The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Wittes and Brody Mullins: Code Red

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Michael Cohen substantiated 99% of what's needed to prove Trump's hush money reimbursement scheme—and so far, Cohen held his own under the weak defense counsel's cross-exam. Plus, are we past the peak power of the corporate lobbying world? Ben Wittes and the WSJ's Brody Mullins join Tim Miller today. show notes: Brody Mulllins' book, "“The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.” Ben on Michael Cohen, Day 2 

Hey everybody, we got our live event in DC tonight at the Six and I Synagogue. So if you are in the Beltway, in the metro area, come on by and see us. We will also be taping the Next Level podcast with me, Sarah, and JVL. Usually that comes out on Wednesdays every week, so that'll be coming out on Thursday this week. Check that out tomorrow. We also have some news this morning that didn't make it into the podcast interviews I want to cover. Joe Biden officially challenged Trump to two debates, one in June and one in September. The announcement video he put out ended with this little jab about his court schedule. So let's pick the dates, Donald. I hear you're free on Wednesdays. Not bad, not bad. Look, I always thought these debates happening was inevitable. I know there have been some counter views on that, but for Biden to

address his biggest vulnerability, the age question, he was going to have to take Trump on head on in a debate, at least one. He's offered two. I think that's a smart move. I've got a longer analysis about this over on YouTube, where I've been popping out some hot takes that don't make the podcast from time to time. So head over there and subscribe if you haven't. We've had 250,000 subscribers on YouTube. So it's really taken off over there. So check out a longer video on the debates on the Bulwark YouTube page. One other news item. Last night, Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks beat self-funding Congressman David Trone rather handily in the Maryland Democratic Senate primary. This result flies in the face of some

expert opinion on this race, even some expert opinion here at the Bulwark. But for me, it's a reminder of a truism I've been pushing since 2016. It's also a little bit of a cautionary tale for Biden. Money and ads are increasingly unimportant in our political campaigns. Doesn't mean that they don't matter at all. They matter somewhat. They can matter on the margins. Look at the Nevada Senate race in 2022. Cortez Mascato spent 50 million more dollars than her Republican opponent. She squeaks out a victory by like 0.3%.

Sure, I'm sure the ads made a difference in that case. But in these races where you have also Brooks, who's a little bit more of a liberal, she's not like a squad member, but she's more liberal than Trone, being endorsed by the Maryland establishment, like Governor Westmore, like Chris Van Hollen, that kind of grassroots support, that social media support, that identity connection in a state that had, I think the Democratic primary vote was about 40 to 45 percent black. All of that means way more than these like cheesy ads that people are running on TV when most people aren't even watching ads on TV anymore. Most people are just annoyed by pre-roll ads on YouTube. I'm like a sole voice on this, that money is a little bit overrated in judging the results of political campaigns. And I thought that it was interesting we had another data point in that direction last night with Angela Alciabrook.

She'll now face Larry Hogan. We will have a lot to discuss about that race in the coming weeks, as you guys might imagine. Okay, big show today. We got Ben Wittes first to talk about the Trump trial and the Michael Cohen testimony. And then a little bit more about money in politics on the back end with Brody Mullins, who wrote the book, The Wolves of K Street. Stick around for both of those. Up next, Ben Wittes. All right, welcome to the Bullard Podcast. It is Wednesday, so there's a break from the trial,

as President Joe Biden cheekily pointed out. And that means we've got Editor-in-Chief of Lawfare and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, our pal, author of Dogshirt Daily on Substack, Benjamin Wittes. What's up, bro? You know, it's a day off. I get to lie around and write my dispatches from the last two days, sip coffee, maybe have some wine. It's great.

There's no like partying happening in the Hype House. There's no like Lawfare Hype House or Instagram content creation. There's always partying in the Hype House. We cooked dinner last night. Anna, Tyler and I, we made some bluefish. We sat around. We talked about Michael Cohen's testimony. This is the kind of thing you do in the Lawfare Hype Out. It's the Hype House for nerds. No bong rips in the Hype House. There are no bong rips. Okay.

Microdosing? Well, it's microdosing of bluefish. Okay. Ben is up in New York. I'm monitoring the trial on Twitter, as is our want. So we're going to bring our own sides of expertise to the table. We want to spend most of this episode on the Michael Cohen testimony, the critical testimony of the trial but before we do that Donald Trump's most loyal lapdogs, his extended family, they all were there yesterday. There was Vivek Ramaswamy, Byron

Donalds was up there. his family even made an appearance his actual family lara and eric boris epstein my old friend boris epstein who i think now is under investigation in arizona you know one of his communications people were there mike johnson i hear you didn't see mike johnson former friend of the pod who now has gone back to the dark side uh but you talked to us just about the you you know, kind of the circus atmosphere now. And it does feel like that's changed a little bit since the beginning of the trial. So I did not see Mike Johnson. I hear he was there. I saw it on Twitter. So I can confirm he was there. Look, it started out, I think Trump was kind of lonely. It would be just him and Boris Epstein,

or sometimes, you know, Jason Miller. One day there was Eric Trump. And I think it became like a thing that, you know, he didn't want to look like he was there isolated. And so then, you know, certain politicians started showing up. First, it was Rick Scott. You know, then it was some other politicians would show up and then it became a thing to, you know, to sit behind Trump and be seen. And so yesterday it kind of came to full bloom with, you know, the Michael Cohen testimony. There was a whole entourage of people there and it was, you know, designed to make a statement and it did. It's just a question of, you know, what statement it made and to whom.

I think there are multiple motivations for this. Some of them are sucking up. They want attention from the boss. J.D. Vance said explicitly that Donald Trump is lonely and sad. And so it was nice for J.D. to be his blankie. There's another more nefarious, I think, motivation here that I've been reporting. Before I get to that, I do want to say, for people that did not follow my sarcasm font there, me and Boris Epstein, not actually friends. Okay, not friends. Boris Epstein isn't a big fan of mine. Andrew Rice is on MSNBC. He's in the courtroom. And he said last night that he was personally witnessing Trump editing and making notations to the comments, to the talking points that those allies were making in their press conferences. Obviously, you're not seeing the

press conferences since you're in there. We're seeing them on Twitter. But there's a lot of suspicion that, you know, another motivation of having these Goombas up there is to help Trump get around the gag order and kind of let them do his dirty work for him with the press. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that broadly. Look, I have been stuck in the courtroom and thus don't see any of those press conferences. I saw one the first day that I was there. But when Trump leaves, which is when he does those press conferences, we are actually, you know, not allowed to leave. We're stuck in the court and the Secret Service and the police don't let anybody leave. So we're uniquely cut

off from those. Look, that said, I think there's something to it. He has chafed under this gag order really dramatically. He complains about it constantly. His lawyers complain about it to the judge and try to push at the edges of it. And they appealed it. The appeals court just upheld it yesterday. And so now he's kind of figuring out ways around it, you know, which are to, you know, have other people say the things that he would want to say. I don't think Mike Johnson's going to make comments about the judge's daughter. There's limits to what they will do. Byron Donald's might.

Byron Donald's might, but they're willing to say things about the process and the system that he wants to get out there. That aspect of it is working for him. There's a large number of people in the country who don't believe this trial is legitimate, who believe all kinds of terrible things about Joe Biden personally directing Alvin Bragg and this being used as a sort of instrument of political repression. And a lot of people seem to buy that. And so the more you can get that message out if you're Trump, the better, not for purposes of winning the case, but for purposes of neutralizing the impact of the case politically if you're convicted.

It is another example of Trump actually getting better treatment despite complaining that he gets worse treatment. Most criminal defendants don't have like a gaggle of surrogates that can go out and go around the gag order for them at a press conference. One other just thought before we get to Cohen that you just sparked. I was reading the Politico story this morning, Jonathan Lemire, about the Hunter Biden trial that's upcoming on gun charges and how President Biden is his staff. I think he's worried about the psychological impact on the president with his surviving son being on trial. I do wonder, in a weird way, does the Hunter Biden trial provide any opportunity

to reach people, you know, who might be looking at this Alvin Bragg trial and thinking, oh, man, this is the Biden administration targeting political foes. Is that too complicated? Do you think of a bank shot? Obviously, Joe Biden's not going to make this case. But for surrogates or other people to be out there saying, look, obviously, this is not some political witch hunt. The president's own DOJ is going after his own son. It is not true that this is the Biden administration going after his political enemies. This is a separate, this is a separately elected,

separate sovereign entity. This is the county of New York through its elected attorney general, elected district attorney going after the former president. Conversely, it is the Biden administration who is going after the president's son. Now, it's down through a lot of levels of independent justice department, and, you know, some of us actually believe in that. But, you know, the special counsel who is prosecuting Hunter Biden reports to the attorney general, who is a political appointee of the President of the United States. So quite literally, the Biden administration is going after the President's son. The Biden administration, at least in this case, is not going after the former president, although it is in the January 6th case and the other case. So look, how you convince people of that, that this case is,

you know, not the Biden machine. This is actually, you know, Alvin Bragg, elected DA of the city of New York. I don't know. You know, I do think there is a difference between the way the president's people talk about this in court and the way they talk about it out of court. In court, they're not saying this is the Biden administration. In court, they're trying to cross-examine witnesses. And outside of court, they're making all kinds of statements, or their surrogates are. Let's get to the big moment, Michael Cohen, who I also don't really like,

on the stand. Just talk to us about the scene Monday and Tuesday, and I guess I'll just put a quarter in the machine and you just sort of describe, you know, what you saw and his testimony. Yeah, so Michael Cohen, as you say, you don't really like him. One of the themes about of the case so far is that nobody likes him. It's kind of sad. All of the prosecution witnesses kind of line up to say, you know, they range. You know, he's difficult, but I never really had a problem with him to, like, hate the guy, right? But the dunking on Michael Cohen thing was a very consistent theme. You know, there's a lot of reason not to like him. He's Trump's hitman

for a long time. He mistreated a lot of people on Trump's behalf. He's modestly apologetic about it, but only modestly. And he talks about, you know, working for Trump in that capacity as a sort of wonderful experience, which he does sort of unironically. So he's quite unlikable, actually, even in his penitence. He is extremely frank in a David Pecker-like way. He just kind of lays out, okay, here's what we did. The difference is that he's got a lot of venom for Trump. He really has come to hate him in a way that makes him a little bit, I think, more relatable than David Pecker, who just kind of describes it as, you know, it was business, that my business is, you know, checkbook journalism and sleaze. And I love Donald Trump, you know.

Look, he put everything on the record that the prosecution needs, specifically that Trump ordered the first code read, which is to say he ordered the payoff to Stormy Daniels, that he was fully briefed on what they were planning to do. And he said at various times, just do it. He made an affirmative decision to pay it off that he intended to reimburse Michael Cohen and made it clear that he did. And that even Cohen called him on the morning that he made the transfer arrangements to make sure he knew all the details. And so if you believe Michael Cohen, you know, Code Red number one is there. He also put on the record Code Red number two, which is for criminal purposes, in this case, the more important one, which is the reimbursement scheme that involved falsification of the records. And Cohen, this is really the only evidence that we have

that Trump, other than circumstantial evidence, that Trump was directly involved in Code Red number two. But he describes a meeting with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump CFO, where he went and was irate and had a bit of a temper tantrum because he hadn't been reimbursed and because his bonus had been cut. And Weisselberg says, we're going to take care of it. And Trump then calls him in and says, I hear you're upset. We're going to take care of it. And kind of Weisselberg comes in and they hatch this scheme to reimburse him using fake legal expenses. And so I think that is 98%, 99% of what the government needs in order to get a conviction if you believe Michael Cohen. And this puts a huge premium on the cross-examination of Michael Cohen caveat that you made at the end.

So what percentage of this, or maybe not what percentage, what specifically is Michael Cohen testifying to that there's no other way to validate, right? That there's no document. And then secondarily to that, why isn't Weisselberg testifying? Because it seems like if he was also in that meeting, he might be a more credible witness. Right.

So these are both excellent questions. The answer to the first one is very little of Cohen's testimony is absolutely uncorroborated by anything else. But two things are, and they're important. One is the conversations with Donald Trump, in which Trump specifically authorizes these things, has no other source. So we have documents that show every single thing Cohen did, every single interaction with another person has, we have both the other person's testimony and the text messages and the emails.

But Donald Trump doesn't use emails and he doesn't send text messages. So like when he wants to reach Cohen, Melania texts him, would you please call DT, right? There are no documents that have, you know, his name on them except the signed checks. And so for these two key interactions where Trump says, do it, pay her off, and then specifically authorizes the repayment scheme, there is, for the first one, only one possible witness, which is Cohen. And for the second one, there is only two possible witnesses. One is Cohen and one is Allen Weisselberg. Now, the reason Allen Weisselberg isn't testifying is that neither side wants him to, because nobody knows what he's going to say. The prosecution won't call him

because he has a contract with the Trump organization that he'll get paid a million dollars in severance, but he's not allowed to talk to law enforcement without compulsion. So they could subpoena him and he could show up and lie, but they have no ability to interview him before he shows up. So they're not going to call him. Okay, so maybe this is just my law and order level of knowledge. This is why you're here from the law fair site. But, you know, couldn't you subpoena and, you know, bring him downtown and ask him a few questions and then determine based on that whether or not you want to bring him on the stand? So he would, according to his severance agreement with the Trump organization, not be willing to have that conversation. And so the judge actually

suggested that they bring him in, have him answer questions outside the presence of the jury to see what he would say, whether either side wants to call him. That has not happened. I think the defense doesn't want to call him because he might tell the truth. And so my guess is neither side is going to call him. Well, so then why wouldn't the prosecution want that? What's the argument against having him testify without the jury present? Because they don't want to risk that he would say something, you know, that would give the defense, you know, a reason to then call him, right? And so everybody thinks it's safer for Alan Weisselberg to stay in Rikers Island, where he is, by the way, serving time for perjury. Also not the most credible witness, somebody that you're bringing in from Rikers.

Exactly. It's a complicated little dance with Weisisselberg but it is a glaring omission in the case that you know there is this other witness to the key events who neither side will access yeah it seems like the biggest hole in the case i do have to say an earlier episode of the blog podcast and the listener mailbag they asked me what my most radical views are left and right to my most radical left view is like i'm basically a prison abolitionist for people that do not do violent crimes and so like that feeling and that wolf inside of me is conflicting very deeply with my desire for people in the trump organization to be in rikers and my joy of that. And so anyway, that's just a personal conflict that I wanted to share with you. The goal is not to live free of contradictions.

It's to be comfortable with our contradictions. And I think that's a healthy one. Thank you, Ben. Okay, now let's go ahead to the cross. Our boy Todd Blanche, sounds like he didn't perform at the highest level. Catastrophic error by the defense here. The defense has one lawyer who is superb in cross-examination, and that is Emil Bovi, who did the cross-examination of Hope Hicks, who did the cross-examination of Keith Davidson, left Keith Davidson in small pieces on the ground when he was done with him. Keith Davidson was the fixer, the person, the Stormy Daniels attorney that was negotiating the deal. Exactly. And for some reason that I cannot fathom, Todd Blanche decides that he is going to do this cross-examination himself.

And he starts out with the question, I mean, I'm literally not making this up. His first question is something like, didn't you do a TikTok video about me the other day where you called me a crying piece of shit? And, you know, it was, I mean, it was funny as hell. You know, there was immediate objection that was sustained. The whole thing seems to have thrown him off his balance. He's been jumping about from subject to subject. Cohen has handled himself in a kind of laconic fashion that has been untroubled. And it went on for kind of two hours. And I don't really think he got anywhere. And so I was really expecting the cross-examination to be a bloodbath, which it may still be because he's going to spend all day tomorrow on it. But so far,

Cohen has held up quite well, and he's established no more than that Cohen is driven by money, which of course he's, you know, is hardly a secret about Michael Cohen anyway, and that he hates Trump, which Cohen is, you know, very open about, and that he's told a lot of lies in the past. And I think he's going to have to do a lot more to take apart Cohen's testimony and to undo the damage that he's done. So similarly, and this has been kind of a repeated question I've had for you every week, but this question of what is the Trump defense, and they don't have to decide on one per se, but what is the strategy?

And it seems, just based on what I read of the transcript and what you're saying, that the strategy such that there was one was basically just to convince the jury not to trust this guy and that if this guy's a key witness that has a couple of facts that only he can testify to, then if they don't trust him, maybe that's good enough. It seems like that's the strategy rather than actually trying to undermine any of the facts that he's testifying about the relevant situation, at least so far in day one. Yeah, but I got to say, I don't think that's good enough, right? So every time you've asked me this question, I've said there are three main components

of the defense case. The second of them is Michael Cohen is a lying sack of shit. You can't believe what he says. Right. And the specific thing that you can't believe what he said relates to these two things that he attributes to Donald Trump, right? That Trump ordered the payment to Stormy Daniels and that Trump ordered the reimbursement scheme. Now, if you can't undermine that claim

in the minds of one juror, you're going to lose this case. And I think they've got to spend some real time tomorrow, which is to say Thursday when court reconvenes, they've got to spend some real time tomorrow, which is to say Thursday when court reconvenes. They've got to spend some real time doing something about those specific claims. Because without that, you actually do have the elements of the crime fairly well established. Lying sacks of shit sometimes tell the truth. You know, lying sacks of shit don't lie all the time, right? So you need to undermine the specific lie. Particularly when they're surrounded by documents and corroborating witnesses.

And one thing that the prosecution has done a very good job of is made it so that you don't have to trust Michael Cohen on a whole bunch of specific things. You merely have to trust that he's correctly reading documents in front of him. That's a wonderful report. Any other color? Any final thoughts from your time in the courtroom? Any observations about Donald Trump? So Donald Trump did demonstratively sleep through the entirety of Michael Cohen's testimony. This, I do not believe for a second, was real sleeping sleeping he was sitting there with his head back and his eyes closed but he was for hours and hours at a time making a point of not caring what michael cohen said i think it was like ujjayi breathing that he was doing just trying to like not lash out and

like it was just sort of like that no i think i think it was a demonstrative show of not giving a shit got it reminded me a little bit of like a five-year-old who when you're you know when you're angry at just you know goes la la la la la um it was a lot of that it was heavy i don't care about what michael cohen says energy and you could tell it was bothering him. All right. Ben Wittes, our man in New Amsterdam. He'll be back next week for an additional update. We'll be talking to you then. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks to Ben Wittes. Up back with Brody Mullins, investigative reporter in the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal.

He covers business lobbying and campaign finance. I've been both source and target of Brody in the past. He's a co-author of the new book, The Wolves of K Street, The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. He wrote it with his brother, Luke. He got the Pulitzer Prize in 2023. He's part of a team reporting into federal officials investing in the companies they regulated. Brody, good to see you, brother. Thanks for having me. I don't remember you being at Target. What was that about? I don't know. I mean, maybe Target is overstated, but certainly, you know, looking around, you know, asking around what exactly is Miller up to?

Those are good questions. Yeah, I deserve it. Why did you decide to do this? Why this book? Give us a give us the elevator pitch. Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I never wanted to write a book. I thought, you know, reading books is hard enough and writing a book. I didn't think I had the attention span for it. And there just came a moment about five years ago when I realized that, you know, we're at a really important point in our country's history where companies have this tremendous influence in Washington.

And when I first started in Washington and when you first started in Washington, it was a little bit more of a fair fight. It was unions battling companies, companies battling environmental groups, public citizen groups out there fighting. And now it's really just companies. You know, unions are basically gone. There's no Ralph Nader's of the world out there. And it's just companies are the only people of influence in Washington right now. And also, it seemed like, you know, this is an era that started in the 1980s or late 1970s, and is now kind of coming to an end. So it just seemed like a perfect moment to write about corporate influence in Washington

and how it's hurt consumers in some situations. What do you think that like the real world outcomes of that are just like the hollowing out of the union lobbying groups? I mean, obviously, progressive groups have influence in other ways now still in Washington, sometimes through the federal bureaucracy, sometimes more direct grassroots democracy is more possible now. So what are the impacts of that evolution as you see it? That's one of the things we write about in the book is that, you know, the corporate lobby has had so much influence, they've blocked a lot of pro-consumer legislation over the years. A big pivot point was the Clinton healthcare bill back in 1993, which is a little before our time. Back then, Clinton was just elected. He was in his honeymoon. Democrats had

the House and the Senate. Bill Clinton was a lefty liberal, and he wanted to push a big lefty liberal priority, which was national healthcare. And the year before, about 17 Senate Republicans had their own national healthcare bill. So this really seemed like a possibility. And Clinton came out with a bill and health insurance lobbyists stood up against it and started fighting it and ran a massive campaign to defeat it. And that ended up changing the course of history and of the Clinton presidency. After that point, he went from being a lefty in the long lines of FDR and LBJ and instead became a centrist and pushed NAFTA and welfare reform and tax cuts and balancing the budget. And since then, Democrats and Republicans have pushed this pro-business center. And in the case of that, you're asking about the results.

The result of that one was that millions of Americans who wanted health care reform and wanted health care insurance, as Democrats wanted them to have, we're not able to get it. So I wonder what you think about this covered a lot more closely than I do, but just kind of observing it being in and out of the world. I always feel like we're past peak power of corporate lobbying world, you know, that maybe right around then, like late 80s, 90s, it really starts ramping up, you know up into the 2000s. And for a variety of reasons, some of them congressional reform, some of them just the nature of how our politics gets done now. Like the inside game is a little less influential than maybe it was in the past. Talk about that arc from like the 90s to now.

Sounds like you've read the book. I mean, that's basically what we write about is part one and part two of our book are about the rise of corporate power from the 1970s to now. And, you know, we started writing this book in 2017 and realized several years later, like, oh, crap, like the peak of corporate power is around 2017. And since then, we see Democrats and Republicans rising against corporate America. You know, we sort of expect Democrats and the OECs of the world to go after corporate America. But to have Republicans do it is sort of stunning to me because it's it's just nothing like I've ever seen. You know, J.D. Vance in the Senate and Josh Hawley have bills that would make it easier for workers to join labor unions. Elizabeth Warren has three bills, three pro-consumer, anti-corporate bills with Josh Hawley.

That's a red flag for me, I've got to tell you. That's a tag team I don't love. I don't know. That gets my spidey senses tingling. But it goes to your point, though, that corporations are under attack from the right and the left, and they don't have the influence that they had when we came up. So you write about a bunch of characters in the book. And to me, the interesting dynamic, just from a navel-gazy DC standpoint, is there is the corrupt, effective corporate lobbying campaign.

Some of your characters are that. And then there's the snake oil lobbying side of things, where it's also corrupt, but they're not really harming anybody, except for the people that they're bilking, the corporations that they're bilking. So talk about that balance. If you dug into this, how much of these figures are big, scary figures that are doing real damage in the way that they're impacting regulations? And how much of this is people that are acting like big, scary figures and there's nobody behind the curtain? We read about both sides. The snake oil folks are super interesting to me because we read about one in particular here in our book. But we're talking about Jim. That's Jim. Jim Kordovich. Yeah.

OK, yeah. We're going to get into him now. So, yeah. So we'll go deep on Jim. OK, so I grew up in Washington, D.C., and we get the Washington Post and read it as kids in high school. And every year there is that story that said, you know, six of the 10 richest counties in the country are all around Washington, D.C. And D.C. And D.C. is an incredibly wealthy area, yet we don't make anything or produce anything. At the end of the day, if we were to take all the widgets and cars and tangible things we made and put them into a bucket, there'd be nothing in the bucket. All we do in D.C. is talk about legislation and policy, which turns out to be incredibly valuable. But what some people have learned is that if you come to Washington and market yourself as an influence peddler or as a lobbyist, you really don't need to produce that much for your clients or actually do that much. You can just stay you

to things. A lot of what a Washington lobbyist does is report back to the corporate boardroom about activities and going on in Washington. And today to do that, all you need to do is read Punchbowl or read Playbook in the morning, and then call back to the office and tell them what's going on. So it's very easy for unscrupulous people to take advantage of the system in Washington, the sort of nebulous lawmaking process for personal profit. And this guy, Jim Kortovich, was one of them. Yeah, and it felt like that actually took off, like the ability to be a snake oil salesman became much easier in the Trump years. The big irony of the swamp draining was there was some element of swamp draining

because some traditional power brokers didn't have access anymore because of the strange way that Trump governed, to put that the nicest I've ever put it. And on the other hand, people like Jim Cordovich, who I know, of the strange way that Trump governed, to put that the nicest I've ever put it. And on the other hand, people like Jim Cordovich, who I know, and he's this character around DC, I'll just full disclosure, I've been to a gaucho party or two. Speaking of my spidey senses, again, we're really tingling at those parties, way more than Warren and Holly. I was like, I don't know, there's something happening with this guy. And I'll kind of let you tell the story, but he hits hard times a little bit with his fake lobbying business. And then Trump comes in and it's like a huge boom, right?

Because there is nobody around Trump. So it's much easier for, it's not just Kordovich. There's a whole slew of people that make a ton of money, you know, peddling, sometimes real, sometimes pretend access to Trump world, since none of these big moneyed interests actually knew anybody in Trump world. Exactly. You know, a couple of things here. One is the perception of power is just as important as actual power. And Jim Kortovich knows that. And so he tries to surround himself with powerful people and make it seem like he's an insider. And then he takes that image and sells it basically to

to US companies or to foreign governments who want influence in Washington. So what he started doing, you mentioned the Gaucho Party. He started throwing these big, lavish parties really for reporters and Capitol staffers and White House aides to come to. And he would take pictures at these events with him hanging out with important people at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or CNN or elsewhere. And then if there's ever a lawmaker who walked in, you snap a picture with the lawmaker or ambassador or something like that. Having been there, I could vouch. It was a very weird group, you know, because he's gay, I'll just say. Like every other demo, you know, we've got the good and bad ones and the gays. And so like the party would be like really handsome 24- old guys. And then like, Gwen Ifill, and Tony.

It's like, what's happening at this party? But those parties drew all sorts of people who are important in Washington. And he would then leak word of the parties to the media to playbook. So people would write about the party to check, which sort of became like a self fulfilling prophecy, like everyone wanted to go to these parties. But the whole point of the parties was not sort of became like a self-fulfilling prophecy, like everyone wanted to go to these parties. But the whole point of the parties was not just a regular social event. It was a business development opportunity that companies or lobbies who went to those parties or saw the pictures or read about them thought, man, this guy's really, really

got juice. And in fact, it was all fake. The Trump element of it is interesting because that was so I'd already moved out of town. So this was if you read one chapter, the whole book's good, but the quarter of a chapter is just interesting just as like a character study. There's just so much in it we can't get into in a podcast. I encourage people to go out and get it, at least go to that chapter. But the interesting part, and I'm curious your thoughts on just the way that he did

this and then the other people that were doing this during this period from 16 and then when you start writing the book through 20, like like the corruptibility in some ways almost the old style of corruptibility was like it was very rote you know it was like we know we know what this playbook looks like and this was a new kind of thing right which is like really you know access trading like you would see and like other parts of the world kind of like you can see him doing deals with cutter and like so anyway talk just a little bit about the kind of the world, kind of. You can see him doing deals with Qatar. And so anyway, talk just a little bit about the swamp change from 2016 through 20 through the Cordovich lens. You know, lobbying used to be insider deals, steak dinners, golf outings.

And our first lobbyist in our book we write about epitomized that. That's Tommy Boggs, whose dad was a member of his dad, was the House Majority Leader. When his dad died, his mom replaced him. Tommy Boggs knew everyone in Washington. He worked for LBJ back in the Senate. It used to be that characters like Tommy Boggs got things done through relationships they had with members of Congress. And that day is sort of over. Those lobbyists are still important, but the best lobbying is done now outside of Washington or convincing a member of Congress that their voters support some position or not. So, you know, a member of Congress, as you know, will do anything to get reelected and they're going to do whatever

their voters support. So lobbying now a lot is going to the states, going to constituents and trying to get them to support, you know, a TikTok ban or a trade bill or a corporate tax cut. And if a member thinks that their constituents support some policy, they're going to vote for it. So that's the world that Jim Corbett tried to get into. It's sort of trying to manipulate constituents so a member of Congress votes one way or another, or to make a member of Congress think their constituents support one position or another. So it's sort of in this very murky world of influence peddling where lots of money is thrown around because companies think this is really the best way to lobby. It costs

tons of money and there's no disclosure. So in the case of Jim Kortovich, he got involved in a scheme where he was passing money back and forth with one of his clients and no one knew it. The public didn't know, the lawmakers didn't know, and even the company didn't know until the FBI found out about it. Yeah. Is there any evidence this stuff works? There's like an old kind of saying in marketing that's like, you know, 90% of my ad spend is wasted. But the problem is I don't know what 90, you know, like a whole lot of this just just bullshit. I think that if a company can convince constituents to support a corporate position, you know, it does work. The problem is that both sides are pushing it and that members of Congress are very wary of what they see now. So for example, 10 years ago,

Google and the tech industry ran an incredibly successful campaign, putting ads on their website saying, hey, call Congress and have them vote down this bill that they thought would have hurt the internet. That was an incredibly successful effort. But then we saw TikTok try to use the same tactic a month ago, and it failed miserably. So, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But if you're not playing the game, you're at a higher risk of losing. And the lobbyists, you know, the lobbyists are your eyes and ears in Washington. And what are they telling you to do? They're telling you, hire me, spend money, spend more money, get pollsters, get, you know, more consultants. So the lobbyists are telling you to spend more, more, more, more.

And so that's really what companies end up doing. The funny scene from this kind of fake grass top from Kordovich is the guys in the blue blazers that are taking the calls in his little office. It's like, we think it's the real people calling me. It's just a bunch of chads. Anyway, one more guy that we have to talk about, the will-o'-the-wisp of the swamp, Manafort.

He's back. He's back in the news. These people never go away. It's another thing you learn, which is good for you, I guess, in your business reporting on these folks. Just talk about his trajectory and what you guys report on. We can even go all the way back to the Manafort and Stone, Atwater era.

Just give us a little thumbnail sketch of that. Paul Manafort is an amazing character. He came to DC in the 1980s, a little bit before working for Ronald Reagan's campaign. And we forget about that era, but before Reagan was elected, Democrats just ruled Washington. They'd controlled Congress for 50 years.

Jimmy Carter was president. The last Republican who was president was Richard Nixon, left in scandal, obviously, and so did all his people. So Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. When Reagan wins, companies say, oh, crap, I need to find people who know Reagan. Who were the Republicans in Washington? And there were basically no Republican lobbyists in Washington at the time. So Paul Manafort said, hey, I can be a lobbyist. So basically, because he's connected to Reagan and companies needed to get access to Reagan, he became the most powerful and certainly wealthiest lobbyist in Washington in the 80s. Later, he moved to Ukraine and left the D.C. scene and started working for the pro-Russian president of Ukraine. What's interesting there is that he ends up essentially stealing money from a Russian oligarch, which is something that in my world,

I think you should never do. Cause this Russian oligarch now wants to kill him. So Deripaska is who we're talking about here. Deripaska. Our audience is very familiar with Deripaska. We can name drop. Okay. So not many shows you can name drop Deripaska and people

know what you're talking about. So Deripaska wants his $19 million back from Paul Manafort and Paul Manafort doesn't want to die. So he realizes that if he reinvents the Reagan lobby model with Donald Trump, he can get that money back, make amends with Deripaska. So he works on the Trump campaign. The whole plan was for Trump to get elected and for Manafort to become a lobbyist. Unfortunately for Manafort, he got kicked off the campaign or got fired from the campaign because some of his work in Ukraine for Russia, for the pro-Russian president, got exposed. So he leaves the campaign, then is pursued in the Mueller investigation, goes to jail.

So right now, you know, Paul Manafort's the biggest loser in Washington. But here we have Trump coming back. Trump is a guy who values loyalty above anything else. Paul Manafort is the only person in the world who has gone to jail for Donald Trump. And just in the last week, we hear news, oh, Manafort's going to start working for Trump again. It just seems like the same model that worked for Reagan. He's got some Chinese clients. Right. And if Trump wins, he's going to put out a tweet or whatever he does or put his arm around Paul Manafort. And Paul Manafort is going to be the richest, most successful lobbyist of all time due to his access to Trump. It's really amazing of his rise and fall and rise

and fall. Like he always comes back and like literally he will be the most important non-elected person in Washington in a few months that Trump wins. All right. Last question. So, you know, a lot of our listeners are like not in the swamp scene. And so you hear a lot of, you know, corruption and, and, you know, the corporate influence and like, I don't want to minimize any of that. But as you look forward to maybe a Biden win, or maybe a Trump win, what are the wolves that are kind of out there that are very, that seem very threatening right now, you know, where the influence is real? Going more broadly to corporate America, I feel like the corporate lobbies in general are going to face more trouble no matter who wins. You know, as both Republicans and Democrats turn against corporate America, they're trying to block mergers.

They're trying to use antitrust to reduce the size of some of these big companies. You know, the investigations into big tech that are going on with Facebook, with Amazon and Google at DOJ and the FTC are bipartisan. Some of those were started by Trump. Now they're carried on by Biden. In normal world, normal in quotes, companies want Republicans to win and Democrats are more anti-corporate. In this election,

corporations are thinking they're gonna lose either way. If Biden wins, you've got an anti-corporate president who has Lena Kahn at the FTC who's trying to take down corporate America. And if Trump wins, he could keep Lena Kahn there. Trump and Lena Kahn are sort of on the same team on some of these issues. So it's going to be a bad four years, no matter who wins for corporate America. You'd never believe this in some of the populist corners of YouTube, but there you go. There's some news. There's a takeaway that may be a bright light in our midst, the corporate power

waning a little bit, corporate influence, Brody Mullins, the book, the wolves of K street. Thanks for coming on the board podcast. Stay in touch, brother. Awesome. Thank you.

All right. Thanks very much to Ben with us and Brody Mullins. We will see some of you tonight at six and I synagogue in Washington, DC. The rest of you we'll see tomorrow. Same bad time, same bad channel. Peace. about channel peace someday my pain

someday my pain mark you harness your blame harness your blame

mark you Harness your blade walkers With the wild wolves around you In the morning I call you, send it farther on game started smacking stars you swing while

you're cream swing while you're cream you creaming me through. And the story's all over you.

In the morning I'll call you. Can't you find a clue? When your eyes are all painted Sinatra blue. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie cooper with audio engineering and editing by jason brown