What A Day - The Barr Has Been Lowered

Episode Date: February 13, 2020

The sentencing recommendation for former Trump campaign advisor Roger Stone got shortened by the DOJ and it all feels awfully corrupt. We discuss what might've happened and how lawmakers are reacting to a possible overreach by President Trump.The chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party is resigning amid calls for a partial re-canvass and a large union in Nevada is calling out candidates that support Medicare For All.And in headlines: white supremacists are publishing more propaganda, WhatsApp hits 2 billion, and more on Papa John's pizza diet.

It's Thursday, February 13th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, finally reunited after a very difficult separation. It's really good to have you back. I'm glad that you've changed. I am just, I'm just heavier. Heavier and more tired. But it's good to be here. On today's show, an update on caucuses past and future, then some headlines. But first, the latest on Roger Stone and the DOJ. We told you all yesterday about former Trump campaign advisor Roger Jason Stone's sentencing recommendation.

Jason is a major red flag for a middle name going from up to nine years for obstruction and perjury to something much, much lighter this week in federal court. The Department of Justice contends that this is not a corrupt about face made at the behest of Donald Trump, but is rather just how they feel. Even though Attorney General William Barr just announced that he will take control of legal matters, quote, of interest to the president. And this is clearly one of those cases. Akilah, there just seems to be no bottom here to what everybody is doing. Take us back through the timeline of how we got here, how this all happened. Sure. So, recent history. Roger Stone was found guilty of impeding the House investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, witness tampering, because he threatened a witness,

and lying to prosecutors about WikiLeaks. On Monday, federal prosecutors in the case recommended a sentence of seven to nine years. And then... Donald Trump tweeted, calling it a, quote, horrible and very unfair situation. The next day, a top federal prosecutor at the request of Attorney General Barr overruled the sentencing recommendation, saying that Stone deserved to be sentenced to, quote, far less time in prison.

No, they weren't specific. Maybe they'll recommend five years. Maybe they'll recommend his Uber slowdown on the way to the airport so he can look at the prison for a second. We don't know for sure. We don't know. Right, right, right. And that's when we saw all the resignations. Three of the prosecutors on the case quit the case and one quit from the Department of Justice altogether. So what do we know about why they were all suddenly quitting? Well, according to reports, they were pissed. The Department of Justice is supposed to act independently of the White House in its investigations, i.e. It's not supposed to be politically motivated. Imagine.

And here's a case, one in which Trump is directly involved, where it appears the president, through his Twitter feed, is dictating that the department give his friends special treatment. And Bill Barr is like, all right, man, fine. And this is from the so-called Law and Order Party that loves mandatory minimums. I mean, there are black people in jail for carrying two joints who are serving more time than this guy. And, like, by a lot. So, anyway, back to Trump. This isn't the first time his cronies have been hail-hydra'd out of the big house.

Officials told NBC that high-ranking Justice Department officials also intervened last month to help change the government's sentencing recommendation for Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. I'm assuming that this is what Trump thinks makes America great. That's what those hats are about. He's doing it. You know, I just I think that he's wrong. Yeah. All this is happening in conjunction with Trump's revenge tour where he's firing everybody who testified against him. That's Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, Vindman's twin brother, who was a lawyer at the National Security Council and an army officer, was also fired. Gordon Sondland was asked to resign, and when he didn't, he got axed too. U.S. Attorney Jesse Liu oversaw sensitive cases spawned from the Mueller

investigation, and what do you know, she was also removed. Elaine McCusker, who was being considered for a position at the Pentagon, clashed with the White House over the Ukraine aid holdup. And now her nomination has been withdrawn. So what are Democrats doing about this? What can they do? Well, Elizabeth Warren, for one, was on Anderson Cooper 360 speaking about this, and she did not mince words. What's going on over at the Justice Department and the whole notion that we have people in our Justice Department resigning because Donald Trump's inappropriate influence and the Attorney General overturning a sentencing of Donald Trump's cronies. You know, right in front of our eyes,

we are watching a descent into authoritarianism. And this just seems like a moment to me everybody should be speaking up. Yeah, and Warren isn't just saying that it looks bad. She's also calling for Barr to resign or face impeachment. Not to bring up the I-word again, I know it's still a little tender, but the House Judiciary Committee has called for Barr to resign or face impeachment. Not to bring up the I word again. I know it's still tender. But the House Judiciary Committee has called for Barr to testify about the aftermath of the Mueller investigation.

And he finally agreed to do so at the end of March. Could have been sooner. I guess he was busy. Keep us waiting, man. Yeah, come on. Hurry it up. It's pretty likely that he's going to be grilled about these sentences. So more testimony is one answer, though.

Remember, the Republican-controlled Senate wouldn't call witnesses and acquitted the president for a literal charge of abuse of power. If I wrote this in a script and tried to sell it a decade ago, they would have been like, this is too on the nose. It's too evil to be believable. Try it again. We're not buying your shitty script, Akilah. And I would have been like, fine. And it goes without saying. But I'm just going to say it. There's no world in which President Obama could have done a fraction of this and still be alive, much less not impeached and exiled on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

And it's going to continue because senators like Susan Collins were worried about Trump's behavior. But instead of doing anything, they hope this guy who has consistently shown himself to have no morals has learned his lesson and was embarrassed badly enough by the impeachment trial. So that was the punishment. Yuck. Just yuck. I hate it. You want me to wrap it up now? Yes, please, Gideon. Roger Stone is scheduled to be sentenced on February 20th.

The country is still scheduled to exist, but only if you all vote in November for someone not named Donald Trump or Roger Jason Stone. Just when you thought you were done hearing about caucuses, we've got a couple updates for you on that front. We'll start in Iowa, where there is yet more fallout from the mess last week. The Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg campaigns have both asked for a partial recanvass of the results and a top party official stepped aside on Wednesday. So Gideon, what's going on? We're going to keep going with it. It's great. Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic

Party, resigned on Wednesday. Troy Price, the chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party, resigned on Wednesday. You know, somebody had to kind of take the fall here. This, of course, comes after the party failed to report results on the night of the caucus and then slowly reported them over the course of the days that followed, where there were errors in the reporting that remain even now. And Price had been facing pressure basically from all sides on this. And now the state central committee is going to elect an interim chair to take the reins on Saturday. In a statement to party officials, Price wrote, quote, while it is my desire to stay in this role and see this process through to completion, I do believe it is time for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward. And my presence in my current role makes that

more difficult. I mean, he's not wrong. No,'t want to look at anything else in Iowa. All right. Well, what's the deal with the re-canvas? When can we stop talking about Iowa, making it about Iowa? Iowa is taking over my brain. Never. It's the United States of Iowa. So here's what we kind of know about this right now. The Iowa Democratic Party said on Wednesday that they accepted the re-canvas request from the campaigns. They're set to begin them on Sunday, and they're going to last for two days. And the results here are close enough that if they do find mistakes, it could change some amount of delegates, maybe one, maybe few. Not a huge change, but important nonetheless for these campaigns, being that

it is so close. But before that, though, on Friday, the party in Iowa is going to send the campaigns more details on the cost for the recanvass and the timeline, and they'll have 24 hours to decide what they want to do. And it's funny that the campaigns even have to pay to do this if it's the Iowa Democratic Party that was making the mistakes here in terms of logging the results in the first place. Yeah, it's kind of like getting hit by a car and then having to pay the driver who ran you over. All right. Well, once that is resolved, there's another caucus coming up in Nevada, where a much more diverse electorate awaits with a bunch of new issues that they care about.

One of the big ones going into voting next week is health care. And there's a big union in the state that's calling out a couple of the candidates on their plans. So want to explain it? Yeah. So this is a story that's developing and sort of a microcosm of the broader health care debate that is being had on the Democratic side in this primary. There's a powerful union, the Culinary Union, made up of 60,000 primarily casino workers, mostly women and Latino members. And in a small population state like this, a group like that wields a lot of power. A lot of the votes in Nevada come from Clark County, where Las Vegas is. And this is a very active group that takes the act of organizing and even going out and canvassing very seriously. And this week there was a flyer that was put out from them

within the casinos comparing all the candidates' health care plans. And on that flyer, they said that Sanders would end their union health care and that Senator Warren would replace it after a transition period. There were positives for both of them and for all of the other Democratic candidates as well, and only negatives for Donald Trump on the issue of jobs and immigration and healthcare. So I want to keep that in mind too. And what needs to be understood here is sort of how prized this union's healthcare plan is.

And it's unique in a sense, because over the years, the union has negotiated and fought for these really good healthcare benefits, sometimes at the expense of other pay and benefits that they might receive. So inherent in that is a fear that with Medicare for All that you have a change to a system that works for them and one that they sacrifice for up to this point. And this has come up around Medicare for All more broadly with some unions coming out for it and others not so much. And this is part of the reason why. It just sort of depends on where a union has gotten in terms of where they've negotiated for health care. And Sanders acknowledged these questions that unions have by adding language to his plan that would allow unions to renegotiate their contracts with employers so that if the employers

have savings from Medicare for All, that would go back into pension and wage bumps. So you're not necessarily losing if you are a union worker in that case. Now, we don't know yet where this is all going. And there's reporting, too, that the Sanders campaign is reaching out to individual members of the union itself. And it's possible that individual members of the union could split on how they view this from where union leadership ends up landing. We just don't know. Yeah, right. Well, that seems like it could be a challenge for Sanders and potentially harm all of that momentum he has. And also a challenge for Warren as she tries to fight back into the pack quickly.

So can you just give us a sense of what the other candidates are up against? Yeah, absolutely. So we'll have more on this between now and the 22nd when the caucus happens, but just kind of a placeholder to keep in mind for now. We're at an interesting moment because Senator Klobuchar and Buttigieg were, you know, the second and third respectively in New Hampshire, and they've yet to demonstrate significant support, even minor support from voters of color. And Nevada is heavily Latino, and it's going to be an opportunity for those voters to have a say. And Biden, the other candidate who had support from a more diverse coalition, has run into these major issues as voting has begun, and that's starting to erode his standing. So we're either going to see him be able to have some sort of rebound in these states coming up or more examples of folks flocking to somebody else. But early voting begins on Saturday. And, you know,

the thing that I really want to see now is a poll from Nevada. Like we haven't, we're kind of in the dark there about what's going on. So that'll be interesting, too. We're going to keep covering stories in the 2020 primary, incorporating the issues on voters' minds and the dynamic that is at play among all of these candidates. We have a long road ahead. We're going to try to make it. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. White supremacist propaganda more than doubled from 2018 to 2019. Not good.

I don't like it. That's according to a new report just released by the Anti-Defamation League. According to a spokesperson from the ADL, rhetoric on written materials became more subtle, emphasizing things like, quote, patriotism in an attempt to update old-fashioned hate for a 2020 audience. Love when they modernize. The report also reveals a decrease in planned white supremacist events, suggesting that these groups don't want to risk counter protests. That makes sense, considering that a majority of the materials were distributed by a white supremacist group that helped organize the disastrous Unite to the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The mobile messaging app WhatsApp just hit 2 billion users. Head of the app, Will Cathcart, made the announcement yesterday and paired it with a reminder that the app's end-to-end encryption technology is not going anywhere. That's the feature ensuring that everything said inside of chat rooms are kept secure from third parties like the government and even WhatsApp itself.

Encryption tech has gotten a lot of backlash from governments across the world like Australia, the UK and India. The U.S. government is also famously against encryption. We hear about it again and again whenever the government wants to break into an iPhone. Cathcart says the company is working with security experts to make sure people don't use the app for stuff that's bad without sacrificing anyone's privacy. Yeah, don't do bad stuff. Pope Francis has rejected a proposal that would allow married men to be ordained in remote areas. The option was recommended by bishops to meet the needs of Catholics who live in the Amazon, where it can be hard to get FaceTime with the man of the cloth.

Francis's decision will disappoint Catholics who saw him as a new kind of pope, who might bring bold progressive changes to the church. But it's good news for conservative Catholics who thought letting priest Mary could open the floodgates to other changes, like the end of priestly celibacy or maybe blue raspberry communion wafers. For now, Francis' solution is to encourage more priests to visit remote areas, which is eerily similar to an idea I pitched to Quibi this month called Priest vs. Wild. I would have watched that. All right. Well, last year, disgraced pizza magnate Papa John Schnatter stunned the world with an absolutely brutal confession about his eating habits. I've had over 40 pizzas in the last 30 days.

That is approaching Ninja Turtle levels. Schnatter made these comments while bashing the new CEO of Papa John's Pizza, the company he founded and was removed from for being racist on a conference call. Well, he's since clarified his comments. Here's Papa on a podcast this week. Well, I didn't say I'd eat 40 pizzas in 30 days. I said I had. When I said had a pizza means I'm inspecting. Thank God.

I feel like a huge pizza-shaped weight has been lifted off my back. Looking forward to never thinking about Papa John's diet for the rest of my fucking life. I'm glad that I'm going to be the only person who has actually had 40 pizzas in the last 30 days. Oh, God. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe,

leave a review, postmark your Valentines today if you want them to arrive on time, and tell your friends to listen. By the way if you're into reading and not just old zoo books from 1997 like me What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe

I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick and that's how you have 40 pizzas in 30 days and by have I mean inspect you lying son of a bitch John. You lying son of a bitch, John. You love pizza. What a Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Sonia Tunn is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.