The NPR Politics Podcast - Democrats And Republicans Pivot After The Mueller Report

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

A day after the release of the redacted Mueller report Democrats and Republicans are treating the findings as a "choose your own adventure" as they use different parts for political messaging. This episode: Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, political reporter Tim Mak, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe. 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 Kathy from Newark, Delaware. Today I'm celebrating my 10,000th day alive. For the past 1,000 days, the NPR Politics Podcast has helped keep me sane amidst this crazy political climate. This podcast was recorded at 1.53 p.m. on Friday, April 19th. Things definitely will have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Okay, Kathy is 10,000 days old, and I have no idea what that is in years, months. How do you figure that out? I don't know. Dominica's doing the math for us. Divided by 365 is 27.4, roughly. Well, happy 27.4th birthday. You really have to look that up ahead of time, right? You get to figure out which day it's actually going to be. I don't know how many days I am, but I'm more than 10,000, I'll tell you that.

Well, yeah, I cover Congress and not math, so. Hey, guys, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress and not math. I'm Jim Mack, political reporter. I'm Domenica Montanaro, political editor. I'm a little concerned that you say that you don't cover math because you have budgets in Congress you have to deal with. You know, I used to be a tax reporter.

Yeah, I've heard. That's big numbers, not small numbers. Yes, I don't do the little ones. All right. It's been 24 hours since the Mueller report was released. And while I'm sure people are still trying to get through all 448 pages, the folks in Washington are not stopping their judgments and their thoughts. Right, guys? Right. I mean, obviously, you've got the Mueller report that comes out. You have Attorney General

William Barr, who, you know, tried to put a shine on the report really twice now. And there are a whole lot of next steps here where Democrats are going to be pushing to not only hear from Barr, but to hear from Robert Mueller himself. Well, look, it's a deeply divided Washington. So there's a deeply divided response to the Mueller report. And there are basically two camps. It's kind of a choose your own adventure book. One camp, you have volume one of the Mueller report, which talks about collusion and how the Mueller team could not find enough evidence to view any sort of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. That's what you want to focus on if you're a Republican. On the other camp, there's volume two, which focuses on the acts that the president might have committed that relate to obstruction

of justice. And that's the volume that Democrats are really focusing in on. And each of these camps, they're just choosing various parts of the report they want to zoom in on. What did you call it earlier? You said it was volume one Republicans and volume two Democrats. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing about this, though, is once you choose your own adventure, Democrats are having to choose a little bit beyond that. Right. So Democrats, once they're going down the path of wanting to talk about volume two, they want to talk about obstruction of justice from there or not to impeach, because right now what you're seeing from them is sort of a little bit of a delay tactic in having to actually confront and deal with that issue on the table, because what they're saying is, let's not talk about that I word. Let's talk about the other I word investigations. And I'm not going to use the

other I word infrastructure, which is never going to happen. We'll get to that later. But when you look at investigations, they're saying, let's turn over every rock. Let's see what else comes up. They're saying we want the full unredacted Mueller report. We want the underlying documents that support those. We want Barr to testify, which is going to happen May 2nd. We want Mueller to testify on or before May 23rd. Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who would shepherd the impeachment process, has said. But what happens when we get beyond May 23rd? What happens when, you know, already we've seen in this Mueller report enough evidence of abuse of power, as a lot of Democrats see it, to say that there's enough to try to impeach the president?

By June, they're going to have to think about what they're going to do. Leadership, Democratic leaders are not talking about impeachment. There is a part of the party largely on the left wing who is talking about impeachment still. We had Steny Hoyer, the number two Democrat in the House, basically saying impeachment is off the table. Yeah. I mean, essentially, you have Democratic leaders realizing and looking at what the history of impeachment has been and how it actually has hurt parties that have tried to push for impeachment. We're specifically talking about Republicans in the 1990s when they tried to impeach Bill Clinton. And politically, there was a backlash

against those Republicans. And Democrats want to avoid that because they know that they won't be able to remove Trump from office because they don't have the votes in the Senate to do that. So the only way to get President Trump out of office, they see as a correct way to do it or the best, most viable way to do it is at the ballot box. But that's an argument based on the politics of the matter, not on the merits of the matter. That's right. I think that there are a lot of Democrats who think President Trump deserves to be impeached and removed from office, but don't think it's worth it politically. Now, one of the things that Democratic leaders seem to want to talk about if they don't want to talk about impeachment is Attorney General William Barr. They want to talk a lot about that

press conference that he had that you mentioned, Domenico, and they want to talk about whether or not he's putting a political spin on the Mueller report. And I'm wondering if either of you can talk a little bit about why that might be something that they care about now and where it's coming from. The question is, is William Barr acting as the attorney general of the United States or as the personal attorney of President Donald Trump. The question that Democrats are trying to pose is whether or not Barr has the country's best interests in mind or if he's just batting for Donald Trump. I mean, they're going to point, for example, to the discrepancies between or their perceived discrepancies between Barr's letter in March and the Mueller report today.

Did he try to pre-spin the Mueller report for the Trump administration? There are certainly a lot of discrepancies between how he described the report and how Mueller's report actually read when we got the pages. Domenico, what's the point of going after Barr at this point? The Mueller report is out. They have the redacted version of it. What does it get them to be having this conversation? I think it made it much more likely that we're going to hear from Robert Mueller himself now, because if you could politicize the attorney general and he's opened himself up to that in Democrats minds that they can put him aside and say, let's just talk to the man who is in charge of this investigation, who was picked to be the special counsel who ran this entire investigation. And we have Barr saying yesterday that he doesn't mind if Mueller testifies. And that certainly sets up a testimony from a man who has been completely silent for the last two years, while the president has called the

investigation he's headed up a witch hunt. What about this idea that Democrats and or at least leadership and some campaign people say that this this whole Russia investigation, Mueller himself, none of that had any bearing on why they won the House in 2018. I mean, I've talked to several Democrats who say, you know, maybe we should move on. Maybe we should go back to health care, go back to immigration. I mean, does this make it harder for them to do that? What's key for 2020 for Democrats is maintaining and retaining those independent voters who voted with them in 2018. And the reason they voted with Democrats in 2018, one was a return to some normalcy and to have a check and balance on the White House and on congressional Republicans, but also because Democrats were pushing health care as a singular issue over and over again, talking about bread

and butter, pocketbook things that matter to actual people when they sometimes people see this Mueller investigation as something that's a Washington story. It's a Beltway story. And how does it affect my life as a regular person outside of Washington, D.C., who's just trying to get by every day? So, Tim, if you are a Republican and you are picking up a copy of this Mueller report, A Beltway Story, as titled by Domenico, and you're like, all right, my adventure is going to start with volume one. What does that get you? What is the political advantage of only talking about volume one of this report?

So volume one deals with ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and the question of conspiracy or collusion. So the ultimate conclusion by the Mueller team is that there was not enough evidence to establish collusion. And Republicans just want to zoom in on that fact and move on. You know, Tim, you and I had a long conversation yesterday about the fact that this is a really long report that is kind of hard to digest. But a lot of people feel like they knew a lot of what was in here because there was public reporting on bits and pieces of this. So do we have a sense of what the kind of collective public perception is of this report yet? Well, I think it's kind of like Mueller's word is like the word of God, right? Like a lot of this stuff we knew, we knew a lot about various ties between the Trump campaign and the

Russian government. We heard a number of stories reporting out the dysfunction in the White House and the efforts that the president made in order to disrupt investigations into his past behavior. But Mueller puts it in a big document with tons of detail, backed by the power of his vantage point from the DOJ. And it's kind of the last word on a lot of these matters. Well, one thing that neither of you guys mentioned there, and I think that it's notable, is any kind of legislating. We're talking about a pretty hostile environment in Washington. And we're talking about a hostile environment for months to come, not just a few more weeks or just a few more days. This is not going to set up a situation where Washington calms down and backs away from their corners. If we're already in a presidential

campaign mindset, if we're, if as Steny Hoyer, who's a Democratic leader in the House, said that we're, hey, we're 18 months from the next presidential election. If we're already in that mindset, it doesn't it means that there's not going to be much legislation or actual substantive work done in the House or Senate between now and then. I don't think it means that nothing could happen, though. I think that these committees are set up and structured and controlled in a way in which they're actually able to do two things at once. The committees don't need to do two things at once. They do one thing. And House leadership, if Nancy Pelosi wanted to get together with Mitch McConnell and say, let's do something on drug pricing, they could create some kind of gang of whatever number and come up with some kind of low hanging fruit thing and then go to the White House and say, let's do it.

Though I will, as the voice of budget point out, that they did do that. Democrats and Republicans have done that several times in the past. And the president has stepped in and has been angry about some aspect of it and has blown up some attempt to legislate that Congress has been trying to do. So he is going to continue to be the wild card in this. So I think what we're talking about is that the environment is not rich to create legislation, right? And that's part of the problem. And that's why when Tim says, you know, look at the politics of this, look at the electoral landscape of this. That's because you essentially have no room to legislate because there aren't good faith actors trying to get

something done. And to that, we will add the ticking time bomb of a spending bill and the potential for another government shutdown at the end of September. Democrats and Republicans in Congress say they're already working together on a deal to avoid that. Is that the next deadline? September 30th? September end of the fiscal year. These deadlines never end. And on that uplifting note, I think it's time for us to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to end the show with Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from ZipRecruiter.

Hiring used to be hard. Multiple job sites, stacks of resumes. But today, hiring can be easy and you only have to go to one place to get it done. ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over a hundred of the web's leading job boards. Then ZipRecruiter scans thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. Summer movie season is here and Pop Culture Happy Hour has you covered.

For a guide through the blockbusters you know about and the surprise bright spots you might not, we'll tell you what we are looking forward to, what we're secretly dreading, and what might sneak up on us. Listen now and subscribe. And we're back. And let's end this week like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about what we can't let go of, politics or otherwise. And this week, we are inviting in a special guest, our special Can't Let It Go correspondent, Aisha Rasko. Yes. When you're not taking care of the White House, we're talking about pop culture. Yes. And I have some specialties that everyone knows about.

And you are here for a very special report, not the Mueller report, but one that only you and I have been able to talk about in this room. And it made me sad. So I'm glad you are here that we can actually have this conversation. Exactly. So what is it? What can you not let go of? Beyonce. I cannot let her go.

Homecoming. Oh, my gosh. So it came out, the documentary and the live album. So here, you know, everybody knows I got kids and I'm tired. And I think there was another report that came out this week that kind of kept us kind of busy. This is the one that matters. Yes. And so I have only, I've been able to, I've just been watching it every night as much as I can.

I refuse to listen to the live album until I see it live. Oh, see, I went the other direction because I didn't have time to watch it. And I've been listening to it on the bus. Before we get into this too much, you have to explain to us what we're even talking about. Okay. Before we get into this too much, you have to explain to us what we're even talking about. Okay. So, Beyonce, who is an international superstar and icon, released a documentary of her live performance at Coachella a year ago. And so she released the documentary on Netflix, and she also released a live album version of that performance. You may have heard people refer to it last year as Beychella.

Beychella, and it was called Homecoming because it is a tribute to black colleges and universities and to their homecomings. And not to Kanye West, a similarly named album. Not to Kanye West, but to all of, of you know all of kind of black college life i since i haven't really seen much of it i'm just really all about the big brass band sound that she's got going it makes everything sound completely different it is amazing and what it is and you could see in the film she talks about how important it was, obviously, to pay homage to HBCUs, historically black colleges and universities.

She wears a Howard sweatshirt. I am a Howard University grad, very proud. There's been a lot of Howard in pop culture lately. A lot because, you know, we're the Mecca, but that's beside the point. But when you talk about black colleges and the black experience and the bands I always wanted to be a majorette oh really so seeing her like with the majorettes and seeing the stepping and the greek life it's amazing So she's become the queen, right? The king. King B.

Are you reframing that? No, that's a thing. She calls it king now, not queen? It's been a long time. Yes. Many albums. Okay. So she's the king now. Yeah. How did she get to royalty status? I mean, she has been in pop culture for decades. I mean, she, we all remember Destiny's Child and that she was breaking new ground even then. She was a teenager. But what qualifies her for the crown?

Did she win a lot of Grammys? Well, yes, she has. My biggest objection is that we're in America. We're a republic. We should not be crowning kings or queens. Democracy? Tim has a... Peter Beyonce.

There you go. Prime minister. Prime minister of pop culture. Let's fly now. Drop it down, drop your legs, turn around and clap. Shuffle to the left, let's fly now. Ooh, drop it down, drop it down low, low. Low, low, low to the floor. Bring it up, clap and roll. Step on them, step on them, step on them, step.

Step on them, kick on them, step on them. Tim, what about you? What can you not let go of? Well, we've spent a lot of time talking about the Mueller report, and part of that has been about the redactions, right? That 90% of the report is unredacted, but 10% is. And big swaths of the report involve redactions. It's a serious issue, but some people decided to have some fun with it. Doing Taylor Swift outfits that look like various pages in the Mueller report based on redaction.

I mean, is it just a black and white striped dress? Well, no, there are many different variations on this theme. So there's one from early on in the Mueller report. It's a number of black and white stripes harmed to ongoing matter. That's why there was this redaction. Seven different stripes of harm to ongoing matter. That's why there was Seven different stripes of harm to ongoing matter. And then you compare that

to the Taylor Swift version, which is her in a black and white striped dress. Nice. Who wore it better, Mueller Report or Taylor Swift? I think you've got to go with Taylor Swift.

There's one, page 33 of the Mueller Report, volume one, interactions and contacts with the Trump Campaign. Oh, I see some color blocking here. You see a block of black text at the top. I'm going to guess.

So I'm guessing it's a dress, and it's like a black bandeau top, maybe? It is a dress with a black top and a white kind of tutu skirt. What was the word you just used? Bandeau. What's a bandeau? It's where it basically sits.

I had to get help from our colleague Danielle to describe these products. And then here's my last example. Page 30, it's just all blacked out. Page 30 of the Mall Report is fully blacked out. And here we are with Taylor Swift in a

black bomber jacket, a black skirt, and a black umbrella. That is my jam. As a person who wears all black all the time, that's my jam. A lot of Taylor Swift here. I just want to give a shout out to Danny Nett on our visuals team because not only did he do this great graphic online for us

showing all of the Mueller report, all 448 pages of it, and where the spots were that were redacted. And by the way, not that much redacted, considering other government documents we've seen. There's not as much blacked out as you might expect. It's about 10%. Yeah, that's not a whole lot when it comes to sensitive government reports. And he also did a version of this right on his Twitter feed. So, you know, thank you, Danny. The guy thinks visually. can't let go of is Michelle Obama and some comments that she made this week where she was in London and she was on stage talking with Stephen Colbert promoting her book and her book Becoming, which has been a top selling book. And she tried a metaphor that I think was a little strained when she talks about President Trump and what what America is dealing with right now. She said that we've become a broken family.

We're a teenager. We're a little unsettled, and having good parents is tough. Sometimes you spend weekends with divorced dad. That feels like fun, but then you get sick. That's what America is going through. We're kind of living with divorced dad right now. Oh, no. It's a tortured metaphor. That one is rough.

Yeah. Yeah. And then Stephen Colbert kind of played into it a little, pretended like Trump was giving the kids the keys to a car, pointing them in the direction of a liquor cabinet, you know, kind of playing it up. And it sort of reminded me of the sort of old stereotype of divorced dads. And you think back to like the 1990s and, you know, Robin Williams on Mrs. Doubtfire, for example. He's standing on the table, you know, doing the cabbage patch, you know, party going on. And, you know, his wife comes home and she unplugs the party and the speakers and he's like, party over. What the hell is going on around here? But I think that that stereotype is a stereotype

and it's something that's changed quite a bit, I would say, over the last 20 years that I think Michelle Obama probably, if she were to redo it, might rethink those remarks. Yeah, and I think, too, like when you look at, I mean, obviously, she's been with Obama or Barack Obama for a very long time. So she's kind of not speaking from experience. But obviously, now dads play such a larger role. They're expected to play such a larger role in this idea that dads are kind of just the, you know, kind of like the parent on the side is not really relevant.

And it's a good time for a shout out to all the really good dads on the NPR politics team, because I know there are many of them. All right. And mine is going to be a quiz. You know, we're here. We're ending the show on a quiz. All right. So for a little bit of context, this is a quiz about Senator John Neely Kennedy. He is the junior senator from Louisiana. He is a Republican. And the folks at NOLA.com, the New Orleans paper, put together a quiz to figure out whether or not these were quotes from

John Kennedy or Foghorn Leghorn. I can't believe they did this. That's going to be hard. For some context, Foghorn Leghorn starred in 29 cartoons from 1946 to 1964, according to NOLA.com. He's a big chicken.

He is a big chicken. I'm a chicken. Rooster, ladies. John Kennedy is a senator. So, to give you a little bit of... Yeah, and a former Rhodes Scholar. Yes. Is he really? Foghorn Leghorn, he's supposed to be kind of like KFC, like Colonel, right? Yes. And as as Nola says,

Senator Kennedy and Mr. Leghorn both prefer to express themselves through colorful colloquialisms and down home saying so. He is a great quote. Oh, he is the best quote in in all of the United States Senate. And I think we've got a little bit of a taste of what he sounds like. So you guys can be prepared for the quiz. I guess what I want is a cross between Socrates and Dirty Harry. Our country was founded by geniuses, but it was it's being run by idiots. You realize to many Americans right now that looks like we're giving Lindsay Lohan the keys to the minibar. All right. And Falkland-Lykhorn is famous for saying, I say, I say. If I'm a rooster, I say, if I'm a rooster, I hope to be struck by... Well, let's put it another way. Way, that is.

So, we have a quiz. Here we go. First one. Who said it? John Kennedy or Foghorn Leghorn? He's a hard dog to keep on the porch. He's not a porch dog. He's a running dog.

He likes to do things his way. John Kennedy or Foghorn Leghorn? John Kennedy. John Kennedy. Yeah, that's what I thought. About President Trump. Yeah, yeah. not a porch dog he's a running dog he liked to do things his way john kennedy or foghorn like horn john kennedy john kennedy about president trump yeah yeah all right he's about as sharp as a bowling ball that's that's foghorn yeah got it all right he's more mixed up than a feather in a whirlwind what does that even mean that's that's got it yeah no it's no it's our first fail. Yeah. So we all, all of the Congress team took this quiz. I won with a 50%. Wow. So if you want to test your knowledge of a cartoon chicken or a United States senator, it is available to you at NOLA.com.

Have you talked to his office about what they thought about this? They haven't responded. And people have been tweeting at them asking if they can win. And we have seen no response from them. I'm certain behind the scenes they are taking this test. He has a very good sense of humor and he is also usually quite comfortable with people poking fun at the way he talks and the way that he uses these phrases, these kind of catchphrases and repeats them over and over and over again. All right. That's a wrap for today. We'll be back as soon as there's political news you need to know about. To keep up with up to the minute news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Just search NPR politics. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House and sometimes Beyonce. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.