Preet Bharara:

From CAFE, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Jelani Cobb:

I thought I had a kind of working understanding of the ground rules of American politics, which Trump blew up. Do we really need to understand people sympathetically how they were able to reconcile Donald Trump making fun of a disabled reporter? He did that, at the very beginning of his political career, and that people were okay with that.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Jelani Cobb. He’s a staff writer at the New Yorker, and the IRA Lippman, Professor of journalism at Columbia University. Cobb, a historian by training, has written extensively about politics, race and culture, and he recently helped produce a pair of frontline documentaries, one on police reform, the other on voter suppression. He joins me this week to discuss how Joe Biden won, the debate around police reform, and the lessons learned from the Obama presidency. That’s coming up. Stay Tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Daniel in New York, “Dear, Preet, AG Barr has found no evidence of widespread election fraud in the election. Does this mean Barr’s throwing the towel in? It doesn’t seem like he’s putting up much of a fight.” Well, that’s an interesting question, Daniel, you’re referring to an interview that Bill Barr did this week with the AP, in which he made a very deliberate statement, and he’s a pretty deliberate guy, and he parses his words very carefully. He doesn’t use them casually. He said, the DOJ has found no evidence of widespread election fraud that would change the outcome of the election, which is interesting for him, because as I’m sure you’ve heard me say over the past number of months, Bill Barr was looking like he was laying a foundation for the president to be able to claim massive fraud.

Preet Bharara:

In fact, in a widely noted interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN a couple of months ago, Bill Barr speculated, without any evidence, and admittedly without any evidence that foreign nations could send thousands of absentee ballots in to the United States, which would constitute significant fraud. It’s a bit of a turnaround for him. We also talked about the fact that Bill Barr, contrary to many decades of policy, was authorizing investigations related to election activity, even before those elections were certified, the results were certified, which led somebody in the Public Integrity Unit at DOJ to resign from that position in protest.

Preet Bharara:

As I said a second ago, it’s quite in the bad face. I guess the significance of it is, given what we know about Bill Barr, given his prior statements about election fraud, given what he must understand to be the disposition and temperament of his boss, the president of the United States, it’s quite a significant statement and deserves all the attention it got. It also marks a very significant break with another Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani, who along with Jenna Ellis, issued a scathing statement about Attorney General Bill Barr.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t have much nice to say about Bill Barr in recent months, but I thought this was an important statement, and it helps put to rest all the speculation and frenzy and nonsense about the election being stolen from Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

This next question comes from Twitter user @putin_comrade. Putin Comrade, maybe I won’t answer your question. All right. #askpreet. Preet, can you speak about the way Biden might go about replacing the US Attorneys in his new administration? What are the criteria he might use to select a new set of us attorneys? Well, the perennial question or I guess the quadrennial question always is, what does the new administration do with respect to you us attorneys? You remember that in my case, four years ago, I had every expectation that I would leave because a new administration of a different party was coming in, Donald Trump asked me to stay, unusual thing, and then he ended up firing me under circumstances that I think are well known to you.

Preet Bharara:

My guesses are the following, one, that the Biden ministration will not summarily fire everyone and ask them to leave by 5:00 PM on a particular day, there needs to be some continuity in some of these offices. Some people might go sooner than others. But the general practice has been, there’s an understanding that US attorneys appointed by prior presidents take some time to leave, some of them will leave right away, and in many cases, there’s a period of weeks or months, where the baton is passed to the next generation of United States Attorneys.

Preet Bharara:

The other prediction I’ll make is that the new set of US attorneys will be far more diverse. There’ll be more women, there’ll be more people of color. The Trump batch of United Sates attorneys was singularly white and male. Maybe the least diverse set of federal prosecutors in a generation or more.

Preet Bharara:

Finally, I want to remind you that unlike some other positions, the position of US attorney is typically one that is recommended by the local US senators in the state. In states where there is at least one Democratic Senator, because Joe Biden is a Democrat, the White House will largely defer to the recommendations made by that US Senator. In states where there are two Republican senators, they might run the candidate by those senators, or otherwise defer to a prominent congressional Democrat in that state what sometimes happens. But those elections will be made by the White House, but in the other states with democratic senators, as was true in New York, the recommendations will be made by the home state senators. Those recommendations are almost always deferred to.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes from a Twitter user [inaudible 00:05:21], don’t know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. Who writes, “Too bad, you missed my Ask Preet a month ago, I asked specifically about the possibility that Trump will sell what’s left of his political power to the highest bidder after the elections, just saying.” Obviously, this listener is talking about the pretty shocking breaking news from earlier this week, that there is a ongoing federal investigation, looking into a potential bribery for pardon scheme involving presidential pardons.

Preet Bharara:

Unlike some other things that get reported in the news, this is not speculation, this is not hearsay. The evidence of this comes directly from a document signed by a federal district court judge in D.C., Judge Beryl Howell. The document in question, which actually dates back to the end of August, is a memorandum and order relating to prosecutors attempts to look at material that is possibly attorney client privilege on a couple of different grounds. One, the crime fraud exception to the attorney client privilege and the other, that the privilege doesn’t really apply because the materials that are in question here are not covered by the attorney client privilege. That’s a long way of saying that the Department of Justice has itself announced, at least to this judge, in what had been a secret document, that there was such an investigation going on. The judge, in her wisdom, did not allow the DOJ, the government, to continue to maintain these documents under seal.

Preet Bharara:

Some may ask, well, why is it coming out now after the election? Why didn’t it come up before the election? Is there some interest that the judge has in making it public? My view is, judges in the federal system and the state system believe very strongly in the principle that court proceedings should be open, and only if there are very, very good reasons, harm to witnesses, harm to an investigation, or some other such compelling reason, documents should be made available, they should be largely unredacted, if possible, and we don’t conduct our court proceedings in our trials in secret. It’s not the Soviet Union, it’s the United States of America.

Preet Bharara:

That said, we don’t know a lot, because this memorandum and opinion is quite redacted. What we do know is the government has claimed two distinct schemes, one, which they characterize as a lobbying scheme for pardons and the other bribery for pardons. We know also, it’s been going on for some months. We know it’s a significant investigation, the government has clearly attached a lot of resources to the investigation, they have a trove of evidence, don’t know if it will lead to charges with respect to bribery for pardons or not, but the government told the judge they have exploited 50 some odd digital devices, including iPads, laptops, iPhones, et cetera. There’s nothing in the document that suggests per your tweet, that President Trump knows about it, had anything to do with it, or that anybody in the White House was open and receptive to it. It could be the case, it could not be the case.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, this news comes at the same time as the New York Times reports that as recently as some days ago, Rudy Giuliani, the everywhere personal lawyer to Donald Trump has had discussions with the President about a preemptive pardon for himself. Remember, there has been reporting, the Southern District of New York mayoral office has been investigating Rudy Giuliani on a number of issues. By the way, there’s also reporting as of Tuesday night, that President Trump is thinking about giving preemptive pardons to his children as well, and also, as we’ve discussed, perhaps to himself, even though that’s almost certainly not lawful.

Preet Bharara:

Even though we don’t know yet what the President will do with respect to Giuliani or his children or himself, or his involvement in this potential bribery scheme, we do know one thing, he has made it clear that he is prepared to pardon people who are close to him. He’s prepared to pardon people who may not deserve it. He’s prepared to pardon people by going around, circumventing the pardon attorney process, the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which has historically been a watchdog in this practice, even though the President has wide berth to pardon almost anyone he wants because the Constitution gives him that power.

Preet Bharara:

There still has historically, though there have been some bad pardons, of course, there’s been some regularity and some process and some vetting of these pardons. That’s all out the window with President Trump. That tells you something else, a culture has been created, in which many, many people are in the position to want or need a pardon, believe that it’s sellable to them. Whether they’re mistaken or not, the president, I think, deserves some responsibility for creating the impression in the minds of some folks, maybe the people involved in this scheme that hey, pardons are not taken so seriously, pardons come to those who have some connections. The President is into politics, the President is into having money for his campaign, and if I do something for him, because he’s a quid pro quo kind of president, witnessed the Ukraine debacle. If I do something for him, maybe he’ll do something for me.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll follow the story and see what happens. But expect week after week until January 20th, for there to be some pardons are talk of pardons, or talk of pardons that we’ll be discussing.

Preet Bharara:

It’s time for a short break, Stay Tuned. Jelani Cobb is my guest this week. He’s a staff writer at the New Yorker and a professor at the Columbia Journalism School. Cobb recently helped produce a frontline documentary called Policing the Police, and he spent years writing about police accountability. Today we talk about what is holding back real police reform, Joe Biden’s path to the presidency, and whether the media should try to understand Trump voters.

Preet Bharara:

Jelani Cobb, welcome to the show.

Jelani Cobb:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

How was your Thanksgiving? You were telling me a little bit about it before we started taping.

Jelani Cobb:

Well, it was interesting because we didn’t travel and nobody came over. Just the essence of what people say is just family being together, but it was a very… I don’t know what you would say, discreet grouping.

Preet Bharara:

Did you eat a lot? You can say. Only hundreds of thousands of people will know.

Jelani Cobb:

I don’t even want to talk about it. It was a disgusting spectacle.

Preet Bharara:

That’s what Thanksgiving is for.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah. That’s true. But I will say this, I will say this, if there’s a pie shop, I don’t know if you can advertise it whatever.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, go ahead.

Jelani Cobb:

There this pie place called Pietisserie, which is in Oakland. I was raving about how much I love their pies, and I did a documentary with Frontline, I had two documentaries with Frontline this year.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, we’re going to talk about them.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah, and as we were wrapping, I was going on about these pies. Just very kindly, the people at Frontlines sent me two of their pies as a thank you parting gift at the end of the documentaries. I got them the week of Thanksgiving-

Preet Bharara:

What kind of pies?

Jelani Cobb:

They were the most amazing pies, ever. They don’t even sound like combinations that you would typically think of. One was a Raspberry pie with a chocolate crust, and the other was a pumpkin pie with a chocolate crust. Oh my God.

Preet Bharara:

Do you want to take a moment and savor it?

Jelani Cobb:

I just want to have a moment to reflect on it.

Preet Bharara:

All right, let’s think about the pies. Let me ask you this, while you were stuffing your face on Thanksgiving, did you take the day off from the news and politics or were you still engaged that day?

Jelani Cobb:

It’s involuntary. I try to check in periodically.

Preet Bharara:

Meaning every five minutes?

Jelani Cobb:

Every five minutes would be like the normal. But I checked in a little bit in the morning, little in the afternoon, and then at night after my children were asleep, just keeping an eye. Then also I think it’s habitual, not only for people who are news junkies, but because of the nature of the administration that we are living under right now has been there’s so much craziness happens at any given minute that part of me was just like, what do they have this sleeve for Thanksgiving? What are they going to do?

Preet Bharara:

You don’t want to fall behind. There have been times, where I’ve been away for like two hours, and then I come back, and I go, oh, Comey was fired.. Stuff like that happens.

Jelani Cobb:

Right. Those kind of things. I imagine that this is a little bit different for you, because you’re someone who has a much clearer vantage point about the norms of government than just even average engaged citizen would have.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe. Part of the problem for people like you and me, you write about the news and about politics and about what’s going on in the country, and in the world, and I speak about it, there’s a limit to how much time I can take off. I can maybe take a couple of hours off, but I know that the following week I’m going to have to talk about all the crazy stuff that went on. So, there’s no escape. We’re trapped. Let me ask you this question, who is the president elect?

Jelani Cobb:

Okay, is this a trick question?

Preet Bharara:

No, I just want you to confirm for everybody.

Jelani Cobb:

Is there a drum roll in the background? I’m going to go with Joe Biden.

Preet Bharara:

You’re going to go with Biden, I think that’s the correct answer. Let me ask you now, a very easy question, how did Joe Biden win both the nomination and then the election? Take all the time you need.

Jelani Cobb:

The most basic point of it was getting more votes than the other guy or the other women. I think there was some things that facilitated him getting the nomination that were different than the things that facilitated him winning the election. What I mean by that is that, for lots of reasons, people seem to believe that everyone had to run as a Bernie Sanders progressive, or at least frame themselves as that.

Jelani Cobb:

Biden, I guess, to a certain extent, Buttigieg were really in the moderate centrist lane. There was a reasoning that if the Republican Party had gone far to the right, that gave Democrats room to go far to the left, especially on the economy and income inequality and health care, and those kinds of things. I think at the same time, there were lots of voters, particularly in Biden’s case, African American voters, who were wary of that idea.

Jelani Cobb:

Looking at what happened in 2016, a significant slice of the, at least the primary electorate was thinking, we want the most palatable candidate possible, the person that is inoffensive to the most people. Quite frankly, I think they were people who had a concern that after having nominated an African American man, and then a woman, that the Democratic Party was… That these barrier breaking candidates were going to necessarily face headwinds.

Jelani Cobb:

I don’t agree with that reasoning, necessarily. But I think that that was how people saw the question. For Joe Biden, once South Carolina happened, it was pretty much over, and it also brought up the other question, I was in South Carolina, and one of the things that seemed to be after the case was maybe the early primaries, maybe Iowa and New Hampshire ginned up a lot of drama and a lot of cliffhanger kinds of interest, but they didn’t really reflect what the bigger electorate was like. Certainly very few voters of color in either of those states. Biden, the key to his victory in the primaries was that, I think that’s why he said that in that speech.

Joe Biden:

The African American community stood up again for me. They’ve always had my back and I have yours.

Jelani Cobb:

And I was like, okay, there you have it, that line is going to be quoted by people on the left and on the right, pretty much for the next four years, no matter what else happens.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think anybody else in the Democratic field could have beaten Trump, or do you think all of them could have?

Jelani Cobb:

I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

You have to give an opinion, sir.

Jelani Cobb:

I was going to say, I think-

Preet Bharara:

You can’t get away with that. You can’t get away with humility in the face of a hypothetical unanswerable.

Jelani Cobb:

I know. I think that if there’s no Biden in that race, Bernie Sanders might actually have a more viable shot than he did in the long term. Then outside of that, I think some other centrists, my people might have had more interest in other centrist figures who didn’t get strong enough support in the first go round. Kamala Harris, the interesting dynamic with her, which is that her candidacy stalled, came out of the gate like gangbusters and then stalled.

Jelani Cobb:

It seemed like people… Even among African American voters, she didn’t get a whole lot of support. But then when she was added to the Biden ticket, Biden support went through the ceiling, along with his donations. I think that, that was saying that people just on the face of it liked Kamala Harris. They just didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with what other people would do if she was leading the ticket. But if there’s no Biden there, then maybe people can get around that question and support her.

Jelani Cobb:

The other thing is that, Pete Buttigieg, for the criticism he got from African Americans, specifically around policing issues, weirdly enough, might have immunized him in other kinds of things that would have been political difficulties, but it might have immunized him from the blow back of the whole, he’ll defend the police kind of thing.

Jelani Cobb:

He may have been… Also, just given the fact that he is incredibly good on his feet as the host of Fox News I’m now aware of-

Pete Buttigieg:

I don’t know why you would want to be in a room with other people if you were contagious with a deadly disease and you care about other people, but maybe the president doesn’t care about other people.

Jelani Cobb:

I think he could have been a stronger candidate in the long run as well.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned South Carolina, and obviously, one of the big things that happened in South Carolina before that primary was legendary Congressman, Representative James Clyburn coming out in support of Biden. Lots of people credit Clyburn with turning the tide for Biden.

James Clyburn:

I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us.

Preet Bharara:

How important you think that was, both to the white community and the black community?

Jelani Cobb:

I think that Jim Clyburn is an old school political figure that, as a voice of authority in South Carolina, certainly a voice of political authority in South Carolina, you don’t get much stronger than his. I also think that the way that he endorsed Biden was significant because he, Jim Clyburn, Congressman Clyburn had recently lost his wife of many, many years. He framed his endorsement of Joe Biden in terms of what his wife would want him to do.

Jelani Cobb:

I think that her memory, and the fact that he is a sympathetic figure, at that moment, grieving, really, you can’t buy that kind of endorsement. I think that had a great deal to do with people’s perspective on him. But that notwithstanding, I think the bottom was probably always going to be a strong candidate in South Carolina, Clyburn added to that.

Jelani Cobb:

There’s another thing that Biden did that, I think, at least in the Charleston area, maybe beyond the Charleston area, did a lot for his candidacy, which is that, the night of the… I think it was the CNN Town Hall, there was a conversation of Reverend Anthony Thompson, who I met when I was in Charleston, covering the murders of the Emanuel AME Church. Reverend Thompson is the widower of Myra Thompson, who was one of the victims in that shooting.

Jelani Cobb:

When Barack Obama came and gave the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, that was not long after Beau Biden had died. Joe Biden went to the church, it was part of the official services with the president, but what most people don’t know is that he went back to the church, just as a person beset with grief, seeking solace. Reverend Thompson stood up and posed a question to Joe Biden about his faith and the role that his faith played. There was a moment there, which was really incredible, it was just these two people who are survivors of profound loss, empathizing with each other.

Jelani Cobb:

For Charleston, and for black South Carolina, where what happened in Emanuel is still very much an open wound, I just thought that people connected with that. It was not the kind of thing that you can create as political theater. These were just two people who understood what it meant to be in a really deep well of grief and have to find your way out of it.

Preet Bharara:

What was the feel when you were in South Carolina, leading up to the primary? How were people talking about the race? What was the expectation? Was it excitement? Was it resignation that we’re going to have-

Jelani Cobb:

No, there was a lot of excitement.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Jelani Cobb:

I found that South Carolina voters take their primary position very seriously. I was in South Carolina in ’08, actually ’07 when Obama was running. There was a big question of whether he or Clinton would win South Carolina. Being the third primary, they are very keyed in with what’s going on with all of the candidates, and how South Carolina has the first chance for a significant African American vote to weigh in on what they think about the primaries. This time was no different.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think we should rethink the order of caucuses and primaries? In other words, if South Carolina was the first contest in the nation, especially for Democrats, do you think things would be different?

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah, I think, Julián Castro made this point a number of times during the primaries, that the first two don’t really reflect the demography of the country, much less the demography of the Democratic voting base. Then, of course, there are all the questions about Iowa being a caucus, and whether or not that really is the most representative way of doing it.

Jelani Cobb:

Of course, Iowans respond with, hey, we were the person that gave Barack Obama the momentum to win those other primaries, which is true. But, I think that there’s a case to be made that, maybe Iowa should not be the very first and maybe New Hampshire shouldn’t be right there after it. Then you have, Nevada and South Carolina. It just seems a little weird in the bigger sense of things.

Preet Bharara:

I was talking to someone recently, who’s involved in politics and has run campaigns, who said about Jim Clyburn, that he thought that Jim Clyburn is the smartest politician in America. I wonder what you think about that. But then also, how much do you think Jim Clyburn speaks for the black community as it stands now? Obviously, no community is monolithic, but what do you think his role… Do you agree with the assessment of his savviness, and what do you think of his position in the community?

Jelani Cobb:

Oh, certainly. Clyburn didn’t get to where he was by being anybody’s fool. But in terms of his voice… Now, there’s another figure who Clyburn has always reminded me of in some way, which is Charlie Rangel, the longtime New York Congressman, and also a powerful figure in the halls of Congress. But for a few things could have been ways and means share.

Jelani Cobb:

But Rangel was an unparalleled political power in Harlem. But if you ever visited Harlem, there was a huge amount of dissent, and people who were younger generations who viewed things differently than he did, he had, at some point, just an automatic machine to return him to office pretty reliably. But that didn’t mean that it was necessarily a reflection of his own popularity within the district, or I should say, a unanimous adoration of him within the district.

Jelani Cobb:

I think the same thing is with Clyburn, especially as it relates to more progressive voices. He said, for instance, that he thought that the calls for defunding the police, the Democrats needed to move away from that kind of thing. There was a whole resounding roar of dissent, many of these from those arguments from young black voters and activists, who think of him as an establishment figure who is too centrist for their tastes, and so on.

Jelani Cobb:

That’s the kind of criticism that people would almost anticipate for him. His district in South Carolina is his district in South Carolina. It’s not necessarily what Maxine Waters’ district looks like in Los Angeles, or what Sheila Jackson Lee’s district looks like in Texas, or any of these other long standing representatives who have different communities as well.

Preet Bharara:

That’s exactly what I was getting at when I was asking about Clyburn, because a lot of Democrats, particularly white democrats point to Clyburn as some kind of fixture in the black community. For the reason they could say defund the police is not a good slogan, is not a good idea, depending on what you think it means. What’s the response from Democrats who subscribe to those points of view, and they say, we’ll talk to young black people. It’s not quite the same.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah, it’s not. But I need to clarify something, just being a historian for a second, and also, as a journalist. The journalist point I’ll make is that the first people to ever talk to me about defunding the police, before there was that terminology. In terms of languaging, political messaging, that is a terrible phrase? Mostly because of its ambiguity.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, I agree with you on that. I want it to be on the record that I agree.

Jelani Cobb:

But the first people to ever talk to me about the idea behind defund the police, were, in fact, police. When we were doing the first documentary we did about Newark and police reform, there were a bunch of cops who said to us, we do too many things, people have us doing too many things. We should be doing law enforcement stuff. But, why are we being called if there’s a mental health issue, or why are we being called… They are basically-

Preet Bharara:

Cat in the tree.

Jelani Cobb:

Exactly, they’re the catch all group. One officer said to me, memorably, he said, people are pissed off at us for all the things that we do that they don’t like the way they turn out, but they’re never pissed off at the person who is in an office suite somewhere, sending us out to do those things. He was talking about elected officials were like, this is how we’re going to run the city, the role the police are going to serve here. That’s just something that I came across in my journalistic work.

Jelani Cobb:

But as a historian, one of the other things that is important to remember is that the first references I saw, or earliest references I saw to what could be referred to as defunding the police, were in the Kerner Commission report from 1968. Those were very, middle of the road, liberals, very establishment, institutional, liberal figures. They said that, when you interface with the police in lots of different contexts, it’s likely that problems will arise, and that there should be what they call neighborhood service centers that could handle non-law enforcement concerns, so that you didn’t have, for every single problem, a person with a gun that you call.

Jelani Cobb:

That was in essence, what it’s been taken up as a… It’s interesting that it has been taken up as a progressive cause, because 30 years ago, 40 years ago, that idea was much closer to the center.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing, depending on how you argue the point that people will say, well, people who are black often end up in the crosshairs, and there’s a documented statistical difference between how often a black person is shot by police versus a white person even taking into account demographics and population. Some people will say, well, that’s a reason why we need to do something about the police. Others will say, well, who tends to call the police, lots of black people in cities where there are crime problems.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know if you can reconcile those two points of view, or going forward, in your doing those documentaries and studying the issue, both seem to be a little bit true, are they not?

Jelani Cobb:

They are, they totally are both true. I’ll go even further that, when we were in Newark, in talking with the mayor, Ras Baraka, who is someone I’ve known since college, we were protesting against apartheid together at Howard University in the 1980s, protesting against many acts of police brutality, as young activists, he became the mayor. When people talked about abolishing the police, he said, that’s something that safe people… I think he referred to it as a bourgeois idea that safe people would come up with. He has no illusions, his father was nearly beaten to death in the course of the 1967 uprising in Newark, and nearly beaten to death by police.

Jelani Cobb:

He is not unfamiliar with the problems with very many police departments as it relates to African Americans. Also, very familiar with what is on the other side of that. Nobody we talked to with regard to the middle class communities, to housing projects, we were there for 10 months, we found zero support for abolishing police. People recognized that, it is just a reality, danger is a reality, and they have to rely on police in particular ways.

Jelani Cobb:

The problem comes when they’re saying that you have no choice between you either have to deal with crime, because you don’t want to call the police, because who knows what will happen if the police come, or you just accept that police are going to do things that violate your rights, and that the entire community has a hostile relationship with law enforcement.

Jelani Cobb:

It seems that there’s a false dichotomy between those two things. But it’s been useful for people on particular extremes of those questions, to not ever move beyond that. We talk with police unions, they seem to be constitutionally incapable of ever admitting that there are problems with the way that police approach black communities.

Preet Bharara:

With respect to police unions, I would think that they would have the view of the people you’re talking about from the ’60s, that their rank and file members should be doing less. On that, is there some common ground?

Jelani Cobb:

We’ve talked with… It is in time, in the course of my work, talked with a few different people on this. I have to say, I’ve never gotten much on the sense of, we want police to have a smaller footprint, it’s generally we want police to have a higher base pay.

Preet Bharara:

Right, and not a lot of discipline.

Jelani Cobb:

And not a lot of discipline, and we want these particular things. But the particulars of how you approach smart policing, you’re much more likely to find that with police chiefs, who are paid to think about those questions. I think police unions are very often much more about the logistics of representing a group of city employees, who have particular interests. Yeah, I think that doesn’t register, at least in my experience, does not register very high on those lists of concerns.

Preet Bharara:

Can ask you this question, it’s a delicate one?

Jelani Cobb:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Preet Bharara:

Do you think the following phenomenon takes place, and if so, with what frequency? That is, white activists take a position on behalf of the black community, without really consulting with the black community. Discuss.

Jelani Cobb:

Oh, yes, we’ve all been there. We have all been in the please stop helping moment.

Preet Bharara:

Describe some of those moments and what you mean by that.

Jelani Cobb:

Before this summer, where we saw a lot of this and even in Portland, where my colleague at the New Yorker, Luke Mogelson, wrote a really interesting, insightful piece, about the distance between an Antifa and Black Lives Matter in Portland. People use those terms interchangeably. But a lot of times, the BLM people are concerned about some of the tactical things that Antifa people do, that they will ultimately be blamed for.

Jelani Cobb:

I’ve seen this more times than I can count. I was out covering when Troy Davis was executed, which was a terrible day, and I think this was 2012 or 2011, there’s a man in Georgia, lots of concerns about whether or not he actually was guilty. Some of the people who testified against him tried to recant and said that they were intimidated to testify against him, and he was set to be executed for murder.

Jelani Cobb:

I was out there writing about it, this was in central Georgia, I lived in Atlanta at the time. There was a group of black protesters, significant group of black protesters, and a smattering of white protesters. Every police officer in the state of Georgia, it seemed, was down there manning the barricade in front of the prison where Troy Davis was to be executed.

Jelani Cobb:

Out of nowhere, one white kid who was in his early 20s, who’d been up in the cops faces and screaming. He walks back into the group, it’s like a street, and the police on one side of the street, the protesters on the other side of the street. This is a fairly significant side street, maybe a four lane street. He says, “Let’s rush the cops.” And goes running headlong into the police.

Jelani Cobb:

I just want to say, all of the black people exchanged a knowing look, and stood there while this guy… It was almost comical. He goes running straight into the police. This one cop just grabs him like the way… Do you know how a little kid, you put your palm on his forehead so he can’t hit you? It was like that. They turned him around, put them in cuffs and put him in a car.

Jelani Cobb:

I think that lots of murmuring happened after that, and people were just like, no black person would say that, because we understand… In this case that maybe the guy humored you and put you in cuffs, that’s not how that would go for us. Another thing that made the news and another story that I was covering, and this was around the Trayvon Martin death and… It was Trayvon Martin or Ferguson, but it was a protest that was in Union Square. There were a group of white, far-left demonstrators who started chanting pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.

Jelani Cobb:

I was there. As a matter of fact, I knew some of the activists who were there, I was quoting people talking to them. People were saying, “Can somebody tell those people to shut the fuck up? They’re going to prompt more violence out here.” Sometimes, in the case of Martin Luther King, there were points where you elicited a violent response, because you wanted to show the world what you were dealing with. There’s a tactical way of people doing that, and that’s not what people were doing there, and nor did it make sense to do that, that particular moment. You certainly wouldn’t do it by threatening by police officers lives.

Jelani Cobb:

That happens all the time. Anyone who’s covered these issues can tell you that any activist who’s been involved can tell you that it is just not an uncommon phenomenon at all.

Preet Bharara:

Is some of that at play in the defund the police idea as well?

Jelani Cobb:

I think that the defund the police idea is just something that got a lot of traction from a lot of different communities who were defining the term in different ways. As in, we need police to have smaller budgets, police departments to have smaller budgets, for which there is a reasonable argument, you can make a very reasonable argument for that.

Jelani Cobb:

Last year, the city of Chicago spent $113 million settling lawsuits. There’s no way that you can look at the City of Chicago and say that they couldn’t find something better to do with $113 million.

Preet Bharara:

I certainly could.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I could find various ways.

Jelani Cobb:

If you’re saying that you need to say like, look, we’re no longer the buck stops here, we’re no longer going to just settle these cases for egregious acts of violence that are happening within the culture that sanctions it in police departments, I think that makes perfect sense. If you’re talking about, in some instances, the police department budgets have exploded to being 30%, 40% of what the overall operating budgets of cities are. There’s a real reason reason to look at that and say, is this the best expenditure of our money?

Jelani Cobb:

In Newark, there’s a particular idea that we want to spend money to make communities safer, but they don’t automatically assume that policing is the same thing as public safety. You have neighborhoods that are safer, and those communities don’t necessarily have more police, What they tend to have is more resources. They’re like, maybe we can deploy funds in different ways that would obviate the necessity of police coming in the first place. Do things that are preemptive of these kinds of problems.

Jelani Cobb:

I think that that’s a smart idea. On the other side of it, though, as you know, probably better than anybody else, we have 18,000 police departments in this country, and a handful of them have these gigantic budgets siphon off huge amounts of the city funds. But if you’re talking about the average police department that has five or six officers, that doesn’t necessarily apply, or what it takes to reform a police department, sometimes you actually need to reallocate the money to reform the department. It becomes a more complicated question than simply saying, slash their budgets in half.

Preet Bharara:

Before moving on from this, I want to ask you, if you agree that there seemed to be some consensus across a pretty broad spectrum in the country after the killing of George Floyd, that various things had to change? My questions are, what happened to that moment? Has the moment passed? The people who say this bad phraseology, defund the police, perhaps punctured that moment, what do you say to those folks?

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah. First off, I have been covering police issues for a long time, going all the way back to Amadou Diallo in New York City in 1998. What always happens is that the people protesting look like the victim, whoever died. Overwhelmingly that has been a black person or a brown person. The people who come out are from those communities, because they’re the only people who see a common interest.

Jelani Cobb:

I remember, I was writing about Diallo, I was covering a protest that was out at City Hall, and I talked to one woman, who was a white woman who was exasperated by the protests, trying to get to where she was going. I stopped and said, have you heard about the killing of Amadou Diallo, who was shot 19 times by police, unarmed person shot 19 times by a police in the vestibule of his apartment building in the Bronx. She was familiar. I said, “What do you make of the protest?” She said, “Oh, I think it’s overblown. The police were a little heavy handed, but it’s not all of this.”

Jelani Cobb:

I just remember being stunned by that reply. The person was shot 19 times. That is one point. Then the diametric opposite, is seeing Salt Lake City, with a black population is something like 1% have with those huge protests that took place over the summer, and sustained the protests that took place over the summer, regarding the death of George Floyd.

Jelani Cobb:

In lots of places across the country, where there weren’t a lot of people of color, and people were looking around going, “Wait, how can you kneel on someone’s neck for nine minutes? What world are we living in where that is possible?” It was a shock of awakening. Now, what I think happened, I don’t think the defund the police ended that moment. I think that there was an ongoing and consistent messaging about protests being anarchists about there being the rhetoric from the White House saying that people are just two inches from complete chaos, the scare tactics and scaremongering, along with the isolated incidents, in which people did actually commit acts of violence. I think all of those things culminated in diminishing that moment.

Jelani Cobb:

I also think that just flat out so many other things have happened, that we’ve had to deal with two more swells of the pandemic. We had the pitch and fervor of the presidential competition, and all of the things that happened in the midst of that, of the endless cycle of crises and it just settled back to baseline. I don’t know if there’s the momentum to address those dynamics in the way that there was before.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about Trump and black voters for a second.

Jelani Cobb:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Preet Bharara:

Do you believe the polling, the exit polling that shows that Trump received a higher share, particularly of black male votes than he did in 2016?

Jelani Cobb:

Well, okay, no, I don’t believe that exit polling, but I think it’s possible the polling is right, if that makes sense.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. If it’s right, what would it account for?

Jelani Cobb:

What would account for it is, I think, Obama… My good friend, Leah Wright Rigueur is really great on this, but I think the conversation had been that they have always been a significant number of the black Republicans who about equivalent to the numbers that Trump appears to have gotten, at least according to the exit polling. We don’t know, because of all of the particularities of this election, how accurate or inaccurate the exit polling was.

Jelani Cobb:

Certainly, the other forms of polling before the election was so far off, that we shouldn’t take anything on face value. But if we assume that it’s accurate, it would mean that Trump got what a Republican normally gets in that kind of competition. Now, the bigger thing is, should a person who said things like, I want them to be fewer minorities in the suburbs, and just actually said that, should that person get the same share of black voters that a George W. Bush gets?

Preet Bharara:

That’s not all he said. He said a lot of things. He tolerated a lot… The theory is, here’s a guy who liberals have said, is racist, and who accommodates racism and who racists like, and there’s all sorts of evidence for that, and look what happened? He got a higher share. Kind of makes no sense. Although I have a theory, which we can talk about in a second.

Jelani Cobb:

I think… Well, here’s one thing that we should float, there is a certain part of the population of black voters who think that both parties are racist, and just being out, it doesn’t take very long to come across those people. In 2016, one of the things that I was… I hate if this sounds like I’m stealing the Tom Friedman line, but it really did happen in a taxi. I was in a taxi, and this was in Oakland, actually, it was in Oakland, ahead of the election. I was covering the anniversary of the Black Panther Party founding.

Jelani Cobb:

I talked to this guy about the election, and I asked him what he was thinking about, and he said, he was thinking about Trump. He wanted to know what I was thinking about, and I said, “Look, I’m from Queens. We’ve known about Donald Trump for my entire life, and I’ve always thought that he was a racist.” This dude said to me, “So, you’re trying to tell me that Hillary Clinton is not?” I just was like, that’s it. That’s it. There are a lot of people who think like that guy.

Preet Bharara:

Look, there are a lot of people, even outside the context of race thought that there was no difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and voted for the third party, and Susan Sarandon is one of those famous people. Yeah, I guess you’re right, there’s a category of people who are so disenfranchised and isolated from both parties, that it doesn’t really matter to them so much, they don’t see the distinction. That’s, I guess, one explanation.

Preet Bharara:

I was hearing somebody very smart, recently make a different point. I don’t know if this is a controversial point or not, it probably is. That part of what is going on is not an issue of black or white, but it’s an issue of masculinity versus femininity. This person said, and I present it without opinion, as I do all things on the podcast as I can, this person was saying, to the extent progressives, keep trying to demonize what lots of men think is traditional maleness, and trying to characterize all those things as “toxic masculinity”, you’re going to lose a lot of black and brown men from your party. Do you have a view of that?

Jelani Cobb:

I don’t know what they mean by a lot, because those ideas have been out and around for a while. But we have tended, as voters, African Americans, to vote more along our interests, concrete interest, than cultural ones. Even on other divisive issues, African Americans have a higher level of participation in the church than the standard, general population, but have been loyal Democratic voters despite having complicated feelings about abortion.

Jelani Cobb:

It has been much more, I think about the bread and butter issues and how to better your community. The democratic vote has been… I think it was more likely that those people wind up becoming non-voters, because the Republican party has… This is partly a story of Democrats winning the black vote, in the last third of the 20th century and partly a story of the GOP abandoning it, or really ushering it out, pushing the black vote out of that party, the push and pull for it.

Jelani Cobb:

I don’t think that those voters are necessarily… I’ll say, I don’t think there’s necessarily a large pool of voters who are pissed off about the toxic masculinity thing, but love the idea of Charlottesville, and there are great people on both sides.

Preet Bharara:

But sometimes just a few votes, even just a few percentage points can make a difference.

Jelani Cobb:

Sure. Now, I will say that I think that masculinity idea is completely true. One of the things that people who remember Trump from the ’80s and ’90s will recall is that Trump was a fixture in the black celebrity scene with rappers and-

Preet Bharara:

I was just about to ask you about that.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you specifically about something that I’m sure you saw Barack Obama said in his interview with the Atlantic, when asked about this issue of some black men defecting to Trump. I know you’ve written a lot about rap and hip hop, and have thought about it. Obama says, “I have to remind myself that if you listen to rap music, it’s all about the bling, the women, the money. A lot of rap videos are using the same measures of what it means to be successful as Donald Trump is. Everything is gold plated, that insinuates itself and seeps into the culture.” Your reaction?

Jelani Cobb:

Okay, this leaves a lot there. But one theory is, I wrote a satirical piece before I knew how significant the candidacy was, I wrote a satirical piece in The New Yorker called Donald Trump is a Rapper. In it, I said, he surrounds himself with excessive amounts of gold. He treats women as accessories, and he has his own fashion line. If you have those three things, you’re a rapper.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Jelani Cobb:

Part of what Barack Obama is talking about represents a certain slice of hip hop culture. I don’t like the kind of totalizing idea of it, it’s not the entirety of the culture. He is savvy enough as a consumer of culture to know that. I don’t think that he views it reductively. But I would say that there is a part of the culture that does resonate in that way, and it does reflect the kind of ideas that Donald Trump has mainstreamed.

Jelani Cobb:

For that matter, I think that a lot of working class men would express, because, what hip hop was really articulating was, in very many instances, a fundamentally working class perspective on life, work, success, women sex, money, and so on, status, and it was an idea that you could probably find corollaries for in other working class communities, just not with somebody rapping over a beat about it.

Jelani Cobb:

I think that there is that shared sense of masculinity that Trump tapped into. Now, of course, it was a very weird kind of idea, because, like very many things in politics, it’s much more about the image than the actual substance. Because, nobody who has actually been around tough guys really thinks Donald Trump is a tough guy.

Preet Bharara:

Really, tough guys don’t whine nonstop and [inaudible 00:53:23] 24 hours a day.

Jelani Cobb:

Also, the funny thing about this was, I think about this, Trump grew up in Jamaica estates, and I grew up in South Jamaica. For people who are listening who are not familiar with New York, those two neighborhoods have exactly the relationship you would suspect based upon their names. Jamaica estates is at the top of the hill, South Jamaica is at the bottom of the hill, Jamaica estates was elite, overwhelmingly white, South Jamaica was working class, working poor black and brown people.

Jelani Cobb:

Just constitutionally, I have never been able to think of anybody from Jamaica estates as a tough guy. I was like, come on the other side of Liberty Avenue, come to the other side of Liberty Avenue, and I will show you some tough guys.

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of this discussion that people are having in the aftermath of the election, in which people are saying, look 73 million people or some odd number voted for Trump. We need to understand the Trump voters, we need to understand how so many people could vote for a person who has these views, and who says these things and acts in this particular way. That rankles some people. Why don’t those voters understand or make an attempt to understand the 80 million larger number who voted for Biden, many of whom were in the cities. People in cities get demonized all the time. But, in the pages of elite magazines, often, it’s the case that the discussion instead turns to, well, what’s going on in the middle of the country and in rural areas? What do you make of that discussion? What do we need to learn and how should we go about that?

Jelani Cobb:

I think it’s frustrating in one moment, because if you’re talking about policy analysis, or demography, or any of the things that we do any time there’s an election, to understand how a vote breaks down, how a particular slice of the electorate thinks, why people are motivated to do particular things. Sure, that is no more or less pressing now than it would be in any election. But the underlying sentiment that they represent a group of people who have been wronged, or who somehow have lacked for a forum within the culture, the broader society, it’s frustrating. Because what typically happens is, that’s the first part of it. The other part of it is the belief that people have paid too much attention to the issues of people of color, and that the concerns of these communities have come at the expense of paying attention to issues that relate to people of color.

Jelani Cobb:

Eventually, if you continue far enough, in that conversation, someone says, the dreaded phrase, it’s class, not race, at which point, the only reasonable response is to get up from the table and walk away. It’s all of those things. We can say that there’s a particular kind of analysis that needs to happen. But I also think, and I talk to my students about this, that getting someone’s perspective does not necessarily equate agreeing that this person is right.

Jelani Cobb:

There are objective things. Outside of the policy things, people know, my politics is not hard to know, my politics, as David Remnick, Editor of the New Yorker says, your politics should be hidden on your sleeve. People know where I’m coming from. But I thought I had a working understanding of the ground rules of American politics, which Trump blew up. Do we really need to understand people sympathetically, how they were able to reconcile Donald Trump making fun of a disabled reporter? He did that at the very beginning of his political career.

Preet Bharara:

He did.

Jelani Cobb:

And that people were okay with that. Is it necessary to understand how people are okay with things like firing inspector generals, who are just there to prevent corruption, they’re not there to advance anyone’s interest, anyone’s partisan agenda, but to make sure that we do not have corruption, and rot within the government. Just fundamental basic things. We can say, we disagree about where the furniture should be placed in the house, or what kind of furniture we should have, or even if we should have this house, we can debate all those things. What we can’t debate is whether or not you get to knock down a load bearing wall.

Jelani Cobb:

While you see the person gleefully kicking holes in the wall, the reaction should be we have to stop this from happening as opposed to well, we have to understand why people want to collapse this wall.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I guess, in politics, the thinking probably goes for the pragmatic people, as you said, at the beginning, very wisely, how did Joe Biden win? He got more votes, you got to get more votes than the other guy. If the enterprise in politics is getting more votes than the other guy, you got to figure out why so many votes went to the other guy last time, so you can steal some of them back.

Jelani Cobb:

Sure. Yeah. I think that that’s fine. If we’re framing this in the sense of the kind of analysis that happens anytime you have an election. But I think the bigger cultural point is not about that.

Preet Bharara:

I think that’s right.

Jelani Cobb:

It’s the hillbilly-elegy, sepia tinted… The other thing I’ll say about this is, is there’s a real problem with the extent to which, and this is data that’s pointed to this, the extent to which white people believe themselves to be the most disadvantaged group in American society. That is flat out statistically untrue. But there’s so many people who believe that. You can get to understanding part of what Trump’s appeal was, and it still doesn’t necessarily give you anything that you want to replicate with that electorate.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about Obama for a second. His book is out. I know he’s very competitive with Michelle. So it him a little extra time to write it. It’s 700 pages, which by my calculation makes it almost as long as a New Yorker article.

Jelani Cobb:

That’s about half the length-

Preet Bharara:

Every time I have a New Yorker person on, I got to make a joke about the length of your pieces. A, have you read it, and B, I want to quote back to you something you said not long ago on television, about Obama’s best lesson for Joe Biden, you said it’s that, “moderation won’t save you.”

Jelani Cobb:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of Obama’s legacy, the book, if you’ve had a chance to look at it, and what do you mean by moderation won’t save you?

Jelani Cobb:

I just got the book. So, I haven’t cracked it. I planned to start it over Thanksgiving, and didn’t get around to it.

Preet Bharara:

Because you were eating.

Jelani Cobb:

Yeah, exactly, I was eating and writing and trying to finish another project, which I’ll tell you, it’s quite a comical aside to what you said about the New Yorker. I’m working on a project, an editing project of some of the older articles that were in the magazine with David Remnick. One of the things I found was when you go back, the older pieces were… I’m literally not joking, roughly triple the length of the ones that run now.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, my goodness.

Jelani Cobb:

It really was like reading a book. That said, on the moderation issue, I think that Barack Obama, in 2007, understood some things about race, that the overwhelming majority of black people in this country did not understand, and that was why he saw a path to being elected. My running joke ever since then, has been, if you had done a poll in 2007, asking if it was possible for a black person to be elected president, everyone would have said no, except for four people, and they all lived at the same address in the Southside of Chicago.

Preet Bharara:

All with the last name, Obama.

Jelani Cobb:

All with the last name Obama. He understood something that I think most people didn’t know. But when he was elected, I think that flipped, that black America at large, understood some things that I think the Obama administration struggled to pick up, and that was that they were not opposed to his policies, they were opposed to him.

Jelani Cobb:

We had seen this phenomenon before. These were the people who were threatening to kill Hank Aaron so he couldn’t break Babe Ruth’s home run record. It wasn’t about the home run record, it was about Hank Aaron. The mere existence of a black man in proximity to the presidential seal was too much for some people, and they reacted in ways that were not all that unpredictable. Going so far as even to demand that he prove that he was a citizen, so that he was eligible to vote in the election that he actually won.

Jelani Cobb:

All these kinds of absurdities and indignities that were heaped upon him. I think that his life, at least as we understood in Dreams From My Father, and Audacity of Hope, had led him to believe that there was always a pragmatic alternative, there was always a way to be above the fray. You have to first demonstrate… One of Barack Obama’s under appreciated virtues and assets, was the fact that he had been a professor. Time and time again, I had this conversation with other professors, he approached his campaign, the way a professor would, when people would raise a question, he would look at the question from all possible dimensions, sort out the ones that were unworkable, or unfeasible, and then come up with an answer that took all those things into account.

Preet Bharara:

Class was over, by that time class was over.

Jelani Cobb:

By that time, class is over, right.

Preet Bharara:

That’s part of the problem.

Jelani Cobb:

That’s part of the problem. It was by he didn’t soundbite as much, he was thoughtful in those ways, and really ran this like a seminar. Listening to him was like a knowledgeable professor in a seminar. That’s great, except that there was not always… People weren’t operating on positions of principle. If they took up the stance opposite you, it wasn’t a good faith position. When they tried to do this, to try to find a moderate middle ground above the fray with Merrick Garland, and that went nowhere. When they tried to do that on climate change, it’s like, oh, we’ll give some concessions, and that’ll give Republicans an incentive to come down somewhere to the left of where they would be normally, and ultimately would wound up in the middle, and that didn’t happen.

Jelani Cobb:

On immigration, one of the rationales was that the number of deportations that took place under Obama was that he was trying to tack to the right to give Republicans room to tack to the left, that never happened. Even the point where he was going through the conversation with Chuck Grassley about what he could get on the health care, what kind of bill could you vote for? They were like, none.

Preet Bharara:

None.

Jelani Cobb:

None.

Preet Bharara:

So, Joe Biden should not go down the path of moderation in your view?

Jelani Cobb:

Well, I should say this, if he goes on the path of moderation, it should be because that is the best on a particular issue, because that is the most viable path, but not because as a default-

Preet Bharara:

Not for strategic reasons.

Jelani Cobb:

Right, exactly, not for strategic reasons. That there may be reasons that you need to tack to the left on some issues. But as a general presumption that you can navigate between the shoals of left and right, right down the center, I don’t think that that’s reasonable. The other thing about discrediting the election, which was the equivalent of birtherism, having instilled in people’s minds, the idea that Joe Biden did not win the election that he cheated, he can now be viewed as an illegitimate president, and treated essentially the same way that Barack Obama was. I think that they should go into it with that kind of presumption.

Preet Bharara:

Jelani Cobb, I’ve kept you way longer than you were obligated to be on the show, but I really thank you. It was a real treat. Thanks for being on.

Jelani Cobb:

Thank you for the invitation.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Jelani Cobb continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. Try out the membership free for two weeks. Head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Jelani Cobb. 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 @PreetBharara, with the hashtag #askpreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-247 PREET. Or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios. Your host is Preet Bharara, the executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller, the technical director is David Tatasciore, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Calvin Lord, Geoff Isenman, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh, and Margot Maley. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara, Stay Tuned.