Today's Playbook Audio Briefing is presented by Facebook.

Good Thursday morning. I'm Anna Palmer and welcome to your Politico Playbook Audio Briefing.

And I'm Jake Sherman. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had this to say Wednesday evening to reporters.

I feel optimistic that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but how long that tunnel is remains to be seen.

Pelosi was talking about COVID relief

talks between herself, Chuck Schumer, Mark Meadows, and Stephen Mnuchin. But she may as well

been talking about 2020 broadly. By the way, talks are stalled and zero progress was made Wednesday.

It seems unlikely a deal in principle or in theory will be reached by Friday. Meadows put it this way.

There are no top line numbers that have been agreed to. We continue to be trillions of dollars

apart. All right, now that we got that out of the way. Here are a few details from the negotiating

meeting Wednesday. As has been said publicly, the meeting between Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader

Chuck Schumer,

White House, Mark Meadows, and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, and Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy,

was quite heated. Schumer repeatedly peppered DeJoy with questions, like, does he agree with the president that the USPS is not prepared to handle election mail?

What's the Postal Services plan for the election?

Why, in the middle of the pandemic, did they decide to make operational changes to the USPS?

The idea of pension reform in this bill has taken a hit.

Meadows suggested talks would need to include key senators like Chuck Grasssey of

Iowa and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, which complicates the process negotiators believe.

Republicans offered to prepare a regulatory fix to pass through entities impacted by salt caps

to sweeten their 200 billion or 150 billion, depending on who you're talking to, offer.

Pelosi said that's more like salt in the wound.

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