CSPAN - Washington Journal 08/25/2025

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Aug. 25, 2025 07:00-10:00 - CSPAN

02:59:47

Washington Journal 08/25/2025

Participants

Main

evelyn farkas

28:46

greta brawner

cspan 33:26

Appearances

brian lamb

cspan 00:45

donald j trump

admin 01:41

hakeem jeffries

rep/d 01:22

jd vance

admin 01:18

jerome powell

01:29

john mcardle

cspan 00:56

mohamed el-erian

01:12

sergey lavrov

01:08

wes moore

d 01:31

Clips

al green

rep/d 00:06

kristen welker

nbc 00:28

margaret brennan

cbs 00:26

patty murray

sen/d 00:08

sean duffy

admin 00:04

Callers

donna in west virginia

callers 00:33

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Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Calls and comments live.
		And then we'll talk about the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war with McCain Institute Executive Director Evelyn Farkas.
		And Politico White House reporter Maya Ward previews the week ahead at the White House and other news of the day.
		Also, we'll discuss President Trump's claims about mail-in voting and election security with Michael Morley, an election law expert at Florida State University's College of Law.
		Washington Journal is next.
		Join the conversation.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Happy Monday, everyone.
		Welcome to the Washington Journal on this Monday, August 25th.
		We're going to begin in our first hour this morning with the economy and your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		If you're a Republican, dial in this morning at 202-748-8001.
		Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		Independents, your line is 202-748-8002.
		You can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003 or post on Facebook.com slash slash C-SPAN or use the handle at C-SPANWJ on X and you can post there.
		We're going to get to your thoughts here, your confidence level in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		We're pegging this question off of a recent poll conducted by Pew Research, and this is what they found.
		36% of those that participated in the survey said they are not at all confident, while 19% said not too confident, 21% said somewhat confident, and 23% said that they are very confident in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		When they broke it down by party, 80% of Republicans were very or somewhat confident, while 11% of Democrats were very or somewhat confident.
		We want to hear from you this morning.
		It's your turn to let the President and Washington know what you think about the President's ability to make good economic decisions.
		From theeconomist.com, we are 217 days into Donald Trump's term.
		GDP grew at 3% per year in the second quarter.
		The unemployment rate is low at 4.2%.
		And the SP 500 is up 6.9% since he took office.
unidentified		The Economist says, though, it's too early to discern much effect on the economy.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		GDP grew in the second quarter, but the healthy headline figure was flattered by a sharp drop in imports.
		In other words, the tariff policies have yet to show up in the economy, according to news reports.
		What is your confidence level in Trump's ability to make good decisions?
unidentified		On Friday, or on Thursday last week, we heard from the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		That was Friday.
		He was in Jackson Hole for an economic symposium.
		And here's what he had to say about interest rate drops that could come later this year.
jerome powell ▲ ● ▼		This year, the economy has faced new challenges.
		Significantly higher tariffs across our trading partners are remaking the global trading system.
		Tighter immigration policy has led to an abrupt slowdown in labor force growth.
		Over the longer run, changes in tax, spending, and regulatory policies may also have important implications for economic growth and productivity.
		There is significant uncertainty about where all of these policies will eventually settle and what their lasting effects on the economy will be.
		Changes in trade and immigration policies are affecting both demand and supply.
		In this environment, distinguishing cyclical developments from trend or structural developments is difficult.
		This distinction is critical because monetary policy can work to stabilize cyclical fluctuations, but can do little to alter structural changes.
		The labor market is a case in point.
		The July employment report released earlier this month showed that payroll job growth slowed to an average pace of only $35,000 per month over the past three months, down from $168,000 per month during 2024.
		This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially.
		But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market, an outcome we want to avoid.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve Chair, on Friday, now when he was talking about that fall in job numbers, Washington Times says that the Powell said in that speech that there's been a sharp falloff in immigrant workers and labor force participation went down a bit.
		So this is what the Federal Reserve is concerned about now.
		And this could be why there is an interest rate cut in the fall.
		After the Powell announcement, President Trump talked about how the stock market reacted and his view of the economy overall.
		This is what he had to say, President Trump, on Friday.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		And now you look, and now you look at the stock market today.
		It's way up to start off with, from where I took it.
		And this market was going to crash.
		If Joe Biden or Kamala were president, this market, we would have had a crash like in 1929.
		You're not going to have that.
		It's only a question of how high is it going to go.
		You know, I had the strongest economy in the history of our country.
		And despite COVID, we had the strongest economy in the history of our country.
		And we're going to blow it away this time.
		I was always good at making a lot of money.
		And whether it was for myself or whether I like doing it this way better.
		I mean, I like making it for the country.
		Our country has been ripped off by friend and foe, nations all over the world ripped off.
		And the friends have been much worse than the foes for the most part.
		And they're not ripping us off.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		President Trump on Friday, you can hear him talk about the economy overall, expressing confidence in the direction that it is headed in.
		Do you share his confidence?
		What is your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions?
		Steve in Ormond Beach, Florida, an independent.
		We'll hear from you first.
		Steve, good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I voted for Barack Obama twice, and I'm very upset with Barack with the insurance deal, you know, with having to pay for it and being penalized.
		Anyway, make a long story short, I did not trust Trump in the beginning or Hillary.
		I put my own name in the election box for president.
		What I've seen, what he has done, I am 100% confident in President Trump.
		Everything he does, I got to say most everything.
		He's not a perfect, you know, he's a man.
		He's a human being.
		But most everything he's doing is correct, and I am very proud of him and very glad he's my president.
		Thank you.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And Steve, before you go, can you tell us some policy decisions that you think are correct?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Like what so far, 217 days in, what do you like?
unidentified		Well, let me tell you what happened.
		I had a heart attack six years ago, and the VA wasn't paying for it.
		I didn't retire.
		You know, I did my one term, and I was fighting with the VA saying, hey, I got excellent credit.
		My credit's going down the hill.
		I have collection agencies coming after me.
		So I kept fighting, and a few months later, the veterans call me, you know, and they say, hey, it's a good thing Trump's president.
		They said now you're going to have your bills paid and you can pick your own doctor now.
		I said, great, unbelievable.
		Listen to this.
		I was at a restaurant the other day and I was talking to the waiter.
		He's from Brazil.
		He goes, do you know since President Trump, he wasn't a fan of President Trump either in the beginning.
		He says it took me five weeks to get my legal, you know, to get my paperwork done to become, you know, illegal, you know, to get through, you know, he was like.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Visa.
unidentified		Visa, exactly.
		He said, I've been trying for years and years, and now I'm getting it.
		And he goes, and I invested, I'm making so much money now in my investments.
		And this is a man from Brazil working at a restaurant as a waiter.
		All right.
		And now with the tips and everything, you know, I have my son gets overtime all the time in his job.
		I got family members that get tips.
		They don't have to pay taxes.
		I'm 65, you know, here in Florida, I live.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Steve, are those folks that are getting tips, though, no taxes on tips, are they concerned at all or upset that this is just temporary?
unidentified		No, I don't think they are.
		You know, this is an advantage for later on when they run for the election again.
		They're going to put it back in.
		You know, they're going to, you know, the Democrats are probably going to fight against it and the Republicans are going to fight for it.
		They put it temporarily on purpose.
		That's an advantage for them.
		You know, so down the road, they could fight for it again.
		That's my opinion.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Steve, with his announcement there in Florida and Independent.
		Sandy and Florida Democratic caller, your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		What do you think?
unidentified		Well, I'm not sure he knows exactly what he's talking about, because I wanted to call when he was speaking about the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.
		I owned a company and I was one of the 125,000 employers that was surveyed in the last, I'd say it was in the last six or seven years.
		And I'm retired now, but I wish I'd kept a copy of that survey because I found that the questions that they were asking were statistics about my employee census, about the economy in our area.
		I'd been in the particular type of business for almost 40 years, and I can't believe that it took that long for them to find me to survey me.
		But I had to provide my actual numbers.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so Sandy, your point is, and how does that relate to the economy?
unidentified		Well, he's using that to say that those numbers are not correct and that those numbers affect the economy by the rates that are currently in place.
unidentified		And he took out the person that was in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be able to alter those numbers.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		So you don't trust the government numbers now?
		Yes, correct.
		All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Sandy and Florida Democratic caller.
		We're asking your confidence in the president's ability to make good economic decisions.
		The lines are on your screen.
		Republicans 202-748-8001.
		Democrats 202-748-8000.
		And Independents 202-748-8002.
		Take a look at the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning.
		Stagnant hiring is rising economic hazard.
		The good news is that unemployment remains low and employers haven't been all that interested in laying people off.
		The bad news is that companies haven't been all that interested in hiring either.
unidentified		The precarious situation means even a relatively small increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shedding jobs, a process that can be difficult to reverse once it starts.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Worries about this possibility have come to the fore at the Fed, especially after revisions included in the July employment report showed much weaker job growth in recent months than previously thought.
unidentified		This is why, while inflation is above the 2% target, Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday signaled the central bank's policymakers could cut rates when they meet in September.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Powell characterized the labor market environment as curious.
		Frank in Gadson, Alabama, Republican.
		Frank, what's your confidence level?
unidentified		Extremely high.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Okay, tell us why.
unidentified		Well, you know, any good thing takes time.
		And so the policies that President Trump has put in place are, you know, need to evolve themselves.
		It's not something that's going to happen like, you know, from one day to another.
		You don't build a house in one day.
		It takes time, especially if you want one to last.
		And that's basically what he's doing with his policies that he has in place.
		All right.
		Frank's thoughts there.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		John, Easton, Pennsylvania, Democratic caller.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		John, your turn.
unidentified		Hi.
		I have no confidence in him because he never got anything right.
		He said gas prices went down when he was elected, but they went up.
		And all these other things that he said are happening, there's inflation because he's not doing anything about the deficit.
		You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
		If the deficit is high, you're going to have problems with the economy.
		You're going to have problems with inflation.
		You're going to have problems with everything.
		He's adding on more than the Democrats did.
		A lot more.
		And that is going to be a problem.
		Have a nice day.
		All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		John, Easton, Pennsylvania, Democratic caller, mentions inflation.
		This is from the MarketWatch website, marketwatch.com.
		U.S. economy gets its mojo back, SP finds, but inflation is also picking up.
		The Fed is grappling with inflation and a weak jobs market, weaker than expected.
		Listen to CBS's Face the Nation yesterday.
		They spoke with the Alliance chief economic advisor, and this is what he had to say about the Federal Reserve.
mohamed el-erian ▲ ● ▼		He finally pivoted to the risk that matters most for the U.S. economy right now.
		By construct, the Fed has to deliver two things: maximum employment and price stability.
		And the Fed is looking at slightly higher inflation and a weakening labor market.
		And what Powell finally did, and many of us feel he should have done this earlier, is he said the risk to the employment side is higher than the risk to the inflation side.
		And therefore, an interest rate cut is warranted.
		As you know, many of us felt he should have cut last month.
margaret brennan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Fed chair said significantly higher tariffs are remaking the entire global trade system.
		Tighter immigration policy has slowed labor growth.
		And there are big tax and regulation changes you can't quite quantify at this point.
		But it's a lot of uncertainty.
		Since economists have to build off of models and data, how do you predict where we're going if basically he's saying throw out your models?
mohamed el-erian ▲ ● ▼		So one of the problems is he hasn't looked forward enough.
		He's been very data dependent and therefore he has tended to be late.
		Look, there is something promising in our future and that is productivity enhancement that comes from exciting innovation in AI and life sciences and robotics and other areas.
		We just have to manage a challenging few months in the period ahead.
		And if that challenge is mishandled, we will not be able to get the opportunities that we have that offset a lot of structural headwinds and that includes high debt and high deficits.
unidentified		A lot of policy there in that conversation and that clip that we just showed you on CBS's Face the Nation.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		She's talking about what the president is doing on immigration and tariffs and the tax bill that was recently passed, the so-called one big, beautiful bill.
		This morning we're asking you, so your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		What have you seen so far?
unidentified		And what confidence does that give you?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Here is one of our viewers, Deb, who posts on X, Terrible.
		She says, higher costs coming to a store near you.
		He's done nothing for the poor or the middle class.
		And then you also have Raymond on Facebook.
		The big, beautiful bill was signed July 4th.
		Give it time.
		Businesses have to plan.
		There were no assurance it would pass.
		Ask in the new year.
		We'll go to Christopher in Vegas, a Republican.
unidentified		Christopher, what do you say?
		I got to tell you, I get very disturbed when I hear my so-called fellow Republican saying how everything is honky-dory.
		Your first caller said that everything is peachy clean.
		Matter of fact, what did he say?
		One of his Brazilian waiters or something had just gotten his visa thanks to Trump.
		That's amazing considering that everybody who is talking about their visas right now are terrified.
		So I would like to know how he was able to go down and get his visa so fast.
		And then he also said something about the VA, if I'm not mistaken.
		I'm sorry.
		This sounds so scripted.
		This is why a lot of people in my original Republican Party can't stand.
		Everything is scripted.
		I hear people calling in, and it sounds like I'm listening to Fox News, Newsmac, MSNBC.
		Everybody is saying the exact same thing word for word.
		Okay?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Christopher.
		So tell us your perspective then.
		What's your confidence level in the present?
unidentified		I can tell you.
		I have to tell you, excuse me, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I have to tell you, I had a little issue with you.
		As you were opening up the segment, you were reading all the stats from the news from the article.
		You didn't mention the fact that the last two months of job growth have been horrible.
		Yes, we did.
		It's right there on the screen.
		73,000 jobs in July.
		You didn't mention that at all.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we did.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we did.
unidentified		Ma'am, I'm sitting here watching you.
		You didn't say one word about the jobs in July and June.
		You missed the shot in the document while you were talking.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Christopher, you missed the shot from Powell, where he talked about it.
		And I also mentioned it from the Washington Times.
		Sophia in Manhattan, Independent.
unidentified		Good morning, Greta.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, I don't have no confidence of Mr. Trump.
		Majority of the restaurant that I enjoy, they shut down.
		I voted for him in 2016.
		He had make me laugh.
		He had make me sad.
		He had made me anger.
		Now, I am so feeling horrible.
		A lady.com from Tennessee.
		You had a good day and I had a good day.
		She was 96 years old.
		She said she worked until 92.
		You see, Mr. Trump, in 1987, when the stock, I'm going to try to make it faster.
		And I had one question, Greta.
		In 1987, when the stock market crashed, he bought everything and sell it and he became a billionaire.
		Now, he is selling most of the people.
		He became a trillionaire.
		Question for you.
		Greta.
		Yes.
		I feel bad about this.
		C-SPAN, open poll used to be at least 30 minutes without interruption.
		You see, people call I call to listen to each other.
		I always say, if you don't like the guest or if you don't like the host, just change the channel.
		But 10 minutes is everything what we already heard and everything.
		And 10 minutes that the people quelling and then being recruited, even me, Greta, you know, it's stopping.
		But like I said, you know, but we're going to be survived.
		We're going to be okay.
		All we have to do is just be strong.
		And I feel sorry.
		I stopped working.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Sophie.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to go on to Benny, who's in Louisville, Kentucky, Democratic caller.
unidentified		Benny, we're talking about the economy this morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Your confidence level in President Trump.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		I have little to no confidence in President Trump's economy.
		I do, looking at the gas prices, they've not gone down.
		They seem to be going up.
		The food seems like the only ones getting enriched is President Trump, selling Bibles and Bitcoins and things like that.
		And it does scare me that that's entering our economy, the digital money and stuff, because I think it has the propensity to mess it all up, mess our dollar up, playing around with this Bitcoin stuff.
		So I have little to no confidence in President Trump's economy.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Benny, this morning, let's turn to USA Today.
unidentified		This is a recent piece published by them.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		U.S. will dodge recession, but Trump's policies will slow economic growth.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		This is from a report by Moody's Analytics.
unidentified		President Trump's aggressive economic policies will likely significantly slow the U.S. growth and push up inflation, but stop short of a recession or stagflation, the dire scenarios that forecasters envisioned before he took office.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Again, this is from Moody's Analytics.
		Stagflation is an economy characterized by high inflation, slow or stagnant growth, and high unemployment, an unusual and toxic cocktail.
		Typically, a sluggish economy leads to low inflation, allowing the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to stimulate more borrowing and activity.
		The Fed, however, faces dilemmas because lowering rates to bolster a softening labor market could further drive up inflation.
		Consumer price increases generally have eased substantially over a pandemic-related spike, but recently edged higher in part because of Trump's sweeping import levies.
		We'll go to Becky next, Memphis, Tennessee, Independent.
		Morning, Becky.
donna in west virginia ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Greta.
donna in west virginia ▲ ● ▼		I have zero confidence in Trump for anything.
unidentified		I'm scared.
donna in west virginia ▲ ● ▼		You know, I'm a senior citizen and I retired in January.
		And anyway, I just have no confidence.
		I think he's just for the rich, just for them to make more money.
		I don't think he could care less about poor people.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Becky's thoughts there.
		Woody in Augusta, Georgia, Republican.
		Woody, good morning to you.
unidentified		How you doing this morning?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Doing well, Woody.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What's your confidence level?
unidentified		Hey, I believe in giving everybody a shot.
		Everybody be complaining.
		The man ain't been in office one year.
		It's just the whole last name that these haters, the ones who hate him, they just hate his name.
		And he ain't did nothing.
		They ain't gave a man a year to find out.
		They're so used to getting so many freebies from the damn, so everybody need to work and save a little money.
		Not everybody going crazy.
		That's all it is.
		Ain't nobody.
		I don't see nobody losing everything.
		It's been panicking.
		I see all the athletes signing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts and everything else.
		Nobody ever get on C-SPAN and complain about the athletes making too much money.
		I don't understand that.
		But you want to talk about what Trump did during the when the crash market crash.
		Hell, everybody do that.
		I do it when it's tough down.
		I buy a low sale.
		I mean, that's the American way, isn't it?
		But it calls his last name Trump.
		Everybody wants to prosecute him.
		Get a man a chance.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Woody.
		Woody there in Augusta, Georgia.
		Ted in Hawaii, Democratic caller.
		Ted, we'll turn to you.
unidentified		Hello.
		Hello.
		And, Greta, I want to give you a pat on the back for being very nonpartisan.
		There was a guy a few callers back that was trying to criticize you for not putting a segment on.
		And I heard the segment, and you were right.
		Okay, that's just a pat on the back for your nonpartisanship.
		Thank you.
		But I'm calling about Trump and the confidence level.
		I'm out here in Hawaii, and we're pretty much on our own in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
		I've been out here 48 years since the Vietnam War got over.
		And anyway, I do not have confidence because I watch critically what goes on.
		And I would like to be able to say yes to him, but I got to be honest.
		And honesty seems to be in short supply in that city these days.
		And so, and I've been a farmer for over 50 years in Washington State here and Hawaii.
		And I consider all the farmers I know to be very honest and tell it how it is.
		Their life depends on it.
		And anyway, I just wanted to give you a pat on the back for being, yes, you were correct about that one caller that you had played that segment.
		I heard it.
		You were right.
		And I don't have confidence in what's going on.
		And I wish I could.
		I really do, because that's good for all of us.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And Ted, what about his agriculture policies are impacting you as a farmer and others that you know?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What are they saying to you?
unidentified		Well, I have to be honest, I did retire shortly ago, but I have a lot of cousins, et cetera, that grow apples and things in Washington State.
unidentified		And they have always been for Trump for that.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
		All right, Ted there in Hawaii.
		I want to share some other news with you this morning.
		Earlier this morning, Washington Post reporting that the National Guard in Washington, D.C. will be carrying weapons.
		That was the latest on the takeover of Washington, D.C. by the National Guard, by the president.
		And then this is the front page of the Washington Post this morning.
		Trump's threat of troops looms over big cities as well.
		The Illinois, he's talking about Chicago is next.
		That's in the Washington Post this morning.
		And then you also have this headline in the Washington Times this morning, free again.
		And then Mr. Garcia faces new ICE arrest deadline this morning.
		This is from the Washington Times.
		Stephen Dinan reports that lawyers for Kilmar Garcia said that the threat appears to be part of a strategy to coerce Mr. Garcia's plead to plead guilty to embarrassing criminal charges.
unidentified		They've offered to let him be deported to Costa Rica if he does agree.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		The lawyer said in new court filings, he has a Monday deadline this morning to check in with ICE, where the government has told him he could face a quick deportation to Uganda, a country to which his lawyers say he has no ties.
		A deadline this morning at the ICE office in Baltimore.
		So that's the Washington Times this morning.
		There's also this in the Washington Times.
		The president seeks billions from Congress to beautify D.C. streets.
		The president is eyeing roughly a three-mile radius from the White House.
		$2 billion to beautify D.C., and this comes after Republicans approved a spending bill that resulted in a roughly $1 billion cut for the district in 2025.
		So that's from the Washington Times this morning.
		There's other news to share with you as well.
		This is from the Washington Post: New Republican bill's latest push to extend the federal control of D.C. police.
		It comes from Congressman Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona.
		He's pushing to extend the federal takeover of the D.C. police for months longer through new legislation.
		Under Washington's Home Rule Act, which grants D.C. limited forms of self-governance, the president can take over the Metropolitan Police for up to 30 days if special conditions of an emergency nature exist.
		And the Senate and House must pass a joint resolution to extend that timeframe any further.
		So Congressman Andy Biggs is now going to introduce legislation to do that.
		So that's your update this morning on the federal takeover of D.C. police.
		We'll go back to our question on the economy.
		Guy in Stigler, Oklahoma, and Independence been waiting.
		Good morning.
		Go ahead, Guy.
unidentified		Hey, good morning, Greta.
unidentified		How are you today?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Doing well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What's your confidence level?
unidentified		My confidence level is extremely high.
		First, I'd like to back up under the Biden administration.
		You know, people were complaining about inflation and prices going up.
		Remember, under the Biden administration, housing prices doubled.
		Automobile prices doubled.
		Mortgage interest rates quadrupled from 2.5% to 8.5%.
		Groceries doubled and tripled.
		And here are Democrats complaining about a few little ticks going up, percentage points.
		Give me a break.
		And in fact, the last three months in a row now, month-to-month inflation three months ago was three-tenths of 1%.
		Two months ago was three-tenths.
		I'm sorry, two-tenths of 1%.
		Last month was three-tenths of 1%.
		Inflation is basically flat.
		All the propaganda, all the fear-mongerings and the fake news and the Democrats.
		We're going into recession.
		They're stealing your Social Security.
		They're going to cut Medicare and Medicaid, all a bunch of filthy lies.
		And if you look at the stock market, NASDAQ, record high.
		Dow, record high.
		SP, record high.
		Trump has brought in $17 trillion, trillion dollars of foreign investment.
		Yeah, it's going to take a year or so to really bump the economy up and hit the GDP.
		And in fact, the GDP, it went from 2% to 3% in the last six months.
		It's been 2% for the last five years.
		It's been flat.
		It just hit 3%.
		What an indicator.
		Go, Trump.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Guy, before you go, respond to concerns highlighted in this Economist article.
		The strains are starting to show, is what they write.
		Retail sales are weakening.
		Housing starts have dropped to their lowest since mid-2020.
		And an immigration crackdown is tightening labor supply.
		And the labor market may be softening.
		America added just 73 jobs in July, far below economist expectations.
		So, Guy, do you have any concern about that economic data?
unidentified		Well, you know, the immigrants before Biden opened up the border, there was already 20 to 30 million immigrants here to begin with.
		They added another 10 to 20 million.
		And out of the people that Biden brought in over the last four years, only 8% of them have found jobs.
		Over 90% are living off the government, the taxpayers, us, free education, free medication, free housing, free food.
		And remember, when they came across the border, they got a debit card preloaded with $8,000.
		And then every month after that, they got it reloaded again with another $5,000 every month.
		We've spent $800 billion in the last four and a half years funding these illegal aliens.
		All right, guys.
		Yeah, you know, interest rates went from two and a half to eight and a half percent.
		Confidence was low.
		The interest rates are starting to come down, but it's going to be a while until the housing market recovers.
		It went from the best housing market in history under Trump to the worst housing market under Biden.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What about during the pandemic, though, and the buildup with the appreciation during the Biden administration that folks saw in their houses?
unidentified		Yeah, housing prices doubled.
		Inflation, because of all the money they printed with these bills, the CHIPS Act, the infrastructure bill, the Rescue Act.
		And remember, the infrastructure bill, to me, that was an abomination.
		Only 9% of $1.6 trillion went to infrastructure.
		9%.
		Where did the other $1.4 trillion go to?
		It vanished.
		It disappeared.
		Nobody knows where it went.
		What a crime.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Guy's remarks there in Stigler, Oklahoma, an independent caller.
		I'll just piggyback off of what Guy was saying about immigration deportations.
		This is from the New York Times this morning.
		Take a look at this chart where daily ICE arrests surge the most this summer.
		These are arrests by ICE Field Office.
unidentified		The Boston, Miami, and Chicago offices cover multiple states and territories.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		So you can see the uptick.
		These are the cities across the country this summer where they saw an uptick in deportations from the president's crackdown on immigration.
		We'll go to Pat, who's in Florida, Republican.
		Good morning to you, Pat.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We're listening, Pat.
unidentified		Pardon me?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We're listening to you.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
		Thank you.
		Yeah, I was just going to tell you that here where I live in Florida, businesses are going up everywhere.
		And there's signs out there saying needing 140 employees.
		I think that Trump's done a great job.
		I'm making money now on my investments.
		He, you know, I'm like the guy I said earlier, you can't build a house overnight.
		You got to give him a chance.
		And I just think that, a matter of fact, yesterday I bought gas for $2.69.
		How long has it been since we've seen it that cheap?
		And I just feel like that everybody, you know, when you say Trump, you know, they just want a degrading, you know, you got to give the man a chance.
		And I appreciate you taking my call.
		And I think that if everybody would just sit back and realize that it takes time and he's doing the best he can do between that and all these wars going on.
		And thank you for taking my call.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Pat.
		Margaret, Fort Valley, Georgia, Democratic caller.
		Margaret, good morning.
		Share your thoughts with us.
unidentified		Yeah, I'd like to switch gay.
		President Trump is a pedophile.
		He knows he's a pedophile.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Margaret, we're talking about the economy.
unidentified		I want to switch gay.
unidentified		I want to talk about Trump.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're going to talk about the economy.
		We're going to have an open forum later.
		Angela, California, independent.
unidentified		Hi, how you doing?
		I've been independent since 1978.
		I'm nonpartisan.
		Here's my thought on everything.
		I'm looking for the future.
		I'm just turning 65 years old.
		I got a seven-year-old great nephew.
		20 years from now, what is his future going to be in this country?
		Is he going to be able to buy a house?
		Is he going to be able to eat?
		Is he going to be able to work?
		I'm noticing here in California, the majority of the employment in the medical field is going to the Asians.
		We keep talking about the illegal aliens.
		They're just doing the bottom of the line working.
		I'm in insurance.
		They're bringing in A1 now to start reading medical reports.
		So that means they're going to start throwing the humans out of that market.
		Military.
		We're playing with the military like they toy soldiers.
		Who is paying for all this military to be in these cities?
		Where's the money coming from?
		Now he wants to beautify D.C. Guy talking about gas in Florida is $2 and something.
		With a gas here in California, it's $5 and $6.
		The cheapest you're finding right now is $4.86.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Angela.
unidentified		All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Danny in South Carolina, Republican.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And Danny, your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
unidentified		No confidence at all.
		I just feel sorry for the Republicans.
		They're always talking about immigrants.
		Why?
		It's all right for him to marry Democrats.
		They don't have no problem with that.
		Thank you.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Danny, there in South Carolina.
		We're talking about the economy this morning in our first hour of the Washington Journal.
		And we want to get your thoughts, your confidence level in the president's ability to make good economic decisions.
		Here are the lines: Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We're pegging this question this morning off of a recent poll that was conducted by Pew Research.
		And when they asked folks your confidence in the president's ability to make good economic decisions, this is what they found out.
		36% not at all confident.
		19% not too confident.
		21% were somewhat confident.
		And 23% very confident.
		When they broke it down by party, 80% of Republicans were very confident or somewhat confident, while only 11% of Democrats were very or somewhat confident.
		In case you missed it earlier, this is what the president had to say, his take on the economy overall on Friday when he was in the Oval Office, responding to the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's hint at cutting interest rates.
		Here's the president on Friday.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		And now you look, and now you look at the stock market today.
		It's way up to start off with from where I took it.
		And this market was going to crash.
		If Joe Biden or Kamala were president, this market would have had a crash like in 1929.
		You're not going to have that.
		It's only a question of how high is it going to go?
		You know, I had the strongest economy in the history of our country.
		And despite COVID, we had the strongest economy in the history of our country.
		And we're going to blow it away this time.
		I was always good at making a lot of money.
		And whether it was for myself or whether I like doing it this way better.
		I mean, I like making it for the country.
		Our country has been ripped off by friend and foe, nations all over the world, ripped off.
		And the friends have been much worse than the foes for the most part.
		And they're not ripping us off.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		The president of the Oval Office on Friday with his take on the economy.
		Front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning, stagnant hiring is rising economic hazard.
		Even as employers keep workers, fragile job market is front and center for the Fed.
		The Fed pointing to lower job numbers than expected in July and hinting that that could be the reason why interest rates are cut in September this fall.
		We're talking about your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		Tariffs is also part of the mix here with the economy.
		When Pew asked about Trump's tariff policy, this is what they found out.
		39% strongly disapprove.
		22% somewhat disapprove.
		15% strongly approve.
		And 23% somewhat approve.
		We'll go to Pat in New York, Democratic caller.
		Pat, you are up first.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Yes, my concern about our economy is so many thousands of people have lost their jobs.
		How can the economy increase with the people that have lost jobs?
		And with the job increase, they say, it has to be because probably the people that lost their jobs that had a paycheck that could cover basically their needs now may have to work two or three jobs just to pay their bills.
		So I have no faith in the way that the economy is going now.
		And it's a concern.
		It's a very big concern because people are suffering.
		Inflation is going up.
		And if anyone says it is, something's wrong with them.
		Thank you.
		All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Pat's thoughts there.
		Michael and Logan, West Virginia, Republican.
		Michael, what do you say?
unidentified		Well, I'm 110% pro-Trump.
		And I was born here long ago.
		I left as a five or six years old.
		My daddy won't bring me up life of a miner.
		One grandpa never met.
		He was crushed in the mines where I was born.
		And the other one died at Blackwell.
		And moved to Woodbridge, Virginia.
		It's between Washington, D.C. and Fredericksburg.
		And I worked for the PAR company, Virginia PAR, and I was in a bad wreck.
		No alcohol dope, never did, never will.
		And then I'm on a check.
		I just cannot afford to live in Virginia.
		And I hear Interstate 95 is two stories high in places.
		And people keep on hurting there.
		You get paid good, but.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, so Michael, your confidence level in the president?
unidentified		110%.
		I'm pro-Trump.
		All right.
		All right.
		I'm going to go to James, who's in Alexandria, Virginia, Democratic caller.
		James?
		Hello, Greta.
		It just bothered me that all these guys, white guys particularly, calling in saying the economy is good.
		Trump left us a bad economy.
		He left us just one term, $8.1 trillion in debt.
		He turned around and killed 1.4 million people with the COVID because he thought it was a hoax.
		Now he comes in office after the Democrats, after four years, straightened out his mess.
		And then you have these guys calling in, giving data that they can't even verify.
		They listen, they listen like him.
		Just like he said, we spent $340 billion in Ukraine.
		We haven't even spent $200 billion in Ukraine.
		Just because of the white supremacy, they think they can get on the phone and talk all this stuff with no verification.
		And I think some kind of way we got to verify this information because this information is going out throughout the United States and people believe in this stuff.
		Trump, just ask for Trump grades in college.
		Let him produce that, just like he asked for the birth certificate for Obama.
		Once he produced those grades, we'll see what the dummy we have inside the overall office.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, James' opinion there.
		Back to inflation.
		USA Today, this morning in their newspaper, says Trump's tariffs are opposed by 61% of U.S. adults.
		A majority think the president is hurting how the federal government functions, and more people oppose his signature legislative achievement, dubbed the one big beautiful bill, than support it.
		Recent economic reports also show inflation creeping back up and job growth slowing, presenting more potential challenges for the party in power.
		Your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		Rip in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
		Republican, good morning.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Morning.
		Trump isn't stupid.
		Trump is brilliant.
		Putin's brilliant.
		There was a time probably that Biden, even though I very much dislike him, was brilliant.
		Just after you have been in the kitchen for that long and made so many mistakes, you learn a lot, as we all do.
		And we're all creatures of habit and we all learn a lot.
		The big thing that I've always stated is I think we have probably close to 100 million illegal immigrants in our nation.
		And we were always told we had 10 million, 9 million, 8 million.
		And now it's 30 million.
		But there are think tanks all over the world that say we have close to 100 million illegal immigrants in our nation.
		And it wouldn't surprise me.
		It wouldn't surprise me if Obama was not from this nation.
		Wouldn't surprise me if Kennedy wasn't killed by the FBI.
		I mean, none of these things really.
		People need to listen back to themselves and don't listen to yourself on the phone.
		Just go back to Washington Journal and you can click on it.
		You can listen to yourself as many times as you want to.
		All right, Rip.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Lisa in Georgia, Democratic caller.
		Your confidence in President Trump's ability to make good economic decisions.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		He didn't do it his first time, and he's definitely not doing it now.
		Let me just make a comment right quick on one of the callers just called about three calls.
		He said that give Trump a chance, give him a chance.
		He had a chance his first term.
		And I hope Republicans member when they came out the day after and said, we want to make Obama a longer term president.
		Now the rep Lisa, I apologize.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Our connection is not great.
		You're breaking up too much.
		We'll go to James in Arkansas, Republican.
		Morning, James.
unidentified		Yes.
		I would like to make a comment on the economy that Trump's doing.
		But right now, we're kind of in a bind out here in the economy.
		Trump says it's doing good, but what about people that's on a fixed income?
		That's got to go with the economy, too.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And what's it like, James, for those folks?
unidentified		Well, the gas went up.
		The electric bill went up.
		All the utility bills went up.
		You don't have enough money to pay your utilities or pay your bills.
		Yeah, what have you seen on your electric bill in the past few months?
		I've been paying over $200 the last two months.
		And how does that compare to previous summers?
		Well, the previous summers it was like paid five dollars and something, you know, but it wasn't no real high bill.
		So, what do you got the gas company right now charging away way too much for the gas?
		Yeah, gas is up as well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		So, here's a headline.
		Here's a headline in Forbes to share with you.
		Electric bills are up 10% so far this year.
		Why they could keep getting costlier.
		Electricity bills have increased almost 10% since the start of the year and could rise another 170 per year for households by 2035, thanks to the repeal of clean energy tax credits, new tariffs, and rapid expansion of electricity-hungry data centers to fuel a boom in artificial intelligence.
		You can read more if you go to forbes.com.
		CBS.com also has a similar headline.
		Let's go to Brittany in Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale.
unidentified		Good morning to you, Brittany.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I believe that Trump, his policy is to exacerbate income inequality.
		For example, when you look at military spending, billions of dollars go to very few people that profit from more.
		In the Middle East, when he went there earlier this year, he got those leaders to buy a lot of U.S. weapons in the EU.
		He also was encouraging every country to increase their military budget to 5% of their GDP.
		And with the war in Ukraine and then also with Israel, we keep sending billions of dollars for military spending.
		And like I said, it just goes to a few war profiteers and everyone else.
		It takes away from what that money could be spent in in our communities.
		Also, with the Golden Visa program, I'm here in South Florida.
		And so you have a lot of foreigners that are very wealthy.
		And when they are able to purchase homes, they are able to outspend everyone else and drive up the market for what housing costs here.
		And when you talk about the HB1 visas, and then when he fired a bunch of federal workers, what happens with them is because usually when you work in the public sector, you earn a little bit less.
		And so now those people are in the private sector, and those are very skilled workers.
		And so other people in the private sector have to compete with them for jobs.
		And then with the tariffs, I mean, whatever they do monetarily, what they're doing politically is they're uniting a lot of different countries against the United States.
		It's encouraging bricks, like what he did with India.
		I mean, he's using the tariffs almost as a punitary measure.
		And so it's an incentive for a lot of countries to want to de-dollarize the global economy.
		And it might cause the dollar to no longer be the reserve currency.
		And so it just doesn't seem like Trump is able to really relate to the working class.
		I don't think he actually cares.
		Even with the Build Back Better, I think a lot of those things that will hurt people the most, they don't kick in until after 2026.
		So the Republicans will be protected when they run again for Congress.
		And it's kind of a joke if you think otherwise.
		He's earned billions of dollars personally since he's been in office.
		And I think that's really all he's able to care about is profiting for himself and for his wealthy friends.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Brittany there in Fort Lauderdale.
		We mentioned Washington Times reporting this morning that Kilmar Garcia faced a deadline today to show up at an ICE office in Baltimore, where the government has told him he could face a quick deportation to Uganda.
		The lawyer said that the threat appears to be part of a strategy to convince, to coerce Mr. Garcia to plead guilty to embarrassing criminal charges.
		They've offered to let him be deported to Costa Rica if he does agree.
		Take a look at the scene outside of this ICE office in Baltimore.
		These are protests who have arrived in Baltimore this morning in support of Kilmar Garcia.
		There it is on your screen.
		All right, we'll go to Alan in Brooklyn.
		Alan, Democratic caller, we're talking about the economy.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Yes, thank you.
		Good morning.
		I want to revert back to something that was said on Russian television shortly after the election last fall.
		December 4th, 24, a number of Russian TV hosts were basically celebrating the list of very incompetent Trump cabinet appointees and saying if they were confirmed by the Senate, they would dismantle America from within brick by brick.
		I have never heard Trump refute that intention or that he shares this aim with those who are looking in from his friends in Russia.
		But I think that explains a great deal about what's going on here.
		Early in the first 2016 term, it was revealed that Trump had been approved to build a hotel in Moscow.
		He has developed other sources of untraceable bribe mechanisms through his adoption of Bitcoin, which makes it hard to trace the source of bribes.
		He has bypassed the emoluments clause by allowing foreign powers to give him money and enrich him.
		And it seems to me that everything he is doing is calculated to harm America and gain retribution not for voters, but for himself for having been insulted by losing in 2020.
		And whether you look at the inflation caused by tariffs, the hardships caused by shifting tax burdens from the wealthy to the poor, the unemployment, the reduced competency of our agencies by having them gutted en masse by the Doge mechanism under Elon Musk,
		the hurting of our alliances, both militarily and economically, threatening Canada and Mexico and other countries that don't go along with him.
		He's basically helping Putin gain a relative advantage over the U.S. All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And Alan, I'm going to jump in at that point.
		You're our last call here for that conversation.
		But the Washington Journal continues.
		Later on, in light of recent statements by President Trump about mail-in voting, we're going to have a discussion with Florida State University's Michael Morley on the role of the federal government in elections and voting security.
		Up next, after a short break, McCain Institute Executive Director Evelyn Farkas discusses the latest in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
		That'll start at the top of the hour.
		Before we get to that, though, a sneak peek at a new program, book program, C-SPAN is launching this fall.
		It's called America's Book Club and will feature interviews with some of America's most influential authors at some of the nation's most iconic libraries.
		C-SPAN's John McCartell recently caught up with the new host of America's Book Club to talk about what viewers can expect.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		We're joined at the Library of Congress by David Rubenstein, a businessman, a philanthropist, owner of a major league baseball team.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Why did you want to add host of America's book club to your resume?
unidentified		Well, reading books has always been important to me.
		As a young boy in Baltimore, my parents were blue-collar workers.
		Really couldn't afford to buy a lot of books.
		So they took me to the local library, and every week I could take out 12 books, and I would take out the 12 books, and I would read them that day, and I had to wait another week before I could take out another 12 books.
		And I always loved reading books, and it was something that inspired me to really move forward in my life by reading.
		And I always thought that if you read, you learn more, and you can become a better person by it.
		So while I can do many things better than I've done, one of the things I'm proud of what I've done is reading a lot and meeting a lot of authors and also trying to read as many books as I can every week.
		I carry a lot of books with me and I'm always trying to read two or three at the same time.
		One of the ways I've learned how to do this is I now have a number of programs where I interview authors.
		So I have to read the book to interview the author.
		I don't like to hear about a book from somebody else.
		I like to read the book myself and then interview the author.
		And I found these to be really intellectually inspiring kinds of events when you interview an author and they can tell you why they wrote this book and why they enjoyed this or why they enjoyed writing it that way.
		And so to me, it's very enjoyable.
		It's a good way for me to keep my brain fresh by reading books and then interviewing the authors.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of author interview programs out there.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What's going to be different about America's Book Club?
unidentified		Well we're going to interview the greatest authors in our country.
		That's one thing.
		Secondly, we're going to do it from great places like the Library of Congress, which hopefully will inspire people to want to visit these sites as well because the libraries in our country today are very important places where people who can't afford to buy books can go and borrow books.
		And you can do that at many libraries around the country.
		Hopefully people will also want to come to the Library of Congress where you can't really borrow books, but you can see the greatest books that any country's ever accumulated in one place.
		So it's a great site, as are other great libraries that we'll be doing the show from.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What makes a good author interview?
unidentified		An author who is very self-I'd say introspective.
		An author is willing to be frank.
		If an author is not willing to be frank, that's not good.
		Sometimes authors are very good at writing books and not good about talking about their books.
		So I can learn pretty quickly if somebody really is a good talker as well as a good writer.
		Some authors are really great writers, not great talkers.
		Some authors are great talkers and great writers.
		Doris Kearns-Goodwin is so enthusiastic when she talks about books, you just can't wait to read her books.
		The same was true of David McCullough.
		When you talk to David McCullough, you just couldn't wait to read the books that he's talking about.
		So some authors are great at that, and I hope to bring out some of that in the authors I interview with this program.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You're going to interview authors that have a lot of bestsellers.
		Stacey Schiff, Walter Isaacson, John Grisham has written more than 50 books.
		How do you figure out which book to focus on or what topic to focus on with that kind of author?
unidentified		When you have an author like John Grisham, he's written so many books.
		You can't do 50 books in one interview, but take the best-known books, and the ones that I'll focus on are the ones that he's probably best known for.
		And authors want to talk about their best-known books, certainly.
		So Walter Isaacson is a good example.
		He's written a lot of books on geniuses.
		And these are books, all of which I think are great.
		I've interviewed him about them before, but now what I hope to do is kind of bring them all together and interview him about all of his books in one interview about all the geniuses he's written about.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Where are we right now?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What's this place?
unidentified		We're at the main reading room of the Library of Congress.
		The Library of Congress building that we're at now was built in the late 1800s because the Library of Congress originally was in the library.
		It was in the Congress of the United States.
		When the Library of Congress was set up in 1800, it was really designed to help Congress, and so it was called the Library of Congress.
		And the Library of Congress was in the Capitol building.
		When the British came in 1814, they burned down the Capitol.
		They therefore also burned down the Library of Congress.
		Thomas Jefferson then sold his collection of books to the Library of Congress, and that became the basis for the Library of Congress's collection.
		Unfortunately, that collection was burned apart to some extent as well.
		But now the library has rebuilt large parts of that, and now the library has the most books and the most materials of any library in the world.
		This is the main reading room where anybody can come in and sit and read and do research.
		So it's as impressive a single room in any library I've seen in the world.
		It's an incredible site.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		On the wall, there's a lot of quotes in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress.
		One of them is by Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian.
		The quote is, in books lies the soul of the whole past time.
		What does that mean to you?
unidentified		Well, in books, when you read books and you learn how to think differently, you learn about the past.
		You learn about what made an author inspired to write that book.
		So I think people can live past the world in which they are by reading books.
		In other words, today you might be in a certain situation.
		You might not be that happy with your life or you may be very happy with your life, but you can transform what your life is all about by reading either fiction or nonfiction and be inspired to learn more about what other people have done and how other people have grown.
		So I think that one of the most important things people can do is to read.
		You can't read too much, but also increasingly, increasingly, what we're finding is that people read very little compared to what they used to do.
		A new study has come out that showed that people are reading less than they used to.
		And also people, when they read, they think reading an email is reading, it's really not quite the same as reading a book.
		So what I want to do is not inspire people just to read because you can read emails, you can read memos all the time.
		But when you read a book, you focus your brain.
		It takes hours to get through a book.
		And that's why I think it's important to focus on books.
		I'm not having a show on how to read emails or how to read tweets.
		That's maybe a different skill set.
		I think it's important to read books because it focuses the brain.
		You have to spend hours and hours in doing it.
		And I think you become a better person by doing that.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		A lot of great authors ahead on this series, a lot of great places and locations ahead.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		When it's all over, what will you consider success for this series?
unidentified		Well, success is getting people to talk about it and say, look, I just saw this author.
		I want to read that author's books.
		But I also want to read other books by great authors.
		So the success is measured by whether people not only watch the show, but also they're reading more.
		And what I want to do is get people to talk about reading.
		We have at the Library of Congress has a national book festival every year, but there are festivals for books all over the country.
		I want to get more people to go to these festivals, learn about how to meet authors, talk to the authors, get their autographs if you're inclined to do that, but also be inspired to teach your children how to read as well.
		Most children learn more about how to read from their parents than from any other mechanism.
		And so when parents aren't teaching their own children how to read or aren't reading to them, that's not a good sign.
		Encouraging people to learn how to read and also encourage their children to read is important.
		Sadly, in the United States today, roughly 14%, 14% of American adults are functionally illiterate, which means they can't read past the fourth grade level.
		If you can't read past the fourth grade level, your chance of succeeding in life is very diminished.
		A large percentage of people in federal prisons and juvenile delinquency courts are functionally illiterate.
		I think roughly two-thirds of the people in the federal prison system today are functionally illiterate.
		So what I want to do is get people at a young age to be inspired to read more, and hopefully parents will be inspired to teach their children to read.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The series is America's Book Club.
		The host is David Rubinstein.
		Thanks for your time.
unidentified		My pleasure.
		Thank you.
		Washington Journal continues.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And we are back here this morning.
unidentified		Evelyn Parkas is joining us.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		She's the executive director of the McCain Institute here to talk about the future of Russia-Ukraine and the war that is happening there.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		I just want to share the front page this morning of the Wall Street Journal.
unidentified		The Pentagon has quietly blocked Kiev's missile strikes on Russia.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What do you know about this policy?
unidentified		What impact do you think this is having?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think it's horrible.
		We should not be tying Ukraine's hands behind their backs.
		Their people are being targeted every day at an increased volume by Russia.
		And what Ukraine is doing in retaliation is targeting military and economic assets that the Russians have in the hinterlands of Russia that are fueling, literally, because many of them are fuel depots, fueling their military war.
		So they're viable and they're very important strategic assets that Ukraine is hitting.
		So we are hindering Ukraine in winning the war if we tell them that they can't strike those targets.
unidentified		JD Vance was on Meet the Press yesterday, NBC Sunday show, and here's what the vice president had to say about sanctions against Russia.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		I had the opportunity to interview Secretary Rubio last week, and he said he actually doesn't think that new sanctions would force Putin into a ceasefire.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		Are sanctions now off the table, Mr. Vice President?
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		The sanctions aren't off the table, but we're going to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis.
		What do we think is actually going to exert the right kind of leverage to bring the Russians to the table?
		Now, you said sanctions were not going to lead to a ceasefire.
		I think that's obviously correct.
		If you look at the way the Russians have conducted themselves, they don't want to ceasefire.
		They don't want to ceasefire for complicated reasons.
		We, of course, have pushed for a ceasefire, but again, we don't control what Russia does.
		If we did, the war would have been over seven months ago.
		What we do believe, though, is that we continue to have a lot of cards.
		The President of the United States has a lot of cards left to play to apply pressure to try to bring this conflict to a close.
		And that's what we're going to do.
unidentified		Evan Farkas, do you believe the administration has cards to play?
unidentified		And if so, what are they?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, the vice president is correct.
		The administration has cards, and we're the only ones with these cards.
		We have the strongest cards, and sanctions are one of them.
		Sanctions alone will not bring the war to an end.
		But the threat of sanctions actually brought Vladimir Putin to Alaska because it was in response to President Trump saying, I'm going to slap sanctions, increase sanctions, and the so-called secondary sanctions, which means if other countries buy oil and gas from Russia, they will be sanctioned.
		And he slapped them on India already and threatened to do so with other countries.
		So that threat alone was enough for Vladimir Putin to say, okay, okay, why don't we meet in Alaska?
		Which is what the president did.
		President Trump met with President Putin, except the problem was he didn't get a ceasefire, which is what he went in to get.
		And we've made no progress.
		So we should put sanctions on Russia now because we know that pressure works.
		It motivates them.
		On top of that, of course, we should arm Ukraine further because it's really going to be a defeat on the battlefield that forces Vladimir Putin to understand this aggressive foreign policy isn't working.
unidentified		You said we've made no progress since Friday.
unidentified		What do you mean?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Well, unfortunately, what the Russians wanted was time to continue fighting on the battlefield.
		They're making incremental gains on the battlefield.
		But mind you, meanwhile, Ukraine is developing missile technology.
		And as you indicated with your first question, they're hitting targets in the rear in Russia proper.
		So, you know, it's not that Russia's winning, but Vladimir Putin's convinced himself if he has time, he can gain advantage on the battlefield.
unidentified		Maybe Russia can win militarily.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Again, that's an open question.
unidentified		And so he's trying to get time.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		He doesn't want to negotiate yet.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		He doesn't want a ceasefire.
unidentified		Where do talks stand between the Ukrainian president and the Russian president?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Russian president has made it clear that he is not meeting with the Ukrainian president.
		And we heard, you know, on NBC interviewed foreign minister, Russian foreign minister Lavrov over the weekend.
		You're probably going to ask me about it.
		And, you know, he said, oh, the Ukrainians and the Russians can meet, but the two presidents won't meet.
		And I'll tell you why, because Vladimir Putin does not consider Vlodymir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, his equal.
		He wants Ukraine to be part of Russia.
		And he wants to control what happens in Ukraine.
		He's not going to meet with Zelensky unless Russia is defeated.
		And even then, I don't think Putin would sit down with him.
		And you don't need the heads of state to sit down to negotiate a final treaty.
unidentified		Let's listen to the Russian foreign minister on Meet the Press on Sunday.
sergey lavrov ▲ ● ▼		Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit.
		And this agenda is not ready at all.
		President Trump suggested, after anchorage, several points which we share.
		And on some of them, we agreed to show some flexibility.
		When President Trump brought those issues to the meeting in Washington with Zelensky present together with his European sponsors, he clearly indicated, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership,
		including the discussion of territorial issues.
		And Zelensky said no to everything.
		He even said no to, as I said, to canceling legislation, prohibiting the Russian language.
		How can we meet with a person who is...
unidentified		Evelyn Farkas, what do you make?
unidentified		He says the agenda is not ready.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because the two sides are too far apart.
		And the biggest issue are these security guarantees.
		Because for Ukraine, it means they need a guarantee that Russia will never re-invade.
		Russia will never challenge their sovereignty.
		They can't have a ceasefire and then the people are every day thinking we're going to get re-invaded.
		That's not tenable.
		And so what is a security guarantee for the Ukrainians?
		It means having the United States say, if you get attacked by Russia or any other power, we're going to go in militarily.
		So it's either bilateral or the United States as part of NATO.
		And anything short of that, I don't think the Ukrainians can and should accept.
		And the Russians are saying, well, we won't let NATO troops into Ukraine.
unidentified		You know, why don't we just have a great power agreement?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		We already had that.
		There's something called the Budapest Memorandum.
		In 1994, it was signed.
		The United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Ukraine signed it.
		And we said, Ukraine, thank you.
		Give us your nuclear weapons.
		And in exchange, if anyone invades you, we didn't think Russia would invade Ukraine, but anyway, we will come to your military aid.
		Now, the United States did kind of, because of course we sent military assistance to Ukraine.
		And when President Obama was in office with the first invasion in 2014, I was in the Pentagon.
unidentified		We defended Ukraine's sovereignty.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		But it wasn't exactly what Ukraine had in mind, I think, when they signed that Budapest memorandum.
		And this time around, they're going to want U.S. troops to guarantee.
		And frankly, if we guarantee, the Russians won't invade.
		That's the whole point of having that security guarantee.
		It's so robust that the Russians won't invade.
		We won't go to war with Russia.
unidentified		We're not going to go to war with Russia.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		They're not going to try to go to war with the United States.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What is the McCain Institute?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		We are a nonprofit.
		We focus on promoting democracy, human rights, leadership, national security.
		We are working globally.
		We support, frankly, individuals making change in their societies.
		We help our policymakers in the United States in articulating why we should support Ukraine, for example, or Taiwan, why we should stand up to China and Russia, why it's important to defend our way of life, and frankly, human rights for people all over the world.
		Because John McCain, for those who knew him, he was somebody who was unafraid.
		He would be standing right now in the well of the Senate saying, we need to do more for Ukraine.
		Let's not tie their hands behind their backs.
		Let's actually give them more arms.
		And let's unfreeze $300 billion that we can unfreeze together with the Europeans and give the Ukrainians more weapons.
unidentified		Evelyn Varkas is our guest this morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		She's the executive director of the McCain Institute here to take your questions and your comments about the Russia-Ukraine war.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Here's how you can join the conversation this morning.
unidentified		Republicans 202-748-8001.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Democrats 202-748-8000.
		And Independents 202-748-8002.
		Remember, you can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003.
		Front page of the New York Times this morning, below the fold.
		Donbass's future is pivotal to fate of Ukraine war.
		Would you agree with this news analysis?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yes, because that is where the fortification line is right now.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		That's where the Ukrainians are holding the line against the Russians.
unidentified		It's also really has always been the industrial heartland going back to the Soviet times.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		So munitions and other, all of the mineral wealth that President Trump is interested in obtaining.
		We have an agreement now with the Ukrainian government to get some access to the minerals and the revenue that will come from selling those minerals.
		That's all there in Donbass.
unidentified		And so what is the status then?
unidentified		I mean, where could there be, should there be middle ground when it comes to the Donbass region?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Or whatever.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		So the Russian military is only in part of Donbass.
		But of course, Vladimir Putin will demand what isn't his and what he doesn't deserve.
		And so he's saying, I want all of Donbass.
		I mean, rather than trying to compromise, he's actually asking for more.
		So it's a non-starter for the Ukrainians.
		If anything, the Ukrainians might be willing to give some territory, not officially, not under international law, but sort of see, you know, accept the reality that Russians occupy Crimea, for example, or that Russians do occupy part of Donbass and part of Lugansk, which is another area, right?
		They might say, okay, you're there now.
		You've been there for a while.
		We'll accept that.
		And in exchange, we want security guarantees.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And talk about Crimea, because we're showing our viewers a map right now.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And talk about when this was taken over and what it means for Russia, Russia's economy, and also Ukraine if they were to say, okay, you can keep Crimea.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Well, so Crimea, let's go back in history.
		Catherine the Great, you know, this is under the empires, or the empires, yeah.
		She was the one who actually captured it because you will know that Crimea has a lot of Turkic people there originally.
		And so it's a mishmash of people.
		But the Russian Empire took it over and they fortified it.
		They understood that it had strategic value.
		And when the Soviet Union fell apart, so then the Soviet Union, of course, was the successor to the Russian Empire.
		And this is why Vladimir Putin talking about the Soviet Union, it's all very imperial.
		So when the Soviet Union fell apart, the international community recognized that Ukraine was a sovereign state.
		The Ukrainians voted in a referendum for independence in 1991.
		In fact, they're just about to celebrate their independence on the 24th.
		I don't even know what day it is today.
		Maybe it's a good question.
		They did celebrate.
		Yeah, they did celebrate.
		So Crimea remained part of Ukraine.
		But the Ukrainians and the Russians came up with an agreement whereby the Navy, the Russian Navy could use Crimea.
		So there was a power, you know, there was a sharing agreement of the naval facility.
		That's actually, you know, in an ideal world, what you would go back to.
		But you can't if the Russians are imperial.
		So at this point in time now, since 2014, when the Russians invaded for the first time and shocked all of the Ukrainians, they essentially took over Crimea very quickly because none of us were ready for this.
		And frankly, if the Ukrainians had fought back, it would have been quite bloody.
unidentified		This is a little bit controversial, but certainly the Russians took it over, occupied it.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		There was always a high ethnic component of Russians because of the history of the military, et cetera.
		It was a kind of a playground for people taking vacations in Crimea because it's on the Black Sea.
		So Crimea can be potentially ceded, again, not in law by the Ukrainians, but they might be willing to make a deal if they can get a guarantee that they'll never get invaded again.
		I can't speak for the Ukrainians, of course, but that to me seems like it might be not fair, but at least sustainable.
		And they want a durable peace, and they want justice for the people who have been murdered, raped, the children who have been kidnapped.
		You know, something will have to be done about that as well.
		But in exchange, maybe, even though it's so unlawful, the fact that the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine and seized their territory, the first time since Hitler did it to Austria, which, by the way, is reconsidering whether they should be neutral because of all of this.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to calls.
		Bobby is up first in Portsmouth, Virginia.
		Republican caller.
		Hi, Bobby.
unidentified		Hey.
		I just wanted to clear the air about why we are there in Ukraine.
		Obama let the Russians in there when he was in office in Crimea.
		Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright went over there, I remember, and told them if they give the nuclear weapons up, we would take care of them.
		If the Russians invaded them or anybody else, so okay, so Bobby's referring to the Budapest 1994.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		He jumps forward to President 2014, the Obama administration.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What's your take on Crimea and the Obama administration, how they reacted to that?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think there's something there in terms of what Bobby's saying.
		So as I said, I personally don't think we should have encouraged, at that point in time, a fight between the Ukrainians and the Russians.
		I went to bed at night really afraid for the people, the Ukrainian military folks who were in the bases encircled, thinking if they put up a fight, they would be killed overnight.
		And so I was afraid of that bloodbath.
		And I'm guessing that that's also what was going on in the White House.
		I was in some of the conversations, but obviously not at the highest level.
		I will say, however, when he says Obama allowed, there were things that we could have done, and I was part of that administration, and I was fighting hard for us to do more to help Ukraine fight back and push back the Russians when they armed their proxies in another part of eastern Ukraine, so the Donbass and Lugansk areas.
		There, we could have done more.
		We could have been less risk-averse.
		And so I do agree with him there that, again, but that then follows all the way through the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration, where all along we could have done more to help Ukraine in the war, because ultimately, it's really going to be the war that's going to win this.
		Sanctions alone, diplomacy alone, won't do it.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		So what needs to happen on the war front then from the United States?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		We need to arm the heck out of Ukraine.
		The Ukrainians need to be given, of course, I mean, we shouldn't be holding their hands behind their backs in terms of telling them how they should or shouldn't fight the war, getting back to your first question.
		And we should make sure that they have the money to buy the weaponry, which, by the way, most of it will be purchased from the United States.
		Although, of course, the Europeans now, with President Trump's urging, are ramping up their own defense industries.
		But we need to make sure that we can get arms quickly to Ukraine.
		So there's also some element of the United States government and industry doing everything it can to get on a war footing, frankly.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Thomas, who's in Maine, Democratic Caller.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Hi, Thomas.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, and thank you for C-SPAN.
		My question regarding the origins or reasons why Russia or Vladimir Putin are invading Ukraine, obviously beginning with the takeover of Crimea.
		If you could explain more about why politically, economically, militarily, this is something they're doing.
		And thank you.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so Vladimir Putin essentially from the beginning has been clear that he wants to remake the Soviet space.
		Not at the very beginning of his term.
		So he came to power in 2000.
		He's been in power now, obviously, 25 years.
		In the beginning, he was more willing to work with the United States, and he wasn't so clearly neo-imperial.
		That increased over time.
		He became irritated at the United States for not recognizing Russia as an equal, a la the Soviet Union, decided that he was going to have to rebuild the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire.
		And so there was some tension between the states who were former Soviet states who wanted to become part of the West.
		So they wanted to become economically allied with the European Union.
		The Ukrainians in particular saw the Poles next door.
		During the Cold War, the Poles had been smaller, poorer.
		They were also under the Iron Curtain under communist rule.
		And the Ukrainian people, especially the young people, saw, wow, it's better economically for us if we're part of the European Union.
		Then there was the democracy part.
		The Ukrainians have always been, really since the 90s, struggling to have more democracy, way ahead of the Russian people, the Russian Federation.
		And Vladimir Putin sees that as a threat.
		He does not want democracy in Russia because that would be the end of his power, the end of his rule.
		And so in 2014, there was a struggle, and the Ukrainian government at the time, which was controlled by the Kremlin, said they were being courted by the European Union, but also Russia was saying, no, no, you should continue to be economically allied with us.
		Yanukovych, who was the Kremlin puppet at the time, basically lost his nerve.
		He said, first of all, he told the Ukrainian people, well, we're not going to join the European Union.
		They went to the street.
		They demonstrated.
		His forces shot at the people.
		The international community intervened because it looked like there was going to be a civil war, including the Russian ombudsman.
		There was a Russian representative.
		And the United States, the European Union, Russia essentially said, okay, we're going to have a provisional government and you're going to go to elections as soon as possible.
		In that timeframe, the Russian puppet lost his nerve, like I said, fled to Moscow.
		The Russians then pretended they had nothing to do with this interim agreement, but they went to elections.
		They elected, you might remember, Petro Poroshenko.
		He was the chocolate magnate oligarch.
		He was the first president before President Zelensky.
		And the Ukrainians were very clear that this time they weren't going to lose their democracy.
		They actually stayed on the square demonstrating for a long time to make sure that the government put into law the things that they wanted.
		They were very much anti-corruption.
		That had been a long time, long-standing problem, continues to be a problem in Ukraine, but they made a lot of progress against it.
		And even more recently, when President Zelensky looked like he was going to backpedal on corruption, the people went to the street.
		So the roots are really the desire for the Ukrainian people to have their own democratic way of life, to have an economic system that was competitive, that's not a communist system or not a crony system.
		And then also, finally, the desire to have their own state, because what the Russians are trying to do is erase the idea that there is a Ukrainian ethnicity and a Ukrainian state.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Going back to Russia's motivations, Politico's headline out of that Alaska summit, Sergei Lavrov's Alaska Outfit hints at Soviet nostalgia.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		The foreign minister shows up in Anchorage ahead of his leader wearing a t-shirt with the letters CCCP, Russian for USSR.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		I mean, he was essentially reminding everyone that we, the Russian Federation, are the modern day, or he was trying to, equivalent of the USSR.
		In some sense, they are.
		They're repressive.
		They put their opponents in jail.
		They're not quite as bad as Stalin was, right?
		But they are a repressive society.
		They are not as powerful, though, as the Soviet Union.
		So I think sometimes our president likes to also be nostalgic about the 1980s and see things through that prism.
		It's important to remember that the Russian Federation has an economy, I think, about the size of Italy's now, maybe Texas.
		It's not powerful.
		Yes, they have nuclear weapons, and in that respect, they're on par with the United States, although the Chinese and others are working hard to catch up.
		But the Russian Federation is not the USSR.
		This is Lavrov pretending that they're a big power, pretending that this is a summit like the Soviet days.
		That's not the reality.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Potomac, Maryland.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Mary, independent.
unidentified		Hello.
		Yes.
		Putin is like a playground bully.
		And would it help if America gave more offensive weapons that could penetrate Russia and hit Moscow?
		Would that help him to back off?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I think that's a very good question.
		And I think a lot of Russia experts, a lot of people who have met Putin, a lot of people who deal with the Russians understand this kind of Russian leader is absolutely a bully.
		And the way you deal with a bully is not by giving in.
		You have to hold your ground.
		And even better, give them offensive weapons.
		So she's absolutely right.
		And that's what I was getting at earlier when I said we need to arm Ukraine even more.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to California.
		Tom is watching there.
		Independent.
		Hi, Tom.
unidentified		Hi.
		Yeah, Evelyn.
		This is Tom.
		I'm glad to hear from you.
		I think that the meeting between Putin and Trump was just such a farce.
		It was amazing how Putin had Trump's number all the way and pandering to his ego.
		It was just unbelievable.
		And he talked about how Trump won the 2020 election, and he was certain of that, and that Trump, the war would have never started had Trump been in office.
		And he just, it was amazing how he fed Trump's ego to the hilt and Trump gave in to him.
		And also, I'm curious if you have heard of the North Koreans working in construction in Russia for slave wages, and the wages themselves go to Kim Jong-un as well as manning their factories and things in Russia.
		Thank you very much for your support of Ukraine.
		I'm half Danish and half Norwegian myself, but I think Finland has got their number and their arm to the teeth.
		And Russia doesn't want to mess with them because they know what they'd be up against.
		And I think we should do the same for Ukraine.
		Thank you very much.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Tom.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, Tom.
		You made a lot of really good points.
		So I think what Tom points out there is, first of all, that the North Koreans are working to help Russia.
		They have had this slave labor working in forestry and other areas.
		But what's more important and disconcerting is, of course, the fact that the North Koreans have sent thousands of troops to Russia to fight.
		The North Koreans pushed the Ukrainians out of this part of territory in the Russian Federation that Ukraine had seized in order to have a bargaining chip.
		The North Koreans are providing ammunition as well.
		And they're gaining technology, technological capability.
		And as we know, the South Korean president is in Washington today to meet with President Trump.
		North Korea continues to be a threat, and it's a greater threat today because of their work with Russia.
		So I think that's another case where we have to stand up to the North Koreans as well.
		With regard to Finland, you know, again, this is a loss.
		This is why Russia is not winning.
		You know, Finland, Sweden, they were neutral before.
		They're now part of NATO.
		As I mentioned before, there are very few neutral countries now in Europe.
		Austria is one of them.
		Austria is now thinking maybe we shouldn't be neutral.
		I don't know about the Swiss.
		So the map has changed because of Russia's aggression, but also because Russia is working with North Korea, with China, and with Iran.
		And that array makes it really global in terms of the stakes in Ukraine.
		It's not just about Europe.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Describe the threat to Poland here, and how is the United States addressing that threat and working with Poland?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So those of us watching Putin are much more nervous now that he might try some sort of a probe, some sort of something that looks less than military, you know, little green men, something the Europeans call sabotage, you know, blowing something up in Poland or in a Baltic state to test the political will of the NATO alliance.
		What he really wants after Ukraine is free will to take Republic of Georgia or the Georgian country, to take Moldova, to really solidify that neo-imperial, that former Soviet space.
		And the Poles are in the way, and of course NATO's in the way because NATO says you can't have the Baltic states, they're part of us right now, and you can't invade your neighbors.
		And we are the only collective alliance that's actually operational.
		And by the way, I should say the Ukrainians are probably the strongest European state outside of that alliance, so we should let them in quickly before they go on the other side.
		But the Poles are nervous because, first of all, there have been drones that have fallen.
		Last week, a drone fell on Polish territory.
		That's not the first time something like that happened.
		And as long as there's no great loss of life, our European colleagues have kind of shrugged these things off.
		I'm not sure whether that's the right approach because we need to deter Russia.
		We need to make sure that Russia is careful and does not violate NATO airspace, NATO territory, because that could be war.
		And we need to deter Russia from even thinking about war against the NATO allies.
		But if Putin thinks we don't have enough will or somehow there's a split between the United States and Europe because he's trying to create one, then he might actually be tempted to attack a European state.
		Probably not, like I said, with tanks, but some kind of operation, and he'll pretend that he's protecting Russian-speaking citizens in the Baltic states or something like that, similar to the justification, the fake justification in Ukraine.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Let's go to Lou, who's in New Jersey.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		He sends us this text.
unidentified		Good morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		To what extent are you willing to go spending hard-earned American money to provide for Ukraine?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		This type of escalation will lead to World War III and perhaps nuclear catastrophe.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		So it's very inexpensive.
		Senator Graham himself, who has, by the way, a big sanctions bill hanging out there waiting for President Trump to give the green light.
		Senator Graham himself said I think it's about 3% of the annual DOD budget is what we give Ukraine annually, we the United States, in military assistance.
		It's not a lot.
		It's pennies on the dollar because look what Ukraine has been able to do to reduce the threat posed by Russia to NATO and the United States.
		Because let's not forget, in the global context, we face adversaries, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran.
		The Ukrainians have severely degraded Russia, which makes them also a weaker ally for the Chinese, although the Chinese like what Russia is doing to distract us from what they're doing all over the world.
		But these things are interconnected, and so I think it's really important to hold the line against all of them simultaneously.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to New York.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Peter's there, Republican.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		I'd like to take issue with a few things that were said.
		The original agreements with Russia that there would only be nine members, now there are over 30.
		So Putin doesn't trust that.
		Secondly, if we give any guarantees to the Ukrainians that they won't be invaded, that is a de facto membership in NATO because that is the whole purpose of NATO, I guess, without them having to pay the 3% fee that NATO members have.
		And thirdly, as far as the $300 billion that are in European banks and the United States, that's not going to happen.
		This is not a new idea.
		And the banking industry will be against that because the whole banking system is based on trust that if you put money in those banks, that money is guaranteed because then other countries will feel, well, if I fall out of favor with the powers that be, they're going to take my money.
		So I'm not going to put my money in those banks.
		That's about it.
		Please comment.
		Thank you.
		Okay.
		There was a lot there.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		I'm going to try to remember.
unidentified		First of all, there was no agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies about the number of NATO allies.
unidentified		Once the Soviets decided the Warsaw Pact would dissolve, there was no agreement.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		There's been a lot of controversy about whether NATO agreed not to put forces in the eastern part of the territory of NATO.
unidentified		There was also no agreement.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		There may have been a hope and an assumption on the part of the Soviets that we wouldn't do that, but there was no agreement that was violated.
		And you can read everything that James Baker and the Bush administration people, you know, George H.W. Bush administration people wrote who were there at the time, and I think Gorbachev himself.
		So there was no agreement.
		And the reason that NATO expanded didn't have only to do with Russia.
		It was also for stability.
		It expanded southward and eastward in order to create the conditions of military stability.
		Neighbors would not fight one another so that economic development could occur.
		I remember that very clearly.
		I was sort of in that mix.
		I'm old enough to remember that firsthand.
		The other component.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		He talked about 3% GDP.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		So there's no fee.
		There is an agreement, though.
		Article 3 says you must invest in your country's defense, meaning you can't be a slacker.
unidentified		And President Trump has put pressure on the countries so that they increase how much they're going to do.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Ukraine is at like 35% of their GDP.
		So forget about it.
		I mean, they have invested away a ton, and they're going to continue investing.
		So there's no problem there.
		And in fact, as I mentioned, Ukraine is probably the best armed, equipped, capable military force in Europe today.
		I think, you know, maybe the Russians, you could argue the Russians are larger, but certainly if they joined NATO, they would be the best ones there, minus the United States.
		So, you know, I think it would be to our benefit to include Ukraine.
		And yes, Article 5, if we gave an Article 5 type agreement, if we gave a bilateral agreement to Ukraine, if Russia invades, the United States will come to your defense.
		It's not going to be like NATO Article 5 because it's just the United States giving that agreement.
		What it would resemble, though, is the agreement we have for South Korea or Japan, where if China invades South Korea or Japan, we will come to their aid.
		And so the same would happen for Ukraine.
		And ostensibly, you would guess we would station troops there because we did that for North Korea, sorry, for South Korea and for Japan.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		He also talked about the banks and trust in the banks.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		The banks, yes.
unidentified		Okay.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, but if you invade your neighbor counter to international law, counter to UN Charter, as they did in 2014, and then re-invade and rape, murder, kidnap children, all of that means you have forfeited your rights to enjoy banking.
		And we already, the international community already decided we kicked them out of the G8.
		We kicked them off of the SWIFT banking system.
		We froze their assets.
		They're already frozen.
		I mean, they should have written them off.
		So, and frankly, they are going to be targeted anyway for reconstruction of Ukraine.
		So, we may as well use some of them to buy weapons because $300 billion is a lot.
unidentified		I want to go to a text here from Rob, who's in West Virginia.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Russia isn't going to enter into a peace agreement right now when they have the upper hand.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		They gained momentum on the battlefield after Trump's temper tantrum and temporary suspension of military aid to Ukraine early this year.
unidentified		Do you agree?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I heard reports, and I, you know, I'd have to verify that, I think, with people who really know, but I heard reports that when we suspended intelligence sharing to Ukraine with Ukraine, that that was when the North Koreans and the Russians kicked Ukraine out of that part of territory that Ukraine had seized in order to have a bargaining chip.
		So they certainly took away that advantage.
		And yes, any time that President Putin gets to fight on the battlefield another day is a loss, frankly, for us and for the Ukrainians.
		And it's a tragedy, frankly, also for the Russian people.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Clyde's in Atkin, Minnesota, Independent.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, and thank you.
		I wrote a piece about this, and I know I don't have time to get it all through, but I want to draw just a couple of three very important points.
		The World War II was one of the most horrific events in our history, in our recent history, of what, may I say, good against evil.
		And the price that was paid by all of the blood and treasure of soldiers, Marine, Navy, even Russian citizenry that has died to create NATO and the Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Program is vital.
		And I think Trump has dishonored all these lives by this awfully suspicious relationship with Putin.
		I almost call it treasonous in a way.
		I just can't stand it.
		I think we should have put Putin on notice from the get-go.
		You don't stop, you're going to, we're coming after you.
		We have to stop him like we stopped Hitler, or this is going to continue.
		You don't see any of the equalities in Trump that they teach in West Point or Annapolis.
		This man is not the right man to do this.
		Obama dropped the ball, and Biden was a little bit too slow and a little bit too late.
		But Trump has got a relationship with Putin that just makes me want to vomit.
		I can't stand it.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Clyde, we'll take your comments.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Evelyn Varkas.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think, look, it is mystifying to me that President Trump oftentimes will dismiss what Russia is doing and doesn't seem to understand the history when he tries to say that there should be territorial swaps as if people aren't involved and history isn't involved.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		So there is some sort of lack of understanding there.
unidentified		And yes, the relationship with Putin, the fact that he likes him so much, I don't know.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Putin is a war criminal.
		There's an arrest warrant out for him.
		The International Criminal Court has called for his arrest.
		We didn't arrest him because we're not required to, because we're not a treaty to the International Criminal Court.
		We haven't signed the treaty.
		Had we signed the treaty, we would have been required to arrest him in Alaska.
		So, you know, someone like him should not be welcomed to the United States with a red carpet.
		Having said that, it is important to speak to the adversary and to have negotiations, but probably not at the presidential level, not until you have a baked deal.
		So it is regrettable.
		And I will say that the caller is correct, that World War II, we lost so many people there.
		And we said never again.
		And by the way, this also applies to the Middle East because people say, well, we carpet bombed in the Middle East.
		After World War II, we said never again will we have a Holocaust, a genocide of the Jews, a Holocaust.
		You know, Stalin carried out millions of murders as well of communists and others, not just Jews.
		And we said we're not going to allow that again.
		And we're going to make sure whether we like the borders or not, the borders are going to stick because that will mean that we're secure.
		And whoever has control over this territory, they're responsible for basic human rights.
		Yeah, you can be a kingdom.
		You don't have to be a democracy.
		As long as you make sure that people have basic human rights, the UN guarantees you the right to your boundaries.
		And again, for the first time since World War II, the Russians are challenging this.
		They want to go back to the sphere of influence system.
		They want to scrap the United Nations.
		That's a very dangerous world.
		Why does Viktor Orban like Vladimir Putin and what he's doing?
		Because Hungary, after World War I, and I'm Hungarian American, lost their territory to five different states.
		And Viktor Orban would like a greater Hungary again.
unidentified		You know, he's neo-imperial.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		That is highly dangerous.
		We would have more war in Europe then.
		And of course, we know the ramifications in Asia.
		Just look at China threatening Taiwan right now.
		There are all kinds of territorial disputes in the South China Sea as well.
unidentified		We don't want to open that can of worms again.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Georgia.
		Walter is watching there.
		Democratic caller.
		You're up.
unidentified		You're up, Walter.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		I agree with the previous caller.
		Mr. Trump or President Trump is the biggest stumbling block to helping Ukraine fight for freedom because all he has to do is encourage Congress to free up the money and pass whatever bills are necessary to get the aid to Ukraine.
		But I think he has a higher allegiance to Russia than he does to Ukraine and ours.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Walter, I want to take the first part of what you had to say there.
		All he has to do is turn to Congress and free up the money.
		Can you respond to that?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, President Trump, we see any legislation he wants, Congress passes it.
		And frankly, there's bipartisan support for Ukraine.
		Democrats, Republicans, there are 83, I think, or 82 or 83 people have signed the sanctions legislation that President Graham authored and then added, sorry, Senator Graham and Senator Blumenthal.
		And there's a companion piece of legislation on the House side.
		So they could sanction and then they could also authorize weapons.
		It's a small vocal minority in the House that opposes support to Ukraine.
unidentified		That's it.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		And the leader of the House, Republican leader Mike Johnson, would go along with President Trump.
		He's done everything President Trump has asked him to do.
		So the caller is correct that the cards are in President Trump's hands.
unidentified		What weapons specifically are you hoping Congress would approve?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Long-range artillery, obviously, to make sure that those strategic sites in the rear are hit.
		In addition to that, the most important thing, of course, from the civilian perspective is more air defense.
		President Trump has said, to his credit, that he wants to rush patriots to Ukraine.
		I just don't know what the status of that is.
		Our allies are helping with that as well.
		They're basically saying, okay, take ours, and then we'll get backfilled, if you will, from the United States.
		All of those weapons have to be made by the U.S. President Trump could help by providing more money and putting those companies on a wartime footing.
		For a lot of these U.S. companies, they want to make sure that they're going to have a pipeline if they ramp up a production process.
		Frankly, it's the United States government that can guarantee that.
		And we need more air defense.
		We need it for Taiwan.
		We need it for other places around the world, obviously the Israelis as well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Jack in Michigan Independent.
unidentified		Hi.
		You know, good morning.
		People often state that, you know, NATO expansion is, you know, a contributing factor to causing the war, and I would agree.
		But there's an even more direct cause that started the war.
		And it involves, you know, John McCain, the namesake of this McCain Institute you're with.
		Mr. McCain went over there in 2013 and 14 with Lindsey Graham and Chris Murphy.
		And we had all kinds of U.S. officials pushing for a governmental coup that happened in 2014.
		That is the most direct cause of the war.
		And that caused a split between the eastern and western regions of the country.
		And so it's challenging.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Let's take your point.
		Jack, let's take your point.
		Can you talk to what Jack's?
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Well, I touched on it earlier.
		So when I talked about the fact that in 2014, the Ukrainian people went to the streets because their leadership, their Kremlin-supported leadership, said, we're not going to join the European Union.
		And the people went to the streets and they said, this is unacceptable.
unidentified		They demonstrated they wouldn't leave.
unidentified		So the government shot them.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Over 100 people died.
		And those fallen heroes to this day, if you go to Kyiv, you will see the monuments to them, along with those who are dying every day on the battlefield.
		And the international community said, okay, this is, they need help here because the government was about to fall.
		And in fact, the leader fled.
		But before he fled, he agreed, okay, let's put together a provisional government.
		So this was not a coup.
		This was the leader of Ukraine agreeing with the opposition leaders with the international community working to broker an agreement so that they could work provisionally to get to an election.
		But the Soviet-backed, the Russian-backed guy, he knew he wasn't going to win in the election.
		And he knew he probably would end up in jail.
		And so he fled.
		Why would he end up in jail?
		Because he shot at his people.
		And so this was not a coup.
		This was the will of the Ukrainian people to be associated with the European Union.
		They felt that they had been betrayed by their government.
		They were calling for new elections.
		The international community interceded to stop the bloodshed and to try to broker a political agreement.
		And the Russians were part of that, as I mentioned earlier.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Evelyn Farkas is the executive director of the McCain Institute.
		Thank you for the conversation with our viewers this morning.
		We appreciate it.
evelyn farkas ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
unidentified		Thanks.
unidentified		Later on on the Washington Journal, in about a half an hour, a discussion on election security and mail-in voting with Florida State University's Michael Morley.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Before that, though, we'll be an open forum.
		Any public policy issue or political debate, we want to hear from you.
		There are the lines on your screen.
		Start dialing in.
unidentified		We'll be right back.
		Past president.
		Why?
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brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Sir Richard J. Evans has been writing about Germany and Adolf Hitler for his entire professional life.
		He was knighted in Britain in 2012 for his service to scholarship.
		From 2003 to 2008, Professor Evans published a trilogy of the Third Reich with a total of over 2,500 pages.
		His latest book titled Hitler's People, The Faces of the Third Reich, will be published in paperback in September.
		In his preface, Sir Richard, a former professor at Cambridge University, writes, The individuals who stand at the center of this book range from the top to the bottom, from Hitler all the way down to the lowest of the Nazi Party.
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		Washington Journal continues.
		Welcome back to the Washington Journal.
		We're an open forum this morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Any public policy or political issue that's on your mind, you can share with us this morning.
		We'll begin with President Trump's Truth Social post about Maryland Governor Wes Moore.
		He said, Governor Westmore of Maryland has asked in a rather nasty and provocative tone that I walk the streets of Maryland with him.
		I assume he's talking about out-of-control, crime-ridden Baltimore.
unidentified		As president, I would much prefer that he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a walk.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Westmore's record on crime is a very bad one unless he fudges his figures on crime like many of the other blue states are doing.
		But if Westmore needs help, like Governor Gavin Newscomb did in LA, I will send in the troops, which is being done in nearby DC, and quickly cleaning up the crime.
		Governor Wes Moore, Democrat of Maryland, on the Sunday shows yesterday, CBS's Face the Nation, and he responded to the president's Truth Social post.
wes moore ▲ ● ▼		The year before I became the governor, in 2022, Baltimore was averaging almost a homicide a day.
		And I came in and I said, I refuse to be a governor who just offers thoughts and prayers to this situation.
		So we said, we're actually going to work in partnership with Mayor Scott, work in partnership with local elected officials, work in partnership with local law enforcement.
		We made the largest investments in local law enforcement in our state's history, over $50 million going to Baltimore City alone.
		That came from federal Monday.
		That came from both federal and state money.
		And also, Maryland became one of the only states that actually helps to fund the U.S. attorney out of balance sheet, taking many of those gun crimes and actually turning them into federal charges.
		And the results have been incredibly encouraging, where Maryland's had amongst the fastest drops in violent crime of anywhere in the United States in the past two and a half years.
		The homicide rate in Maryland is down over 20% since I have been the governor.
		And the last time the homicide rate was this low in Baltimore City, I was not born yet.
		And so the reason that I've asked the president to come and join us is because he seems to enjoy living in this blissful ignorance, these tropes in these 1980 scare tactics.
		And, you know, just last week I was in Baltimore, and I was with a group called We Are Us, who's a violence intervention groups.
unidentified		And they say, we're all we got, we're all we need.
wes moore ▲ ● ▼		And that's exactly how people in this community feel, because while the president is spending his time from the Oval Office making jabs and attacks at us, there are people actually on the ground doing the work who know what supports would actually work to continue to bring down crime, but it's falling on deaf ears of the president of the United States.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Maryland Governor Westmore on CBS's Face the Nation responding to the president about potentially sending federal military to Baltimore and Chicago and other cities across the country.
		By the way, also reporting this morning, CNN, and the Washington Post this morning that the Guard, the National Guard here in D.C. will be carrying weapons as the control of the D.C. police force continues here in the nation's capital.
		Mario in California and Independent, we're in open forum this morning.
unidentified		Go ahead.
		Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my call.
		I'm first-time caller.
		I wanted to go back something to your guests.
		First of all, thank you for having your guests just on.
		And I had a question of a thought and experiment for the Ukraine Russia thing.
		And going back to her points of they were part of G8 and then it became the G7.
		And then originally, if I recall some years ago, Vladimir Putin was wanting to become a part of NATO.
		So I wondered if, and this would have been a question for her, what if we offered that to Russia and to see how they would respond?
		Because NATO is a defense primary purpose is for defense.
		What if you expanded that defense to include Russia and Ukraine?
		And then come up with, I just curious how it would go.
		Obviously, Vladimir Putin probably wouldn't go for it because the values that he has with becoming an autocratic dictator.
		But I'm just curious how the people would respond.
		And that's my question.
		All right, Mario in California.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll go to Frank in London, Kentucky, Democratic caller.
unidentified		Frank, what's on your mind?
		Good morning, and thank you for taking my call.
		I would just, I listen to C-SPAN just about every morning, and I enjoy y'all.
		And I just wanted people to realize that none of this stuff that's going on in the United States today or anything like that would have happened.
		It wasn't Trump's fault.
		It's not Trump's fault.
		It was Mitch McConnell's fault.
		If Mitch McConnell had been a man, Trump wouldn't have never been in office again.
		And I think everybody knows it.
		So thank you.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Frank in Kentucky, Mark in Pennsylvania, Republican.
unidentified		Mark, we're in open forum.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		Good morning, Greta.
		Good morning.
		You brought up the Garcia case a couple of times this morning, and I want to bring some light to something that hasn't been reported for four months on this, which is kind of interesting.
		The document that showed where he was eligible for deportation was never presented to anybody.
		And the Tennessee Star newspaper on April 22nd, Tom Peppert, he got a hold of the document himself.
		And it was very interesting because first, he was already eligible for deportation, and he lost the case.
		He even admitted that he was eligible for deportation.
		But then he tries to make an asylum claim seven years into, after he got caught, of course, where you're only allowed to do it for one year.
		The judge actually stated that you only can do it for one year and you're not going to get an asylum claim.
		But for some reason, he did give him a withholding to not to deport him.
		But it wasn't to El Salvador.
		It was to Guatemala.
		And so everything we've been told so far has been a lie about this.
		And where he was deported to was perfectly acceptable because that was his original home country.
		But because our lawyer that was representing the case for the United States to defend our position was a leftist and he got fired for what he did.
		He basically just said, no, we made a mistake.
		And the judge never asked for the deportation order, which is shocking to me.
		So he obviously was a left-wing judge, too.
		And it went through this whole court system: 17 judges, six court cases.
		It never should have gone to that system either.
		Here's another point that most people don't know.
		We have an immigration court system.
		There's 700 judges that do just immigration, and all the appeals go through that, which he had.
		He had all of his appeals, and he was ordered to be deported.
		The end result was he ended up in the other system somehow.
		And they let it get in there, and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which is shocking to me.
		And nobody, not one person, asked to see that deportation order because this thing should have just been thrown out and you're eligible to be deported and end of that.
		So here we are.
		Here we are talking about this four months later when all we needed to do was look at the deportation order.
		Now, what I suggest to people, if you really want to see documents and have it be analysis, go to Robert Govea.
		He's a lawyer out of Arizona.
		He does a YouTube channel called Watching the Watchers.
		He goes through the entire documents and you'll see the truth for once in our lives.
		We do not have to have opinions about it.
		It's the truth.
		He reads line by line, and you can read it for yourself and make your own decision.
		So that's where we're at with this.
		And it's kind of shocking that nobody's ever put, you can't even find it online, honestly.
		You can't find this document online.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Mark, I'll leave it there.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		I want to share with you and others the latest on Mr. Garcia.
unidentified		As we talked about, he faced a deadline this morning of 8 a.m. to show up at this ICE office in Baltimore.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Here is the New York Times this morning with the latest.
		Kilmar Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March and then brought back to face criminal charges, was detained again today, this morning, after the administration indicated that it planned to re-deport him to Uganda.
		The move came three days after he was freed from custody in a federal criminal case filed against him.
		Mr. Garcia spoke through a translator earlier this morning.
unidentified		Here's what he had to say: también qui ansu frido, separaciones y que vienco constantemente por la menasa decer separadas.
		Quiero decirle, an que la injusticia, no estabul piendo duro, no perdamos la fe to all the families who have been separated or to all the families who have been threatened with family separation.
		This administration has hit us hard.
		But I want to tell you guys something.
		Dios estaco nosotros, dios nún cano dejara, dios hace justicia, a toda la injusticia que ang echo.
		God is with us, and God will never leave us.
		God will bring justice to all of the injustice that we are suffering.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		That was Mr. Garcia this morning as he faced an 8 a.m. deadline to turn himself in at an ICE office in Baltimore.
		We're an open forum.
		You can talk about that debate as well as others.
		Hakeem in Memphis, Tennessee, Independent.
		Hakeem in Memphis, Tennessee.
		We're an open forum.
unidentified		What's on your mind?
		Yes, my concern is about Trump's relationship with Putin and his interest in people like Hitler.
		He seems to be the type of person that would self-destruct.
		And he also makes decisions with his power that just seem to be very concerned in these days.
		Like one day he could maybe cause a war in his own country.
		You're talking about Putin.
		Who are you talking about?
		I'm talking about Trump.
		Trump in his own country.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Got it.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		Hakeem there with his thoughts.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Dan in Oregon, Democratic caller.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thanks for taking my call.
		I called about nine months ago, and I've been trying to call since then.
		And I forgot to get a point across that I thought everybody might want to hear.
		And that is that everybody who was a federal employee that was fired with a letter of poor performance didn't hit the statistics as the unemployment numbers.
		And I thought that was just really dirty pool towards people who have served faithfully and had given their lives and hearts to helping America be great in the first place.
		That's all I wanted to say was that I forgot something important to say long ago.
		All right, Dan, we're an open forum here this morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We'll hear from Bill next, who is in Hackensack, New Jersey, Independent.
unidentified		Thank you.
		My comment is regarding the no-cash bail.
		It goes against common sense when the Democrats release dangerous criminals without bail because, guess what?
		They go on to victimize, rob, rape, and murder more innocent people.
		Here in New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy, Democrat, released a twice convicted criminal who then went on to murder an innocent mother and her 11-year-old daughter.
		This is why people are saying Mr. Murphy basically is responsible for their deaths.
		And God bless President Trump for protecting people of all races, specifically in Washington, D.C., and his common sense approach.
		It defies common sense to release dangerous criminals because they go on to victimize innocent people.
		Thank you.
		Bill's thoughts there.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		In New Jersey, an independent caller, on the Russia-Ukraine war, JD Vance, the vice president, was on Meet the Press on Sunday, and he said that Russia has made significant concessions to President Trump on Ukraine.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Here's what he had to say about the possibility of sanctions.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		I had the opportunity to interview Secretary Rubio last week, and he said he actually doesn't think that new sanctions would force Putin into a ceasefire.
kristen welker ▲ ● ▼		Are sanctions now off the table, Mr. Vice President?
jd vance ▲ ● ▼		The sanctions aren't off the table, but we're going to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis.
		What do we think is actually going to exert the right kind of leverage to bring the Russians to the table?
		Now, you said sanctions were not going to lead to a ceasefire.
		I think that's obviously correct.
		If you look at the way the Russians have conducted themselves, they don't want to ceasefire.
		They don't want to ceasefire for complicated reasons.
		We, of course, have pushed for a ceasefire, but again, we don't control what Russia does.
		If we did, the war would have been over seven months ago.
		What we do believe, though, is that we continue to have a lot of cards.
		The President of the United States has a lot of cards left to play to apply pressure to try to bring this conflict to a close.
		And that's what we're going to do.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		The vice president on Meet the Press yesterday.
		We're in an open forum here this morning.
		Any public policy or political issue that's on your mind, we want to hear from you.
		Before we go back to calls, we'll go to the White House.
		Joining us from C-SPAN's post at the White House is Maya Ward.
		He's the White House reporter with Politico to talk about the president's schedule here.
		Let's begin with his meeting with the South Korean president today.
		What is on the agenda?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a ton on the agenda today.
		Of course, trade.
		We know that that agreement was announced in July.
		But as with all of these agreements, you know, they're vague in details.
		They're mostly frameworks.
		And so the expectation is that that will be discussed today to try to push that forward.
		And then, of course, China is going to loom large over all of this.
		The expectation is, you know, South Korean defense will be discussed as well as U.S. troops in South Korea.
		And that's where, you know, on the China issue, we see a bit of a gap because, you know, the president is really keen on bringing allies together to lessen China's influence, whereas, you know, South Korea, they have taken really less of a confrontational and combative approach to China.
		And so that's going to be interesting.
		There's a bit of a gap there.
		But what I will add is that there is some room for cooperation.
		We are expecting shipbuilding to be brought up.
		That is huge for South Korea.
		And the president has been talking about this issue extensively as well and sees it as a way to really combat China.
		So that's one room that we, that's one area that we could really see some room for alignment.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Before we see these two leaders together at the White House, the president is expected to sign at 10 a.m. an executive order.
		Axios has the scoop here this morning.
		Trump plans order to end cashless bail in DC.
		According to Axios reporting, it's an executive order that aims to eliminate cashless bail for arrested suspects in Washington, D.C. Maya Ward, are you learning about this for the first time as well as Axios scoops this?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean we're waiting for more details from the White House today, but that's what we're hearing.
		I saw another report this morning that there could be another executive order targeting flag burning.
		But on the cashless bail, absolutely.
		I mean, this is a way that the president is going to continue to target DC and DC's policies and Mayor Mario Bowser as well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What else is on the president's schedule this week?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean we have some more executive orders.
		We're expecting to hear from more from him throughout the week.
		I think we're gonna, you know, of course, the president is going to be continuing to push on the Russia-Ukraine issue.
		Last week ended with just a great deal of uncertainty and confusion about where that was going to go next.
		I mean, we heard from him on Friday.
		He again kind of resorted to this two-week deadline that he likes to turn to saying, you know, we don't know where this is going to go next.
		He mentioned sanctions again and discussing that as a possibility.
		And, you know, the president really does believe that these talks are still on track, but, you know, my colleagues have reported that Trump's aides are increasingly acknowledging that this is an incredibly challenging issue that we're seeing unfold.
		And, you know, we saw over the weekend, I mean, Russia continued to hit Ukraine, continues to kind of throw cold water on some of the things that the president and his top aides are saying, whether that's, you know, that they're openly, they're increasingly open to security guarantees for Ukraine or even the idea of a summit.
		They're throwing cold water on that as well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And what about the prospects of the president's going into Chicago after the takeover here of the DC police in the nation's capital?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, I think it's becoming increasingly clear that this is not just going to stop with DC.
		I mean, we heard him also mention New York this week saying that Chicago was also going to be on his list and potentially the next target.
		And I think it goes well beyond just DC and tackling DC crime.
		I mean, as we increasingly turn to midterms, I think this demonstrates that the White House, you know, they see this as a political messaging opportunity as well, tying the issues of immigration, public safety, and crime together.
		This is a sweet spot for the president and one that he's going to try to carry forward, and other Republicans will as well across the country.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		On immigration, your story yesterday on the administration's efforts on detention.
		The headline you say it is built upon support from Republican governors.
		What did you find out?
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, the administration is rapidly trying to deploy the mega bill funding dollars, and a big piece of that is rapidly building up detention capacity around the country.
		They are turning to Republican governors to make that happen.
		I mean, we saw the model in Alligator Alcatraz in Florida.
		That is something that Secretary Noam has really used as an example.
		It's a soft-sided facility.
		And that's what we're seeing these other Republican governors do as well.
		They're building up these soft-sided structures.
		We've seen it in Indiana.
		And they're also turning to vacant prisons and jails, you know, facilities that they really don't have to do much in terms of building out.
		It allows the administration to be more efficient, to move quicker.
		And then for Republican governors, you know, it gives them a political messaging opportunity.
		They're able to, you know, tout they're tough on crime, tough on immigration.
		So this is really going to be a key part of the administration strategy.
		My award is the White House reporter for Politico.
		You can follow her reporting if you go to politico.com.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		My award, thank you very much for your time.
		We are, we'll go back to open forum here this morning.
		Any public policy or political issue?
		Eric's been waiting in Duluth, Minnesota.
		Democratic caller.
		Morning, Eric.
unidentified		Good morning, Greta.
unidentified		How are you?
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Doing well.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What's on your mind this morning?
unidentified		Well, the story in Ukraine is bigger than the American people want to acknowledge.
		I have read the history of the Ukraine and recently read it.
		And I just want to tell people that history can repeat itself and must be learned from.
		The Russian state has continually pulverized the Ukraine.
		And I mean, trying to remove those people from the face of the earth so that it could be repopulated with the kind of people they wanted.
		I want the American people to look around at what's being done to America right now.
		It's as if we're being relegated under the same algorithm.
		And I think that's important: that history repeats itself.
		This is a chunk of ground that Trump and Putin seem to have declared their own.
		And they're now treating America like Ukraine, shutting down all its valuable agencies, you know, all the things that are being done.
		Read the history of Ukraine and see how much it reminds you of what's going on now in America.
		Thank you very much.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Eric in Duluth, Minnesota, they're sharing this headline with you from the Wall Street Journal this morning.
		Texas Senate has backed the redrawing of its maps in that state.
		CNN reporting this morning that Governor Greg Abbott, Republican, expected to sign that legislation today, according to CNN's report this morning.
		Hakeem Jeffries, who's the leader of the Democratic Party in the House, responded to questions about redistricting efforts across the country as he vowed to respond in similar actions undertaken by Republicans.
		Here he is on CNN's State of the Union yesterday.
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		I've been in touch, of course, with Governor Kathy Hochul as well as the legislative leaders.
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		House Democrats are going to respond from coast to coast and at all points in between, as has been done in California, forcefully, immediately, and appropriately to make sure that Donald Trump cannot steal the midterm elections.
unidentified		Okay, can you be more specific?
		Let's just talk about New York, where you obviously have a window into what's going on there.
		We know what California is doing.
		They're going to try to get this on the ballot.
		What can you do in New York?
		Is it even feasible to redraw the maps before the midterms?
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		Texas acted in a way to try and rig the congressional maps so they could add a couple of different seats to the Republican column.
		Understand that Republicans right now have the narrowest majority, just a three-seat majority, of any party since the Great Depression.
		And they have no track record of accomplishment to be able to successfully run on, which is why they are running scared.
		California responded forcefully, thanks to the leadership of the governor, the legislative leaders, the members of the California congressional delegation led by Zoe Lofgren and Pete Aguilar.
		And we will continue to respond when necessary across the country.
		Right now, this has happened in Texas.
		California has responded.
		Let's see what comes next.
unidentified		So is there not a plan yet in New York?
unidentified		Is that what I'm hearing?
hakeem jeffries ▲ ● ▼		There's a plan to respond as appropriately in New York and in other parts of the country as the circumstances dictate.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Hakeem Jeffries on CNN State of the Union talking about redistricting battles taking place across the country.
unidentified		Coming up in the Washington Journal, we're going to be talking about mail-in voting and election security.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		That's our last conversation of the morning here.
		Want to share this ahead of our conversation.
		According to data from 2024, 35.2% of people who voted, they voted in person before Election Day.
		37.4% voted in person on Election Day.
		And 30.3% voted by mail.
		We're going to have that conversation coming up on the Washington Journal.
		Michael in Island Park, New Yorker, Republican.
		Michael, good morning.
		We're in open forum.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		I want to go back to what you were talking about before about the situation with the Ukraine and Russia.
		And while I'm a Republican and I'm a big backer of President Trump, I feel that the big mistake that they're making there is that they're coming at Russia from a position of weakness.
		All right.
		Trump more wants to make a friend out of Russia than he wants to end this war and win the war.
		Until the war is being fought on Russian soil in an offensive way, we're not going to bring Russia to the table and never going to come to the table unless the war is being fought on an offensive way on Russian soil.
		It's all got it, Michael.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Michael's thoughts there on the Russia-Ukraine war.
unidentified		More calls coming up here in open forum.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		I want to share with you what's happening on C-SPAN today and our coverage on C-SPAN 2 at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
		We're going to have coverage of the Democratic National Committee that's taking place in Minneapolis.
		We will hear from the DNC chair, Ken Martin.
		That'll be on C-SPAN 2 on our free video mobile app, C-SPAN Now, as well as online on demand.
		Ken Martin's going to be talking about the future of the party, including a proposal to eliminate corporate and dark money donations from the upcoming presidential primary cycle.
		Live coverage on C-SPAN 2 at 10 a.m. Eastern Time.
		At 6:15 p.m. today, South Korean president will be in Washington, D.C., as we told you, to meet with President Trump and offer remarks on foreign policy and U.S.-South Korea relations.
		He will be at the Center for Strategic and International Studies after he is at the White House, and we'll have coverage of that at 6:15 p.m. Eastern Time on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, and online at c-span.org.
		And then at 8 p.m. tonight, Mark Ulford, a Republican, will hold a town hall with his constituents as part of a 15-county tour through his home state.
		We'll be live in Missouri starting at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.
		Again, right here on C-SPAN.
		And you can also watch on C-SPAN Now, our free video mobile app or online at c-SPAN.org.
		Coming up here at 10 a.m. Eastern Time here on C-SPAN, about 45 minutes away.
		We are going to hear from President Trump.
		He'll be in the Oval Office signing an executive order, and we'll have live coverage of that.
		Joanne in Rhode Island, Democratic caller, Joanne, good morning.
unidentified		Yeah, what I'm going to say is heartbreaking, but I believe it's true.
		You know, I listened to the Vance's Fast Talk of Bologna Meet the Press on Sunday.
		And what's heartbreaking is that in the past, the USA had plenty of cards to play in regards to Russia.
		But we elected Donald Trump for president, and now we have no cards to play because Donald Trump is obviously a compromised man.
		Trump will never cross Putin, and that's been clear since his first term as president.
		You know, it breaks my heart to say that Putin obviously holds all the cards due to Trump's corrupt financial dealings with the Russian banks and oligarchs, and also for Trump's immoral behavior while romping around Russia with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein.
		So this is what happens when a country elects a corrupt, immoral person as their leader.
		And today we have more proof of that with the Pentagon trying to stop Ukraine from attacking military targets in Russia.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Joanne.
		Walter, Upper Marlboro, Maryland, Independent.
		Hi, Walter.
unidentified		Hi.
		Thanks for having me on.
		I've been watching your program for a while, and I've appreciated the kinds of things that you bring forth.
		Part of the problem that we have is we're dealing with a number of major issues simultaneously, and one detracts some attention to the other.
		For instance, in the Middle East, where the Palestinians are basically starving, few people know the story of Palestine.
		And even remember that Palestine, Gaza, was a refuge camp to start with back from 1948 with the Palestinian mandate.
		In terms of addressing that issue, it would be easy enough if the U.S. had the will or the interest to stop the starvation in Palestine or Gaza.
		All they would have to do is withdraw the support of weapons that are used to kill the kids and the women.
		You don't kill 60,000 people to defend yourself because a thousand people have been killed on your side.
		And I am not anti-Semitic.
		I'm a true independent and I am definitely not anti-Semitic.
		I am against killing women and children wholesale.
		If you go back and look at the history of Netanyahu, you'll notice that Netanyahu has been after the expansion of Israel and territorial aggrandizement in that area for a number of years.
		There's nothing new about this.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, and Walter, I have to jump in at that point.
		We're going to take a short break.
		When we come back, we're going to turn our attention to mail-in voting and election security.
		Florida State University's Michael Morley joins us for that conversation.
		We'll be right back.
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		Hear our live call-in program, Washington Journal, daily at 7 a.m. Eastern.
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		C-SPAN, democracy unfiltered.
		So you interviewed the other night.
		I watched it about 2 o'clock in the morning.
		There was a little thing called C-SPAN, which I don't know how many people were watching.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Don't worry, you were in prime time too, but they happen to have a little rerun.
patty murray ▲ ● ▼		Do you really think that we don't remember what just happened last week?
patty murray ▲ ● ▼		Thank goodness for C-SPAN, and we all should review the tape.
unidentified		Everyone wonders when they're watching C-SPAN what the conversations are on the floor.
al green ▲ ● ▼		I'm about to read to you something that was published by C-SPAN.
sean duffy ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of things that Congress fights about that they disagree on.
al green ▲ ● ▼		We can all watch that on C-SPAN.
unidentified		Millions of people across the country tuned into C-SPAN.
		That was a major C-SPAN moment.
		If you watch on C-SPAN, you're going to see me physically across the aisle every day, just trying to build relationships and try to understand their perspective and find common ground.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		And welcome forward to everybody watching at home.
unidentified		We know C-SPAN covers this live as well.
		We appreciate that.
		And one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell.
		This is being carried live by C-SPAN.
		It's being watched not only in this country, it's being watched around the world right now.
		Mike said Before I happened to listen to him, he was on C-SPAN 1.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		That's a big upgrade, right?
unidentified		Washington Journal continues.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Joining us this morning is Michael Morley.
		He's a college of law professor at Florida State University, and he's also a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises.
		Michael Morley, let's begin with the president's Truth Social post where he wrote, I am going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and also, while we're at it, highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial voting machines, which cost 10 times more than accurate and sophisticated watermark paper, which is faster and leaves no doubt at the end of the evening as to who won and who lost the election.
		Michael Morley, let's talk about mail-in ballots first.
		He calls them highly inaccurate.
unidentified		Yes, mail-in ballots are a part of the electoral system.
		States vary in how they use them.
		About two-thirds of states allow any eligible voter to cast a ballot by mail if they wish to do so.
		About a dozen or so states have what's known as for-cause absentee voting, where particular groups of people, such as senior citizens, people who are confined to their homes for medical reasons, in some cases, people who will be outside of their counties on election day, are permitted to vote by mail.
		And then anyone who doesn't fall into one of those categories has to vote in person, either during early voting in states that offer it or in their polling place on election day.
		And over the course of the 2024 election, we saw roughly 30% of votes nationwide cast by mail, whether vote by mail or absentee.
		And states really vary in terms of based on their laws and based on their political culture and what the voters there are used to and their own preferences in terms of how much of the electorate in a particular state chooses to use them.
		You'll see states that in an ordinary election, right, COVID obviously was different, but in the ordinary course of events, you'll see states that have as few as 5% to 10% of voters choose to cast their votes by mail.
		In other jurisdictions, you'll have over a third of voters choose to do so.
		And there's a handful of states, of course, that conduct their elections almost exclusively by mail.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Let's take a look at those numbers that you just referenced.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		30% of those who voted in 2024 election did so by mail.
unidentified		37.4 voted in person on election day, while 35% voted in person before Election Day.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Michael Morley, if you vote by mail, have states done so in a timely fashion so that voters know the American people know who won the election quickly.
unidentified		So states, as with many aspects of the electoral system, state laws differ dramatically.
		Florida, where I teach, has a series of laws that allow for election results to be determined very quickly, even though we have one of the most robust vote-by-mail systems in the entire country.
		That's because, number one, state law allows election officials to begin pre-processing of vote-by-mail ballots several weeks before election day.
		So, this means when election officials receive a ballot, they don't do final tallies, but they'll do all of the steps leading up to the final tally.
		So, they'll open the envelope.
		They'll make sure, yes, this is a person who requested an absentee ballot.
		This is a legitimate ballot that we election officials sent out, right?
		It's not some sort of fraudulent document, homemade document.
		They'll do signature match.
		They'll compare the information on the ballot envelope to the voters' information to confirm that, yes, it appears that the person who was entitled to cast this vote cast it.
		They'll run it through the scanning machine and they'll do everything except for determining the final tally of how many votes each candidate received.
		So the longer before election day you start doing that, if all of that work is already done, that makes it very easy to then be able to determine the results on election night.
		Some of the other factors that vary dramatically by state: what is the deadline for returning absentee ballots, right?
		In many states, including Florida, domestic voters are required to ensure that election officials have actually received their absentee ballot by the close of polls on election day, whereas other jurisdictions may take longer to be able to get results because they allow absentee ballots that are either postmarked by election day or in some cases that lack a legible postmark to be received for days or in some cases, even a week or two afterwards.
		I believe the longest period in the country is 21 days after election day.
		Again, the ballot still has to be completed by the voter and mailed out by election day, but by the close of polls, right, election officials don't even know how many legally valid votes have been cast in that election.
		One of the other major factors is what's called the cure period for provisional ballots, right?
		So if you show up to a polling place and let's say you don't have your ID, or in some cases, let's say election officials don't think your signature matches, rather than say, or you're not, or let's say you don't appear in the registration books, even though you know or you believe that you've registered to vote in that polling location, rather than turning you away and saying you're not allowed to vote, federal law and state law requires election officials to give you a provisional ballot.
		So you fill out the ballot, you choose the candidate you want.
		That ballot is put in a sealed envelope and then it's set aside.
		And so then states vary in terms of how many days after election day the voter has to cure that defect.
		So to go back to election officials to the election office and show their ID or show their voter registration card, provide a different signature, provide whatever information was missing that they didn't have with them at the polling location.
		And so the longer the post-election cure period, again, election officials don't know how many legally valid votes have been cast in that election because you don't know how many of those provisional ballots are going to get cured.
		And in some cases, you might have hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots, particularly in a high-turnout election, such as a presidential election.
		And so it's sort of these under-the-radar, technical nuts and bolts aspects of state law that determine if you have, even if you have robust vote by mail, are election officials going to be able to generate results quickly?
		And again, this is the initial results, the unofficial results.
		Every state in the country has a more formal canvassing process that occurs over the days and weeks following the election.
		But those initial unofficial results that get announced and that allow networks to call particular races, again, all unofficially, it's all these technical nuts and bolts aspects of state law.
		When does pre-processing begin?
		What is the actual deadline for the return of ballots?
		How long is the cure period?
		These are, and of course, resources, right?
		How are election officials adequately staffed?
		Do they have the funds?
		Do they have the resources necessary to be able to process the amount of absentee ballots they're receiving?
		These are the factors that determine how quickly you're going to get results.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We'll ask our viewers to join us in this conversation.
		We'll take their questions and comments this morning.
		Michael Morley, Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001.
		Democrats 202-748-8000.
		And Independents, 202-748-8002.
		Michael Morley, going on to voting machines.
		I misspoke.
		The president called the voting machines highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial.
		Can you respond to that?
unidentified		Sure.
		So again, the term voting machine can refer to many different types of technologies.
		Jurisdictions across the country use different types of technologies in order to allow people to vote.
		Of course, right here in Florida during the 2000 election, many counties use the punch card ballots, which of course the nation came to become familiar with and ultimately led to the post-election dispute in Bush v. Gore.
		And so since that crisis, states have been looking to move away from those sort of less reliable, particularly manual type devices, and looked for machines that would be able to assist.
		And so on the one hand, when you say voting machine, you might be referring to what's called a DRE device, where a voter presses a button on a screen and that's it.
		You have to count on the machine to record the vote.
		You have to count on the machine to tally the vote and the voter doesn't see anything else about their vote.
		Those have become extremely rare based on, according to the most recent report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, somewhere about only 1% of the jurisdictions in our country still use those sort of black box DRE machines.
		And I would expect over the upcoming election cycles, we're going to see their usage further reduced and even eliminated.
		On the other hand, many states and many, many counties in Florida have what's called ballot marking devices, where voters, rather than having to manually fill out the ballot themselves, instead they go to a touch screen, they press the buttons next to the names of the candidates they want, and the machine actually prints them a ballot that is already pre-prepared for them.
		And so their voters then can then look at that ballot.
		They can confirm, yes, these are the people who I want them to vote for.
		These are the candidates that I chose.
		If there's a mistake, if the machine didn't record their touch correctly, or perhaps they accidentally touched the wrong button, they can return that ballot to election officials and have the machine generate a new correct one for them.
		And then once you have that printed ballot, you avoid the issues that arise when the voters themselves, particularly elderly people, people who face physical challenges, perhaps if they were required to manually complete the ballot, they don't write dark enough where they might make stray marks, right?
		Anybody who's taken the SAT or standardized tests know how sensitive some of these scanning machines can be.
		And so having the ballot marking device prepare the ballot eliminates that opportunity for manual human error while still letting the voters confirm, yes, these are the candidates I chose.
		And then many jurisdictions have tabulation devices where those ballots are then scanned in.
		So you have a PDF image or you have some other digital image of the ballot.
		The tabulator records the votes, but you still have that paper trail.
		You still have those ballots in the machine.
		So you have the opportunity for a hand recount if necessary.
		You have the opportunity for a post-election audit in order to confirm the accuracy of the results.
		And before any of these tabulators are used, states require what's called logic and accuracy testing before the election.
		So, all of these tabulators are tested in public.
		Candidates are allowed to show up.
		Political party representatives are allowed to show up.
		Members of the press, the public can show up, and election officials will run a known stack of ballots where they know exactly how many votes were cast for each candidate.
		They'll run a known stack of ballots through each of these machines to confirm and to demonstrate, yes, they're properly calibrated.
		Yes, they're properly programmed, they're working correctly.
		If some of the machines are returning inaccurate results, they'll be taken out of service or they'll be reprogrammed, recalculated, right?
		They won't be used unless and until election officials can demonstrate, yes, they're programmed accurately, yes, they're working properly.
		And again, you have that paper trail if you have a close election or if doubts do arise as to the validity of proper results.
		So, talking about voting machines as a category, I think, like I said, that there are lots of different types of devices.
		It could be that term could be referring to, some where it's just the touchscreen and nothing else and no paper trail.
		Those, those, those have been.
		They've been challenged in court.
		Most election officials have chosen to move away from them.
		But other sorts of things like ballot marking devices, like the modern tabulation machines, I think help to promote election integrity.
		I think they help to, again, we talked before about getting results as quick as you can, getting accurate results as quick as you can after election day.
		Having those tabulating machines do that initial determination of results is certainly much quicker and, based on empirical research, much more reliable than having to go through and wait for hand counts of every single vote and every single ballot cast in every single race.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Charlene, Maryland, Democratic caller, you're up first.
unidentified		Yes, good morning, Greta.
		I have a question.
		Could you do a fact check on Donald Trump?
		Because if I'm not mistaken, he mailed in his vote when he was running.
		And my thing is, and I'm not trying to get off the subject, my thing is every time something bothered him, it seems like it's a big deal.
		So he's going to make it as a big a deal, just like Charlene.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's take your point.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Michael Morley, do Republicans use mail-in voting?
unidentified		Well, yes.
		I mean, again, Florida, I hold up as the gold standard in this regard.
		Florida is at least currently a Republican state, and mail-in voting is an integral aspect of Florida's election system, right?
		Putting aside the states that are all mail, right?
		Florida has one of the highest percentages of voters who choose to cast their ballots by mail.
		We'll go to Brian next in Houston, Republican.
		Hi, good morning, guys.
		Real quick, I wanted to know from the guests, and I've always found this topic fascinating and just the different types of voting systems that we have.
		But I think what frustrates me, and probably a lot of callers, is on a, you know, I watch other elections around the world.
		I'm fascinated with Canadian elections and British elections and all that.
		And we know within a few hours of the polls, you know, of them coming on air who the winner is overwhelmingly, whether it's the conservatives or the liberals or whoever.
		And we don't seem to have that here because you have these, you know, California, two weeks later, we're getting that.
		And I'd be curious to know from the guests, just regardless of what type of voting system is used, if there would be some type of national, if he thinks there should be some type of national standards set in terms of all votes have to be reported by X a day.
		The states can then decide at what point they open up voting, whether it's by mail, whatever.
		Obviously, allowing for overseas and military ballots and provisionals and keeping within the terms of law, but there's no reason in a country like ours why we can't know 100% every we're within 99.8%,
		99.9% what all the results are barring recounts within election night where it's not, well, we have to wait on the House and we have to wait two weeks for California to get their act together because their system drags out so long.
		And same with Neveta and all that, that, hey, you can canvass all those early mail ballots by exit date and those can be reported as soon as all polls close.
		All right, Brian.
		Professor Morley.
		Sure.
		So there's a lot to unpack there.
		Most basically, right, as we talked about before, there are lots of nuts and bolts technical aspects of state laws governing various aspects of the electoral process that determine how quickly states will be able to be able to calculate their results after election day, right?
		The sooner they're able to begin pre-processing absentee ballots or vote by mail ballots, the earlier you're likely to get results, right?
		If your deadline for returning absentee ballots is election day itself, for domestic voters, then you're likely to get earlier results.
		In terms of having those unofficial results determined, in many cases, it's really only the close elections where the media is going to withhold judgment and is going to wait hours, potentially days.
		If an election actually is coming down to a few hundred votes for, let's say, a statewide Senate election or a few dozen votes for more local elections, certainly when it comes to a presidential election, California doesn't need to actually finish counting all of its votes for the presidential election before the state gets called.
		So part of the issue, too, in terms of will an election get called close to election day comes down to, in large part, how close it is.
		Another thing, as I mentioned, states vary in terms of how many of their voters choose to cast their ballots by mail, even among states that don't use excuse-based voting, that allow any voter who wants to vote by mail.
		Again, political culture, voter preferences, what voters are used to, you see different usage rates of vote by mail.
		The more voters you have choosing to vote by mail, all else being equal, that's going to impact how long it takes to get your results, especially because you typically see a significant uptick in ballots being returned in the days immediately before election day and on election day itself.
		Election officials, by definition, can't have pre-processed them because they're just receiving them on election day.
		And so if election officials are being deluged by large amounts of absentee or vote by mail ballots on election day, on the day or two before election day, that's going to likely delay getting those initial results.
		Whereas if most people in a jurisdiction are voting in person or whether during early voting at their polling places, well, all election officials need to do is take the dating card, take the data cards from those voting machines at the close of the polls, plug them into the county system or upload them to the county system, and they have their initial unofficial results.
		So for voters who are able to do so, who are physically able to do so, right, who don't face unreasonable burdens in doing so, it is certainly to their own advantage to vote in person because they don't have to worry, will my absentee ballot get returned on time?
		Did I fill it out correctly?
		Did I leave something off?
		Did I manually fill in the bubbles wrong or something like that?
		If they're voting in person at a polling place, they don't need to worry about that.
		If there's a problem with their ballot, election officials in most jurisdictions will let them know, or in some cases, the ballot marking device or the tabulation machine will let them know, and they'll have the opportunity to fix it.
		And from a systemic perspective, if they've cast their vote in person at a polling place, that helps expedite, as we talked about, getting those results after the election.
		The last thing that the caller had mentioned was the possibility of a national standard, and that gets into concerns about federalism.
		Congress, of course, has jurisdiction over congressional and presidential elections.
		It has less power to regulate state and local elections.
		When it comes to state and local elections, Congress's power is really limited toward protecting the constitutional right to vote and preventing racial discrimination and violations of other voting rights amendments like discrimination against women or against people who are at least 18 years old.
		But beyond that, when it comes to state and local elections, Congress does not have constitutional authority to legislate just because it thinks it's a good policy idea.
		It can use its spending power.
		It can say, we'll appropriate a few million dollars for elections, but states have to follow these particular rules in order to take advantage of this election funding.
		Michael Morley.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		But does the president have power?
		He wrote on Truth Social.
		He wrote on Truth Social this.
		Remember, the states are merely an agent, he said, for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes.
		They must do what the federal government, as represented by the president of the United States, tells them for the good of the country, he wrote, to do.
		So he thinks he has the power here.
unidentified		Right.
		The Constitution states that Congress has the power to regulate the time, place, and manner of congressional elections.
		The Supreme Court has said Congress has similar authority over presidential elections, but in the absence of a federal statute delegating authority to the president or delegating authority to the executive branch to adopt certain regulations to make certain decisions.
		No, the president doesn't have unilateral power to prevent states from using vote by mail in any elections or to prevent states from using particular voting machines.
		Any sort of federal action on this end would require a new federal statute.
		And one of the arguments that congressional Republicans have made is that elections are primarily state-based systems, right?
		Each state has its own election code.
		Elections, including federal elections, are primarily run by states.
		States, of course, conduct their elections consistent with the U.S. Constitution, within the bounds set forth by federal law, the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, UOCAVA for military voting, statutes like that.
		But within those fairly broad boundaries, states have broad authority with regard to how to conduct their elections.
		And that's especially true with regard to state and local elections.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		We'll go to Michael in Del Ray Beach, Florida.
		Democratic caller.
unidentified		Your turn, Michael.
		Good morning.
		Good morning.
		Greta.
		Greetings.
		Oh, yeah.
		So I was in Florida in 2002.
		I mean, the gore Bush.
		And I'd like you to delve into that just a bit more.
		Now, I'm not sure if you were around then, but they delayed the results for, was it, two and a half months trying to figure out what happened in Florida.
		Well, Michael, there's a lot that happened then.
		So what specifically do you want Mr. Morley to delve into?
		My vote didn't count.
		My vote didn't count because the Supreme Court decided they stopped counting the ballots because there was so much fraud and abuse.
		And what's to stop that from happening this time?
		I mean, my vote won't count because Mr. Morla, I'll have you take that.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		We've got other calls waiting.
unidentified		So take it, but don't spend too much time on it because I want to get some other voices in this morning.
		Sure.
		The main concern that the Supreme Court had identified in Bush v. Gore was an equal protection violation.
		The court said that the state of Florida didn't have specific enough standards to govern the manual recount to make sure that election officials in different counties or in some cases, election officials at different tables in the same room were all applying the same standards.
		And so the court said because the recount was being conducted in an arbitrary manner where different people were, some people would count a particular ballot, other people would reject that an identical ballot.
		The court said it's unconstitutional and there wasn't enough time before the safe harbor deadline set by federal law at the time to do a new recount.
		Since then, Florida has dramatically changed its laws.
		It doesn't use punch card ballots anymore.
		And the Secretary of State has promulgated very detailed regulations that actually show or attempt to show every conceivable way a voter could try to mess up their absentee ballot and goes through and says, yes, count this, no, don't count this, in order to try to provide those uniform standards that the Supreme Court demanded.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Steve is in Massachusetts, Republican.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to the conversation, Steve.
unidentified		Good morning.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Morning.
unidentified		Hey, how are you guys doing?
		Hey, I'm just wondering with the mail-in voting, do you know how many countries in the world have mail-in voting?
		I couldn't tell you that.
		I would need to look that up.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		What's your point, Steve?
unidentified		It's, well, there's only 12 countries in the world that allow mail-in voting.
		All right.
		And many countries have had mail-in voting, and they've gotten rid of it to the amount of fraud that's gone on with mail-in voting.
		And 12 countries have it, and that's it.
		You know, the rest of the countries won't.
		And I just want to tell you stories.
		My son, who's in his 40s, had a friend who was one of the original hackers in school.
		He hacked his grades, you know, back in the early 2000s or whatever.
		And he went by one day because he's a multi-millionaire now.
		And I said to him, you know, could you hack a Dominion voting machine?
		And later on, when I saw him, he said that he could do it within 10 minutes with a paperclip and that he had never hacked Dominion, but he hacked similar machines just to show that it could be.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		All right, Steve, I'll just follow up from factcheck.org.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		They say 11 other nations allow all their voters to use some form of mail-in voting, and 22 additional countries allow some voters to cast ballots by mail.
unidentified		Professor Morley, your thoughts?
		So the extent of vote-by-mail usage is really represents a balance, right?
		On the one hand, states want to provide a reasonable opportunity for every eligible voter to be able to cast their ballots, right?
		And some voters face physical challenges, mobility challenges, transportation challenges, or even in some cases, just job or family responsibilities that prevent them from being able to cast their votes in person, right?
		On the other hand, of course, states have a compelling interest in preventing and minimizing opportunities for fraud, accident, mistake, irregularity, disaster, things of that nature, while at the same time, maintaining public confidence in the electoral process, right?
		Having fair elections, having accurate elections don't mean much if the public doesn't believe that they're accurate.
		It doesn't accept that they're accurate.
		And so when states decide what sorts of voting opportunities are we going to offer, what sorts of safeguards are we going to put in place?
		They're trying to balance these various considerations, right?
		Ensuring as broad access for eligible voters as possible, while at the same time preserving the integrity of the system.
		And so, rather than completely eliminating mail-in voting, right, some states have chosen to limit it to certain groups of people.
		Some states have specified that election officials can't just automatically mail out actual ballots to every voter who's registered.
		They instead need to wait to receive an actual request in a particular election cycle from that voter.
		Voters need to put personal information, whether it's their driver's license number, the last floor of their social, their state ID number, on that ballot request form in states like Florida, for example, to confirm their identity, to make sure that some fraudster isn't just requesting other people's absentee ballots.
		On the back end, additional checks are done to make sure that the ballots are cast by the people who were entitled to cast them.
		So, rather than just completely shutting down vote by mail or absentee voting, right, states, right, to include Republican jurisdictions, attempt to preserve the integrity of the election and preserve public confidence in election outcomes by adopting these sorts of security measures, right?
		States, many states have chosen to prohibit third-party ballot gathering, colloquially known as ballot harvesting, requiring either voters themselves or their family members to be the ones to return ballots to election officials.
		They're concerned that if you have a third-party middleman, especially if it's a political activist, they're worried about the opportunity that maybe those ballots will get changed.
		Maybe they'll collect a bunch of ballots and fill them out themselves rather than having the voter do so, or maybe they'll throw away ballots if they're not cast for the right candidate.
		And so, some states, again, rather than just completely prohibiting mail-in voting, attempt to adopt security measures, such as, again, prohibitions on ballot harvesting to protect the integrity of the process and to promote public confidence in the process.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		George is in Texas, independent.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Hi, George.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hey, Yande.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Morning, go ahead with your question or comment.
unidentified		Well, mind about governors and state officials reaching into the election process.
		And this is something that actually happened in the state of Texas where Attorney General Ken Paxton was suing other states.
		And then the governor of the state of Texas, in the meantime, declared that if you were dropping off a ballot, if you were dropping off a ballot, that each county would have one location, one drop-off box.
		So it might be a county with 10,000 residents, or it might be a county like Harris County in Houston with 3 million residents, and you have one drop-off box.
		And he declared that in the middle of the election for 2020.
		And at the same time, his Attorney General Ken Paxton was suing other states.
		I think it's Pennsylvania, because their governor had made changes to the election law during the election.
		So I know I hate to bring up something that actually happened, you know, like, gee, Dominion.
		All right, George, George, I'll have Mr. Morley respond to what you had to say there.
		Sure.
		So the Supreme Court didn't even agree, didn't even agree to hear that lawsuit that you're referring to because it was a suit from one state against the other.
		The Supreme Court had original jurisdiction over it, and the court didn't even hear the case.
		So the court agreed that it was without merit and not worth hearing.
		In terms of drop boxes, that is another one of the controversies where states take different perspectives in terms of balancing voter access on the one hand and minimizing opportunities for problems and preventing and promoting public confidence in the process on the other.
		On the one hand, if you have more drop boxes, if you have more opportunities to return vote by mail or absentee ballots, This can make it easier for voters to be able to do so.
		This can increase access.
		It can increase participation.
		On the other hand, to the extent that you are worried about things such as ballot harvesting or quite frankly, even intentional acts against the electoral process.
		There are a handful of incidents where Dropboxes were set on fire.
		And so if you have a box where all that's in it is ballots and generally speaking, ballots from a particular geographic location where you can tell this is a Democratic area, this is a Republican area, that's arguably a vulnerability.
		And so both in order to prevent those types of disasters.
		And I should add, there are many Dropbox machines that have fire suppressive devices built in and that seek to prevent exactly that sort of disaster.
		So perhaps over time, this is something that we can even have more confidence about or not have to worry about.
		But how many Dropboxes you should have, what types of security measures you should have for them, where they should be located.
		This is the sort of thing that reflects a state-by-state balance between making access as broad as possible versus being able to enforce things like bans on ballot harvesting or attempting to deter opportunities for manipulation.
		I can say that Florida adopted a bill within the past three years or so that restricted the geographic areas where Dropboxes could be used.
		And there did not appear to be a drop off in voter participation compared to other equivalent elections, comparing congressional election to a past congressional election.
		It didn't actually appear to have a substantial impact on voter turnout.
		And so include specifically including the use of vote-by-mail ballots, the return of vote-by-mail ballots.
		And so again, states are experimenting with different approaches.
		We'll draw that balance in different ways, but hopefully we'll be able to find an appropriate place, an appropriate policy to adopt in order to facilitate ballot return without opening the door unnecessarily to integrity-related concerns.
		One other point, of course, is that vote-by-mail and absentee ballots can generally also be returned just by putting them in a mailbox or giving them to a mail carrier.
		Nancy, Connecticut Independent, we're talking about election security and mail-in voting.
		Go ahead.
		Hi, Michael.
		Hi, Greta.
		Good morning.
		Morning.
		Good morning.
		Rules and regulations, of course, are very important to keep mail-in voter fraud at bay.
		Why did our President Trump violate the rules and regulations when he asked Georgia reps to find him votes, when he recently asked the Texas governor to get him five seats?
		And on January 6th, he expensed to stop the electoral votes.
		Why did Trump do this?
		Thank you.
		Michael Morley, you have any thoughts, your reaction?
		I think you'd have to ask him right off.
		You're covering a broad swath of territory there.
		I think, as with all things, one of the main concerns that arises is government officials using whether it's official authority or just their own partisan influence their own partisan gain.
		You know, rather than, rather than promoting accurate electoral outcomes, right and whenever you that that's actually one of the the issues that comes up.
		You had mentioned the Texas situation.
		That's one of the the issues that comes up frequently.
		With regard to drawing district lines right, in many states uh, legislatures have the authority to draw district lines, not only for the?
		U.s.
		House OF Representatives, but for the legislature itself.
		Right and so and so uh, people sometimes object that this, this is self-dealing right, the very people you have rather, you have the people themselves, the legislators themselves, who are going to be up for election, determining right, who they're, who their respective electorates are going to be.
		You know, having said that the, at least with regard to federal elections the the, the framers made that very choice in the in the constitution right, it said that uh Congress, as state legislatures, shall be determined the time, place and manner of federal elections, and Congress can make or alter those rules if it, if it wishes to, and so right structurally, the constitution entrusts authority to determine the rules governing the electoral process, to uh, political you, to legislators themselves to to,
		to politicians themselves.
		And you know there's, there's a history you can, you can, go back to with regard to the English Parliament, as to why they thought it was important that the, that Congress, be able to step in to ensure that congressional elections occur, to ensure that congressional elections are fair, that they didn't want to trust other branches of government, whether it's whether it's the the, the president, and certainly uh, in the early years the, the courts.
		From a separation of powers perspective, the framers didn't want to trust other branches of government to be able to undermine, potentially undermine, Congress by being able to assert substantial authority over the electoral process.
		And so, at the end of the day, there's really no great answer in terms of who are you going to trust with with final authority.
		To a certain extent, you know the the, the constitution gives us some guidance and, beyond that, this is a decision that each state's voters again draw that balance for themselves.
		Some states have chosen to create independent redistricting commissions to draw district lines for state legislatures or, in some cases the, the U.s.
		House OF Representatives.
		In some of those cases right, the commissions themselves have have, have come on have come under fire uh, whether in terms of their they they were too partisan, they didn't, they didn't draw lines correctly, and so again, this is something I don't necessarily think we'll reach one consensus over, the one right answer to states.
	Continue to experiment with different approaches, all right.
	Michael Morley is a College OF LAW professor at Florida State University is also a member of the National TASK Force on election crises.
	Thank you for the conversation, appreciate it.
	Thank you very much for having me coming up here on C-span.
	We're expecting the president uh to allow cameras into the Oval Office around 10 a.m eastern time, just moments away where he will be signing another executive order.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Live coverage right here on C-span.
greta brawner ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for watching today's Washington Journal.
unidentified		We'll be back tomorrow morning, 7 a.m eastern time.
unidentified		This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation.

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