The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, January 10

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

President Trump says he is willing to declare a national emergency if Democrats don't go along with his demands for $5.7 billion for a border wall. Plus, prosecutors investigating Russian interference in the last U.S. presidential election suspect former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has links to the Russian intelligence service. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, editor correspondent Ron Elving, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and national security editor Phil Ewing. 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 Janera Kohler from Dallas, Pennsylvania. I'm a third-year medical student, and I just scrubbed in on my first C-section and delivered a healthy baby boy. This podcast was recorded at, whoa, 4.34 p.m. on Thursday, the 10th of January. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It's the 20th day of the government shutdown,

partial government shutdown, and President Trump visited the U.S.-Mexico border. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. All right. So before we get to the president's border visit, very quickly, I would just like to go back in time to yesterday when all the congressional leaders came up to the White House for a negotiation. And 30 minutes later, they were outside talking about how the president had walked out. Bye bye.

Well, some of the headlines said stormed out. Some said walked out. Many of the Republicans who had been in the meeting came out and said, no, no, wasn't like that at all. Very polite. Nobody raised their voice. Nobody slapped the table. None of that happened. But the president himself seemed to confirm that he had left the proceedings very abruptly and done so in a fit of pique. Because, he says, and Nancy Pelosi says, he said, if I reopen the government 30 days later, will you give me a wall? And she said no. Right. Which is exactly what this is all about and what it's been all about since the government shutdown started 20 days ago. way to bridge differences, compromise language so both sides would get what they wanted. The president is eager to skip all the way to the last page of the novel, where he does an end run around Congress, declares a national emergency, and does it all by himself. That state of emergency thing is something that he's been teasing for a while. The idea that he could declare a state of emergency and then take funds from the military, basically have the military build the wall. Well, not soldiers, right? Yes. They would fund the wall, not build the wall. Yeah, they would

take money from military construction funds and not do those things that it was set aside for and instead use it to build the wall. He was on the border today and, you know, he's teased this before. He talked about it again on the border today. His message essentially is, if Democrats don't give me what I want on the wall, then I'll do this thing. If for any reason we don't get this going and they're not going to act responsibly and they don't mind death and crime and all of the problems that they cause by not having a barrier, then you will see what happens with national emergency, which I can do very easily. And there's no question it holds up. And it was approved by

Congress because the act itself was approved by Congress. Earlier today, he said he, quote, definitely would do it if he didn't get a deal. He seems to be very eager to do this. Tim, do you understand this Emergency Powers Act? How does it work if the president were to declare a national emergency? Is that all it takes? It's not all it takes, but the president's power to declare a national emergency is pretty unconstrained. Basically, declaring the emergency gives the president access to about 100 different statutes. But not all of them would apply in this case. And some would argue that none of them apply in this case. Has the president ever invoked these powers before? Yes.

This president has invoked them for sanctions on Zimbabwe or on Venezuela. There are a bunch of presidential emergencies related to a lot of things. Ron was telling me like there was an emergency declared after 9-11, for instance. And there was an emergency declared after Katrina. And there have been any number of times when the president has declared an emergency as a way of getting access to more of the government's powers and moving money around in ways that'd be expeditious to deal with something that was universally regarded as a problem, like 9-11, or the hoarding of gold at the time of the beginning of the Depression, or, say, Katrina. Everyone could agree the government had to act and it needed to act as quickly as possible.

In this case, it would be invoking an emergency in order to break a political stalemate that is a completely different kettle of fish. And the political genesis of this idea came from the president's outside advisors, who have told me quite flatly that they believe if he can't build a wall, he won't get reelected. And if he can't get the Democrats to give him money for a wall, he has to prove to his base that at least he did everything possible in his powers to fight for this. And they said, if the end game to this confrontation over wall money is that if he can't get it from Congress, he declares an emergency, goes down to the border as he did today, he gets challenged in court, which he will. Inevitably.

Inevitably. Even if he loses in court, he still will have court, which he will. Inevitably. Inevitably. Court challenges. Even if he loses in court, he still will have kept faith with his base. It's better than the alternative, which is to throw in the towel and say, well, all right, maybe we don't really need the wall all that much. Well, I guess either way, the wall doesn't necessarily get built. Doesn't get built. But the thing that would happen in addition to court challenges is that the House will hold a lot of hearings on why is this an emergency? Why, if border apprehensions are the lowest since the 1970s, you need to do this? Why you didn't do this in the last two years? Why is it an emergency now

and it wasn't an emergency seven months ago? So there will be a lot of scrutiny on this decision. Yeah, I was talking to a couple of legal experts about this. And what they were saying is, yes, the president has this pretty vast power to declare an emergency. But if he does it to solve a political problem, if he manufactures a crisis, or if the emergency declaration isn't up to the crisis, then they see that as an abuse of power. necessarily because they don't support the president on the wall. If anything, I think this week proved that the rank and file Republicans up here are very much behind him. But if he were to do this, there is a recognition that it does challenge the norms of executive overreach, which is something that we heard a lot from Republicans during the Obama administration as saying that the president, because Congress would not act, would end run around Congress to try and

essentially legislate. And that is essentially what the president would be trying to do with these emergency powers. And why couldn't a Democratic president say, we have a national emergency, we must do these things on climate change, we have a national emergency, we must do these things on health care. You know, there's two things, though, We now have what might be a majority on the Supreme Court who believes in executive power. And we also have Republicans in Congress who not only are for the president's goal in this, which is to build the wall, but they really want the government to be reopened. They want this problem to be off of their plate. And that's what would happen if he declares a national emergency because he'd have to open the government before he did that. But then wouldn't that be Congress sort of abdicating its job? So what else is new? Yes, this is Congress having to confront the fact that they have already sacrificed much of their co-equal powers over the years, drip by drip, issue by issue, crisis by crisis. This would be more of the same. If you take the president at

face value that there is a humanitarian and security crisis at the border, that is a thing that Congress could fix through legislation. But Congress is not doing it. Well, because the president says the answer is a wall. The Democrats are willing to do a lot of things on border security. The sticking point is a wall. The president would be invoking this national emergency to build a wall. And a wall. And this is where the new divided government would really come into play, because you'd have a lot of House committees who would be able to investigate this and really grill administration officials on why all of a sudden this is really a crisis when it wasn't before and when illegal border crossings have been coming down steadily since 2000. There's also the counterpolitical incentives.

Maher talked about the president and his advisers who see the wall as critical to his presidency, to his reelection, to his to his base support. I mean, Democrats get that, too. Right. You know, Nancy Pelosi understands that calculation that if Donald Trump gets a win here on the wall. That is good for the president. And I think that's why you see Democrats in lockstep behind this strategy between with Nancy Pelosi saying absolutely no wall. There is no sentiment that I pick up talking to Democrats up here that they are in any way nervous about what denying the wall could do to them politically. Democrats have a base, too. Exactly. And if anything, House Democrats that just took the majority look at the 2018 midterms where the president weaponized the border in the closing weeks of the 2018 campaign, and they still swept not support the wall. And they're going to keep fighting it to the bitter end because they do see, if they win on this, a very destructive political loss for the president, which is a pretty big prize if you're a Democrat right now. He's made it so important to him. He's made the wall kind of the focal point of his presidency to the point where Democrats have

to stop him. One thing that is totally mind boggling to me about this is like a messaging thing from the president is he went from who's going to build the wall? Who's going to pay for the wall? Mexico is going to pay for the wall to taxpayers need to pay for the wall. Congress has to pay for the wall and we're going to shut down the government to get it to potentially we're going to take money away from the military to pay for the wall. You know, this is on track to now become the longest shutdown in history. I do think it's worth thinking about the pressure points on what could possibly end this. Friday is a payday for a lot of federal workers. I think the pain that real Americans are feeling becomes more and more a reality. And one of the realities

of the shutdown is that hundreds of thousands of Americans are being asked to suffer due to an unrelated political stalemate in Washington. And I don't know how sustainable that is, but I think as more and more people are actually affected by this, it will be hard to connect the dot as to why you're not getting a paycheck, or you can't go to a park, or, you know, your airport's getting jammed up, or all of those things are somehow tied up to a border fight. And I think that that is going to be a hard message, particularly for the president to continue to tell the people that, you know, Americans should suffer because of this border dispute. That's why declaring a national emergency is so

appealing, not just to the White House, to Congress, because it ends the shutdown. And it might be the only way out. And right now, right now, President Trump is getting all the attention. He's at the border. Those are the images on TV. As those paychecks don't go out, the people who are affected are going to be the ones whose images are dominating the news. All right, Mara and Ron, we are going to let you go. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Thank you, Tim. And when we get back, it is time once again to talk about the Russia investigation. Stasha Shepard thought she knew her dad.

But then one day, a stranger called their home. The phone is in my ear and he's saying your father's a crook. Did you know that? The story of a fallen hero and the mysterious obsession that drove him for decades. This week on Hidden Brain. And we're back and we've got Kerry Johnson and Phil Ewing in the studio. Hey, guys. Hi. Hi, Tim. And we've brought you in because we got news this week that we actually shouldn't have gotten because it was supposed to be redacted in a court filing, but it turns out it wasn't redacted. Kerry, what happened there? It appears that a lot of lawyers in this country need to take elementary courses in technology

because there was kind of a cut and paste fail. Paul Manafort's lawyers intended to make something redacted or blacked out, but they did it wrong so that if you copied that text that was in black in their original document and pasted it into a new document, you could see every secret word that they had typed. Okay, so what were the secret words? What did we learn from this document? Well, we learned at least three new facts about alleged lies that the special counsel believes that Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump, told to investigators after he agreed to plead guilty. One is that he allegedly shared polling information with a Russian business associate, a longtime

Russian business associate, that the Mueller team, the special counsel team, has linked to Russian intelligence. That seems like a big thing. It seems like kind of a big thing. We don't know exactly when this handoff occurred and whether this was internal secret polling data from the Trump campaign or regular old polling data that a lot of people would have had access to, but nonetheless kind of relevant to an investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, you might say, right? You might say. The second thing that we learned was that Paul Manafort had gone ahead and met with this former business associate, Konstantin Klimnik, in Madrid where they allegedly discussed

a Ukraine peace plan. That, once again, is code for lifting sanctions against Russia. And the third thing that we learned about Manafort's alleged lies was that Manafort, who had told investigators he was not in touch with the Trump White House or Trump administration officials really very much at all after the inauguration and that period after that Manafort had, in fact, been in touch with several Trump administration officials. And he had authorized some unnamed third party to drop his name, to drop Paul Manafort's name, if this person ever got a meeting with the president. It also isn't clear yet whether President Trump had any knowledge about these contacts or what Manafort might have been doing. Trump was asked about this as he got ready to go on his trip to the border. And he said, no, he did not know what Manafort was doing.

But there are people like Senator Mark Warner, who doesn't usually go out on a limb. He's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. And he was on with Anderson Cooper saying this. I don't know whether you call that collusion or what you call that. But to me, that is inappropriate and is one of the most significant items of this whole investigation. Here's what was fascinating to me about Senator Warner's comments. He was asked elsewhere on CNN on Wednesday whether he knew about this contact before. His committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been looking into Russia since almost before the

special counsel's office in 2017. And he said, no, this was new to him, which is important because it shows you even after all this time and energy by members of Congress, there are still things that they are learning in real time the way we are coming out of these government investigations or coming out in this case of these legal disputes between people like Paul Manafort and prosecutors. And so we don't know what we don't know even after all this time. And it could be that around the corner, there'll be more huge revelations or other bits of information that no one expected that could change the story in the way that it's been

changed so many times before. I just want to pause for a second, because this is one of many developments that have happened over the course of the last two years. Maybe not the biggest development on its own, but we have come a very, very, very long way from Hope Hicks, the spokesperson for the Trump campaign, saying there was no contact with Russians. This is a long way from no contact with Russians. Not only that, this meeting in 2016 between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with this delegation from Russia that was supposed to offer the campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton, the Russian lawyer in that meeting was

charged this week in an unrelated case in New York City by the U.S. Attorney's Office there with obstruction of justice. And the two important things about that case that we need to know for our purposes is, one, she's very close with the Russian government, according to the allegations in that indictment. And two, the U.S. government has been collecting her communications with Russian government officials. The court documents allude to emails she was sending and receiving with people who work from the Russian government. Inference, that was the case in 2016 as well for this meeting. Further inference, the U.S. government, the National Security Agency or the CIA or the FBI have been monitoring what she's been saying to people in Russia. So again, there's this huge

pool of information that the government has, the special counsel's office, the intel agency still have that we only see small snippets of, but the story keeps moving forward. So even if each individual thing is not a big bombshell, it adds up to a much more complete understanding about what took place. All right, let's move on to one other justice-related thing, which is the president's pick for attorney general has his hearings next week. He's been up on Capitol Hill. Carrie, can you start by telling us who he is? Yeah, his name is Bill Barr. He actually has been the attorney general before under President George H.W. Bush. He's a well-known quantity, pretty well-liked inside the Justice Department, a guy who went on to have major roles in the

Washington, D.C. legal community, made a lot of money working as general counsels for big companies in the D.C. area and elsewhere. His daughter happens to work for the current deputy attorney general. And he's a pretty conservative guy, but also a pretty pro-law and order law enforcement guy. Sue, you are up on the Hill. He has been up on the Hill. How is he being received? You know, usually these are more about charm offensive and getting a chance to get to know senators one on one. It is not necessarily gone as well as these visits often do. He did spend part of the week meeting with people like Lindsey Graham. But he also had a bit of a I guess like a PR mishap in that Senate Democrats, including Amy Klobuchar, is a Democrat from Minnesota, saying that she asked to meet with him and he refused and declined, blaming the shutdown.

But that became sort of a mini dust up and then they backtracked and now they're set to meet. So not going necessarily as smooth as I always think they like to go. Maybe that's because of the government shutdown. Yeah, that's a good use of shutdown excuse, I think. Oh, sorry, shutdown. He probably is in a good position for Senate confirmation because Republicans grew their majority in the midterm elections. They have 53 seats now. And I would say barring a really poor performance at his confirmation hearings next week, the sense you get from Senate Republicans is most of them are inclined to support him. I think he will probably face some tough grilling

on certain questions, certainly the Russia investigation. But there hasn't really been within Republican circles, which is where it really matters, any real sense that this is a nomination in trouble. He had written this memo, this extensive memo that he sent to people at the Justice Department and apparently people affiliated with President Trump as well, lawyers affiliated with Trump, sort of outlining what was wrong with the Mueller investigation and why he didn't think that the president could be charged with obstruction of justice, which you got to figure he's going to be asked about that. He will be asked about that. And he has been asked about that. In fact, in the meeting with Lindsey Graham yesterday, Lindsey Graham said he asked him

about the Mueller investigation and what he protected. And Graham essentially came out and said he was told that he would protect the Mueller investigation, that he did not believe Robert Mueller was on a witch hunt, and also dropped a little bit of trivia to note that Bill Barr and Robert Mueller are, in the words of Bob Barr, good friends. And even Lindsey Graham said publicly to reporters, I didn't even know they were that close. I fact-checked this, and it's true. It is true that they are good friends.

It is true that Mueller has attended the weddings of Attorney General nominee Bill Barr's children, and their spouses know each other, and that is all true. And I think that is something, it's a minor piece of trivia, but I think it's major in that that is the kind of thing I think you will hear a lot of Republicans point to

in the rationale for why they believe that they can trust Barr is that personal relationship. And I think partly it's true, as Kerry said, but also I think that is something that we will probably hear a lot about next week

in terms of giving his nomination, you know, giving people cover to say, you know, I believe him, I trust him, I can vote for him. And there is another item that comes out of this, which is that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who we've talked about a lot on this podcast, who's been overseeing the Russia investigation, he would leave if Barr is confirmed? Yeah, word from inside justice is that Rod Rosenstein, who will have been in the job for nearly two years, probably around the time that Barr is confirmed, if he is in fact confirmed, is thinking about leaving. There may be some period of overlap where these two men kind of

exchange information and work alongside each other for a little while. But in a way, it's normal. It's natural. It's not one of these situations that some progressives and people on the left, including some Democrats in Congress, have feared where Rosenstein's getting pushed out by Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is then going to take the Mueller investigation over and control it himself. The issue is, listen, when you get a new boss at the top of a department, that new person generally gets to pick his or her number two. And Rod Rosenstein seems to understand that, acknowledge that, and is leaving kind of on his own accord as opposed to being pushed off the plank. All right. We are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, can't let it go. Hey, it's Guy Raz here. And on the next How I Built This, how two women with no background in fitness set up some stationary bikes, dim the lights, boosted the music, and created a cult following in a multi-million dollar business called SoulCycle. You can find How I Built This

wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And we're going to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, where we talk about the one thing we can't stop thinking about and talking about, politics or otherwise. Carrie. You know, the president was asked today about the personal business of an individual American citizen. The president was asked about the pending divorce of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Bezos is getting divorced? He's getting divorced from his wife of 25 years. They apparently announced this divorce on Twitter, said it was amicable. They've been undergoing a trial separation for a long time and they hoped

to remain amicable for some time to come. But for some reason, this became a point of questioning of the president of the United States. Well, that's a whole nother question, right? Yeah, exactly. What do you say? Would you approve that? Jeff Bezos is divorced and it's a fair. Well, I wish him luck. That's it? I wish him luck. It's going to be a beauty.

It's going to be a beauty. It's going to be a beauty. Which, you know, this president has said about a lot of things over the years, that word beauty, Tam. It's true. He has described a lot of things that he considers to be negative as a beauty. Yeah. So it's unclear to me whether the beauty of the situation was Jeff Bezos, whether it was the amount of money that Jeff Bezos may be losing, or just the whole idea of divorce in general to this particular president. But, wow, it was a lot. It stuck in my mind this morning. It's something we don't often see in Washington. I can't wait to see the tweets.

Tam, what can't you let go of this week? There's a video going around on the Internet of a 1950s Western TV series called The Trackdown. And in this episode of this show, a Dr. Walter Trump comes to a Western town and he is predicting doom. He is predicting that the town will be hit by an asteroid or a comet and blown off of Earth. And there is just one man who sees through this. He brings the whole town together to tell them how he is going to save them. It will cost a lot of money, of course. The people were ready to believe. Like sheep, they ran toward the slaughterhouse. And waiting for them was the high priest of fraud i am the only one trust me that's mr trump i can build a wall around your homes that nothing will

penetrate whoa what do we do how do we save ourselves you ask how do you build that wall you ask and i'm here to tell you steal slats so what you're saying is he alone can build this wall to protect the town? That seems to be what Dr. Walter Trump was going to say in this show. Eventually they catch him and they say, you know, you're going to have to go tell the people about your fraud. You're going to go back and tell them, Trump. What? You're going to go back and tell him it's a fake. Is it true that in the next episode of this show, the sheriff's office shuts down and the deputies all get furloughed?

I don't know what happens in the next episode. This one seems to be the only one that is posted on the YouTubes. Well, there you go. Sue, what can't you let go of? OK. Have you guys ever seen the movie Broadcast News? One of my very of. Okay. Have you guys ever seen the movie Broadcast News? One of my very favorites. No. When I was a little girl, my dad said, someday you will be a journalist. You need to watch this movie. Yes.

So Broadcast News is an 80s film. It is, I don't know if I'm going to say it's my favorite journalism film, but it's definitely one of my favorite films about journalism. And in it, it is essentially the story of a female news producer who's like really high strung, but really ambitious and sort of captures the zeitgeist of TV news in the 80s. It's a perfect little movie and unto itself, people should just watch it because it's so great. So I love that movie and earlier this week, there was news out of CBS that they had named a new head of news and it's a woman named Susan Zirinsky. I admit, if you've never heard of her, I had never

heard of her either and I was at home and my husband works for CBS News and he got the announcement about Susan Zirinsky. And he kind of says to me offhandedly, like, oh, yeah, no, she was the basis for the Holly Hunter character in some movie. And I like sat up and I was like, wait a minute, she was the she was the basis for the Holly Hunter character in broadcast news. I had no idea about this, that in the movie broadcast news, this character perfectly played by Holly Hunter was based on Susan Zirinsky, that she was actually a technical producer on the film, that she worked with Albert Brooks to get the character right. And people who know her say like the character and the mannerisms are all based on Susan Zirinsky. And it just kind of blows my mind because I've had my whole adult life believing that this was, like, a purely fictional film and did not know it was based on a real person in the news. And I think it's so perfect because if you know the movie broadcast news,

that is probably what ended up happening to Holly Hunter's character, Jane Craig. Yes, but promoted at the age of 66 years old. I asked the question whether, you know, she might have got this job 25 years ago, for instance. It's great that she got it now. She's a hero of mine having never met her, but adored this movie. And I watch it at least once a year because it's funny and it's funny because it's true. Did you know that she was the basis for this? Like, am I the only person that did not know this piece of news trivia? I did know this.

You did know this. Yeah. I just think it's really cool. And I think that is like an amazing bragging right to be the real life person that this iconic character in a journalism movie was based after. And if you have not seen the movie, dear podcast listeners, you should watch it because it's amazing. Phil, what can't you let go of? Here's what I can't let go of this week. Two words, baby shark.

Baby shark. Baby shark. Baby shark. Baby shark. Mommy shark. Baby shark. Baby shark. Baby shark. Baby Shark is, as those of us who are cultural leaders here at NPR know, a huge hit online for children under, what's the cutoff, Tam, four, three? Well, no, my six-year-old likes it, so I'm going gonna say at least six my daughter is three and we sing baby shark in our home or permutations on baby shark literally every day multiple times a day and have for about six months

and this week baby shark broke into the mainstream it became number 32 on the billboard hot 100 list of actual songs and you heard it here well not first but anyway it's a thing in the mainstream now that it hasn't been in a lot of ways and it's kind of become a crossover hit which is insane it's created by this for kids that's right it's created by the south korean children's brand which has all this stuff on uh youtube videos and so forth and i looked at the original video which is actually from two years ago i didn't know this it has more than two billion views. That's billion with a B. And now finally it's kind of working its way into the

American mainstream. Yeah. Sue, your child is too young for this. This is the horror of my future to come. It is coming. But you're going to phase into Baby Shark within the next year. And you just can't get it out of your head. We will all be singing this all day. I will be walking around NPR going

Baby Shark. These are also the songs that your head. We will all be singing this all day. I will be walking around NPR going, baby shark. These are also the songs that make you think that there are subliminal messages for kids. Like there's something so repetitive in the sound of it that you're like, what are you telling all these kids, baby shark? All right, that is a wrap for today. We will be back as soon as there's political news you need to know about. Until then, head to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram and search for NPR Politics for the most up-to-the-minute news. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress.

I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.