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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On today's show what Elon Musk might do with Twitter and the implications for speech and disinformation and democracy. Also, a candidate interview with Jumaane Williams, the New York City Public Advocate now running for governor, but we start with none other than former WNYC reporters, Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, whose final episode of their Trump Inc Podcast produced by WNYC was in production just as the January 6th insurrection was unfolding in Washington, DC.

Even though their investigation into Trump's businesses, that was the premise of the Trump Inc Podcast, was formally ending with the finale of the Trump presidency, the legal investigations ramped up even more. As you probably heard, just yesterday, a New York state judge held the former president in contempt of court for failing to comply with a subpoena from New York State Attorney General, Letitia James's office. The AG's office is seeking records from Trump, about his family business for a civil probe, and now he'll be charged $10,000 per day until he hands those records over. Of course, he's appealing that ruling.

Meanwhile, the former president is still dealing with an investigation into his role during the January 6th interaction and leading up to it. Last week, we haven't gotten to talk about this yet on the show, audio of Congressman Kevin McCarthy from California, the Republican leader in the House speaking to House Republicans on January 11th, 2021, five days after the insurrection, that audio has been leaked to reporters. Here's a little bit. In it, he tells his fellow Congress members that Trump needs to acknowledge his responsibility. Listen.

Kevin McCarthy: Well, let me be very clear to all of you, and I've been very clear to the president. He bears responsibilities for his words and actions, no ifs, and, or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened, and he need to acknowledge that.

Brian: McCarthy who is likely to be the next Speaker of the House, if Republicans take the House of majority in the fall, called the report totally false when it first came out, that he said anything like that, oh, but, oops, there's a tape. As one podcast ends, another one begins for Andrea and Ilya. This one titled, Will Be Wild, tells the story of January 6th, using first-person accounts and narrative storytelling.

Joining me now to talk about their new podcasts plus these latest news developments on the former president's legal issues are Andrea Bernstein, and Ilya Marritz. I'll say that in addition to co-hosting the podcast, Andrea is an investigative journalist at NPR now and the author of, American Oligarchs, The Kushners, The Trumps, and The Marriage of Money and Power. Ilya covers Trump legal matters for NPR too. Andrea, Ilya, welcome back to the show. Hello.

Andrea Bernstein: Hey, Brian.

Ilya Marritz: Hi, Brian.

Andrea: It's always great to talk to you.

Brian: Now, before we get into the podcast, let's start with the latest news. New York State Attorney General Letitia James, has been investigating the Trump family business for three years now in a civil probe and has said that the Trump Organization has engaged in fraudulent or misleading practices, and now Trump has been held in contempt of court for not turning over documents that they've subpoenaed in conjunction with that probe. Ilya, remind us how we got there.

Ilya: Oh, my goodness. Well, it's taken three years to get here, but I'll give you the short version. If you remember back to when Michael Cohen testified before Congress in early 2019 and talked about Trump's practice of inflating or deflating the value of his assets, depending on whether he was talking to banks or local tax authorities, or others.

Well, that got the New York Attorney General, very interested because she thought there could be potential legal problems here so she started investigating. At this point, she has thousands and thousands of pages of documents from the Trump Organization. She has tax returns, she has interviews with lots of Trump Organization insiders, and she's very close to a decision on whether to file civil charges, but the final step is to actually try to understand what Donald Trump knew about all of this. What kind of information he had and what kind of information he was giving to others in this matter. Basically, we're talking about inflating and deflating the value of assets across a lot of different properties.

She subpoenaed Trump to interview him. She also subpoenaed Donald Trump, the man for documents in his personal possession as opposed to Trump Organization documents. Letitia James has gotten to see lots of Trump Organization documents, but she doesn't know what's in his file cabinets. I was in the courtroom yesterday, and I got to see some of her attorneys making the case to the judge.

They basically said, "We want to look inside his file cabinets on the 25th and 26th floors of Trump Tower, and we want to know that a diligent search was done." Trump's lawyer Alina Habba said, "We did do a diligent search, we just didn't find anything. My client doesn't email. He hasn't used a computer. As strange as it seems he has no documents at all." The Attorney General said, "I don't believe you, and I also don't believe you did a thorough search." The judge agreed with Letitia James's lawyers. Judge Arthur Engoron imposed a penalty of $10,000 a day. We'll see what effect that has, we'll see whether that can be resolved quickly, but that's where we're at right now.

Brian: Is he paying the $10,000 a day starting today or does he get the opportunity to appeal that, Ilya?

Ilya: My understanding is the written decision comes today. My guess is the written decision is going to spell out all of the mechanisms. I haven't seen one yet. His lawyer hopes to have an opportunity to cure the contempt finding by basically submitting an affidavit that she did do a diligent search of the file cabinets, and the off-site storage, and all the locations that the Attorney General spoke about. The pattern with Trump is that he always starts these drag-out fights that end up setting back investigations by months or even years. We'll see whether this is an opportunity for that or just a little kind of road bump.

Brian: Andrea, I saw that of this news, of the $10,000 a day, contempt citing you tweeted, "I wrote a book on Trump and I've done two podcasts on him. I can't think of a single case where this has happened before." What did you mean by that?

Andrea: I mean, [chuckles] just that. Nothing comes to mind that is parallel to this. I think one of the reasons for that is that Trump, the businessman, spent so much time making sure cases never got to the level that they're now in New York. The Manhattan district attorney never investigated Trump's business prior to 2012 that we know of. The New York Attorney General, up until Trump University never mounted a case like this. Trump, before he was President, generally, he would always push things but he wouldn't entirely act as he has at the judge that he did in this case, which is just, literally, in contempt of the law.

What was so striking, was that in court yesterday, the Attorney General's office said they'd received zero documents from Donald Trump. Not a post-it note, not a scrawl, not something written on somebody else's documents. Nada, that they have, in fact, gotten just 10 documents, but that came from the Trump Organization.

We see a continuous pattern here from the way he acted as a businessman to the way he acted in the White House with the recent revelation that there were seven hours of no White House phone records on January 6th, during the pivotal seven hours of the run up to the attack. This is just the pattern with Donald Trump. He certainly brought the way he ran his business to the White House, and it's a business of non-disclosure, it's a business of "I don't have to comply." That is exactly what is being tested right now, both in these cases in New York, and in the investigation into the events of January 6th.

Brian: Andrea, on this leak, Kevin McCarthy audio, I'm not sure what's so new here. He said on the House floor in public on January 6th, or just after it that Trump was responsible for that. Then he realized that so much of Republican America was still for Trump. He went to Mar-a-Lago and met up with him, and he's been supportive of Trump ever since. Kevin McCarthy who might be the next speaker of the House. Now this new audio that we just played a little of has been leaked, something that he had denied that he said or a few things that he had denied that he said, now there's audio showing that he said it, but what is this change if anything?

Andrea: I'm not sure that it does change anything. I think what's so visceral here is the audiotape and that he was caught in the line and that it was on tape and he denied saying what he said on tape and all of us can hear on tape. Which is extraordinarily disturbing when you think about the power that he may be in his hands very, very soon. I think for me thinking about the Republican leaders in Congress right now and many representatives.

There is a moment after January 6th and I know that this tape struck you very much too during the impeachment trial when Mitch McConnell basically said it's Trump's fault. It's just that this isn't the venue to say that. I think there was this moment maybe the first six months of last year, where people felt, "Okay, January 6th is behind us." People came to their senses. The bullet was dodged. There was a transition of power. "We can put this behind us," and I think for Ilya and I, as the spring wore on and it became increasingly clear that that wasn't the case.

That, in fact, the same forces that led to January 6 were only intensifying, that's the moment where we said, "We need to dig into this. We need to do another podcast. We need to go back to work. We need to find out how this happened, how this is still happening." That was really the impetus for the podcast that just dropped and wide released yesterday Will Be Wild.

Brian: The new podcast from Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, Will Be Wild. Ilya, talk about the title, first of all, I know the reference. Tell everybody what it is.

Ilya: Small point of pride. It was my idea. We'd been looking at the pattern of how what got people to Washington DC. The thing that kicked it off was this tweet from Donald Trump on December 19th, 2020, where he said-- it was a longer tweet, but it ended on "Big protest stand in DC, be there. Will be wild." I love the ambiguity of that. That's one of Trump's core skillsets, is this ambiguous communication. Is he being serious? Is he being jokey? What does he mean by wild?

I think we found a lot of meaning in his call to come to Washington and also in the ambiguous language that he used. What's been interesting just in the last few months as we've watched how select committee investigating how things came together there, there's an increased focus on that date. There's a lot of data to suggest that that tweet really kicked things off in terms of mobilizing individuals, mobilizing some militias in some cases, getting people really excited that this stop of the steal rally timed to coincide with the certification of the electoral college vote was going to be the main event, the last stand.

Brian: Will be wild. Let's hear a clip. You use first-person accounts of that day to build a narrative of what happened in episode one titled Warnings. Ilya, you speak to a woman a former Mrs. Idaho Winner. That was the title Mrs. Idaho.

Ilya: Mrs. Idaho, correct.

Trump: That was the beauty pageant for married women, I guess, who went to the capital on January 6th? Let's listen to about 50 seconds of what she had to say.

Natalie Jangula: He's not a great speaker, you got to love him, but you hope he sticks to the script sometimes.

President Trump: It would be really great if we could be covered fairly by the media. The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I'm concerned.

Natalie: Of course, we always love when he turns around and calls the media out for not reporting certain things. That was a highlight for me.

President Trump: These people are not going to take it any longer.

Ilya: Did you at this point hold out any hope that Donald Trump could remain president one way or another?

Natalie: Of course, yes. Of course. Just because I still believe that our election had interference and that's upsetting to me. Of course, there's a part of me that just really wished that that would happen that day. I always say that if I could do it again I would've taken my kids.

Brian: She went on to say that she wished her kids would've been part of something historic. Ilya, I'II stay with you, how do you think she thinks the insurrection will be remembered?

Ilya: Natalie's a very interesting person because she got motivated around that event. She actually decided after coming back from DC to Idaho, that it was her time to get involved. She ran for council in her town in Nampa, Idaho, I think it's the fourth largest city in Idaho and she won. She's now on the city council in Nampa, Idaho. I don't know, renaming streets and making decisions about sanitation and stuff like that. One of the things that we saw was that January 6th was this hugely motivating event for a lot of people.

There are a lot of people I think like Natalie, who are Trump supporters and have found a way in their heads to preserve the parts of January 6th that they like. Like the stop the steal rally and hold themselves apart from the parts of January 6th that were criminal. Natalie's very clear. She said people should not have stormed the capital. She made no excuses for that, but she in her head still thinks of it as a really special day when she got to see a political hero up close and also connect with other people who felt as she felt that the election had been stolen.

Brian: Andrea, let's say can step back. Actually, I want to invite callers in listeners for Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz, late of our podcast Trump Inc. Now of the podcast Will Be Wild. We can take your phone calls on anything pertaining to what you've heard so far and that could be the Kevin McCarthy leaked audiotape. That could be the contempt of court ruling against Trump yesterday and the $10,000 a day fine a judge ordered against him until he produces evidence that has been subpoenaed by the New York state Attorney General or that could be anything from the narrative of what led up to January 6th, and the day itself from Andrea and Ilya's new podcast.

212-433-WNYC with your questions stories comments, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Andrea, let's take a step back for a second. I'm thinking it's January 2021, Trump is about to leave office because Biden won the election. You two are wrapping up the Trump Inc Podcast which was this ongoing investigation of his business interest and how they affected the public interest for while he was president. You were both going to head off to the mothership NPR or maybe in the digital age, I should call it the motherboard. What's going through your mind as you're wrapping up this chapter of your career and seeing an insurrection suddenly unfold at the Capitol.

Andrea: What was happening on January 6th, 2021 is that we were in a table read for the final episode of Trump Inc, which at that point we're obviously all on Zoom and we all got on Zoom and we were reading through the episode and getting each other notes and fixing things. We start to see this thing on Twitter. I think for a lot of us, it was really hard to process in real-time what was going on. I think that for a long time many months Ilya and I weren't sure what we were going to do. We knew we were going to keep an eye on the Trump legal cases and eventually the legal investigations of Trump and the broader investigations of Trump like the House select committees you just mentioned sort of merged and we see these same patterns.

There was a point last summer where I was interviewing-- In addition to the select committee, there's a there's a number of civil cases against Donald Trump, which we'd been following. I was speaking to one of the lawyers who was sketching at the timetable and he said to me, "Oh, I think we'll have discovery by the end of the summer." I thought to myself, "Well, have you sued Donald Trump because I've covered a lot of his cases?" I think that that really is what happened that it became one large investigation of this former New York businessman who became the president who is somebody that really understood how to bend the truth to get people to do things for him.

In some ways, what we saw on January 6 was the ultimate representation of that. I also think that a reaction and the more that Ilya and I dug into this all three of us were working at WNYC on 9/11. All three of us covered what happened and covered the aftermath for years and watched the whole construction of the Department of Homeland Security and this apparatus that was supposed to protect us against terrorism. One of the things that we kept asking ourselves is, "How did that fail? How did the Department of Homeland Security whose number one purpose for being, if you read its mission statement, is to protect against domestic terrorist attacks, how did it fail?"

As we began to look into this and look into the people inside the department who tried and failed to prevent this kind of attack, but who could see it coming, the story just really unfolded from there. One of the things that was so striking is that for so many people in the homeland security space who interviewed us for this podcast and for those people who listen to Trump Inc, I think one of the things that's really different about Will Be Wild is we did get so many former Trump administration officials to speak to us on tape, on the record to tell us their experiences.

One of the things that became so clear is they too were motivated by 9/11, that 9/11 had inspired them to join the government or join public service in other ways and were baffled, and enraged, and confused about what happened. Many of them were our partners in figuring out the story to the extent that we've been able to figure it out. There's obviously more to come and more that we'll learn as these investigations proceed.

Brian: When we come back from a break we'll play another clip from Will Be Wild this time of Daryl Johnson and to what Andrea was just saying, he's the former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, who issued a report in the early 2000s that actually predicted something like this. That's coming up. Ilya, I'll just mention before we go to the break, one of the tweets that just came in.

You may not be surprised, we have a full board of callers as well. One of the tweets that came in after listening to that clip that we played of your interview with Natalie, Mrs. Idaho, who attended January 6th with pride, listener tweets, "I just cried listening to Natalie, not for a good reason." Have you had that kind of emotional reaction to this?

Ilya: Yes. A few people have been really struck by Natalie because she sounds like a really lovely person, but the people that I've heard from completely disagree with her on the facts. That's one of the paradoxes when you start to look into January 6th and the effect that it's having in the broader body politic is that your friends and neighbors, the parents of your kid's friends, a lot of them may feel really, really, really differently about these events from how you feel.

Brian: In episode two titled Boots on the Ground, they report that, "Nearly one in seven of those charged for crimes related to the insurrection had a background in the military and law enforcement or law enforcement. Ilya spoke to Daryl Johnson, the former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, who issued a report in the early 2000s that predicted something like this. Let's take a listen to a bit of a clip of the fallout from that report. Oh, is that the wrong clip?

Daryl Johnson: We were in the process of actually staffing up the number of analysts in anticipation of this rising threat that was going to emerge.

Ilya: The weekend after he delivers the report, Daryl Johnson is out with the Boy Scout troop where he volunteers.

Daryl: I was out with the van full of boy scouts delivering mulch and happened to have the radio on to the local rock station. At noon hour, they had just a quick soundbite of the main headlines for the day. The second or third story was, "Homeland Security issues this report warning us about right-wing extremists." It was very surreal. I was like, "Is that the report that I just wrote? How do they know about that and why are they talking about it?"

Brian: Whoa. Ilya, it gets picked up by conservative media, and what happens next?

Ilya: Well, Pat Robertson starts giving out the phone number for the Department of Homeland Security and urging his viewers, the televangelists, to call in and register what an outrage they think this report is. Just in brief, Daryl Johnson was for a time-- he described himself as the lone ranger of domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security. This is in the early years of the agency. He was the only person focused on Americans attacking other Americans in America. When Barack Obama began to run for President, Johnson was asked to see what people were saying on right-wing message boards and what he found really shocked him.

It seemed like the candidacy, having a black major-party nominee for president was really the spur for a huge amount of organizing activity. So Johnson spends a year, writes up this report. It comes out in, I think, March or April of 2009, so in the early months of the Obama administration and there's just this right-wing firestorm. Now, I've read the report. It's about 10 pages. It's not that exciting, but what he says is, "I'm seeing a significant uptick in violent rhetoric, militia activity." Critically, what he says is, "We're concerned that some of these groups are going to try to recruit returning veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

If you think back to 2009, particularly then there was a huge population of people who've been through these really brutal wars that Americans had become disillusioned with. He said, "We believe some of these groups are going to try to recruit veterans for their expertise, for their prestige." Unfortunately, Johnson in his report used the word "disgruntled" and that just flipped people out. I think there was a very insincere attempt to take the whole thing as an insult to veterans, which if you read it, it is really not intended that way. You'd have to deliberately misunderstand it, I think, to interpret it that way. Regardless, the cat was out of the bag. This Firestorm just seemed to grow.

It spread from right-wing media quickly to Congress and Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of DHS at the time, was forced to go on Fox & Friends and apologize. The report, it was effectively varied and Daryl Johnson's plans to do a roadshow and go talk to local law enforcement in many states around the country about how they could prepare, and organize, and learn about this uptick in domestic right-wing extremism, that was put on ice. He was actually reassigned to look at Al-Qaeda threats.

In a very real way, long before Trump was on the scene taking advantage of some of these themes and using that to build his political capital, there was already this unhealthy dynamic in our politics that made it really, really hard for civil servants doing work on domestic terrorism, especially right-wing extremism to do their job.

Andrea: I just want to pick up on something that Ilya said if I could. I think that this was something that we really saw Trump focused on and capitalized on. In the next episode after the one you played, we're going to be talking to a lot of people who worked for Trump and that is what we see that he very, very, very forcefully pushed back against any efforts to curtail domestic terrorism. In fact, domestic terrorism began to grow under Trump, unusually for a Republican, especially right-wing domestic terrorism.

That is one of the big factors that contributed to this incredibly wild mob on January 6, that descended on the Capitol, many of them dressed in military garb and prepared for what they saw as civil war. You're talking about the Will Be Wild tweet. What we know is that, that really amped up talk and amped up a sense of people who call themselves patriots, that they had to go to Washington, they had to go prepared for battle because their president had told them to do so.

Brian: Well, on that note, are you ready to talk to a caller who says he attended the January 6th rally. Here is Frank in Locust Valley. Frank, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling today.

Frank: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I appreciate the opportunity to tell some truth to your listeners.

Brian: Well, go ahead. What do you want to say that's your version of truth?

Frank: Well, there's only one version of the truth, Brian? That is the truth. What I want to speak about is what's being lost. What's being lost is that over a million people, now, that is an eyeball estimation, but it is clearly over a million people assembled that day because they truly honestly believed that there was a problem with our electoral system, with our voting system, and now a year and some change later, we have the evidence. Look at Maricopa County in Arizona, the algorithm showed that Trump won by 59% and Biden only had 41%. There was all sorts of irregularities in the voting systems. Something along the lines of 125% of people actually voted in the state of Nevada.

Brian: Frank, there was an independent investigation of the vote in Arizona that the pro-Trump people endorsed and it found that Biden won the state.

Frank: These anomalies are not accurate. You don't get 100% turnout, let alone over 100%. 95% of the mail-in ballots prior to the election day had legible signatures and then 95% of the ballots that came after were non-legible, the addresses with no structures on them.

Brian: How would they even, if there were all these additional voters, which is I think the allegation from any of the states or the allegation is even too strong a word, the argument. How would all these voters hundreds of thousands of additional fraudulent voters be matched against the voter roles to even have their votes counted?

Frank: Brian, you're smarter than this. Please don't try to pretend like as if you don't know the Dominion voting machines and the software for Dominion, they proved that the voting machines were hooked up online, so right there we got a problem. That's a problem that's a violation of the voting laws and they proved it. They proved it. Let's not forget back in Venezuela, I think it was like in 2007, where they proved that the votes were altered by the same company, Dominion. It's very funny, isn't it?

Brian: Frank, I'm going to leave it there. Ilya and Andrea, this is your beat what do you want to say about what Frank is saying?

Andrea: Sorry, go ahead Alia.

Ilya: I think a little bit of Natalie Jangula, who we heard the clip of early on, the woman from Idaho who ended up running for council in her town. She probably would agree or be interested in a lot of the things that Frank had to say. When I interviewed her, I asked her, "You ran for council a year after this election that you think was probably fraudulent or that you have questions about it, so how do that your election for council was legit?" Her answer was very interesting.

She had actually gone to the, whoever the local Idaho election authority was and talked with the guy about how they run elections and once she'd been sort of read in on how this system actually works, she was like, "Yes, I believe that my council election was fair. I just still believe that the presidential election was not," and that's a little bit of the problem that we have in miniature, which is that people will believe the elections where their guy wins and they feel less certain about the election where their guy loses. If we continue down that path that's going to be-- [crosstalk]

Andrea: I think it was different in this case though, is that you have the former president actively undermining faith in the rule of law and faith in the election system. We just know, your caller mentioned Dominion. I don't want to so go too deeply down the rabbit hole, but we know that every time it's been judicially tested, was investigated by the former Attorney General Bill Barr, no particular foe of Trump, by his successor Jeffrey Rosen, by US attorneys, all kinds of prosecutors by the Department of Homeland Security and all of these people, Trump appointees to a person said, "No, the system is fine there's no fraud."

I think what is disturbing and one of the reasons that we really were motivated to do this podcast is because of what we hear from the caller, Trump is still fanning the disinformation. He's still putting it out and we know it's just not true. As you mentioned, the Arizona thing was ratified even by a group that wanted to find it fraudulent. That is the predicament we're in as a country, is that these things have not gone away at all, these beliefs. They haven't in many cases.

Brian: Despite all the findings by courts, by that Arizona investigation, Bill Barr's conclusion, who would've loved to conclude that Trump is right and yet there's so much belief out there. It's a little bit baffling, but that's the condition that we're living in and that's the condition in which Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz's new podcast series, Will Be Wild now begins to drop. Just to be clear the podcast is produced by Pineapple Street, that podcast company, their NPR work is in addition to that as they continue to focus for NPR on some of Trump's legal affairs and post-January 6th reporting, but Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street and Andrea and Ilya, I will always be listening. Thanks for coming back on the show.

Andrea: Thank you, Brian. Good to talk to you.

Ilya: Thank you so much, Brian. Really good to talk to you.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

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