The Shadow Docket, #MeToo, and the Power of Reporting (with Jodi Kantor)

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tune. I'm Pete Barara. Four years ago, I got a tip about the court. And I was not in the market to cover it whatsoever. But this tip was about a secret influence campaign that had been carried out inside the court. As you know, the very idea of that is outrageous. Welcome to Stay Tune. I'm Pete Barara. My guest this week is Jody Cantor. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the New York Times, perhaps best known for her seminal reporting on sexual harassment and assault, that catapulted the Me Too movement. She joins me to discuss her latest investigation into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, and her most recent book, How to Start. That's coming up Stay Tune. What does it take to be prepared for disaster? You have to be confident. You have to be calm. Will you be perfect? No. But the idea is that you'll have your bearings, and this won't be something new to you. This week, unexplain it to me, how to stay ready, so you don't have to get ready. New episode Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Sue Bird here. This week on A Touch More, I'm celebrating the start of the WMBA by breaking down what I saw on Opening Weekend. And we have NBC's One and Only Maria Taylor to talk about her boundary-breaking career in sports journalism, the NBA playoffs, and her thoughts on which teams have the best chance of making the WMBA finals. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More, wherever you get your podcasts, and on YouTube. What is the origin story of the Supreme Court's infamous shadow docket and the legacy of the Me Too movement nearly 10 years after the first news story broke? Jody Cantor, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's taken a very long time. I've been wanting to talk to you for a very long time. For a lot of reasons, I gave your credentials in an intro, all too brief intro, but I didn't mention your most important credential, which is that you are an alum of Homedale High School and grew up in the great county of Monmouth, New Jersey. And we are brought together by serendipity, as I am also an alum of the county of Monmouth, but I went to Ranny's school and maybe people that I knew played sports against maybe you and people that you knew. I did not play sports much. Wow, I think I had read that in a profile of you 100 years ago and kind of noted it and felt a certain kinship, because I think there's especially something about Homedale and Titton Falls and Eden Town, New Jersey. Well, and their relationship to New York City and not being from the city and not having gone to one of the fancy private high schools here. And I am a kid from Queens and Staten Island. And then moved to New Jersey and then moved to Homedale. And so I grew up in the New York City area, but in like a totally different world than the one I inhabit now. I just remember getting to Columbia when I was 17. And there was a group of kids who were so polished and so in the know, you know, they seem to speak. Oh, from the city schools. Yeah, or they had gone to boarding schools to prep schools. And that was like, I mean, that was mind blowing. And where are they now, Jody, in the world of journalism compared to you? I don't know. I confess that I don't spend my time checking. You don't spend all your time checking or you spend no time checking. I think I spend close to no time checking, although one of, we're here to discuss serious things. But one of the pieces of fun that comes with a big story or a book coming out is that you do hear from these people earlier in your life. I mean, in the last week, I've gotten notes, especially because my book is about how to start. And as you know, I tell some like pretty mortifying stories of my early career. Thank you very much. Hearing from people in that era in my life is actually really special. I want to talk about that. But first, we got to talk about some other things, matters of consequence, as they refer to in the little prints. Supreme Court. So we don't have to get into your dropping out of Harvard Law School, because you want to be a journalist. But I respect that great deal. But now you're sort of coming full circle a little bit and you're covering the Supreme Court. Let me ask you a couple of preliminary questions before we talk about the secrecy issue that listeners of the podcast will be familiar with, because we've had Steve Latic on. We have talked about his book, The Shadow Docket. But so why of all the things in the world to cover, given what you've covered before, we'll talk about the Me Too Movement and your role in that. Supreme Court. Important why. In journalism, scrutinizing the powerful is job one, as you know. And a couple of years ago, about four years ago, I got a tip about the court. As you know, the very idea of that is outrageous that anybody could be trying to infiltrate the court to influence the justices. And some pips as a reporter, there are things you know, but when you do this story, you come to really know them and feel them. And I saw in the course of that reporting, and in the course of working with my colleague, Adam Liptack, that we don't know the answers to some really basic questions about the Supreme Court. The place is a locked box other than oral arguments and opinions. How partisan are the justices really? How much work are they doing? And how much work are the clerks doing? What is it like to age in those jobs? What is it like to hold power for 20 or 30 years at a time? How are they really responding to the Trump moment? Those are like pretty obvious basic questions like, I'm a law school criminal. I'm a law school dropout, not a fancy legal scholar. And yet, you know, I can pose them. And so what I wanted to see is if the tools of investigative journalism could work to help us learn more about the Supreme Court. And it turns out they really can. We now have a five-person team at the New York Times, including our editor, we have Adam Liptack, Ross Halderman, the editor, and Mary-Mau covering cases and decisions. Abby Van Sickle, who does a little bit of everything and me. And the New York Times has a new institutional commitment understanding the Supreme Court better. And there are a lot of things we've been able to bring to light preet. You know, I broke the story about the two provocative flags associated with January 6th outside the Alitos homes. Adam and I have now done behind-the-scenes stories about three cases. We did dobs. We did the immunity decision. And now the shadow papers story tells the story of the origins of the shadow docket. So the point here is that on your show everywhere, there's tons of debate about the Supreme Court. But it's hard to have a really great debate about a place that's so secretive. So what I want to do is put information on the table that helps us have a richer, more penetrating, more accurate debate. Let's talk about a couple of premises here. When we say, I don't know if you mean to say this and maybe you do, the Supreme Court is secretive and I hear senators say the same thing. Sounds pejorative. Would you can see that there is some legitimate reason why Supreme Court justices should maintain a certain level of privacy, that they shouldn't be going on, Steven Cobra every night, and going on podcasts every week, keeping their thoughts to themselves because they could prejudice some debates that they enter into and keep their private life secret. Is some of that valid or not? So I would make a distinction between telling them what to do versus deciding what I as a reporter should do. Listen, I think if you're a really principal journalist, you're not telling public figures or officials who hold high office what to do. You're seeking information and I know the information I'm seeking. And in that, in my own work, I do make that distinction because pre- you don't see us in the pages of The New York Times, for instance, getting ahead or trying to get ahead of the court's decisions. Like when Politico published The Dobbs League, of course, they were right to do that. That was newsworthy information. But getting that kind of thing is not the goal of my reporting for two reasons. One, it's going to come out anyway, right? It's going to come out in two weeks and three weeks. So with the limited bandwidth, the like investigative journalism is really hard and you have to decide where to aim your capital. That's not my goal. And also another principle of journalism is that you do try to observe and not get in the way. And to get to opinions early does create the issue of like, you're kind of becoming an actor in the deliberative process, which I don't particularly want to do. The other distinction I should make is that you use two words that for me are very different. you used secrecy and privacy. And throughout your career, you learned things, right? And you come up with independent principles of your own to add to the craft that you're learning. And one of the things I learned in the course of breaking the Harvey Weinstein story with my partner, Megan Toey, is that there's a difference between privacy and secrecy. Did those women who were abused, did they deserve privacy, of course? Of course, right? I mean, these were intimate crimes, these were humiliating violations. This was traumatic. Was the system benefiting from whole scale secrecy in which secret settlements and dodgy legal agreements were used to erase what happened? No, that was enabling of abuse. So I feel like a lot of my work-- I've met with students who say, "Jody, we want you to cover the Supreme Court the way we cover Congress or the way we cover the executive branch, like we want immediate gratification and constant stories and we want the horse race." And I push back at them and I say, not only would my sources not tolerate that and support that, but I don't think that's right. I think form wants to meet content. And I think what we want to do here is create a system of covering the Supreme Court, the federal courts, that actually matches what really feels right and what judges really do. So like, for example, the shadow, Paperscube, which I'm so delighted to talk to you about today, Adam and I were reporting on a case that this was in 2016. This is old. And so that's the idea that I want a challenge that 10 years later for something so mementos that allows us to observe the creation of the shadowdocket weren't allowed to really know about or understand that, even though the court didn't explain its decision at the time and it hasn't fully explained its thinking since. So I want to talk about the origin story in a moment, but just reorienting the question about the privacy of the dresses. And my view is that it's an absolute minimum. The work they do, the actual work they do, should be public. There shouldn't be a shadowdocket. There should be cameras in the courtroom. People should understand what the Supreme Court does. That's different from some of the ways we cover members of Congress, unless there's a direct conflict of interest. So what someone does with their private time, what TV shows John Roberts likes to watch, I'm not sure if that's relevant or not. Maybe when TMZ begins to cover the court, we'll learn some of those things. But it can become relevant if Clarence Thomas associates with certain people and gets benefits from them or they try to impose their views on him or there's a spouse of a Supreme Court justice who creates a conflict for the justice. So I guess it's complicated back and forth, but would you prefer as a citizen that the justice has got out and about more and explain themselves more outside of the four corners of their opinions? Does that benefit democracy or not? - So I want to somehow answer your excellent question in a way that complies with my own rule of truly not telling the justice's what to do. I will tell you what I have witnessed in almost four years of this, Pete. I have seen nine people who are treated in such a weird way. Because what I mean is-- - What do you mean? - The obsequiousness that surrounds any Supreme Court justice is profound. - Have you seen a cabinet meeting? The obsequiousness towards Donald Trump is also a thing to be held. - I'm sure you're right, but as you know in legal circles, there is like a special-- - Yeah. - Like at its best, it's genuine respect for the office and at its worst, it's like a kind of blatant sucking up. Okay, so let's say that some huge percentage of what they face is sucking up, then you have another category which is attack and threat. You've got some crazy person making a real threat on Justice Cavanaugh's life. You've got Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who's sister, who has nothing to do with her job, getting a pipe bomb threat in her mailbox. And so what we're talking about here is a really extreme way of treating justices, right? And what I am interested in contributing to, because some of this exists, but I wanna see more of it, I wanna see a rigorous, fair examination of the justices that doesn't fall into the camp of either obsequiousness or attack, right? Like both of those things are pretty negative. We want honest, sophisticated, credible, enthralling coverage of the court. It was the same when I covered President Obama. There was like this hagiography industry like devoted to like the glorification of the Obama's that I was not interested in being part of. He was the president, like we probe him, we probe power. But then there was also like, you know, these birth or attacks, saying he wasn't born in the United States. So the job of a journalist is like to create a totally different space. - So let's go back to what you began to speak about, the origin of the shadow, you don't call it the shadow docket, call it the shadow papers. So what should we call it for this interview? - Okay, so as you know, there is a ton of discussion about what to call this form of dealing with cases. I think in this discussion, we should call that the shadow docket, 'cause that's the name that people know. The shadow papers is the scoop that Adam and I published, which I'm happy to explain if anybody missed it. - Why don't you do that? And then I have a couple of questions about why the Supreme Court interacts with the way that they do, 'cause I think it's very unusual. - Okay, great. So anybody who listens to the show knows what the shadow docket is, right? Like let's just say it in case there are newcomers, but it's a secretive fast track in which the court bypasses some of the time-tested tools of judicial evaluation and decision making and they make temporary but very consequential decisions, very fast and often there's essentially no explanation. They issue the short orders sometimes that have like the legal boilerplate and vague instructions for what should happen, but have no reasoning and reasoning, as we know, is the bedrock of the law, it's what an opinion is, it's how judges and justices hold themselves accountable. So this has existed for a long, long, long time. It's been used more typically over the decades for like true emergencies, like death penalty cases or election cases, about 10 years ago, the court starts to use it in a new way, especially when it comes to presidential power. And of course, like your audience knows that the shadowdocket is really how the court has for the most part granted President Trump a ton of power in the last year and a half. There have been over 20 decisions, big victories for President Trump. They came on the shadowdocket and some of them were totally unexplained. So the question is, so why, yes, so why in 2016 was that shift? That's what Adam and I asked. In 2016, there's this case. Obama in his last days in office is trying to pass a new energy policy. Like climate change is happening in a big way. He hasn't done anything really big to address it. He's trying. He's got this regulation called the Clean Power Plan that is aiming to transform the fossil fuel industry. And opponents of this plan states who fear it's going to be expensive and power companies challenge it. And they take it all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court does a very surprising thing at the time, which is that even though the DC Circuit is going to hear this and has said arguments, the Supreme Court intervenes. And they halt Obama's plan. And they do it not with a full opinion that explains why they're, they had never before interceded at this stage of a case. Instead of issuing a real opinion that explains why they've done this very surprising thing, it's the short order. It's 142 words that says nothing. And in retrospect, we see that this case, the shadow docket was born slowly and over years. But this is a signal point. This is a pivot point. This case marks a shift. So Adam and I are essentially asking the question, what happened? How was the shadow docket as we know it? Born. And I'm proud to tell you, we got a real answer because we were able to publish 16 pages of the justices, private deliberations. This wasn't like the dobs leak, an opinion that was meant to become public. This was correspondence between the justices that allows us to eavesdrop on them during this five-day sprint when they are making their decision. And in part because they never released any public reasoning, it is very interesting and telling to see their reasoning in private. So let me ask a methodological question where we get to more of the substance. So you look at these memos and you see people on the court going back and forth. Why don't they have a meeting? Why don't they get a question? Why don't they get a cup of coffee and sit around in a wood panel conference room and hash it out? Why these formal memos that are always subject to be leaked? Well, I thought you were going somewhere different with the question. Go wherever is better for me to go. Let's concentrate on the first half of your question, which I think is really important. The justices do have a really special room with really special chairs and a really special table, as you know, where they make their decisions. This is their private conference room. It's like the holy of holies inside the Supreme Court. And for most cases, for merits cases, they do meet in person to vote. And like I think sometimes the votes are, you know, just going around the table saying which way you're going to vote, but often very robust discussions about the issues at hand. But with shadow-dock at cases, for the most part, they don't meet in person. Those memos were circulated. They were circulated, I think, both over a hard copy and email. But the justices were away. It was during a mid-February break. They're all over the place. Their clerks are in the building, sharing these memos. And if there was any justice to justice communication during this five-day period, we don't know about it. So they communicate in writing. And one of the concerns about the shadow-dock it is essentially people saying, "Will you please sit down and have a real discussion? You're going too fast." So now let's go to the $64,000 question. Why was this day different from all other days, Jody? Why did they decide to do something? I mean, there must have been other occasions in the history of the court when one or more justice has thought, well, time is of the essence. We should intercede in a proceeding whether it's the DC circuit or some other circuit, but they didn't. Why here? I would take you to the Chief Justice's memos. Out of this entire stock of memos, he is the author who just leaps out of these pages because we see a different Chief Justice than the one we have seen in public. The one we've seen in public, as you know, speaks in kind of magisterial tones. He is, of course, very conservative, but comes across as very even-handed, very concerned with process and the stability of the court. Here he is moving so quickly. He writes the first memo because the DC circuit is his responsibility and he comes out of the gate really strong. We have to halt this plan. We have to do it for these reasons. The democratic appointees on the court raise really serious procedural objections. There were memos essentially say, this is unprecedented. This is weird. We've never done it this way before. Why are we doing this? I have very serious concerns. And he is dismissive in response. He says, we have to do this because this is the most expensive energy regulation ever imposed and it's going to cause irreparable harm to the coal companies and to the states. If we do this, and by the way, for fairness, we have to say there was a real legal issue here. It is not clear if the Clean Air Act really authorized this legislation. So it's not that there wasn't a real discussion to be had here. It's the way the court handled it. So the listener might be thinking to oneself, that sounds an awful lot like policy, not law though. Is that a fair observation of the way you presented the question? For Adam and I, it's really important to put the information out there in public and to let legal experts like you and legal scholars draw those conclusions. But yes, many people who have looked at these papers, not everybody because there's been debate about how to interpret them. Many people thought that the Chief Justice was relying too heavily on what we would call extrajudicial factors. Like essentially he was using math that should not necessarily be part of like the strict math of how a judge makes a decision. And in particular, what you can see in the papers is that the Chief Justice was in a power struggle with the Obama administration and the EPA in particular. He felt that the EPA had bypassed an earlier decision and he did not want the court to be sidelineed again. That doesn't necessarily explain why they persisted in this practice. Did they get sort of, you know, high on the sauce to the extent you can of the shadow doc? Let's do that again. And or look, there wasn't a lot of pushback that came much later and it's a very esoteric issue that lay people don't necessarily understand or care about or vote on combination of those things, something different. The best thing I can do, Priet, is to amplify your question and say, you know, and say as a reporter, like if the justices are going to do really big thing, it's like make decisions over the last year or so about who can be deported and with what process. Why not provide more reasoning to the public, especially given that trust in this court is languishing at historically low levels. And given that we know that courts get and preserve their authority from writing opinions, I mean, that's where they get the legitimacy from exactly. And it's so it's such a powerful, beautiful thing. It's like there may be listeners out there who have had a judge decide something against them in such a painful way, right? A judge could put your brother in jail for life after a crime or a judge could make a decision that shuts down your business. And so writing an opinion is an act of respect and credibility that says, I know that a lot of you are going to disagree with this, but I want you to know that I was sincere and I was diligent and I'm reaching a purely legal conclusion. And so that distinction is really important for me to make in this work because I know there are critics of our reporting who think that we're just trying to undermine these decisions. If anything, the opposite, we're saying, please can we understand the court's logic better? No, absolutely 100%. There's a scholar at NYU Law School, Jeremy Waldron writes about thoughtfulness in the law. And he makes this point that you've made very eloquently that people don't often think about. And that is you want to see the reasoning for decisions to understand whether or not the decision was made correctly. And so other courts, if it's not the Supreme Court, you know, higher level courts can make determinations. There's a record. People can debate them. People can understand legitimacy. But there's this other thing that you just mentioned, which is the affording of the dignity to the parties who aren't left to wonder, well, did they even deliberate at all? Did they even think about it at all? Or are left to their worst assumptions, right? Like the kinds, if we care about stability in the courts, we're suffering a loss of faith in the law in so many ways, right? In so many different sectors of society. And there are people who find it hard to trust a court that won't explain itself. And also, like obviously, there are lower court judges who are saying it's just really, like they're saying, I can't do my job without more explanation because-- You need guidance. Exactly. And it's a conferral of dignity upon the parties. And so let me ask you this question from a journalistic perspective. Do you think that this issue, based on your reporting and scholars talking about it and a very, very, very influential podcast, such as this one, raising the issue, that there is a bit of not just defensiveness on the part of the justices who engage in this practice, but a little bit of rethinking about it or-- Yes, and no. So there's a couple things. There have been a couple of recent shadoweddocket opinions where they have provided a little more explanation. And the common interpretation of that has been to say, okay, they get it. Like they understand the concern they're trying to do a little more. But also, this has become a public debate among the justices, most notably with justices Katangi Brown-Jackson and Justice Sonia Sotomayor being vocal critics of the shadowdocket. This is just in the last couple of weeks. You know, they've made statements saying that they're very concerned about this. interestingly, Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been a very public defender of this practice. And he's essentially, you know, his attitude has been the court has to take these cases and can't abdicate its role. Also, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said something very interesting in the book she published last fall about this. She said, sometimes when we don't explain ourselves in these opinions, it's because we're not ready and we don't want to lock ourselves in. The answer to which, like the rejoinder to which I should say, the criticism of what she said is that some of these decisions are so enormously consequential. You know, if you're talking about a reordering of the shape of the federal government or firing tons of people, like by the time the court gets around to the merits case, that case may have become a kind of ghost ship of a case that is irrelevant at that point. I'll be right back with Jody Cantor after this. Support for the show comes from Thrive Market. So many of us experience decision fatigue while grocery shopping, keeping track of ingredients, brands, prices, it's a lot. What if you could go to a grocery store that only stocked items specifically to your tastes and preferences? That's basically Thrive Market. Thrive Market is a membership based online grocery store. For just $5 a month, you get access to a curated selection of organic and non-GMO brands that you can easily filter by diet. You also get access to weekly sales, free gifts, and peace of mind knowing that the foods and ingredients you're getting are right for you. 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We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early this morning and we assessed that individual they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today explain drops every week day afternoon. Hey, I'm Matthew Shell, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away, it's called that sounds like a lot. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world and then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media podcast network. You mentioned John Roberts a few times. He is the chief. It is the role of the chief in some ways to steer the court and to figure out who writes the opinions. But you wrote a piece not that long ago about the immunity decision. And what's super interesting, I mean, many interesting things about it. Is the lack of awareness on the part of the chief justice that appears. But how is opinion would be received? Which raises a number of questions, including, is that an important consideration? Is that a valid consideration if you're just calling balls and strikes? The empire should not be concerned about the booing of the crowd. If he or she calls a strike and the crowd wanted it to be a ball or thought it was a ball, does he care about that? And why did he get it so wrong? There are two big criticisms of the immunity decision and it's worth mentioning them both, because I think they fall into different categories in terms of your question. One criticism, of course, is like the obvious one we've heard a million times, which is that the court gave President Trump too much immunity. Many scholars, many thinkers have said that. They've said, why did they award him even more immunity than his lawyers actually asked for? This opens the door for things like bribery, etc. So there is disagreement with the actual upshot of the decision. And as you know, the traditional thinking is that judges and justices need to be very careful about the way they think about and respond to that stuff, because we don't want our jurists to be overly sensitive to public opinion. How sensitive they should be, I think, as a matter of great debate, including on this court. Like I don't think all of the current justices have the same views about the tension between like on the one hand true independence, which is so important. And then on the other hand, like knowing what time it is and being in touch with public sentiment. But then there's another issue with this immunity decision, which is whether it works as a piece of legal logic, whether it holds together. And that was a second criticism, even among conservative scholars. They said, this chief justice is like a very experienced and distinguished judicial craftsman. Why does this opinion appear so disjointed? Why does it raise as many questions as it answers? Why do they appear to be holes in it? And that I don't think was a partisan question. That was a very basic question about whether this thing works or not at a critical time as to why it ended up that way. I mean, I can tell you from our reporting that we got some insight into the conservative super majority, right? It's easier to, it's easy to look at these six Republican appointed justices as one thing and one body. They're not. It's like a very complicated ecosystem of six people who have different views. We know from bits of memo that we published from justices, cabinet and gorsuch that we they were really egging the chief justice on that they were telling him that, you know, this was a genius opinion. There's been some commentary. I think an excellent question that I don't fully know the answer to, but that's worth mentioning is were the justices. Remember, this opinion came out during the Biden administration, right? Were they also trying to send a message and protect president Biden from political prosecution after he left office? So anyway, there's, you know, Adam and I, I'm happy to say that Adam and I reported as much behind the scenes as we could, but there are many questions left to answer. I just want to read a paragraph from the piece so people understand exactly what we're talking about. And also because it gets at what must have been a view of the chief justice that Donald Trump, and at that point, he was not in office, this sort of a passing phenomenon and can't do too much damage and get over it kind of thinking. And you wrote, you and Adam wrote this quote in his writings on the immunity case, the chief justice seemed confident that his arguments would soar above politics, persuade the public and stand the test of time. His opinion cited enduring principles quoted Alexander Hamilton's endorsement of a vigorous presidency. And asserted it would be a mistake to dwell too much in Mr. Trump's actions. And he wrote in the opinion, our perspective must be more far-sighted. If he else you want to say about what that reveals in your mind about the perspective, both backward looking and forward looking on the part of Justice Roberts. Well, I think it speaks to one of the most important questions we have, which is what is the attitude of the center of this court, which is a very conservative center, of course, towards President Trump. Because if we look at, we've got essentially three swing justices, right? We've got the chief justice. We've got justice, Kavanaugh, and we've got justice, Amy Coney Barrett. And they have all experienced President Trump in like a very intense way, right? Whether it's through these emergency applications or some of them go to state of the union, some of them don't, as you know, well, I think those three have mostly attended the chief justice and justice Barrett when I think Justice Kavanaugh went as well if memory of serving correctly. I don't have it in front of me. Anyway, two of them were appointed by President Trump and spent time with him during that process, et cetera, et cetera. So they are like, they're not strangers to the figure of President Trump. So what do they really think of? I think what we see is that the Democratic appointing justices really see President Trump as a threat to the constitutional order. They have written that again and again and again. The center of the court is the big question. And in the immunity decision, they did not seem like they wanted to countenance or grapple with what happened on January 6th, what message the court was going to send about it. You know, like this was a politically complicated case wrapped up in a presidential election. And so you see in that opinion, and in those words that Adam and I wrote, the chief justice making an attempt to kind of like soar above it all and say, we're not really going to address the urgent and complicated questions of the current moment. It doesn't always work. Since I have you, and since you are an intrepid reporter who hails from mom of county, which is terrific background. I'm going to ask you this question. I'm going to hold you to the answer. Is justice Alito retiring this year or not? Oh, I don't know. Come on. I know. I bet you know. Not only do I not know, but I will tell you the second as a reporter, you make a prediction. You are cursed. Okay. How about this? Absolutely on that topic and show your reason. Show your what are some of the factors that suggest he will retire and the ones that suggest he won't. Okay, that's totally easy. So there's been like a ton of speculation about the publication date of his book. He's got a book coming out in October. It coincides with the start of the term. Some people have reasoned, oh, well, he wants to go on a book tour. He's not going to be like showing up at the court during that time. Other people have said, no, he is riding high judicially. This is the moment he has been waiting for all of these years. And he is not going anywhere. There is I've heard both sets of logic and I I truly don't think we know because on the one hand, he's got a powerful incentive, obviously, to be replaced by president Trump. But on the other hand, we have learned observing powerful figurine powers, whether it's on the left or the right, people seem to have a lot of trouble of letting go of power when they get older. That's why they're going to have to pry this microphone from my, what is the phrase, my cold dead hands with powerful consequences for the Republic breed. Yes, we'll reverberate through all time. Look, it's also possible he doesn't know. Of course. Right. Part of the reason maybe we don't know is because he doesn't know. Maybe he's thinking about it. Maybe he's contemplating it, but he's not, he's not sure. I don't know the answer to the following question. And I think I should. Is it known to someone or some people who the leaker of the Dobs decision was? I don't know. Okay. We don't know if the political reporters know who leaked it. Okay. So it's not the case that it is known, but we don't know. Maybe nobody knows. I don't know. Like is there some scenario on earth in which the court internally identified the leaker and made a decision not to publicize it? I guess that's hypothetically possible. It seems pretty unlikely to me. But I honestly, I don't know. It's very hard to find a leaker, very hard. I know that from, from my experiences as well. So we spent a lot of time talking about the court. And the things you've written about with Adam Lipptack and others, but as you've alluded to, you had a really important impact on the country, on the world, on workplaces, through your reporting with Megan Tuey. What is that now? 10 years ago? Nine years ago? Almost, almost. I can't believe it, but it's been what are your reflections on that reporting and where we are in the country today? So it's been nine years, almost to the day that I started investigating Harvey Weinstein. Megan was off having a baby. I was alone. I remember the trial nine years later. There's a trial going right now in the Manhattan, D.A. office. He's been on almost continuous trial for the last couple of years, as you know. But I remember, like the blank Google document I started at the beginning of that investigation. And I did it without knowing if Harvey Weinstein had ever crossed a line with actresses. So I think I would say two things in response to your question. One, the truth works, brave sources work, even in our crappy information environment. It is still true that evidence is powerful, that these women and their stories were more powerful than all the shenanigans that Weinstein pulled. I mean, he did crazy stuff, as you probably know, in addition to traditional stuff, PR stuff and attempted lawsuits and lawyers, he sicked a group of Israeli ex intelligence agents on me and on other reporters and on sources. They tried to doot me. They came to my apartment building and took photos. All this stuff he did, which sound scary and intimidating. It did not work because these women's stories were true. They were real and these women were incredibly brave. And if we look at the, like if you look at the number of people who gave us the vital information we needed to publish the Weinstein story, including, by the way, Harvey Weinstein's accountant at the time who I won. Yeah, I won him over. And he ended up helping us. And he was very brave. That number of people would fit inside like a tiny conference room. Like he would fit inside this tiny podcast studio here at the New York Times. And yet look at the worldwide impact they had. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is, boy, these obituary's for the Me Too movement. They have really been premature. I mean, talk about not making predictions. There is a massive backlash against the Me Too movement. Obviously it is a presidentially led backlash in so many ways. And yet, look at what's happening. Pre, look at the Caesar Chavez story that my colleagues published just a couple of weeks ago. Look at Gisele Pellicot in France coming out with her head held high during that trial and a lot of other examples. You put Eric Swalwell in that category. I think that's a really good question, right? There's like a, it's a complicated story, but I do because there is now a mini reckoning going on in Congress all these years later. And it's not just democratic or republican, right? That is about how could this behavior have happened? And why didn't it come out sooner? And what's the system? And who helped these guys instead of helping the women who were in a vulnerable position? And so I would say the Me Too movement has become politicized. There's a huge backlash. We've never sorted out the basic questions about like how are we evaluating these stories and what's in bounds and what's out of bounds and what kind of behavior do we care about? And what are the tools we used to examine them? But the process goes on. Nine years later, the conversation is still happening. And we have not returned to a, you know, here in a evil scene, a evil 2015 mentality. We just haven't. And the other thing I will say is when people talk about these incidents, one of the first questions that people ask, whether it's the most relevant question or not, is when did the conduct happen? And if the conduct happened in recent times, meaning after public awareness, after you're reporting, after Harvey Weinstein, after all these other stories and all this other accountability. And then it happened. It's judged, I think, correctly, more harshly because there's not, there's no excuse before. But now someone decided to engage in awful damaging consequential conduct, knowing that you're not supposed to, even though you should have known it before. Do you know what I mean? Oh, well, look at Governor Andrew Cuomo. I mean, part of what's astonishing is that some of the most serious allegations against him were from right after the major Me Too moment, which was like 2017, basically. And he was the governor of the state that was ground zero for this stuff happening. So you're raising an excellent question about, you know, if you, if you take the women's stories to be true, what was he thinking? On the other hand, he's also probably in some ways a poster child for the backlash because given the alleged conduct and what you're describing, you know, he came fairly close to becoming the mayor of New York City. You can talk about that either way, right? Because his campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. And I do think the fact that he had lost the trust of many people. played a role in Mayor Mamdani's victory. Do you hear from the people you wrote about now? Do they have a different perspective? Oh, it's a true. I love that you asked that. Yes. I'm in touch with a lot of them, not all of them every day. But I'll tell you one great story, because this is very much a story about the law. Okay. Here's this woman named Zelda Perkins. She lives in the UK. She is not a famous actress. She's a former assistant turned producer. She had a secret settlement with Harvey Weinstein that dates back many, many years. Like this goes back to the 90s. It's a complicated story because her story is linked to another woman's story. She was less of a victim herself than somebody who knew about it at the time, tried to help end it up taking a secret settlement, really regretted it. So I call her in the summer of 2017 and we begin a dialogue. I was very honored. I'm still honored at the time that she decided to trust me, to talk with me. And in doing so, she's breaking the secret settlement, right? So she's breaking it privately. And the thing she's starting to think about is, could I ever really come out of the closet? Like, could I ever go fully public with what happened to me? And her story's crazy because she still had some of her papers and the conditions of the secret settlement were so bananas. Like, you can't tell your accountant what happened without speaking to Harvey Weinstein. You can't tell a therapist what happened without speaking to Harvey Weinstein. So I know she's considering this and like as a reporter, of course, I want her to break the settlement. But I also know that she's in a perilous situation. So I call this lawyer in the UK who specializes in these kinds of settlements. And I don't use the name Weinstein and I don't use her name, but I describe the situation. And I said, Mr. So-and-So, I want you to tell me how much legal peril would she be in if she publicly broke the settlement and told her story? Because I want as a journalist. I had an obligation to know. Good question. So he starts, like, he gets as close to screaming at me as a British person can get. And he's like, he's like, Jody, this is irresponsible journalism. This is reckless what you're doing. Like, even the private conversations with her, she is facing legal jeopardy. She is facing financial jeopardy. It's basically this like giant lecture that I don't know what I'm doing. And it's really dangerous. And I need to stop. So needless to say, I didn't stop. Megan didn't stop. Zelda was in our first story, but on background, we didn't acknowledge that we'd spoken to her. Later, we're able to tell the whole story. And she does publicly break her settlement agreement, she tells her story to the press. She becomes a campaigner against secret settlements in the UK. She recently succeeded in getting legislation passed that really limits these kinds of settlements. And prete, she just got a CBE, which is that fancy British thing you get when you get honored by the king for being of great service to the British Empire. So I mean, I can't ever remember that name of that lawyer I spoke to, but I would like him to know that not only were we not doing reckless and damaging journalism, but this brave woman now has one of Britain's highest official forms of praise. Well, that's a good story. So no legal consequence for her because someone chose not to. Well, Weinstein has not gone after these women. I mean, well, she has other problems. Correct. By the way, just going back to something we were talking about earlier, I meant to ask now it's sort of come up again. Do you have a view as a journalist about the fact that as is reported that Supreme Court clerks now sign NDAs? Oh, well, I reported that. You reported. I mean, I didn't mean he's a passive voice. My view is that I broke the story. As you yourself, Jody Cantor, have reported, but you didn't put an opinion about that in the article. Do you have an opinion? Oh, I have shocking news to tell you, prete, which is that we don't express our opinions in the pages of the New York Times. On podcasts, you must. So what is your view of that? My view is that it's our job to chronicle the court's secrecy, to probe it, to challenge it in a appropriate way as a reporter. I'll give you what I think is the more interesting question, which is like, does it work? I mean, what we see with NDAs, both. So there are two types of NDAs, as you know, there's like the workplace NDA that's a blanket NDA that everybody has to sign if they want to work at the place. That's what we're talking about at the Supreme Court and at like a million companies. Then there are secret settlements, which is after anything bad happens or allegations of anything bad or sexual abuse. In consideration for the money you get. Exactly. But what both of them have in common is that like, they're not the strongest legal tools ever created. Like especially the workplace NDAs, we've seen over time and I'm not just talking about the Supreme Court is that they tend to be tools of intimidation. It's not clear whether they hold up in court. When they're meant to protect a trade secret, they are stronger. The strongest example I can give you is like an NDA that is meant to silence allegations of sexual abuse. We've seen that like there are judges who are not going to uphold that. Like that's not the original purpose of an NDA. We've got a long time and I want to talk about your book. That is, I guess inspired by or of a piece with a commencement address you gave that you're on the monitor at Columbia. I have a million questions about it so you'll have to come back so we can talk about some of the themes and some of this stuff is more important. As I said to you before we hit the record button in people's lives, then this other really important stuff we talk about. One question is you talk about craft which I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that people should learn craft as opposed to trying to become king of the mountain at the outset. Those concepts are wrapped up with each other. But you're talking about this idea of need. Think about what you want to do. Think about what the world needs. The economy I usually hear when people talk about how you decide what to do with your life. There's a debate on this and I wonder how you feel about this. Some people say do what you love and some people say do what you're good at. And for some people who are lucky enough, those are the same thing. But for some people they're not. As between do what you love, do what you are good at and do what is needed. How do you decide among those three things if you're a young person? Well first of all, if you say to some college graduate right now in the spring of 2026, like, oh, just do what you love and follow your passion and good things will come. You're going to get shot by that kid or like the rhetorical equivalent of getting shot. What these kids are facing, Pete, is unbelievable. This is why I wrote the book. I mean, we don't know what I. Which kids, so can I be contrary and from what you're talking about kids who are admitted to and are going to matriculate from one or more of the most prestigious universities. Not only I have been to Stanford with the material in this book and I have been to Texas woman's university. Which one? But university is nonetheless. These questions are generational. I know that it is a typical. It's not that I'm equating the kid at an Ivy League school with a kid from a humble background at a community college, but I am telling you, Pete, these questions are generational. I'm hearing the same thing on every campus. I'm hearing that we don't know what AI is going to do to entry-level work, but we know what it's done to hiring, which is that hiring is being digitized. And there are young people who have done a ton of job interviews and they are AI interviews in which they're not meeting real people. There are kids I'm meeting who went to very good schools, by the way, who are saying, I applied for 150 jobs and I didn't get a bite. There are kids who are saying, I believe that satisfying work is only for the rich. Only for people who have trust ones. If there are graduates who are saying, I got a great job and I am still worried that I won't make enough to rent someplace decent or buy someplace decent later on. So there are these like over, I'm not saying that all of these kids are the same. Of course not. But there is a common set of concerns and a common set of concerns that parents have, because they sent their kids to college on the assumption that college plus hard work equals something decent, something substantive. And there is fear. I don't think we're ready to say that that bargain is falling apart, but there's fear. So the interesting question is not because we could spend our whole time here talking about the negativity and the bad statistics, but we shouldn't do that because there's a more interesting question that I try to answer in the book, which is like, what does a powerful and productive response look like to these current circumstances? And by the way, I'm so interested in like the version of this conversation that's about lawyers at law school. Oh, boy. Because I'm a law school dropout, right? Who chose another path? Not to disagree with your thesis, but it's something different today, materially, in the level of angst among young people. Then for example, in 2008. Yes, because for two reasons, one is that like young people are being told, and this like, I will go back to the no prediction rule, because I think this is smart. I don't think we know what is going to happen with the future of work. Everything I have learned in decades of reporting on the workplace tells me that like these are stories of unintended consequences and unanticipated twists and like technology never really works in quite the way that anybody predicts it. Well, so I don't think we know. But of course, there are very worrying signs about entry level work. So this generation is being told, like in 2008, they were told that it was a tough hiring environment. Right now, kids are being told, you're not going to be needed. Like, you're superfluous. And that is a terrible message, Pete, and it's damaging, first of all, and it is not true. Anybody who has spent serious time in the workplace will tell you that we need the ambitions and energies of young people. They are vital. They refresh us without them. The workplace will differ. I've been doing a lot of talking about this with the therapist as their parallel, who's very interested in these issues. And she said something so smart to me recently. She said, when I was starting out, I was really anxious and fearful about the workplace, but they were my own hangups. They were my own private anxieties and fears. I didn't have this social overlay of generational concerns about the workplace hanging over me as well. I wonder if that makes it worse or better that you you're not alone. You're not alone. Everyone is experiencing the same thing. And I guess it cuts, cuts both ways. Yeah, but the quote, but like again, the question is, I wrote this book because I think there is a way to face it. It's really hard. It's a, it's a very complicated environment for new graduates. But I want to convince them to still take a shot at filling their life's work with vitality and meaning. And the reason I want to is not only because I think it's possible, but because we can't give up on the workplace. It's our engine of progress. It's how we get stuff done. Well, so that's interesting because the question I have is, is whether or not, generationally, there's a different relationship to work. Now, when I think about myself, I think how lucky and fortunate I am. I may have a blessed life. And if you ask me, I mean, obviously my first identity is in relation to my family, right? Wife and kids. And that's the most important thing. And I think we've done pretty well. But then I, but my identity is, in no universe is my identity not bound up with what I've done as work, whether it's to be in the public square or it's representing people, the people, the United States of America. Like I did for a long time or engaging in, you know, I think about work all the time. I'm a workaholic. I know from lots of indicia that you're a workaholic. And I don't find anything degrading or dehumanizing about the fact that I and my work are bound up with each other. I'm proud of it. Again, I'm lucky as I think you are that I find my work not to just be a job, but to be a calling in all its various iterations. So maybe we're different and luckier than most. I do sense that among some people, there is the idea that, you know, your work is not your identity and it shouldn't be your identity and you should shun it because there are other things. And to be caught up in the thesis that you are your work or you're defined by having been a butcher or a construction worker or a doctor or a lawyer or a journalist or whatever else is somehow not as self actualizing an existence as you might otherwise have. Does that make any sense? And do you find that? Oh, of course. So what's right? Giving up on work and saying, I'm just going to like work till five o'clock and then check out and then my real life begins. That is a rational response to this environment. Like the world of work has become pretty dystopian in many ways, but not wholly dystopian. And what I care about, Preet, is that for the people who are like you and me for like work is how we spend our time. Even if you don't want to be as much as you are. Even if even if somebody is not as workaholic as you or I are, like it's still what they are going to do with their time on earth. And also like there may be people out there who are truly happy people despite being miserable at work. But I have never met anybody like that. So I want to read you one thing from this book. Cause like if people read it or not, here's the paragraph I want young people to remember, because I don't want them to give up before they even had a chance at work meeting in satisfaction. I don't want them to hear all this bad news and accept defeat. So what page is it on? Cause I'm going to follow. Oh, thank you. Page 13. And it says, do not give up before you start frustration and disappointment or certain failure is possible. But if you abdicate the search for satisfaction now, you will put it further out of reach. Resist the urge to arm yourself with uninformed cynicism, masking as oh so wise pragmatism that is really just good old fear of rejection. We do not yet know what the world will offer you. Pete, I had no idea what the world had to offer me. I was like a kid from Staten Island. I didn't know what investigative journalism was until I think like several years into working at the New York Times. You know, it's interesting when you talk about AI and the effect this is having, I think that's a much more recent phenomenon that is an overlay on top of the anxiety and the anxiety began before. Oh, completely. So I wrote this book in response to like as you know, like at Columbia's in a deer, they asked me to give the undergraduate commencement address, which was a big honor, but a tough assignment given what was going on there. And it was the students who said to me, we don't talk about President Trump, we don't talk about Gaza, we don't talk about Israel, our class, despite its political differences, is united in the question, how do we figure out our life's work in this crazy environment? And the question gripped me in part because I had written about employment for a long time. But in part because ever since Megan and I broke the Weinstein story, we had been traveling to campuses and year over year, you could feel exactly what you were saying well before AI, there was a rising tide of cynicism about work. Listen, like work is not perfect, there can be terrible things about it, finding a job as anxiety provoking. But what we have always associated graduation with is new beginnings and opportunity and some optimism and some relish and excitement. And I heard that diminishing and this fear and dread about the workplace taking over. And I am very worried about that in part because I think that like my own life and experience has taught me that work is sometimes a more potent area of progress than politics. What do you mean by that? If you look at your great question about what happened with the Me Too movement, Me Too became politicized in a way that was pretty negative, right? We went from the first year of Me Too when there was impact on both sides, right? You had Bill O'Reilly and Roy Moore on the right and you had Harvey Weinstein on the left. Like Me Too did not initially feel partisan and then it began to feel that way. Like we could talk about another time. The moment of the cavit on nomination is really when it became very, very, very politicized. However, and there's been progress on a political level. There have been like legislatures that have passed important rules, etc, etc. I'm not saying that politics didn't get us anywhere with Me Too. But you could also see that where some of the most progress occurred was in the boardroom and it was at the corporate level. It was with organizations who shifted and said the calculus has changed. This is such a liability. It is a risk to the sanctity of our company. It is now worth it for us to root out this behavior instead of protecting someone who may have done something wrong and these boards and their lawyers and their committees, they came up with new policies, they came up with new training and they took action. So I've seen like I have seen sometimes the workplace be a more right-barrier of progress. I also think a really good workplace protects you from the craziness that is American politics right now, right? Like you to be on a team to look, I don't know if you fell down the rabbit hole that I did of the astronauts who just went to the moon and their incredibly beautiful teamwork and sense of mission. That is like the most positive version I have seen recently of what the workplace can be there. You know what I took from them? What? The thing that which will tell you a lot of it is that they're not 23. No, and they talked about they're like my giant. I'm like, wow. But they're, they are professionals. Like they have code, they have technical expertise. They work together, they treat each other well. They, and by the way, one of them stood up and said, like somebody asked them, what's the most important thing you can tell young people? And one of the astronauts answered failure. We are here like to get to the moon is a process of learning to deal with failure on an individual and a collective level. I was going to ask you a number of questions that arose from my interview of Ben Smith last week, including whether or not you agree with Ben Smith that journalism and journalists are a little more self-important than they need to be. I'm just looking, I'm watching your expression change. Well, you're asking me this at the New York Times, and you're asking me this actually on who it's her day when we are just hours from finding out. Oh, are we? Are you up? No. Is that a thing? No, no, no, no, no, no, I wasn't talking about myself. At three o'clock, it's Monday. You're recording this, I should say. It's Monday, it's Monday, May 4th. And what? May the 4th be with you? What we have been told is that at three o'clock, there is a ceremony here. And that is all we know to date, but it's a big, if like, first Monday and May is a big deal, you know, at Vogue and with the Met Gala at the New York Times. It is, it is Pulitzer Day. Do I agree with Ben? So Ben and I debate many things about journalism and have for years. I think I would state it less in terms of criticism than a goal. I think, I'm not interested in criticizing other journalists. What I'm interested in is making sure that we relate to people and connect with people and like part of the joy of doing a podcast like this. Thank you for having me on is that there's a real formality to what I do. I mean, right? There's like an analogy to a lawyer in a courtroom when Adam and I write in investigative article for the Times. We are wearing the suit and tie of the New York Times as we speak. And there is real rigor and power in that, but it's also very formal. So whether it's being on the daily, which we were coming on your podcast or being on Instagram or linked in, which I try to be like, there's an opposing desire that I think is very important to connect and to constantly be building trust everywhere we go. And yeah, like for sure, self-importance and lack of humility can be a barrier to trust, especially right now. Okay, that's a good note, Dan. Jody Cantor, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for exposing so many important things in our country that deserve exposure. The book is how to start discovering your life's work. Jody Cantor says right here, New York Times bestselling author. That's cracked. Yeah, there you go. There's no conflict there, right? In fact, I'm going to say like, I don't know. It kind of works for the time she's on the New York Times bestseller list like it's in no, it's like the pool. Corruption everywhere I look, Jody. It's like the Pulitzer's if you ask, it's incredibly bad form. That there are somewhere in this building, there are people who do the bestseller list, but I don't know who they are. And likely story. If I did, the most I would do is smile at them in the cafeteria because to like, oh my God, even the suggestion that you were trying to game the system, I get high of thinking about that. I would never want them to think that and I would never want anyone to think that's the way the Times works. I was going to say that the last point, that's one place where the shadow docket is alive and well. Exactly. And appropriately so, Jody Canter, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Pete. Our conversation continues for members of the insider community. In the exclusive bonus content, Canter discusses how to build a fulfilling career and why a good boss can make all the difference. I think some of the bad advice young people are given is that their resume has to be like this straight line that all the arrows have to point in one direction. To try out the membership, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that's cafe.com/insider. After the break, I'll answer your question about 8647 products on Amazon. Ensure my thoughts about a new viral cash patella impression. [MUSIC PLAYING] This week on Criminal, a man leaves his girlfriend at the top of a mountain. He's charged with her death. And then at the trial, his ex-girlfriend testifies that the same thing had happened to her too. She screamed, she felt dizzy. And at that moment, she realized she was completely alone. Thomas apparently left her. On her other show, this is Love, a story of another couple on a mountain. There's no ledges. There's-- you're trapped. Add confidence that there's no way this many things can go wrong in a row. You can listen to both episodes right now on Criminal and This is Love, wherever you get your podcasts. This Chinese president Xi Jinping sees Trump as a partner or an opportunity. So President Xi comes to this meeting with quite a lot of confidence. They recognize that President Trump is dangerous, potentially. He's unpredictable. But I think they also believe that they can manipulate him. I'm John Feiner, and I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, former US Deputy Secretary of State, Kirk Campbell joins us to discuss the Trump Xi Summit in Beijing. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the Splendid Table podcast. Every week on our show, we celebrate the intersection of food and life. In this month, we're highlighting some of those iconic people in the food world. It's a new collection called Culinary Masters. And we revisit interviews with some of the people who have really changed how many of us cook and think about food. People like Martin Yan. When I was so small in the first few years, I can only work and help out the worship vegetable to cut up something and help to bone the chicken. So that's why now I can bone a chicken in 18 seconds. Dr. Jessica B. Harris? Well, I now know that it was neither the ironpops nor the wooden spoons. But there were multiple unspoken and as yet still unharrowed in, in many cases, unknown, gifts that Africa gave to the cooking of not only this hemisphere, but the world. And Claudia wrote it in to name a few. Why is this dish here? Who was here before? What kind of life did the peasants have? That's why this dish is the way it is. Search for the Splendid Table in your podcast app to listen to the series now. Heds up, folks. Stay tuned is Going Live. I'll be speaking with my friend and colleague, former US Attorney Barb McQuade, at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on Sunday, May 31st, about her new book, The Fix, Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-style government. To get in-person or virtual tickets, head to cafe.com/bar. That's cafe.com/bar. Don't miss it. I hope to see you there. Now let's get to your questions. This question comes as an email from Brian. Amazon currently lists over 3,000 items of clothing, mainly hats and t-shirts, imprinted with the numbers 8647. I'm thinking about buying an 8647 sweatshirt before I do, I have two questions. First, do people who wear this kind of apparel risk arrest and criminal charges for threatening President Trump's life? And second, do you think the Department of Justice will take action against Amazon and the makers of these products? Brian, that's a very interesting question and gets to a particular, I think, contradiction/apocracy of the charges that have been brought against Jim Comey. And you're not the only one wondering about this question. On last Sunday's episode of Meet the Press, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked almost the same exact question, though I'm not sure Kristen Welker was asking because she's considering buying such a sweatshirt. Before we get to Blanche's answer, let's just remind everyone quickly of the background. About a year ago, former FBI director James Comey posted a photo on Instagram of C-shells on a beach that he says he found arranged to form the numbers 8647. 47, arguably refers to the 47th President, Donald Trump. Now, 86, as many people understand it, is common restaurant jargon, meaning to remove an item from a menu, or to take something away from a table. So by extension, 86, I suppose, can mean to get rid of, cancel, or discard something like, let's 86, that idea. But some Trump supporters interpreted the post as a call for violence against the sitting president. And I guess the Department of Justice or certain people in the Department of Justice felt the same. DOJ investigated the Instagram post for roughly 11 months and in April, a grand jury returned to count indictment against The indictment is quite short about two and a half pages. It alleges that, quote, "a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret the seashell formation as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president of the United States." That's a conclusion that I don't think will be provable in court. The statute requires that Komi knowingly and willfully made the threat. It is not clear at all, based on the evidence we have, that he knew 86 could be interpreted as violent, or even that 86 can raise violence at all. In fact, even Fox News Legal Analyst Jonathan Turley, with whom I pretty much always disagree, commented, quote, "I believe that this indictment is facially unconstitutional, absent some unknown new facts," end quote. So on Meet the Press, Wilker pressed Blanche on how prosecutors intended to prove intent. It was not responded by essentially acknowledging that the indictment itself on its face doesn't provide evidence or an understanding of how they're going to prove Jim Komi's intent. He said, quote, "This is not just about a single Instagram post. This is about a body of evidence that the grand jury collected over the series of about 11 months." Many people are interested in understanding what that, quote, unquote, "body of evidence" could possibly be. When asked what that other evidence consists of, Blanche said, quote, "We are talking about evidence of all sorts." That means documents, that means witnesses, end quote. What he did not provide any specifics. Later in the interview, Wilker raised your question about a peril on Amazon featuring 8647. Blanche answered, every one of those statements does not result in indictments, of course, and emphasize that the Komi case isn't about a single incident, although we don't have any information to the contrary, and none of those other alleged incidents that he spoke of appears in the indictment. What documents or witnesses the DOJ may have uncovered that support their case remains unknown. And I'll say it's a little bit odd, given that there is a lot of public skepticism about the retribution campaign, the vengeance campaign of Donald Trump against various people, including Jim Komi, the fact that the earlier attempt to indict Jim Komi from making false statements to Congress fell flat and was dismissed and hasn't yet been resurrected. So if ever there was a time to make clear to the public so that they have faith and confidence in the doings of the Department of Justice about what evidence they have against Jim Komi before there's a trial, this was an opportunity to do so. And by the way, they know how to do it and have done it in other circumstances. In another, I think, very, very weak case against the Southern poverty law center, the Joyce Vance and I have talked about it some length on the insider podcast. The indictment is not two and a half pages. It goes on at some length, giving some facts and details about the theory, which I think is mistaken and ill-founded, but at least giving some details about the theory of their evidence, the theory of their proof in their criminal case against that civil rights organization. Not so here. So Brian, unless you have other incidents hiding in your closet, you are probably safe adding the sweatshirt to your wardrobe. This question comes in an email from Laura who, right, take pre. Did you happen to catch the last episode of Saturday Night Live? If so, what did you think of a Z's unsurrying impression of Cash Patel? Laura, I'm so glad you asked me this question. My simple answer is nailed it and it's a particular line that made me laugh out loud and lots of members of my family too. You guys should not be reporting the lies in the gossip. You should be reporting on the historic nature of my appointment. I'm a trailblazer. I'm the first Indian person to suck at their job. I'll go so far as to say unsurries impression of Cash Patel is one of the best new impressions we've seen in the past season of SNL. Slate even called it perfect, writing that only one comedian could have captured Patel's broy energy. It's not the most important thing that I pray for, week after week, but I'm saying a small prayer that is easy and sorry we'll be back. Well that's it for this episode of Stay Tune. Thanks again to my guest, Jody Cantor. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Blue Sky at Preet Barara with a hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That's 833-99Preet. Or you can send an email to [email protected]. Stay tuned is now on Substack. Head to stay tuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. Stay tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Seper. The deputy editor is Saline Roar. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indick. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez. The audio and video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy. The marketing manager is Leana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Tory Peckett and Adam Harris. I'm your host, Preet Barara. As always, stay tuned.