Clip: Tulsi Gabbard’s role in election security investigations

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, let's stay on that because in the sort of litany of extraordinary events, the nerd in me thinks that one of the most unusual things I've seen in the last year is the head of National Intelligence going to an FBI raid of a local election board. I mean, not to get all schoolhouse rocking, but why -- explain why that is so odd.

Jonathan Lemire: I mean, that's not her job. I mean, she is not involved with election security. And the story has shifted so many times as to why she was there, who sent her there. Was it the attorney general? Was it the president? You know, to Gabbard, a letter to Congress, says that she went there on Trump's behalf, at his behest, you know?

But, I think, it's five or six different times that we've gotten different accounts as to why she was there pursuing these unfounded conspiracy theories about foreign election.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Can you think of another time in American history where, openly, an intelligence service of the United States focused on foreign threats has gotten this deeply involved in American election issues?

Jonathan Karl: It's not supposed to happen. And she's not supposed to be using the powers of the intelligence agency to effectively spy on Americans. That's not what it's --

Jonathan Lemire: she put the president on the phone with the FBI agents to congratulate them for what the work they were doing.

Liz Landers: And I would just add too that I spoke with an election attorney this week who was making the point that because the president has now been so involved with what happened in Fulton County, because he was on the phone with those FBI agents, because he apparently sent her down there, according to what she sent in a letter to Congress, that this is now completely bungled whatever investigation and whatever the DOJ and FBI tries to present going forward.

Jonathan Karl: I mean, there's nothing to really investigate.

Liz Landers: Right.

Jonathan Karl: This has been so thoroughly investigated.

Liz Landers: Yes.

Jonathan Karl: And, you know, I mean this, this also gets to the point of who is in the White House now, who is in the president's cabinet, because Donald Trump wanted those ballots to be seized in 2020. He wanted Bill Barr to activate the Department of Justice to do it, the former attorney general. And then when Barr left, he wanted Barr's replacement, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, to do it. When Rosen wouldn't do it, he threatened to fire him and install somebody who would do it, a guy named Jeffrey Clark. When the president was about to do that, the entire civilian leadership of the -- you know, political leadership of the Department of Justice threatened to resign in mass and it didn't happen. Now, he has an attorney general that will do what he wants, whatever he wants. And he has a director of National Intelligence who will also do whatever he asks.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let me note that the president seems to be -- this is my impression, talking more and more about 2020 and more and more. Is this a sign that he's actually worried about what's coming down the pike in the midterms?

Michael Scherer: Well, he's almost -- he's basically said that presidents almost always lose. And one of the things the White House --

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, he's preparing the ground for a --

Michael Scherer: One of the things his advisers have been telling him is don't be so fatalistic about this. They want him out on the road. They're going to get him increasingly out on the road as the year goes on. They've got to excite people for this election.

And the truth is he's not in that mind space right now. He sees what most political observers see, that this is not -- the polling does not suggest there's much hope for a Republican Congress.

Liz Landers: I would just add, my observation has been that the president talks a lot about the election and the rigged election of 2020, his false claims about that. What I think is new that we're seeing more recently is that he's talking increasingly about how he's going to change the midterm elections and how he's using the government to investigate things in ways that we've never seen before. So, it's more the forward-looking part of this that I think is different.

That's interesting. I mean, at the National Prayer Breakfast this week, he spoke a about this in a way that one usually doesn't hear at the National Prayer Breakfast. Let's go -- let's just watch one minute of that.

Donald Trump: They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my -- now I really have a big ego though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I believe he's paraphrasing St. Francis of Assisi here, by the way. It was such an odd location. The reason that it struck me is because it's such an odd location to do that very honest riff in a kind of way. He's talking about his preoccupations. But you're saying that he's -- is he using those moments to lay the groundwork for this belief that the Democrats will never let him win? Is that the sort of thing that's going on?

Liz Landers: He's also been talking about the election and the fact that he thinks that he won places like Minnesota three times. This is something that he's also been saying recently when people are talking about the ICE operations there. And so he is really, really fixated on this, I think, more now that we're in the new year, now that the midterms are looming, now that he's talking about possible impeachment, which I think probably will happen if Democrats retake the House.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Liz Landers: So, It's all of those.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, you wrote this week, you talked about the president not helping his own midterm cause by doubling down on the wrong things. What did you mean?

Jonathan Lemire: Yes. Well, I mean, because of that race in Texas, in particular, a thunder clap for Republicans, this was a seat that the Democrats have not won since 1978. It was a 31-point swing since November 2024 when Trump was elected again. And they're telling -- Republicans are saying quietly and increasingly publicly, focus on the economy, focus on how you're trying to make people's lives better, and instead the president is -- he's doubling down on these election fraud conspiracies. He's doubling down on gunboat diplomacy. He's doubling down on leaving his lasting imprint on Washington, whether it's the White House ballroom, or we've seen the last week or so with the Kennedy Center. And they're saying to him, this isn't how you win elections or help us.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, we'll stay on that for a minute, because, I mean, let's talk about the Kennedy Center, Penn Station in New York and Dulles International Airport, which I'll have a couple of things now in common. They're very drafty and impersonal, and Donald Trump wants to have his name on all of them. Is that not working for the base anymore, this desire to rename everything after him?

Jonathan Lemire: He's telling on himself that he clearly doesn't ride the train very much, because you wouldn't want your name on Penn Station in New York City, the Moynihan Station.

Jonathan Karl: The Moynihan. Moynihan's pretty nice.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I actually think since they put it in the post office --

Jonathan Lemire: The Moynihan part is nice. It's the Penn Station part is still very --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Dulles Airport, you're not going to get me to defend?

Jonathan Lemire: No, no one here would. No, I don't think that there are too many Republican voters who eagerly put President Trump back in office who said among their top three issues were, I hope he gets his name on more things.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I guess what I'm getting at, you combine that psychologically with what he said at the prayer breakfast, my ego needed it, it seems that we're moving into a phase where he's even more obsessed with building things to put his name on and just sort of grandiosity. Maybe I'm --

Jonathan Karl: He's always wanted to put his name on things, but there's something much more ramped up this time and that is, he's thinking about his legacy. You see it in what's happening at the White House, not just the reconstruction he is doing, but presidential portraits everywhere that you just didn't see last time. There were a couple his first term, but he's really thinking about his place in history, and that's why -- I think that's part of what's motivating him to make really big, dramatic changes that will outlast him.

But this Penn Station and Dulles thing goes beyond just putting his name on something. He's holding or trying to hold, and a judge just now at least temporarily blocked to this, he's trying to put $16 billion on hold that's been appropriated by Congress, signed into law for this big tunnel project and saying directly to Schumer, I'm told in the Oval Office directly to Schumer, well, hey, you know, you could name Penn Station and Dulles --

Jonathan Lemire: This already backfired once. This already backfired once. It was a gift to the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey when he killed the tunnel the first time. That was a closer race and then it swung her way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. I want to -- in the couple of minutes that we have left, I want to switch subjects and go to the subject of The Washington Post. We have a lot of people who come on our show from The Washington Post. We have a lot of people at The Atlantic who once worked at The Washington Post, including Michael.

Michael, I know it's hard not to talk about the 300 people who just lost their job, but I want to lift up and have you talk about maybe at a sort of a moral level, what does it mean for journalism and democracy when this happens to one of the three major newspapers of the United States?

Michael Scherer: I think it's a serious blow. And it's a serious blow because there was so much optimism in that paper, you know, when, when the new owner, Jeff Bezos, took over, it was 2013, President Obama had just been elected. He embraced this idea, democracy dies in darkness. That was a term that like even reporters of the Post were like, well, that's a little aggressive, you know? That's going to be our motto. He leaned fully in., And as soon as the winds changed, as soon as, you know, the president switched voters were looking like they were going to reelect President Trump, he entirely flipped.

And the decisions that have been made since 2024 have repeatedly hurt the place, not made it stronger. And I think history will almost certainly show that what happened this week is going to make it weaker still.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Was this an extinction level event or an extinction level threat for a newspaper?

Michael Scherer: I think it's a extinction level threat for Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, yes. I don't think there is a path for that to recover, and I think it's just a matter of time before he decides to move on from it and sell and allow somebody else to try and rebuild it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Jon, last question to you on this. A lot of Republicans are saying, oh, well, The Washington Post is having these problems because it was too liberal, but they think the same thing about The New York Times, which is flourishing --

Jonathan Karl: Yes, which is massively --

Jeffrey Goldberg: How do you understand this ideologically? Or do you?

Jonathan Karl: I mean, look, The Washington Post thrived under -- in Trump's first term. The Washington Post really started to spiral after a series of editorial decisions actually in the direction of the right when they refused to do -- when Bezos didn't want to do an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris that had already been written, wanted to make changes in the editorial page, the slant of the editorial page, and they lost hundreds, 250,000 subscribers. That's a big blow.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, I mean, it is, and I don't want to dismiss this, it is a tremendous blow to a lot of people in our industry. They're very talented people. They will be fine, but we have to be very vigilant about independent journalism in this country. We really, really do.

I'm sorry to say, that's all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank you at home for watching us.