The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Demands Review Of Russia Investigation Surveillance Tactics & Tuesday's Primaries

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

President Trump says that he will order an investigation into whether the FBI and the Department of Justice "infiltrated or surveilled" his campaign "for political purposes," potentially setting up a showdown between the president and his intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, 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, it's Alex from Albany, Oregon. I'm sitting here at 350 in the morning with my three-week-old daughter and future Supreme Court Justice, Josephine, listening to the NPR Politics Podcast and trying not to fall asleep before she does. This show was recorded at... I've been doing a lot of stuff at three in the morning lately. It never occurred to me to record a timestamp. Smart thinking, though. It is 2.10 p.m. on Monday, May 21st. Things might have changed by the time you hear this. Here we go. Enjoy is 2.10 p.m. on Monday, May 21st. Things might have changed by the time you hear this. Here we go. Enjoy the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Another weekend Twitter explosion, this one ending with President Trump hereby demanding that the Department of

Justice investigate whether the FBI infiltrated or surveilled his presidential campaign for political purposes. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Keri Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Keri, another weekend of deadlines and very nebulous, confusing, multi-layered stories for you.

Oh, good. It's right in my wheelhouse. Woo! Well, we all appreciate it when this happens and you can come into the studio and help us make as much sense as there is to be made out of something. We'll do our best. Okay. So let's just start with the tweet and work our way backwards. It's a good policy in this era. So this tweet comes at the end of a weekend full of talk about secret informants and the Russia investigation. Carrie, what started all of this?

There were some initial reports that an FBI source had been in contact with three Trump campaign advisors. What do we know about that? Here's what we know. A couple of newspapers reported that an FBI source, someone who lived overseas, an American professor, had been in contact with three different Trump foreign policy aides in the course of the campaign in 2016. Those aides include Sam Clovis, who was at one point involved in the leadership of the campaign, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor who ultimately pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Carter Page, another foreign policy advisor who's been on the FBI's radar screen for a long

time. President Trump read these reports and took it to mean that some spy had infiltrated or embedded in his campaign. The way we're able to understand it is that the FBI was trying to understand allegations or hints of contacts between Russians and Trump campaign aides in 2016, didn't want to go super far and call these aides in for questioning directly, so sent a source in to talk to them instead. And as you just pointed out, the idea that this was just a fishing expedition doesn't really square up with the fact that Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty. And we know that Carter Page is tied up on a whole lot of different angles of this investigation.

Yeah, of course, Carter Page has denied any wrongdoing, but we know based on old cases that the FBI and prosecutors in New York have brought involving Russian agents inside the U.S. that Carter Page came up on the radar. He'd been warned by the FBI to be careful dealing with the Russians. And here again, in the course of the campaign, he came on the FBI's radar for some of the contacts he made, some of his international travel and speeches he gave in Russia. Mara, you've been our norms ombudsman all along. How does this latest Trump demand square with other things we've seen when it comes to the president interfering with trying to pressure, trying to decry the Department of

Justice. This one seemed to go to the next level because he used language like I hereby demand, I am going to make this official. I'm ordering my Justice Department to investigate this. In the past, the president's bark to bite ratio has stayed pretty high, meaning mostly bark, not much bite. Some of that depended on what happened after the tweet. Did he follow through? Did he do what he was threatening? Did the people around him manage to massage his threat and make it into something more norm-like and less against the rule of law. So we're waiting to see. Today is when he said he would hereby officially demand and instruct the Justice Department to do this. They haven't put out any paper yet at the White House. Is that correct, Carrie? Not yet. But as of this taping, in a short while, the FBI Director Chris Wray, the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats are set to go to the White

House to talk about this with the President, to talk about his concerns. I got to tell you that after this tweet came out from the President, hereby demanding the Justice Department do something with respect to an investigation, a whole bunch of current and former DOJ officials went on red alert. People like Adam Schiff, a Democrat bunch of current and former DOJ officials went on red alert. People like Adam Schiff, a Democrat in Congress who had been a former prosecutor, talked about whether we might see a Saturday night massacre in slow motion. Eric Holder, the former attorney general under President Obama, said that Trump's demand is dangerous and undemocratic and it's time to stand up for the Justice Department's independence. But I got to

say, it is not clear to me whether the White House is going to follow through, like you said, Mara, and actually instruct the Justice Department to do so. Right. We don't know that. But we do know that Rod Rosenstein did respond right away to the tweet. Yeah. Rod Rosenstein is, you know, used to being a whipping boy for this president. I hate to say it that way, but he's been under attack for over a year now from Trump. And Rosenstein almost immediately, within a few hours after this tweet from the president on Sunday, announced that he was going to ask the Justice Department's inspector general, an independent watchdog inside the DOJ, to look into whether anybody had been inappropriately surveilled or whether any

political considerations, any improper political considerations were taken into play in the investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016. In other words, he was going to give it to someone who already is looking into those things. The inspector general's already looking into the Carter Page wiretap application. The inspector general's already looking into how the FBI handled or mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz how the FBI handled or mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is a his campaign, have led to a lot of serious questions asked about the Trump campaign and things that President Trump has done in the White House

in response to this investigation. So this seems kind of similar to all of that talk about the dossier going back to remember the secret memos from a couple of months ago, making the argument that this investigation started on flawed grounds because it was started out of some sort of like political motivation. But there's a big difference between putting a spy wearing a wire inside your presidential campaign, which seems to be what people are talking about in one area, and the fact that we know of the FBI looking into leads that came from other sources and saying, let's try and gather some information. Yeah, 100 percent. We have no evidence that the FBI or the Justice Department embedded some informant with a wire into the Trump campaign in 2016.

In fact, the evidence right now points to the contrary, the evidence that's public. One of the explanations for the DOJ and the FBI sending this FBI source in to talk to these guys is they didn't want to do anything that would signal to the public that this investigation, this counterintelligence investigation was ongoing in the course of the campaign. They wanted to figure out what they had. And one way you do that is to send a source quietly to talk to these folks, see what you get. In fact, some of these people, people like Sam Clovis through his lawyer, has told NPR, I didn't think there was anything unusual or particularly weird or suspicious about my meeting with this professor in August or September of 2016. And all of a sudden, I just connected these things. So the FBI may have been doing a less aggressive thing by sending in this guy. Because the only investigation the FBI was talking about throughout the campaign was their investigation of Hillary Clinton. The only damage that the FBI did to a candidate during the campaign was the damage they did to Hillary Clinton. Now, afterwards, of course, you know, and in the final days of the campaign, we got to learn more about this counterintelligence operation. But in terms of the bigger political context that Scott

just described, the president has made a tremendous amount of headway in his effort to undermine and discredit the Mueller investigation, because one thing that he does is to relentlessly repeat the charge, which is that it's rigged, that he's, you know, Mueller is hopelessly compromised. And polls show that Republicans who are initially said, you know, the president should cooperate. He should sit down with Mueller. Now they're more willing to say this has gone on too long. The president, this is a distraction for the president. We should wrap it up. Now walk through why that matters, because obviously the investigation is going to continue unless President Trump does something like begin the process of firing Robert Mueller. So how do those political shifts,

those shifting poll numbers, how do those affect any sort of results of this investigation? What it means is that the president basically had two political paths. One was all out war with Mueller, fire him, and then take the political blowback. That's a high, potentially high political cost. The other path is just discredit Mueller, just constantly attack him, constantly bring out to get me, so that whatever Mueller comes up with, you can dismiss as tainted, partisan, witch hunt, hoax. So they've clearly chosen the second path, that it's less politically costly to undermine him. Well, I got to say that there's another cost at work here, and that's confidence, public confidence and trust in the work of the Justice Department and the FBI. The new FBI director, Chris Wray, Donald Trump's own pick, a friend and former lawyer to Chris Christie, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. And Christopher Wray, the new FBI director, was on the Hill last week talking about this.

He kind of asked a question about the FBI's work with respect to human sources. And what we're all talking about here is the outing of this source who was talking with folks in the Trump campaign. Here's what Chris Wray said. And the day that we can't protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe. That day has come. Not just that. I mean, let's face it. Not just that, Mara. Remember, the president is reported to have told the Russians in the Oval Office last year about some other intelligence, which may have outed other sources, other foreign sources, and with respect to the fight against ISIS, the Islamic State. So this is not the first time. That's

right. You know, what's so interesting, we've talked about this before, but if Donald Trump or the Trump era is a stress test for democratic institutions, the Justice Department and law enforcement in general and the intelligence community has been the most stressed. And so far, I would say they're holding up pretty well. But there hasn't been a big showdown, confrontation, Saturday Night Massacre. Instead, it's been kind of a steady drip, drip, drip, chipping away at the credibility of these institutions. You now have an entire party, the base of the Republican Party, thinks the FBI and the CIA is part of some nefarious, deep state. What happens when the president of the United States

needs the American people to believe in a conclusion that these agencies have come to because he's asking them to make some kind of sacrifice? Two more questions for you, Carrie, as we wind this part of the podcast down. First of all, you mentioned the inspector general, been a pretty busy guy. I mean, there are a lot of legitimate questions to ask whether anybody in the FBI happened to leak to Rudy Giuliani, now the president's personal lawyer, then just his campaign ally, any dirt about Hillary Clinton in the course of the campaign. That investigation by the IG has been underway since January 2017. I'm expecting the report, which has described me as a bombshell in a matter of days, this week, next week, it's going to be a big deal. And then this investigation into the Carter Page surveillance application and whether there was any

misconduct with respect to this human source targeting Trump campaign aides in 2016, that just started. So that's some months, if not years away. In fact, Scott, one of the people you cover, Mark Meadows, in the Congress and a close ally of the president seems to be unhappy with the notion that DOJ is kicking that to the IG. And speaking of Rudy, the other thing I want to ask about is that Rudy Giuliani told several reporters, including NPR's Ryan Lucas, over the weekend that it's kind of a game of telephone. So I want to get it right. Mueller told him, and now he's telling reporters, that Mueller promised that the portions of the investigation into specifically whether President Trump obstructed justice or was personally involved in collusion,

all that, according to Giuliani, according to Mueller, will be done by September 1st. How much should we read into that statement? How much of it is just political posturing? Not much. My initial reaction to those comments by Rudy Giuliani last night was, really? How do you know that? And of course, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, really never talks in public. They are not going to confirm or deny whether that's in fact what they told Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani has been, shall we say,

fact challenged for a number of weeks on this now. And he also has publicly stated he wants to increase the pressure on the Mueller team to wrap up this investigation, whether they're ready to do that or not. I think those remarks by him are best understood in the context of the pressure campaign he says he's mounting. It's my understanding that Justice Department guidelines is that investigations should not continue too close to an election. An investigation that might impact the results of an election should be suspended or go on hiatus. Obviously, that was honored in the breach by James Comey, who didn't follow that rule. In this case, what does that mean that Mueller should not indict anyone after June 1st until after the election? What does that actually mean? Nothing is written down in terms of a number of days before an election. And I interviewed Sally

Yates in Chicago earlier this month. I asked her that question because former acting Attorney General Sally Yates used to be a major league public corruption prosecutor in Atlanta. Sally Yates pointed out that Donald Trump is actually not on the ballot. So while Trump this past weekend has tweeted that he thinks Mueller is going to hurt Republicans in the midterm if this goes on too long, it's not clear to me that Mueller is bound by that guidance. That said, both Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG, are pretty cautious guys. And he may be quiet for a while. Let me also point out that there's one way in which they can't be quiet. Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman, is going on trial on conspiracy and fraud charges in July and September.

So if you want to move that off the front page, I don't know how you do it if Paul Manafort's on trial. All right. You both mentioned primaries. Good moment to pause, shift gears, talk about those primaries. First, we're going to take a quick break. Thank you, Carrie. My pleasure. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about primary races tomorrow in Georgia and a runoff in Texas. 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. You can find the TED Radio Hour on NPR One or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we're back.

Now it is just Mara and me. A combination that you can see in person in a couple weeks, June 1st in Charlotte. Tickets at nprpresents.org. Mara, there was a meeting today. You weren't at it, but we talked about some exciting ideas for the live show, including possibly walk-up music. I'm really looking forward to it. Bad to the bone. You can play that. And we can preview it now. Or...

Beethoven's Fifth. You know, you've got a couple weeks. Either way, I'm just picturing a foggy auditorium, Mara coming in from the back. Just like Donald Trump at the convention. How about silhouetted in a doorway? We don't want to give away all the ideas right here, but NPR Presents dot org. A cute little child could skip in front of me scattering petals.

Or we could hang wires from the ceiling and Mara just rappels down onto the stage. Yes, I could come down like that. Like halftime, you know. All right. It's another Tuesday coming up. More primaries. Two states we're going to focus in on here real quick. First of all, Georgia. There is a really interesting gubernatorial race going on. Right. The Democrats are interesting because there's two women. They're both named Stacey. Stacey off. Stacey Abrams and Stacey Evans. So it's kind of could be kind of confusing. One is African-American, one is white. And they have slightly different

theories of the case about how you can win in a state like Georgia. In the past, we've seen Democrats like Michelle Nunn not reach that magic threshold of getting 31 or 32 percent of the white vote, which people thought Democrats needed to kind of crack the code in the South. But the South is changing and it's getting less white and more minority. And Stacey Abrams thinks that young people, minorities and single women are a bigger and bigger part of the electorate. And she can energize that part of the base. Stacey Evans thinks it's still important that you got to reach out to those white Trump type voters. And they're facing off in a primary. So that same dynamic is playing out in so many races in one way or another. I was in Houston

last week and one of the races I was looking at is a race that's going to be decided in a runoff tomorrow. It's a primary between two Democrats in the 7th district, which is like the archetype of the exact type of district the Democrats are trying to flip to win back control of the House. High income, high education, suburban district, ringing a big city, voted for a Republican, but also voted for Hillary Clinton. There's like 25 of these districts. They think they can get back to the House through these districts. So in Houston, you have a similar dynamic, though the racial politics are a bit different. It's the question of, do we win this race by appealing in broad strokes to moderate Republicans who we think we can win? Or do we say, you know what, we're going to charge up our base, we're going to be really progressive, we're going to

excite voters, and we're going to get our base to turn out at higher levels than they have before. Most Democrats I talk to say you've got to do both. You can't win with just the base, especially in a lot of these swing districts. You have to turn out your base in higher numbers than you have before. And so far, Democrats are doing pretty good at that. But you also have to be able to reach out to white working class voters, voters that like the way Republicans nominated these Tea Party candidates who weren't ready for primetime and lost opportunities in 2010 and 2012. So that's the big question. And Republicans are feeling very happy that in a couple of these primaries, the more, quote, progressive, left-leaning, Bernie Sanders-type Democrat has won. That was the case in Nebraska last week.

Certainly the case in Nebraska, yes. Yeah, and that could be the case in this district as well. The two candidates are Laura Moser and Lizzie Fletcher. And Laura Moser got all this attention a couple months ago when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee got pretty aggressive, intervened in this race by releasing all this opposition research about a Democrat. And they were saying, look, she can't win this race. She's been a longtime writer, and she wrote all these various things that come across as offensive. She said they were sarcastic. So they really stomped their foot down. It backfired.

She advanced to the primary, and now you have her running on this single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type, aggressive Bernie-type approach. And the other candidate, Lizzie Fletcher, is a much more mainstream, typical Democrat with the backing of a lot of national leaders who's taking that approach of, you know, I'm a Democrat, I'm liberal, but I'm trying to reach out to Republican voters. Yeah, and you know what? I don't even think it's the policies, the raising the minimum wage, Medicare for all, that's going to sink some of these left-wing candidates. It's just what you're talking about. It's things in their past. It's things that they've said. It's social media posts that they've had that will be used to undermine them. But you know, what's so interesting is the story out of the first chapter of special

elections and off-year elections was that Democrats nominated people like Ralph Northam, Doug Jones, Conor Lamb, very not left-wing firebrands. These were not ideological alternatives to Trump or Trumpism. They were stylistically the opposite. They were common sense. I'm going to work across the aisle. Phil Bredesen is a really good example of that in Tennessee. And when you're trying to win districts in red states or districts that are swing districts, we're going to now find out if more left-wing candidates can actually prevail. So that's the storyline in a bunch of different races on the Democratic side. Anything worth flagging about tomorrow on the Republican side?

I'm still looking for the same things I've been looking for all cycle, which is turnout, who has the advantage in terms of being energized. Up until now, it's been the Democrats. But you've seen some upticks in Republican participation, too. So that's one thing I'm looking for. But, you know, in addition to looking for the kind of standard indicators of energy and turnout and if one party nominates candidates that are too far to the right or left, The other thing that's happening, I think, in the cycle is that the incredible optimism that Democrats had that a big blue wave was forming, I think that subsided a little bit. And even though wave could develop at any time, we're still many months away

from the election. The generic ballot is tightening. The president's approval ratings have inched up. The economy is still chugging along. And I think Republicans in general are feeling better. And the one metric that every Republican operative I talk to points to right now is right track, wrong track. Right track is about 38 or 39 percent. That's the question. Do you think the country's on the right track or the wrong track? That seems very low, but actually it's higher than it's been in quite a while. And there's a lot of data that when the right track number gets above 33 or 34 percent, generally the party in power is not wiped out. Yeah. So I think Republicans are just feeling a little bit better right now. All right. I have one very important thing I need to mention before we close, Mara. Last year, a couple different times, and then it took off and it became a whole thing.

We talked about Sheetz and Wawa, the convenience stores in Pennsylvania. And if you did not live in the East Coast, you tolerated this conversation politely. But many people would always tweet at me, you need to check out this store or this store or this store. Now, I mentioned I was in Texas. Many people had always said you need to go to a Buc-ee's. I was driving by a Buc-ee's. Have you been to these places before? I've never been to a Buc-ee's.

I thought, oh, there it is. Got to pull over. I have to say, it was like convenience store Disney World. It was the size of a Target. They had souvenirs. They had all sorts of food. They had a station making fudge. They had an island in the middle where people were making barbecue.

Was this at a gas station? Yes, it was massive. So I went. It was great. I'm impressed. All the people who had been saying you need to check one out, you were right. I'm not going to say it's the best, but I was very impressed. I ate a lot of barbecue.

It was a great experience. This is why it's nice to get out on the road. All right. And we'll see you in Charlotte. That's right. If there's anywhere we need to go in Charlotte, please let us know. Yes, we really want to know. That is it for today. We will be back in your feed very soon. We've been doing more and more podcasts lately. We're going to keep that streak up. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. Carrie Johnson joined us earlier. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.