Hello everyone. This is Politico's Nurdcast. I'm your host, Scott Bland.

Coming up this week we check in with some political White House reporters to see what's been going on at

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and in the White House's relationship with the rest of its administration.

And we're going to take a look at the special relationship between President Trump and a certain

and higher power.

Plus, Democrats can't seem to find the candidates they want to run for Senate in the last week or two.

Could this be a problem for them? We've got one of our congressional campaign reporters coming on

to explain. Just a heads up before we get going. We are taping this a little bit before noon eastern on Thursday, May 2nd, so it's all up to date as of then.

All right, I want to welcome in two of our White House reporters this week.

Nancy Cook, hi Nancy.

Hey, thanks for having me. And Andrew

Restusha, hi Andrew. Hey, how's it going? Good, good, good. Thank you so much for

coming in and back in the studio after a brief hiatus, fortunately, senior

politics editor Charlie Matessian.

Hi, Charlie.

Hey Scott, good to be back.

Welcome back.

All right, let's get started.

Here are our first data points, 5 and 0.

Five hours was how long Attorney General William Barr spent testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday taking a lot of heat from Democrats about discrepancies between the Mueller report and of in full. And then Zero is the amount of time he spent testifying to the House Judiciary

Committee today. He was scheduled to testify. He was a no-show argument over whether he would

be questioned by members of Congress or staff attorneys was at the center of it all.

...