The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, June 1

Episode Date: June 2, 2017

President Trump announces he'll withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accord, with an eye toward renegotiation. Why it's not that simple — plus Trump's overseas trip, and the Russian investigation reportedly inching toward Jared Kushner. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Scott Detrow, political reporter Vanessa Romo, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. 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 David Saunders from Charlotte, North Carolina. This podcast was recorded at 4.52 p.m. on Thursday, June 1st. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org or on the NPR One app and on your local public radio station. Okay, now for the show. It's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of some of this week's political news. We'll talk about President Trump's decision on the Paris Climate Accord, the latest Russia investigation news, including the potential entanglement of Jared Kushner, and take a look at the president's big overseas trip, which I am very happy to be back from now.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Vanessa Romo, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. Nice to have you back within six time zones of us. It's good to be back. And Ron, you were away too. I was in Spain. I cannot reveal all the reasons that I was there, but let us say that they were all fulfilled.

Did those include cava and tapas? Cava, no. Tapas, sí. Now, a listener I remember last year during the campaign said, I have a Spanish Mediterranean villa that I'm inviting Ron Elving to. No, no, no. What? That was a Grecian island. Oh, that's right.

It was a Greek island. And you know because you're going there in six months. No, no, no. What? That was a Grecian island. Oh, that's right. It was a Greek island. And you know because you're going there in six months. No, no. I have no plans on the record or off. Okay. And Vanessa, welcome to you. Back to the pod. Back to the pod.

Your first roundup. Yeah, very first. I'm excited. Lots to cover. Oh, my God. Yeah, so guys, we know we only did one this week. This is the only one. It was a short week.

And now that means we have a lot to talk about. However, just before we get to it, a quick reminder that you should be downloading Up First each weekday morning. And there you can get your political fix from people like Scott Detrow. I'm happy to wake up at 3.30 in the morning once or twice a week to be on Up First giving you the latest news. It's been a lot of the stuff we're talking about in the show. We are also on your radio.

I don't know if you know that. Yes, we do talk on the radio too. So first up today is the president's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. But wait, there's more. But begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or in really entirely new transaction

on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers. So we're getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine. Okay. So where to start? Scott Detrow, you covered energy for a long time and still obsess about it. Yes.

I think I should start. I have some big thoughts, but let me just start by what the president said right there, that we will begin the process of renegotiating. That is, by and large, political fantasy. This is an agreement that took hundreds of nations years to come together on. Like 200 nations. Yeah. So this is not something that is just going to be restarted.

It was a years-long process. And the other big players here, the European Union, China, among others, are continuing to stick to this agreement. They are not going to... This is a situation basically where the United States is zigging while the rest of the world continues to zag. Well, in fairness, we could sit down with the other countries that did not enter the Paris Accord. That would be Nicaragua, which didn't feel it went far enough. And perhaps that could be balanced by the other country, Syria, which did not want to be dictated to

by an agreement in terms not perhaps entirely different from the rejectionist language the president used today. So one big thing about this Paris Agreement is that it was voluntary. All the countries that are part of Paris who agreed to meet certain goals and, you know, hit certain benchmarks on reducing carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, all of those countries are doing it voluntarily. They came up with their goals. So President Trump could have stayed in the Paris Accord, said he was going to stay in and just renegotiated the deal and said, you know what, we're not going to meet that goal, right? Like we could, well, we're going to meet a lesser goal. Yeah. Well, that's that's a question

that I had. Was it sort of a way, a form to save face so he could say, I'm sticking to this promise that I made throughout the campaign. And then he could still talk to his voters for whom coal mining is their number one interest and then say, but we're not totally out. The game isn't totally over. We can still be a part of it. Yeah. The big picture goal here was to lower carbon dioxide emissions to try and keep the world off what they refer to as the guardrail. That is a two degrees Celsius increase in overall global temperature. The thinking being that if the temperature increases beyond that, then the atmosphere, weather patterns, everything would

probably go completely haywire in a way that would create real long-term damage for the world. The thing about Paris is that even the people who put this together agree it was not enough to reach that goal. This did not go far enough. That's something that President Trump criticized today, though he's coming at it from a completely different point of view of negating the problem to begin with. But they said this was going to be one step going toward more agreements over time that got stricter and stricter. So this was like a really monumental big deal today because it's the United States stepping away from a big international agreement that took a long time to get to. But it's not as big a deal for two different reasons. One, President Trump kind of made this decision already when he signed executive

orders nixing EPA regulations that were the way the U.S. was going to get to this goal. That was basically something called the Clean Power Plan that created regulations that would shift states away from coal-produced energy. Two, the U.S. is going to be doing a lot of this anyway. Not all of it all at once, but a lot of it anyway. Coal is going out of style. Natural gas is coming in. Wind is coming in. Solar is coming in. That's going to keep happening despite today's agreement. And that's been happening for a long time. And natural gas is cheaper and it's cleaner and it's just been economic forces have been doing that. Yeah. But it was important for the United States to show the leadership to be willing to participate in these talks, to be willing to make a commitment to do voluntarily, as has been described.

It was important to do that because as the world's largest economy and largest user of energy, we have a certain kind of natural leadership in the world. And which way we chose to lean in the great question of how much should we strain the environment was going to be crucial to the rest of the world's attitudes. So President Trump is making the argument that Paris, this agreement hamstrung the United States, hurt American workers, hurt our economy. Is that true or does pulling out of it help the economy? Yeah, this is something that Trump wasn't alone among Republicans running for president, really railing on the not just the Paris agreement, but the the EPA rules that that were a big part of this, you know, saying from both sides. Yes, there were regulations in place regulating oil and gas extraction. And yet, really cratered over the last couple of years and created a lot of layoffs in this industry.

But that's not because of regulations. That's because we were just pumping out so much. So this is really, on one hand, on the other hand, way to look at it. So this picture that Trump painted on the campaign trail of energy just being totally hamstrung by the federal government is not quite reality. Well, but politically, there's no question but that for a large portion of Donald Trump's base represented, I suppose, in the White House, largely by senior advisor Stephen Bannon, who was in the front row, not only in the front row in the audience leading in the in the applauding, but also well represented in the

speech. This speech sounded more like the inaugural address back in January than anything we've heard since. I think that observation has been widely made. It really seemed to come from the same pen and it spoke to the populist spirit that the president and Steve Bannon and some others in the administration think was the genius of his election. Yeah, and here's a little clip of tape. Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, and across the world should not have more to say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives. Thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America's sovereignty. And you know what? A Trump voter loves phrases like that. I mean,

think how powerful it was on the campaign trail when Trump said, I'm not running to be the president of the global community. I'm running to be the president of the United States. And I'm here to look out for you. You know, I think environmental policies are something that are hard to campaign on. It's very easy to campaign against environmental policies saying this person's for raising the price that you pay at the pump. This person's for raising your home heating and home energy bills and saying, forget all this regulation. Screw it. We're going to drill for as much oil and gas as we want to. That's really popular with Republican voters and popular with voters around Pittsburgh, which he name checked several times. No, Hillary Clinton did actually win.

She won Pittsburgh itself, but he really cleaned up western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh. I just wanted to make a note just in terms of the tone of the speech. So stepping away a little bit from from what he's actually talking about, just talking about the words that he was using. So many times he talked about really loving America and loving Americans and loving workers and employees. And then the other thing that I really thought was a really remarkable line was the line about being laughed at, that the world is laughing at the U.S. At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We don't want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won't be. They won't be.

And this talk of campaign and sort of the politics of climate could be relevant because under the Paris Accord, basically the timeline is such that the U.S. would not actually fully be able to technically pull out until right after Election Day 2020. That's true, though I think generally speaking, historically, climate change is not like the super pressing issue for voters because it's so theoretical and it's so long term. Yeah, and I don't know that it will be this time either. Yeah. But isn't it when you're thinking of it in terms of jobs?

I mean, that's the reason that everybody gets so riled up about this and all the lines about coal and coal mining and all the other forms of energy in the U.S. I mean, that's the reason that voters seem to really care about this around election time. Right. That's the flip side of it. It can be a pressing issue for people who feel like this takes away their jobs. But in terms of long term, you know, 30 years from now, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, the world will be warmer. That being said, I think you can have more powerful short term political arguments now because you have been seeing a lot of concrete things happening right now that people say is a direct result of climate change. I mean, we have seen massive melting of Arctic ice sheets. We have seen big problems with coastal flooding. We have

seen major droughts that a lot of experts say, yeah, you can draw a direct line between climate change and this. Yeah. And one of our correspondents, Rob Schmitz, was just in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. I think he was basically scuba diving, but he was scuba diving with scientists and they were looking at bleaching of the reef, of the coral in the reef and just warmer temperatures of the water and how that's affected the reef. Yeah, that reef especially is just drastically reduced every year in terms of the amount of wildlife there. Climate change is very hard to deny, even if you are supposedly a, quote, denier, unquote. What people tend to deny is the connection between that demonstrable, observable climate change

and our use of fossil fuels or our restraint of fossil fuels. And that then turns into an economic question, an economic argument, to some degree pitting the producer states, the Oklahomas, against the rest of the country or the more consumer states. And then there are some that are in the middle, like Pennsylvania. And so it becomes the sort of thing where you can make anyone who feels economically disadvantaged or anyone who feels that they have lost ground in recent years, and that's an awful lot of Americans to be certain, you can make those people feel as though it's been the work of some kind of a conspiracy, perhaps with foreign countries, perhaps with the elite in this country, perhaps with people who

they don't like in the first place. And that is a potent mix. We've seen it not only in our own 2016 election, but in other countries as well. Just to add, the reaction has been pouring in. Of course, it is relatively predictable. We're hearing from business leaders. Elon Musk, who is the Tesla guy, is pulling out of all the presidential commissions he had been part of doing sort of business work with the Trump administration. Former President Obama released a statement essentially saying that even if the president of the United States is pulling out of Paris, the sort of private industry and people and states and cities are not. And there are a lot of big states that have big economies within them that are that are sticking to this. You have basically the entire northeastern block of states has a cap and trade system in place they're sticking this. You have basically the entire northeastern block of states has a cap and trade system in place they're sticking with. California has its carbon regulations in place, its major incentives to push the solar and other clean energy. One statement in the total swarm of

congressional reaction that was happening as that speech was going on that was interesting to me. I'm just going to read a sentence. The sentence itself isn't that interesting. Who it's from is more interesting. If America is going to be a global leader, it has to have a seat at the table where issues and agreements with global implications are discussed. The Paris Agreement isn't perfect,

but by abandoning it, America is relinquishing that seat at the table. That is from Patrick Meehan, who is interesting because he is a suburban Republican House member. And those are the types of people who are going to be really at the center of things next year in terms of whether or not Democrats can regain the House. It's suburban Republicans like Pat Meehan. So it's interesting that he was saying this is this is the wrong move.

Of course, there are also a lot of people who are praising the president's move, including Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma. Senator from Oklahoma. Yes, who had thrown the snowball on the Senate floor. And Paul Ryan, the House speaker, and many others on the right. So it's splitting in much the same way a lot of things are, except that a big part of the business world happens to be on the side of the Democrats and the globalists and the world leaders. It was really an interesting moment when you had ExxonMobil come out and say, no, actually, we should we should stay in this Paris agreement. Wait, can we go back to something that you said, Tam, which is that withdrawal will take place or will take effect in the next election? Yeah, the general timeline as this was set up is that countries can't say they're pulling out until three years after it was signed. Then that process takes some time as well. You can kind of think of it like the United Kingdom deciding to leave the European Union. The decision was made, but it's going to play out over a long period of time. The difference, of course, is that the European Union has been around for decades and decades

and decades, and the Paris Agreement is really just starting to get off the ground. And speaking of the European Union, President Trump, almost a week ago, wrapped up his trip that took him from Saudi Arabia to Israel to Europe, where things got a little less pleasant and where he called on NATO leaders in Brussels to pay their fair share. He kind of never mentioned or explicitly endorsed Article 5, which is basically the most important part of the NATO charter, the thing that says all for one and one for all. If one country is attacked, it's as if all countries were attacked. And and then he went to this G7 meeting in Sicily and by all accounts was pressed

by basically all the leaders there to please, please, please, please, please don't pull out of Paris. America is a leader in the world. And if you pull out, it matters. Well, clearly, he said, no, thanks. It's interesting. Trump talks about, as Vanessa was pointing out, the world laughing at us. I mean, I think I think actually this decision today is the closest that that has come. Not laughing, just really parentally disappointed. We have a statement from Angela Merkel was very disappointed, said that Germany is going to continue to do its work. We have a statement from the United Nations expressing disappointment. That's kind of the key term from the big countries who are have been our top allies today. Well, and following that trip, Angela Merkel was giving a speech,

and I think she was in a beer garden or something. There were a lot of images of beer associated with this speech. Well, she's campaigning for another term, so it was a campaign event. She was in Munich, and they make the steins big in München. They do make those steins big. But here's what she said, and this was immediately following meeting with President Trump, both in Brussels at NATO and then at the G7 meeting. She says, quote, The times when we could completely rely on others are to an extent over.

I experienced that in the last few days, and therefore I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands. Of course, in friendship with the United States and in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbors wherever it is possible, also with Russia and also with other countries. But we need to know that we have to fight for our own future and destiny as Europeans. So, Ron, I know that you don't remember what it was like before World War II. But during, God, it was hell. It was really bad. And you also don't remember what it was like during World War II. But, you know, the U.S. and Germany have had a bond since then that now it seems to be in trouble. We should be cautious about where we really push our analysis of what's going on with our

relationship with Europe. I think an awful lot of this is being done for domestic political consumption in the United States and in the part of Angela Merkel, she... Well, domestic political consumption in Germany too, right? From the standpoint of Angela Merkel, she is talking to German voters, just as Donald Trump is talking to his American supporters. And in her case, it probably does her a certain amount of good to distance herself from Donald Trump, who is not popular in Germany, and this will help her in winning another term. Should she win, it will be in part because she was able to parlay the growing tension, or you can see it as a growing conflict with the United States, to her own benefit. So once all

that has passed and we've moved on to the next phase, or there's another crisis, or we have to look to our European allies in the Middle East or perhaps something will happen in Asia. It is more likely than not that our longstanding relationship in NATO with Germany will be intact. But more likely than not feels a lot different than it's been for a really long time. I mean, isn't that in itself like crazy? It is difficult to talk about without kind of shrugging your shoulders and saying we're in some uncharted territory here. It has been disturbing to Poland, to the Baltic states, to all the Eastern European countries that were occupied by the Russians for decades and decades after World War II. So this is an existential issue for them and for the Germans. For us, we can sort of stand back and say, maybe you've all been relying on us a little too long and maybe we're tired of paying the bills, even though we did a lot of that for our own sake, not just for that of the Europeans. Because I just feel like there's a lot of dystopian books and movies that one of the

early premises is that NATO has dissolved. It just seems like it's been a big thing that everybody in the American political system has agreed on for a very long period of time. And let us be fair, Donald Trump is not calling for the dissolution of NATO, and he's certainly not calling for Europe to break up in any sense. What he is saying is, we don't want to pay the degree that we have paid to the defense of the free world, the Western world. We want everybody else to pony up a little bit more. Even though we have been doing this for our own sake as well as theirs, he wants to change the formula, the equation. So, Tam, I have one question for you about your trip. So I was watching your Twitter feed very closely the entire time that you were away. And you mentioned that you had been asking the

administration for documents about the deals that the Trump administration was able to negotiate with these leaders. But you haven't been able to get these documents? Yeah, and I tweeted that like a week ago. The president signed something like 17 or 18 different documents. And these are the ones that he boasted about in today's speech. Also, he said, you know, these are $350 billion worth of deals that are going to provide hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans. Yeah. And they keep saying, we're working on it or, yeah, we'll get that to you. And as of 5.27 p.m. on Thursday, June 1st, I'm still asking. And, you know, if the past is any indication,

sometimes the headline on a deal is far more spectacular than the details of the deal. And we just simply don't know the details. And with that, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, the latest on the Russia investigations and more. So let's move on to the latest on Russia, or we should call it the Russia stuff, because there's a lot of it. Since last we talked about it, which was about a week ago, the Washington Post and others reported that Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and Kislyak, about using Russian diplomatic facilities in the U.S. to conduct conversations with Russian officials away from the prying ears of U.S. intelligence agencies. But the reports also say that the channel was never set up. So why is this a big deal? Well, I think this would have mattered a lot less in a vacuum if we had not had months and months of this constant drumbeat of the overall investigation and the key question to it of what sort of conversations or contact were there between Trump's orbit and Russian officials and Russian intelligence operatives. As former CIA Director John Brennan said last week, there was intelligence of some sort of communication there.

So not only that, but several instances of key members of Trump's orbit initially denying any sort of contact at all, only to after the fact acknowledge that there was some sort of conversation. And I think the way that the administration responded to this from things that Homeland Security Secretary Kelly said specifically, they seem to be acknowledging that this conversation did happen. It wasn't an outright denial. It was saying, yeah, and so what? Yeah, it was kind of this weird thing. The other thing that came up during the last few days was another fellow named Sergei, besides Kislyak, whom Jared Kushner had met with supposedly according to these reports. And, of course, some of these are reports that we have not independently confirmed.

We should say that. And we should also hasten to add that Jared Kushner has volunteered to discuss this at the proper time in the proper places with the proper officialdom. But this other— FBI, congressional committees. Senate Intelligence Committee, whom have you, and presumably he will. But this other guy named Sergei, his last name is Gorkov. And Gorkov has been many things in the Putin world.

He has now the title of some sort of banking official. But he has also been someone who worked with Putin with respect to intelligence and with respect to policy in countries other than in Russia. There is also this element of Putin himself saying that while the Kremlin certainly didn't get involved in any kind of meddling with the American election in 2016, there may have been patriotic, sentimented Russians, people with deep patriotic feelings. This is something Putin said today. That is something that Putin has said as the week begins to wind down, a couple of days after we'd heard about Sergei Gorkov having a meeting with Jared Kushner. And is he another one of these patriotic-minded Russians who just wanted to do what they could to advance the Russian interests around the world? This is the sort of contact that people really get a lot of questions going about. Yeah. To me, the thing that stands out from this is just Jared's in the mix now. He is one of the president's closest advisors. He is married to the president's daughter. And now the cloud is around him, too. He's another billow in the smoke.

He's another billow in the smoke. And we should continue to emphasize that we are talking here yet about smoke. It's just that there's so much of it and it's so close now with the Kushner billow to the president himself. And while the administration is saying that, hey, what's the big deal? This kind of thing happens all the time. People do set up back channels. The big question here is the fact

that it was during the transition. But the thing is, we don't really know if a back channel to Russia was actually ever set up. There's a couple of different thoughts that have been stewing around in my head all week on one of this. The first one, if the intention was to evade U.S. intelligence that was monitoring those conversations, that certainly leads to a lot of questions. What were you saying that you didn't clearly U.S. intelligence was listening to these conversations because that's how we knew that Michael Flynn met with the Russian ambassador, talked about sanctions in the days after Christmas. That was the key conversation that led to his ouster, that led to that big dramatic meeting where Sally Yates went to the White House and voiced concerns.

So that has a lot of questions. The other thing I've been thinking a lot about is that at this point, I think the Russian collaborative issue is a central question. But there's an equally central question in this investigation now of what steps did President Trump take? What things did President Trump say once he was in office to possibly slow down, to possibly impede any sort of investigation. That's the heart of the Comey firing. We know how close Donald Trump is to his family. We know how defensive he is about this already. If Jared Kushner is going to be a central figure in these investigations, how does President Trump react to that?

How much more defensive and angry does he get about this? And I don't know if anyone has noticed, but Jared Kushner is actually on the cover of Time magazine this week. And that's interesting to me because Donald Trump has a thing about how many times he's actually appeared on the cover of Time magazine and really brags about that quite often. And doesn't much like others appearing on the cover of Time magazine. Steve Bannon. Right. Getting that kind of attention. Never to mention any names, Steve Bannon. And we don't know at this point whether Jared Kushner will be a central part of this investigation or not.

He certainly is somebody who various committees and various investigators want to talk to, but we don't know, like, what's below that, really. We also know that in this White House, there is a camp of people and it's not clear how big that camp is, but there's a camp of people who are deeply concerned about the deep state or about, you know, the intelligence community or about, you know, Obama people, leftover Obama people or, you know, back when the president was still President Obama, very concerned that Obama and his people and the deep state were out to get Donald Trump and his allies. And I mean, if you look at President Trump's tweets and sort of obsession with unmasking and leaks and the concern about leaks, this is all part of that deep state. So was was Jared Kushner trying to get around the deep state? I mean, this does fit into some patterns we already knew during the transition. One of them was that, you know, typically a president-elect, obviously you're talking to people all over the world when you know you're going to become president. That's the responsible thing to do.

Everybody wants to get to know you. But typically, and we saw this actually thanks to WikiLeaks emails from John Podesta's emails account that that gave a glimpse into the Obama transition back in 2008 and early 2009. We know that Obama and every other incoming president worked closely with the State Department to set those calls up to get the information they needed to go through the formal process. We knew that President Trump was basically flying blind, not engaging with the State Department at all, and just kind of fielding calls on his cell phone. So there's a lot of stuff the Trump transition was doing outside the orbit of the federal government. Well, and just this week, there were reports that while he was in Europe, President Trump was trying to exchange phone numbers with world leaders. They could just

call each other, you know, call me on my cell phone. That might not necessarily escape the ears of the National Security Agency, but there does appear to be a question mark hovering over all of these contexts, because if the intent was to keep the transition teams' discussions with foreign leaders from American intelligence or from people in American intelligence they didn't trust because they thought they were going to leak it or they thought that they were somehow still working for Barack Obama, then that's one thing. But if they then relate to activities before the election on the part of the Russians and their surrogates, and if they relate to the relationship with Russia after the president actually takes office, I think that's of high, high interest to the American people and certainly will be to many in Congress.

So there are many other developments in the Russia stuff category, and I'm just going to run through some of these. And Scott, you're going to help. James Comey is set to testify in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Yeah, you're going to help. James Comey is set to testify in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Yeah, that's going to happen next Thursday, 10 a.m. We just got the announcement from the Senate Intelligence Committee. It's going to be a big deal. Remember, all of just a couple of weeks ago, but feels like years ago, our mantra of 2017, Comey was fired. And shortly afterwards, this details emerged of this Oval Office meeting where Trump said, basically lay off Michael Flynn. He asked all the other aides to leave the room,

talked to Comey, said this. And we know that Comey not only wrote detailed notes about that meeting, he apparently wrote detailed notes about every other interaction he had with President Trump. Now, all of that is, according to sources close to Comey. I am pretty sure he's going to be asked repeatedly about all the details in those notes. I don't know how forthcoming he'll be because the key thing is that he's also now a key witness to the special counsel investigation that's underway. So we don't know if Bob Mueller or anyone else in that investigation is going to request that he be a little bit more vague in public. So we'll see. But I do know we'll be covering every single moment of that hearing. And I'm pretty sure we'll have a podcast as than me analysis that because Trump himself has talked about it publicly and tweeted about it publicly, that he doesn't have as strong of a leg to stand on since he's shared his view of that conversation. All right. And James Comey is no longer an employee of the federal government. So there is at some point or another a First Amendment right for James Comey to express his view of what's going on. So this is all going to be very interesting. Again, Thursday, June 8th, 10 a.m.

in the morning, we will be all over it. Yeah. And then at one o'clock, they're doing a closed door session, which will be probably even more interesting and we will never know what happened. Well, we'll probably hear a certain amount about what happened from some of the people who were inside that room. Closed doors or no closed doors. Of course, it would be nice to have tape. Of course, it would be nice to bring it to you live. We'll just have to do it secondhand. It was funny when Brennan testified last week, the same thing happened. He did open session. And then as the meeting ran down, one of the chairmen said, all right, we're all going to move. We're all going to shuffle down to the

secure room, a couple of floors below. There are sandwiches in the secure room if anyone's hungry. All right. And as to how the White House is dealing with all of this, they are new adherents to the idea of compartmentalizing. And Sean Spicer at the briefing yesterday was asked questions about Russia. And this is what he said. Our job, we are focused on the president's agenda and all going forward, all questions on these matters will refer to outside counsel, Mark Kasowitz. So that's the answer. Outside counsel, they really are trying to wall this off. And yet the president continues to tweet about it himself. So only partial success on that front. Yeah. Moving right along, we're going to talk about communications in this White House and a shake up in the White House communications team.

And I'm just going to skip ahead to the point I want to make, which is like you can only do so much with communications when the person at the top, when the president of the United States does what he wants and does not adhere to message discipline, whatever the message is? The average American sees the president, hears the president, also hears and sees the president's official spokesman, Sean Spicer, and perhaps a few other faces in the administration who get out in the media fairly often. The average American has never heard of Mike Dubke, and he has worked in very serious fashion in the back rooms, if you will, not in some kind of covert way. He is the person coordinating a lot of the communication activity of the White House. It's a highly important and respectable job. And he is, to some degree, it seems, getting stuck holding the bag here for a difficult period of media relations for the White House. 18th. And we only just found out about it after the president got back from his big foreign trip. He is the communications director for the White House now. I mean, it's kind of this weird thing.

He hasn't actually left, but he has resigned. That's right. And in fact, he resigned. The president had accepted his resignation. But with the president going on a foreign trip, it was an awkward time. There was work to be done. So they essentially postponed announcing it for a couple of weeks. And the thing that struck me was when he announced officially or when the White House finally acknowledged that he had resigned, most of the news organizations had to put out a pronouncer for his name so that people would know how to say Dubke because no one, as you pointed out, had ever said his name before. That's what you call the definition of a backroom job. And yet, clearly, he's better than other White House staffers at keeping

information private and not sharing with the press if we didn't know he resigned on May 18th. Yeah, that was probably the best kept secret, right? The first kept secret, it's possible to say. And so another thing that seemed to be happening this week in terms of the communications from the White House is the fact that Sean Spicer, who's long been rumored to potentially be phased out from being in front of the camera, this week actually kind of went behind the camera. And this week we had an audio only press briefing. Yeah. And they didn't want it to be live. They wanted it. But then it ended up being live anyway.

Right. Which was so interesting to me. I had never I didn't realize that those kinds of things were negotiated before. So there was some negotiation that was happening behind the scenes about releasing the tape and when it could be released. Yeah. So the White House Correspondents Association, you know, the Correspondents Association's whole purpose is to have better access. And so when the White House says we're having a briefing and we'll do it in the briefing room and it'll be on mic, but it won't be on camera, the White House Correspondents Association pushes back and says, no, no, no, this should be on camera. Why wouldn't this be on camera? Well, it wasn't. Dumb question. What would happen if somebody just broadcast that?

I don't know that there is any, there's no legal consequence. I don't know. They could lose their credentials. Yeah. I mean, the White House could do something. The White House could say you're not allowed back in the press briefing room with that camera or any other camera ever again. Well, and so funny story, we're on this foreign trip and they did a couple of these briefings that were off camera, but on mic. And at both of those briefings, Sean Spicer and also Sarah Huckabee Sanders, both at one point or another, tweeted pictures of the briefing while it was happening,

even though it was an off-camera briefing where cameras weren't allowed inside. But that's okay, because they set the rules. Speaking of the rules. Yeah. I think we saw a pretty good case of somebody breaking the rules from outside of officialdom this week. Are you talking about Kathy Griffin? I'm afraid I am.

So I was off the Internet for a few hours and missed this. I totally missed it, too. I'm now up to speed, but I first checked in and she was apologizing. Yeah. So, Vanessa, you have been following every twist and turn of this. Every twist and turn. So Kathy Griffin got together with this photographer who's sort of a celebrity photographer and he takes these sort of outrageous pictures. His name is Tyler Shields. So they got together for this photo shoot and they've kind of been promoting it for a little while, sort of alluding to it on Twitter, talking about how can someone get arrested for artistic expression? And then a couple days later, we see these photographs that Tyler Shields has posted, and it's Kathy Griffin holding up what looks to be the severed head, the beheaded head of Donald Trump. And he's completely bloody. And so this, of course, set off a firestorm on Twitter and other social media. And people were really outraged at the

depiction of a beheaded sitting president. There are times when bad taste goes beyond bad taste. And this is such a time. Right. So Kathy Griffin has now apologized. Immediately afterwards, she said, you know, I'm so sorry. I didn't realize how far in bad taste this has been. Comedians go too far. That's our job. I went too far. So, so sorry. And she was subsequently fired from CNN because she hosts the big New Year's Eve CNN event every year with Anderson Cooper. But then yesterday, Tyler Shields filmed some kind of video saying he's not sorry and that it was an artistic expression and that it's totally fine and he stands by it.

Now, she was not threatening the life of the president of the United States, as far as we can tell, based on what she says. But as Chelsea Clinton said on The View, it's never funny to joke about killing the president. It shouldn't be funny to joke about killing. And it certainly should not be funny to joke about killing the president. It shouldn't be funny to joke about killing. And it certainly should not be funny to joke about killing a political figure, a president of the United States. And we've talked a lot about how civility has declined in our politics. This is certainly another example of outrage in this regard. We saw in the early months of the Obama presidency a few placards here and there. And I think that was always called out as unacceptable.

In either case, in either case, an offense to civility, particularly something that's going to go to the heart of an awful lot of people's greatest sensitivity. And I would say that that was true of this as well. And one other thing, at yesterday's press briefing, Politico's Matt Nussbaum had a line of questioning for Sean Spicer. And it was related to this story. And and we just want to play a bit of it for you. I wanted to ask about Ted Nugent, who joked multiple times about assassinating President Barack Obama, who said Hillary Clinton should be hanged. He was invited to the White House for dinner by President Trump. Do you believe that was appropriate?

And if Trump is offended by this incident, why was he not bothered by all of Mr. Nugent's comments? With respect to Kathy Griffin, I think the President, the First Lady, and the Secret Service have all made statements on that that I'll let stand. No, but that Nugent, that discrepancy there, why was it okay for Mr. Nugent to make these comments? I'm not, to be honest with you, I'd have to look back and see what those statements were and what the reaction was at the time. But he's stuck on my machine. with you, I'd have to look back and see what those statements were and what the reaction was at the time. I understand that, but I'm not aware of what the reaction was at the time. I know that

the statement with respect to Ms. Griffin was acknowledged by both the First Lady, the President and the Secret Service. Francesca. Francesca. Thank you, Sean. Yeah, and that at the very end was April Ryan jumping in. And we should say that Mr. Nugent was a guest at the White House not that long ago. With Sarah Palin. Yes, and Kid Rock. And Kid Rock. Yeah, and visited the White House, had a dinner with the president. And so in short, moral of the story, joking about killing the president, probably just

avoid that. Never funny. All right. We are going to be back in just a moment with a few of your questions and can't let it go. All right. We are back. Thanks as always for writing us with your questions and your recordings of our timestamp to start the show. Our email is nprpolitics at npr.org if you ever want to get in touch. So let's answer a few emails from recently. First up, Ed, who wrote with a question about the version of the GOP health care bill being worked on by the Senate. He writes, will the CBO re-evaluate the health care bill when the Senate revises it. I think Mitch McConnell said they'd vote after the CBO results, but I'm not sure how that changes with a new draft of the bill. Keep up the good work. Ed. I'm going to defer to Ron on this one. I think Mitch McConnell was just

saying that they would wait until the initial CBO scoring had been done to take up the House bill. Now the House bill has been scored a second time by CBO. But let's face it, the Senate is not paying that much attention to the House bill. And of course, the CBO scoring is important to them, but they have all kinds of other problems with it too. And when the Senate has come up with its own bill, which they are doing as we speak, even in the recess period, they're working on it. When they do have a bill, the CBO will score that as well. Yeah, I think there's actually been a lot of confusion based on the way that some of the questions that come into us read about this.

You know, thinking that there is going to be a whole different bill from the Senate. Yes and no. The House passed a bill and sent it over to the Senate. There's a lot of reasons why the House bill to the Senate Republican caucus is untenable politically, policy-wise. They have a lot of problems with the bill. So they're basically politely setting it aside, ignoring it, and drafting in what will likely be a long process their own version of the bill.

So they'll take the House bill, they'll amend it with basically totally different language and have their own bill that will emerge at some point. But if we said many times before, it's worth just quickly saying again, it's going to be really hard to draft a bill that keeps the entire Republican caucus on board. And they basically have to keep the entire Republican caucus on board because the numbers are very tight. They can lose two. And then presumably there would be a CBO score of the Senate version. Correct. And unclear.

Before the Senate version? Correct. And unclear... Before the Senate votes. Well... That's the question. That's probably the root of the question here, right? He wants to know... Before or after? Will the Senate try to pull what the House did, which is having their vote before they had their final CBO score? And Mitch McConnell has said no.

The Senate is generally speaking less down with shenanigans than the House. But people's views often change when they're trying to get a bill passed as opposed to being in the minority in terms of what the regular process looks like and should look like. In other words, watch carefully when they get to the same point with that that the House got to in terms of desperation. And we should just say if they get to that point. If they get to that point. Another question we have comes from Paul. Hi, NPR Politics podcast team. I can't stop thinking about ethics and conflicts of interest

with the Trump administration. My goodness, I feel sorry for this person. But I do recall the statement made by President Trump's attorney that all Trump Hotel profits from foreign dignitaries would be donated to the U.S. Treasury. It's been months since that pledge was made, enough time to sort out the mechanics of making this happen.

So my question is just how much money has the Trump business donated so far? Many thanks, Paul. Yeah, so this is a policy that the Trump organization announced, saying that this was a way that they would deal with the question of conflict of interest, that that countries might just book a lot of rooms or events at the Trump hotels away to curry favor with the president. We heard back from the Trump Organization this week. They sent a letter to Congress responding to questions about this, which boiled down to JK, LOL. It turned out, again, boiling down. The general just was, oh, we didn't realize how hard that would be. So they're not going to do it. It's a lot more complicated than we thought.

Yeah. They said that this would put an onerous requirement on people spending money at the hotel, saying that, you know, you're basically asking us, well, they were asking themselves because it was their idea to demand papers, to demand documentation. And they said, this is really hard. So unless it's a very clear cut, obvious instance of someone being affiliated with a foreign government, we're not going to keep tabs on this. And just one more quick thing on this. We have an ethics tracker that looks at President Trump's promises and actions. And it's on the NPR Politics Facebook page if you want to check it out. OK, we have one other note. Actually, we've got a lot of notes about this.

I have a Ron joke for this. What does that mean? I'm going to channel Ron and give a Ron-esque joke. So just brace yourself. OK. Are you ready? Are you ready? This is going to be good. So we have a note. Actually, we got a lot of notes about an exchange between the first lady at the Pope during the meeting at the Vatican.

So the Pope asked what she feeds the president. What do you feed him? A lot of this word that sounded to a lot of people like pizza. But it turns out is a Slovenian treat called potica. Let's all say it together. Okay. Potica. Potica. So we talked about it last week. Mara Eliason on the pod mentioned it, and we got this email from Susan in Oregon. She writes, as much as I admire Mara Eliasson and have a grudging respect for the Pope, both of them mispronounced the Slovenian sweet the Pope mentioned to Melania.

It's potica. My husband is of Slovenian heritage and we make potica often. I assure you that if Trump were eating it regularly, he might not be slimmer, but he'd be a lot happier. Susan. So here's my Ron joke. Well, that's interesting since both the Pope and Mara Eliasson are viewed as infallible. What I was going to say was as much as I admire the Pope and have a grudging respect for Mara Lai. Which Ron joke was better, the authentic or the knockoff version? All right. Get back to us on Twitter or at our email address. That's NPR politics at NPR dot org.

And thanks to all of you who dropped a lot of knowledge about Slovenian treats on us. Okay, now it is time to end the show as we do every week with Can't Let It Go. And we all share one thing we can't stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. Ron? Covfefe. Let's just get it out there and get it over with. The president tweeted out a reference to negative press Covfefe late at night. And it appeared... I believe it was early in the morning. Well, all right. Late at night, early in the morning. It was late at midnight because I totally missed the news on this.

I checked my phone, saw that his tweet went, huh, and went to sleep and then woke up to a different world. We've all been there. We've all done it. We've been trying to write one last tweet before we slip off into the arms of Morpheus. And we simply didn't complete it. And fortunately, spellchecker or instant completer completes it for us. And sometimes it uses a word we didn't mean to use. So we got covfefe. But what is covfefe?

Well, it appears he was trying to say coverage. He was trying to say negative media coverage. And he got the COV part right. And then it kind of wandered off. And then he got distracted or he went to sleep. And several hours later, it was amusingly referred to by the president as saying, oh, now everyone can try to figure out what covfefe is in joy. And it's definitely covfefe we know now, right? Yes, that has been. Not covfefe, not covfefe. But where, how does, is the V silent? Well, yes, in coverage, of course, you do say the V, but it's much more difficult to say the V in covfefe.

Covfefe. Covfefe makes no sense, which is how we know he didn't really mean to say covfefe. Covfefe. Covfefe makes no sense, which is how we know he didn't really mean to say covfefe, despite all the wonderful definitions of that non-existent word we have heard in the last couple of days.

And beautifully, this did come up at the White House press briefing, and Sean Spicer was asked about it. No, I think the president and a small group of people

know exactly what he meant. Blake. Sean Spicer. Blake. Was he being sarcastic or was this like a straight face? Like, I honestly don't know. I can't figure it out. Really? I think he was just trying to dismiss the question as quickly as possible, whether it was sarcasm or whether it was straight ahead. Yes, a small number of people probably do know what he meant, which was he meant to go to

sleep. Ron, you mentioned definitions. Arnie Seipel, one of our excellent editors here, tweeted this, covfefe, verb, comma, overreacting to predictable behavior of an unconventional public official. Quote, don't covfefe. He's been president for four months. All right, Vanessa, what can't you let go of? I can't let go of something that HRC can't let go of, which is her anger, animosity, upsetness with the DNC. So on Wednesday, she was in California speaking at a recode conference, and she started to list all of the things that went wrong with her campaign and the election. Among them, you know, the usual suspects, Russia, Trump. James Comey, probably. Comey.

Was she asked? She was asked. She was asked. But then she also just dug into the DNC and how they didn't really prepare her with the right kind of data that she inherited nothing from them and just kind of out of the blue threw them under the bus. And so one of the DNC aides last night responded to that comment in a tweet, as like all conversation happens now, and said, hey, this is effing bull, right? You can't throw us under the bus this way. Don't throw my staff under the bus. And then those tweets have since disappeared. They're sort of gone, but lots of people captured it. So they're still out there for everyone to read if they want to. So that beef is something I can't let go. Yeah. Also, we're just in some seventh circle of hell

where this thing gets relitigated or whatever you want to call it, like every two days. And then the president has to tweet and be like, oh, my God, Hillary can't let go. It's getting to be a real problem with my Twitter muting policy because, you know, every proper noun related to politics seems to be something that comes up over and over again. It's really hard to keep reading Twitter. Well, and the other thing that's sort of connected to this is Joe Biden's new announcement that he is forming a new PAC called American Possibilities. And that has sparked lots of speculation that he might be running in 2020. So 74-year-old former VP Joe Diamond Biden might be 2020's presidential hopeful. Yeah, I think we can leave it at hopeful.

Scott? So I'm going to take us away from politics. The New York Mets are not having a good season. They have entered a period of their franchise that baseball fans often refer to as the LOL Mets phase. LOL Mets? LOL Mets. That's so sad. It's kind of like LOL Cats.

They're not doing too well. And as someone who roots for the New York Yankees and Washington Nationals, from all perspectives that I look at things, I don't really mind that. This is all good. And when the Mets tank, they tank in like comical, explosive. Spectacular. Yeah, it's just it's never it's never clean. It's always a mess. It always plays out on the back page of the tabloids in New York.

So on all of their problems this year, including pitching injuries, pitchers staying out at clubs too late in the night and getting caught, Mr. Met has added to it with a scandal that has led to the firing of Mr. Met. And Mr. Met is? Mr. Met is the mascot of the New York Mets.

His head is a giant baseball and he's got a Mets cap on top. That's Mr. Met. Delightful. He is married to Mrs on top. Oh, okay. That's Mr. Met. Delightful. He is married to Mrs. Met. Aw, sweet. Yeah. And the Mets originally had a Beagle mascot, but the Beagle ran through the outfield the

first game the Mets played and they had to get rid of the Beagle mascot. So the Mets happily married a mascot big-headed baseball couple, but Mr. Met was feeling frustrated when the Mets lost to the Brewers last night and as he was going into the tunnel in the stadium, a fan heckled him or something and was recording it, and Mr. Met turned around and gave him

the finger, but not just the middle finger, which Mr. Met actually only has four fingers, so you had to just interpret that it was his middle finger, but he gave it with a full, what's the best podcast way to describe? I think that's an Italian gesture, is it not? Yeah, Domenico Montanaro. I'm trying to make this sound.

We're all in here doing the same motion. We're all making the motion. I'm sure everyone listening to the podcast is making the motion. Domenico, who is from Queens, referred to it as an Italian outer borough salute. I think we got it. So anyway, not cool, Mr. Mett. He has since been fired. Anyway.

Mr. Mett has some anger management issues. You know, he's looking for a job. All right. And that is it. No, I have something. Well, why can you not let go? So I haven't been on the podcast in about a week, which means I'm going back to the thing that I couldn't let go of a week ago, which conveniently, people in Saudi Arabia on Twitter seem also not to be able to let

go of. Because at least once a day, I still get some sort of a response to a tweet I sent out while I was there on the president's trip. I ventured away from the hotel to try to find some shawarma. And because people on Twitter had been telling me that I had to go find local cuisine or quasi-local cuisine. But anyway, I went out. I tweeted a picture of some shawarma that I got from a place called Mama Nura. And it was delicious.

And then there were like all of these people in Saudi Arabia who were like, I hope you got the extra garlic sauce because if you didn't get the extra garlic sauce, then you aren't doing it right. And then other people were like, did you get the extra garlic sauce? Did you do it wrong? Is that what you're here to admit today? I didn't know that I was supposed to get extra garlic sauce. It was delicious. I'm not sure you can call it shawarma if it doesn't have the extra garlic sauce. And then other people were like, dude, you went to the wrong place. Shawarma house is the best shawarma in Riyadh.

Anyway, it was this very long conversation that has continued well past. You know, like I tweeted a picture of a waffle in Belgium and it did not elicit the same response. You know, I have to say though, when you were tweeting and talking about that shawarma last week, it made me really hungry for shawarma. And I stopped for shawarma on the way home at Washington, D.C.'s own Shawaffle. Oh, yes.

I think somebody also told me I should go there when I'm back in D.C. So you're doing it right. Shawaffle's pretty good. This one's going in the books as the Covfefe Shawarma podcast. Covfefe is probably what they... Not to be confused with the Wawa podcast. The one about Covfefe Schwarmapod. No, I bet that's like, that could be a good name for the garlic sauce.

Covfefe. Yeah. Yes. Okay, that's a wrap for today. We will be back again next week. And again, make sure you're catching up with us and our colleagues, our very smart colleagues, on Up First every weekday morning. And of course, you can support the podcast and public radio by supporting your local public radio station at npr.org slash stations. Find that link in our

episode information. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House and shawarma sometimes for NPR. I'm Scott Tetreault. I cover Congress. I'm Vanessa Romo, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elving, editor, correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.