The NPR Politics Podcast - Comey FAQ/Listener Mail

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

Your questions, answered — on the firing of James Comey and other political news. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and White House correspondent Scott Horsley. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Steve Held from Santa Rosa, California. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 on Monday, May 15th. Things may change by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org or the NPR One app and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with some answers to your questions about the firing of James Comey and a few other topics. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. And I'm Carrie Johnson, the justice correspondent. All right, everybody, it has been less than a week since President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. But Washington news cycles are even more advanced than dog years, so it already feels like it's been months. You've all sent in tons of questions about what happened, what it could mean, what comes next,

and Kerry Johnson is just the person to answer them. How's it going? More or less okay. I guess we're halfway through the afternoon, and who the heck knows what else might happen today. I feel like news o'clock usually is a little later in the day. So we'll see if we're back in your podcast feed later on today. But Carrie, what we did was we got so many listener questions that we just kind of combined all of them here to Comeypalooza. Ready?

As ready as I'll ever be. All right. So let's start with this one. When Comey was fired for two days, the White House said this was all about the Hillary Clinton investigation and how Comey botched the rollout and that Trump was simply following the advice of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Then President Trump speaks to NBC News and says basically the opposite. And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story. It's an excuse. So the first is, Carrie, what are the implications of Trump saying that, that the Russia investigation was on his mind? Well, in addition to kind of hanging out to dry a whole bunch of people in the White House, including the vice president who had been out publicly talking about the DOJ recommendation being the basis for this firing. It also cast

a cloud over the current Justice Department leadership. So now Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general for just three weeks, has become a national news figure and a man who has a lot of answers to questions of people all over the country and in the U.S. Senate have. Rosenstein is going before the entire Senate later this week to try to answer questions about the removal of Comey the second time he's appeared on the Hill. He had already briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee chairs behind closed doors last week. Yeah, but there are still a lot of concerns about the role he played in Comey's ouster, what the reasoning was for that ouster. Remember, James Comey was leading

the FBI and leading the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and possible ties between the Trump campaign and people in Russia. So the president admitted to NBC News he was thinking about all those things when he decided to give James Comey the ax, something that hasn't happened since 1993. Well, in zooming out a bit, I'd also add that this kind of hammers home the idea that, you know, what the White House spokespeople say, and perhaps even what the vice president says, is subject to change until Donald Trump has the final word. And I believe we've seen that in a few other cases before this. So this just kind of adds to that continuing narrative. subject to change until Donald Trump has the final word. And I believe we've seen that in a few other

cases before this. So this just kind of adds to that continuing narrative. Trump came out last week and said, maybe we should just stop having these briefings and I'll just either I'll do it myself every other week or we'll put something out in writing. And one other thing that I want to ask about that Trump said or rather tweeted, this is Friday morning, Trump tweets, quote, James Comey better hope there are no, quote, tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press. Exclamation point. So this came after The New York Times and others had reported a lot of pushback against the narrative that Trump had put forward about his meetings with Comey, particularly that Comey had assured him he wasn't under investigation.

So, Carrie, two questions. First to the tweet, it sounds like there could be some serious political and legal ramifications here. Yeah, legal. I'm not so sure, Scott, although Democratic politicians, national politicians immediately seized on this Trump tweet to make the claim that the president was intimidating a possible witness against him, the FBI director, James Comey. That could carry some legal ramifications. Basically saying, watch what you say about me. Yeah. Issuing a threat, a direct threat to the FBI director. But from my sources, the FBI director is not so scared and eventually is going to come out and tell his side of the story either to Congress or to reporters or all of the

above. So there are as many political ramifications here as there are legal ones. Members of Congress from the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats and some senators as well, have already written the White House ordering the White a world of legal hurt, a world of legal trouble for failing to comply with orders from members of Congress not to destroy documents in the course of an investigation. And the White House has been very vague about whether there are, in fact, tapes or some other kind of recordings of these conversations. Because didn't Press Secretary Sean Spicer not deny the existence of these tapes when he was asked about it in a briefing? He was asked about it repeatedly, didn't answer the question, and said, I'm moving on. Right. And the Wall Street Journal reported just a couple of days ago that some associates of Donald Trump, before he was in the White House, this is, said they saw him use recording devices

to record phone calls in the past. In addition, another person said that he, and this is from the Wall Street Journal itself, that he knew that Mr. Trump had recorded a conversation with him because it was later entered into evidence in a lawsuit once again before Trump was in the White House. But, you know, this does show that he had a pattern of doing this in the past. So one other thing in all of this before we get to our many, many other questions about what's going on right now. A lot of the Comey-Trump interaction centers around this dinner that the two supposedly had. In the first few days of the Trump administration, what do we know about this dinner and what was said or not said at the dinner? Yeah, this dinner happened January 27th, shortly after the inauguration. President Trump has told

interviewers that James Comey basically invited himself to dinner at the White House as part of an effort to keep his job. Now, I'm hearing from sources close to Comey that things did not happen that way. In fact, the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, told a lot of cable TV networks over the weekend that he talked to Comey the day of the dinner. Comey was reluctant to go, thinking it would cast aspersions on his independence, the independence of the bureau, but that the White House had invited him and he didn't feel he could say no to the president. So already, there is some friction between those two accounts. SONIA DARA Once again, is this kind of a dinner unusual for an FBI director and a new president?

MEGAN LESLIE KENDRICK Meetings are not unusual. I'm not aware of former FBI Director Mueller going over to the White House willy-nilly for dinners with President Obama or President George W. Bush. But then again, former FBI Director James Comey is a much more outgoing kind of guy than Robert Mueller was

and a much more high-profile guy, in part because when you're six feet, eight inches tall, you kind of get recognized all over town. Yeah, not a problem that I have, or actually anybody in this room has, but yeah. Okay, so they're looking for a new FBI director right now. Where do things stand with that? You know, President Trump was just asked a question about this moving through the White House. He told the pool reporters there that things are moving rapidly. Earlier, he said he might have an FBI director pick by the end of the week when he leaves for his first overseas trip. If recent history is a guide, that would be very fast. But

a whole bunch of DOJ reporters spent Saturday camped out at the building, observing eight people going in and out for interviews. Some are current and former FBI officials. Some are political figures like John Cornyn, Texas Senator, Republican, former Representative Mike Rogers, another Republican who had been an FBI agent and is the choice of the FBI Agents Association. But there's a lot of questions about whether you should elevate somebody to be the FBI director who has a background in a political office, in part because these things are so sensitive. And the whole justice system is operating under what I would call a near crisis in confidence. So to inject another bit of politics

into the equation might be problematic. Now, a lot of these agency heads are often, you know, people with political backgrounds, former governors, senators, things like that. It's true that nobody's ever run the FBI who was a career politician, right? They've all come from within the ranks. Yeah. You're not going to believe this. Well, maybe you will. There have only been seven directors of the FBI in FBI history. I guess because one of them stayed around forever. Yeah. Of course, that's J. Edgar Hoover, the guy the building is named after, someone who's really looms large for positive and negative reasons in FBI history.

Yeah, a man who amassed enormous power, more power, some would argue, than the presidents he allegedly served. And, you know, somebody, James Comey, to be honest, was wary of. Comey kept in his office some documents involving the FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King Jr. as a reminder that these jobs carry a lot of authority and you should use it wisely and well. Wow. Scott Horsley, a question for you. So many Democrats are now calling, well, they've been calling for a while, but they've amped up their calls for a special prosecutor in this case that's separate from the independent congressional committee that they want put together to look into this. Special prosecutor call. What exactly is that? How does it work? What are we talking about here when we say a special prosecutor should take this investigation over?

Well, when you say special prosecutor, the name that comes to mind is Archibald Cox. That was the special prosecutor who investigated Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. He was appointed by the attorney general and later dismissed by the attorney general. A couple of attorney generals had to be fired in order to get that dismissal through. That's what's the episode that's known as the Saturday Night Massacre, to which some people have likened Jim Comey's firing. Then in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed a law that allowed for something called an independent counsel. And this person would be appointed not by the attorney general, but rather by a three-judge panel. And the idea was to have a

little bit of insulation from the executive branch of the government if you were investigating somebody maybe in the executive branch of the government. So that the president can't fire the person investigating it. That's right. And the most famous independent counsel, of course, was Kenneth Starr, whose investigation led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. That law lapsed in 1999. And since then, we have had something called special counsels who are, again, appointed by the attorney general. So all of these are different flavors of somebody to go out there and investigate somebody in the executive branch or with whom there might be a conflict of interest with having the normal investigative arm of the federal government do it. And we should say, you have Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, pouring cold water on all

these ideas and saying, look, we have the FBI is conducting its own investigation. We have the Senate Intelligence Committee conducting its investigation. There's no reason to launch a new probe. That would just be one too many cooks in the kitchen. Let's let the Intelligence Committee do its work. Right. And actually, the next question was about those House and Senate investigations. And I think we've answered a lot of it. But one thing that has been a dynamic that I don't think has been fully appreciated as they've gone forward is how much the House and Senate investigations are basically parasitical to the FBI investigation. And I don't mean that

as an insult. I mean that the FBI... No, you mean parasitic in the best possible way. They're dependent on the FBI to do a lot of legwork. Right, because the FBI is out there kind of aggressively doing the investigating, and then the committees are going to the FBI, the CIA, to other agencies and looking at the raw intelligence they've scooped together. Now, that has been the case so far. Last week, the Senate committee kind of kicked things up to a different gear by issuing its first subpoena in years to Michael Flynn, former national security advisor, subject of many a podcast in your podcast feed, asking for documents related to the investigation.

So that was a sign they are kind of being more aggressive themselves, but they just don't simply have the manpower or the investigators to do what the FBI is already doing. Yeah. And that's why a lot of these people are meeting behind closed doors, these people in the Senate, with current law enforcement officials to engage in what they call deconfliction. That's a really boring way of saying, listen, we don't want to get under your feet. We don't want to impact any kind of possible criminal investigation going on. So you tell us the lanes and the lines and you tell us how many bodies you can help and what kind of information you can pass to us in the Senate. So we have one more specific question that we have. Celia, a Canadian in America. Interesting title there, Celia. The Canadians among us. Wrote to say.

So this is from Celia. I've been really confused by the coverage of the Comey firing. Isn't it possible to think that James Comey acted poorly and also think that firing him at this time was odd? A lot of coverage makes these two ideas sound diametrically opposed. I guess that kind of gets really to the heart of this, doesn't it? Yeah, not opposed at all. You know, in fact, a lot of people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere read that three-page memo last week from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which excoriated James Comey for his conduct in the Clinton email investigation and came away thinking, huh, James Comey did

violate a lot of longstanding norms and policies in the Justice Department and the FBI about not beating up people you decide not to charge, not reopening an investigation so close to an election, not putting your thumb on the scale before people go to the polls to vote. But the question was, why did you fire him last week instead of doing it in January or instead of waiting until after the Justice Department inspector general, which is investigating all these things, comes out with its own findings? Which would be in some ways a more reasonable and appropriate time to get rid of the FBI director if you wanted to do that. And I think the most shocking thing to me politically to happen in all of this was all of the indications that the Trump White House was genuinely shocked at the Democratic reaction because they thought that the Democrats had

criticized Comey so much they would either not have a problem with this move or they wouldn't have much like to stand on. But very quickly, starting with Chuck Schumer holding an Insta press conference, they said this is not about the Hillary Clinton investigation. This is all about the current investigation. Yeah. Bringing us back to the start of this podcast, which is, you know, you can rely on Rod Rosenstein for three days. But when the president himself says, no, I fired him because of Russia, you got problems. You got problems. Well, since we've come full circle, maybe it's time to put a dot on that and say thank you, Carrie, as always. Maybe one day you'll stay for the full podcast.

Today is not that day. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. All right. As Carrie picks up all of her notes and leaves the studio, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, a few more questions. If you can believe them, there are questions that are not about James Comey. We will talk about that.

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of the show. We cannot answer every note that comes there, but we do read every single one of them. And it helps us to know what you're curious about. And sometimes they're also just funny to read. And we appreciate your funny notes. Before we get back to some questions, Scott, real quick, the White House is getting a notable visitor tomorrow, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is complicated, to put it mildly. It is complicated, and it's just gotten more so with Trump's order to arm Kurdish militias fighting in Syria. The U.S. likes those Kurdish militias. They think they're good fighters and

can be very helpful in the battle against ISIS in its de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. Erdogan has a very different view of those Kurdish militias. He's worried about Kurdish separatists in Turkey. So he's unhappy with that. There's also friction over the Turkish mullah who lives in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan sees as an instigator of that failed coup attempt last summer. And Turkey has been petitioning the United States to send Fethullah Gulen back to Turkey. So that's another potential friction point. That's right. And he probably wants to stay in the Poconos rather than going back to Turkey to face whatever music Erdogan might have for him there. And then a potential source of friction, although not much friction

with this particular president, is that referendum that Erdogan instigated that vastly expanded his powers as president of Turkey. I think a lot of foreign policy professionals in the U.S. were a little bit alarmed at that, saw it as kind of an authoritarian move and a step away from democracy. Trump, however, seemed fine with it and called Erdogan to congratulate him after that referendum passed. And Trump has proven pretty fine with associating himself with strongmen, I suppose is the best catch-all word for it. You know, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, El-Sisi of Egypt. He has a pattern of praising these guys in some small or large way. So that's something we will keep an eye on. All right. So more questions in the mailbag. This is from Patrick in New York.

Hi, I have a question. All right, then let's hear it. We keep hearing about Republicans at their town halls where they're attacked by angry constituents. Do Democrats also hold town halls? Are they love fests? Are they just so uneventful that no media show up? Thanks, Patrick.

So you're right. You do have Republicans getting a lot of some super angry town halls, I believe. Scott Detrow, you experienced one last week. Yes, a five hour long super angry town hall. Right. And so, you know, what we see right now is sort of the mirror image of what we saw in 2009, right down to the subject matter that is coming up in a lot of these, which is, of course, health care. This time it's the reverse. It's like bizarro world. This time it's whether to repeal Obamacare as opposed to pass it. Now, Democrats haven't seen this level of anger, but a few have had some pushback. However, not from the right. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, this is not

quite recently. This is back in February. But she notably had this town hall where people from the group Indivisible, which is a progressive group that is anti-Trump, showed up and kind of castigated her for not being leftist enough. You have had some Democrats see some pushback in one form or another for what some constituents believe is not being oppositional enough to the Trump agenda. The point here is in 2009, 2010, a lot of the energy was on the Tea Party side and the Democrats were getting the brunt of it. And in 2017, a lot of the energy is on the left and Republicans are getting the brunt of it. Democrats are also getting some pushback from folks on the left who don't think they're left enough. So there you go. Democrats also holding town halls. Next question is from Melissa in Wisconsin. She writes, greetings to my favorite podcast people. Thank you. My question is about the travel ban that the president has been trying to get approved. As I understand it, part of the

reason for the ban is to halt people from certain countries from entering into the U.S. so that we can get a better plan in place to properly vet them. Since this travel ban has not yet been successful, what, if anything, has been going on behind the scenes to change our current vetting system? Thanks, Melissa. A timely question today. It's very timely. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is holding, held a hearing earlier today on Trump's travel ban 2.0. And Melissa is absolutely right. That was supposed to be a 90-day freeze on travel from six majority Muslim countries. And the federal government was going to use that 90-day period to improve the vetting of visitors

from those countries. Well, it's been 60 of those 90 days have passed. What have they done? The answer is not much. And that's because the Hawaiian judge who put a freeze on travel ban 2.0, his order was so broad that the government says even the vetting portion, even the part of the order that dealt with vetting, has also been put on hold. So they say we took that order seriously and we put our pencils down and haven't done anything. Now, there's another piece of the order that has not been stayed by the courts. And that applies to not just travelers from these six countries, but international travels from all over the world. And the federal government is reviewing its policies for how to screen those visitors. They've looked at things like maybe getting passwords so you can check out

the visitors' social media postings, maybe quizzing them about their ideology. Those have been controversial, and there's been some pushback from the travel industry who says this might kind of pull up the welcome mat from visitors. But that vetting review has gone forward, and the Department of Homeland Security is supposed to deliver a report to the president this week about that process. Do we have any sense, and I guess the answer is probably no, what sort of timeline would be reasonable to expect this to work its way up to the Supreme Court? I mean, it's a high-profile national issue that directly is pitting the president against federal judges. I have to assume it's something that will interest the court.

Yeah. I mean, we have the Ninth Circuit held a hearing today. And when the first travel ban went before the Ninth Circuit, they came back with their ruling upholding the stay pretty quickly. Last week, we had the Fourth Circuit here on the East Coast reviewing the same travel ban. If those two circuits came to conflicting conclusions, then you'd really have the Supreme Court would almost certainly have to get involved. As it stands, if circuits came to conflicting conclusions, then you'd really have the Supreme Court would almost certainly have to get involved. As it stands, if they came to the same conclusion and say left the travel ban on hold, then the Trump administration could appeal to the Supreme Court. And in that case, maybe the high court would have a little more leeway in whether it

decided to take up the case and how quickly. Next question is from Carol in Sochi, Russia, which is great because I love few things in life more than the Winter Olympics. Carol writes, do you think in the near future that Russia and the United States will be able to soften their relationship? If it is possible, what do you think needs to happen? Well, a certain investigation would have to disappear, I imagine, right? And I think it's not a flip answer because all the stuff that President Trump talked about in terms of improving relationships with Russia is basically on hold because of the political dynamics among anything else. where the U.S., even today, with this really kind of disturbing news about crematoriums in Syria, you had a State Department official, you know, accusing Russia of tolerating, as they said, Syrian atrocities. So, I mean, like, that is yet one more, quite literally, a battleground where the U.S. and Russia kind of end up meeting.

You've also had, you know, Russia was supposed to be in charge of enforcing Syria's disposal of its chemical weapons. We now know that they didn't dispose of all of them or they reconstituted chemical weapons. And you have the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying Russia is either incompetent in policing that agreement or complicit in Syria's actions. So there's been lots of bad blood. Obviously, the United States is still unhappy and the international community in general is still unhappy with Russia's annexation of Crimea, the illegal, in the eyes of the international community, annexation of Crimea. So this is not just a personality clash between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin or before that, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. There are real strategic differences between these countries. And the most immediate thing that Russia would want in terms of a softening would be the U.S. lifting massive economic sanctions in place. And not only is that, yeah, that's not only untenable politically, but that's something that there's wide bipartisan support to keeping those in place in Congress right now.

So, Carol, it seems like it's not going to happen anytime soon. Last question is about health care. It's from Natalie in Fort Worth, Texas. Of course, she says, howdy, NPR politics crew. Help me understand something. We have heard a ton of talk and have seen a health care bill come forward from the Republicans in Congress. However, I'm wondering whether the Democrats have tried crafting a bill that would repair Obamacare. If Obamacare is so popular right now, wouldn't it make sense for Democrats to go public with a plan to make it better that would serve as a competitor to the Republicans' ACHA bill? Thanks for enlightening me. Love the show. Natalie Fortworth.

You know, certainly there are fixes that the Democrats could offer up, things to strengthen, for example, the individual mandate. That might mean a bigger stick, a bigger penalty for people who don't sign up for health insurance, or more carrots in the form of more generous subsidies to encourage people to sign up for health insurance. The challenge here with Obamacare and the reason we've seen rising insurance premiums and other challenges is that the pool of people signing up for individual insurance in the Obamacare exchanges has just not been big enough, young enough, healthy enough to make that pencil out the way it should. And that is a correctable problem. I mean, the reason you haven't seen those kinds of increases, for example, in workplace insurance policies, that is, policies you get from your employers, because it's a bigger pool. And so if you could get more people into the tent, it would work better. And there are certainly

sort of technical fixes around the edges that one could do to do that. The reason you haven't seen it from the Democrats, I think, is they're in the minority and they're not going to be able to pass it politically. They were not able to do it during the time when Obama was in office. They're certainly not going to get it done when Trump is in office. And their feeling is, look, if you guys Republicans are so set on undermining Obamacare, it's on you now. Right. One other big problem that Obamacare is having right now is many parts of the country where there is only one insurer left. In the great state of Iowa, for example, there was recently news that they could soon go

from three insurers down to one or even zero as of next year. And we've seen that sort of thing happen in many other parts of the nation. By some recent numbers, you have one in five people in the exchanges who are in counties where they only have one insurer. And to tack on to what Scott said, yeah, I mean, when I read this question, I first thought of that ACHA vote where you heard Democrats singing, you know, na, na, na, na. Actually, sing it. Sing it. Hey, hey, hey, goodbye. Thank you. You sang it. I feel like myself included, everybody who, like, talked about this on the news were like, they said, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, good. You went for it. You are absolutely welcome.

I think you do have to do the wave, wave your hand back and forth in slow motion. So, I mean, there was a sort of, they're willing to sit back and watch Republicans kind of really hurt themselves by passing this bill that they seem to really like. This is why there's a lot of frustration in the country, though, because you have, you do have real challenges for the Obamacare exchanges. They are probably fixable challenges. Right. But rather than come up with some fixes, you have both parties trying to score political points. Totally. Yeah. So like policy-wise, there are changes to make, but

politics dictate that nobody is willing to step up and actually make them. We are moving on to the most important question of the day. We have to ask you this. Yes. You should ask. Okay. All right. Last question this week comes from Jerry in California. He wrote in response to a discussion that was on last week's Weekly Roundup. I listened to that myself.

And I was a little baffled myself on this. So Jerry asks, Scott Detrell mentioned a restaurant referred to as Wawa. What is that? Now, I know what Wawa is, but I was kind of baffled by the... Yes. The... So much more than a restaurant. By how much people seem to latch on to gas stations out here.

Well, you're from Iowa. Scott, you're from Colorado. I grew up mostly in New Jersey, so I'll take over from here. Let's hear it. I will say, first of all, a couple of weeks ago, we were shocked to see how much of a stir the question of who invented manned flight led to in terms of tweets and emails and responses. Not as simple as you'd think, Scott. But if you think who invented the airplane is bad, try weighing in on regional convenience store rivalries. A quick recap.

I was in South Jersey last week. I mentioned on the pod how I had made multiple Wawa visits. What is a Wawa? It is a regional convenience store located along the East Coast, but I would say its spiritual center is southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. Spiritual center, yes. And spiritual center is right because this is more than just a regional convenience store. Apparently. This has a faithful following that rivals any religion. Wawa is a way of life.

You've got gas. You've got way of life. You've got gas. You've got above average coffee. You've got excellent hoagies, a wide selection of drinks. You know, they have mozzarella sticks. They've got lots of things. However, you may have a Wawa near you or you may live in a Casey's part of America or a Quick Trip or a Come and Go or a Turkey Hill or an AM PM or a Speedway or a Circle K. Danielle mentioned to us a chain I didn't know existed called? Pump and Munch.

Pump and Munch. So many choices. But if you live in Pennsylvania on the western part of the state, you have a chain called Sheetz. And Wawa and Sheetz have a beef with each other. I said in the pod that I prefer Sheetz. And I do. I lived in central Pennsylvania that I prefer sheets, and I do. I lived in central Pennsylvania for several years. And it was, yeah.

Controversy ensued. I put up a Twitter poll over the weekend. 1,200 people voted in it. And the results, do you want to guess the results before I share them? I think it's just telling that 1,200 people felt impelled to weigh in. That tells you it's more than just a regional convenience store. I feel like there's a twinge of irritation in your voice. I'm going to guess that Wawa won. You're right. Now I like Wawa. I just like Sheetz more. But Wawa won by a

62 percent to 38 percent margin. Wow. That's like Macron. Sheetz is not Marine Le Pen here. That is a big margin, though. That is, that is, and this is. Wait, I have a question for Scott Horsley here, though. Like, I have been, like I said, a little baffled to hear people around the newsroom show genuine emotion, like real full body emotion about this, like Wawa versus Sheets. So, like, Scott, out in California, are there rivalries? Like, between Casey's and Quick Trip in Iowa, you just kind of go to whatever is nearest. If there is this kind of devotion in California, I'm not aware of it. And in my home state of Colorado, I don't believe there was, nobody had that sort of loyalty to AM, PM or the 7-Eleven.

But you just get your gas and move on with your life. But having traveled in these corridors, I do know well that the... People care. The Wawa Sheets rivalry. If we missed your favorite convenience store in our honor roll

of regional convenience stores right there, please let us know. Nothing could be more important than that. We are going to wrap it right there on that topic for today.

We'll be back in your feed in a few days with our weekly roundup. In the meantime, you can keep up with all of this on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We're NPR Politics at all of those. And as always, you can support the podcast by supporting your local public radio station at the link in our episode information. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR.

I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. Danielle Kurtzleben. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.