The NPR Politics Podcast - Zuckerberg Faces Congress And FBI Raids Properties of Trump Lawyer

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced 44 senators in a hearing on Capitol Hill, the first of two such hearings this week. The FBI raided the residence and legal office of the president's personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen and the president is also dealing with a foreign policy crisis after more than 40 people in Syria were killed in what appears to be a chemical weapons attack. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, political reporter Tim Mak, and national security editor Phil Ewing. 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 Daniel Bercha calling from Arlington, Massachusetts, and I'm getting ready for my fifth grade band concert. This podcast was recorded at 4.39 p.m. on Tuesday, the 10th of April. Things probably have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, the NPR One app, or your local NPR station, or by forcing your friends to listen to this podcast on the way to bed. Here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, and we're doing this one in two parts because there is so much going on. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced senators on Capitol Hill where he said he's sorry a lot. But first, the FBI raided the residence and legal office of the president's

personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, and President Trump lashed out. Could he be on the verge of trying to shut down the special counsel investigation? All the while, Trump is also dealing with a foreign policy crisis after more than 40 people in Syria were killed in what appears to be a chemical weapons attack. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And we had planned today to do a podcast all about the Mark Zuckerberg hearing, and we will get to that. But it turns out that there have been just a lot of developments.

I don't know what day of the week it is, but it seems like it should be late. So all across official Washington today, or at least up on Capitol Hill, where there are many reporters in hallways accosting senators and asking them, there has been basically one message to President Trump, which is do not fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Absolutely. In a bipartisan message, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been blasting out statements all day demanding that Republicans move ahead with legislation that would protect Bob Mueller's job as special counsel and even some senior Republicans on Capitol Hill. People like Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters today that firing Mueller would be suicide for this president. I think it would be

suicide for the president to fire him. I think the less the president says about this whole thing, the better off he will be. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told CNN that getting rid of Bob Mueller wouldn't happen because the president is too smart for that message. Don't do it. Don't do it. And Mitch McConnell, who's the Senate majority leader, he also weighed in. I don't think he's going to be removed from this office. He shouldn't be removed from the office. He should be allowed to finish the job. At the same time, he has repeated the Republican mantra, which is there's no need for Congress to do anything right now to protect Mueller from being fired. Same message. Don't fire Bob Mueller. But what isn't clear is whether, you know, Mitch McConnell has gotten

some sort of assurance from somebody that, well, don't worry. Really, don't worry. Whether he's, you know, has he talked to the president? We don't know. What we do know from people who do talk to the president is that the president is madder than he's going to take steps to fire Bob Mueller, which would include either firing Jeff Sessions or trying to change the chain of command there. But I think that what I have heard from people on the Hill is that members of Congress, including the leadership, have communicated to the White House in the past that while they're not going

to make a big fuss about this in public, they do consider firing Bob Mueller to be a kind of red line for them. And so why is President Trump angrier than he has ever been? Let us rewind to yesterday. Sound effect. Yeah. So yesterday morning, and we didn't find out about it until the afternoon, but yesterday morning, there were some knocks on some doors, right, Carrie? There were some knocks on some doors, not just one door, not just the door of Michael Cohen's legal office or an office where he had been working inside a law firm, but also his residence where he's been living, a hotel room in New York City. The FBI raided multiple properties connected to Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. And in a second, let's get to what they were looking for as much as we know.

But first, who is Michael Cohen? He is an interesting character. Michael Cohen is the president's lawyer, as the president said the other day on Air Force One. You got to ask Michael. Michael's my lawyer. But the president has a lot of lawyers and they each do different things. And Michael Cohen, some lawyers draw up contracts, some lawyers litigate. Michael Cohen was more of a fixer and he helped make deals and he helped get people out of trouble. So he was more, he was a different kind of lawyer. And he had left the Trump organization and formed his, you know, went off on his own with all of the documents protected by attorney client privilege between him and Trump. Is Michael Cohen a guy who does

a lot of stuff for Donald Trump and who also has a law degree? Or is he the president's lawyer? And how does that how is that defined? Well, I'm going to tell you who's going to define it. It's going to be the Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents going through this tranche of materials, electronic communications, telephones, computers and paper documents they seized from Michael Cohen in this raid yesterday. And what happens in these situations is that they have to do a very careful analysis because Michael Cohen's lawyer, Michael Cohen, the lawyer, has his own lawyer. And he immediately, I think he has multiple lawyers. That's the crazy thing. Who doesn't these days? But Michael Cohen's lawyer came out immediately out of the gate and said, this is a problem with respect to attorney-client privilege, and the Justice Department is going too far here. This is an affront to this age-old privilege that protects communications between lawyers and their clients. And what happens here is that the Justice Department is going to have people who are not involved in the day-to-day in

this investigation go through all these materials and make an assessment as to whether or not they cover attorney-client privilege stuff between Cohen and Donald Trump or Cohen and any other legal clients he has and what stuff is clean and therefore able to be passed onto the team actually building some kind of case or doing some kind of investigation. So the way we know that Trump is really concerned about this is because he tweeted about it. He said, attorney client privilege is dead. Exclamation point. And that was that was one of his tweets this morning. The other one was a total witch hunt.

Three exclamation points. So what exactly do we do? We know what the FBI was looking for? We don't know because under the way these raids are conducted, the people at the properties or the subjects of the raids get some piece of paper suggesting basically what the FBI is looking for, but it doesn't contain a blueprint or a roadmap. A judge, it's important to note, has already approved this. A magistrate judge or a judge at some level has approved these rates. The authorities at the Justice Department and the FBI had to go to a judge to get permission and a finding of probable cause before any FBI agents spanned out anywhere. And at the Justice Department, we know the Deputy Attorney General was involved in this process, other officials at DOJ in Washington and the U.S. attorney's office in New York, whose two top leaders now are appointees of Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration. So to the extent the president says this is a witch hunt, it's a witch hunt being overseen by Republican appointees of his own administration. And to the extent that the president says attorney-client privilege is dead, can we just explain what attorney-client privilege actually is and what it covers?

Yeah, the privilege is supposed to cover legal advice and communications and conversations between a lawyer and a client. It is not in play, or it can be pierced, lawyers say, when there's evidence of crime or fraud. And authorities can make that case to a judge and try to pierce the attorney-client privilege when there's evidence of obstruction of justice or some other crime going on. It's also important to note that the privilege doesn't apply necessarily, even if somebody happens to be a lawyer and they're acting as a dealmaker and not a lawyer. And it's hard to say right now all of the things that Michael Cohen did for Donald Trump

and the Trump organization over the years. But the Justice Department and the FBI are going to be reviewing all of those materials to figure out what's covered and what's not. And at the end of the day, Michael Cohen and his lawyer and maybe Michael Cohen's clients like Donald Trump can make a case to a judge that the DOJ has done something bad and impugned their attorney-client privilege, but were too close yet. There's no evidence yet that's happened. But in order to raid his various residences and offices, they had to get a judge to allow them to do this with a much higher bar than a normal search warrant because of that attorney-client privilege. Yeah, there were layers of approval that had to go on in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and also at the Justice Department in Washington, higher-ups in the criminal division, career officials there. And we're told all the way

up to the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, was aware of this application. Because this is a big deal. Lawyers' offices are not usually raided. They're not usually raided, but it has happened. And it has happened when there's evidence of authorities say some kind of fraud, some kind of obstruction of justice or some other crime that has gone down. And we don't know exactly what this is about, but there are a few ideas of what this could be about. Michael Cohen has been in the news most recently because he said that he paid Stormy Daniels, adult film actress and director, $130,000 to go quietly away and not talk about the sexual encounter and ongoing

relationship she had with President Trump about a decade ago. Yes, but the payment happened in the waning days of the election, in the waning days of the presidential campaign in 2016, which is why election law and FEC experts have been asking questions about whether there was anything improper there. Michael Cohen has said that Donald Trump didn't know anything about the payment. And Donald Trump, when he was asked on Air Force One last week, said, you have to talk to Michael Cohen. I don't know anything about it either. So that was a signal maybe to authorities that there wasn't an attorney-client privilege issue there if Donald Trump disavowed all knowledge of it.

And so did Michael Cohen. And we know, based on reporting today from The New York Times and others, that one of the things the FBI was after were records with respect to payments to Stormy Daniels and payments to Karen McDougal, a Playboy playmate who also said she had an affair with President Trump during that period about 10 years ago. OK, so one thing we definitely know about this that we learned from Michael Cohen's lawyer is that this search warrant, these raids came about, this investigation came about at least in part,

as the result of a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller. So what does that mean? And what does that tell us about Mueller and his investigation? And what does it tell us about this? So Steve Ryan, who's Michael Cohen's lawyer, says that this raid came about in part because of the Mueller referral. To be clear, Robert Mueller is not talking about this. The Justice Department is not talking about this. The source for the information is Steve Ryan. If Steve Ryan is correct, and this came from a referral from Bob Mueller, it means that Bob Mueller's team of 17 lawyers traipsing around looking for an answer as to whether any Americans helped the Russians, conspired with the Russians to tamper with the election and potentially influence the outcome, came across some evidence about Michael Cohen. And he took it to his boss at the Justice Department, Rod Rosenstein, who ultimately decided it should be handed over to the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, which, of course, is where Michael Cohen lives and where he has his law offices.

What it means is that everything in this investigation, as described up until this very moment, has been under the control of Rod Rosenstein and is not a witch hunt. It's operating under legal process led by Republicans in the Justice Department and at the FBI, and not some going rogue effort of a train running off the tracks as President Trump and some of his allies want to portray it. And just like we went from the Whitewater land deal to Monica Lewinsky and the Clinton impeachment, this is what happens when you have a special counsel or an independent counsel. They have pretty broad latitude. If he turns over a rock and sees evidence that a crime may have occurred,

he takes the proper steps and refers it to the proper people. And also, this is a grinding process. It's hard to understand what's happening. It's like looking at things through a straw. We don't hear anything from Bob Mueller. He doesn't tell us about his strategy. We get little bits, step by step, bit by bit. Yeah. And we learned something else in the last 10 days, which is that we don't know exactly what's in Mueller's mandate and what's not in Mueller's mandate.

We got some news last week which suggested for the first time that the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, had laid out in August 2017. We only found out about it last week, some things that Mueller was investigating with respect to Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman. There were big, big redactions on those pages. There are other people being investigated for things we know not what at this point. And that's only from August 2017. Who knows what kind of other secret memos have been written and are under wraps right now with respect to Mueller's authority and with respect to what prosecutors in New York are doing. So President Trump reacted to this raid on Cohen in a very visceral, angry way.

He described it as they broke into his house. They broke in. So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys. Good man. And it's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt. I've been saying it for a long time. I've wanted to keep it down. We've given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel. They continue to just go forward. And here we are talking about Syria. We're talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever. And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now. So we can't be certain what message Robert Mueller was trying to send, if any, with the Michael Cohen situation. But Mara, do you have a sense of the message that President

Trump received? Sure. It's getting closer to him. And President Trump doesn't like it one bit. This is, it's been described to me as the maddest he's ever been about this. It's getting closer to him. And President Trump doesn't like it one bit. This is it's been described to me as the maddest he's ever been about this. It's getting awful close. I don't know how much closer you can get than your own personal attorney. And he's around all the time or was around all the time. I mean, President Trump had dinner with Michael Cohen like a week and a half ago at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, I took another message away from President Trump's remarks.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he called this an attack on our country. And he called this investigation and raid of his friend and lawyer Michael Cohen an attack on our country. And that was really strong stuff because, remember, these actions were carried out under the auspices of the Justice Department and a judge's approval. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat or one of the top Democrats in the House, on the House Judiciary Committee, said that President Trump thinks he's the state and he still doesn't understand what the rule of law is. He constantly conflates himself with the institution all the time. And the message, of course, that he's sending to supporters is that what Mueller is doing is undemocratic. The president has for a very long time been going after the special counsel in that 10-minute rant yesterday. He talked about how the special counsel's office was more conflicted than anyone has ever been or a more conflicted group of people than ever. He's been talking about that for months.

Yes, but the message he's sending is he wants to undermine the credibility of the special counsel so whatever they come up with at the end of this, he can tell his supporters to dismiss it, fake news, don't listen to him, he's hopelessly corrupt and compromised. And even if he never fires Bob Mueller, at least he's taking steps now to make the argument at the end of this process that Bob Mueller has no credibility. And speaking of Bob Mueller, at the end of that availability, as reporters were being ushered out, someone shouted out, you know, Mr. President, are you are you going to fire Bob Mueller? Should you fire Bob Mueller? And the answer was not conclusive. Why don't I just fire Mueller? Well, I think it's a disgrace what's going on. We'll see what happens. But I think it's really a sad situation when you

look at what happened. And many people have said you should fire him. Again, they found nothing. Not only not conclusive, but today at the White House, the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said that the president believes he has the authority to fire Bob Mueller. Does he believe he has the power to fire special counsel Robert Mueller? Does he believe that's within his power? Certainly believes he has the power to do so. Which came as news to me, having covered this since the appointment of Bob Mueller and having read the regulations that govern the special counsel. Those Justice Department regulations say the person in charge of Bob Mueller is Rod Rosenstein. Rod Rosenstein can fire Bob Mueller. You can fire Rod Rosenstein if you won't fire Bob Mueller.

Or you have to repeal the special counsel regulations. But the only person who can fire Bob Mueller is Rod Rosenstein. And the only reason he can be fired is for good cause. And according to Rod Rosenstein, there is no such good cause. And in the past, the press secretary has said at other times that President Trump believes he has the right to fire Bob Mueller if he chooses. Maybe that's shorthand for first he would fire Sessions or Rosenstein. But the interesting thing about Sarah Sanders' comments today is in the past, she's always qualified that by saying, but of course, he has no plans to do so or no immediate plans. She did not qualify the statement today. This was the most forward she's ever gotten about the idea of Trump firing Bob Mueller. So, Carrie, you said the other option would be to rescind the

special counsel regulation. What is that? How would that work? Sure. So after the statute, the independent counsel statute was allowed to die, basically, after Bill Clinton's entire administration had been besieged by independent counsels and Congress decided not to reauthorize or renew that statute, the Justice Department realized there would be circumstances where its own lawyers might not be able to investigate some politically sensitive issues involving conflicts of interest. So instead, the DOJ wrote a new regulation for special counsels. That's what Robert Mueller has been appointed under. And it's a much tighter supervision than the independent counsels in the 90s used to have. And it puts the special counsel under the auspice of the attorney general or the acting attorney general, in this case, Rod Rosenstein.

And Mueller, as special counsel, needs approval to do a whole bunch of stuff, notifies the Justice Department. And the only person who can fire the special counsel is the attorney general or the acting attorney general and for good cause. If President Trump wanted to get rid of Bob Mueller, get rid of the special counsel team, he would either have to fire somebody who's overseeing the special counsel or get rid of those regulations. And so would he do that through executive order or would he order the attorney general to get rid of the regulations.

To use one of your favorite phrases, we'll see what happens. Last night, after the president's remarks, I emailed the top lawyer at the White House who is dealing with the Mueller investigation, Ty Cobb. He is the one who, on numerous past occasions, has sent me emails, has called me back, has said, oh, come on, the president has no intention of firing Robert Mueller. He's not considering firing Robert Mueller. He didn't respond last night. I emailed him again today. I have called him repeatedly today.

He's not responding to that question. Yeah. And in the past, he's been very fast to respond to that question. Well, I emailed the Justice Department this morning understanding that one way to get rid of Bob Mueller is to get rid of Jeff Sessions and install somebody else who's not recused from this investigation or get rid of Rod Rosenstein, who's overseeing Mueller. And the Justice Department said today, we're not going to be talking today about personnel announcements. Now, Tam, I have the great good fortune of sitting next to you. And when we learned this afternoon that Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, was going to the White House today for a football ceremony, I looked at you and I thought, what might happen next if he comes into contact with the president? Though we learned from

the pool report that the president did not acknowledge that Sessions was there and as Sessions was walking out his sessions was walking out. Reporters were shouting, Attorney General, how's your relationship with the president? And he just smiled and waved and kept walking. So for how long? Who knows? But one crisis averted. I just want to move on really quickly to Syria. President Trump, when he delivered all those remarks about Michael Cohen and the Mueller investigation, he was actually at a meeting of military leaders where he was supposed to 40 people were killed in what appears to be a chemical weapons attack. The U.S. State Department, the U.S. government is expressing a relatively high level of confidence that it was a chemical weapons attack.

This time a year ago, President Trump responded to another chemical weapons attack with a missile launch aimed at the Assad regime. The question now is, now what? He has said that in the next 24 to 48 hours, he'll be making a decision about what to do. He certainly has laid down a precedent. That strike a year ago was limited. It was more or less symbolic, and it didn't seem to have the desired effect because a year later, there's been another horrific chemical weapons attack with just the same kind of horrible pictures that the president said really affected him the first time. So he drew a red line. He said, unlike Obama, his red lines really mean something. Now the question is, what will he do? Will he have another limited strike that seems to have limited utility?

Will he go after Syria's air force, which he could, but that would risk a confrontation with Russia? And so that's what the president and his military advisors are trying to figure out. And don't forget, this chemical weapons attack came just days after the president said he wanted to get out of Syria. He told his military advisors, as soon as ISIS is defeated, and he expects that to be in the next couple of months, he wants out. John McCain and others said, as soon as he made that public, it gave a kind of green light to the Assad regime to use chemical weapons, since the president had done exactly what he campaigned against President Obama for doing, announcing that he was leaving.

So we're going to wait and see what he does. But there is certainly a lot of pressure on him to do something. And he seems to be, you know, talk about telegraphing. He has been telegraphing in and along with Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, has been telegraphing in many ways. Stay tuned. Something is likely coming. As of last night, President Trump said, we're probably going to do something and we'll tell you about it after we've done it. One of the things that was notable about this for me was that I think for the first time, President Trump mentioned Vladimir Putin by name on Twitter in response to his outrage over this attack on civilians, including images of young children struggling to breathe in the wake of what

appears to be a chemical attack. But attacking Putin by name, that's new. That's new. He attacked Putin and Russia separately. He said President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing animal Assad. Big price to pay. So we're waiting to see what the price is going to be. All right. We will no doubt get back to this again when something happens or we learn more. But for now, Mara and Carrie, you guys are going to leave the studio and we're going to welcome new friends to talk about the Facebook hearing and Mark Zuckerberg over on Capitol Hill.

So thanks, guys. Thank you. Make new friends, but keep the old. Yes, and probably rope you back in later in the week, depending on what happens. Mark Zuckerberg really needs to do that. Ooh. Ooh.

Ooh. Good times. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Sony Pictures. With all the money in the world, legendary director Ridley Scott brings this thrilling drama inspired by true events to life. The film follows the kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty III. Christopher Plummer stepped into the role of John Paul Getty, earning him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Starring Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer, and Mark Wahlberg. Bring Home All the Money in the World, now on digital and on Blu-ray April 10th.

Hey, it's Maria Hinojosa, host of NPR's Latino USA, the podcast that takes you inside the Latino conversation. Each week, we'll take you into one story that will fascinate and often surprise you. Listen to Latino USA on the NPR One app or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, we are back and I am joined by a new cast of characters, Tim Mack and Phil Ewing, here to talk about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Hill today. It is day one of two days, two full days potentially of testimony. And as we've talked about before, Facebook has been under a lot of scrutiny over issues related to privacy and security, also related to its role in the 2016

presidential election. So there are two separate hearings this week. The first one was today. It was like a combined hearing of two different Senate committees, which means that there were 44 different senators who could come up to bat and ask Zuckerberg questions. Tim Mack, what were they looking for? So there are two major scandals that senators were interested in asking questions about. The first one has to do with privacy, has to do with, hey, what kind of data does Facebook have about me? How does it use it? And does it track what happens to it? You know, we had this scandal as it relates to Cambridge Analytica. This is the digital firm that does election work, and it did work with the Trump campaign during 2016.

And it managed to get a lot of information from Facebook through an unauthorized means and basically used information to target voters, to target whether people were likely or unlikely to go to the polls or likely or unlikely to change their votes from candidate A to candidate B. So that's one scandal. This is the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. So that's one lane that they were looking at. That's one lane. Okay. And the other lane? The other lane? accurate and what's not accurate? And how can we vouch for whether or not the people we're talking to on Facebook are who they say they are? Are they Americans or other people? Are they fake Russian accounts? Are they propagating fake information like the Russians tried to do in 2016

is meant to defy Americans against each other? So these are the two big things that lawmakers are interested in. And so Mark Zuckerberg comes to Capitol Hill. How well prepared was he? He was very well prepared. He clearly wasn't wearing the hoodie. That's right. Zuckerberg decided to ditch the college dorm shtick and instead he wore a suit and a tie. He made a round of meetings with senators on Monday in Washington and talked with them behind closed doors, likely about the questions that he would get about the topics that would come up in this round one in the Senate. And he had the script very well rehearsed. And as someone

who has covered many, many endless hours of boring congressional hearings, he knew the tips and tricks that you do, that you always make eye contact, that you're always respectful, that you address the chairman as Mr. Chairman or the members as Senator. He declined to answer questions when he didn't want to, but he promised that he would follow up with their offices in the same way that the Deputy Pentagon Undersecretary for Energy and Environment, who didn't want to answer a question of Ike Skelton 15 years ago, would say, oh, you know, Mr. Chairman, that's a great question. I'll have my people get back to you about that. Maybe they do and maybe they don't. But in the moment, it's a polite way to respond. And Zuckerberg very deftly was able to walk that walk today. He is not an energetic or magnetic personality. He's kind of a monotalker.

But at the same time, I think in terms of Facebook, they definitely got across the message that they wanted to get across. And it seems like a big part of that message was simply, yes, I'm sorry, Senator. We have made a lot of mistakes in running the company. I think it's pretty much impossible, I believe, to start a company in your dorm room and then grow it to be at the scale that we're at now without making some mistakes. And because our service is about helping people connect and information, those mistakes have been different in how they, we try not to make the same mistake multiple times, but in general, a lot of the mistakes are around how people connect to each other

just because of the nature of the service. Overall, I would say that we're going through a broader philosophical shift in how we approach our responsibility as a company. For the first 10 or 12 years of the company, I viewed our responsibility as primarily building tools that if we could put those tools in people's hands, then that would empower people to do good things. What I think we've learned now across a number of issues, not just data privacy, but also fake news and foreign interference in elections, is that we need to take a more proactive role and a broader view of our responsibility. The idea that Facebook is trying to push for today is, hey, we're sorry about these scandals. We apologize for not

properly keeping track of this data that happened with the Cambridge Analytica story. And we're going to try to do better. And they said, hey, we're open to new regulations. Although the scope of those regulations that they seem ready to endorse is not very broad. I mean, they've endorsed some bipartisan legislation that would force them to label political advertisements on their platform. But that's not a particularly restrictive rule. That just brings them up to speed with television and radio and print, where everyone who has a political ad on those platforms needs to say, it's sponsored by, brought to you by, committee XYZ. It doesn't get to the broader questions about whether or not there should be legislation regarding our data,

whether we have a right to know what kind of data these tech companies have on us. And it doesn't get to regulations about how we know that people are who they say they are on Facebook. It doesn't get to the question of misinformation on Facebook. So the types of things that they're actually behind, they may be saying, sorry, but we don't actually know in the future, how are we going to make sure these sorts of things don't happen again, other than their say so. It sounds like sort of what they're saying is, we are totally open to working with you on things that don't force us to be uncomfortable or change our business model in any way, unless we decide that maybe we do want to change our business model in some way. Facebook has an enormous power to lobby in Washington to shape regulations,

but they're not really proposing any sort of broader restrictions. They're not interested in having that conversation. And so likely, unless lawmakers press the point, we're not going to have any. Can we just talk a little bit about sort of the mismatch that happened where Feinstein, people like Chuck Grassley and others who are in some cases in their 80s. I think Senator Feinstein is 84. And this huge generation gap between the two of them that you could see very clearly on TV was this perfect metaphor for the speed at which big tech has been able to outpace governance and regulation in Washington. Why is Congress so bad at doing cyber? Why is it so bad at doing tech? Among many reasons, one reason is the generation gap between the people who are sitting in those seats and who are responsible for writing legislation and the nature of the technology itself. What is the global information grid that Facebook uses to connect all these users? And why are mobile subscribers important to it? And what kind of technology

should underpin its ability to deliver the Instagram pictures of the dinner you had last night to all the other users in the world that want to see it? These are technically difficult things to understand. And if you don't use the services as some of these members of Congress don't, and you don't get how they work, that makes it all the more difficult to then decide how to write a bill that govern the way they should behave. Did that, Tim, do you think, interfere with the public's ability to learn what Facebook is really up to or the ability of Congress to press Zuckerberg? Look, the idea of Congress having these hearings is about oversight, right? It's about what kind of legislation might be necessary in order to press forward on social good. And if lawmakers don't understand the basics behind these types of social media platforms,

they can't make an accurate analysis of that question. They can't figure out exactly how Facebook should be regulated, if at all. And so what happened with the congressional committee today is, hey, they actually speak in terms of seniority. That means the people who are generally the oldest speak first, and then those who are probably a little younger and a little bit more tech savvy speak later on. And so we had a lot of very confused questions early in the committee hearing where there are the most ears and the most eyes on what's happening. stark contrast between a young 30-something and Mark Zuckerberg, who is immensely powerful, and these very powerful senators who didn't really quite seem to understand what was going on before them. There's a great moment in this hearing exactly along the lines of what Tim is describing,

where a very senior and long-serving Senator Orrin Hatch, who's a Republican from Utah, was talking with Mark Zuckerberg about kind of the basics of what Facebook does. And as we know, users sign on to Facebook and share photos and information about themselves and connect with their friends and identify things they like or brands they want to follow or whatever. And Facebook uses that information to then go to advertisers and say, hey, Tamara Keith really likes a particular brand of soda pop. And if you pay me money, I will show her an ad that will incentivize her to purchase your soda pop. Senator Hatch didn't quite get how that system works and why people would use a service that lets you connect with friends if they don't have to pay for it.

And here's what he said. How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service? Senator, we run ads. This moment also highlights something else that might come out of these hearings, which is that Zuckerberg and Facebook's well-known chief operating officer, Sheriff Sandberg, have been kind of putting their toe in the waters as a part of this contrition tour about some kind of pro or premium Facebook product that might spin out of this. So even if Congress doesn't ultimately pass a bill that changes the way Facebook operates,

Facebook itself could decide it's in our best interest for public relations purposes to have there be a subscription model. So if you don't want to see those soda ads, Tam, you may be able to pay Facebook 99 cents a month or a dollar a month or whatever, and you won't see them. And you might have some additional certainty about Facebook protecting the data that you volunteered since you've been a member. We'll see if that actually happens. Tam, what else stood out to you? You know, one of the big issues is this issue of privacy.

And Dick Durbin and Mark Zuckerberg. And Dick Durbin is the Illinois senator. He's the Democratic senator from Illinois. They had a really interesting exchange. Would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? Um, uh, no. If you messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people you've messaged? Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here. I think that may be what this is all about.

Your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy, and how much you give away in modern America in the name of, quote, connecting people around the world. There's two points regarding the Durban exchange that we just heard. First is the more legitimate point, which is that it's very disturbing to imagine that these very personal parts of our lives, where we stayed last night or what kind of brands we like or who our friends are or what we discuss privately might be up for grabs in a type of marketing scheme. But the other point is, you know, a hotel would never share your name and the fact that you're staying with them. The thing is, we sign on to Facebook and we agree to their term of service and their terms of service includes, hey, we might use this information.

We willingly go about joining these social networks. They say we're going to use our information. We kind of ignore it. And we kind of say to ourselves that, okay, well, we lose a little bit of privacy, but we do get this service that connects. Let's be honest about the good side of Facebook, the positive side of Facebook. It connects us with our family and our friends in ways that we can't replicate elsewhere. And Tim's point is also apt because the thing that might change about Facebook coming out of this is the behavior that it exhibits in the context of political ads, which we talked about

a little bit. But the other reason why Mark Zuckerberg is in the hot seat is because Facebook was the prime platform for the Russian intelligence agencies to use to attack the presidential election in 2016. They used fake accounts to create these likenesses of American users. And in fact, they even organized some political events that took place in the real world. So it wasn't just ads about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It was them forming groups that said, if you want to show up to a certain place at a certain time, we're going to have a rally where we'll protest on a certain issue. And they were able to get people to go from this virtual world of Facebook to a real world activity, whether it was in Texas or the Midwest or Florida or elsewhere. And that is something that Zuckerberg

also talked about. And that could be the focus that Facebook puts on this even more than that business model Tim was just talking about, because that's not going to change. And as we've been discussing over the course of the show, it's very popular and very lucrative. People love Facebook. That's why they're continuing to use it. The question will be how much it changes its practices in terms of information warfare and being the arm of a foreign power without its knowing that it is. And Senator Lindsey Graham, he's a Republican from South Carolina. He got into another issue that Facebook potentially faces, which is whether or not they are a monopoly. If I buy a Ford and it doesn't work well and I don't like it, I can buy a Chevy. If I'm upset with Facebook, what's the equivalent product that I can go sign up for?

Well, the second category that I was going to talk about are specific... I'm not talking about categories. I'm talking about is there real competition you face? Because car companies face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, it gets out in the world. People stop buying that car, they buy another one. Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector? Yes, Senator. The average American uses eight different apps to communicate with their friends and stay in touch with people,

ranging from texting apps to email. Which is the same service you provide? Well, we provide a number of different services. Is Twitter the same as what you do? It overlaps with a portion of what we do. You don't think you have a monopoly? It certainly doesn't feel like that to me. Okay. There are two things that come to mind when we talk about a monopoly. The first thing is, from a lawmaker's perspective, if there is a monopoly, is there some sort of anti-competitive

behavior here? Does that need to be, does this firm need to be split up in some way? Do we need to regulate this in some way? And I think Facebook's very concerned about that. The second thing that's relevant when we talk about a monopoly is, is there any competition? Is there any alternative? And that gets to the heart of some political questions, especially for people who are frustrated with the way that Facebook currently operates. You know, the conservative movement in this country is very, very deeply concerned about whether tech companies like Google and Facebook and Twitter have their fingers on the scale against them. And, you know, Ted Cruz asked Mark Zuckerberg

about political bias. And that was something that's really important on the right right now. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and Ben Sasse. These are all Republican senators who made a point of asking questions about whether or not Facebook tips the scales. Well, Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook. In May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck.

In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters' Diamond and Silk's page with 1.2 million Facebook followers after determining their content and brand were, quote, unsafe to the community. To a great many Americans, that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. Do you agree with that assessment? Senator, let me say a few things about this. First, I understand where that

concern is coming from because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. And this is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company is making sure that we don't have any bias in the work that we do. And I think it is a fair concern that people would at least wonder about. Let me ask this question. Are you aware of any ad or page that has been taken down from Planned Parenthood? Senator, I'm not, but let me just... How about moveon.org? Sorry? How about moveon.org? I'm not specifically aware of those.

How about any Democratic candidate for office? I'm not specifically aware. I mean, I'm not I'm not sure. interference or to root out hate speech. And yet then they're also under pressure to not tip the scales and not. So like if Facebook isn't just this neutral platform where anything goes, then all of a sudden Facebook is making decisions. Absolutely. And if you're a company that has two billion plus users, what you determine to be bullying and hate speech and how you define it and how that behavior is prevented from coming onto your platform, it matters quite a big deal. And conservatives are worried about coming with these regulations and these lines being drawn, coming down on the wrong side of that. There's some old fashioned Washington politics at play here as well in both what Senator Graham and Senator Cruz said. The M bomb, as Tim mentioned earlier in the show, is a very, very powerful weapon that the government can drop. Monopoly. In the context of whether it's tech companies or any other commercial entity that's operating inside the United States. And so whether Senator Graham and Senator Cruz actually expect there to be a bill that comes out of this that affects Facebook in some way or not,

by waving this flag about monopoly, they're echoing for a lot of people in Washington the way Congress treats, for example, Major League Baseball. Every time there's a doping scandal or a scandal about whether there should be a second base runner in extra innings in Major League Baseball or any of the other things that come up over the years about baseball. Wait, Congress isn't going to weigh in on base runners. We'll have to see what Congress weighs in on. The point I'm trying to make is every time Major League Baseball has to go up to Congress, members of Congress say,

we give you people an antitrust exemption because you're the only game in town, if you will. Major League Baseball is the only big league ball in the United States. And we agree to do that because we expect you, Major League Baseball, to be responsive to our concerns or the concerns of the government. Whether or not there's a bill or legislation, Graham and Cruz in this hearing, as we've heard over the course of the show, are saying, we know what we can do to you, Mr. Zuckerberg. And if we decide that we get mad enough at you that we're going to break up Facebook or make Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp three separate companies because otherwise they're a monopoly, we can take action to do so. And so if Facebook is going to regulate

itself as it wants to do, these senators have sent him away with a flea in his ear because they've used one of the most potent weapons they have to coer with a flea in his ear because they've used one of the most potent weapons they have to coerce him to behave in the way they want. Tim, you've watched Congress over time. Is anything going to happen this year? No. I mean, I'm not looking to your crystal ball, but... The last couple of weeks was congressional recess. It's a great time to go up to the hill and talk to your sources and talk to people who work on the hill. They've shut down. For the rest of the year, they're basically determined to do nothing at all because it's a political year. It's a campaign year. There's not much left to do. There's going to be some government spending bills at the beginning of the fiscal year in October. They're going to probably do some markups in various committees. You know, you talk about, you hear, you know, them talking about the defense authorization bill and things like that.

But from a major perspective, something like regulating Facebook, some big legislation, that's not going to happen. Man, what a life. Let's call it a year. I'm done working for this year. It's like April. Yeah. Yeah, good. That's fine. Let's go home. Podcast over. Okay, that is it for today. We will be back in your feed soon. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. And if you like the show, leave us a review on iTunes. That helps other people find the podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Tim Mack, political reporter. And I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor.

And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. We'll be right back.