Does the NRA Connect Trump to Russia?

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This week saw lots of developments in Mueller's investigation.

Manafort, Cohen, Pecker, and Butina, who on Thursday became the first Russian national convicted of seeking to influence the 2016 election.

Why did a Russian gun rights activist involve herself in American politics?

Why did the NRA spend more on Trump's election than any other?

Why did Russia use the NRA to influence American politics?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, listeners.

It's Alex Wagner.

There have been big developments this week in Special Counsel Mueller's probe of Russia, the Trump campaign, and the 2016 election.

Natasha Bertrand, our Atlantic staff writer, has been covering this story and was in court on Thursday morning to get the latest.

Hey, Natasha.

Hey, Alex.

Thanks for having me.

So it's been a big week.

If you were a Trump associate, or perhaps if you were the president himself, a lot of your old friends were in court.

Beginning with Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, what happened with them this week?

Yeah, so Paul Manafort, of course, was accused of not being forthcoming with prosecutors throughout his cooperation, allegedly with them.

And the court hearing this week was kind of bizarre because his lawyers didn't really seem to know what to make of the government's assertions that he had been lying throughout the course of his negotiations with the special counsel.

Apparently, he had lied about his business dealings.

He had lied about his communications with a suspected Russian spy named Konstantin Kalimnik.

He had just been blatantly not telling the truth, even though his plea agreement required him to.

But his lawyers said that they needed more time to discuss with their client what

the lies had actually been and whether or not Paul Manafort actually agrees that he was lying.

So we're not going to learn more about that case until January when the next hearing is held.

But it was a weird one.

So there's Paul Manafort, who remains puzzling and intriguing.

And then there is Michael Cohen.

And then there is David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer.

Both of those names were in the Klieg lights this week for different reasons.

What happened with Michael Cohen, Natasha?

Michael Cohen was sentenced on Wednesday, and the government kind of laid into him, as did the judge.

He essentially said that he had been acting out of blind loyalty to the president, that he takes responsibility for his actions and all of the dirty deeds that he did for Donald Trump over the 12 or so years that he was working for him, including paying off two women just before the 2016 election to keep them quiet about an alleged affair that they had with Trump.

But the government really was not having it, and neither did the judge, who said that he had committed really serious crimes, including defrauding voters during the election and withholding important information from them.

So he was sentenced to three years in prison, not just for the campaign finance violations, but also for tax crimes and lying to the banks and lying to Congress as well.

Mueller's team actually charged him with lying to Congress about the extent of a Trump tower deal that he was pursuing with Moscow in 2016 that Donald Trump was also apprised of.

But he is going to serve that sentence of two months concurrently with his three-year sentence.

So it won't be any additional jail time.

But essentially what happened is that he implicated the president directly in these campaign finance violations.

And by extension, he accused the president of committing a felony.

Aaron Powell, right.

I mean, we should not lose sight of that.

It is a turning point in all of this.

The president has been accused of committing a felony.

And his concigliary, who executed on his behalf allegedly, is going to serve three years of jail time.

On the same count, Dave Pecker, who was a longtime sort of friend of the President, is now working with the Feds.

He has a plea deal with prosecutors.

He's admitted to making hush money payments to a Playboy model in order to assist the Trump campaign and its election bid.

Does it feel like the walls are closing in if you're in the White House right now, Natasha?

Yeah, this was arguably the bigger piece of news to come out on Wednesday, which is, you know, pretty much moments after Michael Cohen was sentenced.

The Southern District released a press release saying that David Pecker was cooperating and that as part of that cooperation, well, that AMI, American Media Inc., was cooperating.

And as part of that cooperation, they had acknowledged that the payment was made in order to prevent, specifically to prevent the women from coming forward to prevent them from influencing the the election.

So this wasn't just a private transaction

as the president has been describing it.

It was actually made for the purposes of not derailing his candidacy, which makes it very much an explicit campaign contribution.

So I think if you're the president right now and you're in the White House, you see that your longtime friend David Pecker and AMI, who he's been close to since about 2003.

Who keeps many secrets.

Both of them are secret keepers of this president in more ways than one.

And there are rumors that AMI has an actual safe where it keeps a lot of the Donald Trump secrets just about his affairs, about his family business.

So you see that both of them now are cooperating with either the government, the prosecutors in the Southern District, or with Mueller's team.

And that should be extremely concerning to the president because

as we should remember, he has acknowledged in the past, according to sources close to him, that the Cohen investigation and the investigation into the Trump organization is far more concerning to him than the Russia probe.

All right.

So we have a man named David Pecker who has been accused of making hush money payments to Playboy models.

We have the rumored existence of a safe with all kinds of dirt on the sitting president of the United States.

We have a fixer who effectively broke down in court this week, talking about the sort of emotional stranglehold the president has on him.

Of all these intriguing and insane plot lines, though, the one that I am most fascinated by, the one that sort of tells us something about

how America has become a more bitterly fought partisan landscape, is the story of Maria Butina, who had a hearing on Thursday morning.

Natasha, you were in court for that hearing.

Who is Maria Butina for people who do not know her name as yet?

So she's a 30-year-old Russian national who founded the first gun rights organization in Russia, where of course individual gun ownership is very discouraged and it has very strict gun laws.

So she was unusual in that sense.

And she cultivated a relationship with this GOP operative named Paul Erickson.

And the two of them started going to NRA conventions in 2015 in the U.S.

where she kind of hobnobbed with Republican politicians and tried to get in with influential policymakers.

The rest kind of, as they say, is history.

She continued to come back to the U.S.

and she started studying here on a student visa at American University doing a master's degree.

And she continued having these, you know, friendship dinners.

She called them with influential people in Washington.

And she basically was trying to ingratiate herself in Republican circles because she had actually predicted as far back as 2015 that Trump would be elected president.

And that in and of itself is very interesting because of course no one thought that Trump would actually be elected president, but she was determined to get, you know, not only close to him, but also close to

people who surround him.

And she was largely successful.

She was actually set to

go back to Russia, I believe, which is why she was arrested in July of this year and charged with acting as a foreign agent, unregistered foreign agent.

Basically, that she had been acting as a spy, essentially, without notifying the government that she had been acting on Russian government interests.

So the big questions that she could potentially help the government with now that she's cooperating, because she has agreed to cooperate, is was there any Russian money being funneled through the NRA, which again she cultivated very close ties with at the direction of a high-level Russian official to the Trump campaign in

massive violation of campaign finance laws?

And what was her boyfriend doing, her GOP operative boyfriend Paul Erickson doing to advance Russian government interests as well?

We still don't really know how close her Russian, you know, alleged Russian handler, this guy named Alexander Torshin, is to the Kremlin and whether or not he himself was taking direct orders from Putin.

But it seems clear from the statement of the offense that she pleaded guilty to, that she was taking direct orders from him.

Aaron Trevor, what's so intriguing about this is that at the center of this web of deceit lies the National Rifle Association.

Maria Butina and effectively her handler, Alexander Torshin, the Russian official, used the NRA as almost a through line to powerful Republicans and eventually the Trump organization.

How did she end up working with the NRA?

Was it just that there was a sense of like-minded objectives shared by the Russians and the NRA, which was namely to be in touch with Republican centers of power?

Yeah, so she had actually encountered Alexander Torshin in Russia, and they had this shared passion for gun rights, allegedly.

That's the story they tell anyway.

And so they had begun traveling over to the U.S.

to attend these NRA conventions because Alexander Torshin himself was a lifelong member of the NRA.

Maria Butina became one herself as well.

And they cultivated these relationships.

because they wanted to become enmeshed in powerful circles.

That's what the government says anyway, and that's what she pleaded guilty to.

I mean, she has said that she wanted her main goal was to, you know, establish these relationships so that they could influence American foreign policy as it related to Russia.

So she was really acting in the country's interest.

Whether or not she was acting at Vladimir Putin's direction via Alexander torsion, that is something that hopefully prosecutors will be able to learn from her cooperation agreement.

But there's also a question of whether she was trying to compromise any of the people that she came into contact with because she invited members of the NRA, high-level members of the NRA, over to Moscow in December of 2015

for meetings with high-level Russian officials.

And so that was kind of a weird twist.

And they attended those meetings, we should say.

And they attended those meetings.

And so the question now is,

did anything compromising happen?

Were any deals made?

And why, you know, subsequently did the NRA give more money to Donald Trump than it ever has to any candidate?

Aaron Powell, $30 million on the record so far.

All right, Natasha, we will be back asking you more questions in the coming weeks as this

insane series of developments continues.

Thank you, as always, for your time and your great reporting.

Thanks so much, Alex.

The fact that the NRA was at the center of a secret Russian plot is a striking reminder of that organization's power and its influence.

Needless to say, it was not always this way.

After the break, we'll take a deep look at how what started as a small sportsmen's organization became an apparent back channel between the Trump organization and the Kremlin.

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Today, the NRA is a fiercely partisan organization.

It's apparently even willing to get in bed with Russian agents just to further its own political interests.

What happened to the NRA?

And how did we get here?

Mike Spees is a staff writer at The Trace.

He writes about gun violence, and he reported a series earlier this year about NRA lobbying, which became a great New Yorker story.

Mike, great to have you on the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me, Alex.

I really appreciate it.

So let's just start with the sort of big picture of how the NRA has changed from its sort of humble beginnings.

When did it turn from a sporting organization to a political group?

It's a really fascinating story because it was founded after the Civil War to improve marksmanship among northern soldiers and

stayed basically on that path until the 1970s when a group of insurgents that were on the NRA's board did this thing which is now known as the Cincinnati Revolt, where they essentially ripped the organization away from the leaders who were moving it even more in like a sporting and hunting direction and instead decided that the organization was going to be specifically about gun rights.

I mean the leadership at the time was fairly vocal about saying that the Second Amendment didn't give the right to carry a gun.

That's not like what they were claiming it was about.

So the dividing line is 1970, right?

70s.

Yeah, well, the mid-70s, that's right.

The mid-70s when it changes.

But when does it become the sort of fierce political juggernaut that we know it to be today?

Aaron Powell, it grew up in the 80s under Reagan, rolled back some of the restrictions that were put in place in 1968, which was like the first major piece of federal gun control legislation, and then continued to gain strength in the 90s.

Wayne Lapierre took, as we know, he's the most identifiable face of the organization, has been there forever,

ultimately took the reins in the early 90s, grew the organization, turned it into an even more fiery entity than it was before.

And their big moment politically on the national stage was in the 1994 Republican House takeover.

It was the first time that the NRA essentially, not entirely, but almost entirely abandoned the Democratic Party,

totally threw its lot in with Republican challengers.

And it was a big current call.

They claimed a lot of credit.

It became the thing that they fundraised on.

Then they had a setback

in the same time period when they made the comment about national police being jackbooted thugs.

And that resulted in George H.W.

Bush

rescinding his membership.

And that was like a, that was a, but ultimately a minor setback.

Yeah, well, and but that was the sort of beginning of the NRA's endorsement becoming a litmus test for conservative politicians, right?

Which has reached its sort of florid, a fever pitch in today's political landscape.

That's right.

At the same time, so the NRA slowly, and especially in the last two decades, has become this powerful political machine.

At the same time as that's been happening, the Russian government, under the direction of Vladimir Putin, in the last decade, let's say, has been extending its tentacles into the American right.

After the Cold War, the Kremlin, of course, tried to forge links to the American left, and those haven't necessarily stopped entirely.

But really, Russia's recent history shows a government that's increasingly interested in conservative causes and conservative movements.

Russians have looked to American organizations that may share quote-unquote traditional Russian values.

And that's part of what we now know as a broader system of Russian infiltration into U.S.

systems.

American conservatives, meanwhile, largely under the auspices or the leadership of President Obama, have become allegedly frustrated with certain liberal positions on issues like terrorism or homosexuality, gay marriage, gay rights.

And they have increasingly begun to look more favorably at places like Russia, right?

Once seen as the arch enemy of the United States.

So what you've had here is the NRA becoming really powerful.

And at the same time, the Russians more interested in powerful conservative organizations.

And what that's resulted in, which we're seeing the fruits of this week, is Russians going to the NRA and trying to use the NRA as a channel to get to influential conservatives.

My question to you is: at what point did the NRA come to represent something

more than just gun ownership?

At what point did this organization come to sort of embody conservative values?

That's a great question.

And I think actually you could look back to the 90s.

I remember an old Barney Frank quote where he was talking about the power of the NRA and why it was unique.

And he said that people looked at it the wrong way when they looked at it as a gun rights organization.

And he said that it's not really that.

It's more akin to a religion.

And that's what makes it so uniquely powerful, is that it's a lifestyle.

It comes with a set of values.

People live their lives around like its concept.

Whereas like there's not really

a culture to go along with its corollary, which is gun control.

There's not really a way to like build a build a I mean, not in the same way anyway.

It's not like a, it's not a.

You can't build a culture around an absence of a thing in the same way that a culture is built around guns.

Right, exactly.

So then the idea became, you know, the gun became a symbol for something greater, which was this old American concept having to do with rugged individualism and being the caretaker, and that being a really appealing narrative.

The way the NRA fundraises is that it needs to consistently

push.

It's not like enough to just stay on the same issue to say

we need to expand gun rights.

It's got to also be about we need to expand gun rights, and gun rights are our first freedom.

And once gun rights go, then all these other freedoms that we care a lot about will go to.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: So, in a bid to sort of secure its existential fortunes, the NRA has tied guns to a sort of broader set of cultural values.

The sort of first they came for our guns argument, right?

They see it as a bellwether issue.

And I think over time they wanted voters to see it as a bellwether issue.

So the idea was if the candidate was good on guns, then they were probably good on all these other things too, like abortion, immigration, which you can see a lot of their propaganda actually hits those notes too.

Especially now, it's not just about it.

It's gotten fairly explicit and even more so in the 2016 election.

So let's turn to,

if the NRA recognized that it was as much a cultural clearinghouse as a gun rights organization, the Russians certainly understood that too, right?

So in 2010, Putin apparently decides that he wants to exploit the American gun lobby.

And he decides a man named Alexander Torshin is going to be the guy to do it for him.

Torshin is a gun enthusiast who became a member of the NRA in 2010.

In 2011, Torshin forges a friendship with David Keene, who is the president of the NRA.

By 2012, he's attending NRA conventions as a VIP guest of the organizations.

He becomes an election observer in the 2012 election.

In Nashville, he tweets, my NRA card opens doors to any polling stations for me.

How did this happen?

Did the NRA, why were they receptive to the overtures of a random Russian gun enthusiast?

Was it the idea that, oh, here's a way for us to spread our message overseas?

I mean, it bears mentioning that in Russia, private gun ownership is basically illegal.

Right.

So what does the NRA have to gain by this?

I mean, there's still, honestly, there's not a great answer to that question yet.

What I can tell you, just in terms of like the inside look, was that at that time when torsion first started coming around and then Butina, there were definitely a lot of folks, like just normal employees at NRA headquarters, according to like sources of mine, who were very confused by it and didn't understand why it was happening.

They just, it was something that was being talked about.

There was some kind of like, clearly there was some kind of overseas effort that was happening, specifically, it involved Russia.

Why was this happening?

And I don't think anyone had a great clue.

I can speculate.

I mean, I think there's

the reason that they would like to put out into the world, which is just...

Of course, this should be a global movement.

And of course, in a country like Russia, like what better coup for American freedom than to transfer like our first freedom to our traditional Cold War enemy.

What an amazing thing.

If the whole point of the Second Amendment is to ensure your right to stand up to a tyrannical government,

then why not have our former arch enemy armed to the hilt?

I mean, you have to understand the logic is a little bit of a course.

Oh, no, right.

It doesn't really make any sense.

So then the question still becomes: like, what else was going on and why are they doing this?

I mean, so there are certain things that are notable, which is that there were two major trips to Russia, one in 2013 and one in 2015.

So in 2013, David Keene, the NRI president, goes to Moscow to speak to a conference of the Right to Bear Arms Organization, which is the one founded by Maria Butina.

This is the president of the NRA going to the home of America's former global enemy, and he's preaching a message of unity and common humanity shared by the Americans and Russians when it comes to the subject of guns.

There are no peoples.

They're more alike than Americans and Russians.

We're hunters, we're shooters, we do all the things, we value the same kinds of things, and we need to work together to the extent that we can on these and other important issues.

So 2013 is an interesting year, and it feels like, and it sounds like from some of your reporting, that there was a lot happening behind the scenes that we don't quite know about as far as the NRA and Russia.

Look at what happens in the years afterwards, right?

In 2015, the NRA is actually providing a channel through which Russians can meet with potential presidential candidates.

At the NRA convention in 2015, Alexander Torshin meets with Scott Walker, presidential candidate, and reportedly Donald Trump at the NRA convention.

And then in December 2015, the Right to Bear Arms sponsors an NRA delegation to Moscow.

to meet with influential Russian officials.

That includes David Keene, the president of the NRA, and the soon-to-be president of the NRA, Peter Brownell, as well as some Trump campaign surrogates.

In the meantime, top NRA officials keep crossing paths with top Putin cabinet officials, including Sergei Lavrov.

In your reporting, this seems incredibly coincidental if there's not actually an agreement and there's not actually some kind of arrangement or some sort of broader scope of interaction.

But the NRA has sort of said

there's not that much to see here.

Right.

They've said nothing.

Do you think it's possible that they didn't know they were being used by the Russians to gain entree with Republicans?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is possible.

It is totally possible that they could have just been ⁇ I mean, that they didn't realize that they were useful Marx who just

were unwittingly engaging into what was, I mean, especially from the current perspective, a highly problematic and potentially dangerous relationship.

One thing I think that's particularly interesting about that 2015 trip, by the way, you mentioned some of the folks that were on it.

They included Brownelle and Keene.

They also included other people named another man named Arnold Goldschlager and another person named Joe Gregory.

And what all of those folks have in common is that they're part of the high donor club, the NRA's high donor club, which is called the Golden Ring of Freedom, which means that they've all given a million bucks or more to the NRA.

So that means they're all business people.

And what's interesting about that, what hasn't really come out yet, though, senators have sent them letters asking for information about it, is

like were there some kind of were there business dealings that were happening was that was that part of what was going on why were business guys going over to Moscow in 2015 all right let's get to sort of the heart of the sort of inquisition around the NRA in Russia which is the money that the NRA donated to the Trump campaign $30 million

which in some worlds is a conservative estimate dark money may peg that as high as $70 million

the Senate Intelligence Committee has inquired about whether any of the $30 million that the NRA gave the Trump campaign, whether any of that might have come in from foreign nationals.

And they've said that merely $2,500 of expenditures

since 2015, mostly dues, were from Russians.

Is that the whole truth?

Is it possible, you know, the way that the NRA sort of donates and a lot about its campaign finances.

Could some portion of that be Russian money that the NRA either knows about or doesn't even actually know about, but that somehow made made its way to the Trump campaign?

Trevor Burrus: Well, when we say made its way to the ⁇ you know, that's the

step plus they're right, because those are independent expenditures.

I mean, there's no way to ⁇ nothing's been proven yet, obviously.

We don't have any ⁇ there's nothing right now.

There's no evidence that shows that Russian money was making its way into the NRA's coffers.

But it could have happened in a variety of ways.

I mean, there's no...

Just to be clear, the NRA is allowed to accept foreign cash.

It's only forbidden from spending that money directly on U.S.

elections.

That's right.

But in an organization as big as the NRA, I mean, cash is fungible.

Oh, yes.

So an apolitical donation to the NRA by Russia could have freed up other funds elsewhere to be spent on politics or political campaigning.

Right.

That would be true.

If that is true.

If that is even true.

So let's get, just to give a little bit of context here.

From your reporting, we now know that the NRA was violating all kinds of campaign finance laws during the 2016 election, right?

Certainly what it seems like, yeah.

And specifically when it comes to the Trump campaign.

The Trump campaign, and you've reported deeply on this, illegally coordinated with the NRA.

What happened, Mike?

So if you're an independent organization, you're allowed to spend as much money as you want in an election advocating on behalf of a candidate, so long as that money is spent independently of the candidate you're supporting.

So one thing that can happen, and has happened before, and it's technically on its face legal, is that a campaign, in this case the Trump campaign, the NRA, can share or have a common vendor, which is to say someone, a vendor, for example, who places ads for both entities.

But when that happens,

according to the law, those working for either client must be essentially firewalled off from each other.

They're not allowed to share information, because once they're sharing information, you're coordinating, and that means that the expenditures are no longer independent, and they are, in fact, considered in-kind contributions which are subject to $5,000 limits.

So if the NRA is spending over $30 million, that's obviously way over the limit.

And it's also worth noting that the NRA was basically the only outside conservative group that was spending considerable sums on Trump in 2016.

Right.

No one else was putting their

eggs in that basket.

And that's like everything they had.

The NRA isn't, for other, you know, for a variety of reasons right now, the NRA, by its own admission, is in severe financial distress.

And that hole is part of the reason why they're having a obviously a very hard time digging themselves out of it they're also engaged separately in like a costly lawsuit but like it's still

it was an unprecedented amount of money for them just to be very clear so the same people were working on the same ad buys at the same time running ads that were almost identical in terms of content and theme

the nra is basically marching in lockstep with the trump campaign to the tune of multiple millions of dollars to the sort of confusion at best of everybody on the outside.

Right.

Well, what it allows them to do is to fully maximize their resources and their spending.

If you're coordinating, your spending is way more efficient and the

messaging is far more powerful.

I mean, it just so

the traditional argument, if you're accused of coordination, is you say, well, everyone at the firm signed a contract saying they're not going to share information.

But if you, one single human, are doing both things,

you can't sign a contract separating yourself from yourself.

Exactly.

So that becomes the problem.

All right.

So, I mean,

when you look at what the NRA was doing to assist the Trump campaign, going to extraordinary law-breaking lengths to coordinate message and assist the Trump campaign in its messaging strategy,

and you look at

this outrageous amount of money that the NRA spent at cost to itself,

its involvement curious and multi-level with the Russian government or Russian interests.

How does the NRA-Russia piece stand at this point?

And how does it dovetail with the investigations into Russian involvement in the 2016 election?

We know House Democrats are going to take control of the chamber in January.

Do we expect more answers on all of this in coming months?

Or where are we?

I think that we do expect more more answers in the coming months.

And the only question that really matters is whether or not Russian money, and I mean real Russian money, made its way into the NRA's coffers and if that money was then used on the campaign.

Because if it didn't, and that didn't happen, then it is, as continues to be a possibility,

the NRA could have just essentially been like a, I mean, for lack of a better phrase, it just like

a useful idiot

to the Russians.

Like this is just, you you know,

their understanding of how our political system works and how this is like a very powerful and prominent conservative group that gives them access to a lot of very powerful and prominent conservatives.

And the NRA then innocently thinking, like,

as we talked about before, there's something we can gain from this where

bringing a gun rights movement to an autocratic country

would be a huge thing to celebrate, then that could very well be the case.

So I think that the House, thankfully, when it falls back to Democratic control,

will pursue some of these leads.

Right.

One more question before we let you go.

When we look at the trajectory of the NRA, it begins at this sort of post-Civil War organization, then it turns into a sportsman's hobbyist organization.

And then in the 70s and 80s, it gets really political.

And that sort of seed of political discontent is fostered, it's watered, it's grown, it's harvested, and it becomes this sort of venomous beast.

I wonder if you see parallels between the NRA and what's happening in American politics.

Yeah, I mean, I think they track very neatly with each other.

In fact, I think the parallels, the general parallels between

the Republican Party's move to the right and the NRA's move to the right are essentially the same.

Actually, when I mentioned earlier that

by the mid-90s, the NRA

was giving to far fewer Democrats or spending on behalf of far fewer Democrats.

And then

by the time we got to 2012, 2014,

it stopped completely.

There are no independent expenditures on behalf of any Democrats running for federal office.

Which is to say that the NRA and the Republican Party are inextricably intertwined with each other.

They're in lockstep.

That's also where bipartisanship basically goes to die.

So if a very powerful institution becomes that polar, I mean, becomes that polarizing and becomes that one-sided, then it has the power both to contribute to the polarization of politics in Washington, but also

is a reflection of it as well.

I mean, it's just, it's made the decision that there's no longer anything to be gained by supporting Democrats.

Similarly, Democrats have decided that there's violence, which is, I think, a useful thing for the Democratic Party, that there's nothing to be gained by supporting NRA positions anymore.

So when some people ask,

you know, is there any hope, like in terms of like legislation getting passed at some point?

There probably is.

I mean, once Democrats at some point retake control of the upper chamber and perhaps get beyond the, you know, the filibuster threshold of 60 votes, and maybe even not e maybe it doesn't even need to get that high because there are some Republicans who are in states who are not so red that they feel like they have to stick with the NRA's point of view on everything.

I mean, it's conceivable that legislation could get passed.

So, you're saying there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

I am saying there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

Mike Speeds with the trays.

Thanks so much for your time and great reporting.

We're happy to have you on the podcast.

Oh, you're welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

All right, that'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks, as always, to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, to our fellow Patricia Jacob, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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Thanks for listening.

We'll talk to you next week.

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