Pod Save America - “Ukraine, if you’re listening.”

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

Trump commits the impeachable offenses he’s accused of on live television, Congress subpoenas the White House and its Cabinet co-conspirators, and our latest PollerCoaster 2020 shows that Arizona is a top-tier battleground state. Then Congressman Jamie Raskin talks to Dan about the Judiciary Committee’s next steps on impeachment, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed talks to Jon about the new Crooked Media podcast he’s hosting, America Dissected.Subscribe to Crooked's new podcast America Dissected: http://apple.co/americadissected

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, Dan's conversation with House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin. We're also going to be checking in with Abdul El-Sayed, the host of Crooked Media's brand new podcast, America Dissected, which you should immediately subscribe to and listen to if you haven't already. It's all about how healthcare in America has been fucked up by the media and politics, and it is smart and funny, and I will be talking to him all about it. Before that, we get to talk about all the latest developments on impeachment, including Trump's epic meltdown on Wednesday, more self-incrimination today, Thursday, and we'll also share the results of our brand new polaraster survey with Change Research in the battleground state of Arizona.

Finally, if you haven't, check out the newest episode of Pod Save the World, where Ben and Tommy look at Trump's impeachable phone call from a foreign policy angle, including how it could destabilize the Ukrainian government, how Russia uses corruption to control Ukrainian politics, and how the policies advanced by Biden were initially shaped. They also talk with former British Prime Minister David Cameron about Brexit, Boris Johnson, and the time that Ben Rhodes offended the Queen of England. So check it out. The Patsy of the World teases are getting quite good. I know. Tommy really put some time into those, Tommy and Michael.

Okay, let's get to the news. Public support for impeachment has been rising, and we now have our own polling to confirm that. We'll talk more about all the results from our latest Polar Coaster series with change research in a bit. We did ask about impeachment and found that 49% of Arizona voters support impeachment, including nearly 94% of Democrats and about half of independents. More than 90% of voters say they've heard about the Ukraine scandal. And what they learned has made independents and swing voters, and swing voters we're defining as people who have voted for at least one Republican and Democrat in the last three years. Independent and swing voters are 20 to 30 percent less likely to support Trump.

Who've heard about the Ukraine scandal. We also tested a few different Democratic messages on impeachment against Trump's message that Democrats are engaged in a witch hunt because they're mad about 2016. And the most effective Democratic message is that Congress needs to hold Trump accountable for his abuse of power to ensure a free and fair election in 2020, even if it means impeachment. After hearing this, voters said they were more likely to support the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate's message by 51 to 43 percent. over the Republican candidate's message by 51 to 43 percent. Dan, how should this kind of data and some of the other polling we've seen inform Democratic strategy on impeachment? Well, I think it is important to see polling in a battleground state, which Arizona clearly is, as our poll makes clear. as our poll makes clear, in this very polarized nation we have, national polls where Trump is incredibly popular in some states and incredibly unpopular in other bluer states don't really give

us as much of a signal of what's happening in the states that are going to decide the presidential election. And the fact that impeachment is a winnable exercise here in Arizona, a state that will help decide the presidency and who controls the Senate, should put steel on the spine of the Democrats who are doing this. If you can litigate this political case in Arizona, you can do it anywhere in the country, and that is – I think that should give comfort to some of the members who are more nervous about the politics of this than they should be. Yeah. And look, I mean, one thing we've seen from the polling throughout the last week is that this is not the, at least so far, this is not some scary political loser that a lot of, you know, Democratic strategists in D.Cc thought it was at first uh democrats like almost unanimously now support impeachment across polls it's like you know between 85 and 95 percent are supportive of this uh there was a few stories today too that i saw some of the uh representatives from more

conservative districts like max rose um some other people, you know, stories about them going back to their districts. And, you know, they've been holding town halls. And actually, a lot of their voters were pretty supportive of what they're doing. There's even one, I thought there's one story about Alyssa Slotkin, who is representative in Michigan, also a district that she flipped from a Republican. So it's a pretty moderate, pretty conservative district. And they interviewed a couple, basically Trump supporters, who got all their news from OAN and Fox and everything. And who love Trump and think that impeachment is a waste of time. And then the reporter is like, well, what about Alyssa Slotkin, your representative, who is now supportive of impeachment?

They're like, oh, we love her. We love her. That's okay that she supports impeachment. We don't agree, but we still love her. So, so far it's shown that there's not as much risk as people thought for Democrats. I do think the other thing that was interesting is, you know, we tested two messages on impeachment and the first one was more straightforward. Donald Trump deserves to be impeached for, and then we sort of listed out some of the impeachable offenses. And then we did a second one that was like, look, here's what official White House documents show. And we talk about the call summary and then we say,

in order to defend our democracy and hold the president accountable and make sure there's free and fair elections, Congress has to investigate that even if it means impeachment. So it was a little more couched, a little more cautious, a little more sort of like framing it as this more sad bipartisan thing that we have to do and it was much more popular much more persuasive among voters not very surprising but it does tell you why sort of Pelosi and a lot of the other Democrats are framing impeachment as they are like and and not making it quite so partisan. So celebratory?

Right, yeah, it's not a celebratory time. It's more in sadness than anger, Dan. Yes, yes. One other thing in the poll that I thought was very notable for Democrats in this, which is we asked people how much they'd heard about Trump's phone call with Ukraine, and the numbers were stunning. 66% of respondents said

they had heard a lot. And another 25% said they'd heard a decent amount about this. So in this distracted, disaggregated media environment where it's hard to break through, this story is breaking through. You have nine in 10 voters hearing a lot or a decent amount about the story in the last week. And as you mentioned, the polling, the information in that story is very politically damaging to Trump. And so like that is an argument both for standing strong here and continuing to push forward. It's also an argument against short circuiting this process early because you want to get over with. It's also an argument for Democrats, you know, making sure that they

drive this message every single day, that they, you know, you know, that they're speaking to the public, that they're holding press conferences, that they're holding hearings, because so far, the news has done the Democrats work for them, right, by breaking the story. And there's new things for people to hear all the time. At some point, when all the facts are known, you know, there's going to have to be an effort on behalf of Democratic leaders to keep this in the news. Impeachment hearings would obviously do that. But there is a danger here where if they just everyone just goes about their business and forgets this ever happened, it will fade from the news and it will fade from people's memories. ever happened, it will fade from the news and it will fade from people's memories. So one person who's not acting like impeachment will be a political winner for Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

All of his, you know, his couple weeks of angry tweeting came to life on Wednesday during a rolling day-long meltdown alongside the president of Finland yesterday, first in the Oval Office, then at a press conference. You know, it was all more of the same. Accused the media of being corrupt, accused Congress of staging a coup, call for congressmanship to be tried for treason. You know, it's just typical Wednesday.

Trump talked about how impeachment and the Ukraine scandal is all a hoax, that he did nothing wrong, that his phone call was perfect. And then this morning, Thursday morning, he confessed to everything he's being accused of by publicly calling on Ukraine and now China to investigate Joe Biden and his family. Let's listen to some highlights. Well, I would think that if they were honest about it, they'd start a major investigation into the Biden. It's a very simple answer. They should investigate the Bidens because how does a company that's newly formed and all these companies, if you look at, and by the way,

likewise, China should start an investigation into the biden because what happened in china is just about as bad as what happened with uh with ukraine dan what are we doing here what are we doing here he did it he tells us he did it what else do we need well look i see this angry red-faced man screaming into the void and i say that is a man who looks like he just lured Democrats into his impeachment trap. I mean, it is amazing that he – basically the equivalent of what he did today is Nixon going to the South Lawn, admitting that he directed the break-in to the Watergate, and then suggesting he's going to do another break-in to another Democratic Party headquarters later. It is truly mind-boggling in its audacity, stupidity, the audacity of dumb. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it. He's spent the last seven days trying to argue that he did not

pressure ukraine to do this and then he you know this is a very i will say the question that was asked today is the same question that jeff mason from reuters asked trump yesterday which was a very smart question yes which is they asked what specifically did you want Zelensky to do with regard to Biden? And I think most questions that reporters ask of Trump too often are treating Trump as a cable news pundit and not president. This is a very specific one where the answer is if he tells the truth, he is admitting to the crime. And he got so mad about it yesterday that he screamed at Jeff Mason. It's hard to imagine, outside of the context of an angry football coach, one adult screaming at another adult like that in public. Yeah, we actually have a clip of that, too.

Let's just play that really quick. The question, sir, was what did you want President Zelensky to do about Vice President Biden and his son, Hunter? Are you talking to me? Yeah, it was just a follow-up of what I just asked you, sir. Listen, listen, you ready? We have the president of Finland. Ask him a question. I have one for him.

I just wanted to follow up on the one that I asked you. Did you hear me? What did you want? Did you hear me? Yes, sir. Ask him a question. I will. I've given you a long answer.

Ask this gentleman a question. Don't be rude. No, sir, I've given you a long answer. Ask this gentleman a question. Don't be rude. No, sir, I don't want to be rude. I just wanted you to have a chance to answer the question that I asked you. I've answered everything. It's a whole hoax. And you know who's playing into the hoax? People like you and the fake news media that we have in this country.

And I say, in many cases, the corrupt media, because you're corrupt. Much of the media in this country is not just fake it's corrupt and you have some very fine people too great journalists great reporters but it to a large extent it's corrupt and it's fake ask the president of finland to question please yeah so that was uh that was donald trump screaming at a reporter, ask the president of Finland a question. My favorite line in that is, hey, hey, we got the president of Finland here. Ask him a question. I mean, Donald Trump's deep and abiding respect for the protocol of the two and two foreign leader press conference is admirable i guess

i also just think like look we we have now spent the last couple days with donald trump and the entire like republicans in congress maga pundits fox news the whole fucking conservative swamp ecosystem um coming up with all of these bullshit defenses about you know who is the whistleblower and this is secondhand information and you know he worked with adam schiff and adam schiff should resign i'm shift made up the phone call the whistleblower made up the phone call none of this is real and then all of us hear donald trump call on foreign powers to investigate his political opponents like in public this morning it's like i guess are we all the whistleblowers now hello hello inspector general

i have some secondhand information i have heard from very good sources donald trump's voice asking for his foreign asking foreign governments to investigate his political opponents should i write up the complaint should i go to adam schiff what should i do with this information asking foreign governments to investigate his political opponents. Should I write up the complaint? Should I go to Adam Schiff? What should I do with this information, Dan? I think there is a broader issue here about the Trump presidency that sort of manifests itself in the last week, which is whether it's in his Twitter tantrums, which we talked about on tour last week,

or what he said in his various press temper tantrums yesterday. But here you have the President of the United States calling for the arrest, sentencing, and execution of Democratic members of Congress in whistleblowers. You have the President bullying a whistleblower, comparing a whistleblower to a spy, accusing them of treason. You have the President calling a constitutional impeachment process a coup to take away people's Second Amendment rights, which seems not dangerous at all. And we have reached this point where sort of the majority of the political community, the reporters, politicians, blue checkmark nation,

reporters, politicians, blue checkmark nation. We now no longer take the president seriously or literally. He's basically the person screaming on the subway, where you're more focused on the fact that they're screaming than what they're screaming. But he's president of the United States, and these things still matter. And they really matter. Like, we shouldn't take it lightly when the president calls for the investigation of political opponents or members of Congress, when the chief law enforcement officer in the entire country is a named member of the alleged criminal conspiracy at the root of this whole thing. And so, like, we laugh about it. He is insane. It is ridiculous. it is a fucking national and global embarrassment that he is president of the United States but we have to we can't default to

he's a crazy person therefore the things he say don't matter because as we know from all the violence that happened in El Paso or the pipe bombs that the things he say do matter and there are people in this world who act on them even even if they're not members of Congress. There's that. And there's also the fact that he is, because this scandal and these impeachable offenses have to do with national security and foreign policy, it opens up a whole new element to why this is dangerous. The president is jeopardizing our national security because he is basing our foreign policy on his own narrow political interests, right? Like Ukraine is a country that was invaded by Russia, that the global community and the United States of America have decided that it is in our interest to help defend them

from Russian aggression. And now that is at risk because Donald Trump wanted them to investigate his political opponent. China, an authoritarian government with whom we're in a trade war because of Donald Trump, with the entire global economy and the United States economy at stake. Now he's sending them a message that this authoritarian government should investigate an American citizen and their family who happens to be a potential political opponent of Donald Trump. That's what he's doing right now. It's not just like, I mean, it can, you know, I've laughed at times during this whole thing. It is absurd watching this unfold. But we are, you know, the fact that our foreign policy is at stake and our foreign policy is being based on whatever Donald Trump thinks will get him through the election is incredibly dangerous.

Incredibly dangerous. Yeah. These are not great times, I would say. No. No, they're not. It's not great, Dan. Politico reports that... Buy those tumblers.

Buy those tumblers. Yeah, no, buy them. That's it. It's on sale now. Politico reports that some Republican lawmakers and strategists are concerned about Trump's strategy. I couldn't get through the question, sorry. With one Republican operative saying, quote, Nobody wants to look like Kevin McCarthy did on 60 Minutes.

And right now there is deep skepticism that the late night Fox lineup will have any credibility with rank and file Republicans that are necessary to prosecute this argument against House Democrats. What do you think about that? I mean, it is certainly true that, I mean, I reject the premise of the question in the sense that there's obviously no White House strategy, right? They don't, there isn't one, there is just a man ranting into a microphone and then various sycophants with two to three million people audiences parroting those you know I was struck by this tweet from is it I think was a tweet from Laurie Ingram that said basically she was trying to give Trump advice where if he

essentially ignored this and treated it and stopped acting like a crazy person that he would get through it better um and it is it's interesting to watch because he there is there is a strategy here it's pretty obvious that any normal human being could take and there's also a for trump right like you could say i did nothing wrong you could blame rudy giuliani right? Like you could say, I did nothing wrong. You could blame Rudy Giuliani and fire him. You could say you're going to cooperate, right? I mean, that's sort of what they did with Mueller is they kept saying they were going to cooperate and they cooperated on the things that didn't matter that much. And on the things that really matter, they obstructed and they got away with it, obviously. There is a

strategy for Republicans too, which is to say, we don't agree with what Trump did. We think it was wrong, but we don't think it rises to a level of an impeachable offense. And we think it is a shame that House Democrats are so busy trying to undo the results of the 2016 election that they're refusing to help raise wages for families or improve health care. Like there's an obvious strategy, but they can't do it because with Trump, you have to take a loyalty oath for political death, right? Like you have to ride with him the whole way or you live in fear of being one tweet away from a primary. Yeah, it's ride or die. I mean, there is a strategy if you sort of like step really far back and squint, you can sort of see the strategy,

which is, you know, the call was perfect. The whistleblower is a partisan liar. Adam Schiff is a partisan liar. They're all in cahoots with the deep state and CNN and, you know, whoever forged Obama's birth certificate. So they have this sort of this conspiracy brewing. And, you know, you saw it yesterday a little bit when the New York Times has the story about how the whistleblower who originally filed a complaint within the intelligence community before going to the IG, just with the whistleblower's bosses, wasn't getting anywhere, didn't know what to do because they were obviously trying to cover up the complaint. So then the whistleblower goes to Adam Schiff's committee, to one of his staff members and says, hey, I have this complaint,

what do I do? And sort of doesn't explain exactly what the complaint is, but just gives the outline. And then the committee says, okay, well, you should get a lawyer and you should go to your inspector general at the intelligence community. That's the official channel. But because the New York Times writes it, you know, as like Schiff might have known early about the whistleblower. Suddenly now every single right wing media figure is on high alert. Donald Trump's waving the article around during the press conference. I'm exonerated. See what I told you? Adam Schiff's a liar. He's in on this. And I do think what the right is doing is they're just sort of waiting for these little developments to then cling to,

to point to and say, actually, this whole thing was a fucking deep state plot after all, and Donald Trump's innocent.'s what is the problem with that here well i mean the there i mean there was a fundamental problem and this entire strategy speaks to the weakness which is nothing the whistleblower did or said who they spoke to who they voted for they could have a feel the burn license plate on their car and it wouldn't fucking matter because we don't need the whistleblower is inconsequential now because the core piece of evidence prior to donald trump admitting to the crime national television earlier today was a call transcript released by donald trump's white house right all i mean the whistleblower basically drew a crime map

and then we've discovered all the crime since then. So it doesn't matter. And so that strategy doesn't hold up to literally one millisecond of scrutiny. It may be enough to get through primetime on Fox and to keep Trump's 40% base in his corner, but it's not a long-term strategy to deal with the political fallout of this. Yeah. I mean, no person who just sort of, even if you're a headline scanner, even if you're one of the, even if you're just walking through the airport and see Chiron's on CNN, you're going to figure out that this is all bullshit. That the, like you said, the whistleblower does not matter anymore because the call transcript was the impeachable offense, the main impeachable offense,

until then the president went on TV and called on Ukraine and another nation to investigate his political opponents. Look, and this is why we need to impeach him. And this is why fucking Republicans should join in too. Like, it is clear now that we cannot have a free and fair election in 2020 because the president of the United States is using the vast powers of his office, including his ability to make foreign policy and make national security decisions to pressure foreign governments to solicit foreign assistance to interfere in our election on his behalf. on his behalf. Literally what the founders were worried about, foreign interference in the United States affairs, in our elections. Donald Trump is committed to doing that. Even now, even as he has been caught and in the middle of an impeachment trial for this, impeachment inquiry about this,

he is asking foreign nations to investigate his political opponents. And if people think that he's going to stop at Joe Biden, you should think again, because he will do this. He will find a foreign nation to investigate Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and on and on and on. And it won't just be foreign nations. It will be, you know, right-wing billionaires. And no matter, he will do anything. He will use all of the powers of his office including the investigative powers of the united states attorney general and the justice department whatever he can get his hands on he will use it to dirty up his political opponent in 2020 and that is why impeachment is so important let me ask you this question though yeah um do you think impeachment will stop him from doing it again perhaps not perhaps not

basically all it is is, you know, it will sort of be a flashing red light for everyone because it'll be in the news. So that's like, everyone be aware that the next time you hear something shady about one of Trump's opponents, now you know that he probably, you know, he probably called on someone to find that smear,

find that dirt, right? Like it at least, all it does is it exposes Trump's motives, methods, and sort of shines a light on what he's doing to try to dirty up his political opponents. So in some way, and look, and it might not stop Trump, but there's probably enough people and enough foreign governments, you know, who will, if he's being impeached for this, will maybe think twice about it. I don't know. That's the hope. It's basically the only option we have, because the other option is everyone go about their business and Trump just solicits foreign interference in quiet and we don't talk about it. Yeah. Like, I obviously am for impeachment. I think it's the right thing to do

full stop. It's also the right, the best political move in the situation we're currently in. stop. It's also the best political move in the situation we're currently in. I think it probably, I think it almost certainly doesn't decrease the odds that Trump commits more crimes and potentially increases the odds that he commits more crimes because nothing happened to him other than being a historical political embarrassment now and have to wear the wearing the scarlet eye for the rest of time yeah um and but he still is in office um so i think but i do think it's it will it will encourage other people to come forward who are witnesses to these crimes that's right and i do think it will make the people around trump not like like the most MAGA-y of his people, but the people who run the government, right, to be more cautious about getting sucked into his vortex of crime. I think that's right.

So when you get the order from Mick Mulvaney or someone else to put the call transcript on the classified server, you're going to be less willing to do that or more willing to tell someone you got asked to do that. So I think that is, we're looking to be less willing to do that or more willing to tell someone you got asked to do that. So I think that is, we're looking at actual substantive benefits of going through this process. I think that is one of them. Because for the people who were either willing or were witting or unwitting accomplices to Trump's crimes here, they're all going to spend time in front of Congress. They're going to have to deal with legal bills and people are not going to want that. all going to spend time in front of Congress. They're going to have to deal with legal bills and people are not going to want that. And again, if the ultimate substantive goal is to get him

out of office, at least in 2020, because of the election, this will keep him mired in scandal and on the defensive and melting down as he did yesterday. And that's not good for him politically, right? Like his poll numbers are down. The support for impeachment is up. Like this is not every day that he's having a complete meltdown is another day that he and his campaign don we get to the Arizona poll, but we tested a number of message frames on Trump to try to figure out what the best story to tell about this man is. And one of them was about his constant tweeting and the petty fights and the chaos that comes from a Trump presidency. And that message was very effective with core sets of voters. And so Trump is doing himself, you know, we talked earlier

about how the country is dialed into this story. So you have a story that everyone's focused on, people are paying attention, and Trump is exhibiting at a record level the exact behavior that turns a lot of voters off. And so by turning, like keeping Trump at an 11 is good for the Democrats over the long term. So let's talk about the latest substantive developments from this week. First, the latest on the scandal and then what Congress is doing about it. We learned on Monday that Donald Trump has effectively sent William Barr on an international mission to solicit foreign assistance in discrediting Robert Mueller's investigation and confirming the right wing conspiracy theory that it was actually Ukraine and the Democrats

who colluded and interfered in the 2016 election. Seriously, this is a real thing. As part of that effort, Trump has reportedly called the Australian prime minister. He called Boris Johnson. Bars met with the Italians. Dan, how are these calls for foreign assistance different than the Ukraine call? different than the Ukraine call? Well, the Ukraine call is an off-the-books effort to use law enforcement to politicize an election, to interfere with an election. And the calls with Australia involving Bill Barr is an on-the-books effort to use foreign interference to interfere

with an American election, right? This is a sanctioned investigation that is happening, but it has the same goal, right? Which is to strengthen Trump politically by creating some sort of fig leaf to say that he is not actually guilty of obstruction of justice or wanting to collude with the Russians. And so, I mean, and we should be all very clear, all of us are paying for this. Every taxpayer in America is paying for Bill Barr to fly around the country to try to make the things that come out of Sean Hannity's mouth true. That is an official mission of the chief law enforcement officer in the country. Yeah. And it's not just, it's not just like looking into the past here either, right? Like I think what they're going for here is, and you hear

this from all the biggest MAGA pundits out there, like fucking Hugh Hewitt and all the right-wing lunatics, they are all very excited. They keep talking about the Barr report like it's the Mueller report. And, you know, it's yet again, it's another Devin Nunes memo. It's another Barr summary of the Mueller report. Like what they're hoping is for Bill Barr to come out with this explosive new report that says, yes, the American intelligence community did go after Donald Trump in 2016. FBI did go after Donald Trump in 2016. The origins of the investigation were funded by the Democrats, like all of our crazy conspiracy theories have said for a while. And by the way, we don't know that Barr and the Justice Department won't bring more indictments against people that are politically motivated. Like we just, we can't trust that anymore because of what Barr has done. I mean, how, what is the significance

of Barr's involvement here? Personal involvement like isn't isn't it a little unusual for the attorney general of the United States to be personally investigating American intelligence agencies at the president's request yes I mean that's a question that answers itself like yes it's really fucking unusual it is like there was this view among the sort of establishment legal community in Washington who've you you know, were on Bill Barr's moot court team or went to Chode or, you know, like the sort of elite law school community in D.C. which cares more about each other than their party affiliations. There was sort of this view that, oh, Bill Barr is just doing this to shut Trump up, right? Like it's sort of a fake thing.

We're just going to do it. I've assigned this U.S. attorney to do it, and it's just going to be happening, and we're just going to calm the president down. But that's not what's happening. Bill Barr is himself flying around the country. Let's just put it this way. It is so unusual. Like if Bill Barr himself was flying around the United States to investigate a major crime here in the United States, that would be an odd use of his time. So this is – like a massive ongoing criminal investigation in the United States, that would be odd.

And the fact that he's traveling all over the world and taking all the time, like when is he doing his job? Right. No, he is he doing his job? Right. Yeah, no, he's not doing his job. He is a full-time. This is what he sees as his job, right? He is serving Trump, not the country. No, he's a full-time henchman and co-conspirator. But the attorney general is just one of Trump's co-conspirators in the cabinet.

conspirators in the cabinet uh the other turns out is secretary of state mike pompeo who confirmed on wednesday that he was on donald trump's call with president zelensky after basically lying about it on the sunday shows um dan if the call was so perfect why did uh why did pompeo lie about it great question john really great question i mean why did he lie so poorly? I mean, Ben and Tommy have made this point. I think it is highly unusual for the Secretary of State to be on the phone when the president is having a foreign leader call. This is just a conversation with the new president of Ukraine. This is not the first call ever with the head of Iran, or this is not a conversation with Kim Jong-un. This is a normal, theoretically, in the course of business call. So it's very strange for Pompeo to be on it.

It is very notable that he lied about it. I mean, there is an irony to this, which is Pompeo made it his life mission over several years to make Susan Rice saying an incorrect thing on a Sunday show to be one of the greatest crimes in human history. And he goes on a Sunday show and doesn't say an incorrect thing. He lies to the American people about it, which says to me, at least, that Pompeo knew what he heard was bad. Because if he said he was on the call, they didn't have to say what he heard on the call. And so it's not a good piece of evidence for the Trump case. Yeah, I think what's important to know about Pompeo is just how political he is. And, you know, there was a good Vox piece about how all these State Department officials are on record or

went on background saying, like, he has politicized this department to such an incredible degree. There was that, the profile of him a couple of weeks ago where one diplomat called him a heat seeking missile for Trump's ass. Like he's the big, you know, Trump himself said, I think I fought with everyone on my staff and in the cabinet except Pompeo. He's the only one I haven't fought with. So Pompeo is really sort of in competition with Barr here to see who can curry favor with Trump the most. But it makes you look, if this whole idea where Rudy Giuliani is basically saying, you know, oh, I just didn't do this myself. I did this with the help of the State Department, right? Like Rudy's trying to implicate the State Department. And, you know,

you think knowing how Pompeo's relationship with Trump, that Rudy might be right. Right. And as they continue, this is why Pompeo is trying to prevent officials from the State Department from testifying to Congress. He doesn't want anyone to testify about this, probably because he knows the State Department is implicated in Trump trying to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. trying to pressure ukraine to investigate the bidens right i mean like trump also trump trump and pompeo allowed our ambassador to ukraine a career civil servant longtime official to be to be fired for no reason no cause only because she wouldn't participate in this fucking scandal to uh pressure the ukrainian government to dig up dirt on biden and pompeo did nothing about that nothing about that and all of this is going to come out when these people eventually testify right and in

the documents right like you can tell this in um you know how kurt volker who was the assistant secretary and others have reacted to this which is what was happening was highly unusual and made people very uncomfortable so to what extent is there email traffic about this amongst State Department employees? I would not be surprised to find some of these people who got roped into this crime caper, writing a note, sending an email to file, essentially, to sort of detail what happened in real time, much like Jim Comey did in some of his conversations with Trump. And this is one of the reasons Pompeo's ability to prevent those documents from coming out is much more limited than the White House's because State Department documents are subject to FOIA. And so the legal case for getting them, even outside of the context of

impeachment inquiry, is much stronger. And so their goal is clearly delay, delay, delay, delay, and try to keep this information out because there are people, there is a story to tell here because Giuliani, we assume the okay of Mike Pompeo, turned elements of the State Department into a taxpayer-funded part of the Trump for re-election campaign. And that is multiple crimes. Yeah, that is not legal. So let's talk about what the house democrats are doing about all this uh they've now subpoenaed

rudy multiple state department officials and the white house itself for documents and depositions um pompeo responded with a letter that basically told democrats to fuck off though he didn't explicitly say he wouldn't be cooperating he just it was a lot of words about oh i don't want to subject my employees to the bullying and intimidation of congress and blah blah blah um rudy sounds like he might tell them to fuck off his excuse was well no it's it was only it was signed by democrats so i don't have to comply with a subpoena signed by democrats that's not a thing that's not a thing no uh who knows what the white house will do can trump and his goons just ignore these subpoenas?

And what can Democrats do about that? I mean, there will be a court case about this if they ignore it. And we will, once again, put our hands in the judiciary. Now, the ability of a judge to side with Trump in the Trump administration is much harder in the context of impeachment inquiry. There is an urgency to this request that is very, both in terms of time and value of the request that is much bigger. And so it seems unlikely that they are going to be able to stop everything. There will be conversations about executive privileges and relates. So, you know, certainly these calls, the other calls that are on the highly classified server, things like that, maybe there, you know, there will be a debate

about, but in general, it seems like Congress, the Trump administration is going to have to cooperate at some level or they will be forced to cooperate. And I do think that the Pompeo letter is essentially performative obstruction. He's writing the letter so that he can show Trump and Trump's goons that he is goon-like, even though there isn't a lot of bite to the bark in the letter. that Schiff and Pelosi and the Democrats have been smart in that in these letters that they send in these subpoenas, they say, by the way, if you do not comply, it will be used as evidence against you in the impeachment trial. And that we will consider obstruction of, I mean, remember, one of the articles of impeachment for Nixon was obstruction of Congress. And, you know, Schiff and Pelosi are basically saying, anyone who doesn't comply, this will be part of an article of impeachment that is obstruction of Congress. Now, I wonder if the Trump administration isn't looking at that and saying, well, you know what, if we're either going to be, if the president's

going to be impeached for either a bunch of crimes and abuses of power that the whole public knows about, or be impeached for us obstructing Congress because we don't want to provide any information or have anything else be revealed. They don't just take the path of being impeached for obstruction of Congress because they just, they know that essentially this is all, you know, this is a political exercise as impeachment always is. Impeachment is a political exercise. And they just think it will be less damaging to them in the election if they're impeached over obstruction of Congress versus if a whole bunch of new information comes up. Yeah, I really much worry about that because it's essentially like adding a fourth life sentence to someone's

term. Like, why do they care? Right. Right. And what, and I think it, so I hope that Democrats don't default to that in the interest of handling this expeditiously. Yes. Because we do, I, I think we do want to get to the bottom of this. We want to know the full, we want the truth. We want to know the full scope of what happened. And we also just think of all the things we've learned within a week. And this is without, and this is only from things that Trump has either admitted publicly or the white house has released. Imagine what we can find out when we actually get the things that they think we shouldn't have. Right. And so there will be a balance. And I understand there's a balance here. Like we can't live in a world where the house has to wait for this to Right. we can and don't allow some sort of November deadline or December deadline to allow Trump

to be, deny the American people the fullest picture possible of what Trump did. Yeah, I agree. Okay, let's talk about 2020 and start with the results of our latest Polar Coaster 2020 series with our wonderful partners at Change Research. Just a note about Change. Change's weekly polling was one of the very first to spot Elizabeth Warren's rise in the primary. They can do polling very quickly with dynamic online sampling.

And so if you're a Democratic candidate, committee, nonprofit, think about using them. Go to changeresearch.com. Check out all of their data. They did a great impeachment poll within like 48 hours last week. So you can check out all the results there. All right. So we polled Arizona.

Dan, why did we poll Arizona and what were we looking to achieve in this poll? Well, two things. We polled Arizona because Arizona has been talked about for years as a battleground state. Even 2008, Obama even considered investing in there at the end. In 2016, the Clinton campaign campaignedrizona in the last week and spent money there decision that hasn't worn well over time but there's been this thought that arizona is on the cusp of becoming a true battleground state like wisconsin michigan pennsylvania colorado virginia etc and our poll indicates that it is. So we wanted to test that. We wanted to

see how real a battleground state it was. Is it sort of more like Wisconsin than Georgia? Is it close enough that it deserves early and serious investment? The other question is, we've done one other battleground state, and that is Wisconsin. And there has been this debate raging for a while now within the Democratic Party of, do we want to focus on the quote-unquote rust belt in the industrial Midwest or the sun belt, states like Arizona? And our poll indicates that that's a false choice, that there's very little difference in the efficacy of the messaging between those two states. You don't have to have a message for Arizona, a message for Wisconsin. The same message could be very

effective in both places. You just have to have the right message. Yeah, I think that's a super important point. All right, to the findings. Trump's approval in Arizona is the same as it was in Wisconsin, 48%, which is higher than his national average of around 41%. He's got a 50-48 approval on the economy, which was also the same as Wisconsin. And he trails a generic Democratic candidate 47% to 46% with 2% voting third party and 5% undecided. That's also, you know, it was a one point margin in Wisconsin as well. This is a state where new voters are key for Democrats. Non-2016 voters, people who did not vote in 2016 but say they're going to vote in 2020, lean Democrat by 69 to 16 percent. And this is why

in this poll Arizona is much closer than it was in 2016 where Trump beat Hillary by three and a half points. And also 68% of those new voters are under 35. So this is, there is, you know, there's the one difference between some of these Sunbelt states and some of these Rust Belt states is in Wisconsin, it is a bit more of a persuasion game. And it does seem like in Arizona, it's much, and we've seen this in Texas and Georgia as well, it's much more about trying, Democrats trying to expand the electorate to bring in new voters and especially young voters. Swing voters, people who say they voted for at least one Republican and one Democrat in the last three years, support the Democratic candidate by 54 to 26 percent. Independents lean Democrat by 43 to 40 percent. Independence lean Democrat by 43 to 40%. Also, we pulled the Senate race and found that Mark Kelly has a 50 to 47% lead over Senator Martha McSally, whose approval rating is a pretty awful 30%

with 50% disapproval. Dan, I'll stop there before we get into the messaging stuff. Your initial reactions to the top lines and how do you see the state being different than Wisconsin for Democrats, if at all? The initial reaction to top lines is Arizona is going to be one of the states that decides the White House. This is not a stretched state. We generally divide, in the context of a presidential campaign, usually divide the states into battleground states and, quote, expansion states, which are states that you don't necessarily need to get to 270. They are harder to win, but if all things are going your way and you have resources, you'll invest in them. North Carolina is an expansion state. Georgia is theoretically an expansion state. But Wisconsin

now deserves to be on the battleground state list with the states that are essentially coin flips right now, at this stage at least. And so I think that is a very positive sign for Democrats because Trump's ability to move Ohio and Iowa into his column have dramatically narrowed the number of paths a Democrat has to 270. And so getting one more state that we have a chance to win is very helpful, right? You could lose Wisconsin, win Arizona, you're still president. And also forces Trump to compete in another state. So I think that's very important. I think it is very similar to Wisconsin in a lot of ways, but the way in which it is different, you point out, it is the path to winning is different and

I think somewhat harder or more resource intensive than Wisconsin. Because Democrats have not been running well-funded, well-organized presidential campaigns in the state for decades now, you're starting off with a less, you know, your volunteer list, your voter list, your data is less sophisticated and well-organized than it is in some of these other states. And it just simply is harder and more expensive to get new voters than it is to persuade people who vote all the time. There's greater upside to it, which is why you want to do it. So to compete in Arizona is going to require the Democratic Party and eventually the Democratic nominee to start investing as soon as possible, because there's a big registration task and the turnout task is

going to be harder. But it is very winnable. And the upside is actually because of this new voter universe higher than in Wisconsin. Yeah. We also pulled the Democratic course race, which we don't put a ton of stock into because Arizona is not an early state. And we tell everyone, tell you guys to make sure to only really care about polling in the early states. So you can look at our Democratic course rates polling. But the one, and you know, Warren leads, it's 35 with 35, Bernie's at 19, Biden's at 15, et cetera, et cetera. But I do think the one thing that it's worth paying attention to is the favorability ratings

among all of the candidates. So Trump's, we talked about Trump's approval. Trump's personal favorability rating among all voters is 42-56. So negative 14 approval, which is pretty bad. But the only Democratic candidates currently more popular than him are Pete Buttigieg, 39-35. He's at plus three, but that's of course 39-35. That's a lot of people who have no opinion of Pete at all. Elizabeth Warren, who's 45-45.

So she's at, that that's her approval bernie sanders is 41 50 at negative 9 kamala harris is 35 48 negative 13 and then joe i was mostly surprised by joe biden's favorability in this poll is one of the lowest 3356 that's negative 23 that's worse than Trump's approval. What do you make of that? I think that it's – this is one data point. So I think we need to be very cautious about drawing too many conclusions from it. Much like this poll was conducted, which is I think a caveat we probably should have made. This poll was conducted basically in the worst week of Trump's political life to date. Yeah, it was last week. And it's notable that he's still at 48 in this poll in terms of his approval. This has also not been a great week for Joe Biden because every conversation about Trump's impeachment involves a conversation about Joe Biden.

Now, that conversation is based on nothing of substance because there is no evidence Joe Biden did anything wrong. But it's still – like he's in the noise, right, of the story that nine in ten Americans are being held subject to. That's part of it. It also I think probably speaks to some polarization within the Democratic Party because Biden can't be at 33 without a decent amount of Democrats having an unfavorable opinion of him. And so the question is, is that a thing that corrects itself when a nomination fight is over? So I think it's something worth watching truly to say. But it would be a point of concern for me if I was in the Biden campaign, for sure. So the important part of the poll for us was our message testing.

We first wanted to answer the question, what's the most effective overall argument about Trump? We've said this a lot of times, there's a million accurately negative things you can say about Trump. But a campaign is about choosing a message, being disciplined, repeating it over and over again, you have to eventually make a choice about what you say about your your opponent. You can't say everything, you know, Hillary Clinton ran into can't say everything. You know, Hillary Clinton ran into this problem in 2016. John Kerry ran into this problem about George Bush in 2004. We called him a million different things. So we tried to test, you know, is it Trump's lying, his racism, his corruption, his policies? What's the most effective argument? Two clear winners emerged of all of the frames that we tested. Here's the first one. Here was the most

popular frame. Donald Trump's constant tweeting, nasty insults and petty squabbles with everyone from politicians of both parties to America's allies are preventing us from making any progress. Instead of uniting us to solve big challenges, he's divided us for his own political gain. That was effective among independents, among swing voters, even among some Republicans. But a close runner up, almost tied, was this message. Donald Trump ran for office as a champion of working people,

but as president, he's given tax breaks to big corporations, supported trade agreements that help big businesses, and proposed cuts to healthcare and retirement benefits. That was also very, very popular with independents and swing voters. That one was a little less popular with Democrats,

and I'm guessing it's because Democrats probably didn't agree with that first line that he ran for office as a champion of working people. Yeah, I think that's probably right. Both of these, for context, the first one overall made 12 percent. Scratch that. The math is fucked up in my head. Both of these did very well overall and with independents. The one about Trump is a faux populist did a few points better with independents.

Yes, it did. It did. And Republicans, which is interesting, too. Yeah. I think just to give people context about why we did this, the most fundamentally basic exercise that any campaign goes through when they get into a race is something called the message box. And the message box is four squares on a whiteboard generally, where you put your positive argument for yourself and you put your positive argument for yourself, and you put your negative argument for your opponent. And you want to know what your opponent's positive argument of themselves is and their opponent's negative argument for you.

The bottom left, the Democrats' best negative argument about Trump is one that we have never been able to figure out. Right, to your point. Racist, liar, conman, uncouth, unfit. You say all the things, all of which are true. But if you say all the things, no one thing breaks through. And so you need a clear and consistent story. And so this point of this was the beginning of the exercise to figure out what is the best way to describe Trump that is the most impactful with the voters we need. Because if we run through the same exercise where we say all the things again, then we're going to have the same problem we had in 2016, which is no one –

like you can't ask voters – voters won't be able to read back to you. Like I remember doing post-election panels in 2016, and I would ask voters – or I'd ask the attendees what was Donald Trump's message for himself, right, in the context of this message box? And they would say, make America great again. I'd ask the question of, I'd say, what was Hillary Clinton's message for herself? And you'd get lots of answers. People would shout out lots of things, but they were nothing consistent. I would ask what Hillary Clinton's negative message about Trump was, and the room would erupt, right? Like, I would ask what Hillary Clinton's negative message about Trump was, and the room would erupt, right? Like, racist, unfit, alt-right, liar, etc., misogynist, all true. And you ask to be able to have at the end of the 2020 election.

When you ask people, what is, you know, Democratic nominees X argument against Trump? You want to be able to read back something specific to you. Yes. And so after we did that, the next series of messages we tested were more specific statements about Trump's record and policies on immigration, abortion, health care, judges, national security and the economy to see which statements would make voters more or less likely to support him. Once again, as in Wisconsin, we found that statements describing Trump's economic policies were significantly more effective against him than any other statement about his policies or record. And so, you know, you listed the top four in the memo that you wrote about this, which, by the way, everyone should go to cricket.com, read Dan's memo about Wisconsin. It's brilliant, just like the Wisconsin memo was. So go check that out. But top four messages most effective

against Trump. Trump promised to reduce the deficit, but, you know, he dramatically increased government spending and cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. And the deficit is expected to grow to a trillion dollars this year. So one about how his tax cut increased the deficit. Another one about how his tax cut gave a tax break to companies that ship jobs overseas. And GM and some other companies are already closing plants and moving stuff overseas. Another one, this was the most popular one in wisconsin message in wisconsin donald trump broke a campaign promise by proposing more than one trillion dollars in cuts to medicare

medicaid and social security even as he passed a tax cut for the rich and then donald trump promised to repeal nafta but now he's working with wall street major corporations and the big drunk companies to pass a new nafta that hurts workers and helps corporations. All messages about Trump favoring the rich overworking people with his policies. Dan, what did you think about these results? And, you know, tell us a little bit about what you said in your Arizona memo. So in the memo, I offer three recommendations for how Democrats can begin the process of winning Arizona. The first one is, as I mentioned earlier, which is invest now and early because this is going to be about registering and turning out new voters. That is going to be the path to win.

You've got to start that process right now. The second was about the narratives, which is that the best argument about Trump is that he is a chaotic corporatist, right? That he is causing chaos. And I think what was most important about those narratives was that there was a cost to his actions, right? And it is not just that he is a, that he is a crazy tweeter who doesn't, who fights with people. It's that because he is doing that, he's not doing, he's not helping your family. He's not fighting for things. And so in any message about Trump, you got to draw it to a specific outcome for American families. It's like, this is not a question, we're not trying to convince

people not to vote for him because he's unpresidential or uncouth. It is, his behavior is not bad on its own. It's his bad behavior has an impact on your life. It could be better than us. And we should say that even in that first one about his tweeting, I think one of the reasons it works is instead of uniting us to make progress, he has divided us for his own political gain by doing all this crazy tweeting and yelling and insulting and stuff like that. There's a specific mention that he has impeded our progress as a nation. And then the third point, which I think is the most important point, and I think it's true in Arizona, it was true in Wisconsin, I think it's true nationally, is whoever wins the economic debate is going to win this race. So Trump's economic approval rating in this poll is 50-48, and that comes despite a summer of really bad economic news for Trump. huge market gyrations, some below expectations growth numbers. Despite all of that, Trump's economic approval rating is still positive. And he gets positive ratings on nothing. And so that's significant. And we also tested Trump's positive economic message for himself.

And so we tested, since Trump became president, we've created millions of jobs and unemployment rates are the lowest they've been in decades. That message was very effective. Most Trump messages that we have tested, either in Wisconsin or Arizona, don't do anything to move the race. Just they're either slightly more – they're like slightly less offensive to independents and swing voters. This one was – made 20 percent of independents – made independents 20 percent more likely to support Trump and even cut the Democratic number down into the 60s. And so that is very significant.

But as you point out, Trump's economic support is a mile wide and an inch deep. And so if we communicate the messages outlined in this poll, the ones we tested, we can take him down. And if he loses his economic support, I think the bottom does fall out with everyone other than the MAGA base. And so for all the discussion of all the other important issues we can and should talk about, guns, civil rights, Trump's racism, the Democratic candidate has a moral obligation to talk about those things and campaign on those things. But the effort to take Trump's economic approval rating down should begin right now.

And there is so much information. The problem is people know the unemployment numbers, and they know that Trump says the economy is going to be good. But they don't know what his actual economic policies are, and they don't know who his economic policies are for. When you find out that he has done these bad things in order to help his friends in big business and enrich himself, then it can be devastating. But that information is not breaking through in the organic press. And so it needs to be part of – I know I'm a fucking broken record on this – but an aggressive, targeted, sustained advertising campaign. And that campaign should have started yesterday. Well, when you... Yes, it should have. When you read this memo,

you read this poll and read our Wisconsin poll, you realize why during yesterday's press conference, Nancy Pelosi opened with, instead of impeachment, I'd like to talk about prescription drug prices and our legislation to about prescription drug prices and our legislation to lower prescription drug prices. And look, we have been very critical. We had been very critical of Pelosi before this impeachment inquiry for not pursuing an impeachment inquiry. But I would say that Pelosi's reluctance to pursue impeachment makes a little more sense when you read polls like this.

Now at least you know what polls she's been looking at. Because these polls all say, like, the best way to beat Trump, the most effective way to beat Trump, is to talk about these economic issues, to talk about his faux populism, his plutocracy, his helping his rich friends overworking people, his budget cuts, his health care cuts, his social security cuts, his Medicare cuts. Like, this is what Democrats need to be talking about in this election in order to beat him. And, you know, now my argument would be that I think that we can do both, that like there is both a moral obligation and a political benefit to impeaching him and we should do it and

we've argued that we're in it now but i think if all we talked about from now until the election is trump's crimes and his criminality and everything he deserves to be impeached for and his racist outbursts and his tirades and all that kind of stuff and we didn't talk about all of the policies that he's passed that are making life harder for most people in this country, of all races, of all genders, of all backgrounds, then we would, you know, we're not putting our best argument forward. And so I understand, you know, and everyone should understand, like, this, this is, like you said, this is our ultimate goal. We do need to communicate to voters exactly what Trump's policies are, and what they have done to the country, especially on the economy.

And the last point I'd make on that is I think it's great that Nancy Pelosi started a press conference that way. But Trump is spending millions of dollars on digital ads to take this message directly to the voters. to take this message directly to the voters. And we are not going to communicate the economic narrative that we need through the press. We have to communicate directly to people. Yeah, that is an old theory that we can communicate it through the press. And we know this because all of this information

that we show to voters has all been covered by the press. It's not that they ignored the stories. They wrote stories about the trillion dollar deficit. They wrote stories about the tax plan. But it doesn't break by the press. It's not that they ignored the stories. They wrote stories about the trillion dollar deficit. They wrote stories about the tax plan. But it doesn't break through the noise. People's information, like, the mistake we make in democratic politics

is we worry about the coverage and not the conversation. Like, if you can't, it's not, you can't just add up the number of headlines you got and news hits you got and think that that equals communication. It is, is it showing up in people's social media feed? Are they seeing it? Are they seeing it relentlessly? And there just is no strategy or no possibility to use the organic earned media to do that. So you're going to have to spend money to do it. And it can happen at the exact same time

that we're impeaching Trump. Okay. At the exact same time, we're impeaching Trump. At the exact same time we're talking about how Trump's policies on guns have contributed to all these other things. But it has to be happening. Yep. All right. When we come back, we will have Dan's interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin,

and then we will have my interview with Abdul El-Sayed. He's the Democratic congressman from Maryland's 8th District, Jamie Raskin. Welcome to Pod Save America. Delighted to be with you guys. Congressman, I want to start with the briefing that you had yesterday with the State Department Inspector General. Can you tell us about that briefing and what you learned? Well, the Inspector General felt he had to act after he learned of the whistleblower's complaint because he was sitting on this bizarre package of propaganda papers, essentially,

which had been delivered to him in a manila envelope that was addressed in calligraphy to Secretary Pompeo, attention, Ruth. And then the return address was the White House, but it didn't really look like White House stationery. And then there were a group of subdividers within these documents from the Trump Hotel. But basically, it's a compendium of of propaganda hits on the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Yanukovych. I think that's her name. And then also on Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. And so it looked to me very much like the kind of stuff that Rudy Giuliani has been talking about. And sure enough, we learned later in the day yesterday that Giuliani took responsibility for having delivered this over to the Secretary of State. And it made its way from Pompeo to his

legal counsel to the inspector general who turned it over to the FBI. They've had it for four or five months. Apparently there's nothing in there that they found worthy of launching a criminal investigation. And then when he heard about the whistleblower complaint, he decided he should turn it over to Congress as well. So to my mind, what it reinforces is the idea that there was a propaganda campaign, It reinforces the idea that there was a propaganda campaign, which was largely run by Rudy Giuliani, trying to undermine the Bidens and also trying to undermine the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Congressman, what questions do you have coming out of that briefing? And what more do you want to know about the role that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo played in this whole effort?

about the role that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo played in this whole effort. Well, yeah, I mean, I would like to know what exactly was Secretary of State Pompeo's role. There was no postmark on this document that reached him. So somebody apparently handed it to him, gave it to him. Maybe it was over at the Trump Hotel because there's all this Trump stationery built into it. I don't know where it came from. We don't know what else he did with it. And it at least suggests the possibility that he was part of the kind of shadow campaign that Giuliani was running in the Ukraine to try to dig up dirt or produce disinformation about the Bidens. And so I would certainly like to learn from Secretary Pompeo

what he knew about it and what his involvement was. But in terms of the core of the story here, it doesn't alter in any way my understanding of what happened. President Trump, in this phone call, And President Trump, in this phone call, very clearly tried to shake down the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, in order to get him to produce political dirt on the Bidens. And he was willing to withhold $391 million in the weeks leading up to that phone call as part of that effort, and then engaged in an effort to cover up all of these proceedings, the shakedown and the basic sellout of our own election. And basically, at this point, we're in the process of collecting more details about what else went along with this phone call. Was there preparatory work? Was there a more detailed campaign by Giuliani to try to get the Ukrainian government to play ball, as they said?

What is your optimism about getting access to the materials at the White House and other departments, given that they have to date refused to comply with any congressional requests? Does this being an impeachment inquiry change the nature of this? Well, I think it's all going to come out. You know, we have whistleblowers popping up all over the place now, which is why it's so important for us to protect the original whistleblower who described this scheme in great detail. And so much of this, I think, we will find documented in texts and email messages. And this is a president whose original sin was to decide to use his public

office as an instrument for self-enrichment and private political advancement. And that's pretty much all that has gone on in the White House, as far as I can tell, or most of what's gone on in the White House. So we're going to find lots and lots of emails and texts that record all of these activities. Now, obviously, we've learned also about this secret computer server, this electronic safe, where the original records of the July 25 phone call were stored. Apparently, there are other phone calls that are in there, and I would be very interested to see all of those, both relating to Ukraine and then also perhaps relating to other tangential matters. For our listeners, can you help them

understand exactly how making this request in the context of an impeachment inquiry is different? How does it increase your chances to get access to the information you want? Yeah, I think that everything has changed in terms of the chemistry of White House obstructionism of our investigative powers. Because we are in a full-blown impeachment inquiry led by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi, and all of the committees are working together towards a common goal here. Our investigative fact-finding powers are at their judicial zenith, so the courts are going to regard them as at their peak. But moreover, we are able to say with compelling plausibility to people in the executive branch, you turn over these documents as you are

legally obligated to do. And if you don't, we can hold you in contempt, either civil contempt or criminal contempt, and try to take you to court, or we can hold you in contempt ourselves. But in any event, leaving contempt to the side, you are an obstruction of justice, and that itself can become an article within an impeachment process. If you go back and look at the Nixon impeachment, for example, obstruction of justice in a much narrower way than what we're seeing here was one of the counts laid out in an article of impeachment. So I think that's a serious threat that they have to be concerned about. The other thing is that as an evidentiary matter, we are letting all witnesses know that the refusal to turn over this or that document

or the refusal to testify or to testify honestly will be taken as an essential admission of the underlying factual allegations they're trying to avoid or dismiss. How concerned are you that this is going to end up in a long, drawed-out court battle that extends an inquiry longer than you would like? No, I think time is on our side. We're not relying on the courts. The core of presidential misconduct is well known and essentially admitted by the president who bragged about what he was doing. And even today, again, I tried to ask other countries to produce the information about the Bidens. And so

the core of misconduct is known. We do want to try to flesh out surrounding factual particulars, but to the extent we are obstructed in that, we will just count that as effectively an admission. You know, this is not a court of law, and this is not a matter of crime and punishment. The president's not going to prison if he's impeached and then ultimately convicted and removed in the Senate. He's simply removed from office on the finding that he's unfit because of having committed high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people and against the American Constitution. So I think that he, given that he's running around the country

saying that his phone call was perfect and his behavior has been perfect he needs to come forward with all the evidence they have to try to show that what seems so perfectly clear to everybody else isn't actually the case and I would love to see

what his argument is he says that he did nothing wrong that it was flawless and that his performance was perfect. Let him come forward and let them stop trying to prevent documents from coming out. Let them stop trying to obstruct witnesses and tell us exactly why this is not what it seems to be, which is the use of the foreign policy and military power of the presidency to extract political favors from an ally which is struggling against foreign aggression, in this case, Russian aggression. It's just an outrageous

sequence of facts, and the president or somebody needs to explain why there's anything remotely defensible about it. You're a member of the Judiciary Committee. How concerned are you about Attorney General Barr's involvement in this specific scandal? Well, we have multiple questions for Mr. Barr, who was indeed named by the president, who made him sound like he was a participant in these events. And if that's the case, of course, he must recuse himself from anything having to do with this investigation. When the whistleblower complaint was sent over to the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice found that there was no reason to investigate any further to find whether there was criminal conduct involved. He did not recuse himself.

There's no mention of any recusal by the attorney general. So that's a very serious problem. You know, we're talking about an AG now who, from the beginning of his service, has been acting much more as a right-hand man and a counselor to the President of the United States than he's been acting as an attorney general and a lawyer for the American people. So we want to know precisely what his involvement was. And it does look as if he also was trying to lobby foreign governments to produce the information that the president sought against them, which is pretty astounding if it's true. Congressman, one follow-up on that. How unusual is it that Attorney General Barr is flying all over the world, engaging in an investigation into American intelligence and law enforcement agencies? Well, first of all, the Attorney General seems to be in pursuit, not of the truth,

but in pursuit of fabricated information to try to contradict what our law enforcement agencies have all found. So the CIA and the FBI and the Department of Justice's own special counsel, Robert Mueller, all found that there was a sweeping and systematic campaign by the Russians to interfere in our election. That's simply beyond dispute from the standpoint of official United States government sources that have studied the matter. And yet they appear to be wanting again to reopen and relitigate what happened in the 2016 election. What's remarkable about that to me is that the president, of course, declared repeatedly that the Mueller report exonerated him on the charge of collusion with Russia. Now, it did not because, as Mueller said, we don't deal with the question of collusion, which is a colloquial statement about interactions.

And they found more than 100 interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia. But it did say that there was not sufficient evidence to charge Trump with conspiracy. Now, some have said that's because Trump refused to testify and there were other problems in the evidence. But in any event, that was a conclusion that there was not sufficient evidence to go forward with conspiracy charges. So you think that Trump and his team would just leave well enough alone. And he, after all, did declare victory there. You know, no collusion and, you know, no conspiracy, he said. But they're still trying to undermine the conclusion that Mueller rendered that there

was a sweeping and systematic campaign by Russia. Why would they be doing that? That seems as if they're doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin more than they're doing a service even to Donald Trump. I mean, that's remarkable to me that they're traveling all over the world to try to undermine the findings by the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and a dozen other intelligence agencies. And yet there we are. And of course, they are also trying to shake loose information about the Bidens. And the packet that we saw yesterday also targeted Ambassador Yovanovitch. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save America, and we'd love to have you back on again soon.

Good, I would love to do it. Thanks again. Thanks. Bye-bye. All right, on the pod today, the host of the newest Crooked Media podcast, America Dissected, Abdul El-Sayed. Abdul, how's it going? I am doing great.

How are you? I am fantastic. So we've known each other for quite a while. You came in many months ago now to pitch us on the idea for this podcast, and we were immediately interested. Could you give us a version of that pitch here and tell us why you wanted to tackle all these issues and do this podcast? Absolutely. So, you know, John, I'm a doctor and an epidemiologist. And before I ran for governor in Michigan, I was the health commissioner in the city of Detroit. And before I ran for governor in Michigan, I was the health commissioner in the

city of Detroit. And one of the things you come to appreciate when you sort of break out of the little nucleus of your medical and epidemiologic world and into the broader world of the way we think about government and politics is that the conversation that most of us are having about health is just the wrong conversation, right? Whether it's the political conversation or it is the media conversation or even worse, it's the wellness conversation of people exploiting your insecurities to sell you stuff that could hurt you. We're just not talking about this right. And I realized that part of that is because we are so siloed in our conversation. And so what we're trying to do with this podcast is to break the wrong conversation and build the right one and really center on the fact of science and the role of government in what

has been a pretty miraculous increase in our overall well-being over the past century. And I know, you know, in a moment right now where Donald Trump moves our timeline, where our conversation at the pace of like, you know, a new conversation every day, we don't really think in centuries long, but like the last century saw our life expectancy rocket, right? And we go from, you know, a life expectancy in the 40s

to a life expectancy in the 70s or 80s. And that's a pretty big deal. So like, how do we do that? And then how do we apply that kind of logic and reasoning now? So yeah, I mean, it's interesting, you know, people think about the issue of healthcare in America. And so often, the debate is focused on coverage, and what kind of a health system we want to build. And obviously, you know, you cover that as well. But there are also these sort of public health issues that you cover, which I find really fascinating. You know, one of the one of the early issues you talked to us about that you end up covering in this podcast,

that really made this whole thing click for me was sort of the Ebola scare. Because I remember sort of the Obama administration trying to prevent the spread of Ebola. And there was this media hysteria around it. You know, it was fueled by Donald Trump and other right-wing figures. And I just remember thinking how fast the media hysteria sort of overpowered our ability, you know, the government's ability and the medical community's ability to deal with this in a rational way. And, you know, I think what's fascinating about this podcast is you sort of track that not only for the issue of Ebola, but for so many other issues where media and political hysteria and bullshit sort of overtake

the capacity of government and the medical community to really grapple with issues that they should be able to grapple with. That's right. So I was a professor of epidemiology in New York during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. And you had this sort of movement of these scare tactics by people who would ultimately run for president on those scare tactics. scare tactics by people who would ultimately run for president on those scare tactics. What it did was it created this sort of need to respond to an issue that had not actually become an issue and would really not become an issue in the United States. Now, that did two things.

Number one, it took our attention away from what we actually could do about the problem, which is empower our public health infrastructure to go and fight the epidemic and save lives in West Africa. But then number two, to actually do something about the problems that we're actually suffering at home. Like one of the things that was happening during the Ebola epidemic was that we were having one of the worst flu years in recent memory that year. And one of the things that we can do is just get a flu vaccine. Like that's a way to protect yourself from a very deadly disease right at home. But like people don't talk about the mundane that way, right? They talk about these extremely scary diseases. And Ebola is a terrible disease that killed a lot of people, but not in the United States. And so we were just having the wrong health conversation.

I loved your episode about the anti-vaxxers. That's out now. What did you learn about why health conspiracies like that proliferate and what we can do to stop them? Yeah, you know, a couple of things. I had some really interesting conversations with folks. And I think number one, I think the medical and public health community just has to be a lot more honest about what we know and what we don't. And I think when we come to it, this conversation from a space of honesty and respect for the scientific process, I think what it does is it creates the space for folks to say, okay, what can I trust now? But like And one of the problems with the way we have conversations is that we just come at it from a place of blame and anger. And usually when you're part of an institution that people don't trust in the first place

because you're so all or nothing and telling them what to do, and then you start yelling at them for making the decision that you told them not to make, you don't usually win them over. And so we've got to be able to differentiate between some of these problematic people who are exploiting the space to sell pseudoscience and to sell products from folks who are their victims. And I think when it comes to the victims, we've got to come from a place of empathy. One of the young people that I interviewed is a gentleman named Ethan Lindenberger, who he's got a really interesting story because his mom is a big anti-vaxxer. And so he didn't get vaccinated when he was a kid. But then when he turned 18, he decided to. And, you know, he talks about the way

that he went about talking to his mother, who's this anti-vaxxer, about why he chose to get vaccinated. And you just see this empathy that like, if we were to bring that into not just a conversation about health, but like most of our political conversation, it would be a very different country right now. And so I think there's a lot we can learn about how we communicate both with honesty and empathy. So your next episode is about the insanely high cost of prescription drugs. Talk about what we can expect from that episode. And I'd also love to hear what you think about Nancy Pelosi's legislation on this that she announced a few weeks ago that she's been trying to push even in the midst of impeachment. Yeah, look, I really am thankful that House Democrats, led by a number of legislators, including the speaker, are bringing this forward.

are bringing this forward. So what they're trying to do is give power to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate with drug manufacturers for the 250 most expensive medications on the Medicare formulary that are currently under patent. And so that's a really, really big deal. But what we're trying to dig into in this episode is precisely why prescription drugs are so expensive in the first place. And that's because the government cannot negotiate. And it's this crazy thing that shows you exactly how corporations have, in effect, because of our lax campaign finance system, have been able to reach across the firewall between government and economics to create these hugely problematic policies, like the fact

that Medicare, which is one of the biggest purchasers of prescription drugs, can't negotiate down the cost of these drugs. And so we use this story about a really critical hepatitis C medication, hepatitis C being the most deadly infectious disease in America right now. This medication that's priced at $84,000 a course. And we look at how it got priced that way. And the fact is, is that the research that led to the creation of this medication, it was funded by the NIH and the Veterans Affairs Administration, our taxpayer dollars. And so it's crazy because these pharmaceutical companies have leveraged their input into the political process to basically

leave us paying both for the research and development that creates these medications. And then also on the backend, these exorbitant prices that are way higher than any other country. So we like really try and walk the listener through how this, this drug got created, how it got bought and how wall street leveraged it's in it's, it's weird incentive structure to leave it costing that much. And I do hope that this bill moves forward. I'm a little bit cynical about what the impeachment process is going to do to it, but it's an important start. I think we can go a lot further and we talk a little bit about that in the pod. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the

things that, you know, even as there's disagreement on health care within the party, among people is the high cost of prescription drugs. It sort of unifies people across party, class, education. It is one of the most pressing problems in healthcare for sure. I mean, one of the things about it, so I ran for governor of Michigan in 2018 and got to meet a lot of folks and almost everybody has an experience either for themselves or among one of their loved ones, where that person had to really, really stretch, if not potentially co-bankrupt, to be able to afford a medication that was critical for their being alive. Whether it's insulin, whether it's an EpiPen, whether it's this medication for

hepatitis C. We're watching as these corporations have, in effect, just flayed us financially so that they can make billions of dollars. And so it really doesn't matter who you are, this issue touches you. And sometimes when we talk about healthcare writ large, if you have insurance and you've never actually had to use it, it's one of those things that sort of back of mind. But when it comes to prescription drugs, because all of us are affected by it, it makes sense that it pulls so highly among the set of concerns that people really identify when they want government to act. All right, Abdul. So everyone, please go check out America Dissected. Go download it. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts. You are the perfect person to do this, having both

a health background and a political background. So you can fuse the two worlds together. So everyone, it's, and it's very entertaining too. It's just a really fun podcast and you will learn a lot. So thanks for joining us and good luck with everything. Yeah, John, thank you guys for doing this pod. Like the goal here is that we're having the health conversation we should be having and it doesn't have to be boring, right? Because these are things that all of us

have to pay attention to in our daily lives for ourselves and our loved ones. So hope you'll check it out. Thanks for the opportunity to do it. And it's been a lot of fun working with you guys. And I hope that folks will check it out. Thanks to Abdul and Congressman Raskin for joining us today. And we will talk to you next week. We're going to switch next week. Dan and I will be doing the Monday pod. And then you'll hear from Tommy and John and I for the Thursday pod. Just keeping people guessing.

Yeah, all the time. Bye. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer.

Thanks to Carolyn Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmel Coney, and Yael Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as a video every week.