Pod Save America - “This is the end of my presidency. I’m f*cked.”

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is finally public, and it’s not great! Politico’s Natasha Bertrand joins to talk about all the explosive revelations, the fallout, and what comes next. Then we discuss Bernie Sanders’s decision to hold a Fox News town hall, and hear from comedian Chelsea Handler about her crush on Robert Mueller and her political awakening.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. In just a bit, we'll talk to Politico's Natasha Bertrand about the Mueller report, which is now out. And we'll talk about what comes next. We're also going to talk today about whether the Democratic presidential candidate should be appearing on Fox News. Bernie Sanders opening salvo against the Democratic establishment. And then later, you'll hear the interview we recorded last week with Chelsea Handler, who has a brand new book that's already in New York Times bestseller. Speaking of new books, our friend Adi Barkin, one of the most

inspiring humans on the planet, has written one called Eyes to the Wind, a memoir of love and death, hope and resistance. It'll be out this September, but you can pre-order it now, so please do so. I can't wait to read that book. I pre-ordered my copy last night. Me too, me too. I'm also prematurely crying over it, because I already know the impact it's going to have on me. Yeah, no, I feel the same way. And don't miss Pod Save the World this week.

Tommy and Ben talk about the arrest of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and what we know about Bernie Sanders' foreign policy worldview. Finally, we have two new 2020 candidate interviews out as bonus pods this week. Dan talked to Governor Jay Inslee when we were up in New Hampshire over the weekend, and I spoke to Senator Kamala Harris here in Los Angeles. Great interviews. Check them out. We're just rolling through these candidate interviews. Of course, now we've got like 500 left, maybe.

All right, on to the news. A lightly redacted version. I don't know how much work the word lightly is doing there. A lightly redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller's report about his investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign has finally, finally been made public after weeks of waiting in one last press conference from Attorney General William Barr. And here to walk us through all the revelations and answer all our

questions is the brilliant Natasha Bertrand of Politico, who's been covering the story from the beginning. Natasha, welcome to the pod. Is this the full exoneration we were promised? Thank you for having me. You know, it's interesting because there's clearly, and I'm still reading through it, and I don't want to pretend to have fully digested all of it, but, you know, it's interesting just how many contacts there were between the campaign and the Russians that we didn't actually even know about that are outlined in this report in volume one, which is the collusion and conspiracy aspect of the report,

but which did not apparently, according to Mueller Rice, the level of a criminal conspiracy, because there wasn't that kind of, you know, smoking gun agreement to coordinate to win the election. But, you know, that didn't stop the Russians from trying. And there's a bunch of new stuff in here about how, you know, Vladimir Putin kind of enlisted his oligarchs to, you know, reach out to the campaign and the transition team after the election and how he was very, very eager to establish this kind of direct line of contact with them as soon as possible. And then, you know, with regard to the obstruction aspect of this, I also haven't gotten a chance to read through it fully.

But it looks like, you know, Mueller's decision was based at least in part on, you know, a decision by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. know, a decision by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, you know, the policy that says they can't indict a sitting president, and there's a line in there that says that, you know, it wouldn't have been fair for them to make a decision when you can't bring a charge anyway. You know, just going to point out that that seems to be in direct contrast and conflict with what Barr said during his press conference today, which is that the OLC policy did not factor in to Mueller's decision to kind of punt on that question. It appears as though it actually did. And also a lot of really interesting stuff in here about, you know, what Don McGahn

told the special counsel and how angry Trump was when Mueller was actually appointed. Yeah. So I want to dig into all of the obstruction part of the report in a bit, but just back to the conspiracy and collusion part, what were the biggest takeaways for you in terms of the 108 pages in the report that describe contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians? What sort of stuck out at you as new that you hadn't really known about before? So, you know, this portion of the report was kind of frustrating because in many instances, Mueller would kind of lay out what witnesses had told him and what the president had said in his written answers, but would not himself draw a conclusion as to whether or not those testimonies

were reliable or verifiable. So, for example, you know, he went through the Trump Tower meeting stuff, and he said that, you know, Mueller, that Trump and his, he had not necessarily, had told the office that he did not know that his kids and his campaign chairman were going to meet with Veselnitskaya and the Russians to get this dirt on Hillary Clinton, but that the office really wasn't able to determine either way whether or not Trump was aware of it. They're just kind of going off of his word there. But yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of other stuff in here, like the fact that AlphaBank's co-founder was enlisted by Putin to reach out to the Trump

transition directly in order to halt the U.S. from putting more sanctions on Russia and to kind of establish this better relationship with the campaign and with the incoming administration, which is interesting because, of course, as we all know, there's this weird connection between the Alpha Bank server and the Trump Organization server that's never actually been fully explained. And that is also not really, Mueller doesn't go into the Alpha Bank server stuff in this report, from what I can tell. So, you know, that's kind of an interesting role for Alpha there. And then, of course, there's also a whole lot of stuff about the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, who, you know, reached out to the campaign via various contacts

and tried especially hard to get in touch with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. to facilitate these kind of backdoor channels. Mueller, you know, reaffirmed that Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. to facilitate these kind of backdoor channels. Mueller, you know, reaffirmed that Kushner wanted to set up a back channel using Russian embassy facilities to talk about Syria. And then, you know, another interesting thing that Mueller apparently discovered was about the infamous PJs, which is that apparently Michael Komen was told that the tape and any other kind of tapes that might exist of compromising information of Trump were fake, and that he had, you know, an associate over there had effectively stopped those tapes from being disseminated to the media and, you know, more widely. So a couple of interesting, interesting things in there. But overall, this is a lot of what we already knew. interesting things in there. But overall, this is a lot of what we already knew. And again, it's a little bit frustrating because Mueller doesn't actually draw a lot of independent conclusions, including about the Ukraine platform change at the RNC convention, which he says, look, you know, J.D. Gordon told us this, this other person told us this. We didn't find any

evidence that it was directed by Russia or directed by Trump directly. But, you know, we still don't really know why this action was taken. Natasha, there was another element of the Trump team's efforts to collude, I guess, or to participate in a conspiracy that they failed to participate in, where it talks about Trump directing Michael Flynn to try to get Hillary's emails and talks about Trump directing or Flynn reaching out to two people, Peter Smith, which we sort of knew about from public reporting and this grassy staffer named Barbara Ledeen. And ultimately, I mean, that seems like a pretty big bombshell to me. What was your reaction to that revelation in the report? Yeah, you're totally right.

I totally left that out by accident. That's a huge one. That's absolutely massive. You know, I guess it's not necessarily a surprise that the president wanted to find Clinton's emails. He had made that pretty clear. But the fact that he actually directed Michael Flynn to do it kind of connects a lot of dots that we hadn't known about before. We were trying to kind of figure out Peter Smith's relationship with Michael Flynn, and we could never determine what kind of communication they had with regard to the Clinton email search. But now we know that it was actually a direct request from Flynn to Peter

Smith to keep doing this project because, you know, it's not that Peter Smith initiated the search on Michael Flynn's request because he had apparently been looking for the emails from December of 2015. And that in itself is notable, because, you know, that is around the time that Russia started to, you know, hack into the DMC. It's when, you know, the Russians were kind of preparing to release the stolen emails and figuring out how they were going to disseminate them. So all this was kind of happening simultaneously. And I think, you know, when you think about whether or not a crime was committed here, the only saving grace, it seems like, was that Peter Smith was a little bit incompetent. He really wanted to, you know, connect with the Russian hackers. to connect with the Russian hackers.

He told a cybersecurity researcher named Matt Tate that he really didn't have any objection to connecting with dark web hackers, even if they were Russian, because he just wanted to find the email. So if that had happened, and if Peter Smith at the direction of someone on the campaign was effectively helping and encouraging the Russians to hack

the Democrats, then that would have been a very serious crime. But because Mueller was never able to, because Mueller was able to establish that he never actually made that contact, it appears as though they were kind of let off the hook on this one. Yeah, it does seem like in quite a few places, the behavior of Trump and his campaign sort of walked right up to the edge of criminality and might have gone over that edge were it not for either people deleting communications via, you know, secure communications channels like, you know, WhatsApp or Signal or their own sort of bumbling incompetence, like you just said. I mean, I thought it was very interesting about

the famous Trump Tower meeting when they talked about talked about like you know a big question has been why hasn't why wasn't don jr indicted basically muller says the government would unlikely to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the june 9th meeting participants had general knowledge that their contact the conduct was unlawful the investigation has not developed evidence that the participants in the meeting were familiar with the foreign contribution ban or the application of federal law to the relevant factual context. So I guess that means that if Don Jr. and company didn't know that what they were doing was possibly committing a crime, then they didn't commit the crime?

Right. And this is one of these weird areas, I think. And Ryan Goodman of NYU was saying this also, which is that campaign finance law is one of those weird areas of the law where ignorance of the law actually is kind of an excuse. familiar with the machinations of how to run a campaign and, you know, the ins and outs of campaign finance regulations really, I guess, does seem to have saved them here because it's very clear that they were prepared to accept, you know, a foreign contribution to the campaign that would have been very valuable to them. I mean, if they had been given anything of use by the Russians with regard to Hillary Clinton, then this whole scenario would have turned out very differently, I think. Yeah. Natasha, I wanted to, you know, the last time you were on the podcast was right around the time of Barr's confirmation. And now, you know, he's been confirmed. He had this press conference today. I wanted to get your reaction to his performance.

What was surprising to you? Was there was there stuff that was troubling? It was unique, to say the least. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a generous way to put it. I'm so generous. So I'll just, I'll just say what I've heard from, you know, former DOJ officials and legal experts and people on both sides of the aisle who watch this, which is that it was striking to them in the first instance how often Barr used the president's language, like verbatim language, to describe what he considered to be the top line findings of Mueller's report, which is no collusion. You know, he said that many, many times. And he completely neglected to mention any of the many, many Americans who were indicted as a result of this investigation. I mean, if you had been just listening to his press conference and had not been following anything that had happened in the last two years, that had happened in the last two years, you wouldn't even know that the president's campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, national security advisor, personal lawyer, were all

indicted as a result of this investigation. His categorical statement that there was no collusion, for example, by the campaign completely leaves out the myriad inappropriate contacts that members of his campaign did have with Russians, maybe not Russian government officials, but certainly with Russia-linked nationals. That's something that you would never know if you had just gotten Barr's version of this and not been able to read the report yourself. You would have never known, you know, that Putin was enlisting his oligarchs to reach out to the transition team and try to establish these back channel lines of communication to an administration that was very naive and very susceptible to any kind of influence, let alone foreign influence from a country that the president was already very sympathetic to. So, you know, it was clear,

very clear to the experts, I'll say, that were listening to this, that the main purpose of it was to set the narrative. I think that's very obvious. And to create this kind of PR spin and create an environment where the report might land on a softer cushion. I don't think it had the intended effect on people who have been able to and who have wanted to read the full report. But, you know, it certainly created headlines for a couple hours. And I think that's what ultimately they were trying to do. But again, you know, this is the attorney general of the United States. This is not the president's personal attorney.

And, you know, one former FBI official who left the FBI in 2017 told me any, you know, reason to give him the benefit of the doubt has now completely evaporated. Yeah. I mean, look, before Barr's letter ever came out, it seemed like legal experts, the majority of legal experts said, here's the deal. You know, Department of Justice guidelines say that you can't indict a sending president. Guidelines say that you can't indict a sitting president. So if Mueller really finds all this evidence of obstruction, what he's going to say or what he's going to try to communicate is this is up to Congress. This is why you have impeachment proceedings, because it's Congress's job to hold the president accountable while in office because a sitting president can't be indicted. Isn't that essentially almost exactly what Mueller says in this report? Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.

And, you know, I also think that the idea that Barr would just go ahead and clear the president of obstruction on this one was obviously a very deliberate move. There is no reason why he should have been involved in that decision. But then again, you have to, no legitimate reason why he should have been involved in that decision. But then again, you have to know legitimate reason why he should have been involved, knowing the kind of public pressure that that, you know, this report and the investigation was under and the scrutiny it was under. But that being said, the regulations are kind of what they're confined to at this point. So the special counsel regulations were a complete overcorrection from the star era. Right. Right. And, and so what you have now is, is the special counsel is directly accountable to the attorney general and the attorney general, if he wanted to,

didn't even have to release the report at all. Now that would have been politically, you know, completely unacceptable Now, that would have been politically completely unacceptable, and there would have been a lot of hell to pay if he hadn't released it to Congress, at least. But they are kind of a victim to the regulations, which do not provide a mechanism by which Mueller could go directly to Congress, if that is indeed what his recommendation is. It was clear in the report that he did intend for Congress to make the final determination, but the regulations stipulate that he has to go through the attorney general.

And if the attorney general, you know, considers himself to be an arbiter in this, which Bill Barr obviously does, perhaps to an excessive extent, then it's really up to him to make these decisions. So I think maybe what we'll see after this whole thing is over is maybe a tweaking of the special counsel regulations to deal with this problem, because we went from one extreme in the star era to another, it seems. Yeah. As you go on and do your reporting, what are the big questions you still have that you're going to be tracking down answers to? So, you know, I'm still really interested in, you know, why exactly Mueller decided not to answer this question. I think that we still don't really know why he he because we're getting two different answers.

Right. So Barr said that he did not rely on the OLC opinion. Mueller says that he wanted, you know, Congress maybe to look at it, but we still don't really know what the deliberations were like internally about the obstruction question. You know, another question I would like answered is how the Mueller team has been viewing all of this and whether or not they were even told about this press conference this morning beforehand, how they have viewed the rollout of a report they worked on for two years. And then, you know, just going back to the collusion aspect of the report, why, you know, why none of this rose to the level of a criminal conspiracy? I don't think that that is particularly well laid out, especially because we still haven't gotten to the Roger Stone trial,

which is going to reveal perhaps a lot about the potential coordination that went on between the campaign and WikiLeaks and potentially even Russia. So what is the rationale behind that? Why did he end the investigation when he did? I don't think we've gotten a good answer to that either, especially because of so many outstanding things, including Rick Gates' cooperation. So it's a lot of things that need to be farmed out a bit, but those are the biggest ones for me,

is just the rationale underlying some of these decisions in greater detail and also what the know, what the Mueller team's reaction has been watching Barr kind of spin this the way he has. Natasha, one last question for you. It's indicated in the report that Mueller's team made a number of referrals to other elements of the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. We know of only a handful of those. Do you have any indication of your sources? What else we should be looking for for future criminal for future indictments or charges to come out of this report? No, I mean, all I've all we know right now is what's been publicly reported. But that's that's a really good question. I think that we have yet to see just how much he

has, you know, farmed out from this investigation, especially because there could very well be additional sealed indictments, not from Mueller, apparently, but out of the Southern District of New York or in Washington, D.C., stemming from things that Mueller did hand off. I think the Trump inaugural committee investigation is going to be a really big one. Obviously, the Roger Stone trial is going to reveal a lot. But maybe some of these unanswered questions that we all have are going to be resolved by the U.S. attorneys officers in various parts of the country. And we also have to remember that there might still be an ongoing counterintelligence investigation. And that could be the reason why some of these people haven't been charged, because to do so could disrupt that ongoing investigation.

So I think there's a lot more to come on this. could disrupt that ongoing investigation. So I think there's a lot more to come on this. I think this is definitely a good start to understanding what happened, but there are still so many threats that need to be pulled. Natasha, thank you so much for joining us, and we very much look forward to all your continued reporting on this issue. Thanks so much for having me. All right, we're back. Dan, I want to get your take on your multiple takes on everything that's happened this morning. I do want to start with Trump's quote upon learning of Mueller's appointment, which exists in this report, which is my favorite quote of the day.

Oh, my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. Does that sound like the musings of an innocent man? Yes. Yes, it does. I had to, I saw that quote, I think he might even have texted that, a tweet with that quote in it. And I was sure it was bullshit. I just, I thought it was like onion joke. So I had to quickly start scanning to see

that it, yes, in fact, it was real. And I think it is A, funny, B, an indication of guilt, but also is sort of a Rosetta Stone to understand everything that unfolded afterwards. Which is, even if in Trump's – and we've talked about this a little bit before – but even in Trump's mind, he believed he was innocent of collusion or conspiracy to defraud the electorate or however you want to think about what was encapsulated in volume one of the Mueller report, Trump knew that he had been living crime adjacent his entire life. And if you had a super cop like Bob Mueller on your case, he was going to uncover all kinds of things, which is why he was willing to engage multiple times in what was obstruction of justice. And that sort of helps us understand. It explains what Trump did. It explains how he's been acting from the beginning and says that there's a lot more threads to pull here as Congress and the American public digest the specifics of the obstruction case against the president. Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, let's start with the collusion conspiracy chapter, right? And so basically Mueller lays out in the

report, and this is a quote from the report, in sum, the investigation established multiple links between Trump campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the campaign. In some instances, the campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances, the campaign officials shied away. So basically what Mueller lays out in 108 pages, as we said, of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, is that multiple times Russia knew that they were interfering with the election to try to elect Donald Trump, and they thought they would reach out to the Trump campaign to see if they wanted more assistance to win. And the Trump campaign multiple times said, yes, give us the assistance, we want to win.

But because there was no criminal, because there wasn't a explicit conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians that said, hey, let's work together on this and let's see that to fruition that, you know, Mueller didn't charge anyone with an actual criminal conspiracy. And also, we should say, by the way, that Mueller lays out in the report that what we've been talking about forever, which is this word collusion, a sort of bullshit. Like he basically says, you hear this on TV, you hear the president's people talking about it. It's not really a term. What I'm talking about here is conspiracy as it is defined legally and sort of cooperation, which is a tacit agreement between multiple parties to sort of commit a crime together. And because there weren't those tacit agreements or because Mueller didn't find sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that conspiracy, that's why, you know, Don Jr. and some of these other goobers weren't actually charged.

Was that sort of your take on the whole conspiracy part? Yeah. I mean, ultimately, if one day in time, there is a Trump library somewhere engraved on the side of will be saved by his own stupidity, because these people tried to commit multiple crimes. They knew Russia was interfering with the election. They knew Russia was doing so to help Trump. They wanted to take advantage of that help. They were just too stupid to commit the actual crime that Mueller felt he could charge. Yeah. And that's incredibly important because we've talked about this for so long. Collusion is a fake word.

It doesn't mean anything. The president really sort of shifted the Overton window on this, and the press fell for it hook, line, and sinker, this idea that the only crimes, the only way in which Trump could be found of any wrongdoing would be if he could be found of the ultimate wrongdoing, which was in an always improbable case where there was some explicit agreement between Trump and Russia to steal the election, which was never going to happen because Trump doesn't have the capacity to engage in such a complicated conspiracy. But they were engaged in wrongdoing throughout the process. And this report is very bad for Trump. Whether that will lead to political accountability is a conversation we'll have later in the pod,

but it lays out a lot of wrongdoing, a lot of lying on Trump and his associates. And we should not, this is not, they're not innocent of anything. They colluded all over the place. They just were incapable of maximizing their collusion to the point of crime. Yeah. I mean, the president tried to cheat to win the election. He tried on multiple occasions to access stolen documents from his opponent. He wanted those emails. He tried multiple ways to get them. The report lays out the president of the United States ordered Michael Flynn to find the deleted Clinton emails.

Michael Flynn then contacted Peter Smith, who has ended up dead since then. Flynn then contacted Peter Smith, who has ended up dead since then. And then Peter Smith put together a whole plan about how they were going to try to contact foreign intelligence services, not just Russia, but China, Iran, other foreign powers to try to find these deleted emails. But, you know, it never went anywhere because Peter Smith was kind of a bumbling idiot and didn't know how to do it. But Trump wanted those emails. Trump, as we all know, said, Russia, if you're listening, find Hillary Clinton's emails. And then Mueller says in this report, five hours after Trump did that, said that to the public, was the first time that Russian military intelligence hackers hacked into or tried to hack into Hillary Clinton's emails. So we know from this report that Donald Trump wanted stolen documents from his opponent so he could win the election.

And he knew that getting those stolen documents involved, working with a foreign power that he also knew was trying to interfere with our election. We know this. It's all laid out in Robert Mueller's report here. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's truly, I mean, Brian Fallon, former Hillary Clinton spokesperson from the 2016 campaign, made this point, which I think is important,

which is if there had not been really good reporting from The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, others over the last two and a half years here, as well as congressional oversight, that if we had learned everything in this report for the first time today, as opposed to a slow drip, if there had been no information and all of a sudden this report comes out, 400 some pages, just detailing a massive amount of wrongdoing, whether it reaches a criminal standard or not is an open question, but wrongdoing, lying about wrongdoing, it would be a political earthquake like we've never seen before.

What happened in this report goes well beyond what came out in Watergate. Well beyond. Yeah. I mean, in addition to trying to find the emails on the front end, Mueller also found that the president himself and his campaign knew that the stolen DNC emails were going to be released before they were actually released. They put together a press plan to capitalize off of it. Trump was in contact with members of his campaign and Roger Stone. Of course, all the Roger Stone stuff is redacted because that trial is still to come. But it's pretty clear that Trump was involved.

Trump knew that WikiLeaks was going to disseminate these emails. And the campaign was basically putting a plan to help coordinate and disseminate those emails. Now, the reason, so you might say, like, why weren't any of them charged with this? the problem is is wikileaks as the intermediary here right so russian hackers stole the emails they committed the crime that's the hack right then they gave those emails to wikileaks to publish wikileaks publishing those emails is not itself a crime this is partly under press protections this has to do with the whole assange thing that we just saw happen last week too right like if you you know wikileaks as an organization publishing documents that just happen to be stolen not necessarily a crime and then the trump campaign

working with wikileaks to then disseminate those stolen documents and to have a press plan around how they could capitalize off it and win the campaign, not necessarily a crime, but still pretty fucking bad. Yeah. Right? Like, doesn't need to be a crime. It's not great. And this is, I think there are a couple important points about this, which one is that this is the president of the United States.

Yeah. President of the United States. Yeah. And he, we have to hold him to a higher standard than just the average criminal defendant. There should be political accountability for activity that is obviously wrongdoing, but is simply does not meet the threshold for being charged because of technicalities. That's what this is. It's not that this report did not find that Trump in his campaign did not do bad things. It found out that the bad things they did were not done in the exact way in which you would charge a crime. There's a difference between not being charged and being innocent. And this is not a declaration of innocence of Trump or anyone around him. It's an explication in great detail of how they are guilty of trying to cheat to win

the election, as you put it. That's exactly what they did. Now, Bob Mueller made a conclusion that the way in which they did it did not meet the technical definitions of a crime, but that doesn't change how both the public, Congress, and history should render judgment on what happened. And by the way, this wasn't just cheating and garden variety corruption with people within the United States, like shady characters who want to help Trump win the election. It's not just that kind of cheating. There was a foreign power that attacked our election, right? This is, this is like disloyalty to the United States. And to think back now to the fucking Helsinki press conference, when Donald Trump is standing next

to Vladimir Putin and denies what's in this report stated as a fact over and over again, with a ton of evidence that the Russians hacked into our election, denies the fact that Russia ever interfered with our election, denies the conclusions of American intelligence, of the American law enforcement, and sides with Vladimir Putin in front of the whole world. And all these fucking Republicans now are like, oh, all these Democrats who called Donald Trump a traitor or disloyal or all this kind of thing, they owe him an apology. No, it's fucking disloyal to the United States how Donald Trump and his campaign acted throughout the 2016 election.

The other thing that I did, you mentioned this, I thought was really notable, was that the Trump campaign created a communications plan around maximizing the disclosure of the hacked Clinton and DNC emails. And that is notable because this collection of JV Republican staffers and Fox Green Room rejects have not written a plan in their entire lives. The fact that they actually wrote a plan for this is notable for how serious they took it and what an opportunity they saw it was. This wasn't like on a whiteboard with like infrastructure week and our plan to roll out our child care policy. This is the only thing they had to plan on the entire campaign. The rest of it was a bunch of ass backwards freelancing. Yeah. So now to move on to the obstruction part of the report.

to move on to the obstruction part of the report. I do think, and you mentioned this, the paragraph that sort of sums it up here is, you know, they talk about the firing of Comey. And the report says, the evidence does not establish the termination of Comey was designed to cover up a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, right? And we know that to be true, because Mueller did not find a conspiracy, he did not find enough evidence to establish the conspiracy. He did not find enough evidence to establish the conspiracy. He did not indict anyone based on that conspiracy. But then the report goes on to say, but the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the president personally, that the president could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns.

So right there, Bob Mueller is saying that is the motive to obstruct justice that Trump had. So this whole idea that fucking William Barr, when he wrote the four page letter, said, you know, Trump couldn't possibly have obstructed justice because there was no underlying crime related to collusion. Well, yeah, that's not the point. there was no underlying crime related to collusion. Well, yeah, that's not the point. Trump obstructed justice because Trump was worried, as you said, that Mueller was going to uncover his other crimes. And guess what? Mueller did uncover his other crimes, and so did SDNY, because when he referred the Cohen case to SDNY,

he found that Michael Cohen committed a crime in relation to the hush money payments, that Michael Cohen committed a crime in relation to the hush money payments and that Donald Trump was implicated in that crime as an unindicted co-conspirator. So it's like there was, of course, a corrupt intent to obstruct the investigation. Donald Trump was worried that Mueller would find all these other crimes. And guess what they did? Yes. I mean, long before he was president of the United States, Donald Trump was mayor of Crime Town. Because he has been, whether it is the tax fraud uncovered by the New York Times, the hush money payments uncovered by SDNY, Trump University, rampant fraud, corruption, payoffs, things that happened in Atlantic City, all across the board.

He had a massive amount of criminal exposure. And he acted just like that and has continued to act just like that. And he has had Bill Barr as his willing enabler for the last couple of months here. Yeah. And so, you know, Mueller goes on to list 10 different instances of obstruction, everything from, you know, firing Comey, you know, the president directed White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller and then told him to deny that he directed him to fire Mueller. And that says McGahn then, quote, called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office and prepared to submit his resignation letter and told then chief of staff Reince Priebus that the president was asking him to do crazy shit.

I think the McGahn thing is really interesting on a couple of levels. Because, one, that's a fucking crime. Two, for the president to instruct a subordinate to lie, which McGahn did not do. But the mere instruction to lie is obstruction. And that is something that is one of the reasons I believe that it was pretty clear that Mueller was unwilling to, quote unquote, exonerate Trump from this. But there's also something that McGahn is just like a fucking metaphor for the Republican Party right now, which is the president of the United States instructs him to commit a crime and to do

something that McGahn believes would be an impeachable offense for the president. He drives to the White House, packs up his stuff, says he's going to resign. Does he resign? No. He was instructed to commit a crime on a Saturday, and he went to work on a Monday and stayed in the job for another fucking year because he thought it was a great way to put judges on the bench who would rule in favor of corporations and overturn Roe v. Wade. So they're willing to hang out with criminals, willing to cover up crimes, as long as you get to do your conservative shit. And that is the Republican Party in the Trump era and why we have a problem that goes long beyond after the individual one leaves the stage. So basically, you know, Robert Mueller gives us a motive and a corrupt intent for Trump

to obstruct justice because he's worried that this investigation will produce more evidence of other crimes that he may have committed or things that will be personally embarrassing to him. So he's got the motive. And then Mueller goes on in great detail to list 10 different instances where the president of the United States ordered his aides to obstruct justice, tried to obstruct justice himself. And because the aides refused to carry out his orders, Mueller basically says that's why Trump's aides weren't indicted on obstruction of justice because they refused. But he doesn't say that that's why Trump is scot-free, because telling someone to obstruct justice is still a crime. So he has all this evidence of crime and of obstruction of justice.

and of obstruction of justice and then now we get to the point where we think about this fucking letter from attorney general barr a couple weeks ago that exonerates the president of obstruction of justice because he says you know oh bob muller just couldn't really make a determination on this either way so i decided to step in and say that he's exonerated. Well, it turns out that's not what Bob Mueller did at all. Ari Mulber, in a couple of tweets, put this pretty succinctly. He said, Barr was wrong. Mueller report states DOJ rules don't allow indicting presidents. So his policy, the Mueller probe avoided any approach that would, quote, result in a judgment the president committed crimes. Mueller explicitly says as a matter of DOJ rules, quote, no charges can be brought against POTUS.

So Barr's letter was incorrect in its depiction of Mueller. And then Mueller goes on to say many different times in the report, basically, this is up to Congress. So what the fuck was Bill Barr doing? Well, I think it's pretty clear what he was doing, which was he was putting in the fix for Donald Trump. How did he think he's going to get away with this is the real question because we know what he was doing but like did he think he was going to be able to fucking get away with this forever i mean he still might i guess i mean it depends on what you mean by get away with it right

what is the accountability that will come to bill barr he got what he wanted which was he is going to forever be in trump's debt. He wanted this job for this reason. We know this because he auditioned for it by running a 19-page memo, raising questions about the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation. He has played his role exactly through, I think, the three Democrats, Joe Manchin, Doug Jones, and Kyrsten Sinema, who voted for Bill Barr, have a lot to answer for. Or at least Kyrsten Sinema and Doug Jones. Joe Manchin is just being Joe Manchin, and we're sort of fucking stuck with that. I think there's going to be a lot of discussion about what Democrats do next and how they take this. And there's a lot of threads to pull for Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler in the committees

in the House with oversight authority over elements of this report. There's the question of when Bob Mueller will testify and when we will hear from Bob Mueller, which will obviously be interesting content, if you will. But I think there's a question about what Democrats do with Bill Barr because what he did here was deeply inappropriate. It was deeply dishonest. It was an abuse of power. was deeply inappropriate. It was deeply dishonest. It was an abuse of power. It undermined the traditional independence that an attorney general should have from the president. It will raise questions about any and every decision he makes about corruption and criminality

related to Trump and his administration for the next two years here and, you know, God forbid, two years here and, you know, God forbid, the four years going forward. And so I think that like we like a lot of Democrats have called for Bill Barr to resign today, which he's obviously not going to do. But what do you think about bringing up Bill Barr on either impeachment or censure in the House? I mean, yes, because he didn't just, I mean, you put it politely, he undermined the independence between the Attorney General and the President. He fucking obliterated it. I mean, he sounded, the letter was bad enough. The press conference this morning, he basically sounded like a slightly more well-spoken Fox pundit talking about, you know, no collusion and the president was frustrated.

He basically said that the president obstructed justice because he was frustrated about the investigation. I guess if you get charged with obstruction of justice, that's a new defense now that you can make. Well, I was pretty frustrated. That's why I tried to break the law. Yes, it's true. If any of our listeners get pulled over for speeding, Bill Barr has instructed you to tell the cop that you were frustrated by the speed limit. I mean, and look. Don't actually do that, people. That's a bad idea. No, it's a bad idea. Don't speed. Drive safe. There's a few other questions, you know, from from Mueller when they finally get Mueller before Congress, which is Mueller basically says that he in the report, he saw Trump's written answers to his questions as inadequate.

And yet he did not subpoena Trump. He didn't ever he never actually had a sit down interview with Trump. And basically, the report says he didn't because it was he was basically like, I have enough evidence that he obstructed justice. But then basically, you know, leaves it to Congress, partly because of these DOJ guidelines. But I guess my question to Mueller is like, why didn't he proceed with the subpoena? Why didn't he try to sit down for Trump with an interview? he tried to sit down for Trump with an interview. I think I've wondered this question for a long time, and I thought Preet Bharara had a very good answer when he spoke to you guys on the Monday pod right after the bar letter came out, which is this would have wound its way through the court

for years and probably extended beyond Trump's reelection. So if you go down the road of subpoenaing the president, having that go all the way to Supreme Court, you can't really conclude the report and send the evidence to Congress until after the election. So I think this is maybe the most favorable interpretation, I think, is that he was caught between, is it important both for the propriety of his investigation and for the American public to conclude it with enough time for the American public to digest it without dropping it as some sort of bomb the month before the election, sort of pulling a Comey, if you will. and pushing this all the way to the end, which would mean that the Americans would very potentially go to the polls in 2020 without knowing Bob Mueller's conclusions, which Bob Mueller, given what a straight area is,

probably thinks that's both unfair to the public and unfair to Trump, right? Depending on what he thought he would find. That's the only explanation I can give, but in taking that path, I think he sort of doomed his investigation. Because if you have to show corrupt intent for Trump's actions to invoke obstruction of justice, then you are, it's pretty impossible to do that without asking the person to their face what their intent was,

and not just getting some letter written by Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow. Yeah. So let's talk about what the Democrats should do, because, you know, as we said, special counsel regulations don't allow for Mueller to have made an official impeachment referral like they might have in the past when it was a you know independent when the independent previous independent council law was in effect but Mueller basically this is basically an impeachment referral from from Robert Mueller he basically says in no uncertain terms you know this is up to Congress Congress has the ability to make sure that the president doesn't obstruct justice. Like he sort of drops a few more than hints in the report that Congress should should take this up. So now what do Democrats do? They've they've basically received evidence of the president obstructing justice from the special counsel.

The special counsel has basically said in no uncertain terms that he leaves the determination to them. Now, what do the Democrats do? Well, that's the $10,000 fucking question, John. I think the first step, I think we should do this in sequence, right? You don't have to figure out where you're going to go from day one. So I think step one, subpoena all the underlining materials, which I believe that is in process right now. Subpoena Mueller, which I think that is also in process. Presuming Mueller requires a subpoena, but get Mueller in front of Congress and get his answer

to these questions about what drove some of the decisions were there. I think it is take as much of the oversight resources within Congress and focus it on pulling all the threads here, digging deeper, having public hearings with key witnesses to hear what they have to say about these things. That is everyone from Jared Kushner to Don Jr. to Barbara Ledeen, the Grassley staffer who was working with Peter Smith on getting the stolen emails. Let's hear from anyone and everyone, and let's do it right now. Let's do it strategically. Let's do it smartly and let's do it in a way that exposes it to the public because there's a lot of work that has to be undone to wipe away the impression that Bill Barr left with his willfully dishonest letter of

a few weeks ago. So that's where I would go now, which leads to the question of what do you do about impeachment? And I think you got to start at you got to ask the questions that are left remaining in the report before you know the answer to that. Yeah, I think I think that's right. I mean, look, I think back to, you know, the conversation that you and I have had multiple times where you have basically counseled Democrats against impeachment because this we know where this goes. Right. If the House impeaches the House holds impeachment hearings and the House Democrats impeach Donald Trump, which would obviously be on a party line vote because it doesn't look like any Republicans are coming along. Then it goes to the Senate. There's a hearing in the Senate. Chief Justice John Roberts presides. There's no fucking way we're getting, what, 13, 14 Senate Republicans on board to impeach. Who knows if we even get fucking Joe Manchin on board to impeach,

right? And so then, you know, they fail to convict the president. And the president says, total exoneration. Mitch McConnell says, total exoneration. Mitch McConnell says total exoneration. And he goes free. And now we're, you know, close to the election. So that's all the downsides to impeachment. But I will say there's sort of a middle ground here and that like the focus doesn't necessarily have to be on the Senate and whether the Senate convicts the president, right? Like we have said for some time that this is going to be decided at the ballot box in 2020, that this is going to be decided at the, that the American people are going to decide whether the president is fit for office or not in November of 2020. So that's true. Let's keep that in mind, but let's, I don't know, provide the American people with all the evidence, all the testimony, all the underlying documents, all the witnesses and all the tests, everything they need to make a determination about whether the president is fit for office or not.

And obviously, they'll make that determination also based on the fact that he wants to take away their health care, the fact that their wages haven't gone up, the fact that he's a crazy lunatic. their health care, the fact that their wages haven't gone up, the fact that he's a crazy lunatic. So there's going to be a number of factors in there. But why not say part of why we're conducting this impeachment hearing is so the American people have all the information they need to make a determination about this president when they go to the ballot box in 2020. I think the challenge with you did a great job of making my argument. So thank you. The I think the challenge with that is that you can uncover that information in two ways. One is through oversight hearings and through the normal course of business, right? Intelligence committee, judiciary committee, oversight committee, just like the Cohen hearing of a few months ago or whenever that was because time's a flat circle. So that's one way to do it. The other way is to open impeachment hearings through the Judiciary Committee to call witnesses for the purpose of having a vote on impeachment at the end of that process.

And if you start that process, you're going to end that process with a vote. Yeah. That is exactly what happened with the Republicans in the 90s around Bill Clinton. And you just have to decide if you want to do that. But if you start the process, you will end the process, you will have a vote. And if that vote were to fail, that's even worse than my alternative scenario, which is possible. There are a lot of Democrats who are uncomfortable with that. is possible. There are a lot of Democrats who are uncomfortable with that. And so I think you just have to decide whether you do that. The last point I make on this is that you don't get any, like Trump doesn't lose electoral votes if he has a scarlet eye on his chest, right? So this is going to play itself out the same way no matter what. And if it was up to me, I would impeach Trump. I said this before, I would impeach Trump. I said this before, I'd impeach Trump.

I'd get him out of the 25th Amendment. I'd indict him. There's like any course of legal means to get this man away from our country, I would take. But I just, I think we have to be strategic about what our goal is. And our goal is to expose all of the evidence the American people bought, all the things Trump has done wrong in the Russia measure, but then in everything else, whether it's the tax cut, it's the self-dealing around the Trump Hotel, massive amounts of corruption left and right, the Gulf States investments and Jared Kushner's failing real

estate entities, all in the above issue. It is the job of the house Democrats to make that information available to American people so they can make a fully informed decision. I am very torn on this issue. I'm just very worried about how it plays itself out. Look, I am too. And I, and I very much understand the politics. I very much understand that most voters out there have not been following this as closely as we have, may never follow it as close as we have. And even those who are, maybe Trump's criminality is baked into their opinion of him. So they either believe he's a criminal and we're going to vote against him anyway, or they're, you know, ride or die with him to the end, or they're unsure about Trump,

but it's not because of potential crimes he committed. It's because they don't know if he's serious about taking away their health care. Right. So, like, I get the politics and I get the potential backlash to the politics. I just I have a real problem with this report coming out with so much evidence that the president of the United States broke the law, that he abused his office, that he abused power, that he committed obstruction of justice in all these different ways. And that because we are worried about the political impact of what happens if we go down the road of impeachment proceedings, we're just going to let it go. And, you know, they didn't let it go with Richard Nixon and he resigned. And, you know, you can

argue about the Bill Clinton one, but like, it's just, it's so incredible to me. And I worry so deeply about the precedent it sets to say that we had knowledge that the president committed a series of crimes. And, but because we Democrats weren't in the majority or didn't have enough votes in both houses, and we were worried about the potential backlash and what it would mean for the 2020 election we just sort of let it go um so i don't know it's just very concerning it's concerning to me it really is and i get and like i said i get the arguments on both sides of this but and look i mean the other thing is here we didn't even mention this part of the report special counsel found evidence of crimes outside its scope and made 14 criminal referrals to other jurisdictions, only two of which we know about.

One is the Cohen thing. So like there's I mean, and we've already talked about the inauguration is getting investigated. His businesses are getting investigated. So who knows what other crimes might come to light? what other crimes might come to light. And perhaps that makes the decision for us that if one of these other investigations or multiple other investigations turn up more crimes by Trump, then the political calculus changes on impeachment. Who knows? Yeah, I like I am certainly not arguing to take it off the table. I think that would be a mistake to do that. Because we we may only be looking at the tip of the iceberg. And it's, it's very possible that Trump has committed impeachable offenses completely outside of – that Mueller doesn't know about.

They're outside of the scope of this investigation that should be looked at. By any normal definition, the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels prior to the election that Trump then lied about would at least be in the conversation of an impeachable offense. So there's a lot more to find here. We just have to be realistic with people, because you see this on Twitter all the time, which is like, impeach him, impeach him, impeach him. And I worry sometimes people think that Democrats in Congress, and Nancy Pelosi in particular, are not taking a step to remove Trump from office. And that's not. It is a question of whether you're going to do something to send a signal to the country,

to the history books or to whoever about what Trump did. But it is not a decision about whether he comes or goes. The only people who make a decision about whether Trump stays or goes are the American people in November of 2020. And that's what we have to keep in mind. That is correct. And that is a good transition to our next topic, which is 2020.

On Monday night, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders participated in a town hall hosted by Fox News. It was the highest rated candidate town hall of the primary season thus far, besting CNN's town hall with Kamala Harris from a few weeks ago. Other Democrats may be appearing on Fox News soon. Amy Klobuchar has already signed up for her own Fox News town hall. Pete Buttigieg is reported to have been in negotiations to do the same thing. Beto O'Rourke said on Wednesday that he'd be willing to go on Fox. And Kamala Harris told me she would, quote, think about it. Her tone didn't suggest she was very excited about it, but she said she would think about it.

The network's number one fan, our current president, took notice of the Bernie town hall, tweeting, So weird to watch crazy Bernie on Fox News. Not surprisingly, Brett Baier and the, quote, audience was so smiley and nice. Very strange. And now we have Donna Brazile? There's so many great parts of that tweet like we like you know he's part of the team on fox news and how did we get donna brazil and also i love this i also love the shot at brett bayer who as we know only has a six out of ten on the trump loyalty scale

probably went down to a four after that um so first of all dan did you watch and how do And how do you think Bernie did before we get to the big question of whether he should have been there in the first place? I did watch it. I thought Bernie did great. He did. He did fantastic. He made strong points. He pushed back really hard against some questions from Brett and Martha McCallum that exposed their bias, if had to do a huge piece, which what I assume is Steve Doocy's son, Peter Doocy, about how amazing the Trump economy has

been for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to try to undermine Bernie's comments about how the economy is rigged. And it was just a wild thing. I thought Bernie did great. He was very, he had an audience that was very enthusiastic about him. I never found out the exact answer to who that audience was, but I presume that was an audience of Democratic primary voters as the CNN town halls have been as well, I believe. So he did great. It was from a performance standard. He, it was a home run for him. No it appears that the audience was uh democrats and independents um i i read that somewhere um well i i i agree i think he did he did very very well uh for a couple reasons one was he needled the hosts a couple times right like he was sort of

um he he wasn't exactly friendly to brett bear and martha mccallum all the time he at one point he said that the fox net News Network doesn't have respect in our world. At one point, he sort of joked with them and he said, oh, the president, I'm told he watches your network a little bit, right? So he was funny towards them. And then, you know, he really emphasized economic issues. He tried to say that a lot of these economic issues and his economic issues were not, shouldn't be partisan, that everyone should want infrastructure spending, that everyone should be afraid of Trump's plan to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Doesn't matter what

party you are. So I thought that was very strong. And then of course, there was that great moment that went viral where Brett Baier asked the audience if they liked Bernie's Medicare for all plan better than their own private insurance and they all cheered which is certainly not something that fox news expected um so i thought it was great i thought now the question is you know what impact will it have on the campaign uh if any what do you think i i think it is a huge net positive for bernie's I think the challenge for Bernie Sanders is he has to demonstrate electability. I think he is winning – he is leading in the polls among the declared candidates by very large margins. He has a massive money advantage over everyone else. He has a bigger campaign.

He has more staff. He has serious political support around the country, both from important Democrats, but also elected officials as well. He is the hands down, most likely nominee of the people in the field right now. It is very important for Bernie to demonstrate that he can beat Trump. And going into Fox News and walking out with the heads of Brett Baer and Martha McCallum is a huge win for him. Yeah. And it also, by the way, we know from Trump's tweets and the New York Times has reported this as well, that Trump and his advisors were nervous about not only Bernie getting a town hall there, but potentially other Democratic candidates infiltrating Fox at Getting Town Hall. So this did make them a little nervous. So I know, Dan, from reading your tweets and also texting you all day long and also

knowing you for the last 10 years, that you do not think this was ultimately a good idea, not for Bernie to do within the confines of his own campaign, but sort of for Democrats to do in general. Tell us why. Yeah, so I understand why Bernie Sanders did this. And if I was advising his campaign, if I worked on his campaign, I would probably tell him to do the same thing. I understand why Pete Buttigieg is reportedly in negotiations to do this. I understand why Amy Klobuchar wants to do this. It is an opportunity to get attention.

And it is not about courting Fox viewers. Like, no one is doing that. And if they say that to you, they are being willfully dishonest. What it is is a chance to, quote unquote, go into the lion's den, come out looking strong, and get all the other press to write about and talk about and tweet about your appearance on Fox. Bernie Sanders on Fox got a hundred times more news coverage than

Bernie Sanders on CNN because he was on Fox. Let me just go back for a minute. How confident are you that there are no gettable voters for Democrats who watch Fox News, whether it's their Fox News obsessed or just occasional Fox News watchers? Like, is there evidence? There's two ways of thinking about this, right? One is, are there gettable Democratic primary voters who watch Fox News a year and a half before the election. Right.

Unlikely. Unlikely. There's very little evidence of that. There will be people who tuned into that town hall who are Democratic primary voters, but they are not Fox News viewers, right? These are not people who are just like trying to see what came on after the five and stumbled on Bernie Sanders

and were like, huh, I like his healthcare plan. That's not how that played itself. Right, right. Okay. In the context of a general election, Democrats are obsessed about talking about Fox News viewers. We're like, we got to get Fox News viewers. We got to get, you know, we lost Michigan because we didn't have Fox News viewers. That is a really rudimentary and one-dimensional way of looking at this, which is, in 2012, we did a lot of data analysis of where were the best media outlets to reach undecided voters. Fox was not high on that list. It was not, from an efficiency standpoint, and not a good use of President Obama's time. And I have to imagine, although I haven't looked at this data since 2012,

in the world of Donald Trump, when the Fox News put away the dog whistle and took out the racist bullhorn, there were fewer, quote unquote, up for grabs voters for Democrats. But let me say my bigger point here, which is the Fox, a lot of very important grassroots work has been done by sleeping giants, media matters, a lot of incredibly important reporting from people like Jane Mayer and Gabriel Sherman to expose Fox News for what it is, which is not some conservative version of MSNBC. It is a corporate-funded racial grievance machine for the sole purpose of electing Republicans. It exists to protect Trump. It exists to destroy Democrats. News is the coffee grinds in which they smuggle in the cocaine and propaganda.

And a great amount of work has been done to make that case to advertisers, to make that case to the public, to make that case to other reporters, to take what they say as a grain of thought. We have come a million miles since Obama was dealing with Fox when we were in the White House in terms of public understanding of the danger of Fox. And if all of a sudden 19 Democrats all go on Fox, it undermines that work. It allows Fox's advertising department to go back to the advertisers who have pulled out because of things that Sean Hannity has said, Tucker Carlson has said, Laura Ingraham has said, and say, look, Bernie Sanders comes on here. Amy Klobuchar comes on here.

Pete Buttigieg comes on here. And we see we are legitimate and to get those advertising dollars back. Do you think that works? You know, the head of... You really think that the advertisers would be like, oh, I'm going to second guess my decision to pull the ads because Bernie's on the channel.

That's the view of Media Matters, which has been leading the effort to do this. I mean, basically during the Tucker Carlson, Fox has been showing basically dead air because they can't get enough advertisers to fill the inventory for that show. And see, money is fungible. So that comes out of Fox's bottom line. So I do think we have to think about the fact that if you do things that help Fox sell more ads, what you were doing is making it easier for them to keep Tucker Carlson on air. You were supporting their white supremacist programming, which is incredibly dangerous to America. Right. And I think that that is my concern, is that if the Democratic Party all of a sudden embraces Fox again, and I think we're doing it for sort of dumb political reasons outside of the confines of your own campaign strategy, right? We are doing a lot of work to rehabilitate Fox

in the minds of corporate America and the public writ large. And I think that is potentially damaging the long-term progressive cause of undoing Trumpism in America, which requires limiting the influence of these dangerous propaganda networks, most notably Fox. Yeah. look at that is a very compelling argument. I agree with all that. I've been, you know, one of the people highlighting all the great work that Media Matters and Jane Mayer and everyone else has been doing to expose how fucking awful that network is. I think it's a cancer on our democracy and probably the worst thing that we have going for us in this country, even worse than Donald Trump in some ways, because it's a propaganda machine i guess my question is what is the best way to dismantle

that propaganda machine and there's something appealing to me about every once in a while during a campaign season like this a couple prominent democrats going on there and calling the network out for the bullshit that it is once they're on there. Like, my fan, you know, I was saying earlier that it was funny that Bernie, like, needled the hosts. Like, great. I would have liked, I would like to see some Democrat go on there

and actually take it right to fucking Fox when they have the whole audience there and they have everyone viewing, knowing that they're probably not going to convince a lot of Fox News viewers, but that that moment would go viral and actually talk about what a disgusting racist network propaganda machine it is and sort of bring receipts. That to me would be really cool.

Great viewing. I would love to see how Fox, I mean, because my problem, the reason I always say, like, don't ever fucking go on Fox. When you watch these people go on Tucker Carlson or go on, you know, Sean Hannity or any of these fucking programs. The whole game is rigged. You don't get to actually communicate to their viewers. You don't get to. It's not a fair fight. They rig the game.

They yell over you. They cut the commercial break. It is a waste of fucking time to do that for sure. There is something about the town hall format where the hosts are minimally involved and you get to speak directly to the audience, not just in the town hall, but to the viewers at home, that is appealing about finally piercing the bubble of at least some of the people watching that network and showing them that maybe Democrats aren't the caricature that Fox News always makes them out to be. And I just, to me, there's something appealing about that. Yeah, I will state this is a close call. Yeah. And I just, to me, there's something appealing about that. Yeah. And potentially effective.

I will state, this is a close call. But I'd like to make two other points. One is, I woke up yesterday morning to find out that a lot of people who really love Bernie Sanders decided that I was some sort of massive hypocrite because Barack Obama went on Fox News when I worked in the White House, including doing interviews with Bill O'Reilly, and that somehow this meant that I was being unfair to Bernie Sanders. And that was not my intent. And if people had read my book, which I don't expect everyone has, but I talk a lot about this. Because within the years I worked for Obama, I was a big advocate for a long time of doing exactly what Bernie Sanders did, which is go into the lion's den. I did not give two fucks about Fox viewers. That was not who my audience was. We did this

in the 2008 campaign. Obama went on Bill O'Reilly the night of the Republican convention and the McCain speech on the Republican convention. And we did it because we knew we'd get a ton of coverage and it would be on all the morning shows the next day. If there had been active social media, it would have been a viral moment. Like you were doing it not for, it is a setting for a press conference. It is not an actual attempt to communicate with those voters. I was, I pushed for that strategy. And my experience from doing that was twofold. One, that it had much less impact on... Let me put it this way. The lessons I learned from doing that, which I talk about in the book a lot, are that I was wrong initially and that Obama's appearances on Fox did more to legitimize Fox than they did to help Obama spread his message

to Fox News viewers. And it is based on that experience that I believe that it is a mistake Yeah. ignore Fox News viewers. And just to set the table stakes here, Fox shows get on average 2 million viewers. That is a fraction of the Fox News problem in this country. The actual Fox News problem is not what people tune into on Tucker Carlson at night, although that is fucking gross and shouldn't be on the air. It is how Facebook has weaponized Fox's content and spread it throughout the internet to groups much, much, much larger than people who actually watch Fox. So my strategy for reaching Fox viewers is to go, quote unquote, Fox viewers, is to go around Fox, not through Fox. So it should be by campaigning in the communities where, in rural communities, it should be doing local media in rural and more conservative communities.

It should be to use digital advertising to target people who we know are receiving Fox propaganda with countervailing narratives about why Democrats are good and why Trump is a problematic president who has broken his promises. This is not an idea to ignore Fox viewers. This is not an idea to ignore Fox viewers. It is to find a way to get to those viewers without padding Rupert Murdoch's pockets. So we continue to fund a global effort to destabilize the liberal democracies with racist propaganda. Yeah. And look, looking back on Obama's interview with O'Reilly and some of the other things he did, I agree that that was a mistake and actually helped legitimize Fox because he was the president of the United States at the time. And Bill O'Reilly was an asshole to him and interrupted him. I mean, it was totally not worth it. And I do think- That one is also just for the context of that,

is that was actually for Fox, not Fox News, but for Fox's airing of the Super Bowl. Right, right, right. And we had a big, we hadn't done Fox in a very long time at that point. And we had a big internal debate about whether we should do it or shouldn't do it. And ultimately, we decided to do it because it was on Fox, although some of it aired on Fox News. And because we had done every other Super Bowl interview, regardless of the interviewer, for six years or seven years at that point, whatever it was.

I think that we probably made the wrong call, but it was not an easy call. We were not salivating at the opportunity to talk to Bill O'Reilly. We just thought it would be easier to do than not do, and that was probably a mistake. And I take responsibility for that because I was there then, but it wasn't something we were excited about, I'll tell you that. Yeah, and I will say, while I think it's okay and possibly effective for candidate bernie sanders candidate pete budaj candidate amy klobuchar uh to go on fox news during this campaign i do not think it's okay for president sanders or president budaj or president klobuchar to sit down with interviews

with them once they're in the white house. And I would fucking ban Fox reporters from the briefing room in the White House. And I wouldn't think twice about doing that. My only consideration is how do we communicate and pierce the bubble of some of these voters in an unimpeded, direct way, just with pure messaging and pure communication where you can get right to them. And the second that you have to go through these pundits and these lackeys that work for Fox, it's not fucking worth it.

It's just not. I think the thing to track on the Bernie town hall is not what happened in that one hour. Right. Right. But is then how has Fox weaponized parts of that content, both on social and the other programs, to use it as an opportunity to distort his message, not to push it?

Yeah. And that is a lesson I learned from Obama interviews and even some of my own appearances on Fox, which I was on Fox News Sunday, which is on Fox Network and Fox News a couple of times when I was White House senior advisor. And I would think I did fine on it, right? But then whatever they could take that would be least helpful to Obama or most hurtful to Obama and make that the clip they ran all day, that's what they would do. And so to judge the true impact of how Fox did it, it's not just what happened in that hour. It's how did they use that content, particularly on Facebook, to distort the message and push their larger propaganda efforts. I think that's an important thing to look at.

Yeah, that's right. Okay. I have too many thoughts on this. I do, too. Well, you wrote a lot about it in your book, which everyone should go buy. Okay. When we come back, we will have our interview that we recorded last week with Chelsea Handler. On the pod today, we have the best-selling author of the brand new book, Life Will Be the Death of Me, Chelsea Handler.

Hi. You're finally here. Hi. I'm very happy to be here, guys. Thank you for having me, especially you, Joel Muvvett. Thank you for saying that. You're welcome. It's great to have you here.

Chelsea, we haven't spoken since Robert Mueller finished his investigation. Mueller finished his investigation. And since you write about him in this book quite a bit as someone that you're sexually attracted to, take a number. How are you doing since the end of the investigation? Were you disappointed? Are you waiting for more? How did you feel?

I am not. Until I read the full Mueller report, I can't make any judgments about where our relationship is going to go sexually. So I still have, what I've learned through this administration and what I've learned through the last two years is that I am a naive person and I believe that good will prevail. And I'm going to just choose to be stuck in that naivete and believe that something good is going to come out of mean a million things did come out of it there were how many indictments 37 yeah so that's something and um i'm still attracted to him i i'm not actually going to pursue it right now because first of all he's married and second of all i haven't seen the report right can i can i just follow up on that um are you attracted to him? No, that's not my type.

I'm not like a G-man. That's not my thing. But I was going to ask that. A way fish award winner. I love. Yeah, that's true. I love a sort of way fish. I would say my type is Lannister.

No, but does his politics and his success in bringing down Trump affect how attracted you are to Robert Mueller? And would that also apply to Paul Ryan? I don't want my love

to be conditional. And so if I'm judging him solely based on, you know, he's a T-crosser and an I-daughter. I think he forgot a couple of T's and a couple of I's, or somebody did. I think you're right. But I am going to have faith in the fact that that is a person I am attracted to because

it's the exact opposite of anything that I've ever been witness to in my life with men being responsible and being like rule, you know, rule oriented. I like that. I like that. My dad was a bit of a shyster. So anyone who's got their shit together and who looks like they have an eight or six pack possibly underneath that white shirt when he walks through hallways, which I've known everybody, I'm not the only person who's

watched him do this. There's anyone that age that can keep a six or eight pack in their 70s. And that's my message for today. My name is Chelsea Handler. You write a lot about your political awakening in this book. Walk us through your journey here, starting from... I wish you wouldn't use words like journey. Journey. The Bachelor ruined that. They've ruined words like universe and gratitude, too. Words we could have all been using.

From the moment that I was on your show and I guaranteed you that Hillary Clinton was going to win to election night to the early days with your therapist after the election. Well, what happened to me was I had, which I'm sure many people can relate to, I had a major kind of mental, I just couldn't understand how something like this could have happened. I didn't understand why, I didn't think, I thought the adults were supposed to take care of politics and that, you know, that weren't like super into politics before that. Or were you? No, I mean, I was active in during campaigns, you know, you know, when there was a presidential election, I wasn't definitely running out to the midterms when I was like in my early 30s voting, I doubt I don't think I was doing that. And once I became a little bit more aware of politics as I was in this industry, which is hard to not, you know, be aware of it, I did more. But no, this was like a mental, like, what the hell, how could this possibly happen? And so what I ended up doing was going

to this psychiatrist who I had interviewed on my Netflix show, my last talk show, and about adolescent brain development. And when I, when after the election, I thought my outrage was so high and at such a 10 that I needed to harness it and figure out why the hell I was behaving like such a spoiled brat, you know, because that's how it was. And what I've discovered through him was that it was, I mean, I bitched and moaned about Donald Trump for the first three or four sessions at like $600 an hour. And I would have paid double. Um, but a lot of therapists got to buy boats in those early months in LA. A lot of very begrudgingly happy therapists around the Los Angeles environs.

I like when you use words like that. And I loved it. I was like, this is awesome. I'm really getting all this off my chest and I'll leave here and I won't have more anger. But what it ended up coming, what I ended up finding out was that what Donald Trump becoming president represented to me was the world being unhinged and out of balance. And that's what happened to me when I was a little girl. My brother died when I was nine. He said he was coming back

and that he would never leave me alone with these people, meaning my parents, and he never came back because he died. So the relationship and the trigger that Donald Trump was for me, I think is a lot of people's early childhood trauma where you just don't feel like you have any control and you don't know what to do. And I wanted to dive into why I couldn't get past it, why I couldn't turn the news off, why I was in the cycle of, you know, kind of like self-abuse. Yeah.

Or, you know, it's cancer causing, as you guys well know. So it was I wanted to get out of my headspace and find a way to find like happiness again while Donald Trump was still the president. So I did throw myself into the midterms and that gave me something for a while. But once the midterms were done, I was like, fuck, I'm exhausted again.

I don't want to deal with politics. Like, I don't want to, I mean, luckily so many hands were on deck that we were able to make, you know, so many people were able to make so many great things happen. But at the same time, you're so burnt out as I know you can all relate. So, yeah. Yeah, it's tough. It's all the time.

It's constant. It's all the time. What have you learned about effective activism now that you're active in politics? I've learned that you really have no use to other people until you clean out your own injuries and your own messes. And that I've learned to meditate, a sentence I thought would never come out of my mouth. I've gotten completely like focused on doing good things and not just thinking about how to feed my ego

or feed myself or take a paycheck and do another thing and do another thing. Like I really sat with myself and said, what do I want to contribute that's worthwhile? Because if this is where the direction of like, you know, our society is going, then we need a big opposite tick of things. And I'm responsible for putting a lot of shitty messaging out there. So I wanted to really think about, okay, are you just a loud mouth who's getting a bunch of paychecks? Or do you want to be a loud mouth who says something of import? And so, you know, I felt like this book, I finally had something to say.

And if I'm going to make a career oversharing, like at least now I'm oversharing stuff that's helpful to people, not just like all the guys I had sex with in my 20s. I think, you know, part of the reason we started Pod Save America is we felt frustrated with the way people analyze politics on television with the kind of stilted language people use. Donald Trump is many things, but he's not stilted. Right. I think he communicates to his people in a way that makes sense to them, that makes him seem like them. I think that's something you do well. Right. I think you're I don't think anybody believes you're reading from talking points. And if they are, we should find the person writing them and

put them in some sort of cell. But the but but I think there's this question, like, do Democrats know how to talk to people, you know, different kinds of communities, different kinds of people? Do they sound like regular people or do they sound like Washington? And I guess when you see these 2020 candidates, when you see the conversation that we're hearing right now, are there any are there any are there any people that stand out? Not because you like them more than you like the others, but just because you think they they sound real to you. They sound like the way people talk. Well, no, I mean, some of them are they're totally politicized or political or whatever the right frame of reference is there, because, yeah, I mean, Kamala Harris is a politician.

Elizabeth Warren, I find to be a little bit more grounded. I feel like she's a little bit, and Beto is Beto, and Pete Buttigieg is a normal person. Did I say it right? Buttigieg. Buttigieg. Buttigieg. Buttigieg.

And Beto. Oh, he wants the DG. Beto. Buttigieg. Okay, well, when they become the president, I'll get it right. And it's Beden. You're also working on a project on white privilege. Tell us about that.

I did a documentary for Netflix. What did you learn? So for that, it's kind of the same thing as the book. I just did a deep dive into, like, what am I doing with myself, and why am I constantly looking in my own lane instead of looking outside my lane? And I was kind of embarrassed when I really looked around and thought about all the, everything I've gotten in my career when I, really, it's not about talent because there's too many untalented people that are successful and vice versa. So I started to

really pay attention to black authors and started to, especially after the election, because I realized how bad the racism was, another thing I was naive to, and wanted to have a conversation about privilege because I did a documentary for Netflix about race on racism, where we just kind of slightly skimmed the surface. And to me, that was the most compelling one for me in terms of learning. So we just went, we went down south and we talked to people about the issue of white privilege and whether people think it exists or not. Because I certainly didn't think about it in terms of my own success until I was 40. And then I thought, wait, why do I keep getting rewarded every time I quit a job? Why do I get another

offer? And I get to do this and I get to do that. I've never struggled for anything. You know, I've had heartbreak and my brother died and that was trauma, but I've never really like been hungry or had to, you know, I waited tables for five years. That was as bad as things got. And I felt embarrassed that I'm not as good things that are actually more meaningful, I figured why not do it? And it was a hard conversation because nobody wants, white people do not want to talk about this issue. And I wanted to hang out my own privilege to dry, to be like, I'm aware, I get it. I get this house and I get all of that. You know, and white people are just like, you know, again, it's a black person's problem

even though it's our problem. So last question, obviously we're out of the prediction business now. Is Donald Trump going to win in 2020? I don't do predictions either anymore. You must. Honestly, what do you think, John? You look sick almost at the thought.

I thought you just went generally. I feel great. Thanks a lot. Is it something about my skin? I wanted to qualify. Is it my pallor? You look flavescent. Yeah, there's a tone of flavescence.

It's the shirt. Are my humors out of line? It's the shirt. Shirt's a lot. Let me know when you're done. Get it out. I'm done. I'm done.

I'm done. I don't know what's going to happen, Chelsea. I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Most presidents get reelected. We just got to, you know, get to work, guys. I'm just happy that we're handing this on such a high note.

What's the name of the book, Sean? The book is Life Will Be the Death of Me. Yes, and I'm coming. It's fantastic. I've read it. I'm going on tour, too. I blurbed it. I blurbed your book.

You blurbed my book. Yes, you did. Thank you very much for that. You're very welcome. I'm going to check my email. I don't believe I was asked. Well, you're also just cultivating other great authors like Alyssa Mastromonaco. You're just bringing them up through your system.

Right, right. I'm cultivating her. She doesn't need me to cultivate her. But yes, I love Alyssa. I'm going to see her this weekend when I head to New York. Oh, fun. Yes, and I'm going on tour. LiveNation.com for tickets to be on tour.

I'm going to like 23 cities. Wow. Cool. All right. Get some tickets, everyone, and go buy Life Will Be the Death of Me. It's a fantastic book. Chelsea Handler, thank you for joining us. Thanks, boys. Thanks to Natasha Bertrand for joining us today.

Thanks to Chelsea Handler for joining us. And get John and Tommy here, too, because we just wanted to say a special goodbye to one of our very first Crooked Media employees who's leaving us for bigger and better things. I mean, let's let's time will tell if they're bigger and better. I'm not ready to admit that yet. Corinne is one of our very first employees. She was with us when our office was essentially a one-bedroom apartment with one bathroom that also happened to be in the kitchen.

She produced Pod Save America. She produced Pod Save the World for a while. She has gone to Europe with us to do live shows. She has run our development. She's done literally everything you can do with this company. This company wouldn't exist if not for the work Corinne did. She helped develop Keep It. She helped produce the HBO show.

She's fantastic. We're gonna miss her. We're fucked. Just kidding. We're so excited for Corinne. Very excited for Corinne. Sad to lose Corinne. All kidding aside, we will miss Corinne. She's done such an amazing job. Alright, well that's our show for today. And we'll see you guys next week.

Oh, I should say, there will be no pod on Monday. We're doing it Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon. Monday, the Gillibrand episode's going out. That's right. Re-released. It's not new. Right.

No one get too excited. But if you haven't heard it, it's new to you. It's new to you. And we will be back with another brand new pod, the Three of Us, on Tuesday afternoon. So have a good weekend, everyone. Bye, everybody. Happy Miller Day.