Christina Phillips, Rebecca Laveoy.

You know the expression when the cats away, the mice will play?

Of course I do. I have two cats.

I guess you can say this podcast kind of has cats too and they're named Nick and Hannah. I think Nick and

Hannah. I think Nick would resent being called a cat but I mean he's more like a puppy

but Nick and Hannah they are not here this week so I'm'm Rebecca Lefoy, and I'm Christina Phillips.

And this is a special edition of Civics 101, where we, the executive and senior producers

of the show normally behind the scenes, are taking over the mics. Christina, what exactly are we doing here today?

Well, this is a little bit of a format breaker.

As you know, we have a newsletter.

Extra credit.

It comes out every other week.

Yes, and that newsletter is usually a follow-up or a supplement

to an episode we've released, but this edition of Civics 101,

we've decided to flip that.

That's right, we're making an episode of the podcast to follow up on some newsletter

business.

So I'm not going to call this a bonus episode per se, but an extra credit episode.

Later in the show we'll be following up on a newsletter you wrote as a sort of follow-up to a recent episode we dropped on presidential

pardons that's sort of what your newsletter was about because it was about

Donald Trump's current trial so we're going to be talking about all of that. Right and

Trump is involved in a lot of court cases and they're all pretty confusing.

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