The Press Box - Hannity Revealed, Comey’s Book, and Spinning the Syria Attacks | The Press Box (Ep. 455)

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the news of Sean Hannity being Michael Cohen's third client (02:00), the "Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week" (15:015), the James Comey book tour (19:15), and the media's coverage of the missile strike on Syria (39:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, the Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, and every living journalist scrambled a tweet that they, too, worked alongside the winners. Which journalists do you want to claim now before they actually win a Pulitzer? Present company accepted, excluded? I think, okay. I think my moral obligation is to pick you, my dear friend, Brian Curtis. You better believe I would have a lengthy tweet about how much you've meant to me and implicitly how much I've meant to you whenever you win this award.

Listen, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer. I think the doors have blown off the possibilities here. I'm going to take a total wild card with hopes that I'll be one of the few people who says I was there the whole time. I'm going to go with like, who'd be the weirdest? How about like PFT commenter? Wow. Like future Pulitzer winner. I didn't realize there was a podcast category.

Are we going with his writers? No, no, just nonfiction, just nonfiction emissions. Is this the one for like theater or something like that? Yeah. Isn't there a comedy category? Yeah, PFT comedy. We're not really friends or anything, so I don't know how much I can claim him, but I can claim that there's a vague deadspin overlap or something.

I don't know. All right. You knew PF Commenter before he was a Pulitzer winner. All right, guys. This is the Press Box on the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to use memes from American Chopper ever. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoeaker of the Ringer.

And if you want some recent content by us, David, how about they listen to The Recapables? Yeah. Is that a good show? Do you have some recapable content coming up? I have some recappable content coming up. I will be hosting the Westworld recapables. There you go.

Put that on your calendar. David, got three topics for you today. First, you'll never believe what we just learned about Sean Hannity and Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen. Second, when a nonpartisan ideologue has something to sell, scenes from the James Comey book tour. And finally, when America lobs missiles into a country like Syria, it's a war story and it's also a media story. We explain. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But first, David, let's call this segment Client Number 3.

We weren't planning on this. But how can you have a media podcast and not talk about Sean Hannity? We learned minutes before this podcast that in court today, Michael Cohen had three clients, right? Am I saying this right? I believe so. They were Donald Trump. Yes. Elliot Broody.

Yeah. And number three was Fox News host, Sean Han. Hannity, who might not have mentioned this when he was commenting about various Michael Cohen-related news stories. This is Hannity's response from Twitter, quote, Michael Cohen never represented me in any matter. I never attained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees. I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective.

So in other words, his defense is, much as with Trump, Michael Cohen really wasn't acting as my lawyer either. What was your first reaction upon hearing this? My first reaction was kudos to Sean Hannity, who narrowly avoided being a subject of last week's Pressbox podcast for his just Flame War with Jimmy Kimmel. That's right. But he made a strong showing at the last second today.

Just nosed out other competition. Really every week. Yeah. It's kind of like we can always do a Trump segment. We can always do a Sean Hannity segment. It's pretty impressive. Those two things often go hand in hand. And in the interest of full disclosure, oftentimes those segments sort of eat each other, right?

I mean, we don't often want to do Trump in Hannity on the same show. We have to sort of separate this out, right? Because a lot of people think of Fox News as the Trump network, right? They see no problem, no problem or at this point it's a problem, but we just, it's so ingrained in our heads that whatever Trump does, people on Fox News, especially Sean Hannity will defend it. This is a little bit of getting a little closer for comfort, right? Right. This is my lawyer, or at least I've consulted him for legal advice, and this is also the president's lawyer who is embroiled in this giant scandal of his own. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I think that it's some form of confirmation bias that's at play here, right? Because I don't know that him having had a brief conversation with a lawyer. And listen, there's plenty more that may come out about Cohen and Hannity's relationship and how deep it goes. But from what we know, it's more of, I'm not sure that them having a business relationship changes the stakes a whole lot for someone who, I mean, I don't think anybody was surprised to learn that Hannity was friendly with Cohen and friendly with Donald Trump. And that that presumably heavily influences his coverage of our president. Yeah, I think there's been this kind of low simmering dispute about whether Hannity is a Trump advice. Right? Or at least early in the in the administration because he was calling, Trump was calling him a lot and talking to him and saying, well, Hannity was, I'm not an advisor. But yeah. It's sort of like, but you, but he's calling you for advice. Right. It sort of depends on what your definition of that is. I'm not sure there's much of a distinction in the Trump White House. Fannie Fares, Gabe Sherman says on Twitter, quote, person familiar with the situation says Handy hired Cohen around the time left wing groups called for boycotts against him last year. Because of the, he was spreading the Seth Rich.

conspiracy theory, which in a lot of ways shows how far Hannity and his ideological or anti-ideological movement has come. Really, at that point, it felt like Hannity was grasping at straws for some sort of like anti-anty Trump story and he was going to the conspiracy theory world. And now, you know, he's a little bit on, if not firm or ground, more, at least he's more convicted of what he's talking about. But anyway, yeah, he, that's what Gabe Sherman reported. I was actually watching MSNBC when he first said that out loud.

And Hannity apparently denied that immediately on his radio show. This is a great media spectacle, by the way. Is Sean Hannity finding out that he was named in court while doing his radio show, which is. And he tweeted that it was weird that he were, he said on the radio show is weird to watch Fox News. And his name was in the Chiron. Yeah, his name is in the crawl. In the Trump presidency, everything happens on cable. news.

Yeah. The only things that matter happen on cable news. Mm-hmm. And then everybody's speaking about him and then Hannity is denying or, I mean, reacting directly to cable news on his radio show. Yes. And reacting to what other people are saying on competing cable news stations about him. Yeah.

Also on his radio show. I feel like we should turn on CNN or something on the TV in here just so we can react in real time as well. So there's another thing. There's the full disclosure element of this, which I think whatever Sean Hannity's relationship to whatever legal relationship. relationship he had with Michael Cohen, right? We can probably say, I mean, I hate to get into the, oh, nobody will care thing because

nobody cares about anything, right, at a certain level. But there is like, so let's say that he should have disclosed that. There's also, as media matters, Matthew Gertz points out, Hannity and by extension Trump's case against Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is that he's dogged by conflicts of interest, right? That's what they keep saying. How can you be the voice on this? because how can you adjudicate this?

Well, isn't Sean Hannity by that logic also dogged by conflicts of interest if Cohen is offering him legal advice in whatever capacity? Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure that contradiction is really going to be what this thing turns on. But maybe, I mean, maybe we've seen Fox News take, you know, sort of principled stands in the past when there were conflicts of interest and, you know, other. inconsistencies, you know, for their, for their talent. But, you know, they've always been very direct about the fact that they don't, you know, that they see Hannity as a pundit and that, you know, a lot of the normal rules don't apply to him. So I'm not sure.

I'm not sure if there will be any actual repercussions. But this feels, this, this, this just feels like a bigger deal for some reason. I think so. Well, I think, you know why? Because I think it's a scandal. It's why it feels a big deal. Sure. If you just even tangentially linked to a job.

giant developing scandal. Yeah. Which, as we learn from Maggie Haber in the New York Times on Friday. Congrats on your Pulitzer, by the way. Trump fears much more than the Russia scandal. Yes. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you don't want your, even if it's not a pundit rather than a journalist, you don't want the pundit to be that close. Yeah. And talking about this sort of, you know, the way that Hannity had been painting the Mueller investigation. see Stephen Dennis from from Bloomberg tweeted just after this stuff came out today that just to sort of underline the fact that

just last week Hannity had Newt Gingrich on where he likened the FBI raid on the Cohen office to the Nazi Gestapo. Oh, wow. So you start there, I mean it's not just a conflict of interest. It's not just, you know, not being fourth right, when you're actively promoting this narrative that, you know, that the Mueller investigation is acting like a, like a, like the Nazi secret police, then, you know, that that's

the sort of thing that I think that like Fox or, I mean, just general, you know, amateur ombudsman might take issue with. Yeah, absolutely. This is another tweet, by the way, it's funny that this was Handy's Insta reaction on his radio show. I think it's pretty funny. I'll decide if I'm going to put a statement out there, and then he just went back to bagging on James Comey.

Yeah. Back to the regular thing that I went out back to my all thing. By the way, you might wonder, how did Fox News cover this? We actually have some sound here. The federal judge in this case ordered Michael Cohen to be here in person to answer questions directly related to who his clients are. She wanted to know how many he had and exactly who they were. Now, Cohen's legal team complied and named names this morning, sort of, in a court filing, as requested by the judge submitting a short list of three names.

President Trump, GOP fundraiser, Elliot Broody, and a third person that they did not identify at today's court filing. Now, in today's proceedings that are underway right now, Stephen Ryan, one of Cohen's attorneys, was asked by the judge to specifically name the other name because they said it would not fall under, attorney-client privilege to withhold that name. And he stood up and named him as Sean Hannity. So moving on to- Now, it's incredibly awkward. I love that last line. So moving on, correspondent says, also Juan Williams apparently called him out on the air. I mean, that's the other thing. Like, who is going to, who from Fox News? You're like, okay, we have to say something. Somebody, preferably somebody way down the list at the end of the bench has to say something. Right? at least just so we can milk this for some controversy.

Absolutely. This is a story. No, that's why Juan Williams is employed at Fox. Yeah, Shep Smith, though, would you have who's criticized Hannity in the past? Yeah, I think. If we had to bet. I would assume he would have something to say. He would at least, I think, sort of gleefully reported, right?

Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, it's just, it's such a weird story that Hannity has come out and denied that there was any meaningful representation going on. I mean, from the very beginning, it seems like he's just slicing this so, so thin, sort of. Like, he's just, I don't know. I don't know what you would expect the conversation. First of all, the Gabe Sherman report seems like something you wouldn't want to deny out of hand.

If you're Hannity, right? Of all of the things that you could have been in, you know, in secret communique with the lawyer Michael Cohen about, getting his input on, you know, people on people boycotting your show because of the Seth Rich stuff, that seems like a pretty low-level thing to admit to, right? It seems like the kind of thing I expect him to be. Yeah, not a lot. Not a big deal. You just, like, shoot a line to a couple of your lawyer friends and see what they have to say. So the fact that he's just, like, kind of actively denying that so quickly.

That seems strange. And I just don't know. I mean, Cohen has three clients. A record, right? Yeah. And one of them is Sean Hannity. Even if it's a $10 in your, I'm giving you $10 so we can like talk a bull and keep it, you know, under privilege.

That's pretty significant, right? Oh, it's totally. I think it's tough. I mean, I just think that this, these stories are all of right wing media right now, right? It's Mueller, it's Cohen, it's the FBI, it's deep state, right? Yeah. And so that when you have your big talking head compromised in any way, right? Yes.

It just feels like, uh-oh, you know, it's like, uh-oh, if he can't talk about this or if he's, you know, if there's any kind of noise in his presentation on this, it just feels like that that's bad, right? This is like this is our, we're going to this every day, right? This is Fox prime time lineup every day. That's a really good point. Unless Tucker's talking about pandas or whatever the thing was the other day. It was pandas. Sex-crazed pandas. Sex-crace pandas.

So that's like topic B, but topic A is the witch hunt, quote unquote, against Donald Trump. I think, yeah, I think that's a really salient point. Because if they, if Fox does decide that he, that Hannity is, you know, cannot cover the Mueller investigation or at least not anything that has to do with Cohen, then it seems like you have to make, I mean, then the next conversation that immediately follows is, do we move Tucker into that spot? Or do we, can he, can he keep that, can he keep his block for the next three months?

Yeah, because remember there was that whole thing, Trump was going to lose the election and Sean Hannity was going to go to Trump TV. I think we had that discussion. By the way, Sean Hannity responds to more stuff in real time.

Does any cable news host respond to things just on Twitter instantly? Yeah. Even just random Twitter trolls. I feel like Jake Tapper tweets a lot, but Sean Hannity, it's just like,

I mean, he's just all the time, right? Yeah, he's very active. And he's got a lot going on too. I mean, we just just, it's funny because everybody is listening. I mean,

all of us, think of him as a nighttime fox host, but he spends the vast majority of his time on the radio. Can I share my favorite Sean Haley tweet of all time? Yeah, please do. I'm not sure how somebody must have retweeted in my timeline because I don't follow him and I do not follow this entity as I'm not. It was him backstage at a Rascal Flats concert, like on the side stage. I mean, he was in, baby. He was in and he took a picture of it and just, you know, at Rascal Flax, killing it,

exclamation point. It's like the perfect Sean Hannity tweet. I love it so much. All right, David, now it's time for the Overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Should we just do the Sean Hannity gags

that are coming in right now as we speak? Read them, man. Let's go. This is, I want to make sure we get the correct. Nick Field, frequent contributor to the Overwork Twitter joke of the week. This is Nate Cohn of the New York Times. I don't know if this brings bringing Anthony Weiner back for the season one finale, but this is a strong move by the writers, right?

So do we consider this to be like an episodic TV show? Yes. Claire Malone from 538. This show is way too predictable. Somebody named G. Eliot Morris, season two of this show is off to a great start. I applaud the writers. Okay. So if you think of something, if you turn any news event into a TV show, you are, you are, you

went overwork, Twitter joke of the week. Also, speaking of frequent contributors, Matthew Zeeland, I believe I gave the title of editor at large of the press. box. And now he's just been promoted to national correspondent for the Kendrick Lamar Ballasur Prize. Here's his tweet from our old teammate at Granlin Stephen Hayden. This is incredible. But if Dam gets a Pulitzer, then to pimp a butterfly should get the Nobel Prize. And then lots and lots of tweets about who should win a Nobel Prize. That's the thing. If you win one award, then the joke is you're going to win lots of other awards. Also this week last, or recently, David,

legendary coast-to-coast AM host Art Bell died. Yeah. What a loss. I loved Coast to Coast A.M. Report. See, there's the joke. You did it.

I did it. Damn. When George Romero died, everybody's like, he's coming back. You made zombie movies. That's funny. It's funny.

All right, when we recorded this pod last week, a robotic in a scared way Mark Zuckerberg was sitting on a booster seat and testifying before Congress. Did you notice all the jokes about Tom from MySpace? Tom from Myspace. never stole our information, and we still turned our backs on him.

Thanks to that, Michael Douglas, who was a UFC and wrestling obsessive, not the noted actor. Also, last week, Paul Ryan announced he was not running for re-election. Did you see any professional journalist use the gag, Paul Outboy? Oh, no. It was both a BuzzFeed headline and tweeted by the Atlantic's Adam Soror. That is not even a fully-formed. That's not a pun. No.

That does not make sense. No. Also, we're just old. Like, this fallout boy worthy of that sort of? Paul out boy. That's thanks to Alex Kaplan for bringing that very serious story to our attention. On Friday, the Cowboys cut wide receiver and my de facto spiritual advisor, Des Bryant. Oh, no.

Did you see the joke, the Cowboys dropped, does Brian? Referring to a certain horrible moment from a Green Bay playoff game. I saw that many times, yeah. Comedian T.J. Miller, who has lots of issues in his life, was also arrested for calling in a bomb threat on an Amtrak train last week. A very serious story. But with comedian and bomb, do you see where this joke is going? Can only go one place.

Right. Who called in the bomb threat to T.J. Miller's career. T.J. Miller is not funny enough to think of a bomb threat bit. He stole it and doesn't deserve credit. And finally, this is actually the second fake bomb threat T. T.J. Miller has made. The first was regarding my laugh factory set in 2012. That's from, guess who? Dane Cook.

Gratz Dane Cook. least funny comedian, American history. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Thanks to our pal Ryland Grant for that one. All right, David. Before we get to James Comey, let's take a quick break. Hey, this is JJ Reddick. You may know me as a basketball player.

You may have seen me play during my college career at Duke University. Or perhaps over the past decade playing in the NBA for the magic, the bucks, the clippers, or the Sixers. Well, today I'm here to tell you about my show, the JJ Reddick podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. This is where you can find me interviewing athletes as well as in-depth conversations with celebrities. So make sure to subscribe to the JJ Redick podcast wherever you get your podcast. David, speaking of puns that have no point. Oh, no. Our second topic is called Comey, don't play that.

Kudos. He has a book out this week. An initial printing of $850,000. That's a lot. You're our book publishing guy, right? That is a, I think the book publishing term is a shit ton of books. It's Brian Stelter notes. Fire Aid Fury's initial print run.

Same house, McMillan was 150,000. So here we go. Well, everything kicked off on television anyway with the George Stephanopoulos interview, which aired Sunday night. I often ask you this on the press box. Did you know 2020 was still a thing? Wait, was it actually 2020? It was like a special. I watched the whole thing and I kept thinking to myself, this feels like,

episode of 2020 instead of a news hour. But yeah, okay, I guess I was dimly aware that 2020 existed. Let's hear a little bit from that interview. Is Donald Trump unfit to be president? Yes, but not in the way I often hear people talk about it. I don't buy the stuff about him being mentally incompetent to early stages of dementia. He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who's tracking conversations and knows what's going on. I don't think he's medically unfit to be president. I think he's morally unfit to be president. A couple of notes on the presentation of this interview. Please.

A number of people remarked on this. How weird was that wildly overproduced, let's have some fun in the edit room first segment? So strange. Right? Yeah. Because you have like the interview that everybody wants. They're just pumping this thing. And this is going to be, it's like my favorite one was a polarized man for a polarized time.

The other thing the announcer said, the answers could change. everything and they just showed like Stephanoplas asking questions before and like a pensive comie not answering that was the tease what will he say but they chopped up this this first segment so it reminded me of like post Ted Koppel nightline yes where it's like this is a show made in New York City it reminded me of of not 2020 but Dayline NBC when they're like covering a small town murder or something and they just keep they continually cut to like stock footage of a shirt floating in a river or something like it was there was a lot of weird editing Stop footage.

I'm floating in a room. Yes. And what's weird is this goes again, like, we'll talk about this in this segment, but the allure of James Comey, to the extent there is an allure. Mm-hmm. He's this man of probity, right? Yeah. He's this serious, very serious subject. You know, public-minded official.

We've done these big jobs. And when you cut him up and it was like weird editing and weird inserts, it sort of worked against it. It kind of calmed down after a while. It did, but right before it started, at least right before it started when I was watching on the West Coast, I saw somebody tweeted that, you know, they were running an hour of the interview, but the interview was, in fact, five hours long, and the New York Times got the full transcript, right? So then you actually start, I started watching the interview, and I was like, they're only running an hour, but they're not even running an hour. They ran like 30 minutes or, you know, all told of this interview when you account for all the weird interstitials and commercial breaks and everything else? Including the trip to James Comey's childhood home.

Right. That was a weird one. It felt a lot like, I'm sure that there's, you know, there's always a little bit of competition. But Chris Matthews is about to do this giant, this big, like, who is Comey? Who is the man behind all the news on MSNBC? And I wonder if they were just trying to step on that, just own the whole thing. It was also interesting, at least I found it, that this is not a typical 60 minutes interview, right? Here is a newsmaker and we're trying to, you know, give him tough questions and put him in the hot seat.

This is essentially George Stephanoplas saying, please summarize your book. Yes, it's the book report. That you've already written. Yeah. Which is a little strange, right? Yeah. I mean, not useful because people want to show them. This is sort of like the first serial to go to use another book publishing term.

There you go. This is the first official. I mean, obviously the manuscript. I mean, the book itself leaked last week and it was all over the place. We'll talk about that a little bit, I'm sure. But this was the official first news hit for, And, you know, I think that what, like the real proprietary stuff that Stephanopoulos and ABC had was just was the content of the book. So he was basically just saying asking him questions that were asked rhetorically within the context of the pages of the book.

And pressing him on things like reopening the Hillary Clinton investigation. His interactions with Trump. Why did you act this way in that? Which were interesting. I thought the most effective part was they had this. He told the story of going to the White House a couple of days. a couple of days after the election. And he's kind of trying to basically hide from Trump in the same room as Trump.

There's all these officials there. And he goes, he's wearing a blue suit. And he stands next to, and he wrote about this, he stands next to these blue curtains and basically tries to just blend in. Right. But ABC has the video. Yes. So Comey describing this and you can put the pictures to it is so much more effective than it would be in a literary form. Right.

It was really funny because he really was inside the room. And then Trump was like, oh, come here, come here, come here. It looked like he kissed Comey on the cheek. It felt like it looked a lot more like a kiss in Comey's retelling, or at least in Comey's mind, than it didn't in real life. And Trump's like, he's become more famous than me, which is like, obviously the big thing he cares about in this direction. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, it was very strange. I kind of felt like Comey's moral equivocations were sort of the least interesting part of his presentation. And when he, and then the minute detail, I, I, thought, you know, when he was describing his first encounter with Trump, the human being, he's talking about his height, his hands, his tan, everything else. I feel like there was a lot of insight in the way he told the story, but not in the way that he thought he was giving insight. Or maybe it was, maybe this is all part of a master plan.

Maybe it's Comey that's playing 40 chess. But this sort of very sort of just robotic attention to detail makes you, in some ways, it does make you. trust his retelling a little bit more or trust him as a sort of alien come down to catalog what is happening in Washington in this very moment. Did you think that stuff, though, the physical descriptions of Trump, his orange skin, whether his hair was real, size of his hands, tie was too long, was that a book editor saying, all right, James, we need some detail here. We need some, we need some, A, some detail and B, some things that will just like red meat

to liberal Twitter. Sure. Like what Trump looks like. Do you think he was cataloging all that stuff in his head? I mean, he noticed it, I'm sure. But like, do you think he was, you think that was really part of his telling of the story? I mean, it's totally possible that you're right. My gut reaction is that I don't know why Comey would be, you know, could be talked into going the red meat route, especially on something so insignificant, sort of.

But, I mean, you know, like you said, I've been in book publishing and the great editors of book publishing have a sort of mystical sway. over the book, you know, over their writers that they work with, and maybe that's true. It just all seemed so just insignificant to me that it, like, it seemed like the sort of, the sort, if it is a playful jab, you know, if he thinks he's needling

Trump, it seems like a sort of needling that only someone is humorless as Comey would have, like, would have thought up. The only Combe thought was funny. Yeah. I can't imagine his book editor was like, here's something that will really get Twitter going. Like, I think you'd go, you'd go like a couple of degrees deeper than that, right? And then the way that Comey just repeated it, just, you know, word for word in the

Stephanopoulos interview, that it felt like, I mean, maybe, I'm certainly reading too much into this, but it felt like something that he, you know, that he was either, that he is either exposing himself as a robot, which is, again, could be part of the plan, or he actually thought this is funny. Speaking as a book publishing veteran, who came up with the title, A Higher Loyalty, Truth, lies in leadership. Oh, man. What is my assumption of who came up with this? Yeah, that seems like to me a title James Comey would be very happy with.

And it's almost like, okay, you can call it the most boring thing you want as long as we have the James Comey book. My guess is because of the speed with which this was, you know, turned from a, I mean, it turned from, you know, Comey was fired to there as a book deal that probably the the proposal wasn't titled, but who knows? And then if the proposal is entitled to eat or even if it is, if it's up to the publishing house to figure it out, it's just memoir madlibs. You know, you think of the five things that you want to get across. And, you know, you look at the first and the last sentence of the book proposal and you just start pulling out the big, you know, the proper or the nouns and you make a tidal out of it.

Yeah, Hillary Clinton's what happened is like in retrospect, like one of those daring political memoir titles ever. Right. Simply because it just actually is like sort of interesting. Yeah. Instead of just, you know, my experience. And the title matters literally zero, right? I mean, you will find this book on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble or, you know, whatever, by Googling the author's name.

As long as you don't like accidentally stumble into like a sexual double entendre with your title, you're pretty safe, I think. Part of the media pageantry of a big book release is the initial review. This case from the New York Times, former New York. Timeser. Machiko Kakatani. She's back. Amazing. She is back. Triumphant return to the pages of the Times. That was that was kind of amazing. And she was, I remembered reading that piece like why she was so good at like nonfiction, like newsmaking nonfiction. Yeah. Because she has such a great, like, just capacity to know everything that's happened, to bring together lots of things to know what's

news in the book. Mm-hmm. Right? And also to have read because, you know, they divide times critics basically by beats to a certain extent to just basically know everything that was, you know, like had been written before and why this was important and everything. Yeah. It was a really good piece.

It was one of those like, okay, I don't need to read the book now because I've just read this piece. I mean, I don't, you don't need to read the book, you know, because of everything else you've heard along the way too. But her piece, I mean, I think that she's a brilliant writer. and if anything, she just goes in too deep on these things, right? I mean, she finds, and listen, I'm speaking as someone who, who, you know, made my career going in too deep on an art form that didn't need that sort of deep inspection. But the, but, you know, she clearly would rather be talking about Reinhold Niebuhr than James Comey, you know, in reviewing this book.

She's interested in the sort of second degree, you know, the more, the more meta aspect of his, of what his time in Washington and post. and more importantly, is exit from Washington really means for the Trump presidency and the country. So, I mean, it's a really good piece. I'm not sure. You know, I think that her writing in some ways does more justice to the book, having not read it, but certainly having read a lot of her takes on these big nonfiction memoiry pieces, you know, a lot of times what she writes is more significant than the book itself. Should we talk about a couple of the big moments that have come out of the book?

Please. I mean, P-Tape is definitely number one, right? I'm really glad that you didn't start today's episode with this is the press box, a podcast where you cannot use the phrase, do I look like a guy who needs hookers? I thought that was a given. This is by the New York Post. This is quoting Comey. He brought up what was called the, quote, golden showers thing. I love that.

Golden Showers thing. Adding to the bottom of him, there was, quote, even a 1% chance his wife, Melania, thought it was true. And this was Comey's big line. In what kind of marriage to what kind of man does a spouse conclude there is only a 99% chance of her husband didn't do that. I like, that's just like, that's like stodgy, right? Stodgy, upright James Comey. So weird. I mean, which is.

But his felicity, I mean, he wasn't using like, you know, urban dictionary for any of this stuff. But he was very free with discussing hookers and peeing and everything else. Like it wasn't, there was no like, there was no, you know, he wasn't talking. around it. There were no euphemisms employed. But that's the subtext of the book, right? Right. I am this kind of moral man. At least this is Comey's chosen subtext, right?

I am this moral man confronted with this immoral president. Yes. What do I do? The other one, and this is quoting from Politico, Comey recalls in the book writing that John Kelly, President's Chief of Staff, said he was, quote, sick about the ordeal. This is Comey's firing and, quote, intended to quit in protest to the president's decision. Kelly said he didn't want to work for dishonorable people.

to which I enjoyed this Isaac Chotner tweet. Just so I have this straight, Comey tells Kelly to stay on, regardless of the latter's opinions about Trump, because America needs people like Kelly in times of crisis, blah, blah. And then Comey writes a book with a story that might get Kelly fired. That's where the moral man thing kind of does. Yeah, I feel like the Trump stuff has been so, has taken up so much oxygen that that hasn't gotten quite enough attention yet. But I'm glad that you mentioned that. Can we talk a bit about the RNC's media response?

Lioncombe.com. That's lion with no G. I'm laughing silently. I can't deal with this. Are we a little worried that he gave the same name to James Comey as he gave to Ted Cruz? Ted Cruz. And this was a real, I enjoyed this Jonathan Chaitline.

By regurgitating the label Trump used during the campaign for Ted Cruz serves to demonstrate a lack of originality in one of the president's very few fields of genuine talent. Yeah. Like that's one thing he's good at is picking the name. Yeah. I'm not sure why. Did Likin Comey not catch on? I guess Leakin doesn't really have any direction. Crooked Comey?

That was Crooked Hillary, though. Oh, right. Yeah, we should come with a better Comey nickname contest. If you're anti-comy, what should we be calling him? It's a, it's very interesting. I, in some ways, I mean, this does it, is it, should it be? Should it feel odd that the RNC's reaction to Comey feels like the most pure distillation of Trump in this whole thing? Yes.

That like maybe maybe the White House is sort of, you know, tempering his reaction a little bit. But for some reason, the RNC is just the full bore Trump. Yeah. By the way, I'm now looking at Donald Trump's Twitter account, he has tweeted yesterday about slippery James Comey. Right. Slippery. Doesn't that sound like a word from like a 50s like children's book or something like that? Exactly.

You slippery rascal. Yes. I love that. But the other thing about the RNC thing is it on the merits literally doesn't make sense. So this is where Trump is trying this like triple bank shot against Comey. Right. So he cannot say Comey, I fire, you know, Comey is bad because of the Russian investigation. He cannot say that.

So instead he has to do this workaround where he says Comey's bad because of the Hillary investigation. And quotes these and the R&C does this too, quotes Democrats talking bad about Comey because of both announcing, but basically reopening the Hillary investigation in October weeks for the election, which allegedly lost her the election. Okay. Right. But Trump's problem with Hillary with Comey and Hillary wasn't that wasn't reopening the investigation. It was that he didn't prosecute Hillary enough. Right. This was the guy saying lock her up, right?

It's not that he was too hard on Hillary. It wasn't hard enough, is what I'm trying to say. Right. So now this is the tangle that we are in. Speaking of Tangle, Kellyanne Conway went on TV and said that and referred to Comey as a man who swung an election. So that was. Right. She said she was being sarcastic after in an addendum.

But clearly she was not particularly being sarcastic. And so sort of admitted that Comey did in fact swing the election, which, I mean, one of the things that Kakadining got really right, sort of Michiko, I think, is what we call her in the business. was that there is a great irony to the fact that that someone who tried to be so apolitical found it could find himself reviled by both Trump and Clinton and their and their most ardent followers but we this is going to keep coming up over and over again it is funny how everyone just sort of in such a in such a split era how you know no one especially on the liberal side no one quite quite knows how to deal with

with James Comey. No. He's not a hero, you know, but he's, but he has the potential to, you know, have a, you know, to feed a heroic, you know, a, you know, a positive outcome from that point of view. And I think in the publishing sense, his heroism is that he's the first one from the administration to come out with a book. Yeah. That was David From.

I'm pretty sure during W. You know, he came out of the book that was sort of mildly critical or critical enough for the president that basically excommunicated. But like, there's got to be a race, right? There's so many people who could write a book about Trump. Yeah. Comey happens to have been fired early on, so he gets the book out. I don't even know who was first, but Stephanopoul has also had that role himself coming out of the Clinton White House.

Yes, yes. And I think that might have played that role in the Clinton White House, definitely, if we're talking about book by a former staffer. Yeah. To the lastly, to the point about political books, everyone will buy and no one will read. I love my old boss, Michael Kinsley's, I mean, the classic experiment, I love telling the story. He goes to a bookstore in Washington where a giant 500-page memoir, political tract, has been published. I want to say it was Strobe Talbot. Somebody of that, that's close enough, right?

That sounds totally feasible. It goes to a bookstore where, and this book is on the bestseller list, at least the Washington bestseller list. He puts a note, a business card in the middle of the book on like page 400 and says, I am Michael Kinsley, editor of the New Republic. look, here's my phone number. If you get this, call me and I'll give you $5. And nobody called. Nobody ever called because no one reads these books.

No, especially not when everything's being leaked in every direction. But even if you wanted to give it a shot, you're probably not getting to page 400. Who is doing that? I just want to give a parting kudos to, I mean, no matter what you think of Michael Wolf, no matter what you think of, you know, other. you know, White House, you know, narrative weavers over the years of Bob Woodward's in their sort. Reading the pieces of this book that I've read, if all you have are the primary sources, even when the greatest book editor in the land is overseeing the process, it's, this is, Trump versus Comey in letters is, it's like, it's like two computers having an argument.

Like these, like, you're two, like, two robots from different species. Or, like, you know, this is R2D2 and C3PO. Like, I don't understand the conversations that are going on here. Between Trump's tweets and Comey's just weird robotic, affectless, you know, retelling of these stories where I do not understand what he's getting at. Or, I mean, I understand some of these deeper truths that are being, that are being touched on. But it's just so complicated. I long for the days where problematic scribes like, you know, like, like, like, like, like. Michael Wolf, are we are informing me of the narrative, so I don't have to work as hard.

I think that's a fair point. By the way, George Stephanopoulos' Clinton White House memoir called All Too Human. By the way, bought that, did not get to page 400. Really? Well done, David. All right, our final topic today, let's call this one spinning Syria. On Friday, we learned that the United States, in a joint exercise with France and Great Britain, was firing missiles into Syria. Here's Donald Trump announcing it from the White House. The purpose of our actions tonight is to establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread, and use of chemical weapons. Establishing this deterrent is a vital national security interest of the United States. The combined American, British, and French response to these atrocities will integrate all instruments of our national power, military, economic,

and diplomatic. We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents. Every war, David, is first and foremost a war, but it is also at some level a media story. And I think it's worth just talking about how this transpired, how this was covered, how it was sold, how it was spun a little bit, I think it's fair to say. Let's start with why did we do this? Why did the United States do this? All right. It was because Bashar Assad, president of Syria, used chemical weapons on his own people. And there was a sickening, heart-wrenching news video, which then prompts Trump to act. Is that fair to say? Yes. I mean, this is a civil war in Syria that's claimed many, many, many lives. But this,

the impetus here to act was chemical weapons and particularly the pictures of chemical weapons. Mm-hmm. That's right. And that was, I mean, that immediately had echoes of, was it the last time that we launched an airstrike on Syria? Was it last April? I think that's right. Where the story then was specifically told that it was Ivanka Trump having seen pictures of children and the atrocity implored her father to take action. Then we have Trump's tweet of April 8th, quote, many dead. Now this is, we're. We should preface this for a second because Trump has been very reluctant to tweet about Russia. One of the few things he's been reluctant to tweet about through this whole thing. Also that people are Trump ran very explicitly on get us out of Syria and really all foreign wars at that point.

Right. So Trump's tweet is from April 8th is many dead, including women and children in mindless chemical. That's all caps. Attack in Syria. Area of atrocities in lockdown and encircled by Syrian army, making it completely inaccessible to the outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing animal Assad. Big price. At which point we all went, okay.

Yeah. What is that big price going to be? Because here now he is going out, walking out on the plank, right? Yeah. And saying if I don't respond, now that I've tweeted this, right, this is not the kind of, you know, usual stale message from the White House. Animal Assad, naming Putin. Now if I don't do something. This isn't even just like there is a red line.

There's this. This isn't some metaphorical, you know, stalemate that we're putting ourselves in. Yeah. And I think that was, it was interesting. Because that was the real, and we always talk about ratcheting up, whether it's with, you know, with the president's tweets, right? Whether it's North Korea or whatever. But that was, this is one of those where there is something the United States can do. Yeah.

And is Trump going to actually do it or not? Yeah. And then we saw what actually happened, which was a pretty limited missile strike. Now, in the couple of, couple of random notes about this. One is Sarah Sanders. Did you see this? posted a photo on Twitter. Oh, yeah.

From the Situation Room, White House. Was it even supposed it was it was it even actually confirmed to be the situation room? You think it was like just some other just some meeting some meeting with just cast in black and white to make it look give it more gravity right But this is and let's let's let's say this right this is this is not confined to the Republican Party Remember the picture that conveniently released by Obama the Obama white house when they were a waiting word Whether Osama bin Laden and they're killed in that rate right that very now very famous photo yeah leaders being briefed But that photo of from leaders with American troops in harm's away right? Yeah This is a media totem of every military exercise.

Well, but the controversy over the Sanders tweet was that the photo was not taken that day. Mike Pence was in it and Mike Pence was not in Washington. Mike Pence was in Lima, Peru. Taking President Trump's spot. Which she later clarified, I think reasonably right, that it had just been taken a few days before. Yeah. Mike Pence did not time travel into the photo. No, no, I think that's fine.

It's just a, it was a, again, just like a slight, like just a few. degrees off from the, I mean, if that's the, you're clearly releasing this as like a PR press release, right? So, so why, why get it 5% wrong? A couple of other weird media things that came up. One was Trump sort of left open how big this attack was going to be, right? We're going all in in Syria in some big way. And then you had the defense secretary Mattis come back and say, no, no, this is a one-off thing. Those are like two statements basically ended exactly the same time.

I think Trump, do you, I don't. I don't know if anybody else has talked about this. My guess is that from his first tweet, Trump sort of cornered himself because of his campaign, you know, his campaign pledge that he would never let the enemy know what he was going to do. Yes. And his first tweet was- Why are we announcing strikes on people? Yeah, exactly. And his first tweet was just so over the top that he had to then just be like, and who knows what we're going to do?

We could do that. We could do more. And then that put Mattis in the position of having sort of correcting the record, you know? Right, right. Oh, absolutely. Then you, of course, after everything like this, you have varying accounts of what happened, right? So, United States wants to say, we have taken out the heart, as the New York Times says, of Bashar Assad's chemical weapons program, right? And then Trump's infamous tweet, mission accomplished. What did you make of that? I mean, is that a case? Is that just Trump, is that just Trump not knowing the mission accomplished thing or not being or not remembering it? Not remembering exactly.

I mean, obviously, that never makes it past any public relations staff. Yeah, remembering, I think probably it exists somewhere in his memory, but he doesn't remember exactly that it, you know, that it was such a punchline. I don't know. I have no idea. I think that there's, that the fact that that sort of echoes, you know, George W. Bush, that, I mean, that sort of gets it something that I don't have an answer for this, but something that's really interested me about this. most recent for into Syria is that this feels like in some ways, dog wagging aside, this feels like sort of what it, our first moment of like what if Trump had been a sort of conventional president?

Hmm. You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's reductive and just sort of cold-blooded to think, to be, you know, to only think of that when it comes to international conflict. But that this is like, everything. else stripped away. We would be getting, I mean, this is, you know, when he was giving his, when he was giving his statement to the country, announcing that these strikes were taking place, I felt like we were in a parallel universe, you know, just listening to that.

It was, it was a, it was Trump as regular president. And certainly that was probably part of the intended effect if you want to, you know, go the conspiratorial route. Right. And you're not, and you're not going for the point of tonight as the night Trump became president. No, no, no. I'm saying. You're just saying, this is like, this is, this looked like.

You know, if we had had generic Republican president, right? Or if Trump had been elected and some people, you know, were theorizing at the time and decided to be a centrist, you know, decided just to be, just to actually just go for approval rating. You know, this is a very just, yeah, down the middle, like presidential moment. And it felt so oddly out of place with everything else that's been spiraling around. A couple of other media reactions to this. There was a Pentagon was fearing a Russian disinformation campaign because what part of American life now does not include a Russian. disinformation campaign. Oh my gosh.

Also, this from New York Times, early Saturday morning, Mr. Assad's office posted a video that appeared to show him strolling into work in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase as if nothing happened. So that was serious response to the thing. You touched on this minute ago, but let's talk about it now. The elephant in the room is wag the dog, right? A term we saw on Twitter approximately nine seconds after Trump's announcement. Yeah.

Maybe basically as Trump was saying it, which is this concept. By the way, Wag the Dog is now one of those movies where everybody remembers the title, everybody remembers the concept, nobody remembers the movie. Name one thing that happened in that movie. Like, nobody knows, right? I remember a scene on a set. It's a whole subset of movies for which that are true. Sure, sure.

Like, we remember the thing, but we don't actually remember the movie. Where do you fall on this? And again, talk about bipartisan, right? Bill Clinton getting interested in the Balkans. and various things in the late 90s when he was when his sex scandals were coursing through the White House? I mean, listen, in the, in the,

I think there's two things. I mean, if you want to be slightly conspiratorial but not, but also slightly realist, there's the wag the dog and then there's also the John Bolton just stirred his job, right? I mean, so there's, these two things

are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but there's, you know, these are, these are two, uh, these are two powerful, um, forces that certainly may have had an effect on us bombing Syria, right? Trump has so little

staff, right? Does not have a secretary of state at the moment, you know, like, it's somebody like Bolton could have an outsized effect. And also I think that, you know, I mean, if you talk about non-partisan, if you want to go for the, you know, the far left take on this, I mean, we bomb so many places so much nowadays that the, that the

distinction, it might just be the degree to which the president acts like he's taking it seriously. Obviously bombing Syria is a much bigger step than a drone bombing in the Middle East. But like it's not like the fire side or the, you know, the statement to the country was the most significant thing from a political standpoint about this, right? It's him acting presidential. And in that case, I think it is dog. It's wagging the dog.

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't, it's funny because it's like, so to use up my allotment of Maggie Haberman citations in this podcast at two, she reported at the end of the week that Trump was. as cornered and sort of, you know, angry as he'd been, basically, his presidency, right? He's got the Russian investigation of Mueller moving on the one hand. He's got Lee Cohen investigation, which he feared was much more, you know, or at least people around him feared was much more, much scarier and threatening to him and moving in New York on the other hand, right? Yeah.

Multiple law enforcement bodies at this point. And that is the moment that he then goes out and strikes at another nation. And I don't know, you know, we never, we will never know anybody's mind. mind, right? We will never prove, you know, to anybody's mind unless they, in Trump's case, just confess it to somebody like Lester Holt, which he may do in the next 20 minutes. The closest we can get to inside his mind right now is Comey's book, where he tells the story of describing the, you know, Russian effect or, you know, the Russian infiltration of our election process and then Trump and the people around him, their immediate response was, how do we spend

this politically? Yeah. Right. So, I mean, I think if you, it's not, it's not that, that conspiratorial. to be, at least to be questioning it. Yeah, and also a massive reversal of what, of what Trump said on the trail. Ooh. Talking about it, the political spectrum before, I mean, I saw someone pointed out online that the Donald, the famous pro-Trump Reddit subreddit,

like every other comment on the threat about Syria was that the users were getting banned permanently from the, from the subreddit for just being like, what the hell? I don't, like, what is he thinking? Yeah, and it was a rare moment of disagreement on Fox News, right? Uh-huh. You had Tucker Carlson. I think Lori Ingram, too. you know, sort of saying, wait a second, this isn't what we, this isn't what we want it, right?

And there's been moments of that. And there's been plenty of moments of that in the Trump presidency, let's say, whether it's a tax bill and things like that, right, that were not, that were not part of the bill of sale. But this is the one. I mean, and it was, I think it was funny because the media probably of all the things about the Trump, the things Trump was using to get votes that were the most salient. The media realized later that being anti-war or at least anti-recent. wars was one of the biggest. Yeah. Right.

And also the most. And painting Hillary Clinton as pro war essentially. Sure. I mean, and one of the big distinctions from liberal versus Republican versus Democrat in cycles passed. Right. I mean, it was the Democrat was traditionally in the position of saying the Republican is pro war.

And Trump was able to flip that, right? I mean, it's interesting that Tucker or, you know, whoever else we're saying that, you know, we're taking the sort of modern Trumpist view that, that, you know, international wars aren't necessarily a good thing when like they've all been carrying the water for that side in the past. But I guess it's sort of the people, as you say Laura Ingraham, too, the people who have sort of come to their most recent television iteration as part of the new Trump era are I guess obligated to be of the, you know, the most recent Republican mold. All right, David, very good point. And on that very good point, that's the press box. Yeah.

More media hot takes next week. See you then, buddy. Later, man. Do I look like a guy who needs hookers? Thank you.