- [Voiceover] Funding for
Overheard with Evan Smith
is provided in part by
the Alice Kleberg
Reynolds Foundation
and Hillco Partners,
a Texas government
affairs consultancy.
And by KLRU's Producers circle,
ensuring local programming
that reflects the
character and interests
of the greater Austin,
Texas community.
- I'm Evan Smith.
He's the breakout star
of the political
journalism class of 2016.
A reporter for the
Washington Post,
whose dogged coverage
of Donald Trump
won him praise from his peers
and legions of fans
and just maybe a Pulitzer.
He is David Fahrenthold.
This is Overheard.
Let's be honest.
Is this about the
ability to learn
or is this about the experience
of not having been
taught properly?
How have you avoided
what has befallen
other nations in Africa
One could say that
he made his own bed,
but you caused him
to sleep in it.
You saw a problem and
over time took it on.
Let's start with the sizzle
before we get to the steak.
Are you gonna run for President?
I think I just got an
F from you actually.
This is over.
- David Fahrenthold welcome.
- Great to be here
- So a reporter in 2016,
who people like and admire
- (laughs)
- You're like half unicorn,
half Bigfoot.
- It won't last.
- No it couldn't possibly be.
We're not in a business
that people like
or admire very much these days.
We're kind of between
child molesters
and IRS investigators, right?
The journalism business
has seen better times.
- Right worse than
Congress actually
- Right.
What happened?
How did we get here?
- How did we get
to such a low ebb?
- What did we do wrong?
I thought we were doing
the people's work?
- Well there's a lot of
us in the business right.
Some of us do it well.
Some of us do it poorly.
But mostly we're a good foil
for everybody right?
Politicians on both sides see us
as when things aren't
going their way
they find it's a
convenient way to blame us.
- Right
But the public believes them.
They can blame us all they want
but the public actually
seems receptive to this idea.
- Right and also when
people read the news
or watch the news the part
that they agree with the
regard as just right.
How hard was it to
find what was true?
When they don't
agree with something
then they blame you.
- They blame us
The facts are the facts.
- Right if they disagree
with the facts they blame us.
- Does it make you less
apt to do the work you do?
- No no not at all.
In fact I have to say I'm kind
of a counter example.
This year I've had a really good
relationship with readers,
a really good relationship
with the public.
- Right
- The abuse has not been
nearly as bad as it has
been for other people.
- Only from the
people you cover.
- Yeah and not even
that much from them.
One of the weird
things about Trump
is I don't even get
abused that much by them.
They just ignored me a lot
- Are you offended?
Wait a minute.
He's attacking other people,
why won't he attack me right?
- I did not think that.
- (Laughs)
You know it's funny.
Throughout a lot
of this campaign
Trump would go after
individual reporters
by name and
- And occasionally the Post
- Occasionally the Post
and he banned us
from covering him
for a long time.
But he's never actually
tweeted about me.
And I blame the fact
that my last name
is hard to spell for the fact
that some other
people don't abuse me.
(audience laughs)
I think they abuse
Congressman Blake Farenthold who
has a slightly easier to
spell version of my name.
- He attacked the
Congressman that's it
we're gonna go back and
look this up right now.
- Maybe they blame him instead.
- So you worked for the Post,
you've worked for the post
for 16 years
- Yes
- It's been your one
employer out of college.
- Right
- Right?
- That's right
- And you've covered Congress,
you've covered D.C.
city government,
you've covered the bureaucracy,
- D.C. police
- the environment.
You did all that
sort of stuff, right?
You've covered a
range of things.
But never a presidential before.
- Well I had done a little
bit of the 2012 campaign,
in which the highlight
of my 2012 experience
was that I found a man
in New Hampshire
who took his goat
to meet all the candidates
(audience laughs).
- Okay, great
- And you remember
John Huntsman then.
John Huntsman spent
like a thousand days
in New Hampshire and
nobody liked him anyway.
- He put all of his
chips on that square.
- And nobody liked him
except for the goat guy
and that was because his goat
had bit John Huntsman
and Huntsman was
totally cool about it.
And that was the one committed
Huntsman voter I met
- This is like the
last five minutes
of every local newscast right?
The human interest story
- Right
- The goat story
So that was like your only
- Nothing like 2016
- This was really the
first big presidential.
How do you get on the Trump beat
if you're at the Post.
You've got a news room
full of big stars.
I mean this is not,
I look at the Post's
work over this campaign
and I think the Post
did the best work
of any journalism organization.
No close second
and it was almost to a person,
Dan Balls, Karen Tumulty,
Robert Costa Katie Zezima.
You go down the list,
Rebecca Sinderbrand.
Everybody at the Post
did amazing work.
You were one of many.
- Yes
- How do you throw elbows
and crowd yourself
on to that team?
- Well it kind of
happened by accident.
I spent 2015 covering,
I don't like parts of
political journalism
where you're one of 100 people
following a candidate around.
I wanted to be the one person
doing the story I was doing.
So that meant covering
basically losers last year.
So I spent a lot of
last year writing
about people who had no chance
because I just thought
they were interesting.
So Rick Perry.
Actually when I flew to see
Rick Perry give a speech,
to start a profile of him,
he dropped out in the
middle of the speech
that I saw him give.
- You're like the Sports
Illustrated cover curse, right?
- It's like a mummy's curse.
If touch you die.
- You're dead.
- So it meant that by
the time we got to Iowa,
all the people I had covered,
Santorum, Pataki, Gilmore,
they were all gone.
So they sent me to
follow Trump around.
To write a story.
Basically the oh my God
- Were they trying to kill him
is that what they
were trying to do?
- No.
It was supposed
to be Donald Trump
may actually win
the Iowa caucuses.
Religious conservative Iowa,
Donald Trump the three time
married mogul might win.
So they sent me to
follow him around
in a caucus state.
And I'm in Waterloo, Iowa
watching Trump give a rally.
And Trump stops the rally
in the middle and says,
come on up here
people from this local
Waterloo veteran's organization.
I'm going to give you a check.
That's something I'd
never seen before.
He gives them this giant
golf tournament sized check
- Like a novelty check
- Yeah it says Donald
J. Trump Foundation
on the top Make
America Great Again
on the bottom.
It's for $100,000.
So he gives them this check
and they say thank you
and he goes back to the rally.
So he's using his
charity basically,
as a prop in his
political rally.
If you remember a
few days earlier,
Trump had held
this big fundraiser
for veterans in Iowa
- right
- Skipped the Republican debate
- I think he said
he had $6 million.
- Said he raised
$6 million total
and that $1 million
of it was his.
So I see him give this
big check to people
and I don't know
anything about charities
but I know you can't do that.
- There's a law.
- There's a law that
says that non-profits
like the Donald J.
Trump Foundation
can not get involved
in political campaigns.
To me I thought what clearer
evidence could there be
that he's using his
charity as a prop?
So that was one thing
that I was interested in.
The other thing was
I saw him give out
these big novelty checks
and then he stopped.
And he'd only given
out about $1 million.
And he said he'd raised six.
So where's the
rest of the money.
So I came back.
I had no candidates to cover
because all my other
candidates were dead
and I thought alright,
why don't I just
spend a couple of days
and figure out what happened
to the rest of the money.
Figure out if
Trump broke the law
and figure out what
happened to the rets.
- Did you do this on your own
or did you go to an
editor at the paper
and say I want to chase this?
- This part was
basically on my own
because I didn't
think I was assigning
myself something
for nine months.
I thought I was
assigning myself,
- So a skunk work
and if then it made,
you go to your bosses
and say look what I've got.
- Yeah and thought
there's no way,
I thought I would call
the Trump campaign
and they would say oh yeah,
here's the rest of the money.
Because who would
ever stiff veterans
in the middle of a
presidential campaign?
Who would say I've
raised $6 million
and then not give it out.
So of course they must
have given it out.
So I started calling them
and calling veteran's groups
to try to figure
where the money went
and it wasn't a couple of days.
It wasn't an easy
question to answer.
That was February first
that I saw him
give the check out.
It took me until the end of May
to get them to cough up where
the rest of the money was.
- So did the Trump
campaign not respond to you
when you made initial calls?
- They responded to me a
little bit along the way.
By the beginning of
March we knew where
about half the money was
but they said okay we're not
gonna tell you any more.
And through all this was
Trump had said on the stage,
I'm gonna give a million dollars
of my own money,
in addition to this money
I had collected
from other people,
one of the six million is mine.
Well where was that?
That was the part that I
was most concerned about.
That's the money he has
the most control over.
I asked questions,
I couldn't figure
out the answer.
Until something really
interesting happened.
At the end of May
I get a phone call
from Corey Lewandowski,
who was Trump's campaign
manager at the time.
And he says Mr. Trump
has given out his
million dollars to veterans.
But I can't tell you
who he gave it to
or when or how or
in what amounts.
It's all secret.
Except for fact that
you should just know
absolutely he has given money.
- Take our word for it.
- Take our word for it.
But I didn't want to
take their word for it.
This is a huge campaign promise.
I'm not gonna just
take their word for it.
So I said okay how
can I figure this out?
In the old days
you just would have
to call all eight zillion
veteran's organizations.
You'd never really be sure
that he hadn't given it out.
But now there's Twitter.
And there's a way to
put out these requests
in a way that a lot
of people will see it
and that Trump will see it.
- This is one of
the amazing parts.
In some ways your
reporting over the course
of the story was as modern
and as tech forward
as it could have been
And in some ways it was
literally ink on paper
as old school as
it could have been.
But the tech forward part was
you used social media,
Twitter specifically.
To essentially crowdsource
the information
that you were trying
to get from these guys.
- That's right.
So I thought the
veterans philanthropy
community is not huge.
So I could tweet to
Veterans of Foreign Wars,
Disabled American Veterans,
and other groups that
deal with veterans
in a way that not only
the national press
corp could see,
because they're all on Twitter.
Trump could see
because I'm putting his
handle on the tweet.
And the idea was okay I'm gonna
ask all these people
hey did you get any
of this million dollars
Donald Trump gave out?
But even if they didn't,
someone else might see it
and say hey you didn't ask us
but we got money.
So maybe you wouldn't
find the whole iceberg
but you'd find the
tip of the iceberg.
And maybe Trump would see it
and respond in a way
that would give us more details.
- Yeah
- So I spent a day tweeting
and accomplished nothing.
I learned nothing.
The people all responded saying
they hadn't gotten the money.
I thought this is a
huge waste of time.
But Trump saw.
And it turned out
that actually when
Lewandowski told me
that he'd given away
his million dollars
that was completely wrong.
That was totally false.
The money was still
in Trump's pocket.
It was only after
my day of tweeting
at all these groups
and looking for the money
that Trump actually did
give the million dollars,
all in one fell swoop,
to a group that he'd
known for years.
- Now we should say
that although this
was the current year
and this wouldn't have
been available yet.
In previous years when
you're investigating
somebody's charitable giving,
which you eventually
did do over time,
you would simply have
tax returns available.
Tax returns would be a helpful
primary source document.
But in this case we didn't have,
and still don't have,
Trump's tax returns.
- In previous years Clinton ,
anybody who'd run
for office previously
had released their
personal tax returns.
Which would show
what they'd given.
- If you were investigating
somebody else's
charitable giving
you would have it
right there on paper.
- It wouldn't be much
of an investigation.
- It wouldn't take
any time to resolve.
- In this case Trump calls me
and says okay I've given
this million dollars.
- He personally calls you.
- He called.
This is the last
time I talked to him.
- Stop.
I gotta know about this.
This is actually interesting.
Because he may have you
killed at some point.
So I want to ask you
while I still can.
So he calls the
Post switchboard?
What does he do?
Does he call your cell phone?
- Well no I had been
asking all along
to talk to him.
And in the past you
could just call him.
Like when I had written stories
about him in the summer of 2015,
you could just call his
cell phone and get him.
Now as he rose in the polls
it was harder to
get a hold of him.
But I had been asking okay,
have him call me.
So he did.
This is the last time we talked.
He called me and he said yes
I've given the
million dollars away.
Long after Lewandowski
said he already had.
I said did you only give it now
because I was asking about it?
He said you're a
really nasty guy.
You just a nasty guy.
- Just for asking that question?
- Yeah he didn't
answer the question.
It was the strangest interview
because then I'm not
gonna argue with him
about whether I'm
a nasty person,
but I had other questions
that I wanted him to answer.
What happened to the other money
that other donors
gave you to give away?
Where is that?
- The other five million.
- The other five million.
So I'm not just
gonna argue with him
so he would say oh you're a
nasty guy, you're terrible.
I would go back and
ask a factual question.
He would reset.
He would give some
factual answer
which would then devolve
into more insults of me
and then we'd go back again.
So the strangest interview.
- But that was the last
time I talked to him.
We talked then,
I wrote the story.
- So at what point
did you decide
to expand your focus from
that specific $6 million
to all charitable
giving by Donald Trump?
- It was after that.
So Trump after he called me,
he had this angry
press conference
at Trump Tower where
he described giving
away the rest of the money
that people had entrusted him
just for the veterans thing.
Remember he called the
media a piece of work
and insulted people.
Then Marty Barron,
our executive editor said
why don't you look at all
his charitable giving.
Basically if he's
willing to play
fast and loose with
money for veterans
in the middle of a Republican
presidential primary,
has he been keeping
his promises before
when basically
nobody was looking?
- Right
and at that point you broke out
the big chief tablet.
We actually wondered
what was it?
Is it a notepad?
Was it a notebook?
Because the museum
ought to have your,
whatever this thing
was that you wrote on.
- It was a legal pad.
So I though okay now,
the question then became
Trump over his lifetime
had promised to give
tens of millions
of dollars away.
He has this weird
dichotomy where he's
always telling you
how rich he is.
He's so rich he doesn't
need more money.
He's so rich.
Like that's the first word
of "The Art of the Deal."
I'm so rich I couldn't
use any more money.
But yet he's always
hustling for more money.
He's trying to sell
you steaks or classes,
- The gold plated Make
America Great hats
for Christmas
- Right
- I got an email probably
today about that.
- Right
- So he's always like this guy
who says I don't need more money
but he's always
hustling for your money.
Well how does he suqre that?
It's always well
it's for charity.
Trump University,
the profit's going to charity
- Charity
- Trump Water, going to charity.
He told Howard
Stern all the money
for the Apprentice,
$2.5 million a year,
was going to charity.
- But no proof of that.
- No proof of that.
So let's try to find again,
the tip of the iceberg.
So Trump wouldn't help me at all
and I thought well why don't I
just make a list
of the charities
I think are most likely to have
gotten money out of
Trump's own pocket.
I'll just call them.
I'll go down the list
- How long was the initial list?
- The initial list was
a couple of hundred.
When I wrote it down it
was a couple hundred.
And then I kept expanding it.
Thinking maybe he would call
and volunteer and
tell me something
or maybe somebody else
would know something.
So I started writing
it down on a legal pad
and taking pictures of it,
putting it on Twitter.
- Putting it on Twitter
- The idea being
that you can get
a lot more information
into a picture
than you can into a tweet
- Yeah
- I wrote out the ones
where they said never,
he'd never given them
money in one color ink.
So you could see visually,
how hard I'm trying
and how many places had said no
we've never gotten his money.
- Right.
And did the
organizations you called
respond in most cases
quickly or at all?
Were some reluctant
to cross Trump?
What was the story there?
- Almost everybody responded.
So it started to grow
and people started
coming to me with things
that I didn't even
know I was looking for.
I started out not really
knowing what was legal
and illegal in the
world of charity.
And also not really
understanding
- This was not your area
of expertise before.
It is now.
- To the degree that I
had an area of expertise
no this was definitely not it.
Just as an example of how
this all turned so fast.
I get a call one day,
after I'd been out there doing
this stuff for a while,
from somebody in the
Palm Beach area code.
Somebody I don't know.
Trump owns the Mar A
Lago club in Palm Beach.
The person says havi art Trump.
H-A-V-I art Trump.
Okay that sounds like nonsense.
Almost all the time you get
a tip like that it's useless.
But this was the
perfect situation.
I googled that and
immediately found
a portrait of Trump.
- This is the famous
six foot portrait?
- This is another portrait.
- A second portrait.
- This is the second portrait.
The six foot portrait
we knew about already.
That's the one he
paid $20,000 for
out of his charity.
- Out of foundation money.
- Right.
I still never found that one.
As a brief aside on that.
I think you'll enjoy this.
I get a picture of the
six foot tall portrait.
This was painted by a speed
painter in five minutes.
Trump paid $20,000 for it.
It's a picture of Trump's face.
It's sort of his
normal skin tone
but done in kind of
a neony sort of way.
We get a picture of it
but we couldn't get
the rights to use it.
So I'm thinking
okay I'll put this
into Google image search
and it'll show me another place.
Maybe it's hanging on the wall
in the background of somebody's
prom picture or something.
I put this picture
of Trump's face
into the Google image search.
This is not a lie,
this is absolutely true,
Google says I think
this is an orange.
(audience laughs) and
it shows me pictures
of Oranges,
pictures of Orange Julius,
orange juice.
Anyway.
- Literally can not make it up.
- No.
So now this person
calls and tells me
so now we know about
this second portrait.
A $10,000 portrait that Trump
had also bought in 2014
with money meant for charity.
So from the tip from
the Google search
I call the charity
and confirm it.
I get a picture of
that new portrait.
- That one you can get.
- I do have the rights to.
I post it online at
like 10:00 a.m. one day.
So the tax rules say
Trump can't just take
that picture and hang it
on the wall of his house.
He can't hang it on
the wall of his club.
It has to serve some
charitable purpose.
So I ask the Trump
people where is it?
What's it doing?
Is it on the wall of
a children's hospital?
What's it doing?
No response.
So I put this out at 10:00 a.m.
And by five o'clock that night,
at that point I don't
know where it is.
It could be burned,
It could be buried in a hole.
It could be hanging on
a wall in Trump Tower.
Five o'clock that
night I get an email
from somebody who is
a Twitter follower
of mine in Atlanta.
Stay at home mother
Alison Aguilar.
She had gone to the
Trip Advisor page
for Trump's golf course at Doral
where you can put in
user generated photos
so there's like 500 photos
of people's hotel
bathrooms, the 18th green.
She's been scanning
them 20 at a time
and she spots this portrait.
- At the golf club.
- At the golf club.
Okay so now we know from
the Trip Advisor picture
it was at the golf club
in February of 2016.
But where is it now?
So at 6:00 I tweet that out.
Look we found this picture.
We know where it was.
There's a guy named
Enrique Acevedo
who is an anchor at Univision.
He does the 11:30
to midnight newscast
at Univision whose studios are
in Doral, Florida.
Close to this club.
He sees my tweet.
He remembers that
it's four blocks away.
He makes a reservation
for that night.
And he uses points.
He doesn't want to
give Donald Trump
any of his money
but he uses points.
So he goes over to
the club checks in
and starts wandering the halls
and convinces the cleaning folks
to let him into the sports bar
and bang there it
is on the wall.
So we went from
10:00 a.m. who knows
where in the world it is
to 12:30 at night.
- This modern
world of journalism
- It's amazing.
It would have taken me 10 years
to find that thing on my own.
- Investigative
journalism is not dead.
Period, paragraph.
You're proving that
and you're proving it in a way
that combines the modern
and the old school, right?
- I think so.
And people enjoyed it.
That was the thing that
people liked about it.
It was a scavenger hunt.
There was something
tangible to look for.
And also it was easier
to tell the story
of misuse of charity money
when you have
something like that.
Of course it's illegal
to buy a portrait
of yourself and
hang it on the wall.
- In the end we all
in the media business
and people are closely
following this campaign
knew what you were doing,
paid attention,
admired it.
The public did not
seem to believe
that the Trump Foundation,
whatever it was
or was not doing,
was a relevant data point
in the outcome of this campaign.
- Well I think you
can't assume by the fact
that Trump won that
people didn't care.
I think people did
care about that.
- In the end they didn't care
as much about that
as other things.
- Yeah that's right.
That's fine.
You don't do this to
try to beat Trump.
You do this
- Of course
- so people can be informed.
I think you're dependent
always in the media
on other media picking
stuff like this up,
the candidate,
the candidate's surrogates.
The Trump Foundation
got some kind of lift
from the campaign.
President Obama mentioned
it once on the trail.
The six foot portrait
to mock Trump.
I did a lot of TV.
There was some pick
up on other media
- Yeah
- I could only do so much.
I can only sort of put
it out there so much
and if people are interested
it'll go on its own.
- Let me ask you a question.
Why didn't you investigate
the Clinton
Foundation as closely?
- Because it was another
person's job at the Post.
- So somebody else did it.
- Right
- It's not that you
didn't necessarily think
this is a worthy topic
of investigation but
- I had done some Clinton
Foundation stuff back in 2015
but at that point it had
been sort of bifurcated.
- And also the
Clinton Foundation
and the Trump Foundation,
my sort of distanced
reading of the two,
different situations.
- Yeah.
The Clinton Foundation is a
public charity so it's big.
It's designed to take
in money from people
other than the Clintons.
It does a lot of things.
It employs a lot of people.
- No problem knowing
where that money went.
- Right, exactly.
It employs a lot of people,
it does direct charitable work.
There it's a question of
the moral responsibility
of power, right?
- Right
- Clinton has power.
Did she use that power when
she was Secretary of State
in a way that
benefited her charity?
For Trump, it's a really
small organization,
the foundation.
It doesn't employ anybody.
It's a question of the moral
responsibility of wealth.
Does Trump feel,
the fact that he's wealthy,
does he feel a
moral responsibility
to help people who are
less fortunate than him?
And what you see is
he actually tried,
he knew that people
expected he would feel
that moral responsibility,
but he tried to do
as much as he could
to sort of shirk it
or to have an illusion
that he was fulfilling it.
- Well he talked about it
and the question
is did he actually
back up what he talked about?
- Right even though in
the Trump Foundation,
he used other people's
money to do that,
in a way that people
thought they were
getting money from Trump.
- Most years of reporting
and on a campaign,
you do the Trump
Foundation story
which happens over
time that's enough.
You also broke the Billy Bush
Access Hollywood tape story.
- Yes
- That was your story.
- Yes
- You wrote that story
and on the day you
wrote that story
that was the most
concurrently read
story in the history
of the Washington Post website.
- The champion story before this
had been a story about
a lady in Borundi
who had faked her own death
and showed up to scare
people at her own funeral.
(audience laughs) It's
a pretty good story.
So that had been
the most total views
and the most concurrent views,
meaning the most people
reading it at one time.
- Right
- So I should say,
the number of people
reading a story at one time,
we have that on a big
chart in the newsroom
and 20,000 people
reading a story
at one time is huge.
- Is generally a lot
- Right
- How many people were
reading this story at one time
- Over 100,000.
- At one time.
- At one time.
The little dial we
have to measure it
was literally spinning
and the traffic servers broke
because there was
so much traffic.
- And that was a story
that within a very short space
of time after you
published that story,
I think NBC published a version
of the same story or the video
- Right
- It had been of course
in their property prior
and they had declined to
publish it at that point
You published it
and then they went ahead
and they published it.
So it no longer became
your story as an exclusive
but you were first.
- We were first.
We got the story
about 11:00 a.m.
We go the tape about
11:00 a.m. on a Friday.
It was not something that
I had been looking for.
I'd been doing
this charity stuff.
- Without asking you
to reveal anything,
you got a tip.
- Right.
- That's what happens, right?
Why you?
You were the Trump
Foundation guy.
- I was much better known then
than I had been before.
You don't look a gift
horse in the mouth.
- Speaking of charity, right?
- Right.
So we knew, the video,
once it came in it was obvious.
It's a five minute video.
The first two minutes were Trump
and Billy Bush were on the bus.
You can hear them
but you can't see them.
That was the part
that we cared about.
We had a couple of
questions right off the bat.
At 11:00 a.m. we get it.
Our video people tell me,
look we're gonna cut this
and make it into a video.
We're going to subtitle it
so you tell what they're saying.
We need til 3:30.
3:30 in the afternoon.
That's the soonest we
could have it done.
So that's the time frame we had.
So we had to call NBC to see
if they were gonna sue us
because it was their video.
Or if they were gonna
say it was a hoax.
And then we went to Trump to see
is he gonna say it's a hoax
because as I said
you can hear them
you can't see them.
You can't see
Trump's mouth moving
so will they say oh
that's not really him.
We sent the Trump people
first a transcript
of the offending
part of the video
and the said well it doesn't
sound like Mr. Trump.
Can you send us the full video.
There was some debate
among the editors
and they decided yes
send them the video.
That was a little after 3:30
and we were gonna
publish it at four.
At four o'clock as
someone's walking over,
this is how lame
the stop the presses
moments are in
digital journalism.
There's no presses,
there's no big button to hit.
There's someone walking over
to her desk to hit the
button to publish it
and the Trump people called
so I told her to stop.
They said we're gonna
send you a statement.
Basically it's him.
He said that it's
just locker room talk,
you remember he
said I apologize.
- Yeah right, right.
- I apologize if
anybody was offended.
Which surprised me.
I had had so little luck
from the Trump Campaign
responding to anything
that I had asked them
about the foundation.
I was surprised they
would admit to this.
But they did.
- It's just stunning to me
that they didn't try to delay
or just not answer in the way
that they had prior.
They could have
basically anything
to keep you from publishing.
Would you have published
if he hadn't responded?
Obviously you were about to.
- We were about to.
- You were about to.
It didn't make a difference.
- No That was not my call
but the lawyers and
editors had decided
that we had done
everything we could
to make sure they knew about it
and given them a
chance to respond
and they hadn't.
- Again I'll observe.
Among the many things
that were different
about this campaign than
any previous
campaign in our lives
and we may never
have this again.
This kind of a story hits,
it changes temporarily,
the trajectory of the campaign.
- It does.
- And then ultimately
it does not
change the outcome.
- And at the time I had thought
that its legacy would be,
Trump had gotten
away with so much
that he'd done before
because it was so public.
All the Howard Stern stuff.
Imagine if Mitt Romney had said
one-tenth the stuff
that Trump had said
on Howard Stern.
We would have tarred
and feathered him right?
But now Trump says it in public,
he's playing this character,
it seems like it's okay.
Well this was private, right
and it was not just talk.
It was him describing,
this is how I act,
this is what I do to women.
Then it set off this sort of
inter-Republican fighting.
I thought that was
going to be the legacy.
Remember Paul Ryan pulled back
and Trump attacked him.
- Well people said
Mike Pence may
drop off the ticket right?
Ultimately it didn't happen.
- At some point in October,
after that but before
the Comey letter.
When it seemed like this
was the biggest thing
that had happened
on the campaign.
I was interviewed by
this German journalist
who at the time wanted
to find out about this story.
He asked me in this
very German way,
do you think that this
is the peak of your life?
(audience laughs) It will
never get any better?
I was like fine.
That's better than
writing about Jim Gilmore.
But the Comey letter.
You have a lot of factors here.
I've heard people say
the Comey letter was,
I heard Nate Silver
the Comey letter
swung the race in a way.
And that's not fake news.
- We're never gonna know
- Right.
- We're never gonna know
- Right
- We're out of time.
Was this the peak of your life?
I should ask you the (audience
laughs) same question.
I'm afraid that
the German reporter
took my last question.
It's a good time to
be doing this work.
- It's a great time
to be doing this work.
We're now entering this era
where I couldn't tell
you what's gonna happen.
It's completely uncertain
but it's a great time
in American journalism.
I feel like I understand
how to cover Trump.
A lot of other people do.
- Yeah
- There's a lot of people
doing great work now.
I don't know what's coming next
but I know that we at
least are prepared.
- Are you still
on the Trump beat?
- Yes
- And you'll stay
on the Trump beat?
- Of course.
- On behalf of
America thank you.
- David Fahrenthold
thank you very much
(audience applauds)
Great job.
Thank you.
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