Stuart Stevens: Republicans Are Desperate

Tim Miller (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show an old friend, former Republican media consultant. He worked on five presidential campaigns, including as chief strategist for Mitt Romney, senior advisor to Lincoln Project. His books include The Conspiracy to End America, and It Was All a Lie. And he also wrote a book about Ole Miss football. And so he's back to talk about that. My first question for you, Stuart, is, are you ready?

Stuart Stevens (0:38)

Yes, I'm ready. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (0:41)

I'm in my shirt as promised last time you were on.

Stuart Stevens (0:43)

This is probably historic first for The Bulwark to have two people in Ole Miss gear. As soon as we hang up, I'm going to be talking to Keith Carter and see if he can sponsor The Bulwark now. It's an official Ole Miss platform.

Tim Miller (0:56)

I'd love to come visit The Grove and this would be as good as time as any as a loser, so everybody could rub my nose in the dirt. It's time to go back, go see Square Books again.

I'm proud Larry's haven't been doxxed for a hot minute, so handy-andy maybe. But it was a hell of a football game and I had planned, what, three, four months ago now to bring you back during Ole Miss LSU week. We had Wright Thompson on last week. I do have a little favor for the audience. Love that guy. Dude, he's so great. That pod was so great. I've said this before, it's just worth repeating. The podcast, like this one right now, we're about to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome and how Trump is crashing in the polls and where we do Hopium for the midterms. The algorithm does the work for us on those podcasts.

People are going to see this out in the world. The Wright Thompson ones, the thoughtful, the literary ones. The algorithm doesn't know what to do with that. So if you enjoyed Wright Thompson, you have a friend in your life that thinks they would have liked that podcast, please send it to him. He was fucking hilarious on game day with his little voiceover, talking about how important the game was. So a loss is a loss, but it was great theater. I enjoyed myself.

Stuart Stevens (2:06)

Well, look, I think that, I've long thought Mississippi is sort of the Ireland of America, this green poor place that overvalues writing, fighting and drinking.

Thompson is in that mix, a guy like he could, it's wonderful how much he is respected amongst, at least, I think all writers, but Mississippians, he's not an unknown guy in Mississippi. This is a place for Willie Mars, a former writer, a famous writer from Yazoo City. When Willie died, he laid in state at the state capitol. So Mississippi does still know how to honor writers and it's great to see Wright continuing that tradition.

Tim Miller (2:48)

We'll have a little bit more Mississippi in a bit. I want to start with a bombshell report out of ProPublica this morning regarding Susan Collins. Senator Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatec, whose CEO, Martin Cowell, illegally funneled thousands of dollars to our campaign or necessarily to our super PAC through a fake nonprofit. The FBI was about to launch a probe, was I and Collins, maybe some other lawmakers. But then Trump gutted the unit that was in charge of corruption probes when he came in. The nonprofit, I love this, was called Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers, which has no relationship to Derrick Zulander Center for Kids Who Can't Read. Good.

But look, there's a lot of this. A lot of times this stuff is a little gray Stuart where it's like, you have a special interest that pays money to a PAC, and then they get treatment when you're in there, and this is the tale of all this time. In this case, though, it's pretty stark.

As a government contractor, you're not allowed to donate through the company to politicians. So, they went around it, created this fake non-profit with a ridiculous name, and then when they got caught, Clea Mitchell, who was part of the insurrection in Trump's effort to overturn our democracy, hatched a plan post-hoc that was like, hey, what if the Society for Young Women Scientists gives money to schools in Maine to make it seem real? The whole thing is pretty cut and dry. ProPublica did a great job with it. I don't know what your thoughts are.

Stuart Stevens (4:22)

I find that it's astounding that Clea Mitchell is still walking around free in this world, unindicted with the law license. In the famous Oval Office call when Trump called Secretary of State of Georgia, if you read the transcript, at a certain point, Trump wasn't making it clear enough, and Clea Mitchell, who was there, started telling him, this is what you need to say. This is what, you know, she is a force of anti-democracy evil. She is devoted her life now to changing how we vote in America, to curating the vote. It is the continuation of the Federalist Society after they received $1.3 billion.