Pod Save America - "We had plenty of ethical fun."

Episode Date: January 12, 2017

Jon and Dan talk about Obama's farewell and Trump's press conference. Then, former Obama ethics czar Norm Eisen joins to talk about Trump's decision to retain ownership of his business empire.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan, welcome to Pod Save America, your first episode. I'm excited to be part of the Crooked Media family. Absolutely. Today on the pod we have Ambassador Norm Eisen, who was the former Obama special counsel for ethics in the White House. Norm kept us on a straight and narrow when we were in the White House. So we will be talking to Norm all about the press conference yesterday and Trump's conflicts of interest and his attempts to rectify that situation, which I don't think went very well. that situation, which I don't think went very well.

First, before we get into it, a little housekeeping. Thank you to everyone who listened, who reached out, who rated us on iTunes for our first episode. Positive America currently right now is still number one in the iTunes store, which is thanks to all you guys. So please keep giving us good ratings. If you haven't already in the iTunes store, tell a friend. There's still a lot of people who listen to us on Keeping It 1600 who I see on Twitter who didn't know that we've moved over yet. So still trying to get our audience back. So if you guys would tell some people to

listen in, if you like our program, we'd be very appreciative. Tell a friend, people. Tell a friend. Dan, let's start with the farewell address, Obama's farewell address on Monday in Chicago. Neither of us were there. I was very sad about it. I know, me too. I didn't realize how sad I would be about not being there until you went on Instagram or Facebook. And basically every person we know was there, like seeing people I haven't seen in eight or ten years.

It was pretty amazing. And I was pretty sad about it. I was too. We were focused on the first episode and the launch, and I was physically happy that I wasn't getting on a plane to Chicago and staying out until like 2 in the morning that night, but I was sort of emotionally depressed all day when I saw it. But I'm sure you checked out the speech, as I did,

and what did you think of the speech? Where did you watch it? Did you watch it at home? I watched it at home, but then Lovett and Tommy and I had to go to a dinner for this company. And so we basically heard the latter half of the speech in an Uber on public radio

on the drive to Venice. And we're like, you know, silently like tearing up in the Uber. That's how we heard the rest of it we i watched it at home on like 10 minute delay so i'd put my phone away which was actually like really nice because i didn't have to be on twitter when it was happening uh because my wife i was waiting for my wife who was stuck in an uber that started going the wrong direction so this is there's a lot of uber threads here i you know i think up until they started playing City of Blinding Lights when POTUS walked out, it had not fully hit me yet that Barack Obama is no longer going to be our president next week.

Like I knew that intellectually, obviously. Like an election happened. And I've had this slow roll of – I've been to DC and the White House a couple times. I've seen POTUS a couple times. I'vec in the white house a couple times i've seen photos a couple times i've seen all our old friends a couple times but like this was the one where like the sort of the emotions came out where it really the shock were off and it was this is the end of this chapter of yeah you know our personal lives and and the country i was struck by, I mean, so much has changed in eight years, and we're about to face something fairly scary, I think, and challenging.

But I was sort of struck by how little changed about him since he sort of first stepped on that stage in 2004 in Boston. And, you know, some people said, oh, that was a more, a sunnier, more optimistic message. I still think that sort of like the optimism and the faith and the hope he had in 2004 was still there in this speech. And he talked about things in the speech that he gave warnings in this speech that he'd sort of been giving his entire presidency. Right. When I mean, the whole the theme of the speech, I think, was what is required to maintain democracy? What does democracy require in the 21st century?

And he sort of went through the different challenges to a fair democratic system, inequality, racial tensions, autocracy around the world. And so he sort of ticked through all those things, you know, but there are challenges that he's been talking about basically since he's he got into public life and they just happen to be heightened right now with a Trump presidency coming. But I don't it's weird because some people I saw Jonathan Shait wrote an interesting piece about this about the speech where he said that basically the whole speech was a warning about Trumpism in a way. I think it was, but it was also a warning about all the conditions in our country and the world that led to a president trump and so it wasn't directly about trump himself but sort of what got us here you know yeah trump is a symptom not the disease i think in the way that speech was written i think that's exactly right and my other go ahead my other non-serious takeaway from it was everyone

always like puts up those two pictures of Barack Obama in 2009 and Barack Obama now. And they're like, Obama's gotten so old. The presidency's aged him. He has gray hair. But everyone posted on social media all their photos from campaign days. We have also aged a lot. Yeah. He may actually be doing better than some of us.

lot uh yeah he may actually be doing better than some of us it's like we were america elected a very young man staffed by a bunch of children to run the country and thank god it worked out because we were very very young and we looked even younger than we were back then i also had about 10 15 pounds on me when i started the white house yes well i had them i had them not gone away when i look at the pictures of me in 09 with my also why did anyone let me shave my head but that was uh yeah it was until 2013 i thought you were going prematurely bald then you were just getting ahead of it i was shocked when you showed up when you left the white house and came back with hair like six months later oh it's so in some ways we're better but no no i i thought like i thought it was i thought it was a great speech i was so i was

happy he ended you know i have one final ask as your president. Same thing I asked when you took a chance on me eight years ago. I'm asking you to believe not in my ability to bring about change, but in yours. To me, that's the central message of his presidency, of his campaigns. And it is also the greatest contrast to Donald Trump, whose message in the campaign was I alone can fix it. Right. And for all the commentary on how, you know, Obama's presidency was a self-referential presidency and it was all about his personality and his story, all of which I think is way overdone and bullshit. You know, the message from the very beginning is the for a democracy to work,

everyone has to participate and you cannot just depend on the people that you elect to bring about change. You have to continue working and fighting and participating every single day. direct line from the O4 convention speech. And there's no question there are some there's thematic similarity there. And, and you are right that it's he has the same optimism as present if somewhat tempered by, you know, years of being on the front lines of battles. But the speech I thought it was most like was the Yes, we can speech after Obama lost in New Hampshire in 2008. Because, like, that was the same context was a bunch of people who had incredibly high hopes, who believed in something who had gotten let down by circumstance, you know, by an election. And, you know, stepping in at that moment, when people are lacking hope, and giving them hope for the future is, I think, the best Obama. And, you know, I am sure that, you know, at least among the tens of thousands of Obama volunteers and organizers and staffers, a lot of them got up

that Wednesday morning and, you know, sort of looking for what the thing they can do is to make an impact here. And I think that was sort of the message was to the people let down by the election. But that we can, you know, we control our fate. And at the end of the day, what Obama stands for, what we stand for is the future. And Trump is a throwback to a rapidly dying past. Yeah. And also the idea that change is, and the fight for change is, it's hard and it's unending, right? And it also, it doesn't end when like, you know, if we elect a Democratic Congress and we beat Trump and elect a Democratic president, like, job's not done then either. You know, you don't just elect, politics is not transactional.

You don't just elect leaders that you agree with and then step away and hope that they fix everything. And I think that's been his message from the start. And I also think that's what the Trump administration and the people who voted for Trump are going to find out soon, too. A lot of people have said that, like the Che piece, that this was basically a big speech, quote unquote, subtweeting Trump. Presidents don't subtweet people. Other underlying message there, I thought, other than just a simple message of the country, which was the main part here, was a message to Democrats about how – what we should stand for and how we should stand for it in this new era, right? He actually laid out a pretty smart test and message for the Affordable Care Act fight that's happening in a good positioning for Democrats that hopefully they adopt that is slightly more clever than hashtag make America sick again. And so I thought there's a lot for the country who was worried about the future to take from that speech. There's a lot of nostalgia for people who were part of this journey with President Obama from that speech.

I think there's a lot for the people who are engaging in the battles to come to learn from that speech. I think there's a lot for the people who are engaging in the battles to come to learn from that speech. I think he, he, there's, there, there are like hints of a roadmap in there for the future for the, for the progressive movement. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I was struck by, it wasn't just a farewell address. It was, it was a blueprint, you know, as, as, as I think of what Axelrod would say is it was an exhortation, very Axelrodian word there. Yes. All right. So let Alright, so let's go from that very high plane to the leak.

Pun very much intended. So like, while that speech was happening, if there wasn't a better contrast or a sadder contrast, I guess, there were news reports that U.S. intelligence officials,

FBI, CIA, DNI, Director of National Intelligence, briefed both President Obama and Donald Trump separately, along with, I think, eight leaders in Congress, and no one else got this briefing on the Russian hacking operation. And during that briefing, reports are that they informed both Trump and Obama that there are reports that the Russians have compromising information on Donald Trump that they could use to blackmail him with, including, you know, stories about prostitutes in hotels in Russia, business dealings, all kinds of other stuff. So BuzzFeed publishes the dossier that, the full dossier that basically the intelligence officials borrowed from to relay the information to Trump and Obama.

And all hell breaks loose. So, I mean, there's a lot going on. I mean, you should read some of the stories about this because it definitely reads like directly out of a bad spy novel. I mean, but to try to like put together the story here, exactly what happened, because it's very confusing. Apparently an ex British spy named Christopher Steele was hired by a firm, a research firm that was hired by a Republican donor back in the campaign to dig up stuff on Trump. This ex-spy has been well-respected in the past. He worked on many different cases and had helped the FBI in the past, so he's not some crazy guy. He used to spy in Moscow.

He did this for a long time. He found enough evidence to sort of outline two different Russian operations, one to find compromising information on Trump and two meetings between the Russian government and the Trump campaign during the 2016 campaign. Put together this document, it sort of made its way around Washington and everywhere else. It was passed around to a couple of Republican operatives during the campaign. Washington and everywhere else. It was passed around to a couple of Republican operatives during the campaign. Rick Wilson, who was working for Marco Rubio at the time, he saw it. By the fall, some documents had been given to the FBI. It was also passed to British intelligence because the guy who did it didn't just want it to be politicized in the United States. He wanted the Brits to have it too. At one point, John McCain found it, came across it. McCain gave it to the FBI because he thought it was important enough to give to the FBI.

And then finally, the CIA, FBI, and the NSA found it. I don't know if they found it persuasive and they didn't. It was unverifiable, they said, the reports in the document. They could not verify them. And there was plenty of reason to doubt their veracity. And yet, they still thought it important enough to brief the current president and the next president about. So I don't know. So I guess there's a couple of questions here. One, there's been this journalistic debate. Should BuzzFeed have published the documents at all?

What do you think about that? What is the crooked media position on this? So I've gone back and forth on this. Like, I just I think BuzzFeed was right to publish them with a fairly hefty warning, right? Which is, we cannot verify the contents of this. There's plenty of reason to doubt the contents of this document. Also, BuzzFeed did not publish it, like, 20 days ago when there was no news about U.S. intelligence officials briefing the current and future presidents about this, right? Like, I think if there hadn't been news that this made it to the level of Trump and Obama

and that our intelligence officials found it necessary to tell them, then they didn't have a right to publish it. But the fact that we have news reports that Obama and Trump were getting this information and the information is out there circulating around Washington, circulating around news organizations, I don't know, it seems like with a dose of caution, then you could publish it. It's a close call. I agree it's a close call. And I will say in the fullness of what limited self-awareness I have, that I am sure I would have a different position if this was a dossier about Barack Obama. But so, you know, bias is on my sleeve here. But I agree with you that if it is significant enough to have been briefed to the President of the United States and the President-elect and has been written about

as an existing document, I'm not really sure how someone doesn't publish that. Now, we are obviously dancing around the very salacious accusations in there of what that compromising information is. And I don't know if I'm adhering to crooked media, journalistic ethic policies, or if you have developed those yet. You mean the golden shower stand? Yes. I mean, I feel like we were compelled to make a bedwetter joke, but we'll just let that stand. A lot of people made them on Twitter for us. It was great. Yeah, that's right, including friend of the pod, Mitch Stewart, this morning. Of course.

It's a close call. I think there was a pretty interesting debate between – Bill's interview was really a debate between Chuck Todd of Meet the Press and Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, about their decision to do this. And it was pretty clear from the interview that Chuck disagreed pretty strenuously with that decision. Well, one thing Chuck said to Ben that was just wrong was he was like, you guys publish fake news.

And it's not fake news. It may be fake news. Someday we may find out that every single allegation in that document is false. It could very well be true, but we don't know that yet. And the intelligence officials still found it necessary to tell the president and the future president. And part of the reason, if you believe some of the reporting here about why they included it was, it was a piece of supporting evidence that the Russians may have had compromising information on Trump and not used it, which is evidence that the Russians were releasing information for the purposes of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton. I'm trying to think of the best analogy. if after the 2008 campaign, intelligence officials had briefed George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the

fact that Russians who had somehow hacked the campaign claimed to have information that Barack Obama wasn't in fact born in the United States. Totally uncorroborated. But obviously, we all knew there had been rumors about Obama not being born in the United States. We knew that all of this was a conspiracy. But now the Russians claim to have hard evidence about that. And then BuzzFeed publishes that. I mean, we would have all freaked out and said, like, you shouldn't publish that stuff like that because we were in the White House. But I don't, like, would the media have gone crazy and said that they shouldn't have done that? Now, back in 2008, maybe, because people had, you know, know people there was a higher higher bar there but i don't know like i could

see that happening pretty easily i mean the press including this is not an attack on our friend chuck todd but nbc was one of the major organs for donald trump to go out and get and shout birther claims from you know know, as loud as he possibly could on the show, because he was an NBC, he was doing the rollout or the season premiere of Celebrity Apprentice at the time. And he was on the Today Show all the time. And sometimes the Today Show was very good about saying it wasn't true, but a lot of times they weren't. So it seems hard that you can put Donald Trump on your TV network to say provably false things about Barack Obama. But this document that's part of possibly one of the major political scandals of our time and most alarming international issue we've dealt with in a while should not be discussed.

we've dealt with in a while can't it should not be discussed i think it's a really i would encourage people who were to just watch the interview between chuck and ben about this because i think it kind of gets to both sides of the argument other than chuck's one point about fake news it gets to both sides of the argument i think in a pretty smart rational way yeah and again i don't i don't think it's the easiest call. I think both sides of the argument have merit here. But I definitely come down on the BuzzFeed side. So then Trump, this is right before Trump has his press conference yesterday. And what a press conference it was. So first of all, weird open to the press conference where incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer comes out and just sort of blasts the BuzzFeed story, attacks CNN, oddly.

CNN did not publish the document, by the way. CNN just reported that the intel chiefs had briefed Obama and Trump. So Spicer, Trump, later Kellyanne Conway on Anderson Cooper, which is quite a 10 minutes of video if you're going to watch it, and Kellyanne Conway on Seth Meyers, which is also an awesome interview, all just lie through their teeth about CNN to the country that CNN had somehow published fake news, published this document, was lying about this. Actually, nothing I can say. You work for CNN, so you can't say this, but I can because I often criticize CNN. Literally nothing about what CNN had said was false about this story. And it has now been, it's now been proven to be true because Clapper late last night, the director of national intelligence basically

admitted that they had briefed Trump and Obama on this information. And they said that they've not made any judgment that the information in the document is reliable, but they said they had briefed them basically because they wanted to give them, quote, the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security. So Clapper admitted that they had, you know, so the CNN report that the Trump campaign had decried is 100 percent accurate. I just thought it was weird that Spicer came out at the beginning. Like, have you ever seen anything like that? No, never. And I'd say a couple of things. One, it's worth remembering that the press secretary is supposed to be

the media's advocate within the West Wing, right? It's a balancing act. Robert Gibbs, Jake Carney, Josh Earnest all had to do that balancing act. But it's clear that the way you get approval in the Trump world is shit on the press. So that's going to be his job. Two, he hasn't even started yet. And he seems wound a little too tight for this job. I mean the briefings might be, if they ever actually happen and are not just a meeting with Breitbart and RT, will be interesting TV to watch for sure. But it was just very strange.

It's very strange to have a staffer come out before the president to do that. And it's not constructive. Like it's not – I think – like Sean's a pro. Like he's been doing communications in D.C. for a long time. Like you may get a pretty good pat on the back from Trump for doing that, but you're not serving your boss's long-term interest in any – or even his medium-term interest in any way, shape, or form to handle it that way. I thought it was just pretty unprofessional and pretty dumb, pretty dumb. Well, so I mean it was sort of like the first in a series of attacks on the press during that press conference.

Then Trump got up and he called BuzzFeed News a failing pile of garbage. He, yeah, really. And then he, and then he started to, oh, then, so Jim Acosta from CNN asked a question and he basically refuses to answer Jim's question and says, at one point he just says, you're fake news and shouts him down, which was pretty, it was also, it was pretty scary too. The fact that like, here's a question he didn't want. And Trump just said, no, you're not getting a question, moved on and then answered a question from Breitbart. I thought that was-

Was that who the next person was? Was Breitbart? Yeah, no, he went to, he went next to a Breitbart reporter. Huh. That's one of the many advantages of having basically state sponsored media is that you can turn to them in times like this. Yeah. No kidding. What'd you think about the Acosta thing? I think like, as you point out, I'm a CNN contributor. Um, so I work with Jim. Uh, CNN had to, I mean, he had to try to get a question in like that was the right thing to do i think there are times when reporters are incredibly obnoxious about getting their questions asked yeah incredibly obnoxious and they do not serve themselves or their readers or their public well i don't think this is one of those cases i think if the president of the future press

secretary of the united states and the president-elect has just lied about your news organization, you should do what you can to ask a question about that. Like that is the right thing to do. And the scary, there are some scary things about this, about the future, which is according to Acosta, Sean Spicer threatened to kick him out if he tried to ask another question. Right. So that seems to be, seems fairly suppressive. Right. So that seems to be – seems fairly suppressive. And then a Republican member of Congress from Texas today said that anyone who asks questions like that should not be allowed at the White House or in press conferences like that. Like you get – like we're getting to a – there are real hints at dangerous levels of authoritarianism in how Trump and his team are going to handle the press.

And the problem the press has, like you tweeted, if Trump did that to a reporter, someone should ask that reporter's question, which I understand actually did happen later, that another reporter asked the question that Acosta wanted, which is good. But the problem the press has is they don't have the same collective interest. So they're sort of in this together, but they're also competing with each other at the same time and they're competing over a ever dwindling pie and so like in a smart world the press would figure out they would come together and try to come up with ways so that because they all benefit from a certain number of questions being asked about how to do that in a smart way and how to stand up for each other. But their competitive instincts with each other prevent them from organizing themselves in a way that would do that, which is – I mean that's just life.

Like that's not – It's life. Although I do think if they want to survive this era and they want to actually get Trump to answer stuff, they're going to have to be creative in what they do and possibly put some of their competitive differences aside. They're going to have to be creative in what they do and possibly put some of their competitive differences aside. You know, I mean, a couple of things I think the press could do in future press conferences or they might what they might have learned from this press conferences. Like, you know, what I was saying is if someone doesn't get a question, the next reporter should ask the question. Multi-part questions with Trump are not a great idea. I never thought multi-part questions with Obama were never really a great idea.

Like you ask you try to get in like four questions at once and then it all becomes sort of jumbled. Obama would at least go back and try to remember what all the questions were and answer them. Trump just basically will blow through the multi-part question and just say one thing and then move on, you know? I don't know why this is so hard for the press to learn. Like Obama would oftentimes do it because he likes to give very fulsome answers at press conferences. But other times he wouldn't, right? Like you are setting yourselves up for failure if you give a person who controls the microphone three different questions to answer where they can pick how they're going to allocate the three minutes they're going to spend on it. You know, you and I have done a lot of interviews. If you ask me a multi-part question, I will start with the part of the question I want to answer and hope you forget about the other part. And so just ask a

one part question and then he forced the person being interviewed to answer that question, right? It's yeah. And also like questions with pointed answers, right? Like yes or no, confirm, deny, like not like, you know, what about your gaffes type questions? Yes. Because if you ask a specific question, can you confirm that? Do you have any knowledge that members of your team talk to Russia? I'm just making up a fake question. Yes or no? Right. And then if he doesn't answer that, you can say, you didn't answer my question. If you answer, ask three vague questions, you're, it's pretty hard to follow up. Yeah. As opposed to like, what do you think about allegations that some of your team met with Russia? Which is a lot of the style of some of these questions. What do you think about reports that, you know, like you should never ask him what he thinks about stuff. Treating the president like a pundit, it's not a good use of anyone's time.

That would always be the thing that would drive me crazy in the White House. He's a pundit. He's good at it. The press would demand a press conference, and we'd have a press conference, and it'd be a bus trip question. The same questions they would have asked David Axelrod if he was on Meet the Press. Yes. No, it's very true. Why?

Okay, let's get to some of Trump's answers. On the Russia stuff, he basically finally admitted that Russia was responsible for the hacking, which he hadn't done in a long time, probably called it fake news a half a dozen times. He brought up WikiLeaks to argue that the leak was a good thing, that the leaks from WikiLeaks were a good thing in the campaign. And then he also cited Russia's denial about the compromising information as a defense, which seems odd. The other thing, I mean, it was so, I mean, the answers were insane. And people who say that he gave a good performance, as I think Politico Playbook did this morning, or somewhere in Politico. Yeah, it was Playbook. That's an insane approach right like have we lowered the threshold for of expectations for trump's solo that literally drooling on not drooling on himself is success well this is my problem it's like people think that because

everyone got the election wrong that the way to get things right is to think the opposite of everything that you feel in your gut. So if you look at that press conference and think that it was a complete disaster, the smart thing to do is be like, no, it worked like a charm. You know, and I just, I mean, it could have, but there's not necessarily evidence that it was a good performance. I mean, the reason I tweeted that about Politico this morning, because there was some caller to some Trump voter called up Minnesota Public Radio this morning and was like, I voted for Trump, uncertain about my vote, and that was just the most awful performance I've ever seen. It was pathetic.

Well, this Trump voter was complaining about it. You're like, you at least might want to ask people about what they thought about the performance first. And it's also the judgment of success or failure is not in how much his poll numbers may go up in the next five to seven minutes. Right. Right. He told a bunch of lies that are going to come back to haunt him. Sean Spicer declared that Trump had never met Carter Page and didn't know who he was. He was one of the, in this report you referenced, were one of the people who was seen as a potential intermediary between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Yet Trump specifically named Carter Page in the Washington Post editorial board as one of his foreign policy advisors who were helping him on matters.

He told lies that are going to come back to haunt him. He made mistakes come back to haunt him. He basically set out an impossible standard for Obamacare repeal and replace. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about that because I thought that was an interesting response here. So he basically said that there will be no repeal and delay, that he wants to replace it, replace Obamacare possibly simultaneously, and that he will have a plan to do so when his Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is confirmed. This is going to be a tricky one, right? There is – you cannot – Republicans without Democratic votes can repeal Obamacare and are trying to head down that path right now. Right now, they cannot replace Obamacare without Democratic votes unless they eliminate the filibuster, which, you know, 2017, to have a terrific replacement that ensures everyone,

that makes Obamacare cheaper, that makes the health insurance cheaper, that makes premiums go down. That is next to impossible to do if he follows any of the plans Republicans have put forward, including his own plan in the campaign. No, it is actually, it's not next to impossible. It is absolutely fucking impossible. It cannot be done. There is no way in which it can happen. And even if it could, you could not do it in a month. It took us almost a year to get Affordable Care Act bill to be voted on, and Democrats have been working on that project for 40 fucking years. Yep. for 40 fucking years. So, like, the Republicans have been saying they're going to come up with a repeal, with a replace plan every year for the last six years. And every year they have not done it. It is not possible.

And the reason it's not possible is because, because of the, how the conservative, the Democratic caucus in the Senate was, when we had 60 votes, the plan that could pass is essentially the Republican plan for universal health care. Right. It is the plan Republicans used – the basis of that plan is the plan Republicans used as their alternative in the 90s against a single-payer plan. alternative in the 90s against a single-payer plan. And so there is not something to the right of Obamacare that can work. And the specific things they have talked about, particularly, the most popular part of the Affordable Care Act is getting rid of the ban on pre-existing

conditions, right? So you cannot deny someone health care because of a pre-existing condition. Pre-existing conditions can be anything, including pregnancy. And the most popular part by far, the only way to do that is with essentially universal coverage, where people are for, you need the mandate to do that. And so that will go away under every Republican plan. It'll throw the insurance markets into chaos, healthcare costs will go up, and fewer people will be insured. And many, many, many of those people are Trump voters. Yeah. Which is why Republicans are so nervous about this.

But they're also stupid. Yeah. But of all the things we talk about that matter to voters, right, to me, and again, like, we don't want to be in the prediction business anymore. But look, there are a lot of people who under almost any one of these Republican plans, or every one of these Republican plans that we've seen so far, would lose their health insurance, millions of people who would lose their health insurance, millions of people who would not be paying lower premiums, and in many cases, higher premiums. So I just, I don't know what they're going to do here. Now, this again, and I said this on Monday, this is not to say that there are not plenty of improvements to be made on the Affordable Care Act on Obamacare. You can have more competition in some of these markets so that premiums and deductibles aren't as high, you know, with a

public option. You can make sure people are paying less for their health care by increasing the subsidies that a lot of people are getting. You can expand Medicaid in some of the states that it's not, hasn't been expanded so that more people are covered who are low income. Plenty of ways to improve this bill. But that, so far, we haven't seen any proposals to that effect from any members of the Republican Congress or the Trump administration. There is no question that, and we knew this going in, and it's probably even harder than we thought it would be, the politics of healthcare, of passing a law to give people access to healthcare, are really hard. Yeah.

Right? People, healthcare is a very personal issue. Most people have healthcare through their employers, so it doesn't affect them directly, but gives them fear of what could happen. It is very, very hard to do. And it was the right thing to do. And I will argue till the day I die that you get elected, you build up your approval rating so you can help people and you should spend your political capital and giving health care to 20 million people is a pretty hard to think of a better use of political capital than that. But the politics of taking health care away from people are 10 times worse than the politics of passing the Affordable Care Act. I mean, just some of the things in there are

amazing. Do you think getting rid of the ban on pre-existing conditions, getting rid of, just purely taking health care away from Trump's base seems problematic. Repealing the Affordable Care Act blows up the deficit and gives a big tax cut, $7 million tax cut to some of the richest people in America. It is a thousand campaign ads waiting to be made. And you can say that once it happens, they'll just lie and say, oh no, it's better. And there'll be this whole debate again, fake news, real news. Republicans lie and say it's great.

We say it's bad. But the difference here is that people are going to feel this in their own lives. When you lose health care, it doesn't matter what the news reports say or what Republicans say or Democrats say. You're not going to have health care anymore and you're going to be upset. And it's going to be potentially life threatening. And that's, you know, it's a God. So what do you think the best route is here for opposition to this? We talked a little bit about this on Monday and, you know, I was sort of identifying some

of the red state senators or some of the senators who are up in 2018, Republican senators who are probably going to have the most competitive races like Flake and Heller. Republican senators who are probably going to have the most competitive races like Flake and Heller. I think it's probably also worth people calling and petitioning senators in red states or senators in other competitive states in 2018, like the Joe Manchins of the world. Joe Manchin, who represents a state in West Virginia where, you know, a disproportionate number of people are on Medicaid, right? Like I can't even as conservative and right wing sometimes as Joe Manchin is, I can't imagine him wanting to cut back on Medicaid for people. So what do you think about like sort of the best path for resistance here? 2018 states and it's the moderate republicans republicans my moderate is i'm using air quotes right now um so she says no one can see that people who are going to define themselves in part in opposite as somewhere between the democrats and trump right that could be lisa

murkowski or people like that because you got to keep this under you get there's a chance to keep this under 50 if we can keep all the Democrats together. So definitely, we should let every Democrat know that anything less than the standard Barack Obama set out about coverage and cost in his speech is unacceptable to Democrats, and there is a price to pay at the polls. And what we, ideally, if you know, a independent or Republican, a Trump voter who cares about this issue, and you can get them to communicate with their member, that I think is particularly compelling. I voted for Trump, but, you know, and you can see that in states like Kentucky, where, which is one of the more successful, has one of the most successful state-based Affordable Care Act exchanges,

and, you know, went by, I don't know, 100 points to Trump. And there are a lot of people who suffer there. And I think as a party, what can the Democratic Party do, not just the average citizen? But the Democratic Party can give the average citizen the tools they need to be activists here. One is a compelling and agreed upon, reasonable sounding message on this that we all echo. And I hope it flows from what the president said on Tuesday night. Yes. Second is, we as a party, if we can find ways to highlight these voters who would suffer, who were Trump voters, they might be, you know, the new soccer moms are Obama Trump voters,

people voting for Obama in 12 and Trump in 16. The Democratic Party Progressive Organization can find those voters who will talk about the cost of losing health care and elevate those voices in paid media, in free media, have videos that people can share on Facebook. You know, I think that's a lot of where we talk a lot in terms of citizen activism about calling your member and emailing your member. And that is very valuable because it's shocking, but it actually works because it affects the daily lives of the staffers who help the members make these decisions. But also, you know, if you see stories about maybe, I don't know, written by Crooked Media about the effects of repealing the Affordable Care Act, share those on social media. Make sure your friends and family see those. Let people know. Use your role as an influencer in your network to inform people about the actual

consequences. Everyone has to be a bulwark against the fake news, disinformation, propaganda campaign that the right has gotten very good at very quickly. Yes, exactly. And don't let it like dispirit you and say, oh, this is impossible to get any kind of message through

because of what they do all the time. You're right. I mean, stories still have power and these are huge stakes for millions of people. And I actually think that we have a pretty good fighting chance huge stakes for millions of people. And I actually think that we have a pretty good fighting chance here to stop this from happening. Okay, when we come back, we will have

Ambassador Norm Eisen on to talk all about ethics and the Trump administration. We didn't get to that part of the press conference, but we're saving it all for Norm. So we'll have Norm on next. You're listening to Pod Save America with Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vitor. With us on the pod today, we have Ambassador Norm Eisen, who was the former Obama special counsel for ethics. We used to call you the ethics czar. Norm, welcome to the program. Thank you, Jon. Hi, Dan. Hey, Norm. Norm, what did the program. Thank you, John. Hi, Dan. Hey, Norm. Norm,

what'd you think of that Trump presser yesterday? Did he do everything you had hoped for to comply with ethics rules or what? Fabs, it was one of the worst things my ethics eyes have ever seen. I laid out a five-part scorecard the day before. We did it the day before because we didn't want to be accused of moving the goalposts. It was bipartisan. It was me, the Bush-era ethics czar, painter Richard Painter, and America's premier constitutional scholar, Larry Tribe. And Trump got an F on all five classes on his report card. We said he had to break ownership interests, like every president has done for four decades. He held on to all of his ownership interests. We said he's got to set up a blind trust. Joe G. says it's the policy of the federal government. Again, everybody has done it since Carter.

Blind trusts are the equivalent. No, he refused to do that. He put his kids in charge, which is the opposite of the independent trustee that we wanted to be able to have faith in, an independent professional with no connection to Donald Trump. It's the biggest no-no to put a kid in as a trustee in a blind trust. Fourth, perhaps the biggest problem, and this is going to create huge legal exposure for him, he's going to be violating the Constitution because he didn't do anything significant about his foreign government payments and other benefits, so-called emoluments,

Payments and other benefits, so-called emoluments, expressly prohibited under the Constitution because they can distort your judgment. You guys were both my clients when I was the White House ethics czar, so you know that I'm pretty tough on this stuff. What he did was a joke. It violates the Constitution. And then finally we ask for a strong ethics firewall, a big beautiful wall, to screen off his family's business interests. He set up an ethics sieve. It's like an ethics colander. You could drain spaghetti through his plan. So it's a total fail.

Norm, thank you for that. That was good. Well, so let's go through some of the things you just talked about. I want to start with the emoluments issue because, you know, his lawyer, Trump's lawyer at the press conference yesterday made this argument that, well, if a foreign government is paying to stay in one of the Trump hotels, it's like they're paying a hotel bill. It's fair market value. That couldn't have been what the Emoluments Clause meant. And now he's donating any of the profits from foreign governments staying in hotels back to the U.S. Treasury.

So I heard a few people after that be like, well, I don't know. That sounds pretty good. Isn't that clearing it up? So what's the problem with the quasi-solution that Trump's lawyer announced yesterday? quasi-solution that Trump's lawyer announced yesterday? So the solution is we're going to take the, what she said was we're going to, they have an existing bookkeeping system, which they purport tracks foreign government payments at their hotels. And at the end of year, they're going to return the profits from these hotel rooms. There's a lot of problems with that. Number one,

there's never been this distinction where the recipient has been allowed to say, oh, this part of what the foreign government gave me is profit. This part is to cover my overhead. On the contrary, there's a long line of OLC opinions that say you shouldn't make that distinction. Anything that comes from a foreign government has got to be screened out. Number two, this only applies to his hotels. The guy has huge condos, apartments, properties. What about the other stuff he's selling to foreign governments?

He's a real estate developer, and he's a marketer of his name. So on the real estate side, he requires loans, some of which are from foreign governments. He's got a big one from the Bank of China. And he requires permits. Both of those are constitutionally prohibited emoluments. Emolument means anything of value. And then trademarks. On the licensing side, he's applied for dozens of those since deciding to run for president around the world.

Those are emoluments. So this was, you know, totally inadequate. And look, I'm not, you guys know that I'm an ethics hard-ass, okay? You have always been a stickler. You both sat in my ethics training. I started with the president. I was just with the president,

and he was joking about the advice I gave him. If it's fun, you can't do it. Half tongue-in-cheek. Because we it's fun, you can't do it. Half tongue in cheek, because we had some fun too, okay? But we had ethical fun in the White House. This guy has gone way over the edge, and it's not going to stand. The courts are not going to allow him to do this. So what happens then? Well, I suspect that there's going to be litigation pretty promptly into his administration because the courts are an independent branch of government.

They're jealous of their own prerogatives. Seriously, are they going to allow a president to be a naked, blatant violation of the Constitution? And this is not a harmless violation. The guy is getting the huge uh... forbidden foreign government payment uh... so i think there's going to be a court case that i think he's gonna find himself embroiled in uh... in litigation it'll get into discovery maybe when we're in discovery will finally get its

tax returns but i don't think the courts are gonna stand for it i'll tell you what else i think think the FBI and the career foreign corruption prosecutors, the public corruption section of DOJ, these are not political people. They're going to start looking at it. Like this $2 billion offer he got from Dubai over the weekend. Once he's in office, people are going to say, gee, why was that offered? What was your reaction?

Was there a quid pro quo? Was somebody trying to influence government? So the executive branch will get involved. I think ultimately Congress will feel the political heat when the scandals start to flow. And finally, I think the state attorneys general, they have authority to enforce the Constitution. I think you're going to see them come to the table as well. So he's opening up a needless can of litigation hurt on himself, his family, and what's worse, the White House, which we all love, the institution we were privileged to serve together, and the country. What a shame. I'm sorry I didn't vote for him, but truly, I'm sorry he's taken this choice. So, Norm, give us a scenario where someone doing business with the Trump organization

could gain access or exert influence over the Trump administration because of these lax rules. Because I think sometimes in people's head they hear, like, there's a lot of legalese, it seems like this could be right for corruption, but, like, how could this make a difference in my life? How could this actually hurt policy that could hurt real people? Well, Fabs, we don't have to look any further than what's been going on in the transition, where you have the family members who are blurring this line, right? I mean, can you imagine in our transition, if we had allowed Sasha and Malia to sit in meetings and do deals, it's impossible to have any of the Obama family members. That's a million miles away from the way we or both administrations have done business.

And the danger when you have an Ivanka sitting there in a meeting with the Japanese prime minister while she's doing business in Japan, when you have the sons sitting in meetings with the leading business executives of the country, the danger is that Trump is doing deals to benefit himself, and he's hurting the people. He's taking the value away from the people that he was elected to help, including some of the people who've suffered the worst in our country in recent years. Today there are media reports, for example, and this is totally unprecedented, that he's meeting with AT&T about the merger that they want to do, and some in the press are speculating he's doing it to get back at CNN.

That is guaranteed. These mergers will have a huge effect on all our lives. It can't be the subject of his corrupt intentions or his petty vendettas. So the point is, he's going to siphon off. He's going to do things to benefit himself that hurt the rest of us. Norm, what about, so obviously Trump has a lot of challenges. What about some of his staff and advisors? Like today, he announced Rudy Giuliani is going to be in charge of a task force. Carl Icahn, who has obviously a lot of financial interests around the world, is going to be the regulations czar.

Are these people in legal jeopardy? Are there things Trump can do to insulate them by undoing some of the rules you wrote? How is that process managed? Well, Dan, the Icahn example that you point to is a good one. And I want to contrast it, because I don't only want to be negative. I want to contrast it with Jared Kushner. Painter and I, everything I've tried to do on this is bipartisan, because people obviously know I'm associated with President Obama, with the Democratic Party. I'm proud of having worked for the president, worked with both of you, and the incredible accomplishments that this administration has achieved. I make no secret about that.

One of the things I'm very proud of, I know it was difficult for everybody. This hurt me more than it hurt you guys. Scandal-free White House. When is the last time we had eight years? Trump's been in transition a little over eight weeks. He's had more scandal than we had in eightandal-free White House. When is the last time we had eight years? Trump's been in transition a little over eight weeks. He's had more scandal than we had in eight years in the White House because of these very tough rules. So take the ICON example. Dan, it is going to not only hurt ICON, it's going to hurt Trump, and it's going to hurt the country. ICON comes in,

they have a press release, they give him an official title, they give him broad sweeping responsibilities as a special advisor, I believe, to the president for regulatory matters, and they claim he's not a government employee, he's just an informal advisor. That is not the law. It makes no sense. It's blurring lines. It appears

now we've got to see what happens. Maybe they'll back off, which they sometimes do when there's a public outcry. Blurring lines. How does that hurt people? First of all, Icahn. If he gets inside information, he's going to be exposed to insider trading liability if he trades on it. We know he left Trump's victory party to put a billion dollars in play in the stock market.

Number two, Trump is liable now after the passage of the Stock Act. Trump is liable now after the passage of the Stock Act. Trump is liable for insider trading if he gives information to ICON and ICON and goes out and trades on it. Number three, it's going to be bad for others who may be involved. It's going to be a scandal for the White House. It's going to be a distraction for the country. Again, it takes Trump away from doing the things he said he would do, helping the people. He ran on a platform of draining the swamp. He's flooding it. Now I'm going to tell you what I really think. There is one for holding back.

Going forward, how do we monitor instances of corruption in the Trump administration? Are we totally relying on the press here? Do you think there's going to be litigation? How do you think this plays out as we go forward? Because obviously a lot of this is going to be sort of secret because that's how they set up the laws. You know, we live in a world now and the three of us live through this in our government service, the transformation of the world to a world of no secrets. I mean, when we started out, I remember being part of the group that advised the president whether or not he could use his BlackBerry when he went into the White House. The things that have happened since with the explosion of social media,

the proliferation of smartphones and other ways to tape people, the sheer volume of the leaks, the instant nature of news, the role of whistleblowers stepping up, people who see or hear things and move forward publicly with it. I don't think it's going to be possible to hide stuff. Here's some ways that I think things will come out. One, Trump himself is not very good at concealing things. I mean, I got to tell you, you know, if I were his lawyer, I wouldn't have advised him necessarily to advertise that $2 billion offer he received as part of this press conference. My eyes popped out of my head.

He was pretty proud. He was pretty proud he turned down the bribe from Dubai. There's his proclivity for inadvertent transparency. But more than that, I think you're going to see it's been a pretty leaky Trump Tower already. You know, this is not the group of us who were there from day one on the Obama campaign with the bonds of loyalty to the president and to each other, and the pretty leak-free White House that we managed to operate, you're going to see a very leaky porous. It's a gang of rivals. And if one, if Bannon thinks he can get a leg up on Priebus, that stuff's going to be

leaked out. We've already seen some of that coming out of Trump Tower. Very, very leaky. The press is all over this, and not just in the United States, but globally. You know, we're in this instantaneous connectivity. So like the India story that Trump had met with his India business partners, that was pulled off of Indian media and sent back to the United States. So I think you're going to see global stuff. A lot of FOIA. There's just been the Freedom of Information Act.

That's a way you demand information from the government. The administration supported. President signed into law the FOIA Improvements Act recently. So there's FOIA that's going to be more robust than ever. The organization that I founded, that I've now gone back to as chair of the board crew, the government watchdog group, is busy doing FOIA requests. Many, many others are doing the same. So FOIA will be another vehicle. And then this litigation he's opening up is also going to produce discovery. And so I don't think, you know, maybe there'll even be a Snowden who pops up to do for Trump's tax returns what Snowden did with the NSA information.

So I don't think you're going to be able to hide it. We've never been able to hide scandal since Watergate. It always comes out, and it's not going to be a pretty picture. Okay, well, we'll end on that hopeful note. Norm, thank you for all the years of ethical fun in the White House. We appreciate you. I'm glad I had no assets or business interests when you were in charge of our ethics. So it was pretty easy for John and I. Well, I tried to impoverish you guys as completely as I could. Best of all, the president that we

all serve totally committed to this stuff and that's made a difference in having the most scandal free White House in modern presidential history that's an accomplishment we should all be proud of I'm knocking on wood we have 7 days left I think we'll make it through the last

7 days fingers crossed Ambassador Norm Eisen thank you for joining and we will talk to you again soon. Thanks, Dan. Okay, bye-bye. Thanks again to Ambassador Norm Eisen for joining us today. And again, go on, tell your friends to sign up for Pod Save America, rate us in the iTunes Store or wherever you get podcasts,

and we will see you again on Monday. Bye, guys. Talk to everyone next week.