The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, April 19

Episode Date: April 20, 2018

The latest on Michael Cohen, a public spat between UN ambassador Nikki Haley and the White House, and diplomacy in the Trump administration. This episode: host/political reporter Asma Khalid, political editor Domenico Montanaro, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, and White House correspondent Tamara Keith. 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

G'day! This is Shannon and Andrew from Florida. We're camping through the Nullarbar, the world's largest treeless plain in the Australian outback, and keeping up with the news at home with our friends from NPR Politics. Boy, is there a lot to keep up with. This podcast was recorded at 2.13 p.m. on Thursday, April 19. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at nPR.org and with the NPR One app or at your local public radio station. OK, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, and we are here with our weekly roundup of political news. Today in the show, diplomacy in the era of President Trump, plus the public spat between U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley

and the White House. Then the latest with Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer who's making headlines of his own. And we will, of course, end the show as we always do with Can't Let It Go. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. So before we jump into any news, we just want to say hello to the newest member of the NPR Politics Pod Squad, Ayesha Roscoe. Thank you. Thanks. Glad to be here and glad to be joining the team. So Ayesha, you should just tell folks listening a little bit about yourself, where you came from before you came to NPR. I am from North Carolina. I was born and raised there, but I went to Howard University. And then from there, I worked at Reuters, which is a newswire for a long time.

And now I am at NPR and I am covering the White House. And we are so glad to have you on our team. And that is the big news. Yes, that is the big news that I'm here, I guess. Well, welcome. And we're going to look forward to having you a lot more here. Thank you. So since we have two White House reporters here, I think it seems fitting

to begin the conversation with President Trump. Oh, come on. We always begin the conversation. I'm trying to justify why I'm beginning. I was like, I have two of them, two experts today. Well, the president, you're right, Tamara, but the president has been hanging out with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago.

They've been golfing, discussing trade and, of course, North Korea. In fact, much of their conversation focused on the nuclear threat posed by North Korea as Trump is preparing for the summit with Kim Jong-un. On Wednesday, President Trump held a joint press conference that came after two days of meetings with Abe. He told reporters that he wants to end North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and that he would walk away from his meeting with Kim Jong-un if it looked like they couldn't reach a deal. If I think that it's a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we're not going to go. If the meeting when I'm there is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting and we'll continue what we're doing or whatever

it is that will continue, but something will happen. All right. So what is going on? Is he backtracking? No, I don't think so. I think he's given himself a little bit of an out if things don't go well. But clearly, if they get to that meeting and he has to walk out, things have gone terribly wrong. He doesn't want that. He's given himself a little flexibility. He's given himself a little flexibility. But, I mean, overall, it seems like they've been pretty optimistic about this. But, of course, this sit-down, the stakes are huge with this.

A sitting president, U.S. president, has never met with the leader of North Korea. So to have that happen, the administration is going to want that to go well. But I guess he wants to try to lower the stakes for him a little bit and say, look, if this doesn't go well, if this doesn't happen, I'll walk away from it. Well, and other members of his administration are still talking about this, not as a certainty that the meeting will even happen. They've never said the meeting is happening at a date certain and a time certain. They've always said if it happens sometime in May, maybe. did confirm that, you know, he has taken this interesting preliminary step, that he sent his CIA director and Secretary of State nominee, Mike Pompeo, to North Korea over Easter to start laying the groundwork.

What was sort of the substance of that meeting? We don't really know what they talked about, but President Trump says that they developed a great relationship. He says that it went really well, but it also does help with his nomination, which could be in trouble. Pompeo's nomination. Pompeo's nomination, which could be in trouble in the Senate because they have such tight numbers among Republicans. So by doing this and kind of putting him on this huge world stage, you say, OK, if you don't allow him to be secretary of state, then he's not going to have the credibility that he needs to carry out these very important negotiations.

One criticism of Pompeo has been through this confirmation process that he's not much of a diplomat, that he's not somebody who likes to undergo that kind of those kinds of talks and that you need somebody who's not as hard line. One aspect here, we've seen conservatives make the case that actually Democrats should probably be thinking about confirming him because they already confirmed him to the CIA post, but also now because he shows that he wants to be diplomatic. You know, I think the president's trying to give himself a little bit of wiggle room when he talks about flexibility. He wants to say that he's unpredictable. But generally, the criticism has

been diplomatically that this president or even Barack Obama, when he said that he would meet with presidents from Iran or wherever, remember when he said he'd meet with Ahmadinejad during that debate, they said the problem with that is that there's supposed to be a spate work that goes in and a president's not supposed to go to the table with an adversary principle head to head if they don't have kind of a precooked scenario already in diplomacy. And from what you're describing, Domenico, this seems like a somewhat or rather conventional approach to diplomacy. It's not traditional, but at the very least, it does show that they want to have something in place before the president gets there. Well, I mean, they actually probably even just wanted a an invitation in place. Because up until this point, there had not been direct communications that we knew of. The invitation came by way of like the game of telephone through the South Koreans. And was announced, in fact, right? Actually by the South Korean leader. At the White House. It was like by an ambassador at the White House. Nothing about this has been particularly conventional.

It was it's sort of like the announcement came before the policy, which happens a lot, actually, in the Trump administration, where the president tweets something or says something. And then they sort of back build on the policy and and sort of work it out and put the scaffolding up after the announcement has been made. Because we still don't know what North Korea has really promised to give the U.S. in exchange for these talks. Pompeo went to North Korea, but he didn't come back with three Americans who are being held hostage there. Is that a criteria for meeting with North Korea? Will they have to agree to give these Americans back? I mean, it would seem that if you're going to meet with the head of North Korea to have this type of meeting, that part of that would have to be that you would bring these Americans back or that they that you would have some clear parameters for what they would give you.

And it doesn't seem that they have that. And I think part of what the South Koreans and Japanese are quietly nervous about is that President Trump could go over there and be eager to get a deal and not really get the commitment that they need for complete denuclearization and kind of give away too much. Well, and in the past, even just the idea of a leader of North Korea meeting with a president of the United States, that would be seen as a reward in and of itself, as a as a give, as a victory in and of itself. Well, they're kind of giving that as a given ahead of it. One thing that they that the Trump administration has been saying is, well, North Korea is agreeing to talk about denuclearization, that they're willing to do denuclearization. What Elise Hu, our reporter in South Korea and Seoul, has said is that North Korea and the rest of the world have different definitions of denuclearization. And that when they talk about denuclearization, they're talking about the entire Korean Peninsula. They're talking about the U.S. pulling its troops off of the demilitarized zone. They're talking about a lot more than just putting mothballs in their own program. In this press conference yesterday,

Trump was asked, not very surprisingly, yet again, about Russia. There's been a lot of public speculation that the president is going to get rid of both the special counsel, Robert Mueller, who has been investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, and also that he would get rid of the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. But yesterday, Trump was asked about this and he refused to say whether he plans to fire them. But yesterday, Trump was asked about this and he refused to say whether he plans to fire them. In fact, he kind of punted. They've been saying I'm going to get rid of them

for the last three months, four months, five months, and they're still here. So we want to get the investigation over with, done with, put it behind us. So he didn't answer directly and he did, he called it a hoax. He said that he's ready to get this over with, done with, put it behind us. So he didn't answer directly and he did. He called it a hoax. He said that, you know, he's ready to get this over with, that this is all and no collusion, no collusion.

Like six times. Many times. He said that multiple times. But so we don't really have an answer. I don't know if this moves the needle too much, but it just kind of shows that he's still he's still pretty mad about it. Well, speaking of moving the needle over the past month, what we've seen is that Republicans

have grown much more skeptical of the FBI investigation, of the Mueller investigation and of the FBI itself. Fascinatingly, our NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll shows that Mueller's unfavorable rating went up 19 points among Republicans just in the past month. OK, they've grown far more skeptical. A majority see his investigation and the FBI as biased against the Trump administration. Trump and his supporters want this over with. As we heard there from the president. They want this done with. And the effort in conservative media has certainly moved the needle, at least with Trump's base.

And it seems like it is resonating. I was, in fact, in West Virginia, which, you know, is the sort of most Trump friendly state in the country. The president is still quite popular there. And I heard a similar sentiment from voters. In fact, I was talking to a Republican voter in Charleston who made the point that he's so frustrated by the, quote, disrespect people are given the president. And Robert Mueller is seen as a part of that. He's seen as sort of a component of disrespecting the president. Even though Mueller is a Republican and James Comey, who was fired and has gotten all this attention this week, was a Republican. And the people who are signing off on these things, like Rod Rosenstein at the Justice Department, were all appointed under this president.

So there's only so far that that argument goes. But there is this sort of ultimate loyalty within his base to him, the singular individual, as opposed to everyone that surrounds him, which is really rather remarkable. One thing that I hear in what the president said that comes from spending a fair bit of time talking to his lawyers is he says these words, we want to get the investigation over with, done with, put it behind us. In reference to the idea of firing Mueller or Rosenstein. The message that his lawyers have been giving him is just let

this thing proceed, cooperate, cooperate, and it will be over with. And he is sort of echoing that language of let's get it over with. It's possible that means that his lawyers who have tried to impose some calm and walk him off the ledge have gotten him off the ledge a little bit, or maybe not. But it is interesting to me that there's an echo in the language between what I hear talking to people who are advising him not to fire them and what he said. Well, there's another news nugget around the president that caught my eye this week, and that is his sort of very public spat with the U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley. She went on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday and said that the U.S. was

ready to implement a new round of economic sanctions on Russia. That would be for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after his alleged use of chemical weapons. But then we saw this really public rift erupt. According to the New York Times, President Trump was watching TV and he got angry. He apparently had not decided that there would be additional sanctions. And then we saw sort of this rift, I would say, erupt between both Nikki Haley and the White House economic advisor, Larry Kudlow. Let's listen to what he had to say. She's done a great job.

She's a very effective ambassador. There might have been some momentary confusion about that. But if you talk to Steve Mnuchin at Treasury and so forth, he will tell you the same thing. The U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, responded in a statement where she said, quote, with all due respect, I don't get confused. Damn. Yeah. No, I mean, look, he's trying to say he's trying to walk this line between President Trump and Nikki Haley. And Haley has been much more forceful on this line against Syria, against Russia, making a moral case. When you heard President Trump the night of the Syria attacks, when he announced those attacks,

he sounded a lot more like Nikki Haley than he did some of his, you know, talking about some of his more protectionist instincts previously. So Nikki Haley has a very clear ideological worldview on how things should go. So when she hears someone say she's confused, she's like, hold a second, I'm not confused. In fact, she's not saying this. I'm saying this. But there is a definite confusion if you're someone in the world looking at what the United States is doing or if you're a domestic observer and you're trying to figure out, trying to discern what the Trump doctrine is. It is confusing.

But the thing is, Nikki Haley doesn't go on the Sunday shows and speak out of school. Like, you don't you don't go on the Sunday shows without talking to the White House, being prepped, knowing what the talking points are. She goes out, she delivers the talking points, and then she's completely undercut, thrown under the bus, cut off at the knees, whatever you want to call it. Meanwhile, Larry Kudlow, who's this economic advisor who's relatively new to the team, has on numerous occasions, and he hasn't even been there very long, shown himself to not actually know what the policy is at the moment and to be sort of confused. And can we talk about the fact that he's the economic advisor?

Right. So like, what is he talking about? And then he's saying she's confused. Not cool. be and to just go along with what the White House is saying at the moment, that they're not going to step out and defend themselves. But she took the unusual step of actually defending herself and saying, no, I wasn't wrong. I wasn't. I didn't make a mistake. If there was a mistake made, it wasn't me. Which does make me wonder, you know, about her longevity. She has been remarkably resilient within the president's cabinet. And part of it maybe is the fact that she's in New York. She is somewhat physically removed from a lot of the day-to-day mayhem. But you're right. Very few people actually are willing to wade in and have a public spat. It is funny, though, because of her stature, a lot of people talk about her as a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

And when you think about how Trump at one point undermined her when she was in the room and said, you know, you want me to fire her? She's doing a great job. But hey, I could fire her if I want to. It was almost like saying, hey, let's remember who's in charge here and who's boss. Yeah. And Nikki Haley, unlike, let's say, Rex Tillerson, Rex Tillerson had like bus marks on his face that he couldn't wash off. He got rolled over by the president again and again and again. The president undermined him at every turn. Nikki Haley doesn't seem like she is going to put up with that. And she has an important role. She is our top diplomat for the country to the United Nations. If she doesn't have credibility in what she says, she has a serious problem, much as Rex Tillerson had a serious problem. So, you know, I think that she is trying to avoid being like the former Secretary of State. All right. With that, we are going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll have more on Michael Cohen, the president's attorney, and problems at the IRS. And a reminder, if you like the show, leave us a review on iTunes.

In addition to helping us feel good, it helps other folks find the podcast. All right. We will be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from FrameBridge. Easy online custom framing for your favorite art and photos. The perfect Mother's Day gift is already on your phone. Frame it with FrameBridge. Their team will custom frame your pictures and deliver them straight to you in days. Get 15% off your first order at FrameBbridge.com with promo code NPR. This is Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air.

We do long-form interviews with the people behind the best books, pop culture, journalism, and more, so you can get to know the people whose work you love. You'll find Fresh Air on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. Several podcasts ago, we talked about the FBI's raid on Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen. Let's start first with the latest Cohen news. He has abruptly dropped defamation lawsuits relating to accounts of him in the infamous Russia dossier without conceding anything about the substance of those accounts. So, Tam, what were these defamation

lawsuits about? So he had sued both Fusion GPS, which commissioned the so-called Steele dossier. They're an opposition research firm that had been hired by Democrats during the campaign, among others. He also sued BuzzFeed News because they published the dossier in full back in January. He is dropping these suits, they say, his lawyer says, because, you know, given all of the other events, they need to focus their time and effort on other things. However, his lawyer continues to say that they feel as though Cohen was unfairly maligned in the dossier, that he is not guilty of the things that the dossier said he did, which included things like being sort of a back channel to Russia.

All right. So basically, he's got a lot of other stuff going on right now. The other possible real reasons why it's dropped is that if you're filing a suit like this, eventually it will go to discovery and then you'll be under oath asked about every single item in said dossier and whether it's true or not. And maybe he doesn't want to be under oath being asked about these things, especially at a time when he is under federal investigation. So let's talk a little bit about that. Let's rewind back to Monday when Cohen appeared in court. It was his first appearance before a judge since the Justice Department revealed in court documents last week that he's been the subject of a months-long criminal investigation. Let's talk about this hearing and some of the news that came out of it.

Tam, can you actually explain sort of what the main issue is? The hearing was about attorney-client privilege. Does Cohen have a right to review all of this evidence that was seized and determine whether it violates attorney-client privilege before it gets to the investigators. Got it. Now, typically, the way these things work is that, I mean, it's not all through the evidence and make a determination about whether it is subject to attorney client privilege or not. And then they turn over to investigators the stuff that they think is clean and the stuff that they think not so clean. They don't turn over to investigators. Cohen had been arguing, actually, we think my team should be able to look at it first. And then President Trump hired a new lawyer who also went to court to argue that the president and his legal team should be able to review all of this evidence first.

This is a very uncommon request. What is the judge decided? One thing the judge did decide was that Cohen and Trump, who wanted to be able to review the documents personally beforehand, before the prosecutors were able to, they were told no. One of the issues with this is that the government's been arguing that Michael Cohen is less a lawyer and more a fixer, that he doesn't really have that many clients. And so the morning of this hearing, he was told, you need to tell us who your clients are. And Cohen's attorneys said, here's the list. It is Donald J. Trump.

It is a Republican fundraiser who had to quit the RNC fundraising committee because of an arrangement made by Michael Cohen to pay off a person he had an affair with. And a third client who did not want to be named, a mystery client. And Tam, to that point, Miles Parks from our NPR politics team was there reporting on the day. Let's take a listen to how he described this really sort of fascinating moment to Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered that night. Federal prosecutors were arguing that we can't really talk about attorney-client privilege without knowing the clients that Cohen represents. And the federal judge agreed with that. So she asked Cohen's attorney to say the name out loud. They initially pushed back, but eventually it came out. It was Sean Hannity.

And? And there's a gasp in the room. I mean, it was truly shocking. There was a massive reaction. All the air kind of got sucked out of the room. So that right there, I have to tell you, I love Miles. So like I am the coach of our vaunted NPR softball team and Miles brings the enthusiasm. This was like the big reveal, you know, like who is this person? OK, fine. We'll say it.

Sean Hannity, you know, this Fox News host, this ally of the president, this person who had been on the air all week. Has Hannity responded to this? Yeah, he has. And in fact, he said on his show that he never retained Michael Cohen. I remember that. He actually just talked to him about real estate because he doesn't like the stock market. So he likes to talk to him about real estate investments, which makes the attorney client line kind of murky. But we should really say and point out here that he holds that there was no third party arrangement in the same way there were for clients number one and clients number two.

So Sean Hannity wanted to make sure that people understand that, according to him, he was not a party to any type of agreement like that, because when that was when it was announced in court, the first thing you thing you think is like well what does Michael Cohen have a an expertise in paying off the ladies so so he I think that Sean Hannity wanted to make clear we were just talking about real estate not stormy not stormy not any other playmate type people all. I think it's time to move on from there. So let's talk about... Good call. Wasn't going to get better. Oh, man.

Let's talk about something that no one really looks forward to every April, and that is taxes. The IRS announced that it would give taxpayers an additional day to file and pay their taxes because of technical issues on the agency's website. Basically, it was impossible for people to look at their tax records or even make a payment for apparently a chunk of the day on Tuesday. The technical issues were not fixed until early evening Tuesday. And people who were filing the sort of old fashioned way, putting a postage stamp on it, putting into the mailbox, they were OK. But if you went online, which, you know, is millions of people, they could not file their returns electronically. The week before, the IRS was praising its, quote, mobile friendly website as a tool for people who need last minute

tax information. So this sort of glitch, you know, on a real important day is kind of a big deal. And Domenico, this comes after a decade or so of what you would say is kind of neglect by the IRS to do much technologically here. First of all, let's just paint the picture here. Let's just tell you the scene of what happened. Let's say you're typing away, you go onto this IRS-friendly website to file your taxes directly. Do you have experience doing this? No, because I go to one of these third-party tax preparers because this kind of thing makes me anxious and I don't like it. So they do it for me.

But when they clack away at one of those third-party preparers and they went to file on this IRS site, here's what it said that day. Planned outage, April 17th, 2018, which, by the way, is the day that it was due. Deadline day. Through December 31st, 9999. That sounds very ominous. 9,999. The IRS was down. Shut down forever. Until sounds very ominous. 9,999. The IRS was down. Shut down forever! Until that website was in. So part of what

happened here after this thing says planned outage, you wonder, how did they actually deal with this, right? Like, how did they actually fix the thing? So our colleague Brian Naylor has been reporting this story out, and he spoke to John Koskinen, who is the former IRS commissioner, and let's hear what he had to say about is the former IRS commissioner. And let's hear what he

had to say about what it might have taken. Sometimes it's like your home computer. It's simply a question of rebooting. The problem with the IRS system, it's in many ways the largest financial institution in the world, is when you have to reboot the system, it's not a question of just turning the power off and turning it back on, because all of the related systems have to to be rebooted and you have to test to make sure that they've all come up appropriately. So a reboot will take several hours. You can imagine that when millions of people who have procrastinated to get their taxes done on that last day are trying to file and this message won't go away until the irs can reboot the entire system there's like somebody running around flipping light switches somewhere now of course the first question anybody asks is uh-oh was there a hack or it'd be like huh

psyched to pay my taxes no i don't think anybody would ever think that, Asma. And I think you in your heart of hearts know the tax man. So it doesn't matter if they have to do it by paper, by hand or knock on your door. They are going to get their money. Right. So the fact is, people saw this and said, what just happened? And we actually didn't know what happened for some time. You know, the IRS figured it out and got it back up and running. But what's now started to come out a day or two later is that there was a malfunction in the IRS's, quote, master file. So when you think about a master file on any computer, exactly, Tam, every single piece of everyone's information ever was what was essentially down, that file that houses all of that information. So when any time anybody was trying to use that information from various parts of the

IRS, they couldn't function. They couldn't do it. Let me just add a little bit of context to the IRS's problems. One, they currently have an acting director and an acting deputy director. Their director, President Trump, nominated a permanent, would-be permanent director only in February of this year. The other thing is that the IRS has been chronically underfunded. Republicans in Congress are not fans of the IRS, and they've been trying to starve the beast. So here's John Koskinen, the former commissioner of the IRS, saying about what it might have taken. The budget has been continually under pressure for the last eight years, even though we have almost 20,000 fewer employees and 10 million more taxpayers. Sooner or later, something's going to give something's going to give and let's just back up for a second how this is all sort of what what the irs is dealing with and whether or not it's part of the 21st century at this point there are mainframe computers that the irs came online

to in the 1960s during the kennedy administration they take up an entire room that, you know, and back then they actually ran tours to the facility in West Virginia where they had this because it was so modern. You know, it was like this, like, holy cow, look at this thing. They're still using some of those. No, for real? Yes, for real. I couldn't believe this when Brian told me this, but as he's been reporting this out, some of those mainframe computers are part of what's powering the system still. It's crazy. It like predates the floppy disk. Absolutely.

By like a lot. By like a generation. Floppy disks are modern. Yeah. Are you kidding me? So that's a big part of the issue here. It's not modernized. It's been perpetually underfunded. And that's been a big, big problem for the IRS as they've tried to come online. In fact, the other big piece of this is that the IRS, there were proposals under the Obama administration to try to modernize how we file our taxes. So one big thing that the IRS wanted to do was be able to have a one-stop shop where you could go online and have your information pre-filled, right?

Why not? They already have your information. They type your social in and then everything comes up. And it's already done. Exactly. But guess what? Millions of dollars were spent by the H&R blocks of the world, Intuit, TurboTax, to say they don't want that. So they killed bills to actually have this be able to go through so you could just file easily to pre-file, have your information pre-filled with the IRS website.

I think the real lesson from this all is that we all should have just filed extensions. Learned from our president. No, file early. What are we talking about? You get your W-2s in like January. But Ayesha, didn't the president file an extension? The president did file an extension. So if you filed an extension, you are not alone. The IRS says they expect 14 million taxpayers to ask for extensions this year. And President Trump was among them. Of course, we do not know when he does actually file.

We won't know what's in those taxes. He certainly hasn't agreed to reveal them. And so that's what is unusual as president, is that he hasn't made his taxes public where other presidents for the past few decades have. All right. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, can't let it go. What does it take to start something from nothing? And what does it take to actually build it? I'm Guy Raz. Every week on How I Built This, I speak with founders behind some of the most inspiring companies in the world. Find it on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we get to Can't Let It Go, we just want to take a moment to acknowledge the loss of a political woman who has been with us for decades.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush. She, of course, was the wife of former Republican President George H.W. Bush and the mother of former President George W. Bush. She was 92 years old and really, in a lot of ways, a really remarkable woman, a really remarkable wife. Her and her husband had been married for, what, 73 years. Oh, wow. And everybody in her family called her the enforcer. So there's a funny joke about that because I'd heard that when she was asked about this, you know, why are you called the enforcer?

And she said, well, because somebody has to be. I also love, there's a great book that I would recommend all of our listeners read. It's it's called What It Takes. It is about the 1988 presidential campaign. She is beautifully described in that book. In particular, it talks about the loss of their young daughter and how she held it together. The daughter died of cancer and she basically held the whole family together and has been holding them together ever since.

She was really a remarkable woman. All right. Now on to my favorite part of the show, Can't Let It Go, where we always talk about something that we cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Domenico, why don't you start? Oh, you want me to go? Yes, please. So what I can't let go of is a story that I heard on NPR where I always hear a lot of my smart things. And our colleague here, Elsa Chang, on All Things Considered, interviewed the Pulitzer Prize winning car from the white supremacists that had plowed into a crowd. And you see just all this chaos, people, you know, bodies flying, cell phone that's dislodged from someone, this horrific scene. And but what I couldn't let go of in this interview, this guy wins the Pulitzer Prize on his last day of work at the newspaper. And he now has a very unique job. You've since left the newspaper, The Daily Progress. And I understand now you run social media for a brewery. Why the career change? It's a nine to five. It's low

stress. It's great folks here. And there's free beer at the end of the day. So it was a nice quality of life trade off. But I had no idea that I was going to be leaving the newspaper under such wild circumstances. So that was Ryan Kelly, who was the photographer. And I have to just say, you know, we're talking about a midsize daily newspaper here. You know, here he is again talking about what some of his usual assignments included. You know, normal day to day coverage is community events or portraits or high school sports was doing it even on that last day of his job and obviously did it quite well. Something tells me, you know, I had a professor in college when I left journalism for a few years to teach high school English, where he said to me, you know, any painter paints and that bug will come back. And I think that a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer

is probably going to have a lot of job offers. I would think so. I would hope so. Aisha, you want to go next? Yes. So I can't let go of Cardi B, the great rapper from the Bronx who was the star of Love & Hip Hop, which I watch a lot and am a fan of, who has now Cardi B has made it big, so big that she has Bernie Sanders tweeting about

her. She Cardi B recently released her album Invasion of Privacy, and she had an interview with GQ and she talked about how she loves political science and presidents. And she talked about Franklin Roosevelt and how if it was not for Franklin Roosevelt, old people wouldn't even get Social Security. And now I'm beginning to understand where Bernie comes in. Yes. And so she said that Franklin Roosevelt was the real make America great again, because if it wasn't for him, old people wouldn't even get Social Security. So Bernie Sanders tweeted that Cardi B is right.

Cardi B is right. We have got to protect Social Security for all generations. So I like how these two very different people were able to come together and make a connection. And I think that Sanders may even be willing to campaign with Cardi B. I'm sure she would bring out a different crowd for him. Well, he has a lot of young people. I am pretty sure he would have hoped that this came out during the pregnancy. Yeah, during the pregnancy. To give him some street credibility. Yes.

So, and, you know, any news about Cardi B I like because she's also pregnant right now. And so I'm a working mom and she's working. She's out there dancing. I could never do that at six months pregnant. So props to Cardi B. And that's why I can't let it go. All right. Asma, what can't you let go of? All right. So what I cannot let go of is this week we lost one of our dear colleagues. His name is Carl Castle and he died at the age of 84.

If you ever did listen to the radio, I am sure that you know him. He was that voice you'd hear in the mornings at newscast at five in the morning. His voice, I thought, really elicited a sense of authority. And yet he was always really friendly. And I always thought that was a really impossible thing to do, to be both like trusting, authoritative and yet friendly at the same time. Later in life, he had this sort of second act to his life. So after being this sort of very traditional journalist at NPR for years, for decades, he went on to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which is the NPR News quiz show. And he was the judge scorekeeper there. And the

other day, I believe it was just the day after he passed away, his colleague from the show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me had this really beautiful remembrance on. In fact, I started tearing up as I was listening to it. And I just want to play a little portion of it. But of all the reasons I loved him, the most important was how much Carl enjoyed himself. He was a born broadcaster who loved his audience just as much as they loved him. I just can't envision myself, you know, the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt sitting on some beach, particularly since I quit drinking.

So anyhow, I just love that he found like humor even in his own life, you know, sort of like making fun of himself, making fun of stuff. And one thing that I thought was so beautiful and so fitting is his wife had actually said that in lieu of flowers that Carl would have appreciated for folks to donate to their local public radio station. I just thought that was so perfect for a man who had spent decades in this industry. Yeah. I mean, he was the kind of voice, you know, he's somebody who was so serious in his newscasting days. But I think a lot of people got to know him even better because of that sense of humor in Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, which was always just so much fun to hear him.

And there was another heartening thing that kind of came out about some of this, you know, for the jobs that we do anyway. There was a letter to the editor in The New York Times while the Sean Hannity stuff is coming out and getting all this attention. This person, John from San Diego, wrote, We learned that Fox News's support for Sean Hannity may be related to his popularity. Three point two million viewers. The envy of the industry. And John continues to write a few pages later in Carl Castle's obituary. We learned that NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me has six million listeners, far more than Mr. Hannity. So, you know, I'll take that with some some pride for the work that we do and that Carl was one of the people whose shoulders we stand on. Truth.

Yeah. Absolutely. All right, Tamara, you get to go last. All right. So the thing I can't let go of is twofold. And I'm going to take the privilege if that's OK. All right. So about, I don't know, two weeks ago, there was this just incredibly hilarious thing on Seth Meyers' show,

The Late Night Show. I never see that show much. Well, I don't either. But my dad texted and was like, you've got to watch this thing. And then for the last two weeks, people keep saying, did you see the Seth Meyers thing? And of course I've seen it. The reason people keep asking is because I'm eight and a half months pregnant. And this happens to be a story about a harrowing delivery. So Seth Meyers describes his wife going into labor, his wife and mother-in-law saying it's go time and then they ride down in the elevator. We get into the lobby of our building. I have called an Uber. The Uber is outside and

we basically get to the steps of our building. We're in the lobby, and we're walking down the steps. And my wife just says, I can't get in the car. I'm gonna have the baby right now. The baby is coming. And I just am trying to calm her down. I'm like, look, this is it again. I know, because I've been through exactly one birth.

This is their second child. I'm like, this happens all the time. You're feeling... It's not trust me. I know what I'm talking about. They decide, no, we're not gonna make it. We are not happens all the time. You're feeling, it's not, trust me. I know what I'm talking about. They decide, no, we're not going to make it. We are not going to the Uber. And then this. And I looked at my wife,

and the only way I can describe how my wife looked was, she looked like someone who was hiding a baby in a pair of sweatpants. What? Hiding a baby in a pair of sweatpants. It was like someone who was trying to, like, sneak a baby in a pair of sweatpants. It was like somebody was trying to sneak a baby on a plane. And so then we're trying, so we bail, we're not going to leave. So we walk back in and we had to decide, do we go into the lobby or back on the elevator?

Those are terrible options when what you're looking for is a hospital. So they end up staying in the lobby. She lies down on the floor. They basically, like, take her clothes off, and they're like, oh, look, there is a baby right there. What? Pulls the baby up on her chest to keep it warm. I called 911.

This is how fast it happened. I called 911, and over the course of a minute conversation, I basically said, we're about to have a baby. We're having a baby. We had a baby., I basically said, we're about to have a baby, we're having a baby, we had a baby. I went from someone calling in about an emergency to just sharing good news with a stranger.

I was like, yeah, it's a boy. Yeah, it's great. He sounded remarkably chill about it all. Well, it would be. He's in the best position for this, right? He could be calm, But, you know, I can I'm getting like scary flashbacks from my deliveries. Thank God this did not happen to me. So on Sunday morning at 7.04 a.m., I get a text message from Scott Detrow, host of this podcast. Baby time over here. Oh, my gosh.

I'm like, oh, my God. Yay. And he's like, yeah, we were in Harrisburg at a minor league baseball game. We're driving back home to D.C. now. So his wife goes into labor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I asked if they stopped at a Sheetz on the way. They did pass some Sheetz, but they did not stop. They made it to the hospital in plenty of time, but it had to have been a harrowing drive. Thank goodness his wife was not like Seth Meyers' wife.

I feel like that is the one time the excuse of, you know, like when the cop pulls you over for speeding, you'll get the escort. You will totally get the escort. I'll get you through this county and then we'll hand you off to another deputy. So Joshua Francis Detrow was born on Sunday. Scott has tweeted some pictures. You guys should definitely look them up. He's so cute. So cute. So much cuteness and so exciting. He's going to be great. And I told him now he has license to make all the dad jokes.

I don't know that you're really going to relinquish that. I didn't say he gets to make like like in other words, the universe of dad jokes is just his. I'm just saying he gets to make all of whatever dad jokes he wants to make. I'm not giving it all up. All right, that's all. Thank you for listening. And we will be back in your feed soon. You can keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. Thank you to everyone who submits timestamps for the top of the show. We're only able to use some of them, but we do listen to all of them, and we enjoy listening to them. We enjoy hearing you.

So if you want to submit one, you can just email a recording of yourself to nprpolitics, all one word, at npr.org. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domen Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tamara Keith. I also cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.