Preet Bharara:

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

Michael Lewis:

It turns out it’s easier to fire the good people than the bad people or get the good people to leave because good people have options in the private sector. So what they did is they chased out a lot of talent and left all the dead weight. Who does that? Who can do that and not think about it? You’ve got to come in just believing that all these people are wasteful. Otherwise, you go shoot yourself.

Preet Bharara:

I’m Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Michael Lewis. He’s a writer and financial journalist who wrote The Big Short, which later became an Oscar-winning film. He joins me now to discuss his latest book. It’s called Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State about the downfall of the Department of Government Efficiency among other things. That’s coming up. Stay tuned. Michael Lewis, welcome back to the show.

Michael Lewis:

Pleasure to be here.

Preet Bharara:

I’m shocked that you have another book.

Michael Lewis:

Why?

Preet Bharara:

No, I’m not. That was sarcasm. That was sarcasm. That’s what you do. I’m going to hold it up for the YouTube audience. Michael Lewis, Blockers. Apparently there’s a subtitle not on the cover because one might wonder in the bookstore or in the library what it’s about. The subtitle is Rebels in the Deep State. So I was going to start by asking you the question, who are the blockers we’re talking about and why are you writing about them?

Michael Lewis:

Blockers is a term that Elon Musk and lots of tech people like to use. It’s the people who are the crusty old people who won’t change when you go into an organization and they try to stop you from implementing change. And when he created DOGE and invited lots of 20-somethings to go in and wreak havoc in the government, he told them to find the blockers and get rid of them. And I actually learned of the term through the people who he got rid of. I mean that I was kicking around the government thinking about what it meant, what they were doing. And I kept finding these people who had been extremely good at their jobs, nonpartisan people in critical places in the government who got told they were blockers and kind of either removed or encouraged to leave.

So that’s where the title came from. I thought we’re going to turn what Elon Musk thinks is an insult into a compliment, into a badge of honor. But the how I got kind of interested in writing about it, I mean, I’ve been… Trump electrifies the material he touches. Trump is kind of in here some and he’s not the main character, but he’s turned the federal government into a really interesting subject and he’s done it by trying to change its very nature. Instead of a two million person nonpartisan workforce, takes an oath to the constitution and it serves no man, it’s being turned into this loyalist operation that serves his narrow interests. And I just thought there is a story in this. What does it mean for the various things that the government does when you change its nature?

Preet Bharara:

I often think that the words people use to describe some folks in their jobs not only doesn’t do the job justice, but also is undermining of what the job is really about. They’re sort of pejorative terms or they’ve come to be pejorative because of people’s biases. And so one word that you didn’t name the book is bureaucrat. Which is the most pejorative of the following, blocker, bureaucrat or unelected bureaucrat?

Michael Lewis:

Unelected bureaucrat. I would guess that’s the most pejorative.

Preet Bharara:

People use that a lot. They use unelected to describe bureaucrats.

Michael Lewis:

But that’s not what… A bureaucrat’s always unelected. So that’s-

Preet Bharara:

I know.

Michael Lewis:

It’s redundant. But they’re all pejorative, you’re right. And what they all are, interestingly, is they’re all a false stereotype. I think with people, when you tell them government worker or civil servant or bureaucrat or whatever word you use or phrase you use, I think an image pops into most Americans’ heads is just very different from how they are. And why that is is interesting, but why that is is also a literary opportunity. I mean, that’s where I get excited is when I walk into a place and I can see the reality is different than the perception.

Preet Bharara:

And expertise, which is something we used to like as a majority. Is it a conscious part of your effort here? It sounds like maybe it is, both in this book and in The Fifth Risk and in some other things you’ve written, it kind of changed the reputation and the stereotype of the unelected bureaucrat, the rebel in the deep state, or is that a byproduct of this report?

Michael Lewis:

It’s a byproduct. It’s more of a byproduct of the reporting. I get into this subject, it’s such an odd subject for me in some ways, the federal government, but what got me into it in the first place was Trump won when he walked in day after the election and fires his transition team, the 550 people who were supposed to teach him what’s going on inside his government. And you know that this is a uniquely uninformed president. He’s never been in the government and that he had no real interest in knowing and that he told Chris Christie that we can learn everything we need to know in an hour about the government and he’s supposed to be running it. That got me interested. It was like, what the hell is this thing?

You know how it’s like, I had this feeling, it’s a sensation, this feeling that… You ever been in a car with a bad driver and the driver’s going too fast and not only are they going too fast, they’re looking at you while they’re driving and my reaction when they do that is to look at the road even more intently. It’s like if I pay attention really hard, maybe we won’t get in a crash even though I… I had that sensation with the federal government, like if I pay attention to it, maybe a disaster won’t happen. And that’s what got me into it in the first place. And then it was certainly not conscious.

I found myself crawfishing towards the characters because the characters I was running across were so good that it became clear that there were people to write about whose stories were never going to get told, doing things that were amazing and interesting, that just deserve to be aired in a larger narrative. So I got to that with the first book. At the very end, I kind of figured it out. In this case, since the characters were the ones who were under assault, it became very natural to kind of put them front and center.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about DOGE. DOGE no longer exists as an entity, which we were discussing before we hit the record button, I think, to ferret out whether or not that could be one plaintiff against you in some defamation. I take it from your book and from all the things you say, notwithstanding the good things you say about the government, I served the federal government for 17 years. I think there are a million or more, maybe multiple millions of really dedicated, devoted, helpful government servants. But I just want to be clear that you’re not suggesting that there’s not waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.

Michael Lewis:

No. Well, no, certainly not. But these things all get tossed into one pile and I think they’re different. I think whatever abuse is, abuse sounds, I don’t know what that… But waste, of course there’s waste, but it’s sort of like this systematically designed waste that it isn’t waste, oh, person comes in and behaves in a really wasteful way with government resources. Fraud, there’s fraud. Obviously there’s fraud, but the common kind of fraud is an ordinary American citizen who’s not a government worker trying to defraud the government, cheating on their taxes or stealing from Medicaid or all that rest. I’d be surprised if there’s much, and Elon Musk didn’t find much, of actual government employees like stealing, that kind of thing. That’s not the thing.

What there is is a lot of inefficiency. Some of it’s built in and some of it is just necessary. No government is really designed to maximize for efficiency. It’s sort of like trying to prevent bad things from happening and sometimes there’s a lot of redundancy in that. So there are real problems with the government. I mean, well before Trump, there are real problems with the way we govern ourselves and it’s beyond time to have the conversation about how to structure the thing. So I’m not saying no, it was all perfect. No, there were none of these problems. I am saying that DOGE wildly exaggerated all of this.

Preet Bharara:

Right. No, I’m just trying to establish at the outset that there’s a universe in which a Republican president or a Democratic president, and I think there’s a good example of a Democratic president actually doing this, coming into office and saying whether it’s waste, fraud and abuse or inefficiency or an overlap of those two things to say we’re going to try to make things more efficient just like a new CEO might. And that’s done in good faith and it can be done in good faith to make the country better and to spend less money and to make sure that where there are not enough resources, you can move resources being spent inefficiently to things that need more spending like cyber threat or AI or disease or whatever the case may be. So the question to you is, at its outset or in the minds of the progenitors of DOGE, was it good faith or not?

Michael Lewis:

It was clearly bad faith.

Preet Bharara:

From the start.

Michael Lewis:

From the start. And here’s the tell that what they said they were doing was so obviously different from whatever they were actually doing. Unless you’re willing to believe that Elon Musk is just a complete idiot, and it just seems highly unlikely he’s a complete idiot, but he said he was coming in to cut the deficit. He was going to cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion deficit. He then proceeds to take a wrecking ball to a really narrow sliver of the government. He’s not trying to touch entitlements. He’s not trying to touch the military spending. Interest on the debt. That’s like three-quarters of the government. So right from the beginning, they can’t do what they say they’re going to do.

Then they lie about what they’ve done. They claim to have cut $100 dollars or several hundred billion dollars of stuff, which is actually not that great in the grand scheme of things. But when the GAO goes in and analyzes what do they actual cut, it’s like 4% of what they claim they can verify. 96% they can’t verify. New York Times did an investigation of this so that they are… And then when you look at the constant tweeting by Elon Musk and you start to parse it, fact check it, it’s not just exaggeration. It’s boldfaced lie after lie after lie. And what’s odd about this, especially when you compare him to Trump, Trump lies all the time, right? When he says something that’s true, you’re shocked. It’s like he just does it. It’s strategy. It’s feature, not bug.

But Musk, if you talk to Musk’s friends, like the people who really admire him and work in his companies, one of the first things they’ll say about him is Elon doesn’t lie. Elon believes everything he says is true. And I’m having trouble with that, but I don’t know what’s scarier, the thought that he is just lying all the time or that he thinks this stuff is true, but it was all… There was so much falseness in it all. So the question was, let’s assume he’s I think the best case, let’s assume he’s not a dummy. Let’s assume he was there for some reason other than the reason he says because the reason he says he wasn’t even trying to really do the thing he said. What is it? Now-

Preet Bharara:

Right. That was my next question.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, what is it? What is it?

Preet Bharara:

So what was the aim?

Michael Lewis:

What’s the aim?

Preet Bharara:

These are busy people, right?

Michael Lewis:

Well, one way of answering that question is to ask, what did he get? Maybe he got what he was after. Well, he definitely got his friend put in the job of running NASA. He got that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s small potatoes.

Michael Lewis:

I don’t know. If SpaceX is your big business, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

Right. But you’re doing the whole DOGE thing to get the one guy.

Michael Lewis:

That one guy. That seems like not enough. I agree.

Preet Bharara:

And also it didn’t end… Well, I don’t want to put the cart before the horse.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, so that’s-

Preet Bharara:

But DOGE didn’t end well for some folks, correct?

Michael Lewis:

Well, I don’t think it ended well for anybody. Did it?

Preet Bharara:

But people who were the DOGE people, it did not end well for them.

Michael Lewis:

The Musk-rats, the people who came in to help him, no, no, it didn’t end well with them. It was like the fall of Hanoi when-

Preet Bharara:

Right. And they weren’t trying to get someone into NASA.

Michael Lewis:

So why were they there? So they were there. That’s-

Preet Bharara:

I guess I’m asking all the questions at once.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah. So why they were there is different from what… They were there because Elon was there, that people wanted to be near him.

Preet Bharara:

They wanted to follow.

Michael Lewis:

They wanted to follow. They wanted to be near him. They thought that if he’s staying close enough, some money will fall out of his pockets or jobs or you worship him and you want to be near your idol. There were all kinds of reasons like that for them to be there.

Preet Bharara:

It couldn’t be, I’m going to say this and don’t laugh. There are various reasons. One of the reasons why blockers are in their jobs is they’re interested in public service. Some people do public service in their jobs. Some people like to serve from the private sector and serve on commissions and those sorts of things. In the interest of completeness, I want to ask you, is there any argument in favor of that reason?

Michael Lewis:

Oh yeah. Not Elon. Not Elon. I don’t know about Elon.

Preet Bharara:

But they though, they were told, “Look, we’re going to cut waste. We’re going to make it more efficient.”

Michael Lewis:

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a good cause.

Michael Lewis:

I think in the case of some of the people who came to Washington, their motives were mixed, but I think there were some who really came. In fact, I feature one of them. He gets a lot of air time in my book and ends the book. I mean, some of them came because they had a very specific thing they wanted to fix in the government. So they actually did think, “Oh, I have these technical skills. The government doesn’t. It can use them. I can be a useful citizen.” There were people who thought that for sure. So yes. And it was not all one thing. And it wasn’t all one thing in the way a party is not all one thing. It was a party. It was a social network. People were not exactly recruited to DOGE. They just kind of showed up. Really, it was like a friend of a friend of a friend told me that you needed this, can I come and help?

Preet Bharara:

So the people who showed up and thought they were serving some cause to fix government or whatever, do you have any insight into whether or not that was based on ideology, sort of old standing, longstanding ideology of the right? As Reagan said, the most dangerous sentence in the English language is, “I’m from the government. I’m here to help.” The demonizing of government workers that we’ve seen for decades upon decades, was it that or was any of it in the spirit that I understand that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had their efficiency increasing project, which was more modest, but also I think more fair. And if you want to comment on that, you should. But were these people driven by ideology or something else, if at all?

Michael Lewis:

I think the ideology was a necessary, but possibly not sufficient condition. So if you just have to look at how they did what they did. So 26-year-old who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Elon shows up, is given credentials to go into some agency, Veterans Affairs, pick your agency, but let’s take Veterans Affairs because I had eyes on that and is told, “Get rid of people and get rid of contracts.” This person has never set foot into the Office of Veterans, knows nothing about it. He’s 26 years old. So he does two things. He pulls up all the contracts of the Department of Veterans Affairs, like 90,000 contracts, and they don’t mean anything to him, but he just starts plugging in keywords like, I don’t know, gender, bias, women, whatever, and just cuts the contracts that he assumes are wasteful by the titles on the contracts.

Preet Bharara:

Based on ideology.

Michael Lewis:

Based on ideology, right. Not based on any kind of analysis of the value of the contract. So that is an ideologically driven action. It’s premised on… You can’t do that if you think government has value because you’d be worried you would be cutting something that was valuable. So that happens. Then the second thing they do across the agencies is they cut people in the only way they can cut people. The permanent civil service has these protections and it’s hard to get rid of them. It is a problem actually how hard it is to get rid of them, but there’s a reason it’s hard to get rid of them. You don’t want people being fired for political reasons. Anyway, the group of people who are fireable easily are the so-called probationary workers. Were you ever one of those?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I forget what the time period is, but every federal prosecutor, every assistant U.S. Attorney is probationary for-

Michael Lewis:

18 Months.

Preet Bharara:

18 months or 24 months. And it was something that we would joke about like, “Oh, you’re going to be thrown out.” But I was not aware of anybody who ever didn’t make it through.

Michael Lewis:

The term is so odd.

Preet Bharara:

And then after that, then it’s very, very… I mean, I thought too difficult when I ran a government office of 450 people. You don’t want to do it on a regular… But there are people in any institution that shouldn’t be on the job.

Michael Lewis:

That need to go. That’s right. But the probationary workers didn’t have the same protections. And so what they could do to just get the head count up of who they fired is fire all of them. Now, who are they firing when they fire those people? They’re firing the young you, they’re firing young people, and they’re firing people who’ve been brought in to deal with some immediate problem. So they’re not firing people because they’re bad. They’re firing them because they can fire them. So they end up having this very perverse effect. If you were going in and what you wanted to do was get rid of the dead weight, you would go about it almost exactly the opposite. Well, they got-

Preet Bharara:

You’d fire the people who’d been there the longest.

Michael Lewis:

That’s right. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And they also, based on the government pay scale, I presume also paid the most.

Michael Lewis:

Yes. It turns out it’s easier to fire the good people than the bad people or get the good people to leave because the good people have options in the private sector. So what they did is they chased out a lot of talent and left all the dead weight. Who does that? Who can do that and not think about it? You’ve got to come in just believing that all these people are wasteful. Otherwise, you go shoot yourself. And some of the kid, to their credit, some of them actually kind of had misgivings afterwards. There’s not been a whole lot public about this, but I interviewed a bunch of them, it was like, “I’m not sure what we did was a good thing.”

As I say, the ideology… What does ideology do? What does real partisanship do? It blinds you. You don’t look at facts. You don’t look at what’s going on under your nose. You come in, you already know the answer. Your ideology gives you the answer. Your religion gives you the answer. So you’re not actually responding to the facts on the ground. And I think that blindness was absolutely necessary for them to do what they did because anybody who was actually looking and sensing and paying attention would say, “We shouldn’t do this.”

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Michael Lewis after this. I think it’s the first one you talk about, the first agency you talk about, the U.S. Institute of Peace, which I will admit, you can see this in your book. I’ve been a creature of government for a very, very long time, as I said, 17 years, and I have a lot of friends in government and I cover government and I read the papers. And like you, I never heard of the U.S. Institute of Peace either. You say not so much as a faint whisper about it. I mean, what’s great about this, I don’t mean to pander to the guest, but if we describe the book as a book about unelected bureaucrats, which is pejorative and also boring sounding, you would think this is… How can you make that interesting? But you have all these reveals and you revealed, it’s a small one, that the U.S. Institute of Peace was a private corporation.

Michael Lewis:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

What the hell’s going on with that?

Michael Lewis:

Well, Congress for 150 years, I think the first one was the Red Cross, actually charters, these kind of semi quasi-government institutions. They may get some congressional funding, but they’re designed to be independent from the government. And I don’t know, Kennedy Center’s probably this. Smithsonian’s probably this, where the government has some money in it. The president may appoint people asynchronistically to his term. The whole point is he doesn’t control it. The charter is written that way. And the U.S. Institute of Peace was created, and like you, I’d never heard of it. This is what got me really… Actually, this is what caught my attention because I had had my head, “Oh, Trump doesn’t care about government. He didn’t even try to run it the first time.”

And then the second time they come in and they’re running not only the government, but all this stuff that’s not… They’re trying to seize all this stuff that’s not the government. It was like the most enthusiastic act of management I’d ever seen. And that this thing that I never heard of that was a private nonprofit that owned its own building finds itself invaded by some combination of FBI, DOGE, D.C. Police and private security firms. I thought, what is this? It’s like they come into your house, take your house. That kind of woke me up to the possibility this was something completely different. Let’s just back to the previous thing we were talking about, what are they doing or why they’re allowed to do… Is DOGE allowed to do what it does?

So I think, my theory of the case here, and you just tell me if you think I’m wrong, my theory of the case is that the Trump administration came in this time and it was a massive power grab. It was, “We’re going to grab as much power as we can. We’re going to seize the power of the purse from Congress. We’re going to ignore a law. We are going to make this president more powerful than any president’s ever been.” And then when you do that, you transform the habitat, you transform the executive branch. And the character in this chapter you’re talking about, the security guard, even he said, he asked, “Why the hell are they coming for us? Nobody even knows we exist.” And then he decided they’re coming for us to show that they can. They’re taking our building to show they can.

Preet Bharara:

So I agree generally, except where I think about this, even though you have a lot of implicit and explicit, legitimate criticism of these guys, I worry that part of this conversation gives them too much credit.

Michael Lewis:

Oh. [inaudible 00:24:02] thinking about it?

Preet Bharara:

That they thought it all about it. Yeah, that they were just utterly thoughtless about where they were going, what they were doing. Did six guys sign up for the U.S. Institute of Peace or were they randomly assigned? They went to the-

Michael Lewis:

It’s randomly assigned. The DOGE people were random-

Preet Bharara:

Randomly assigned. Yeah.

Michael Lewis:

But were assigned by somebody. Somebody said, “Go get that.”

Preet Bharara:

It goes to a question I wanted to ask you before we come back to the subject of the theory of the case. Did any humans do any planning whatsoever with respect to any of this? I mean, if you had to guess how many meetings happened by and among the DOGE personnel before going into an agency, do you think it would be more or less than how much I prepared for this interview?

Michael Lewis:

Probably about the same. Yeah. But however, there are people… So Russell Vought at the Office of the Management of Budget and co-author of Project 2025, those people thought a lot about what they wanted to do. And I think-

Preet Bharara:

But what they wanted to do was unleash massive numbers of termites into agencies to eat at the wood.

Michael Lewis:

Yes. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So they didn’t need the soldiers to be thinking.

Michael Lewis:

That’s exactly right.

Preet Bharara:

They just needed to go out.

Michael Lewis:

The kids don’t know. That’s right. The kids who are rolling into the Institute Peace probably don’t even know that it’s a private corporation.

Preet Bharara:

So that was a design.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You think that was a design?

Michael Lewis:

Yeah. I think that the ignorance is also a feature here, that you only do this stuff if you don’t know anything about it.

Preet Bharara:

And you don’t really care. I don’t know if termites is the right metaphor, but if… Locusts, I don’t know what it would be. But if your goal is just to sort of destroy and disrupt, and if you believe… Let me ask you a different question about what Trump and others believe or Elon believes. Do you think the people at the top, meaning the sitting President of the United States, either thought about, or if he did think about it, believe that DOGE could cut $2 trillion?

Michael Lewis:

If he cared about that, we wouldn’t get his budget. The national debt has gone up three and a half trillion dollars in Trump’s first two years. He doesn’t care about that.

Preet Bharara:

Why isn’t the explanation for Trump just, it’s disruptive, it sounds good, it’s got a cool name, this cool guy who’s the richest man in the world is being pressed into service to do it. I can tell people that we’re cutting all this waste. I mean, it doesn’t matter if he does or not. I mean, he tells people we have the best economy in the history of the world, right?

Michael Lewis:

Right, right.

Preet Bharara:

Inflation doesn’t exist.

Michael Lewis:

Well, I think this is truth of the Trump presidency is that that’s probably close to the story Trump tells himself, but that’s not the story that the people who are orchestrating and the work on behalf of Trump tell themselves.

Preet Bharara:

Who would you identify as the mastermind of DOGE?

Michael Lewis:

Russell Vought is the person who made the most practical use of it. It starts with a guy named Paul Dans, but Vought is the spider in the web. I think he and Steven-

Preet Bharara:

Is he an elected bureaucrat?

Michael Lewis:

Yes, he’s deep state. It’s very funny. He has created the very thing that he bandies around, the idea that this is… There really is a deep state now. Stephen Miller and Russell Vought. And his fingerprints are never on anything. It’s very impressive. It’s a very impressive performance. He’s a Shakespearean character.

Preet Bharara:

Does he regret the DOGE or not?

Michael Lewis:

Oh, I know this secondhand, so this is not my own reporting. I know from someone who reported this out, Andy Kroll, I think at ProPublica. He said that what Vought told his minions at the Office of the Management of Budget is that DOGE is like the tsunami or the hurricane or the earthquake. It’s this disaster that’s happening and we can’t control it, but we’re going to be the ones who are in charge in the rubble. And that he himself was… There’s that famous video of Russell Vought before the election talking, he didn’t know he was being filmed, talking at a fundraiser saying that his goal was to traumatize the federal workforce. He wanted to put them into a state of trauma.

Preet Bharara:

That worked.

Michael Lewis:

That did work. It totally worked. It’s Russell Vought who is deciding whether medical schools are getting their funding right now. He’s sitting there giving himself the power to approve all research grants. So I think he’s sort of like the operational brains. And I just assume, I do not know this to be true, and if you’d asked me, “Michael, is there anything you wish you could have found out for this book or been a fly on the wall of for this book that you didn’t get?” I would say, “I would like to have been a fly on the wall when Russell Vought tells Elon Musk where to go. It wouldn’t have taken many conversations, but he’d have said something like, “The government’s like a pirate ship and the three agencies you need to pay attention to are the Office of the Management of Budget, but I’m here, so don’t worry about that.”

“And then there’s the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, and you get ahold of that and you got a hold of the engine room, the crew quarters, and the bridge. And then you can go do what you want after that.” And that’s what he did. I don’t believe Elon Musk figured it out all by himself. I think Russell Vought in a room would be very impressive to someone who’s intent on dismantling the thing. So I just assume those conversations happened, but I don’t have evidence of it. I would love to have watched them. It would’ve been fun. And your explanation of Trump, this is obviously true. He’s evinced no interest in the federal government at all, in running it really.

Preet Bharara:

Well, except, can I point out, I mean, if I hadn’t read the book and I didn’t know the end of the chapter, I probably would’ve asked you this question. And as a joke, I would’ve said, “Well, he probably just wanted to put his name on the building.” As you end the chapter, a month later after a judge ruled against them on various of these points in December 2025, that institution was renamed the Donald J. Trump United States Institute. He put his name on the fucking thing.

Michael Lewis:

Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

Preet Bharara:

We have to bleep out the effing. I mean, it’s almost comical and you’re laughing, but I know that’s a disturbed laughter.

Michael Lewis:

Yes. Yes. Not that disturbed. Don’t worry too much about me.

Preet Bharara:

No, no, no, no. I just thought this question. It’s needlessly complex.

Michael Lewis:

That’s all right.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if it’s complex or not.

Michael Lewis:

Go ahead. I’ll try my best.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s confusing even to me, but I’m going to ask anyway. Because a lot of people talk about their heedlessness of consequences, Trump and others. In your view, is it that they don’t think about consequences? They don’t care about consequences? And either way, is it they don’t care about consequences because they don’t think about them or they don’t think about consequences because they don’t care about them? Or is it something else? I want to understand how you can have people who have such consequential positions and jobs and authority who the evidence shows again and again and again, they haven’t thought a step or two forward.

Michael Lewis:

Like attacking around?

Preet Bharara:

Yes, that’s a good example.

Michael Lewis:

So I think Trump is pure impulse. He’s the opposite of Moneyball, right? He trusts his gut and he doesn’t think things through. The world may be playing chess, he’s playing checkers kind of thing.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the best explanation I saw was it’s not that people are playing chess and he’s playing checkers, people are playing chess and he’s eating the pieces. That always stuck with me. I think that’s more accurate.

Michael Lewis:

That’s pretty good. But what do I think? I think that they aren’t thinking of… That’s not how they think. I don’t think they’re thinking we have a social responsibility to fund scientific research because it’s going to save lives in the distant future, anything like that. I think it is this pure power play and there are two elements to this. One is when I think about how do you predict what Donald Trump’s going to do or where he’s going to go, I think of him as a trust destroying machine, that it’s all about undermining trust because he does not function in a world where trust is alive.

That if we’re in a room with Donald Trump and six other people and we all trust each other, that Donald Trump’s essential mendacity and untrustworthiness is going to get him spit out like a bad seed. He doesn’t compete in that world. He competes in a world where nobody trusts anybody else. So he’s sowing mistrust wherever he goes because that creates conditions for his strengths. So he’s really good at reconfiguring the environment so he’s strong in that environment. The other thing I think is it’s not like consequences. It’s maybe political consequences they think about, but it’s not like we’re calculating how we’re going to save lives here or anything like that. I think they are thinking about how do we both accumulate and express power?

And there’s this line in Orwell that I could not get out of my head when I was working on this book and it’s somewhere in 1984. And a character is asking, how do you know if you have power? It isn’t that you get to do whatever you want. It’s not that people are doing what you tell them to because maybe they had done that anyway. That doesn’t confirm that you have power. The way you confirm to yourself you have power is you inflict suffering on others. You make people suffer. So I think it’s the opposite of a must be socially responsible kind of thing. It is actually inflicting suffering on people is a piece of the puzzle and it isn’t a byproduct. It’s like it is important.

And so a lot of this stuff that they did with bureaucracy is simply inflicting suffering on people, what they do with immigrants, what they do with trans people. It’s like this is important that they do this. It’s a way of demonstrating power as much to themselves as anybody else. So when I think about explaining Trump, it’s that.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think Trump revels in people’s suffering?

Michael Lewis:

I think it makes him feel important. It makes him feel good about himself. And then the relief of suffering too. I can also relieve your suffering, but controlling the suffering.

Preet Bharara:

As you know better than anybody, part of what DOGE did was cause suffering by taking away relief.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it was mysteriously cruel and it’s mysterious because why be so cruel? You could do this a completely different way, but the cruelty is important. The cruelty is an important piece of this. And so that’s how I think about him. I don’t think, you’ve asked a couple questions to suggest that maybe I think Donald Trump has some diabolical complicated plan in his head and I don’t think that. I don’t think that at all. I think other people around him do, but I don’t think he does.

Preet Bharara:

So you said cruelty is part of it. Stupidity also is in the nature of it?

Michael Lewis:

Ignorance. Ignorance.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s willful ignorance a bit, right?

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, it is willful.

Preet Bharara:

It’s almost trying to get educated.

Michael Lewis:

Right, that’s right.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, there are a lot of ignorant people who then… I was ignorant at a lot of things, including making a podcast, but then I sought to make myself unignorant, if that’s a word. So this is not as big a deal as some other things, but the five bullet point email, which a lot of people joked about and a lot of people made fun of, but just to remind everyone, how can anyone forget? I think every federal worker or the aim was to ask every federal worker in the United States of America, what did you do last week and give five bullet points and you write about it and you point out the 98 different way… I mean, you could written the whole book about all the things that were stupid about that plan. Could you grace us with a couple?

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s funny because I think if you ask someone in a small company in the private sector like, “What do you think of that?” They might say, “Well, we do that kind of thing all the time.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. It has a surface appeal.

Michael Lewis:

It has a surface appeal, right. But when you’re asking CIA agents in the field or IRS people who are auditing to put it in an email, there are many jobs in the federal government where if you put in an email what you were doing, you could go to jail. So that’s just for starters.

Preet Bharara:

Or if you put that information in your bathroom in Mar-a-Lago, you could also… Oh, right. I forgot.

Michael Lewis:

There are many jobs in the U.S. Government, believe it or not, where you don’t get a computer. So inside the IRS, for example, there were lines, there were these long queues of people at the one computer station-

Preet Bharara:

To do the five bullet points.

Michael Lewis:

To do the five bullet points, which also, I mean, in addition to being intentionally insulting and kind of condescending, they didn’t ever intend to read this thing. They got two million responses or whatever. They got a lot of earnest responses. Nobody read them. So what purpose?

Preet Bharara:

Wasn’t there a plan? I thought you write that the AI was supposed to read it.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, yeah. Show me. I think we’d know if something interesting happened with those. No, that’s not what happened. They said that was very hand wavy.

Preet Bharara:

Claude was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

Michael Lewis:

He’s too dumb. Why am I reading this stuff? So nothing was done with it. It was no purpose. It feels like something Elon Musk thought was funny at midnight and hit a button. And they figured out a way to do it. They figured out, thanks to Russell Vought probably, that you go to the Office of Personnel Management and just hit a button and everybody would get this thing. But they infuriated lots of very good people. And I don’t know in what world is that a smart management strategy? In what world? I don’t understand. The thing about Musk that I would love some serious business reporter to tackle, I don’t understand what world Elon Musk is actually good manager of enterprise, that he screwed up Twitter royally. He didn’t know what he was-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But SpaceX is doing very well.

Michael Lewis:

No, he’s a good promoter.

Preet Bharara:

And Tesla is a real company and makes real cars that people buy.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, that’s true. It makes me wonder who’s running those places though, because if what we saw was Elon Musk’s management skills in DOGE or Twitter where the most public display of them, it just makes you wonder about the guy.

Preet Bharara:

Well, but isn’t it the case, I’m not defending anyone in particular, but there are people who are really good at doing the one thing that they do, and some of those people are folks who trade stock and they make a billion dollars or whatever, or they found a company and it’s more successful than any other company that’s ever been in that industry. And they think they’re smarter than everybody on everything, right?

Michael Lewis:

Well, that’s true.

Preet Bharara:

They think they can do science. They think they can do government. They think they can do medicine.

Michael Lewis:

They think their jokes are funny.

Preet Bharara:

They think their jokes are funny.

Michael Lewis:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

So why couldn’t it be that, that you can simultaneously have someone who’s very successful and was a real manager and a real leader and a real entrepreneur? I mean, you don’t get to be the richest person in the world by accident.

Michael Lewis:

No, no, no. I’m not saying he has no ability whatsoever.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, it takes some management and leadership skills probably, but then people go… They think they can play a sport because they’re athletic in one sport, they can do any sport and that’s just not how it works. Could that be the explanation?

Michael Lewis:

Yeah, that could be. It could be. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I promised you that I was going to take us back in time and it’s relevant to all these things that you write about, which are so helpful. I was telling my team recently that one of the most memorable parts of a conversation for me as a podcast host that I had was with you, and it was eight years ago. I can’t believe it was eight years ago. And the question was a deep philosophical one, like why do some people do bad things and other people don’t? Why are some people corrupt and other people aren’t? And sometimes those people are members of the same family or members of the same workforce or members of the same agency. And you restated my question wisely as, are you asking, “Preet, why is it that when a mob moves in one direction, some people are able to step outside it and say, “That is wrong. Let’s not do that”?

And you said, among other things, a unifying trait in the characters you’ve written about, this is eight years ago, and I wonder if this is still true, is that they still hear their mama’s voice in their heads and how they were raised, which sounds very quaint. And then you say, “A lot of the characters who I’ve admired who stood against corrupt or inefficient or broken systems are people who don’t actually have a great neediness. They didn’t need me to write a book about them.” I think it’s related to confidence, but it’s a sort of, and this is the part that I have remembered, it’s a sort of self-possession. Some people seem sort of self-possessed and you say, “I’ve never quite gotten there.” And I admitted that I had never quite gotten there.

And you said, “It might be my favorite quality in a person is self-possession because it leads to all these other things. It leads to not getting swept up in the moods of the moment and it leads to kindness towards people who were sort of ostracized. And on the outside, it leads to generosity because you kind of just have an awareness. I think you’re probably more likely to be brave in situations if you’re also self-possessed.” That had a big impact on me. I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. And I give people that answer when I get that question and former prosecutors get that question, right? Why are some people bad and do bad things when other people don’t? Is that still your answer? Do you have a different answer?

Michael Lewis:

I do have a different answer.

Preet Bharara:

Is it confirmed?

Michael Lewis:

I’ll freeze.

Preet Bharara:

In the last eight years.

Michael Lewis:

No, and in fact, let’s look at one of the characters in the book, Kathleen Walters, who’s at the IRS and is the lady who stands between the White House and your tax returns. She was the chief privacy officer of the IRS. She lost a career she adored because she refused to hand over the addresses, the tax returns of seven million undocumented workers. It was against the law to do it. She knew it. She refused to do it. And in the narrative, it becomes pretty clear that what’s going on is she has her daddy’s voice in her head. Her father was this Atticus Finch-like lawyer in a small town in Pennsylvania who taught her that a meaningful life is lived in the service of others. He was this guy who took on any customer and if they couldn’t pay, they didn’t pay kind of thing.

And he instilled in her not just a value system, but this self-possessiveness, this sense of integrity in… Like she was a fully integrated person. And so when someone comes and sort of says, “Here, we’ll reward you for doing a bad thing or not punishing you, and won’t punish you if you do this bad thing,” her response is it doesn’t even occur to her to do the bad thing. It’s like, “What are you talking about? That’s not me.” And so if I were to extend that description, I’d say it is amazing the extent to which we are creatures of our own narrative, that we tell stories about ourselves, even if we’re not aware of the story. There’s this kind of soundtrack in your head about yourself. And when that soundtrack is clear on this subject, like I know the difference between right and wrong and I’m not going to do it if it feels wrong, it really helps you in those situations.

Preet Bharara:

No, I think that I’m glad that you have the same view. How much of all of this do you put in the category… You can see I’m coming at it from a particular point of view because this is where my brain has been the last few years, as intentional wrongdoing, intentional evil, to use an extreme word, or thoughtlessness. One might invoke, as I’ve invoked recently on the show a few times, Hannah Arendt’s phrase the banality of evil. Is this book about the banality of evil or something different?

Michael Lewis:

If you ask me what the book is about, the banality of evil is not the phrase that would pop to mind, though it is between the lines of the story.

Preet Bharara:

Does it support the thesis of the banality of evil or not?

Michael Lewis:

Oh yes, totally. And I almost think why is evil banal? I don’t think that people who were doing wrong are really framing the world as right and wrong. They don’t think they’re doing wrong.

Preet Bharara:

You said this eight years ago in a passage I didn’t read, you said the people who are corrupt, they never think they’re corrupt. And I was thinking about that further as I was reading it in preparation for this interview. Violent people will admit they’re violent.

Michael Lewis:

Oh.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean, frauds are different. Corruption is… They’re different buckets of crime. A mobster will, “Yeah, I kill people.” They’ll explain why they do it.

Michael Lewis:

They don’t think it’s wrong. They’ll do it. They’ll say, “I’m violent.”

Preet Bharara:

No, I think some of them do.

Michael Lewis:

There’s a reason for violence. Oh, okay.

Preet Bharara:

Some of them… Yeah.

Michael Lewis:

Okay.

Preet Bharara:

But the fraudsters, they’re a little bit different. They, in my anecdotal experience, were more likely to testify because they’re just… Their whole… I mean, people who are true and true frauds, and there are people like this, they think… I’ll explain to people the way I explain to the people I defrauded.

Michael Lewis:

I’ll never get caught.

Preet Bharara:

Well, there are people on both sides of the equation, right? Takes two to tango. So a fraudster needs people who can be defrauded, and there are people like that too. I mean, there are witnesses that my prosecutors would put on who’ve been the victims of a Nigerian crazy fraud, for example. And in the prep for the trial, you had to deal with the little wrinkle. This guy has been indicted, he’s going to trial, he’s going to prison probably. They’re like, “Maybe there is a prince. Maybe there is a prince in Nigeria. I don’t know. You’ve never proven to me there’s no prince. It’s possible there’s a prince.” And so that’s how they get by.

Michael Lewis:

I think the Trump corruption, it isn’t they’re framing it as right and wrong and what I’m doing is okay. I think if they’re framing it as just all there are in the world is winners and losers and we’re winning and triumph. It’s like we won, we won, we won, and they lost, they lost, they lost. Our side is good. Their side is bad. They aren’t even thinking what values your… Maybe these are the values his father taught him, but they’re not thinking, “What did your mama say when you were little about lying and cheating and stealing?”

Preet Bharara:

Not everyone’s mama and daddy are the right role models.

Michael Lewis:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

Just in closing, Michael, you have done… I don’t think you meant these books to be love letters to the government worker, or maybe you did. That’s my phrase, not yours.

Michael Lewis:

Yeah. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

But they kind of are, whether you like it or not, to unheralded people who often make less money than can make otherwise. I know there’s this common view that they’re overpaid and underworked, but I know you know from your experience in writing these books that that’s not true. Do you have a word of encouragement for folks who are thinking about leaving the government or thinking about going into government? And then you’re dismissed.

Michael Lewis:

All right. The thing I would say about it is that don’t spend too much time focused on this moment. It’s going to pass and that we know the society can’t function without the kind of people who are the best in our government. The people who have figured out that well-led life is a life led, not just for yourself. It isn’t just pursuing money and fame. It’s about service. And service can take many forms and the government is an unbelievably powerful place to serve. If our society is to survive, the spirit that informs the kind of person who understands that is completely necessary.

And I think young people tend to naturally have it in themselves and it gets beaten out of them by life. If you’re a young person, you’ve got that feeling, the government’s going to come back to you. It’s like it’s going to need you maybe more than ever. So don’t be cynical. Don’t be cynical. There is a place for those feelings that make you the best you.

Preet Bharara:

That’s great. Michael Lewis, thanks again. The book is Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State. Please read it, everyone. Good luck.

Michael Lewis:

Thanks, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

In a special segment for members of the insider community, Michael Lewis reveals one of the indirect victims of DOGE’s agenda.

Michael Lewis:

It was a two decade research program of trying to build manuals for how communities should defend themselves against fire and also escape plans for communities that are struck by these wildfires.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to staytuned.substack.com. Again, that’s staytuned.substack.com. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about the perjury allegations against Special Counsel Jack Smith, plus the Trump era’s impact on civic awareness. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Heather who writes, “There has been a lot of discussion of Senator Schmitt’s bungled attempt to catch Jack Smith in perjury, humorous as that may be. I’m curious how the senator got the text messages of Mr. Smith’s colleagues. Was that legal?” Heather, so that’s an interesting question. There were plenty of questionable moments during that hearing, but it’s not clear that obtaining the text messages was one of them. There’s some reporting about it, which I’ll get back to in a moment.

So for those of you who somehow missed it, last week, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Jack Smith about his work as special counsel investigating President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents. Now, during the hearing, Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri made quite a scene. He attempted to use text messages exchanged with Smith’s colleagues to suggest pretty strongly, without foundation, that Smith had secretly coordinated with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who had brought a separate election interference case against Trump in Georgia. I’ll take you through that again in a moment.

So to your question, how did Schmidt get those messages? It’s not 100% clear. What we know is, from Jack Smith’s previous testimony, that he and his team were issued government phones for communications related to the investigation. If they also used those phones to discuss personal matters, those texts could have been retained alongside official communications preserved under the Federal Records Act. According to reporting from MS Now, it was the Justice Department who provided the text messages to the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s not necessarily especially unusual. From time to time, DOJ does turn over a limited set of non-sensitive records in a case or program that happens to be the subject of a congressional investigation.

It is fair to say though the Trump appointees seem to have engaged in a highly unusual practice of sharing a broad swath of sensitive material. That’s unusual, but I’m not sure there’s anything illegal about it, even though its use in particular circumstances can be colossally stupid. So the Senate Judiciary Committee staff then gave Senator Schmitt’s team access, but they handed the text messages over with a warning, according to reporting. MS Now reports Senator Schmitt’s staff was explicitly told that the material was unvetted and that they were responsible for verifying it before using it. Seems like a pretty big warning sign to me. A warning sign that Senator Schmitt failed to heed.

And so, as you now know, during the hearing, Schmidt asked Smith whether he had attended an Atlanta Hawks game against the Golden State Warriors on February 3rd, 2024 in Atlanta. He then held up a poster of the text messages for dramatic effect and just as quickly took it down. In response to Smith’s confusion at the question and the poster being taken down, the senator then said somewhat ominously…

Senator Eric Schmitt:

I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself.

Preet Bharara:

Smith seemed confused, denied attending the game. There was some more back and forth about whether or not Smith had ever been in Atlanta during the period in question. He said he had not been. And at the end of that completely inconclusive, non-harmful questioning, Senator Schmitt said to Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt:

“You will go down as a total dirt bag.”

Preet Bharara:

Then it was Senator Amy Klobuchar’s turn. She asked a few follow-up questions and Smith recalled attending a different basketball game on the date in question. The Iowa women’s team playing Maryland in Maryland because Caitlin Clark was going to be playing. Senator Amy Klobuchar then suggested that Senator Schmitt might have confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Could it then be that University of Iowa as the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?

Preet Bharara:

Adding-

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

I think that people should have their facts straight before-

Senator Eric Schmitt:

Oh, we had [inaudible 00:54:44] this time around here.

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

… they accuse someone of being a dirt bag and not get the team wrong.

Senator Eric Schmitt:

I stand by that statement.

Preet Bharara:

Such are the proceedings now in the most deliberative body in the world. By the way, the whole session of his questioning was a series of viral moments and there was a viral moment within the viral moment, if you will. And if you haven’t seen it, you should go online and find it. And that’s the slow zoom on Senator Katie Britt’s face as she seemed to realize the fiasco that was unfolding before her. Pretty precious. Now you may be asking yourself the question, even if he was right, and it’s a question I haven’t heard discussed as often as it should have been, even if the senator was correct to interpret text messages as establishing that Jack Smith went to a basketball game in Atlanta the day after something happened of significance in Fani Willis’ case, what does that prove?

I’ve been kind of chuckling about it, although it’s not very humorous. In a city of two million plus people, the fact that one prosecutor went to a basketball game proves nothing, nothing at all about whether he had a meeting with, had a phone call with, conspired with, colluded with anyone, much less Fani Willis. So we’ve all been focused on the error and the embarrassing nature of the questions asked, but even if you assume all of it to be true, I don’t know what it proves. It proves nothing.

The second thing I’ll say is as a veteran and alum of the Senate Judiciary Committee myself and having worked for a fairly tough senator, amid all the speculation that Senator Schmitt’s chief counsel would lose his job, I remember thinking as the drama was unfolding, if I had engaged in that kind of reckless preparation of the member of the Senate, I wouldn’t be finding myself in an unemployment line. I might be finding myself in the morgue. A friend of mine who served a Republican Senator back in the day when I was there texted me in the middle of the proceedings also and said, “If I had done this to my senator, he would’ve stabbed me in the neck with a pen live on C-SPAN.” Now, I don’t have the latest on whether or not anybody has lost his or her job on Senator Schmitt’s staff. I think that if they had, we would’ve heard about it.

The fact that we hadn’t means at least one-hundredth of the Senate is being served by completely incompetent and malevolent people. The final thing I will say is once again, just to note the incredibly rich irony of a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee lecturing a witness about supposedly making false and unproved allegations. That’s the whole gist of the cross, accusing him of making false allegations while he himself is doing what? Making false allegations. Good work.

This question comes in an email from Scott. “In the first year of law school, we all become quickly aware of how critical commonly adhered to norms are to the proper functioning of American democracy. Do you believe the assault on norms we currently are experiencing will usher in a new dawn of civic awareness and productive debate?” Scott, thanks for your question. I have just two quibbles with it. One is I’ve tried to stay away from using the word norm going forward because I think the more important word and the more meaningful word and the more relevant word is value. So reframing your question as how important commonly adhered to values are of democracy, I think better captures the problem because norms by themselves are neither good nor bad. There have been bad norms in our history and there have been good norms in our history. And I think when we complain about their dismantling or their trampling, we should be more specific.

The second quibble I have is to your phrasing, your use of the future tense. And that’s good news actually, because I think we’re already seeing signs of renewed civic awareness and engagement. Whether that leads to more productive debate and outcomes is a harder question, but I feel for the first time in a while there are reasons to be hopeful. We can see evidence of what you refer to as civic awareness in a lot of different ways. You can see in the protests, the renewed spirit of engagement and defiance. Harvard researchers found demonstrations in nearly 38% of U.S. Counties last year, including counties that Trump won. They also found that the protest movement was reaching further into Trump country than at almost any point during his first term, and many of the protestors are doing it for the first time.

A survey commissioned by the organizers after the March 2026 No Kings demonstrations found that nearly a third of participants were taking part in a protest for the first time. So that’s new engagement. There are encouraging signs at the ballot box too. For example, Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election drew record participation in that state. Young voters nearly doubled their turnout in New York City’s 2025 primary and registrations through vote.org more than doubled in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period before the 2022 midterms. And we’ve also seen, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, people engaging more directly with their local government. I also think that the audience for this podcast and others focused on law and public affairs reflects too, an appetite for understanding how our institutions work and how they can work better.

People are making time to educate themselves about what’s happening and what they can do. Even the choice of topic in Michael Lewis’s latest book that we spent an hour discussing is cause to be hopeful. It’s a form of civic engagement itself. We also hear in the questions we receive every week. Listeners ask how they can push back against this administration’s actions and what it will take to repair the damage to the executive branch after this president leaves office. I don’t have answers to all of these questions, but I’m heartened by how many people are asking them and I think the momentum is just increasing as the midterms approach.

So from my perspective, the renewed civic awareness you’re hoping for is already here. The challenge now is to turn that energy into sustained participation and lasting institutional reform. I suspect we’ll see that engagement reflected at the ballot box in November. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Michael Lewis. 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. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky at @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Gloria Teal. The editorial producer is Claudia Hernández. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.