- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by, HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.

- I'm Evan Smith.

She's a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times who covers the Department of Justice, a job that used to be important, but kind of boring.

Not anymore, which is why you can't turn on the television these days without seeing her.

She's Katie Benner.

This is "Overheard."

(soft music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You really turn the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauds) Katie Benner, welcome.

It's nice to have you here.

- Oh, thank you so much for having me.

- Thank you for being here.

What a moment we are in with all the news.

And it's specifically the stuff that you are charged with covering by The Times.

Could you have imagined a year ago or five years ago that you would be as busy, and on top of, or at the center of, so much as you are today?

- You know, no, absolutely not.

And it's not just a lot of news, it's really historic news because what's decided in the next, you know, 12 to 24 to 36 months of some of these cases go to the Supreme Court.

We're really writing history right now in a big way.

- Yeah, and it's a legal thing on the one hand, as you point out, but there's also an election that's happening not behind it, but in some ways adjacent to it.

And so history is being made kind of in real time and it's continuing to be made.

And I frankly don't know, and maybe you don't know when it's gonna end.

- No, we do not.

- Right.

So the number of indictments of the former President, if I'm correct, is 91, right?

It's two federal cases and it's two state cases, right?

- Yes, that's correct.

- It's 40 indictments in one of the two federal cases related to the classified documents.

It's four indictments on the January 6th insurrection.

In the state cases, there's 13 in the state of New York.

No, the 13 is in Georgia.

Is in Georgia.

This is the question of election fraud, potentially.

And then there's 30 in the state of New York for falsifying business documents, right?

I mean, that's just, under any other circumstances, or at any other time, people would just be gobsmacked about this.

And yet there sort of has been this like acceptance of this as the new normal.

- Well, it's the new normal for Donald Trump, and we're hoping that it does not become the new normal for American democracy or for the presidency.

But for him, over the past, you know, six years, this is the norm that he created.

So certainly for him that's true.

- Say more about that new abnormal, or the new norm that he created.

- You know, so one of the interesting things about Trump is that so many of the things that he spoke about, so many of the things that he did would've once been considered the fringe in American politics, or even the far right.

But because he was the president of the United States, because he was elected by the voters, just that position has mainstreamed a lot of those ideas, including the idea the presidency is far more imperial than anybody had ever thought.

Now, one of the things that we're gonna see in this election, it's going to be a referendum on those ideas.

Is that what the American people want?

Is that what we believe in?

And that's one of the big questions.

So all of these indictments, they're a way of saying yes, the criminal justice system is looking at whether or not he committed wrongdoing, whether or not he broke the law.

And then the American people are saying, does that matter to us?

- Right.

Do you think the American people is paying attention to this?

I mean, we're painting with a broad brush here when we talk about the American people.

But I ask this because those of us who are in the media business or are interested in politics naturally, you know, we gravitate to information about something like this, but I wonder if out there, the vast majority of the country is even tuned in on this.

It's the way that we sometimes say Twitter is not real life.

Now, I guess X.

You know, some very small percentage of people we know in the world are on that platform.

And yet it has this larger significance to those of us who are down the well.

I wonder if we're down the well on this.

- You know, I think we're all a little bit down the well whenever we're covering anything and we're really invested in it.

And that could be a business story, that could be a politics story.

So certainly that is always true.

But I think that there is something interesting about Donald Trump.

He has a gravitational pull.

He is not the president of the United States today.

And when you look at the coverage, when you look at how people speak about politics, you would not necessarily know that from the number of stories written about Donald Trump versus the number of stories written about Joe Biden or really any other person who is actually in political office today.

He has an enormous gravitational pull and he wants to be center stage.

He wishes to be.

So that combination does make him somebody who's a little bit more compelling and who's somebody who gets a lot of attention.

- So, are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving into the attention junkie?

I mean, I actually could make the argument that there is no more important story right now, especially if you align it with the future of our democracy, than what happens to this guy.

Does he exit the stage?

Does he go quietly?

He probably goes loudly if he goes.

The future in some ways rests on the resolution of this story.

Maybe we should be giving him this much attention.

- You know, so I think you're touching on something that is a debate that's ongoing inside of newsrooms.

- Every newsroom?

- Every newsroom, every day if you're covering the upcoming election and if you're covering these cases.

They're of enormous historic import.

So it's not whether or not we cover them, they must be covered.

But really, how?

Is this a time for, you know, just covering the news, the who, what, when, where, and why?

Or is this a time for context?

Do we need a big story by somebody like a Peter Baker at The New York Times to put this into historic context?

Do we need sharp opinion pieces that we highlight more than we might have in the past to give people, again, more context?

Because just simply saying, simply repeating what the former President is saying in his social media, I don't think is going to cut it.

- Well, and the existential anxiety, I think, just to stay in newsrooms for a second, we'll get out of newsrooms here in a minute, but just to stay in newsrooms is, you know, when you have his comments, quotes in a story, if you interview him either on tape or live, the torrent of falsehoods comes at you like a fire hose turned up to the highest setting.

What are the obligations of people in the news business in that moment to fact check him in real time, or to correct, contextualize, as you said?

We as a business didn't seem to do a particularly good job of that the first time, right?

And so that's the question and the challenge going into the next election cycle.

- Yeah, and I don't know that it's necessary to have him on live television and to treat him as somebody who was going to go into an interview in good faith.

But it's also very, but, you know, I think that cuts both ways though, because after he was elected, I had not listened to a Trump rally during the election season.

I hadn't really paid that much attention to what he sounded like.

And I remember when I moved to Washington to cover the Justice Department, I was working late one night, and it was my first time ever hearing an entire Trump rally because we played them all in the office, all of the time.

And I was really stunned because when you take little snippets of what he says and you put them in an article, as a quote, and with more context, et cetera, in many ways that normalizes what he's doing too.

And hearing him, and actually hearing how he speaks, hearing his rambling, his disjointed thoughts, I was really, I was incredibly shocked.

I was taken aback.

I did not realize just how really beyond rhetorically, beyond the pale he was as a president.

- So how do you do justice to covering a Trump rally?

Because look, the polls right now have him, not only ahead, but miles ahead of his competitors, just on the basis of that, you have to assume it's his nomination to lose.

Now things could happen.

So we're probably heading into another time when those Trump rallies are going to be a feature of all of our lives, so what does the news business do if by taking quotes out you're actually not doing justice?

- You know, I don't have an answer for this.

But I can tell you the kinds of stories that I would really be curious to read as just as a consumer of news, I would love to read some stories about this rhetoric and where it is in history, what it draws from, what are the antecedents to some of the things that he's saying.

He's not coming up with ideas in a vacuum.

He's coming up with ideas that are very, very much, much part of strains of American thought that have been, again, once considered very extreme.

Where do they come from?

How do they operate?

Why do we want them.

Why do we have them?

And why do people support them?

I would love to read more about that.

- The complicated part of this, Katie, and again, I want to get off of this and get back to the question the indictments in a second, is that when someone from The New York Times, you, anybody, talks about the President's language or ideas as extreme, you're against him, right?

- Right.

- You're oppositional or you are the enemy.

And this is the way we've litigated the relationship between the media and people in politics since he was elected, right?

It's us versus them.

And if you describe, even if it's accurate, ideas as extreme, well, you're now part of the problem.

- Well, I mean, it's also a little bit different because he was the president and you can't emphasize that enough.

You know, if there were a different person speaking about a far right ideology, for example, it wouldn't matter as much if they were a more fringe character, but because this is a human being who was the president of the United States, he's actually enabled what was once considered fringe and extreme to be part of one of our two mainstream political parties in America life.

- It's in the national bloodstream now.

- It's in the national bloodstream and it is fully taken over a large swath of the Republican Party.

And so it's true.

How do you cover that without there is an inherent critique?

There's an inherent critique saying this is in some ways undermining democracy.

This is something that comes from a far right tradition in the United States that we have tried to push out of civil discourse and everyday life for decades and decades and decades since the Civil War.

I mean, the minute you say these things, you're right.

You are inherently critiquing, not anymore a fringe person, but an entire political party.

And that is something that's really difficult to do.

And I mean, but it's something that has to be done because the reality is that a mainstream party has embraced fringe ideas.

- Yeah, and that mainstream party that has embraced fringe ideas very well might win the White House again.

And we're gonna be back to the things that we saw, maybe worse than we saw in that respect before.

So back to the indictments, 91 indictments, four cases, give us the sequence of this.

From what we know today, how is this likely to play out sequentially?

- Yeah, so even though it was the first case brought, I think New York is inclined to go last.

We've already seen, you know, we've already seen New York say, we don't need to bring this case to trial right away.

We defer to the federal government.

We think that those cases take precedence and we want to see how they play out.

- Take precedence or are stronger.

There was criticism of Alvin Bragg, the DA, who brought the first set of cases in New York for putting a weak, what was perceived to be a weak or weaker case, than some of the others out front first, so that people dismissed the seriousness of it, right?

- Yes, you know, whether or not he was accurately accounting for how he spent his campaign money.

Absolutely.

And so people were saying that that case was weak.

I mean, this is the thing about our criminal justice system.

We have a lot of rules and we know how everything is supposed to happen.

But at the same time, it's a system made up of human beings with their own flaws and biases and assumptions.

So that's what makes these things so unpredictable.

You can have all the pundits in the world say, this case is strong, this case is weak, this is how it should play out.

- We'll know when we know.

- We'll know when know because it's a jury of human beings.

- Right.

- And so who come to this, no matter how impartial they want to be.

- So New York goes last.

- New York will probably go last.

And yes, like there are people who said that case was weak in part because of what it was about, you know, a bookkeeping case, I think is the critique.

What's happening at the federal level, you know, you're seeing basically Georgia, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith in Washington DC, almost in a neck-and-neck race to see who will bring their cases first.

And the cases involve much of the same material.

Was the President, former President of the United States, while president, trying to undo a free and fair election?

That is the question.

And if the answer is yes, that is inherently an anti-Constitutional thing to do.

And so, is that who we want for president becomes the next question?

But the jury may not actually decide before we get to the election.

And that is what is so interesting.

And so, again, very historic.

- So I asked you about sequence, let me ask you about severity.

In your mind as a reporter, which of these four cases sets up for you as potentially most problematic for the former President?

- I mean, most problematic for the former, I think of them as, what's most problematic for our country?

And, you know, I think that, I would say probably least would be the classified documents case.

No matter who wins, keep in mind, all these cases will be appealed, I cannot see the Supreme Court wanting to take that case up.

It's a case about whether or not classified information was mishandled.

There's tremendous body of law.

Tons and tons and tons of other cases.

This is, again, not something the Supreme Court will take.

So if he wins, he wins.

If he loses, he loses.

And that's kind of it.

And I don't see that going further.

And it's a case that would be that the government, based on the evidence we see in the affidavits and in the court filings, it's very strong.

However, the January 6th case, and the Fani Willis case, there is not a tremendous body of law.

And there's not a lot of court precedent for something like this.

I can see that getting appealed no matter who wins.

And I can see the Supreme Court wanting to weigh in.

And it could really chart a lot for the country, particularly vis-a-vis executive power and for Donald Trump, - Well, this is a Supreme Court, that if you just look at the makeup of the court right now, you have to guess is at least open to the idea that the President's side might be the legitimate side to take, right?

- I would say open to the idea of a strong executive is probably accurate, yeah.

- Yeah, so, you know, the charge on all of this, Katie, 'cause you've heard this, as we've all heard this, is they've weaponized the Justice Department.

This is becoming a talking point in the presidential campaign.

Not just his campaign, but other people's campaigns, who seek the favor of his supporters, hoping that he falls away and they inherit those folks.

What does that exactly mean?

I mean, my understanding as I was growing up, basic civics, is that the Justice Department is independent, that nobody could weaponize it for political purposes.

- Yeah, so, you know, I mean, historically, the Justice Department wasn't always politically neutral.

It was weaponized many, many, many times in our past.

I think most significantly during the Civil Rights movement when you had the FBI spying on MLK, on Martin Luther King Jr and trying to undo the Civil rights movement.

You had, you know, the former FBI director working with presidents to basically gather oppo research.

So we don't have a pristine past.

But post-Watergate, you're right.

A lot of reforms were put in place to make sure that did not happen again because the dangers of it became so clear in the '60s and '70s, culminating in Richard Nixon's attempts to use the Justice Department to gain power and be reelected.

- Right.

- So that said, what Donald Trump tried to do during his presidency was to undo those Watergate error reforms.

He did not adhere to them.

I don't even know if he consciously thought, woke up and said, I'm going to undo the Watergate era reforms.

I really don't think that's the way he operates.

- Yeah, I'm kind of with you on that.

Yeah.

- But he did ignore them and he flouted them.

And he desperately wanted to weaponize the Justice Department to retain power.

- Well, the reality is that his anger, first at Jeff Sessions and then at Bill Barr resulting in both departing the job of Attorney General, was in part that he wanted the Attorney General to be the president's lawyer.

- Absolutely.

- And not the country's lawyer, in essence, right?

- Absolutely.

- And you know, Merrick Garland, as we're sitting here today in the, you know, latter mid part of September, Merrick Garland just testified in Congress in which he said expressly, I am not the President's lawyer.

- Yeah.

- He, you know, sort of said that flat out, but there's only the evidence of, as I said, Sessions and Barr that the President, former President thought differently about that.

- Yeah, well, and then he wanted to put a functionary named Jeff Clark in the role of the Attorney General in the 11th hour to overturn the election.

So he really did make explicit what he wanted the AG to do for him.

Garland is an interesting figure.

I think the jury is definitely out about how history's going to judge him.

- [Evan] Yeah.

- 10 years from now, I think we'll still be working it out.

He had such a belief in process.

He had such a belief that if you just follow the rules, everything will be okay.

And I don't know that that's what's going to happen.

- Well, there's a certain, I mean, again, no disrespect to the Attorney General, there's naivete in that.

I mean, the thing is the idea that in the world that we're living in today, that if you just play by the rules, it will all work out, kind of seems quaint, right?

- Yeah, well, it kind of reminds me of Antigone a little bit, right, of course.

You know, like the king's like, if I just keep following the rules, it'll be okay.

But the rules are, you know, they're not fit for this moment.

They're not fit for this wartime footing.

They're not fit for what society wants.

They're not fit for my own family.

And then tragedy unfolds, of course.

But his adherence to the rules is unshakeable and Garland is a little bit like that.

- What is your sense as a reporter covering the Justice Department?

Is the left more angry at Garland on a regular basis?

Or is the right more angry at Garland?

- Oh, I mean, lucky for Merrick Garland, everybody's mad at him all the time.

- I mean, seriously, right?

It's peak Merrick Garland, right?

Everyone's mad at me.

But the left has been really frustrated because they felt like he did not move quickly enough on matters related to the former President.

- Right, and again, I think there was this belief that, well, if the men and women, the career people of the Justice Department won't find the evidence to charge Donald Trump, they will do it.

And that's great.

And I'm going to let them do this.

Now, since appointing a special counsel, the January 6th case is the most interesting to me.

Basically, Jack Smith came in in November.

And everything we saw in the indictment, we knew before he was appointed to be special counsel, there was not much new in that indictment from that time.

But what was new is a figure who came in and specifically said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this with you and my name, Jack Smith, I will take responsibility for this.

You know, federal employees, they work for an administration.

And when the really tough decisions are made, whether it's controversial prosecution, a public corruption case, and inspecting an airplane to make sure it's safe, you want a politically appointed head to sign off on that when you are the civil servant.

You don't want that.

That's not what you signed up for.

Of course, it would take that kind of leadership, that kind of direct leadership to get something like that over the finish line.

It is such a difficult and hard thing to do.

Who's going to be hauled before Congress?

Jack Smith.

Not the men and women of the Justice Department who Merrick Garland just thought would do it.

- But look, this is the job he signed up for.

I mean, when you're asked to be the special counsel, do you really have much of a choice?

- No, and I think that he eagerly took the job.

- Yeah.

And so you and I were talking earlier today about the fact that you got to The Times and switched beats to the Justice Department, kind of right at the beginning of Robert Mueller.

- Yes.

- So you've had the opportunity to observe Mueller up close and Jack Smith up close.

Compare and contrast.

- Well, I think that the big difference is the way the press is treated both men.

I think that it is not unfair to say that the public, some parts of the press, a lot of columnists, a lot of Twitter were all decided when Mueller was appointed that it meant the end of Donald Trump.

And, of course, as we know, it did not mean that.

- Yeah.

- So when Jack Smith was appointed, everybody was far more conservative in how they approached that news and what it would really mean for the former President.

- Well, Mueller had had a reputation that preceded his appointment at special counsel.

That he was like, you know, Gary Cooper.

- Yes, it was appointing a rockstar.

It was appointing like the man who helped the United States after 9/11.

He remade the FBI.

He made it this extremely powerful counter-terrorism agency.

And he was revered.

I mean, that is really different.

Jack Smith was also completely unknown.

Nobody really knew anything about him.

- Right.

I mentioned The New York Times.

So you got to The Times in '15.

- [Katie] Yeah.

- And you've been in journalism since then.

We'll come to your personal story in a second because I guess I think it's interesting that you didn't necessarily start out in college or even right after college thinking this is what I wanted to do.

But you got to The Times in '15.

You were covering technology.

- Yeah.

- You switched over in '17 to the Justice Department.

So you've been at this now for approaching a decade at The Times, and longer than that in your career.

The business that we are in has changed and changed and changed and changed and changed.

It's changing as we sit here.

Reflect on that.

- I mean, when I started in 2001, really, - Yeah.

- the press had power, had a lot of power because it controlled who had a big public voice.

- [Evan] Yep.

- So if you were a columnist for The Washington Post or The New York Times, it was a big, big deal.

You, an elite corps of people, got to spout their opinions into the public, and that was it.

And we all read it and absorbed it, especially on the opinion side.

Now, because of social media, everybody gets to be an opinion columnist.

It's different.

We've democratized it, for better or worse.

And so while there is still a lot of prestige in having that job, the power is really diffuse.

And on the reporting side too, there's something similar going on.

Like you can break news, you can be the only person who knows something, but it's disseminated so quickly you don't really have much control over it once it happens.

And information, facts, with the spread of misinformation, you might break news and you might have a fact, but it can get completely buried and nobody will know what happened.

- Yeah.

Well, another thing that I'm gonna mention, because of your presence, your persistent presence on television these days, which you made a face, but you're good, I can say it, is that that didn't used to be part of the expectation.

- No, not at all.

- And now suddenly, you are so much better known, and so much more recognizable as a consequence of your time on television.

I wonder if that's a help or a hurt to the job that is your principal job.

- Yikes.

I mean, well, I had to buy a lot of shirts.

- I had to buy a lot of shirts.

Okay.

Well, wasn't the answer I was expecting, but go on.

- I mean, like, if you've seen "Spotlight" you know that journalists aren't known for their sartorial like, excellence, but.

Yeah, so that is, in DC, DC's a very TV driven place.

Like, politicians watch cable news, people in the administration watch cable news.

So it's helpful in that people know who you are and they're willing to at least have a conversation with you, maybe when they wouldn't have before.

But otherwise it doesn't really do much.

I mean, it's just an expectation of the job, because the way The Times wants reporters to be credible and to have their stories front and center.

- You know, I have this theory, and it's, what's the point of it, it's just a theory?

But that it benefits the big media organizations to have their reporters on, not so much because they're seen in DC and New York and LA, but because they're seen in Des Moines.

And they're seen in Birmingham.

And they're seen in Columbus, Ohio.

And now suddenly the people in the middle of the country are having the same conversation or are listening to the same conversation that the rest of us are because cable television, for all of its ills, has sort of brought us together.

And now they're aware of the reporting that you did where they may not have been once upon a time.

And from The New York Times' perspective, more readers in the middle of the country, however you define that, it's probably not a bad thing.

- Yeah.

Not a bad thing.

And not a bad thing for people to see reporters talk about how they got stories.

Why they thought a story was important or what they think a story means.

- Well, that's the best part of those cable shows is you talking about the process.

Like a fourth grader in math class, showing us your work, right?

Which I think is kind of great.

We have two minutes left.

You grew up in Vermont, you went to a small college in Maine, Bowdoin College.

- Yeah.

- And then you went overseas to teach.

- [Katie] Yeah.

- Yeah.

You did not think that your life was gonna be about journalism at the time that you left Bowdoin College, or certainly at the time that you were growing up in Vermont and before you went to college.

- No, I didn't know any reporters in Vermont.

And I didn't read The New York Times growing up.

Like most people, I read my local news.

I read the Rutland Herald in Vermont, so no.

But I was in Beijing and I knew a lot of expats who were reporters.

My boyfriend at the time worked at The China Daily.

It was, you know, it seemed like an interesting job.

But then after 9/11, when we were all trying to get information about what had happened, and I was just calling people and gathering info, I, you know, I figured out I could make that into a story.

And after that experience, I was like, this is a kind of extraordinary job.

I sit around all day on the phone calling people and I can ask them kind of anything I want.

They don't have to answer, but I get to ask.

And then if the information's compelling, I can put it together in a story.

And it can help people understand what's going on.

It's great.

- I love that you came to it organically.

I think that's great.

We're out of time.

Katie Benner, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- I really enjoyed talking about it.

Katie Benner, everybody.

Give her a big hand.

(audience applauds) - We'd love to have you join us in the studio.

Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- I grew up in a very blue collar family.

My dad worked in a factory and my mom worked in a daycare center, which I think are very honorable and good jobs.

However, I understand that I'm privileged to sit in an air conditioned office, seated, and that my job is to think and to type.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" is provided in part by HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, and by Christine and Philip Dial.