The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, November 8

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Jeff Sessions has been forced out of his job as Attorney General. Will his replacement undermine the Russia investigation? Also - a deep dive into state legislatures and ballot measure results from Election Day. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, national security editor Phil Ewing and Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow. 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

This is Patrick from Tempe, Arizona, recording at the Internet, TV, and radio exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. as part of my first visit to the East Coast. This podcast was recorded at 1110 a.m. on Thursday, November 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Jeff Sessions has been forced out of his job as Attorney General. Will his replacement undermine the Russia investigation? And we're going to dive deep on state legislatures and ballot measures, all the things we haven't talked about yet that happened on Tuesday.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. All right, guys. It did not take long. We kind of knew that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was beleaguered and that the president regularly berated him and that he probably was not going to last long after the midterms. But wow, that happened fast. You know, I've been around long enough to know that sometimes things like that even happen on election night. So I was prepared with a mug of tea just in case. And in fact, things didn't go

down with Jeff Sessions until the following day. So that was a very reasonable in some circumstances course of events. So you took your tea to the microwave, you reheated it, and you started reporting? That's right. And Carrie was so well prepared. Let me just take you behind the scenes. Her story about Sessions' resignation was like an ice core from a glacier or like counting tree rings out in California.

It had been updated so many times with news events over the past year plus, as there have been these tensions and criticisms by the president of the attorney general, that it was this New Yorker-esque masterpiece that we were able to launch in very short order because of how long she and everyone else had been expecting this departure. Okay, so let's just explicitly address the question. Was he fired? Did he resign? I'm going to go with forced to resign because he's saying he resigned at the request of the White House, at the request of the president. And that matters for legal reasons because it implicates who might replace him and what kind of person that needs to be. But clearly, he got the call from the White House after the midterms, and they told him, Jeff, you've offered to resign in the past. Now is the time to go. Obviously, we know that President Trump was infuriated at Attorney General Sessions for

recusing himself and starting the process that led to the Mueller investigation. Were they on the same page on basically everything else? Was it only Russia that made Trump so angry at Sessions? Virtually everything else, Scott. The irony here is that all along, all this time that the president has been beating up on his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions was maybe the most effective cabinet member in advancing the president's agenda on very, very tough immigration measures, very pro-police, stepping away from investigating entire police departments like the Obama administration did. Very tough on drug criminals and drug crimes.

And very tough generally on sentencing issues. All of these were big turnarounds from what the Obama folks did and very much in line with the messaging of the Trump campaign for candidate Donald Trump. So let's pour one out for Jeff Sessions. Move on, I guess. You know, the sort of central tension point, as Scott said, between Sessions and President Trump was over the Russia investigation. Let's talk about who the new guy is and whether he will now oversee the Russia investigation. Okay, so this guy is not unfamiliar at the Justice Department. He actually was Jeff Sessions' chief of staff, his right-hand man, which is quite a leapfrog to go from like the guy who carries the briefcase to the guy who's making the decisions. But that's exactly what the Trump

White House wanted to happen. His name is Matt Whitaker. He's a former U.S. attorney in Iowa in the George W. Bush administration. And he has a long, long record as a commentator on CNN and elsewhere before he joined the Justice Department of making rough statements about the Mueller investigation and maybe calling it illegitimate. He doesn't like the Russia investigation. He has a long record of speaking out against it. Is he overse like the Russia investigation. He has a long record of speaking out against it. Is he overseeing the Russia investigation now? That's right. And he could try and move people out of the special counsel unit and back to main justice or the FBI, wherever they came from. He could try and pay them less. He could try and interfere with Mueller in the conduct of this investigation in terms of the authorization that he gives it about investigative tools that

it wants to use, subpoenas and things like that. Right now, we don't know whether he will do that or what this means in practical terms for the conduct of Mueller in his office, because this happened too recently. But the president was asked on Wednesday about why he doesn't just fire Mueller or eliminate the special counsel's office. And he said, in so many words, I have the power to do that, I believe. I just think it would make me look bad. I could fire everybody right now, but I don't want to stop it because politically I don't like stopping it. If Whitaker does constrain Mueller or the special counsel, he would have to do so in other ways because of the president's political calculations. Tiny little sidebar, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who had been overseeing the Russia investigation.

Just quickly, what happens with him? Rod Rosenstein is still in his job for now. I've heard some reports unconfirmed by the Justice Department that he may be eyeing the exits as well. Of course, this is an enormous thing to be leapfrogged over by the chief of staff who then becomes your boss. It's kind of bizarre. Rod Rosenstein, of course, has been in the Justice Department for something like 27 or 28 years. So it would be a big thing for him to leave. But he's been rumored to be on the way out the door for a long time now. So we know that part of the Mueller investigation has been into the idea of possible obstruction of justice going through the firing of James Comey and so many other things that that the thought was would be meant to limit this investigation. Would possibly the forced resignation of the attorney general over this reason be part

of that scope as well? Or is that hard to tell at this point? Or can the president just fire his attorney general because the attorney general works for him? You know, that's a matter of legal debate. We do know, Scott, that the Mueller team has already been asking questions, not just about the basis for firing FBI Director Jim Comey, but also all these complaints and criticisms that Donald Trump has made of Jeff Sessions. The Mueller team has been asking the Trump legal gang about this for some time. And so why not add one more question about Jeff Sessions' forced resignation to that list. You know, the thinking from Democrats is that Donald Trump has tried to get rid of a lot of people who were in charge of investigating him one way or another. And Jeff Sessions, of course, is yet another on the list. Scott, you cover Congress. I do.

They have Democrats in Congress in particular have been weighing in on this move. They do. And that matters because soon the Democrats will be in the majority of the House of Representatives and they will be able to determine what to investigate, what to call hearings on. Ranking member Jared Nadler on the Judiciary Committee and the other Democrats on the committee have sent a letter to both the Justice Department and to the current chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who is still a Republican through the end of the year, saying the forced firing of Attorney General Sessions appears to be part of an ongoing pattern of behavior by the president seeking to undermine the investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election.

And they go on from there. Just a reminder that while Democrats don't have that investigating power just yet, they sure do in January. And you can guarantee that they will look at this pretty quickly. The difference between now and January is now this is a strongly worded letter that the White House, the Justice Department, the Trump administration can treat basically like a letter from the public. And in January, it will be a letter from a committee that has subpoena power. The other thing that's different is today the Russia investigation is completely partisan. It's something Democrats believe implicates the president,

and there's lots of evidence of wrongdoing. Many Republicans do not believe that. There's been months of conditioning of the political battlefield by the president and his allies to cast Mueller as this grand inquisitor who's run amok, and he's got all these allegedly biased specialists who are working for him. And the political environment for the Senate today is different from the way it was a year ago, when people were talking about Sessions being fired at that time, or Mueller potentially being fired. Americans now view this story through those

partisan prisms in a way that could make the reception of a new attorney general a different proposition politically than it was a year ago. Let me also add this. We haven't heard much from Robert Mueller over the last seven weeks or so. The thinking is that they went into kind of a pre-midterm election blackout to try to avoid influencing voters in one way or another. But after this, I'm headed to the courthouse where a former aide to Roger Stone, dirty trickster and sometime Trump advisor Roger Stone, is challenging the authority, the constitutional authority of the special counsel. So things are ramping up again in some respect in this Mueller investigation. We're going to be hearing a lot more. We know that the grand

jury has been meeting a lot and talking with a lot of people close to Roger Stone. And more could be coming from the Mueller team. The question is what new acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker is going to do about that. Well, and the reason Roger Stone is relevant or interesting, one reason is that well before the emails were released, well before John Podesta's emails, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails were released well before John Podesta's emails, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails were released by WikiLeaks. Roger Stone tweeted out, well, Podesta's time in the barrel is coming soon. He also had a conference call in August of 2016, in which he told people he was aware of what Assange's plans were and that they should stay tuned because things were going to happen that were going to help in the Trump campaign. There

have also been reports that suggest he communicated with the leaders of the Trump campaign, including the CEO at the time, Steve Bannon, saying, keep your eye on this, Assange, he's going to dump a load for us for a week for the rest of the campaign cycle. What Stone has said since then is that he was just making it all up. He was pretending that he had some kind of inside line with WikiLeaks that he really didn't have. He was just going off Julian Assange's public statements. No one knows what the reality is behind all this, but we may get some of the answers as Carrie was just discussing from the special counsel's office. Impressive bluffing, though, given how accurate it turned

out to be. Uncannily accurate in the view of some. All right. Well, I believe that we should stay tuned because odds are more is coming. But for now, we're going to let Carrie and Phil go back, carry off to court. And Scott, stick around, because when we get back, we're going to be putting on our magnifying glasses and looking below those big top lines at state legislative chambers. Do you put on magnifying glasses? Well, maybe like readers. You know, Scott, in a couple of years, our eyes are going to turn and then our arms won't be long enough and we'll need readers and bifocals. This is taking a dark turn.

And then we'll die. Scott is wearing his glasses on the tip of his nose, just like former Michigan Senator Carl Leavitt. Oh, God. I salute you. Yeah. Bye, guys. Bye-bye. Goodbye. Okay, we'll be right back.

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To get started, go to rocketmortgage.com slash NPR politics. RateShield approval only valid on certain 30-year purchase transactions. Additional conditions or exclusions may apply. Based on Quicken Loans data and comparison to public data records. Equal housing lender. Licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030. Ever get to Friday, look back on the week and say to yourself, what just happened? I'm Sam Sanders. Check out my podcast, It's Been a Minute.

Where every Friday we catch up on the news and the culture ofma Khalid and Domenico Montanaro. Hey. Hey there. And Scott is still here. And I'm still here. Hello. Hi, Scott Detrow. Scott's not going anywhere. So we focused a lot on the 435 House seats and the 35 Senate seats and all these governorships that were being voted on on Tuesday. But there were a lot of other things on

the ballot, state legislative races and also in a number of states, ballot initiatives. What stood out to you, Domenico? Well, look at Medicaid expansion. It passed in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, not exactly liberal states. Marijuana was also expanded for use in Michigan, Missouri and Utah as well. It was legalized actually in Michigan, aiming to go on sale by 2020. And minimum wages were increased, passed in Arkansas and Missouri as well. To me, what was interesting is Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, pretty conservative states where we saw Medicaid expansion. The other thing was also that was also very interesting to me was in Florida. So in Florida, there was a ballot initiative to restore voting rights for former felons. And this passed and it will arguably give the right to vote back to over a million

people. And I think a lot of people are paying attention to the really, really tight races right now for Senate and governor in Florida, which still look a little bit murky. You could make the case that with a million new voters, some of that dynamic may change in the future. And this, to me, is one of the biggest stories of Tuesday. And it's so interesting because, as we've talked about, Democrats running statewide and Republican states are having a hard time, continue to have a hard time. But if you look at progressive ideas by themselves, they're incredibly popular and increasingly popular. All of these initiatives, Medicaid expansion, recreational pot, minimum wage, were a lot more controversial a few years ago, but they're passing in conservative places. And it seems to me that progressive ideas without the polarizing progressive candidates are popular. And I think maybe that's an area where President Trump is really politically smart because he knows that so many people out there respond to the cultural sports team like, I hate your team, I like my team, and he attacks candidates personally. And that seems to work. If you take the candidates out, the progressive ideas are really popular. If you take the Obama out of the care, for example. Yep. I mean, Medicaid expansion was something that was part of the ACA, the Affordable Care Act passing. And those are states where they decided not to.

I think your point is really spot on. And I would even add the idea of kind of aspects of criminal justice reform, which if we conclude the restoration of felon rights to that bucket list, I know when governors have unilaterally done that, it's not necessarily as popular. Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, a great example. Exactly. But my question is, why is that the case? I get what you're saying about the fact that these ideas are popular in isolation, but I don't fully get why they don't match up when we actually have candidates running on those policies. I think it comes back to the idea that we view politics through this tribal lens of us versus them and you like your team and you hate the other team. So I think when it's attached to the person that you've been trained to dislike, to yell about on Twitter,

then you don't think about the idea as much. And I mean, think about, go back to the Obama administration, how much he would stump around the country pushing for his actual proposals, something that President Trump doesn't really do. President Trump goes around the country just holding campaign rallies all the time, whether it's an odd year or an even year. And he seems to get that, by and large, a lot of voters aren't ever going to look under the hood when there's another candidate that they can just

dislike and vote no against. So policy doesn't really matter for a lot of our politics, is what you're saying. I think the policy matters. It's just that partisan identification becomes a much stronger thing than the policy. I mean, if you can have the argument on one side or the other and have people say, oh, a Democrat is passing this thing or pushing this thing. You know, there must be something in that that's not really wholly about this because you know them. And Asma, you were saying before that it wasn't particularly partisan. No, it wasn't. That's what I heard from voters down there.

I mean, when you would talk to people, a lot of folks knew about this ballot initiative. They knew about it just as much as they knew about who was running for governor, which was sort of surprising. I mean, this is sort of an extrapolation. I was talking to people who are obviously politically engaged. But to me, that was interesting. And I met people who said that they had door knockers come into their doors. One guy said that he had somebody who I believe was actually formerly incarcerated himself come to his door. I mean, it's a great strategy for getting a ballot initiative passed. Well, another sidebar on a lot of these ballot initiatives is that you have increasing numbers of states where recreational marijuana is becoming legal, and yet it's still illegal on the federal level. And there seems to be no game plan for rectifying this or getting everybody on the

same page. I mean, that's going to hit the road at some point sometime soon. You know, I know we've been talking about Medicaid expansion, but one count example that I thought was really interesting is that in Montana, voters appeared to have rejected an initiative to raise taxes on tobacco sales, and that would have continued funding Medicaid expansion. So, I mean, maybe it's an indirect argument. You could argue, I don't know if the voters were voting against Medicaid expansion or against increasing taxes. But the end result is that likely Medicaid expansion will not continuously be funded in that state. And to that point, there are a lot of conservative initiatives that also wound up passing. For example, North Dakota rejected marijuana legalization. Photo ID is now going to have to be used at voting places in Arkansas.

Alabama passed a couple of amendments that were interesting, one to allow the Ten Commandments to be shown in public schools and on public properties, which is something that obviously became a big issue when Roy Moore, who ran for the Senate, was the chief justice in that state. They also passed an initiative on right to life, that there would be no abortion protection, that the state policy is to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and rights of unborn children. That was on the ballot. And West Virginia passed a similar initiative that a lot of people believe putting that in place is directly, they're doing a state

constitutional initiative where they're saying that they're against abortion. And a lot of people believe that that's intended for when or if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, that they could then say automatically not allowed in the state. What's interesting about what you're describing, Domenico, is that most, if not all of those things you described are cultural issues, as opposed to, say, health care policy. It's just an interesting observation. Let's move on to state legislatures. A whole bunch of state senators and assembly people and state house people, depending on your state, were up for election. Was there a big trend that emerged from all of these elections?

Going into Election Day, Democrats were expected to pick up somewhere between four and 14 legislative chambers. They wound up picking up six in New York, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, Colorado and New Hampshire. Now, what all of those have in common is that they either had a another chamber that was already Democratic or they have a governor in that state. So, you know, it's not as if Democrats wound up taking over a bunch of, you know, swing state legislatures, but they think that there's a lot of progress that they've made. Scott. And here's one fact that I've really been

obsessing on all week, and it's my policy can't let it go, I guess, from the National Conference of State Legislatures. After Tuesday's results, there is only one state in the entire country where the upper chamber and the lower chamber are controlled by different parties, and that is Minnesota. Everywhere else, the same party controls both chambers. Now, there's a lot of states where the governor might be a different party, but that just really is such a key glance at how increasingly tribal and aligned with certain parties we are state by state. And it's the first time in over 100 years that that's been the case, which, you know, a lot of times we talk in presidential elections that you can determine how people vote based on geographically where they live. And it's a really uncomfortable statement for a lot of people. But I think that

when we look at state legislatures and how aligned they are with either Republicans or Democrats in different states, it kind of just reaffirms this idea that really geography does matter. And geography is sometimes akin to partisanship. And of course, we should point out that not all states have two chambers. Nebraska has its unicameral. Moving on. Wow. Way to go, Nebraska. Republicans really focused on legislative seats for about a decade. So about 15 years ago or so, Republicans really started spending a lot of money on these state legislative races, which is not a thing that a lot of campaigns had been really doing or a lot of parties had really been focusing on.

I mean, it's not sexy. It's not like what donors want to necessarily spend their money on. But that effort by Republicans paid dividends. It certainly did. And now I'm seeing for the first time in this cycle and last cycle, like 2017, during the Virginia statehouse race, there were Democratic outside groups that popped up that were pouring money into those races and really had an understanding of what those races were like. And I was getting emails and phone calls the way I would from national committees for other things. So Democrats have really started to pick up on this. In fact, Democrats picked up three hundred and thirty three state legislative seats. Now, they were down about a thousand state

legislative seats, but they see this as a lot of progress. And they also picked up seats in some of those places like Texas, Florida and North Carolina. They didn't flip those chambers, but they really moved into Republican margins. I was at an event with Tom Perez, who's the Democratic National Committee chairman, and he was talking about those legislative seats, but he was he was really crowing about North Carolina where they were able to flip enough seats so that Republicans wouldn't have a super majority in either chamber of the legislature in North Carolina. That is like that is such a tiny little thing. But I mean, I mean, it makes it makes a big deal in those states. It does make a big deal in those states. But that that is like it feels like I can see what you're saying. It's a small thing. But the fact that people were protesting on Mondays because the North Carolina legislature was fully controlled by Republicans. And they had a Republican governor.

And they were instituting a lot of things that a lot of Democrats and liberals found odious. And it went to the point of lots of national attention and people saying, how could this be possible? Well, it's possible when you forget about those inches. But even the National Conference of State Legislatures did describe this as modest. I mean, I know the Democrats are talking about this as being progress, and I totally understand why they see it that way. But in 2010, Democrats lost a lot of seats, right? That was the year the Democrats across the board didn't do well in the midterms. And what they were saying is Democrats lost 24 chambers

at that point. So even if they're making these incremental gains, they're just starting off at a point where they've got a lot of work to do if they want to be in a position by 2020 to actually control more state legislatures. And that matters for for redistricting. Yeah, let's do a lightning round. We've been talking about state legislatures and control of state legislatures. Lightning round. Why does it matter? They set policy that's statewide. I mean, we think about it through redistricting, but it's incredibly important for what passes and doesn't pass in every state in the country. Yeah, it is very, very important on a local level when it comes to specific types of policy, education, taxes and health care and health care. You know, we talked a lot earlier about Medicaid expansion. There are governors who ran on Medicaid expansion. One example is Tony Evers in Wisconsin, the Democrat. He won already. The Republican controlled legislature has come out

and said we are not on board with this. So it matters if you are not in sync in terms of your policy initiatives when it comes to the governor and the legislature? Yeah, I think it's policy and politics, right? I mean, you have the local issues that can really matter, especially when people are looking at Washington as being dysfunctional. And we have a now we're gonna have a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, and they're probably not going to get a whole lot done together. And there's politics as well, right? I mean, when we look at redistricting for 2020, this is a place where, you know, a lot of that groundwork starts. We are going to end this conversation here. And Scott, we know you need to run. So we'll see you later. See you later. And when we come back, can't let it go.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow with Google is providing free online training and tools to help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed. Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Support also comes from ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds the right people for you and actively invites them to apply. That's why ZipRecruiter is rated number one by employers in the U.S. based on hiring sites with over a thousand reviews on Trustpilot. And right now, listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. By midday on November 6th, 1985, Columbia's Palace of Justice in Bogota was a battleground.

Guerrillas held dozens of hostages and the army had the building surrounded. What happened that fateful day? This week on Radio Ambulante. All right, we are back and now it is time for Can't Let It Go. The things we just can't stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Domenico, kick us off. And it's good that you use the phrase kickoff because I'm thinking about racing and this is about horse racing. And I don't particularly follow horse racing very closely. But when I was looking through ballot initiatives, when I was prepping our briefing book, I was really surprised by one initiative in particular. And it is an initiative that was to try to legalize historical horse racing in the state of Idaho.

What is historical horse racing? Horse racing that already happened. Happened in the past. What? And literally, it's to go to places like OTB, you know, off-track betting facilities. They install these, like, little, you know, monitors all over the state and bars and things like that where you could watch horse races that already happened and place bets on who would win those races. But, like, that's weird because, like, what if you know? Exactly.

That's a very good question. And there's, like, the Google machine. But like that's weird because like what if you know? Exactly. And there's like the Google machine. Anyway, this thing failed. Fifty four. Forty six. The good sense of the voter. You're looking at me as if like, duh. You know what?

This actually was passed by the state legislature five years ago. It was something that they were taking up. But the thing that people were upset about was they felt that the machines that were installed look like slot machines. And it was sort of an eyesore around the state rather than the idea that you're betting on horse races that already happened. Maybe they're like local horse races and no one was paying attention and there's no records of it. Just say it. No, they're not.. Because I went into a little bit of a rabbit hole. Will Seabiscuit win? I don't know.

I guess I'll bet on Seabiscuit. It was really strange. But millions of dollars were spent promoting and fighting the measure, and it went down, Prop 1 in Idaho. But I suspect, given its history, it'll be back. Like maybe we can bet on historical ballot initiatives when that one comes up. Asma, what can't you let go of? Oh man, so mine's not nearly

as funny. It's a little more straight-laced, but it's about a race that was called sort of just recently after the fact and that's Georgia's 6th Congressional District. Y'all might remember this district because we paid a lot of attention to it in 2017. It was the center of the political universe. It was. And it was the most expensive House race in history at that point. It was Karen

Handel, the Republican, versus the Democrat, John Ossoff. Handel won, but she was defeated now by a woman whose name is Lucy McBath. She's an African-American woman who ran, I would say, really quite strongly on gun control. She was one of these mothers of the movement. She lost her son to gun violence, and she talked a lot about this. And, you know, we have, I think, a lot of questions this election cycle about what issues matter to voters. To me, what's interesting is the 6th Congressional District was not a district that many people would consider to be a quite Democratic district. No, the opposite. Yeah, no, it was much more of a Republican suburban district. And here you have a woman who ran on gun violence, but also a woman who's African-American who ran in a district that is about three quarters percentage white. I mean, and so this raises questions, too. I know, you know, people talk a lot about political analysts

often encouraging minority candidates that, hey, if you want to win, run in minority heavy districts. And we see a number of examples from Election Day where we had African-American candidates win in districts that didn't really look like them demographically. Yeah. And there was some thought that she was able to excite the population of African-American voters that are in that district more than John Ossoff did. Tam, what can't you let go of? So I got this press release from the Secret Service. It is the most amazing story ever. The president of Estonia was coming to America and had signed up for the New York City Marathon.

Because, you know, why not? The president of Estonia? The president of Estonia. Apparently she has been training. I mean, there's like 25,000 people running that thing. Maybe she gets a special dispensation. Maybe she won in the lottery. I'm not sure.

But she comes to New York to run the New York City Marathon. The Secret Service provides protection for foreign dignitaries. Oh, my goodness. So there were two Secret Service agents who had to run the New York City Marathon. Couldn't they just pass off the baton? But they didn't. That would be great.

This is the most amazing thing. These two Secret Service agents actually ran the marathon and it was not like a slow time. She finished in four hours, two minutes, 40 seconds. Wow, that's fast. That is like 40 minutes faster than my marathon time. And I bet she didn't throw up, 40 seconds. Wow, that's fast. That is like 40 minutes faster than my marathon time. And I bet she didn't throw up at the end. That is way faster than my marathon run because I've never run a marathon. Do you like how Tam sneaked that in there? That she ran a marathon? I know. Did you guys catch that? I know. People who run marathons

are insufferable. My dad is a track coach and can't stand marathons because he thinks they're so bad. Because the people are insufferable. No, no, no. Because they're so hard on your body. And in fact, that's actually one reason why I would be annoyed if I were the president of Estonia or I was privileged enough to get Secret Service protection. And I had two exhausted Secret Service agents running next to me. But get this. These guys were awesome.

I'm sure they were. Because these Secret Service agents, one of them had run 56 marathons before. Another one had run 28 marathons before. Who runs so many marathons? I know some of our listeners are probably going to write me back. But I'm just saying I have never run a marathon. I'm always perplexed and so amazed by people who do. We're actually very popular with runners.

I'll have you know. Because people like listening to our podcast while they're training. Because we talk a long time. Yeah, there you go. All right, those are the things we can't let go of this week. We will be back as soon as there's political news you need to know about. Until then, keep up with our newsletter, which contains the best political stories and analysis from our team. Domenico, where can they find that? NPRpolitics.org.

All right. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.