David Fahrenthold: Investigating Trump

really really enjoyed doing our podcast this year. Thank you so much for being a part of this and for sharing your wit and most importantly your wisdom about politics. Oh my god, well, thank you. Wait what just happened? I was just weirdly sincere for a moment. Thank you for allowing me to to blah brush aside greatness every other week for about an hour or so. Thank you and away. Well, of course, Donald Trump was the big story.

We spent a lot of time talking about Donald Trump this year, so we wanted to spend the last podcast of the year talking about something new and different, right, Brian, Yeah, what is that, Katie? Donald Trump? And we're going to do that with a journalist who really held his feet to the fire during the campaign season. David Farrenhald is a reporter with the Washington Post. Many people are saying he might actually want a pulic surprise. I don't want

to jinxis. But remember that Access Hollywood tape, Remember all the reporting on the Trump Foundation. Yes, I'm not mentioning you know the word because I don't. I don't know. I don't like that word, Brian, the p word that Donald Trump used. The Yeah, I tried to avoid that. Let's just say, yeah, he likes to grab him by the kiddies. How about that? That sounds gross too, But anyway, David Barrel broke these stories and reported fearlessly throughout the

course of the campaign. But David became kind of Woodward and Bernstein all rolled into one at a time when a lot of people were just commenting on the poles and the horse race. He was really focused on trying to figure out who Donald Trump is, as revealed by his charitable contributions, his past comments, and really broke news about stuff that matter. That's right. He wasn't talking about the comment of the day, the news of the day.

He actually did some serious digging and digging using a cool mix of twenty one century social media technology and little fashion gum shoe reporting and yellow legal pad reporting. David Farenthal from The Washington Post, thank you for joining our podcast. We're very excited to talk to you. We're going to be completely geeking out today. David. It's going to be all Trump, all the time. I'm glad to be here. First of all, I want to say congratulations

on your extraordinary reporting this campaign season. I know you've been heralded for all your scoops, for many of your pieces that really got to the heart of issues in a in a era when people were covering really the superficialities of the horse race. So congratulations. There there Pulitzer rumors flying around. David. Um, you must be feeling pretty good about yourself right now. You know, I was looking at your bio by the way, and it occurred to me it took you about sixteen years to become an

overnight sensation, So I think that's probably good to remember. Exactly. Yes, this time last year was writing about Jim Gilmore. So it's really been a pretty fast rise. Well, how are you feeling? Well? Good? I mean, the job that I thought was going to sort of be over on November eight,

now continues on in a much more comprehensive way. So I'm trying to kind of get figure out what my niche is gonna be covering Trump the president, So it'll be some Trump charity stuff as well, but it's obviously got to expand because it's you know, He's there's a lot more to say, you know, before we talk about moving forward, because that's a big area I think we want to broach. How would you characterize covering this campaign? What was sort of your your true north as you

set out to cover the Trump candidacy. Well, I felt like the way to cover Trump is not to write about his words, or not about his words only not about what he says, but about what he does. Uh. And the Trump is a unique candidate. And then he spends all his time sort of throwing out these things that I don't know if they're on, if it's purposeful or not, but they serve as a good distraction. Every day there's some new thing to chase, and the campaign,

it was sort of a new outrage every day. He said and said things that would have killed off anybody else's campaign. But the way he did it. He would say them, and the next day, when we were sort of getting spun up to cover the first outrageus thing, he'd do another outrageous thing. We have just jumped onto that. So I wanted to cover his actions, the results of his actions, and in particular in this case, this really

sort of important moral dimension. This is a guy bragged his whole life about how much he gave the charity, how generous he was. Let's go and see if it did he really keep those promises, and how much sort of moral compunction did he feel to help. He really put sort of a bull's eye on Trump's carrot. I mean, I think in a way that any great journalists would can use just reveal or review what you discovered in

the course of your reporting. The main takeaway from me was that Trump understood that because he was rich, people expected him to be generous. That that's what rich people do have always been. That's a sort of part of the lifestyle of a rich person is giving to charity, and he wanted to have that appearance as much as

he could. He wanted to have the the sort of the facade that he was a very generous person, but he did as much as he could to avoid actually doing the charitable work that that that illusion or that facade required. So often he would use other people's money as his own charities. He's find a way to convert other people's money into what seemed like his own charitable gifts.

He would often promise gifts that he never gave. Even his own charity, that Donald J. Trump Foundation, he would use that in ways that basically where he was the biggest beneficiary, it looked like he was helping charity, but actually often he was helping himself. So that's that's what I learned. He knew that people expected him to be generous, and he need to meet those expectations on the surface,

but didn't. I often want to comply with the sort of true moral dimension of charity, which is giving actually something of yourself to help others. So what actually spurred you to start looking into Trump's philanthropy or lack thereof, and and how hard was it to track down the

contributions he did or didn't make. Well, it started actually kind of by Shant, So I spent all covering basically loser candidates George Pataki, Jim Gilmour, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, they were all gone by the time we got to the Iowa caucuses where they were, they were all clearly hitted out the door. So I had nothing to do on Iowa caucus Day. And the report the editors said, Okay, go to Iowa, follow Trump around. We're gonna see this possibility,

which didn't actually come to pass. This three time married guy, sort of play famous playboy is gonna win, we thought, the famously conservative and religious state of Iowa. So go see what he does on caucus day. So I went to this rally Trump did on caucus in Waterloo, Iowa. And during the rally, he got up. It was up on stage, and he stopped the rally and he said, okay, now come to the stage. Uh, this local veterans group,

the this Waterloo Veterans Aid group. And in the middle of the rally, he gives them a giant check like one that they give to people who win win golf Tournament's a really big oversized check that says Donald J. Trump Foundation on the top, make America great Again on the bottom for a hundred thousand dollars. It turned out this was money that he had raised a few days ago. Do you remember he skipped a Republican debate because he was having a fight with Fox News and he had

this big televised fundraiser race. He raised six million dollars for veterans, which included a million bucks out of his own pocket. So this is he's stopping his political rally to give away a check from his charity. Um, And I thought, Okay, I know you can't do that. I don't know much about charity law, but I know that's against the law. You can't use you the money and your charity to boost a political campaign, even if it's

your own. Uh. So I came back from having covered Iowa and New Hampshire and I wanted to look into that to see where they'd broken the law. And there was another thing. He had said he'd raised six million dollars, but he only actually given out about a million dollars of these oversized checks and then he stopped. So I wanted to know, Okay, where's the rest of the money.

And I thought at the time that question where's the rest of the money would take a couple of days to answer, because what political campaign would basically stiff veterans in the you know, in the middle of a Republican primary. Who would ever do that? The veterans contributions he made to catch people up were as part of an event to get out of a presidential debate that he didn't

want to be part of. He said, you know what, instead of debating these you know losers, I'm gonna throw a fundraiser for veterans to which I'm going to contribute a million bucks of my own money. Basically, you're right. So he got a huge political goodwill out of that televised fundraiser and out of the idea that, look, isn't he amazing? He can raise six million bucks for veterans at the drop of a hat. He's so rich he can give a million bucks of his own at the

drop of the hat. It's important to test and see whether he really followed through in those promises, because he got a lot of good will out of making so funny. This seems like such a no you know, a no brainer, doesn't it, David? I mean, you did something that most journalists should be doing. You've actually followed up right. You continued to cover the story and connect the dots. But

the dots were harder to connect than I thought. Because I got back and said, okay, Trump, you know Trump campaign, Where did the rest of the money go? And I looked and looked at called the veterans organizations he named his beneficiaries. I talked to them. After a month, I could find about three million worth of the six million. I didn't know where the other three million had gone. And I kept looking, kept looking. This was kind of in the background while I was writing some other stories.

Finally we get to May, so it's not been almost four months since the original fundraiser. Something really odd happened. Coral Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager at the time, called me and he said, Okay, I can tell you what happened to that one million dollars the Trump said he'd get give out of his own pocket to veterans groups. He gave it away. But I can't tell you who got it, or in what amounts, or when or anything. It's a secret. But just know that million dollars has

been given. At that point where you at that point where you also looking into Trump's other charitable giving. Had you broadened out yet or were you just focused on this one event. I was mostly focused. We've done some other stuff, but I was mostly focused on the veterans thing. Was there was such a concrete promise he had made in the in the context of the presidential campaign on TV.

So I really wanted to focus on that um. And so after Lendowski says that to me, I thought, well, okay, I want to I want to see if he's right, you know, if you will tell me any details. I want to try to find some of this money on my own. So I used Twitter, knowing that Trump was on it, knowing that a lot of media were on it.

I started sending out queries on Twitter to different veterans. Well, I thought, if in the old days before Twitter, you would just have to send out, you know, call or email a million you know, different veterans groups, and there's thousands of them, and you never would be able to reach them all. So, you know, the idea you could prove a negative. It's no way you could prove the negative dot Trump gave no money. But I thought, maybe

I'll prove the opposite. I'll find a little bit of the money and we'll say, okay, well I found the tip of the iceberg. This must have been a real thing. Uh. And I sent us spend a day tweeting and nothing, no response from anybody. I couldn't find any of the money, and I thought at the end, yeah, I thought, okay, I've just wasted a day. I felt like the oldest man in the world. I was like, right, the Twitter didn't work. Uh, what a waste of time? Uh So

what howen was Trump? Uh? He saw he was paying attention. And that night, the night that I had been making this search and not finding any of his million dollars, that's when he gave the million dollars away. So when Lewandowski told me he'd given it away, that was totally false. It was still in Trump's pocket. So how did you do the crowdsourcing? So you tried to Twitter and that didn't work so much, although it actually did because Donald

Trump saw it. But tell us about crowdsourcing the report? Well, that was my first experience with it, and I was surprised at how well it worked. And then a bunch of media, a bunch of you know, campaign reporters, other reporters picked it up and started tweeting about it, spreading the reach and Veterans Group started started tweeting about it, and the idea had been okay, maybe I don't. I won't be able to query every veterans group in the world.

But you know, somebody else watching this will say, well, hey, you didn't ask me directly, but you know he did give us this money, so and I could find it kind of by word of mouth that way. That was the idea, and it turned out and I thought, okay, my backup plan is maybe Trump will just tell us what he did. And it turned out to be that's what happened. Because he hadn't given it. There was nothing else to find. There was nothing to find at that point. It was all in Trump's pocket. So you kind of

shamed you kind of shamed him into it in a way. Yeah, I guess. So I asked him that night. He so Trump called me. This is the last time he and I spoke. He called me in late May to say, okay, yes, I just gave the million dollars out. He gave it all in one fell swoop to this particular charity run by a friend of his, and I said, well, you know, could you would you have given this money out if I hadn't been asking about it? And he said, oh, you're really a nasty guy. You're a very nasty guy.

That was his answer. Did he say sad with an exclamation mark? I don't. I don't find that he says that in conversation, but he does say nasty a lot. It was a weird interview because he would say, you're so nasty guy, and Hillary Clinton was a nasty woman. Yeah, I'm not definitely not the only nasty person. We should

que Janet Jackson right now for some reason. But anyway, and then you started looking more broadly at what the Donald J. Trump Foundation has been doing or not doing, and in a nutshell, the answer would be, well, the Trump Foundation, he was giving money out of it, not in very large amounts, to charities, often charities that did

business with him. You have to remember a lot of Trump's business at marl Lago and Trump Tower is running out ballrooms to charities who can pay like two it and seventy five thousand dollars a night to rent out Mara Lago. So they're his clients. So he was giving donations to these clients. But the money we figured out was not his, the money the Trump Foundation. He hadn't given the Trump Foundation a dollar since two thousand and eight, and had all been other people's money that he took

in and then gave out. I mean, the one extreme example we found just amazed me. So okay. So there's this charity in in Florida, the Palm Beach Police Foundation, which is uh, they ran out Mara Lago for seventy five thousand dollars a night. Trump wants to give them a donation, but he doesn't use his money. He doesn't even use the money. And the Trump Foundation. He calls the foundation of a friend of his who has died and asked the friends surviving relatives, hey, listen, I'm raising

money for the Palm Beach Police Foundation. Can you kick in someone? I say sure, but he says, don't give it straight to the Palmic Police Foundation. Give it to me and I'll pass it on to them. So they give him two hundred thousand dollars the Donald J. Trump Foundation. He just takes their money and gives it on, adding nothing of his own, gives it to the Palm Beach Police Foundation, and then Trump is recognized as a philanthropist. He gets a giant crystal palm tree as a reward

for his grate philanthropy. When was all somebody else's money that's the sort of most director like Florence Johnson gave the money, but he gets the credit credit. Yeah. One of the strangest stories was the story of his portrait four ft tall or six foot tall portrait that was paid for by the foundation. Can you tell us the story of that portrait? Sure? So I've been calling all these charities the Trump Foundation had given money to just to find out a had Trump given them any money

extra out of his own pocket? And also to find out, Okay, what was the money when the Trump Foundation gave this donation. Was it an exchange for anything or was it just a straight up gift? Uh? And so this particular group, this was I'd called three and five charities is choarity number three five? And they said, yes, that the Trump Foundation gave us twenty thou dollars. But it wasn't just a straight gift. It was a purchase. A Trump had gone to this event at Mara Lago, where the entertainment

was a guy who was a speed painter. He paints portraits in like five minutes and then then auctions them off. So he painted a picture of Trump he auctioned off. Trump's wife Melania, was the only person willing to bid very much for it. She won it for twenty dollars, and then he paid with the Trump Foundation's money, and that is really puts him on thin ice with the

I R S because that is not kosher. Well, basically, the I R S says that if you're a charity and you buy something, that has to be something that you're using for a charitable purpose. Right, Trump can't use his charity to buy something for himself or his business. So the question what the heck charitable purpose would there be in his six ft tall portrait of Donald Trump? And we never got the answer. Wh wouldn't she just pay for it from from their private We never got

the answer. I thought in a number of cases that Trump's understanding of his charity was whenever he needed to give money to another charity, he would use the Trump Foundation, basically not understand ending that that's not how it works.

That even though in this case the money went to a charity auction, and then we said we then we found this later another portrait, a ten dollar portrait also of Trump himself, that was also bought pay using charity money, and that we actually were able to trace to his golf resort outside Miami where it's hanging on the wall of the sports bar. So that's clearly a legal so wait, wait, so what so so there were two portraits, there were two portraits one and so whatever happened to the twenty

dollar one? Is that in Trump Tower. All we know is that afterward the artist at Milania Trump's direction, boxed it up and shipped it to Trump's golf course in Westchester County, New York, with the understanding they would hang in the employee boardroom. I haven't been in the employee boardroom there. They won't let us in, they won't talk to us about it. So maybe it's there, and maybe

it's somewhere else, but it was clearly Children's hospital. But the other one you tracked down though, and that was we're again. Trump has a golf resort called Durrell outside Miami, and so thanks to my Twitter followers, we found it hanging on the wall of the sports bar there. So that's you know, the charity paid for it, and it was used to decorate the wall of Trump's for profit business,

which is like textbook self dealing text books. And you became kind of famous over the course of this reporting of sort of mixing Twitter with this old fashioned yellow legal pad that you used to keep track of how much money Trump was giving or not giving to charity. Um, how did the yellow legal pad become such a thing?

You know, we had all these promises Trump had made to give money to charity out of his own pocket over the years, and I was trying to figure out if he'd done any of that, And so the Trump people wouldn't help me, and I try to think, Okay, well I'll try to again, trying to prove, not prove a negative, but proved Trump. Right, let me try. Let me go calling the charities that I think seemed closest to Trump, the ones most likely to have gotten his money.

I'll call him and see whether they ever gotten a donation from him. And I knew it was going to be futile a lot of the time, that I was going to be calling and getting nothing, no answer. So I needed a way to make futility look interesting. And that's when I came up with that legal pad. Right, could take a picture and at one glance sort of show you how hard I was trying to find this money and how I was failing. We're gonna move on

in a moment. But before we do, I have to ask you why you're reporting, as excellent as it was, didn't seem to resonate with with a many voters on election day when it came to Donald Trump and his use of charity dollars. I think people did care. I have sort of a couple of theories about this. One is that I don't think it was used very effectively

by the Democrats. I think you're you're sort of dependent on you know, in some cases, you know, I can only bring these things to light, somebody else has to use them for political purposes and for them to quote unquote matter and the election. So they used it a couple of times, but not very much. That maybe one reason.

The other one is that there was just a lot else going on in this election, and there are so many other factors, you know, an FBI director chastising the Democratic candidate writing a letter a week before the election, you know, just to say that Trump one. I don't think that means that it didn't matter. It just means that a lot of other things matter too. Well. When we come back, we're going to talk about your other big scoop of this campaign cycle and has to do

with Kitty. We'll be back with David farenthought right after this. During our last episode, we asked you what is the best thing that happened to you in two thousand and sixteen other than our podcast, of course, And here's what you had to say. Hi, this is Lisa Craig from Cleveland, Ohio, and the best thing about was the Cleveland Cavaliers winning the World Championship and breaking our ruts here in Cleveland. And we're also really proud of how we hosted the

r NC this year. Oh and the Indians made it to the World Series. So I think Cleveland was the best thing for me about So you asked for the best thing that happened into thousands of sixteen. For me, the best thing that happened was coming to this beautiful country and being able to expand my life and my career and my education to how to high a level after being twenty five years in the dictator Ship, which

is a minial east In country. Thanks Katie, Bye. So, Brian, you love to learn, right, or at least I like to give people that impression. Well, I have a new way for you to learn, the Great Courses Plus Video Learning service. It's a great way to learn about any topic that interests you. You can learn new skills, expand on your hobbies. I know about the Great Courses Plus because I'm a big fan of one of their classes,

which is called the Fundamentals of Photography. The teacher is Joel Sartor, who's a long time expert National Geographic Photographer. And this has been very useful for me because with a new baby at home, I have to take a lot of photos. As you can imagine, you should be sending more of those photos to the team here at

the podcast. You sound like my mother. But anyway, The Great Courses Plus gives you unlimited access to over seven thousand amazing video lectures presented by top professors, any time, anywhere, from any device. And now I think we have a special offer Gianna for Katie kurrg listeners. Right, we do. You can stream hundreds of their courses free for one month when you sign up, get your free trial of the Great Courses Plus by going to the Great Courses

Plus dot com slash Katie. That's the Great Courses Plus dot com slash Katie. On our next episode, we will be talking with Donald Trump. Well, actually we'll be talking with Alec Baldwin, who plays Donald Trump. Does a fantastic Tony Bennett. By the way, he does a lot of fantastic impressions. Maybe he'll do something for us. He is he is on Fuego, Yes, he is, as Donald Trump would say, Uh, what questions do you have for Alec Baldwin?

Please leave us a message At nine to nine to four, four, six, three seven, and we're back with David Farenthal from the Washington Post. Let's talk about your other big scoop and this was the notorious Access Hollywood Billy Bush tape. Um. I'm not sure how much you're going to be able to talk to me about this or how much you're going to be able to reveal your sources, But come on, David, give it up. How did you get that tape? I can always say we had a source. It was not

something we were looking for. We had you know that we knew existed beforehand, but you know, on our laps, And maybe it was because I'm better known than I was before because of the Trump Foundation stories. You know, not look at a gift horse in the mouth and we had Can you just describe sort of how it came to you? In terms of did you get a phone call? Uh, when you listen to it, I mean, just give me some color commentary here, please, Well, uh, we got it. I can't say much more about how

it came to us, but when we got it. You know, I'm watching this videotape. In the beginning, it's just a it's a it's a video of a bus, right, It's a bus driving around this extremely boring back lot. At the beginning, like this is so lame. Yeah, And you can hear some mumbling, but you can't really hear what

the mumbling is about in the beginning. But then maybe fifteen or sixteen seconds in, you hear Trump's voice and you hear him telling this story about Billy Bush, about trying to seduce this woman in Palm Beach, And you know, immediately you knew the language. You know, you could tell was Trump's voice, obviously, but you knew the language was different. This was him talking about himself in a way that even Donald Trump had not talked about himself in public.

It packs a lot in the two minutes, uh, And I mean to the point that you know he's there's that line in there that I always stuck with you with me where he talks about groping women, and then he says, when you're a star, they let you do it. And then and there's like a wonderment in that in his voice, there like a genuine wonder where he's like wow, like I'm not I'm not bussing here, like I'm just telling you, this is amazing that this happens to me. I can't believe the world works this way. So we

knew it was a big deal. And we knew it was you know, this was not him talking about women, rating women's bodies or whatever. This was him saying like, here's how I behave, Here's what I do to women. Here's what I will do. Here's something I might do to this woman we're about to meet right now, this soap opera actress. And so the the sort of guy

got a lot of gears started in motion. Here, the video team, the lawyers, you know, trying to figure out getting everybody ready, like okay, listen, something really big is going to happen, and we have don't have that much time to do it. In did NBC sit on that tape? I read later that they did that they had got they had found it. Uh, the Monday of that week, I guess in response to an AP story that was

about The Apprentice. Uh, I don't know. That was my main worry all day long was that we were gonna get beat by by NBC. UM. So we had a call NBC obviously to say, hey, you know, you know, are you gonna sue us? Because this is you think this is your property? And we we've you know, we've gotten it somehow. And b do you think it's a hoax? Do you think this is? Um? You know that this was because when all the offending words are said, you can see the bus, but you can't see Trump or Bush,

can't see their mouth moving. So are you gonna NBC gonna say it's a hoax? And we had a called Trump for the same reason to say, to see if he would say it was a hoax. So that was so wait, yeah, yeah, So what did NBC say? What did Trump's and miss basically did not get back to us on the record. They didn't send the signal that hey,

We're gonna sue you, but they didn't comment either. Trump's people At first we sent them a transcript of the video of you know the parts that are the first two minutes and they said, well, it doesn't sound like Mr Trump. Can we see the whole video? And uh, we were like, you know, there was some arguing back and forth among the editors, and they decided yes, they can see the video. So we sent them the full video and it was, you know, probably it was about

three thirty. We told him, look, we're gonna publish it four. Uh, and you haven't till four o'clock to comment or not. We're gonna publish with you know, either way, and they got back to us at four. It was almost like a sort of digital stop the press this moment. I had to yell at somebody to get her to stop, you know, before she get the button to publish it. And their statement that came in then was yes, Trump did it. You know, this is him. He apologizes, locker

room talk that sort of thing. Wow. Wait, I just have a question because I'm this is so fascinating to me. Do you think NBC so they didn't get back to you because you know, they took a lot of criticism for sitting on the tape, holding onto it, maybe with the suggestion and that they were protecting Billy Bush. You know, this was their show Access. Hollywood is an NBC show, so just like The Apprentice was an NBC show. But he didn't say that they didn't get back to him.

He said that they didn't respond on the record. I know. That's why I'm following up, baby, go ahead, go ahead, and let the master work go ahead, David So Uh, I don't know, really, I did not get that much out of them that day. I should note that our story published it like four oh two that afternoon, and MSNBC and Katie Tour had a story about this up at like four oh six, So we beat them, but not by very much at all. I wonder, but I wonder.

I mean, it's very interesting whether I guess the the official story is they were kind of running it through their lawyers too, But it seems like they had a lot of time and those were you know, a number of days spent running it by the lawyers. It didn't take you that long to do that, did it. I wonder if they wanted the cover of not being the ones to break the story and to let you all have that honor. Who knows if if they did, you know,

and that's the origin of all this. I don't know, but I'd be grateful for it, you know, however it happened, I'm grateful for the h that it was me. Uh, no, matter what, this changed the tenor of the campaign dramatically for I would say maybe two weeks. Yeah, two weeks, and uh, you know, Billie Bush lost his job at NBC as a result of it. A number of senior Republicans,

including members the United States Senate, abandoned Trump. This is when McCain finally abandoned Trump, and we now know that behind the scenes, a lot of top Republicans were panicked, convinced they were going to lose in the landslide. Some even said that Trump he should drop out at this moment. Do you know much from your reporting about what was going on in Trump Tower as this was unfolding, Uh no,

not really. I mean I've read, you know, our version of it, and it seemed like I read this interesting. Glenn Thrush from Politico wrote something a few weeks ago about sort of how Trump responded to it, and they called that sort of one of the most consequential decisions of the election. That Trump basically was unrepentant. You know, he said, I'm sorry, but then you know, quick move quickly to say, you know, this is the liberal media

to get me. This is a you know, conspiracy to stop you the people from getting what you want, apparently borrowing a playbook from a lot of things that Bill clin did when he was under investigation for his affair. So you know, Trump responded aggressively. I thought that the that the true consequence of it for those couple of weeks was going to be that it had set Trump against the Republican establishment in a very open way. Remember, he was attacking Paul Ryan and encouraging his people to

vote against Paul Ryan. It was this kind of like Republican circular firing squad that had set off that lasted a long time, lasted basically till the COMI letter. Yeah. And and it was interesting in in those days following it, Kelly and Conway wouldn't really come out to defend him on this topic. The only person who really did was Rudy Giuliani, right right, b Rudy Giuliani, who has been rewarded for that so far, rewarded for that loyalty with

precisely nothing. Glenn brush Piece you referred to in Politico. I highly recommend people who are political junkies to read it. It goes into some depth on this topic, and and it reports that Trump was actually pissed at Giuliani for going out and defending it, for saying that he made a mistake and he's apologized because they just wanted to go on the attack. They wanted to throw out the normal playbook and just divert the topic to the liberal

media trying to screw Donald Trump. What impact do you think that huge, huge story had on the electorate when all was said and done. Well, I think it did have an impact on the electorate when it happened. I think people it did changed people's minds about Trump. You

saw that in the polling averages. Uh. And I think also it caused you know, there are a lot of other Republicans who I think, we're willing to support Donald Trump when they thought he could win, but you know, disagree with him in a variety of things, and at that point when they thought he was going to lose, we're willing to back off. And think of Jason Chaffits,

the powerful House Oversight Committee chairman, saying I'm out. You know, I can't look at my teenage daughter in the eye when I hear this sort of stuff, you know, and it's it's made people, I think, even more cynical about politicians, if that's even possible, because there were so many people at that moment who said, on principle, absolutely no, they couldn't support Trump, they couldn't vote for him, who then reversed themselves again before election day and said they were

for Trump, including chaff its Um And and now we're having to back him because he's president elect. So what have we learned from this? I mean, do you think politicians are going to behave differently in response to scandals as a result of this? I mean, I think that this sort of picked up a lesson that George W. Bush and before him, Bill Clinton had employed, which is that if you don't seem ashamed by whatever you did, people will start to think that it wasn't shameful after

all that. I think a lot of people look to politicians to communicate the depth of their own mistakes. And if you were able to convince people that you don't think it's a big deal that you're moving on or it's really somebody else's fault, you can move past it.

Not everybody can do that. I was going to say, though, I'm going to have to take issue with that, David, because I think this was a singularly Trumpian response, and I'm just not sure anybody would have the bluster and the hubris to kind of deflect a story like this the way he did, don't. I mean, can you see that as well? I think you're right. I think he was an extreme case. I mean, he already at by that point, had been the guy who said I could

shoot someone in Fifth Avenue and people wouldn't care. You know. My colleague get Yahoo mapped By often said during the course of this campaign, Trump cannot be shamed. He does. He's genetically he's genetically incapable of feeling ashamed about anything. But I think that's right. I think that's what we learned. But it's interesting thing to me you mentioned other politicians. I was really struck by those people. Sort of they were reacting to what they thought voters would think, to

what they thought voters would care about. And I think when voters, you know, I think after a while, when they realized that voters were not turning on Trump in the way they thought, they sort of slowly came back because they wanted to be on the winning side. So, David, I met you a few weeks ago at this conference at Harvard that brought together all the time campaign operatives

on both sides, and Katie's to Harvard people, Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. Yeah, we're gonna do the secret handshake after this, but you can't watch it my safety school. By the way, David, she says, not at all defensively. I was really struck by saying. Robbie Mook, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, said to me, which is the negative frame on Trump was always take something he said and kind of make fun of it,

attack it. But the media always showed the thing that Trump said, and the negative frame on Hillary was something totally outside of her campaign messaging the Clinton Foundation or the emails or ben Ghazi, and so she didn't get the opportunity to like say what she wanted to say. And so for a lot of voters it kind of boiled down to Trump the badass versus Hillary the crook.

And given that choice, particularly in the wake of the FBI director's letter, Uh, they went with the badass um and thinking at least they get some cha Angeine Washington, Well, we talked about the you know, the shame thing. And I think that's a really interesting They were two very opposite cases of of how do you deal with a

shameful act? Right think of way Clinton reacted to the email thing, which was for a long time giving shifting explanations about how much she was allowed to do it was totally fine, or maybe it was mostly fine, then apologizing for it than apologizing more for it and dragging it out and letting it be the main thing that she talked about because she couldn't find the right thing

to say about it. Uh. And I think that's sort of that she was an extreme case in the other way, and that she showed so much sort of shame and unhappiness about that that it allowed it to dominate the campaign. So I think I think Robbie Mook was right. I think that's I think he's right about uh, sort of the two different frames. But Clinton someone did some of that to herself, and I should say that she didn't have some sort of other positive message about herself or

not anything that broke through. So she was relying on Trump to sort of make her case for her to be a sort of campaign against him rather than four Can you imagine Hillary Clinton responding the email scandal by saying, hey, I did it, deal with it. Well, it's interesting. One of her biggest supporters made exactly that point that she shouldn't have apologized, that she should have said, you know what Cohen Palell suggested it. It was allowed under the rules.

I did it, and you know, there was nothing wrong with it, and there was nothing you know, and it didn't it didn't jeopardize national that that email was ever hacked, right. I do think that. I mean, I'm playing armchair armchair politician here, but I feel like if whatever she was going to do, she should have started doing it in May of two fifteen and stuck with it. And the same with the Golden Sack speeches that you know released

that or don't. But you know, at this at the Harvard thing, uh they have somebody asked one of Clinton's aids, why didn't you just put out the transcripts of the Goldmen Sack speeches before? And her response was, well, what people would have picked through it. They would have asked all these questions. It would have been a lot of hassle.

It was not a political calculation. It was them bearing the weight of these years of Clinton scandals and not wanting to get into it, and they created this something that lasted, this mystery that lasted the It was just drip drip, drip drip. And because she never gave a satisfactory answer, every journalist had to ask her every time she did an interview. And she could have said, hey, refer to my comments from May. I've answered that question.

Let's talk about things in American people really care about. You know, I think I'm going to run for office. I'm kidding. Anyways, were talking about fake news significant ye to to final sort of categories that I want to talk to you about. And I know Brian's super interested in this as well. You know, why wasn't fake news discovered before election day? I mean, we saw all these bogus stories circulating around Facebook. I had friends send me things and say did you see this? And I'd be like,

it's insane. You know, Whoma and Hillary Clinton are lesbians, or Whoma's associated with the Muslim Brotherhood or I mean, there's so many crazy, crazy things out there. What happened? What I mean? I think journalism I include myself in

this category. I think journalists really let the American people down by not pointing this out earlier, and we know the impact it had because there was one study that showed that in the three months before the election, these fake news stories were actually more widely shared than real

news stories. So what happened? Well, I do think that it's, you know, part of our bubble is that we live in a world where we read other legitimate news outlets, you know, that's who we follow on Twitter's, we follow on Facebook as journalists, and so I think in some ways it was hard to see how much you know, other people had self selected their their media feeds to just tell them all fake news. I think we didn't

get it because we didn't see it. That's one thing. Uh. Another thing is I think that it's you know, for us to agree that we knew about it. You could write about it, and there was some writing about it, but you know, we are struggling to figure out, Okay, well, how do we show people our credibility, you know, how do we stand out how do we beat those people in the marketplace if Facebook or Twitter is going to treat them equally to us. And I think we're still

sort of trying to figure that out. And for me, my own little piece of it adant, trying to be very transp Aaron about what I was doing. You know, here's how I'm gathering this information, Here's who I've asked, Here's what I've asked, you know, and be open to people's suggestions. So to degree that people saw me doing that on Twitter, I was trying to show them, Look, this is how you report a real news story. Uh, you know, so you can have more trust than what

I'm produced. So what's going to be What can be done about fake news without sort of censoring you know, news that may not be desirable or whatever. I mean, how do you how do you get your how do you wrap your arms around this? Well, part of it is a question for people like Twitter and Facebook. You know, they have to decide do they want to you know, is there a market reason forget about censorship or you know,

public good reason. Is there a market reason why they might want to be able to give their customers a way to distinguish between you real and fake things? You know, what do they think there's a there's a you know, a problem with their business model. You know, half of the news they're showing is fake. Uh. The other thing for us, because how do we think about ways for the you know, the mainstream media, the true media. How do we show people how hard we worked to produce

what we do. How do we show people the standards we adhere to. I think we need to be a lot more explicit about this. We think we live in our world and think that, oh, everybody knows, you know, you have to have two sources everything. Everybody knows things are better on the record. Everybody knows the rules that we follow, but not everybody. You're saying that journalists have to have to sell the public on what good journalism is and explain it to the public. I guess maybe

maybe so, huh yeah. I mean, if we're gonna grow our audience. There's a lot of people who read us now, but if we're going to reach those people who are out there passing around fake news, like we need to show them Okay, this is this is how we do it. You know, we need to be sure we're not wrong. Bec we can lose a lot of what having sort of like a good housekeeping seal of approval for legitimate

news organizations. Craig Newmark, from the who started Craigslist, said, is giving a million dollars to the pointer Institute, and one of the things they're talking about is having some kind of indication to viewers or readers that this is from a legitimate news, particularly on social media. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I support that. I think there's you know, there's a lot of difficulties inherent in that, and you know, you worry about seeding the power to somebody to distinguish

my real or faith. Uh, you know, more want to do that on your own with the way you you know, with your own work. But I think it's important people are paying attention to that. I mean, I was just thinking about ways to make our you know, our stories more trustworthy or more you know, more clear how we

know things. There's ways you could do stuff online to show people, make it easier for people to see the primary sources you relied on, to show people how you know the things you know when when that's possible, I think it would be really educational for a lot of people. And covering President Donald Trump is going to be an enormous challenge already. His team is floating stuff like eliminating

the daily briefings for the press. What do you think are going to be the two or three biggest challenges for reporters trying to hold this White House accountable. Well, I think the biggest challenge we've identified so far is Trump himself. That he often uses Twitter as a way to reach a mass audience and with information that's wrong. I mean, he'll he'll, he'll tell you'll tweet out something that where the facts are wrong or the context is wrong.

And you know, the way that we had dealt with things like that in the past was if the you know, on the Sunday talk shows or a presidential speech or something like that, if the president says something, the first version of the story is written usually by somebody who's not a subject matter expert in that thing, and the story is the President said X, right, and then a few hours later, somebody who's a sub a matter of expert rights the second version that says the President says X,

Here's what it means, here's how you know, here's what's going to happen next. All that context. But the way that you have to do with Trump. Trump comes out and says, you know, the Air Force one contract carts four billion dollars. That's wrong. You know, millions of people voted illegally, that's wrong. But you know, nobody knows about climate change. That's wrong. So you can't have the first

version of the story responsible. You can to the first version of the stories that be Trump says X and then five hours later come back and say, hey, what he said was totally wrong. I mean, the truth is a you know, lie gets around the world before the

truth gets its pants on. So we wanna have something where we can the first time we write about Trump's statement, the first story we write about his tweet or whatever is from the expert, and the expert says, hey, Trump said this, but it's wrong, and I want you to know that right away. Well, so it sounds like a lot of the coverage is going to be intensely critical. And do you worry about alienating the wide swath of American readers, viewers, etcetera, who say, hey, give this guy

a chance. I mean, it's it's kind of a delicate balance, isn't it. It is. I think the main question for us is to avoid uh seeming sort of emotional or invested in in a particular outcome, and meaning in Trump not doing well. There's a big political ecosystem out there, and our job is to tell you what happened, and to tell you, you know, what's what's new about what Trump is doing, but not to tell you, you know, is it going to lead to the autocracy or is

it going to lead to America being great again? You know, we have to just tell you what happened. Let other people run with the with the meaning of it. I think that's gonna be Uh. We have to sort of restrain ourselves from commenting too much rather than just sort of telling you what happened. David Farenthald, it's so fun to talk to you. I could stay here all day, and I have so much respect for your reporting. You do our podcast. After you want to pull us or

did I just jinx it? Don't jinx it, but I would love to come on again. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You'll have a good home, Okay, Thank you, David. A big fat thank you to Gianna Palmer for producing the show and Jared O'Connell for engineering and mixing it. Thanks to Mark Phillips for our fantastic theme music. And thanks to you for listening throughout this year. We really appreciate it. And remember you can email us at comments at curric podcast dot com or you can find me

on social media. Brian is on social media too, he has oh tens of follower Yeah, I'm at Katie Curic on Twitter and Instagram and Katie dot curric on Snapchat. What's your handle? Good buddy? You don't even know, do you? Yes? I do? Isn't it? Is it at BM Goldsmith? No, that's sad at goldsmith b on Twitter? Good because I don't like BM Goldsmith. Okay. Best of all, you can rate and review us on iTunes. Don't forget to subscribe as well. Thank you again for listening. We've had so

much fun doing this. I hope you've had fun listening to our antics and we'll see you in two thousand and seventeen.