Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, the point was while we didn’t reach ultimate judgments, it was also clear that we couldn’t say there had not been a crime committed, which is a little bit of an unusual thing to say.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Aaron Zebley. He’s a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, an FBI agent, and chief of staff to Robert Mueller at the FBI. He’s now a partner at WilmerHale, which makes him my colleague.

Andrew Goldstein:

I think it was a very principled decision for Mueller that he’s just not going to say his own view about the President’s conduct.

Preet Bharara:

And that’s Andrew Goldstein. He’s the former Chief of the Public Corruption Unit at SDNY and is now a partner at the law firm, Cooley. Zebley and Goldstein were part of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Now, the two of them, along with co-author, James Quarles, are out with a new book that goes behind the scenes. It’s called Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation. We’ll discuss Mueller’s major decisions, the politicization of national security and whether the team has any regrets. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

So on last week’s episode, you may recall, I answered a listener’s question about the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. The question was from X, or Twitter, user, Chelle, who asked, “Why was this last would-be assassin not charged for any attempted assassination, only felony firearms?” So I explained that the charges brought at the time, pretty quickly, involved being a felon in possession of a firearm and being in possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. I said they were strong charges, easily provable charges, and most importantly, sufficient probably to keep the target, the defendant, behind bars for the time being. Whereas other charges, which might seem more serious and more suited to the conduct, like attempted assassination under Section 351 of Title 18 of the code would be harder to prove without more evidence, more investigation relating to the defendant’s intent. Well, since then, there’s been new reporting and new revelations about that intent.

Investigators recovered a note written by the defendant, Ryan Routh, which, according to a DOJ memo, he apparently dropped off at a friend’s home several months ago. Here’s what the note said. “Dear World, this was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.” That’s pretty powerful proof of his intent.

At the moment, as I record this on Tuesday, September 24th, prosecutors are using that note to make the argument that Routh should remain behind bars during the pendency of his trial, but I bet it will also be used to try to prove that Routh had the intent to assassinate former President Trump. And in fact, those charges may come even by the time you hear me speaking these words. With that note now in prosecutors hands, there’s a much more powerful case for invoking the statute I mentioned and to bring additional charges against Routh. Of course, we’ll keep our eye on new developments and I look forward to answering questions that you might have about this case going forward.

This question comes in an email from Kim who writes, “Hey Preet, I heard there’s some dispute between Jack Smith and Trump over the length of a brief in the DC case. Smith asked for an extension in pages and Trump opposed it. How standard is it for lawyers to ask for page extensions? Are they usually granted? Does the other party often oppose this?” Well, these are really interesting lawyering questions that you ask. As you might imagine, lawyers are very, very wordy. I try not to be as wordy as I used to be, and as some people are, but when you want to get your case across, whether it’s in a pretrial brief or sometimes whether it’s in a summation, lawyers tend to use more words than necessary. And so a necessary corrective to that, in part, is for courts, state and federal, often to impose page limits or word limits on what the lawyers can submit. If there were no page limits or word limits at all, ever, imagine how much the courts would be overrun with the verbosity of pompous attorneys.

Now, in this case, the dispute that you mentioned involving the DC District Court that is overseeing the potential trial of Donald Trump’s election interference as alleged by the government, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision about presidential immunity, the prosecutor’s office, Jack Smith’s office wants to put in a filing that explains what can remain in the case and what may be, arguably, does not remain in the case. They need more space and room in their briefing than what the court typically allows. The page limit in this case is 45 pages. Jack Smith’s team, arguably, is asking for a lot when it says it wants to extend its page limit to 180 pages, which is quite a bit over.

However, answering your several questions, how standard is it for lawyers to ask for page extensions? It’s quite standard. It happens all the time. In a couple of cases that I’ve handled myself recently, there were routine requests for page extensions both on our side and on the other side. When you asked, does the other party often oppose this? Well, usually not. It’s a standard courtesy that you accord the other side, in part, because it’s often the case that you want more pages yourself and if you extend the courtesy to the adversary, the courtesy will almost certainly be extended back to you. And then, your other question, are they usually granted? In my experience, they are usually granted. I will say, however, this is a request for quite a substantial elongation of the briefing from 45 pages to 180. So we’ll see what happens.

And by the way, folks, I’m not kidding here, as luck would have it, just as I’m recording this on Tuesday afternoon, there’s breaking news on this very important issue that the judge in the DC case, Judge Chutkan, has granted the government’s request to file a longer brief, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s objection. So there you go.

This question comes in a tweet from X user, It Doesn’t Suck. First of all, we’re going to have to discuss that Twitter handle, but that’s for another time. “#Ask Preet, on the pod before asking Joyce or the guest a question, you always ask, ‘Can I ask you a question?’. I was curious if that is ingrained in law school prefacing a question with permission to ask it, as in, ‘May I approach the bench?'” Well, that’s an interesting question. I never really thought about that. I will take issue with one part of your premise, which is, I always ask, can I ask you a question. Obviously, I don’t always ask that because every podcast would then be about 11 hours long, and so I was thinking about what you asked because I know I do that on occasion and I’m not quite sure why.

I don’t think it has anything to do with, may I approach the bench, that’s a totally different context. And obviously, when I was examining witnesses in court or in a deposition or some other context, in Congress, or what have you, I didn’t preface any questions with, can I ask you a question, because that’s what they were there for, to answer questions in a formal setting frequently under oath. So obviously, the podcasts are not under oath and it’s a different kind of dynamic, and I asked the question that you posed to the podcast team and we had a discussion about it and the best consensus view, for good or ill, is that it tends to be occasions where there’s a shift in the conversation and I want to pose a question that maybe is not hostile but is a little bit contrarian or a little bit more confronting a point that the guest made or my co-host made where I have a disagreement and it’s a respectful sign in a way that I’m shifting gears a little bit and pausing to ask you something that maybe is not fully in agreement with what was said.

And it’s a little, I guess, rhetorical tick I have that I didn’t even notice I did. So thanks for pointing it out and you’ll be making me very self-conscious going forward when I do that thing where I say, can I ask you a question. But I think that’s right. Before I go on to someone else, can I ask you a question? What is up with that Twitter handle?

This question comes in an email from Olivia who asks, “Any Supreme Court cases you’ll be watching closely this term?” Well, frankly, quite a few, which has been the case the last few Supreme Court terms. But rather than answer that question myself this week, we have something special. My CAFE Insider co-host, Joyce Vance, and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, recorded an Insider episode this week all about the upcoming Supreme Court term. So do yourselves a favor and check it out at cafe.com/insider.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein.

THE INTERVIEW

Lawyers Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein were both leading members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Now, they’re giving readers the inside story.

Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein, welcome to the show.

Aaaron Zebley:

Thanks for having us.

Andrew Goldstein:

Great to be with you, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

So congratulations on the new book. It’s called Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation. I should point out that you have a co-author. It’s Aaron Zebley, Andrew Goldstein, and James Quarles, but we ran out of mics, so we only have the two of you. I want to point out at the beginning, just put on the table that, obviously, for people who don’t know, Aaron and Andrew are both dear friends of mine. Aaron is a current colleague. We are at the same law firm practice. He’s my law partner at the WilmerHale firm. I work on lots of cases with him. I have the utmost respect and admiration for Aaron, and also, Andrew, who I hired at the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York some years ago and promoted in the office.

I’ve said this on the podcast before that one of the great summations I’ve ever seen was Andrew giving the summation, the closing argument for the government in the case against Sheldon Silver who is the assembly speaker in New York. So I come into this with great respect. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to ask some questions you may not love about the Mueller investigation, but let’s begin there. Congratulations on the book, folks.

Aaaron Zebley:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

So can we start with something that I think takes us to the beginning? So Jim Comey gets fired in May of 2017. There is discussion about and agitation about whether or not a special counsel should be appointed. One is appointed and then there comes the business of putting together a team. Obviously, Bob Mueller is not going to be doing all the work. He’s leading the Office of Special Counsel. How did you guys become part of the Special Counsel team and why would you want to do that?

Aaaron Zebley:

I’ll start. We’ll each have our own answers.

Preet Bharara:

Aaron.

Aaaron Zebley:

For me, I was working with Bob at the time. We were law partners at the same law firm where I am now, and before that I had been Bob’s chief of staff when he was Director of the FBI. So in the run-up to the moment at which he was appointed, he had already talked to me about this and we had discussed before like, “Look, if I’m appointed,” this is Bob speaking now, “I want you to come with me.” And of course, my answer was yes, I’ll go with you.

Preet Bharara:

Did you ever say no to Bob?

Aaaron Zebley:

Probably not. We disagreed from time to time, but that was rare. But no.

Andrew Goldstein:

And I was working in our old office, the Southern District of New York. I was the chief of the corruption unit and we had a very fast moving case involving Paul Manafort and I think just a couple of days into Aaron and Bob Mueller and Jim Quarles starting the Office of Special Counsel. They asked me and a colleague to come down to present on that case. And shortly after that, they asked me to come down and it was an easy answer for me, as well.

Preet Bharara:

Did you have any idea, I mean, you must’ve had some because you’re smart guys and you’ve been around the block, that the investigation would be so fraught and so controversial and that the whole Special Counsel’s office, and Bob Mueller, in particular, would take such furious incoming.

Aaaron Zebley:

Look. We had some idea, obviously, for the reasons you suggested, but frankly, I was ultimately quite surprised at the level of incoming that we took. At the beginning of the investigation, the way I thought about it was, we are examining a foreign adversary’s interference in an election and it was the Russians. How could not the whole country be at our back for that kind of investigation? So I actually came into the investigation with a little bit of that perspective. Of course, the country wants to get to the bottom of this. But over time, that was not necessarily always the way that we were greeted.

Preet Bharara:

Andrew, did you have a view about that?

Andrew Goldstein:

I actually came and I met with you and talked about what might happen.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t remember specifically what I said when you asked me for advice, but I’m sure I gave you that admonition.

Andrew Goldstein:

You said two things. You said it was worth doing, it was important public interest. And you said, “Just be prepared. You’re going to come under fire from all sides,” which was entirely true.

Preet Bharara:

Was it worse than you thought?

Andrew Goldstein:

No. I assumed that when a president is under investigation that he or she would not like to be under investigation. And this particular president, he had already, he had fired you. He had already done things publicly that were unique in modern-

Preet Bharara:

That’s one way [inaudible 00:14:10]

Andrew Goldstein:

… governance. And so I kind of expected that we were going to take some attacks. I wasn’t expecting the way the attacks took place. I would never have thought that we would be characterized as a bunch of angry Democrats, because none of us were political.

Preet Bharara:

Well, let me ask you about that for a second. One area of criticism of some members of the team is that there were some either registered Democrats, or people who had, if you just Google searched it, given to Democrats and maybe it’d be worthwhile to explain why that was and why, arguably, it wasn’t proper to screen people for their politics.

Andrew Goldstein:

Well, the one very literal answer is there’s actually a provision in the United States Code that says in federal hiring you can’t consider someone’s politics. You’re just not permitted to do that. And even if that were not the rule, I think once you start considering things like that, there is some risk that you’re sort of picking someone for views, which is not really what a prosecutor does. A prosecutor’s supposed to decide based on facts and law, and that had been the entirety of my experience as a prosecutor and as an FBI agent. Politics didn’t matter.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but do you understand why, from the perspective of some skeptical folks who would believe that, yeah, politics is not supposed to count, and that’s exactly why you want to screen for either actual bias or the appearance of bias, particularly when you have an investigation of this nature involving a distinctly political figure, notwithstanding that particular rule that seems to be maybe antiquated in this circumstance, that it might’ve been useful to try to find people who were ostensibly politically neutral based on their track record of giving and party affiliation as opposed to just turning a blind eye to that. Is that a fair argument?

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, I think you have to have impartial decision-making on the part of agents and prosecutors, and you have to look for a history of that and you have to watch what people are doing when they’re running investigations that have politicians in the middle of them. But whether or not you could screen people out based on political donations or membership in a particular party, that seems equally fraught to me.

Andrew Goldstein:

You got to remember the leadership of this investigation was Bob Mueller, a Republican, and then working with Aaron, who has never donated to anybody, has never been a registered Democrat or Republican, Jim Quarles who had given more to Republicans than to Democrats. And so it’s hard to think that with that leadership, those people running the investigation that who they hire and which sort of government people they bring over should have any effect at all.

Preet Bharara:

What about Andrew Weissman?

Andrew Goldstein:

Nobody wants to take that one.

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, can I just say one more thing about the way an office runs, and Preet, you know this better than probably anybody having served as the US Attorney. Bob was effectively a US Attorney. The way decisions get made in cases like this, there are agents and then there are the line prosecutors making decisions, and then there are courts making decisions about whether or not there actually is probable cause and there’s a grand jury that’s making a decision about whether or not there actually is probable cause to charge. And Bob is in the review chain for every major action, every search warrant, every charge. And so you’ve got that layered approach to what the office does, and because this case was as potentially charged as it was, Bob was very much in the mix in all those decisions.

Preet Bharara:

Did you ever fear, during the pendency of the investigation when the Special Counsel’s office was open, for your personal safety? Either of you.

Andrew Goldstein:

I did not, but we also took pretty extraordinary steps to be completely anonymous. We rented a house in my wife’s name. I stayed out of public records. I don’t think people could have found me until very late in the game. I got a FedEx package from 60 Minutes trying to beg us to appear on 60 Minutes.

Preet Bharara:

Were there gold bars in the FedEx package?

Andrew Goldstein:

They were not, but I was worried about how they found where we were.

Aaaron Zebley:

I wasn’t worried about myself so much. I did worry about Bob. I mean, he was on the news all the time, not speaking, but his face was on the news constantly and he was no longer director, so he didn’t have a security detail. I worried about him. I mean, the most risk I faced was reporters showing up at my house. As with Andrew, I actually won’t name the publication, but I had a reporter get in line on Halloween with several kids and when he got to the front of the line, I didn’t give him candy. He asked me whether or not I wanted to comment on the most recent action from our office.

Preet Bharara:

I want to get to the substance of the investigation in a moment, but this is sort of table-setting for what the orientation, philosophy of Bob Mueller and the team was. You mentioned, a second ago, that Bob really didn’t make his own statements. That is a long-time tradition and posture of Bob Mueller. I knew him when he was FBI director, also, when I was the US Attorney, and he’s famously press-averse. Was there a discussion at the beginning or just an understanding at the beginning that whatever arrows were slung in your direction and in his direction, that he would stay mum and even when there were points of clarification to be made that the better part of valor was the discretion of just being silent?

Aaaron Zebley:

In short, yes. We actually talked about that explicitly. I knew that already from having worked with Bob when he was director. I mean, his perspective is this is not about me and you’ve got to let these things roll off your back and move on. To your last point about errors, we generally let those go. There were some exceptions when we thought it was really important to step in. I can think of at least one exception, but-

Preet Bharara:

What was that exception?

Aaaron Zebley:

The one exception was with Jeff Sessions who was Attorney General at the time. And I can’t remember the exact report, but there was something about our perspective on whether or not he had perjured himself when he gave testimony about his interaction with Sergey Kislyak in the fall of 2016, and Kislyak was the Russian ambassador in Washington, DC at the time. And we had already concluded at that point that Jeff Sessions had not perjured himself. And so in that instance, we thought it was very important to clarify and make clear that we had reached that judgment.

Preet Bharara:

There were other instances that, I think, we’ve come to learn later, people got the story wrong. I think one of them, and correct me if I’m wrong, there was a lot of upsetness on the part of some people that it appeared that there was a no-knock warrant executed against Paul Manafort, which is a way of going in and conducting a search without announcing, surprise, and it’s somewhat aggressive in a white collar matter. Was that correct? Was that a no-knock warrant or not?

Aaaron Zebley:

No, we didn’t do a no-knock warrant on Manafort’s residence.

Preet Bharara:

But my recollection is that everyone in the press and everyone else who was reporting about it thought it was a no-knock warrant, which is an aggressive step. Was there any discussion about correcting the record on that one as you did with the Sessions business?

Andrew Goldstein:

The problem you have is that if you correct every time the press reports something like that incorrectly-

Preet Bharara:

When you don’t correct-

Andrew Goldstein:

When you don’t correct, they take it as a confirmation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but was there some, in retrospect, do you think that was right to be mute in almost every instance or was there some other balance, because you struck a balance on the Sessions point.

Aaaron Zebley:

Going back, would I change the set point? Actually, I don’t think so. If you’ve got other examples, I’m happy to talk about them, but I don’t think I would, actually. I think we were better off letting our pleadings do the talking for where we were in the investigation.

Andrew Goldstein:

It is worth putting yourself back in the way things were at that time where you had two 24-hour cable news stations effectively talking about our investigation all the time on information that was not coming from us, and so much of what they were reporting was wrong. If we tried to fix things as they were going, it would’ve been an impossible task and I think ultimately might’ve made things worse because they would’ve taken our silence anytime as confirmation.

Aaaron Zebley:

But the Special Counsel’s office did have a spokesperson, Peter Carr.

Andrew Goldstein:

We did. We probably should have just called him a person.

Preet Bharara:

Was he the most overpaid person in Washington? He didn’t do a lot of spokesing.

Aaaron Zebley:

He didn’t. But I’ll say this. Bob, even when he was director, his preference was not to be out there talking to the media, but he always believed it was very important to be tuned in to what the media was saying and what sort of questions they were asking. And so Peter performed that role admirably. He took a lot of calls and it was valuable to know what the media was saying and asking.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to what you said a few minutes ago because it was important, the way you described what the mission of the Special Counsel’s office was. The way a lot of Americans thought about it and will have thought about it, and certainly, pro-Trump people would’ve thought about it was this was an investigation into potential criminality of Donald Trump. That that was the mission, it was out to get Trump. You stated it very differently, Aaron, a moment ago. Could you do that again? And then I want to talk about what was true and what was not true in the aftermath of a lot of posturing and spinning on the Mueller report.

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, I would say, I’m not sure exactly which of my statements you liked, but our mission was to understand Russian election interference. That’s like the third line of Bob’s appointment order and to determine if there were any links or coordination between the Russian efforts and members of the Trump campaign. We didn’t conceive of it as an effort to bring the president down at all. We were running a criminal investigation of those issues.

Preet Bharara:

As you say in the book, the first substantive line in the entire Mueller report is, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” And then you also write, “We also made it clear that this Russian interference was designed to favor one candidate over another. The Russians were trying to help Trump win.” Now, there are points of disagreement and ambiguity with respect to some things in the Mueller report, and I think some of this has gotten lost. But can you just state again how certain you were of the statement that I just read?

Aaaron Zebley:

100% certain and so certain that we were able to present evidence to a grand jury and charge those cases. One is the Active Measures case, which was the social media campaign run by the Internet Research Agency, which is a Russian entity in St. Petersburg, Russia. It ran a social media influence campaign. We are certain that they favored Trump over Clinton, and that was ultimately funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is known as Putin’s chef, very close to Putin, although, now dead. And then there was that case that we called the Hack and Dump case, which was Russian military intelligence, the GRU hacking into the Clinton campaign’s emails and dumping what they stole at times designed to favor Trump and to harm Clinton. There’s no question that those things happened.

Preet Bharara:

So those things happened. In the political world, and in the legal world to some degree, there was a lot of focus and energy, and the three of us discussed this briefly before we pressed the record button, but it’s a very confusing issue. And for whatever reason, the term that became popularized, that people applied to what your investigation was supposed to be about was this word collusion. Was there collusion between Trump and any Russian entities or actors in connection with the election, with the interference, which is the title of your book? So having established through the course of the investigation as you just said, 100% that the Russians interfered and they favored Trump. The question was, was that done, depending on the verb you use, it has a different outcome, was that done in conjunction with and coordination with and collusion with or in conspiracy with Trump?

You point out in a footnote in the book on this point of collusion, which is a semantic thicket and has caused a lot of people on talk shows to get red in the face, you say in the introduction to volume one that the Mueller report, addressed the term collusion, which was frequently invoked in discussions about our work, but collusion was not a specific offense or theory of liability in the statutes at issue in our investigation. In other words, collusion doesn’t have any term of art value in a statute. You instead “Applied the framework of conspiracy law, not the concept of collusion.” Do you think in a way some of the things that you were trying to do in the report talked past the way political actors and others talked about your investigation?

Aaaron Zebley:

I suppose, potentially. We thought the best course of action for us as prosecutors was to ground our work in established standards, and conspiracy law is established. We all understood what that meant. It’s a criminal justice yardstick that we could apply meaningfully. So that’s what Bob had us do. Do I think a lot of the discussion around our report held onto this notion of collusion and that there’s some confusion there? Potentially. But I am not sure that, even recognizing that, I’m not sure I would suggest we should have done anything differently than stick to established rules and standards for conspiracy law.

Preet Bharara:

As a matter of ordinary language, maybe you want to pronounce on this because you suggested that you wouldn’t. If you’re proven beyond doubt that the Russians interfered in the election and they favored Trump, and as this was going on in the 2016 election, Trump himself got up at the podium and exhorted the Russians to hack into emails and do all sorts of things to help him in the election. What term would you apply as a lay person to those set of facts? Not conspiracy, but something else?

Aaaron Zebley:

So we talk about this in the book, and we talk about this in the Mueller Report as well, and just to add some facts to your setup there, Preet, in July, 2016, then-candidate Trump gives a speech and he calls out and he basically says, “Hey Russia, if you’re listening, wouldn’t it be great if you found these emails that belong to Hillary Clinton?” And then about five hours later, for the first time ever, the Russians attempted to break into Hillary Clinton’s office email account. And so what we describe that as is call and response. We distinguish that still from conspiracy, which requires some kind of agreement, either explicit or tacit. And we just, in that conduct, we didn’t see an actual agreement. So we labeled that, potentially call and response.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein after this.

I want to talk about some of the inflection points in the investigation. Obviously, there were a number of arrests, a number of indictments that were brought, none against the former president, and we’ll get to that and the reasons for that and what the report said about that. But in connection with the investigation, one of the more interesting topics of conversation among legal experts and others, and certainly, we talked about this on the podcast a lot, was the strategic decision to subpoena or not subpoena Donald Trump.

So you have evidence that you’re looking at relating to whether there was a conspiracy or not. In connection with that investigation, you turn up evidence of possible obstruction, right? The Mueller Report ultimately was in two volumes, one relating to the Russia stuff, the other relating to obstruction. And specifically, and especially to the second part, obstruction is the state of mind of the person that you’re looking at. And the best way to get the state of the mind of the person you’re looking at is to talk to that person. Describe, if you can, the decision-making about ultimately not seeking to subpoena Trump and how much independence you had in making that ultimate decision from the Attorney General and the rest of the department.

Andrew Goldstein:

So I can start with that. Look, we thought it was important to interview the president, and the book goes into great detail about our conversations with the President’s counsel over a number of months trying to push the president to meet with us.

Preet Bharara:

Who was that principally, who was that counsel?

Andrew Goldstein:

At first it was John Dowd, and then it became Rudolph Giuliani working with Jane Raskin.

And at first, it looked like the president had an interest in sitting with us because he and his team thought that they could make us go away, at least as to him, if he came and met with us quickly. But as our investigation progressed and more people cooperated with us and we announced charges, their tune changed and it became clear that he was not going to voluntarily sit for an interview. And so we started considering whether to try to compel one through the use of a grand jury subpoena. And that was a tricky issue for a lot of different reasons, one of which you flagged, which is that if we were to subpoena the president and he was to take it to court, and his lawyers told us that they were going to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, that we would not be able to just do that on our own.

We would have to be working with the Department of Justice, with the Attorney General to advocate the type of legal positions that would be required if we were going to be litigating this all the way to the Supreme Court. And so we spent a long time working with the Department of Justice, talking to president’s counsel, trying to figure out if we could bring a subpoena that could make the president testify. But ultimately, we didn’t have the full support of the Department of Justice. The president was very clear that he was not going to testify, period, and we gained an enormous amount of evidence from other sources that made the importance of interviewing him less so. And so ultimately, Bob made the decision, and I think it was the right one, that a subpoena would’ve led to months, if not years, of litigation and would not have gotten us anything.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Well we’ve seen that in the other four criminal cases that have been delayed for various reasons. But I just want to come back for a moment to the point you made a second ago that you didn’t have the support of the full department. Can you explain that to a lay public who was given the impression that the Special Counsel’s office had pretty much carte blanche and independence to do what the office thought was right and correct?

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, a special counsel, ultimately, is a part of the Department of Justice. It’s sort of the third iteration of a regime where you can have a prosecutor conduct an investigation of the president. You had the old special prosecutor regime, that’s Archibald Cox, the person who launched the Watergate investigation of President Nixon. And then you had the independent counsel model. Ken Starr is a primary example of that. And then you have the special counsel regime, which is the one under which Bob was working. And it is true that the special counsel has a measure of day-to-day independence, there are actual regulations describing how a special counsel should run things, and they have a measure of day-to-day independence. But ultimately, you report to the Attorney General. The Attorney General remains accountable for the investigation.

And so for issues like this, issuing a subpoena for the president’s testimony and then enforcing it, you have to consider where you sit relative to the Attorney General. And as Andrew just traced out, we recognized that we would need the Attorney General if we were to push this and try and enforce a subpoena all the way through to the Supreme Court.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a very respectful and polite answer. Let me ask you a broader question, and there are a couple of other skirmishes that we’ll come to including the issue of the release of the report, the delay, the redactions, Barr’s own summary. But overall, in retrospect, do you both believe you were given the proper measure of independence that the guidelines and the statutes were supposed to accord you or not?

Andrew Goldstein:

I think we were up until Rod Rosenstein was no longer in charge and Bill Barr effectively took over.

Preet Bharara:

How so?

Andrew Goldstein:

Well, as I think you just alluded to, by the time that Barr came in, we were very late in the investigation. So there weren’t investigative decisions that Barr had to approve or not approve, so that wasn’t the issue. But as the book talks about in some detail, when we turned in the report, rather than putting our own words and our executive summaries out into the public, Barr ultimately put out his own letter that, in many ways, mischaracterized our findings. And our report didn’t come out until a month later., And I think that caused a lot of confusion.

Preet Bharara:

It did. I want to dive into that a little bit more shortly, but just pausing on it for a second. Do either of you want to characterize the good faith or bad faith nature of Bill Barr’s actions in that instance?

Aaaron Zebley:

I will come back to that question in a second. I just wanted to go backwards for one moment, if it’s okay. I just want to put one gloss on something Andrew just said. And maybe your question wasn’t about this, Preet, but just to be sure, I don’t think there were leads that we were not able to pursue. I don’t think we left something on the table, just to be clear about whatever constraints might or might not have been put on us. I think we were able to do what we thought was necessary to run the investigation. We wanted the president to talk to us. He didn’t. There were folks who I wish had cooperated fully who didn’t. Paul Manafort and some others come to mind. So there are things that we didn’t get to the bottom of that I wish we had, but I don’t think we left anything on the table.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Care to comment on the good faith or bad faith nature of Barr’s conduct?

Andrew Goldstein:

Look, I wouldn’t put it that way. I think that he was acting as the politically-appointed attorney general. And part of what, I think, he saw his mandate as was to protect the president and he handled-

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask a different way, because there’s a lot in that phrase that you mentioned, politically-appointed attorney general. Is it your view given how steeped you are in the ethics and tradition and norms of the Justice Department, that that’s how he should have thought of himself?

Andrew Goldstein:

No, that’s not how I think that an attorney general should think of themselves. But it’s also not surprising when the attorney general is a politically-appointed member of the president’s cabinet. And one reason that you have the special counsel system is to give a measure of independence from the attorney general. And the issue with the way that he handled the findings of our report is he ended up putting things in his own words and characterizing things in his own way and that undermined the confidence in the whole operation.

Aaaron Zebley:

There was a real cost to that. I mean, that’s the way I would say that. The purpose was to hear from the Special Counsel, and that’s not what happened.

Preet Bharara:

Since we’re on Bill Barr, what about other things that he did with respect to sentencing and Michael Flynn? Do you have any views of those moves that he made?

Andrew Goldstein:

He inserted himself into the Michael Flynn prosecution, into the sentencing of Roger Stone in ways that I think many other attorney generals would’ve stayed away from and would’ve allowed line prosecutors and career prosecutors to do their jobs. I can’t say, because we don’t know what was he really thinking, and he has articulated publicly reasons for why he stepped in. But in case after case involving aspects of our work, he inserted himself in very significant ways that I think are unusual for an attorney general to do.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned Rudy Giuliani, previously. I thought this is striking in the book and knew, I don’t really think I’d been aware of this internal thinking. There came a time when Bob Mueller lost patience with Rudy Giuliani. Could you describe that?

Andrew Goldstein:

After John Dowd left as the president’s counsel and we learned that Rudy Giuliani had come on, it’s sort of a funny way that we learned it in that one of the president’s other lawyers, Jay Sekulow, told our colleague, Jim Quarles, America’s mayor is coming on board.

Preet Bharara:

Pete Buttigieg?

Aaaron Zebley:

That would’ve been an interesting twist.

Preet Bharara:

That’s so odd. I would’ve thought his loyalties lay elsewhere. So interesting.

Andrew Goldstein:

People forget that at one point, Rudy Giuliani was viewed as America’s mayor. So early on, after Giuliani came aboard, he asked for a meeting with Bob. And Aaron, Jim, and I all met with Bob, with Giuliani, the rest of the president’s legal team. And at the beginning of the meeting and at the end of the meeting, Bob made it clear that what was going to be discussed in that room was going to stay in that room. And it was important for all of our discussions going forward to have that kind of relationship of trust. And Giuliani said, “Yes, of course. You’re going to hear nothing from us.” And then, within weeks of that meeting, Giuliani was on TV talking about the meeting.

Preet Bharara:

No. America’s mayor was shooting off at the mouth?

Aaaron Zebley:

And it was not an accurate recitation of the meeting, as well.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s also shocking. You’re just shocking everyone today. And then so what did Bob Mueller-

Andrew Goldstein:

So after that, Bob decided that he was not going to meet with Giuliani again, it was a matter of basic trust. We, as the team on the inside, we obviously had to keep talking to and meeting with the president’s lawyers, but we tried to meet and had our dialogue principally with his other lawyers, with Jane Raskin and Jay Sekulow and dealt with Giuliani as little as possible.

Preet Bharara:

So we’ve gotten to the point of the conversation, folks, that I know you’ve been waiting for, and that is sort of the ultimate question that people have and that people have debated and cogitated over and wondered about. And I’ve had separate conversations with each of you about this since the conclusion of the report. But what everybody wanted to know, notwithstanding the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that you can’t prosecute a sitting president, what everybody wanted to know after all this money was spent, after all the resources were brought to bear, and a lengthy report was issued after many, many witnesses were interviewed and documents were analyzed, did the president of the United States, Donald Trump, at the time, commit a crime or not?

The report is pretty clear that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the elements of conspiracy in connection with Russian interference. But there’s a volume two that contains 10 examples of ostensible obstruction about which there are varying degrees of evidence. And with bated breath, everyone was trying to see what Bob Mueller and the Special Counsel’s office thought of that. And in the most read and analyzed text in the report, I’ll read it and they’ll take a minute and then I want to spend some time talking about it and if you have different views today.

“Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the president’s conduct. The evidence we obtained about the president’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time,” and this is a critical but somewhat unclear sentence, “At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”

My note, you did not so state.

You go on to say, “Based on the fact and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.” And then finally, “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

First question, do you understand why that last sentence, “While this report does not conclude that he committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”, why that is incredibly frustrating and perplexing to the ordinary public?

Andrew Goldstein:

We do, and we acknowledge that in the book that we wish that part of, and particularly, this part of the report could have been clear, but it’s also the case that the full set of language here was not released until a month after Barr initially put out his own letter summarizing our findings. And so I think part of the confusion as to what we had found, it was not due to our lack of clarity here, although this certainly could have been clearer, but was due to the way it was released.

Preet Bharara:

Bill Barr sort of elided the subtlety of your last sentence. Remind folks basically said that the report, I mean, he might’ve not have said it in such stark terms, but I believe a spokesperson for the Justice Department literally posted on social media that your report exonerated Trump when you have a sentence in here that says, it does not exonerate Trump. Do I recall that correctly?

Andrew Goldstein:

Well, it was a spokesperson for the president, not for the Justice Department.

Preet Bharara:

I got it wrong. How did you react to that presidential spokesperson’s description of your report?

Aaaron Zebley:

I mean, look, this is, I think, part of the cost of our actual words not having been released. I wanted to go backwards just a second to just take up your point about frustration. And I agree with Andrew, yes, I understand why people are frustrated by some of the statements. But look, the point was, and I hope this is clear in the book, is that while we didn’t reach ultimate judgments, it was also clear that what we’re trying to say is we couldn’t say there had not been a crime committed, which is a little bit of an unusual thing to say for a prosecutor. But we were reporting to the Attorney General and we thought it was important to tell the Attorney General that we hadn’t reached that judgment, so that’s why that sentence is in there.

Preet Bharara:

Is it the case that you, or Bob Mueller or others, had a view that the president did or did not commit a crime or did commit a crime and because of the OLC opinion and other prudential considerations, you just wouldn’t say or you don’t have a view, because people would find it difficult to believe you don’t have a view, whether or not you felt it appropriate to state the view.

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, it’s not the case that we are saying, but for this prohibition on charging a sitting president, we would tell you that there had been a crime. We hadn’t actually reached a final judgment. It’s, in fact, true. We had not reached a final judgment. And once we determined that was the path we were taking and that this happened in a meeting with Bob in late 2018, where we turned was to do a plain and, I hope, sober and clear recitation of all the evidence. We do weigh the elements of obstruction of justice. And I think in four instances we say there’s substantial evidence of each of these elements. So it’s not that we had reached some judgment [inaudible 00:47:26] stayed our hand, we actually didn’t reach a final judgment and opted instead to describe the conduct and to do a close analysis of each of the elements of obstruction of justice.

Andrew Goldstein:

Let me just say something about that. I think it was a very principled decision for Mueller to make here where in a world where we couldn’t charge the president with the crime even if we had wanted to, and where the Constitution is set up where it should be the House of Representatives and Congress who would accuse the president of a crime if there was going to be one, Bob took the humble, principled approach that he’s just not going to say in an internal report to the Attorney General that would likely, ultimately, be made public, his own view about the president’s conduct. And I think that that was the right thing to do.

Preet Bharara:

You’re not saying that your review turned up inconclusive, are you?

Andrew Goldstein:

No. It’s that we analyze and documented the evidence that we had of the president’s conduct and laid it out very clearly and none of that has been impeached in any way in the five years since our report has come out. But what we did not do is take the step of saying whether this set of conduct amounts to something that we would charge. And given the constraints that we were operating under, and Bob’s own view about fairness and about his role in our constitutional structure, again, I think that that was the principled thing to do.

Aaaron Zebley:

Your question, Preet, actually raises an element of the Attorney General’s letter that he issued right after our report was turned in. He described what we had done almost as if our judgment was inconclusive and we had somehow left it to him, and that’s not where we were.

Preet Bharara:

I guess, the question here or the issue here, and this is not your fault, and I thought about this a lot, that the expectation was set, not by anybody in particular, because I don’t know that people were focusing on it, but there was a presumption that at the end of the day, Bob Mueller and his team would say, yes, we believe the president’s committed a crime, or no, there’s insufficient evidence to say that he committed a crime. And that was the case for month after month after month after month because Bob Mueller is tight-lipped and has a good, principled reason for not opining on a talk show about the mission and about what was being found, which I think was all to the good and all correct.

There was an impression left on everyone that we would get a more definitive conclusion in the report than we got. And the book does indicate a little bit, and I don’t mean this as a criticism, that this point, this inflection point was focused on quite late in the game after a lot of investigation had been done and the report was being written. Is there any argument in favor of the idea that someone in some fashion might’ve set a lower expectation about what the report was going to do at the outset? I don’t know who it would’ve been to do that or would’ve had an interest in doing that, but a lot of the issue of disappointment and frustration and confusion comes from the expectation that lasted a very, very long time that we would have a different result and conclusion in the report. Is that fair?

Aaaron Zebley:

It’s a difficult question for a couple of reasons. One is your question almost presupposes that we’re delivering a report that’s for the public when, in fact, what we’re doing is writing a report for the Attorney General. I understand-

Preet Bharara:

But you also say in the book that you understood, just like Robert Herr understood-

Aaaron Zebley:

Yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

That it would become public.

Aaaron Zebley:

Yeah, yeah. That’s not going to be my, how I ultimately defend my ultimate answer, which is I don’t think there really would be room for announcing or lowering expectations. I will say that Rod Rosenstein, who was the acting Attorney General, this was before Bill Barr was in the seat, and when Bill Barr was in the seat, they knew this was the path we were going down. So I think they understood what we were doing. And I know you’re not saying this in your question, but I just wanted to change your question a little bit. You framed it in terms of disappointment. Another way of asking the question might be, did you fail? And I don’t think we did.

I think what Bob decided to do in running this investigation, given all its complexity and where we sat in the constitutional order, as Andrew just explained, his decision was, we are going to be principled. We’re going to adhere to Department of Justice norms. We’re going to deliver, I hope, the definitive account of what the Russians did and how the president behaved towards our investigation. And we’re going to tell the facts in a plain and sober way. And the Attorney General will see that, and potentially, the public will see that, and Congress will see that. So I know you asked about disappointment, but I just wanted to take on-

Preet Bharara:

People wanted to know very simply if Bob Mueller and the team believed a crime had been committed or not, and they didn’t get that, and they didn’t know that they weren’t going to get that. I guess a different way of asking the question is at what point in the process did it dawn upon Bob and you folks that that was not a thing you were going to be able to provide to the public? Was it at the outset? Was it towards the end? Was it in the middle?

Aaaron Zebley:

Well, I don’t think we decided how we were going to take on this issue until towards the end. It was towards the end of 2018 when we really landed on this. And there’s a chapter about this in the book about deciding that we were going to handle it this way. So it was later. It was earlier in the investigation that we looked at and thought about the OLC opinion, which says you can’t charge a sitting president. So we had that in mind for a good long while, but it was later that we decided we would handle the report this way.

Andrew Goldstein:

I’m not sure that there’s a way for Bob or us to deal with the unrealistic expectations that were out there.

Preet Bharara:

There was an expectation. Why do you say they’re unrealistic?

Andrew Goldstein:

Again, I think you had a significant portion of the population that were hoping that we would somehow, as prosecutors, bring down Trump in a way that the electorate had not.

Preet Bharara:

No, but taking the position in the most good faith way you can, there are people who are like, “Look, if he didn’t commit a crime, he didn’t commit a crime. And prosecutors should say that.” They didn’t get that either, right? So yeah, there’s some people who wanted Bob Mueller to bring down Donald Trump. There’s some people who wanted the invocation of the 25th amendment to bring down Donald Trump. Later, people wanted the 14th Amendment Article three to bring down Donald Trump. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who thought this is the reason why we’re doing all this is so we will get a sober judgment from a respected person and a respected team, having done this and been through the ringer a million times before, to tell us did he or did he not commit a crime. That’s all.

Andrew Goldstein:

I think two things. One, that part of the issue is the way this was rolled out, sort of our explanation for why we and why Bob handled it the way that we did, did not come out for a month. And so that was a difficulty. And the second thing, on that, I think we viewed it as, if we lay out, in great detail in an unimpeachable and sober way, what the president did, and we analyze it under the elements of the obstruction offenses. And as Aaron said, there are four occasions where we concluded that there was substantial evidence that each of the elements were met, that that would give the American people the information they need to be able to make decisions without Bob in the position of making an accusation or deciding whether to make an accusation that he didn’t think was his to make.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have any view or reaction to the fact that it doesn’t seem that even those four counts where there was substantial evidence, those four episodes where there was substantial evidence of obstruction were brought by a future special counsel, Jack Smith or any other prosecutor, do you draw anything from that?

Aaaron Zebley:

Look, I think in many respects the die was cast in the way the report was released and the way in which Congress responded to it. And then the Department of Justice and Congress was on to other things, so I don’t know that I’m terribly surprised.

Preet Bharara:

So as you write in the book and as has otherwise been reported, Bill Barr knew that you had an executive summary that wouldn’t have required redaction, that would’ve gotten the main theme and message of the report out immediately to the public, while other sensitive things might’ve had to be redacted, like grand jury information and the like. And you had this impasse with Bill Barr, and it was very tense, as you describe in the book. Was there any moment that Bob Mueller or you folks thought you would just unilaterally and immediately release your own summaries that were more accurate?

Aaaron Zebley:

I would say perhaps that idea flitted through our minds for maybe-

Preet Bharara:

Not Bob Mueller’s style.

Aaaron Zebley:

Yeah, not Bob Mueller’s style, so maybe for a second. But I just want to add a little context to this, and that is when Bill Barr was going through his confirmation hearing to be Attorney General, he said he was committed to transparency. And there were other points along the way where we understood that if he were to release something, it would be our words. And so we went into that with that expectation. And then when that didn’t happen, as we lay out in the book, we tried to handle it and Bob tried to handle it in a very principled way. And so had we taken a different path by releasing it unilaterally, that would’ve been contrary to everything we had been trying to do, which is be principled. And it’s just, as you say, not Bob Mueller’s way.

Andrew Goldstein:

Did I have dreams of Bob calling a press conference outside our office carrying the tomes of our report and dropping them in front of everybody? Possibly. But as Aaron said, we knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But was it a question style or ethics? Would it have been unethical to do that? I don’t think so.

Aaaron Zebley:

I think it would’ve undermined our principled approach. It would’ve looked like-

Preet Bharara:

Yes. But what was undermined, as you have been reciting for the last number of minutes, was basically the whole import and correct message of the report. And when you put those two things in conflict with each other, which one should win?

Aaaron Zebley:

Yeah, I mean, look, we have the benefit of five years of hindsight now to know, but in the moment when this was unfolding, our thinking was, look, what’s the best way to navigate this? And Bob decided we navigate this by sticking to a principled approach. And one of the things that happened, as you know and as we describe in the book, midweek, a couple days after Barr had released his letter, Bob wrote to the Attorney General and tried to force his hand that way. We sent them releasable versions. We did all we could within the rules. And you’re right. Look, in retrospect, it is true that the way this rolled out had a material impact. I don’t know that we saw that in the moment, though.

Preet Bharara:

Given your experience in the Special Counsel’s office, do you have a view on either of the following questions? One, should the Department of Justice revisit the OLC opinions about the propriety of prosecuting a sitting president, number one, and number two, the guidelines relating to the Special Counsel, which essentially put, as your experience, I think, crystallizes, puts a Special Counsel between a rock and a hard place where you have to write a confidential report that you know is going to become public, describing all the ways in which somebody engaged in misconduct but not enough to charge them, potentially, against the policy of not writing derogatory information and putting out derogatory information about someone who’s not being charged. Reforms to either or both of those things wise?

Andrew Goldstein:

I think in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions, actually, I think it’s almost a moot point.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Andrew Goldstein:

The OLC opinion, while saying you can’t charge a sitting president, it also makes it clear that you can and should investigate wrongdoing committed by a president while memories are fresh to preserve the evidence, potentially, for either an impeachment or for a future prosecutor. Now, under the recent Trump case by the Supreme Court granting wide swaths of immunity to the President’s official conduct, you have a real question as to whether a special counsel investigation like ours could ever start in the first place.

Aaaron Zebley:

I think that’s exactly right. And so would I revisit the OLC opinion? No. I think energy needs to be spent on thinking about, and I guess this will happen through the courts, understanding what are the boundaries to core constitutional powers? What are the boundaries to official actions? Does immunity from prosecution actually mean what Andrew just said, which is you can’t even investigate it? I suspect it might, but that’s where I would spend time and energy and analysis now.

Preet Bharara:

Some of this conversation, as you have mentioned, I think, quite correctly, is with the benefit of hindsight, which is 20/20. I think you suggested in your book that you would’ve handled perhaps the back and forth with Bill Barr differently in connection with the release of the summaries that were not accurate. Are there other things that you think you might’ve done differently or advised Mueller to do differently now that we’re a few years on?

Aaaron Zebley:

I think that’s the number one thing that comes to mind, for me, as the thinking through the delivery of the report. One of the things you asked about at the beginning was political considerations for applicants, people you’re hiring, should you consider past political donations and the like. As we said, I won’t go over that ground again, not something I would necessarily change about that. But I think you might consider, and we might have considered, is somebody who’s joining our team, particularly interested or overly interested in a particular outcome for the issues we’re looking at. Maybe that’s something we could have factored into some of our hiring decisions. And we comment on that a little bit in the book, although I think that’s still hard to do. But that’s me just sort of reaching right now to find an answer other than what you just suggested, which is changing the way we delivered the report.

Preet Bharara:

Andrew.

Andrew Goldstein:

I think our book talks about some smaller mistakes that we made throughout the course of the investigation, but to me, the broader question is what kind of person do you want to be running an investigation like this? And do you want somebody to be playing by the rules and doing things in the buttoned-up way that Bob insisted on? And I think the answer, particularly in this moment where you have people who are urging prosecutors to have political reasons for bringing cases and for investigating different people, I think having somebody like Bob, who’s playing it completely down the middle, is exactly what you need, and that he was, in fact, the right person, the exact right person for the moment, for this investigation. And part of why we walked through mistakes and reasons for decisions that we made in this book is to lay out why we think having somebody like Bob was so important for this kind of an investigation.

Preet Bharara:

Are we ready for the 2024 election? Based on all the things that you have learned in the past, are we on a better path to election security?

Aaaron Zebley:

I think we know election interference is still happening by foreign powers, and not just the Russians. I think artificial intelligence is something we might need to consider now. One of the ways election interference works, in fact, the only way it works is if somebody is trying to influence you to vote in a particular way and you don’t recognize or understand that it’s an actual national adversary. And artificial intelligence means it’s even easier to do that in a manner that you can’t detect it. So are we ready? Probably not.

Preet Bharara:

Aaron Zebley, Andrew Goldstein, my friends, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your insight and the behind the scenes look at the Mueller investigation. Congratulations on the book, which has a lot of implications, not just for what we have been through, but what we might be going through again in the future. The book is Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation. Thanks, gentlemen.

Aaaron Zebley:

Thank you, Preet.

Andrew Goldstein:

Thanks, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discussed the prosecution of Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Andrew Goldstein:

He ended up admitting to lying to Congress and he gave us the information about the Trump Tower Moscow project.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to CAFE.com/insider. Again, that’s CAFE.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week with a note about the election. We’re now less than six weeks out from the presidential election, and it’s up to all of us to make sure we have the leaders we need and deserve, and that will sustain and strengthen our democracy. Exercising our constitutional right to vote is among the most important acts of service we can do for our country. But there are forces at play who want to intimidate people out of voting, suppress people’s votes, and misinform the public about the voting process. In every election cycle, but perhaps in this one more than ever before, protecting everyone’s vote is absolutely critical. To that end, as some of you may know, I participated in an event last week in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. It was organized by the Pennsylvania Democratic Voter Protection Team in support of the Harris Walz campaign.

I took the stage in Philadelphia with actor Gina Torres, who you may know is Jessica Pearson from the hit show, Suits. We talked about the importance of volunteering, not just to help get out the vote in this election season, but to protect the vote. One way to do that is to volunteer to be a poll monitor, which looks different in different states, but it’s generally someone who observes the voting process to ensure that it’s fair. Some people might find a task like that to be intimidating, and some folks think they can only sign up for poll monitoring if they’re a lawyer. But that’s not true, anyone can. Groups like Pennsylvania’s Democratic Voter Protection Team and similar organizations in other states across the country provide training and give you all the support you need come election day.

Poll watching is absolutely vital, not only in Pennsylvania, but in all the battleground states, and, in fact, in every state. So I want to urge you all to vote, to make a plan to vote, to get your family and friends out to vote this year. But if you’re able, I also encourage you to sign up to volunteer in Pennsylvania, another battleground state, or wherever you are. Let’s all do everything we can to protect the vote.

To sign up in Pennsylvania, head to padems.org/voterprotection. You can also check out iwillvote.com if you’re interested in learning more about the voter registration process and polling sites in your state. That’s iwillvote.com. And check out other links in the show notes that talk about other battleground states, as well. And if you’re volunteering this year, write and tell us about it. Send your messages to letters@cafe.com.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Aaron Zebley and Andrew Goldstein. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-73382. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The Deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.