The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, June 14

Episode Date: June 14, 2018

A Justice Department watchdog on Thursday criticized former FBI Director James Comey for violating long-standing department guidelines and mishandling the Hillary Clinton email investigation in 2016. We break down that report, and look at a new lawsuit filed against the Trump family. Plus, Republicans - sort of - find a compromise on immigration. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, Congressional correspondent Susan Davis and political editor Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Ryan from Newport News, Virginia, and I'm doing nothing exciting, just living my life. I have Chipotle. That's kind of nice. This podcast was recorded at... It's 5... It's 520 on Thursday, June 14th. And things may have changed since then, but probably not in my life, just an ordinary person. Thanks for listening. Now here's the show. and where Republicans landed on immigration legislation. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I also cover the Justice Department.

All right. So the way the FBI handled the 2016 presidential election, and I think both of you would agree, has really loomed over Washington, D.C. ever since. Two years later, we're still talking about it. We're still thinking about it. It still has an effect on a lot of big stuff that's going on here. This is a big official Department of Justice report into that. Ryan, can you explain what exactly this report is and how it fits into all the other statements and hearings and everything else we've been digesting about James Comey's actions in 2016? You bet. Well, this is a report from the Justice

Department's Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. He announced that he was going to look into events surrounding the FBI's handling of the Clinton email investigation. He made that announcement back in January of 2017, around a week before President Trump was inaugurated. And he said that he was going to look into these issues because of requests, basically complaints, really, that he had received from members of Congress, from members of the public about the FBI and Justice Department's handling of the Clinton investigation. There are a number of issues that he said that he was going to look into. But the biggest one, of course, that everyone was waiting for is James Comey's public statements that he made around the investigation, the one in July of 2016 and then the ones right before the election itself.

Right. The statement in the last weeks of the campaign is something the Clinton campaign faults for the for the fact that she did not win the election. They've said that plays a big role in it. Carrie, what are the main points of this report? Yeah. So I've got a hard copy of this report and I'm going to use it to, you know, improve my bias ops moving forward. It's a big report. Yeah, 500 pages or so. But here's the top line, okay? With respect to Jim Comey, the former FBI director, the statement in July, the statement in July 2016 where he said Hillary Clinton was really extremely careless with her emails, but we're not going to charge her with a crime. The inspector general called that extraordinary and insubordinate. They said he went

out of his way to not tell the attorney general and the deputy attorney general what he was going to do. This violated well-established DOJ policies, and it kind of cast a cloud over this whole investigation. The IG said there's no evidence that Comey was acting out of political bias, but it was inconsistent with policy. And Scott, one thing that jumped out to me was these IG reports, usually they're pretty basic. They're pretty bland. But there are ways in which bureaucrats can target other bureaucrats. And remember, Jim Comey in his book tour talked about two doors and two very difficult choices. He said, I could speak or I could conceal. The inspector general said, actually, there were two doors. There were two choices. One was to follow the policies of the Department of Justice. And the other was to not follow the policies of the Department of Justice. And IG said Comey chose the wrong door. I actually love the line in that same paragraph. He says

it was a false dichotomy, a false dichotomy, false dichotomy. So, Gary, you said a few things there that that stand out. Extraordinary and insubordinate, obviously, is a key takeaway, but also no evidence of political bias, because President Trump and President Trump's allies have been for years now saying there was political bias, specifically in the decision not to charge Hillary Clinton with any crimes. So the IG didn't look at every single step that prosecutors and the FBI agents took, but he did look at several. He found most of them were judgment calls, and he found that it was reasonable, in essence, for them to conclude that Hillary Clinton should not be charged with a crime, in part because DOJ precedent leveled a pretty high bar for that. They pointed out that the former Attorney General

under George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, had been taking classified information home with him in his briefcase and keeping it there, and Gonzalez wasn't charged with mishandling classified information. So why should Hillary Clinton be? But there's another complicating factor here, Scott. And that's that even though the top line was that there was no political bias in this investigation, the inspector general uncovered some new text messages by FBI folks that really look terrible. Now, we've been hearing about texts before. We've seen some of these texts before. President Trump has repeatedly returned to them as proof parts of the FBI were biased against him. What is new today? What's new today is an exchange between Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer,

with Peter Strzok, one of the top FBI agents on these matters. And Page texted Strzok like, Donald Trump can't win, right? There's no way he can win, right, right? And Strzok responded, no, no, we're going to stop him. Words to that effect. And that looks terrible. So terrible that the inspector general says that kind of statement gives rise to legitimate questions about whether Strzok's decisions were influenced by his animus toward Donald Trump. One other thing that the report says about the text messages is, one, the questions that it raises about political motivations of those carrying out this investigation. But a lot of the text messages they say in this report actually relate to the Russia investigation.

It raises questions about the Russia investigation as well. And that's something that the IG says is not part of this review, but it may be something that he'll look at down the road. OK, so maybe that answers this question, because that's a text message of an FBI agent saying we're going to stop him. But as I mentioned before, the campaign that thinks that the FBI stopped them from winning is the Clinton campaign because of that Comey press conference and because of that decision so close the election to say the FBI is looking into new evidence. Is there anything in this report that gets to why the FBI was so public about its investigation into Hillary Clinton, but said nothing about an investigation that had already begun during the campaign into whether or not there was collusion, there was collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. The Inspector General report does not address why Jim Comey adopted a different approach

to public statements about the Russia probe. Comey has talked in his book tour and other places about that being a very early stage investigation, a counterintelligence investigation. You don't want to tip off any spies and have them change their conduct. But Scott, I got to tell you, the message resoundingly from Democrats on Capitol Hill today, and you must have been getting these emails too, was there was a double standard here. And it always hurt Hillary Clinton and helped Donald Trump, no matter what these text messages said. Right. Because door number three, a lot of people yelled was, we're looking to this

investigation. And oh, by the way, there's another investigation going on as well. And let me tell you a little bit about it. Okay, so another key moment in 2016, with a lot of repercussions, was that meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General, on Atarmic and Phoenix at a time when the FBI was still investigating the Clinton campaign. Anything in this report about that? Yeah. In fact, the inspector general interviewed Bill Clinton for his report. Bill Clinton didn't have to be interviewed, but he voluntarily sat down for this interview. And Loretta Lynch, the attorney general at the time, came in for some criticism from the inspector general. He said that Lynch failed to recognize she had a big appearance problem by meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton, and she should have taken action to cut that visit short. It was an error in judgment. And her wishy-washy non-recusal over

the Clinton email investigation created a lot of confusion and didn't address the situation. Loretta Lynch is just out this evening with a statement saying, I always did my best to defend the priorities and the Justice Department as an institution. I didn't operate with political bias. I hold my head high. Are there any parts of this report that praise the FBI for any action taken in 2016? I mean, this was an agency facing investigations of two presidential campaigns. It made a lot of decisions that have come under so much scrutiny. Is there anywhere where the inspector general says, in this particular case, the FBI did the right thing. It's not the IG's responsibility to say that they did the right thing in each instance. What the IG is doing is going through certain decisions that were made and seeing whether there was a reasonable basis to make those decisions and whether they were predicated upon department policies.

And in some cases, the answer is yes. In the cases of decisions that they made regarding whether to prosecute or not prosecute Hillary Clinton, they found that decisions that the department came to were reasonable. So the idea that Hillary Clinton would have been charged with a crime except for the political bias of career law enforcement officials was not validated in this report. Yeah, you know, in fact, another area in which the inspector general offered some criticism was this. It was with respect to the timing. Remember, the reason Comey said he reopened the investigation in October 2016 was the discovery of all these emails on the laptop

belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton's top aide, Huma Abedin. And the IG doesn't understand why, if this investigation was such a big deal at the FBI and the Justice Department, why it took those folks weeks and weeks and weeks to get a search warrant. If they had gotten a search warrant earlier to look at those emails and found that there was nothing really new there, Comey wouldn't have to talk in late October right before the election. He could have figured out that nothing was really all that interesting going on in those things and wrapped up the matter sooner rather than later.

Yeah. How does this report tie into the ongoing Mueller investigation, which, of course, Trump has been criticizing day in, day out with an increased intensity in recent months and saying this all stems from a flawed partisan process to begin with. A couple of points on that. One is Democratic leadership came up and had a press conference really not that long ago, a couple of minutes ago. And minority leader Chuck Schumer, the first thing that he said speaking to reporters was that anyone hoping to use this report to undermine the Mueller investigation and prove a deep state conspiracy will be sorely disappointed. They didn't talk about the Hillary Clinton email investigation and other decisions that the FBI made.

The first point that they wanted to make politically was that there's nothing here that can be used to undermine the Mueller investigation because there is that concern that the president and his allies are going to try to use this to, one, undermine the Mueller investigation, because there is that concern that the president and his allies are going to try to use this to, one, undermine the investigation, and two, Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, hinted at this in the past couple weeks, that they see James Comey as someone whose reputation and integrity and word they can raise questions about and so doubt about, because they view him as a key witness in parts of the Mueller investigation. And they view this as a potential tool to help towards that end. Right. And it's worth refreshing because it was 76 twists and turns ago in the story that

when President Trump first decided to fire James Comey over a year ago, that first announcement blamed it on Comey's actions when it came to the Hillary Clinton email investigation. And of course, days later, he told Lester Holt on NBC Nightly News that he made the decision to fire Comey because of the Russia investigation, which quickly undermined that initial argument. But that was the initial official argument. Yes. Well, in fact, the president during the course of the campaign was tweeting praise at Jim Comey for some time for reopening the investigation and all this other business. And then he gets elected and gets into office. And then not right when he started, right after the inauguration, but months later, he decides to fire Jim Comey. That's, in addition to the Lester Holt interview about the Russia thing, another reason to ask serious questions about why Comey was actually fired. What are the reactions to this report from the White House, from the attorney general, from the FBI? Yeah, at the White House, Sarah Sanders says this report reaffirms the suspicions the president had about Comey and points out that some of these texts cause a great deal of concern. The Attorney

General Jeff Sessions says the department needs to be able to take criticism and it will move forward under and the FBI will move forward under the new director, Chris Wray, who's already announced new steps to make sure that workplace conversations and the workplace generally is free from the appearance of political bias that could, he says, extend to how they staff highly sensitive investigations in the future. Ryan, what happens next with all this? I think we wait for the fallout, the political fallout, and see what the president has to say. As of this point, he has not commented on this, but we're going to have to see how the president and his allies approach this report

if they decide to use it as a cudgel to continue their attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department and raise questions as well about Robert Mueller's investigation. And all the nuance of a 500-page report probably won't be fully clear in a boiled down tweet, an understatement, to put it mildly. As someone who's had the misfortune to be reading Justice Department Inspector General reports for many years now, I can tell you that a couple of things are getting lost in the shuffle that are relevant for moving forward. One is the notion that the IG has referred five FBI folks for internal discipline.

That includes Lisa Page, who's since left, and people who are still there, like Peter Strzok, and three other unnamed people who were exchanging these text messages and instant messages filled with political commentary. And the other is that we've all been waiting for information from the IG about whether anybody in the FBI office in New York or elsewhere may have been leaking to President Trump's friend Rudy Giuliani in the FBI office in New York or elsewhere may have been leaking to President Trump's friend Rudy Giuliani in the course of the campaign. Remember, Rudy Giuliani went on Fox

and other networks saying something was coming, and it raised a lot of questions about whether he had inside info. The IG didn't address that today. That matter and other matters regarding leaks are still under review. So there could really be more shoes to drop moving forward. Carrie, anything else in this report? Yeah, you're not going to believe this. The inspector general found that James Comey, the former FBI director, had used some personal email inconsistent with Justice Department policy, some personal email to do FBI business, but the IG said none of that material was classified.

To which Hillary Clinton responded on Twitter, retweeting someone pointing this out, quote, but my emails. All right, Carrie, as all of this plays out, the Mueller investigation is continuing behind the scenes. But tomorrow we have one of the public moments in this investigation. Paul Manafort appears in court. Tell us what's going to be happening. Yeah. Remember that Paul Manafort has been charged with new crimes since he last was in court. He's been charged with obstruction of justice and witness tampering allegations. And we also know that the special counsel team, Prosecutor Andrew Weissman and others, have asked the judge to adjust or revoke Manafort's bail because after he was already charged with a crime in February 2018,

he allegedly started leaning on witnesses that could testify against him. And that may meet the standard, the special counsel team says, for revoking his bail. So there's the prospect tomorrow. We don't know if it's going to happen or not. Paul Manafort, who's been out on bail wearing bracelets, GPS monitoring from two different jurisdictions, D.C. and Virginia, could actually be remanded into custody until his trials start later this year. That would be an enormous fall for a guy who, you know, was really near the top of the world. Yeah. And on top of that, the prospect of the former chairman of a presidential campaign being in custody is certainly a far cry from the idea that this is a witch hunt that has led to no actual conclusions. All right, Carrie, Ryan, thanks to both of you.

I have a feeling we will continue talking about this for many months to come. But thanks for coming in to talk about this today. Thank you, Scott. All right. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back, talk about immigration and the other news of the week. looking to connect with each other. The League is your hub for all things social. Date someone new, find your soulmate, make new friends, or discover exclusive events going on in your city.

Get complimentary, expedited review of your application by downloading the app at theleague.com slash NPR politics. Did you know you can ask Google Home to play NPR podcasts for you? It's easy, just ask. Like, play the Fresh Air podcast. Use Google Home or Google Assistant to connect with your favorite shows anytime. Okay, we're back and two confessions to make. First of all, I am now joined by a totally different cast of characters. Why don't we all go around and introduce ourselves? I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Confession number two, it is also a totally different time. We're recording this at 1235. Having gotten all that off my chest, we will go forward here. So we were just talking with Carrie and Ryan all about the GOJ report and Paul Manafort's hearing. A little bit more legal stuff to talk about. And this is a lawsuit filed today by the New York attorney general against the Trump Foundation. All the directors of the foundation, President Trump, Donald Trump Jr.,

Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump are all named in the lawsuit. Domenico, could you tell us what this is all about? Well, it's pretty fascinating. You know, this started under the former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and has now been picked up and continued by Barbara Underwood, who is the current Attorney General. Eric Schneiderman, who had gone after Donald Trump really hard during the campaign during the first year of the Trump administration, but had to resign in disgrace a couple of weeks ago after the New Yorker broke a story with multiple women accusing him of sexual assault. This lawsuit alleges some self-dealing of the Trump Foundation. This is different than Trump University, which the attorney general's office had originally come out with an investigation on. Yeah, and they had

settled for millions of dollars during that probe. So this is different. This is the Trump Foundation, which we heard so much about from the Washington Post during the campaign. Right. And it accuses the foundation of a pattern of illegal conduct. I mean, the language in this lawsuit is 41 pages and it is just scathing. It accuses it of multiple violations of state and federal law, says that it was essentially just a checkbook for President Trump's whims when Trump, before he was president and while he was campaigning, said that there was lots of illegal coordination between Trump's campaign and the foundation as well. So, you know, while President Trump says that a lot of this money went to charity, the New York Attorney General's Office says that when it looked at what kinds of groups this money went to, it often had to do with politics. Yeah. And going back to that reporting that that was going on during the campaign, there were examples of the foundation money being used to settle lawsuits. There was that example of a big portrait of Donald Trump

commissioned with foundation money. Domenico, some examples in this lawsuit about some overlap with the foundation and the 2016 presidential campaign, right? Yeah, I'll give you two examples. One, it alleges that Corey Lewandowski, who for a time was the campaign manager, was directing the foundation's expenditures, even though these foundations are not supposed to be doing political activities. And there was an Iowa fundraiser, you guys might remember, for a veterans group that somehow wound up popping up through the foundation. A lot of us were looking at this foundation website and thinking, why is the veterans money for, you know, to donate going through the Trump Foundation? Well, this lawsuit says that the Trump digital director, Brad Parscale,

is actually the person who was the one who set that up for this Iowa fundraiser. And the New York Attorney General's office just says this is not the way a foundation is supposed to be run. It, in fact, is seeking to limit Donald Trump's involvement with nonprofits for 10 years. And his children who three of his eldest children who worked on this foundation had the most direct contact with it, that they should be banned for a year in New York. And Parscale is now the guy who's running the 2020 Trump campaign. That's right. Worth pointing out here, again, this is a lawsuit. This is not any sort of charge of any crimes.

Sue, President Trump responded, as he often does, on the Twitter. Can you walk us through what his response was? I would be happy to read these tweets, Scott. Thank you for asking. Anytime. Go for it. Two tweets. Tweet one. The sleazy New York Democrats and their disgraced and run out of town AG Eric Schneiderman are doing everything they can to sue me on a foundation that took in 18

million and gave out to charity more money than it took in. 19 million. I won't settle this case. Tweet two. Schneiderman, who ran the Clinton campaign in New York, never had the guts to bring this ridiculous case, which lingered in their office for almost two years. Now he resigned his office in disgrace and his disciples brought it when we would not settle. You know what has been normalized over the last year? 280 character tweets. Yeah. Totally normalized. Nobody blinks an eye.

Not settling, though, is always, I mean, isn't that always the Trump M.O.? I mean, they do not settle lawsuits. They fight every single one. No, they settle all the time. They settle. He settles. He settled Trump University. No, he's a big settler. And then he can seal the settlement.

No, no, he settles all the time. He's a settler. He's a settler. This is essentially a campaign finance question, right? So couldn't they just settle it quickly with paying a campaign finance fine and move on? Well, he did. He did make some adjustments. He reimbursed the foundation. He did try to make this right, but obviously the New York attorney general's lawsuit says that they sent referral letters actually to the Internal Revenue Service, to the IRS, and to the FEC, to the Federal Election Commission, to has gained so much ground with a lot of Republican voters, especially making that a political issue for them.

Here is a lawsuit with a lot of serious allegations, but he's taking the same exact tact, the same tact he took with the Trump University thing, which, as you mentioned, he did end up settling for $25 million, but still said this was only people coming out after me because of my politics. Well, and attacking the judge for having Mexican heritage. And for that reason, he said this judge could never be fair in that suit because the judge's parents were born in Mexico. What strikes me, yes, he's using the same strategy on all these fronts. The fronts are multiplying. He's got a lot of civil lawsuits against him. There are emoluments, whether he used his office improperly, took foreign money. There's a sexual harassment lawsuit. There's a defamation lawsuit. Now there's this. Right before, minutes before he tweeted what Sue just read.

He said, now that I am back from Singapore, where we had a great result with respect to North Korea, the thought process must sadly go back to the witch hunt. So was he talking about his thought process? And what was so interesting is he didn't miss a beat. You know, even on the plane back from North Korea, he was attacking his enemies. His strategy here is to fight, fight, fight, try to undermine the credibility of his various accusers and investigators. And what's interesting about that is it's two things. It's clearly his obsession. His thought process is often filled with these investigations. But it's also a political strategy. And as you just said, it seems to be working. You know, the number of Republicans who think that Bob Mueller is on a partisan witch hunt is increasing. And I think

what Trump hopes to do is if he can undermine the credibility of all of these law enforcement agencies who are investigating him, when they come up with some kind of a conclusion, he can dismiss it as nothing more than a partisan motivated investigation. Are these lawsuits, the number of these lawsuits unusual or is this kind of par for the course for a president now, especially from state AGs from the opposing party? I mean, there seems to be something about this that's very familiar, although the subject matter is new, but the politicized AG suing the president or the administration seems like fairly normal. Well, except that these are personal. Many AGs sue the president and the administration over policy and laws. I think this is more personal suits than we've seen before.

This is more directly toward the conduct of Trump himself, as opposed to Scott Pruitt as attorney general from Oklahoma suing President Obama's EPA. And with the exception of the emoluments cases, all of these cases are about things he did before he became president. All right. We're going to shift gears here and we are going to talk a little bit about immigration because Republicans have found a path forward on immigration. Kind of ish, ish, ish. We have talked a lot forward on immigration, kind of. Ish. Ish. Ish. We have talked a lot lately about the pressure that moderate House Republicans were putting on House leaders to vote on some sort of fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Republicans met last week, couldn't find a compromise. Same thing earlier this week. But, Sue, they have finally reached, ish, a compromise. Walk us through what has been decided. some of them illegally. These are the kids that are in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival programs. Often we call them dreamers. And it would include a path to citizenship for all of the people eligible for the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals program. We have not seen the actual bills that they're going to vote on yet. They're still being drafted. We may see texts before the end of the week, but we know broadly what they're going to do. And one is aimed at being sort of the more conservative solution we know broadly what they're going to do. And one is aimed at being

sort of the more conservative solution to this problem, more hardline immigration policies, and goes kind of more beyond the scope of just DACA to tackle legal immigration and other issues. And the other one is being cast as a compromise measure, but not a compromise with Democrats, a compromise among conservative and moderate Republicans that would aim to address what we have talked about in old podcasts, the four pillars, which were the four elements of immigration policy that President Trump wanted Congress to address earlier this year. If you recall, which we talked a lot about in this podcast, the Senate had a similar effort where they brought up immigration bills, multiple immigration bills, and could not pass anything.

And the one that had all those pillars got the least amount of support, less than 40 votes. So the House is kind of going to do what the Senate did. They are agreeing to have votes. They are not promising anything is going to pass. House Speaker Paul Ryan this morning said, we won't guarantee passage. They have just said that this is a debate that enough of their rank and file members have really wanted to have and people want to go on record. So it it kind of seems to me like the moderate Republicans who do have real frustration on this issue had real leverage for once. Did they just let that leverage go or is this or is this a satisfying solution for them?

A little bit of both. Moderates, part of what forced this is that a group of moderates teamed up with Democrats and were working on something called a discharge petition, which is a rebellious legislative act that can force the House to vote on something that the party leadership doesn't want. In this case, they were going to force votes on a number of bipartisan immigration measures. One of them was just a straightforward DREAM Act, just a path to citizenship for these kids. And leadership successfully short-circuited that. I would say that I think the fact that they didn't get the 218 votes they needed also is an indication they probably didn't have the votes. But it did serve their purpose of putting a pressure lever on their party to say,

we got to have this debate and we have to have these votes. And the lawmakers that were really agitating for it are Republicans who represent districts that Hillary Clinton won and Republicans who represent districts that have Hispanics or high levels of immigration populations, which most House Republicans don't have. But in the races that matter, they were really feeling pressure to look like that's just a perennial. You could go into our archives. You can. And that was part of what I think gave party leaders confidence is that this wing of the party, the moderates, and we talk a lot about the House Freedom Caucus. The moderate group is referred to as the Tuesday group. I mean, Mara, you're exactly right. I mean, it's almost become a joke that the Tuesday group always buckles. But part of what they would say is that they always want to get a deal. They do actually want to get a deal, where conservatives tend to be more like

hostage takers. Moderates are more, they're moderate. They want to be more reasonable. They want to work with leadership, not against it. And yes, they always fold, even if they have four aces in their hand. But what's interesting is, OK, they want a deal. But first of all, is this a deal that's good for them? My question is, assuming this is not going to pass, I can't imagine 218 Republicans voting for one of these things. Democrats are not going to vote for two of the four pillars, the two pillars that decrease pretty drastically legal immigration. Yep. That's something that Donald Trump added at the last minute. There was a deal on DACA to be had.

Build the wall, full funding for the wall in exchange for some kind of legalization path to citizenship for the Dreamers. Democrats were going to do that. But then Donald Trump said, no, no, I want to add two more pillars to this. And it had to do with decreasing the levels of legal immigration. So I guess my question is, if it's not going to pass, is just voting for this enough to protect these moderate Democrats at home? Not necessarily. And I think you hit on the point is this is why party leaders did not want to have immigration debates in the summer of an election year, is that there's no easy way out of this.

And yes, it's entirely possible that they bring up both of these bills next week and both fail. And the people that are still in trouble are these same moderate members who have now handed their Democratic opponents back home a pretty good campaign hit. Right. I think that's the big thing, too, is that, you know, you have these like two dozen seats that Republicans are in that Hillary Clinton won that are key, that are through a lot of these suburban places that do want to see some kind of moderate immigration reform happen. And also this is happening in the broader context of what we're seeing with children being separated from their families when they're coming across the border and even the Southern Baptist Convention coming out against what they see as an inhumane policy.

But you have someone like Stephen Miller in the White House who's a hardline guy and wants to see this as a deterrent, even though critics say that it doesn't work as a deterrent. So you have these pressures on differing sides of the Republican Party. And, you know, Sue's exactly right that that's why leaders in the Republican Party don't want to have to have an immigration debate in the summer of an election year. And don't forget about Trump himself, who thinks immigration is a great issue for him to rally the Republican base between now and November. He's on the campaign trail. He talks about immigration a lot. He talks about MS-13. These gangs, actually, they make up 1 percent of all gang activity in the U.S., but most of them are from Central America.

He calls them animals. That's become a new chant at his rallies to call these people animals. So he is going he's doubling down on his hard edged immigration rhetoric at the same time as the Republican Party is getting some backlash, not just for the dreamers who are extremely sympathetic, but as you said, for these little kids who are being separated from their parents at the border. And I think he's the big question going forward. What what side does Trump take on this and how much does he invest in this? And that's been the case on so many issues this year. All right, we're going to take one more quick break. We will come back, talk a little bit about that summit that happened in Singapore this week, and also what we can't let go from this week's news. Support for this podcast and the following message come from AT&T on behalf

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Okay, we are back and we are ending the show like we do every week with what we can't let go from the world of politics or the world of otherwise. Mara, you are up first. What you got? My can't let it go has to do with the biggest story of this week, the summit in Singapore between President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Here's how President Trump answered when he was asked why he was so sure that Kim would come through on his commitments. I think, honestly, I think he's going to do these things. I may be wrong.

I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, hey, I was wrong. I don't know that I'll ever admit that, but I'll find some kind of an excuse. I thought that was so great. First of all, it shows self-awareness. Radical honesty, I think they call that. It shows even self-deprecating humor.

This is not something that we see from Donald Trump a lot, but it also shows you how much of this is performance art for him. Yeah. I'll find a way to blame Barack Obama. He lives in the moment. He says what he needs to, the thing that he thinks he needs to say for the moment. He even tweeted on the way home that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat to the U.S. and everyone should sleep easier. I just thought that that was a real window into the pure Donald Trump. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking about this week, because at the summit they were saying this is the beginning of the process. We're going to go from here. The agreement North Korea made is something they made several times before and it's gone nowhere. And yet since he's gotten back, Trump has talked about it like a done deal,

saying North Korea no longer a nuclear threat, essentially. I think what happened is he was downplaying expectations before he went, which made perfect sense. He was being very rational about it, saying it might not work out, might take many, many meetings. But when he came out of that meeting, it was just super sell, super hype. We have a deal. I trust him. He's talented. He's a great negotiator. No more nuclear threat from North Korea. He really, really wants to kind of get this on the scoreboard as a success. And I think that's risky. Yeah. Because it might not be a success over time. It also reminds me when he gave the at the

Republican fundraising dinner recently when he was had the speech where he was like, and this election is very important. And he was like, no, it's no, it's not. You know, he was talking about the midterms. He was saying he was more important than 2020. No, he was saying something like this one is going to be more important than 2020. Now, who wrote this line? Yeah. And it's also those things I always say about Trump that it is really important to you.

You have to hear him and not just read him. Because when you read that what he did in your in that clip, Mara, like it reads much worse than it. You hear it like you hear humor in his voice. He was making a joke at his own expense, which is something he doesn't often do. But when politicians do that, it really humanizes them. And it's just something that he just doesn't always do. But he's capable of it, as we just heard. All right, Sue, you are up next. I'm going to take this opportunity to do a random act of kindness this week, at least in the NPR Podcasts universe. And I'm going to donate my Kligspace to one of our listeners. Take it away, Kimberly.

My name is Kimberly from Houston, Texas. And my can't let it go this week is just one word IHOP I feel like Domenico probably has thoughts on on that situation why just because he's from New Jersey first of all I'm not from New Jersey that was insulting on so many levels but yes there are many diners that I have been to. However, I mean, IHOP, I've been to a lot of IHOPs in my day and it's pancakes. And they do a fine job. I don't understand why they need a B

and it's a lowercase B. Is that because it's like an inverted upside down P? Because it's a P upside down, yeah. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, this is a real sign of trouble for this company, I think. I mean, they need a new sign of trouble for this company, I think. I mean, they need a new ad agency. Well, it was a stunt, I think. Sue, can you explain the IHOB?

So I know what happened. I'm still not sure whether I'm going there to get pancakes or burgers anymore. But IHOB, the International House of Pancakes, had this sort of viral campaign this week where they seemed to announce that they were changing their name to IHOP, the International House of Burgers. And this lit a fire on the internet. And it was people complaining about the fact that like, why would you why would you mess with greatness? You know, and I am still not entirely sure like what the goal of this campaign was. The goal was to get people to talk about IHOP on the internet.

And I mean, like, I thought more about IHOP before the hours of like 1 a.m. this week than I ever have in my life. So I guess it succeeded. I don't know. Are they doing OK? I mean, they're always crowded when I go. And I think we should just clarify to not further enrage anyone that what IHOP was doing, they're not changing their name, but they did this short-term promotion. Apparently,

they're just introducing burgers into the pancake restaurant to get people to come in after the breakfast rush. Oh, that's what it is. Boo hiss. Pancakes all day, says Mara. Mara, are you booing the introduction of burgers or the stunt, or both? I'm booing the stunt. It was lame.

I'm going to stay in the world of otherwise. It was a big week for sports on several fronts. The Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup and proceeded to bro around Washington, D.C. with the Stanley Cup ever since. The U.S. is not in the World Cup, but the World Cup

started and we're getting the World Cup in eight years. That's kind of fun. Yeah, super fun. But the thing I can't let go from the world of sports is that a lifelong mystery was solved for me. You go to the baseball game. There's a blown call. The manager comes out and screams at the umpire. It's very animated, but you never know what's actually said. Like, I've always wondered what they've said. The same thing when the coach goes to visit the pitcher on the pitcher's mound. Bull Durham solved that because they're talking about wedding gifts.

But mysteriously, it emerged on the internet, this video from a 2016 confrontation between Mets manager Terry Collins and an umpire. When the Mets pitcher Noah Snydergaard had been thrown out of the game for throwing... You just called him Snydergaard. Why? He's Cindergaard. Cindergaard. Sorry. Thank you for that important correction. Good fact check. He's Cinder guard. Cinder guard. Sorry. Thank you for that.

Good fact check. He's thinking of the disgraced AG. Yeah. So this video mysteriously pops up on the internet of Mets manager, Terry Collins getting tossed from a game two years ago. I guess the ump was wearing a mic. I have no idea where this video came from, but you can hear the whole interaction and it it starts with Noah Syndergaard.

Syndergaard. Ah! Noah Syndergaard. Noah Syndergaard gets thrown out of the game for throwing a pitch behind Chase Utley from the Dodgers. He's pretty calm about it. You see the umpire talking to him, and then all of a sudden the umpire takes off

sprinting in the other direction because Terry Collins has run into the field like a maniac, and we should just let the video pick up from here. I promise you, you know, you gotta give us a shot. You know what? You gotta give us a shot, Tom. Okay, listen to me and let me hear what I'm saying, okay? You get your shot.

You had your shot right there. He's lost his mind. I don't know the situation, Terry. Why don't we get a shot, Tommy? Because that makes it worse. Terry, that makes it worse. Oh my God. This sounds like New York sports talk radio.

He's like screaming at the top of his lungs. It's too... I don't know how old is the umpire, but Terry Collins... He's like a middle-aged guy. Terry Collins is an older gentleman. Like, he's in his 70s. Once the beeps, once the many beeps are put onto that, I'm not sure how clear the maniac vibe will come through,

but I watched that video about 30 times yesterday. You should make it your ringtone. Yeah. All right, Domenico, what other than that can you not let go from this week? Well, you know, we're always looking for moments of joy here. And one of the top stories on the NPR's website yesterday was of an eight-year-old girl, Yoyoka Soma,

who absolutely crushes the drums in Led Zeppelin's Good Times, Bad Times, which is not an easy thing to do. John Bonham is one of the great drummers of all time. He's apparently her favorite drummer. This is her playing. She's eight. Whoa!

Whoa! And the entire time she's got this giant smile on her face and polka dot socks with a camera on her polka dot socks as she is just wailing away on the bass drum. Pretty amazing. And this was part of her entry for the 2018 Hit Like a Girl drum contest. Amazingly, she didn't actually win, but it did earn her a spot in the finals. She didn't win?

No. There was another eight-year-old girl who was better? Not to cast any shade on the actual winner, but that's suspicious. Well, it tells you. Or the winner's really good. It tells you how good, that's what I'm saying, how good the other young woman was.

All right, well, I think we should end it on that note. We will be back in your feed soon. In the meantime, if you have a question, if you want to send us what you can't let go this week, send us a note at nprpolitics at npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.