Full Episode: What happened to Jamal Khashoggi?

ROBERT COSTA: A missing journalist upends the U.S.-Saudi relationship and the Middle East. I’m Robert Costa. How will President Trump and Congress respond? Plus, the midterm battle grows fierce. Tonight to Washington Week .

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: (From video.) This is a very serious situation and it’s something we’re taking very seriously.

MR. COSTA: Mounting questions surround the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, forcing the Trump administration to confront the alleged conduct of a key ally, Saudi Arabia. Despite new reports that the Saudi government killed the Washington Post columnist, President Trump is so far resisting pressure from a bipartisan group of lawmakers to pull out of a multibillion-dollar deal to sell weapons to the Saudis.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: (From video.) I would not be in favor of stopping a country from spending $110 billion and letting Russia have that money and letting China have that money.

SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY (D-VT): (From video.) In the United States we stand for a free press. If we do nothing, what do we stand for?

MR. COSTA: All this as the president prepares to say goodbye to a member of his foreign policy team.

U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N. NIKKI HALEY: (From video.) It has been an honor of a lifetime.

MR. COSTA: Plus, after a volatile week on Wall Street –

PRESIDENT TRUMP: (From video.) Under Republican leadership, America is booming, America is thriving, and America is winning like never before.

MR. COSTA: – President Trump goes on the warpath against Democrats.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: (From video.) The radical Democrats have turned into an angry mob.

MR. COSTA: Some Democrats say they will fight back.

FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: (From video.) When they go low, we kick them. That’s what this new Democratic Party’s about.

MR. COSTA: And with a new Supreme Court justice sworn in, base voters in both parties are energized just weeks before the midterm elections. Those stories next.

ANNOUNCER: This is Washington Week . Once again, from Washington, moderator Robert Costa.

MR. COSTA: Good evening. President Trump faces a looming diplomatic crisis due to the disappearance and possible murder of a Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist who vanished after visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. Per reporting by The Post , where I work, Jamal Khashoggi was last seen on October 2 ^nd , when he walked into the Saudi Arabian embassy in Turkey to collect papers for his upcoming wedding. He never walked out. The Turkish government has told U.S. officials that it has audio and video proof that Khashoggi was interrogated, tortured, and killed. There are also reports that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the action. That’s putting pressure on the president and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have personal relationships with bin Salman, and raises new questions about that multibillion-dollar deal on the table to sell weapons to the Saudis.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: (From video.) They’re spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs, like jobs and others, for this country. I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States because you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to take that money and spend it in Russia or China or someplace else.

MR. COSTA: Joining me tonight, Katty Kay, anchor for BBC News America; Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times ; Vivian Salama, White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal ; and Brian Bennett, senior White House correspondent for TIME Magazine.

Katty, you’ve been on the phone with your sources in Saudi Arabia all day. When are we going to get a clearer picture of what exactly happened here?

KATTY KAY: Well, they’re obviously advising caution and to wait for the facts to come out, and we should all be doing that. They’re also cautioning that the Turks have their own agenda in this and this is coming from leaks from the Turkish side, what we know so far or what’s being alleged so far, and that we should be – treat that with some skepticism. I have asked about the conference that’s being held in Saudi Arabia in about a week’s time and whether there is concern in Riyadh about the number of people who are pulling out of that conference. I’ve been told that the conference is secondary and cosmetic at the moment, and that that’s not the important issue; the important issue is to get to the bottom of what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.

MR. COSTA: And you think about this whole episode, Peter, revealing about the Saudis, about bin Salman, about his whole international project.

PETER BAKER: Yeah, I think this brings home something we learn from time to time with Saudi Arabia, which is that it has two faces to the world, right? There’s the outside face to the West, where you have very modernized, liberal-minded, Western-seeming leadership and executives who – like Mohammed bin Salman, the new crown prince, and Americans and Europeans, you know, enjoy doing business with them. And then you’ve got the inside Saudi Arabia, which is in fact one of the most autocratic places in the world, where there’s no dissent and where there’s no toleration of the kind of things that Jamal Khashoggi was writing. And I think that this brings home again to the West, and particularly to President Trump, the real tradeoffs of a policy of friendship with this kingdom.

MR. COSTA: When you think about the friendship, Brian, what are the consequences for the region if this U.S.-Saudi relationship actually got rattled in the coming days and weeks?

BRIAN BENNETT: This case is potentially really destabilizing, and it’s going to put a lot of pressure on the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Trump to take some sort of punitive action against Saudi Arabia, which he is resisting. But more than that, Saudi Arabia and Israel have taken a quiet alliance against Iran and have been cooperating behind the scenes, and so that has been changing the dynamics of the region. And if Saudi Arabia becomes isolated because of this case, that could upset that balance that has started to emerge in that region. Also with Turkey. Turkey is trying to take advantage of this situation right now. They just released the pastor, Alan Burson (sic; Andrew Brunson), to try to cozy up to the United States at this moment, where they had been estranged, and to try to push a wedge in between Saudi and the United States.

MR. COSTA: Are they thinking about this all on Capitol Hill, Republicans who control the Congress, when they talk about possible sanctions, knowing the disruption sanctions could cause? But they also – there seems to be an appetite in the GOP to take action.

VIVIAN SALAMA: It’s weighing very heavily on Republicans especially on the Hill who believe that they really cannot justify any kind of deals – political, business deals, whatever you want to say – with the Saudi government if this indeed proves to be the worst-case scenario, which many are fearing. And so right now there is a lot of pressure internally with the Hill, a lot of discussions trying to find out exactly what took place and whether or not the Saudis were involved. Obviously, they see the Saudis as a very strong ally in the region, someone that they can use for political stability in the region with the Palestinian issue, with the Syrian issue, to get the Turks kind of to come to the table on the Syria and Iraq issue, so many different factors – and of course, the big one, which is Iran. If that element – like Brian was just saying, if that element disappears, then so many things are in jeopardy. And so, obviously, so much pressure on Capitol Hill, but there’s also the business element of it: defense contracts, you know, Boeing contracts, so many different things that could be in jeopardy right now. And so a lot of people are just –

MR. BENNETT: Well, this is such a reminder – it’s such a reminder for Trump that – and for the rest of the country that when you become close to autocrats, autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia, you run the risk of finding yourself in a position of being on the wrong side of an event like this.

MS. SALAMA: Playing with fire.

MS. KAY: This is not new. America has wrestled with its relationship with Saudi Arabia through multiple presidencies. There’s always been this tension of needing the Saudis, whether it was for its oil reserves, whether it was because of the relationship with Iran or whatever the issue was, and having to deal with the more distasteful elements of Saudi society and Saudi politics. And you’ve had people on Capitol Hill, including Republicans, who have been concerned for a while about the war in Yemen and the – and the civilians that are being killed there, and America’s role in supporting Saudi Arabia in that war in Yemen. So I think when MBS came in, this new crown prince, there was a hope that this would be a change in the kingdom and a breath of fresh air, but actually you don’t have to scratch very far to see that he hasn’t been that much of a reformer. He came here and he schmoozed tech titans and he schmoozed people in Hollywood, and the Saudis loved that. But actually, they let women drive; it was on the front pages of every paper. A week before that they locked up a bunch of women activists. So I think there has been some skepticism in foreign policy circles about whether this was really the reformed Saudi Arabia that policymakers would have hoped it was, because it would have made America’s relationship so much easier with Saudi Arabia. They’d be happy.

MR. COSTA: So based on that, what Katty just said, how is this – how is this president going to handle it? His son-in-law Jared Kushner, his senior advisor, has in many ways embraced the crown prince, wanted to see that modern side of Saudi Arabia, but the whole world is watching on human rights and other fronts.

MR. BAKER: Yeah, that’s right. You saw the body language in the clip that you showed. What was the president doing? He was like this, right? He doesn’t want to deal with this. He doesn’t want to get in the middle of two allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t want to mess things up with Saudi Arabia.

MR. COSTA: And you were with him in Saudi Arabia, Peter.

MR. BAKER: I was with him in Saudi Arabia. It was the first place he went to visit outside the United States as president. He meant that as a statement. And he told them specifically, we’re not going to tell you how to live; in other words, human rights is not going to be out number one priority, even our number three or four or five priority. Now, look, as Katty said, we’ve been dealing with this for years. Plenty of presidents have made tradeoffs when it came to Saudi Arabia and downplayed human rights concerns because we do have these interests, because they are good with us on intelligence and terrorism and Iran and energy. But, I mean, rarely have you seen a president be so overtly willing to say human rights doesn’t matter to us, that he doesn’t even bother to pay lip service to that. And he says – what he said today about – and in the last few days about arms sales, other presidents would have thought the same thing; they wouldn’t have said it out loud, quite so openly. They wouldn’t have said, ah, we’ve got a lot of jobs, I’m worried about that. They would have said, well, we’ll take a look at that. They would have played it off. They would have, you know, put it off till later. They wouldn’t have been so open and candid the way President Trump is about it.

MR. COSTA: We talk about a diplomatic showdown and a crisis here, also a crisis for journalism: a Washington Post columnist at the center of this. You have someone – journalists throughout the Middle East, you all have – I’m so glad you’re all here. You’ve all reported and lived in the Middle East. You understand global politics. You’ve seen it up close. What does it mean for journalists as they watch this all?

MS. SALAMA: I mean, I can speak for myself. I was based in the Middle East for 12 years as a reporter, and fearing for our lives is not something unusual. Throughout the Arab Spring we were always looking over our shoulders, worried that someone could come after us, that we would be targeted because of the work we were doing. However, this has a totally different dynamic in the sense that this happened on foreign soil in a casual way that we’ve really never seen before, where Khashoggi essentially just walked into the Saudi consulate and then he allegedly disappeared. And that is what we’re grappling with now, is just the casual nature of this alleged incident and the mystery surrounding it, where we just don’t have the answers yet and no one is really coming to the play.

MR. BENNETT: And other autocratic regimes are watching the U.S. reaction and, you know, there are plenty of other countries like China that crack down on the press, and they’re going to be watching how the world reacts to this case as a guidepost for how far they can go to crack down on internal dissent and freedom of speech.

MS. KAY: I mean, to some extent it is – this is more than the case of one journalist and one man, and even more than the case of human rights in this instance. There is – it has become a test for American leadership in the Trump era. And for the past 70 years America has led the world in a way that was not transactional. Of course they did things that were transactional, too, but there was some sense that America did – led by exceptionalism, led by example, led by moral values. And if the president is only going to put – if $110 billion worth of defense contracts there, that is a sea change in the way that America has led the world for the last 70 years.

MR. COSTA: Let’s turn to another major foreign policy development. Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, surprised many officials this week when she announced she’d be leaving her post at the end of the year. During her tenure, the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem in Israel, took a harder line with Iran and conducted historic nuclear talks with North Korea. And even before reporters asked about her next move, Haley said she was not planning to run for office in 2020, but she did have high praise for the president’s family.

Dina Powell, the former deputy national security adviser, bowed out of the process here. But we see with the departure of Haley an establishment Republican, or at least someone who’s friendly with establishment Republicans, traditional hawks, talking about those norms Katty just mentioned, now leaving the administration. What does that mean for President Trump?

MR. BAKER: Oh, she has been a fascinating figure in a lot of ways because she has managed to straddle a really tough line in this administration in particular where she has, from time to time, spoken out in ways that seem contrary to the president and yet stayed more or less on his good side, it seems like. Remember, she got out there, talked about Russia and how we had to be tough on Russia; he didn’t do that. She talked about sanctions on Russia; he then actually undercut her at one point on that. But she was never in the doghouse the way, say, Rex Tillerson was or H.R. McMaster and so forth.

And her timing in leaving now a few weeks before the election allows it to be on her terms, not after the election when it might be lumped in together with a post-election bloodbath if the voting goes badly. So she’s managed to, I think, preserve some viability within the system, to use a phrase, and to leave a lot of options open to her.

MR. BENNETT: I mean, Nikki Haley may be one of the few people who’s able to leave this administration in a clean way. I mean, she set the end of the calendar year for the time for her to leave. She’s leaving with high approval ratings, she’s popular, and she leaves her political ambitions intact.

MR. COSTA: Yeah. But she also found herself crowded out at times with Secretary of State Pompeo.

MS. KAY: Yeah. Now there’s a debate going on about whether that will carry on being a Cabinet position and whether the next American ambassador to the United Nations actually will still have a Cabinet post, which I suspect both Mike Pompeo and John Bolton will be quite happy if it didn’t.

MR. COSTA: You have Bolton inside, a former U.N. ambassador, advising the president, maybe this whole institution, this whole role of U.N. ambassador to be pulled back.

MS. SALAMA: Well, Bolton in general has tried to streamline and size down, essentially, the operations around him especially and so this wouldn’t be a surprise if he wanted to have someone reporting to him versus a kind of separate element to it.

But in general, Nikki Haley has been – was someone that wanted her own voice in the early days of her term as the ambassador. And she really spoke out, as Peter was saying, sort of opposite to what the president was doing in a lot of cases and it really made her stand out and have her own voice. She was trying to establish herself on the international stage. She had never really held a position like that and so she kind of checked that box with this job, and now it seems that she’s realized that she got that experience, it's time to move on.

MS. KAY: Even famously managing to say I don’t get confused when she was being quizzed last. A rare moment of somebody pushing back against the White House in public and surviving it.

MS. SALAMA: That’s right.

MR. BENNETT: And if she does want to run for president someday, she has this foreign policy experience to add to her domestic experience.

MR. BAKER: And most people they’re talking about as her replacement are people who don’t have her independent stature, people who would be therefore more subordinate, presumably, to the White House.

MS. SALAMA: Sure, yeah.

MR. COSTA: Let’s shift from foreign policy to the campaign trail. President Trump was in Ohio this Friday night. That was the fourth campaign event for the president in less than a week. Brian wrote in this week’s TIME cover story – I have it right here – that “the elections will test the strength of President Trump’s hold on his party and show just how lasting an imprint his unique mix of populism and nationalism will make on the Republican Party and America for years to come.”

We’re just weeks away, Brian, and he’s out on the trail, he’s in Iowa. Peter and I were in Erie, Pennsylvania with the president this week, in a rally tonight in Ohio. Can the Kavanaugh nomination stoke this base to come back to 2016 levels?

MR. BENNETT: The RNC and the Republicans and Donald Trump are banking on it. Donald Trump has really made this midterm about him, a referendum on him, he’s embraced that. The polling that the Republicans are doing are showing that unlike the thinking a few months ago that tax cuts would be mobilizing, that the economy would be mobilizing: No. What they’re finding among the Republican base is that talking about Kavanaugh and judicial nominations, that’s mobilizing, the Kavanaugh fight, and talking about Democrats potentially obstructing Donald Trump’s objectives and policy decisions going forward if they get to control one branch of the House. That also is mobilizing the base.

So that’s why you hear Donald Trump out there talking about the Democrats being a mob and using words like “obstruction” and bringing up the Kavanaugh fight as often as possible.

MS. SALAMA: Just this evening he said that Brett Kavanaugh actually did a service to the Republican Party because of the controversy surrounding his confirmation. And he said that –

MR. BENNETT: I’m sure Kavanaugh doesn’t see it that way. (Laughter.)

MS. SALAMA: I’m sure he doesn’t. But he said that he did a service and that he’s mobilized Republicans like never before. And so that is essentially something that he’s going to be using in the next couple of weeks to say get out there and vote so the “mob,” in his words, doesn’t come after him.

MR. COSTA: But polls tell a complicated story. When we were in Erie, we saw Lou Barletta, congressman running for U.S. Senate against Bob Casey in the Keystone State – Barletta’s behind. Republicans running in Wisconsin for Senate, Ohio – running behind the Democrats. So you see the enthusiasm at the rallies, but polling shows that in the states the president won in 2016, Republicans aren’t exactly having an easy time.

MR. BENNETT: Well, and you see a disparity in particular between the House and the Senate, too, which is going to be an odd thing for a lot of people to understand if the House were to go Democratic and the Senate not only not go Democratic, it could even pick up Republican seats. Because the way the seats are arranged this year in the Senate races, there happen to be more Democrats who are vulnerable than there are Republicans.

But you’re right, the energy has been, for many, many months, on the Democratic side. The president’s trying to duplicate that on the Republican side. But people go to the polls because they’re angry, because they want to protest something, not because they want to say thank you. Right? They’re not going to the polls to say thank you, Mr. President, for giving us Brett Kavanaugh. They would go to the polls to say, hey, we don’t like Brett Kavanaugh, we’re going to go and protest. He’s trying to get them to look at this as a protest against the mob, the left-wing mob. And it’s hard to see if you can maintain that kind of anger for that many weeks over something you actually won, a battle you won.

MS. KAY: Yeah. I guess, how long is three-and-a-half weeks in American politics?

MR. COSTA: It’s a – it’s a year. In American politics, in the Trump era, it’s –

MS. KAY: I’m trying to even remember what happened three-and-a-half weeks ago, but I’m sure it’s something we’ve all forgotten.

MR. COSTA: It’s hard to remember what happened three-and-a-half hours ago.

MS. KAY: Yeah. So that’s what the Democrats are banking on. You take somebody like Claire McCaskill, during the whole Kavanaugh crisis and confirmation process – for her a crisis – her approval ratings amongst independents went from plus-10 to plus-four. I saw her just a couple of days ago. She said that even after Kavanaugh was confirmed, she already started to see them pick up again and it was stabilizing. So Democrats are desperately hoping that three-and-a-half weeks is a long time in American politics.

MS. SALAMA: And it shouldn’t be overlooked that most of the networks are not now – are not covering these rallies anymore –

MS. KAY: So interesting.

MS. SALAMA: – which is so fascinating, including Fox News, who apparently it’s a ratings issue where there have been so many, it’s just not getting the pull that it used to. Obviously, this is – this hurts the local candidates that he’s going there to endorse, but it also makes you question whether it’s gotten to the point that it’s too much. And so this is something that the White House is now grappling with, trying to figure out how they can – what the strategy should be moving forward to keep people interested.

MR. BENNETT: And, boy, he’s out there everywhere. He’s on 60 Minutes this weekend, he’s giving interviews in the Oval Office, random interviews.

MR. COSTA: He’s making it a referendum on him.

MR. BAKER: He’s making it a referendum on him, exactly.

MR. BENNETT: Yeah, he really is.

MR. COSTA: What about suburban men and women, especially suburban women? Where are they tilting based on your reporting and the data?

MR. BENNETT: So it was really interesting to go out and talk to people who are supporting Trump and thinking about voting for Trump. And we found a really interesting mosaic. You have people who love his harsh rhetoric and love what he says and then you have people who like his policies and are willing to overlook, you know, are uncomfortable with his harsh rhetoric and willing to overlook that. And that interplay is really playing out in the – in the suburbs. Among higher-educated, more-wealthy voters, you have more people who like his policies, like the judicial nominees and the deregulation and it’s just whether they’re willing to overlook that destabilizing and harsh rhetoric.

MR. COSTA: What about the Democrats? On health care, are they – are they catching on with those voters? Because the Democrats are playing health care hard now in the closing chapter.

MR. BENNETT: The Democrats feel like health care polls really well for them and mobilizes their base. And we’re going to have to see if that pans out.

MR. BAKER: Right. You see the president and the Republicans trying to push back on that with his op-ed this week in USA Today trying to make the case that the Democrats would actually destroy Medicare and not strengthen it. You hear him at each of these rallies say very explicitly I’m going to protect preexisting conditions. That’s something he hadn’t really talked about a lot; you hear it a lot these days because he knows they’re vulnerable on it.

MR. COSTA: When you talk about sugar highs for the Democrats, Beto O’Rourke, a congressman in Texas, raised $38 million this quarter. He’s drawn thousands of people to rallies across Texas, yet the polls show he’s still nine points back, at least according to Quinnipiac.

MS. KAY: Yeah, I think there’s only been one poll – right, and I right – that has actually shown Beto O’Rourke ahead of Ted Cruz, so there’s been a huge amount of interest in Beto O’Rourke, not least from amongst us and this unicorn idea of the fact that Texas may switch from being red to blue. My sense would be that it’s still a couple of cycles out. It may be that the press has been more interested in Beto O’Rourke and is also looking for somebody for 2020. And I’m sure that if Beto O’Rourke were to win, he would very quickly be talked about in the press as somebody who’s a potential contender for 2020. But the polls just don’t bear out the idea that he is somebody who’s going to flip that seat from red to blue at the moment. I mean, he could do it and maybe this money will help. But there’s also a lot of other money coming in on the Republican side, too, we shouldn’t forget about that.

MR. BENNETT: It’s money and also enthusiasm. I mean, what matters is who goes to the polls on Election Day. And if Beto O’Rourke can get the momentum and come from behind and get the enthusiasm, that’s what this campaign is banking on right now, even if the polling shows him behind.

MR. COSTA: And I – and I wonder about that enthusiasm among Trump voters. Because down in – up in Erie, Pennsylvania, some of them I spoke to, they said President Trump hasn’t gotten the wall funding he deserves from Congress, and they’re disappointed in the Republicans even if they’re with Trump. So you just wonder, are they actually going to come out for the Republican?

MS. SALAMA: I mean, this is the question in the next couple of weeks. And President Trump is ultimately making this a case about him, is that you need to support me. This is, yes, you’re going to be voting in members of the House and the Senate which will ultimately carry out my legislation, but this is ultimately about getting me reelected in 2020. And so a lot of it is if you want your wall and you want all these other issues that I have struggled to get through with a fragile majority in the Senate and in the House, you need to come out and vote. And that’s what they’re really pushing right now.

MR. COSTA: And it’s complicated by trade.

MS. SALAMA: It’s very much complicated.

MR. COSTA: The Democrats are echoing the president on trade instead of really countering him.

MR. BAKER: Yeah, trade is – trade is one of those issues that just crosses lines all over the place right now, particularly in the Midwest. But what’s interesting, too, is he has had experience in these special elections, most of which have moved more Democratic in the last two years, and yet he has gone in sometimes at the last minute in some of these states, clearly juiced up turnout, clearly made a difference for Republican candidates who otherwise were in trouble, and so he does have an ability to shift things in select places. He’s not going all over the map. It’s still a very select map for him. He’s going to Erie, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh, right?

MS. SALAMA: Well, the issue is he’s also – I mean, getting back to the trade issue, he’s coming and trying to deliver these accomplishments of, yes, I just had great trade deals. I just signed some – a deal with Canada and Mexico, and I’m bringing you all these deals. But we also have tariffs in place, which also hurt a lot of the farmers, and so it’s a mixed bag.

MR. BENNETT: We had interesting discussions with farmers, particularly in Missouri, who don’t like the tariffs, are already anticipating the tariffs are going to hurt their bottom line maybe by 10 percent or more in the next crop season, but some of those farmers we talked to like his other policies. They like his deregulation, his environmental rollbacks, and that could help them.

MR. COSTA: And the president’s still pretty skittish about the economy, talking down the Federal Reserve. The economy is relatively strong, but he’s nervous about how the interest rates are moving.

MS. KAY: Well, he’s clearly nervous because one of the things – his barometers – his favorite barometer is the state of the stock market. We’ve seen stock market – it closed up today, but we’ve seen stock market declines of about 2 percent during the course of this week. That doesn’t play into his narrative of all the things that he has achieved. It’s unusual for a president to bash the Fed, and actually we have in the Fed chairman at the moment somebody who acts very independently; I’d be surprised to see the Fed taking too much notice of what President Trump says out on the campaign trail. But clearly a strong stock market is something that the president has used throughout his term.

MR. BENNETT: Well, I mean, it’s dangerous if a president wants to use the federal interest rates for political purposes, and that’s why that firewall has been in place for so long. And Trump, like all these other conventions that he’s shattered as president, he’s shattered that one.

MS. SALAMA: He’s called them “loco.” (Laughter.)

MR. COSTA: We got to leave it there. When I was on Air Force One as a pool reporter this week, the president came – made sure he came to talk to reporters about the Federal Reserve, to wag his finger. We’re going got have to leave it there.

And before we go, we want to send our heartfelt thoughts to everyone affected by Hurricane Michael. The pictures of the devastation there are incredible, and we wish you strength as you rebuild your lives down there and the towns down there.

I’m Robert Costa. Thanks for joining us.