The NPR Politics Podcast - Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearings Day One; New Book Details A Chaotic White House

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh opened on a contentious note Tuesday, with Senate Democrats raising noisy objections that much of Kavanaugh's lengthy paper trail is still off limits. Plus, White House staff concerned about President Trump's leadership have hidden documents from him to prevent him from signing off on certain actions, according to reports about an explosive new book from renowned Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, editor correspondent Ron Elving, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. 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

Hey y'all, this is Josh in Portland, Oregon, where I just started law school and can't wait for those topical classes like constitutional law and criminal law. This podcast was recorded at 5.17 p.m. on Tuesday, September 4th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show. I just want to say, Josh has a very good radio voice. Yeah, I was going to say, if the law doesn't work out, Josh. Well, hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. The first day of confirmation hearings for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, have just wrapped up. I am optimistic about the future of America.

I am optimistic about the future of our independent judiciary. I revere the Constitution. If confirmed to the Supreme Court, I will keep an open mind in every case. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And I'm Kelsey Snell, congressional reporter. So, Kelsey, you've been at the hearings today. Why don't you start for us and just explain what the mood was like? Well, it took almost no time at all from when Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley started pounding his gavel to the moment the Democrats started objecting. And that was kind of the way things went for the entire hearing.

It started this morning around 930 and it ended after five o'clock. It has been a long stretch and it's been filled with protesters. With Democrats asking for the hearing to just stop altogether. And with a lot of bickering between senators who are sitting on this committee that often gets along pretty well. So, Kessa, let me stop you right there. You were talking about the fact that Democrats, you know, they were sort of demanding that this hearing be adjourned, be postponed. Why? What's their argument there? They've got a couple of different arguments, but the big one, the one that they think is the strongest reason for this to be postponed, is that they want more documents and more time to review them.

So what they're asking for is millions, really, of pages of documents on Brett Kavanaugh's time in the White House when he was a staff secretary under the George W. Bush White House. They say that his public record and the things that he's written and his rulings just aren't enough for them to understand how he would rule and how he feels about things like the executive privilege of the president. Now, they are also upset because they got 42,000 pages just last night, and they felt like they didn't have enough time to review those before going into the hearing that will essentially be their most prominent chance to ask this nominee questions. And Kelsey, we've actually got a clip of tape of Chuck Grassley and Senator Amy Klobuchar sort of combating, talking over one another about this very issue, the document dump last night. Mr. Chairman, we received 42,000 documents that we haven't been able to review last night, and we believe this hearing should be postponed.

So, Ron, these documents are part of a larger collection of papers that crossed Brett Kavanaugh's desk when he was the White House staff secretary in the George W. Bush administration. Can you explain what are these documents and why are they so contentious? A staff secretary of the kind that Brett Kavanaugh was is a highly expert person. And these documents have to do with all the most difficult issues that a president might be wrestling with. And let's imagine that there are things that he wrote over that period of time that were speculating on various and sundry ideas he had about presidential power that at this moment in history, 15 years later, in the context of the presidency of Donald Trump, would give people some pause. Do we really want to give the president the amount of power that Brett Kavanaugh might have thought that in that

circumstance, right after 9-11, President Bush ought to have? So it sounds like you're suggesting that maybe there might be sort of new information gleaned from these documents, not the fact that Democrats who already oppose him would necessarily get something new out of these documents, right? Because we already know that they are not necessarily going to support him. So why do they need the documents? Well, they don't necessarily need the documents to persuade themselves to oppose him all the more. What they need is documents that might persuade some of the Republicans to vote against him, or at least to support a delay so that the Democrats would have a chance to push all this off past the November midterm elections. Well, I can actually think of a couple of other reasons why they would want the documents. One is that they're trying to convince some of their own

Democrats not to vote for Kavanaugh. There are a number of Democrats, particularly senators in these red states. We're talking about Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. We talk about her quite a lot lately. Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and Joe Manchin in West Virginia. These are the kind of people who have not really announced where they're going on this. And Democrats are hoping that there are pieces of information in these documents that will sway Democrats to stay together in opposing Kavanaugh. And part of that is because they think that if they can all stick together, it puts more pressure on those moderates who haven't picked a position yet. And it puts the onus on them to make the decision, not on those vulnerable

Democrats to be the make or break. They also want the documents so that they can make a bigger case to the American public, because the easiest way to turn the tide is if the American public started to get really upset about Kavanaugh. And that just hasn't happened so far. And so what I found so fascinating about the way these documents were discussed today, this document controversy, is just how fundamentally different the same storyline sounded when you were listening to a Republican senator versus a Democratic senator. So we have a clip of tape of Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, Republican, who was defending the sheer number of documents that have been produced to date. Judge Kavanaugh has produced 511,948 pages of documents. That includes more than 17,000 pages in direct response to this committee's written questionnaire, which is the most comprehensive response ever submitted to

this committee. In terms of the number of pages, it might just very well be, but that's not really the point. The point is not how many documents have been produced. It's how many documents have been specifically requested and withheld. And that's exactly the point that a number of Democratic senators made the case that some 90 percent of Brett Kavanaugh's record has been withheld. And so they're making the argument that it's not just about the sheer number of documents. It's the percentage of documents that they've been getting. In fact, 93 percent of the records from Kavanaugh's tenure in the White House as counsel and staff secretary have not been provided to the Senate. Yeah, that argument took up so much of the day today. It took up so much space in the hearing.

And it's funny because when I talk to progressive activists and I've talked to a lot of these groups, they say that they want Democrats to talk more about the issues. They want to talk about abortion rights. They want to talk about health care. They want to talk about gun control. And Democrats have been focusing on the document fight instead. Now, to be fair, Democrats have made their own argument about why they're focusing on the documents. And like we talked about, it's about what might be there that they don't know. But it doesn't really seem to be speaking to the activists who are really putting the pressure on them. So we know today was just opening statements, right? It wasn't really a chance for senators to grill Brett Kavanaugh on sort of an in-depth way on some of those issues. But it seems like we gleaned a little bit about some of the issues that are likely to come up the rest of this week. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're

going to be hearing about abortion rights, gun control, LGBT rights. But another thing I think we're going to hear a lot about is executive privilege and what the president can and can't do with his power. Now, I think the person who addressed it most directly was Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. We are here to decide whether or not to rubber stamp Donald Trump's choice of a pre-selected political ideologue nominated precisely because he believes a sitting president should be shielded from civil lawsuits, criminal investigation, and prosecution, no matter the facts. You know what? There's something we should say before we move on is that she said this with him sitting like five feet away.

Everything that was happening in that room was happening with him sitting right there. Kavanaugh was there for all of it. And he had a really remarkable poker face. I suppose you need to in these situations, but... Not everybody on camera did. There were a couple of people who were getting caught in that C-SPAN camera who did not have great poker faces.

So, Ron or Kelsey, I'd love to get a sense from you because we've talked about this. There were a couple of people who were getting caught in that C-SPAN camera who did not have great poker faces. So, Ron or Kelsey, I'd love to get a sense from you because we've talked about this. I know we talked about it in the pod last week. The idea that the Democrats really have limited options here to block Kavanaugh's nomination. Did we get a sense of what their strategy is in terms of what they're trying to spotlight moving forward or just what their game plan is? As far as I know, their game plan essentially is to try to keep their Democrats together and try to force those moderates to vote against Kavanaugh. They say that they have other things in their pocket. I've been assured that there are other things that they can do, but none of them would tell me exactly what those things are. And they're trying to raise questions. They're trying to say, why are they hiding the ball?

Why are there documents they won't let us see? What is this really all about? Why can't we have a completely transparent process? And the Republicans and Judge Kavanaugh himself were really selling an image very strongly today with the statement that was so strongly reminiscent of the same statement that Judge Kavanaugh gave the night that he acknowledged having become the president's nominee. And we should remind people, you know, he talked extensively about his mother, his mother's work as a school teacher, his eagerness to hire different diverse minority clerks. His coaching of fourth grade basketball girls.

And he named all the girls on his team and he talked about what he tried to teach them. At the end of a very long and contentious day, perhaps that was a balm for some people to hear the sort of homey side of a Supreme Court justice nominee's life. But it also seemed oddly, curiously, really out of place in the midst of the grave issues that people were trying to raise about this man. Did you get the sense at all, Kelsey, that, you know, I knew I did hear throughout the hearing, there seemed to be a frustration among some Republicans about just sort of the tone, or we should say the mood of the hearings. I think we certainly heard that from Chuck Grassley himself. I know Lindsey Graham at one point called this a hypocrisy hearing, just sort of the tone he felt being very unfair that Democrats were taking. Did you get the sense of that very much so in the room? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's a message that they've been trying to send for a couple of weeks

now, which is that why should they why should Republicans be caving to these requests from Democrats who have already made up their mind about how they're going to vote on Kavanaugh? And it's they were frustrated. They were They were frustrated with the protesters. They were frustrated with the Democrats on the committee. It was just kind of a sour mood altogether. Well, what happens tomorrow now? Tomorrow is when the real questioning starts. Now that we've got all of these opening statements out of the way, there will be a couple of rounds of questions and they will, every single person on the committee will have a chance to ask Kavanaugh questions. And that could take a really,

really long time. But it could also be the time when we see the most revealing segment of what it is each person wants to talk about. I also think that it's a really good time to watch who might be running for president in 2020. Because you have a couple of contenders on that committee who, you know, will have an opportunity to be on a national stage standing up for something that the base wants. So I've got my eye on Kamala Harris from California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Ben Sasse, who is from Nebraska, not necessarily a 2020 contender. He's a Republican who is kind of trying to remake his image within the party. So the question before us today is not what

does Brett Kavanaugh think 11 years ago on some policy matter? The question before us is whether or not he has the temperament and the character to take his policy views and his political preferences and put them in a box marked irrelevant and set it aside every morning when he puts on the black robe. He also talked about how judges shouldn't be viewed as wearing red jerseys and blue jerseys. They are not ideological. It's all about their judicial thinking and that he thinks that that idea of partisanship in the court is really poisoning the conversation about the judicial branch in general. But let us, and that also, of course, was a feature of Judge Kavanaugh's statement,

that there should not be any ideological divide represented by an aisle in the Supreme Court where some of the justices sat on one side and some on the other side. I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences. I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I'm not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge.

I am a pro-law judge. But let's be realistic. What did President Trump tell us he was looking for when he was looking for his next justice? What did he say he wanted? What kinds of decisions did he make, want made on Roe versus Wade, for example, or Obamacare? I don't think that there was any question whatsoever. It was made quite explicit, and the president seems quite pleased with his choice, as does his party. And it's impossible to imagine that Judge Kavanaugh really expects to be seen as a blank slate. All right. Well, thanks a bunch, Kelsey. We're going to say goodbye to you for now.

Bye. We'll be talking again soon, I'm sure. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll have lots to discuss about a new book about the Trump presidency. Support for NPR and the following message come from Newsy, the TV news channel with honest, in-depth context on the stories that matter. Newsy is for people who aren't satisfied with getting only the loudest part of the story. Newsy delivers more, more context, more solutions, and greater understanding of the people and events that shape our world. Learn more at

newsy.com slash watch. Sam Sanders here. You listen to my friends here on the politics podcast, which means that, you know, covering the White House has maybe never been more interesting. This week on my show, I sit down with two White House reporters to hear them reflect on all of that. Join us on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we're back and we're joined now by Mara Liason. Hey, Mara. Hi there, Asma. So we brought you in, Mara, because amidst all of the Kavanaugh news, the Washington Post today released excerpts from a new book about the Donald Trump presidency. It's called Fear by Bob Woodward, who's also an editor at the Washington Post.

And let's just say that this book does not exactly paint the most idyllic picture of the White House. No, it doesn't. But on the other hand, it paints a picture with incredible detail and riveting scenes that comports with a lot of what we call the shallow state, the top officials just below the president, not the deep state of faceless bureaucrats, conspiring to protect the president from himself or protect the country from the president by purposely not carrying out some of his orders or the things that he wants done. And it's a pretty damning portrait. I think it's safe to say there have been a lot of books already about the Trump presidency and some of them have been described as explosive and inside jobs and Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury and then, of course, Omarosa Manigault Newman's book from inside the White House. Apparently, she recorded every conversation she had when she went to work. These were a pretty big deal in the media,

but on the other hand, they're people that most Americans don't really know whether or not to believe. This is a guy with a pretty phenomenal reputation, a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, an awful lot of books that have stood the test of time and that have stood up against some pretty tough scrutiny. This is a different credibility question. Yes. And I've talked to several people who say that it's going to be harder for the White House to discredit Bob Woodward since his reporting has rarely been discredited or shown to be false. So this Bob Woodward book, like other previous books he's written, relies on unnamed sources. And the thing is, when you're relying on unnamed sources, it's really easy for people to deny that these stories, these anecdotes ever happened. Bob Woodward is saying that he has tapes of the interviews that he conducted. But as of now, we already have White House officials denying a number of the anecdotes that have been released in the excerpts so far that we've seen from The Washington Post.

But, you know, the anecdotes that we've seen reported out from The Washington Post are really rather explosive. Ron, I'm curious what you thought, the anecdotes that we've seen reported out from The Washington Post are really rather explosive. Ron, I'm curious what you thought was the most surprising. One that leaps out has to do with the president's possible on again, off again interview with Robert Mueller, who is, of course, the independent counsel who has been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is the man who is running what the president so often calls a rigged witch hunt. At one point, John Dowd was his lawyer handling negotiations with the Mueller investigation. And there was a lot of talk about the president sitting down and having an interview with Robert Mueller that would allow the president to personally put out his view of what may have gone on and put this whole thing to rest because the

president kept saying that's what he wanted to do. According to the reporting that Bob Woodward has done, John Dowd, his attorney, decided to have a mock interview in which he or one of the other lawyers actually played the role of the Mueller investigator and interviewed the president and then got a sense of how well the president might do if this were the real thing. And after that mock interview, his advice to the president was, don't ever sit down with the Mueller investigators. Otherwise, it's an orange jumpsuit for you. Was it the fear, Mara, that he would essentially possibly perjure himself? That's how poorly this

mock interview went? Yes, that was the fear. According to Woodward, Dowd met with Mueller and said to Mueller, I'm not going to let to sit there and let him look like an idiot because the transcript of the interview with him theoretically would leak out. And then he says, and guys overseas are going to say, I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for? And according to Woodward, Mueller replied, John, I understand. Wow. So I want to share an anecdote that I thought was just extremely enlightening, though also rather surprising. So Gary Cohn, who was Donald Trump's former top economic advisor, according to Woodward, stole a letter. Actually, it seems like he did this twice, stole a letter off of Donald Trump's desk that he says the president was intending to sign to

potentially withdraw the U.S. from pretty big trade deals, one including withdraw the United States from NAFTA. And so in order to circumvent this, prevent this from happening, according to Woodward's book, Gary Cohn just lifted the paper off his desk and apparently the president didn't notice it was missing. And of course, Gary Cohn is no longer with the administration, we know. One that is perhaps not surprising, yet does attract the eye, is according to Bob Woodward's book, Trump saying of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, whom he makes a whipping boy of rather regularly on his Twitter account, he says, quote, this guy's mentally retarded. He's this dumb southerner.

He couldn't even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. Dumb southerner. To me, the Sessions story of calling him not just mentally retarded, but also a dumb southerner is really crucial because Trump famously said he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters. Well, his voters live in Alabama, if they live anywhere in the country. And what I wonder is, would an anecdote like that be offensive to some of Trump's own base voters? Or are they so tribally devoted to him that it doesn't matter if he demeans Jeff Sessions,

not just for being disloyal, which he's done almost every single day, but for being a dumb Southerner. And apparently in this story, Sessions says he mocked Sessions' Southern accent while he was saying this. I agree, Mara. I thought that that was almost a more compelling, you could say, or a more sort of biting criticism. And it's certainly more likely to offend a base Trump voter than the things that Trump is quoted here saying about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which if we want to get into this, according to the reporting that Bob Woodward has done, he says, let's effing kill him. Let's go in. Let's kill the effing lot of them, referring to the Assad regime in Syria and all their

supporters. And this, we should say, was after the Syrian president was accused of using chemical weapons on his own people. And what's interesting is the reaction of Mattis. According to Woodward, Mattis told the president he would get right on it. But then he hung up the phone and he turned to a senior aide and said, we're not going to do that. We're going to be much more measured. Now, of course, they ended up developing a plan for airstrikes and Trump ordered them to happen. But it's amazing how much of what Trump says he wants done doesn't get done because his top

officials prevent him from doing it. According to Bob Woodward's book, they simply shrug in many cases and, you know, as if to say, well, there's that again. And there's a kind of implicit eye rolling. And then they just go on doing what they would otherwise have done. You know, so Bob Woodward's book is apparently drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews with people who are really intimately connected to President Trump. And one of the things that I think is so fascinating is that because these people were really in the innermost quarters of the White House, they described this dysfunction really in kind of incredible detail. But it seems that the president himself was never interviewed for the book. And it seems that at some point he presumably learned about this book and wanted to be interviewed.

And so he called Bob Woodward. And we have a little clip of that tape that was shared by The Washington Post. But you never called for me. It would have been nice, Bob, if you called for me in my office. I mean, I have a secretary. I have two, three secretaries. And so you hear the president there. He's repeating over and over again that his staff had never informed him of this interview request and that if he had, you know, he talks to Bob Woodward about the fact that they met some years ago and that apparently Bob Woodward had wanted to write a book about him some 20 years ago and he, you know, sort of respected his work. So, you know, the president basically says that, you know, he was never approached to do an interview for this book.

And Bob Woodward's response is that he actually went through six, seven people and asked to get an interview with the president, and he never got any feedback about it. And one of the people that he says he specifically asked is President Trump's advisor, Kellyanne Conway. And so as Bob Woodward is on the phone with Donald Trump, Kellyanne apparently seems to just walk into the room. And we're going to play a clip of that tape. Well, let me ask her, why don't you speak to Kellyanne?

Ask her. She never told me about it. Kellyanne. Hi, Bob. How are you? Hi. Remember two and a half months ago you came over and I laid out, I wanted to talk to the president, and you said you would get back to me? I do, and I put in the request, but, you know, it was rejected. I can only take it so far.

I guess I can bring it right to the president next time. Somebody rejected the idea of Donald Trump talking to Bob Woodward. Who was it? It's unclear. Was it Hope Hicks? Was it somebody else? That part of the phone call is a little vague. It doesn't sound like she directly asked the president if he wanted to talk to Bob Woodward, even though she does have access to him. Yes, but at another point, the president does acknowledge that he did hear something about Bob Woodward's desire to interview him from Senator Lindsey Graham, who is one of several senators that Bob Woodward says he tried to use as go-betweens. Yes, and he says that Lindsey Graham mentioned it to him. So he does acknowledge that he knew about the book, that he knew that Bob Woodward wanted to interview him, but somehow they never connected. And then, you know, apparently the president, I guess, gets wind of this book and just a couple weeks ago after the manuscript is already done,

gives Bob Woodward a call here. And it seems like they were eventually able to connect, but not in a way that was necessarily useful for the book, which at that point was already done. And it seems as though it was done more or less for the purpose of being able to have it on the record that he had not ever been interviewed and that he wished he had been interviewed and that somehow he is in some sense being victimized by this. So, you know, this audio recording is certainly one response that we have from the White House, but we now have a more official response from the White House. And Mari, can you bring us up to speed on that? The White House had several reactions. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement saying the book was, quote, nothing more than fabricated stories, many by

former disgruntled employees told to make the president look bad. Chief of Staff John Kelly said the idea I ever called the president an idiot is not true. The president's former lawyer, John Dowd, said, quote, I did not refer to the president as a liar and did not say he was likely to end up in an orange jumpsuit. That was from a scene in the book where Dowd tells the president he shouldn't testify to Bob Mueller because if he does, he would end up in an orange jumpsuit. The president himself gave an interview to The Daily Caller where he said the book was, quote, just another bad book. And he claimed that Bob Woodward, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, has, quote, a lot of credibility problems. Although on that phone call earlier with Woodward, he said, I think you've always been fair.

But what we've also learned is that there's generally a tweet for everything. And back in 2013, Donald Trump tweeted, quote, only the Obama White House can get away with attacking Bob Woodward. So we'll see if that's actually true. Well, that is a great place to end. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. The book we've been discussing will be officially released next week. And we will be back in your feeds again tomorrow afternoon to talk about the Bright Kavanaugh hearings, which are ongoing all this week. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.