( J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo )
Philip Bump, national correspondent for The Washington Post, brings us the latest national political headlines, including a preview of Monday's hearing of the January 6th Committee, at which members are expected to vote on criminal referrals for those involved with the insurrection. Plus, what's happening with Elon Musk and Twitter.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Well, as you've been hearing, the January 6th Committee will hold its final public hearing this afternoon at one o'clock, and we will carry it live here on WNYC. Multiple news organizations are reporting they will vote to recommend three criminal charges be filed at former President Trump, insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress.
Let's just dive right in and talk about what to expect, and what today will likely mean with Philip Bump, national columnist focused largely on the numbers behind politics for The Washington Post. We will also talk with Philip Bump later in the segment about his reporting and analysis of Twitter and the Elon Musk situation, including journalists who were suspended and reinstated this weekend, a few who are not reinstated, including a Post reporter, and what it means that Musk did a Twitter poll about whether he should step down as the head of Twitter, did you even hear about that one yet? That was just yesterday, and the respondents voted yes, step down. The January 6th Committee first. Philip, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.
Philip Bump: Of course, thanks so much.
Brian Lehrer: I think I'm personally most intrigued, and I'll jump right in on this by the alleged criminal act called conspiracy to defraud the United States that the committee will reportedly recommend to the Justice Department that Trump be charged with. It's not illegal for a politician to lie to the public or they'd all be in jail. Can you explain conspiracy to defraud the United States and how that becomes a crime?
Philip Bump: Yes. To some extent, the charge is something of a catch-all. There are a lot of things that can fall under conspiracy to defraud the United States. People may remember that during the investigation that was undertaken by Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel looking at the Russia probe, there were a lot of conversations about whether or not certain individuals might also be subject to conspiracy to defraud the US charges. In fact, there were some plea deals that were agreed to and made that centered on that as the charge.
When we talk about conspiring to defraud the United States, it can mean trying to defraud the government specifically out of property or money, if you were to engage in some sort of fraud that allowed you to obtain a permit to do something, something along those lines, but it can also just mean simply trying to use fraudulent measures to try and change what the government's doing. The idea here being that these actors, Donald Trump at the helm, and others in support of him, had worked to try and change the way that the election outcome was implemented. That, by itself, can, under the loose rubric of these charges, count as something that was a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
Brian Lehrer: I guess part of the evidence would be that so many people close to Trump have testified saying they told him there was no evidence the election was stolen, and he proceeded to make that case publicly anyway, and organize the January 6th event. The case is he must have clearly known he was defrauding everyone, I guess. I imagine we'll see some video of some of the people in the administration who were close to him on that, William Barr, Ivanka, others.
Philip Bump: I think that's likely. One of the things that's come up as a potential defense for Donald Trump has been the idea that perhaps he sincerely believed that the election had been stolen from him. As is always the case with Trump, it's hard to parse what he actually believes and what he's just saying for effect, or it can often be the case that that's hard to differentiate.
John Eastman, the attorney who worked very closely with Donald Trump on his effort to retain power, Eastman had made in court filings this argument that a lot of people, even though Bill Barr was saying this thing, there were lots of people in Donald Trump's ear saying the opposite, saying these nonsensical claims about fraud, and that that was reason enough for Donald Trump to think that the election perhaps actually was stolen from him.
The extent to which that is actually a defense against potential criminal charges is assessed differently by different attorneys. It is certainly not the case that ignorance of the law is a safeguard against being charged for having broken it as lots of people who are currently in jail can attest. This is a unique set of charges, and it's obviously an extremely unique situation, and so it may be the case that the Justice Department will be a little warier of issuing criminal charges or trying to obtain indictment on this particular thing if Donald Trump is able to claim believably that perhaps he actually thought the election had been stolen.
Brian Lehrer: Do you know how this will go today? Will one of the committee members lay out the case? I don't know if you've ever served on a grand jury. I have. The prosecutor comes into the room and lays out the evidence on why to indict someone and then the grand jury votes. Will one of the committee members play prosecutor in this respect, and then the whole committee will vote?
Philip Bump: We've seen in the past similar votes that have led to them making recommendations, for example, criminal contempt charges or the subpoena of Donald Trump that was voted upon mid-October. It worked like that, that there were a committee member or committee members, it outlines the rhetorical case for why what they were doing was the important thing to do, and then they all voted unanimously.
Obviously, this is not a grand jury. It's almost as if you had a grand jury consisting solely of prosecutors on the case. It's not quite the same, but yes, I think we can expect it to follow that format because again, what they're trying to do here is they're really trying to make a public case. They're trying to convince the public that this is the right next step to take and create political space for the Department of Justice to seek this indictment.
The Department of Justice is already investigating this. We know that for a fact. It's not as though the Department of Justice is suddenly tomorrow going to be like, "Oh, look. We got this new tip about Donald Trump." They've been looking at this for a while. What they're trying to do is make the public understand that this is a natural next step. I think they probably will follow format along those lines.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you have questions about the January 6th Committee hearing and the reports, at least, that they're going to file a recommendation with the Justice Department to charge Donald Trump and maybe a few other people with some criminal penalties. Again, reportedly with respect to Trump, it would be insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress. If you have any questions about how this will go or anything related for Philip Bump from The Washington Post, 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.
We'll have a separate segment with Philip in a little while on his reporting about Elon Musk and Twitter. We'll take calls separately on that when we get there, but for right now, on the January 6th Committee. Continuing on how this will work, do these recommendations to the Justice Department go right to the Justice Department from the committee or does the full House have to receive them from the committee like they would take a recommendation from a committee on a bill and take a full House vote?
Philip Bump: The way that criminal referrals generally work is that essentially a member of Congress can send a letter to the Justice Department and that constitutes the referral. I actually just filed a piece that looked at a number of recent criminal referrals in recent years. For example in February of 2019, people may remember Michael Cohen gave that very dramatic testimony before Congress about his interactions with Donald Trump. Immediately after that, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, who was then in the House offered a criminal referral to the Justice Department suggesting that Cohen has lied under oath.
That is instructive for several reasons. The first being that the process is very simple. They wrote a letter to the Justice Department and that constitutes the referral. Then secondarily that didn't go anywhere, which is often the case with these criminal referrals, in part because they can be used as a grandstanding tool, as was the case, I think, in February 2019. It's also instructive because Mark Meadows may himself be the target of a criminal referral today, so it's an irony to having watched him do that then. I think they're probably going to be wary of trying to bring this before the full House, but I also don't believe it's needed.
Brian Lehrer: What about the charge of insurrection that they say will be recommended for Trump. The same House of Representatives already impeached him for incitement of insurrection, so in a way, how could they not charge him with that, but the standards for impeachment, which really, ultimately is political, and for a criminal charge, are different. Do you have any sense of what case they'll make for an insurrection charge?
Philip Bump: My guess is based on, obviously, having watched this committee at work for a long time. A central part of what the committee was trying to do was articulated by Representative Liz Cheney at the outset, which was essentially to demonstrate the breadth of what Donald Trump was trying to. This is ostensibly predicated on the Capitol riot, that Capitol riot was obviously an offshoot of this broader effort by Donald Trump to try and retain power. My guess is that they're going to try and make the broad case for what it was that Donald Trump was trying to do in the post-2020 election period by centering on this insurrection charge.
Again, these are criminal referrals. This is not anything where all of a sudden the Justice Department has to try and cobble together a criminal case and make the evidence in order to-- they could refer Donald Trump for having stolen a spaceship. It doesn't matter. They can refer anything to the Justice Department. They don't have to make the case. I think probably part of it too is just to have this plan, this flag of this is how seriously they take what it is that Donald Trump has done by making this very high-level charge. Does Donald Trump ever get actually indicted for insurrection? I think that's very unlikely.
Brian Lehrer: Trump insists he did not steal that spaceship. It's a hoax. The other one is obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress. Now, on that one, Trump could easily say that he was just holding a protest on January 6th and recommending that people go to the Capitol to try to convince members of Congress and Vice President Pence not to certify the election, not trying to physically obstruct the proceeding though people wound up breaking in and doing that. How might they make a case for that charge?
Philip Bump: I think they've actually done a good job of making the case. I don't want to say it's circumstantial because it obviously involves a lot of actual direct evidence, but it is a case that has been made by picking out the particular steps that were taken. Coming into the morning of January 7th, 2021, it was very fair to assume that the Capitol Riot was primarily due to Donald Trump, simply because he had repeatedly made these false claims about election fraud, and he had drawn all those people to the Capitol on January 6th.
Without Donald Trump's intervention, there's no capital. It was safe even at that moment to draw that line between Trump and what actually occurred. What the committee's done a good job of doing is showing how over the course of that day, Donald Trump had been repeatedly warned about not doing things that he did, that he had been warned about sending people to the Capitol from the White House at the risk of making it seem as though he was fomenting his interaction.
That was some testimony that had come, that was through statements his lawyers had made that he, on that morning when he was giving that speech that there's a draft tweet saying that he was going to send people to Capitol. He said, of course, in the speech that next they were going to march to the Capitol and he said they were going to march to the Capitol, even though he knew that there were questions and concerns about the extent to which that crowd was armed and dangerous.
That he asked, according to testimony, that the magnetometers be turned off, that people just be able to come in and come around the White House and show their support for him, because he reportedly said, that he understood they weren't a threat to him, and that implies both that he understood they were a threat to someone else, and that he knew what their politics were.
Then he took that crowd and he pointed them to the Capitol. All of those things came out through the committee's work, and I think they are the sorts of putting the pieces of the puzzle together to create this picture of our fuller understanding of the way that Donald Trump tried to get that crowd to do his bidding at the Capitol that day.
Brian Lehrer: Now, people may forget there is already a special prosecutor in place, Jack Smith, appointed recently by Attorney General Merrick Garland to consider charges or no charges against Trump regarding January 6th and the classified documents case. A special prosecutor because Garland said, as a Biden appointee in a politically charged case involving the Trump-Biden election, someone else should recommend to Garland whether to charge Trump or not for the sake of independence and the perception of independence.
Do you think Jack Smith will be getting any new information from the committee's referral and the final report, which comes out later this week, or would today's proceeding and the report just make a public statement of what he may already know?
Philip Bump: There has been a back-and-forth between the Justice Department and the committee for some time. Merrick Garland has made very clear that he's paying attention to what it is the committee's doing. He has in the past, the Justice Department has in the past asked for more information from the committee, including full transcripts of their interviews, which the committee was not always willing to turn over in part because they have a very specific political outcome that they're trying to achieve here.
I have to assume that when Jack Smith took his position as special counsel last month that he was given everything that the Justice Department had. The expectation was, at least as of a couple of months ago, that it would be only after the committee had finished, its work that they would turn everything over to the Justice Department. I think the Justice Department probably can look forward to that happening once the report is out.
Again, the report will be a compendium of what it is that is discovered, but it will not be literally everything. It will not be literally every single interview that was conducted, I assume, that is released. That's scads and cads of information, but that information will then make its way to the Justice Department presumably, and to Smith and therefore greatly expand the number of resources he has to work
Brian Lehrer: With Dominic in Westchester, you're on WNYC with Phillip Bump from The Washington Post. Hi, Dominic.
Dominic: Hi. Good morning, guys. I have to admit that I'm just so burned from the Mueller report. I was so one of those people that, oh, we got him now. I want some assurances that something's going to happen to this guy beyond just us talking about it and the Congressional Committee recommending something.
Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, Phillip. Go ahead.
Philip Bump: I don't think anyone could offer you such assurances. I think that one of the things we've seen with criminal referrals in the past is that they don't generally lead to actual indictments or criminal charges. There are lots of quiet criminal referrals, which may be more effective. I think that a lot of this flashier ones don't necessarily go anywhere. I think the Justice Department [inaudible 00:15:41] extremely carefully as they have been all along.
I think that the bar for obtaining an indictment against a former president, and Donald Trump, obviously, is very aware of his being a presidential candidate, muddying the waters a little bit. I think that is very much a factor in what the federal government is going to be considering. I don't think anyone can offer those assurances. I will say that I think that the political case, which again, is what Cheney had said at the outset that she wanted to make very clear to Americans that Donald Trump should not once again hold power.
That was one of her desired outcomes. I think that political case has been pretty unquestionably effective, at least for those who might have been wavering as to whether or not Donald Trump would use his power responsibility, should he again, win election.
Brian Lehrer: The other side of the politics is, of course, what Trump himself has posted on his social media site in response to the reports of what the committee would recommend. As usual, he calls it a scam and a hoax. He also says, these weaponized thugs and tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful country will die. That language these thugs and tyrants must be dealt with. Is that at risk of being taken as a new call to violence by the proud boys or anyone?
Philip Bump: Oh, absolutely. After the search of Mar-a-Lago, there's that guy in Cincinnati who went and brought a rifle to an FBI headquarters in the area that appears to have been tracking Donald Trump on truth social and following what he was saying. Yes, absolutely. There are two ways in which this trickles out. There's the very direct way of people like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers and far right extremists, who the FBI has been warning about for quite some time, taking this as a call to action and potentially putting together some plot.
Then there is the incidents in which there are people who are not mentally well, who seize upon these conversations that are happening in the public space and act on them. This is well documented and there have been any number of incidents in which people have been targets of violence by people who are not emotionally stable, simply because they've been thrust into and made scapegoats by people for their own political purposes.
Brian Lehrer: Charles in Queens, oh, Charles, hang on a second, actually. We have Greg in Monmouth County who is waiting to be next. Greg, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Greg: Hey, thanks for taking my call. I guess what I'm just wondering is if there's any thought or consideration being given to the idea that they're going to recommended charges against any of the congresspersons or senators or I guess, appointed officials who assisted in this plot and potentially invoke, and I forget my history here. Is it the 13th or 14th amendment that prohibits members from holding office if they participated in an active rebellion or insurrection?
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Greg, and that gets to the question of moving on from Trump. Who else might the committee recommend criminal charges against?
Philip Bump: I think that there are two tiers of criminal charges that might be at play here. There's this functional tier, and then there's the, the political tier. The functional tier is things people who may have misled the committee in their testimony. That may be like Tony or from the Secret Service, who there are real questions about the testimony that he gave to them and whether he tried to protect Donald Trump and his testimony, particularly about what happened as Trump was leaving his speech on January 6th, that infamous incident inside the vehicle that was driving him back to the White House.
There's that level of did people work with the committee in good faith? Then there's the secondary question that I think caller getting at as to whether or not people besides Trump were involved in this effort to help Trump retain power. There's no question, of course, that there were a lot of people involved in it. Marjorie Taylor Green, for example, worked very hard even before she was a member of Congress. She was sworn in only days before January 6th to try and help Donald Trump retain power.
I think the question then becomes, to what extent does the federal government try and affect some criminal punishment or other punishment against people who either may have been misled or may have been just trying to work the rests, or may have been trying to push something into the Supreme Court and the last ditch effort. These are very, very fraught considerations. I think that the federal government is not an institution that by its nature is risk-taking in terms of trying to use its power as a political tool I think very often justifiably.
Brian Lehrer: Now, according to one of your colleagues, or some of your colleagues at The Washington Post in the paper today, a person familiar with the proposed recommendation said that the central actors who aided Trump in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election will be called out by name during the hearing today, but it was unclear whether the committee would formally refer them for prosecution. I guess we'll see. One of the names that keeps coming up, which is not a household name, attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who put forth the fake elector's scheme. Can you remind people what that is, and why that might rise to the level of a crime?
Philip Bump: The presidential election came down to how the electoral college voted as anyone who was alive in 2000, remember? What happened as the date for electors to make their votes near, which is December 14th, 2020, is that Donald Trump and his allies had Republicans in states that Joe Biden won, put together alternate slates of electors. Theoretically, this was in case they were able to prove that the election in that state had been fraudulent there would be a slate of electors to which the House, and Senate could turn on January 6th, and count those votes instead.
That was, theoretically, the idea, but as is often the case with things related to Donald Trump, it was messily implemented, and not necessarily, again, being done in good faith. You had a number of electors in states. There were very clearly won by Joe Biden with no question. Obviously, he won every state that he won [chuckles] and there was no evidence that fraud played a role anyway. Chesebro and others were involved in this effort to try and put together these alternate slates.
There was an effort in immediate days prior to, and on January 6th to try, and have those alternate slates be recognized, even though there was obviously no validity to them. This was very public at the time. People may not have been paying attention, but on December 14th, it was known there were these alternate slates. Moving forward, it was as after the fact, as the broad scope of what Trump was doing was unveiled that they were looked at as, "Oh, my gosh. How are they doing this thing?" This, again, may fold into a conspiracy fraud in the US indictment.
Brian Lehrer: It folds into the conspiracy to defraud because they would have the right, I guess, to claim that there was a fraud and to have alternative electors ready to go, just in case some of the states did overturn their electoral votes. I wasn't sure why that one would rise to the level of a crime, but that one still keeps getting reported.
Philip Bump: There are things in Michigan if my memory serves correctly. They had to meet in the Capitol. That's the state statute. You have to meet in the Capitol, do it. They weren't allowed access to the Capitol. They did it at a Republican headquarters if I remember. They signed a document saying they were meeting in the Capitol on that day as was required by law. That, for example, is a fraudulent document, and therefore, there there are little things like that too.
Brian Lehrer: All right. Now, we'll get to Charles in Queens. Charles, you're on WNYC. I see you have a question about something that maybe Trump is not going to be charged with, or recommended that he be charged with. Hi, Charles.
Charles: Hi. As I'm an ex-Marine, I wondered from the outset why the committee went the long route. Mr. Trump was president at the time, and he was present at the time. He was also the commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, and he did nothing. To me, that is their election of duty, and it would've been much easier to just pin him on that than to go this roundabout way that has taken us months and months.
Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Charles. Do you know if, at any level of the military, they considered dereliction of duty, but also, Charles brings up, did nothing. I'm not seeing in the reporting that the committee is going to recommend to the Justice Department that Trump be charged with something for the do-nothing part of January 6th, which is very, very serious. When he was, and it's been well documented. He was watching the events unfold on television. People were imploring him to say something, to call off the riot, and he sat there for hours, and did nothing, presumably, because he liked what was going on. Isn't that a crime?
Philip Bump: I think the way the January 6th committee looks at that is that it speaks to his intent, that it speaks to the fact that let's grant Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt. Let's say that he actually thought that the election had been stolen from him. Let's say that he believed coming into January 6th, that the proper, and legal thing to do would be for the House, and Senate to reject some of these electors from these states.
That he then saw this riot underway, that he then heard from people that these people were under threat, that he then knew that the Capitol windows had been smashed, that there had been gunshots fired inside the Capitol, and did not speak out. That then undercuts the idea that he was only simply trying to affect a legal mechanism for retaining power.
That suggests very clearly, and very obviously, to a lot of Americans, that instead, he was simply trying to retain power by any means necessary. I don't know if there'll be specific criminal referrals centered on his having done nothing, but I think the committee sees it, and many Americans see it as very strong evidence that there was no goodwill at play in what Donald Trump was doing in trying to retain power.
Brian Lehrer: All right. Again, the hearing starts at one o'clock this afternoon. We will have live coverage here on WNYC, and we will see what the January 6th committee actually recommends to the Justice Department today, and what else they do. Phillip Bump is going to stay with us. We're going to turn the page. He's been doing a lot of reporting on the chaos at Twitter, and we're going to get his take on that. Also, we're going to launch a little Twitter poll for you, dear Brian Lehrer Show listeners, stay with us.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue with Philip Bump, Washington Post national columnist focused largely on the numbers behind politics. Here's a new number behind the politics of Twitter. Elon Musk took a poll of whatever Twitter users wanted to participate last night, asking if he should step down as CEO. 57% or around 10 million people said yes. It's just the latest bit of chaos surrounding the 50-day reign of Musk at the social media giant, right?
He also this weekend banned and reinstated most, but not all of a group of journalists, he said was putting him at risk of assassination. He has now banned people who tweet from linking to any other social media site, including Facebook, and Instagram, and Mastodon, but also lesser used once. Philip has been writing about all this, including a two-part article called Twitter Polls Aren't Real Life. Philip, what happened with this poll about whether he should step down?
Philip Bump: Elon Musk, that in keeping with the idea that the tech industry will eat its own dog food, he keeps putting out these polls to people asking to weigh in on various decisions he's making. This most recent one was, I think, caught everyone by surprise, except for potentially, Tesla investors who've seen their stock prices plummet in recent weeks.
Basically, he just asked users to weigh in on whether, or not he should still be CEO, this is not representative of anything. It's not scientific, it really is as I think you very aptly put it, that it is based on whoever wants to vote on it. He said he'd stand by it, and the outcome was that about 57% said he ought not to be the CEO of Twitter. We'll see if he actually stands by this one too.
: Let's see. Did this come before or after the poll? I saw some reporting that says he insisted there is no successor in the wings, "No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive." He tweeted, "There is no successor." Did that come before, or after the poll? Do you know?
Philip Bump: I believe it came before the poll over the course of yesterday. You mentioned this thing about Twitter banning links to other social media companies, and which they actually then fully rescinded. They deleted their tweets about it, and they actually deleted the policy from their website. I think one of the things that's been revealed as Elon Musk has been in charge of Twitter is yes, he has a very clear vision for what he wants Twitter to be, but he has a very deep misunderstanding of the way the internet works.
One of the central tenants of the internet for a long time has been the more you link people out to stuff, the more you provide them information elsewhere, the more they're going to come back to you as a source. That's foundational. It's a fundamental part of journalism as well. We tell stories about other things, and then people come back to us as trustworthy sources.
It's very much the case with the internet and the way that linking works, and the way you push people out, and then they come back to you as a trustworthy source of information. He never got that. He doesn't get a lot of things about Twitter. He doesn't get what the point of verification was at the outset. I think that he has a vision for what he wants Twitter to be. That is a very [unintelligible 00:30:00] in small view, a very small portion of what social media broadly and Twitter specifically is good at. I think that he may misunderstand who can do a good job with Twitter, in part because he misunderstands Twitter himself.
Brian Lehrer: This poll about whether he should step down, that followed other polls by Musk, right?
Philip Bump: He's done a whole bunch of them. He did first thing, and he started it with these very odd polls about whether or not there should be a particular peace plan in Ukraine as though that's something useful for him or Twitter users to weigh in on, but over the course of his tenure, for example, he put should Donald Trump be reinstated to the test and people chose to that Donald Trump should be reinstated so Donald Trump was reinstated even after this weekend when he shut down the accounts of a number of journalists. He offered that up as a poll, should those people be reinstated immediately or after a week.
He actually had two polls on that, one of which went against his view, and so he decided there'd been too many options, and so he had fewer options in the second pole, and that one went against him too and so all those people were reinstated immediately. To his credit, at the very least, when he pledges to stand by the results of the Twitter poll, he actually does so. This seems to be the way in which he is. One might charitably say engaging the community and building engagement on Twitter, one might also less charitably say that it's a way for him to deflect criticism, hey, it wasn't my idea to reinstate Trump. It was the user's idea.
Brian Lehrer: It's like talk radio. I always say, when we ask people's opinions, it's an informal, unofficial, thoroughly unscientific poll because it's obviously just those people who happen to be listening and happen to feel strongly enough to call in. There's nothing scientific about that. Is he stepping down as CEO?
Philip Bump: To be determined. I wouldn't be surprised for a few reasons. The first is I don't think he's enjoying being Twitter CEO. I think he thought it was going to be something very different. I think he thought he had a grasp on Twitter than he very clearly doesn't, and he's embarrassed himself a little bit. I think Tesla owners are extremely frustrated. Stock price Tesla has really crater, I shouldn't say crater, that implies it's like gone to zero, but it's gone down a lot since he has been focusing so much attention on Twitter.
I think Tesla investors' stock was up before markets opened on news that this poll had gone against him. I think that, fundamentally, people should remember, he didn't really want to buy Twitter. He put in as bid to buy it, and then he fought it very hard and almost went to court to try and not have to actually buy Twitter. Then, essentially, because he'd made this crack contractual obligation, he then had to buy it. I think that he also is having some buyer remorse and I think is happy to step away and let something else happen.
Brian Lehrer: He could still own Twitter, but not being charged day-to-day as CEO?
Philip Bump: Exactly, which is obviously a format that works in a lot of other companies.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, let's do a little Twitter poll of our own. This is purely advisory, but should this show stop using Twitter as a place for you to post comments during the show? Some people have asked us to do that. Some people are so outraged by Musk, they say we should stop using Twitter to invite people in to post comments in questions in real-time during the show.
Should we stop using Twitter as a place for you to post comments during the show, or should we continue to use Twitter as an option, but add another option for your real-time comments and questions? For those of you who object to Twitter and want to leave Twitter, or should we just keep using Twitter as we do? This is a poll obviously for people currently using Twitter, but tweet @BrianLehrer what you think.
This is purely advisory, I will say again, but in your opinion, listeners who tweet at us, should this show stop using Twitter as a place for you to post comments during the show, continue using it, but add another option for your real-time comments and questions, or just keep using Twitter as we do. This is a poll for people currently using Twitter.
Obviously, if you're not on Twitter, you can't respond to this poll. That's why it's informal unofficial thoroughly unscientific and only advisory but let's see what your tweeters out there. Think tweet @BrianLehrer and we'll report the results of the poll a little bit as we go in our last few minutes here with Philip Bump, but also on tomorrow's show. Phillip, what happened with the suspension of journalists? Remind us of the timeline here.
Philip Bump: Part of the challenge here is that it's hard to take Elon Musk at face value. These were suspensions made by Twitter. It's also hard to necessarily give Musk full agency over these decisions, although one has to assume that it happened. People may remember last week that Elon Musk said Donald Trump because the tour was so similar, Elon Musk spoke out against this account called ElonJet, which essentially been tracking his private jet showing where it was landing.
These sorts of accounts are common for very wealthy people and can often be informative, like, oh, so-and-so went to X, I don't know what they're doing there. Elon got very mad about it. There was some guy who he said accosted him on the ground in Los Angeles. Musk essentially blamed the ElonJet account for tipping off where Musk was at any point in time. Obviously, knowing the location of a jet doesn't do most people any good, because it's usually flying in the air where it's hard to get to, but he decided
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Brian Lehrer: They know where it's going to land.
Philip Bump: It lands at an airport. As I joked on Twitter, airports are not notorious for being easy to find people at, but anyway. This was his argument. A lot of people then were like, this is goofy, this information's out there elsewhere, you can find it at X site, for example. A lot of reporters did that. Some reporters who did things like say, this doesn't make sense because you can find it elsewhere. He decided they two were sharing this real-time information which he had decided was for [unintelligible 00:35:55] and so their accounts were shut down.
Then there were other questions about Taylor Lawrence and The Washington Post account was shut down briefly this weekend purportedly because she was sharing links to other social media networks. The part of the challenge is it was all ad hoc and for violations of rules that had been implemented, some cases after the purported violations had occurred, but it seemed very clear. It seemed clear from the outset that one of the reasons Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter was to implement a way of constraining the media.
The media is much more into Twitter than our most cultural groups, if you will, in the United States. It seemed very clear that Musk who's always fumed net negative coverage saw ownership of Twitter as a way to lockdown journalists. This seemed to be manifestation of that, but it was one also that was very shoddily put together and didn't really make sense and has since largely been rescinded.
Brian Lehrer: With this airline thing, airplane thing is Musk, in his chaotic way, perhaps setting a positive standard, no posting of things that identify anybody's whereabouts or home addresses, maybe this is the kind of limits we should want on free speech on Twitter. The original concern, of course, was that Musk would let dangerous hostile stuff go through when he said he was a free speech absolutist and that he was inviting Trump back who was suspended specifically for inciting violence. Maybe in his chaotic self-interested way, he's setting a positive standard here, which is better than the one he came in articulating.
Philip Bump: I think that's overly generous, for a few reasons. The first is that they're already bans at Twitter for doxing. If someone had posted my home address, for example on Twitter, I could ask that being removed as a violation of Twitter standards for sharing information. The second is that particularly as articulated, and there may be a way to better articulate it, but particularly as articulated, it was way too broad. For example, the example people were using, Lionel Messi was at the soccer stadium in Qatar yesterday.
Brian Lehrer: I noticed that.
Philip Bump: That's real real-time doxing where he is but doesn't do anything, or for example, Liz Cheney is going to be at the house conference room X this afternoon as part of this hearing. That would violate the standard that exists this weekend
[crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: That's a public person in a public place, as is Messi. That's different.
Philip Bump: It's not different based on the standard that was drawn out by Twitter this weekend. That's my point, is it was very loosely articulated and that a more specific standard already existed that Twitter. Yes, I take your point and I think Musk certainly sees it that way, but if you're going to do that, you have to then do that in a way that is articulated so that you avoid the sorts of examples that I just made because obviously those should be allowed.
Brian Lehrer: Your colleague who you mentioned, Taylor Lawrence, who was suspended this weekend and was still suspended after most of the other journalists were reinstated, and you just said that was for linking to other social media sites, is that policy now rescinded? You can again link to other social media sites on Twitter and Taylor Lawrence is reinstated or isn't reinstated
Philip Bump: No, she is reinstated and she later found out that that was why her account had been locked down. This was revealing, if you go back and look at Elon Musk's conversations, he does a lot of replying to people on Twitter and people made clear to him like, this is useful to me. I need to be able to link to other things because X and it makes Twitter better, and you can see him be like, oh, that's interesting, I hadn't thought of that in the mentions and that I think then led to the reversal of the policy.
Brian Lehrer: Here's another journalist who I read has not been reinstated. You can tell me because I know this keeps changing hour by hour. That's part of the chaos here. You can still tell me if it's still the case, but it's Lynette Lopez, columnist for Business Insider. Here she is giving her take on why she thinks she has been suspended from Twitter on MSNBC.
Lynette: I posted legal documents that are years and years and years old. I've been covering Elon since 2018. I started investigating in 2018 and I stopped deeply investigating his activity at Tesla in 2021. These documents are related to a lawsuit that started in 2019 when Elon sued my source. These documents point to Elon stalking my source, hacking my source, and also doxing a prominent critic at the time. The reason why I feel I was suspended is because Elon didn't want people to see him as a hypocrite.
Speaker 2: Now I'm still seeing Linette Lopez suspended. What can you add to her take on? Why do you know the Lynette Lopez story?
Philip Bump: I do, but I can't speak to the suspension cause and the reason that's part of the challenge here is that one of the criticisms of Twitter that I think was valid was that for a long time it would suspend people, and not necessarily be opaque about why it was doing so. Musk had promised to change that policy and make it so as more obvious why suspensions were occurring, but he hasn't done so. We have these sort of like, what is it exactly that triggered this suspension? Maybe there's a totally valid reason for it.
Maybe Lynette Lopez had done something that most people would agree, like, "Oh, okay, well I can see why that doesn't make sense." There isn't any transparency about it, and because Elon Musk's Twitter has not earned the benefit of the doubt in regard to that, I don't think it's fair to assume that it is valid. As such, it would make more sense for Twitter as an institution to be very clear about why it's doing, it doesn't have to. It's a private company. It's owned by Elon Musk. You can shut me down, write this incident for no reason at all. He doesn't like my haircut, but without that, we're left to guess
Speaker 2: Couple of early responses in our Twitter poll as to whether we should keep using Twitter as our only realtime comments and question source other than the phones, whether we should keep it, but add another option or whether we should stop using Twitter because of the objections to Elon Musk. So far, overwhelmingly in this very unscientific poll, want us to stay on Twitter one way or another, listener rights.
I vote you keep using Twitter the way you've been. Another one says, we need to relax, we need to keep using it. Never react to invective. Another says, please add another option outside Twitter to comment on The Brian Lehrer Show. It's uncomfortable to use the platform I no longer support, but eliminating Twitter would be a political statement. That listener doesn't want that. Somebody else keep Twitter, another person says, and this is interesting, please continue using Twitter until there is a comparable alternative.
Meaning they want it out there on the front lines of where a lot of people are and so far the poll has 160 votes. 15% say stop, 53% say add an additional option and 31% say status quote. I repeat that's an informal unofficial thoroughly unscientific poll of Brian Lehrer Show listeners who are using Twitter at this moment and this is just advisory, but there are those results. Last question, Philip, I saw a theory that all of this chaos is just to get people talking about it, so more people go look at Twitter, and Twitter will make more money. Do you think that's what this has been all about these 50 days of Musk ownership?
Philip Bump: I think, again, I almost didn't think, I think that Elon Musk probably thinks to some extent that he can justify the way that he's been treating Twitter and acting on Twitter through that lens. I'm saying these controversial things, but I think that's for the benefit of Twitter because look how much user engagement is up. He's actually tweeted little charts about showing how the number of daily active users has increased.
I think he's done enormous damage to his own personal reputation. I think that he has very clearly taken sides in America's culture war in a way that is odd for a guy who sells electric cars that have been very appealing to the left. I think that he has made very clear that he has a vision of what Twitter ought to be that is not necessarily in keeping with what Twitter has long been and not necessarily one that I think most outside observers would say is the way that Twitter is going to be financially successful.
That he may rationalize what he's doing by that, but I think that this is very much rooted in his sense of what he wants Twitter to be and how he thinks he can. Look, you don't tweet about the woke mind virus as being something that needs to be uprooted in the United States of America simply to drive engagement. You can go so much short of that, if your only goal is to get more people using the service.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, I heard about COVID and RSV, but I missed that that virus, Philip?
Philip Bump: That's because we're all infected with it. That's the problem.
Speaker 2: Phillip Bump, Washington Post, national columnist focused largely on the numbers behind politics. Thank you so much for this two-parter today. We really appreciate it.
Philip Bump: Of course.
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