Pod Save the World - Is the Mueller investigation doomed?

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

Tommy talks with The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand about how the potential departure of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein would impact the Mueller investigation and operations at DOJ. Then they discuss what we've learned about Russia's efforts to influence our elections over the past two years, and the shady right-wing characters that link Trump to Wikileaks.

One year ago, I stood before you for the first time in this grand hall. I addressed the threats facing our world, and I presented a vision to achieve a brighter future for all of humanity. Today, I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we've made. In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country. America's so true. Didn't expect that reaction, but that's okay. That's our president.

Welcome back to Ponce of the World. This is Tommy VTor. That is a clip of the world literally laughing at the president of the United States. It doesn't make me happy, but I thought I would play it for you guys. President Trump is spending, part of this week in New York at the UN General Assembly. That is when all the member countries

come together. There's general debate. Leaders give speeches. Sometimes there are special sessions on really pressing issues like Syria, for example, and then they can meet one-on-one. But I'm not going to talk about the UN General Assembly today because it's not clear to me that the president has any agenda. And frankly, it's pretty obvious that everything he does or says there is going to be overshadowed by the Kavanaugh nomination and by will he or won't he stories about firing Rod Rosenstein. So that is why I invited my fantastic guest on today. Natasha Bertrand is a friend of the pod. She's a staff writer at the Atlantic. She is one of the best politics and national security reporters out there. We talked about Rod Rosenstein's week,

what it would mean for the Mueller investigation, what it would mean for the Department of Justice generally to have that kind of turnover. And then we went back to talk more about Russia There have been some huge pieces over the last few weeks about Russian efforts to hack our elections. We've learned a lot more over the course of a couple of years. And Natasha walks us through it, including some of the strange associations that President Trump's teams had with WikiLeaks and a whole bunch of bizarre actors that helped serve as cutouts or conduits to the Russians to WikiLeaks to other bad actors. So it was a fun conversation. We laughed a lot so we didn't cry. So thanks for listening.

And here's the conversation with Natasha. I wanted to start with my friend Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. It's been a hell of a few days for him because first he was reported that he talked about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from office and even discuss wearing a wire to record their conversation to build his case, which is really weird. And then on Monday, recording this on Tuesday, there were reports that he was going to resign. He was sort of forced to run over to the White House, grovel. And then I guess there's a stay of execution until Thursday. So maybe we could start with the first piece of this, which is the New York Times story about the 25th Amendment and the idea that he was looking to record Trump's comments. What do you make of that report?

And maybe the motives behind however it got out. Yeah, I think that you're asking a question that not enough people have asked, which is what would have been Rosenstein's reasoning for wanting to record the president? We've heard, of course, that he was perhaps being sarcastic. but I would not be entirely surprised if he was being serious because, of course, this was a really sensitive moment, a really chaotic moment in the Trump administration. He had just fired Comey. He had just met with the Russians in the Oval Office and disclosed classified information that the Israelis had given us. So there were a whole lot of things happening at the time that made it seem like Trump really was not fit to hold the office. And so you have to look at this suggestion that Rosenstein made

through that lens. This wasn't just the aftermath of the Comey firing. This was also when Trump was interviewing people to be the FBI director. And according to the report that we saw, Rosenstein actually wanted to wear this wire while he sat in on Trump's interviews with a prospective FBI director. He wanted people who were perhaps interviewing for the job to wear these wires. And that suggests to me that Rosenstein was worried that perhaps Trump was going to ask for some kind of loyalty oath from the FBI directors that he was interviewing. I really can't see any other reason why he specifically would want people to be recording Trump while he questioned the person that was ostensibly going to be leading the investigation into his campaign team. It just seems to me like he had known that Trump

had made these requests to Comey, that he had fired him with corrupt intent. And now he wanted to prove to the world perhaps whether or not these were going to, these recordings were going to be released publicly, of course, we'll never know and nothing ever came of it. But I think that he wanted to prove and be vindicated by the idea that no, Trump did not fire Comey because he was angry over how he handled the Hillary Clinton email debacle. He was, he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation. See, this is why I like talking to you, because you remind me of the substance and don't let me jump to the politics of it first. Because it's like, you're right. Like, you should put your mind in his head and think, why would you want to do this? I mean, we know from Amarosa,

that D.C. is a one-party consent town so you can record someone and it's not illegal. But If you recorded, let's say, an FBI director's conversation with the president and you're at DOJ, are there legal issues there? You know, it's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. The people that I've spoken to have said that people who know Rosenstein have worked with him have said that he would never actually do this. Then again, it was a really chaotic moment and it was unprecedented. And so, you know, there was a feeling that anything could go at that time. But as far as whether or not, it was. be ethical for him to do this. That is another question entirely. Now, he could perhaps argue that he was saving the Republic and that anything was warranted. But legally, I don't know whether that would be a gray area. Yeah. So you wrote a great piece about what Rod Rosenstein's departure would mean for the Mueller investigation. Can you walk us through the implications of him resigning or Trump firing

Rosenstein? Yeah. So as of right now, if he does meet with Trump on Thursday and Trump kind of rails on and ultimately decides that he's out, then Noel Francisco, the current number four at the Justice Department, we currently have a number three as the acting. So it would kind of fall to him. He would take over the Russia investigation. And that is concerning to some people because he has expressed skepticism of special counsels in the past. He has a pretty expansive view on executive privilege, which could allow Trump to shield certain evidence or communications from prosecutors. He has remained relatively mootent, you know, throughout the last year and a half on the Mueller investigation has said virtually nothing about it. So it's really hard to tell whether his views that

he's, you know, iterated in the past would extend to his new position. But that is definitely a concern that I've heard among, you know, legal experts. Now, the other question, though, is whether or not he would have a conflict of interest because his firm, Jones Day, was, of course, a lawyer for the Trump campaign. So he would potentially have to either get a waiver from the White House to serve as the overseer of the Russian investigation, or he might just pass it off as kind of a hot potato because he doesn't necessarily want this job. It's a very stressful job, but you're subjected to a tax repeatedly by the president. So that is still up in the year. But what we know is that the White House and the Justice Department have a great. read that for now, as soon as Rosenstein is gone, then Noelle Francisco would immediately, if not

forever, take on that role. But that does not, you know, guarantee whether or not Rosenstein is replaced. That does not guarantee that the Mueller investigation is going to be shut down. Like I said, it's really hard to predict what Francisco or any other replacements, actions would be with regard to the Mueller investigation and having someone highly sympathetic, perhaps, to to Trump in that position is not a guarantee. So I think that when this news broke that Rosenstein was perhaps leaving, everyone needed to kind of take a deep breath because it did not necessarily mean the end of the Mueller investigation. Taking a more pessimistic view, I think you could say that, you know, anyone who does replace Rosenstein, who has been a very staunch defender of Mueller

and who has really taken on kind of a hands-off approach to the entire investigation and let Mueller's do his thing, anyone who replaces him could potentially be a little. more hands-on and could try to stymie the investigation in a way, in subtle ways that Rosenstein maybe didn't. So it's really, it's unclear at this moment. Stepping back a little bit. I mean, we know of Rod Rosenstein as the person overseeing the Mueller investigation who named the special counsel. But the deputy attorney general is a big job. You run the day-to-day operations of the Department of Justice. Do you get a sense of how disruptive his firing would be to the work they're doing to the department, to law enforcement, to the FISA

efforts to, I guess, the FBI as well? Yeah, it would be a major upheaval. And people at the Justice Department are really, they don't want this. They want him to stay in his job. He's a very steadying hand. And of course, the White House would have to go through the motions if Noel Francisco did not accept this position. They would have to find a new person to oversee the Russia investigation. It's also not clear whether they're going to divide up the acting attorney general. They're going to make an attorney general versus a deputy attorney general versus acting deputy attorney general, which would go to. Jeff Sessions, Chief of Staff currently, so they would make it even more complicated. So it's so weird. It's very, very strange. And we don't know what's going to happen. It's unprecedented. But there is definitely a sense that no one in the Justice Department wants this. They drafted an exit statement. As we saw yesterday, it was reported that, you know, conveyed the department's feelings about Rosenstein, which is that he's very respected. He's a career official. He'll be missed, etc. But I think that, you know, conveyed the department's feelings about Rosenstein, which is that he's very respected. He's a career official. He'll be missed, et cetera. But I think that. But I think that. But I think that, you know, even if we see Rosenstein leave, Congress is going to really tighten the noose on him and on the Justice Department. I think Mark Meadows already said that even if Rosenstein is out, he still needs to testify before Congress about the report that he wanted to wire the president and invoke the 25th Amendment. And of course, after the New York Times story broke, we already saw kind of Republicans leaping on the idea of subpoenaing the memos that allegedly disclosed all of this things that

Rosenstein said during those meetings. So Republicans, I think, are kind of salivating either way. I don't think it's going to affect them one way or the other in terms of going after the Russia investigation. But as far as Rosenstein leaving, it's not something that anyone is greatly eager for. Yeah, what a mess. Speaking of memos, on September 17th, President Trump ordered law enforcement and intelligence officials to declassified documents related to the Russia investigations, including text messages from some of the officials, some socials. summaries of interviews that were conducted and documents related to the surveillance of Carter Page. Then a few days later, Trump reverse himself and said, no, we actually won't declassify and release

those documents. Let's have a DOJ review them instead. Do you understand what happened in those intervening days that led to that walk back? No, and that's a really good question. I think that what, based on my conversations with people involved in this entire process, what seems to have happened is that Trump was told that releasing all of this material would not necessarily be good for him. This is obviously sensitive material related to the Russia investigation. And Republicans have tried, Republicans who are attacking the Russia investigation, have tried to make it seem like all of these text messages in the Carter Page documents, etc. are really, really incriminating for the Justice Department and for prosecutors and for the FBI

that's been investigating all of this since 2016. But taking a closer look, and again, based on the, my conversations with the people involved in this process. Republicans don't want to die on the Carter Page Hill, right? I mean, Carter Page, there's a mountain of evidence to suggest that Carter Page has had ties to Russian intelligence since at least 2013, well before any of this came out into the open, well before, you know, obviously Trump was running for president. So releasing more information about the surveillance activity on Carter Page and the justification that the FBI used when applying for a warrant to surveil him would reveal more information about his ties to Russia

and raise more questions about why the president chose him to be on his campaign. Yeah, and we also know that Carter Page lied or at least changed his stories a number of times about trips to Russia, meetings with Russian officials. I mean, I'm confused about why people like Devin Nunez and other allies of Trump on the Hill have been pushing so hard for these documents. Is they just desperate for anything they can use to show allegations of bias? true? Yeah. So what I've been told is that they think that the Carter Page, FISA, Warren, in particular, is a way to prove that the steel dossier was used in FBI investigative materials.

And that, in turn, they say, can discredit the entire origin of the Russia investigation. So if they can prove, for example, that the FBI used the steel dossier to justify aspects of its surveillance on Carter Page, then perhaps that will allow them to prove that the FBI relied on the steel dossier. to launch the entire investigation. Now, of course, we know that that's not true. The investigation was launched because of George Poppidopoulos' big mouth at a bar in London when he was told about these stolen emails that the Russians had. But it's still kind of the Hail Mary, which is that they saw that snippets of information from the dossier made its way into the FISA warrant.

And it did with the caveat, of course, that Christiel is a reliable source and has been for the FBI for a number of years. But, you know, all that aside, this is a way they feel that they can discredit the entire investigation from its very beginning. Let's talk Russia. There have been two very expansive pieces in the last week or two about how Russia tried to subvert our elections. One was in the New York Times. They did, you know, sort of 12 pages of reporting on it. There's another in the New Yorker. Is there anything that you found particularly interesting or notable about what we're still learning about the different ways of Russia is using cyber tools to influence our elections?

Yeah, so that piece in The New Yorker was, I think, the piece that everyone has been waiting for. It proved how people saying that Russia did not change votes in the election and that Russia really had no influence on anyone in the election. You know, some people said, well, Russia didn't hold a gun to my head when I was in the voting booth. It's completely nonsense. Trump won the Electoral College by something like 80,000 votes across three states. And if only a small percentage of the people that voted for him were influenced in some way by Russian propaganda on social media, then that made a dramatic impact on the outcome of the election. And so I think that diving into the impact that Russian propaganda and influence operations on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Google and everything else, Instagram, I think is a way to. answer this question when, you know, Republicans or Trump allies ask it of, well, how do you know that Russia influenced the election? There's no way to prove that Russia influenced the election. Sure, they interfered, but how do you know they influenced it? Well, just look at the small, small number of votes that Trump won by and just take a glance at the things that people in your Facebook feed are sharing. I mean, these are articles and, you know, posts that were shared hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times.

And the idea that not one of them influenced a single person is just completely preposterous. So that New York article is definitely one that everyone should read. Yeah. And it's still happening, right? I mean, there's a bunch of campaigns this year that have already been targets of hacking campaigns, including a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for the nomination to challenge Dana Roerbacher, who's Russia's man in Washington. The DNC has pledged not to use any stolen or hacked materials for campaigns,

but it seems like Republicans are refusing to match that commitment. Is there any chance that the parties come together and say, let's not let foreign propaganda be used against us? Yeah, so it's actually something I've done a lot of reporting on, which is it's actually the D-Triplec that has pledged not to use any hacked material in their election campaigns and the NRC, which has not. Part of the DNC, actually, I've been trying to get a hold of, and they will not answer my emails, so answer my emails. But you hear that DNC? Right, and Tasha back. At the heart of this is really the reluctance of the Republicans to say that,

If a hacked document is leaked to the media, for example, and the media already is reporting on it and it's already out in the public sphere, will Republicans then exploit that? Will they use that in ads? Will they essentially use the hack document without using the hack document, if you know what I mean? So Democrats have said that they won't do it, that even if something that has been hacked has made its way into the public sphere, that they're still not going to use it in ads. They're not going to run on it. They're not going to invoke it in any way. Republicans don't want to make that commitment. They say that as long as it's in the public sphere, then it's fair game. As of right now, they have not reached a consensus on this issue. Part of the, what Republicans wanted to do is they wanted to shift the onus onto the reporters and the media and say, and include kind of a bullet point in this pledge that they made that criticizes the media while not themselves committing to not using any of this hack material in any kind of their campaign materials. So they kind of want to have it both ways. in that sense. They'd be willing to sign on to this pledge not to exploit these hacked documents as long as it doesn't make them commit to not using them as long as they're in the public sphere. And Democrats are kind of moving along on their own. The senatorial counterparts of each of these committees are still in question. So stay tuned. Yeah. I mean, I guess there's a giant loophole here for everyone, which is super PACs, independent expenditure arms, like all the gross, dark money that gets cranked into elections

late in the game anyway. When we talked at the beginning of the year, you had just published a piece in the Atlantic that included transcripts of messages between Roger Stone and WikiLeaks from October 2016. I guess he had apparently exchanged DMs on Twitter with Gustafor 2.02, who was a front for the Russians we now know. Can you talk us through what you had reported earlier in the year and the questions that reporting left you about how WikiLeaks operates and asserts its influence? Definitely. So prior to my reporting, we had not known that Roger Stone was communicating directly with WikiLeaks Twitter account, which is run by Julian Assange during the 2016 election. Obviously, he had said many times during the election, teased many things about big drops that were coming. In October surprise, he seemed to have previous knowledge of things that WikiLeaks was going to drop. So that raised a lot of questions. But what I reported was that he actually reached out to WikiLeaks in October. and he asked them to stop reeling on him.

Essentially, what was happening was that WikiLeaks was trying to distance itself from Roger Stone to preserve some shred of credibility. And Roger Stone had reached out and said, hey, man, I'm the only one defending you guys right now, because of course this was after WikiLeaks had already published all of the hack DNC documents in the summer. And so Roger Stone was saying, I'm really your only friend. You need to learn who you friends are. Stop attacking me. Stop trying to distance yourself from me. And WikiLeaks wrote back and said, well, you know, you are. undermining us and you're making it seem like this is all one big coordinated effort between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. Now, this entire conversation sounded very contrived and it did not

seem like there seems to have been a general awareness that they were talking on Twitter DM and I am not, I have not confirmed that that was either the beginning or the end of their correspondence. But there is one clue, which is that after the election, WikiLeaks reached out to Roger Stone again and said, are you happy now? We're free. We're now more free to talk. And that was on November 9th. So questions are still swirling about whether Roger Stone did, in fact, meet in person with Assange. Of course, I think it was the Wall Street Journal that reported that they had dinner together or that Roger Stone had intimated that they had dinner together. Whether there was some kind of intermediary that was feeding Roger Stone information about Assange and WikiLeaks.

But what we do know is that Robert Mueller is very, very interested in Roger Stone. And speculation is also swirling that. he could be the next person to be indicted. And it's not just anyone speculating about that. It's Roger Stone himself. Roger Stone has said that he expects to be indicted by Mueller. So once he is or is interviewed by Mueller, which he hasn't been, which is also a major clue that he's at the center of this investigation, we will kind of tie up the loose ends that there still are about whether or not there was any coordination between the campaign and WikiLeaks and therefore by extension the campaign and Russia. So big open question, but nothing is going to happen.

until after the midterms, obviously. It's so funny to think that these guys would be dumb enough to communicate via Twitter DM. I mean, any, like, person worth their salt in terms of protecting sources would be on signal or encrypted email or some other encrypted messaging app. I mean, maybe this is just the way they made first contact, but it seems crazy to me. Right. And we also saw Donald Trump Jr. communicating with WikiLeaks. Yeah.

Well, he's a moron. So you also reported about how there was this far right blogger named Charles Johnson, who was also a Holocaust denier, who may have played a role in how WikiLeaks eventually got to Donald Trump Jr. It's his bizarre chain of events that include some of the truly worst people in conservative politics like Dana Roerbocker, who we talked about earlier, who's a big fan of the Russians. How was it that Charles Johnson and Dana Roerbocker become the conduit to WikiLeaks for Donald Trump, Jr., of all people? Wow, you are going way back in my reporting history.

All your good stuff. So basically, it's a complicated web. But Charles Johnson, who he calls himself an independent journalist. He is a far right extremist figure. He runs this website called Got News. And on September 20th, 2016. Which is such a lame name for a website. I know.

It's like, hey, what's a stupid milk ad from the mid-2000? Let's make that our website. I'm sorry, go on. So he published an article on September 20th, 2016. claiming that he had obtained a memo from a George Sorrow, and I'm quoting, George Sorrow tied PR firm that is launching a website to spread conspiracy theories about Trump's connections to Russia. And he said that that site, PutinTrump.org, was going to be launched on September 21st. He updated his article again to include the password for PutinTrump.org, which was still locked at that time.

And he said that he had obtained it from Got News researchers. So there's that. Two hours after he published that article on Got News about this conspiracy website, Wikileaks shared the Putin-Trump.org site and its password in a tweet, which Johnson then took credit for. Then, 10 minutes later, WikiLeaks repeated those quote-unquote discoveries in a private message to Trump Jr. And that was the first instance in which WikiLeaks, according to these DMs that we saw, reached out to Trump Jr., was to alert him. to this kind of conspiratorial thing that Chuck Johnson said he had discovered about a website funded by George Soros that was going to dedicate itself exclusively to looking into Trump's Russia ties. So WikiLeaks reached out to Trump Jr. said that a PAC is running this anti-Trump site that you should be aware of. And Trump Jr. said, off the record, I don't know who that is, but I'll ask around. And that was kind of the end of it.

But what we see is this very clear, bizarre trajectory from Chuck Johnson to WikiLeaks to Donald Trump Jr. And it was all very 2016. Yeah, very 2016. I mean, it's just so weird. Like when I was at the White House and the NSC, I remember giving that first tranche of WikiLeaks documents, all these leaked cables that were from Chelsea Manning. And at that period of time, it did feel like there was a sincere whistleblowing element to what they're doing. mission. But now we've got the Guardian reporting that Russian diplomats have been in secret talks with people close to Assange about trying to get him from the UK where he's been hold up in the

Ecuadorian embassy for years. They didn't fall through with it, but it adds to this growing body of evidence that WikiLeaks is a Russian carveout. And I guess I'm trying to wrap my mind around whether that was the case the whole time, whether this is a marriage of convenience because Julian Nassange has a worn out for his arrest and can't get the hell out of an embassy in the UK. I mean, do you have any sense of how the intelligence community views WikiLeaks is morphing over time? Yeah, so it's a great question. I think that the transformation can be attributed to Julian Assange's desire for a safe haven. He's been trying to get into Russia since at least 2010.

That's when he first applied for a Russian visa. it didn't work out. But at first, you're right. His mission with WikiLeaks was to be a radical transparency organization, and he was kind of an equal opportunity offender in that sense. He has always had this idea that perhaps WikiLeaks was going to become this massive open source kind of parallel intelligence arm almost, where whistleblowers could go and kind of create their own outcomes and reality with leaks. But ultimately, what it became was Julian Assange being a Putin stooge and being a stooge for Russia. I think we saw that, of course, with, you know, he did try to get into Russia from the Ecuadorian embassy, as you mentioned, with the Guardian article that was ultimately aborted, according to people that I've spoken to because they thought that there was a grab team outside of the Ecuadorian embassy that was going to snatch Julian Assange as he was trying to make his escape. So this wasn't necessarily an idea that was aborted.

because Julian had a change of heart. It's because he thought he was going to get caught. So if you put the timeline together and if you take everything that Julian Assange was doing during the 2016 election, which was completely devoted, his interests were completely aligned with Russia's. He was completely devoted to defeating Hillary Clinton. A lot of the leaks that have come out from his, you know, former supporters during that period have shown that he thought Hillary Clinton was literally the devil. and he was working with Russia by releasing all of the material that they gave him. And if you put that together and if you see that by the end of 2017, he was trying to escape the Ecuadorian embassy with Russia's help,

it just seems very obvious that that was what he was banking for. Imagine a world where Hillary Clinton isn't Secretary of State never pisses off Putin or Julian Assange and then runs for president without those two assholes gunning for her the whole time. It's a very, very different outcome. My last question for you, because I've asked you about literally everything you've ever reported over the past year, but I read all your stuff. You wrote a piece today about how Orrin Hatch has quietly weighed in on this big upcoming Supreme Court case that could have huge implications for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigations. Can you lay out what that piece says and why it's so important?

Yeah, so I was a bit shocked when I came across this amicus brief that Orrin Hatch filed earlier this month. he filed it on September 11th. And it's part of a case that on its face really has nothing to do with the Mueller investigation. It has to do with a man who's fighting a federal charge based on double jeopardy. He says that he was wrongfully charged by both the state and by the federal government for the same crime. And he says that that violates his Fifth Amendment constitutional right to not be tried for the same thing twice. So Orrin Hatch has weighed in, and this obviously has big implications for the Mueller investigation, even if it's not directly related to it, because the kind of saving grace that many people have said could prevent Trump from issuing pardons, kind of will and nilly in the Russia investigation, is that he will be deterred by the fact that many of these people who are caught up in the Russia probe could be charged anyway on the state level for the same crimes. And that's due to something that's referred to as the dual sovereignty.

doctrine, which essentially says that, well, the federal government has the right to preserve and protect its own laws, so do states. So, Orrin Hatch, Mr. Conservative Republican, who you would think would be on the side of state's rights here, he files this amicus brief saying that the dual sovereignty doctrine should be overturned, that it should be put to rest, and that there should be no ability of states to charge people based on crimes that they have committed, that they've already been charged with at the federal level, and either been acquitted for. for or pardoned. So essentially this would open the door to if the dual sovereignty doctrine was overturned. This would, of course, open the door for Trump to be free to issue pardons without the fear of having them blow up in his face by having, you know, his children, for example, or his associates who have been caught up in the Mueller investigation be charged with state crimes. So something he did quietly, Orrin Hatch did quietly. It was a 44 page. Amicus brief, very, very detailed, very firm. in his belief that this should be overturned.

And of course, experts I spoke to said this is crazy, especially coming from Orrin Hatch, because it would essentially upend the entire idea of federalism. And it would take away state's rights to prosecute crimes at their, you know, state law enforcement. It would compromise state law enforcement and it would allow the dramatic expansion of Trump's pardon power and his ability to interfere in state's law enforcement procedures. So very surprising, or perhaps not, because Oran Hatch has. of course a staunch Trump ally, but we'll have to see how this case plays out because it is a 150-year precedent, the dual sovereignty doctrine. And throwing it out would be, it would certainly

muddy the waters, as one legal expert told me. My God, yeah. I mean, that feels like a huge deal. And to your point, I mean, Hatch is retiring. He's on his way out, and I guess rightly so. But he's been he's been someone that is out ahead of almost everyone else on pushing for Kavanaugh's nomination. His staff has clearly been coordinating all kinds of rebuttals and attacks on people who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. I mean, it is really pretty shocking the degree to which he is carrying water for President Trump at this point. And of course, Kavanaugh will likely, I mean, we have to wait and see what happens this week, but if he were to be confirmed, then he would be sitting on the bench by the time the Supreme Court heard this case dealing with

double jeopardy and the dual sovereignty clause. Well, I just threw up at my moment. mouth a little bit. Natasha, thank you so much for doing the show. Everyone should read your stuff at the Atlantic. Everyone should follow you on Twitter because you are breaking big stories all the time and it's really important stuff. So thank you for walking us through it. Thanks so much, Tommy. Thanks for having me. Thanks again for listening to Pot Save the World. Appreciate you guys tuning in. If you like this episode, please feel free to share it. You should follow Natasha on Twitter. And if you have a minute, give us a couple stars in the iTunes store. It helped people find the show. and it would mean a lot to me.

So thanks again. Have a great week.