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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna, a producer for The Brian Lehrer Show, filling in for Brian today. Coming up on today's show, WNYC's lead Eric Adams reporter Elizabeth Kim will be here, as she always is on Wednesdays, to report on the mayor's weekly press conference, the only one where he takes questions from reporters on any topic. Yesterday, reporters asked about the city's drought warning and the mayor's relationship with President-elect Trump, plus more.

Later in the show, how transgender Americans, a group that was demonized by the Trump campaign, is preparing for the next Trump administration. We'll wrap up today's show with a look at what comes next for outdoor dining here in the city as the pandemic sheds we've all grown to love or hate are coming down with only a fraction of restaurants planning to put them back up in the spring.

First, more than $20 billion flooded into the 2024 presidential campaign, signaling a trend in American politics on both sides of the aisle. Both presidential candidates and their political allies raised enormous sums of money from billionaires. According to OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan watchdog organization that tracks the influence of money on politics, a majority of these megadonors were Republicans. Their donations paid off literally with Trump's resounding victory.

Who are these high-rollers and what do they expect in return for fueling Trump and other GOP campaigns? Joining us now to break it all down is Daniel Klaidman, investigative reporter for CBS News and author of several books. Most recently, Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. Welcome to WNYC, David.

Daniel Klaidman: Daniel.

Amina Srna: Oh, pardon me. Daniel. [chuckles]

Daniel Klaidman: It's okay. It's one of those names people mix up Daniel and David all the time, so no problem. I'm used to it. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Amina Srna: Certainly. First-time host, rookie mistake.

[laughter]

Amina Srna: You did a taxonomy, as you called it, of the megadonors that helped propel Trump's campaign. Before we get into the weeds, $20 billion was spent in this election season. Just how big of a deal or how unprecedented is that amount of money?

Daniel Klaidman: Well, it's a record. As you mentioned in the introduction, there is a trend of billionaires pouring more and more money into campaigns. The numbers are going up and up. The $20 billion includes the presidential election, down-ballot federal and state races. It's important to point out that $5 billion or close to $5 billion of that money is outside spending, that is independent groups like Super PACs. There are no limits on the amount of money that individuals, corporations, unions can give to those Super PACs. That's part of the reason that the amount of money keeps going up. There's nothing to suggest that that trend is going to be reversed anytime soon. There doesn't seem to be any political will these days for significant campaign finance reform.

Amina Srna: Definitely, this is post the 2010 Supreme Court decision that ruled that corporations and other groups can spend unlimited funds on campaign advertising so long as they aren't directly working with a candidate or a party. Usually done by Super PACs, which we'll talk about.

Daniel Klaidman: That's right. One more. Just important point along those lines is that a lot of that money comes in is so-called "dark money," where people don't know the true source of the spending and therefore don't know what their agendas and interests are that lie behind the money and the messages that are paid for in terms of advertising.

Amina Srna: Right. Something that we're going to talk about now. In your recent piece, you acknowledge that it's pretty easy to write off megadonors as being financially motivated like the tax breaks and more tax breaks for the rich and so on. You write, "In some ways, political giving defies neat categories." Before we get into the taxonomy of Republican megadonors who wants what, can you first talk about some of those overlapping interests?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, part of the reason that I set out to write this piece, this taxonomy of megadonors, is because I think there is a sense in which a lot of people out there think, "Well, rich people give money because they are looking for something in return," and that something is generally furthering their own personal business interests and helping their own bottom line. There is a lot of truth to that, but there are also other reasons that people give money.

Someone that I spoke to for this story said that there's a spectrum, but you can also think of it as a kind of a Venn diagram, that there are people who may be largely motivated by ideology or their philosophy about the way government should work or what kinds of policies should exist. It just so happens that those ideologies or those philosophies coincide with their own personal business interests as well.

If you think about somebody who is a kind of a free-enterprise absolutist believes that just as a matter of principle and ideology that the government should not get in the way of the free enterprise system. They will back certain kinds of candidates who are going to promote those policies and those ideas. If you're a billionaire, the likelihood is those policies and philosophies are going to help your bottom line and are going to advance your business interests. That is the kind of overlap between personal interests and philosophies or ideologies that are fairly common.

Amina Srna: We'll get into those categories as you outline them for CBS News one at a time. First, let me open up the phones for our listeners. Listeners, this one's for you. In this age of seemingly unlimited spending on political campaigns, what do you want to know? We'll be definitely talking about Elon Musk, who many of you might be familiar with, as well as Miriam Adelson if those names sound familiar to you. I know a lot of you keep tabs on this stuff. Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text that number.

Yes, let's get into one category at a time. You said this in a recent interview actually. It's been echoed widely in other news sources that Elon Musk might be "America's first oligarch." Before we get into the weeds of his influence on the Trump administration already, can you just explain that term for us and why some believe oligarch applies to Musk? It's usually something we think of, at least in the news media or have referred to as Russian oligarchs. What is an American oligarch?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, that's right. The context that most people, in recent years anyway, have used that term is to talk about a group of very, very wealthy Russians who profited from the collapse of the Soviet Union and a lot of the big state enterprises essentially being doled out to these people. They became extremely wealthy and extremely powerful as a result. Vladimir Putin has found ways to manipulate those people to promote his own interests. Some of those people ended up being arrested and put in prison, probably on trumped-up charges.

That's what we think about often when we talk about oligarchs. Oligarch, it's a very ancient term. It goes back to the Greeks. Essentially, at its most pure definition, it's very, very wealthy people, wealthy business leaders who help to run the government. They are so wealthy. Their interests are so pervasive that they are essential to actual elected leaders or people who run governments and help run the government themselves. In a very real sense, we are seeing that unfold before our own eyes with Elon Musk.

Amina Srna: Yes, you cite that Musk has at least 100 different contracts with the federal government across 17 different agencies. That is a very long list and you definitely don't need to get through all of them, but can you just talk about some of the biggest ways in which Musk is enmeshed with the government already?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, the important thing to understand about Musk is the particular businesses that he has and how essential they are to the United States government and to, really, governments around the world. Obviously, everyone knows about electric cars, Tesla, but also satellites. Here's a stunning statistic about Musk's businesses that makes the point. Fully half of the satellites that are in orbit today are owned by Elon Musk through his company, Starlink. This is an important point because this isn't just about his ability to influence the United States government.

He operates on the world stage. His businesses and his ambitions transcend American policies that could help him financially. This is someone, through Starlink, through his rocketry company and space exploration company SpaceX, has the ability to really influence geopolitics. He has the ability to alter the course of wars. You think about the fact that in battlefields, countries that need access to the internet, some of them are dependent on Starlink, on Elon Musk's satellites. This is something that we have not seen before, I think, in human history, someone that has this kind of global power and the ability to affect geopolitics.

Amina Srna: We'll get into what he's doing alongside Trump in just a second. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're speaking to Daniel Klaidman, investigative reporter for CBS News, about the megadonors who funded President-elect Donald Trump's campaign. We can continue to take some of your questions or comments at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692 and you can also text that number.

You're also reminding me, latest news being that, I believe, President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk recently met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In terms of geopolitics, there's already some movement there. You write that Musk has also been weighing in on other key staffing decisions. The FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, who Trump is expected to name as the agency's chairman. How would that benefit Musk or is he eyeing any other regulatory agencies?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, the Brendan Carr example is a good one. Brendan Carr is a member of the FCC, one of the two Republicans on that regulatory agency. President Trump has announced that he's going to nominate him to be the chairman of the FCC, giving him a lot more power. Musk has been cultivating him for a long time. Brendan Carr has been very open about his support for Musk and his belief that Musk and his companies have been unfairly regulated by the government. He plans to change that.

One example, which adds up to a lot of money, is that the Democratic members of the FCC essentially cut Musk out of the Biden administration's rural broadband program, which denied him hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in subsidies. That's something that Brendan Carr, with the other Republicans on the FCC, are going to try to reverse. That will be a huge windfall for Elon Musk.

Now, you could say, "Well, with Elon Musk, a billion here and a billion there, for somebody who's worth an estimated $314 billion and is on his way to being perhaps the world's first trillionaire, that that's not really all that important." If you think about all of the different regulatory bodies across the government and all of the businesses that have contracts with the United States government, you mentioned before 100 contracts across 17 agencies or something like that, a billion here and a billion there pretty soon adds up.

You asked about other personnel picks, other agencies that Musk is interested in. I said a primary one would be the SEC, which has been at war, in a sense, with Elon Musk over a lot of different things. Elon Musk, for example, is a huge backer of cryptocurrency. The SEC has really cracked down on cryptocurrencies and, under the Biden administration, was going to continue really regulating those digital currencies.

That is something that Elon Musk and many others who gave money to the Trump campaign want to reverse. That's another area that Elon Musk is focused on. Across the government, he's been weighing in on every significant cabinet pick. Then of course, he has been named along with Vivek Ramaswamy to head this Department of Government Efficiency. That'll be an opportunity for him as well.

Amina Srna: Actually, we have a caller, I think, who is going to bring this up. Let's go to Barbara in Harlem. Hi, Barbara, you're on WNYC.

Barbara: Hi. Thank you so much. I think, actually, you're just answering my question, and that is how can someone as a so-called oligarch like Elon Musk-- and he fascinates me generally, but seeing that as he's noted, he has so many contracts with the US government. Now, he will be part and parcel of a peripheral agency. I guess it's not an official government agency, but some kind of auxiliary post wherein he's going to be working on government efficiency. Is there no way in which we can prevent somebody like this working on behalf of the US government when he's got his fingers in so many pots? Are there not most obviously conflict-of-interest issues here and can that be prevented? Thank you.

Amina Srna: I hear you, Barbara. Thank you so much for your call. Yes, Barbara brings up the point that there are likely a lot of conflicts of interest, especially with all these government contracts. At the same time, this Department of Government Efficiency, which he will be heading up as you mentioned beforehand, is actually not a government agency, right? How is that going to work?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, there are a lot of unanswered questions about this Department of Government Efficiency, which, by the way, the acronym for it is DOGE, which happens to be Elon Musk's favorite cryptocurrency. Look, as far as we know that they have no employees. They've got no budget. It's unclear who is going to fund this. Is this going to be privately funded? Will Elon Musk pay for it? There's just a lot that we still don't know.

The caller makes exactly the right point, which is that someone like Elon Musk, who has so many government contracts, will he use this enterprise as a way to advance his own personal business interests? The potential for conflicts of interest are enormous. This is a commission or an agency or whatever you want to call it that not only is going to be trying to reduce the size of the government workforce and reducing its budget.

Elon Musk said he wants to carve $2 trillion out of the United States budget, which I think is going to be very hard to do. Vivek Ramaswamy says that he wants to essentially fire, I think, 2.2 million employees of the US government. All of that is enormously ambitious and is going to be hard to pull off. The point about efficiency, they are also going to presumably try to remove all sorts of regulations.

Those regulations are likely going to be the kinds of regulations that hurt Elon Musk's personal business interests. He comes into this position with a lot of his own personal business experience and focused on the kinds of regulatory hurdles that he's had to deal with. It won't be surprising at all if those are the first things he targets. Those are real conflicts of interest that people ought to be concerned about.

I guess the silver lining here is what I had said before, which is I think it's going to be awfully difficult for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to succeed because there are so many different interests in Congress. People who are going to want to protect those jobs, protect particular programs, they all have constituencies. Those constituencies are not going to be quiet about this. I don't know that Elon Musk fully understands the battle that he is about to start here. It's easy to say we're going to do all of these things. It's a lot harder to actually achieve it.

Amina Srna: There's one more Musk enterprise I want to ask you about, but first, let's take one more call who I think is going to refute that Elon Musk is America's first oligarch as some news outlets have been reporting. Mitchell in Stuytown, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Mitchell: Hi there. Thanks for picking up the call.

Amina Srna: Of course.

Mitchell: Yes, no, I'm appreciating and enjoying the conversation a lot. Something I think about a fair amount. I would like to just say that oligarchy has been dominating US politics for a long time. It's just a little bit behind the scenes, but visible. What I mean is just take a look at the Koch brothers, for instance. For the last, honestly, at least 20 years, not only did they really put G.W. Bush into office, not only did they help to control a lot of oil legislation, but they're also the backers of a very important organization that very few people know about called ALEC or the American Legislative Exchange Council.

They've been working mainly on state levels. They draft the legislation. They hand it to the senators and the assemblymen and the local state representatives. Of course, they pay them some money and they get the bills through. These are the people who are actually writing most of the legislation. They are very much part of the oligarchic class in the United States. Anyway, I just wanted to share those thoughts.

Amina Srna: Fair point, Mitchell. Thank you so much for your call, Daniel. All valid points.

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, absolutely.

Amina Srna: Does this feel different?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, I think it's different in scale and in Elon Musk's personal ambition. There is a sense in which just the optics of it. If you have been watching the transition, if you have been watching the events down in Mar-a-Lago or soon-to-be President Trump's travels, Elon Musk is omnipresent. He's with him all the time.

Amina Srna: Right. The photo we saw recently of him on a private plane with, I believe, Vivek, RFK, Jr., and others eating McDonald's.

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, but more than that you alluded to, it wasn't a meeting with Zelensky, but Trump was on the phone with Zelensky and he put Elon Musk on. I just read that Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, has invited Donald Trump to France in the wake of his election. Well, he didn't just invite Donald Trump to France. He invited Donald Trump and Elon Musk together to visit the Elysee Palace. It is a kind of almost shadow presidential role that Elon Musk is playing.

Then there is the point that I was making earlier in the conversation, which is that Elon Musk is not just involved in domestic policies. He is really going to be an influential player on the world stage. I think this is a distinction. Yes, it's true. There have been, for a long time, shades of oligarchy in this country. Frankly, you could argue that it goes back to the 19th century with the robber barons, who exerted enormous influence on the US government.

This feels different because it is one individual who has amassed more wealth than anyone in the world ever has and is likely to be or could be a trillionaire and has enormous ambitions, not just for his own personal businesses, not just for the United States of America, not just for Earth but for space, someone who wants to colonize space. I take the caller's point. He may not be the first American oligarch, but we've never seen anything quite like this.

Amina Srna: We are going to have to take just a brief break. My guest is Daniel Klaidman, investigative reporter for CBS News. We're talking about the billionaires who propelled Trump and other Republicans' campaigns this year. Stay with us.

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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you're just joining us, I'm Amina Srna, producer here at The Brian Lehrer Show, filling in for Bryan today. My guest right now is Daniel Klaidman, investigative reporter for CBS News. Moving on to your taxonomy of these megadonors, next up is what you call the pragmatist. A quintessential example you write would be Ken Griffin, billionaire founder of the Citadel hedge fund. Interestingly, you're right. He hasn't donated to Trump directly. Why not and how is he influencing the Republican Party?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, I think he hasn't given directly to Donald Trump's campaigns because he's not a supporter of President Trump. He's more of a mainstream Republican who refers to himself as a Reagan Republican. He is the founder of the Citadel hedge fund, an enormously successful hedge fund. He still managed to give $100 million in the 2024 cycle, which put him at number five on OpenSecrets' list of the biggest donor.

He has given a lot of his money to entities like the Senate Leadership Fund and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is the House version. These are much more establishment entities. He's mostly focused on congressional and House and Senate races, looking to help elect mainstream, business-friendly, business-oriented Republicans who are going to give Congress much more of a business-oriented complexion.

This is someone who cares about the free enterprise system. He wants to reduce government regulations, particularly in the financial industry, which is where he makes his money, but he's not particularly ideological. There's not a whole lot of other areas that he's particularly focused on. I call him a pragmatist. Another really good example of the pragmatists are those people who are giving money on behalf of the cryptocurrency industry.

That is a relatively new industry that is heavily regulated by the federal government, by the SEC. They are looking to reduce those regulations and they will give to Republicans or Democrats. It just so happens that Republicans and President Trump have been more friendly toward cryptocurrencies, so that is where the bulk of their money has gone. They are equal-opportunity givers as long as it is helping elect people who back their industry.

Amina Srna: Interesting, though, in your piece that the Defend American Jobs, which is a type of crypto Super PAC, helped Ohio's Republican senator-elect Bernie Moreno get elected. I think a lot of listeners are familiar with Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, so do we know--

Daniel Klaidman: They dropped $40 million in that Senate race, which certainly had an impact on helping Bernie Moreno get elected and defeating Sherrod Brown.

Amina Srna: Moving on, I want to get to another category, the ideologue. The best example as you write is Miriam Adelson, who, along with her now deceased husband, Sheldon Adelson, have been long-time Trump supporters. I think listeners might be familiar with the Adelsons, but I'm just wondering what has their influence been in the past, and does it give a sense of what might be to come in the future?

Daniel Klaidman: Yes, Miriam Adelson and her now deceased husband, Sheldon Adelson, big casino magnates from Las Vegas, they have given a lot of money over the years and really stepped up their donations in 2020 and then now, Miriam Adelson in 2024, where she gave $132 million to help Trump. All along, their interests have been essentially personal, ideological, and not really all that closely related to their own business interests.

The main interest that Miriam Adelson has and her husband before he died was helping Jewish causes and Israel. The money that they gave has had a real impact. When they gave tens of million dollars to Donald Trump In 2016, the main thing that they wanted was for the US embassy that was then in Tel Aviv to be moved to Jerusalem and for the United States government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel, which is something that had not been done before. It was kind of a red line because Jerusalem is holy, obviously, to three religions.

That was a policy position that no previous president had been willing to take. Presto chango. After the Adelsons gave all that money, that was one of the first things that Donald Trump did after he became president. Obviously, there is a war going on between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and a lot of things going on in the West Bank. She clearly has a deep interest in affecting policy in that area going forward. I think that is why I put her in the category of ideologue because she really is singularly focused on one cause and that's basically why she's been given the money that she's been giving.

Amina Srna: Daniel, we are getting a little bit of pushback from a few callers on this focus on Republican candidates. As I said in the intro, we are talking about this because this is the party that largely swept the elections, but let's hear from some of them.

Daniel Klaidman: Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. I was going to respond to that, but were you going to put a caller on?

Amina Srna: Let me put a caller on and then we'll have a chat. Thank you.

Daniel Klaidman: Great.

Amina Srna: Avi in Brooklyn, you are on WNYC. Hi, Avi.

Avi: Hi. Good morning. This program seems like deja vu. I remember after the Democrats won, you had the CBS correspondent on saying how Mark Zuckerberg gave $400 million and Bill Gates gave $50 million and Soros poured money into local elections. That just threw out all the DAs, put in his DAs. It's really like they're mirror imaging. These two programs are so interesting.

It's just exhausting hearing the left. Everything Trump does like, "Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Sean Duffy has no experience in transportation. Pete Buttigieg had tons of experience as transportation secretary." It's just thing after thing after thing. It's laughable. Both parties do the same thing. The cronies give money and that's how politics works. The politicians give their jobs to their cronies. If you don't think that happens on both sides, your head is in the sand.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for your call, Avi. Certainly, I think, Daniel, you discussed in your piece, funding was unprecedented in this election from both sides. There's billions and billions of dollars that we're talking about here. I'll let you respond to Avi in any way that you prefer, but I wonder if you can also speak to the lump sum of contributions, right? There have been elections in the past where we talk about small donations and how certain people have campaigned and garnered a lot of small donations versus these $132 million from Miriam Adelson and so on and so forth.

Daniel Klaidman: Yes. Well, look, both sides, over the years, have actually been quite successful at raising small donations. The internet was a huge boost to those efforts. We really saw it with the Obama fundraising juggernaut. They were able to use the internet and technology to target small donors. They raised a ton of money that way. There's something healthy about that because you obviously don't want all of the money to come in from wealthy individuals, who have an ability to influence policy in the way that average Americans don't.

Let me address Avi's point, which is a fair one. We did make a decision to focus on Republican donors for this particular story because Donald Trump had just been elected. He had raised unprecedented amounts of money from billionaires as the Democrats had done as well. We have written a lot about Democratic fundraising and Democratic megadonors and the way Democrats, and particularly the biggest, most important Democratic Super PAC, Future Forward, has been able to raise unprecedented amounts of dark money to help first Joe Biden in his reelection effort, and then Kamala Harris when she succeeded him.

I did a piece earlier this year about one particular donation. It was dark money. It was $64 million that came from one individual that went to Future Forward, the primary Democratic Super PAC. To this day, this was, by the way, for the 2020 Joe Biden campaign. The money was routed through various 501(c)(4) organizations, which was a way of hiding the ultimate identity or the ultimate source of the money. $64 million from one individual and we don't know who that individual was. That's a shocking amount of money.

It also tells you something about our campaign finance system that one person could give that much money to a presidential election effort. No one knows who that person is, what his or her interests and agendas might be. This is an issue that crosses both parties. Democrats will tell you that they have been very supportive of legislation that would close these dark money loopholes that would prevent the undisclosed money from coming in. They can't get any support from Republicans, so there's no chance this legislation is going to pass.

They are not going to unilaterally disarm. As they would put it or as one person said to me, "We're not going to go to a gunfight with a knife," but it is done on both sides. We have covered it on both sides and we are committed to continuing to do that. We focused on the Republicans this time around because Donald Trump won the election and because a lot of these donors are playing a role, informing the government, and affecting policies. We thought it was important to focus on that this time.

Amina Srna: We're just about out of time. I have one more question for you, but I also want to circle back to the fact that you said crypto Super PACs would fund anybody who is behind the interest of promoting cryptocurrency. I remember during the presidential campaign, Kamala Harris also was out in San Francisco, more or less, courting the VCs and the tech industry there.

I guess to that same point, we'll close with this final group of donor as you refer to as the enigma. You write about Tim Mellon, who happens to have given more money to Trump's election than any other donor, at least $197 million. He's this reclusive railroad magnet, rarely appears in public. What do we know about him? Do we know anything about his personal interests?

Daniel Klaidman: A little bit. There are some clues. He's a fascinating character who just emerged on the scene fairly recently, at least in terms of giving these kinds of sums of money. He lives a reclusive life in Wyoming. He does not hobnob with politicos. He doesn't go to party conventions. He is not someone who the parties court very much because he's not interested really in talking to them. He does seem to have a certain political and, I think, business interests that he's interested in.

This is someone who spent his career in business and the railroad industry and various other businesses. Over the course of his career, he's tangled a lot with government regulators who have, in his view, gotten in the way of his ability to run his businesses in the way he thinks they should be run. One episode that I think was a key turning point for him was when he bought an airport in Connecticut, a small airport in Connecticut.

He set about to cut down a lot of the trees so that it would be easier for pilots to land there, but it turned out he ran afoul of Connecticut and state and local environmental regulations and ended up in a big legal fight with the state. That seemed to have enraged him. That colored his view of government and the relationship between government and business. He became very fixated on those issues. He wrote about this in his own memoir. This is how we know about it.

He got more involved in political giving at that point. You could argue that that is about his own personal business interests. He wants to be able to make more money by getting the regulatory hurdles out of his way. I also think it became a big part of his own personal philosophy of the way government should behave and how they should behave vis-a-vis business. That is part of the reason I would assume he has given a lot of money to Donald Trump.

Then very quickly, this is an issue that really has nothing to do with his own personal business interests. He gave $25 million to RFK, Jr., when he was running for president in this cycle. A lot of people thought that he was being a spoiler. He was giving money to RFK, Jr., to siphon votes away from Democrats to help Donald Trump, who he had given even more money to. I don't think that's the case. It turns out he is a real vaccine skeptic.

He has written about this. He refused to take vaccines, doesn't believe in them, doesn't think that they have been sufficiently tested. Well, guess who else is a vaccine skeptic? RFK, Jr. Tim Mellon last summer wrote an op-ed piece for The American Spectator magazine explaining his support for RFK, Jr. That was a big reason. That has nothing to do with his own personal business interests. It's a little hard to disentangle the various reasons why he gives money. That's, in the end, why I called him the enigma.

Amina Srna: Yes, very enigmatic or eccentric, perhaps.

Daniel Klaidman: [chuckles] That's another word.

Amina Srna: [chuckles] That is all the time we have for today on this topic. My guest has been Daniel Klaidman, investigative reporter for CBS News and author of several books. Most recently, Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on.

Daniel Klaidman: Happy to join you. Thanks for having me.

 

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