Today's Playbook Audio Brief is brought to you by United Health Group.

Good Friday morning. I'm Jake Sherman and welcome to your political playbook audio briefing.

And I'm Anna Palmer. We just got a really good lesson about the fraught nature of COVID relief negotiations and the politics that both parties are confronting at the end of this year.

On Thursday morning, Senate Minority Leader

Chuck Schumer was in upstate New York, and he said this, that Republicans had finally agreed

to COVID-relief negotiations, and they would meet later that day. He positioned this as a

breakthrough. Democratic aides throughout the Capitol echoed the message that it was indeed true, representatives to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Schumer, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were meeting to discuss government funding and coronavirus relief.

Well, this was news to Republicans, who immediately said it was BS. The meeting was simply about the end of the year government

funding bill, which is due for renewal on December 11th. Nonetheless, the market popped on the news

after the meeting. Democrats put it this way. Staff of the Four Corners spoke today at 2 p.m.

In the meeting, they discussed COVID relief and omnibus, which is the government funding bill.

Democrats look forward to continuing those talks. Republicans said bluntly no, it is the government funding bill. Democrats look forward to continuing those talks.

Republicans said bluntly no, it was a government funding talk.

But here's what actually happened.

The two sides did, in fact, discuss the expiration of COVID relief related items like

pandemic unemployment insurance, student loan forbearance and the Paycheck Protection Program,

but they did not talk about a new COVID relief deal.

It's entirely possible that some of these programs get renewed in or alongside a government funding bill.

So it all depends on how you define COVID relief talks.

They did talk about renewing expired measures, but it was a mostly pretty pedestrian meeting about government funding. That's about it.

The Wall Street Journal has the latest on the pressure cooker that is the Treasury versus the Fed.

As Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin declined to extend federal emergency lending programs into the

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