The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, March 22

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

Cambridge Analytica is at the center of a growing controversy over how it obtained the private data of millions of Facebook users, and how it may have used that data in its work for the Trump campaign in 2016. Congress unveiled a $1.3 trillion dollar spending bill less than two days before government funding runs out — it's over 2,000 pages long. And John Dowd, who had been leading President Trump's outside legal team, has resigned. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Tim Mak, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell 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 Tina from Park Ridge, Illinois, and I am heading to my polling place right now to vote in the Illinois primary. This podcast was recorded at 1.42 p.m. on Thursday, the 22nd of March. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, so you can keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, using the NPR One app, or at your local public radio station, like WBEZ in Chicago. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of political news. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of a growing controversy over how it obtains the private data of millions of Facebook users and how it may have used that data in its work for the Trump campaign in 2016. Congress unveiled a $1.3 trillion spending bill

less than two days before government funding runs out. It's more than 2,000 pages long. And John Dowd, who had been leading President Trump's outside legal team, has resigned. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tim Meck, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And Tim, this is your first time on the podcast. How does it feel?

I'm so excited to be here. Welcome. Yeah. This is actually... No, actually, we really are excited that you're here. I'm super excited to be here. Domenico and I were ready to keep that slow clap going and gradually build, but I think we have other things. Yeah, it was not like slow clap jazz.

That was like slow clap sports that eventually gets you hyped. Anyway, Tim, welcome to the podcast. I'm not sure I was ready for the kind of podcast that I was going to walk into. I'm good. I'm just going to go. I'll see you guys. See you guys later. So, Tim, we have brought you here today because both you and Scott are pretty deeply immersed in the Cambridge Analytica story. This is something that has been dominating the news all week. A lot of people, I think, are probably still confused by it. I will confess that I'm one of those people.

So let's just start from the beginning. What is Cambridge Analytica? So they're a political consulting firm. They worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, and they do a practice called micro-targeting. And what that does is it takes data from thousands, tens of thousands, millions of users, and they try to tailor political messages. Say you're against abortion rights, but you're a Democrat. The Trump campaign would want to know that and would want to tailor a message to get you to maybe vote for the Trump campaign or to turn out for them on Election Day. So that's what Cambridge Analytica did. And that's not particularly controversial. That's just their kind of standard business.

Yeah, that's right. A lot. And before we talk specifically about Cambridge Analytica, we should say, because I think this has gotten mixed up in the coverage, a lot of your data is out there and for sale and political campaigns are buying it all the time, as are private companies. And what they're doing is putting together models so they can figure out what kind of

voters are likely to vote for them and how to get in touch with those voters. Barack Obama did a lot of this. Hillary Clinton did a lot of this. Every single campaign is doing this on some level. What does that mean? It's your Facebook information. It's your social media information. It's your web browsing history.

It's your purchase information. It's your credit card information. It's your web browsing history. It's your purchase information. It's your credit card information. It's how much and how often you vote. And I guess the idea there is rather than just sort of spamming the whole world with ads, they could target those ads or target those messages to people who are more likely to be receptive to those messages. Right. This is about efficiency. This is about, hey, if I want to tease out a particular message that's going to be really effective with a small group of voters and get them to vote for me, I need to identify them using data. So at this point, it all sounds innocuous enough or, well, you know, alarming,

but no different than anything else. Commonly used. However, however, there are some things about this story that are different. Yeah, and Cambridge Analytica was different from the beginning, and that's the way that they pitched themselves. They got some attention in the early parts of the 2016 race, including some stories that I did at the time when I was covering tech, because their CEO, Alexander Nix, a man we heard from a lot this week, though he wishes we hadn't, he was promising to do something different and bold and unique. And that was to not just do micro-targeting by habits and interests and money spend and

voting patterns, but to create psychological profiles of every single voter in America. That is what he promised. That is what he talked about in a lot of interviews. And the information for those psychological profiles, we now know, some of it at least, came from Facebook in violation of Facebook's rules. Or no, you're making a face at me. Not quite, because this stuff is complicated. Thank you.

So here's how they said they did this. They would do personality quizzes with a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people. We're going to come back to those personality quizzes in a moment. They would take this personality quiz and they would try to figure out information about the people who took the quiz from Facebook and other sources. So they could say, OK, lots of people who live in this part of the world and have these specific interests and follow these pages have this type of personality. And the idea was that campaigns could tailor their message in different ways based on people's personality types. The Cruz campaign actually did try this and used it in the early primary and caucus states. So Facebook, by the time that Cambridge Analytica was doing this, it obtained millions and millions of data sets from Facebook users.

But Facebook's rules didn't allow this information to go to political campaigns at the time that this was happening. So is that their rules or is that just like the rules of like whose rules are those? That's Facebook's rules. I see. But they did allow this sort of research to be done for academic purposes. So what happened was an academic researcher took these millions and millions of user profiles and passed them off to Cambridge Analytica. And here's the way that he did that.

He developed this app that was a personality quiz. And in order to use the app through Facebook, you had to sign in with your Facebook account. And that is the point where this researcher, Alexander Kogan, was able to acquire all this information about the Facebook profiles of the people who logged into this app. Not only that, but the information of all of their social networks as well. And that's things like the information you put into your Facebook page, your name, where you live, where you went to school, your marital status, your job. All of this up to this point was within compliance with Facebook's rules at the time. So then, and Tim's been looking at this too this week, here's where Cambridge Analytica and this researcher took a turn and violated the rules.

He was allowed to get all this information from Facebook if he used it for research purposes. That's not what he did. He gave it to Cambridge Analytica to use for commercial political purposes. Right. And once that happened, it was clear that Facebook doesn't have control over the data that they were sharing. How would it be possible for them to track and control your private information if they're passing it off to academics? And those academics could conceivably pass it off to anyone. Yeah. So, Scott, you said that we have been hearing a lot from Alexander Nix. He's the CEO of Cambridge Analytica. We've been hearing a lot from him in undercover videos that were shot by Britain's Channel

4 News. And here I just want to play a little clip from that where he basically describes Cambridge Analytica. We are not only the largest and most significant political consultancy in the world, but we have the most established track record. We're used to operating through different vehicles in the shadows. It's like Night at the Roxbury in here. Oh, I thought it was like music that was made to make it sound even more ominous. I talked to a lot of people this week who worked with Cambridge Analytica during 2016. And by and large, they were pretty shocked by the things that he said in the Sting video.

But they also thought that there's a good chance that he was just being a blowhard and exaggerating and trying to impress somebody in a bar. And that Cambridge Analytica is not doing this James Bond type stuff all over the world trying to influence elections, but rather that he's just trying to oversell what they were offering. Cambridge Analytica has suspended him as CEO. They took this pretty seriously. This has been a very bad week for this company. But the more interesting thing to me is that when you look back at the psychological profiling that Cambridge Analytica was really selling itself as, and Nix was going around doing interviews after the Iowa caucuses. Including with you. Including with me, taking a lot of credit for Cruz's win in the Iowa caucuses,

and then later taking credit for Trump's victory in the general election, is that the psychological profiling ended up being kind of a dud. Like Ted Cruz's campaign was all about trying every sort of political science trick, trying every sort of data trick, which was interesting at the time covering it because there was all this stuff that had been written about in research. But no presidential campaign had ever had the guts to actually try because it comes off as creepy sometimes. But they did try it. The Cruz campaign at the time showed me the different ways that they would campaign on the exact same issue to the different personality types of voters. But people I talked to in the Cruz campaign said in the end, they did some testing. They didn't see this actually made too much of a difference. So they started spending their money elsewhere instead. So we're talking about Cambridge Analytica. You know, what's important here is talking about the Trump campaign. How did they get hooked up with the Trump campaign?

The Mercer's are these billionaire Republican funders. And if you want to win a political campaign in America, and you're a Republican, it really can't hurt to have them on your side. Now, Rebecca Mercer is, of course, one of the Mercers, and she's on the board of Cambridge Analytica. And there's a lot of reporting that shows if you're a Republican and you want the support of the Mercers, he was in charge of digital for the Trump campaign. He's now the campaign manager for 2020, had said on 60 Minutes last month, you know, I think Donald Trump won, but I think Facebook was the method. It was the highway in which his car drove on. This is about efficiency. This is about, hey, I've got a limited amount of resources. Let me tailor a specific message to these smaller groups of the electorate,

and they're going to be responsive to it. I think we should talk for a minute about what Cambridge Analytica did with the Trump campaign, because that's what so much of the attention is on, right? Yeah. And he became president. He did. Ted Cruz did not. So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination. And up until that point, Donald Trump had basically ignored tech, ignored data, hardly had any staff, was not paying for the types of analytics that the types of campaigns does, but he started talking about how he just doesn't understand tech companies and Silicon Valley and how he had built real things, buildings, and these people have built software, and what is that? And he was talking about how he met with these tech CEOs and just didn't understand them. You know, they come up to meet me, a lot of the guys from Silicon, and they're wearing undershirts. I could tell you a story. Some of the biggest in the world, they'll come in and roller skates he doesn't get it sounds like why

will they not wear ties and suits sounds like npr the number of cuffed pants with roller skates i've seen in this building so no so that's so that's trump's viewpoint on the worthwhile nature of spending money on tech, right? Right. RNC, the Republican National Committee felt very differently. And they were like, hey, now that you're our nominee, let's talk about your data team. So the RNC invested a lot of money in giving Trump's campaign what's called the voter files. This is the information I was talking about before about every single voter in America.

So they worked with Brad Parscale in his San Antonio office and a couple people from Cambridge Analytica, the team ended up growing to about a dozen people, worked with the RNC staffers with the Trump tech team out of Texas. And they did not do any of the psychological profiling with the Trump campaign. But that's not because they had realized it didn't work at that point. It was because Trump had no tech infrastructure, so they had to work on much more basic things. So according to people I've talked to who were in the room, the focus for the Cambridge Analytica team was on digital fundraising, was on finding likely voters to

persuade and get in touch with online, and through turning out the people who they thought were going to vote for Trump on Election Day. And that's a lot of the micro targeting stuff Tim was talking about, where you're able to tailor specific messages to specific people and put it in their Facebook feeds. So did this actually help Trump win? Is this, you know, is Cambridge Analytica the reason that Donald Trump is president of the United States? Or was it like, you know, the million other things, like the free media and Hillary Clinton's emails all over the internet all of October? Well, it's impossible to gauge, right? We'll never know what would have happened absent Cambridge Analytica. But Cambridge Analytica would certainly like you to think so. And going back to that undercover video that Channel 4, this British television station, did, Nix was basically bragging, hey, we ran the entire Trump digital campaign.

Trump lost the popular vote, but he won the election. And the reason was he knew how to reach out to the voters that mattered in strategic places. Berg has been under a lot of pressure to say something about this roiling controversy that's been going on all week. He finally did some interviews yesterday, including with CNN, and he said that he was open to the idea of Facebook being regulated. I actually am not sure we shouldn't be regulated. I actually think the question is more, what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? He also had this really weird formulation where he talked about whether he would be willing to testify before Congress. So the short answer is, I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do.

You know, Facebook testifies in Congress regularly on a number of topics, some high profile and some not. I think Congress usually has more to say about whether it's the right thing for you than you do. You know, look, Mark Zuckerberg is somebody who does not like to talk to the press. You know, he's yes, he's a billionaire, but he hasn't made all that money because he is like an extrovert who loves to socialize and get his face out on TV. But his company, his billions are at stake right now. And when that's happening,

when it seems that other people are controlling the message, then Facebook needs to stand up. And the reason he needs to do that is because Facebook is now a public company. There's a board. And we've seen what's happened to high profile CEOs in the past if they don't get their arms around a controversy like this.

And this is all taking place in a broader context. Facebook's role during the 2016 election, not just with data privacy, but also its susceptibility to being used by actors, foreign actors like the Russian government and Russian trolls in order to influence the political process here in the United States and divide Americans against each other. That's something I'm sure he's going to be asked about when he's testifying before Congress. And with that, we are going to take a quick break and we're going to say goodbye to Tim. Bye. I mean, this is not forever. This is just for this podcast, but we can't wait to have you back. Awesome. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for shedding light on all that. It's complicated. Yeah. And when we come back, more complicated. Congress is once again up against a deadline to fund the federal government past Friday. It's like deja vu all over again. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from GoToMeeting. It's the simple, flexible, collaborative meeting tool that works for you so you can focus on getting How much would you pay how your company can make the switch today. Visit gotomeeting.com. How much would you pay to avoid morning traffic? Why are plane tickets to Boise so expensive?

I'm Cardiff Garcia, co-host of The Indicator. In every episode, we take on a new unexpected idea to help you make sense of the day's news. Listen every afternoon on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we are back and Kelsey Snell is in the studio now, just like magic. Hey, Kelsey. Hey. Tagging in. So the good people up the street in the Capitol have reached a deal, it appears, to fund the government through the end of September. That is right. A $1.3 trillion deal. So, you know, the big bucks. The big bucks. They waited all day, all day yesterday and finally last night. Many days, in fact, not just yesterday. We've been waiting for this bill for over a week. They waited until they had, you know, about 48 hours until the deadline. And then they released a 2,232-page spending bill.

Yes. Last night, President Trump says that he plans to sign it. But Kelsey, it's not quite done. The House, as of right now, as we always say at the beginning, things will probably have changed by the time you're listening to this. But as of this moment, the House has passed the spending bill without really any problems. We are just waiting to find out what is going to happen in the Senate. Earlier today, a bunch of reporters asked Majority Leader Mitch McConnell when they were going to vote on it, and he said, you'll have to ask the junior senator from Kentucky, Senator Rand Paul.

Oh, snap. In the House, just quickly. Yeah. Bipartisan. Bipartisan. We were kind of expecting that because spending bills this big when you've got a one point three trillion dollars, pretty much everybody gets something they want out of the deal. And it makes it really, really hard to vote against. On that note. Yeah. I feel like we always pay so much attention to the early budget that comes out from the White House.

And even though people like Tam always say, this is not final. This is just a philosophical document. I'm such a broken record on that. It's cool. You know, we all have our trademark things. Domenico has many. We all have bills we want to die on.

Mine often involve Congress. As Mara Eliason and I say, we aim to come up with new cliches. So a lot of attention about drastic cuts to departments like Environmental Protection Agency that the White House proposed. Looks like Congress totally ignored that on a lot of different fronts, including the EPA here. Yeah, Congress is kind of as a group, they're a group of experts in ignoring what the White House wants. So particularly when it comes to spending. 535 people. 535 at ignoring what the White House wants. So particularly when it comes to spending. 535 people.

535 people who ignore the White House. Really, honestly, they often do ignore the White House on these kinds of things because it's really hard in a divided government to get a spending bill passed when you're trying to completely undermine large sections of the government. Now, Democrats were never going to vote for a bill that cut out large portions of the EPA. And in fact, a lot of Republicans don't agree with that either. You talk to a lot of people who are sportsmen and hunters and fishermen. They say that they really believe that the EPA has an important role to play in keeping the environment safe. OK, so let's just go through what we do know about what's in it. The top line that people are paying the most attention to right now, I think, is that it funds the government through September, which is nice.

It means we don't have another spending fight for a really long time. And through September of this year or September of next year? This year. So we know that that's happening. We also know that this includes $1.6 billion in money for border security. And that is one of the most controversial parts of this bill. Democrats, Republicans and the White House were all fighting about this up until late in the night, even probably last night and the night before, as far as we know. Part of the problem is Democrats wanted a tradeoff. They wanted to say, if you're going to spend money on building a wall, we need to make sure that there are legal protections for the people who would be protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. That's not in there. That is not in there. And there are a lot of Democrats who are mad because if you remember, that's why Democrats shut down the government or that's why they say they shut down the government earlier this year was to get DACA protections. And they still have not gotten them.

There are three things that jump out at me in this bill that are kind of below the top lines. If you think about a few things, one, there's a provision to allow the Centers for Disease Control to start reviewing gun violence, which, you know, there was an act that was passed in the 90s that stemmed from an Arkansas senator who had been known as a mouthpiece for the NRA, quote, and he later regretted the kind of work that he had done on this provision that essentially said that the government shouldn't review gun violence. So they're going to do research on gun violence. They can do research on gun violence through the CDC. That is if the CDC agrees to do it,

though. Correct. And that is still a political fight that I think we will see play out over the next several months. Right. And there's no funding that's attached to this. But it's interesting that in the wake of the Parkland shooting, that this is something that is in there. In addition to the FixNICS stuff where that's the database for guns and background checks, that they're providing some extra funding to states to be allowed to go and try to revise their systems. Yeah, it requires that states and other jurisdictions like the VA and the military have to notify this database, the NICS database, which is used for most gun background checks. Anybody who buys a gun from a registered dealer has to go through this incident background check. There will be better communication between them. And so if you commit a crime, it is far more likely under FixNICs that that crime would be inside of the database.

And if people don't comply with it, they would be punished. Now, this doesn't expand background checks. It does not. But it is something that came following the Parkland shooting and is something that the Parkland families want. Proponents argue that it would make the background check system better without expanding it. This other item is of note to anyone who works in the service industry in a restaurant or

anyone who cares about how waiters and waitresses are treated, or if you are one, frankly, because how your tips are used, that's how you make money. As a former waiter, you made money based on your tips. You're not paid minimum wage. And there was a rule that the Trump administration had designed to allow some of these restaurants to be able to pocket some of this money, or at least that's the fear, as long as they paid minimum wage to the waiters and waitresses. Now, what this bill does in the omnibus, it blocks that. It says that these restaurants can't do that. I mean, most people in Congress did not agree with that rulemaking decision. So it was, this seemed like kind of one of those no-brainer opportunities for them to get a bipartisan thing in there. Thing though, is we will still be tearing through this for some time to come. And in the immediate, we are really wondering whether or not the Senate's going to be able to

pass this in time for the deadline. We don't have that much time left. And as Majority Leader McConnell said, it's kind of up to people like Rand Paul and possibly Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana, who was coming out of a press conference earlier today and was asked how he felt about the bill. We can hear what he had to say. It sucks. You're not going to vote for it. I'm going to vote against it twice if they will let me. Well, are you going to vote for it i wouldn't i'm gonna vote against it twice if they will let me well are you going to vote against letting it get a vote before the deadline of the show i don't know yet i don't even know what's in the thing okay this is an embarrassment you know i said it yesterday on a minute this this is a great dane size whiz down the leg of every taxpayer in this country. Whoa. A great Dane-sized whiz down the leg of every taxpayer in America? He's not talking about cheese.

Kelsey and Sue and I have had many hallway conversations about the fact that Louisiana's John Kennedy has been the MVP this year for hallway quotes. He is a magical quote machine. And he is so willing to talk to reporters. And he is so clued in on literally anything you could possibly ever want to ask him about. He is paying attention and he is just gold. And then he says things like that. He does. Well, he's clued in except for the fact that he doesn't know what's in the bill. All right. So the junior senators from Louisiana

and Kentucky, they could because the time is so short, if they wanted to, through procedural thingies, they could prevent this bill from getting a vote before the government shuts down. Yes, the big, slow, complicated Senate has many, many ways that things can be slowed down. But as of now, they can't stop it. So they could just slow it down. They can't stop this trend. We could have another situation where there's a temporary lapse in funding overnight, like we saw when Rand Paul did this in February. But you know what? He's not actually threatening that right now. He's out on Twitter complaining about the length of the bill, showing how tall the bill is and how long it took him to print it. But he's not actually saying he's going to stand in the way. And we're looking at two weeks of Congress not being in Washington. And there are very few things that motivate senators more than getting out of Washington. OK. One other thing motivating members of Congress to get out of Washington is that they have a funeral to get to. They do.

Yeah. Louise Slaughter, longtime Democratic congresswoman from New York, died on Friday at the age of 88. She was the ranking member on the Rules Committee. Rules Committee, not super sexy, not well known outside of Washington. But very important. Incredibly important. And the committee most likely in the House to pull an all-nighter. Yeah, absolutely. They have pulled more all-nighters than I think any other group of people in Washington. She was known as one of those people that everybody really loved. And there's a book sitting in the Speaker's Lobby right off of the floor of the House where people can leave notes. And I have heard reports that nearly every single member of Congress has made the time to go write in that remembrance book for Louise Slaughter.

And the amount of people that they're expecting at this funeral is really, really surprising. So they, in New York, this funeral will be tomorrow or Friday in New York. And the local paper had to put together a whole listing of ways that people could pay their respects. So they had four hours on Thursday to pay their respects, and they're setting up over 3,000 seats for her funeral, including two overflow rooms. statement was like, you can tell when when lawmakers kind of mail in their statement about somebody passing away, a notable figure. But his seemed like incredibly sincere and that even though he disagreed with her a lot, he really respected and liked her. And you could see that all over the building.

The thing that struck me about her, she was punchy. She was tough. So sharp. And she just, you know, when she got her teeth into an issue, she didn't let it go. And, you know, she also had one of the great accents because she was born in Kentucky and represented upstate New York. Man, that makes for some mix. We're going to take one more quick break. And when we come back, President Trump's lawyer, John Dowd, is out.

And there is a lot of other White House news, too. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from ZipRecruiter. House News 2. Technology identifies people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job. Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Hello, just dropping in to remind you about On Point, the NPR show where we take you behind the headlines. On Point talks with newsmakers and real people about issues that matter most. Listen to On Point now on NPR One or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we are back. Tam and I have switched roles here for a moment to talk about something Tam's been covering. On Monday, we had a podcast all about the latest in not only the Mueller probe, but also what is going on with President Trump's legal team and legal strategy.

Whole episode on Monday for you to check out. But Tam, since Monday, as often happens during the week, a lot has happened. And today, just a few hours ago, we learned that President Trump's lawyer, John Dowd, is leaving his legal team. What had Dowd's role been? So Dowd is actually the lead or was the lead lawyer on Trump's outside legal team handling Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation of Russia and all things else that he is investigating. I called Dow up and he answered and I was like, hey, are you resigning? He's like, yes. I said, why? He said, I'm not going to tell you, but I will tell you this. I love the president and wish him well.

How many lawyers does that leave working on this issue for Trump? but there's a new lawyer, Joe DeGeneva. He is a former federal prosecutor. team is because he is willing to say things on television, has been saying things on Fox News that are deeply critical of the investigation of some parts of the FBI and the Justice Department. This was him in January on Fox News. There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton, and if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime. So there has been a clear shift, which again we talked all about on Monday, of President Trump and his legal team

getting more aggressive in criticizing Robert Mueller head on. You saw Trump tweet about Mueller. Dowd actually had that statement over the weekend that at first he said was speaking for the president, then he said was speaking for him, that was saying end the investigation. Is Dowd out? Can we group that into this shift in tone or do we not know for sure at this point? Well, Dowd is an interesting case because he actually sort of goes way back, knew Robert Mueller at the same time that he was saying he thought the investigation should end. He was also describing discussions with Mueller's team as productive and constructive. And so I think it's not entirely clear

which of President Trump's lawyers were trying to hold him back from tweeting and which ones were encouraging it. But it's clear to say that a trade of DeGeneva for Dowd is definitely moving more in the direction of just criticizing the investigation head on. So on the topic of legal issues, the president finds himself in, if not quite directly tied to the Russia investigation. A couple other updates to talk about. First of all, Stormy Daniels will be speaking on television about her alleged affair with President Trump this weekend. We've talked a lot about the nondisclosure agreement that she signed for $130,000 in late 2016 during the presidential campaign. Nevertheless, she will be speaking to 60 Minutes about it.

They posted a very cryptic preview of this interview in which she literally said nothing. But, Tam, another name came up in the news this week. Karen McDougal. Who is she? What is going on there? So she is a former Playboy playmate who met President Trump around the same time, that 2006 time period that President Trump

allegedly had the affair with Stormy Daniels. And McDougal says that she had a relationship with President Trump. She wanted to tell her story and sold her story to the National Enquirer. The National Enquirer then never ran the story. She this week sued saying that she wants to be able to tell her story. She wants her story out there. Who'd she sue, the National Enquirer or President Trump? Yeah, she sued the parent company of the National Enquirer. President Trump was really, truly not a party to that agreement at all.

But as I understand it, the person who is in charge of buying her story at the National Enquirer is a personal friend of the president's. Is that right? There is that. President Trump throughout the campaign seemed to have a beneficial relationship with the National Enquirer. If you go back, you can look at deeply critical stories of in the National Enquirer of Ted Cruz and his wife.

And yet, you know, basically nothing about Donald Trump. They bought this the rights to exclusively tell her story, Karen McDougal story, and then never ran it. Is that a common practice? It turns out it is for them. Right. I mean, it's they have these kill fees. Yeah. The New Yorker did a whole story all about this at some point last year. That's worth Googling. And there is one more name that I just want to toss in here. Her name is Summer Zervos.

She is a former apprentice contestant who accused President Trump of sexual harassment and other things. President Trump said, no, she's lying. And then she sued him for defamation. This week, a judge ruled that the case can go forward even though President Trump is president of the United States. Well, because of one big precedent, right? Yes. One Bill Clinton precedent. So because he was sued for sexual harassment and that case was allowed to go forward. And a really interesting part of this is that precedent was set. The lawyer who was going up against Bill Clinton is Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, her husband. He is the lawyer who made that precedent possible. I had a question about Dowd. So when you talked about him leaving, you know, it seems like it's just been so herky jerky because he'll say something.

Maybe the president goes against it. You know, there's a lot of been a lot of discussion and reporting about the fact that when the president wants to do something, he just does it right. He goes and he goes on Twitter. And it's like the worst thing possible from a legal standpoint. Like a lawyer wants to control a situation. That's why they get paid a lot of money. They want to control what their client says to best protect them. And they like these long term strategies to be able to know that they are controlling that environment. Was that the sense that you were getting that from people even behind the scenes that, you know, it's just been kind of difficult to have President Trump as a client? President Trump is not an easy person to have as a client that that is. I mean, he's also if you're a communications director, he's not an easy person to try to develop communication strategy for. Sometimes, obviously, he does listen to the advice of his lawyers. And for a long time, his lawyers had been saying, this will all be over soon. There is nothing to worry about. Everything will be great. But then the deadline, the over soon timeline kept shifting. And now the president seems to just be, he's just doing, Trump is doing Trump right now. And that is a perfect segue to the last thing I wanted to ask you about. Do not congratulate. Well, we can back up a little bit. President Trump talked to

Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone. Putin won overwhelmingly the Russian election over the weekend. It's easy to win when you make sure that your top opponent is not allowed to run

against you. That helps. So obviously, there were a lot of questions about the validity of the election and President Trump went ahead. And during the phone call, as he told reporters, congratulated Putin on his win. That caused a lot of outcry. Tam, what's the context here? Well, the context is think about everything that has been happening in the U.S.-Russia relationship in the last year, or the last two years. But even more than that, just last week, the U.S. government issued sanctions against Russia over the interference in the 2016 presidential election and other sort of hacking and cyber activities. The U.S. also joined other European countries and allies in condemning this nerve gas attack on a former Russian spy in the U.K. and his daughter. President Trump didn't

bring up either of those things in his call, we know, because the White House said so, with Putin. And instead, he congratulated Putin and said he wanted to get together with him sometime soon. And then just a couple hours after we learned this, because, again, the president said that, there was a really notable story in the Washington Post where White House sources, national security sources, told the paper that not only had staffers explicitly warned Trump not to congratulate Putin, they put in all caps, do not congratulate in the notes the president read. But how many people could have possibly known that that was written down? Right. That's the thing. You know, but never mind the it's sort of common sense. I mean, in the sense that like with the context of everything that's been happening with Russia, you know, the last thing that his advisers would want is to call more

attention to to that, especially, you know, we're talking about John Dowd and the part of that being the Russia probe and how they've got to deal with them. It's not in the president's interest to get in the middle of that. And it's really striking when you think about the president having an opportunity to stand up for democratic values and to stand up for democracy and saying that American elections are free and fair, that he would then essentially congratulate an autocratic leader. He had the opportunity to also talk about election interference in this country and at least bring it up in that pool spray in the Oval Office. And Sarah Sanders said that he didn't bring it up on this call in particular. And this also comes

a short time after the Department of Homeland Security said that Russia was undertaking cyber attacks on American energy facilities. Like there is a disconnect between how the president wants to kind of reset this relationship with President Putin in the same way that maybe Barack Obama did and George W. Bush did where they tried to have a better relationship with him. But there weren't the same sort of overt, controversial issues that have come up and Russia taking as adversarial a stance as they have now. And the president of the United States decided to punt on those things. Yeah. Well, Domenico mentioned Obama. How did Obama and Bush deal with similar situations? Obviously, Putin's been winning a lot of elections over a career that

has spanned multiple presidents. Winning in quotes. So in 2012, President Obama, five days after the election, called Putin and did congratulate him. That's in the official readout from the Obama White House. But before that happened, the U.S. State Department put out a pretty tough statement congratulating the people of Russia on their election and also raising questions about whether it really was a free and fair election. The Obama administration wanted to have a reset with Russia. There was a period where Putin wasn't the president. That didn't really work out so well because it turns out Putin was always in charge. And, you know, President George W. Bush back in the day had said, like, I looked Putin in the eyes and I saw a man that I could work with. More paraphrasing.

So this is not a new phenomena. Yeah. And just a quick plug that Mary Louise Kelly from All Things Considered was in Russia for the week leading up to the election, did a ton of great coverage about the election or about the atmosphere in Russia. And if you go to the NPR web page, you can listen to a ton of great reporting that she did there. All right, we're going to take one more quick break. And when we come back, we will do Can't Let It Go. Jen Palmieri was Hillary Clinton's communications director during her 2016 campaign. And about a month after Hillary lost that race, Palmieri got a chance to confront Kellyanne Conway. I would rather lose than win the way you guys did. No, you wouldn't. Yes. Yes. Yes.

That's very clear today. No, you wouldn't, respectfully. You know, afterwards, I thought like, oh, God. Excuse me. She said white supremacy. And then the next morning I woke up, I was like, I don't care. Hey, I'm Sam Sanders. I host the show for NPR called It's Been a Minute. Check out our recent episode with Jen Palmieri. We talk about what went right and wrong for Hillary in 2016. It's been a minute from NPR.

Find it wherever you get your podcast. All right. We are back and it is time for that thing that we do that we love to do where we talk about one thing we can't stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. Domenico. Well, I want to bring a little joy into this thing because I think we need a little divine intervention. And what I want to talk about is Sister Jean. I don't know if anybody knows Sister Jean. I'm up to speed.

It's great. I am not. Following the sports ball of March Madness, as some of our friends on the Washington desk like to call it. Sister Jean is the chaplain on the Loyola Chicago basketball team. This upset, upstart story. And she's been the chaplain. She's 98 years old. She's been the chaplain of the team for the last 25 years.

She's been rooting for the team for the last 60. She sits on the bench. She does. She's the coach. He's dangerous. Well, come on. The coach called her one of one of the honorary coaches on the team. And when Loyola Chicago upset Tennessee, they hit this last-minute shot.

And he went on a sports radio show and said that, well, I think because one of my honorary coaches is a nun, I think we've got a little more divine intervention than most. She was on Good Morning America this week, and here's a little bit of her. Don't let those Tennessee team members scare you at their height. Height doesn't mean that much.

You're good jumpers. You're good rebounders. You're good at everything. And just keep that in mind. Was that her prayer before the start of the game? She's been telling everyone. She goes on. The New York Times went through a day in the life with Sister Jean. She's up at like 5 a.m.

doing prayers and meditation. Then she's doing round round after round of TV interviews to promote the team. In fact, the athletic department has had to hold her back because she wants to keep saying yes. I want her in my corner. Right. And they've had to they've had to to sort of say no because she's got all this energy and is so excited and pumped about the team that she really wants to be able to get out there and talk to everybody. But it was really funny. On Good Morning America, she also said that she prays for the team. She even prays for the other team, but perhaps not as hard. I feel like, sister, you're doing too many TV interviews. It's not like a thing that the media department has to say too often.

Oh, man. Scott, do you have one? Yeah, you know, honestly, I didn't know what to talk about here. But then Domenico was talking about Easter eggs in the bill. And I just thought about something. And it's true. So I'm going to say it. I love Cadbury cream eggs.

It's almost Easter. It's almost Easter. And Cadbury cream eggs pop up in the grocery store for about a month before Easter, and they're delicious. Do you cut them in half? Do you eat them? Do you bite into them? I just bite into them. You're so gross.

I'm not a huge drug. Domenico, do not hate on this. Wait, what do you do when it gets all melty? It's delicious. Well, here's what I do. What's the best part? I eat it right away because I get it because it's up near the cash register. Often at the grocery store near work. I'm here's what I do. What's the best part? I eat it right away because I get it because it's up near the cash register. Often at the grocery store near work.

I'm going on the way home. It's always crowded. I'm a little stressed out and grumpy. I see the Cadbury cream eggs. I buy one, and it's just the best texture. I don't like chocolate that much. That's how I feel about wine. But it's, you know.

Cadbury is delicious. It's delicious, and I love the fact that they're only around for a month. I wouldn't want year-round Cadbury cream eggs. That's fair. You know? I'll just say it wouldn't want any around Cadbury cream eggs. That's fair. I'll just say, it sounds like somebody needs a Cadbury cream egg right now. You have a track record of being a rain cloud on people's joy. Everyone knows. That's true.

That's why I tried to bring joy to this one. Maybe we can go. I can buy you one after this. We can all just share a Cadbury. Well, you know, they sell them in boxes of four. No, just one at a time. I know, but they sell them in boxes of four. No, just one at a time. I know, but they sell them in boxes of four. There's enough for each of us.

That's true. I like the big kind of basket. As soon as we leave, we'll walk around the corner of the grocery store all together, holding hands, and grab some Cadbury Creme X. I am going to go next because it is quasi-Easterly, but not really. Scott Detrow, I know that you are a fan of Marlon Bundo, Vice President Pence's family rabbit. I am.

And his Instagram feed. We were early adapters to Marlon Bundo. Oh, you brought that to the podcast a new book about Marlon Bundo. And it's an illustrated children's book. Mrs. Pence illustrated it herself. She's an artist. It gives money to art therapy and also a charity that helps prevent child slavery or child trafficking. And there's another Marlon Bundo book also that John Oliver, the comedian, came out with

that is now the number one selling book on Amazon. And it is about a gay bunny who has a run in with Mike Pence. I think I don't really know the plot. I haven't bought it. But here's the thing. Charlotte Pence says that she bought John Oliver's book. I saw this. This is actually really nice.

She's like, you know what? Their book gives money to charity. My book gives money to charity. Let's all have bunny books. It was a nice moment. Everybody, everybody donates. And Marlon Bundo was on The View this week. Kelsey, what can't you let go of?

Mine is political and no surprise about Congress. I have been really interested in this story about Cindy Hyde-Smith being appointed to be the next senator from Mississippi. She's going to be taking over for Senator Thad Cochran when he leaves on at the beginning of April. He is 80 some years old and in poor health. He stuck around to finish up one last spending bill as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And then the governor announced this week that he was appointing Cindy Hyde-Smith, the state agriculture secretary from Mississippi, to fill that seat. The part of this that I can't let go. Well, two things.

One, she used to be a Democrat. She was a Democrat as recently as 2010. That's like every politician in the South. And then she was like, oh, wait, I live in Mississippi. Right. So she switched parties. She says she voted for President Trump and she will be running to keep that seat when they do the special election. And part of her campaign promise is that she is a big Trump supporter. The other part of this I can't let go is that she is going to be the very first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress in history.

And there's only one other state in the entire United States that has that reputation now, which is Vermont. Not that woke Vermont, the very similarly styled Vermont. Yeah, Vermont and Mississippi, I think are like polar opposites on a lot of things, including geography. But apparently they are they shared until well, they will have shared this distinction until April 1st.

The only two states who have never elected a woman. And you know what? Mississippi will still not have elected a woman to fill a seat in Congress. She will have been appointed. The disparity between being elected and being appointed on this front is really interesting. We actually at NPRPolitics.org have a whole chart of every state the first time they had a woman representative of Congress. Yeah. And as I was looking through this, the thing that was pointed out to me was that it really isn't that uncommon for women to have been appointed to their seats and to have gotten power in Congress through appointment. The first woman to be duly elected to Congress was Barbara Mikulski of Maryland,

and she was elected in 1987. So that is not a particularly long timeline. Yeah, there is sort of a long history of women being appointed to take over their deceased husband's terms. And so that's what I can't let go this week is welcome to the Senate in the future, Cindy Hyde-Smith. But that's two new female senators, both appointed, I guess, continuing the trend. But the number is very slowly ticking upward. Absolutely.

There you go. All right. And that is a wrap for this week. We will be back in your feed soon. Keep up with all our coverage at NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © transcript Emily Beynon