The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: April 30th

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

This week, California's secretary of state confirmed that there are enough valid signatures to trigger a recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat. Newsom was praised last spring for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, so how did the tides turn against him? Also, federal investigators raided Rudy Giuliani's apartment this week as part of a probe into the former New York city mayor's activities involving Ukraine.This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales and CapRadio's Nicole Nixon.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Watch our 4/27 NPR Politics After Dark live showLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Bubbles the Vampire, and I just put a bid on a house in a crazy hot real estate market in Akron, Ohio. This podcast was recorded at 1.04 p.m. on Friday, April 30th. Things may have changed by the time you listen. Enjoy the show. I'm sorry, did he say his name was Bubbles the Vampire? Yeah, I have some questions. I'm going to Google him after this.

Yeah. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And today, for the very first time on the pod, we have Nicole Nixon joining us from

Cap Radio in Sacramento. Hey, Nicole. Hey, thanks for having me. Oh, we're happy to have you on because we have a lot of questions about your state politics right now. Your governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, is now subject to a recall election. So we obviously want to get into the politics behind this, but many people, including myself, need a primer on how recall elections work in the state of California. Yeah, I think about 20 states allow for recalls.

But in California, there is pretty much always an attempt to recall statewide officials. It's very rare that they actually get the signatures they need. How many signatures do they need? You need about one and a half million signatures for a statewide elected official. So it's pretty big that the organizers behind this recall got that. Nicole, this seems like a really notable change of political fortune, because when I think of Gavin Newsom, way over here on the other coast, he was sort of one of the governors that was seen as getting

great marks and handling the pandemic well and started this pandemic really strong. And the tides just seem to have turned against him. Yeah, you know, I think the tide really turned for him. That one moment was when he went to this birthday party at this very fancy restaurant in Napa wine country. I remember that. Yeah. With a big group of people. This is the same time when he was telling everyone else to stay home and avoid these kinds of gatherings. Yeah. At the same time that happened, the recall organizers had gone to a judge and asked for more time to gather signatures because of the pandemic. And they got that. So those two things combined

really spelled bad news for Newsom. The signature drive exploded when that came out, and they ended up gathering more than 2 million signatures. And we just found out this week that enough of those have been verified to put this before voters probably later this year. So Newsom won, you know, by a big margin in 2018. He had been, I think, seen as a relatively popular governor. Is all of this unraveling basically just attributable to his handling of the pandemic? Well, the recall organizers have a long list of reasons that they pushed this and that people signed it. It's very driven by Newsom critics who, yes, hate his pandemic restrictions, but also hate his stance on immigrants and the fact that California has high taxes and it's expensive to live here and the housing market, the housing is very expensive.

So while it really got going because of the pandemic, and especially because of that Napa dinner, there are a lot of reasons that people signed it. Yeah. And so I don't know, like, I don't know if unraveling is exactly the right word. Obviously, it is absolutely terrible, not something you want to do. You do not want to have to defend yourself against a recall. Having it qualify for the ballot is a very bad, no good thing for Gavin Newsom, who is someone who has at many times had national political aspirations. But he's actually above water in his approval ratings right now, which is crazy. Like so he's not he is not as deeply unpopular as you might think he would need to be to really be in trouble.

Absolutely. And I'll just point out that the the signature threshold to get a recall of a governor on the ballot is lower than much other states. I think some states require 20 or 25 percent of voters who voted in the most recent statewide election. It's only 12 percent here. So big state. Yes, lots of voters. But it's not that hard in a state as large as California to find two million people who hate the governor. At any given time, for any given reason, I imagine. Yeah, exactly. So we know that they've collected the signatures, and this will now go to a ballot? So the next steps here are we're in this kind of weird period where for the next about six

weeks, anybody who signed a recall petition gets the chance to withdraw their name if they want. After that, if there are still enough signatures, then this will for sure go to the ballot. But the state is going to spend the summer estimating how much that will cost. And so we're probably looking at an actual election date being set later around September, and that election will probably take place in November. And then once it's on the ballot, is it like, do you want to recall? Yes, no. Who do you want to be governor? Like, how does that actual ballot work? That's exactly it. The first question is, shall Gavin Newsom be recalled? The second question is,

if Gavin Newsom is recalled, who do you want to replace him? And that's where the very long list of candidates will be. In 2003, there were 135 people running to replace Gray Davis, the governor at that time. Right. I mean, I'm glad you brought up the last recall effort, because, Tam, I think you made a good point, too, that we're going to draw a lot of parallels, because in politics, we always want to draw a parallel to the precedent. But Gavin Newsom does not seem to be in as politically precarious a position as Gray Davis was nearly 20 years ago facing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yeah. And so I did cover that recall election and then covered Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And there are some key dynamic changes. California was a democratic state back then too, but it's even

more dominated by Democrats now than it was back during the last recall. The California Republican Party has absolutely atrophied. And there's been a huge growth in people who are declined to state voters who have no political party preference. And the state is just truly up and down the ballot in all ways dominated by Democrats. And it's hard to see a scenario, but anything is possible. I mean, you couldn't just have Republicans vote and have Gavin Newsom removed from office. In the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he was perceived as someone who was not just a partisan warrior, in part because, you know, he spent much of his campaign using he had a he definitely had his own brand. His campaign speeches were just like absolutely full of movie lines from his movies. A lot of I'll be back. And he did have this real sort of populist campaign.

There's a very important difference thus far, which is that Governor Newsom has been able to prevent any Democrats or serious Democrats from throwing their name in as an alternative. It's a long summer, though. There are still opportunities for some Democrats somewhere to throw their name out there. But Newsom is trying very hard. His team is trying to close ranks around him, present the Democratic Party here as very unified behind their candidate, which is Gavin Newsom. How has the governor responded to the recall petition? And how does he defend himself against sort of the anger towards him for his handling the pandemic?

Yeah, he has responded by calling this driven by political extremists, the national GOP, which hates California politics and politicians, and anti-vaccine, you know, QAnon types. Things are very much on the upswing here in California. So we have the lowest infection rate of COVID in the nation right now. And he is touting that very strongly. He has this plan to fully reopen the state's economy by mid-June in about six weeks. So that's how he's defending it. And I'll also point out that, you know, while we're drawing comparisons here between now and 2003, Newsom's approval ratings, like Tam mentioned, are much higher than the than Gray Davis approval ratings were back then. He has pretty good approval ratings from voters on

how he's handled the pandemic, how he's handled school closures, how he's handled the economy. All of those things are looking pretty good for him. So Newsom, as obviously, as you said, trying to draw ranks around him in the Democratic Party. Is there any sense of there being any coalescing around who the non-newsome candidate would be? And I would note here that one of the names that's at least gotten a lot of press attention is Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender activist, sort of famous Hollywood celebrity who has a ton of name recognition, like a former candidate who also beat a governor of California in a recall election. Can we say she's a Kardashian?

Is she still a Kardashian? She was never a Kardashian. Well, yes. But she totally appeared on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I classify Caitlyn Jenner as a Kardashian for sure. But I will note her Kardashian, the rest of her Kardashian family has been very silent on her announcing. I haven't seen anything from anyone in her family. Well, they're Democrats.

So there's that. To answer your question, I think it remains to be seen what happens with all these Republican candidates, because there are so many of them already. There's Caitlyn Jenner. There's the former Republican mayor of San Diego, Kevin Faulkner, who was widely seen before all of this as the one who would challenge Newsom in 2022 when he would normally be up for reelection. A few other Republican candidates out there, but we have a few weeks and months here to see who rises to the top and who else announces. Yeah. And Nicole, I think you make a good point, too, because if much of this was driven by pandemic anger, if this election doesn't happen until the fall, we could be in a totally different universe by then. If kids are back in school, if the economy is on the up and up, people's anger might not be the same politically as it is months and months from now. Absolutely. And that is probably the exact

argument that Gavin Newsom will be making over the next six months here. At least that's what he's hoping is going to happen in the next six months. All right. Well, Nicole, thank you so much for coming on the pod and talking us through all of this. Thanks so much for having me. All right. That was Nicole Nixon of Cap Radio in Sacramento. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the FBI raid on Rudy Giuliani's apartment. Today, it seems like everybody's got a bone to pick with the news. So what happens when somebody stops talking smack and just decides to wage all out war? First thing you do in an evasion, you eliminate the communications of the enemy. And what happens if they win?

Visit Stockton, California, for a story about a revolt against the mainstream media that's shaken up a city from NPR's Invisibilia. And we're back and we've got Justice Correspondent Ryan Lucas with us now. Hey, Ryan. Hi there. You know, every time I think that Rudy Giuliani is falling out of the news cycle, bam, he just comes right back into it in ways you don't always expect. He does. Though in this case, this was kind of like semi-predictable. Maybe some people were expecting it.

Earlier this week, FBI agents searched Rudy Giuliani's New York apartment and office. Ryan, tell us what we know about the reasoning behind the raid. Well, we have known for quite some time that investigators in New York were looking at Giuliani's business dealings and his work related to Ukraine. It's a probe that went kind of on hold over a course of several months in 2020, in the middle of 2020. But it is quite clearly very much an active investigation at this point in time because of this search warrant that around a half dozen FBI agents executed, as you said, on Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment and office early Wednesday morning. Giuliani and his attorney have both said that the agents carted off about around a dozen or so electronic devices, so phones, laptops, hard drives.

Giuliani and his attorney, Robert Costello, have both said that according to the documents that they were given, meaning search warrants, that this is part of an investigation into potential violations of foreign lobbying laws by Giuliani. Ryan, when you talk about foreign lobbying laws, what are you talking about here? The law in question here is called the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And basically what it says is that if you are doing political or public relations work on behalf of a foreign entity, you have to disclose that to the Justice Department. You have to register. And the argument here would be that Giuliani was doing such work, but didn't disclose it and didn't register with the Justice Department.

So other than my question about what you do when all your phones are taken away by the FBI, what were they looking for? Well, from what Giuliani's attorney has said, this revolves around Giuliani's actions, his work tied to Ukraine. Of course, Giuliani has had business dealings in Ukraine for several years since he left the mayor's office in New York in the early 2000s. But a lot of this appears to be tied to his work related to Ukraine when he was serving as President Trump's personal attorney. Giuliani was actively trying to gather information in Ukraine about Joe Biden, derogatory information. can clearly recall from our time covering this, were a central part of the Ukraine scandal of 2019 and early 2020 and President Trump's first impeachment. It's also important to remember, because he came up a lot in impeachment and even in the time since then in defending the president, that Giuliani never played any government role. He was always the president's personal attorney

outside of White House counsel or outside of any official government legal advice for the president. That's right. He was part of his personal legal team. He did not hold a post in the White House. He did not hold a post in the administration. What is interesting in the course of this investigation is what we also saw on Wednesday, indicating kind of the breadth of this and pointing again to Ukraine, is that federal agents also served a search warrant on a Washington lawyer by the name of Victoria Tenzing. That name may ring a bell for you. Tenzing is someone who worked with Giuliani on his Ukraine claims. Also somebody who hired a man by the name of Lev Parnas at one point in time.

Now that name may ring a bell. Right. Parnas and his business associate, Igor Fruman, are two individuals who helped put Giuliani in touch with people in Ukraine in his quest to dig up information on Joe Biden. Parnas and Fruman were both indicted in the fall of 2019 for campaign finance crimes and other offenses. They have pleaded not guilty. They are fighting those. But this is all part of that sort of milieu that Giuliani was running with in 2019 that is now seemingly caught up in this investigation. I think that it's important to say at this point in time,

you know, I've spoken with Giuliani in the past about questions related to foreign lobbying and whether he needed to register with the Justice Department. He has always said that he followed the law to a T, that he never did anything wrong. He said something similar last night in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. I never ever represented a foreign national. In fact, I have in my contracts a refusal to do it because from the time I got out of being mayor, I didn't want to lobby. Never did it to Bush. Never did it to Obama.

Never did it with Trump. And I can prove it. Just give me an opportunity. So Giuliani has, in a lot of his public statements so far, tried to kind of distract from the investigation that he is facing, and instead try to turn tables and talk about President Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden, we know, is under federal criminal investigation. That is an investigation that is ongoing. He has not been charged yet. And he may not be charged. But that does not change the fact that there is indeed, clearly, a federal criminal investigation into Rudy Giuliani. And that is a massive change of fortune for a man who, after 9-11, was considered America's mayor.

A national hero, yeah. And was riding high for a good portion of the early 2000s. And then as President Trump's personal attorney, he was front and center in the news for many years. And now he is under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Southern District, New York, the very office that he once led to much acclaim in the 1980s. But Brian, all of this seems to beg the question about, well, so what about former President Trump? I mean, all of this timeframe that the FBI seems to be investigating is when Giuliani was doing work, both publicly and more behind the scenes that we may not know about,

on behalf of the former president. So I think people might wonder, does this raise any legal doing work, both publicly and more behind the scenes that we may not know about, on behalf of the former president. So I think people might wonder, does this raise any legal questions for the former president himself? That is a good question. From what we know at this point in time, I don't think that there's a very satisfying answer. There's nothing that points to President Trump directly from what we know.

But it's certainly something that Giuliani and people in his corner like to point to in trying to frame this as an example of Trump derangement syndrome more than anything Giuliani has done. Tim, this obviously seems like it could be a pretty politically sensitive investigation under the Biden administration and under the Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland. Have they weighed in at all on the raid or what's happening here? Yeah, and I would say it was also a politically sensitive investigation during the Trump administration under the previous Attorney General. But President Biden, because there inevitably would be questions about political interference or whether

President Biden somehow knew this was happening or wanted this to happen. President Biden was asked about that directly in an interview with NBC. And he said, no, he did not know that this was going to happen. He was not given a heads up. And in fact, that's the normal course of things. That's the way it should be. This administration, you know, in part as a reaction to the past administration, is going out of its way to show that the president is not going to interfere with the work of the Justice Department. All right, Ryan, thanks for coming on. I think we're going to let you go. Good to be here. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what we can't let go this week. And we're back. And it has been a week. We had President

Biden's first address to Congress. And we did a super fun live Zoom show earlier this week. You can find a link to that in the show notes if you'd like to catch up on and watch it later. But now it's time to end the show like we do every week by talking about the things we just can't let go of, politics or otherwise. And in order to do it this week, we had to bring back a very special guest, NPR's own Claudia Grisales. Hello there. Claudia, we had to bring you back after last week because your Can't Let It Go requires a bit of an update. It requires an update and I still can't let it go requires a bit of an update. It requires an update and I still can't let it go. And I can't stop talking about it and tormenting my family with updates about it. Now, as you may have heard by now, there was

a viral Chihuahua rescue. And his name is Prancer. And he is a 13-pound rage machine, as I described him last week. And his foster mom, this is Tiffany Fortuna, wrote this incredible post about him and just the torment that her family has gone through for the last six months, watching Prancer and all of his issues. He came to her again with a cashmere sweater and a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich stuffed into his crate, an obese Prancer. And she just could not take any more of this dog and basically wrote this post out of desperation. But it truly went viral. They got hundreds of inquiries from around the world from people trying to adopt this

dog. And again, this is from the Second Chance Pet Adoption League in New Jersey. They've even printed up t-shirts with his face asking if you've ever had your life taken over by a Chihuahua rescue. This is your moment. And so I'm a mom of a Chihuahua rescue as well. So it could clearly relate to this dog. But he takes it to another level because he hates men, children. He hates everyone. Yes, everyone. He's people opportunity hateful.

Exactly, except women. And so that's where the good news comes in. He was adopted this week. It was revealed by an Ariel Davis in Connecticut. So he's not going too far from New Jersey where he is. And he's going to be living this, you know, happily ever after. But I see his story continuing, this haunted Victorian child in the body of a small dog. I see Disney movies. I see contract writers for the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches and more cashmere sweaters and the

Disney films and the books. And so for now, at least we know he's living happily ever after. Sounds like he found his perfect mom and he has his own Instagram channel and I can't wait to keep up with the updates. Adorable. Is your Chihuahua as temperamental as this Chihuahua or other Chihuahuas more loving? I admit I haven't spent a lot of time with chihuahuas in my life. Yeah. So ours, we believed for the last, I would say, 10 years, believed that she hated men too, except for my husband.

That was the only one that got a pass. But just this week, we had two contractors come over and she was so friendly. So this was a new discovery this week. But yes, she is kind of at night. She's Goldilocks. So she goes to all the different beds. And then this week, her trick is to torment you through the entire night. And so my oldest daughter, she got to get tortured last night.

She was up all night. So they're not on speaking terms now. And we were not on speaking terms with her earlier this week, because she kept us up all night earlier this week. So yes, 14- pound terror. I can really relate to Prancer. Well, and I hear that. Did I read correctly that Prancer's adoptive mom is a single lesbian, which should deal with the whole man hating dog problem? Exactly. Perfect, perfect note to make. She said, I'm a single woman. I'm a single lesbian. I live

with another woman. I don't have any men in my life. I work in women's rehab. I don't have other animals. It's like the perfect match. Why not? Truly her spirit animal. Spirit animal. Exactly. It's such a perfect ending to this crazed story of this, you know, rage machine. It's just fabulous. Claudia, what is your chihuahua's name? Riot, as in public disturbance. I'm sure. All right, Tam, what can't you let go of this week?

Mine is also in the canine department. The president and first lady sat down for an interview with NBC's Craig Melvin. And one of the questions turned to the family pet or pets. And it turns out they really are going to get a cat. And, you know, we know that Major Biden has a nasty little biter. No, I mean, you know, if you were taken to a new place and there were a bunch of weird people around you might get nippy too anyway i'm in defense of major biden but major biden did go

away for some training it turns out part of his training was to build his cat tolerance for this new cat that is coming um i guess they took him to an animal shelter to meet cats must love cats um so anyway it's part of his retraining uh my favorite part of the interview was uh he asked uh the president was this your idea and the president was like uh no i feel like major biden is not going to be happy about having a cat around. If he doesn't like people around, like cats are like there's dog sworn enemies in many situations. But that cat is going to be happy because I know there are rodents. There are rodents that need to be caught at the White House. We could use a cat at the Capitol too.

It would stay very busy. Old buildings. Old buildings. Sue, what can't you let go of? The thing I can't let go of is what so many people around us are obsessing about in these days. The cicadas are coming. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Any minute now. No. I don't know if all of our listeners are as consumed by cicadas as the entire East Coast, but particularly in this region. But every 17 years, a type of cicada known as broodex literally crawls up out of the ground, mates, dies, and then their eggs go back in the ground and come back out 17 years later. But people are like freaking out about the cicadas because frankly, it sounds pretty gross. But the reason why I can't let it go is I just want to calm everyone down. Because I was in D.C. the last time they came out, 17 years ago. And I'm here to calm your fears that it's not going to be as bad as, like, the horror movies that people online seem to think this is going to be. They don't bite.

They don't even really like humans. They're just here to mate and have a good time and then die again. Like, just let the cicadas be. There's just going to be a lot of them. There's going to be a lot of them. It's like they get all over the sidewalk, so it's kind of gross. But that's, like, the worst part about them. It's much worse.

What were we scared about earlier in the year? The killer bees? What was the one? No, the murder hornets. Murder hornets? That's right. It's not a murder hornet situation it's like they're loud and they're just here to party well conveniently our local public radio station is doing an entire zoom show about cicadas including a cooking lesson cooking apparently they're edible oh i'm like probably going to attend because I want to learn how to cook them.

I want to learn all about them. I am obsessed. I am not scared. I am obsessed. That's it for us this week. Our executive producer is Shirley Henry. Our editors are Mathoni Mottori and Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Barton Girdwood and Chloe Weiner.

Thanks to Lexi Schipittel and Brandon Carter. Our intern is Claire Obie. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Claudia Grisales, and I cover Prancer, but really I cover Congress, but sometimes Prancer.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.