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For a year now, headlines in cable news have followed every dizzying detail of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

But somehow, despite the media circus and a cascade of leaks from an ever-evolving cast of characters, Mueller himself and his team have been tight as a drum.

What do we know about the investigation?

And where is it heading next?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic, and I am delighted to say that my co-host, Alex Wagner, my esteemed co-host Alex Wagner, is here with me in studio in D.C.

What a joy it is.

It is a joy to have you here.

Not only to be back on the Radio Atlantic Airwaves, but to be in the same space as you, Matt Thompson.

I am thrilled, delighted.

It feels right.

So reciprocated.

I am also joyful that our colleagues, David Graham and Rosie Gray, staff writers for The Atlantic, are with us to tell us what the hell is going on in the city of Washington, D.C., where I live.

So there's this thing that you might have heard of that's been going on for like a year now, but it's been flying kind of under the radar.

So I want to just like tell you about it.

This guy, Robert Mueller, who used to head this law enforcement agency, the FBI.

He's been quietly in an under-the-radar sort of fashion investigating Russia's interference in America's 2016 election, the question of whether anyone in Donald Trump's campaign played any role in that

interference.

Really?

And

whether the president, in firing the guy who started off asking these questions, may have obstructed justice.

That sounds crazy, Matt.

Right?

Obviously,

for our listeners, if you haven't heard of the Mueller investigation, you are either living in a place that doesn't care about the U.S.

at all or under a rock.

And if you're living under a rock, I'm very jealous of Iraq.

Send me the address of Iraq because I will come.

Is there room for three under that rock?

I am good in an end-time scenario.

I've read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction.

Just send me the address.

But

for all of those who, like me, have been feeling honor bound as a citizen to stay up to date with this investigation,

I wanted to ask the three of you, each of whom has been spending plenty of time reading up on the latest of the latest.

Living through the latest.

Living through the latest of the latest.

What the hell this thing is?

What's going on?

What is this thing?

So

my.

The Mueller investigation is unusual to pay attention to.

It's this thing where there are a lot of there are a lot of leaks from a lot of different directions.

There have have been indictments of various players.

So we have some sense of what the investigation encompasses, of who's getting asked before grand juries, of where Mueller and his team are looking.

But

one thing that I have really struggled to understand,

and Alex, I want to point this question to you first.

Please point away.

is

what actually is the size of the iceberg underneath the surface of the investigation that we see?

What is the size and shape of the investigation that we don't know of yet?

Do we roughly know sort of like

where all this thing is going?

I think there are

assumptions, there are inferences.

You know, I think that the iceberg is pretty large underneath the surface of the water, just by virtue of some of the evidence we've gotten thus far.

Like we're all talking about Michael Cohen and payments that were made to Michael Cohen from various entities.

And the name Viktor Vexelberg is sort of now, I mean, is it a popular name?

I don't know, but we are more aware of the name of this particular Russian oligarch because Viktor Vexelberg

may have, through a U.S.

subsidiary, paid Michael Cohen $400 or $500,000 in payment for what we're not quite sure, but at any rate, we're talking about Victor Vexelberg.

Victor Vexelberg was already a person of interest to Robert Mueller,

who had taken him and had basically imaged Vexelberg's electronic equipment when he landed in the U.S.

a few months ago.

Whenever we get a new piece of information for in the Southern District probe, for example, it always feels like Robert Mueller has been there.

Like the scent of Mueller is lingering in the room when we all walk in, which gives you the sense that his investigation is wide-ranging in scope and meticulous in detail, right?

That he is a few steps ahead of the game.

Given how many people we're talking about, how many people who, there are two new subpoenas that were issued today, the tentacles feel extraordinarily long and no detail appears too insignificant.

I mean, the fact that we are now once again talking about new subpoenas are being issued to get at perhaps whether Roger Stone did meet with Julian Assange and whether he knew, you know, re-litigating this famous Roger Stone tweet of 2016, that we're still doing that at this point to me says this is an exhaustive investigation.

Was that 2016?

That was 2016.

How many years ago?

David Graham, you write 12 stories a day about the goings-on in Washington.

How do you stay oriented?

What do you pay attention to?

How are you taxonomizing the investigation and the various strands of what's being investigated at the moment?

Haphazardly.

There are so many different strains, and I think it's really tough to keep track of them.

And I think it's easy to lose sight of certain things.

Not that long ago, I was thinking about

the canary in the coal mine for this whole thing, which was the theft of Hillary Clinton's emails or emails from the DNC and from John Podesta.

And something we haven't heard a whole lot about is what Mueller is doing on that front.

We know this is a major thing.

We know there's a crime that materially happened.

We don't know who committed it.

We know there's a crime.

We know what the intelligence community thinks about it, about who perpetrated it.

Yet we don't see Mueller talking about that.

So there are these strands that are obviously very important that I think we can assume he is looking at, but we haven't heard anything about them publicly.

And that's where the iceberg question comes in.

There seem to be things that he's talking about that we just have no idea.

Yeah.

One of the dimensions of this story,

or at least our understanding of the investigation, is that there are leaks.

There are official developments in the investigation that are widely known about.

There are requests from Congress to Mueller and his team, to the Department of Justice.

Rosie,

what is your sense of where information is coming from about the investigation and where it is not?

Well, it doesn't really seem like Mueller's team itself leaks.

You know, for example, the list of questions that Mueller wants to ask Trump was leaked to the New York Times by someone who had received it from Trump's legal team, right?

So that's not really the way that it appears.

You know, occasionally there are developments in the investigation that are public, like Mueller will indict someone, or, you know.

As far as where information is coming from, I mean, this is one of the leakiest periods in Washington, I think, probably ever.

And so, from a lot of different places, there's a lot of leaks from the Hill, from the White House itself, you know, and not just on this topic.

Why is Trump's team so leaky?

Well, you know, I think that there's probably like a whole nother podcast that we can

actually

strategic reason in some of these cases for these leaks.

Some of them leak out because of who knows what.

But in other cases, it's an attempt to get ahead of the story or to signal to allies or to rally supporters about things that Mueller is looking into.

Or in some cases, possibly to message to Trump.

We know that the White House staffers use the media as a method of getting the president's attention.

And so if you put things out that way, that's one way to get the president's attention.

And to telegraph seriousness where he doesn't always seem to be taking this all that seriously.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, also, I mean, let's keep in mind, this is the person that hosted The Apprentice, right?

He loves designating winners and losers.

There's like a constant battle royale inside this White House, and they're under an enormous amount of pressure, given the fact that

there are two dueling investigations, right?

Like, as bad as it may seem on the outside, it's like a lot worse on the inside.

So, there's a huge amount of stress.

There's a desire to sort of curry favor or settle scores.

And one of the ways you do that is by leaking.

That happened last week when we got a leak on

a comment that a sort of like mid-level White House staffer made about John McCain.

That is evidence of an unhappy tribe inside the confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Trevor Burrus: I also think that leaks beget leaks.

Like if there's a culture of leaking, it encourages other people to leak because if he's leaking, why don't I?

There's another dimension of this, not the leaks, but the questions that are being asked of Mueller's team, the information that's being asked of Mueller and his team in the Justice Department by Congress, most notably, most controversially, the House Intelligence Committee, led by Republican Demon Nunes.

What is the House Intelligence Committee doing, and how is it affecting the way this investigation is playing out in practice and in the press?

Well, they, I mean, you know, they

investigated this question of whether or not

of

Russian interference into the United States.

I feel like you're speaking Washington exactly.

I'm being very careful.

I'm being very careful.

And, you know, and basically

they concluded their investigation

with a report exonerating the Trump team of having

done any funny business.

But from the behavior of Nunes,

that's raised a lot of questions about the House Intelligence Committee's sort of commitment to really

finding the real killer on this, so to speak.

But I thought that they finished their investigation and that they exonerated the president and that was done and the hands are wiped out.

So what is it?

It's clear.

I mean, the president has openly referred to some members of the

conservative wing of the Republican caucus as his soldiers, his like his warriors, right?

And while the House committee may have exonerated Team Trump, they are, as you point out, not content to let that be the final word.

And you're seeing action even this week with Freedom Caucus members making an effort to undermine the Mueller investigation directly by saying, you know what?

This investigation is not transparent enough.

We have questions.

We think there are partisans.

We think the Department of Justice is...

awash in partisan, nefarious behavior.

We want answers.

We want unredacted information.

They're asking for all of this stuff from the Department of Justice that Jeff Sessions probably doesn't want to give over, that could seriously compromise the work of the special investigator.

And they're asking Trump to be the one to demand it.

And it has put this, it has sort of like really outlined the battle lines, if you will.

Like there's the cavalry, which is, you know, House Republicans to a large extent, and the general, which is Donald Trump.

And you're seeing the two sort of wings work in tandem with one another.

And they all have their sights set on Mueller and the law enforcement agencies.

Aaron Ross Powell,

what is,

how does Nunes, to the best of our ability to know this, how does Nunes perceive his role and the role of his committee?

Can I just say one thing?

I thought it was striking last week that they had to basically give Nunes a classified briefing on site.

They will not entrust Devin Nunes with classified information at this point because they are so concerned he is going to leak that information to either the executive branch or to other places.

And so, when Devin Nunes asked for classified information relating to the Mueller probe, they had to give it to him behind closed doors.

They did not give him the material.

Devin Nunes and Trey Gowdy had to go together, which is a sign of the mistrust that has blossomed between law enforcement agencies and the chairman of the House committee designated to investigate the the same thing that the law enforcement agencies are investigating.

Aaron Ross Powell, there's a weird inversion because the kind of things that

Nunes is doing are not entirely out of the realm of oversight in the past.

But it's very strange for the congressional overseers to be going against the Justice Department, but in league with the president who directs that Justice Department.

And so everything about the way we think about congressional oversight of intelligence has been flipped on its head.

The memo that they're trying to get here is, I suspect, very interesting.

They want this, I think, three-page memo that says, has the specifics of what Mueller has been directed to investigate.

So when Rod Rosenstein appointed him, there was a public letter.

It's a page or two, very vague,

saying he would have appointed and he could investigate any crimes he came across in the process.

They want to know what the memo itself says.

Now, the Justice Department says if we let this go, it's going to compromise the investigation.

It's going to make Mueller's job more difficult or make it impossible.

But I suspect that if we, the public, could see what was in that memo, we would know a lot more about the investigation.

It'd be very interesting.

What leverage, who has the most leverage in this scenario?

I keep hearing this phrase, contempt of Congress, which I didn't know existed until like a second ago.

But what would it mean for the House Intelligence Committee to hold the Justice Department and officials from the Justice Department in contempt of Congress?

Not a whole lot.

Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress.

I believe he was the first attorney general to ever be so held.

And it was a major moment moment for norm breaking, but breaking of norms is so boring in 2018.

No one even has a lot of people.

There's three norms right now.

Yeah, that's like every day.

Don't you think, though, that the difference is that Eric Holder and Barack Obama had a different relationship than Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump at this particular moment?

I mean, part of this,

when Jeff Sessions

is squeezed, he doesn't necessarily, by Congress, unlike Eric Holder.

There is already a rift between President Trump and his attorney general.

And in many ways, people think that this White House is just looking for an excuse to further marginalize or even get the resignation of the Attorney General.

I don't know.

I mean, that's a good question.

I just think

it's a weird, it's a rockier landscape than even the last time an attorney general was.

Yeah, I think that's right.

There's

potential second order implications.

But as a first order, I don't know that makes a lot of difference.

The second order is very interesting.

And the question of what it would take for Trump to actually fire Jeff Sessions Sessions is one that I'm very intrigued by.

He has talked about wanting to get rid of him.

He has threatened him.

He has refused a resignation.

He has not fired him.

What could it take at this point?

Rosie, I'll direct this at you, but I'm curious for your sense of what the dueling strategies are and what they're aimed at.

Because it feels like there's really three very different types of games being played at once, right?

From my layperson's perspective,

on the one hand, there's an investigation, buttoned up, formal, with varied.

That's your voller voice.

That's my volume.

That's your volar voice.

Varad authorities to subpoena us.

You lowered your base voice even lower.

And grand jury stuff.

There's the House Intelligence Committee investigation

and oversight function,

which is leaky and political and deeply politicized and

in tension with the intelligence community.

And then there's the Trump legal team, or I should say legal teams, private and public,

each of which is playing in part to Trump the president himself and using the obscure arcana of presidential legal jurisprudence, executive client privilege and all that stuff, and is also

has all these various things to lean on, like the pardon power that plays a mysterious aspect in their work.

There's also, I should say, a fourth thing going on in the press that involves figures like the lawyer of porn star Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, who represents the latest media celebrity to grace the cable news airwaves.

The dueling strategies, there are like 12 different ways of reading what's happening in this investigation and 12 different strategies afoot.

How do they intersect?

Which is most effective?

Who is running the pieces on the chessboard?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, as far as intersecting, I mean, really, it's about how certain people's strategies affect other people's strategies.

If you're talking about the Trump team, you know, he has several lawyers, either inside the White House or outside the White House.

So the outside the White House lawyers at this point, you know, include Jay Secculo, Rudy Giuliani.

Inside the White House, it was Ty Cobb until recently.

And now he's been sort of replaced by this guy, Emmett Flood.

And Ty Cobb leaving has been sort of pretty widely interpreted as a sign that the Trump team is ready to take a kind of a more aggressive stance towards Mueller because Ty Cobb's his idea was basically to cooperate and to, you know, to sort of keep things on an even keel.

And so now that it's a year into this investigation and there's been more than one legal shake-up on that team,

I think that people are sort of expecting there to be a little bit more obstinacy.

Aaron Powell, I think that Trump has the upper hand, to be honest.

I think he has, while he is in a fit of sort of like chaos, can you be in a fit of chaos?

While he lives in a chaotic world, I am currently in a fit of chaos.

Trump has been fairly consistent in his messaging.

This is a witch hunt.

There is no collusion.

He says it over and over and over again.

It is repeated by conservative media outlets and conservative news over and over again.

And he has Congress, I mean,

in his pocket, effectively.

It is a Republican-run Congress in the Senate and the House.

And there are legislative levers they have to make Robert Mueller's life difficult.

There is, I was in Indiana, I have been in Trump country the last couple of weeks, and Trump supporters are on message.

They do not believe that there has been any, there's nothing to look for, nothing to see here.

They say the words witch hunt.

I mean, there's an incredible amount of consistency, and it's a very vocal position that everyone has taken.

It's very aggressive.

On the flip side, the people who want to see this smaller investigation come to fruition, that he should be given time and darkness, if you will, or at least,

you know, the

shroud of sort of institutional protection to do his work.

I mean,

a year isn't that long.

And they are already calling for, in terms of special counsel investigations, and they are calling for revelations, redactions, you know,

firings in some cases.

Robert Mueller is racing in, I don't think he actually is, but in terms of the court of public opinion, I mean, there's so much media frenzy around what Mueller's looking for, when he's going to reveal it, that he is.

whether or not he actually feels it, the public feels like, come on, like people are chomping at the bit for it.

And I think that's very much played into Trump's hand.

And because of the unity overall about what this investigation really is, Trump

in some way is winning the messaging war.

Well, and the hashtag resistance wants to know all those things immediately too.

They have already convicted him in their minds and they want to see the facts and they're sick of waiting too.

Right.

I think this gets to the leaks question because they're fighting an asymmetrical war.

What Mueller has is a lot of information.

Trump doesn't know what information he has, all of it.

And I suspect Trump and his team don't know, not only they don't know what Mueller has, but there are things that Mueller has that they don't know.

You know, today Trump discloses that he paid this money to Michael Cohen.

Last year, he signed a disclosure that omitted that.

Now, maybe Trump knew he was lying, but maybe he didn't know about the money he paid to Cohen because somebody had signed off on it for him.

So there's all these, the chaos in the Trump.

orbit means that they don't always know, seem to know what the left and right-hand are doing.

But they do have leaks.

Mueller isn't talking and has good reasons not to talk to the press.

And so the way that Trump can can fight back is through this messaging, by leaking out just enough to further the impression that it is a witch hunt and by having this catchy phrase that is very easy to repeat and become a mantra.

Now, Alex, you're framing that

it's compelling, this idea that the president holds all the cards.

I don't think he holds all the cards, but I think he has an advantage.

Yes, because he has the court of public opinion to that he can control part of the public.

And also, let's be clear: the president has done things that no other president has done before.

And he's, it hasn't hurt him.

His approval rating in the last week has gone up.

But I guess the flip side of the question to me, and I'm curious for your thoughts on this, David.

From my vantage point, it seems like the stakes are highest for President Trump and almost lowest for Robert Mueller.

Like, can't he just, you know, once this is all, okay, so let's say he

gets Saturday Night massacred and the president asks for

Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller.

Rosenstein refuses.

He's dismissed.

Jeff Sessions tries to protect him.

He gets knocked out of the game as well.

Trump gets to overturn the entire chessboard and put in place his own pawns.

Mueller, in that scenario, just kind of like, you know,

goes back to his life as a private citizen.

Like, going.

You mean, like, is Mueller going to survive as a professional in all of this?

I think he probably will, no matter what, right?

But like what are his stakes?

Yeah, when he gets fired, he can go and just chill, you know, or he can go back to...

Go back back to his white shoe lawfully.

Yeah, exactly.

Which strikes me as a sort of power, right?

That he can.

I don't know.

Do you think that would be satisfying to all the things that Robert Mueller, I think, believes are on his shoulders?

But then he can, like, you know, think about it.

Sit by the lake.

And so could Donald Trump.

He's not going to be broke.

He could write his version of what was James Comey's book?

The Higher Loyalty.

The Higher Loyalty.

I think about Lawrence Walsh, who was the Ron-Contra special

prosecutor, who was in a similar position to Mueller.

He was at the end of his career.

He had really nothing to prove.

And he wrote Iran-Contra

to the very end.

I mean, he was like in his 80s, I think, when it finished, and he was working six and seven-day weeks, even as people were being pardoned around him, and the White House was destroying his case.

And I think that Mueller has a certain similarity with Walsh.

I mean, obviously, he knows the Walsh's example.

He was working in the government at the time, and I think he's cut from a similar cloth.

He seems like the sort of person who wants to follow it through to the end, even if,

as far as he can, even if people are interfering with him and despite whatever the political ramifications are.

All right.

In a minute, Rosie, I am going to ask you to bring us into the witch hunt view of the Mueller investigation.

How is this playing in Trump country?

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I've been asking about the view of this investigation as a layperson.

But Rosie, give me a sense of what this investigation is like to someone who believes it is a witch hunt.

Well, it's really important, I think, to pay attention to what right-wing media is saying about this investigation and how it's covered on the right at places like Fox News, because there's been a total push to discredit the investigation, to discredit the people running it, to discredit top officials at the Justice Department, and sort of like undermine the entire basis of it, right?

And so if you're somebody who, for example, watches Fox News, you know, reads websites like Breitbart, you know, as a primary source of news, that is the line that you're getting, right?

And so it's become sort of a closed feedback loop

with really, really heated rhetoric about the deep state trying to get President Trump, you know, about a sort of basically a wide-ranging conspiracy against him.

My understanding is that when this investigation began, or I should say, when Mueller took over as special counsel, he had a reputation as being a, as it were, a straight shooter, that he had a well-respected community as an FBI, as

he had a well-respected career as FBI director, that he was viewed as a non-partisan, straight-ahead figure from all sides.

And how has his character changed, evolved for those who are skeptical of the investigation?

Well, as far as

conservative media and the way that they cover it, I mean, he's become kind of the foil, the sort of you know, boogeyman character.

Although he is, he does appear to be so sort of upstanding, right, that they've it's i think it's been kind of a stretch for them and so they often talk about rosenstein or um

and you know some of the some of them sort of more public more public

the same reputation well right but i'm what i i guess what i mean by that is that mueller is so sort of mysterious in a way and inscrutable that it's hard to like find i think it's been hard for them to find too many angles whereas you know rosenstein speaks publicly and jeff sessions speaks publicly right and uh and so i think that they are sort of easier punching bags in a way.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Rosie brings up the deep state.

I mean, you have to keep in mind that's a theme, and he wasn't using the phrase deep state when he was a candidate.

But I mean, one of the reasons the FBI, according to the New York Times today, at least, says it didn't pursue theories about Russia in collusion with a Trump campaign

at the outset is because they were worried about

giving Trump a reason to believe that there was actually a deep state conspiracy, given the fact that he was talking about how the election was rigged.

I mean, he's been talking about this rigged system for a year and a half, two years, right?

And the Mueller investigation has dovetailed very nicely with his ideas about nefarious institutional conspiracies to take down the outsider.

So, and that's coupled with a president who can do things that no other president has been able to do, right?

I mean,

fact, in many ways, this president is impervious to it.

We talk about the Mueller investigation.

The president is calling it a Democrat-run

witch hunt.

All of the people running this investigation are Republicans.

But that has not stopped him and the echo chamber, largely on the right, of saying this is a Democratic conspiracy, right?

I mean, these are,

that's what sets this whole sort of dynamic apart from anything else we've ever seen in American politics.

Aaron Ross Powell, there's a cleverness to the attack on Mueller, too, where his strengths are turned against him.

The fact that he is a lifelong Republican, well, he was one of those Republicans.

You know, he's one of the people.

They work for the,

not the real Republicans, not the Trump Republicans like us.

The fact that he worked for Obama, the bipartisan veneer suddenly becomes a threat.

The fact that he is a career government servant suddenly becomes evidence that there's something nefarious about him.

And then you combine that with just straight on truths, like claiming he worked for Barack Obama for eight years.

It's not true.

But if the president says it, he's certainly not going to correct the error.

And a lot of people are going to see that and they're not going to see the rebuttal saying this is simply factually not correct.

I think that Alex's point about the rigged system rhetoric is really, is really key because Trump is able to just apply that concept to any situation that he's in, basically,

to be able to undermine whoever his opponent is at that time.

I mean, he initially started saying it as kind of insurance against possibly losing the election.

Right.

And he was going to, he was saying, oh, the system's rigged, you know, and that was going to be sort of his face-saving way of dealing with a potential loss.

Now that he's, even despite the fact that he's the actual president of the United States, he's still able to use that rhetoric to sort of undermine

his critics despite being kind of the most powerful man in the world.

Whose party controls the judiciary and all houses of Congress.

Who, you know, by the way, Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's appointee, right?

And who was the first sitting senator to endorse him, by the way?

Exactly.

Not just like some schmoo.

By the way, who played Eric Holder on SNL?

I don't think that there were nearly as many colorful characters from the administration on SNL.

Probably another one of those forgettable Jay Farrow characters.

No.

I think Jay Farrow is not old enough.

Jay Farrow is still in my heart.

Still in my heart.

That's a total side.

How has the question of Russia's interference in the 2016 election been resolved?

What's the conclusion?

You mean among people who'd view this as a witch hunt?

Yes.

Well, they believe that

that was sort of just cooked up as cover for trying to investigate other things about Trump and get rid of him, basically.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: I think it's also like the I could kill a person on Fifth Avenue sort of school of thinking, which is like, who cares?

I mean, it was a remarkable moment when Donald Trump was revealed that Donald Trump didn't pay any income taxes, right?

For any other candidate, that would have been a non-starter.

Donald Trump was like, you see, aren't I smart?

And I think that same sort of justification is used when his supporters hear about Russia.

It's like, well, if he was getting assistance from some outside country or some outside actors,

then why shouldn't he take it?

You know, there's like a, there's, there are levels of justification that happen among his supporters because the president has been, I mean, he is in many ways Teflon Don.

He is like these criticisms, these scandals, these, these potential illegalities just don't stick to him because part of his very being is

just shrugging it all off and saying it doesn't matter.

And if it did matter, then I'm smart for for having weaponized

illegalities in my favor.

Aaron Powell, another aspect of that is that he's undermined faith in the media so much that people don't even, his supporters don't even believe a lot of the stuff that they read about him.

You also grab onto things in Mueller's, for example, when Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency and a bunch of people who worked there, his indictment stated that early on,

Russian internet trolling was designed in part to simply destabilize the election.

And they did things, they organized pro-Clinton rallies.

So you saw a lot of people saying, oh, look, see, they weren't helping Trump.

They were helping Clinton.

In fact, that's who it was designed to help.

Or they were helping both.

It wasn't really an effort to help Trump.

Despite the fact that the indictment, in some argues fairly unambiguously, that it was, you know, the process over time evolved to be a...

sweeping and largely pro-Trump effort.

How is the newest, splashiest, tabloidiest part of this whole saga playing in Trump country, Alex?

How has the Avenatti Palooza, the

sudden press tour?

Well, I think as a creature of media, Avenatta is like a perfect rejoinder to Trump, right?

He like lives on cable news.

He's a Twitter machine.

He hashtags his way.

He like does document dumps on Twitter and hashtags his way into the American consciousness.

What is the hashtag?

Basta.

You know, and he literally like it's the DGAF school of lawyering, right?

And that means don't give a fuck.

And,

you know, this is what a time to be alive is what I think when we're all doing this.

But at the same time, you know, that's, I think by the out, you know, a lot of outside assessment is that Southern District investigation into Michael Cohen and his records that Michael Avenatti is a part of actually poses more of an existential threat to this presidency than maybe the Mueller investigation.

I think it's a little premature to say that since Mueller hasn't come out with any conclusions, but we are already seeing, you know, there are real costs to some of these documents that have been made public.

I mean, we have the heads, the general counsel of Lombardis resigned today.

AT ⁇ T executives have issued apologies.

There have been firings.

I mean, and that cuts to the core of the swamp, which was like a campaign promise that I do think Trump supporters actually care about, right?

The idea that this pay-for-play system exists, that the rich companies get over on the American public.

And that's direct evidence potentially of the swamp being incredibly alive and well and involving key players in Trump's orbit.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: But look, they overruled the AT ATT merger.

Cohen couldn't get anything for it.

And you see Trump saying, look, they didn't get what they wanted.

It's just proof, once again, that I am impervious to these things.

Yeah, yeah.

It's again, it's the clever switch on all of it.

But the administration and officials from the campaign have at this point said out and out that they did make payments through Michael Cohen's LLC, Essential Consultants,

very auspiciously named,

LLC,

that they did actually make payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, a.k.a.

Stephanie Clifford.

So if that's now a confessed truth, I mean, if everybody agrees, oh, yeah, that a rather sizable sum has been paid to

this woman who alleges that the president, that she had an affair with the president,

how is that being received

among the president's most fervent supporters?

Well, I think too, I mean, this is less about the president.

The Stormy Daniels piece is important because it's the, at least from the behavior of the president, he is reluctant to tweet about Stormy Daniels.

And there is a real question about whether the real reason that they wanted to prevent Stormy Daniels from coming forward is because allowing her to do so, releasing her from her NDA, would have potentially released other women from their NDAs.

Stormy Daniels, I think, represents more than just one porn star who slept with the president.

I think there's a concern on the part of some Trump watchers and Trump supporters, maybe to some degree, that there are more like her, and that that could pose a real problem with the president, setting aside any violations of campaign election financing.

And I think that

in the immediate problem for Stormy Daniels, it exposes the relationship between the president and Michael Cohen, which is a very complicated relationship.

And Michael Cohen is a very complicated actor that, as we've seen in the last week, has exposed a number of kind of questionable dealings that are part of Trumpland.

Aaron Powell,

right.

I think that the Stormy Daniels story is at this point about so much more than Stormy Daniels that she herself, while interesting, is not necessarily even the main focus.

I mean, it's metastasized into this, like Alex was saying,

sort of episodic reveal structure where every week we find out some new thing, or every couple of days we find out some new thing that Michael Cohen was doing that exposes sort of like other parts of the Trump puzzle.

Aaron Ross Powell, and but how is that, how is the Avenatti Palooza playing on Fox?

Well, Avenatti has been campaigning to go on Sean Hannity's show and Hannity's saying no.

I don't think Avenatti's been on Fox yet.

I do know that you talk to Trump supporters and they say, Stormy Daniels, keep your private parts private, right?

They sort of focus, unlike...

I think all of us, on the singular porn star and not the rest of it.

So, I mean, I don't know that Michael Avenatti's larger sort of reveals are making the impact on Trump supporters the way that they have on people who are not Trump supporters.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, primarily he's going on CNN and MSNBC.

Right.

So that affects him.

And he's being covered in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Trevor Burrus: I want to turn to one aspect of this that also complicates the game theory of the dueling strands of the investigation in interesting ways, which is our looming midterm elections.

2018 will conclude with some votes, and those could have implications for

the investigation and the characters involved in it.

David, what might happen in November?

Well, it's fairly clear that despite the urgings of the White House,

Mueller is not anywhere near wrapping up.

And that it's not a matter of a few days or a few weeks.

There's clearly so much more to go.

And I think that means we're going to run through the midterms, barring a firing.

And I think that means we're likely to get, well, you hear people saying it's likely to go quiet.

Mueller won't do a lot in that time.

Watching what happened to James Comey and the blowback, not just from Democrats, but really from across the board to Comey's decision to talk about the Clinton probe publicly.

I would imagine Mueller will stick closely to the Justice Department guidelines, which counsel against doing anything that could be seen as interfering in the election.

But I'm not sure what it really means for Mueller to be quiet because Mueller has been quiet all along.

Like we might not get any indictments, but most of the leaks, like Rosie said, are coming from elsewhere, not from the Mueller team.

So I suspect we'll still keep learning things, even if they're not coming from him.

Alex, people are going to be voting in November.

How do you think that that affects how Mueller's investigation plays out and what impact it has?

Oh, I think the impact of the midterms could be huge, in part because it depends on who controls the House.

I think that the Democratic or the narrative that this is inevitably going to be a blue wave that sweeps the the Democrats back into control of the House and Senate is overly optimistic.

You know, this president has supporters who don't care about the scandals.

They feel like the economy is doing well.

They look at the unemployment rate.

They look at quote-unquote promises kept on the campaign trail once he's in office, and they are very happy with him and they feel defiant.

And I think, you know, that part of the electorate has not been covered the way it should be, especially after 2016.

I mean, those feelings, there is a rawness and an energy on the right that is, you know,

there is anger on the left.

I mean, both sides are really fired up.

But depending on what happens in terms of Congress, there will be huge implications for when Mueller finally does reveal his findings and what is done with it, what is done with them and what the implications are for the sitting president.

So you're telling me this is not, it's not coming to an end right now.

Dude, like buckle up.

It's like, we got some time ahead of ourselves.

I want the rock.

Somebody sent me me the rock that I can hide.

That's gay.

You're going to be like six rocks, like stacked on top.

Oh, I thought you meant Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

Bring him out.

It's like, no, he's running for president, actually.

That's the other rock that we'll all be under.

But Rock is America's sweetheart right now.

Rock is America's mayor.

Speaking of Dwayne The Rock Johnson, let's turn to keepers.

I ask our listeners and our guests every week what we have heard, read, listened to, watched, experienced recently that we do not want to forget.

First, let's play a keeper from our listener, Gina, in Pittsburgh.

One of the things that I really want to keep and hold on to are photos, like the printed photos that used to be in stacks of photo books as we would grow up throughout our lives.

I think that that's something that sometimes has a more real emotional feeling than paging through photos on Facebook or Instagram and something that seems to be going away.

I recently went to my childhood home and found stacks of them and was so happy to have hours to sit and look through these photos.

So I just really think it's something worth holding on to that hopefully doesn't go away over the years.

Thank you very much for that, Gina.

I incidentally have started making a practice of keeping all of the photos that are most dear to me on my phone.

I shouldn't say that because the Russians are going to go get them.

Yeah, wait, that's your like, I'm a, I'm an archivist move.

No,

no, no, no, no, they, having them just to myself, keeping them just to myself, I find, has wait, why are you, why is it just to yourself?

It's on your phone.

Well, it's not on Instagram or anything like that.

I'm not posting my phone.

Oh, okay, okay.

They are merely mine.

Oh, okay, okay.

And one day I'm going to print them out.

It's going to be wonderful.

I don't want to keep them.

Rosie Gray, what do you want to keep?

I want to keep the beautiful memories that I'm sure are going to be made this weekend at the royal wedding.

This isn't exactly a keeper, but it's something I'm enjoying.

I'm reading about this week.

At 4 a.m.

when it begins, when the coverage is going to be a little bit more difficult.

I think it's at like 6, which is not so bad.

Okay.

The wedding itself, I think, is around 6.

I can do.

Well, I'm just going to be like in bed and roll over, you know, so it's not.

Where do you stand on the question of whether America should have a monarchy so that we can get it?

We do, don't we?

We just get this out of our system, basically.

At this point, it's like, might as well, you know?

Are you most excited?

If we're going to be this obsessed.

What are you most excited about?

The dress, the procession.

Oh, just

all the sort of aesthetics.

You know, the fascinators, the dresses, the like carriage that they're going to be in.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, my gosh.

We've had so many monarchy-themed keepers in the course of this show.

I love it.

I love it.

David Graham.

I think My Keeper is a newish record called Your Queen as a Reptile by the London-based jazzian Shibaka Hutchings.

Sort of a reproach to monarchy.

So I think it's timely.

Wonderful.

And listeners, I must tell you, if you have not heard David Graham's immaculate taste in music, do go out and download this quote-unquote record

instantly, because I'm sure it will be.

It's on band camp.

All right.

Alex Wagner, what would you like to keep?

Well, Matt, part of the reason I haven't been able to fulfill my duties as an esteemed co-host on Radio Atlantic is because I've been on the road shooting this this show, The Circus, on Showtime.

And it's a ridiculous, wonderful project, but there's no time.

There are these beautiful scenes of us in restaurants eating this amazing food.

That's like the only time we're allowed to eat.

And I have basically subsisted on nature's perfect food, which is the hard-boiled egg.

You can get it anywhere.

You can get it in a gas station.

You can get it at the Ritz.

You can get it like,

I don't think you can get it in the vending machine yet, but I'd like to invent one i guess that's called a hen but um the point is i love me a hard-boiled egg with salt and pepper it's like i i haven't gotten tired of it yet it's been six weeks i'm still eating them thank you that's my keeper wonderful

i am going to recommend to the listeners a documentary called the work

It's a hard to, in some ways, it's a really hard to watch documentary, but I think one that's pretty topical in an interesting way.

The work is about a unique group therapy program that happens at Folsom State Prison.

Every year, I think,

for four days, inmates who are currently incarcerated at Folsom State Prison

spend time in group therapy with men from the outside.

And the documentary makers

got access to go into, they spent years trying to get the access to go and tape what happened in this group therapy session.

And it gets real very quickly.

Kind of like what happens here in the studio with us.

Yes.

This is our.

It almost got this real.

It almost got this real.

No, but it is, among other things, the documentary is very much about masculinity and what it demands and how it constrains.

And the men are very upfront about that.

And these are the like, you know, they're pretty hard men.

They're tough.

They're in Folsom State Prison.

Yeah, Yeah, they're in Folsom State Prison.

And the men from the outside are not going to mess with either.

There's this one moment in the documentary that happens fairly early on where

one of the guys from the outside who's come in kind of cocky and

admittedly says that he's kind of judging the whole proceedings and

does not know if he's bought into this whole group therapy thing.

There's this one moment where he has a confrontation with another prisoner in the therapy circle, and the camera lingers on his face for like a full minute as he

just stares with like pure raw aggression at this guy.

His face reddens, and you see just like the color red take over his entire face.

He starts to clench his jaw tighter and tighter, and you see tears start to stream from his eyes.

And he says, in my mind, I think I'm a fucking prince.

It's one of the most just startling things to be captured on tape that I can recall seeing in recent years.

So I recommend it to everyone, particularly if you're trying to grapple with masculinity suddenly in the news.

If you're like listening to Jordan B.

Peterson, watch some work.

Oh, Lord.

Okay.

Wait, did I just go there?

Do we need to edit that out?

No, God.

Like, I got into a fight with Jordan Peterson at Belmar last week.

Alex, Rosie, Rosie, David.

Thank you so much.

This has been a delightful conversation, and I feel like I

now can go crawl under a rock.

Just a handful of pebbles for now, buddy.

Just a handful of pebbles.

No, you all have enlightened me.

And I hope our listeners and I look forward, Alex, to our next conversation and to the next time I can get the two of you into studio with me.

Thanks all for listening.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Catherine Wells is the executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by the incandescent John Batiste.

You can listen to the theme in full anytime on Spotify.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact info and your keeper at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you have a rock of your own, not as a retreat from the world's chaos, but as a respite to remember the astonishing degree of order and design in the world, and to, as much as possible, instill that order in your own life.

We'll see you next week.