Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
j
john mcardle
cspan40:55
m
mychael schnell
msnow05:20
s
salena zito
27:23
s
sean casten
rep/d23:30
Appearances
b
beto orourke
d00:31
donald j trump
admin00:48
j
jamelle bouie
01:44
j
joe manchin
i00:39
karoline leavitt
admin01:06
t
tom fitton
01:31
zohran mamdani
d00:34
Clips
brian kilmeade
fox00:09
d
dr rebecca grant
fox00:04
jake tapper
cnn00:15
jen psaki
msnow00:18
m
mimi geerges
cspan00:15
patty murray
sen/d00:04
rachel maddow
msnow00:07
Callers
greg in florida
callers00:05
russell in wyoming
callers00:03
sean-2 in california
callers00:04
?
Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
Vicki On Democrats00:15:25
unidentified
Security at mass gathering events.
You can also watch live coverage on the C-SPAN Now app or online at c-SPAN.org.
C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered.
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Buckeye Broadband supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy.
Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll take your calls and comments live.
Then a look at congressional reaction to the Epstein files controversy and potential impact on the legislative agenda with the Hills congressional reporter Michael Schnell.
And Illinois Democratic Congressman Sean Caston discusses Democrats' strategy on the upcoming government funding deadline and their push for the release of the Epstein files.
Also, journalist Selena Zito talks about her new book, detailing her experience covering the near assassination of President Donald Trump.
The House and Senate both return at 10 a.m. Eastern, and we're with you for the next three hours on the Washington Journal.
We begin with a question for Democrats only on where the party stands one year since Joe Biden's exit from the 2024 presidential race and six months since Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term.
We want to know if you think the Democratic Party's on the right track or headed off in the wrong direction.
So Democrats only for this opening question, here's how you can call in if you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central time zones.
It's 202-748-8000.
If you're a Democrat in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001.
You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003.
If you do, please include your name and where you're from.
Otherwise, catch up with us on social media on X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook.
It's facebook.com/slash C-SPAN.
And a very good Tuesday morning to you.
You can go ahead and start calling in now.
Democrats only for this first question will have a question for Republicans only in about 40 minutes.
But for Democrats only, we're asking simply, are you satisfied with the direction of the Democratic Party to start the conversation?
Two stories from Sunday, the first from the Hill newspaper on polling, where the Democratic Party stands six months into Donald Trump's second term.
The story notes that views of the Democratic Party have been at historic lows for months.
The percentage of registered voters who view the party favorably reached some of its lowest levels, they write, since at least the start of Trump's first term in office, according to a YouGov polling average.
A CNN poll released on Thursday found only 28% of surveyed Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, a record low in the history of the outlets polling dating back to 1992.
An AP poll found just more than a third of surveyed Democrats are optimistic about the party's future.
That's compared with 57% last July.
Those numbers that wrap up of polls from The Hill newspaper.
Also on Sunday, a story in the New York Times on Democrats' new candidate when it comes to the city of New York City.
Mamdani won over New York City Democratic voters the question the New York Times asked, can he charm Washington?
National Democrats are grappling with how to embrace Assemblyman Zorhan Mamdani, a leftist who has become the party's standard-bearer in America's largest city.
Mr. Mamdani was on MSNBC last month, and he was asked about his brand of Democratic politics and whether it could translate nationally.
And you don't have to live in the most expensive city in the country to have experienced that inequality because it's a national issue.
And what Americans coast to coast are looking for are people who will fight for them, not just believe in the things that resonate with their lives, but actually fight and deliver on those very things.
And part of how we got to this point was through the endorsements of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who've been leading this fight against oligarchy across the country.
And I think that in focusing on working people and their struggles, we also return back to what makes so many of us proud to be Democrats in the first place.
As a Democrat in Nebraska, what are your views on Zorhan Mamdani and his brand of Democratic politics and being the standard bearer of Democrats in New York City and what that could mean nationwide?
unidentified
Right.
I have to be totally honest with you.
I haven't listened to him enough to give an honest opinion.
I, you know, I have to be honest, but I know I would be willing to investigate him more to see if it made a difference all over.
But yes, otherwise, I don't know enough to give you a correct answer to that question.
But what are your thoughts about the party as you see these big crowds with Bernie Sanders AOC and the socialists winning in New York City for the Democratic primary?
Well, Brian, it's not the Democratic Party that I knew or that I was a part of for many, many years.
The Democratic Party I grew up in was responsible.
They were compassionate.
They were fiscally responsible.
They understood that they had to do their part, but help those who needed help.
But get up and do something for yourself.
There's none of that right now that we can see of.
And this socialist trend that's going on is something that I couldn't stomach anymore.
And it's why I left.
And if the National Democratic Party doesn't get back to more of a center or center left, there won't be a party that they're going to recognize at all.
So the far left, if that's where it's going, then let them have their own party.
Former Democrat Joe Manchin, his views on the Democratic Party.
We're asking you your views.
Democrats only are you satisfied with the direction of the party.
202-748-8000 if you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central time zones.
202-748-8001 if you're a Democrat in the Mountain or Pacific time zones.
Gwen is out of Motor City in Detroit.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi, John.
Thanks for taking my call.
You know what, John?
It's so funny how, you know, everything, just like Joe Manchin, everything that he said about the Democratic Party is what the Republican Party is doing.
Every time Trump criticizes the Democratic Party, it's what he's doing.
You know, and the same thing, all of them.
You know, they talk about corruption and all this.
Trump is doing it right in front of their face.
You know, and yeah, I do think that the Democrats are doing a whole lot.
They're standing out.
They're going here.
They're going there.
They're speaking out.
You know, they walked out on the Senate floor, you know, for this nomination and they're doing everything they can.
But it's not just the Democrats.
You know, we keep saying, what are the Democrats going to do?
It's the people.
The people have to make the right choices.
You know, they have to vote for who's going to do for them.
And John, I don't see the Republicans have not done anything to lower prices.
You know, they're firing people left and right.
And the people that they hire are not qualified, but they're hiring the qualified people.
Okay, these polls, I think they are just when they ask, when they ask the Democrat, you know, how do you think the Democratic, you know, what do you don't like about it or whatever, people, they just want to see the Democrats or fight harder and harder and harder.
They're just, you know, because of all the things that's going on, they didn't even say Democrats are not fighting hard enough, you know, but they are.
And then those polls are used, they're used to come up with scenarios to say, well, according to the poll, the Democrats is in the gutter and the people are not, they don't want the Democrats.
What do you think of that editorial cartoon, the Cold Play concert-inspired editorial cartoon of the Democratic donkey embracing socialism and Karl Marx?
unidentified
I think the Democrats allowed the Republicans to, especially politicians, to describe who they are.
And they're not, when I was, I'm a Democrat, But I like more of the middle, like when Joe Biden first came, but then when he took president, to me, I think sometimes he went, he didn't go, he went so in the progressive that it wasn't Democratic.
We're focusing on the Democratic Party in this first 40 minutes of the Washington Journal this morning asking Democrats only: are you satisfied with the direction of the party phone lines?
If you're a Democrat in the Eastern or Central or Mountain or Pacific regions, they're on your screen.
Well, I'm intentionally trying not to be Dr. Bruffle, but I am going to try to speak some things I think people think about, they're just too afraid to say.
The Democratic Party has gone too far to the left, if you want to call it that.
I really think the Democratic Party lost its way when it took up the banner of LGBTQ rights, as opposed to, you know, worrying about the rights of black and brown people who were the largest proportion of their voters.
They are, you know, their LGBTQ rights should be protected, but they're not the vast majority of voters.
I can tell you also that black voters are largely conservative.
And as African Americans, we support their rights, but we really don't, we don't really, we don't really rock with them like that.
It's also a bit of a fact that you've had Kamala Harris, you've got the gentleman in New York now, you've got AOC.
All these people had created, have Democratic Party created dossiers.
None of those folks are who they say they are.
They're not socialists.
If you look behind the rhetoric and you look behind the resumes, you'll see that the gentleman from New York was raised in South Africa.
Okay.
AOC used to work, was an intern for Chad Kennedy.
You know, she went to Boston College.
She, I mean, there's a whole, you know, she had her own business at the back by two.
I think Democrats have an authenticity problem, and I think that this development is actually evidence of the party's authenticity problem.
That listening to consultants or whomever tell you that you have to curse more and that's going to read as authentic seems to me, to my ears, actually quite inauthentic.
I want to turn people's attention again to the Momdani campaign and also to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because they both do this, and that is the Mamdani campaign put out a campaign video that was very interesting.
It was kind of outtakes from a previous campaign video.
And in these outtakes, Mamdani is trying to record, and regular people keep walking by and wanting to say hi to him.
And so he stops and he talks to them and they give their greetings and they smile and they take pictures together and people move on.
It's just this again and again and again.
And one message of the video is clearly that, hey, this is a popular guy.
But the other message of the video is that he's a comfortable person.
He likes being around you.
He wants to talk to you.
He's authentic in this very real way.
And Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been known since he's been in Congress for doing these Instagram lives, these TikTok videos, whatnot, where she's just explaining how Congress works to viewers in a way that feels very real and authentic.
And it's treating the viewer as an adult who can understand.
And I think that it's not that you have to copy these things, but that you have to find some way as a lawmaker, as a politician, to embody your actual self and perform it for viewers and for voters.
Now, if your authentic self is someone who likes to curse, then by all means, go for it.
But if that's not your authentic self, it's going to be very immediately obvious that it isn't.
Jamal Bowie, having that discussion on this program just this past Sunday.
If you want to watch it in its entirety, you can do so on our website at cspan.org.
We're asking Democrats only, are you satisfied with the direction of your party looking for your phone calls?
Also for your texts and social media posts on this topic.
This is Steve writing that I am hopeful.
That's why I'm a Democrat in the first place.
The problem is the boomer Democrats fell in love with Wall Street.
They didn't abandon the working class, but when Democrats spend more time defending transgenders than the working class, it feels like it, Steve writes.
This is Jeff in Dearborn, Michigan.
The problem is a DNC Democrat National Committee trying to sell the third way centrist policy that never delivered.
Why would anyone vote Republican light is what Jeff asks?
And this from David in Minnesota, trust and support for the Democratic Party will continue to decline as long as they continue to tack to the right.
The nation needs a progressive party, not a Republican-light.
Couple of your comments looking for your phone calls.
Democrats only, again, for about another 20 minutes here.
This is Kelly in Plainwell, Michigan.
Good morning.
unidentified
Hi, John.
Thanks for taking my call.
My first thought when you asked the question was that I'm not really sure what direction the Democrats are taking.
I do appreciate the champions like Hakeem Jeffries, Corey Booker, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Salisbury.
But that's just a handful of our senators and House Republicans who are speaking out.
I don't know where the rest of everyone else is.
The thing that concerns me is that I have a nephew who's black, who just turned eight that he feels like Charlie Kirk should be the next president.
What do you say to some of those folks who say that the Democratic Party is drifting too far left towards socialism, to the idea of embracing socialism as that editorial cartoon implied today?
unidentified
Well, it's just a cartoon.
I was going to say to you, Cuba has an embargo by the United States, and yet there are less homeless people in Cuba.
So we need to stop using slogans like socialist, democratic, and all of these wars and get people, especially the veterans who fought American wives off the streets.
So we could use all this.
Socialism is actually doing better than democracy right now.
Before we're less homeless people in Cuba and these socialist places, even in Russia, there are too many homeless people.
So right now, democracy is in last place.
Look at our map, our science all around the world.
We got strained up.
So we need to stop using slogans like Lake Lake Lake Socialism and all of these different things when we basically are in last place.
Todd on Facebook saying, I feel like we need changes at the Senate level.
Someone like Chris Murphy and Tammy Duckworth should be at the helm of leadership.
I'm comfortable with Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team.
Both chambers need to be more combative, though, against Donald Trump.
Additionally, we need a true young leader like Josh Shapiro and Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer.
I feel like we have a true solid leadership team.
We just need to use it, is what Todd writes.
Eva saying, Democrats need a better voice like Pete Buttigig, whose sole job it is to counteract all the nonsense and lies Republicans spew about what Democrats believe.
And this is Jack saying, I'm extremely worried that we don't have the candidates in place to attract the mainstream of both parties.
To the Garden State, Burlington, New Jersey, this is Catherine.
Good morning to you.
unidentified
Good morning, John.
This is Catherine again, and I'm using my call this morning to talk about how the Democrats are allowing the Republicans to label them.
The Democratic Party is fine.
We just need to buckle up, get some good candidates, and fight what's going on here in this country.
We're just fine.
Don't allow the Republicans to continue to label us.
Lisa, on that point of Democrats getting more aggressive, Beto O'Rourke, former Texas congressman, has run several times in the state of Texas.
He was on CNN on Sunday talking about potential gerrymandering efforts in the state of Texas by Republicans.
He was talking about getting more aggressive, Democrats getting more aggressive and fighting fire with fire in his comments about how to respond to that.
This is Beto O'Rourke, about 45 seconds from Sunday.
So you support the new Senator because California right now has an independent commission that does districts in as fair a way as possible and nonpartisan way as possible.
You're saying Democrats should, even though you don't approve of it, Democrats should do it too.
Democrats only asking simply, are you satisfied with the direction of your party?
This is Craig in Virginia.
Craig, what do you think?
unidentified
Oh, well, good morning.
How you doing this morning?
I think that the Democrats are, right now, we're running from all the different accusations and all the name calling, trying to defend everything and put all these fires out.
I think what we need to do is step back, take a good look at who's the source of where it's coming from.
I mean, Donald Trump is what we're fighting, who we're fighting.
We're fighting all his little henchmen.
The deal is, they know what they have, but what we don't, we don't act like we know what we have.
I mean, Biden did more in two and a half years, his last two years of his administration.
He got the CHIPS bill passed.
He got the infrastructure bill passed.
And he did it with split Senate and Congress.
He did that because he was a moderate and a knowledgeable politician.
That's Carol in St. Louis, Missouri, our last Democrat in this Democrats-only segment of our first hour and a half today.
But we'll switch to Republicans only now.
The question for Republicans amid the continued stories over the Epstein files and the Epstein case, we're asking you simply, does the Epstein file story matter to you?
Republicans only for this question.
If you're a Republican in the Eastern or Central time zones, 202-748-8000 is the number to call.
If you're a Republican in the Mountain or Pacific time zones, 202-748-8001.
As you're calling in Republicans only, we want to turn to the Hill newspaper now.
Michael Schnell joins us via Zoom this morning.
Once again, Michael Schnell, the headline of your story from yesterday in The Hill, the Epstein saga hangs over Congress's sprint to the summer recess.
This is essentially the second time in two weeks, in as many weeks, that the House floor has been brought to a standstill because of the Epstein saga.
So what happened this week, really yesterday, was that Democrats on the House Rules Committee planned to bring up another amendment vote on this mass economy that would force the release of the Epstein files.
Now, Republicans on the Rules Committee said they didn't want to vote for that amendment.
They didn't want you, they know that as being on the rules committee, the speakers committee, they would have to vote down that amendment because they prefer to have a vote on a different legislation.
But the problem is, and they saw this play out in real time last week, was that when they vote down these Democratic-led amendments on Epstein, they're getting a lot of heat and an earful from constituents back home who are accusing them of trying to conceal the files or protecting the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.
So, Republicans on the Rules Committee said they wouldn't advance that amendment, but they wouldn't vote against that amendment, but they also wouldn't advance it, essentially bringing the House Rules Committee to a standstill.
The group met yesterday, left without voting out a rule, which is, of course, the mechanism that sets debate for legislation.
And I spoke to Speaker Mike Johnson late last night.
He said that essentially there's no time-sensitive legislation on the schedule right now that needs to move through a rule this week, and that the House has other business it could deal with: suspension votes, committee work, committee markups, hearings, things like that.
So, they are not going to report out a rule this week, which is pretty stunning and notable that it's again the second week in a row that the House Rules Committee has been brought to a standstill because of Epstein.
And not to mention, that means that a rule will not be reported out of the House until September because the House is scheduled to leave for August recess on Thursday.
So, a real mess right now in the House GOP conference, still over this Epstein conference.
So, those are the grand jury testimony, the grand jury transcripts of testimony.
And so, what some folks have said, particularly Democrats, have been the loudest about this, is that those documents will only scratch the surface.
Those will only involve testimony from Gillian Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and specifics about them, but not about other people who were involved.
So, there are a number of Democrats and Republicans who don't want to cherry-pick the information.
They want the full breadth of the documents, which is why that move is not enough.
But I will note for a number of Republicans who have been drumming the beat, beating the drum about wanting to see the Epstein files, they're saying that the grand jury testimony, transcripts rather, would be a large step in the right direction.
And they're using that as a way to argue that Republicans and President Trump were on the same page.
It's something that Speaker Johnson's been saying, that there's no daylight between House Republicans and President Trump, although we know that President Trump has urged Republicans to drop this matter while other congressional Republicans are still arguing and calling for complete publication of the files.
So, speaking of calling, we've asked Republicans only to call in, asking, does the Epstein file story matter to you?
And we'll hear from them in just a couple minutes here.
But you talk to these members of Congress, these Republican members of Congress.
What are they saying about this particular issue as they head towards the congressional recess, towards weeks in which they'll be back home hearing from constituents?
Are they expecting this to be the focus of town hall events?
We know from the rules committee, after Republicans on the rules committee voted down that Democrat-led amendment last week, they got an earfull back at home.
And I spoke to Congressman Tim Burchett.
He's the Republican from Tennessee.
Of course, he told me that his cones are running off the hook with constituents calling, upset about the administration's handling of the matter, arguing that they want to see the full documentation.
He's even heard from some personal friends, which he said is not something that typically happens as a congressman himself, personally, for him.
So, certainly, there are constituents calling.
And as you mentioned, this could be a real issue for recess.
Republicans are heading home on Thursday in the House with a big task on their hands.
They need to sell the big beautiful bill to their constituents.
Look, it was really hard to get that piece of legislation over the finish line.
It may be even harder to sell it to their constituents and try to make it a winning message come next November when they're running to expand the majority in the midterms.
So, focusing any time on the Epstein files and not the big, beautiful bill is certainly not the situation Republicans want to be in, especially when they head home for this five-week August recess.
Yeah, so currently, right now, the House is supposed to break for recess Thursday morning.
Now, I spoke to Speaker Johnson last night.
I asked him that, in light of what's happening on the Rules Committee, do you expect to send folks home early?
He said no, arguing that there's a lot to focus on with suspension votes, committee markups, and committee hearings.
But we'll see if he gives back a few days because, again, there's no big ticket legislation to vote on.
Members are eager to get back home to their districts, and it's been a very long six-month stretch here in Washington.
But again, as you mentioned, that September 30th deadline for government funding is going to creep up very quickly.
The House has only passed two out of those 12 appropriations bills.
The Senate is going forward with just its first this week.
Lawmakers are very much so behind the eight ball when it comes to government funding.
Likely, more chatter about a continuing resolution is going to begin as Congress returns in September because they are just so behind on their work.
And so, it's going to be a fierce government funding fight come September because of all these differences between Republicans and Democrats on levels that they want the spending bills to be at, you know, locking in more of those dose cuts.
And then, of course, the different paces that the Senate and the House are on.
Michael Schnell, one of the best congressional reporters in the business, you can read all of her coverage of all of these issues and her colleagues as well at thehill.com.
And we always appreciate your time on the Washington Journal.
It is the lead story in today's New York Times from their front page.
The headline, Trump's deflections ease the base's fury over Epstein, but other grievances are reunifying allies for now.
We'll take you into that story over the course of this 45 minutes, but we'll hear first from Kat out of Culpeper, Virginia.
Republican, does the Epstein file story matter to you, Kat?
unidentified
No, sir, it does not.
What really matters to me are the lies that the Democrats are putting out.
And I honestly believe if anybody's on the Epstein list, it's probably a lot of them and Republicans because, you know, it's human nature.
Even when children are used, I was abused when I was three years old the first time.
So I know what it is to, you know, have to deal with that all your life.
I'm 74 now, but what I really hate are the lies of the getting rid of Medicaid, getting rid of Social Security, or whatever they say.
The Democrats keep putting that out, but it's not.
It's getting rid of the cheaters.
And then when you're that mans of undocumented people who we don't even know who is living next to us and what they're capable of, and I'm sorry, you have to admit, people from the lower countries, uneducated, aren't trying to assimilate.
I have about seven neighbors in a one-block neighborhood that are here illegally.
I love them.
The ones that are in my neighborhood are great, but I just don't feel like the, you know, they're getting taken everything.
That's Melinda in Vermont, and this is Phil in Clayton, North Carolina.
unidentified
Good morning.
Yeah, I just wanted to say when Elon Musk gets this America's party going, then we can do away with the Republican Democrats and all this fussing and arguing all the time.
It's Phil in North Carolina asking Republicans only in this segment, does the Epstein files story matter to you?
Coming back to that front page story in the New York Times, here's what they write in the week after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
It seems there was nothing President Trump could do to quell the fury of some of his own supporters.
But when the Wall Street Journal published a story detailing a decades-old letter with a lewd drawing that Mr. Trump allegedly sent Mr. Epstein for his birthday, Mr. Trump got a respite from the revolt as some of his core supporters rushed to his defense.
Mr. Trump turned one of the most fractious moments for his base into one of the most unifying by tapping into other MAGA grievances, the deep mistrust of mainstream media, the disdain of Rupert Murdoch, and the belief that the president had been unfairly persecuted by his political foes.
Mr. Trump's allies on the hard right, the Make America Great movement, said that the discontent that had divided the base had dissipated, but had not been eliminated, at least for now.
That's how the New York Times frames it this morning.
What we should be focusing on is the news story that's capturing not really the nation, but maybe some of the media publications about all of the Obama administration's nefarious activities during Trump's run for president.
It was yesterday at the White House that White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt was talking about Epstein once again after questions from reporters.
This is yesterday.
unidentified
So, at six months, the president is also experiencing some pushback from members of his own mega base, especially on the matter of the referee Epstein file.
Is the president satisfied that his own supporters are not heeding his call to let him go and to move on?
In fact, he cited over the weekend some polls showing that his approval rating with the Republican Party is actually at an all-time high.
He's polling 90 to 95 percent amongst Republicans right now.
That's higher than any Republican president or any leader of this party ever.
The president is the creator and the leader of the Make America Great Again movement.
It's his baby that he made, and he knows what his supporters want.
It's transparency.
And he has given them that on all accounts when it comes to everything this administration has done, especially when it just comes to the president himself, taking questions from all of you and the press corps on a near-daily basis, multiple times a week.
No question is off limits here at this White House, not just for the president, but myself as well.
Kelly, again, as I just answered, the president has told the Attorney General and the FBI director to release any credible evidence that they find.
And he also signaled to them over the weekend to move forward with unsealing the grand jury documents that were underseal by various judges across the country.
And I believe the Attorney General has taken the proper legal action to do that.
What they say in the memo is there's no incriminating client list.
I want the non-incriminating client list.
And client list is obviously a term of art.
That's why, you know, when people put air quotes around it, they're using something specific or something in a way that you might call a client list, but isn't labeled as such.
So folks want to know who he was in contact with, who potentially was involved in the sort of conduct that was at issue.
In the memo, this Justice Department FBI memo, they talked about a thousand victims.
Well, you know, that's a lot of victims for one man to have been involved with.
Were there others?
I think that's a fair question.
Now, is there other?
They said there's no evidence suggesting others should be prosecuted.
But is there any evidence at all?
I don't know.
So my advice is, because we've got the FOIA lawsuit, is just release the records under FOIA in the lease.
And that way there's a process in place where records are released.
If there are exemptions or redactions where things are blacked out, they typically have to explain why and what the basis is for it.
And at least in the court process, we can appeal it if there's an issue.
But it's a way to kind of regularize this as opposed to the irregular way through which these disclosures and conclusions have been made.
Kathy in Michigan, does the Epstein story matter to you?
unidentified
Not really.
I think there's more important matters.
Like, why don't you discuss what President Trump's accomplishments have been, like the peace through India and Pakistan, the big beautiful bill, the tax cuts.
Everybody was going to get a tax increase.
Getting rid of U.S. aid, only 12% of money went to aid on U.S. aid.
Only 12%.
That was never brought up.
And I wish your channel would play the NPR hearing more.
When that went on, you never played it during prime time.
I watched every channel, and so I wish you would play.
That's the focus, his wins, as she describes it, of Ingrid Jacques' story in today's USA Today.
Her column, Trump is racking up big Republican victories.
She cites taxpayers now free from funding liberal NPR.
Hallelujah.
She writes, Trump is dismantling the Education Department.
Don't forget about Roe v. Wade.
Those are just a few of the things she cites.
But just below that column in today's USA Today, it's Sarah Pekino's column, and it comes back to Jeffrey Epstein.
The Epstein files are a mess that's engulfing the Trump administration, she writes.
Again, this is just below that other column.
Trump really, really doesn't want you to focus on the fact that he said he wanted to declassify the Epstein files in the campaign.
She writes, it's best just to focus on immigrants who are now being treated no better than livestock.
Trump says that they're the root of the problem, and we should believe that, right?
Allegator Alcatraz, she writes, is a cruel reminder that Trump will do whatever he wants to vulnerable populations in the United States, and only a few Democrats seem willing to call him out.
It's also cruel for a reason to appease the MAGA base and keep them from realizing that Trump isn't making good on any of his other promises.
Those two columns, one on top of the other today in today's USA Today.
This is Marshall in Nashville.
Good morning.
Do the Epstein files matter to you?
unidentified
Yes, they do matter.
You know, I want to chide anyone.
I don't care Republican, Democrat.
I want to chide you because there are victims here.
These are little children, boys and girls, who have been, their whole life has been traumatized.
And to minimize what happened to them and to say, let's look the other way, you are no different than a Democrat who looks at the 2024 election process and they saw what the DNC did and they saw what Democrat leaders and Democrat politicians did in this country and they say nothing about it and they turn a blind eye.
Marshall, where did you expect we would be six months into a second Trump administration on this particular issue?
unidentified
Well, to me, it doesn't.
The reason I say it doesn't matter on this act is because nothing will ever come of it.
This is a waste of taxpayer dollars in many ways.
And I'll tell you why.
Lois Smooter was never held accountable for weaponizing the IRS against Republicans.
Reagan was never held responsible for Contra.
Eric Holder never held responsible for his selling of arms to the cartels in Mexico.
What do you it has taken us 50 years to release documents from RFK, and we have evidence that our intelligence agencies were involved with it.
So when you look at it, we're like a squirrel on one of those little squirrel cages running around in circles.
Nothing's going to happen from it.
But is it important?
You're right.
Because people have committed crimes and they ought to be held responsible for it.
The reason it probably won't come out is because you have politicians, lawyers, business owners, wealthy people, men and women, who have used the services of Jeffrey Epstein to abuse children.
And they will never let that come out.
They will never let those people held responsible.
This is today on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Joseph Epstein writes about the Epstein files, noting that I, Joseph Epstein, have grown very weary of hearing my surname mentioned in connection with the odious activities of the late pedophile and pimp Jeffrey Epstein.
But Joseph Epstein goes on to say this about the Trump administration's handling of the files.
Fair to say that the Trump administration has thus far bungled its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, allowing anyone to imagine who might be on the list.
As National Review notes, everyone has built vast castles of fantasy atop the Epstein case.
That includes many members of his administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Director Kash Patel among them.
Now, he writes, President Trump is on the back foot with demands in Congress that he release any files related to Epstein at the Justice Department.
On social media, he says that he has asked Ms. Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval.
I hope that happens soon, he writes, if only so that I and the roughly 12,000 American Epsteins can once again live in peace.
That is Joseph F. Stein writing in the pages of today's Wall Street Journal.
I really don't care about the Epstein thing, but to me, if you really want to know the truth, all the Democrats, Republicans should ask Trump to pardon Delaney Maxwell and have her testify live on TV and throw everybody's dirty laundry out in the street.
Unless the Democrats and Republicans do that, they're all hiding this bull crap.
So my thing is, pardon her, and let's get it on with the show.
The information that seems to be used by the current Republican leaders as what they would use for getting themselves elected, trying to show light on what they believe to be some sense of truth, there's a lot of dirt here.
And if there's nothing to see, release everything, except for the victims' names, right?
Redact that.
But if there's nothing to see, everything else should be released.
Gutting education, gutting aid to foreign aid that makes a difference in soft political power around the world.
It is very unfortunate to see everything, including farm aid and everything else that we have sought to do to make our presence a positive presence around the world strategically.
It is unfortunate to see that instead of a scalpel, there's a shotgun approach to change.
I think it will certainly seek to circle its wagons from what's left of it.
There is this personality cult that seems to be very much in charge.
And at present, like you're seeing the maneuvers that might take place in Texas with redistricting, they will try to circle and hold on to power as long as they can.
But the American people, in the long run, will end up doing the right thing.
And I think it's more than time to say your time is up, Trump.
We showed you some of the responses to that question for Democrats.
Here's the responses to this question.
Jack Elaine says, I care about the Epstein files about as much as the Democrats did when Biden was president and they didn't care at all.
If there was anything damaging against Trump, you can better believe that the Democrats would have released it.
This is Dan saying, yes, it matters, but the rich and powerful of all stripes who might be connected will never let it come out.
So there's little point in continuing to waste time obsessing over it.
Rich saying, yes, it matters, but the victims should be the first consideration.
It's important also to define the list.
A client list could be just that.
The rape and pedo list is the one that counts, and the criminals there should not be protected.
And one more, Gary saying it matters because, as in any crime, justice must be done for the victims.
But quite frankly, I'm more concerned about President Trump and the Republican Congress doing what we voted for them to do.
I really think if there was any real evidence that Donald Trump went to Epstein Island and engaged in illegal activity, the previous Biden administration would have made that public in a New York minute.
Taking your phone calls here, another few minutes asking Republicans only this question.
Does the Epstein file story matter to you?
This is Kim out of the Buckeye State.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thanks for having me on.
The Epstein files, they matter to me.
But right now, I believe there's some more important things to worry about.
Like the illegal immigrants getting them deported.
Why not find out whose Coke was at the White House?
Why not find out who planned the pipe bomb before January 6th?
There's just other things to worry about for them.
Trump was on that list.
It definitely would have been known by now.
And I was reading last night that they have about a thousand FBI agents scrolling through the files and teaching them how to pinpoint where Trump's name is involved in there.
I think our tax dollars have stopped and stumped plenty enough trying to get Trump on other crimes.
And we don't need to spend more tax dollars on that.
This is Frank Bruni in the pages of today's New York Times.
Frank Bruni writes, of course, the conspiracy theorists who reveled in Donald Trump's encouragement of their wildest fantasies feel jilted by his sudden command that they erase Jeffrey Epstein from their cognitive hard drives.
As the tawdry twists in the Epstein tale keep coming, Trump's most obliged defenders are being driven to exhaustion, he writes.
Vice President JD Vance responded to the Wall Street Journal's report that Trump had once written and doodled a special smutty Predators in Arms birthday greeting to Epstein with a social media post that asked, does anyone honestly believe that this sounds like Donald Trump?
Frank Bruni says, does anyone honestly believe that it doesn't?
We're talking about Mr. Grab Them by the You Know What's here, Frank Bruni, writing in the pages of today's New York Times.
This is Thomas Chesterfield, Missouri.
Good morning.
What do you think?
unidentified
Donald Trump needs a haircut and a seat adjustment.
One more from social media on X. None writing in simply just rip the bandaid off here.
Either it's baloney or there are folks paying to get their names redacted as we speak about this.
One more post on that topic.
We're going to end our open forum there and plenty more, though, to talk about on the Washington Journal this morning.
Coming up in about 40 minutes here, we're going to be joined by Illinois Democratic Congressman Sean Kasten.
A discussion on the latest when it comes to fiscal deadlines and what Congress is doing headed into the summer break.
But first, it's journalist Selena Zito.
She joins us to talk about her new book, Butler, her first-hand account of covering the near assassination of President Donald Trump last summer.
Stick around.
We'll be right back.
unidentified
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So it's really important that you ask that question because places like Butler, you know, there's only ever been two presidents that have ever campaigned for president in Butler, and the other one was JFK.
These are the places that often decide election cycles, but they're very far off from the sort of main places like DC or New York.
But they offer a different venue for the president to be able to make his case or whoever is running to make their case, Josh Shapiro, John Fetterman, Dave McCormick.
They're also elected officials that understand the importance of place.
It's situated right along the Ohio border.
Erie's to the north.
Pittsburgh is to the south.
So all of that makes sense in terms of if you're trying to appeal to the middle of the state or the middle of the country, it gives something for voters to have an association with because they see their place through the eyes of the people of Butler.
I cover national politics and I live in Western Pennsylvania.
So, you know, anything that was happening in Pennsylvania, I was pretty much there.
I think I put, I don't know, 30,000, 40,000 miles in my car last year.
So I try to make every event that all the candidates were doing.
Butler is also home to me.
My family, not the Italian side, the Scottish side, were one of the first founding families of Butler County in the 1750s.
So it's also near and dear to my heart.
The morning started out.
If people look at the cover of the book, my daughter is a photojournalist.
She took that cover photo.
We started out that we were going to interview President Trump for five minutes before the event.
Chris Lasavita, who was his co-campaign chair, had called and said, hey, you know, you have an interview.
I requested one.
You have an interview five minutes right before.
I have interviewed President Trump several times.
I knew it was going to be a little longer than five minutes, just because he loves to talk about Pennsylvania.
That quickly changed, which, by the way, is not all that unusual.
And as a reporter, things change all the time.
You never really set out that morning and have accomplished what was on your list by the end of the day.
That changed about midday, and they said, we're running late.
Can we please do the interview after the rally?
That call came from Susie Wiles, who was the other co-campaign chair and who's today's chief of staff at the White House.
I said, sure.
And about an hour before the president came on, I get a phone call from Susie Wiles, and she says, so how would you feel about flying to Bedminster and doing the interview on his plane?
And I thought, well, I'll have a lot more time.
And they said they would get me back, my daughter and I back.
So that's the decision we all came to.
About six minutes before the president was set to go out, he had already landed.
He was in Butler.
Was in behind the stage in an area that's called the Click area.
It's called that because this is where the president meets with local first responders, law enforcement, community leaders, grabs some people out of the rally and just talk to them about their lives, thanks them for their service.
In fact, Mark Vogel's mom was there.
He was the Western Pennsylvania teacher who was held in Russia for several years.
And she was asking him to please do whatever he could, if he won, to get her son released.
So they rushed myself and my daughter back.
And I didn't know where I was going to do the interview.
And so I said to the press aide, his name was Michelle Picard III, what am I doing?
Where am I doing this interview?
And he had no idea.
So he went around the curtain where the president was and then came back very sheepishly and said, he just wanted to say hi.
You're still going to Bedminster.
So I went around, said hi.
We basically talked about our grandchildren.
Both of us have a deep love for our grandchildren.
This is sort of this connection.
And then I go to go back to the riser with my daughter.
My son-in-law is there too.
He's carrying all of our lighting equipment.
And they couldn't get us back to the riser.
So Picard tells us, okay, you guys go in the buffer.
The buffer is the area between the stage that the president walks out on and the people that are attending the rally.
Mostly it's used for photojournalists and Secret Service.
So he comes out, we follow him out.
If you look at the cover of the book, my daughter took that as he's coming out.
But if you take a look at it, and you can see it's not picked, it's a photo of the back of him looking at the people attending the rally.
So we go out and Picard told us, make sure you end up over on the side so when the motorcade is ready to leave, we can just grab you.
So that's what I did.
The president comes out, he comes out to the song, and two things happen simultaneously, which rarely happen, if at all.
A chart comes out.
And I thought, what does he think?
He's Ross Perot.
Like, he never has a chart.
And if he does have the chart, it's at the end and it's on the other side of him.
I've covered enough Trump rallies to know that.
It's very rare.
If it does happen, it happens at the end.
And the other thing that happens, and this is the significance of the cover, President Trump never turns his head away from the people attending the rally.
It is a very transactional relationship.
He feeds off of them and they feed off of him.
This sort of connective tissue that happens.
And now he may turn his body to face different parts of a rally, but he never turns his neck away.
Now, if you know anything about Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, we have beautiful rolling hills, including our farmland.
And so on this, the Butler Farm Show complex is an old farm.
So there's a rolling hill, and that leads to where the parking lot is.
And I didn't realize, we didn't realize that everyone was still there.
They had not let anybody leave.
And they didn't let them leave for an additional hour.
And what could have been very chaotic and angry, like you could imagine all kinds of worst case scenarios in that situation.
People have all different kinds of reactions when they're scared, they're angry, they're, you know, they're destabilized, right?
You literally witnessed a president of the United States being shot.
But what we came upon was actually something aspirational, remarkable.
People were singing.
People were sharing that, you know, a lot of people had killers in the back of their cars or trucks.
And so they were sharing water and food and they were hugging and they were talking.
And so it was really in a moment that could have been gone very, very different way in the aftermath of an assassination was really quite remarkable on those farm fields.
And Butler, I believe that is because of the way the president comported himself when he said fight, fight, fight.
And we called me the next morning, called me bright and early the next morning.
And Selena Zito talks about this in her book, Butler, The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump and the Fight for America's Heartland.
You can join the conversation this morning by calling in.
Phone lines are open for you to do so.
Phone lines split as usual in this segment.
Democrats 202-748-8001.
Republicans, phone lines for you.
Independents as well.
Go ahead and start calling in with your questions for Selena Zito.
And as folks are calling in, you mentioned talking to the president.
You ended up talking to the president several times over the course of the next 24 hours.
Before I tell you what those conversations are like, you asked why, and that's an important question.
If anyone out there that's listening or watching has ever been through a traumatic event and your family members or close friends or loved ones were not with you, and you try to explain it, they can nod their head and understand and have empathy or sympathy.
But if they weren't there, they don't know what that moment felt like.
And President Trump and I have always had mutual respect for each other over one very particular thing, and that's the people I cover and the people that he comes to see.
So he knew me really well, and he knew I was right there because he just saw me just a couple minutes before I went out.
He knew exactly where I was standing because we walked eyes.
And so I think the reason that he repeatedly called me is twofold.
First of all, just that respect for people that I cover and he sees, but also the fact that he knew someone that was right there.
And to talk about it and sort of figure out why he did the things that he did is sort of why we had those conversations, I believe.
And, you know, I suppose if I were any other journalist, I would have really pushed him, but I could tell he was going through something.
So I let him just talk.
And I was also going through something, right?
I wasn't quite sure what it was, but I knew that never happened in front of me before.
And so he began questioning, like, why did I turn my head?
I never turn my head.
And why did that chart go down?
I never do that.
And those questions and those conversations, repeated conversations, led to the hand of God and led to faith and purpose.
And he concluded that he was spared and that he had purpose and that if he won, that he would use that in the way that he believed was the best for the country.
You may disagree with him, but he came to that conclusion.
And so the last thing I asked him in our last conversation, I said, sir, well, why did you say fight, fight, fight?
And he said, oh, yeah, I wasn't Donald Trump in that moment, like not Donald Trump the man, right?
I was representing the presidency, the presidency of the United States, and representing the country.
In that moment, I understood that I needed to show that the country, not me, but the country was strong, that the country would endure and we had resolve.
And I needed to represent the grit and the exceptionalism that our country has always stood for.
Well, let me pause there and bring in some callers for you.
And we have several for you.
The book, again, you've probably heard about it.
It's been very much in the news since the anniversary of the shooting Butler, the untold story of the near assassination of Donald Trump and the fight for America's heartland.
This is Tom, Spring Hill, Florida, Republican up first with Selena Zito.
Go ahead.
unidentified
Appreciate it.
Good morning, Miss.
I was wondering if there is any information, if they're investigating who is behind all this.
My first suspect, I would assume, would be Barack Hussain Obama.
You know, there was a void in intellectual curiosity about Thomas Matthew Crookes.
And also, I did as best as I could, but this is a young man who seemingly had a, he was quiet, however, seemingly had a normal life leading up until November of 2023.
And that's when something changed, snapped, whatever way you want to reference it with this young man.
And you can find through public records that he went from, you know, public email through school to encrypted email.
He went from using Google to using encrypted dark websites.
His father, in the interviews, said something had changed, that he started dancing and talking when no one was there.
And it was a concern to him.
But, you know, in this country, we really don't treat mental illness with the proper scrutiny that I think we should.
There's still a stigma that goes around, that comes around in people's heads about mental illness.
And so for whatever reason, the family is not talking.
That was never, it appears that that was never explored.
In terms of understanding it, we started by talking about Butler and why President Trump went there that day.
You talk about understanding in the term of rootedness, of rootedness to an area.
This is a quote from your book.
Most reporters would better understand what and whom they cover in today's politics and more importantly, where to cover events if they understood the importance of place.
So the majority of Americans live less than 100 miles of where they grew up.
Most of them live within 25 miles of where they grew up.
People are very connected to place.
What does that mean?
Well, priorities, your priority tends to be, and the thing that's valuable to you tends to be living down the street from your parents or your grandparents or the ability to see your grandchildren.
You're very rooted to community.
This crosses all races.
This is why you saw the coalition for the Republicans to grow among Blacks and Hispanics and Asians, because place begins to be more and more important to American people as the elites tend to make things more important or events more important than community.
And so that's why place matters to voters.
It's very difficult to get to that in a poll.
It's very difficult to get to that as a strategist.
I would suggest that likely our problem with not understanding that characteristic is out in places like Pennsylvania, there's a lot of news deserts.
What do I mean by that?
Lots of small newspapers have closed down.
Places where people used to get their news, local news, and even national news from a local perspective, have now closed, which has made people gravitate more towards national news.
Now, there's nothing wrong with national reporters.
However, they are a more placeless.
They're more transient.
I did an event the other day at Hudson, and I asked everyone to raise their hands if they were from DC.
Nobody was.
But I asked them to raise their hand if they lived in D.C. and everybody did.
And they all came from, there's 100 people there, and they all came from very different places.
The people that are in our legacy media are more transient.
They know less and less people that live in places like Butler or Erie, Pennsylvania.
So when they cover them, they don't understand what's more valuable to them.
So things like climate change isn't as valuable as are our roads going to get fixed.
And so when you cover them, you tend to cover them almost as like an anthropological study because you don't know them.
And that's where that distrust in media happens.
And that's our problem in covering American politics because not enough local reporters cover national issues.
Your book, Butler, is, of course, the story of that day in July a year ago, but it's also this idea of place and what happened with the rest of the 2024 election.
There's been a lot of books about the 2024 election.
Jake Tapper had a book with Alex Thompson, the 2024 book that just came out with Josh Dawesy and Tyler Page and Isaac Ansdorf.
Chris Whipple had a book, Uncharted, about the 2424 election.
Do any of them get to this idea, this sense of place?
Have you read those books and what do you think of them?
These are very well-reported books, but they're also very inside books.
This book takes a look at the people who changed American elections.
This looks at the people who make the decision that decides who presidents are and what we can learn from them and what we've been ignoring about them.
I would say, so I would call showing up in East Palestine when nobody else did, in particular in the entire Biden administration until after he did.
I covered East Palestine intensely.
I was there many times.
My family is from East Palestine.
And my great-grandfather ran as a free silver Democrat for state rep in East Palestine.
But not showing up, the Biden administration not showing up there and Trump showing up there was really, really important.
That was February of 2023.
President Trump at that time was down in the polls, New Hampshire poll to Ron DeSantis.
It was probably his lowest point.
And I wrote that day: if everything changes, it's because he showed up and he told people that he saw them and he heard them.
And a week later, he was ahead in the primary polls.
But I also knew it had general election implications in a very significant way.
Butler, when the assassination happened, I believe that was the second moment where if you had any doubt that he was going to win, it should have been erased in that moment.
But I think two other moments are important.
One happened, it was a year ago yesterday when President Biden dropped out.
And seemingly, everyone in my profession just turned their gaze away from the fact that a president got shot and they focused on the shiny object.
And people saw that.
And people that wouldn't likely vote for Trump said, wait a minute, there's no balance here.
And why are we chasing this shiny object?
And this is a guy who you've been telling us is fine.
And now he's dropping out.
So that lost people's trust in my profession.
And I would say the final moment, if you had any doubt at all, happened when the massive floods hit Western North Carolina.
And once again, it's just sort of a bookend East Palestine.
The Biden administration, Harris, were very slow to show up.
Trump and Vance were both there immediately.
And that showing up and getting stuff done, it's a quality that Trump has, but also shared by Governor Josh Shapiro, U.S. Senators John Fetterman and Dave McCormick.
They all get that.
They all have that quality.
And the Biden and Harris administration were very lacking in that.
You write that Corey, this is quoting Helen, looking back a year later.
Corey should be here, Helen told the Washington Examiner through tears while sitting at a picnic bench not far from her home of crooks, of the shooter that day and the failings of the Secret Service.
They haunt her.
They failed my husband miserably, she said, and I want answers from this, she said.
I think she's really concerned about the way that this was conducted by the Secret Service from the top decision makers.
There is an archaic role in the Secret Service where former presidents are not covered with the same robustness that current presidents are.
I remember covering this with Barack Obama before he was the nominee.
And President Trump was like almost a week away from being the Republican nominee.
And I don't think that at that moment you put the same footprint for, you know, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Donald Trump.
This is a man who was a former president.
He's a polarizing figure, but he is also, you know, days away from being the Republican nominee.
I think that was, there are rules to be broken.
That would probably be one of them.
I would think the other problem is the lack of shared resources between local law enforcement, who know where every nook and cranny is in those farm fields, because most of them grew up there.
And not sharing communication with Secret Service who have spent a couple days there, but not the lifetime there, was also something that needs to be explored.
When it comes to responding to Donald Trump, one thing you have talked about is a theory on who takes Donald Trump seriously and who takes Donald Trump literally.
Just less than four minutes left here.
Wanted to give you a chance to talk through that theory, especially as it applies today.
So Donald Trump has been in the American psyche for decades, right?
He didn't just show up in 2015 and decide to run.
People knew who he was.
He was always in the New York tabloids.
He had a television show.
He had two television shows, I think, right?
And so people knew who he was.
They also knew how he comported himself.
So he didn't take everything that he said literally, but they took his candidacy seriously.
Whereas my profession takes everything that he says literally and doesn't particularly take him very seriously.
It was the two worlds that I straddle.
If I go on X, whether it's the far right or far left, it's a very different world than when I experience when I'm out interviewing people.
I don't fly.
I don't take highways or turnpikes.
I only take back roads and listen to people in their barbershops and their homes and in their businesses.
To make the number one best-selling on the New York Times, this book is really a testament to the people who opened their doors and to the people who bought the book and that live in the middle of the country.
I guess the final question would be after going through this experience with Donald Trump, talking through his thoughts and his feelings afterwards over the course of seven phone calls afterward, continuing to cover him on the campaign trail.
It was just last week where he mentioned you were in the building at an event that he was doing in Pennsylvania.
How has this impacted how you cover Donald Trump?
Does it change at all how you cover him as a president?
How do you deal with this as a journalist after living through it as a person?
I've gotten the same kind of greetings from Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator John Fetterman.
When I interview people, I tend to not ask the questions that is more important to someone that's like covering him from a policy perspective, from D.C. or from New York.
I tend to cover them through the people that I interview, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people that don't even vote.
And I do the same thing with Governor Shapiro, Senators Fetterman, and McCormick.
And I also did this with then-Secretary Hillary Clinton.
Coming up in just a few minutes here, we will be joined by Illinois Democrat Sean Kasten will get his take on the administration's handling of financial issues, the Epstein files, and all of Congressionals, the congressional agenda headed into the August recess.
Stick around for that conversation.
We'll be right back.
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Back with us in the Washington Journal, it is Illinois Democrat Sean Kasten.
He serves on the Financial Services Committee.
And Congressman, before we get to some of the looming fiscal deadlines and the congressional agenda, I just want to start with the question that we posed to Democratic viewers at the very beginning of today's program.
We asked the question to Democrats, are you satisfied with the direction of your party right now?
It frankly feels very lonely right now to feel like so many things that we take for granted as Americans are being defended solely by the Democratic Party.
And I think it's hard for a lot of us to process that.
I mean, do you have a Fifth Amendment right to due process?
Do you have a 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law?
Do you have an 8th Amendment right to not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment?
All of these things matter to the American people, and they are defended on a purely partisan basis right now.
And I love my Democratic colleagues.
Some of them are better at articulating that issue than others, and that's fine.
We've got a fair amount of diversity.
But like I said, it's just lonely to feel like we have to defend those things on a partisan basis that used to be.
You know, I'd remind you that back in 20, I came into Congress in 2018.
And at the time, Donald Trump was in the White House.
The House was controlled by Republicans.
The Senate was controlled by Republicans.
And I don't know how you would have answered the question at that time.
Would you have said it was Chuck Schumer?
Would you have said it was Nancy Pelosi?
I don't know.
And, you know, obviously, you know, we had a lot of success in 2018.
But when you don't control the executive branch, when you're not the leader of one of the two houses, it's difficult to get the national spotlight.
I think Hakeem has done an excellent job of running the House, but that's a different job than being a national leader.
I think that'll change a little bit in the next year, year and a half, as people start throwing their hats in the ring to run for president, and we'll start to see some people have some national messaging.
Yeah, so I've averaged a town hall a month since I've gotten in, and we do a mix between in-person and telephone.
I always joke that an in-person town hall is a conversation, and a telephone town hall is a lecture.
On the other hand, you get a lot more people in a telephone town hall.
What I've found in the last couple that I've done, and I don't expect this will be any difference, is the questions have become sort of existential.
You know, I'm used to doing town halls where you say, here's what Congress is working on, here's what I'm working on, here's some constituent services we can offer, and some people, of course, say, I like what you're working on, some people don't like it, why did you vote on this?
That's all pretty easy.
I mean, it's important, but it's pretty easy.
What's been really tough the last couple town halls is people are asking these questions like, you know, I'm fully documented.
I'm an American citizen, but I have brown skin.
What should I do if ICE arrests me?
That's a really hard question to answer.
You know, people saying, you know, will the courts protect us and what if they don't move quickly enough?
These are sort of deep fundamental questions about democracy.
And I've found that we need to be out there.
We need to be talking to people.
We need to be sharing what we know.
We need to provide hope where we can, but also be realistic.
You know, I increasingly feel like it's sort of like a Winston Churchill moment where the purpose of those town halls is to let people know that I have nothing to promise you but blood, sweat, and tears.
I know that if we don't fight, we will lose, and I can't guarantee that if we do fight, we'll win.
Does the rise in political violence, and by that I mean violence specifically against politicians for simply being a politician and being in a position of power, does it give you pause as you are somebody who is, again, known for in-person town halls?
We have a much larger police, both uniformed and uniformed, presence in our town halls than we used to.
You know, I had someone get on the stage with me that we had to have forcibly removed from an event.
And that happens.
I've never personally felt physically threatened.
Candidly, I'm a straight white guy.
People don't come at me the way they come at other people.
But it's a concern.
I mean, certainly some of my colleagues, and out of respect, won't name them.
They've shared stories of people calling their office in the morning and reading to them their schedule for the day, sending pictures to them with pictures of their car with the license plates.
That's really heavy stuff.
And we shouldn't require as a condition to service that you may have to martyr yourself.
But it's a reality of the moment we're in right now, that that threat is out there.
I mean, you should have Mike Johnson on to ask these questions.
We have only gotten one appropriations bill through the House on a purely partisan basis.
There's absolutely no way we're going to get the rest of those appropriations through.
The calendar has been hung up because the House and Senate Republican leadership decided to prioritize first Trump's tax cutting bill and then this rescission package, which essentially says that money that Congress has appropriated, the White House doesn't want to spend.
And Congress, on a straight party line basis, gave the White House approval to not spend that money.
So, you know, things you depend on, like PBS and NPR, they've just decided to cut.
The fact that they prioritized that shoot-up time on the calendar, but it also created a real crisis of trust because for those of us who's, you know, we have the power of the purse.
Our job is to set funding levels.
And to have that funding taken back raised real question amongst our appropriators of why should we trust you the next time.
And so the stakes are going to be pretty high.
I would like to tell you that we are working to push that forward this week.
As it turns out, last night Johnson decided not to bring any bills to the floor this week.
They shut down the rules committee because they didn't want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
So I'm not even sure if we're going to have a whole week.
It looks like our August recess might start early right now because they don't want to go after a pedophile.
I mean, this is really hard to look at what they're doing and saying you're justifying the right things, especially when we are running out of time to keep the government open.
The lead opinion column in today's New York Times is Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, former chairs of the Federal Reserve, writing about the need for an independent federal reserve.
As a member of the Financial Services Committee, what do you think would happen if Donald Trump fired Jerome Powell?
Well, ironically, interest rates would go up because if the rest of the world doesn't trust that the United States has a non-political treasury, then the question is, why should we buy U.S. Treasury bonds?
And we've already seen one downgrade.
We never had that before.
The U.S. was always the AAA rating, and we saw a downgrade recently.
We've seen a dynamic over the last several months where you saw money moving out of U.S. equity markets at the same time it was moving out of treasuries.
That's not supposed to happen.
And it's because money was looking for another haven.
So there would be a bitter irony if Donald Trump in deciding that he wants, he doesn't like the fact that Jay Powell is not lowering rates, fires him and causes markets to raise rates.
But look, there's a really good reason for an independent Fed.
You want your monetary policy to be countercyclical.
When the economy is running really hot, you want to make money a little bit more expensive to cool it down so you don't blow up a bubble.
When the economy is in a bad way, you want to make it a little bit easier to get money.
That's counter to the politics, right?
If you're the president and you're running a booming economy and you're a year away from the election, politically, you wouldn't want to slow down the economy, even though that might be the right thing to do fiscally.
So it's really important that we have an independent Fed and a lot of the strength of our economy and the reason why the rest of the world wants to invest in the United States, wants to use the dollar as their reserve currency, is because they trust that our monetary policy is set by someone who is insulated from the political process.
And this isn't something that you just break and then you fix it.
If you break that, it will take a long, long time to repair that damage.
And on the back end of that, we may not be the world's reserve currency anymore.
So the president's playing with something very dangerous right now.
So I think it is safe to say that the Republican leadership does not want to talk about the Epstein issue, and that's why they're probably going to send us home early this week.
That's why they've not allowed the votes to come to the floor.
There are the votes on the floor to compel the release of the Epstein files.
Thomas Massey and Roe Khanna have this petition that's out there.
And if there's nothing there, then nobody has anything to worry about.
The fact that they are working so hard to block its release suggests that they have some concerns.
And look, we all know the history.
We all know Donald Trump spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein.
This is not about gotcha journalism, though.
This is about do you trust the President of the United States to give you their word?
And I think a lot of the concern that a lot of people have with Trump is, you know, as the caller said, when he says he's going to do something, he doesn't do it.
When he says, I didn't know that person, it turns out he knew that person.
When he says that woman is not my type, and then, you know, is shown a picture of her and identifies it as his former wife.
There's a question of honesty here.
And if you don't believe that the President of the United States is being honest to you most of the time, a whole bunch of other problems come up.
And so Congress, I believe, is a co-equal branch.
That's a partisan idea.
Congress, I believe, when the president is not following the laws of the United States, is not obeying the will of Congress, Congress has an affirmative obligation to do some oversight.
And in this case, that oversight is, let's release the files, let's see what's in there, and let the chips fall where they may.
But between Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, there seems to be a real resistance to letting sunlight be that disinfectant.
So look, number one, I don't think you'll, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any Democrat who didn't condemn violence when it comes forward.
I think it's a little bit laughable to say that Indivisible is a violent group.
I just did a town hall with them last night.
They are awfully nice folks.
They go out and they hold signs at rallies.
To be opposed to fascism, anti-fascism, count myself among their numbers, right?
But it is the rare exception that's out there.
I think there is a larger, there's a larger issue here.
I mean, look, the folks who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were right-wing agitators.
That's pretty clear.
There has been no shortage of evidence from the FBI that the single largest terrorist threat in the United States is coming from right-wing groups.
The biggest terrorist group that's ever existed in the United States is the Ku Klux Klan.
The domestic terrorism is a much bigger threat to the United States than foreign-born terrorism.
And yet the FBI has been very reluctant.
They don't even really code domestic terrorism when it happens because that becomes political.
And yet, who are the groups who are saying we need to arm everybody?
Who are the groups out there saying that the violent will take it by force, quoting the Bible to justify acts of violence?
These are all coming from the right.
That's not to say that there aren't violent people on the left.
But if you look at the numbers, they are historically domestic violence in this country has come much more from folks who are seeking to protect and preserve the current status quo against people who are trying to expand democracy.
And that's as true today as it was during Reconstruction.
And if we're going to call it out whenever it happens, by definition, we're going to be calling it out more on the right.
So, you know, obviously I haven't seen the files, so I have to speculate here a little bit.
There have been, remember, there's been a lot of cases.
Jeffrey Epstein was actually convicted in Florida.
There was testimony in that case.
You remember there was a separate case that at the time Secretary Acosta kind of made go away, but there was a case in New York.
Gilsain Maxwell has testified.
There are a whole lot of witnesses who've testified, some of whom anonymously, some of them under oath.
And so I think while in theory you could imagine a world where the evidence was destroyed, you've also got the reality that a lot of people have seen the evidence, and so it would be hard to destroy it without raising flags of people saying, no, no, I actually saw those files and there was another picture in there that you didn't release.
So yes, they could.
It would be illegal and they could be prosecuted under the law if they destroyed it.
But my guess is that it would be hard for them to destroy that without somebody knowing that it was destroyed.
But I do think it's going to take a long time to repair.
I mean, you think about, you know, think about issues like U.S.AID.
U.S.AID has saved over 90 million lives.
People who have gone to work for government, public servants who've gone to work in some pretty remote and difficult places because they believed in the idea of America and that America should be the leading moral agent in the world.
With that agency now shut down, the rest of the world might reasonably wonder, wait, I thought the United States was the country that gave me food, that gave me medicine, that helped build schools.
I guess they don't do that anymore.
Who's going to come in to fill that void?
I don't know.
Maybe China.
But if we were to try to recreate that at this point, why would those people come back to work for us?
Why would they trust that something they gave years of their life to and always understood that whether a Republican president was in power or a Democratic president, there was a commitment to that idea of the United States being the moral agent in the world?
And if that's not there, why should those people trust the government to come back?
And I'm not saying we can't rebuild that.
I'm just saying it takes, I mean, I remember my dad telling me when I was a little kid, you only have to tell a lie once for someone not to trust you anymore.
Yeah, so a lot of it is, you know, we I sort of got to thinking a couple years ago, you know, and I was in my second term, of how many times I go back into a town hall and someone would say, why isn't Congress doing something that is really popular?
You know, women's rights are extremely popular.
Campaign finance reform, getting rid of gerrymandering is extremely popular.
Sensible gun control is extremely popular.
Why isn't Congress doing that?
And as you start working through it, you realize it's because our founders designed a government where the House of Representatives is representative, and the House of Representatives has actually passed bills to do everything I just described.
But our founders didn't really trust democracy, right?
Because our founders said, number one, we don't want the majority of the people to vote.
If you're female, if you're an African American, we don't want you to vote.
That's not trusting democracy.
They said that even among the people who they did allow to vote, we don't trust you to vote for senators.
We'll have those appointed by the states.
We don't trust you to vote for president.
We'll have those appointed by the Electoral College.
We don't trust you to fill the judicial branch.
We'll have that filled by the Senate who is not elected by the people.
Now, over time, we've, you know, women can now vote, African Americans can vote.
We do now directly elect senators.
We still don't directly elect presidents.
We still have the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote.
And so we have this situation where because of the government our founders designed, there's two ways to come into power in the United States.
You can either win the support of the majority of the people or you can win control of the minoritarian institutions.
And I think our democracy works better if we expand democracy.
And so we've proposed things like expanding the House, which would have the practical effect of largely eliminating the gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College.
We've proposed expanding the Senate by adding 12 new senators who would be nationally elected so that in every Senate vote, 10% of the Senate would be responsive to public will, not just the power of small states.
And we've proposed using the language of Article III of the Constitution that says that the Supreme Court's jurisdiction is limited to admiralty law, maritime law, disputes between the states, and appellate jurisdiction that Congress provides.
And since the Supreme Court is consistently frustrating the will of Congress, we've said, well, let's create a separate senior appellate court staffed with randomly selected judges for every case so you can't pack the courts.
Because I've always been really impressed with Justice Scalia's expertise in maritime law and admiralty law, and I'd be happy if he spent the rest of his life doing that.
But he seems to have a hard time doing things that are supported by the majority of the American people or consistent with the Constitution.
We can do that in Congress, and I think we should.
The House used to expand fairly consistently with population.
Little fun fact, the original Bill of Rights had 12 amendments, not 10, and the original First Amendment said that under no circumstances will a member of the House of Representatives represent more than 50,000 people.
If that was the case, do the math, I think we'd have like 6,000 members of the House right now.
But the flip side of that is that over the course of our history, members of the House of Representatives, you know, if you represent 30, 40, 50,000 people, you can have a pretty good intimate relationship with most of the people you represent, certainly most people who vote.
At 750, you get bigger.
There's only two countries in the world where parliaments represent more people than we do, India, and I believe the other one is Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken.
And so what we've done is really say, let's go back to what we did until 1920 and said, as the population grows, let's grow the representation consistent with the population so that we can continue to be representative rather than growing the number of people we represent.
So it's not making government proportionately bigger.
It's just saying let's keep up with a growing population.
So number one, I have deep respect for the office of the presidency, and I don't think that should ever be confused with respect for the person who's in it.
And vice versa.
The office is important.
And my disrespect, such as I have for Donald Trump, is that he doesn't respect the office of the presidency.
With respect to ICE, let's just talk about immigration here for a second.
The lowest propensity group to commit crimes in the United States are immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants are even less likely to commit crimes than people who come here through legal channels.
And that's really not that surprising, right?
If you think about what would happen if you've lost your home in a hurricane, you're a victim of gang crime in El Salvador.
You're looking for a better place to come for your family, even if you can't get here legally.
The last thing you want to do is get kicked out.
And so when we are prioritizing law enforcement going after groups with the lowest propensity to commit crime, we're intentionally not going after people with higher propensities to commit crime.
And one of the most consistent sets of crimes that I think you can clearly say Donald Trump has committed is white-collar crime.
He was convicted 34 times of falsifying financial records to hide white-collar crime.
The Constitution very clearly says that you cannot use presidential office to secure payments from foreign entities or from domestic people, what are called emoluments.
And yet the president has made over $600 million creating crypto platforms where he can buy and sell.
Crypto can be the broker, can run the exchange in these vehicles that appear to be more or less designed to launder money because in fact he's gotten payments from people who are now, you know, Chinese nationals who are now asking for pardons from him.
So the crimes are out there.
My bigger issue, because he's not the first president to commit crimes, why isn't the Congress doing oversight?
Because if we allow that to continue, then we're complicit in allowing the crime to take place.
And I love this country too much to allow that to continue.
But this is not about the individual.
This is about the office.
And if we respect the office being clear-eyed, that we have to hold it to a higher standard than the people who are in it.
Yeah, so I appreciate the way you framed that, Henry, because you're right that no president is going to fix everything.
And I think a lot of times we overstate the importance of a president and understate the importance of the organization that that president runs.
I spent 20 years in the private sector, 16 as a CEO before I came here.
And I don't think I ever had a board member or an employee who thought that the whole company succeeded based on what I did.
They understood it was, did I attract and retain good people, right?
And I think you look at presidents, look at do they attract and retain good people?
Do they do, you know, Abraham Lincoln famously brought in a team of rivals to challenge his viewpoints and to push him to think different ways.
Whether you agreed with Abraham Lincoln or not, he had people around him who challenged him.
I don't think that's true of this president.
Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is a lousy form of government, but for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
And it's lousy for all the reasons that you described, Henry.
It's slow, it's cumbersome, it bounces back and forth a little bit.
But I think what we have to do, not just as members of Congress, we as all Americans, is do we have a red line that as long as you're not tampering with democracy, you are no more entitled to your opinion than I am to mine.
But once you're tampering with democracy, you're allowing the creation of a system that would elevate your opinion over mine.
And that's where the danger comes in.
And I guess I'd just leave you, you know, with respect to immigration.
Well, number one, with respect to Medicare and Medicaid, Abraham Lincoln, Republican, famously said that the purpose of government is to do things that the people in civil society can't rightfully do for themselves.
What are we going to do to make sure that, you know, disabled kids have productive lives, if not for Medicaid?
What are we going to do to make sure that somebody who had a sudden medical emergency gets food if not for SNAP?
That's the federal government's role.
And I guess I'd just leave you with one of my favorite political philosophers who famously said that the day America stops welcoming immigrants to our shore is the day America cedes its position of leadership in the world.
I have always viewed America as a great shining city on the hill.
And if that city must have walls, make sure it has doors and windows so that all with the passion and the desire can come inside.
Coming up and for our last 25 minutes here before the House comes in, it is open forum.
Any public policy issue, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours.
Numbers are on your screen.
Go ahead and start calling in and we will get to your calls right after the break.
unidentified
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I'm just calling today to bring about this serious issue of how, under this current administration, small farmers, particularly those from minorities, have been underrepresented.
Funding has been cut.
Programs have been taken.
They recently covered the term socially disadvantaged farmers from the USDA.
And I just want to state that this is wrong.
This is appalling.
African Americans have some of the highest food insecurity rates in America, in my state of North Carolina.
And we have to do something to fix this fractured food system because we want to cut things like Medicaid, SNAP, and food stamps.
But we have nothing in place to help people who cannot have healthy access to food, even though that is a livelihood that has just been cut by this current administration.
I want to remind people about what happened before Obama got in office.
You know, everyone wants to blame the Democrats and Biden for immigration policy.
Before Obama got in office, it was the Republican Congress that allowed Mexican immigrants to come in, to come in and pick the field because actually the farmers had lobbied Congress at that time.
It didn't have anyone to pick the crops.
So it was before Obama got in office, under the George, George Bush Jr., yeah, they allowed 12 million immigrants to come into this country.
Now, you know, yes, there's been some since then, there needs to be, you know, different laws to control immigrant population or whatever in a fair by due process, of course.
But everyone now, now this president now wants to stick his chest out.
Oh, I'm doing the work.
No, actually, you're cleaning up the mess that your party created a long time ago.
And you can't, it's going to take a collective effort between Congress, the Democrats, and the Republicans to fix the immigration crisis.
Brian Lamb actually retired, and he still does his podcast that you can listen to on the C-SPAN Podcast Network, so you can still hear his voice.
But what's your question or comment, Larry?
unidentified
Well, it's more of a comment than anything.
I've been listening to it from its beginning, and I've been really kind of disappointed in it in the last few years.
I think the Washington Journal should make a little bit more standards.
Should have a meeting saying people, when they come in there and they have such vowel and hate for our president, that we got to tone it down.
Otherwise, this hate is going to get somebody killed.
And I think we need to tone the hate down.
And when your Democrat callers come in to talk about hate and misinformation about the president, you got to put a stop to it.
Otherwise, somebody is going to get hurt or even get killed.
You know, we got enough hate on CNN and MSNBC and the mainstream media and from the Democrats.
We don't need it on the Washington Journal.
It should have a little higher standards.
And that's my only criticism about you guys.
But that's what I wanted to ask you: as you just have a meeting and maybe talk about how to solve this problem because I'm at the point where I don't know if I really want to get up in the morning and turn you guys on.
Larry, if I get a call from a caller in the next 15 minutes or so who say all the same things you're saying, but about Republicans, that they're concerned about the same thing on the Republican side, what would your response be to that person who calls in?
unidentified
Oh, easily.
For every 20 Democrat, for every one Republican caller that may have something nasty to say, there's 20 Democrats in line.
They are protesting for the fact that a terrorist organization like Palestine, now 20, 30 years ago, you never would try to defend a terrorist organization or even defend MSM 13 and criminals.
You never would have seen anybody in the media trying to defend criminals and stuff like that.
So, yeah, for every 20 Democrats, there's one Republican.
And I do know, and it's for the fact that we try to keep our head clear, but every once in a while, man, after a while, you just want to let loose.
About 10 minutes before the House comes in for the day.
We'll, of course, be taking you there live for gabble-gabble coverage.
Already mentioned the meeting with the President of the Philippines that's happening at the White House today.
A few other events on the C-SPAN networks today.
The House Administration Committee is holding a hearing to review standards and practices used to maintain voter roles and voter lists.
That's happening live 10:30 a.m. Eastern.
We're going to show that on C-SPAN3, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now video app.
2 p.m. this afternoon.
The state and local law enforcement officials that are coming to Capitol Hill today will testify on past security failures and successes at large-scale public events.
It's the first hearing held by the bipartisan House Task Force on enhancing security for special events in the United States.
Again, 2 p.m. Eastern is when you can watch it, where you can watch C-SPAN3, C-SPAN.org, and the free C-SPAN Now video app.
No, I think there should be a third party that separates in the Senate and in the Congress that would make their votes indeterminate.
Robert's Call for Third Parties00:09:51
unidentified
So they just didn't have one party fighting against the other.
It seems like they're all Democrat or they're all Republican.
I just don't understand why we don't have a third party that would make up the third party to vote, and then it wouldn't be just one side or the other fighting with each other.
This is Wisconsin, Corine, New Munster, Wisconsin, Independent.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
I am first-generation American.
My mother was a legal immigrant.
And I believe in bringing immigrants into this country, but they need to work.
They need to learn to speak English.
My mother had to do all that.
And they need to get their citizenship.
They need a pathway to citizenship when they come here if that's what their goal is.
If they come here on a working visa, then they should regard what the visa has legally allowed them to be here.
And they should abide by that.
So I do believe in legal immigration.
The Democrat you had from Illinois at the end before he left implied that he believed in all these things, but he didn't imply that they would be legal.
And of course, everybody wants to come to this country.
Do you think there is room right now in our political system for a third party?
unidentified
No.
It won't never.
It's the same thing.
It won't never go nowhere.
Like Elon is mad over his little EV mandate thing, which I understand.
It kind of messes his business up because he was thinking that everybody was going to have to buy an EV car, an electric car.
That's all that's about.
This third party thing, it'll never work.
The only way you could even attempt to try to get a third party into there is it would just be too monotonous.
It would just be the same thing over and over again.
An independent or however you, if you want to call them American free rally, however you want to call that political party, whatever name you want to use, it'll always just be the same.
It's Bonnie in Florida to Tim in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Independent, good morning.
unidentified
Good morning, John.
Thank you for getting me on here in the last minute.
I want to say that I am an independent.
I do believe some of the things that President Trump has originally wanted to do were good.
Not everything is good.
One of the problems that we cannot have a third party in this country is because the Constitution has not been enacted correctly as it was initially proposed.
Initially, it was proposed that the House of Representatives would increase proportionately with the people in the United States, and that is not going to happen.
He would add 230 more members to the House, another 12 members to the Senate, and for the House to decrease the amount of people each member represents.
unidentified
Well, it would need to be a gradual increase to the proportion that it should be.
Should it be the proportion that James Madison wanted, it would now consist of over 3,000 members.
And my belief is that at such a rate, we would enable third parties because there would be so many representatives that would be overwhelming with how many parties you could have.