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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Our lead story to begin this week, electing private Ryan. Well, actually, Pat Ryan was more than a private when he served as a combat intelligence officer serving two tours of duty in Iraq. Now he's much more than a county executive from the Mid-Hudson Valley who won a special election to serve a few months in Congress because the 19th Congressional district was one of those places where Donald Trump won in 2016 and then Joe Biden won in 2020, but only by less than two points.

Because Ryan won on a campaign about choice, democracy, and freedom, while his Republican opponent Marc Molinaro ran on crime and inflation, exactly the contrast we're seeing nationally, right? As Democrats try to hold and Republicans try to take the house. Our little old Kingston and Newport, Rhinebeck and Poughkeepsie, Ellenville and the Catskills up through areas both East and West of Albany, or all those humble places.

The August bellweather for American politics in November, we'll find out for sure then, but maybe his time as a West point train combat intelligence officer. I don't even know what the rank is for that, but it's got to be higher than private gave Pat Ryan and I for how the moment connects with the country's deeper value. Let's meet Ulster County executive and Congressman-elect Pat Ryan. Congressman elect, congratulations, and thank you for giving us some time today during your transition. I'm sure it's busy. Welcome to WNYC.

Pat Ryan: Oh, thank you, Brian. It's an honor to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can we let people get to know you first a little bit and then we'll dive into the national politics of it all. Where'd you grow up and how did you decide to apply to West point?

Pat Ryan: Sure. I grew up here in Kingston, first capital of New York state, by the way. Very proud of that. My mom was a public school teacher. My dad ran a small business here and they really drilled into me the importance of community and public service. For me at 18, that meant going to West point about an hour South of here where I'd fallen in love as a kid going to football games and the beautiful grounds. Then you show up and you do your first day of beast barracks where you get hazed all day long and you realize, oh, maybe this wasn't quite what they put in the marketing materials here.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, the glory doesn't start on day one. I don't know if you heard the beginning of my intro when I said our lead story to begin this week is electing private Ryan, but that actually, you must have been more than a private when you served as a combat intelligence officer, two tours of duty in Iraq, et cetera. What was your rank for that? Without divulging any national security secrets, how would you briefly describe the nature of the work you did in that capacity?

Pat Ryan: I left my active duty as an army captain. Relatively, low, middle level officer. I had an amazing job in combat as a infantry battalion intelligence officer. Basically, serving in the city of Mosul, which at the time was one of the most violent places in Iraq and had to figure out what the heck was going on. Who were the political leaders? Who were the leaders of the insurgency? How did we keep people safe? How did we try to help rebuild the country and really inform the operations of about a thousand person army battalion.

It was extremely intense, extremely rewarding, and segue to some of the things happening in our world right now, one of my most solemn responsibilities as an intelligence officer with a top secret SCI clearance was to secure classified material, which unfortunately we've not seen others do around the country.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, you're going there. Does that experience give you any particular take on the classified documents that the justice department affidavit says were at Mar-a-Lago?

Pat Ryan: Absolutely. You could ask anyone with a top secret clearance if I or anyone else had done that and so blatantly mishandled and disrespected security protocol, we would be in jail. I think that no one should be above the law when it comes to guarding national secrets, when it comes to guarding HCS, human sources, and other secretive sources and methods, this is deadly serious stuff, and we have to handle it with full trust.

Brian Lehrer: The ones mark human intelligence or special intelligence, both of those categories seem to be getting the most attention in the press coverage since the affidavit was released on Friday. Can you with your experience describe a little bit about what human intelligence as a marking on documents means or special intelligence?

Pat Ryan: Sure. HCS is basically a very highly classified compartment of intelligence where you're protecting an individual human who's almost certainly put their life at risk to divulge very secretive information. Leaking of that in many cases can result in that person losing their life or being targeted by the country that they're essentially divulging the information from. That is extremely sensitive stuff. SI generally refers to signals intelligence, and again, some of our most sophisticated and highly protected ways to gather information about adversaries and keep our country safe. To have that just lying around, it's just unbelievable to anyone who's dealt with this information and intelligence before.

Brian Lehrer: A listener tweets addressing me. I have not heard you or anyone else ask the question, what was Trump's motive to steal all those classified documents? I don't know if steal is exactly right, but he took them. What did he plan to do with them? Truth is I have asked that question and I've heard others ask it as well, but I haven't heard anybody come up with an actual plausible theory. Do you have one?

Pat Ryan: That's one I try to not get ahead of myself and speculate on what might be going on in the former president's head. That seems a pretty dark and scary place to go. I'll just say, the fact that the Espionage Act was part of the justification of the affidavit. It is not an accident and that's something that really needs to be looked deeply at. I'm sure that folks are looking at that now.

Brian Lehrer: All right, listeners, your calls welcome for the newly elected Congressman from the 19th congressional district North of the city, Catskills, Mid-Hudson Valley, places around Albany. Pat Ryan being seen as the symbol of how the reversal of Roe v. Wade has changed the landscape for the midterm elections nationally. Call about representing places like Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Newport, call from anywhere in the district, or call from anywhere and talk about the national politics implied by his win. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Or like the listener I just read from you can tweet a question at Brian Lehrer and as we continue to do your bio a little bit and introduce you to people, I see you've got a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown, with a concentration in terrorism and sub-state violence. You ran a tech company called Praescient, am I saying that right? Analytics like Prescient, but with an A-

Pat Ryan: That's correct.

Brian Lehrer: -that sold tech solutions to national security, intelligence and homeland defense customers as your bio page there described it. May I ask, does that experience give you any take on how to prevent against the rising threat of right-wing domestic terrorism? Maybe you saw the Lindsey Graham quote from the last day since you went there on the affidavit and stuff.

Lindsey Graham said there'll be riots in the streets if Trump is prosecuted for possession of classified documents after Hillary Clinton wasn't. We see the threats now against the FBI agents and election day poll workers and other things that as you well know, have been reported in the news. Does your experience in grad school or in the field give you any take on how to prevent against the rising threat of domestic terrorism?

Pat Ryan: Well, I think if we zoom out, we have to realize, and I think more and more people are, we are at an extremely delicate, dangerous moment for our democracy. So much of the campaign here, the special election was about explicitly calling that out and saying when fundamental freedoms like abortion access and the right for a person to choose what to do with their body in such an important healthcare decision, when those are ripped away, it's part of a broader set of multi-front threats and challenges to our democracy, including as well under that umbrella, threats to voting rights, increased toxicity and far-right extremist nationalist ideology.

All of this is grilling at the same time and coming together at the same time By the way, we're putting more deadly assault weapons, the same weapons I carried in combat onto our streets. It's so much of the reason why I wanted to run and seek this office is that I love this country. I love our democracy and it is so fragile and so delicate right now. We need people that believe in it to get in here and figure out how do we sort this all out.

I think what we saw in the outcome of this special election here up in the Hudson Valley was people see that happening. People understand what's at stake. We certainly centered choice and freedom in the race as it related to abortion rights, but is much broader than that. I think people are smart and they get what's happening and that if we don't get back in the fight and really fight for our democracy, we're in real trouble.

Brian Lehrer: Why did you go to get back to your bio from being an intelligence expert in the army and the private sector and a counter-terrorism master's degree at Georgetown to running for Ulster County executive which I imagine is not about any of that, but much more mundane seeming things like property taxes and collecting the garbage?

Pat Ryan: It's a great question. It goes back to what I said. When I raised my right hand and graduated West Point in 2004, I took this oath very solemnly to protect and defend our constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. As I came home from serving and running this business and reconnecting with my community, to see some of the gravest threats to our democracy and our constitution right here at home was something I could not abide.

I couldn't just watch that happen. I couldn't watch folks like Trump divide the American people for their own power and their own personal interests in such a cynical way. I just felt one of the ways to fix that is to rebuild from the bottom up trust. I think it all comes back to a major trust gap in our country where if government isn't delivering, people lose trust, and then the whole thing unravels.

To have an opportunity in local government in the community that I grew up in to try to rebuild that step by step by improving roads. I manage our whole pandemic response which was quite intense and actually left me with a lot of hope that we can bring people together really even in divided time. My experience in local government was actually encouraging and hopeful. It makes me more optimistic that if we can get our act together at the federal level and actually deliver things, then we can fix this, but there's no shortcut to doing so. We just have to do the work.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, is there a democratic or Republican way to be a county executive? From what I've read, you and the Republican you defeated for Congress last week, Duchess county executive Marc Molinaro from the Poughkeepsie side of the river have worked really well together to run your adjacent counties, but is there a democratic or Republican way to be a county executive?

Pat Ryan: I think a lot of the work we do is not partisan, but I do believe that democratic values of taking care of the most vulnerable, of investing at a time of opportunity. Coming out of the pandemic, for example in Ulster County, we invested our federal relief funds, the American Rescue Plan funds in setting up for the first time a 24/7 mental health and addiction recovery center which we've never had.

We invested it in building desperately needed housing for working people and seniors. Just last week, we broke ground on knocking down our old county jail and building 160 apartments for seniors and working families. We invested in our climate and improving our trail network. Those are not things that you generally see Republican local elected officials doing. I do think those core values do come through.

A lot of the work we do is pretty straightforward and less partisan which is probably why trust in local elected officials is significantly higher than federal. The latest Pew survey which I'm obsessed with looking at trust in different institutions. 22% of Americans have trust in their local government officials, only 9% trust members of Congress. We have to fix that. That distrust and that cynicism is the antithesis and is a real threat to democracy actually.

Brian Lehrer: You hope to bring some of that vibe.

Pat Ryan: That's the goal and do it in a unifying way. So much of what I'm encouraged about and hopeful about after this win here is that people responded to a positive call that even if you might not be personally directly affected by reproductive freedoms being ripped away, you care enough about your fellow American and your community member, that when their rights are taken away, you're going to step up and say, that's not who we are as a country. That is what we need right now on multiple fronts as we see these threats to our democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Before we take some calls and you should see the board exploded with phone calls, as soon as I said, we were going to take phone calls for you from people everywhere who are interested in your win as a potential national bellwether and from all over the district. We'll go to a caller from Ellenville first, we'll go to a caller from Ulster County. We've someone else who grew up in Kingston, somebody in Delaware county.

We'll do some of those in a second, but just to follow up on what you've been saying so far, I hear you talking about progressive values, progressive policies, but at the same time portraying yourself as someone who listens to everybody, that you'll be a hands-across-the-aisle Congressman and maybe your district has demanded that, but are the two things compatible in such a polarized time and a polarized Congress?

The Republicans seem to reject almost every compromise on choice and climate and everything else and fall in line behind Trump's big lie and other things you might consider core. Can you be a progressive values-driven member of Congress and a hands-across-the-aisle person at the same time in this environment?

Pat Ryan: Yes. We have to be because what I think is really happening is there is a small but very aggressive, far right wing that hijacked what I used to know, what we used to know of the Republican party which growing up most of my family was a part of. That Republican party no longer exists. There are a small number of real patriots in the Republican party willing to stand up and call that out but it is a very small number.

Until there are more with the moral courage to stand up and call that out, we are at great risk but we have to support and extend a hand to not just elected officials, but more importantly, fellow Americans who see that happening, who are concerned, but who need a place to feel that there's a broader tent and open arms to welcome them in. I think at this point with the existential threat to democracy, we have to put that at the top of the list and understand we're not going to agree on every single issue, but that we have to agree on that fundamental threat that we're facing right now and that we have to fight against it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call, Tachi in Ellenville. You're on WNYC with Congressman-elect, Pat Ryan. Hi, Tachi.

Tachi: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call and congratulations, Mr. Ryan, we're thrilled to have you represent us. I am a New York City resident actually who has a weekend home in Ellenville where I currently am actually. In 2018, me and my husband changed our voter registration from New York City to Ellenville because we decided why should we vote in New York City with all the rest of the Democrats, let's take our vote upstate where we can make a difference.

We flipped the district to Antonio Delgado in 2018 but until then, up until that point, this was really a [unintelligible 00:19:05] red district. I think John Faso, a Republican represented this district for years and years. I'm just wondering, do you know how many people anecdotally are New York City residents but are voting up here now? I know since the pandemic, a lot of people have bought homes up here and I personally know of many people who changed their voter registration to upstate to their weekend home residences.

Pat Ryan: Thank you. Well thank you for the call and I hope everything's okay down there. I'm actually going to head down to Ellenville later today. Likely there's a significant forest fire down there. I don't know if you can see any smoke from where you are, but we've got folks on the ground responding right now and it's under control, but--

Brian Lehrer: Is that a wildfire? Would you characterize it that way, is from the heat and drought this summer?

Pat Ryan: It is, there's a lightning strike over the weekend. It's contained right now, but we've got a lot of folks working really hard in very high temperatures right now to control it. Thankfully, we think we have it under control, but sorry, I didn't mean to digress from your question, sir. The short answer is I don't have exact numbers, but over the last decade or two, we've seen a huge influx of folks coming and spending more time buying homes, living full-time or part-time up here in the Hudson Valley. As somebody who grew up in Kingston and remembers when we were in a downward spiral here and losing people and losing energy, it's phenomenal to see folks coming and falling in love with this community.

I think it means there's a really bright future for the Hudson Valley. We have to do a lot of work to manage the new pressures and dynamics that new folks coming bring, particularly when it comes to housing. It's been something I've been really focused on as county executive because housing prices have really climbed and we need to work to bring those down. It has certainly changed our politics I think in a good way as we've seen a lot more energy calling for progressive policies to lift everybody up here.

Brian Lehrer: I could see where your victory might be over-interpreted as a bellwether for at least two other reasons. One, the quality of the candidate matters, and with your west point and combat experience and the way you present yourself, people have seen you as a very high-quality candidate. Also even though your district was a toss-up between Trump and Biden, the Congressman you were succeeding there, Antonio Delgado, was a Democrat who was elected in 2020 by 11 points even while Biden won by just one. Might people be making too much of this or what do you think?

Pat Ryan: I definitely leave it to the folks smarter than me on the politics and the punditry. I think we sent a decisive message here. Any of those same pundits or experts almost universally agreed we would not win this race. My opponent, by the way, in the National Republican Party spent almost $2 million of disgusting deceptive attack ads. They outspent us significantly. They tried multiple different tactics.

First, they bashed Biden and blamed inflation. Then they accused me of being soft on crime, even though I've literally served in uniform and consistently increased our law enforcement funding against violent crime and the opioid epidemic here. None of that stuck. I think we really had everything thrown at us, frankly, and stood up against it and stood proud, and sent a clear message.

I think that what happened here is not anomalous. I think the ground is shifting politically and morally in the country as people see what's happening and the American people are smart. They believe in our democracy and they see what's happening. People understand that when a right like abortion access and reproductive rights are ripped away, we know what can be next and Justice Thomas pretty much put it in his opinion as well, where they are going to go next. That's not who we are as a country.

Brian Lehrer: More of your questions for Congressman-elect, Pat Ryan, I'll ask him about how he's been using the word freedom on the campaign trail, which he's definitely been using, and more stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Congressman-elect Pat Ryan. Now the outgoing Ulster County executive. For those of you who only know the places between New York City and Albany as the throughway or the [unintelligible 00:24:16], Ulster County, it's like New Port, Kingston, Exit 18, Exit 19 around there.

The district is a mid-Hudson Valley district, it's broader than that. In his election last week in this special election being seen as a national bellwether for more hope for the Democrats for the fall midterms than people previously thought, Chris in Delaware county, you're on WNYC. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hey, and congrats Congressman-elect.

Pat Ryan: Thank you.

Chris: I'm calling from rural Delaware County where Democrats love to lose. I'm wondering if you have any ideas on how we could improve our messaging, because when I talk to my conservative neighbors, oftentimes they articulate progressive needs.

Pat Ryan: Yes, exactly right. You definitely get it on the ground there in Delaware County. I think so much of what we need to do and it's really, really hard work is to your point, remind people of the values that we share in common. I did talk an awful lot and we'll continue to talk about freedom as an overarching umbrella, not just in terms of abortion rights, but we talked a lot about the economic inequities and the economic injustices happening in rural areas like ours.

Our second big TV ad, which got a lot less coverage than the first was actually talking about how our local utility here has been consistently ripping off customers, mis-billing them, orders of magnitude higher bills than they should at a time where people feel so much economic pain and pressure. I think a lot of what we need to talk about is the fact that at the same time that the biggest companies in our country are making record-breaking profits, millions of people are sitting around the table, figuring out how to pay utility bills, how to pay for gas at the pumps, how to put food on the table, healthcare costs, and their own taxes while those big corporations are paying no taxes.

To see federal legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act that addresses all of that gives us a lot more ammunition to talk about how we're delivering. I think that as long as we talk about it under the framework of freeing that weight that people feel on their shoulders, that's not a partisan thing at all. That's what 99% of people in this country are feeling right now.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you for your call from Delaware County. Southwest of Albany, for people who don't know where that is [unintelligible 00:27:02] to West of Woodstock, sort of around there. Your guiding messages in the congressional special election campaign were about what you've called freedom, choice, and democracy. I think we know what choice refers to right now and more or less we know what democracy refers to, though I think we don't always.

I'm curious about the word freedom there, which is a word that's been used much more by the right in recent years, the right-wing freedom caucus in the house. It's a libertarian word for not having strong environmental laws or progressive income taxes and things like that as I'm sure you know. When a Pat Ryan runs on freedom, what do you have in mind?

Pat Ryan: Well, I have in mind the fact that right now folks are one, scared and worried about rights being taken away. Certainly worried about abortion rights. They're worried about like I am as a parent of a three-year-old and a seven-month-old dropping their kids off at school or daycare and then being gunned down by the same weapons I carried in combat. They're worried about voting rights, they're worried about climate.

So much of what I mean by freedom is we need to take those worries and pressures away, both those existential worries I talked about, but especially the worries at the kitchen table. It really has to be a one, two combo of we're standing up to fight to protect your fundamental rights. At the same time, we are providing you relief. Here on the ground, I talked equally or more about the economic relief I've provided as county executive for the community.

We cut our county gas tax in half, because most people around here have no other option but to drive to get everywhere that they need. We provided millions in small business relief as our local small businesses were getting hammered and the big box stores and the Amazons were making record break profits. I just proposed a single biggest property tax cut in our county in 40 years since the year I was born in 1982. We have to show people that we're delivering relief, that we hear them, and that it's tangible. That all ties back to me to really freedom from this dread and this weight that is on so many families' shoulders right now coming out of the pandemic.

Pat Ryan: Hyam in the south slope Brooklyn neighborhood, but also has a house in Ulster County. Hi, Hyam. You're on WNYC with Congressman-elect, pat Ryan, who's also the Ulster County executive. Hi there.

Hyam: Hello Brian. I'm a serial caller and proud one. We have a place in Arkville in the very Western corner of Ulster county and full disclosure I'm a climate activist working with [unintelligible 00:30:07] on a program to retrofit buildings in Brooklyn. I would like to hear if you have some ideas to join together the rural and Hudson Valley areas with the city for climate progress. A lot of issues there but I wonder if you have any ideas.

Pat Ryan: Absolutely. We've been doing a lot of this work already. As you probably know, the Hudson Valley's been at the forefront of climate and environment for a long time. One of the things that we've done a lot of work on at the county level is actually a major building retrofit program where we used again, our federal COVID relief funds to set up a pool of several million dollars for those that probably otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to do so to retrofit their homes, to improve energy efficiency, bring down their utility costs and add significant home equity values.

That's one area where we're doing a lot of work on building emissions and really economic and environmental justice. The other area that we've done a lot is actually in our transportation system. Ulster County alone, where I'm a county executive is the size of Rhode Island. This congressional district, the 19th is the size of Massachusetts and Rhode Island put together. The only way for a lot of people to get around is a good public transit system.

I'm really proud that we actually put our first three fully electric buses on the road this year in Ulster County, one of the first in the country to get our fleet electrified. Transportation emissions in rural parts of the country are the single biggest emitter ahead of even buildings in more urban areas. Bringing down emissions there, particularly around public transit is a huge opportunity where I think we have a lot more work that we can do, especially with access to some of the bipartisan infrastructure bill funds which will flow into our transit sectors here across the state and across the country.

Brian Lehrer: Hyam, keep calling us. People used to only identify themselves as first-time callers if they were calling for the-- Now, they say I'm a second-time caller. I'm a serial caller. That guy said, keep calling us. I know we have one minute left before you got to go. I'll give it to a listener via Twitter who asks, I'm a resident of Congressman-elect Ryan's current and next district, can Pat give a quick 101 on how he's not moving anywhere but thanks to redistricting, we'll be running in the 18th in November instead of the 19th. You want to do 60 seconds on the race that you now have to run immediately after winning your last one?

Pat Ryan: Yes. Congratulations on win. Now you get to do it again, which we're excited to do. Yes, New York redistricting was certainly bumpy as I'm sure you've covered Brian on your program. The fact that although my family and I are not moving, we are going to be in a newly numbered district can be a little bit confusing but I'm really proud to be running and serving in a place where I was literally born and raised, where I graduated high school, where I graduated West Point which is now in the new 18th and where we're raising our family.

We live in Gardiner, which is a little town right outside of Newport. Look, the stakes in this race in November are actually even higher I believe than the special election that we just won. My opponent in this race has literally cheered on insurrectionists. He's taken campaign contributions from traders like Rudy Giuliani. He's refused to call out Proud Boys and Oathkeepers who have active chapters here in our community that are supporters of his campaign.

He stood by and watched kids get gunned down and maintain an A-plus rating from the NRA. He is [unintelligible 00:34:08] championed and cheered the robing being ripped away and literally thinks that doctors and healthcare providers helping victims of rape and incest should be criminalized. That is the nature of the insidious extremist threat in the Republican party and we have to take that on in November, we have to win. I'm confident that we can, but we need everybody's help and we need to raise awareness of the states.

Brian Lehrer: Well, if you win in November, we look forward to having you on many times as you serve a full term. As you can hear from our callers, we see ourselves as kind of a regional hub. We have callers from South Jersey to the North country in New York and to a bit of New England. You're right in the middle of all that and we look forward to talking to you again if you win.

Pat Ryan: Thanks so much, Brian, appreciate you having me.

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