The Press Box - Impeachment Week Is (Maybe) Here. Plus, ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr.

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the possible impeachment of President Trump … again. They weigh in on the Democrats' decision to file an article of impeachment and then make the case for both sides for impeaching President Trump (3:15). Later, they switch gears as ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. joins to discuss the Manti Te’o saga that involved Te’o becoming a victim of catfishing (27:45). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained Pun-Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Don Van Natta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, Apple and Google took the social network parlor out of their app stores. Siding what the New York Times says is too many posts that encouraged violence and crime. Parlor also lost its Amazon web hosting. What I want to know is, do you have any words to say in memory of parlor? At least is a mainstream-ish thing. I'm sorry to say that I don't. I'm pretty sure you have to enter your phone number to sign up even to just browse. So I can't say that I've ever spent any time browsing around on it.

There's not at the mass man is not on parlor. Somebody's going to start that today, just in honor of this podcast. No, no. I mean, come on. These like nominally conservative, quote-unquote free speech platforms, it's the same thing one after the other, right? It's like you just, it's like, every time I throw a party, I don't know what happens.

All these assholes show up. Like, maybe you got to stop. Throw a park. Maybe it's your, maybe the problems with you, man. Yeah. I feel this has been a really

slow moving train of everybody's going to parlor. I mean, haven't we been doing this for a while? Yeah. I got meet me, didn't Larry the cable guy have a meet me on parlor tweet

at one point? That sounds vaguely familiar. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there have been a couple of these. It was all gab for a while and which is still around,

I guess, and, and, but it wasn't sufficient. free speech free speech for the true believers who believe that you know Nazi catchphrases are important to a to a balance of democracy uh listen they can figure it on their own i guess i mean i it's not a someone pointed this out online and so for anyone that you hear that is that is alarmed that these oligarchical tech monoliths are squelching the free speech of uh of

parlor and its users in some Orwellian, well, we'll get back to Orwellian things later in the show, but in some Orwellian move, as I want to quote Kevin W. Glass from on Twitter here, who said, who points out that the National Inquirer, which is a pro-Trump tabloid that explicitly worked to get Trump elected, and also published Jeff Bezos's explicit text messages, is still hosted by Amazon Web Services. So this is not ideological witch hunt. This is, you know, American corporations actually observing social responsibility at a really important moment in her country's history. I feel

the same way about the word Orwellian as I do about the phrase bad look. If I see anybody using either of those off to parlor with you. Coming up on today's show, we inspect the arguments for Donald Trump's impeachment. ESPN's Don Van Nata Jr. stops by to talk about the Manti-Tayo hoax. And at the very end of the show, a special announcement about Thursday's episode of this here podcast. You're going to want to hear that.

All that and more in the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, it's impeachment week again. And this morning, House Democrats put forth an article of impeachment against Donald Trump for, quote, inciting violence

against the government of the United States, a reference, of course, to the pro-Trump forces terrorizing the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday. the Democrats' message is that if Mike Pence doesn't invoke the 25th Amendment that allows him in the cabinet to remove Trump, and Mike Pence is not going to do that, by the way, then Democrats will proceed with impeachment. Steny Hoyer, number two, Democrat in the House says there may be a vote as soon as Wednesday. So here we are once again at the doorstep of impeaching Donald Trump. Mm-hmm.

I feel like throughout President Trump's term and certainly by the time that they got to impeachment last time there was a question of urgency and now there's a sort of almost artificial urgency of the end of his of the term approaching I mean that's sort of adding up

to making it seem like Congress is operating at a normal human speed as opposed to the snail's pace that it usually seems like this kind of you know round robin of motions and postponements and, you know, long lunch breaks seem to always take. But this is a really urgent, I mean, all that aside, this is a really, really, this is a moment of great urgency. I mean, really, really great urgency.

This is, I think any moment wasted talking about how long it's going to take and what burden it might place on the Biden presidency is really, really beside the point. Yeah. Well, that's what I kind of what I wanted to talk to you about, because I think the case for impeachment is pretty straightforward. It was basically broadcast on television last week and has been shown in videos that, by the way, just got scarier and scarier as the week went on. Yeah, it's not like, sometimes you watch like whatever, you go down some weird rabbit hole on YouTube and you start watching like people falling off of pogo sticks and you end up watching people potentially dying in car wrecks. and you do realize that you as a human being get weathered to this stuff. But this was not

a case like that. It got more and more frightening as a human, as an American, every time. And for that reason, I thought the case against impeachment that a number of Republicans are making on the hill and outside the hill was worth us spending a few moments on. Yeah.

I found three reasons that have been given and I'll give you them in order. Number one goes like this. If you impeach Donald Trump right now, you're going to make Donald Trump's supporters mad. Kevin Brady, Republican representative from Texas, said people calling for impeachment, quote, are themselves engaging in intemperate and inflammatory language and calling for action that is equally irresponsible,

equally irresponsible, and could well incite further violence. So what do we think about that? So, I mean, I think in all of these cases, it's really, I mean, this isn't, you don't always do this, but you can really take these, I mean, take almost all these instances to the logical extreme now, right? I mean,

these are literal insurrectionists, right? I mean, they are a lot, they're heavily white supremacist law. They are pro-tototelitarianism. I mean, say whatever you want to say, but they literally stormed the capital to try to take over the government. I'm not really worried about them being mad.

And if it's a messaging issue that people see themselves in these terrorists, then that's part of your job as a politician. Not to create a fine line for yourself and others to walk, but to build the wall, I mean, sorry for the pun, no pun intended, to delineate very clearly between what is acceptable for a citizen of the United States of America to do, and what is terrorist behavior, right?

you don't need to apologize to the potential terrorists out there. Yeah. And the whole reasoning here, right, is that the president incited people to do violent things. But if you hold that president responsible, then these people or some other people may do more violent things. That seems absurd. And, of course, people have been making the case all week that if you don't hold the president responsible, people will say, oh, I've got a green light. I can get away with this. We can do absurd and horrible stuff like this.

And it'll be okay. It really strikes me as this kind of political tactic we see all the time. We've seen it a ton during the Trump era. I'm sure we can find examples going to the other party as well. But somebody does something really bad. And then the other side has a reaction to it. And the people from side number one say, oh, you've gone over the line in your reaction.

If only you'd had a more measured reaction, this would be such a problem. And listen, that's a, that has been a functional, if not successful political tactic over and over again over the past four years. I mean, the fact that you're bringing it up, the fact that we're here, all that is proof for it.

But again, this is like a unique, this is a very different situation or at least a singular situation, right? I mean, it's thinking we can be slightly more clear right about this. that this won't help unify us, schick, runs parallel to the sort of like, runs parallel to like the comparing,

losing your book, we'll get to Josh Holly later, but like Trump losing his Twitter account equals 1984 schick runs, those two things run parallel, right? Because, well, obviously they're disingenuous, but they're also totally empty.

Because you have to ask, is there any time that it would be okay? If Josh Holly walked into his publisher's office and took his shit on the floor, if he walked in and played in and played planted a bomb. Would it be okay to cancel his book then? Yeah, the answer is obviously yes, right? If, uh, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if you're or, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if you're, if, did, did not rise to the

level of being problematic, right? Because obviously there are, there, there are, Obviously, it's not just a matter of divisiveness to try to impeach the president right now. It's a matter of him doing something that warrants impeachment. That is, in fact, impeachable. Yeah. Yeah. You do get into this weird zone, right, where it's like hypothetical zone. But what about this?

But what about this? No, no, no. Let's just talk about the thing that was on TV. Yeah. Like, we're not inferring anything here. I do find that very weird. Reason number two, David, look, Donald Trump is going to be president

for a week and a half longer. And then Biden's going to be in office. Sworn in on January 20th, next Wednesday. So why don't we just move on? I don't know. I think that it's... I'm looking for reasons. I said it before.

I said it before. To indulge that line of argument, and by the way, obviously, that's a line of argument that is, frankly, more persuasive. or intended to be more persuasive to Democrats who were out there. But to indulge in that line of argument is to do exactly what I was just talking about Republicans doing five seconds ago.

It's to pretend that there's something more important than the actual gravity of what happened last week, right? Is it pretend that there is like degrees to this in which it would be overlooked? If Donald Trump had himself led the charge with a musket in one hand and a machete in the other and chopped some people up along the way, I don't think we'd be having this conversation right now, right? David's really setting the world record for violent hypotheticals on this podcast. I'm just saying if it's okay, like you, what if you say, if you say, no, this is going to hamstring Biden's first month, then you're saying that what Trump did is okay. It's really that simple. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. I mean, and here's a.

the other problem with the let's move on argument. Are we sure Donald Trump has moved on? Are we sure that the last week and a half of his presidency is just going to be Donald Trump being quiet and away from everything and not inciting more things? That seems like an awfully big assumption on all of our collective parts. I also, my mind when I hear this, went back to the whole time to move on thing we heard after the Great Recession. after the Iraq war. Remember that? You know what? There are people here that potentially should face the consequences of their actions. But you know what? It would be divisive. It would be, it would get in the way of all these other things we want to do. You know who channeled the the lingering distaste that was in the

world after we moved on in those two cases? Donald Trump in 2016. That's a really good point. Who cares if he was insincere about his, you know, quote unquote opposition to the Iraq war that, you know, when he was saying rich people can do whatever they want in this country. He understood those feelings. We're out in the country. He channeled them. He channeled them all the way to the White House. Seems relevant in this discussion. All right. Reason number three not to impeach Donald Trump, David.

By trying to do a quick impeachment in the week and a half that Trump has left in office, Democrats are simply moving too fast. There's a group of Republican House members who did not vote. vote to overturn the election the other day. They sent a letter to Biden urging him to oppose impeachment. A line from that letter reads, a presidential impeachment should not occur in the heat of the moment, but rather after great deliberation. Philip Klein, writer in the Washington examiner, makes a version of this argument too. Basically, what he says is, look, if you slow down and don't regard the end of Donald Trump's presidency as your shot clock buzzer here, you can bring in potentially other impeachable behavior like that call Trump made to the Georgia's

Secretary of State the other day. Big bombshell that was in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that the administration pressured the U.S. attorney in Georgia to resign because he wouldn't chase after their ridiculous voter fraud rumors. Why he asks, don't you slow down and do a more complete version that brings all those things in? That's the third argument. It seems to me that that's not mutually exclusive to addressing the real urgency of this moment, right?

I mean, I'm not sure that we need any more information to, we shouldn't need any more information to impeach the president now. And I think anything else that needs to be investigated can that can, I mean, those investigations can certainly take place outside of the impeachment process. but I mean of all of these I mean of all of these rationales I guess that one's the most persuasive but but like hey hey slow down just does not seem like particularly compelling right now it seems a lot with doing you were talking about you made a shot clock reference before this really feels like you're trying to just run it out right yeah I think so and and it's just I keep coming back to the to the image we saw and and to the point you made about what happened without there's no there's no argument about what happened. If you don't impeach a president for this, then what do you impeach the president for? What could you possibly pick? And I'm not going to let David make any more hypotheticals here because we would also impeach for those things you were talking about. But what else would you do it for? And urgency and timeline is so interesting to me because isn't the last like couple of weeks of your presidency when you would try to steal the election? That happens now, right? It wouldn't

happen like the previous May. you're sort of saying, well, you know, there was this thing, but it was right at the end. Well, that's when leaders try to stay in power when they're about to be shoved out of power. Or that's when they incite people to take actions that in some hypothetical universe would result in them staying in power. So that's also weird to me to say, well, it's at the end. Well, yeah, that's when people try to stay on beyond when they're supposed to stay on. Yeah. I don't know.

Do we want to spend a second on Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley? well I think we should for no other reason that they're still going to be in office in two weeks no matter what they are they may well this isn't like an NBA trade

where there's like a throw in we're going to make the salaries match by putting Ted Cruz and Judge Hawley in oh man yeah I mean listen there are there have been calls for both them to step down

which all kind of like you know goes to the point that the response to their involvement in the attack on the Capitol, at least their spiritual involvement has been surprisingly full-throated, right? Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's not hard to find sort of departing Republican congresspeople that are willing to say negative things about these two people.

But I think there's a lot of people co-signing this right now, right? And he's easy. I mean, Bob Corker, former Republican Senator, Bob Corker said, which I think is that this is important when it goes to stating what's true. I keep coming back to this. Everyone can see through and look, understand they're running for president. They think they're getting a pass and they can be popular with this base and there's no harm done, but there was harm done. That's important. Joe Manchin said, there's no way they cannot be complicit in this. I don't know how you can live with yourself right now knowing that people lost their lives. they're losing supporters, right?

Josh Holly's lost his former patron, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, or former senator, and who called his support of Holly the biggest mistake he's ever made. His top donor said he should be censured. Cruz's right-hand guy, Chad Sweet,

fundraiser, and everything else, has cut ties with him. And the financial implications don't stop there. There's, I mean, any number of outlets have reported that Marriott International, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, AT&T, all these are companies that have either specifically stopped donating to these people

or to Republicans or basically said, we're going to stop donating altogether and take a fresh look at who we're giving money to, which is kind of a nice way to say we're not giving money to people that incite insurrections anymore. And, you know, if any of these things don't, don't matter if you can point any of these things. The Wall Street Journal editorial board came down on both of them. And we talked before on this show about how local newspaper presidential endorsements might not be as valuable now as they were at some point in the past.

But their role in tisking their local seditionists has become more important than ever. The Kansas City star called Holly a man who, having so disgrace his office and our state must either resign or be removed from the U.S. Senate. And the Houston Chronicle called for Ted Cruz to resign also saying, your lives cost lives. And it's a real thing. Sheldon Whitehouse said that the Ethics Committee must consider their removal. And this was kind of a cool, interesting little side note.

Jake Sherman, who's at Punchball now said that senior Democrats, see, this is in a tweet, I guess it was in his morning newsletter also, said that Senate Democrats are talking about cutting off any Republican who voted against certifying the election. And that means no bills with them, no letters with them, blocking their initiatives and committee, et cetera. I mean, that seems like there's, this is more, this is more flack than I expected those two to take based on history. And isn't part of that go to something that McKay Coppins brought up with us last week,

is that people in Congress cannot stand Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley? even Republicans, maybe especially Republicans, because they have to work with them all the time. Yeah. And so there's just no, there's no reservoir of goodwill here for these people. I mean, look, and again, I don't want to get away from the central fact. People storm the Capitol. Then you walk back into the Senate chamber and still vote to overturn the will of the voters. Yeah.

That's what they did. But when you see this almost gleeful reaction, wide range. reaction. I think it has something to do with the fact that people just don't like Holly and Cruz. And they started with that point. And now they're like, wow, look what these guys have done. This is even worse than I thought. I think that was part of it. I will ask you this though. You just gave this a whole great run down there. Do we still believe that there are going to be consequences for these two people outside of maybe it endangers their 2024 presidential bit. Weirdly, I think that the presidential bid is maybe the least impacted. As long as they say in office or

sort of, you know, stage managed the next several years correctly, because as we saw with President Trump, you don't have, I mean, you can be the person that all the other establishment Republicans talk shit about and still get the nomination, right? But I guess my question is if they are setting aside their removal from the ethics committee or, you know, by any other means, I guess I'd be interested to know if they were given some sort of lesser punishment, if they were censured or, you know, removed from committees and blah, blah, blah, is a public censure damaging enough that they would consider stepping down before that that came to pass?

I don't think so. I don't think so. So if it's not. You're going to leave the Senate? Huh? You're going to leave the Senate? Yeah. No, I mean, I agree.

I just, I mean, it's interesting. It's, it's interesting to think about, like, what, what the campaign. looks like in four years. I don't, I mean, I think the fact that people are going all in on them now, I mean, leads me to believe that it's going to be a, it's, I mean, that they will in fact face some sort of punishment. But what that, if it, but whether it's significant, whether it actually affects their lives, who knows? I mean, I just kind of, I'm, I'm sort of nonplussed. I will say this, though. I mean, the fact that they're saying this stuff when it's not, I mean, Kevin McCarthy, and people have called for his resignation as well, but Kevin McCarthy was

supporting, I mean, was very supportive of Trump's conspiracy theories about secretly winning the election despite being, which reporter, somebody, somebody reported a day that he said to them specifically several weeks ago that Trump had lost the election and there was the potential for danger resulting from that, even though publicly he wasn't saying that very openly. I don't know. I mean, it kind of seems like like, like, cruise and, Holly might just end up being sort of the stocking horses for the whole thing, right? I mean, like, if the Republicans, if Republicans align against those two, then can the rest of the Republicans act like they weren't guilty of it?

I mean, that might make that they might be attractive targets in that sense, right? Because it's not. So you're saying, you're saying, oh, look, see, the rest of us, though, even though we humored Trump for a month and a half plus, we didn't take that final step of even after their, the capital was invaded of voting to overturn the election. But those two did, and then we're going to make them into pariahs, and by virtue of that make us look a little bit better. Well, we can, we just skate, basically, right?

I mean, that would be, I mean, that would be the thought process. There was an article, man, where was it today? About why, was it in the post? About why people, yes, about, uh, it's how Republican senators are explaining their years of previous fealty to Trump. Um, it's from on January 8th, and it was a really good piece. But it comes down to basically, I think the most convincing argument is that he was a good president for getting the stuff we really care about done. Conservative judges, tax breaks, like whatever.

And a lot of what made Trump really effective in the things that the Republican Party, quote unquote, actually cares about is that he was distracting everybody from that stuff happening. Right. I mean, like we never had to, we never on this show talked about Trump's judicial appointments, maybe one time, you know? Like, I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh, the, the point being that all of the, all of the nonsense that Trump was doing, which, which culminated in an act of insurrection, uh, was part of the plan sort of, right? It's like, you, like, you just go make noise over here while we, you know, cut corporate tax rates. And Cruz and Holly are certainly more guilty than their, than other Republicans in Congress and in the Senate, but they're, if, you know, they're not the only ones

to blame here. All right, David, let's do the Overward 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, send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. You mentioned Simon and Schuster canceling Josh Hawley's book contract. Well, Holly was predictably furious at that development. This could not be more Orwellian. He said in a statement. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write.

Actually, George Orwell got his books published. Thanks to Andrew Graining for that one. We did some of the Trump Twitter band jokes on Friday. But David, there were more. I saw Trump yelling at the kid with the lawnmower. What's my MySpace password? Another one says,

it looks like Trump will be moving to Pornhub. And this was nice. Mr. Bezos with the lead pipe. in the parlor. Thanks to Andrew Brendan, Mark Moore, Matthew J. Moulton, John Spevac, and Andrew Joe Potter for those. And finally, David, did you see the picture of the man walking around the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday

holding Nancy Pelosi's lectern? Well, a man in Florida named Adam Johnson has been arrested and charged with a count of theft of government property. it was an overwork Twitter joke or maybe just a good Twitter joke to write. His lawyer said at trial he won't be taking the stand. Thanks to Socrates Lecrindus. If you found something to amuse us in this horror, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week.

All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And how about we do something that is not about Donald Trump? Okay, please. Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN has a new edition of his show Backstory Out. and it's about the Manti-Tayo saga. If anyone does not remember this, Manti-Tayo was a linebacker at Notre Dame and told the world he had a girlfriend

who died of leukemia. The story was a tear-jurker on ESPN and Sports Illustrated in the New York Times all over the place. And then it turned out Manti-Tayo's girlfriend did not, in fact, exist. And much to the chagrin of sports media people, Teo, excuse me, was the apparent victim of catfishing. Well, Van Nata reopened the story, and I'm glad he did, because it's not just a

mind-blowing story about sports and sex and identity online. It's a story about journalism, and it hits reporters right where it counts. Here's Don Van Nata. All right, Don, let's start in 2012. Mantai Teo is a star-linebacker at Notre Dame. He goes around to all these media outlets and describes the death of his girlfriend, Lene Kakuwa. How does he describe that tragedy? Well, it's a dual tragedy for Manteo. His grandmother died on September 12th. His beloved grandmother, he gets that news, and then six hours later finds out Lene Kakuwa, his girlfriend, died.

So he was processing two tragedies at the same time. But in his descriptions of Lene Kakuwa to the media, almost instantly, and also to his teammates, to people in the locker room, as coaches, he described her as the love of his life, somebody who was his soulmate, somebody that he hoped to see someday again in heaven. And so that was the framing of it for the media that Mantea was playing through this incredible loss and through this grief. And he told reporters that Lene said to him, if I die of leukemia, I want you to keep playing. And he did. And that's why the story was so irresistible. He played through that grief and played incredibly well for Notre Dame and led the team to an undefeated regular

season. We later find out the girlfriend does not in fact exist and that Teo is being catfished. Who was playing the girlfriend? A California man named Ronaya Tui Asa Sopo, who is apparently an acquaintance of Manteo, their families knew each other. And so over a period of several years, Tuia Sosopo is catfishing Manteo, pretending to be Linnae Kakuwa, imitating a woman's voice on the phone, texting constantly, and Manteo, as he tells it to us, has fallen in love with this woman. And so it was an incredibly intricate and elaborate hoax that Raniya Tui Asa Sopo perpetrated on Teo. The question is whether or not Mantea Tiao, in describing the love of his life, who Linéi Kakuwa is, was really being sincere about that when you consider he never set eyes on her.

He never met her. Never met her, never set eyes on her. In fact, Brian, they did Skype calls together and Lanakakakua's image was blacked out even during the Skype calls. So, you know, the more you dig into this, the more sort of preposterous it becomes and you keep thinking yourself, well, wait a minute. How could Manteo fall in love with somebody as deeply as he said he did when he never set eyes on her? And even in these Skype calls, wasn't even able to take a look at her. There are like three different journalism stories buried in your episode of Backstory. Here's the first one.

And this is super easy for us to do here in 2021. But if you had been writing a profile of Manteo, and doing it on deadline, as many of these people were. Would you have checked to see if this girlfriend existed? That's a great question. I don't know whether I would have or not. You know, you want to take somebody at their word when they tell you to your face on camera, on the record, this was the love of my life.

If I was sitting in the chair of Pete Fammell, the senior writer at Sports Illustrated, who did a lengthy interview with Mante Tao just, 12 days after Linnae Kakuwa purportedly died. And Teo is answering those questions, very simple questions like, how did you meet her? And Teo's answer is, well, we just met. She was kind of there. There are so many red flags in that interview, Brian,

that if I had been sitting there. Now, I'm not trying to say that I'm a better journalist than Pete. Pete's a terrific reporter, but there were a lot of red flags. Mante Tayao didn't know Linay Kaku is major at Stanford. And a lot of the language he used, there were certainly questions about how deep this relationship was. If I had heard that, I might have been inclined to maybe do a quick Google search, which, of course, the folks at Deadspin did and my colleagues at ESPN did later and within an hour found out that Linay Kakuwa didn't exist.

And it's a way it gets around reporters natural skepticism because we all have it, even sports writers, about what we're hearing, especially when it's too good to be true. Is it because the story is a feel good and it's not something that's, you know, if we were talking about Mantiahe got kicked out of his high school or had committed a crime, you would go and make sure that's nailed down so you don't get sued and so you don't get it wrong. But did this slip around because it was a nice, quote unquote, nice story? I think so. I think that it, that was part of it for sure.

It was a story that certainly we wanted to believe, right? We kind of bought into it. And Manteaio is somebody, when he talks, he comes across completely sincere. And the way he described the relationship, despite those red flags, he was easy to believe. And so, you know, it wasn't just Pete Fammell. It was my colleagues at ESPN. It was a lot of other journalists people at the South Bend Tribune who first reported Lanakakou's death and really got the story rolling. all of us in the media fell for it.

And I think part of it is because of how sincere Manti sounded in these interviews, despite those red flags that I described. And because, as you point out, it was a feel-good story. It was an inspirational story. This was not an investigative story where we were dubious from the word go. And it was just a story we all wanted to be true. This was the other thought that occurred to me while I was watching the show, is that college football players present a real challenge.

to profile writers. Because somebody like Manti is really famous, but he's young at this period, and he's unformed as a person like we all are in college. And I think it's funny, Don, because if you look at college football player profiles, they're basically two kinds. One is the school didn't give me the scholarship offer I wanted and I had to go somewhere else and now I'm playing with a chip on my shoulder. That's profile number one. And number two is I had this tragedy or challenge in my life. and I think Manti fit into the second bucket. And I think when you are trying to get a 21-year-old kid and explain him to your audience, it's hard, right?

And so when he fits into that second bucket, you go, bam, that's it. That's the piece I'm going to tell the world. That's right. Absolutely. And also there were certain words that Manti used in these interviews that when you hear them, you sort of tumble for the story even more. He's all about faith, and he talked frequently about faith. He's of the Mormon faith.

He believes deeply in the fact that even if you can't see something, you can still believe it to be true. And he used that language. And now, as a very cynical journalist now looking back and knowing what we know after Deadspin broke the story in January 2013, I hear that language. And I wonder, well, wait a minute. Is it possible that Mantai, when he was talking about that and talking about faith was maybe signaling that he had some doubts about whether L'Ne Kakuwa actually existed earlier than he ever had let on. And that was one of the things, one of the

major questions I tried to investigate in this episode of Backstory. You say in the episode that Teo and the media were partners in this story. How so? I think it's because both the media and Teo wanted the story to be true, sort of checked there are questions that we might have had about it, just the way Teo did as well at the door. And certainly the way Teo described her, and as I said, there were these red flags that were sort of ignored by the media. The media also ignored its own red flags. It wasn't just the language of Teo that was sort of suspicious and should have been a signal

to us to look more deeply, even when we did our own fact-checking, when sports illustrated fact checkers, check the Pete Thamel story, and couldn't find any evidence of a car accident that Lanakakua had apparently been in in early part of 2012, couldn't confirm that she was a graduate of Stanford and other things. They still went with the story. Other media outlets also did some perfunctory checking of facts, couldn't find confirmation of certain things Teo said, and yet still went with the story. So it really was a legend that I think was forged equally by the equal partners of Manti and the media. Here's journalism story number two within this.

ESPN gets a call from Teo's agent, guy named Tom Condon, super agent to the NFL. And he tells ESPN, hey, this girlfriend that you've been reading about, she does not exist. And I want a place for Manti Teo

to tell this story, essentially, get it out there before the NFL draft where he's going to be a high pick. Why doesn't ESPN wind up publishing that story? Well, the tip came from Tom. Condon, a very powerful CAA agent, to Chris Mortensen, my colleague at ESPN, the ESPN NFL Insider.

And when that tip comes in, as you said, Brian, it is an opportunity for ESPN to have an exclusive interview, a spectacular story, right? This is giving Manti Tao a platform, is the offer that Condon is giving us to sit down and say, I was fooled, I was catfished. And as we know, first impressions in life are so important. And think about if that had happened before Deadspin had broken it, how we would be viewing this. That information comes in and two things happen. Vince Doria, the head of the news division and a vice president of ESPN at the time and a

man who actually helped hire me and recruit me from the New York Times, he gets this information and he begins negotiating with Tom Condon to get Teo in the chair with Jeremy Shapp for this interview. But at the same time, there's a group of investigative reporters who hear this information, and they begin doing what Deadspin would also do. They start hunting for whether or not Lanay Kakua exists or not. And very quickly, they find out that Lanai Kakouet Kukuit does not exist, that it was a hoax. And within a day, my colleagues who were investigative reporters at the network, produce a story saying that this was a hoax. Doria decides that that story is going to be put on the shelf. He, according to my sources, tells the reporters to stand down

and not do any additional reporting while he on this separate track is negotiating with Condon to get Manteo in the chair. And as we all know, that never happened. Deadspin gets a tip just a day after Condon calls ESPN and they break the story five days later. And we should note this is old Deadspin. Good, good deadspin. That's right. The reporters and the reporters of Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, the editor's Tommy Craigs, all of whom you have on the show. What do they do? What do they figure out, journalistically speaking, that nobody else does in this story? Well, they get the tip that they get, Brian, which is interesting, is that Manti is a fraud. The tip that they get is that Manti was in on this hoax. It was he who was hoaxing the world.

They see it, though, as a sports media story very early on because what Jack Dickey does, he sets up a spreadsheet and looks at all the coverage of the Mantei Teo story from the previous fall and finds all these inconsistencies and all these stories, different dates of when Lanakakawa might have died, all sorts of facts that don't add up. But simultaneous to that, very quickly, they figure out that Lanakakawa doesn't exist. And then, of course, the bigger question is, okay, who's behind? linea cuckua. And through some very smart sleuthing that Tim Burke does on websites, he figures out that the photograph on Lanakakua's Twitter page actually belongs to a college

student in California named Diana Mira. He contacts Diana Mira through a Facebook friend, and Diane O'Meara says those 25 photographs are all out there that are claiming to be Lanakakakua actually are of me. And it just so happens that Diana Mirro sent one of those photos, during the fall, late in the fall of 2012, to a high school classmate of hers named Rania Tuyasa Sopoh. So that is how the Deadspin sleuths figure out that Linnae Kakuwa was a figment of the imagination of Rania Tuiasasopo. And how much of that is these guys just knowing how to do investigative journalism on the internet versus other people just not being as familiar with that world. I think it was a big part of it. Certainly the Deadspin investigators had a lot of experience

investigating hoaxes and scams and frauds. This was sort of their playpen, right? Their playground. They were very comfortable with that. But I would argue, Brian, that my colleagues at ESPN, some of the best investigative reporters in the country, also could have done that had they been given the chance. And they weren't given that opportunity. They very quickly figured out that when they cuckoo was a hoax, but were told to stand down and did stand down much to their frustration. And you can imagine how frustrated they were when Deadspin broke the story, knowing that they had to stay on the sidelines. Yeah. And I think what you said a minute ago, Deadspin seeing this as a media story. It almost makes them more ravenous for it. Because,

you know, look, it's not just going to be this mind-blowing story about Manteo. It's going to be a story about SI. And it's going to be a story about Game Day. And it's going to be a story about all these places that put Mantei-Tayo on the air. Yeah, Tim Burke and Jack Dickey said that to me. They were surprised that it took off and was such a worldwide sensation. They initially really did see it as a chance for them to whack around ESPN and Pete Famil. Their glee was it sort of taking down the sports media that fell head over heels in love with this irresistible story that turned out not to be true.

Right. It's the perfect Deadspin story. I think Craigs tells you that Deadspins' MO, if I'm reading through the the bleeps in the episode correctly was to fuck shit up. So that's precisely what he says. Yeah. And he says that's what he got. And he says that's what he got into journalism to do.

And this was the biggest story deadspin had ever done in its seven year history. And I would argue maybe the best piece of work they've done in that old deadspin era. Because they turned it around so quickly. And they beat everybody in in the mainstream media and the sports media. And it's a story, you know, obviously we're still talking about eight years. years later. Remind us how big this story was when it broke in January 2013? It lands on January 16th, 2013, 4 p.m., and it goes worldwide instantly. CNN, the BBC, across the world, people are fascinated with this, not seeing it as a sports media story, but seeing it as this

incredible human drama and a heartbreaking story, a very sad story of the Heisman Trophy, runner up being catfished, talking for months about the love of his life. And instantly, everyone wanted to know, well, what did Manti know and when did he know it? Because there was a line in the Deadspin story that said, I am 80% sure he was in on this hoax. And I think really, Brian, that shaped people's view instantly that, okay, Manti wasn't the victim here. Manti was in on this. And again, if he had been allowed and to sit with Jeremy Schap and tell the story he wanted to tell, the first impression left by that would have been very, very different from the first impression left by the Deadspin exclusive. So you investigated that idea, whether Teo was involved in the deception. What did you find? I found no evidence of it and looked very deeply into that. There's a lot of smoke. There's a lot of very odd things that I could really never get to the bottom of.

probably the biggest clue that something more is going on here was after the USC game at the end of November 2012 when there is a TMZ video, TMZ sports video of Rania, Tui Asa Sopo, and Manteau, Hugging. Again, I think there are acquaintances, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were in cahoots on this. I found no evidence of it, but looked very hard into it. But I also looked into the question of how much Manteau might have leaned into it. into the language of this. Tommy Craggs frames it, I thought, very nicely in the backstory episode

when he said there were two hoaxes here, the hoax that was perpetrated on Manteaio. And then the second hoax, he says, is Teo's language in leaning into the love affair that he describes as being with somebody who's his soulmate. When you really look at the relationship and it looks pretty casual. And really, they were really boyfriend and girlfriend and I'm using air quotes to describe that for only about a year. Again, who are we to doubt somebody's love, as I say at the end of the episode? But the language that Manti used repeatedly with the media and with his teammates and with his coaches and others far exceeded what you'd think it should have been when you really look closely at what the relationship was in real life. After the story breaks, Teo does one on-camera interview, which is with Katie Couric.

you tried to get him on camera. He talked to you. You interviewed him. You used some of that in this episode, but he didn't want to come on camera and do it again. Does that, do you think, is that part of the reason there are so many unresolved questions

about this whole episode? Yeah, for sure. So it's not just that Teo did the interview with Katie Couric on camera. He also did an off-camera interview with Jeremy Scha. At the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, two and a half hours. It was a very in-depth, wide-ranging interview

that Shapp did with Teo, but there were no cameras there. There were very strict ground rules that were set up by the Teo camp for that interview. So it was really just Jeremy coming on Sports Center late one night saying, I believe what Mante told me, but none of us in the audience could make any judgment until he went on Katie Couric show, as you said. And then he hadn't done another interview since. I found myself, Brian, in the exact same position that Vince Doria, my former boss at ESPN and Jeremy Shapp were, in that again, in trying to get Manti to agree to sit on camera with me,

and by the way, he did agree to do the interview. I mean, we had four cameras ready to go to Chicago in November to interview Manti, and then he canceled. There were all these ground rules again. He didn't want me to ask him about a quote he gave on a college game day piece back in October 2012 about faith. He answered a question, what does faith mean to you? A very simple question.

He gave an answer that I found very interesting that I wanted to ask him about. he told me I couldn't ask him that question and I couldn't even use the clip in the show. So again, I think because it was so carefully stage managed that tour that Mante did back in January of 2013 and even now in trying to get him to sit for an interview with me, he was still setting up all these ground rules and hurdles to get to the truth, which I couldn't accept as a journalist. I think that's why we still have these lingering, stubborn questions about what the truth is in this case. and you were a zero ground rules guy for an interview like this? I'm a mostly zero ground rules guy.

I don't like ground rules. Most journalists don't. I just felt, Brian, to be honest with you, that this was almost a poison pill that Teo and Matthew Hiltzig were putting into this process. He agreed to do the interview with me. And by the way, we had conversations. And I did use some of that in the episode. And I felt it was very revealing some of the things he said

and actually made the audience sympathetic. to how clearly this is still affecting him all these years later, and I feel for him from that perspective, but by the same token, he made a commitment to do something, and then to suddenly say, I can't ask him a question, he knows I want to ask him about it, and can't even use a clip that 6 million people saw in college game day. He's telling me I can't use a clip in my film.

Yeah, that's a ground rule that I was not going to accept. And I think they knew that, and so that's where it ended. I was reminded that this story was so big that when it brings, broke at Grantland, where I was, they convened Chuck Closterman and Malcolm Gladwell to have an email exchange about the story. I mean, it's like, think about that. Like, we did, you know, the buzzer was going off and who can we get, I know, let's get like two of the biggest writers out there to just talk to each other about the story. That's incredible. It was incredible. I remember that piece. Yeah, it's a really good conversation that those two guys had. It was a very

smart conversation. Yeah, and people couldn't get enough of it. And, you know, the media fumbled this badly, right, Brian? And what I found one of the interesting things is the media really didn't do much self-reflection. As you know, we in the media, we ain't good at that. Like, when I was at the New York Times, I actually did the story for the New York Times about Judy Miller and the WMD stuff in 2005. And that was really hard to do because I was writing about my bosses, Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, and Jill Abramson, the managing editor. And yet again, 15 years later, I had friends of mine teasing me saying, you're again now investigating your bosses sort of at ESPN and the way they handled this. It's sensitive. We don't do that. We're not good at it. We should be a lot better at it. There have been public editors, obviously, of publications that are no longer working as public editors. And you can guess some of the reasoning behind that. And so, yeah, there's not a lot of self-reflection. And there was not a lot of that in the the way the media covered this.

And, you know, strikingly, almost everybody who covered this story in the fall of 2012 didn't want to talk to me about it on camera either. I'm talking about the journalists who wrote the stories, did the on-camera, you know, TV pieces. None of those folks wanted to talk about it. That's amazing to me. Because it is understandable, right? It sucks, but it's understandable. We've all made mistakes.

I've made mistakes. We have all made mistakes as journalists. It is understandable. And I was hoping one of those reporters would sit and be sort of self-reflective about it. Shelly Smith, my colleague at ESPN, who did a story after Deadspin, broke the story, you know, did do a Zoom interview with me last fall and said some very interesting things, particularly about the Tommy Condon call that came into the network. But no, I couldn't persuade any of the other folks to do it.

And like you said, yeah, it is understandable. And it is, and it is a, as Jeremy Shapp said, Jeremy said it really well, I thought. He said, look, I wouldn't have necessarily called the funeral home. I wouldn't have looked for a death certificate. Maybe that means I'm a bad journalist. I don't know whether I would have done it either. As I said, I really don't. So, you know, it's, it is understandable what happened to the media with this particular story.

Before you go, let's spend a few minutes talking about newspapers. For those of us that remember what newspapers are and love them, you get to the Miami Herald in 1987. What is the Herald like in 87? The Herald was just an amazingly exciting place. It was filled with so much talent, had money to burn. It was a writer's newspaper. And it wanted to, the Herald existed basically to kick ass and to take names.

And that's how I came up. There was a great editor there named Gene Miller. And Gene Miller would run around the news. room and just applaud people as you were sitting banging out your stories on deadline, called everybody champion. That was his nickname for you. And the ethos of the newsroom was Gene Miller and his laughter. He would laugh. The herald took pride in going after corruption, and there was a ton of it in Miami at the time. And so that was sort of, you know, that's really where I learned how to be a journalist and was surrounded by great reporters who, you know, went

out and wanted to get the truth and damn the consequences, damn the torpedoes, doesn't matter. You know, there were no sacred cows and there were so many great stories. You know, you're really only limited by how exhausted you'd be because everywhere you look, there was something going wrong, some corrupt thing, you know, some public official on the take, some judge putting $25,000 in the seat of his pants. I mean, it was just the stories were great and they were everywhere. Can we name some members of the All-Star team here? Dave Barry, Gene White. Garden, Edna Buchanan, who am I leaving out?

Edna Buchanan, yeah, it was fantastic. Jeff Lean, who is now the investigations editor at the Washington Post. I think he's edited six or seven or eight Pulitzer Prize winning packages. Joel Achenbach, Sidney Friedberg,

a Dynamo reporter who won a Pulitzer when I was there. There's so many, I'm forgetting, Dexter Filkins, who is now with the New Yorker, the great war correspondent. He and I were buddies.

and did a lot of work together. There's so many. I mean, it was really seen as a AAA farm club for the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. And so so many of the people that really kick butt there, you know, moved on to the best papers in the country. So to that point, how does young Don Van Nata think?

How do you get notice so that you get the call up to one of those papers? What's your plan? Well, I got lucky. I got lucky, Brian. And I was sent to a comfort in motel in Florida City as Hurricane Andrew was barreling down on South Florida. I just, you know, really for the luck of the draw, because there were reporters sent all over South Florida. We didn't know where Hurricane Andrew was going to land. And the eye of the storm went over the comfort in motel that I was in and tore it apart with 165-mile-an-hour winds on August 24th, 1992.

And I wrote a first-person story about it, which got the attention. of people in New York and Washington put me on their radar screen and then I became an investigative reporter and did some work that also folks up there admired and then I got the call to go to the New York Times in 1995. How long did it take you to write the hurricane story?

I wrote it on a trash 80 on one of those Texas instrument crappy little computers. You know, 90 minutes, 70 to 90 minutes, something like that. It just poured out. I had a bunch of little observations written in a notebook

and I was very fortunate. We had to actually drive the laptop back to one Herald Plaza where my story was sort of taken off of it and put into a special edition. Big headline on The Herald was Destruction at Dawn, and my story was about a comfort in hero. Literally, a guy who saved our lives knew that we had to go from one side of the comfort end

to the other when the wind shifted as the eye of the hurricane passed over the motel. And I'm convinced that saved our lives. I think only four or five of the rooms were intact when the storm blew out, and we were in one of them. So the piece actually had to be harvested in person off the computer? Because the phones didn't work, that's why? Yeah, the phone lines were all down. It had to be harvested off of the computer.

And, yeah, it was, it was, it was remarkable. And then for months, we were down in South Dade County, you know, covering the aftermath of the storm. The Herald had a horse trailer that people were sleeping in. It was, I remember just how hot it was. There was no help for days after the hurricane blew through there until finally President Bush sent the National Guard and some other help and water to people. And yet the Herald was being delivered to houses

that were completely devastated by the storm. I still remember my colleagues and I delivering newspapers to people and they were so grateful to get that newspaper and to get news in their hands of what was happening in their communities. So it was an incredible experience. You go the New York Times and then ESPN in 2012. We'll end here. What was attractive for an investigative reporter, writer like you, about ESPN? Well, I had been at the Times for 16 years, and I was very fortunate.

I covered the impeachment of a president. I covered 9-11. I covered the Florida deadlocked election. I was in London for three years covering counterterrorism. and traveled around Europe and the Middle East. I was back in Miami as a national correspondent in 2011 doing investigative work and ESPN called. And I was always a frustrated would-be sports writer, Brian. I'd written two of my three books were about sports subjects.

And so when ESPN called and said, we want you to do sports investigative reporting, we're going to give you a lot of resources. You can live out of your house in Miami, travel around the country or even the globe. it just was a new playing field for me. And I just thought this is going to be a lot of fun. It was time to go and try something new and work some new muscles. And also a chance to maybe be a cross-platform journalist, do some TV and audio and all of those wonderful things.

And so I was surprised how quickly I agreed to do it when they called, and I went up to Bristol and visited the ESPN campus. You can watch Don Van Netta Jr.'s backstory. on a bunch of re-airings across ESPN. It's also on ESPN plus the streaming platform. Don, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian. All right, so for David Schumacher, guesses, the Strain pun headline.

Yeah. Everyone sent us the Times of India headline this week that said, C-O-U-P-Clux Klan, Koo-Klux Klan. I got a big round of applause on Twitter. But today's headline comes from Danny Page. It's from IBD Weekly. That is the weekly edition of Investors Business Daily, Investors Business Daily weekly, if you will. The story, David, was about all these big companies moving out of cities.

The subhead is remote work in COVID pandemic and Bolden's big name companies to exit high tax, high cost locales. So essentially the reasoning is, if there's COVID going on, why are we in New York City? Why are we in San Francisco? Why are we in Los Angeles? Yeah. Your pun word here is big city. Bright lights. Is it Bright Lights Big City something?

Big City? Yeah. Good going. Keep going. On the right track. Bright lights. Bright lights. Big.

Dang. Tax. Pretty straightforward here. Don't think too creatively. Don't think too funny. Bright lights small town. Bright lights little city. Bright lights.

big taxes. We're circling around it. Bright lights flee big city. Oh, okay. That's great. Remember, this is IBD Weekly here. No, I like it. I like it.

I mean, it's just, you know. Adjust your expectations according to. A couple of announcements, David, there's a good chance you'll be getting an emergency pod in the next few days from us. We did four pods last week. We're ready for news from impeachment to resignation to Lindsay Graham getting on TV again. check out the press box pod for updates we'll also be doing a reaction show next wednesday after joe biden's inauguration which we desperately hope will be a peaceful event but while we're covering

the news david one thing you and i had planned for 2021 is some theme episodes of this podcast we pick like a great nonfiction book or a great movie about the media or just an interesting topic we go get a big guest and we do something totally different from the normal episode of the press box. Well, guess what? We're going to start this Thursday, January 14th, because this week is the 25th anniversary of the publication of the great book Into the Wild.

And John Crackauer is going to come on the press box to talk about Into the Wild. Yeah. Now, you probably know the story of Into the Wild. Chris McCannless, 24-year-old college grad gives away all his money, most of his possessions, and ventures out into the Alaskan wilderness where he lives on a bus

for more than three and a half months before dying of starvation. Into the Wild was and is a phenomenon. It sold more than 2 million copies after its publication. It has become a movie directed by Sean Penn. It's taught in high schools. There was a study guide, David,

I found online where students were told to look for vocabulary words like perambulation and cramp on. Wow. The book also has a fascinating backstory. We know this as a John Crackauer story indelibly linked to him, but when he was reporting the story for a magazine, he was actually competing with Tina Brown's New Yorker, which was reporting its own Chris McCannel's story.

When he turned in into the Wild One editor thought it was completely unpublishable. and since its publication and since the Sean Penn movie, it has become such a phenomenon that fans started making the trek into the Alaskan wilderness to go see the bus. The Chris McCanness lived on. That has become its own story. The bus was actually moved last year. Anyway, crack hour talks about all this stuff.

So here's what we're going to do Thursday. David and I are going to offer our thoughts on Into the Wild. Then Crack Hour is going to come on and get into all these things. If you've read Into the Wild, grab it and flip through it over the next day or two. If you haven't, now's your chance. It's a very quick 200 plus pages. You can read it in one night.

He is David Schuemaker of Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. And David, we will see you Thursday. If not before. John Crackhauer and more Lukeworm takes about the meeting. See you later, Brian.