jr. talking to WikiLeaks. You have The Intercept reporting other DMs where WikiLeaks is talking about their preference for Trump over Clinton. This is a surprising take for a pro-transparency organization in my view. What is driving this?

Did they just hate Hillary this much and start to drive against her and fight against her and connect with the Trump people? Or is there something more nefarious here? Well, it's not even only that the United States saw WikiLeaks as an enemy of the state, it's that WikiLeaks actually saw itself from the very beginning as an enemy of the US and as an enemy of kind of this, what they saw as an imperialistic, kind of militaristic culture that in the George W. Bush years, was kind of the prevailing idea of the United States at that point. And of course, ever since, you know, it started out very much as a transparency organization, or at least that's what they said that they were, they were kind of indiscriminate

and who they targeted. But now, you know, since Julian Assange has been kind of locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last five years in London, and of course, since the 2016 election, when we saw WikiLeaks essentially become a cutout for the Russians, it's becoming clear. And it's a really interesting shift. And many people are trying to figure out what exactly clicked in Assange's head. It's becoming clear that they are exactly what Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, said that they are. They're a hostile intelligence service that is willing to take help from dictatorships, from autocrats, in order to target and undermine the US and the West. Whether or not that stems solely from their hatred of people like George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton, that seems to be a bit of a

stretch. It seems like now Assange is kind of stretching for relevance. Yeah. I mean, is that what it is you think? this is the personal peak of a guy who's enraged after spending years in a sad little embassy room, because he seems to even have distanced himself from people like Edward Snowden, or Snowden maybe distanced himself from Assange, or Glenn Greenwald, or other folks who, for a while, seemed like they were all sort of on the same team, pushing, generally speaking, for more transparency, even when it did damage to the United States. Even when there was no redactions, right? So Glenn Greenwald actually distanced himself from WikiLeaks and Julian Assange because they were dumping kind of indiscriminately like social security numbers and very private information

of the people whose documents were caught up in their leaks. But it is an interesting thing to wonder about whether or not Julian Assange literally has no idea where the documents come from that he gets his hands on and why he's been so insistent that he never knew that Russia was the source of these hacked documents. What is it like to cover this Mueller investigation day in and day out? I mean, like, I can't even imagine where you guys begin to try to shake down sources to figure out what the hell's going on in there. Are they the steel trap that they look like from the outside? Oh, absolutely. I mean, the way in is kind of trying to get to witnesses that Mueller has already interviewed.

Sometimes, you know, some people are more willing to describe their experience than others. But of course, they come out of their meetings with Mueller and with his team with a mandate not to speak to the press. So it is a very, very difficult nut to crack. And of course, on top of that, it's a lot of speculation. I mean, we really don't know other than these snippets of what the witnesses come out and tell us, you know, about the direction of his questioning or about the sense that they got in the room, we really don't know what he concretely has. We know the pieces of the puzzle that he has, but we don't know what he's managed to put together so far. It seems like, you know, the obstruction case is the more public facing one at this point, just because Donald Trump has not helped himself by being so public about the

fact that he, you know, really doesn't like Jeff Sessions right now, because Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe and isn't actively investigating this, you know, alleged FISA abuse by the Justice Department. And because, you know, he fired James Comey last year. So these are all things that it would be, it's very obvious that Mueller is looking into. But we also saw this big, you know, NBC report yesterday that kind of confirmed that he's also looking into collusion. We saw that Mueller is now asking witnesses specifically, well, what did Donald Trump know about the emails that WikiLeaks had about the DNC emails about whether or not they actually had Hillary Clinton's 33,000 missing emails? We all remember that really, you know, famous moment from that press conference. So it's difficult to get a concrete sense of what Mueller has in terms of

how much of the puzzle he's already put together. But the pieces are there. And right now, it's just up to kind of the press to put them together and wait on what Mueller has in terms of possible, you know, indictments. You might not be able to answer this because of just sort of source confidentiality, but I want to push you on one thing, which is what I was a part of two FBI investigations into leaks when I was at the White House. And the one thing that we were told by our lawyers, by the investigators, by the DOJ was you don't talk about this with anybody except your lawyer, period. They scared the shit out of us. So what is the motivation for a source to talk to the press about what they learned from Mueller or what they were asked? Is this pure score settling with enemies? Is there some other strategy that I don't understand? What's your take on this?

Well, I'll give you a good example. So I interviewed Simona Mangiante, who, of course, is the fiance of George Papadopoulos. And she actually, one of the first things that she told me about was her interview with Mueller. And I was actually very surprised. I was like, are you supposed to be telling me about this on the record? But she was very forthcoming about it. She told me that the interview lasted a couple hours. She described,

you know, that she very well could have been lying to me. But she described, you know, some of the questions that Mueller's team asked her because she was being interviewed out in Chicago. And, you know, I think that her motivation, for example, was that she wanted to make it clear that she had done nothing wrong and that her interview was, you know, very much just kind of superficial questions about what she did for a living, how she met George Papadopoulos, what she knew about George's contacts with the shady Russian professor, Russia-linked professor. So a lot of it, you know, may be just that so many people, turning back to the White House, so many people have kind of come in and out of the White House and have seen so much. And there's so much internal battles that

go on in this administration that perhaps they do want to throw some people under the bus. But I do think that sources coming forward and talking about their interviews with Mueller are primarily self-serving. Yeah, it is fascinating to me when days after Steve Bannon goes in for an interview, suddenly you read a whole bunch of stuff about what's being asked about Jared Kushner. It seems like an interesting coincidence. Natasha Bertrand, thank you so much for doing the show. Everyone follow her on Twitter. Check out her pieces in The Atlantic. Everyone should read the piece about Roger Stone sliding into WikiLeaks' DMs. It is... He's so stupid. Thanks again.

Talk to you soon. Thanks, Tommy. Bye. All right. Thanks to Natasha Bertrand for joining us today. And thank you guys for stepping in for Dan Pfeiffer.

Thank you. We miss you, Dan. We miss you, Dan. We'll see you next... We'll see you in Texas next week. Guys, we're going to be in Texas next week. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're going.

We've got to move some tickets. We've got to move some tickets. Also, so you know, next Thursday's pod is going to come out on Friday. Friday morning. And then the following Monday's pod is going to come Tuesday because we're on the road in Texas. So just make that note. We'll tell you again.

And bonus. And there's going to be a bonus. We won't even tell you when or when it's going to drop. Sunday. It's going to happen. Yeah, Sunday. Perhaps Sunday. Anyway, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Not in that order, but those are the cities.

Texas. I think there's still some San Antonio tickets. Look out, barbecue. I'm coming for you. He's excited. He's excited. I am too. Bye, everyone.

Bye. Thank you.