The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, February 21

Episode Date: February 21, 2019

New reports suggest that the Russia Investigation could end soon, so what happens when Robert Mueller finishes his work? Plus, the House Oversight Committee is busy investigating the Trump administration's ties to Saudi Arabia and prepares to question Michael Cohen. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, editor correspondent Ron Elving, and political reporter Tim Mak. 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

Hi, this is Melissa. And one year ago, I was a student journalist who saw the NPR politics podcast team come to Cleveland. Scott Detrow told me that I was going to have to apply to 30 different jobs before landing the first one as a journalist. One year later, I just accepted a job as a federal tech reporter. And I'm officially moving to DC this week to join the DC journalism scene. This podcast was recorded at... I am very happy to hear that, and I have some context on the other side of this. It is 2.11 Eastern on Thursday, February 21st. Things might have changed by the time you've heard this. Okay, here's the show.

That makes me sound like I was being a downer, but I was saying, like, keep at it. It just takes a while, but it's worth it. You should keep applying, not like, yeah, good luck. And congrats on your new job. Yes, congratulations. We are happy to have you in D.C. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. There are a lot of new reports that Robert Mueller's Russia investigation may be coming to an end.

So we are going to look at what President Trump's new attorney general would do with those findings, what those findings may or may not look like, whether the public will see them, and a whole lot of other questions. And whether or not we get that report next week, there is a lot of Trump investigation talk in Congress right now. So we'll dig into all of that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. So, Carrie, there's all these reports. We could be seeing a report tomorrow, next week, sometime soon.

I feel like we've been hearing something like that for a while. So what reality is this latest wave based on? Okay, Scott. So there's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear, but I think it's fair to report based on my conversations with sources that the Mueller part of this probe is wrapping up and that lawyers working for Mueller are in conversations about what next they might do in the government or outside the government.

And he may be preparing to send some kind of document to the new Attorney General Bill Barr. What Bill Barr does with that document is an open question right now. So do we have any sense whatsoever what the range of report forms could look like, like the star report where it's hundreds of pages of details in a narrative form or just like a paragraph like we're done here. Well, Robert Mueller is a man who follows the law and follows the rules. And here's what the rules say. The rules under which he was appointed say that at the end of his investigation,

he's going to prepare a confidential report to the attorney general explaining his decisions for prosecuting some people and declining to prosecute other people. Period. That's it. And then the regs also say that the attorney general is supposed to tell Congress, specifically the judiciary committees on the House and the Senate side, any instances when the AG may have blocked the special counsel from taking certain action. That's all we know. Susan Davis, Congress, that's your zone. On the general scale of things and fans and hyperventilating reaction and newsy news cycles in Congress, like no matter what, it seems like this is going to be a big thing that just sucks all the oxygen out of the building. Right. Totally. And if you think about just how much political weight has been put into the Mueller report, specifically from Democrats, but also from Republicans who will look at this and depending on what it says,

as either something to hang around the president or use to vindicate him. I've talked to a lot of lawmakers. They don't know what it's going to say, but who have said to me, it doesn't matter what it says, it's going to tie this building in knots for months. They're going to want to have hearings about it. They're probably going to want to try and hear from Robert Mueller about it. And depending on the conclusions and how specifically Congress is informed about what's in it is going to, I think, suck up a lot of oxygen in Washington for a long, long time. And remember, on Capitol Hill, as part of the confirmation hearings for the new Attorney General Bill Barr, lawmakers, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans too, Sue, were pressing Bill

Barr to commit to releasing whatever Bob Mueller sent. And Bill Barr would not do that. What I am saying is my objective and goal is to get as much as I can of the information to Congress and the public. And, you know, these are departmental regulations, and I'm going to be talking to Rod Rosenstein and Bob Mueller. I'm sure they've had discussions about this. There's probably existing thinking in the department as to how to handle this. But all I can say at this stage, because I have no clue as to what's being planned, is that I am going to try to get the information out there consistent with these regulations. And to the extent I have discretion,

I will exercise that discretion to do that. And here's the rub. Bill Barr also said at the confirmation hearing that DOJ rules say if you're not going to indict someone, you don't stand up there and dump a bunch of garbage all over their heads. So this is going to be a complicated analysis. What's interesting to me is while he is technically right for what the regulations of the Justice Department say, I am curious as whether it's politically feasible to not release whatever the findings are in full. Especially given that so many Democrats, when you ask them, should you impeach Donald Trump? They say we have to see what Robert Mueller's report says. What is the right comparison for how much this report, in whatever form,

has been built up and anticipated and loomed over Washington for so long? Is there one? Well, there are many special counsels in the past, going all the way back to 1875, and Ulysses S. Grant appointing somebody to look into the whiskey ring. That's a whole other story. Find that podcast in our feed. Some kind of a conflict of interest there. But the two most consequential special prosecutors, obviously,

were the ones whose investigations led to the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, which forced him to resign, and the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, which impeached him. And he was not removed from office by the Senate, but he was impeached by the House as a consequence of the report that came from Ken Starr, the special counsel who had been looking into first the Whitewater matter, and then later into a number of other occurrences and things that Bill Clinton had done, including his relationship with young intern Monica Lewinsky, that really was the basis for his impeachment. And the Starr Report was infamously long and detailed and graphic.

And read out loud to a committee on television on Capitol Hill and watched by millions and millions of people all around the world. It was pretty hard after that for the House not to proceed with its designs against Bill Clinton's presidency when they had laid out all the evidence in that fashion. I don't think anybody's expecting anything of that nature to come from Robert Mueller or from William Barr, but we will have to see. The other precedent that's out there, Ron, of course, is the Watergate roadmap, which actually became public only recently after years and years of litigation. And basically, Leon Jaworski on the Watergate special counsel team was concerned that the House Judiciary Committee did not quite have its act together. So the special counsel basically

issued to the House Judiciary Committee a set of conclusions and then page numbers and the grand jury testimony and other evidence about where to find this stuff, basically to provide a roadmap for impeachment. That's right. And Leon Jaworski was actually the second of the special counsels to handle the Nixon matter because the first one had been fired by Richard Nixon through his appointed attorney general, acting attorney general. His name was Robert Bork after he had had to fire two other people who refused to fire the special counsel, whose name was Archibald Cox. So, Sue, I have a bunch of questions for you about what comes next in Congress. But first, just closing the page on the Mueller side of things.

I mean, Ron, you mentioned Nixon firing the special prosecutor. Should we be kind of surprised in the end that it looks like Robert Mueller is going to get to the finish line without being fired, given that that it's been two years worth of coverage of President Trump publicly threatening him and and all sorts of stories about him pressuring Sessions and Rosenstein and others? You know, there's probably a case to be made that the president left to his own devices may have gone down that path. But I do think enough of his allies over the course of that time period have pressed upon him that had he tried to end this investigation on his own, and had he tried to do something like remove Robert Mueller from that job, would have created much more of a political problem for him than letting it proceed as normal. And I do think that the president was convincible of that, because I do think he realized

that other actions he had taken, like the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, which was intended to diminish the Russia investigation, had the opposite effect. And so I think that enough of his allies said, you do this to Robert Mueller, it's going to happen again. You know, this is why we bring up people like Archibald Cox and the others who were investigating Watergate and got fired, because there is a phrase associated with their firing because two of these happened, three of these happened in one night. The Saturday Night Massacre, done in the middle of a weekend in 1973 when Richard Nixon thought more or less he could get away with it. And he tried to literally abolish the office of the special prosecutor at that time. Now, because we all remember Saturday Night Massacre, that phrase

has enough resonance, even this long since, that I think that had some deterrent effect. And when people like Don McGahn, who was at that time the White House counsel, were to bring up phrases of that kind, we don't know that he literally used it, but he did apparently push back when it was suggested to him that it would be best to get rid of Mr. Mueller. So there were people resisting, even in the White House, certainly among the Senate Republicans, and they could cite that precedent. And I think that must have had some meaning to Donald Trump, who was, after all, alive at the time. Carrie, because you referenced the Watergate roadmap. I wonder, you know, in Congress,

you have the congressional record. For the executive branch, you have the Presidential Records Act. Does the Justice Department have anything similar in that all of these interviews, all of the paper trail that the special counsel's team has come, obviously, if there was crimes committed, that would be used for a criminal proceeding. But they are sitting on a wealth of information that might be of interest to Congress or other people that doesn't involve technically the law. Do they have to turn it over? Do they have to preserve it? Does it all get shredded? What happens? They do preserve a lot of these materials. The complicating factor here, Sue presented to the grand jury to Congress, they're going to have to go through special steps, get the permission of the chief judge of the federal court here in Washington, D.C., Beryl Howell. And one thing that's been so

interesting to me is that that same chief judge now is the one who approved finally the release of the Watergate materials all these years later. So she's given us a little hint that she's open to doing this, at least for materials that date back to the 70s. So Sue, flip side of the question that you just asked Carrie. Given that Pelosi on down, Democratic leaders have said, let Mueller finish his job and we'll go from there. How quickly after this report gets turned over to Congress or whatever, how quickly do you think we'll have a sense of, OK, Democrats are going to seriously go down the road of impeachment or not? I don't know the answer to that because I don't know what Democrats think the answer to that is.

Does it have to accuse the president of a crime? Does it have to say, suggest he may have known things, but they weren't crimes? I mean, they don't know. Impeach, always remember about impeachment is it's not a criminal proceeding. It's a political proceeding. So the threshold for impeachment is very amorphous. There is no statutory definition of what requires impeachment aside from high crimes, misdemeanors, bribery, treason. So the pressure for Democrats when this report comes out to say, is this it? Keep impeachment on the table or take it off is going to be sort of the secondary wave of the reaction to this. And Ron, last question for you. Democratic leaders seem to have two lessons in their head from the last two impeachment conversations of Bill Clinton and of Richard Nixon. And that is that if it becomes partisan, if it becomes just Democrats

doing it, it's a lost cause, it could hurt them politically, and that it has to be seen as kind of the path of last resort that, well, we don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the benefit of the country, at least in terms of how it's framed. Do you think there's any other thread between the Nixon and Clinton episodes, given that we can't all sit here and listen to slow burn over the course of this podcast, we've got you instead, that you think that people looking at this should be thinking about? The most important thing is that the miracle of Watergate was the bipartisanship of the committee, first in the Senate, and then later even in the House, which was much more partisan. But the agreement of important people in the Senate, like Barry Goldwater, like Howard

Baker, to be on the side of the law and not necessarily on the side of their party or their president, who after all had just won re-election by winning 49 states. Yes, there were people back in their home states who were very angry to see them prosecuting that president, but they did it anyway. And of course, the contrary lesson in the Clinton case was that they impeached him, they couldn't get him out in the Senate, and his approval rating went higher than it had ever been. Many people thought he could have won a third term in 2000 if that were not prohibited by amendment to the Constitution. I do think it's worth reminding people that if and when the Mueller report releases next week and whatever happens with it, it is not the end of investigations into the Trump administration. There are multiple

ongoing investigations. So I think that there's also the sense that the Mueller report is not the end of investigations into the Trump administration. There are multiple ongoing investigations. So I think that there's also the sense that the Mueller report is not necessarily the finality of this. It's just the final chapter in the Mueller story. And you know what? That's going to be our entire next segment. So, all right, Ron, thanks for dropping in. We're going to let you go and swap you out for Tim Mack and a player to be named later. Thank you, Ron. Good to be here.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about exactly what Sue said, all those other investigations. The current tension between the United States and North Korea is really intense, and it's easy to forget that the two countries have a complicated past. On the latest episode of ThruLine from NPR, we look back at the origin of the strained relationship to make sense of what's happening today. ThruLine, the podcast where we go back in time to understand the present. We are back and Tim Mack is in the studio now. Hey, Tim.

Hey, how are you? I'm great. And I have a question for you. Sure. So there have been several false starts here, but it looks like next week, for real this time, Michael Cohen, Trump's one-time lawyer and top aide and now enemy, is set to testify before the House of Representatives. What's he going to talk about? Well, so Congress has really wanted to get Michael Cohen in front of a committee hearing for quite some time. And it's finally going to have its chance. It's going to be Cohen-Palooza next week. He's going to be before a number of

committees. The most public one is going to be the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. And he's going to be asked about all sorts of stuff to include the president's debts and payments related to the 2016 campaign, finance disclosure requirements, campaign finance laws, his business. That includes the Trump Hotel and their charity, the Trump Foundation, and any efforts that the president or his team made to allegedly intimidate Mr. Cohen. Okay. So before we get into this hearing, I think it's worth a quick recap of what exactly Cohen's relationship with the president was, what he's been charged with and pleaded to. Tim, you've covered him for a long time. If I set a timer for 45 seconds, is that enough to do all of that?

Or do you think we need a little longer? Long time friends. He's been his private attorney for years, was a major role during the campaign, though not technically a member of the Trump campaign in 2015 and 2016. And 2018 was a big year for him because he had to plead guilty to counts relating to campaign finance violations and to lying to Congress. Wow, 19 seconds. That was pretty good. That's faster than I thought it would be. So there were some parameters, though, in this testimony, right? Lawmakers will not be able to, for example, ask was useful information core to the special counsel

probe that he got, Michael Cohen got through his ongoing interactions with Trump organization employees in the campaign. And Trump organization employees, of course, would be the president's children. But wait a second. Couldn't you just end up kind of like playing a game of battleship, of asking questions? And then he says, I can't talk about that. And you're like, oh, I see you may have told Mueller about that. I think the chances that this is the beginning of what could be a series of blockbuster oversight hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, there's a lot of anticipation around that hearing, in part because Michael Cohen, if you've ever seen him engage on cable news or in the public, is a pretty, I don't know how to describe his personality.

He's a performer. He's a provocateur, right? And he has been someone who has clashed and been happy to have these sort of like public fights over the Trump administration and any other number of things. So he might lean into this sort of circus element of this hearing where you're also going to have Republicans and Democrats overperforming and kind of trying to trip over each other to try and get the most out of what he's going to say. Democrats clearly have a lot of ammunition they want to use against the administration or get him to say things to build their case against the administration. I think Republicans are also going to use this to undermine Mr. Cohen. I mean, remember, part of what he has

been charged with is lying to Congress. He has established himself as a liar. And I think the more provocative things he says, Republicans are going to try and make the case that you can't believe anything this guy says. In the last year, Michael Cohen has tried to reshape his identity, not as someone who's loyal to Donald Trump, but as some sort of hero of the resistance. He's going to testify and put forward all the things that we were unable to uncover through various investigations. So what kind of Michael Cohen will we see? I mean, during the campaign, he had a very famous exchange on television when he said repeatedly, who says, or says who, when confronted with various facts related to the campaign. will we see a confrontational

Michael Cohen or will we see a contrite kind of Michael Cohen who's trying to rehabilitate his image before he goes to prison? So, Sue, can you clarify this, though? Is this hearing with Michael Cohen, is this the beginning of some sort of stated goal investigation of some of these committees to try and get to the bottom of something? Or is this a one-off, like, hey, let's have a hearing with Michael Cohen and see what happens and what makes news? It is not related to any one specific investigation being conducted by the House Oversight Committee. Broadly speaking, when Democrats took over the House, they saw it as

part of their mandate to conduct oversight over this administration and specifically over the question of the president's finances. Something that was an issue at the 2016 campaign continues to be an issue in his presidency. So he is part of that sort of meta investigation that I think that Democrats are going to make thematically over the next two years a priority for them. They are not specifically investigating Michael Cohen, but he knows a lot of things that they would like to know.

And yes, he knows a lot of things that they would like him to say on television. All right. So meantime, shifting gears to something even more complicated, we got the first taste of what a Democratic House majority with oversight and investigation powers looks like this week when the House Oversight Committee released a report, Tim, you wrote about it. This interim report stated that the Trump administration was trying to rush through transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, which is something that may be against the law. Walk us through this. This seems like a lot. It's a major blockbuster and other administrations would consume cable news for days and days and days. This is a new report by the House Oversight Committee, and it's based on whistleblowers from within the administration who have ethical and legal concerns with this process. The law says

that Congress has to approve any transfer of nuclear technology to a foreign country. But it looks like the Trump administration was trying to press ahead without consulting Congress. And there were also some major conflicts of interest that could be against the law. For example, Michael Flynn, he's the former Trump national security advisor. In 2016, for seven months, while he was working on the campaign, and then during the transition, he worked as an advisor to a company called IP3 International. That's a private company, and they were seeking to build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia. When he entered the White House, he continued to press this project forward. So when you talk about rushed through, it's really rushed through because Michael Flynn

only lasted like a month as national security advisor, and he was trying to move on this during that very brief window? During that brief window, but it didn't end when he left in February 2017. This issue continued to be pressed at the very highest levels of the Trump administration. And then after Flynn left in 2017, Thomas Barak, who is the former chairman of the Trump Inaugural Committee, a close personal friend of Donald Trump's, continued to press forward on this issue. And other top officials in the administration allegedly continued to try to get this project completed. And we should say Barrack's spokesman says that he is standing by, ready to cooperate with the committee. So, Carrie or Sue, do you have any thoughts on this?

Because Barrack was not, you know, in the Pentagon or the National Security Council. He was just friends with Donald Trump and the chair of the inaugural committee. Why is he in this conversation? Well, one of the things that's so interesting to me is that Tom Barrack not only was in charge of the inaugural committee, he's at the center of this as well. And somebody very close to Tom Barrack has been very quietly cooperating with the special counsel investigation for some time. That's Rick Gates. Rick Gates was the deputy on the inaugural committee. He also worked very closely with Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman. And we know that Gates has been an enormously productive cooperator, maybe the single most important

cooperator in the entire special counsel investigation. He appears to have a lot to say about what Barak and other people were up to in the early days of the administration in Saudi Arabia, too. And we know that the inaugural committee itself is under investigation from the Southern District of New York. So not Mueller's office, but a different group of federal prosecutors. One thing that I think is interesting about this, asides from the substance of it, is it's also a good reminder that when Congress puts their mind to investigating something, they can cause real trouble and that they have real muscle to look into things that we weren't even looking at. I like to remind people that the reason we know

about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server was it was discovered by the Benghazi committee on Capitol Hill in the course of that investigation. And that is what created that entire storyline that played a very fundamental role in the 2016 presidential campaign. So to me, part of what's really interesting about this is it was a good lesson to me that a lot could be coming out of these congressional investigations that we weren't even looking at that become really big news stories. I think we've said a lot here. And I think the short answer is we will have many topics to podcast on over the next two years. Is that fair to say? I think that's a fair prediction. No shortage of material. So sounds like a good time to take one more quick break,

come back and end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go. Amazon, Google, Facebook, big companies are getting really big. Is that a problem? Listen to Planet Money's new series on big business, competition, and antitrust law in America. That's on Planet Money. All right, we are back. We're going to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the one thing politics or otherwise that we cannot stop thinking about i will go and mine is really just a quick update on last week's can't let it go where we somehow

ended up with tim and sue talking about how amazing armageddon was i was shocked a lot of readers were as well i'm gonna read just little samples two quick samples uh alan and casper wyoming armageddon is the worst movie ever made. Keep up the good work, though. You're my only source of political news these days. And then a much longer note from Joe in Astoria. Armageddon is not a great film. It is not a good film.

It is not an entertainingly bad film like The Room. It is a bad film. The thing I just want to tell Joe is he may have very valid points, but I am also someone who saw most of the Fast and Furious movies in the theater. So I just like these kind of movies, Joe. You may be more of a film critic, but I am a more of a I like I'm a great film critic if your audience is like 13 year old boys. Sue and I were talking after the podcast and we're thinking about the things that we accidentally left out. Obviously, we did not mention the real greatest space movie of all time, which is Space Jam.

I think the point here, Tim, is that Space Jam is one of the greatest movies of all time. I think that's right. I can disagree. Apologies, Joe. Carrie, what can you not let go other than our taste in movies? That is distasteful, but something else is distasteful. As reported this week by the New York Daily News, the Trump Tower restaurant, or at least one of them, keeps getting dinged for health code violations. Apparently, according to the Daily

News, since 2014, this restaurant has had a history of violating the New York health code. And the word vermin, I'm afraid, has come up. The word rodent has come up. Now the Trump organization says it continues to get a very high rating overall from health inspectors, an A rating. And obviously it's a struggle in New York and Washington, D.C. and other big cities to keep your restaurants clean. But boy, oh boy, when the health inspectors come to a restaurant and find creepy crawlies, it makes me feel a little creepy crawly. I don't even like to say the word R-A-T. In any context, I have serious phobia about that. There is a potential here for a crossover movie about Ratatouille and the trump tower i love ratatouille

and i think this would be this would really get to a slice of america that maybe ratatouille normally hasn't pixar has now branched sequels so maybe that's an idea for them um sue what about you so i can't let go this week. Do you guys ever watch Extra, which you probably don't based on your fancy movie tastes, the entertainment journalism program? Yes. So they have a new special correspondent out on the streets telling stories. His name is Sean Spicer. No way.

What? Thank you. That is the reaction this should get. Extra TV announced this week that Sean Spicer is on a short-term special correspondent gig with them. And he is using this to do, which I loved, is that it was billed as, quote, unprecedented access to people who work for the Trump administration. The largest primetime television audience, period. So Spicer, over the course of these evenings, is interviewing people like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.

Red carpet all the way. Yes. And Kellyanne Conway. So he's doing these like very Extra style interviews. And we have a clip of him interviewing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Oscar season. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Susan, welcome to Extra. Thank you. It's great to be on Extra. When you travel, do you have anything that's on an iTunes list or your downloads? I go back to my high school. I have a big ACDC collection. A country music too. We love Toby Keith and all the country folks.

We're from Kansas. He adores Queen. So I mean, we saw Bohemian Rhapsody first weekend. And a star is born. We usually always stay at home and watch and fight it out among ourselves. It's kind of like a Super Bowl. You, however.

This year I'm likely to be on an airplane, so I'm going to have to make sure the crew can get it tuned in for me. Do you have a peck? You know, gosh, I love Bohemian Rhapsody. So that was also, to me, a little bit of news in this. Would not have pegged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a Bohemian Rhapsody guy. Apparently that was his favorite movie

and he's a huge Queen listener. So thank you, Sean Spicer, for that journalism. Do you want to? Things are going viral on Twitter. You're going to need your phone for this one. If it's safe to do so and you're not driving. So people are Googling Rihanna and their birthday together. Like including year?

No, just the date. Just the date. So my birthday is October 24th. And so it's October 24th and Rihanna. And people are trying to figure out which Rihanna mood are you. That is, which outfit is associated with you. And I was hoping for a very kind of dark version of Rihanna, like an earlier version of Rihanna. And I got it. October 24th, Rihanna leads to a kind of like a very kind of dark

evening photo of Rihanna walking down the street in sneakers, a puppy on her shirt and in a brown overcoat, bold black glasses. I thought it was a very good, I thought it encapsulated me pretty well. You know, I just did my birthday and i gotta say i think you're right because my rihanna is just wearing jeans and a sweater my rihanna is very fancy she's got uh she's got a pink uh floral dress on with uh the top is very flowery and and very fashion forward i think it's a good look scott i'm having so much trouble spelling rihanna. I can't. I'm sorry. We are going to wait, Carrie.

What's your birthday, Carrie? December 1. Why is there an H there? This word should be Rihanna. Oh, she's wearing like a... I can dig it. I like the look on her face. It's fierce. I like the fierce.

It's kind of like menswear inspired. I'm not sure that it's strong. Like a modern Katharine Hepburn, I would do. Yes. Okay. All fierce. It's kind of like menswear inspired. Well, then I would wear it. Like a modern Katherine Hepburn, I would do. Yes. Okay. Nailed it. So that's it for today. We will be back in your feed when there's more news and we will slowly go through the Rihanna of every single person in this podcast. A reminder, we are hitting the road.

We will be in Atlanta on Friday, March 8th. May or may not be wearing our respective Rihanna outfits. But either way, we will be recording a podcast live on stage. Still a few tickets left. So if you're in the area, go to nprpresents.org to get tickets. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department.

And I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Bye.