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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Thursday, July 31st. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show shouting out Pope Leo XIV, who received a very special gift at his papal audience on Wednesday, a pizza from Aurelio’s in Chicago. Hopefully, it was not a deep-dish pizza, as deep-dish pizza is a cardinal sin. [music break] On today’s show, Republicans in the Texas House unveil a redistricting plan to please their MAGA overlord. And former Vice President Kamala Harris hints at her plans for 2026, and they don’t involve running for governor of California. But let’s start with the FBI and the Department of Justice. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Emil Bove to a lifetime position on the third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Does he have a lengthy judicial history? No, but he was President Donald Trump’s personal attorney. More recently, during his time at the Justice Department after Trump returned to office, Bove fired attorneys involved in the investigation into January 6th. He forced prosecutors in New York to stop pursuing Mayor Eric Adams for corruption charges, an effort so bonkers, ten department lawyers resigned. Whistleblowers, three of them, spoke out against Bove ahead of his confirmation vote. Some claimed he told subordinates in the Justice department they may need to ignore court orders. And when asked by Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch a pretty normal question during his June confirmation hearing, Bove answered like this. 

[clip of Senator Peter Welch] Who won the 2020 election for president of the United States? 

[clip of Emil Bove] President Biden was certified as the winner of that election. 

[clip of Senator Peter Welch] So you give the standard answer, you can’t say that he won because he got the majority of votes and also got the electoral college victory? 

[clip of Emil Bove] I think the characterizations that you just made, Senator, are both political, and so I can’t address them under the canons, and they’re also tied up in ongoing litigation. 

[clip of Senator Peter Welch] Help me understand how it’s political to state who got the most votes in any election?

Jane Coaston: Sure. And now he’s a judge. A lifetime job. One rung under the Supreme Court. This is fine. This brings us to the Department of Justice, the entity that reportedly ignored whistleblower testimony about Bove and the FBI. Since Kash Patel took the reins as the director of the FBI, he’s done a lot. The agency has tasked hundreds of FBI employees to go through more than 100,000 pages of evidence tied to convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. According to the New York Times, that effort required mandatory 24-hour shifts to get through the information. Patel’s FBI has also allegedly forced senior employees to take lie detector tests to determine if they’ve ever said anything bad about Kash Patel. You know, normal stuff. But there’s a lot the FBI isn’t doing right now. For example, the FBI has reportedly scaled back investigations into white-collar crime for reasons, well, I’ll let you connect the dots there, dear listener. So what does this mean for law enforcement at the federal level, and what does it mean for you and me, the people who generally want the FBI to spend less time taking lie detector tests and more time, I don’t know, investigating and solving crimes? To find out, I spoke to former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Deputy Director McCabe, welcome to What a Day. 

Andrew McCabe: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

Jane Coaston: So let’s start with Bove. The Senate confirmed his appointment to an appeals court position on Tuesday, despite the fact that multiple whistleblowers have come forward to say that he had been telling career prosecutors to ignore court orders. What do you make of his appointment, to a lifetime position on the federal bench, one rung below the Supreme Court?

Andrew McCabe: It’s a tragedy, right? It’s concerning on so many different levels. Um. The fact that you would even consider someone for any judgeship, much less an appellate court judgeship. Someone who is currently facing multiple credible accounts accusing him of telling his subordinates in a high leadership position in the Department of Justice to ignore court orders. Like that person should have the utmost respect for the acts of our federal court judges. So the fact that that was not immediately a disqualifying fact is just, it’s unbelievably concerning for him, but really for the entire process. And then I think once you start looking at more of the normal, the typical qualifications that are looked at among candidates for this position, like the guy just doesn’t really have any of them. He hasn’t really written anything significant. He’s got a fairly short and I don’t want to say an undistinguished legal career because he was a you know he was an AUSA in the Southern District. That’s a big deal. He’s been in a well-known private firm. Okay, fine. But you know appellate court judges are usually people who are known for their erudition and their academic accomplishments. And from the bench have already written multiple significant opinions and there’s really nothing on this guy. And of course he managed to get through the entire confirmation process without really indicating where he stands on any issue whatsoever. You know, there’s so much about this guy I think you gotta be really concerned about. 

Jane Coaston: What does it do to morale at a place like the Justice Department to have those whistleblower claims pretty much disregarded? What message does it send to career prosecutors and agents? 

Andrew McCabe: I think it’s a pretty clear message, right? The message is shut up. We don’t want to hear what you have to say. And this latest revelation that there was actually another whistleblower who was talking about the same thing and actually had documents to back it up was essentially ignored by the inspector general’s office. I mean, that is that is just the absolute most craven um you know failure. It’s a dereliction of duty on behalf of the people at the of the inspector general’s office. 

Jane Coaston: I’ve been kind of obsessed with this question of what the Justice Department and the FBI are actually doing and what they’re not doing. So broadly, what do we know about how the missions of the Justice department and the FBI have shifted since Trump returned to office? 

Andrew McCabe: So what we know they have been doing recently, we’ve heard these stories about you know hundreds of people who were reassigned to conduct this review of the Epstein file. We hear about a lot of people having to sit for lie detector tests, polygraph examinations over like loyalty issues and whether or not they’ve spoken in a denigrating way about current FBI leadership. Just things that are mind boggling. I’m not familiar with any of that from my 21 years there. We know, for instance that they have taken people from the Joint Terrorism Task Forces. So these are the squads in every field office. This is about 100 of them around the country. They have take agents assigned to those JTTFs, as we call them, and they have told them they must spend at least 30% of their time working immigration matters. That is following ICE teams around and providing security for those teams as they go about executing their raids at wherever they’re going. So you’re taking terrorism specialists, people who’ve been trained to identify, locate, and investigate terrorists. These are the people we rely on to keep us safe every day. And you’re taken them off that duty to walk around as security guards for ICE. That is should be really concerning to people who want us to stay ahead of the terrorism threat. We also know that they’ve made the decision to back off the investigation of many different programs in the white collar area. So they’re not doing foreign corrupt practices act cases anymore. We know they’ve programmed people away from things like fraud cases and mail fraud, wire fraud. You know these are the scammers that reach out to our grandparents and convince them to hand over their savings and things like that. So these are core missions. They’re super important to the United States of America. And there are also things that no other law enforcement agency does. Like they, state and local police departments don’t really have the capacity to do like large scale national fraud cases. This is something we rely on the FBI to do. And we know that they’re doing less because these are the few things that they’ve told us they’re backing people out of. 

Jane Coaston: There was a piece in the Atlantic recently with the title, The FBI’s Leaders Have No Idea What They’re Doing. And it goes on to say the agency is in the middle of a, quote, “radical de-professionalization” and that the most important quality for an FBI official now is not competence but loyalty. Is that the sense you’re getting and what are the risks of that to the American people? 

Andrew McCabe: Yeah, well, you know, I think we know just from the two people they’ve installed in the two most significant leadership roles, obviously the director and the deputy director, but we know that both people come into those roles with really very little to no relevant experience. Now, Kash Patel has never led anything in his life. And now he sits atop a organization, 37,000 employees strong. And Dan Bongino, he was a Secret Service agent, which, again, is great and noble work. But boy, it doesn’t really equip you to be the person who is singularly responsible for all of the FBI’s investigative activity and intelligence collection. These are guys who are inherently distrustful of things like the intelligence community and analysts and the analysis that they provide. So it doesn’ surprise me that that is now filtering its way down. We also know that they’ve been engaged in pretty much a loyalty purge since they got there. They got rid of pretty much every EAD. Those are executive assistant directors who run multiple divisions of the FBI at one time. There’s one over all the national security things, there’s one over all the criminal stuff. These are the most experienced people in the FBI. They are in those jobs because they’ve spent 20 or more years doing that work. They’re all gone. I worry about the night when the phone call comes in alerting the deputy director or the director to a real tragedy, a true crisis, it is going to happen. It happens often when you’re in those jobs. That’s what you’re there for. And when those days come home to roost, I just worry about how these men will handle that responsibility. 

Jane Coaston: Right. Because I just keep thinking about, you know, we go back to, say, the Oklahoma City bombing or 9/11. There are pressure points before those events that could have potentially stopped those. 

Andrew McCabe: Right. 

Jane Coaston: And so you mentioned those employees who work on getting ahead of acts of terrorism. What else should we be concerned about? 

Andrew McCabe: I think distrust of intelligence and of the intelligence community is really a huge step backward. I mean, we went through a massive transformation after 9/11 to become a more productive, a more reliable and consistent intelligence partner, right? The FBI is kind of the lead for domestic intelligence collection, and we really stepped up our game. It didn’t happen overnight. It took a long time to get the right people in place and think about things, I think, in a more effective way. And now you have leadership across the administration that’s like inherently suspicious of anything that comes out of the intelligence community. That has got to have um a degrading effect on those relationships that we’ve built over the last few decades between the FBI and NSA, CIA, the Department of Defense and others. So yeah, I think it’s, you know, having been there to see its growth through that period, watching this kind of pullback at the same time, seeing these kind of, these like loyalty purges, that’s really, really, really worrying, really worrying. 

Jane Coaston: And speaking of someone who is distrustful of intelligence, we’ve also seen the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, making weird claims about the Obama administration and Russian interference in the 2016 election, trying to rewrite the narrative of what happened. But then Gabbard says she’s made criminal referrals to the Justice Department. So try as it might. And obviously, the FBI has been long, you know, conservative coded. And I think that they have they– 

Andrew McCabe: That’s a light way of putting it, but yes. 

Jane Coaston: I’m being very delicate here. But what does it mean for an agency like the FBI to be this politicized? 

Andrew McCabe: You’re absolutely right. Historically, the FBI was born as a politicized institution. J. Edgar Hoover wielded the FBI in part for the purpose of gaining political power for himself. And he did that by acceding to the desires and the requests of every president he worked for. Fortunately, after Hoover, we went through this period in this country with transparency where this reformation of the intelligence community, but also the FBI took place. And it’s that post-Hoover FBI that people really today are familiar with and expect and should expect and demand. And that’s an FBI that is not engaged in politics. An FBI that actively tries to stay out of politics. What you’re seeing now is the people who are complaining about politicization that did not happen are actually engaging in the most overt era of politicizing the FBI and the Department of Justice that really any of us have ever seen. And I think the kind of performative announcements by the DNI are a perfect example of that. She’s someone who, you know, talking about qualifications, she really has none compared to any of the DNIs that precede her. She has no intelligence background whatsoever. Um. And now she’s in a place of enormous significance and a tough spot, I will say, because she’s working for a president who doesn’t like intelligence and really has no interest in it. So that’s gotta be hard. But this latest round of accusations, retread of the 2016 investigations. That was really amazing. And there’s only two possibilities here. She either knows she’s being deliberately deceitful to the American public and is doing it anyway, or she doesn’t understand intelligence enough to actually comprehend the things that she’s talking about. And either of those two possibilities is really scary. 

Jane Coaston: Deputy Director McCabe, thank you so much for joining me. 

Andrew McCabe: Yeah, sure, it’s been a pleasure. I hope I haven’t run on too long, but you had some great questions, I couldn’t help myself. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Jerome Powell] In support of our goals, today the Federal Open Market Committee decided to leave our policy interest rate unchanged. 

Jane Coaston: For the fifth time this year, the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged Wednesday. That’s despite repeated and increasingly annoying demands from President Donald Trump for a cut. Whomp whomp. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during a news conference Wednesday, most of the committee thinks inflation is a little above target and employment is right around where it needs to be. So, playing it safe is probably the best bet for right now. But– 

[clip of Jerome Powell] We had two dissenters who I think, you know, you want that clear thinking and and and you know expression of of your thinking and we certainly had that today I think all around the table 

Jane Coaston: For the first time in more than 30 years, two Fed governors dissented. They voted to reduce borrowing costs. They also both happen to be Trump appointees, but that’s neither here nor there. The decision to hold off on a rate cut is bound to fuel the feud between the Fed and the White House, because much like toddlers in their terrible twos, if Trump doesn’t get his way, meltdowns ensue. Powell said that while tariffs are starting to push up the cost of goods, it’ll still take some time to suss out their economic impacts, and he’s not wrong. Also on Wednesday, the Commerce Department released its second quarter Gross Domestic Product Report. The nation’s GDP grew by 3% from April to June, beating predictions. But there’s a but. Analysts say that stat might be misleading due to changing economic patterns around tariffs. And speaking of tariffs, President Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on India in a Truth Social post Wednesday morning. He says the new rate will apply starting August 1st. Trump also said India would be charged an additional unspecified, quote, “penalty for buying energy and military equipment from Russia.” The president’s new rate is on the high end of what he previously said he was considering. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One earlier this week, he said a rate in the 20 to 25% range was possible before reflecting on how great his trade deals have been. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] India’s been a good friend, but India has charged basically more tariffs than almost any other country. You know that, right? Over the years. But now I’m in Georgia. You just can’t do that. I think the trade deals are working out very well, hopefully for everybody, but for the United States they’re very, very good. 

Jane Coaston: India wasn’t the only country to see new tariff threats from Trump Wednesday. He also announced a whopping 50% tariff on most goods from Brazil. Why? Because he’s mad the country is prosecuting its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, who just so happens to be a longtime ally of Trump’s. And who also just so happens to be on trial for attempting to stage a coup to overturn the results of Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. Hmm. Sounds familiar. Anyway. Republican representatives in the Texas House released their redistricting plan Wednesday. The party wants to redraw its congressional districts, way outside the normal schedule, to flip five seats currently held by Democrats in next year’s midterm elections. Why? Because Trump asked them to. The new map targets seats in the Houston, Dallas, and Austin areas. It also takes aim at a few districts in South Texas, an area that’s been trending more Republican in the last few elections. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice offered Texas a convenient excuse, sorry, I mean, legal justification, for its off-cycle redistricting scheme. In a letter to the state, the DOJ alleged that four majority-minority districts currently held by Democrats had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered along racial lines. Governor Greg Abbott called a special session on the issue soon after. Texas’ nakedly partisan gambit to help Republicans, and by extension the president, keep the U.S. house Next Year has set off a domino effect. Both red and blue states are threatening to follow Texas’ lead. We’re going to talk about this a lot more on tomorrow’s show. And I know, redistricting is not the sexiest issue, but it has massive implications for how the government functions, so make sure you take a listen. After months of will she or won’t she speculation, former Vice President Kamala Harris announced Wednesday that she will not run to be California’s next governor. In a statement posted to social media, Harris said, quote, “For now, my leadership and public service will not be in elected office. I look forward to getting back out and listening to the American people, helping elect Democrats across the nation who will fight fearlessly, and sharing more details in the months ahead about my own plans.” While her decision leaves open the possibility of another run for president in 2028, her next move could just be a book tour. CNN reports an announcement there is coming soon. Whatever Harris ends up doing, I sincerely hope she calls her collaborators to tell them that they did it. 

[clip of Kamala Harris] We did it, we did it Joe.

Jane Coaston: I know. It’ll always be too soon for me too. The pain, it’s still raw. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the existence of radioactive wasps, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how workers at a South Carolina site that once made parts for nuclear bombs found a radioactive wasp nest but no wasps, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and um, where are the wasps? [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Michell Eloy. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Gina Pollock, and Laura Newcomb. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison. And our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with the headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music beak]

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