Barton Gellman

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allberds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into...

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Cover.

Well, the first debate is behind us.

The whole night was horrible.

The format was not sufficient.

Chris Wallace, the moderator, failed to keep control.

But the reason for nearly all of that was President Trump.

Debates can matter beyond all the back and forth on stage by acting as moments to reset a narrative or the trajectory of a race.

Now we've got five weeks left, and it doesn't seem like that has happened.

But what happens if the vote follows where the polls currently are, Trump loses, and then won't accept the results?

Last week, a reporter asked him if he'd commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and the president refused to.

That same day, we published this month's cover story in The Atlantic about the powers the president has to muddle the vote itself.

And my guest this week is the author of that story, Bark Gelman.

He's an Atlantic staff writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his work breaking the Edward Snowden story.

I asked Bark to explain how the president could manipulate the outcome.

The Trump presidency has been a series of guardrails broken, norms shattered.

Pick your cliché.

But we don't yet know what he'll do to stay in office if he loses.

Take a listen.

Bark Gelman, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thanks for having me.

So this piece of yours landed, as it happened, at the moment when we had a question from, of all people, a reporter for Playboy, to the president, in which he did not commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose.

What went down?

Well, I was curious why the Playboy reporter asked the question when he did, because the timing was so perfect for my story.

And he told me he asked it because he'd read my story that morning.

So we wanted to know what the president would say about the transfer of power.

Are you prepared to guarantee that you will honor the traditional transfer of power from

one president to the winner of the next election?

And Trump said no.

He had a big problem with the ballots, meaning the mail-in ballots.

Then he said, if you get rid of the ballots, then he said, There won't be a transfer, frankly.

There'll be a continuance.

But wasn't that him just saying, saying, I'm going to win?

It's not him just saying he's going to win because he has made it clear over and over again that he's not prepared to lose.

He's not willing to lose.

He said in the formal speech at which he accepted his party's nomination for president on August 24th, he said, the only way that I can lose this election is if it's rigged.

He has ruled out the possibility that a legitimate election will go for his opponent.

And that is a just profoundly dangerous thing for a president to say and believe, and especially to act on.

Yeah, and like this is not new for him.

He was saying this in 2016.

I'll accept the results if I win.

It was constantly talking about a rigged election.

Even after he won, obviously has continued to say that actually he got more popular votes.

He didn't lose the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

But the difference of 2016 versus 2020 is that he is the president now.

And so there are powers that he has as president to muddle things and to complicate things.

I think that part of what made so many people read your piece with alarm is not realizing how extensive those powers are.

People think, oh, well, you know,

votes get cast, the states count the votes, then it goes to the Electoral College, and there it goes.

But it's more complicated than that.

it is more complicated than that we would like to believe and i think we assume because everything has always worked so smoothly that there is an umpire in this game called election uh who blows the whistle calls the balls and strikes calls the score tells you when the game is over

and the opposing coach can fight about it and complain about it and denounce the refereeing.

But when the umpire blows the whistle, the game is over and the loser has lost and it's done.

There's nothing like that in the American electoral system.

There are county authorities in about 10,500 jurisdictions who run their own local elections.

There's a state official, usually a secretary of state, who oversees a process by which these thousands and thousands of offices are doing the vote counting.

And there's an electoral college and there's a formal count of the electoral vote in Congress, which next year will take place on January 6th.

But whatever officiance we have in this whole proceeding are all of limited jurisdiction and fairly opaque authority.

But what can Trump do?

How can he directly affect this?

He has the power as chief law enforcement officer and commander-in-chief of the armed forces and chief executive of the executive branch to do all kinds of things that no one's ever done before.

And And we just don't know how he'll use them.

He's the president of the United States.

He is telling us, do not trust the vote count.

There are cheaters.

Democrats are trying to fix the election.

Democrats are cheating.

He can do something about that.

He can send in Justice Department personnel.

He's already done it with DHS personnel in Seattle and in Portland wearing camouflaged uniforms and not identifying themselves and saying that they're there to protect the evidence in a vote vote fraud investigation.

He can send postal inspectors to seize the mail-in ballots on grounds that there's intelligence on a forgery plot from overseas.

These sound like science fiction, but they are within his literal power to do.

He could get someone's blessing.

He can get Bill Barr to say that he has executive authority under this or that provision.

to do a normal criminal investigation, for example, or under postal regulation, this or that he has the power to seize fraudulent mail for evidence.

I don't know where he'll stop, but I do know that he's serious when he says he can only win in a rigged election.

He's serious about his determination not to concede defeat if he's defeated.

You spent a lot of time in a lot of dark places psychologically over the course of reporting your article.

You have

also a pretty good sense of what could happen, where that line between

science fiction and fantasy is, right?

Science fiction is what could maybe happen.

Fantasy is even dark fantasy is not going to happen, right?

When you think about

all the worst case scenarios that you've explored, that others have explored, I've looked at some stuff about how the vote counts could go wrong.

What do you think is realistic?

It's hard to, I'm not really asking you to predict the future here, but I guess in a way I am, right?

Like we should expect that it's going to be chaotic.

We should expect that there are going to be some issues around vote counting, that there are going to be complaints.

But is there really some line that we can say is going to be hard to cross?

Or does it seem like really anything can happen here?

I think one of the wildcards is going to be what his state allies do.

There are

Republican governors in some crucial states, such as Florida.

And

if the president is on live television on election night saying that he has proof that Democrats are stuffing ballots, are cheating, are fraudulently causing the count to go against him,

what's Governor DeSantis going to do?

What are state authorities going to do?

What are his supporters going to do?

The militia types.

If he says that forces from Antifa are threatening the integrity of the vote count,

who's going to go and protect and secure the area?

Who's going to take possession of the ballots to make sure that they're not stolen?

I think anything could happen.

I think the question is, do we expect

his wild words to create wild action?

And I do.

How scared should we be about what's going to happen here?

I mean, like, is it,

should people be stocking up on toilet paper and canned goods the way they were at the beginning of COVID?

I certainly don't think that's where we are.

I think where we are is in a place where we need to recognize that this is not a normal president.

It's not going to be a normal election.

There is significant risk to voters being able to vote and

counters being able to count the vote.

And we shouldn't be surprised when that happens.

We shouldn't let our reflexes be dull.

We should know what we're going to do if someone announces that all vote counting has been brought to a halt under emergency powers.

I think everyone who has a role in the election as an administrator, as a law enforcement officer, as a state official, as a county official should be thinking about what they'll do if they hear something very unfamiliar and not normal.

How will they respond?

Because in the moment, it's going to be hard to believe it's even happening.

You mentioned Florida, Ron DeSantis, the governor there,

the old Tim Rustert line, Florida, Florida, Florida, right?

That's from 2000, when obviously Florida was a very troublesome vote-counting state in the presidential election.

That went to the Supreme Court.

When you were writing your story, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was alive.

Now

she is not, obviously.

And there is likely to be, if the Senate Republicans proceed as they seem to be doing, a

new confirmed justice, Amy Coney Barrett, on the bench.

How important might the Supreme Court be to this election?

What is the difference of if she is not confirmed before the election versus having her there?

We don't know whether the court will be

a sort of venue of important action in this election.

There will certainly be lots of litigation.

There is already lots of litigation about the way the

election will proceed, the way voting will proceed, the way counting will proceed.

There's been fighting in 42 states, I think, last count,

mostly in state courts, because election law is state law primarily.

And so you could have disputes about the election in state courts for sure.

There are some opportunities for bringing it into federal jurisdiction as well.

People on the left who worry that the Supreme Court is just ha ha ha, can't wait, getting ready to grab the election vote and

vote in Trump.

I don't personally believe that.

I believe the court would be very reluctant to get involved in this election,

that it was a traumatic event for the court and the country.

in Bush v.

Gore, that Roberts in particular will be worried a great deal about the legitimacy of the court if it had to settle another election or if it chose to settle another election.

Although President Trump has said that he wants the justice there to do that.

Especially after the president has said, I need another justice to be on my side when the court takes up this election.

That would be an especially bad time for the court to do so if it wants to keep its mystique and its legitimacy as an institution apart from our democratic processes.

I doubt the court will be eager to get involved.

And the thing is, there are all kinds of ways for the process to be litigated, so to speak, without the participation of any court.

The possibilities are that Trump will try to get his state allies to appoint Trump electors for the Electoral College because he'll say the vote count is hopelessly damaged by fraud.

That he will say, in order to represent the will of the people of your state, you need to appoint Trump electors because the Democrats are trying to steal the outcome.

And if they do that, there are potentially two slates of electors who want to cast the same 20 votes for Pennsylvania, and they're casting them on opposite sides.

And then Congress has to decide which votes count.

All right, after the break, I ask Bark to reflect on the New York Times' recent revelations that President Trump owes hundreds of millions of debt to unknown creditors and what that means for our national security.

Packages by Expedia.

You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We were made to easily bundle your trip.

Expedia, made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

So, Part, you have been a national security reporter for a long time.

You want a Pulitzer Prize for being part of the group that broke the Edward Snowden revelations about the NSA.

You've got a new book recounting that that experience, which is a pretty searing one personally and professionally.

One of the questions that comes up about the New York Times piece about the president's taxes is this charge that private information has been revealed and that shouldn't be revealed and that there's an issue with that.

Of course, none of us outside of public office are used to publishing our tax returns.

It made me think of an argument that I had with somebody in 2016 about WikiLeaks, in which someone said to me, well, if there were a filing cabinet that were stolen from an office and put out in a field, would you feel comfortable going through it?

That was in reference to the John Podesta emails and there have been ties, it seems, to Russian intelligence with what was going on there.

Sort me through your philosophy of what you can use and what you can't use and what's private and what's stolen and what's ethical and what's not.

Big question.

It tends to be be so specific to circumstances that it's hard for me to give you a formula that's going to work every time.

In the case of the taxes, it doesn't seem like that hard of a question.

There is already a strong norm in this country going back decades that presidents will release their income taxes.

The same reason that they release their personal health information, although Trump has not done that either.

And it's because this is ordinarily private information, but it's very much germane to the way a person governs and very much germane to the way a person is capable of and apt to use the enormous power that we grant them.

So the presidency is such a powerful, powerful thing that we need to know something about our presidents.

We need to know about their health.

We need to know whether they're saddled with enormous debts, whether they're cheaters in business, whether the stories that they tell us about their business success are true stories, whether they have conflicts of interest that would cause them to make decisions using the power that you have of the chief executive of the United States on behalf of your own personal financial interests.

And the taxes are a window into all those things.

I think it's an easy call, even if someone apparently gave the New York Times the tax returns who did not have Trump's permission to to disclose those tax returns.

That may be a tort or a civil wrongdoing by the person who gave the information, but it's well established in First Amendment law that a journalist may not be held liable for publishing information that was taken without permission.

The publishing side of that equation is protected.

And I think it's clearly the ethical thing to do in this case.

I would never sit on that story.

The Times reporters have said that the sources that gave them the tax returns all had legal access to it.

Do you think there's any difference in that question of if they had said, you know,

there was a burglar who went into the accountant's office and grabbed the files for us and that's how we got them?

Is there anything there?

There is something there that you want to understand the motives of the burglar.

You want to understand those circumstances as well.

Look, I was the recipient.

of some 50,000 documents from Edward Snowden that were all highly classified and nearly all from the National Security Agency.

He is charged with espionage for unlawfully giving those to me.

He took documents he was not entitled to take out of the NSA and gave them to someone else.

That is a kind of theft.

And I've had very senior people in the U.S.

government ask me

how I can sleep at night, how I can live with myself for being the recipient of stolen goods here.

And my obligation is to public knowledge.

And I believe believe that you have, in that case, two quite large interests that run into each other.

I mean, one is self-defense.

We have national security secrets to keep us safe.

And the other is self-government.

And when self-government and self-defense come into conflict, then you have to make hard calls.

But just the fact that the government stamps it a secret doesn't mean it should be forever secret.

And just the fact that I want to know some information doesn't mean that I have to know it.

There are potential national security implications from the president's tax returns.

We see that he's loaded with a lot of debt.

Do you think that we know enough to know what the answers to those questions are at this point?

Or is it that there are more questions that now need to be answered?

Well, we've learned a lot that's new.

And

as often happens, we now have a whole bunch more questions.

We know, for example, that Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

He owes much more than he produces in income from his properties.

In fact, many of his properties are money losers.

So he's losing millions of dollars a year on a bunch of golf courses.

He owes hundreds of billions within the next four years.

How is he going to pay that?

It's a national security question because

he has ways as the president of the United States of doing things that would produce a great deal of value for someone else.

And is he going to sell access to that?

That would be a question you would have to ask if you knew that someone was in tremendous debt.

If someone were guarding something valuable for you, if you hired someone to watch your most precious belongings, and then you found out that person owed hundreds of millions of dollars and had to pay them back soon and had no obvious means of doing so, that would be relevant to your consideration of whether you would hired the right person.

The question with all this ends up being how much of this is Trump derangement syndrome, conspiracy thinking, that he could be

en hoc to

foreign interests and how much of it is more.

Do you worry about things going down that road?

Well, you could clearly speculate yourself into all kinds of spasms.

And it's not necessarily the case that Trump owes his money to hostile foreign interests.

We know it's unlikely he owes the money to standard commercial banks because they all stopped lending to him because he was a poor risk.

We know that even Deutsche Bank, the last of the banks to abandon him, became chariot of it.

And

from what I've read, just as a reader, it's unlikely that he owes that money to Deutsche Bank.

So now you get into foreign interests and non-commercial banking and random rich people.

So there are good reasons to ask questions, but we don't know the answers and can't pretend to.

Your book gets into a lot of the

very

intense circumstances of your life when

you reported on Snowden and after you reported on Snowden.

That was

a different time in a lot of ways.

It was 2013 when the Snowden stuff first hit.

So much has happened in politics since then.

So much has happened in technology since then, our understanding of all this stuff.

Do you think that the way that that played out in the public sphere would be different now than it was then?

I think

it might be different

because

Trump and Obama are so different.

Under the Obama administration,

I knew there was a hypothetical risk that I could be charged with espionage for publishing national security agency secrets.

It had never been done before, but there was a way to read the law to make that possible.

I didn't think it was at all likely, and I didn't think that I was going to be arrested.

I had to worry about hackers trying to steal the documents and all kinds of other things that did happen.

But I didn't believe that the president would authorize something wild.

And I think that if Trump were president and there were journalists publishing national security secrets on a regular basis from month to month to month, based on some of the things he's said and done, I think that story could have had a different ending.

All right.

Well, let's leave it on that.

Bark Gelman, thanks for being here on the ticket.

Thanks, Isaac.

Take care.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.