How young CPAC-goers feel about the war in Iran
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, political reporter Elena Moore, and senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And it's Friday. So let's do a look back on this week, starting with the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller. He died at the age of 81. And Carrie, I think it's |
| 0:21.7 | easy to focus just on Mueller's time as special counsel. We'll get to that in just a bit. But I want to |
| 0:28.1 | start with his much longer career in law enforcement. Tell us about that. Yeah, he really was a |
| 0:32.9 | towering figure. He had been a prosecutor for many years in U.S. attorney's offices around the country. |
| 0:38.5 | He ran the criminal division at the Justice Department. And then he was sworn in to leave the FBI |
| 0:43.4 | just a week before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. And that really required him |
| 0:50.1 | to turn the FBI into something of an intelligence gathering agency. |
| 0:55.9 | His mandate from President George W. Bush was to make sure nothing like that ever happened again |
| 1:00.7 | and to try to get the FBI to gather intelligence, connect the dots, to prevent those kinds of terror plots from taking hold in the U.S. |
| 1:10.0 | And he actually was the longest serving FBI |
| 1:13.1 | director since J. Edgar Hoover. He stayed through the rest of the W. Bush term. And then when |
| 1:19.1 | President Obama arrived, he asked Mueller to stay on another two years. That required Congress to act. |
| 1:25.6 | The Senate unanimously confirmed him 100 to nothing for two more years in that job. And then he thought he would go into private practice and maybe teach a little. Things didn't quite work out that way. |
| 1:37.5 | Right. So getting into the more present time with Mueller, he became prominent during Trump's first term because he was appointed special |
| 1:45.4 | counsel to investigate the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Tam, |
| 1:52.0 | you were covering the White House at that point. Walk us through that moment in time because it |
| 1:56.6 | really was a crazy political couple months. Oh, it was not just a couple months. It was a, |
| 2:02.7 | it was a crazy political several years. And how this all happened is Attorney General Jeff |
| 2:10.7 | Sessions had been one of President Trump's first supporters. I think he was the first senator |
| 2:16.5 | to endorse candidate Trump in that |
| 2:19.0 | campaign. Then he becomes attorney general. And in March of 2017, he recused himself from the |
| 2:27.4 | Russia investigation because he was part of the president's campaign. And this investigation was all about the president's campaign |
... |
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