The NPR Politics Podcast - Russia/Gorsuch Hearings

Episode Date: March 20, 2017

Day one of the Senate Confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, while the House Intelligence Committee holds a hearing on Russian meddling in the 2016 election. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Scott Detrow, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. 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

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Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here on a day that requires a split screen, two major hearings on Capitol Hill. On one side of the Capitol, Senate confirmation hearings began for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. And on the other side, the House Intelligence Committee also held a much-anticipated hearing on Russian meddling into the 2016 election. So, lots to discuss. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elding, editor-correspondent. All right, guys. I feel like today is one of the days that our timestamp is made for. Yes. First day of spring. That too, Ron. And on Capitol Hill, it's busting out all over. All kinds of activity blossoming everywhere you look.

But didn't our cherry blossoms get killed? Half of them. Okay. All right. So let's just jump right in. Today, the House Intelligence Committee held its first public hearing as part of its investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. FBI Director James Comey and the Director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Mike Rogers, both testified. And let's just go straight to the news. Comey made official something that has maybe been assumed but not confirmed until today.

As you know, our practice is not to confirm the existence of ongoing investigations, especially those investigations that involve classified matters. But in unusual circumstances where it is in the public interest, it may be appropriate to do so, as Justice Department policies recognize. This is one of those circumstances. I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was

any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts. As with any counterintelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed. And later in the hearing, he said that the investigation started in late July of 2016. That would be before the election and around the time of the first DNC hacks being leaked out, and also around the time that candidate Trump at a press conference famously invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and release them. When I saw Comey say this, I was like,

whoa, he went there. He did this thing that, I don't know that we came into this hearing thinking he would say. It's like there's so much news going on across the board, and this story has been going on so long with so many updates that are major news stories, but just keep building on top of each other. It's almost like you had to take a moment and say, oh, my gosh, the FBI director just said that there is an investigation into the campaign of the person who became president of the United States for possibly, again, no idea where the investigation is going to go, for possibly colluding with another country to influence the race. This seems like a monumental news development

to me. It is indeed. And it is going to be inducing of a certain amount of indigestion for the White House and already has been, and also for a number of other Republicans. But we should also say that the people who testified today, and that's FBI Director James Comey and also Mike Rogers of the NSA, made it clear that they had not seen any evidence that there was any interference on Election Day. As you just said, Tam, this was back in the months well before the election, and they ruled out any interference of that kind, which, of course, the White House immediately pounced on and said, see, no interference. They said so.

And we're going to sort of talk through this because this was a very long hearing. It was how many hours was it, Scott? How many hours were you strapped, strapped, trapped in a studio? I think it was about a five and a half hour hearing altogether. Which is a very long hearing. Especially when the big chunk of big headline news came in the first 20 minutes or so. But then there were little drips of other news throughout. And because this was such a big, long hearing, we're going to go through it in sort of three categories. There were sort of three lines of questioning, three lines of discussion. Russian meddling in the election. One is leaks related to investigations into that meddling and things surrounding it. And then also the third would be President Trump's unsubstantiated claim

on Twitter two weeks ago that President Obama tapped his phone. So let's start with this wire tapping claim. We can get it out of the way. Yeah, they just really didn't spend much time on this at all. This has been pretty much roundly denied by everyone who was involved in the national security apparatus at the time. And it's been pretty much denied by everybody who's looked into it since. And there just really doesn't seem to be a basis for it other than in some highly speculative talk that went on on talk radio and in some television broadcasts discussing the original speculation. Yeah, just a quick rundown of relevant ranking officials who have said that there's no evidence for what Donald Trump is talking about. House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Richard Byrne, Mark Warner, the top Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, which is the committee that had the big hearing today. And also today, FBI Director James Comey.

Director Comey was the president's statement that Obama had his wires tapped in Trump Tower a true statement. With respect to the president's tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets. And we have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets. Now that sounds like a closed door to me. It sounds as though they're done. The Department of Justice is done. The FBI is done. Everyone seems to be finished with that, except the White House. Sean Spicer said not long

after that, as far as they were concerned, that just meant there hadn't been any evidence found so far. So is the president prepared to withdraw that accusation, apologize to the president? We started a hearing. It's still ongoing. And then as Chairman Nunes mentioned, this is one in a series of hearings that will be happening. And it seems to me that this is one of those hypothetical situations that you heard a lot about during the campaign, about President Trump's Twitter habits

and his overall personality of being someone who counterpunches, being someone who never admits a mistake, never backs down, never says he's sorry and saying, well, what would happen if you were in the White House? And he kept those habits. He has kept those habits. He makes a claim on Twitter. I almost said twame on quitter. He makes a claim on Twitter, doesn't back down for it. And it has ballooned over the last few weeks into literally an international incident. He has alienated and aggrieved British intelligence, and he also made one of these claims while standing next to one of America's top allies in the world,

the Chancellor of Germany. And made a joke about her being wiretapped, though the government has never confirmed that that happened, though they did apologize and say it won't continue to happen. Yes. Okay, so I think that's it, right? Well, we'll see. I mean, we're taping this before President Trump talks tonight in Kentucky. Yes. So President Trump tonight is holding a rally in Kentucky. In theory, the purpose of this rally is to rally support for the health care bill that Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, it turns out,

opposes strenuously. But tune in, everybody, because odds are in favor of the president having a hard time resisting at least saying something about what transpired today. What are those many moments where when you're listening to the podcast, you'll know more than we know as we're talking right now? OK, let's move on to sort of the next big bucket of inquiry. And that's the thing that this is really about, which is Russian interference, Russian meddling in the presidential election. With the original focus of this investigation.

The campaign process, the campaign process in general, not election day, which is a bit of a red herring. Some people have said, hey, maybe there was some kind of hanky-panky going on on November 8th and in the counting of the ballots in the days after. There was some recounting in some states, but that's not what this is about. This is not the election. This is about the campaign and months, months, months back. There was never any evidence of that. I think everyone, every state official and a lot of federal officials made that very clear. But it was interesting to me last week when the Netherlands held its parliamentary elections that there is enough of a fear going around in terms of just like the world political climate right now that the Netherlands actually went to paper ballots just to make sure because they were really worried that someone could mess with their vote totals. And pretty early on in today's hearing, the chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes,

the Republican congressman from California, asked Admiral Rogers about this very question of sort of vote tampering. Do you have any evidence that Russia's cyber actors changed vote tallies in the state of Michigan? No, I do not. But I would highlight we're a foreign intelligence organization, not a domestic intelligence organization. So it would be fair to say we are probably not the best organization to provide a more complete answer. How about the state of Pennsylvania? No, sir. The state of Wisconsin? No, sir. State of Florida? No, sir. State of North Carolina? No, sir. The state of Ohio? No, sir. So you have no intelligence that suggests or evidence that suggests any votes were changed?

I have nothing generated by the National Security Agency, sir. Director Comey, do you have any evidence at the FBI that any votes were changed in the states that I mentioned to Admiral Rogers? No. Yeah, this is one of several things that the White House chose to highlight from President Trump's official White House Twitter account, at POTUS, which is usually a much different tone and flavor than the at real Donald Trump we've all come to know and check every morning at 6 a.m., saying the NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process. And that's something that actually got a real time checked later in the day after they came back from a break. Somebody asked Rogers and Comey about that tweet and characterization. Yeah, that was Congressman Himes from Connecticut.

I asked you whether the intelligence community had undertaken any sort of study to determine whether Russian interference had had any influence on the electoral process? And I think you told me the answer was no. Correct. Correct. We said the U.S. intelligence community does not do analysis or reporting on the U.S. political process or U.S. public opinion. That is not our fault. So thanks to the modern technology that's in front of me right here, I've got a tweet from the president an hour ago saying the NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process. So that's not quite accurate, that tweet. I'm sorry.

I haven't been following anybody on Twitter while I've been sitting here. I can read it to you. It says the NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process. This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans, 16.1 million to be exact. Is the tweet, as I read it to you, the NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence the electoral process.

Is that accurate? Well, it's hard for me to react to that. Let me just tell you what we understand, the state of what we've said is we've offered no opinion, have no view, have no information on potential impact because it's never something that we looked at. Okay. So it's not too far of a logical leap to conclude that the assertion that you have told the Congress that there was no influence on the electoral process is not quite right. Right. It wasn't certainly wasn't our

intention to say that today because we don't have any information on that subject. That's not something that was looked at. So that was kind of a polite trying not to make a headline. No. Yeah, I think that what we're getting at here is there's there's a distinction between counting the ballots versus releasing information from John Podesta's email that made Hillary Clinton look bad? I think it's a simple distinction here. Did they mess with Election Day and what came after? Or did they mess with the campaign that went on for months before Election Day? And what we heard today from Comey and from Rogers, from the FBI and the NSA, was that they don't seem to have messed with Election Day or what came immediately after, but they do seem to have been attempting to influence the campaign,

and that they seem to have been doing it pretty clearly with an attempt to help him and hurt her. And it was notable to me that, remember all of three or four months ago, feels like nine years ago, that is an angle that President Trump really aggressively rejected and took a long time to begrudgingly come around to and accept. And there wasn't really any pushback to that to that basic premise from any of the witnesses today or most of the panel. about classified information making its way to the press, basically conceded that, yes, Russian actors were involved, did hack these emails and spread them in a goal to affect the news cycle of the election. Yeah. And Director Comey was asked pretty directly about what the Russians were trying to accomplish

by meddling in the election. And this is what he said. That they wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her, help him. I think all three we were confident in at least as early as December. And not necessarily hurt democracy by electing Donald Trump, which is what they wanted to do, but kind of create fissions and divisions and questioning of the official narrative. And what they expected, according to a lot of what's been leaked, is that Hillary Clinton would still win, but that she would be a wounded and hobbled American president.

They did not expect that Donald Trump would actually prevail. Now, as for collusion and whether there was collusion or cooperation or contact, that is something that FBI Director James Comey said they were investigating, but he did not reveal any information about the details of that investigation. At one point, Republican Congressman Peter King tried pressing Comey to outwardly say that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which is something that some former Obama administration national security officials have said in interviews. But Comey basically wouldn't go there.

Yeah, but I think that is an important point that of all the undisputed facts that we know, there has been no direct public evidence saying there was a definite collusion or collaboration going on. We now know that there's investigation looking into it. And there are several breadcrumbs, if you will, that are out there, like Roger Stone, close ally of Donald Trump, making several tweets, basically predicting that WikiLeaks was going to have a release, predicting that WikiLeaks was going to focus on John Podesta specifically. But in terms of that direct smoking gun, to use

yet another cliche that people are looking for, that has not publicly emerged. Here's King questioning Comey. I know that, I guess it was just two weeks ago, the director Clapper. He was the former director of national intelligence under the Obama administration. Said that as far as he knows, all the evidence he's seen, there's no evidence of any collusion at all between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Now, obviously, a detailed, exhaustive report was put out talking about Russian influence and the Russians. Now obviously a detailed exhaustive report was put out talking about Russian influence in the campaign. All of the intelligence apparatus had input into that.

Do either you or Admiral Rogers have any reason to disagree with the conclusion of General Clapper that there's no evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign? Mr. King, it's not something I can comment on. Likewise, I'm not going to comment on an ongoing investigation's conclusions. The flip side to what I was just saying on the smoking gun front is something that a lot of people who worked for Hillary Clinton's campaign or supported Hillary Clinton have been saying and said yet again today that you still had Donald Trump standing in front of a microphone at one point last summer saying, hey, Russia, why don't you go hack Hillary Clinton's emails and release them? So if you're looking for back channel communication, there was a lot of back and forth that was happening out in

the open. Well, and the other thing that the Clinton people have been pointing out today and former Clinton people is Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation and Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway and everyone in his orbit and in his campaign said, oh, my gosh, how could that person be president? Lock her up because she was under investigation. And today we learned that that investigation into Russian actions and possible collaboration with the Trump campaign began in late July, which means that had been going on for several months at the time when Comey sent that letter about the Clinton investigation. And while we're talking

about Clinton, Chairman Nunes, he seemed like he was working as hard as he possibly could to get the Trump viewpoint out there. And at one point, he asked Comey to basically investigate Clinton. If this committee or anyone else for that matter someone from the public comes with information to you about the Hillary Clinton campaign or their associates or someone from the Clinton Foundation will you add that to your investigation? They have ties to Russian intelligence services, Russian agents. Would that be something of interest to you?

People bring us information about what they think is improper and lawful activity of any kind. We will evaluate it. Which is interesting because real Donald Trump tweeted that very concept earlier in the morning. You know, Chairman Nunes has rather divided loyalties and responsibilities here. He is the chairman of this committee. The committee is trying to look into this rather serious matter. He's being pushed very hard by Adam Schiff, who's the ranking member that is the most senior Democrat on the committee. And he was a surrogate for Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Adam Schiff was.

And he has been pushing Devin Nunes quite hard to be more aggressive, to be more investigative, to take more seriously his role as the chairman, where at the same time, Devin Nunes obviously is a Republican. He is an ambitious one, and he needs to stay on the right side of his own leadership in Congress and certainly of his president. And he was on the Trump transition team. that same partisanship continue as they went down the road by seniority with all the Republicans and then all the Democrats having their own moments of lines of questioning, which were remarkably predictable. The Democrats darkening the cloud over this whole Russian question, whether there was collusion, whether there was interference. And the Republicans, by contrast, focusing totally on the leaks with one or two exceptions, their questions were that the Democrats and the Republicans seem to put themselves into during this hearing.

And Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, who is a Republican congresswoman from Florida, she really tried to dig into the Russian meddling and why they would try to do this and whether they would try to do it again. Do you expect their interference to be amplified in future U.S. elections? Do you see any evidence of that in European elections? Or do you think that this public acknowledgement would tamper down their volatility? I'll let Mike Rogers, maybe I'll just say as an initial matter, they'll be back. This is coming. They'll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018.

And one of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful because they introduced chaos and division and discord and so doubt about the nature of this amazing country of ours and our democratic process. It's possible they're misreading that as it worked. And so we'll come back and hit them again in 2020. I don't know, but we have to assume they're coming back. I fully expect them to continue this. And that's Rogers. This level of activity, because our sense is that they have come to the conclusion that it generated a positive outcome for them,

and the sense that calling into question democratic process. We've seen this this year with big elections coming up in France, in Germany, elections that just happened in Netherlands. A lot of these same dynamics are going on of the original fake news being disseminated online, financial backings of certain candidates and just general aggressive meddling in those European elections. We are going to have more elections in this country. The FBI director just said that Russia was brazen about meddling or interfering in this election. And at least part of the goal of this

committee and any investigation that the FBI is conducting is to figure out how we don't let this happen again. And Congresswoman Ross Laitinen was also quite explicit about pursuing this further and asking how this particular interference went further than any previous Russian efforts. If what you're saying is that both parties acknowledge a fact as a definite future threat, but are blocked from getting to a solution on that because of partisanship, that this can join a long list of other things ranging from infrastructure to climate change to basically anything else you can think of at the moment. And on that, let's turn to leaks. Republicans in the committee were very focused on concerns about information about these investigations, about various things leaking out in the press.

I thought it was really telling and said almost everything you needed to know that after James Comey made that admission, made that public statement about an investigation, which was big news. Devin Nunes' first few questions to Comey were not about the investigation, were not about Russia, but several pointed questions about classified information and leaks and problems associated with that and laws that may be broken by leaking classified information. You know, in the same way that every Democrat on this committee feels the need to produce a soundbite that can play back in their district and show people how they're resisting the Trump administration, every Republican, with the possible exception of Ross Littman,

seem to be more concerned about the leaks, and they too want to generate soundbites that will be heard in different media back in their very different districts, and which will say, our guy whom we sent to the House is defending Donald Trump and going after the real problem that Donald Trump said was the real problem. And that's the fact that somebody in the government is leaking this information about what the Russians were up to. Yeah. Trey Gowdy, who is a congressman from South Carolina, was really focused on the leaking. And even more than that, he was asking Comey about prosecuting reporters

who published the leaks. I don't think a reporter has been prosecuted, certainly in my lifetime, though. Well, there have been a lot of statutes at bar in this investigation for which no one's ever been prosecuted or convicted. And that does not keep people from discussing those statutes, namely the Logan Act. In theory, how would reporters know a U.S. citizen made a telephone call to an agent of foreign power? How would they know legally? Yes. If it was declassified and then discussed in a judicial proceeding or a congressional hearing, something like that? And assume none of those facts are at play. How would they know? Someone told them who shouldn't have told them.

I mean, there have been high profile legal cases where reporters briefly went to jail, but that wasn't over their actual reporting. That was generally over the fact that judges were trying to compel them to say who their sources were in sensitive cases. And they said, I'm not going to tell you. And it was a contempt of court situation for not sharing a source, not straight up being prosecuted for writing a story. And Comey did again and again throughout this hearing, make it clear that he was concerned about the leaks, just as concerned about the leaks as the Congress people who kept asking him about the leaks. And I think at one point he said that there actually has been a big surge in leaks

in the last six weeks or so compared to typically. And there was a strong implication from Gowdy's questioning and others questioning that they thought those leaks were coming from people who were in possession of information in the later weeks and months of the Obama administration because of their position in that administration, and that on their way out the door, they had shared a lot of that information improperly with reporters. And a number of the stories that have been written were being castigated by the Republicans saying that they were inaccurate, that they were false,

that there was no truth in them. And nonetheless, those stories do seem to have pointed in the direction of things that we heard today from the security apparatus, from Jim Comey, from Mike Rogers. And Comey repeatedly kept saying, I'm not going to confirm that that meeting that's been reported on happened. I'm not going to confirm that this thing that's been reported on happened. Yeah, it sounded like Comey don't play that. He kept saying it over and over until I thought someone was going to say oh okay so call me don't play that well you did you would have said it i'm afraid i couldn't have resisted that's why i'm not on that would have been your soundbite to your constituents congressman elving dropping

the living color references but but what comey was saying is that if he were to bat down every story or try to bat down stories that were false, and he said lots of stories do contain false information, that if he batted down one, then people would assume that the next one was true. And so they just can't be in the business of saying whether stories with unnamed sources are true or false. But that is highly frustrating, you know, say, to the Trump administration and its allies. As it was very frustrating to the Clinton campaign last year when the shoe was on the other foot and the other campaign was on the griddle. OK, we need to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit about the start of the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

That other thing that was happening. This podcast and the following message are made possible by LearnVest, an online financial advice company that believes you should focus the same attention you give to the health of your mind and body to your finances. LearnVest believes in wellness in all forms, and they can help you sleep better at night knowing your financial future is secure. LearnVest, it's wellness for your wallet.

Get a $50 credit when you sign up today or schedule a call and see how they can help you at learnvest.com slash NPR politics. Okay, we're back. And a quick programming note. Tuesday is a big day of testimony in the hearing about Supreme Court nominee Judge Gorsuch. We're going to talk about it a tiny bit now, but just consider that an appetizer

for what's coming tomorrow, which is an episode with Nina Totenberg, our Supreme Court correspondent extraordinaire. The world's Supreme Court correspondent, really. The queen of Supreme Court correspondents. Just to be clear. Yes. Very clear. We will be taping that Tuesday night.

So check your feed Wednesday morning for that. But today was the start, the kickoff, the early moments of the hearing for Neil Gorsuch. And it started with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee delivering opening statements. I think it is such like a symbol of the Senate that Gorsuch had to wait four hours to give his opening statement because that's how long it took for all the senators to talk at him as opposed to listen to him. It felt right. And we here at the NPR Politics Podcast are only going to make you wait about two minutes before hearing Judge Gorsuch's opening statement, because first we are going to hear from chairman of the committee, Republican Chuck Grassley from Iowa, who began by praising Gorsuch's qualifications and legal philosophy. His graphs on the separation of powers, including judicial independence,

enlivens his body of work. And then there was Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is the Democrat from California, the ranking member of the committee. And she started her opening statement off by talking about not Judge Gorsuch, but Judge Merrick Garland, who was former President Obama's nominee who never even got a hearing. We're here today under very unusual circumstances. It was almost a year ago today that President Obama nominated Chief Judge Merrick Garland for this seat. Unfortunately, due to unprecedented treatment, Judge Garland was denied a hearing, and this vacancy has been in place for well over a year. I just want to say I am deeply disappointed that it's under these circumstances that we begin our hearings.

A lot of Democrats are clearly very aggrieved by the fact that Garland never even got a vote. But the only logical way to deal with that would be to never vote for a nominee throughout the entirety of a Trump presidency. And it does not seem like many, if any of them, are prepared to do that. So do Democrats just have to get over it? I mean, what's the right response for Democrats who truly feel robbed of a seat? Ultimately, yes, they do have to get over it because they don't have the votes. But I suppose they could hope that by some miracle and because of the number of seats that are on the ballot in 2018, they're in a terribly disadvantageous situation until 2020. So they have no realistic hope of denying any of Trump's nominees with respect to the Supreme Court in the next four years.

So, yes, in the end, they have to get over it. But in the meantime, it's important for them, again, speaking to their constituencies, speaking to the people who have supported them, speaking to the people who are desperately unhappy about the Gorsuch nomination to do everything they can to bring up the one thing they have, which is the martyrdom of poor Merrick Garland. All right. So Judge Gorsuch is President Trump's first choice, but he was not the first person nominated for this position. Does that hang over him? Does that affect if he is confirmed his legacy as a Supreme Court justice? I suspect that the sad story of what happened to Merrick Garland, and it is unfortunate, and he is a highly admirable jurist in his own right, what happened to him is going

to fade over time. Gorsuch could be in this job for decades, practically generations. And in that period of time, it'll be a lot like Anthony Kennedy, who when he first went on the court in 1987, 1988, was replacing two other nominees who went down in flames of Ronald Reagan's, Douglas Ginsburg, and before that, Robert Bork. But that did not hang over his head as a permanent cloud or as a permanent inhibition in establishing his own legacy, which has been quite substantial. How many people on the court right now were second choices? Because you've got Kennedy, you've got Alito, because Harriet Meyers' nomination was pulled back. Is there anybody else right now? I don't believe so. I don't believe anybody else had any bumps getting there.

And I guess Garland just goes down as, you know, the guy with the asterisk. Historical footnote. He will be in some trivial pursuit someday. Yes. And he will be a sad historical footnote, but an honorable one for his own record as he's established it on the circuit court. The introduction for Judge Gorsuch today, he was introduced by two senators from Colorado, which is his home state.

One of them was a Republican. One of them was a Democrat. So when you're being introduced by one of the Democrats who would potentially hold up the blockade, the blockade, well, it isn't a 30-foot high wall. No, and then he was also introduced by former acting Solicitor General Neil Katyal, who was an Obama appointee and who is seen as an Obama-era

person who spoke very highly of Gorsuch. And this is the problem, is that the man fits the bill of somebody who has been an eminent jurist and who has a record of having been supported at every level of his appointment. In fact, when he was appointed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he sits today, 10 years ago, he was supported by all these same Democrats who are going to beat him up tomorrow. I think that's another problem the Democrats have is that they can disagree strongly with his judicial track record in terms of his opinions, but in terms of his resume and in terms of his personality, he seems to be a very engaging person who delivered a very, you know, personable, relatable opening statement today who has impeccable credentials and was at law school with Barack Obama. Let's hear a little bit of that opening statement. Mr. Chairman, these days we sometimes hear judges cynically described as politicians in robes, seeking to enforce their own politics rather than striving to apply the law impartially. But if I thought that were true, I'd hang up the robe. The truth is, I just don't think that's what a life in the law is about. No, he actually does refer to an honest black

polyester robe and an honest judiciary that is so signified. He also told us a little bit about his daughters trying to keep the pet goat out of the garden. He told us a lot about fly fishing. He referred to John Elway and Peyton Manning, the legendary quarterbacks of the Denver Broncos. It was about as appealing an Americana presentation as you could possibly ask for, while all the time, of course, paying the necessary respect to judicial independence and also to respect for the law and not making the law. All the things we would expect any Republican nominee and probably any Democratic nominee to say. So for more of Judge Gorsuch and the questioning that will begin and a more detailed discussion of his judicial philosophy. Tune in to the podcast tomorrow or Wednesday morning.

Grassley said to expect 10 hours of testimony tomorrow. We will boil that down to, I tonight for a rally. This is a campaign rally organized by his campaign. But the thought is that he is there to rally support for the Russian interference in the process of the campaign hearings. And now we have the prospect of the biggest vote thus far in this Congress and in this presidency on the health care bill. And so obviously, the president is really, really working that particular issue, not only by going to Louisville, home of two Republican senators, both very important. One of whom super opposed Rand Paul, one of whom is the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And then also he is coming to the Hill tomorrow to meet with House Republicans, which is where the rubber is meeting the road right now, because the House is what the chamber that's voting this week. And so he's going to come meet with the House Republicans in their conference meeting, give a pep rally for the bill. And then he's going to also speak to their fundraising dinner tomorrow night. I feel like any of the big things happening right now in another universe would be maybe

the biggest thing to happen to a presidency in an entire month period, if not more. If not more. But they're all just kind of mashed together and all talked about at once this week. Concurrent. And if past experience is any guide, there may be another big story before this week is over that dwarfs all the other three. All right, that is a wrap for today. As we mentioned, we will be back in your feed late tomorrow with an episode recapping Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearing with Neil Gorsuch. It's an all-day affair tomorrow, so we're recording

in the evening. Best bet is to check your feed Wednesday morning for your morning commute. As always, you can write us with your questions or comments at nprpolitics at npr.org. Even if we can't answer your questions on the show, it really helps us to know what you're curious about. And thank you for supporting your local public radio station, which is the best way to support our work here on the podcast. All right. That and sending us cookies and other food. That too. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon