Transcript: Bob Woodward and Robert Costa on "Face the Nation," March 27, 2022
The following is a transcript of an interview with Bob Woodward, associate editor of The Washington Post, and Robert Costa, CBS News' chief election and campaign correspondent, that aired Sunday, March 27, 2022, on "Face the Nation."
JOHN DICKERSON: Welcome back to FACE THE NATION. We are joined now by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and CBS chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa. These are the reporters responsible for that scoop about Clarence Thomas' his wife's efforts to overturn the 2020 elections. Good morning to both of you.
CBS NEWS CHIEF ELECTION AND CAMPAIGN CORRESPONDENT ROBERT COSTA: Good morning.
JOHN DICKERSON: Glad to have you here. Bob Woodward, I'll start with you. Congressman Kinzinger was not forthcoming. He barely admitted that these exist. Why are these texts so important?
WASHINGTON POST ASSOCIATE EDITOR BOB WOODWARD: Well, because they- they come after the election is over. And the general rule in things like the Constitution and the law say there's going to be one thing that happens after the election is over, and that is the certification before Congress when the vice president, the president of the Senate presides. And so this is- I'm sorry to go back to this. We were talking earlier about Watergate, but Watergate was about tampering with the electoral process at the front. Nixon and his underlings mounted a massive sabotage and espionage campaign against a Democrat. But this is after the election and people who believe in the Constitution and the law would say, okay, it's over, you can go to court. But you read- when Robert and I were reading these texts at the beginning, it was almost unbelievable that you would have somebody in Ginni Thomas's position say, quote, others saying- in war, you know, there is no rule, there are no rules, that this is warfare. Well, it shouldn't be.
JOHN DICKERSON: And Bob Costa this brings in another branch of government into this, tangentially. I mean, she's married to a Supreme Court justice. So that's part of- that's- that's the other element of this as well.
COSTA: What Bob Woodward and I have found is this campaign spearheaded by then President Trump that played out in the post-election period across all three branches of government in at least tangential ways. You had Congress working with President Trump to try to block the certification of President- that President-elect Biden at the time. You had the president pressuring state lawmakers. You had the spouse of a Supreme Court justice communicating with the White House chief of staff. And you had the executive branch doing everything possible to have a legal challenge that would maybe go all the way, as Trump said, to the Supreme Court. This was Trump pulling every lever of power. And one of those levers it appears to be, was his own chief of staff at least communicating on legal strategy with the spouse of a justice.
JOHN DICKERSON: Want to stay on the Supreme Court issue with you, Bob. One of your books is about the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts is very concerned about judicial independence. He wrote at the end of last year in his letter from the Chief Justice, 'the judiciary's power to manage its internal affairs insulates the courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust.' The idea that if the court is seen as political, its rulings won't have the weight in American life that it should.
WOODWARD: Well, he really has grounds for being worried. Now, Justice Amy Coney Barrett six months ago went to the McConnell Center in Kentucky, which is the center Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans, set up and she made a remarkable speech. She said, I want to prove to you that we are not a bunch of partisan hacks in the Supreme Court. And she said justices, all justices must be hyper-vigilant to make sure they're not letting personal biases creep into their decision since justices and judges are people, too. So she made it very clear that this hyper-vigilance should be the condition in which justices operate. We now have a situation where the wife of a justice has gone on a crusade and has said 'this is warfare,' 'Do not concede.' The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, himself said this fight is good, good versus evil.
JOHN DICKERSON: Yeah. And you have an instance where the Supreme Court justice was overseeing cases related to January 6th and may again and didn't and didn't recuse himself. Bob Costa, I want to get your sense of these texts. Do they give us a flavor for the kinds of things the committee has? What does this tell us about the work of the January 6 committee in terms of putting together this picture of what President Trump was doing and what those acting in his name were trying to do to overturn the election.
COSTA: John, your interview with Congressman Kinzinger referenced how they have Mark Meadows' text messages to a point, and they are frustrated that for at least the Thomas exchanges, based on our reporting, they do end in late November. And where are the text messages, if any, from December at or around January 6? But at the same time, it's important to note that based on our reporting that the Meadows text messages do provide, to a point, a road map of sorts of some of the things that were being done by the White House chief of staff, then President Trump, during this post-election period. They've also done hundreds of interviews. They have thousands of pages of documents from different people who are cooperating with the committee, but they still feel in many ways they do not have enough. Steve Bannon has refused to cooperate. Mark Meadows has now refused to cooperate. So the question facing- that- Congressman Kinzinger and others is where's the John Dean who's going to put the hand in the air and start outlining all of these different facets?
JOHN DICKERSON: You think there's any John Dean around, Bob?
WOODWARD: There are always surprises as we find in this. And remember, the January 6 committee in a filing in California has said they have a good faith conclusion that Trump and people around him engaged in a full-fledged criminal conspiracy to overturn the election. They rule this is criminal and if you go back 100 years to the Supreme Court, it was Chief Justice Taft, of all people, saying this, we're not going to let people meddle with things like the certification on January 6, which is in the law. So, much is hinging on the committee's effort. I think Robert and I found they're- they're really working hard. They're talking to people, that there is an aggressiveness and a sense of expanding the universe of likely witnesses.
COSTA: The real test is going to be will they ask Ginni Thomas to appear first voluntarily? If they don't ask her to appear voluntarily, are they going to the full extent they can to find the truth? Or will they issue a subpoena? The challenge is here is like any investigation, things go in different directions. Will you pursue all leads or not?
JOHN DICKERSON: And Ginni Thomas not just about what she may have said, but what she was on the listening end of. I mean she has material that she can provide about what Mark Meadows was saying and others she was talking to.
COSTA: We just don't have the full picture at this point about her relationship with Justice Thomas and his knowledge of her exchanges with the chief of staff.
JOHN DICKERSON: Well, we have a little bit more of the picture because of the two of you. So thanks so much to both of you for being here and we'll be back in a moment.