Which Democrats could be on the presidential ballot in 2028?
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram, and senior political 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. |
| 0:06.5 | I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. |
| 0:08.3 | I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. |
| 0:10.1 | And I'm Tamara Keith, senior political correspondent. |
| 0:13.2 | And welcome to our weekly news roundup. |
| 0:15.4 | We're going to start the show off today at the Department of Justice, |
| 0:18.6 | where there are reports of a new investigation into the writer E. Jean Carroll. |
| 0:22.9 | Ryan, for those of us who don't remember, who is E. Jean Carroll? |
| 0:27.2 | So she is a writer, a journalist, advice columnist, author, wore many hats in the journalistic realm. |
| 0:34.8 | But she's probably best known in the past several years for suing Donald |
| 0:41.8 | Trump twice. These are civil lawsuits. She accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan |
| 0:48.0 | department store in the mid-1990s. Trump denied those allegations, but after she made them, |
| 0:53.0 | he also lashed out at her, called her a lot of names. |
| 0:55.6 | She then sued him for defamation as well. |
| 0:58.7 | Ultimately, she won both of those lawsuits. |
| 1:01.4 | She was awarded combined judgments of nearly $90 million against Trump. |
| 1:07.1 | Trump is still fighting these, still challenging them, still litigating them. |
| 1:10.4 | So at this point, Carol still has not seen a dime of that money. Wow. So what is this |
| 1:15.6 | investigation about, though? So this gets a little complicated, but bear with me here. The investigation is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of Illinois. So in Chicago, it centers around a deposition that Carol gave in connection with one of those two lawsuits that I mentioned. |
| 1:32.0 | And in that deposition, Carol said, no outside folks were helping pay her legal bills. It later came out that a nonprofit backed by a big ticket Democratic donor, Reid Hoffman, actually was helping pay |
| 1:46.2 | some of those bills. Trump and his legal team accused Carol of lying about this. Now, as for the |
| 1:52.6 | investigation sources tell me that it is focused right now on Hoffman's nonprofit, the funding |
... |
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