The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, May 3

Episode Date: May 3, 2018

The new head of President Trump's legal team, Rudy Giuliani, said on national television that the president reimbursed a lawyer for payments to an adult film star, which prompted new questions about who knew what when. And, as Trump reorganizes his legal team to combat the special counsel, a list of questions Robert Mueller plans to ask Trump surfaced in Washington. Plus, NPR received an exclusive excerpt of John McCain's forthcoming book. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, Justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and national security and political reporter Tim Mak. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

All gone. This is Specialist Larimore with Charlie Company 248th ASB in support of Operation Inherent Resolve located in Southwest Asia. You are listening to the NPR Politics Podcast, which was recorded on... I feel like I should do the military time, but I'm blanking. It's 2.42. Tim, what is the military? 14.42. 14.42 on Thursday, May 3rd. Things might have changed by the time you have heard it. Keep up with all of your NPR politics coverage on the NPR One app, NPR.org, and of course, your local NPR station. Now here's the show.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup of political news. It has been a week of big revelations in the Russia investigation and surrounding legal challenges that President Trump is facing. Last night, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided yet another one. Giuliani, a new member of Trump's legal team, said the president did, in fact, reimburse a lawyer for a payment made to a porn star. And he suggested the president would not sit down for an interview with the special counsel. We'll get to that and everything else we learned about the Mueller probe this week, plus the rest of the week's news. And, of course, we will end the show with what we just can't let go this week.

I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I cover the White House. And I'm Tim Mack. I cover national security and politics. Hey, everybody. So we were going to start with all the Mueller stuff, right? Like that was already planned. And then Rudy Giuliani just threw a wrench in that.

And let's just dig into Rudy, should we? The hits keep coming with Rudy, absolutely. Okay, so let's just go. Rudy Giuliani, of course, is a new member to a legal team that has seen a whole lot of shakeups. We will get to those shakeups momentarily. So he goes on Fox News Wednesday night and says, yes, President Trump did reimburse Michael Cohen for that one hundred thirty thousand dollar payment made to Stormy Daniels in exchange for Daniels keeping quiet about an alleged affair. That was money that was paid by his lawyer the way I would do out of his law firm funds or whatever funds, doesn't matter. The president reimbursed that over a period of several months. So there is a lot of context to work through here.

But let's just start with this. What Rudy Giuliani said, unprompted, on Fox News, to the surprise of Sean Hannity, Ayesha, that really contradicts what both President Trump has said and what Michael Cohen has said, right? Yes. So President Trump was asked about this on Air Force One not long ago, and he was asked, where did the money come from? And he said he didn't know. And so while that maybe could be technically true that he didn't know where Michael Cohen got the money, it seems relevant to mention that he might have been reimbursing Cohen for the payment and the implication when that question was asked that he didn't know anything about the payment. been this kind of lingering how did this work where you have this personal attorney for uh donald or donald trump uh going and making this arrangement and the president didn't know about it he wasn't president at the time but that he didn't know about it and so now uh there's there's still questions uh giuliani was saying that the did, he knew generally what was going on,

but he didn't know the specifics. And he, Giuliani is saying that he only found out about 10 days ago, the full extent of the arrangement. Carrie, can you reconnect the dots for us? I feel like the dots frequently need to be reconnected in this conversation about what this payment made in October 2016, how that ties into the broader legal conversation right now, why this matters. It mostly matters because Michael Cohen has been raided by the FBI in recent weeks. His hotel room, his residence, and his law office were all raided. And we know investigators took a lot of material from those premises and they're sifting through it right now.

Michael Cohen is under active criminal investigation by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern of the United States, whether he knows something about Trump's activities during the campaign or some other activities that he might want to share with the special counsel team or other prosecutors. Now, of course, Michael Cohen denies wrongdoing, says he's not going to flip on the president of the United States. But the legal pressure is getting hotter on Michael Cohen. And Rudy Giuliani didn't help him all that much last night. Yeah. Now, Tim, a big payment made that benefits somebody running for president in an election just a few weeks away might not just be a payment, right? There's a lot of campaign finance implications here. Right. So the big question here is whether or not this payment was made in order to influence or affect an election in some way. And there's the law and then there's the application of the law, though. So before we get too far ahead on whether they're going to bust

Michael Cohen for a supposed violation of campaign finance law, we have to really take a look at the reality of how that might work. The Federal Election Commission is really deeply deadlocked. And in order to actually investigate and then impose penalties for violation of campaign finance law, it would have to almost unanimously agree to go ahead with this. And Republicans on the commission are unlikely to let this move into the investigation let alone a point where we'd have penalties. So, Aisha, how would we describe the planned or unplanned nature of this rollout? What is the best way to describe the tone and the franticness of the White House reaction after Rudy Giuliani just shares this information on Fox News? Well, it's clear the White House staff was caught off guard.

Sarah Sanders said today that the first time she learned that President Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen was last night on Fox, Fox News. So it seems like some members of the team were not clued in that this was going to happen. And their first response, the first responses from the White House on this were essentially, we're not going to comment on an ongoing legal matter. But of course, that contradicts because they had talked about this issue, maybe not deeply, but they had talked

about the president. He's made clear his position that he didn't know anything about it. They've talked about Sarah Sanders, even talked about arbitration with Stormy Daniels. But throughout all of that, it was notable how little President Trump said about it, because this is someone who cannot not comment on anything, cannot not comment on anything on television. Stormy Daniels sits down with 60 minutes and Trump doesn't say anything aside from that brief back and forth on Air Force One. That changed this morning. President Trump went on Twitter, whole big tweet storm, taking full advantage of the world of 200 whatever characters.

And I will just give the highlights here. Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign from which he entered into through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties

known as non-disclosure Agreement, or NDA. These agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth. In this case, it is in full force and effect and will be used in arbitration for damages against Ms. Clifford, parentheses, Daniels. The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair, despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting that there was no affair prior to its violation by Ms. Clifford and her attorney. This was a private agreement. Money from the campaign or campaign contributions played no role in this transaction. We should, I mean, these are paragraph form tweets that we all do not see. And it sounds just like the way President Trump talks, right?

There is a typo at the end. Okay, so a little bit of authenticity. But, you know, these tweets, I would guess that they did go through an attorney because they're not necessarily in President Trump's usual vernacular. But he's making the point this has nothing to do with the campaign. And Giuliani kind of further elaborated on this this morning on Fox News saying this was a personal matter. So they're trying to make the argument like this happened. Yes, I am connected to it in the sense that I reimbursed Michael Cohen, who's this guy who deals with these kind of crazy issues for me. I think President Trump did refer to it as a crazy stormy Daniels issue, but nothing illegal happened. Let me just jump in here. So while both Giuliani and Trump maintain that no campaign funds or campaign contributions were used to pay this

alleged hush money, that doesn't necessarily matter under the law. What matters is if the money was used to influence the election. And we know that this payment was made to Stormy Daniels, a.k.a. Stephanie Clifford, before the election. So the timing is suspicious and interesting to lawyers here, right? The other thing that's interesting is the notion that, according to Rudy Giuliani, these funds were paid throughout the course of 2017. Rudy Giuliani says they were personal funds of President Trump. Obviously, investigators are going to be able to see those records and see exactly how much money went out and how it got to Michael Cohen.

The question of when the original payments were made really does kind of indicate the purpose of the payment, right? Because Rudy Giuliani on Fox and Friends this morning, he said, well, look, imagine if it came out on October 15th in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton. He understands that there is a political dimension to this payment. Yeah, that kind of undercuts the argument right there. Yeah. I mean, Rudy Giuliani is a longtime veteran of the New York tabloid scene, but he does have a history of kind of shooting himself in the foot. Not only on this, he kind of undercuts the whole legal point, which is, hey, this is not a campaign payment. This is a personal payment by pointing out the campaign ramifications of the payment. And you recall that, you know, he also shot himself in the foot previously when he insisted that the travel ban that the Trump administration had put out there was actually a Muslim ban, which undercut the entire legal rationale for the Trump administration trying to put forward a travel ban. Okay. There is so much more to talk about on this front, but this is only the first of many different updates we need to get through

here. Giuliani talked about a lot of other key things, but first we should point out that he is part of Trump's legal team now. He is a new member of the legal team, and there have been shakeups since he joined the legal team. Last night, another big change. Ty Cobb leaves the legal team. He is replaced by a lawyer named Emmett Flood. Carrie, why does this matter? Well, Ty Cobb has been the leading voice within the White House of cooperating with the special counsel. He's turned over lots and lots of documents, made available dozens of witnesses, more than dozens of witnesses inside the White House to talk to the special counsel investigators. And Ty Cobb has always wanted to be the path of least resistance. He's now leaving. And they're bringing in a guy from what's known as a scorched earth law firm in Washington, Williams and Connolly, this guy,

Emmett Flood, really smart, really conservative pedigree, former Supreme Court clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia. And Emmett Flood has a very interesting background. He's one of the lawyers who helped defend President Bill Clinton during his impeachment travails. And Emmett Flood was also brought in to help Vice President Dick Cheney and the George W. Bush White House when they were having fights about executive privilege with members of Congress. So Emmett Flood's arrival signifies a new phase in the White House approach to the special counsel and maybe a more pugilistic phase. So we might expect to see even more criticism directly of Robert Mueller by the president. Well, I will say this, Scott. The formal announcement the White House put out saying Emmett Flood was joining said that Emmett Flood was joining to respond to the witch hunt

by special counsel Robert Mueller. I don't know how much more hot you can get than that. OK, so let's get to something else Giuliani said on Fox News last night. There's been this ongoing conversation about whether or not President Trump will be interviewed by Robert Mueller, what the circumstances of that would be. Here's what Giuliani said. I would like to get one not under oath. I'd want it videotaped and I'm not videotaped, but audiotapes. I want to make sure they don't misrepresent his answers. But this is an outrageous miscarriage of justice. So, Kerry, do you typically get to make that many demands of

how you will talk to investigators if investigators want to talk to you. Don't do this at home. Don't try this at home. The point here is that the president of the United States is a special person. He may have more sway in trying to negotiate with prosecutors who want his testimony than a normal person. But the point here is also that no man or woman in America is above the law. And if Robert Mueller really wants the president's testimony, he can always send a subpoena to the White House to try to demand it. And so Rudy Giuliani is engaged in trying to set a whole bunch of conditions. These are conditions the special prosecutor might not want to abide by and has no obligation to abide by. In fact,

the president may be better off in agreeing to a voluntary interview because then his lawyers can show up and help him and maybe interrupt if he's getting jammed up. Or, you know, he can do it in the White House as opposed to go to the courthouse, which would be a major league lollapalooza extravaganza spectacle. So Rudy, who's sophisticated about the legal system, a former U.S. attorney himself, is acting as if he's the man with all the cards in his hand. And in fact, I don't think he is. Aisha, could you catch us up to speed on what we learned about conversations about possible use of subpoenas this week from a couple different reports? There was a report that Mueller's team had told some of Trump's lawyers that they might

subpoena him, that they might actually go through with that. But it does seem like that was a way of saying, look, we don't have to play around with you guys. You're trying to make all these demands. We don't have to do that. We don't have to play ball. Okay. So we read these reports that there was the subpoena floated as part of the ongoing back and forth. And we've known for a while, Carrie, that there is this ongoing conversation about whether there will be an interview. The other big report this week that kind of shed more light on this was a New York Times report of a list of 49 different questions

that Mueller's team is interested in learning the answers to. What jumped out at you from that list of questions? There was a whole bunch of questions about possible obstruction of justice, the president's relationships with an alleged mistreatment of his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the firing of FBI Director James Comey, various attempts to possibly fire Robert Mueller or talk within the White House of getting rid of the special counsel himself. questions about the president's business dealings and relationships in the campaign with people who may have had contacts with Russia, people like National Security Advisor, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who's gone on to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators. There was also a good question, an interesting question about former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and whether Manafort may have been engaged in back channel conversations with Russians during the campaign. That question may suggest that the special counsel has evidence from Manafort's right-hand man, Rick Gates, who recently pleaded guilty. Tim?

Yeah, I mean, as a national security reporter, what interests me most is the questions that relate to Russia. You know, one question was said, well, so what sort of discussions were there during the campaign, if any, about possibly meeting with Vladimir Putin? That was a really interesting question to me. There were questions about possible real estate deals that he may or may not have been engaged with and any possibility of real estate deals in the future in Russia. things that we have really never understood during the 2016 campaign is why did the president come out with such a foreign policy that was so friendly towards Russia? And consistently. Consistently, not only towards Russia, but on the issues of sanctions and on the issues of how to address what's going on in Ukraine. The president has always had a view that's more favorable to the Russian point of view. There was nothing politically advantageous about taking these positions during the campaign.

And so Mueller's trying to understand how did you come to that conclusion? And that is the heart of the quote unquote collusion question. Yeah, even though the president tweeted that none of these questions involve collusion at all. Maybe the word collusion didn't show up. But as we've discussed here ad infinitum, collusion is not. Maybe the word collusion didn't show up, but as we've discussed here at Infinitum, collusion is not a federal crime. So there certainly were plenty of questions about that would raise the question of collusion and what the Trump campaign did or did not do with regards to Russia. But I think that's what the White House and what backers of the White House,

when they look at those questions, the argument that they are trying to make is that, look, this is a fishing expedition. You're looking all over the place. You're only supposed to be looking at, did this campaign have ties to Russia? And you're asking about, you know, what I was thinking when I was firing different people. And so that is their argument that the scope of this investigation has gotten too broad. Let me just say this. If this is a fishing expedition, the Robert Mueller special counsel team has already caught Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, 13 Russians whose names I can't run off off the top of my head who allegedly were engaged in information warfare in the course of the campaign. There are fish on the table in the ice chest. The more successful fishing trip than I normally have. Exactly.

Okay, well, those critics that you were both talking about there, they had a very busy and vocal week. We're going to talk about that after a quick break. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from ZipRecruiter. Are you hiring? Every business needs great people and a better way to find them. Something better than posting your job online and waiting for the right people to see it. ZipRecruiter can help.

Their 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. Support for NPR Politics also comes from Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. Rocket Mortgage gives you confidence when it comes to buying a new home or refinancing your existing home loan. With Rocket Mortgage, you can apply simply and understand all the details so you can mortgage confidently. To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics.

Equal housing lender. Licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030. Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers from Embedded. Bill Spencer works at a coal mine in Kentucky. And when I start to ask him about a future without coal, he knows what I'm going to say. So if coal goes out, I'm done for. Coal Stories on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back. We were mentioning just before the break,

President Trump supporters and the vocal critics of this investigation in the White House, in Congress. The critics in Congress had a pretty loud and eventful week. First report in the Washington Post that some members of the House Freedom Caucus, which is the Tea Party wing of the House Republican Conference, have drafted articles of impeachment against Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who is tasked with overseeing the Mueller investigation and in that position has become really the focal point of a lot of the anger from President Trump and his allies about this investigation.

Rosenstein, like Robert Mueller, is often pretty quiet about this, often doesn't respond to this criticism. That changed this week. He was giving an appearance at the museum and he had thoughts. There have been people who have been making threats privately and publicly against me for quite some time. And I think they should understand by now the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted. We're going to do what's required by the rule of law. And any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job. Kerry, given how much or how little Rosenstein usually says in public, how spicy is this statement? This is super spicy. Four jalapenos. Rod Rosenstein is a very smart guy. He's a career Justice Department official, almost 30 years in DOJ, five attorneys general, nine presidents, doesn't normally have the courage to put their name on these draft articles of impeachment.

He said at the Justice Department, when we accuse somebody of wrongdoing, we use credible witnesses and evidence. We don't just wing documents out there and have people forced to respond to them. And he pretty much said he's drawing a red line here. He does not want to make any more concessions to some of these people who are acting in bad faith. Yeah. And in big picture, this is about an investigation that they see as a witch hunt. But it's also more specifically about information they're requesting from the Department of Justice, from Rosenstein. What exactly do they want at this point. Remember, these members of Congress, mostly chairmen, Republican chairmen of House committees and others, have been demanding for months now information about the Carter Page

wiretap application, information about various applications for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and other things, and related to the Hillary Clinton investigation, the Clinton Foundation investigation and others. What appears to be the last straw, though, is this. Mark Meadows, the leading member of the House Freedom Caucus, wants the Justice Department to turn over something that Rod Rosenstein himself wrote in August 2017. It memorializes what special counsel Robert Mueller is supposed to be investigating. We know some of that material involves Paul Manafort because it came out in the course of Manafort's case. But a lot of that material is redacted. The House members want to know exactly what Robert Mueller is investigating, the heartland of the ongoing criminal investigation.

And the Justice Department says no way. But behind the scenes, there actually is an agreement between the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department about the transfer of documents, right? Well, there appears to be an agreement to which people like Trey Gowdy, one of the chairman, has bought into. But this faction of the House Freedom Caucus is not on board with that, Tim. And remember, the president has been threatening Rod Rosenstein himself all year long, or really since last year. And the thinking among Democrats in the House is they are just itching for a reason to get Trump to fire Rod Rosenstein. And members of the House Freedom Caucus, among others, keep throwing issues in the air, wondering, will this be the one? Will this be the one?

And so this guy has been walking on a tight rope since the special counsel was appointed in May of 2017. That's not a great feeling. And Aisha, Trump weighed in yet again after this, right? He did. So he tweeted about this is a rigged system. They don't want to turn over documents to Congress referring to the Justice Department. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal justice? So he said that at some point he will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the presidency and get involved. So that sounds bad. What does that mean?

So it's not exactly clear. He has said that he could be more involved in the Justice Department. The president does have broad powers. He certainly has powers to fire people and to get who he wants in. And so that that authority is pretty unlimited. And so if he wants to get involved, he could. He has kind of done this will he won't he he's kind of played with it, flirted with it, but not actually gone through yet. And some people are betting or Republicans in Congress and the Senate, like Senator Grassley and other people are saying, don't do this. This would be a political suicide. This could lead to your impeachment if you got

rid of Rosenstein. But the president is kind of sending out some signals that he could consider some taking action. And in terms of the draft bill that we saw in the report, I think often things that get introduced in Congress get oversimplified and people think, oh, this is going to happen now. I mean, a draft bill from one corner of the House Republican Conference is a long way from a vote on this, is a long way from anything seriously having a chance of passing. House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have repeatedly said that they support the investigation, they support Mueller. But I think it's really important in this one sense that there has been so much conversation about, is Congress going to protect Robert Mueller? How is Congress going to protect Robert Mueller? How is Congress going to step in here? The House Freedom Caucus, as we've talked a lot, especially when it comes to spending bills, has a huge say on what

issues will come to a vote or not, because there are a lot of Republican votes. And this shows you that the momentum in corners of the Republican Party is not to protect Robert Mueller, but to, in fact, do quite the opposite, to try and tank this investigation. This investigation that's focused on the inner circle of the White House and may be headed toward an interview with the president of the United States himself. In other words, is the House Freedom Caucus trying to get information about the investigation to help the president protect himself? That's not what the DOJ is about.

Yeah, and these are signals. Like you said, it's unlikely that these types of legislation would be successful at all. But it's kind of the analog to what we saw in the Senate and we discussed on this podcast, right? This legislation to protect Mueller that made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee, that, Mitch McConnell said, that will not make its way to the Senate floor. But these are signals. These are signals to the White House. These are signals to the president. On the one hand from the Senate, hey, don't fire Mueller. On the other hand from the House, we can mess around with this investigation a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. We could talk for hours more about all this stuff. We're going to end it there. But I'm pretty sure this will come up in

episode after episode after episode of future podcasts. All right, we're going to shift gears here and talk about John McCain for a few minutes. The Republican senator from Arizona has been battling brain cancer since last July. McCain has a new book coming out, and NPR was actually given exclusive access to a segment of the audiobook. This is John McCain reading from the last chapter of the book. The clip is about three minutes long, and we're just going to listen to it. I don't know how much longer I'll be here. Maybe I'll have another five years. Maybe with the advances on oncology, they'll find new treatments for my cancer that will extend my life. Maybe I'll be gone before you hear this. My predicament is, well, rather unpredictable, but I'm prepared for either contingency or at least I'm getting prepared.

I have some things I'd like to take care of first, some work that needs finishing, and some people I need to see, and I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more, if I may. My fellow Americans, no association ever mattered more to me. We're not always right. We're impetuous and impatient and rush into things without knowing what we're really doing. We argue over little differences endlessly and exaggerate them into lasting breaches. We can be selfish and quick sometimes to shift the blame for our mistakes to others, but our country, tis of thee. What great good we've done in the world, so much more good than harm. We served ourselves, of course, but we helped make others free, safe, and prosperous because we weren't threatened by other people's liberty and success. We need each other. We need friends in the world and they need us. The bell tolls for us, my friends.

Humanity counts on us and we ought to take measured pride in that. We have not been an island. We were involved in mankind. So this is John McCain talking at what's clearly the end of a very long career in public service. He was in the Navy, famously shot down several years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He goes to the House of Representatives, serves as an Arizona senator for decades. And in 2008, he was the Republican Party's nominee for president. Before I leave, I'd like to see our politics begin to return to the purposes and practices that distinguish our history from the history of other nations.

I'd like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different. We're citizens of a republic made of shared ideals, forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it. Whether we think each other right or wrong in our views on the issues of the day, we owe each other our respect as long as our character merits respect and as long as we share for all our differences, for all the rancorous

debates that enliven and sometimes demean our politics, a mutual devotion to the ideals our nation was conceived uphold, that all are created equal, and liberty and equal justice are the natural rights of all. Those rights inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be assailed, they can never be wrenched. I want to urge Americans, for as long as I can, to remember that this shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty. Then I'd like to go back to our valley and see the creek run after the rain and hear the cottonwoods whisper in the wind. I want to smell the rose-scented breeze and feel the sun on my shoulders. I want to watch the hawks hunt from the sycamore and then take my leave, bound for a place near my old friend Chuck Larson in the cemetery on the Severn, back where it began. That's from John McCain's new book called The Restless Wave.

Tim, what's the best way to describe the space that John McCain has carved out in American politics over the last few decades? You know, I listened to that last three minutes and he sounds kind of sick.

He's old. He's tired. But that's not the John McCain I remember or will remember. I'll remember John McCain who, you know, we call them a political maverick, but before that he was a genuine American war hero. You know, I was in Hanoi traveling a few months ago and I happened to go by the lake where he was shot down in Vietnam. And there's a monument there and it calls him an air pirate. I mean, how many among

us, right, will ever be known by a moniker like that? He's also a really funny guy. You don't really get that sense from the book or that segment. But, you know, one time there was a foreign trip and we were both on it together and he was talking, it happened to be around Thanksgiving, and he was talking about frying turkeys. He says, you know, whatever you do, make sure you don't do it on your deck. I set fire to my deck last year. But then came the punchline.

He said, well, I've been in worse deck fires. Of course, John McCain was on the USS Forrestal when the deck caught fire and a bomb destroyed his airplane. And he managed to scramble off the top of the airplane and get to safety. Yeah, it's like in the Senate, typically, the more higher profile you are, the less likely you are to spend any time talking to reporters or reflecting on things. Elizabeth Warren literally never talks to reporters at the Capitol. She'll just walk right past and not talk to you. John McCain would stand up and talk as long as you wanted and be funny about it and be irritated about it and snap at reporters

whose questions he thought were irritating, but also give you long explanations and thoughtful explanations and dig in for as long as reporters want. He would walk up to reporters and his signature line was, what? What? What do you want? Yeah, what do you want? And he has a very short temper. If you ask him a question that he thought was stupid, he would tell you so.

And when I was 24 or I was just starting to cover the defense industry for Politico, new to the Capitol. John McCain's obviously a big deal. And he just yells at me for a question he didn't like. He thought it was silly or dumb or whatever. But he's the only senator who, after casting votes, he came back, he was looking for me, and he wanted to personally apologize for being rude to me earlier. I mean, he's the for me and he wanted to personally apologize for being rude to me earlier. I mean, he's the kind, and he did that on at least two occasions. He does have a hot temper, but he also has kind of a deep well of conscience. Like it bugged him. It bugged him that he was mean. Yeah. I think, Tim, what you said, I think that really stands out to have a politician come

back and apologize to you. I mean, we all know that that's not usually the case. And I think that really stands out to have a politician come back and apologize to you. I mean, we all know that that's not usually the case. And I think that Senator McCain has obviously become an icon of the Senate. And recently, you know, in these years, part of the thing that or part of what critics would say about President Trump, one of the things they look at is his treatment of Senator McCain. And even after his diagnosis, he still will bring up that Senator McCain did not vote for the health care bill. Like this is something that he still brings up even now. And so critics of President Trump will say that that shows a lack of graciousness on his part. And obviously, even during the campaign, he never apologized for saying that, you know, he admires people who don't get shot down.

Don't get captured. Yeah. You know, I got to say, listening to those three minutes, the quality of his voice, where he is now in his life, very moving. But what I heard him saying was, you know what? The legacy of human rights, the accomplishments, America is already great. I read that in part as a subtweet of the current president. And I also thought about that famous picture of Ulysses S. Grant, who was dying, dying of cancer, and wrote an autobiography to save his family from financial ruin. The picture of him on the porch finishing that book. Yeah, and John McCain's voice in that clip we just heard brought me back to that place. Another incredible American.

All right, well, we're going to take one more quick break, and we will come back with Can't Let It Go. This message comes from Npr sponsor lisa the mattress with over 11 000 five-star reviews and a mission to end bedlessness in america the lisa mattress was designed to provide support and pressure relief to every body type and sleep style for a deeper night's sleep. Lisa plants a tree for every order and donates a mattress for every 10 sold. Get $125 off, free shipping, and 100 nights to try the Lisa mattress. Go to leesa.com slash NPR. We are six months away from the midterms, and I am already asking for predictions. Well, I was wrong about Trump. I thought he'd lose by about three and a half million votes. He did.

Sam Sanders here, a Republican strategist on a possible blue wave. Next time on It's Been a Minute from NPR. OK, now it is time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, where we all share one thing we cannot stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. I'm going to go first, and I think mine is a little bit of both. Now, we start the show every week with the timestamp saying things may have changed by the time you hear this podcast. The last time Tamara Keith was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, her can't let it go was about Seth Meyers and his wife having a very crazy baby delivery situation. Then she mentioned that my wife and I had a little less crazy than Seth Meyers baby situation, but we had

a new baby. So Tam tapes the podcast. Tam goes home. Later that night, before many people have heard that podcast, things changed and Tam had her baby, a little boy named Gibson. And then not only that, our producer, David Farrington, had another baby named Aiden. So three boys have been born to the NPR politics team in the last few weeks. That is a lot of babies. It's a baby boom. Congrats to Tam. Tam, of course, will be hanging out with Gibson for a while and she will be back on the pod in a little bit of time. Aisha, how about you? Okay, so this week I can't let go of,

and we talked about this guy a little earlier, Ty Cobb, but not Ty Cobb, his mustache. It's long and luxurious and a well-maintained handlebar. I don't know exactly how he gets the curl. It's got to be some sort of wax. But it is impressive. And unnatural. It reminds me a little bit of Yosemite Sam from Looney Tunes.

I really love that cartoon. I mean, of course, his curls up, whereas Sam's is down. But, you know, people on Twitter, when Ty Cobb was announced that he was retiring, they were saying that there was a competition between John Bolton's mustache, John Bolton, the new National Security Advisor, and Cobb's mustache, and that Bolton won out. And so that's why. There's only room for one mustache in this white house exactly and so I cannot let go of that mustache John Bolton was once asked if if he could he could repeal the Iran deal if he just shaved off his mustache and what did he say

he said he would refuse he would refuse that some would refuse. Some things are just too much to ask a man. Yes. Because the thing is, for all of the ways that facial hair has been in the last few years, and it seems like it might be going out a little bit, but everybody had beards everywhere. It didn't really penetrate the world of politics that much, but you have a lot of robust mustaches in the Trump orbit. Well, remember that many of these gentlemen are of the Tom Selleck, Magnum P.I. era.

So they're not doing Brooklyn. They're doing like the Tom Selleck back in the day. This is not Jared Kushner coming in with a bushy mustache. Moving on from mustaches or not. I don't know what you're going to say. Tim, what can you not let go? Mustache related or no? It's not.

Basically, I was watching the Fox News debate. They hosted a debate with the Republican candidates for West Virginia Senate. And one of the candidates is this guy, Don Blankenship. He's a former mining CEO. He was convicted to a year in federal prison because his mining company was involved in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. Twenty-nine people were killed, and he was convicted of conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards. And I should say that actually NPR did a ton of investigative reporting about that case at the time. Howard Burkus, one of our investigative reporters.

So that's the setup. And he's running for Senate now. And he was asked about the Mueller investigation. And essentially, his response was, hey, I know something about the feds. I know something about how the Justice Department rolls over people. And he got applause. He got cheers. Really? Yeah. And I thought that was just something I've been thinking about ever since, that about how the current environment we're in with the president going after the DOJ as he does is really changing the views, especially amongst the Republican electorate, about justice, law and House has evidenced some interest in giving people second chances. Jared Kushner is leading this kind of prison reform effort. And we know this week he got approached for a clemency bid by Kim Kardashian, of all people. So maybe they're trying to appeal to the redemption, the power of redemption. And there are a number of people who are running for office this year.

Joe Arpaio. Of course, he was pardoned. He was pardoned. And Michael Grimm, who's running for Congress in Staten Island. So it's really interesting to see how the public, at least some parts of the public, seem willing to forgive these sorts of criminal convictions. Or we'll see at election time how forgiving they are. I don't know if you need 50 plus 1, but, you know,

some percentage of Americans are willing to overlook this and support candidates. But forgive not in a way of, like, contrite apology and reform. Forgive in a way of, like, the feds came after me. Absolutely.

It's almost like it adds credibility in a way that you've been, that the feds have come after you, right? I think Arpaio feels that way. And I think that Blankenship feels that way. Well, Carrie, you know more about justice stuff than any of us. So what can't you let go? Well, I can't let go of the Twitter habit of George Conway. George Conway, of course, is, tweets things that could be viewed as jabs at the President of the United States. This morning, for instance, as we were all dealing with the

fallout from Rudy Giuliani's remarks on Fox, George Conway happened to tweet provisions of the campaign finance law that have to do with personal gifts and loans, and talking about how people, even if they're relatives or friends of candidates, give money for the purpose of influencing an election for federal office. That's not OK under federal campaign finance law. Timely time to point that out. Timely time to point that out when your wife is one of the people responding to crises in the White House. It just seems to me a very interesting dynamic. It's so fascinating that this keeps happening.

And Kellyanne Conway was asked about this and she got very defensive. But could you, I was just thinking, could you imagine if like during the Obama administration, like Susan Rice had a husband who was tweeting like, look into, you should look into Benghazi. People would go crazy. It's just unheard of. All right, well, that is a wrap for us for this week. We will be back in your feed soon. All the time in between our podcasts,

everybody always gets in touch with us saying, hey, are you going to do a podcast about this, about that? Why aren't you podcasting about this? In between the podcasts, we are always doing stories on your radio. So you can find us on your local public radio station or on NPR One, or check us out on NPR.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Tim Mack. I cover national security and politics. And I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.