The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump’s retribution tour: Comey, Indiana Republicans, and ABC

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

President Trump and his allies seem to be — once again — seeking retribution from people who have gotten on the president’s bad side. We discuss the Justice Department’s new indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, Trump’s efforts to unseat some Indiana Republican state lawmakers, and a renewed fight with ABC's Jimmy Kimmel.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, Supreme Court and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and senior political correspondent Tamara Keith.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department in the Supreme Court. And I'm Tamara Keith, and I cover politics. And a happy Friday to both of you and all our listeners. We're going to talk about some of the big stories that we haven't hit on the pod yet. Starting with news of another indictment against former FBI director James Comey. Carrie, what is the Justice Department alleging Comey did here? Comey faces two felony charges for allegedly making a threat on the life of President Donald Trump and transmitting that threat across state lines. It all revolves around an Instagram post he put up almost a year ago from a North Carolina beach where he was on vacation. It's a photo of seashells arranged in the numbers 86, 47. 86 being slang for get rid of and 47 representing the 47th president, Donald.

Trump. Now, the Justice Department says that's a credible or true threat against the president of the United States. But Comey deleted that post pretty quickly after he put it up last year. And he said he had no idea those numbers could potentially have been connected to violence. He didn't mean that. Moreover, you know, the term 86 has been around a long time in the restaurant industry and the bar industry. And also, there are a lot of people around the country who have t-shirts and posters about 86, 86 Trump, 86 Biden. So if you were going to make a literal federal case out of this, presumably it would sweep up lots and lots and lots of other people, too. Has the legal community, the broader legal community, had any thoughts on this indictment coming out? That is the biggest surprise to me, Miles.

What's happened here is not only former Justice Department officials coming out and saying, This case is a huge stretch, but also people who are allied with the White House. People like George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, people like conservative legal analyst Andrew Napolitano who told Newsmax this week, there was no crime here, that this is patently unconstitutional, and that it seems like vengeance to go after Comey, who, of course, has irritated the president a lot in the past. Well, and there is a question about what is protected speech, What is protected political speech? And what is an actual threat that would be perceived as a threat? Yeah, there's a lot of Supreme Court precedent about this, starting with a case during the Vietnam war era where somebody protesting the war made a pretty brazen remark about the president at the time, President Johnson, and basically said, if you give me a rifle, the first person I'm going to aim at is LBJ.

Now, that case went all the way up to the Supreme Court at the time. The Supreme Court overturned the case saying that was like political hyperbole, not a true threat. And experts tell me Comey's post didn't even go that far. Carrie, I mean, the thing I'm a little confused that is if the entire legal community is coming out and saying this seems like a vindictive effort against James Comey, how were they able to secure an indictment from a grand jury? You, friend, are not the only one who's confused by that. In fact, Jim Comey's lawyers have only just begun to defend him. Comey says he's innocent. There's likely to be some motions for selective or vindictive prosecution. And it may be that Comey, like other defendants this year, who have been targeted by President Trump, asks to see the grand jury transcripts.

Remember that defendants and defense lawyers are not allowed in the grand jury. The only people allowed in that room are the prosecutors talking privately with the grand jurors. But there have been episodes this year and last year as well where people's faith and confidence in the Justice Department has been so weakened that they're asking to pierce the secrecy of the grand jury and get transcripts. In some cases, judges want to see the transcripts of those conversations for evidence that grand juries may have been misled about the facts or the law. And it's a pretty big step to pierce that grand jury secrecy, but we're already seeing effort. it's in that direction. This is also not the first time Comey has been indicted during Trump's second term. How is this indictment different, Kerry, to the first time?

Remember that first indictment charged him with misleading Congress about a media leak back in the day. That case got dismissed because the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, Trump's former personal attorney, was not lawfully appointed, although DOJ is appealing. In this case, you know, I don't think it came as a surprise to Comey. He put out a statement on Substack this week saying basically, here we go again. And he also said, interestingly, Miles, it's not over yet. He fully expects the DOJ to keep coming after him, which is a pretty remarkable thing for somebody who served as the deputy attorney general of the United States, a U.S. attorney in New York, and the leader of the FBI, basically getting dogged by this administration and this DOJ.

Why, Tam? I mean, why does President Trump have such a thing out for James Comey? So Comey was FBI director at the beginning of President Trump's first term. And as you might remember, there was an investigation into whether there were ties between President Trump's campaign and Russia or whether President Trump's campaign was aided by Russia. And Trump calls this the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia thing. it hung over his presidency. It had hung over a big part of his first term. There was ultimately a special counsel investigation. Trump ended up firing Comey very early on. That only made things worse for the president and created even more of a firestorm. And certainly since then, Comey has become a vocal

critic of President Trump. And I think one of the themes that we have seen is that it's not just the president's perceived political enemies. It's all. also people who are just critical of the president who risk having the full weight of the federal government imposed upon them. I mean, is it fair, Carrie, to see this as part of a broader trend of the Justice Department sort of being aimed at people who President Trump has openly said he disagrees with or doesn't like? There's not just a trend here. It's also intensifying. In the last 10 days, the Justice Department has sought and won indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a former aide-distance.

to Dr. Anthony Fauci and now Jim Comey. And the feeling is they're not even close to being done yet. The acting attorney general Todd Blanche, another former personal lawyer of Trump, very much wants to keep the job on a permanent basis. And the FBI director, the current FBI director, Cash Patel, is feeling a little bit endangered in terms of his job status too. So both of these guys really have a motivation to keep the president happy and what the president has wanted and what what he keeps telling us and them is that he wants cases against these people who upset him. And just to move this to the perspective of the president and his backers, their view is that the Justice Department was weaponized against him, both during his first presidency and when he was out of office, when he was prosecuted. And so they see this new round of going after the president's

perceived enemies as sort of turnabout as fair play. If it's going to be weaponized against us, then we should go after the people who made us miserable. Well, changing gears, but it feels like a similar trend here. The White House right now is in a deja vu moment going after Jimmy Kimmel again. Can you explain what's happening here, Tam? Yeah, so Jimmy Kimmel is a late night comedy host on ABC. And he has been very critical of President Trump, and there have been many back and forth. But the latest relates to the White House Correspondents Association dinner, a couple days

before the dinner, Kimmel did a bit where he pretended that he was delivering the roast at the dinner and said what he would have said at the dinner, including saying that Melania Trump had the glow of an expectant widow. Now, Kimmel had no way of knowing that an alleged assassin would come to the Hilton and try to find the president. And he has said that he didn't intend it that way. His meaning was like, hey, look at that age difference between the president and the first lady. But But on Monday, the First Lady said that it was offensive and implied that Kimmel should be fired. Trump after that was even more severe and is calling for Kimmel to be fired and is saying that ABC needs to be careful. Right. I mean, it's like one thing to disagree with something somebody says.

But now the government, the FCC, which oversees broadcast radio and television licenses, is also getting involved. What's going on there? Yes. Now, by their telling, it is completely coincident that the FCC chairman Brendan Carr, right after the president said Kimmel needed to be fired, announced that he was accelerating the process to review the licenses of ABC-owned television stations. This is an onerous and expensive process, and it is essentially unprecedented in recent history for this to be moved forward like this. They weren't up for a couple more years. And the FCC is saying, all right, now you do this. You know, this echoes actually in history for me. Back in the day over 50 years ago, the Nixon administration actually held TV licenses of the Washington Post Company over the head of Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post.

The Nixon administration was not happy about post reporting on the Pentagon Papers or on Watergate. And basically, they threatened to yank the licenses. of two of the Post TV stations in Florida, like their profitable stations, Catherine Graham held firm and ultimately the Post kept control of those stations. So we've been here before in some ways. And ABC is not backing down. As you might remember, during an earlier dust up between Kimmel and the president, ABC actually put Jimmy Kimmel on leave. That caused a massive backlash.

People canceled their Disney and Whoop. lose subscriptions to send a message. ABC put Kimmel back on the air. This time ABC is holding firm. Kimmel is continuing to make jokes about the president of the United States every night on his show. You might remember that President Trump has sued a number of news outlets who he disagrees with, including ABC and CBS, New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal. Both ABC and CBS settled lawsuits that legal experts said they would have prevailed on. And Trump has just continued to push and push and push. All right. Let's take a quick break and more on the politics of retribution in just a moment. And welcome back. Let's turn now to Indiana, where the ongoing national battle over redistricting that we've talked about a lot this week is playing out on a micro level.

Tam, you were just in Indiana. Tell us about this. Yeah. So this is a state where late last year, President Trump applied a massive. amount of pressure to state lawmakers. It's a Republican. Red as can be state, applied a lot of pressure to state lawmakers to get them to redraw the congressional maps like Texas had done to favor Republicans. The most they could have gotten was maybe one or two seats. But state Senate Republicans, along with Democrats, ended up rejecting this, which was a pretty remarkable defeat for the president at the hands of his own party. That just doesn't happen very often. So the president promised that he would come for them. And guess what? He has. He said that they should be primaried. And so I was there in Indiana covering of all things state races where President Trump and his allies have dropped literally millions of dollars to make these people lose. Which is, I mean, we really cannot underscore how uncommon this is for a president to be this involved in a local race. Yeah, just to put this in some perspective, in a normal year, maybe $200,000 would be a lot of

money to spend on a state Senate race. Well, this time it's like $2 million in one race, $3 million in one race. It is a lot of money. Overall, the president and his allies are expected to spend somewhere around $8 to $10 million on a little more than half. a dozen races. Wow. So this is pretty unprecedented involvement from the president. How are the local politicians feeling about this? They are suddenly getting recognized on the street in a way that state senators haven't in the past because their faces are on television all the time in negative campaign ads. I went out door knocking with a state senator named Jim Buck. Now, don't get the idea that he is some sort of resistance figure. He is a very conservative Republican, highly rated by the conservative political action committee. He is like being called a rhino. Rino, which is a reference to

Republican in name only. Yeah. And he's like, who are they talking about? That's not me. But he did refuse to vote for the redistricting push on sort of a state's rights principle and not wanting to be told by the federal government what a state should do. And he said he was warned. Some of my congressional people told me, begged me to vote yes. Because said, Jim, they're going to come at you with everything possible. They're going to try to destroy your name, destroy your reputation, and they're going to bring money that you wouldn't imagine.

Well, they were right. Indiana is such a Republican state. Do you think these lawmakers basically just support President Trump on almost everything else, but just not this one thing? Yes, that is exactly it. What Jim Buck said is it turns out loyalty only goes one way. I watched him have this interaction with a voter where the voter is like, well, how do you feel about our president? And Buck said, I worked my butt off for him in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. I agree with him on almost everything except redistricting and in particular except the way he is meddling in the state with regards to redistricting. Yeah, like these are Republicans. This is a ruby red state. But talking to the president's allies, their view is this was the top political issue for the president of the United States, who is the leader of the Republican Party. and people needed to fall in line.

And if they didn't fall in line, then there needs to be consequences. And the consequences are a huge amount of spending. Talking to these candidates, they're like, well, I hope my voters know me because if they believe the ads, they're going to lose. What did you hear from voters, I guess, while you were there, on how they feel about all of this? You know, it's a real mixed bag. It's a little bit hard to tell when you're standing with one of the candidates who's been on TV. The voters who walk by and avert their eyes are probably going to vote against them. But there were also a lot of people who came up and said, gosh, I've been a Republican all my life and

I don't like this. Thank you for standing up. Somebody who came up and was like, I'm surprised you had backbone. Now, that person was neither a Republican nor a Democrat. You know, it's really tough to get a read on it. What these incumbents say is they listened to their. constituents. Their constituents didn't want this. They believed firmly that it was a bad idea for Indiana and for Hoosiers. And I was like, but what about taking the path of least resistance? Like, many Republicans in Congress don't agree with everything the president says they need to do, but they know better than to make it hard for him. And what they said is they just felt they had to do the right thing, even though it would be painful.

It just seems like so much effort to put towards local races for a situation. You mentioned this only could have netted the GOP one or two seats. Why, I guess, is the juice really worth the squeeze for the amount of money and energy that they're putting in these races? I think part of it is the message that it sends. The message that if President Trump wants something, you best not deny it to him. I had a lengthy back and forth with an advisor to the president, a political advisor. I was like, why spend all this money on these state Senate races? The answer was

because we have enough money to spend on these Senate races and to spend on maintaining Republican control in the House and the Senate. And I just want to read you a few things this person said, they said that these incumbents are going to their electoral slaughter. And this person said Republican voters are sick and tired of weak politicians who have no problem letting the radical left steal our country out from under us so long as they are not personally bothered. So that is the message. I don't know what the results will be. I don't know if it will be a clear message that says, wow, President Trump still has a huge amount of sway over Republican voters or whether it'll be more of a mixed decision or perhaps it'll say, hey, the president

doesn't have the juice. But it is now a big test on kind of a small stage. It does feel like retribution is the theme. We're kind of hitting over and over again in today's episode. And I guess I'm wondering from both of you where this goes from here, both in terms of the future of our politics, but then also just there's a few more years of. of the Trump administration, Kerry, this isn't over. Not over by a long shot. I expect to spend a lot of time in courtrooms for sure. And the interesting thing about this is how much power the Justice Department and the FBI have to really upend the lives of lots and lots of Americans.

And so even if some of these cases are brought and lost in court, this means that defendants will have spent thousands if not millions of dollars, had to walk into court with their families by their sides, plead not guilty, go through a long court battle, and really suffer emotionally. Yeah, and I think in the case of political retribution, voters do get the final say. Now, voters may say, keep it coming. President Trump campaigned on I am your retribution, and voters said, okay, sign us up. Maybe this wasn't particularly what they were most interested in. I was going to say, I don't know that that was made necessarily the top of the, I think groceries and other things like that maybe were higher on the list, potentially for many people.

Groceries, immigration, all kinds of other things were more important to voters. Few things were more important to President Trump. If you look at the way he's conducted himself in office and the way he has demanded that his administration conduct itself. Retribution is something that he clearly sees as worthwhile in exerting his power and maintaining his power. Because so much of political power comes from people being afraid of the consequences. All right. One more break. And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back, and it's now time for Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot let go of, politics or otherwise. Tam, why don't you get us started?

So this week, King Charles and Queen Camilla were here in America for a state dinner. He also delivered a speech to Congress. And what I was not expecting from this speech is that he brought the jokes, including this one about America's founding 250 years ago. 250 years ago, or as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day. The other thing I can't let go of is I really. really think that the laughter is disproportionate to the quality of the man's jokes. Wait, that's what I was about to say. I was like, that was an extra six seconds of laughter there. Americans are a sucker for an accent. I know. It's like glasses. It just makes you seem smarter.

Apparently, it also makes you seem funnier. And that is what I can't let go of. I guess we'll see him at some comedy club in, uh, in like six months doing a type five or something like that. He did get this like adorable little look on his face like, oh, I should something fun. How funny? Miles, what can't you let go of? Have you guys seen The Sopranos, the television program, The Sopranos? Have I seen The Sopranos? Yes.

I've seen some episodes of The Sopranos. I know the basic outline of this program. Okay. So in the first season of The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, one subplot is that Tony Soprano becomes very obsessed with his family of ducks that come live in his backyard and swim in his pool, which is, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. But my mom is basically going full Tony Soprano over the last couple weeks and has become obsessed with a family of ducks to the point where every time I call her, like it's the first thing she talks about. And it's like we're in the, it's been like a basically a month-long conversation. These ducks live at my brother's house and she's been staying there a bunch, helping take care of my brother's kids. And this duck made a home outside their front door and laid eggs.

and she bought a outdoor 24-hour camera that she could basically monitor the duck for days and days as the duck has sat on these eggs. And then a couple days ago, the eggs hatched. And it was like a deeply emotional. My mom was coming to visit me. And she was like choked up in the airport because she was like watching the ducks. She like has a video of the ducks hatching and then they all like walk away. And I was like deeply skeptical for weeks. I was like, my mom's losing it.

She's going off the deep end. This is the end. And actually, once I saw the video, I kind of understood where it was like a deeply powerful thing that just like watching nature and action can do it for people, you know. She does not need Dr. Melfy. You need to buy her a bathrobe for Mother's Day. So like Tony, she can go outside in her bathroom and take joy in the ducks. All right. I will let her know.

NPR's Carrie Johnson said that. She will appreciate that. Endorse. What about you, Carrie? What can't you let go of? I cannot let go of a photo from the New York Knicks game this week, which contains multitudes. The photo is of comedy genius Tina Faye, wearing a blazer and pants in her trademark glasses and some high tops, sitting next to Timothy Chalameh, wearing a Knicks cap in a huge puffy black jacket, and his girlfriend, entrepreneur Kylie Jenner, wearing rhinestone jeans and a tank top. And people are seeing in this photo all kinds of things like Timmy, who's not a very large guy, man spreading into Tina space, which you would not believe.

And the look on Tina Faye's face in this photo is priceless. People are now repurposing this photo as a meme to talk about New York City politics or even the media. One meme says Tina is C-SPAN, Timmy is T-M-Z. and Kylie Jenner is Fox News. And so you can take this picture and use it to mean so many things. It is art. Sometimes there are photos that you can transpose so much onto. Do you think it's one of those things, like you clearly identified with Tina Faye in this photo? How do you get that idea?

I think other people look, is it one of those like Rorschach tests where some people look at this photo and were like, I identify with Timmy in this photo? Or do you think everyone when they look at this photo, I haven't seen the first. photo yet. But I'm curious, do you think it's universal that everyone would identify with Tina? I'm looking at it now. And... Exactly. Do you think somebody would identify with Timmy? No, I think a lot of people should, but I don't think a lot of people would, if that makes sense. I mean, Tina Fey just looks like so buttoned up and like, oh, what am I next to? and slightly uncomfortable.

And then the other two are just like living their best life. All right. We can leave it there for today. Our executive producers is Mathony Maturi. Our producers are Casey Morel and Brea Suggs. Our editor is Rachel Bay. Special thanks to Christian Dev Kalimer.

I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the courts. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.