The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, April 11

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it is charging Julian Assange, setting the stage for a historic legal showdown with the controversial founder of WikiLeaks. Plus, Attorney General William Barr has launched his own informal inquiry about the origins of the Russia investigation just days before the release of the redacted Mueller Report. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, justice reporter Ryan Lucas, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, national security editor Philip Ewing, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. 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

What's up podcast team? This is John from South Philly. I'm thinking about how excited I am to see is live on the 26th as I am on my way to get a cheesesteak that I will probably regret later. This podcast was recorded at... It is Thursday, April 11th at 1 20 Eastern. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this, but one thing that won't change is me buying regrettable cheesesteaks. You should never regret a cheesesteak, ever. Genos or Pats? Well, that's a whole other political question, Mara.

And you know what? We are going to discuss it in detail on Friday the 26th. If you want to be there for that political discussion, there are tickets still available at nprpresents.org. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. A lot to get to today. First of all, early this morning, Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, was arrested in London.

This is after years of camping out in the Ecuadorian embassy. And the attorney general says the Mueller report, or at least a redacted version of it, is coming. It's going to be public within the next five days. We'll get to all that, but let's start with Assange. Ryan, real quick, because there's a lot of backstory we're going to get to, what exactly is Assange facing charges for right now? Well, the charge in the United States that he's facing was unsealed today. It's one count, came out in the Eastern District of Virginia. And what the charge is, is a conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion. Basically, that just boils down to a computer hacking conspiracy. So, Phil, I'm a little confused because my understanding was

the reason he has not left this embassy in seven years is because he couldn't get arrested in it. So what happened? Why was he suddenly arrested now? Julian Assange has benefited for a long time from the diplomatic immunity granted him by the British authorities because he sought refuge in this embassy that Ecuador has in this office building in London. In fact, it's not far from Herod's department store. But then the government of Ecuador took it away. And all of a sudden, the ambassador there, from what we understand, opened up the door and said to the British police who are outside, come on in. I understand you've got a warrant for this guy who's been in my office since 2012. And they came in with several metropolitan police officers. And there was these extraordinary TV pictures of these London cops

carrying Julian Assange, who now has a beard and long hair, out of the door of this office and then putting him in a police van and then taking him off to court where he was booked. Assange has had this surreal life in the embassy. He had his own cat. The government of Ecuador yelled at him because he wasn't taking good enough care of it. But they also said that he was violating the conditions of his asylum. This was the explanation they gave. He was involved with allegedly hacking some Vatican computer systems. But the point is that immunity no longer applies. He's in British custody and the United States wants to bring him to this country to face justice here.

It sounds like he was the house guest from hell. Right. Wouldn't you follow the rules if you get arrested? He was seeking asylum. Now, what also happened, the backdrop of this is there used to be a left wing government of Ecuador who originally offered him asylum. And now there's a new moderate government in Ecuador who wants better relationships with the United States. But at one point during his stay there, WikiLeaks published a leak of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails stolen from the inboxes of Ecuador's president and first lady. Is that really the way you want to show your appreciation for the people who are shielding you from arrest? But I'm assuming there will be a movie made about this,

and Julian Assange is one heck of a character. It sounds like he really wanted to get arrested eventually. Don't tell Benedict Cumberbatch, who already made a movie with him. Oh, right, right, right. But not with the dramatic ending. So, Phil, Ryan, can we just rewind a little bit? Because Assange is probably mostly in our minds, most recently due to WikiLeaks role in the 2016 interference from Russia. Of course, the emails from John Podesta, from the Democratic National Committee. But he was on the American political scene before that as well.

Who wants to do the... Phil, can you do the catch-up on all the ways Julian Assange has inserted himself pretty aggressively into American politics? Sure. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made their name back in 2010 in the United States when, as we now know, then-private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, gave to WikiLeaks a ton of material about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the way diplomacy was conducted by the United States, the way these cables were sent back and forth from Washington to all these embassies and back. And he achieved great notoriety or great acclaim, depending on your perspective, because of the things about American practices he revealed.

It also set up WikiLeaks as this kind of global brand of anti-secrecy or whistleblowing or revelations in the view of its supporters. And that put him in a position in 2016 to be the choice that, from what we understand, Russia's government made to try to fence out all this material that its intelligence officers were stealing from political targets in the United States. And the information that WikiLeaks has released over the years, particularly in the case of 2010, I was in the Middle East when that happened. And there was a video that they had that showed essentially a US helicopter opening fire on men in Baghdad. And it turns out that a number of the

people who were killed were actually Iraqi journalists. Stuff like that, a lot of people welcomed WikiLeaks roles in exposing that sort of thing. The view has changed somewhat over time. Its role in 2016 definitely put it in a different light in the minds of many Americans feeling that they had kind of unfairly injected themselves into the U.S. political system. Mara, speaking of how views of WikiLeaks have changed, how did, can you remind us how then candidate Donald Trump talked about WikiLeaks in 2016? Well, he mentioned WikiLeaks at least 141 times.

He said he loved WikiLeaks at least 141 times. He said he loved WikiLeaks. He told his supporters at rallies to go look at the latest WikiLeaks drop about Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. He talked them up. This was kind of the sidebar to him announcing at a rally, Russia, if you're listening, please find Hillary's emails and you will be rewarded. So he just adored WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has given us a window into the secret corridors of government power. WikiLeaks has done a job on her, hasn't it? Because WikiLeaks is unbelievable. How about the WikiLeaks? It's been amazing what's coming out on WikiLeaks. Oh, we love WikiLeaks. Boy, they have really WikiLeaks.

And today he certainly changed his tune. Here he is responding to a reporter's question. Do you still love WikiLeaks? I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It's not my thing. Not my jam. I mean, it's so funny because every single news program in the universe is going to play many of the 141 times he said he loved WikiLeaks. But this is really fortuitous timing because all of a sudden, Russian interference in the 2016 election is back front and center. We were about to get the Mueller report. And now Julian Assange, who got all those hack democratic emails from the

Russians, is back in the news. And Phil, can you remind us of what the pipeline was from Russian hackers to WikiLeaks to how this influenced the election? Right. We've learned a lot about this since the 2016 election when it was kind of an open question about where this material was coming from that WikiLeaks was releasing. What the special counsel's office has said since then is that there was this huge wave of cyber attacks by Russian intelligence officers starting in 2015 and continuing probably right up until this day that resulted in the taking of all this material from political targets in the United States, the leaders of the Democratic National Committee, the head of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, and many others, which we kind of gloss over sometimes in looking back at

this. And a lot of that material went from the Russia Military Intelligence Agency, the GRU, to Assange and WikiLeaks. And then he published it to great effect in the election and with great praise from Trump, as Mara mentioned. And we should say that the media incorporated a lot of that material into its reports on the election. Right. It is unclear whether WikiLeaks knew that it was getting that information from Russian intelligence. But Robert Mueller says in one of the indictments in his investigation that there was a conversation between individuals who turned out to be agents of Russian intelligence with WikiLeaks about the best way to release the hacked emails. And Robert Mueller also said in another indictment that there was communication, indirect communication between WikiLeaks and the Trump orbit, mostly through Roger Stone.

And what's even more interesting about Donald Trump disavowing any knowledge of WikiLeaks is his own CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who's now his secretary of state, called WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. I was at that speech that Pompeo gave here in Washington back in 2017. It left a lot of us kind of slack-jawed because we have known for a long time that the U.S. government has a negative view of WikiLeaks. You look at the leak of government documents back in 2010. You look at the leak of government documents back in 2010. You look at 2016. In 2017, this was when WikiLeaks released CIA documents. There is a long history of U.S. government frustration with WikiLeaks and its release of classified U.S. government information. Pompeo basically said publicly what a lot of U.S. folks in the national security establishment have felt

for a long time, which is that WikiLeaks targets the U.S. in a way that it does not Russia, that it does not China, that it really unfairly goes after the U.S. And if it's going to cloak itself in this kind of blanket of high-minded freedom, liberty, journalism, exposing wrongdoing of governments around the world. Well, it has this nasty little habit of basically only exposing U.S. government secrets and not those of dictators or authoritarian governments. So all that being said, what is Assange actually being charged with today? He's not being charged with espionage. He's not being charged with publishing government secrets. The whole difficulty with charging someone like Assange is that WikiLeaks has played a role very similar to what media organizations do, which is trying to expose

government wrongdoing, trying to get information out that it feels needs to be in the public realm. There were definitely discussions during the Obama administration about possibly bringing charges against WikiLeaks, but it was a difficult needle to thread. And what they've done today is not charged him with anything related to the publication of information. They have charged him with conspiracy to hack U.S. government computers, which is kind of this very, depending on how you view it, kind of nifty way of trying to thread that needle. Because he has First Amendment protections?

Because prosecutors probably do not want to have a trial in which they make the key question of the trial, is Julian Assange a journalist? Is WikiLeaks a media organization? Instead, they want to say, did he violate this law that technically prohibits anyone from getting unauthorized access to a U.S. government system? They argue they have the evidence to make that case. The concerns about the precedent such charges might set. But okay, so this charge is from the 2010 hack, the Iraq and Afghanistan and State Department hacks, that first big wave of WikiLeaks dumps. Barr said when he released his summary of the Mueller report that there were no further indictments coming.

Does that mean that there's not going to be any charges related to 2016? Does that mean we're not going to learn any more new information about Assange's role in all of this when the report comes out? Like, help me out here with what could come next or what's just done. Well, what Barr said was that the special counsel's office hadn't recommended any more indictments beyond those that are public. This indictment was brought by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. So technically, what the Attorney General said was correct. But he's also been clear since he sent that summary of the Mueller report to Congress,

that there could be other things that spun out of Mueller's investigation. This could be one of those. The other interesting thing about this is the date on the indictment that was unsealed the day we're talking, Thursday, was March of 2018. So this has been in the can for more than a year. And what we might infer is it took from then till now to get all the moving parts together in such a way that the Ecuadorians would kick Assange out and he would be eligible to be charged. There is one thing that I need to add, and that is the angle that we have heard, the defensive front that is building among Assange's supporters, is that this charge is a threat to journalism. It sets a nasty precedent. And Assange's lawyer in the U.S., in fact, Barry Pollack, put out a statement today saying that, yes, the indictment against Assange is related to charges of conspiracy to commit computer crimes.

But he says the factual allegations against Mr. Assange boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect the identity of that source. Journalists around the world should be deeply troubled by these unprecedented criminal charges. See, that's what's so interesting. The left and the right here are colliding in a really ridiculous way, because in an era that's defined by negative partisanship, in other words, if your enemy is for something, you have to be against it. The left has always championed Assange as a whistleblower and a journalist. The ACLU actually wrote a statement today decrying his arrest.

But in 2016, when he was helping Donald Trump, the right loved him, too. So now how does this all sort itself out? And one thing that I want to add quickly is some of what WikiLeaks has done in the past has been a great help to journalism. In the case of the State Department cables, it was something that people relied on going back and looking at how the U.S. government viewed dictators around the world, conversations that they had. It exposed things that really we just hadn't seen before. And that played a very important role. And that was information that we wouldn't have had otherwise. And even in 2016, I wrote a lot of stories based on the WikiLeaks information about the Clinton campaign. We would mention in the story there was a high likelihood this came from Russian interference, but it also provided a lot of context and information about Hillary Clinton's selection of a running maid, a lot of other behind the scenes things that shed insight into a pretty secretive campaign, but at the same time was being used as a cudgel to score political points.

I guess the last thing I've just been wondering is like what happens inside the embassy now? Like is there are people like awkwardly jostling for the space that Hassan just taken up? If I were the Ecuadorian ambassador, I would call the cleaners immediately. I would think they're fumigating it. I would evict the cat and get the cat box out of there and look for a new embassy, TBH. All right. We're going to take a quick break. Mara, we're going to say goodbye to you because you have to catch a plane.

Talk to you soon, Mara. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And when we come back, more on that Mueller report. We expect it to be released within the next few days. Support for NPR and the following message come from the American Beverage Association. America's beverage companies are working together to support families as they reduce the sugar in their diets. Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi are providing more great tasting options with less sugar or no sugar at all.

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from the Netflix series Russian Doll, the beloved Retta from NBC's Parks and Recreation, and many more. Spread the word, listen, and subscribe now. We are back and now we've got Domenico Montanaro with us. Hey, Domenico. Hey, what's happening? Not much. How are you? I'm good. All right. So we are here to talk about Attorney General Bill Barr. He was on Capitol Hill this week to testify not about the Mueller report, but he was, of course, asked some questions about it. Two things to talk about. First of all, we now have a timeline for the release of a redacted version of the report. We're going to talk about this moment where Barr was asked about potential spying that may have taken place in 2016 by the Obama administration into the Trump campaign.

I think there was a spying did occur. Yes, I think spying did occur. Well, let me question is whether it was predicated, adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting it wasn't adequately predicated. And Ryan, this idea of so-called spying was, of course, a big Trump talking point, a big Trump ally talking point for the last couple of years as kind of a counter to the idea of the Mueller investigation. Can you, before we get into what to make of Barr saying this, what's the baseline fact check of that claim? Well, we do know that there was surveillance that was conducted by the FBI against a Trump campaign aide by the name of Carter Page. We know this because the application that the FBI and the Justice Department made to the court has been made public. They believe that Page may have been working with the Russian government. That's why they went to a court, presented this application, and the court approved it. The court

said, yes, there was indeed reason to believe that Page might be working with the Russian government. So to say that there was spying, it's the word choice here that is particularly stunning coming out of the attorney general, in large part because this echoes, of course, the language that the president himself has used. It's important when he says at the end of that clip that Barr has adequately predicated to break that down into layman's terms. What that basically means is he's not saying that he doesn't know whether it was conducted legally or illegally. That's what that's saying. I mean, but that phrase that adequately predicated, right, was so interesting and stuck out for me because if you think about what he's saying here, it goes back to all of the conspiracy theories that Republicans have had on why the investigation was launched in the first place. Right. You know, trying to say that it was the dossier that launched the investigation, something that the Trump campaign and whether or not there were actors who tried to work with the work with Russia, the Russian government to try to,

you know, help influence the election. That is not where this came from. And by using that phrase, he's sort of dog whistling a little bit, not just to people who believe that, but directly to the president of the United States. One of the thing the attorney general did signpost this week is that there will be at least one more big milestone about this. There will be a report, he said, from the inspector general of the Justice Department this summer talking about the use of surveillance authority by the investigators in the Russia case. And so we're not through with this. We're going to hear more about it when that report comes out. There's one more thing that came out on this, and that is that the attorney general himself said that he is putting together a team of people in his office to look into these allegations separate from what the inspector general is doing. And there was a degree of flack that he was getting from DOJ veterans about the idea of why, if this is already being looked at by the inspector general, why does the attorney general need to look at this himself?

So both this moment where he used the terms that Trump and Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee and a whole lot of people in the Trumposphere of Trump supporters online and on TV are using, the fact that he did that and he's going forward with these investigations that make us reassess the way that Barr came into this job and came into overseeing the final days of the Mueller report and this redaction we're talking about where he was a DOJ lifer. He's somebody who respects the rule of law. That's the way he was talked about, at least by a lot of people. His comments this week have certainly heightened concerns that Democrats have about Barr and his relationship with the president and how fair-minded he's going to be as Attorney General. Nancy Pelosi went after him in particular on this point. So by next week's Thursday Weekly Roundup, we will have the report in front of us. Phil, what do the redactions look like? And especially given what he was saying on Capitol Hill this week, is there any way for Democrats or outside parties to push back on those redactions and say,

hey, why did you take that out and what was under there? Barr is going to take four kinds of things out of the report, he says. Grand jury material, which is secret. Foreign spying information, which is sensitive. Information that implicates ongoing cases, prosecutions or investigations that are continuing even now after the end of the special counsel inquiry. And the fourth thing is information that relates to what he called peripheral players. These are non-public people who he wants to protect the privacy of to the degree the investigators developed information about them. That feels like a lot of things, though.

Is this going to be one of those comical government documents that, like, wastes a whole lot of black ink because you get an entire black page? I expect to see a lot of black ink on the pages of this report when it comes out. The Democrats, especially the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, are not happy about this. They worry that the attorney general is going to use this discretion to try to protect people, perhaps members of the president's family, by using the discretion he's claimed to take stuff out of the report. And Jerry Nadler has the support of members of his committee to issue a subpoena for the full material if he needs to. The question is whether he will or whether he'll get it on his own from the attorney general. I mean, I think the really interesting thing there is the fact that a couple of things, if you're talking about other investigations that are ongoing, does that include

the Southern District of New York and some of what's happening there? Because obviously, that's going to be a pretty key critical one that continues. Right. And the other thing is when you talk about redactions, usually the redactions are for the public, right, where they don't want to, you know, expose national security or sources and methods and all that, which he talked about. But we're not talking about just for the public. We're also talking about what Congress gets. And these are folks with classified clearances. They could have classified briefings on these things. And that is not at all what Attorney General Barr is talking about. There are a couple of things on that. One, Barr did say that he is willing to work with

Nadler, as well as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham, to try to address particularly the concerns that Nadler has about these redactions. And Barr said that he feels that he can probably find a way to accommodate most of the concerns that they have about what might be redacted and find a way to get them that additional information. The sticking point in particular at this point is grand jury material. Grand jury material, according to federal rules, cannot really be released kind of willy-nilly. There are very narrow exceptions. Congressional oversight is not one of them at this point in time. There is a bit of legal wrangling on this, but Barr has not closed the door on Congress getting all of the information that's

going to be redacted. Okay. So once the report is out, no matter how much it is redacted, we will of course be covering it in the podcast. So last question on this, uh, as you open the PDF or whatever form you, you read this report in, uh, I'm curious what each one of you is going to be most interested in. What part are you going to be skimming towards pretty quickly? It's going to be something like 400 pages, right, Domenico?

I think the key word is exonerate. I mean I think that that's one. If you could keyword it, you would because that was the sort of tantalizing piece in the Barr four-page letter that said that the president was not exonerated from obstruction of justice, potentially, even though Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein decided not to go forward with any sort of prosecution of the president on that measure. Two quick things. The other types of election interference used by the Russians in 2016, other than the ones we know about, so not just social media agitation, Facebook and so forth, and not just hacking and dumping and releasing things to embarrass targets? Did the Russians do anything else that hasn't become public to try and help President Trump get elected? We may learn more about that, or we may learn that

that was the extent of what they did. And the other question this report may answer is what knowledge did Trump have about the efforts by the Russians in real time in 2016? The Attorney General says the special counsel did not establish that there was a conspiracy. OK, but did the president get told by any of the people on his team who were talking with Russians in 2016 about what they were doing? And did he just decide not to reciprocate or what knowledge did he have? We're going to be looking specifically for that when this report comes out. I will add to that that that we know of a bunch of dots in this investigation that were contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. I'm curious why Mueller didn't get to the point that he felt that he could establish conspiracy. We know that there were contacts.

Where did Mueller get in all of that? How did he feel that he wasn't able to actually get to that point? And the second thing is, why didn't Mueller make a charging decision on the question of obstruction of justice? He he sat that one out. He made clear that he wasn't exonerating the president on that. He did say that specifically. But why didn't he decide that he was going to make that call for himself? So when this report comes out, whether it's Friday, Monday or Tuesday, you are welcome to read all 400 pages if you want to. But we are going to be helping you get through that. If you go to NPR.org, we will be posting the document and highlighting the key parts as we read it. And of course, we will be in the studio taping a podcast trying to make sense of it.

We're going to take a quick break and come back with Can't Let It Go. Now that ISIS has lost all its territory, what happens to the people ISIS left behind? She chose to take herself out there. She should stay in Syria and rot. And what about their children? How it ends, a new series on Embedded. All right, we are back and it is time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, where we all talk about one thing that we cannot stop thinking about politics or otherwise. And Phil, you get to go first. Okay, thank you. Well, you know, one thing we do in this life covering the special counsel of the Justice Department and so forth

is go on the radio and pretend to be a lawyer. And that is difficult because these concepts are tough to understand. And we have a kindred spirit in someone we talk a lot about during Can't Let It Go, and that's Kim Kardashian. She's the subject of a new Vogue magazine profile, which describes that she wants to become a lawyer, but not by going to law school, because that's too mainstream. She's going to do it her own way. Apparently in California, where she lives, you can, quote unquote, read the law and apprentice and become a lawyer by not going to college, which she has not, or going to law school, apparently in California where she lives you can quote unquote read the law and apprentice and become a lawyer by not going to college which she has not or going to law school which she is not

going to do instead she's just kind of kind of do her own thing let me just read you a section from this profile the reading is what really gets me she said it's so time consuming the concepts I grasp in two seconds and I just want to, I can't let go of the fact that I too can grasp these legal concepts quickly. It's just all that pesky reading you have to do to get the credentials you need.

I mean, we have a solution to this, though. We work in audio. So, you know, she could maybe listen to some of her local NPR stations in California. Maybe they can help her out with some of the news updates.

And maybe even they can get, you know, like Black's Law Dictionary or whatever put on audio. Would you hire her as your lawyer? Well, she better pass first. Ryan? Mine is from the realm of otherwise as well. So I was walking home from the office earlier this week and spied across the street a guy who was holding a dog back. And then on his foot was a baby squirrel. And the dog was trying to eat the baby squirrel.

As dogs do. As they do. So I crossed the street and was like, you look like you could use a little bit of help. And he said, yeah, can you hold my dog for a bit? So he picked up the baby squirrel who he had found originally in the street and put it into the lawn. The baby squirrel jumped back down, jumped back onto his foot. What? This baby squirrel had fallen out of its nest somewhere,

and its mother wasn't around, and it was trying to basically get back into the street and sit there. And so what I told the guy is, I will guard the baby squirrel from getting back into the street. He ran home, got a shoebox, came back, picked up the squirrel, put it into the shoebox. As we were leaving, he was going to go call a vet and find out where he could take it.

A city rescue service, animal rescue service van showed up. What? We presented this man with the squirrel. He said, you know what? I'll take it. Somebody called about this earlier. It will go to an animal shelter for the night. It will be fed, get a little bit of a health checkup,

and then they would return it to the wild the following day. This is great. Ryan Lucas, squirrel Samaritan. Well, I was helping the great Samaritan. I was a squirrel Samaritan helper. On behalf of America's squirrels, thank you. All right, I will go next. So this is about someone who, I guess,

reads a lot more than Kim Kardashian based on his profession and the way he goes about it. So sometimes I moonlight as a book reviewer on NPR.org. And this week I had the exciting task of writing about a new book from my all-time favorite author, Robert Caro. He has written like 700,000 pages worth of material over the years about Lyndon Johnson. It's going to be a five-part series if he ever finishes it, and it's like probably the best political biography out there. So I really enjoy, this was not the latest chapter in the Johnson series,

though, but just like George R.R. Martin, who's never going to finish the Game of Thrones books, it was a side project. Like, hey, I know you really want that next book from me. Here's another book. That is not the book you want, but I promise you it's good. But this was good. It was a short memoir about his approach to reporting and writing. And basically, as a reporter who works on tight deadlines and writes short stories, this mostly just kind of shamed me because it was talking about how he takes 10 years at a time to write these books and track down facts. And some of the anecdotes about the extreme ways he found key interviews were really both amusing and also, again, kind of shaming. And the one in particular I keep thinking about is like he was writing about Johnson's college

years and hadn't really gotten anybody to do anything except just be polite about LBJ. And everyone kept saying, like, there's this one key guy you need to find. And he couldn't find him. He couldn't find him. And finally, someone says, yeah, he just moved to Florida in a town north of Miami that had beach in it. And that's the only tip he had. And of course, like, that really doesn't narrow it down.

So then Carol writes about how he and his wife, Ina, who helps him report, got all the phone books they could find, because this was the pre-internet age when we found phone books, go through it. They found every single town north of Miami with beach in it, went through the phone book looking for this guy. They somehow figured out he lived in a mobile home park, called every single mobile home park to ask if this guy was there.

Someone finally says, like, oh, yeah, that guy moved here yesterday. He gets on the very next plane to the other side of Florida, drives across Florida the next morning, knocks on the guy's door. And the guy was like, oh, okay, sure. And proceeds to tell him something that like sets up the entire first book. So just like all these examples of these insane ways that he went and found, found key facts. He's also working on slightly different, different deadlines. Different deadlines.

Yeah. But there was, there was an article that he had in The New Yorker that I assume is an excerpt from the book in which he also talks about a lesson from one of his first reporting gigs, which boils down basically to read every page. And I think in the case of a report that's coming out shortly, read every page. Exactly. That is our plan. We will do it in less than 10 years and then report on it.

But anyway, it's a great book. It's interesting. And we get a lot of notes of like, what's a good political book to read from listeners? And if you can deal with the length of them, all of his books are probably the best place to start. Or if you're Kim Kardashian, you can get them on Audible. Or think about the big ideas that they present. That's what's important. Domenico, what can you not let go? I can't let go

of the time and space continuum. I probably just messed up all of that for all the space geeks because I'm talking about black holes. This week, we saw a black hole for the first time, which is kind of mind-blowing that we've never actually seen a black hole.

All the black holes we've ever thought we've seen before in movies and stuff like that are all just fake illustrations, essentially. Wait, what? Yeah. Scientists, for the first time, put together the ability. That was the perfect tone for some sort of deep space philosophical. What? So they put together this massive international effort to be able to see a black hole for the first time.

And they took a picture of it. And I went down a rabbit hole of listening. Or a black hole. Yeah, or a black hole. And I listened to the head of the project, Shep Doleman, from Harvard University, who ran this project, speaking at the National Science Foundation, and with the big reveal, and here's some of what he had to say. To do this, we worked for over a decade to link telescopes around the globe to make an Earth-sized virtual dish. The Event Horizon Telescope achieves the highest angular resolution possible from the surface of the Earth.

It's the equivalent of being able to read the date on a quarter in Los Angeles when we're standing here in Washington, D.C. Earth-sized telescope he's talking about there. I mean, how they did that is kind of remarkable. They took all these telescopes from around the world and were able to get them all in sync to turn at the exact same time to point in the exact same direction and be able to see 55 million light years away to take a picture of something that's 6.5 billion times the weight of our sun. It's a remarkable feat that they were able to pull off

and a real feat that they were able to pull off and a real, you know, feat of international cooperation. Well, that deep thought is the wrap for today. We will be back as soon as there's political news, probably that Mueller report. And don't forget, if you want to help us make our next live podcast, it's in Philadelphia. You can go to NPR Presents dot org to grab a ticket. We'll be April 26th. It's going to be fun. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ryan Lucas.

I cover the Justice Department. I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Political Editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.