TRUMP: Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.

BERNSTEIN: Monday, March 30th, 2020. White House Rose Garden. A little after 5 PM. 

TRUMP: Joining us this afternoon are CEOs of the great American companies that are fulfilling their patriotic duty by producing or donating medical equipment. [FADES UNDER]

BERNSTEIN: A day before President Trump tells America that more than 100,000 people might die of COVID-19, he invites representatives of the private sector to the White House. He says they are doing their part.

TRUMP: Darius Adamczyk of Honeywell, Debra Waller of Jockey International, David Taylor of Procter & Gamble, and Greg Hayes of United Technologies Corporation. [FADES UNDER]

BERNSTEIN: In with all these titans of industry, there’s someone else. 

TRUMP: A friend of mine, Mike Lindell of MyPillow. Boy, do you sell those pillows. That’s unbelievable what you do.

BERNSTEIN: Mike Lindell of MyPillow, with his distinctive mustache, gets an audience of 12.2 million viewers. 

TRUMP: You have to say what you’re doing because it’s been really incredible. Go ahead, Mike. 

[PAPERS SHUFFLE]

LINDELL: Okay, well, MyPillow is a U.S. vertically-integrated company which has been forced to adjust to the changing business environment as a result of the pandemic. [AUDIO FADES UNDER]

BERNSTEIN: Lindell talks about how he’s turning his pillow company into a mask-making company, producing tens of thousands of masks a day and selling them directly to health care facilities, and “those on the front lines.”

Then came this:

LINDELL: Now, I wrote something off the cuff, if I can read this.

TRUMP: Okay. 

LINDELL: [LAUGHS] God gave us grace on November 8th, 2016, to change the course we were on. God had been taken out of our schools and lives … [AUDIO FADES UNDER]

[ESOTERIC, AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS]

BERNSTEIN: Lindell goes on for a while. He tells people to get back to the Word, read their Bibles. 

BERNSTEIN: The President extends a long arm behind Mike Lindell, but the two don’t touch. 

TRUMP: I did not know he was going to do that, but he’s a friend of mine, and I do appreciate it. Thank you, Mike, very much.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]

BERNSTEIN: Some people were confused by Lindell’s presence at the coronavirus briefing. But to many Americans, he’s a familiar figure. CNBC called him an “infomercial superstar.”  He has a lot of advertisements on Fox News — like this one, where his face pops up in a medicine cabinet, to the delight of a sleepy couple.

[CLIP FROM THE AD PLAYS]

FIRST PERSON IN COUPLE: Hey, you’re that guy! 

SECOND PERSON IN COUPLE: [OVER-ENTHUSIASTICALLY] The MyPillow Guy! 

LINDELL: That’s right, and I’m here to help you get the best sleep of your lives! [THE COUPLE SIGHS] 

[AUDIO FADES UNDER NARRATION]

BERNSTEIN: Lindell’s face also pops up a lot on social media, which meant he was also a familiar figure to a friend of Trump Inc.

EVERSON: My name is Zach Everson. I report the 1100 Pennsylvania newsletter, which focuses on who's spending money at the Trump Hotel D.C., along with his other properties.

BERNSTEIN: Everson had seen a lot of Lindell.

EVERSON: And then I went back to my archives and I just looked at all of the times that I'd reported seeing him at Trump properties in the 1100 Pennsylvania newsletter.

BERNSTEIN: How many did you find?

EVERSON: There were about 15, mostly around Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Hotel DC, but also at a golf course.

BERNSTEIN: MyPillow has been around since 2005. It has 1,600 employees and a factory in Shakopee, Minnesota. Lindell describes his life as a tale of redemption, from being a crack addict to CEO and a friend of the President's.  

[ESOTERIC MUSIC IS BACK]

EVERSON: He is immersed in some of the upper echelon of Trump world. I mean, there's a picture of him in the back room with the President, another one with him at the golf course.

He's in between Eric and Don Jr. He's having lunch at Mar-a-Lago with, uh, Jeannine Piero. He's posing by the Christmas tree after the White House party with Seb Gorka, and Gorka tweets him out a lot. You know, having a great morning poolside with Senator Lindsey Graham. 

BERNSTEIN: Because Lindell is a member of Mar-a-Lago and a frequent patron of the Trump International Hotel, he is directly paying the President's company. Lindell is also — Zach looked it up — a major Republican donor. He’s given at least $628,000.

(Lindell told Yahoo News that he met Donald Trump in the summer of 2016, and that the two discussed manufacturing. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going all in.’ I felt God led me to go in.”)

[TRUMP INC. THEME STRINGS BEGIN TO PLAY]

EVERSON: Here’s a guy who's donated over $600,000 to Republican causes, spent well into six figures at Trump properties, and he gets to get up there with a whole bunch of companies that, you know — all due respect to MyPillow — he's not in their league. And he gets up there and is able to present an infomercial.

BERNSTEIN: Another journalist, Adam Klasfeid of Courthouse News, searched his database and found that California prosecutors had sued MyPillow twice for false advertising. They settled both times, once for a million dollars. 

Lindell said MyPillow did nothing wrong and that dragging out the lawsuits wasn’t in the company’s best interests.

LINDELL: [ALMOST GARBLED, FAINTLY, UNDERNEATH BERNSTEIN] Thank you, Mr. President, for your call to action which has empowered …

BERNSTEIN: There Lindell was, behind the Presidential seal, touting his service to the nation. 

[TRUMP INC. THEME MUSIC PLAYS]

Hello, and welcome to Trump Inc., a podcast from WNYC and ProPublica that digs into the business of Trump. I’m Andrea Bernstein. Today on the show, who profits from the federal response to the coronavirus. 

We’ll ask who is benefitting, how the Trump family business qualifies for the two trillion dollar bailout, how businesses close to Trump are getting regulatory rollbacks and other long-sought goals, and what kind of oversight we should expect in this new and uncertain era. 

[MUSIC FADES DOWN, BUT STILL PLAYS]

BERNSTEIN: If you’re a fan of the Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, you’re probably familiar with his legal pad notes — he makes lists of reporting questions, notes the answers he’s gotten, and tweets them out. Today’s show is going to be a sort of audio version of that process. We’re going to share the reporting we’ve done on how the President’s family business and his friend’s businesses could benefit from the federal response to the coronavirus. We’ll tell you what we know, and what we don’t know, and what we would like to find out. 

[A BEAT, MUSIC GOES OUT]

BERNSTEIN: The first thing we decided to look at was whether the President’s business can benefit from the bailout package he recently signed into law. Now, it’s important to say that hotels, and the hospitality business, have been particularly hard-hit. But because the President still owns his business, the question of conflicts of interest is ever-present. 

Trump Inc. Reporter Meg Cramer has been digging into the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security — or CARES — Act. So, Meg, a lot of people probably heard that the bill includes language that excludes the President and his family from emergency relief.

MEG CRAMER: Right. So, this is the $2 trillion relief package that was signed into law a couple of weeks ago. And one of the first things we heard about it as it was moving through Congress was that it included this very specific conflict-of-interest clause that prevents President Trump, his children, his children's spouses — essentially the whole Trump Organization — from benefiting from this $500 billion fund that's going to be overseen in part by the Department of Treasury. 

But tucked into other parts of the bill are different ways that Trump and his family could benefit.

BERNSTEIN: So one of the big ones is taxes.

CRAMER: Yeah. So there are a couple of provisions in the CARES Act that all have the same basic goal, and that is to make it easier for businesses to write off losses on their taxes this year. 

Because the President has a business that he hasn't divested from, he stands to benefit from these provisions.

And with all of these, there's no way for us to know whether or not Trump takes advantage of them or how much money he saves because we can't see his tax returns.

BERNSTEIN: We do know that in the past Trump has aggressively used stated business losses to reduce taxes. The New York Times reported, during 1990 and 1991, Trump’s core business losses "were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the IRS information for those years.”

[DRIVING, CURIOUS MUSIC PLAYS]

CRAMER: Then there’s this other bucket of money. This is money set aside for something called the Paycheck Protection Program, which is a loan program that is designed mainly to help small businesses keep people on payroll. And businesses can apply for these loans, and if they spend the money in a certain way and meet certain requirements, that loan or part of it will be forgiven.

And it appears that some parts of the Trump Organization qualify for these small business loans.

BERNSTEIN: Explain that, please.

CRAMER: In the CARES Act, there is a special provision for the hospitality industry, which says a hotel can qualify as a small business if a single location of that hotel has fewer than 500 employees. So even if it's part of a bigger company, if one individual hotel has under 500 people working there, that hotel can apply for one of these loans. And the idea is to protect smaller owners that may be affiliated with bigger chains.  

So what we did was we came up with a list of Trump Organization properties that we thought might meet some of the criteria. 

BERNSTEIN: Okay. So, you pull the list, check the number of employees — what did you find?

CRAMER: We found four Trump Hotels that appear to qualify. Two that he owns outright, and two that his company manages. The first is Albemarle Estate. This is the small hotel that's associated with the Trump Winery in Charlottesville. And the second is the Trump International Hotel in D.C. On the hotel’s LinkedIn page, it says that it has fewer than 500 employees. And I also talked to a couple of hotel industry experts who said that number sounds about right.

The Trump Organization also manages a hotel in New York and one in Chicago that both appear to have under 500 employees.

We reached out to representatives at each of these hotels to ask about staff size and whether or not they planned to apply for one of these loans and didn’t hear back.

BERNSTEIN: So this program, which could be giving Paycheck Protection Act funds to some Trump businesses, is run by the Small Business Administration, which Trump oversees.

CRAMER: Right. And the Small Business Administration still hasn't laid out whether or not there will be any public disclosure of, you know, which businesses qualify, which ones receive loans, and which ones ultimately get those loans turned into grants. Um, we just don't know how that's gonna work.

One thing to add here is that loan forgiveness depends in part on businesses keeping people on staff, and we’ve already heard of Trump Hotel employees getting laid off or furloughed.

BERNSTEIN: So let's talk about debt. Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. His biggest lender is Deutsche Bank. And some of the money that the Trump Organization borrowed from Deutsche bank is guaranteed personally by Donald Trump. So we could have a  situation where a major bank is renegotiating payment terms with the President of the United States, who has the power right now to make sweeping changes to the economy.

CRAMER: So, we know from, you know, recent reporting in the New York Times is that the Trump Organization has already reached out to Deutsche Bank to discuss the possibility of postponing payments on some of its loans. 

[MUSIC FADES OUT, THEN COMES BACK IN, MORE MYSTERIOUS AND UNCERTAIN THAN BEFORE]

CRAMER: There is actually a provision in the CARES Act that applies in this situation and would make it easier for Deutsche Bank to say yes. So, under normal circumstances, when a bank restructures a loan or offers modified terms like the ones that the Trump Organization is asking for, it would have to reclassify that loan as “troubled debt” and then take a couple of extra steps. Under the CARES Act, banks don't have to do that. And the idea is to give banks more flexibility to work with borrowers and prevent, you know, a wave of defaults.

Economists and policy people I’ve been talking to about this all say this is a really important provision. So when it comes to Trump, it's not so much an outright benefit. It's more like one of these situations that we often see that highlight the kind of complicated tangle of business and government resulting from Trump's decision not to divest from his business interests.

I reached out to Jennifer Ahearn, who is the policy director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to talk about the potential conflict of interest issues baked into all of this. Like, what happens if the Trump Organization applies for a small business loan? 

AHEARN: If you have a situation where more than one eligible company is applying and you have to decide between and among them, that’s one thing that is certainly a concerning question — is the president’s business going to be receiving special treatment?

CRAMER: Also, there's a big question around what enforcement looks like. 

AHEARN: That’s certainly a question that I think needs to be raised here, is not just “Will they receive the loans?”, but also, if they were to not comply with the terms of a loan or a grant, what would happen in that circumstance? And who would be making the decision about what to do about that?

CRAMER: There are a lot of open questions here because the reporting requirements haven't been made clear. We still don't know if Trump will benefit or even what his company will have to disclose. 

We do know, however, that he oversees the agencies that are writing these rules.

The Trump Organization and the White House did not respond to our questions about whether or not Trump's businesses plan to apply for loans through this Paycheck Protection Program, um, if they do in fact qualify. And Deutsche Bank declined to comment about its plans for how it will handle troubled loans.

BERNSTEIN: Trump Inc. reporter Meg Cramer, looking at how Trump’s company could benefit from the coronavirus bailout. 

[A BEAT OF MUSIC]

BERNSTEIN: There’s another, related question, one that’s prompted by Trump’s own promotion of the role of the private sector in alleviating the national emergency. 

TRUMP: In some cases, very small companies — family-owned companies — step up and make a lot of great products … [AUDIO FADES UNDER]

BERNSTEIN: And that question is, what is the Trump Organization doing?

PETER ELKIND: It doesn't appear they're doing much. 

BERNSTEIN: This is Peter Elkind, Senior Reporter for ProPublica. 

ELKIND: I spoke to specific public officials who have got city fundraising efforts going, or efforts to get donations of hotel rooms for first responders and medical personnel or — or patients who don't need hospitalization. And they haven't heard anything from the Trump Organization or from any of the Trump Hotels.

BERNSTEIN: So let's break that down. Let's start with New York, obviously, the epicenter of the crisis and where Trump's business is from. What did you find when you contacted officials in New York?

ELKIND: The city desperately needs extra space to house people — medical personnel and also as overflow from hospitals, and for people who need to be sequestered because they're either awaiting test results or have been diagnosed, but don't require hospitalization. And there have been hotels that have stepped up. And while the Four Seasons and the St. Regis and the Plaza Hotels in New York have all agreed to donate space free of charge, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, which is overlooking Central Park, has not.

BERNSTEIN: What other cities have you looked at?

ELKIND: Well, in Las Vegas in particular, they could have donated food. There was an order — a state order that forced all the casinos and hotels to shut down. And the food bank there, which is serving a population that's in desperate need now, they have six special drive-through locations that they've set up to meet the need. After the hotels and casinos were ordered to shut down, they got a deluge of food donations from these places that had all this stuff in their kitchens but suddenly weren’t going to have any guests. And they got food from, you know, a half dozen — at least — of the big casinos in town. And they've gotten nothing at all from the Trump Hotel. In fact, they've never received anything from the Trump Hotel in their entire time there.

[MUSIC PLAYS]

BERNSTEIN: Now, you tried to find out from the Trump Organization what it was doing, right?

ELKIND: Yes, absolutely. So, I left voicemail messages for Donald Trump Jr. I sent emails to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, to Alan Garten, Executive Vice President and Attorney for the Trump Organization, as well as spokesperson for the company. I asked them repeatedly to tell us what they're doing.

I — I mean, it’s — it is possible that the Trumps have engaged in unseen acts of charity connected to the pandemic. The Trumps, however, have not been known to hide deeds for which they might receive favorable public attention.

[MUSIC PLAYS FOR A BEAT]

BERNSTEIN: Peter Elkind is a senior reporter at ProPublica.

[BEAT]

BERNSTEIN: Up next, oversight.

In a national emergency, with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money going out the door and government being reshaped by the minute, Trump is still acting like Trump.

TRUMP: … Conducting these partisan investigations in the middle of a pandemic is a really big waste of vital resources, time, attention. And we want to fight for American lives, not waste time and build up my poll numbers, because that’s all they’re doing, because everyone knows it’s ridiculous.

BERNSTEIN: We’ll be right back. 

[MUSIC PLAYS FOR A MINUTE, THEN GOES OUT]

[MIDROLL]

[INTENSE ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS UNDERNEATH]

BERNSTEIN: We’re back.

At the end of March, the U.S. Supreme Court was supposed to hear a suite of cases having to do with Presidential oversight: Trump v. Deutsche Bank, Trump v. Mazars, and Trump v. Vance.  The president’s lawyers claimed absolute immunity from investigation so long as Trump is President. Trump lost these cases at the district level and at the appeals level — every single decision. The U.S. Supreme Court was to decide this by June, but now that’s on hold.  

The question of how far Congress and law enforcement officials can go in investigating the President remains unresolved. 

That’s the backdrop for the oversight provisions of the CARES Act. Trump Inc. reporter Katherine Sullivan looked into this. 

[MUSIC PLAYS OUT]

KATHERINE SULLIVAN: When Trump signed this bill into law, he didn’t just sign his name. He added what’s called a “signing statement.” He objected to two different parts of the law’s oversight provisions. These were parts that Senate Republicans, Democrats, and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin had already debated and agreed upon. 

BERNSTEIN: The White House called one of the provisions “hortatory but not mandatory.” Which is legalese for the White House saying they don’t have to follow the law that the administration just agreed to. 

SULLIVAN: This is especially concerning to Peter Shane, who teaches law and government at the Ohio State University. He specializes in the separation of powers and the presidency. He wrote the book Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy. 

SHANE: Believe me, it’s my life’s dream to familiarize all of America with the arcane features of inter-branch relations. So this is great.

SULLIVAN: Shane told me that signing statements are a way for a President to object to one small part or parts of a bill that they otherwise agree with. It’s like a way for a President to leave a comment on a law. These statements been around for almost 200 years and often didn’t carry much weight. But they really started to take on a new character about thirty years ago, under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. 

SHANE: And interestingly, of course, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, back in the late ‘80s, who wrote some of the initial thinking about this was an Assistant Attorney General named William Barr. [LIGHT CHUCKLE] And now, uh, of course, he's the President's Chief Legal Advisor.

SULLIVAN: For context here, Shane told me that George W. Bush was by far the most aggressive president in his use of signing statements. He said Bush often objected to provisions limiting his powers on national security and foreign affairs.

Shane says even George W. Bush didn’t reject oversight in the way Trump has — especially for purely domestic matters.

Even Bush, for example, didn’t add a signing statement on the TARP bailout in 2008, the bill the CARES Act was modeled on. 

SHANE: I do think it is unusual, if not absolutely unprecedented, for a President, on a piece of legislation that has been negotiated toughly, if that's a word, [CHUCKLES] between the executive and the legislative branch to then, in a signing statement, draw back from what was agreed upon. 

SULLIVAN: Shane says Trump’s signing statement is a warning sign.

[LIGHT GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS] 

SHANE: If the statement triggers anxiety, it’s not just because of the specific provisions to which the President objected. It's really whether the statement signals an overall attitude towards the CARES Act, which says, “Okay. Congress, we got to, you know, to give us this authority. But, you know, if we slow walk it, it's not that there's anybody who's going to sue us.”

BERNSTEIN: Shane says the signing statement is just another example of Trump’s view that he is “all but unaccountable” to Congress. Not just when it comes to the impeachment inquiry, or revealing his company’s financial documents, but when it comes to spending two trillion taxpayer dollars. 

SULLIVAN: After I spoke to Shane, Trump nominated his pick to the position of Special Inspector General for pandemic response. His name is Brian Miller. He’s Senior Associate Counsel in the White House Office of Legal Counsel. In the first three years of Trump’s Presidency, that office fiercely rebuffed attempts at Congressional oversight.

The CARES Act established another Inspector General. This one, Trump does not get to appoint. A committee of other Inspectors General from across the government nominated Glenn Fine of the Defense Department to this key position. A few days later, Trump abruptly removed Fine from his current posting at the Pentagon, making him ineligible to take up an oversight role in the CARES Act. 

BERNSTEIN: Trump Inc. reporter, Katherine Sullivan. 

On Friday, April 3rd, late in the evening, Trump fired another Inspector General, Michael Atkinson. He’s the one who forwarded the Whistleblower Complaint on the Ukraine Matter to Congress, in accordance with the law. Trump defended his decision.

[GUITAR MUSIC RAMPS UP]

TRUMP: I thought he did a terrible job. Absolutely terrible. He took a whistleblower report, which turned out to be a fake report — it was fake. It was totally wrong. It was about my conversation with the President of Ukraine. He took a fake report and he brought it to Congress, with an emergency. Okay? Not a big Trump fan — that, I can tell you. 

BERNSTEIN: It was only January, three months ago, that President Trump was on trial for abuse of power and thwarting Congressional oversight. After his acquittal, he doled out punishments to perceived enemies and rewards to his friends.  

And that’s what we’re going to be looking at now — how Trump’s allies stand to benefit from the national emergency. 

[MUSIC OUT]

BERNSTEIN: Ilya Marritz takes it from here. 

ILYA MARRITZ: We began this episode with President Trump in the Rose Garden with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy: frequent patron of Trump properties, Republican donor, heaping praise on the president — and getting an amazing promotion from Trump on live TV in return.

There are more concrete things to be gained for other businesses. Bailout money. Contracts. And changes to enforcement and regulation.

[LIGHT WIND CHIME-ESQUE MUSIC PLAYS]

TRUMP: Okay, thank you very much. It’s a great honor to be with the world leaders in American oil and gas — and, really, I could say, the world leaders, period, when it comes to energy and American energy. 

MARRITZ: At the beginning of April, President Trump welcomed oil and gas executives to the White House. 

TRUMP: With us as well are Greg Garland of Phillips 66, Dave Hager of Devon Energy, Harold Hamm of Continental Resources —

MARRITZ: Harold Hamm was one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and earliest supporters in 2016.

TRUMP: — Jeff Hildebrand of Hilcorp Energy — [AUDIO CONTINUES UNDER NARRATION]

MARRITZ: Jeff Hildebrand gave over a quarter million dollars to Trump Victory, the RNC, and the Trump campaign last year.

Also at the meeting, an executive of a pipeline company where former Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently rejoined the board. And Exxon, which donated a half million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. Plus a handful of others.

VICKI HOLLUB: Vicki Hollub of Occidental Petroleum.

TRUMP: Hi, Vicki.

HOLLUB: Thank you for allowing us to be here today and thank you for all you’re doing for us.

TRUMP: Thank you very much. Thank you, Vicki.

MARRITZ: So, there was this meeting. We know about it. The White House posted part of it to Youtube.

TRUMP: Today we’ll discuss the impact of the coronavirus on American energy industry. As the pandemic brought on by global economy — I mean, it’s an incredible thing that’s happened. Nobody thought this was possible. We had the greatest economy in the world. [AUDIO FADES UNDER AS NARRATION CONTINUES]

[MUSIC FADES DOWN AND OUT]

MARRITZ: Like other businesses, oil and gas companies can benefit from a provision in the CARES Act that allows them to turn balance sheet losses into tax savings. 

We also know about a policy change that took effect days before this meeting, which could have a very big impact: a new guideline that says the EPA will not seek penalties for businesses it oversees that fail to meet routine monitoring and reporting requirements for things like water and air emissions if they can show it was as a result of the pandemic. This policy is temporary. But there’s no set end date.

JUDITH ENCK: It’s the most sweeping change, I think, in the history of the agency.

MARRITZ: This is Judith Enck, a former top EPA official in New York. She says the new rule means all kinds of companies — chemical manufacturers, power plants, landfill operators, and, yes, oil and gas producers — may get a pass on reporting pollution.

ENCK: I can’t tell you how stunning it is to have this apply across the board and that companies simply tell EPA after the fact, and all they have to do is explain why COVID-19 made it impossible for them to comply with their environmental permits. 

MARRITZ: The EPA said it’s facing an unprecedented challenge. The new policy will, quote, “allow the EPA to prioritize its resources to respond to acute risks and imminent threats.” Other agencies also say say they’re balancing normal enforcement and oversight with public health. In recent weeks, we’ve seen fast tracking of some merger reviews by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, a rollback of data collection by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — data that’s supposed to ensure fairness in lending. The Department of Transportation temporarily relaxed rules on rest breaks for some truckers — that’s something we know Trump’s donors wanted.

[LIGHT BUT DRIVING GUITAR MUSIC PLAYS]

BERNSTEIN: And this is where you come in. Especially if you’re a federal employee or someone in an industry that is being deregulated right now. Do you see rules that are being changed in a way that donors and Trump supporters would want? Have you noticed a change to the fine print in the federal register? What do you know about how the President or his family or his aides may have been lobbied? We want to hear from you! Go to TrumpIncPodcast.org and follow the prompts to securely tip us.

[MUSIC PLAYS FOR A BEAT, RAMPING UP]

BERNSTEIN: This episode was produced by Ilya Marritz, Meg Cramer, Katherine Sullivan, and Alice Wilder. It was edited by Eric Umansky and Nick Varchaver. Jared Paul does our sound design and original scoring. Hannis Brown wrote our theme and additional music. 

Matt Collette is the executive producer of Trump Inc. Emily Botein is the Vice President for Original Programming at WNYC and Stephen Engelberg is the Editor-in-Chief of ProPublica.

Special thanks this week to WNYC’s truly essential engineering and facilities teams who’ve supported our show as we’ve worked from home.

I’m Andrea Bernstein, thanks for listening.

[MUSIC PLAYS OUT]

 

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