How to Report on the Russia Investigation

by President Donald Trump. When that happens, it's going to be a media circus, which made me think, what's it like to cover a story like that, How does it work? What is the news behind the news? To talk about this? We are incredibly fortunate to have with us Laura Jarrett, one of my favorite people of all time. Laura covers legal affairs for CNN, and she has the DUBI distinction of having joined CNN at exactly the moment when the

Trump administration exploded into the headlines. Laura, you're either the smartest person in the world were the unluckiest in terms of when you started your job. It's not boring, it's not boring. Before Laura joined CNN, she was a practicing attorney in Chicago and private practice, doing all sorts of high powered litigation. Not the sort of person who usually

turns into a journalist. And before that, she was a law student at Harvard Law School, where I had the great pleasure of meeting her, and she was the standout student in a course I taught way back when when Barack Obama was just running for president with John Jackson of University of Pennsylvania, who's now the dean at the end and Burg School at the University of Pennsylvania. And I've been following her career with tremendous and totally undeserved pride,

and I'm thrilled that you could join us. Thank you, Laura for being here, Thank you so much for having me. So start at the beginning. You're sitting in your law firm, you're earning your big law from salary, You're a mover and shaker in Chicago. Why turn to journalism? Other than the fact that I had a killer shoe collection, I

was miserable. And I think part of the issue is, you know, unless you have a legal background or you have parents that are at law firms, a lot of people don't realize that much of the day is spent on phone calls and in meetings planning for different eventualities, but not actually digging into the substance of the law. And so when by the time I left, I was a sixth year associate, and which that means is I'm basically managing other associates, but it also meant you're on

the cusp of partnership. I mean making it to the sixth year. Usually people go for the go for the gold. Sure, but that requires seeing somebody's life who is serving as a partner and thinking, oh, you know what if I just work a couple more years, work really hard, put my head down, that's the life I can have. And there was nobody for which I could point to and

say that's what I want. So why journalism and why not going off to become a ski bumb Because I knew that I still love the law, and I knew that I still loved digging into legal issues, but I didn't want to be an advocate anymore. I didn't like the idea of having to just take a position coal hog, no matter whether I thought it was right or dumb. I was loathed to go in every day knowing that

this is what they're paying me to do. So whether I think they're wrong or right, I'm supposed to argue for it, and you're penalized if you're not as aggressive as possible about it. And I wanted to just dig in on the facts, and so I try to think, well, what can I do where I can cover the facts, I can cover legal issues, but do it in a far more fulfilling, an interesting way. It turns out local

news in Chicago is very competitive. They really want you to have you gone through the ranks of other local markets. And it turns out more sort of nationwide networks, especially Cable, are far more flexible about taking someone with an unorthodox

background that's actually fascinating. I would have had no idea about that, and I was gonna my next question was actually going to be how does someone who's a great lawyer with an impeccable legal pedigree but has never actually stood in front of a camera and explain things to

people before suddenly end up on air at CNN. So part of why CNN ends up being such a great fit for me, especially coming directly from Latham and Watkins having never been on air once in my life, is because it's on all day long, so they need people. They need people on all day long, and there's so much more willing to take a chance on you. And it was really CNN that came up with this idea of well, you have the legal background, why don't we

leverage why don't you cover the Justice Department? And again they remember, this is the summer of twenty sixteen, So the Justice Department that they envisioned for me was, I would say, the pace was going to be slightly different, and they thought, well, you know, in your account, your account, Laura. They hired you because they had nothing to lose, because if you weren't good at four am, they just would

never put you on, you know, at nine pm. And they give you the very boring beat of the Hillary Clinton Justice Department, where nothing especially would happen, and antitrust laws wouldn't be strictly enforced and you know, etc. Etc. Right, we would be dealing with, you know, the twelve Benghazi hearing and congressional document fights about stuff like that. So you took a boring job and you got an interesting one. I knew it would be interesting. I just didn't know

that it was going to be like this. Shall we say, Yeah, I knew, I knew it was going to be great, and I knew it was going to be the right move for me, and it was certainly going to be far more fulfilling the managing document review for large corporate litigation. I had no idea it was going to be like this, and it has turned out, I think, to be, you know, such a memorable and incredible experience for me to have as my first formative job in journalism. So tell me

about what it's actually like on a daily basis. I mean to those of us who are I would say at the periphery of the media like me, I write a column, but I'm not, you know, I don't have to respond in every live moment. Sometimes Trump's legal news seems like drinking from a fire hose. You know. Every morning we wake up, we turn on CNN or we open the newspaper, and we hear the latest story of what's happened. But that means that if we're doing that,

you've already been up for hours before us. You've already assimilated what's happened, and you've already presented it as a as a story. So how do you usually first hear that the president has done something or that the Department of Justice has done something what's your usual, Well, do you usually know about it before it even happens, So it kind of depends on what the issue is. A perfect example of where unfortunately we had no heads up was when the Special Council decided to break his silence

after two years of stoicism. That day, walked into the Justice Department at nine am, got some coffee, sat down, was just sort of casually going through my emails, and what do we get is a media alert from the Special Counsel's office that he's actually going to speak in an hour and a half. And the challenge of something like that is immediately everyone turns to you with what is he going to say? And does that mean that the people within CNN call you. They say, well, you're

on the Department of Justice, bead. We need to be prepared for when he speaks in an hour and a half, So we expect that you will already know what's going to happen before it's happened. That's what they're saying too. Absolutely, go find out exactly what he's going to say, and then not only go out and find out what he's going to say, but get on TV right now and talk about it and tell us first find out and

then tell us about it. But actually you want to we want to do that in reverse order, but really maybe simultaneously. Maybe maybe maybe that And that's that is Again one of the challenges with how fast everything is moving right now is while you are on trying to report about what you just found out about, it's there's still incoming. So why did you how did you do it? I mean tell us concretely, what did you do? Ninety minutes you get the email, suddenly you go into action.

What did you do for the next ninety minutes? So for the next ninety minutes, I was literally running all over the building, or I should say waddling, because I'm eight and a half months pregnant difficulty. We don't make this too easy for you, waddling all over the halls of Justice, um knocking on doors to whomever I thought would be best positioned to know about what exactly he's

going to say. And the challenge with someone like Mueller is that group is very tight lipped and to say the least, And so it's probably not that surprising that we didn't even know he was going to speak that day, because they don't, you know, frontload things with the press. They just they don't operate like that. And so I waddled around Justice and then I made as many phone calls as possible while doing live hits, saying I don't know what he's going to say, but it should be interesting.

And did you did you engage in any pre analysis? I mean, I will say I watched the thing live on CNN, and then I muted it to start writing my own column explaining what I thought had happened. And then when I saw you come on the screen, because about ninety seconds later, then I unmuted it and to listen to you. Appreciate it that I didn't hear you before the event. So did you do any pre analysis?

I did, and what I tried to do there, because I don't think it serves the viewer to do like too much speculation about what he will say unless I've been told he's going to say X. So I was told it was going to be substance. I was told that he had spoken with the Attorney General before about this, and that the Attorney General wasn't blindsided by that. So those types of nuggets, you know, we have now an hour and a half of air to fill. So that's helpful to give the viewers sort of a little bit

of a peak behind the curtain on that. But in terms of, you know, actually predicting the words that are going to come out of his mouth, I don't. I don't see any value in doing that unless I had gotten a copy of the remarks myself, which I hadn't, But I did try to give our audience a bit of a frame to understand why it mattered that he

was speaking. And I think that that's what we try to do in all of these things, because most people aren't following the minutia of this as you know closely, as all of us are sometimes in the media, and so I try my hardest to pull back and think, like, if someone is just tuning in right now and they haven't you been following every last indictment, but they know who Robert Muller is vaguely, and they see his face, and they see b roll of him on our air

every day. Yeah, that's all there is of Mother's brow. There's no way roll, right, So why should it matter to the average person that he's decided to day is the day he wants to open his mouth? So now he speaks. Now he gets up there, he says his piece, he says he won't take questions, and you know, you have at most a couple of minutes before you have

to go on and offer an authoritative analysis. I noticed that CNN first went to a panel of people who kind of free associated No offense to them, They're doing their best, but they were kind of free associating, right, and then you came on and actually said something. Again, part of that part of the dance there is logistics, right, So the press conference happens on the seventh floor of

the Justice Department. I then have to waddle back down to the first floor where my booth or slash closet is, and you know, get miked up, get everything on so that I can be back on air. So there has to be a little bit of a well, who's going to sort of fill the time until we can get the reporters and correspondence back on. And so a lot of times if you see panels, even on the day when the report was released, she'll notice when it first gets released, there is a panel of probably eight or

ten people on set talking about it. But before Evan Perez, who's my colleague, who also covers the Justice Department, and I could get back to our positions to come on and talk about what the report actually says, because it just there just has to be something to fill the time until we can get in position. That's amazing. You know, in my fantasy, I somehow thought they were giving you a minute or twould actually think about what you were

going to say. But of course that's totally wrong. They were just giving you time to walk down the stairs. I'm supposed to have done that. I'm supposed to have done that while I was walking or brushing my teeth this morning. My goodness. So then how do you do it? I mean, maybe it's too hard to explain. Maybe that's like you know, asking Michael Jordan, how does he make

to move under the basket? But in reality, you have to assimilate a lot of information extremely quickly and provide not only a summary of it that's accurate, which is relevant in the molar context because we've learned that not all summaries are accurate, yes, and also an analysis so that the very first thing the listener or the viewer sees or hears is Laura explaining what just happened, and

Laura also saying what it meant. And that's really different, we should just point out than traditional journalism, in which there were really two different jobs. One job was tell us what happened, and that was the fast in immediate job. Yeah, and the other job was tell us what it means. And you used to have a little more time to do that part of it. So how did you do that? I mean, what do you do on a regular basis

when you know you have to analyze as well as described. Well, you know, part of the benefit is that because I just get to cover one beat, I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about this stuff all day long, and it kind of helps if you're sort of marinated over it for a long period of time. I think

it gives you a little bit more context. It gives you a little bit more flavor of what's happening, and so it's not like you're just sort of just dropped in cold without having any sort of heads or tails

of what's going on. And for the times when it's about doing both, as you said, what happened and the analysis, I actually like that better because what happened people can now find out, you know, in so many different ways, and so I hope part of the reason that they would tune in is for our analysis of how to make sense of it, to how to see it in the larger context, how to understand why it matters. I think that that's, you know, hopefully, what would differentiate myself

from you know, another justice reporter on the beat. That should be sort of what we're offering as a brand. Can I ask about that? In fact, because one of the things that strikes me is actually there is almost no way anymore to find any source of news that would just tell you what happened without already hearing the analysis, at least if you want it in real time. And here's what I mean, nobody waits till the next morning

to read the news story anymore. In fact, if I want to know what's happening right now, I'm going to turn on a cable news network, and you know, I've got you guys, I've got MSNBC, I've got Fox News. All three will show Mueller live and then instantaneously all three will give you description plus analysis, and in many cases that will be the most important way that anyone can get that information. I mean, there's no there isn't a network, cable network that just says, we just tell

you what happened, and we don't analyze it. And one of the results of that, and this is actually something that worries me, is that we get the news already analyzed. It already comes out analyzed. And if you watched Fox, which I then turn to, you've of course heard radically different analysis then you've heard on CNN or MSNBC. And that's true of every breaking story nowadays. And I do share that concern, especially when you know this stuff is

not always straightforward. It's sometimes actually requires a beat to sort of process it and think about it. And a good example, I think is the day that the Attorney General Bill Barr released his four page memo on what he took away to be Muller's principal conclusions. And in subsequent days and weeks and everything that's followed, I think there's been a more fulsome understanding of what happened there.

But in the first I would say, thirty minutes of that memo coming out, if you look at the coverage, the coverage is the special counsel has cleared the president of conspiracy or as he likes hiss a collusion. The

analysis that Oler gives is far far from that. But because we were so quick and so lightning speed trying to get on the takeaway and I think trying to be actually as fair as possible to Trump, which I know many people may not think that that's what this was, but it actually I think was an attempt to say, you know, for two and a half years, the president's been under this cloud. If the Special Council's cleared him,

we have to say that right away. And so I think there was actually a jump to do that without taking a second to really process what Muller was saying, and that I think it is an example of the danger of this. But aren't you being a little hard, a little too hard on yourself? I mean, you're leaving out in your description just now you're being so neutral. You left out the fact that Bar's memo, the Attorney General's memo misrepresented, at least in my view, the conclusions

of the Muller report with respect to half of it. Right, So, just to remind listeners, the first half of the Mueller Documents report do say that there wasn't sufficient evidence of conspiracy or collusion to bring a charge. But then in the second half of the report. In fact, there's this very complicated business where there begins by saying that if we had concluded that the president didn't commit a crime, we would have said so, and we can't say that.

And then he goes on to say, on the other hand, because we can't put a sitting president on trial, we're never going to say the president probably committed a crime. But read the details, where sure enough we lay out all the elements of the obstruction of justice, and in a handful of instances five or six, we actually do say that probably the president satisfied all those requirements. And none of that second half, none of it appears in

Bar's summary of the principal conclusion. So didn't Bar play you. I mean, you can't really beat yourselves up for that. You trusted the Attorney General to some degree, and I wonder if we just should have been more like shown our work a little bit more to say, Look, this is a four page summary of even at that time

we didn't know how long it is. So this is a four page summary of a report that could be massive, and just to provide I think the viewer with a little bit more understanding of what the limitations were, But even within that four page memo, I felt like there were things that may have gotten lost the initial sort of understanding of it. But then you again, you see

it switch. So the language switches from there's no evidence of conspiracy to Muller couldn't find sufficient legal basis to charge members of the Trump campaign with a conspiracy with Russia. It's just you're not the same thing at all. Yet which are not the same thing. But if you notice, even in digital rights, from the Washington Post to US to the Times, there's a switch that happens in language

once people take a minute to process it. So let me ask you a question that I'm actually obsessed with, and it's actually steps outside of just the issue of how you make your judgments, And this actually goes to substance of what we think happened. Why do you think in your heart of hearts that Bob Muller opened the door in the way he did to have his conclusions distorted by bar And here's what I mean by that.

There are plenty of ways that Muller could have written the second half of his report the Obstruction of Justice party to make it much clearer to an ordinary English speaker, not a crazy lawyer like we are, that there was substantial evidence to support the conclusion that the President committed an obstruction of justice crime, which unquestionably is the substance

of what he's saying. Why did he bend over so far backwards to say we're not going to say that president committed a crime, even if we think so, because he can't defend himself. I mean, that's a that's a very questionable thing for him to have said. Remember his reason, his stated reason is it's not fair to accuse someone of a crime if they can't defend themselves in court. But of course the reality is Donald Trump can defend himself far more effectively in hablick and has than he

ever could have defended himself in court. There are limits to what you can say in court. There's no limit to what you can say on Twitter, at least not if you're Donald Trump. So what happened with the obstruction section is one of the more fascinating and confounding elements of this and I share I share your obsession with it, especially knowing a little bit behind the scenes of how

this all sort of went down. Tell us more about that too, Yeah, so at least as I understand it, and again you have your understanding of it is only as good as your sources and your skepticism, So as I understand it. For a long time, the Special Counsel's Office struggled with the obstruction issue. They went back and forth with it on Main Justice. They were being supervised by the Deputy Attorney General's office, so they're in regular contact with Main Justice, as we like to call it,

about these issues. They're doing research, you know, what are applicable precedents to even look at this is obviously a unique situation given that it's the president. They're trying to get their arms around this. At some point they all sit down meeting Mueller's whole team, not the whole team,

but the senior team. So Mueller himself, his top two deputies, James Quarrels and Aaron Zebli, who's been his chiefest staff essentially forever, They sit down with the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, Rod rosen Signed and other senior members of DJ and Mueller's team says we can't get there on obstruction, and Barr says, okay, are you saying that? But for the Office of legal counsel that has provided this decades old policy opinion essentially that says Canada died

sitting president. Are you saying but for that opinion? And, according again to bar, Mueller says no. They asked three different times, they're told no. They ask well, what is your reasoning for how you're going to explain the obstruction issue? And they say, well, we're still working on that. I find that amazing that that late in the day. I mean, because Barr wasn't atturne General for very long before the

report came out. It doesn't add up to me, and it has not adequately I think, been fleshed out or reported on it. And I still am trying to dig into how do you have such an enormous breakdown in communication such that the Special Counsel's office thinks we can't even make a traditional judgment and everyone is looking around surprised about that. How does that happen? It's not like

the OLC opinion was new, right. I mean, one thing about your reporting there is that it suggests that the rationale ultimately given by Muller for why he wasn't going to address whether the president committed a crime wasn't really the rationale that it had been driving them in the course of the investigation. I mean that to me is bombshell might be too strong a term, but it's very striking.

I mean it suggests that there was some other reason for them to say no, we can't get there, and that they only later came to the conclusion that the way they should explain or justify themselves was by saying, well, we can't say the president committed a crime. Right, And the fairness issue in particular, how they get to that, the worry that somehow it's unfair to the president to say he committed a crime. Poor a little Donald Trump,

And how that wasn't discussed. You would think that that would have been in constant consultation with DJ throughout the two years, or that would just be a premise of the investigation, right. I mean, if you think that there's a legal matter you can't say the president committed a crime, then that should affect everything you do in your investigation.

And I don't really even understand how it didn't affect the conspiracy part of the investigation, other than perhaps what maybe happened is they realized, Okay, we don't have enough here for conspiracy. Given that we don't have enough for conspiracy, maybe then that also affects our obstruction analysis. I don't think they make that connection, but I sometimes wonder whether

that is what happened. You know, there's another theory that they didn't want to put bar in a sort of tough spot, saying we think the president committed a crime, but we know we can't do anything about it. They didn't have to worry about Bill Barr. He knows that to take care of himself more. I know we're cheaping the weeds here, but I just want to ask you one more thing about that that big climactic meeting that you're describing and obviously only answered if your sources will

let you. Do you know about that meeting at all from people who might be more inclined towards Mueller as opposed to people who are more on the bar side of the fence. I think we now have it from multiple sources that I feel confident with the facts of it,

that's what happened. That that's what happened in the meeting, I think from I think from the Mueller perspective, they think that and you notice this again in the press conference that Bar does on the day the reporters released, I asked him about the OLC memo, and I asked him about whether I asked him about the impact of it, and you know, whether I had any effect on the analysis. And again he goes back to the butt for formulation.

And the problem with the butt for formulation is one that wasn't how Mueller was looking at it, or at least that's not how the team I think, formulates their explanation for it. And indeed, Barr has since dug in on that, and he has said he actually has gone so far as to say he doesn't buy the fairness explanation, that in fact, it would have been perfectly fine to say that the president committed the following acts, which cons studio crime, which is kind of I mean, it's incredibly clever.

I mean, I am never I never ceased to be impressed by Bar's cleverness, just as I never ceased to be impressed by Mueller's strong belief that the year is nineteen sixty five. Yeah, and that he doesn't have to play it by contemporary rules. But you know, I think that Bar is correct to say that that fairness justification makes no sense. But he's ironically used that to make the president look better. Right, He says, well, they could have said it, I don't think it would have been unfair.

And so therefore the fact that they didn't say the president committed a crime essentially vindicates the president. And here is Mueller saying basically one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite, and the Special Counsel's team, i think again thinks to the extent that Barr was asking, but for um this DJ guidance, would you have found the president committed crime? They would say that was true. The answer to that is no, because we didn't even we didn't even go there,

we didn't even start that analysis. Right. But again, that's right, right, that's literally not true if you actually read the report, right, they go through every element of the crime and they say whether it was satisfied or not. I mean so right. The way I've tried to talk about this with my students is, as you will recall painfully, I'm sure you know, when we teach legal writing in law school, we tell people it's got there. There are these different steps you

have to follow. You stayed the issue, you state the rule, you apply the rule, and then you write a conclusion, and this had all of those things except the conclusion. There's just no conclusion there. So they did the analysis, they just don't say the line of conclusion, and of course, the most curious line of the entire thing, saying although the fairness thing might I don't know, it might be a tie, here is the line that if we could exonerate him, we would so state yes, which is very

very strange. I mean that to me is just what is that what people hate lawyers? That's why people hate lawyers, because only a lawyer could have thought of that sentence. Right, we're not exonerating you, and if we could exonerate you, we would exonerate you. But we're also not not exonerating you. I mean, the only lawyers talk that way. No human being has ever talked that way before coming through the

gates of a law school. But for the average I think for the average lay person, and certainly for our viewers, that is cat nip because politically it's saying, I can't tell you whether he committed a crime or not. Laurie, you're from a political background, You're you're from a political family, and you you're no DC very very well and you've seen it in different eras now and two very different eras.

Do you think that the way the way we think about politics and the fights that we have in Washington and beyond have really changed in the Trump barra compared to the Obama era or do you think it's it's actually deceptive to think of them as different, that we were already so profound the partisan in the in the Obama era that you know that this is just a natural evolution. You know, that's a great question. I don't

I don't know that it has changed. I certainly think that the media's sort of role in this dance has changed. And I was sort of always advised when I first took this job and I've seen it throughout is you know that you never want to become the story. We're supposed to be covering the news. And because of for better or worse, how things have gone over the last two and a half years, the media has become so

much part of the narrative. And because of Trump, you know, calling on fifty million people on his Twitter feed to his actually boycott an entire network which happens to be your network. But I mean, well, you're describing is not that. I mean the media, you know, CNN doesn't want to be part of the story necessarily, or maybe didn't want

to at least at the beginning. And Donald Trump just didn't allow that option, right, right, He made he knew very effectively that he could make the media part of the story. And at some level the media does love that. Sure.

But what I what I what I've noticed and what I struggle with is that, of course everything in DC is always partisan, but the media ends up getting accused of being partisan because it's doing his job and it's asking questions, and somehow just even raising the question is seen as taking aside sometimes or even just a fact checking exercise is seen as sort of adversarial. Is there any going back? I mean you mentioned earlier or something

was you mentioned earlier? You know, the claim of the Mother report that they couldn't exonerate the president is katnip for your viewers, That's right, It's for CNNs viewers. It's not cattinet for Fox viewers. Right. We recognize, and you guys recognize as part of your daily lives that there are there are different viewers for these for these networks. So is there any I mean, is there any return.

I mean to me, it reminds me of you know, the early eighteen hundreds when newspapers were starting to rise up in the United States, first national newspapers were coming to existence, and they were completely partisan. There was a federalist newspaper and a Republican newspaper. And I sort of feel that we're there again. Now. Do you see a path back to neutrality or objectivity for the media in

terms of the partisanship. I think that I think that it has the possibility to change, and I certainly think that the media right now is trying its darnedest to hold people account and figure out how to do that in a way that does not come across as that

we have our thumb on the scale either way. I think the problem is that do people believe us when we when we say that, right, do viewers trust it, especially if politicians are saying otherwise, If politicians are you know, convincingly making an argument that actually, know, we're just part of this machine and we're just you know, in the pocket of the DNC or the RNC or it is, if we're just you know, pawns to be used in this If they make that argument effectively, and they make

an argument about fake news all day long, and people hear a drumbeat of that. I do worry that, you know, some of that gets through, But I think we just have to keep doing our jobs and hope that at some point people will be able to cut through some of the noise. But I don't think that we figure it out a perfect solution for it yet. I mean, in a way, you're just like you're like the Department

of Justice that you cover. They've also experienced the present saying again and again and again and again, both before and he went into office and since then that they're biased, that they're not objective, that they're not neutral, and he's convinced. I think a lot of people that prosecution and investigation are politicized, even though many people inside world thought otherwise,

And ditto for news. So I guess that you and the people that you're covering are going to have a joint challenge going forward, right, And I think that there has been a fair um, you know, criticism by some that DJ is playing by an old set of rules, or at least Muller was playing by an old set of rules, and Trump sort of you know, has reinvented the wheel. But I don't I don't know what the

alternative is for the media, right I don't. I don't know that that we have an alternative other than to keep doing what we're doing and just try to keep doing it better and be as accurate as possible. You know, all we can do is just keep moving forward. Laura.

I feel like you took us through the full experience that you've had over the last yet, from that's not over yet, from day one and the shock of the new all the way to prime time day after day after day, covering the most pressing and exciting story we have. Thank you, They thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Talking to Laura about the process of covering the Department of Justice in this crazy time of Trump and Muller and Bar, I'm left with partly a sense of gratitude, gratitude that there are reporters out there who have the legal chops to analyze the issues and the instinct to make the story come to life. We also are really trying to understand the internal motivations of people who don't want us to know their internal motivations, and that requires

strong journalism going forward. We're going to have to avoid the kind of rush to judgment that the media has found itself pulled into, and which, according to Laura, was in fact a real factor in their reporting in the aftermath of the summaries of the Mueller Report produced by Attorney General bar When Bob Muller testifies in front of Congress, we're going to have an instinct to run right out and say exactly that we know all of the relevant parts of his thinking. We won't. We need to take

a deep breath. We need to get behind the stories. We need to do the deeper reporting, and then from that deeper reporting, we have to go to a more profound analysis, one that locates the problems of our current historical moment against the backdrop of the separation of powers and the investigation of a sitting present of the United States for potential crimes including obstruction of justice. Deep Background

is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Ganecott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is deep background