The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, September 7

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

President Trump cut a surprising deal with Democrats on the debt ceiling. What it might mean for the GOP agenda — plus more on the President's DACA decision. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House reporter Geoff Bennett, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and editor/correspondent Ron Elving. More coverage at nprpolitics.org. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comeRL to MTV. The show is called It's Been a Minute. Every Friday, we catch up on the week of news and culture, everything. And every Tuesday, I sit down for some long interviews with authors, filmmakers, directors, and more. You can find It's Been a Minute on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. This is Brenda calling from Rome, Italy. This podcast was recorded at three o'clock Eastern on Thursday, September 7. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org on the NPR One app or on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Ciao. It's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our roundup

of the week's political news. President Trump cut a surprise deal with Democrats on the debt ceiling, and that changes the dynamic for what had been setting up to be a jam-packed September for Congress. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. Have we had the Ron and Mara combination in the podcast before? Not in some while. We have had it, but it has been months, I believe. And it's time we resurrected it.

And Jeff, you are joining us from the Senate booth today. Yes, I'm joining you from the Senate booth because I was here covering Donald Trump Jr.'s appearance on the Hill today, which we'll talk about later. And while that was all going on, the Senate voted on a hurricane aid package, which has become much more than a hurricane aid package yesterday when something really surprising happened. President Trump, Mr. Art of the Deal, struck a big deal with top Democrats. But by struck a deal, what we really of the Deal, struck a big deal with top Democrats. But by struck a deal, what we really mean to say is that he basically agreed with exactly what the Democrats proposed and undercut his Republican allies. So this was the stage here. President Trump is sitting down in the Oval Office with all of the top congressional leaders,

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. And the subject was what to do about the debt ceiling. It's expiring soon. We've talked about that and it needs to be extended. So Schumer and Pelosi said going into it, Democrats would be happy to tie a debt extension to Harvey relief, but only for three months. Now, McConnell and Paul Ryan wanted a much longer extension of 18 months. So three months versus 18 months. Why does this matter? Why were these two sides taking these positions going in? Because there's an election within the next 18 months and there isn't one in the next three. And the Democrats would very much like to have this debt ceiling thing be a burden

for the Republicans and have it come up repeatedly so that the Republicans are forced to take a difficult vote that splits their caucus. And just to back up a little for people who don't know or even care what the debt ceiling is, the debt ceiling has to be raised because Congress decided to make it into one of these painful exercises because Congress has already appropriated and spent the money. So they have to raise the amount of money the Treasury is allowed to borrow, even though they've already borrowed it or allowed to pay back actually on their debts. If they don't raise the debt ceiling, the U.S. goes into default. That's a financial calamity. And it's very, very unpopular, especially with Republicans. And they don't want to vote on it at all, let alone over and over and over again in the next 18 months.

That's right. And Paul Ryan today said one of the reasons why he was pushing for an 18-month deal was because for the credit markets, stability and longevity are key. It's also true politically, what Ron and Mara are saying, that if you look at the last time that there was a vote on a clean debt limit, only 28 House Republicans voted in favor of it. And it's because traditionally, when they do vote on a debt limit hike, they also want to include some sort of cuts. So those are the dynamics going in. And on top of all that, because Republicans don't like to vote for the debt ceiling, Democrats usually have to supply the votes, which means Schumer and Pelosi can say, in exchange for our votes, give us this.

So Republicans feel strongly about it going into the meeting so strongly that this is what Paul Ryan said just before he got in the car to go to the White House. I think that's a ridiculous idea. I hope that they don't mean that. Let's just think about this. We've got all this devastation in Texas. We've got another unprecedented hurricane hitting, about to hit Florida, and they want to play politics with a debt ceiling? So that's the backdrop. They get to the Oval Office and at the meeting, according to sources from both sides, Republicans and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin say 18 months. Democrats say no. Republicans say, OK, how about six months?

Democrats say no. We said three months. We're sticking to that. And suddenly Trump says, I agree with the Democrats and strikes a deal that totally catches the Republicans in the room by surprise. This was one of those immediate record scratch moments that happened over and over again with the Trump presidency. Mara, what did you make of this when you first heard the news? Well, what was so interesting, by the way, is that the night before White House officials were telling Republicans, we're with you on our negotiating strategy. We're going to stick together and get as long a debt ceiling extension as we can.

What was so interesting about it yesterday is I was on Air Force One flying out to North Dakota and back in one day so Donald Trump could give a half hour speech. And usually when you're on Air Force One, all the news is happening on the ground back in Washington. Yesterday was different. The president came back to announce that he had just made this deal. We had members of Congress on the plane with him. For instance, Kevin Cramer, who's a North Dakota Republican in Congress, who came back to talk to us and said that he said he gasped when he heard that the deal had been made. He said, in fact. Not in a good way. Well, he gasped because he was so shocked.

He said, in fact, I sought clarification when the president told us before the flight. I sought clarification to make sure I understood that it applied to the debt ceiling and the CR, not just the CR. And when we received that confirmation, I said, wow. And just for parentheses here, the CR, which we will hear people talking about a lot in the next few hours and days, is a continuing resolution. And it's what Congress does when it has not done its homework and passed all of its appropriations bills. And they're nowhere near getting that done. And they weren't going to get it done. And there was always going to have to be this stopgap measure that we call a continuing resolution. Now we know it's going to go into December.

You know, Scott, you mentioned the hurricane relief. The Senate voted today 80 to 17. They passed it by and large with Democratic votes to approve $15.25 billion in relief for areas affected by Hurricane Harvey. And, of course, Hurricane Irma is now barreling toward the Florida coast. And FEMA has really just spent through the money that it has because advanced hurricane preparations, as you might imagine, costs a lot of money. So this money is desperately needed and, frankly, comes right on time. Yeah. And the total cost, most people assume, of Harvey is going to be north of $100 billion. So even $15 billion, which is about double what it was this time yesterday, is just a beginning down payment on all the costs there.

So, Jeff, going into this month, we had talked a lot on the podcast and everywhere else about how September was going to be action packed, filled with all these deadlines. There was just so much to do. It seems like this really reshapes that, doesn't it? It does. And I think this is one of the areas where sometimes the easiest explanation when it comes to the president is kind of the correct one. I think on this, he was looking for a quick deal. He was looking for some momentum. He was looking for the positive coverage that would come from doing this bipartisan deal with the Democrats.

Because remember, he ran on this platform of upending the ways of Washington. And so, you know, looking ahead to the next three months, what do we have? We have tax reform. He's going to need Democratic buy-in on that. And he's certainly going to need Democratic buy-in on figuring out what to do about DACA, the protections for the immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. I was speaking with Dick Durbin earlier today. He, along with Lindsey Graham, they introduced a DREAM Act, a bipartisan DREAM Act,

that would protect a lot of these young immigrants. The DREAM Act has languished in Congress for some 16 years. But Durbin made the point that inadvertently or otherwise, Trump's decision to rescind DACA with this six-month delay to give Congress a window to act has actually made the ground more fertile for them to get this DREAM Act passed, which I thought was pretty noteworthy. And the president has all but said that's what he wants Congress to do. He's not demanding a lot of other things along with it, like funding for the wall. He's just saying, you know, put some border security and DACA together and I'll sign it. And Democrats are pretty amenable to that. his own team in advance. It was done in such an impulsive way, pulling the rug out from under them right as they were sitting in the Oval Office. And he not only caught them by surprise, he also, in the past couple of days, has called into question his rescinding of the DACA order when

he tweeted, if Congress can't do this in six months, I will revisit this myself. And also in North Dakota, he talked about Chuck and Nancy would like to see something happen, meaning DACA legislated, and so do I. But I will tell you, I really believe Congress wants to take care of it. We discussed that also today. And Chuck and Nancy would like to see something happen, and so do I. And I said, if we can get something to happen, we're going to sign it. It's almost as if for the last 24 hours, it's been Donald Trump and Chuck and Nancy. He's a man without a party.

And Mara, this morning, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, said during her press conference she credited Chuck Schumer's ability to do what she called speak New York to President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday. Because imagine on his side of the aisle, you have Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, two people who he probably doesn't have that much in common with. He's been excoriating them for weeks. Right, exactly. Publicly. And then you have Chuck Schumer.

And remember, Donald Trump, before he leased the Republican Party to run for president, was a Manhattan Democrat, spent a lot of money donating to Democratic causes and to Democratic candidates, has a long relationship with Chuck Schumer. Apparently, the force of personality here is what helped get this deal made. So the concern from a lot of Republicans, though, was that in immediately agreeing to this deal with the Democrats and not getting much in return, he has set up Schumer and Pelosi to have a lot of input a couple months from now when all this stuff comes up. Let's talk about that. But first, let's listen to Nebraska Republican Ben Sasse, who talked about this on the Senate floor earlier today. Chuck Schumer, whose title is minority leader, not majority leader, just made himself the most powerful man in America for the month of December. Chuck Schumer has made himself the key man in all negotiations

in December because of the legislation we're going to pass today. So Harvey and Irma turned out to be highly empowering for Chuck and Nancy to be the brokers, if you will, between the different elements of the Republican Party, which could govern by themselves if they could govern by themselves. But they're so at odds with each other about how to run the government that they would not be able to do it without some Democratic votes that Chuck and Nancy can withhold. So just explain what that looks like. Is that boiled down, oversimplified? Is that we know you need to raise the debt ceiling. We have the votes to do that because your caucus won't do it. In return, legalize DACA.

In return, stabilize health care. Can it be as straightforward as that? Yes. In fact, it could be those things. Exactly. And legalize DACA without putting in money for your wall, which might have been an idea that would have occurred to Donald Trump. And that might have been a real deal.

But now, maybe not so much because we have empowered the Democratic leaders. You could end up the year with DACA legislated, spending not cut, and Obamacare not just intact but stabilized through an act of Congress. Now, that would be a pretty good outcome for President Hillary Clinton. Not an outcome of government controlled at all levels by Republicans. We've been getting this question a lot from listeners. Why do Republicans in Congress have to go along with what the president wants here? Why couldn't they have just said, that's great. We're going to stick to 18 months. Well, I'm sure Jeff has a lot of thoughts on this, but there's a reason for that. You watched Paul Ryan hours before the meeting called it disgraceful and ridiculous to after the meeting

explaining why Donald Trump did a very good thing. He wanted to save the country in the face of these disasters. The reason is that the majority of Republican voters who vote in primaries really love the president, and they don't really love Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. That's right. They are really stuck. I talked to a Republican operative who says that every Republican member that he talks to says the one thing they hear from their constituents, more than anything else, their Republican constituents, is why aren't you

supporting the president more? Now, there is a mini revolt brewing right now among conservatives, members of the Freedom Caucus, who don't like the idea of this short-term debt ceiling hike, and maybe there'll be a revolt. The last time a Republican House speaker, John Boehner, made a deal with a Democratic president, Barack Obama, there was a revolt and Boehner lost his job. Now Donald Trump made a deal with Nancy Pelosi. Is there going to be a similar revolt against him from the grassroots? Probably not. Now, here's a little fact. The Americans for Limited Government, a very conservative group, has put out a survey. It was done by a Republican pollster that shows that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are less popular than Antifa. Antifa... Among Republicans? You may know, this is just a poll. But the astonishing thing is how low Paul Ryan and

Mitch McConnell are even among Republicans. Not less popular than Antifa with that group, you understand. But their point is Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have become poison for the Republican Party. They're less popular overall than a group of leftists. And as a result, what you were just saying about what President Trump can do with the base of Republican voters who are most loyal in a midterm election like next year's is greater than what the supposed leaders can. One of the big questions about this is this short-term deal might in the end be good. He cleared the decks. It means they don't have to worry about the debt ceiling or government funding for the next couple of months. Theoretically, that would be a time where they could get tax overhaul done. That's what every

Republican will say they absolutely have to do, especially after they failed to pass an Obamacare replacement. It's the one thing they need to do to bring home to their voters in 2018. The question I have is, if this is the new MO for Donald Trump, and we don't know if it is, it could just be a one-off. If he truly is going to diss his own party, leave them in the dust and make a lot of deals with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, which people like bipartisanship. Voters say they like it. It gets some good press, might even help his approval ratings. What does that do to the conservative Republican base? Does it make them less enthusiastic or more? And that's a very important thing going into 2018 for Republicans. Donald Trump is not on the ballot.

Republican members of Congress are. They need their voters to come out and vote for them. I don't know if this helps them or hurts them. And on the issue of bipartisanship, let's take a quick listen to something President Trump said about that today at the White House. I think that's what the people of the United States want to see. They want to see some dialogue. They want to see coming together to an extent, at least. And I think you see that with DACA. You see that with so many different things. I think you really saw it yesterday, loud and clear. The people of the United States want to see it coming together, at least to an extent. We're different parties. We have different thoughts, different feelings, different ideas.

But I think you're going to see a much stronger coming together. The thing I kept wondering was, in that meeting, what if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had just floated some ideas for a tax infrastructure plan that the president could assign? Maybe he would have said yes to that, too. We've been floating the single-payer idea. And don't forget, it wasn't long ago that Donald Trump called Chuck Schumer the head clown.

And crying Chuck, too. And crying Chuck. So we don't know how he's going to be with them next week. And not only that, this was the first face-to-face meeting that Trump had with either Schumer or Pelosi since his first month in office. He had been in touch with them on the phone, but they had not been in the same room since fairly early on in his administration. And yet he comes in, he strikes this deal. And one of the iconic images of the day was a Getty Images photograph taken from the Rose Garden looking through the window into the Oval Office by Alex Wong of Getty Images showing a beaming Chuck Schumer in an embrace with President Trump kind of looking like two guys who just struck a deal with a Trump aide in the background looking not super thrilled with the situation. All right. Last thing on all of this. We're talking about how this could affect tax reform.

Mara, you went to North Dakota yesterday with the president to hear him talk about tax reform. What is the quick update on where this actually stands? Is it any more of a real plan with details than it was this time last week? The president says that in two weeks we're going to have the details of the tax plan. Two weeks is his favorite time frame. He says that a lot. In two weeks, we're going to get this. You're so right.

Oftentimes, whatever he's talking about doesn't happen in two weeks. We don't know the details, but apparently they're going to come soon this month. They're going to include rate cuts for corporations. They're going to include an increase in the standard deduction for individuals and the child tax credit. There'll be some incentives for corporations to bring back funds they have parked overseas. The big question, I think, as the tax debate goes forward is, at some point, whatever the details are, they will be scored and we'll find out who benefits the most. How much do the upper income taxpayers get? How much do

middle class families get? And that, I think, will determine the contours of this fight. Taxes have been cut in the past for corporations and they haven't used that windfall or more profits to invest in manufacturing plants and hire more workers and raise wages. You know, the burden is on the administration to prove that what they say is a populist, middle class oriented tax plan will actually help working families. All right. Well, we'll look for that in two weeks or as we've often learned, not. We are going to take a quick break right here. When we come back, we're going to talk a bit more about the president's decision to end DACA and what could come next. All right, we're back. We talked a bit about this earlier in the pod, and on Tuesday, we did an entire episode on it. But let's talk a bit more about President Trump's

decision earlier this week to rescind DACA. That's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And he rescinded it, but not quite. He said he will do so six months from now and told Congress you have six months to act or else these these people will face deportation. But Jeff, that initial cliff or warning the way that Jeff Sessions laid it out. Certainly, it seemed that way. President Trump has since then kind of walked that back several times. Yeah, well, he put out a tweet Tuesday night that said Congress now has six months to legalize DACA, something the Obama administration was unable to do. If they can't, I will revisit this issue. And it seemed to imply that he would in some way take steps to reinstate DACA in his own executive authority if for some reason Congress wasn't unable to act within that six months,

which is unlikely considering that his own attorney general said that it was unconstitutional. President Obama, for that matter, when he established DACA, wrestled with that and said it was a temporary fix. But then this morning, he sent another tweet where he writes, for all of those DACA that are concerned about your status during the six-month period, you have nothing to worry about, no action, implying that they wouldn't be deported. And we know that that tweet came by way of a conversation he had with Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi asked him to send some note of reassurance to all of the Dreamers. And that's the tweet that we got. The thing about it is it's not entirely accurate that they have nothing to worry about because

they don't know, for instance, what happens in six months. Will they lose their work authorization? Will they lose their driving privileges? If they happen to encounter someone affiliated with immigration enforcement, will they be deported as previous Dreamers have been? You know, so I'm not sure that that tweet in itself allayed a lot of concerns. All right. So we should say that if you are a DACA enrollee, the government says your permit remains valid until it expires, even if that date is after March. And you can renew if your permit expires before March, even though they're not taking any new applications. DHS also says that they do not prioritize DACA enrollees for deportation now,

and they do not intend to change that. But we've talked before, Ron, about how President Trump has really veered back and forth from being a hardliner candidate who's very strong in immigration, zero tolerance, to someone who says he has love for DREAMers, that he has sympathy for them, that they have nothing to worry about. And here he's ping-ponging back and forth in just a matter of days. Yes. And we heard this week a lot about that love. He talked about that love that he has for the dreamers several times. This would seem to contradict the policy. But then when we hear him say, then we'll revisit it, you can get an entirely different picture. Now, if you listen to Sessions' speech, Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, gave the speech for that other Donald Trump, the Donald Trump you might

have associated with Steve Miller, who is still in the White House and is a Jeff Sessions guy. And those people had been pushing a very hard line on immigration all along. They continue to do so, and they see scotching the DREAMers program, spiking it as a big trophy, a big victory for their point of view in limiting immigration. For example, you had Jeff Sessions talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs for working class Americans being taken away by implication by the Dreamers, when in fact there is no evidence of such a thing whatsoever. And yet, Nancy Pelosi is saying today that her understanding is the president wants to see some sort of legalization for DACA passed. And here's what President Trump

said yesterday during his trip. I want to see what happens. I want to see what happens in Congress. I have a feeling that's not going to be necessary. I think they're going to make a deal. I think Congress really wants to do this. So has the build a wall candidate created the conditions to get the DREAM Act, which has not passed for 16 years to the finish line here? to eliminate President Obama's executive action. But in the end, he would like to sign a piece of legislation that is the DREAM Act that allows these wonderful people, as he says, that he loves very much to stay in the United States. So he might have set himself up to have the best of both worlds. He did what he said he would do. But in the end, he'll be the savior of the DREAMers. Jeff, you have been talking to people at the Capitol about this all week.

How would you describe the divides on the Republican side of the aisle when it comes to what to do next? You know, I think the incentive structure around immigration hasn't really changed all that much on the Republican side. You hear Republicans still talking a lot about wanting to do border security, wanting to talk about enforcement measures before they do anything that would give dreamers or people in the country illegally a pathway to citizenship. So I do think this is something that should it pass, should it come into fruition, is going to rely really heavily on Democratic votes. Democrats have been gunning to do this for a long time, as we all know. The thing that I think really focuses the minds of lawmakers is this deadline. As we've seen, things on the Hill, things in Congress don't really move until there's a cliff. That's why so many of these things have have cliff attached to them, like the fiscal cliff

and all this other kind of stuff. So I think the kind of like the brinksmanship involved here is the thing I think will make the big difference six months from now. And there are there were many Republicans who were pro-comprehensive immigration reform during President Obama's term who didn't want Republicans to vote for it because they wanted to wait for there to be a Republican president in office so they could get the credit. They thought, what was the purpose of doing this if you're just going to give a Democratic president the credit with Hispanic voters? So there are Republicans who would be willing to vote for this and be happy to see Donald Trump take the credit with a growing segment of the electorate with whom right now Republicans are underwater. Though I'm probably getting like six

or seven hypothetical steps down the line here, but it's hard for me to envision a scenario where Trump gets a lot of credit and praise on this particular issue when you can look at all of the rhetoric he's had over the last few years and all the steps that that his administration has taken to create the situation to begin with. country who are suing to keep DACA in place. And specifically to your point, they say the court should take into account Donald Trump's comments about Mexicans because they're trying to show that this is in some way intentionally motivated by race. Don't underestimate how much someone who has used the kind of xenophobic rhetoric like Donald Trump can whitewash his reputation, maybe not with Hispanic voters, but certainly with a lot of suburban Republicans who are put off by his comments, his racially tinged comments, if he signs the DREAM Act. So one last thing happening this week. We haven't done this for

a while, but the news is right for a This Week in Russia update. Jeff, you said at the beginning of the pod, Donald Trump Jr. testifying on the hill today behind closed doors. Yeah. What do we know about what he was saying and what he's being asked? And behind closed doors, and he was not seen at all while he was here on the hill. They went to great lengths to avoid having him seen by the cameras or other reporters. That's impressive. There are some usual clear spots you walk through. Well, yeah. And as one who spent a couple of hours standing by a doorway hoping to catch a glimpse. Yeah. Whatever they did, hats off. It was crafty. But anyway, he met with investigators on the Senate Judiciary Committee and they were interested,

as we all are, about this meeting that he had, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Donald Trump Jr. met with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. And then beyond that, people who we now know had links to the Russian government. There was, of course, that Russian lawyer. All right. So he told the investigators that he wanted to meet with the Russians, as we know, because they offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton. But he said it was important to him because he wanted to be able to test Clinton's fitness to be president.

And then beyond that, he said that after he had that meeting, he was conflicted about it when he learned that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, might have had damaging information about Clinton. And then he said he intended to consult with his own attorneys about whether or not using any of that information would be proper. Now, a couple of things about this testimony before this Senate panel. Yeah. What he says now, I think, carries more weight because it is a crime to lie to Congress. And the reason I make that point is because this story has been changing. A lot.

A lot. Initially, remember, he said they had this short introductory meeting. Then we later learned that because he released the email that came before the meeting, that he actually went to the meeting with a promise of getting damaging information about Hillary Clinton. And then he then painted himself as saying that this was his first time working with a campaign. It was a matter of chaos. He met with the Russians in much the same way he would have met with any other foreign official. And then remember, the president defended Donald Trump Jr.'s taking this meeting, saying that it happened in the course of the campaign. Anybody would have taken

a meeting to get information on a competitor. Something that many longtime political operatives from both parties have said, no, not really. That's right. And I think what's noteworthy about this meeting that happened in private today is that members of the committee have told me that this private meeting comes before what is expected to be a public hearing. And that's the thing we've heard from a lot of the listeners on Twitter is, why are all these meetings happening in private? You know, when is when is any of this going to see the light of day? We don't quite have a date yet for this public hearing. But the Democrats on that committee for sure believe, and they've actually said that this is what is coming from the chairman of that committee,

Chuck Grassley, that Donald Trump Jr. will be asked these questions in a public session. Mara, Ron, it's September. These investigations on the House and Senate side have been happening since basically the beginning of this year's congressional session. Any sense yet when these are going to come to fruition, to come to some sort of report or conclusions? No, I don't think we know. I don't think we know with regard to the congressional hearings and the congressional investigations, House or Senate, although we're perhaps taking the Senate side a little more seriously. And we don't know with respect to Bob Mueller's special counsel investigation, which has been staffing up and staffing up and doing a lot of work. And one's assumption would be we are still months away from knowing what these people may know and what they may reveal.

Yep. And the investigations are kind of operating on two tracks. One, of course, is to find out if any crimes were committed by anybody in the Trump organization or campaign. But the other is merely to explain what Russia tried to do, the methods they tried to use to disrupt or meddle in our elections with the goal of trying to diminish Americans' faith in their democratic process. And that's going to be ongoing. That's a national security issue because every intelligence official that's been interviewed says the Russians certainly will be doing this again in future elections. So that is going to continue regardless of what Bob Mueller finds in the criminal area. And Richard Burr, who's the Republican leading the primary congressional investigation,

that's the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, he has said that he wants his panel to finish their work by the end of the year. It's a pretty ambitious timeline, and all signs point to the fact that they won't be done by the end of the year. But there is this move to get this work wrapped up sooner than later. All right. So two other important This Week in Russia updates. One, I have to point this out. John le Carré, who knows more about Russian spies than any other novelist, has a new book out this week. He brings back his most famous Cold War spy character,

George Smiley. I say this because he was on Fresh Air this week, another NPR podcast you can listen to. And Terry Gross asked him his thoughts on this whole investigation. That was an interesting interview. But back in the non-fictional world, there was another development that happened this week. Facebook disclosed on Wednesday that it had sold more than $100,000 in political ads that were purchased by, and this is how the New York Times phrased it, a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin. These were ads that ran between June 2015 and May 2017. They talked about issues like race, gay rights, gun control, immigration, and they were linked to about 500 fake accounts created by a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency. So what we don't know is what these ads look like or how many people saw them. Facebook has not released that information. And these are the targeted posts that you see in your Facebook feed when somebody pops up who you're not following in your feed.

And Facebook allows you to very easily target these geographically, target these by interest level. You can send an ad to men in Washington, D.C. who like baseball. And then Ron Elving sees your Facebook ad. So I thought it was interesting that Democratic Senator Mark Warner, who's the co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that this is basically just the beginning. He expects a lot more disclosure from Facebook on activity by companies like this, by groups like this. Yeah, because the point that Warner makes is how would the Russians have the political knowledge to know how to deploy whatever they were trying to test in a way that would make any sort of discernible impact on the election. Because the way that they were using these fake ads to sort of amplify specific wedge issues, they were trying to test, according to the reporting, who would be susceptible or receptive to

political ads that could then be targeted to see, you know, who might want to read a story about Hillary Clinton's alleged declining health or Hillary Clinton, who's going to take away America's guns, that sort of thing. Though, I guess I'm a little skeptical of that takeaway. Again, we don't know how targeted these ads were. We don't know how sophisticated they were. But Facebook lets a pretty average user get pretty, you know, boiled down in terms of who specifically they want to target. And anybody who listened to the podcast or read, you know, Domenico columns last year would have known, oh, I'm going to target people in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin,

places like that. So I'm not sure how much really sophisticated information they would have needed, but I don't know. Well, if you show interest in buying a lamp one time on any kind of an Internet connection, you are going to see a lot of lamps in your feed for the next so many days and weeks. One does not have to show much ankle before one is going to hear from people who want to sell you something having to do with your ankles. articles. Still, I think the big picture here is that we now see a large purchase by a company with ties to Russia done with the intended aim of politically influencing last year's election. Yeah. And I talked to a guy who does a lot of campaign spending because I was a little perplexed by this whole Facebook thing, mainly because 100 grand isn't a whole lot of money to spend for ads when you have a lot of money to spend. Well, for a TV ad. Well, that's right.

But apparently, $100,000 in this realm is sort of a drop in the bucket. But in terms of volume and in terms of impressions, that money, when it was turned into ads, resulted in a lot of volume and a lot of impressions. You know, and there's a reason the Russians might be doing this, or some shadowy Russian corporation might be doing this, that does not necessarily have to do with Donald Trump. It could be just part of a Putin effort or an effort by his administration to discredit American politics or to emphasize the divisions among Americans, not unlike other countries that have found just this kind of activity by the Russians, not unlike what some countries

may have done to the Russians during sensitive moments in their own politics. And the thing we keep hearing from all of these congressional investigations focused on this issue is that Russia is actively interfering in elections across the globe, and they have designs on interfering in the 2018 and 2020 midterm elections. So the question I keep coming back to is, what is Russia doing now? And what will they do next now that we know that they've at least infiltrated Facebook? Right. And that statement said that these bots were buying ads through May of 2017, past the election. So I'm going to end this conversation in the best possible way with an onion story from earlier today. The headline is Bon Appetit denies allegations that

they're responsible for millions of pro-Kish Twitter Twitter bots. I hate Keesh. I don't know. Maybe bots in your replies could convince you otherwise. That's true. All right. We're going to take one more quick break, and we'll be right back with Can't Let It Go. All right.

We are back. And before we get to Can't Let It Go, if you're enjoying the podcast here and you happen to be listening using Apple Podcasts, we know many of you do, do us a favor and go rate the show. That really helps new listeners find it. All right. Thanks. And 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 just can't stop thinking about this week, politics or otherwise. Mara, you are up first. My Can't Let It go is something that Donald Trump can't let go.

Yesterday, I went with the president to North Dakota, where he gave a speech about tax cuts and tax reform. And right off the bat, his very first words were about his favorite obsession. I was just with our governor. He said, you know, Mr. President, we could have had 25 times the number of people. But for policy speeches, they like to keep them just like this. But I appreciate this is tremendous. And this is truly a tremendous state. And we appreciate it very much. We appreciate you being here. Thank you. As you can hear from those applause, the crowd was a lot smaller than Donald Trump was used to,

than what he expects, and that what he likes to brag about. It's always remarkable how many times he's able to set an attendance record at a venue he's speaking at, or at least claim to set an attendance record. But that really means a lot to him. The size of the crowds, his box office, his press coverage, his ratings. I mean, that's his metric for success. Yeah. Ron, how about you? Scott, let's go to baseball. All right.

Let's talk about some sports. It's September. Is this like a sports guy voice? Towards the playoffs. But the accent, you've got the accent, and it's tipping everyone off. We've got to talk about the big controversy that's coming up in the country right now. And I'm not talking about the World Series. I'm talking about cheating.

Yes. Those Boston Red Sox have been caught red-handed. They were using Apple Watches to convey the signals from the catcher to the pitcher to the dugout to the third base coach to the batter so the batter knew what kind of a pitch was coming. Was that a Boston accent? I have no idea what that was. What was going on?

All I know is that no one would claim it. You know, I read that story, and I'm still confused. I don't quite understand how they use the Apple Watches to their advantage. It's always been that the trick is not to spot the signal, because you can do it with a telescope. The Giants were doing it in the 1951 famous Bobby Thompson home run game. You can spot the signal if you've got the powerful telescope out, even in the bleachers. But the trick is to get the signal then to the hitter. But that's what caught me up.

Okay, just to back up here, they were stealing the Yankees' signs. By the way, the Yankees are on the verge of catching them in the AL East as some comeuppance for this. They may have already have done so if it were not for this set of games in Fenway where this evidence was accumulated. But I was confused. So somebody's watching in the clubhouse. They text it to the trainer who looks at their watch, gets it to somebody on the field who relays it to the batter. Third base coach. That's a lot of relay for something.

And MLB is cracking down on how long it is between pitches. That seems very ambitious. It is ambitious. You have to be good at it. Right, Jeff? Well, isn't it easier just to practice and to get good at it? That's right. And they do get good at it. And of course, the Red Sox did not come back by denying this. They came back to the baseball commissioner by saying the Yankees were doing it, too, using yes phones, which the Yankees deny.

So it's now in the court of baseball's commissioner. But the fun thing to remember here is stealing signals in baseball is not against any real rule. Baseball has always acknowledged that if you can get away with it, that's the kind of thing that you should do, steal the other team's signals. That is not cheating. The cheating is the use of the electronic devices. And your hot take here is that you are pro-cheating in baseball. I'm just saying that there may be some kind of an analogy here for what's going on in politics, but we'll have to wait for that to emerge.

But did they, Ron, collude with the Russians? That's what I really want to know. There is no admission on the part of either team, even though one team does have red in the name of the team. Neither team has owned up to any collusion with the Russians. Ah, yes.

This matter could be settled in the judges' chambers located in right field of Yankee Stadium. All right. I could talk about this for a lot longer, but we will move on. Jeff, what can't you let go? The thing I'm bringing to the group this week is the fact that Louise Linton, who is the wife of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, she's speaking out again, this time profusely apologizing for her behavior on Instagram a few weeks ago. And people who followed it might have remembered that she came back from a day trip to Kentucky accompanying her husband. And she stepped off this government plane, head to toe wearing designer goods, including a Hermes,

Hermes, Hermes. Does anyone know how to say that? Hermes. There you go. Birkin bag, which thanks to Google I know costs around ten thousand dollars Jeff I'm gonna have to interrupt and correct you here that you need to use the hashtag before all the brands when you're speaking about yes right because she tagged it on Instagram and then of course someone took issue with it and then she berated the person who criticized her on Instagram all. So she has more recently than that given an interview to a magazine called Washington Life. And she's on the cover wearing this ball gown. I think there's like a multi-page spread of her in various designer outfits. And she says, you know, it's clear that I was the one who was truly out of touch and my response was reactionary and

condescending. She goes on, she apologizes at length, and then she adds, I see the irony of making an apology in a ball gown, but it would be dishonest to proclaim that I'm never going to go to another social function. That's also part of my life. Mara, what are your thoughts? You know, Louise Linton is authentically herself. She's a girl who loves bling, and she's talked about it before. She doesn't just hashtag all the stuff she wears,

but she's described her jewelry and it gives her great pleasure. And the one thing I will give her credit for is she made, as Jeff just described, a really abject apology. She seems to understand all the ways that she could be made into a parody figure. And she's, you know, doing as best as she can to show that she gets it. What was her line of work before she was a celebrity? She's an actress and she was actually in movies. Oh, I ever have to publicly apologize for scandal. I'd like to do so in a tuxedo in the pages of a trending. I think that's great. We'll watch for that. Okay. So I'm up next, and I'm going to, this is going to be a little bit of a quiz. I'm going to read you a list of four things,

and you guys tell me if you can guess what this is a list of, okay? All right. Number one, orange and gold wool robe lined with cheetah fur. Number two, dagger made of pure silver with mother-of-pearl sheath and various designs. Unclear if the blade is Valyrian steel.

Number three, a sword. Number four, orange traditional shirt with silver floral embroidery and leather ammo holder and holster. Can I buzz in here, Scott? I know what it is. It's either something related to Game of Thrones or it's like what Snoop Dogg wore in his last tour. It's gifts from Saudi Arabia.

It is gifts from Saudi Arabia. That's true. It could have been Daenerys' dowry from her Dothraki wedding, but in fact, no. Gifts that Saudi Arabia gave to President Trump and the White House during his trip a couple months ago. This all came in a list from the State Department, 83 in all, because of a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act, that the Daily Beast submitted. But didn't Trump give them back saying, I have one of these already? I've already got the cheetah fur rug. It's coming to the Oval Office next month. But I like the dagger. I could use the dagger.

All right. That is a wrap for this week. On that note, we will be back next week. Keep up with all our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics, on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. And of course, on Up First every weekday morning. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress for NPR. I'm Jeff Bennett. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. Thank you for listening Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Ron Elbing, editor correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.