601: Master of Her Domain… Name

Ira Glass

There's this political parable about Hillary Clinton that made the rounds during the primaries this year, a parable with many layers to it. One of our contributors, Jack Hitt, wrote about this recently for the New Republic.

Jack Hitt

Elizabeth Warren is the person who tells this story. So this goes all the way back to the late 90s when Bill Clinton was still in office.

Ira Glass

Hillary Clinton was First Lady. Elizabeth Warren wasn't a senator yet. She was a law professor at Harvard.

Jack Hitt

And she had written, I think, an op-ed piece about this one bankruptcy bill. And Warren tells the story of the First Lady making contact. And they sat down. And she said, it was just amazing talking to Hillary Clinton.

Ira Glass

This is Elizabeth Warren telling the story to Bill Moyers on television in 2004. One of the problems with this bill, she explained, is that if a man went bankrupt, he would have to pay off his credit card companies and his banks before he would pay off an ex-wife or child support and alimony. She explained this to Moyers.

Jack Hitt

And she got right to the heart of it, totally understood it, and went back and convinced Bill to veto this bankruptcy bill.

Ira Glass

Warren said Bill Clinton had been planning on signing the bill. She credits Hillary with turning him around.

Jack Hitt

And that's the Hillary that we all recognize, if you've read any of the magazine bios of her that go all the way back to college, the valedictorian, the A-plus student, the woman who does her homework, figures it out, and has the best understanding. But then, Warren tells a second part to the story.

Ira Glass

This part happens just a few months after the bill is vetoed. It's 2001, Clinton is no longer the First Lady.

Jack Hitt

So this time, she's a United States senator. She's been elected. A lot of her campaign money came from Wall Street, as Warren points out when she tells this story.

Jack Hitt

And of course, that's the Hillary that is often described as the opportunist, the woman who will do anything to keep power.

Ira Glass

The schemer.

Jack Hitt

Yeah, the captive of Wall Street.

Ira Glass

But then, there's yet another turn to the story. And that's in Hillary Clinton's version of the story. Hillary Clinton says, yes. She voted for the bill. But she did not do that to suck up to Wall Street. She says--

Jack Hitt

She had quietly lobbied to insert language that would protect the vulnerable populations that Elizabeth Warren had warned her about, like single moms.

Jack Hitt

And so, when you hear this version of the story, then you see, oh yes. Right. Well, this is the Hillary Clinton that many liberal commentators love to talk about, the really smart, sharp, the legislator, the one who understands that so many of these legal battles, these legislative battles, happen inside the parentheses of some footnote somewhere, a detail-oriented, shrewd--

Ira Glass

In this version of the story, Hillary gets to have her cake and eat it too. When she votes for the bill, it pleases Wall Street. When she adds the provision for divorced moms, it pleases her liberal base. Everybody's happy. But there is yet one last turn to the screw. In 2005, the bill comes up yet again in the Senate. It still has not become law. And this time, the protections that Clinton had fought for, for mothers and other vulnerable populations, those were not in the bill.

Jack Hitt

So there's no way out for her on this one. She has to declare her side, who she's really defending in Congress, Wall Street or these vulnerable populations that elect her to office.

Ira Glass

Mm-hm.

Jack Hitt

And what happens? Bill is in the hospital for something. And she goes to his bedside and claims that she can't be present for the vote in Congress. Essentially she goes AWOL from the decision and is not there to vote either way.

Ira Glass

She does issue a statement saying that she's against the bill. But she doesn't actually vote against the bill. It passes.

Jack Hitt

And this is the Hillary that drives a lot of people insane. Because this one seems even more Machiavellian, whatever it takes to save my skin.

Ira Glass

In his article, Jack had list the different Hillarys that we see in different stories about her. There's the A-student, the opportunist. There's the mastermind, the rat-fink, the pragmatist, the truth-twister.

Jack Hitt

Almost any story you hear about Hillary, you can kind of break down these various Hillarys in that story. We run across her in all of these variations all the time.

Ira Glass

I have to say, one of the things with Hillary is that she can seem like all of these Hillarys at once sometimes. And then, occasionally, you get a glimpse of a side of Hillary Clinton that is none of those, that doesn't fit any of the regular pictures we have of her. We have a story like that for you today. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Here's what we're going to do on today's program. We have this story about Hillary Clinton that, when I saw it, I feel like it gave me a picture of her that-- first of all, it comes from completely credible sources, FBI interviews, in fact. And it painted a very different picture from what we have all been hearing from both sides in this election.

And then, after that story, all of us here at our show all thought, OK, everybody is so tired of this election and so stressed out on the left and the right-- like, everyone is so freaked out. What's going to happen if their candidate loses? We thought, here at our show, let's just have something funny on the radio and on the internet. So we're going to have that too. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Serve or Be Served-- so Hillary Clinton's polling numbers took a dive this week, of course, after FBI Director James Comey said agents would be reviewing more of her e-mails. There are two basic stories out there about Hillary Clinton's e-mails and her decision to use a private server for her e-mails when she was Secretary of State. The Clinton version of what happened is that she made a mistake. There's nothing in those e-mails. This is her enemies making a lot of noise about nothing.

The Trump version of what happened is that she's a criminal and that she will be prosecuted, she will serve time over those e-mails and the way she's handled them. This was her using a private server to keep secrets from the American people. But I was really struck a few weeks ago reading this article on Politico. If you don't know Politico, it's a nonpartisan political news site and magazine.

And this article told a history of the e-mails that, for all the commotion about these e-mails over this past year, I had never heard this. What they did was simple. After the FBI released its summaries of the interviews that its investigators did with Hillary Clinton and State Department officials and intel experts and CIA experts and some of Clinton's closest aides, a political writer named Garrett Graff read through the 247 pages of summaries.

It's a public document. You can get a copy online yourself. But I think maybe only a handful of reporters have actually read through the entirety of it. And then, Garrett Graff put together an exhaustive and, frankly, very page-turney account of exactly what happened, according to what the FBI found.

That is, how Hillary Clinton and her aides ended up doing her e-mails this way. What were they thinking? How did this happen? How did she end up running her e-mail from a private server in the basement of her house, including e-mails with classified information on them? Garrett Graff talk to one of our producers, Sean Cole, about this. Here's Sean.

Sean Cole

Garrett Graff spent three days reading the interview summaries. He's been covering the FBI for almost a decade. And he's pored over a lot of documents like these. And his conclusion, after reading the 247 pages, is this. The way Hillary and her top aides dealt with her e-mails is indeed scandalous. It's just a totally different scandal than people thought.

Garrett Graff

I think a lot of us thought that this was done out of sophistication. That it was done out of this very advanced Machiavellian understanding of federal records laws and advanced knowledge of computer technology. But by the time the FBI got done with all of these interviews, it becomes really clear it was actually done out of technological ignorance.

Sean Cole

Garrett writes that the documents, quote, "depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried, inner circle of aides. Reading the FBI interviews," he writes," Clinton's team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover up."

So beginning at the beginning. When Hillary took over Secretary of State, she and her staff had to figure out how she would handle e-mail. Hillary had always checked her e-mail on a BlackBerry. And she requested a secure government-issued BlackBerry. But she was told she wouldn't be able to use her personal e-mail account on it. That wasn't allowed. And using government e-mail for personal stuff was discouraged.

Garrett Graff

And if you remember, one of the first things Hillary Clinton said when this scandal broke in 2015 was, well, I didn't want to carry two devices. And everyone in Washington started laughing at that. Because most officials, most people in Washington, carry two or three devices.

Sean Cole

Because there are strict prohibitions against using government phones or computers to do political campaigning. So multiple devices is normal.

Garrett Graff

But when we actually read through these documents, you can almost come away with a sense that that is actually why they did it, that Hillary seems to actually be a very persnickety technology user. She is not very comfortable with most technology, only liked to use a BlackBerry and, more specifically, only liked to use a specific type of increasingly older and more out-of-date BlackBerry.

She doesn't know how to use a desktop computer. She--

Sean Cole

Wait, wait, wait. Back up. Back up. She doesn't know how to use a desktop computer.

Garrett Graff

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, does not know how to use a desktop computer, according to multiple sources interviewed by the FBI.

Sean Cole

How is that possible?

Garrett Graff

The short answer is, I don't know. I mean, I can get not knowing how to play an X-Box or a virtual reality machine or something like that.

Sean Cole

Right.

Garrett Graff

But a desktop computer, this is literally the oldest piece of personal technology available to us today.

Sean Cole

I looked into this. It's actually the abacus. At the same time, says Garrett, you have to think about where the Clintons were at the advent of the everyday internet. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, you could count the number of websites in the dozens. Bill himself didn't really properly use the internet until 1998. They just didn't live regular lives and never would again.

When Hillary became Secretary of State, she asked one of her predecessors, Colin Powell, how he dealt with e-mail. He wrote to her, quote, "I didn't have a BlackBerry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line--" sounds ancient-- --"so I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without it going through the State Department's servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders."

Powell advised her not to let the rules get too much in the way of communicating. But he also told her to be careful about using e-mail in general, as anything you write can become a matter of public record. He said all of this in an e-mail. He signed it, Love, Colin.

Powell has also said he used a secure government computer for classified information. Anyway, his solution-- checking e-mail on a desktop computer-- wouldn't work for Hillary Clinton because, again, she didn't know how to operate one. So her staff embarked on a series of thrown-together work arounds. They kept buying her the antiquated type of BlackBerry she preferred, the Curve 8310 with the trackball. One staffer remembers having to buy one either on Amazon or eBay around 2013, after BlackBerry stopped making them.

To complicate matters further, her office at the State Department was in a secure area where no BlackBerrys or cell phones were allowed. The worry was that spies could remotely turn them into listening devices. So the Secretary of State would leave her BlackBerry with a guard on the way in. And then, when she needed to check an e-mail, she'd get up from her desk, go get her phone, and wander around the eighth floor balcony.

One more quick word about Colin Powell. He sometimes used a personal e-mail address to do State business. He used his AOL account.

Garrett Graff

And his argument, at the time, was a personal e-mail address is basically like a home telephone line. You can make personal calls on it. And you can make business calls on it.

Sean Cole

So the Secretary of State using a private e-mail account wasn't anything new. It was frowned upon by the State Department, but it wasn't forbidden. And Garrett says, reading through the FBI files, using personal e-mail for government business was also rampant.

Garrett Graff

State Department workers regularly, across the board, across all levels of the organization, regularly relied on personal e-mail in order to be able to conduct the business that the State Department needed to do, because they were traveling or because it was night time or it was a weekend or they were overseas away from an embassy.

Sean Cole

Or for a much simpler and much more important reason-- the State Department computer network didn't work very well.

Garrett Graff

Part of what we learn in these FBI files is that that system actually wasn't compatible with the Wi-Fi that the Air Force uses--

Sean Cole

Oh my god.

Garrett Graff

--on the planes that the Secretary of State travels on. So her staff would sometimes use private e-mails just when they were sitting on the plane with Hillary Clinton. People didn't think that the printer function worked very well within the State Department's regular e-mail system. So in order to print documents, they would often just forward documents to their personal Gmail or Hotmail, because it was easier to print out of that than it was to print out of the State Department e-mail system.

Sean Cole

This is one of the big, if accidental, revelations in this investigation-- just how crappy and backwards the State Department's computer system was. It's shocking for anyone who's ever worked in a normal business.

Garrett Graff

Moxt Americans would be absolutely horrified at the state of government technology writ large. But the State Department seems to be a particularly antiquated user of technology. When Colin Powell showed up at the State Department in 2001, he was given, in his office, a laptop that still relied on a 56K modem.

Sean Cole

If you're under 25, that was a way to dial into the internet over a phone line. And a phone line that used to-- it doesn't matter.

Garrett Graff

And Colin Powell made a really big effort to try to invest in actually putting computers on people's desks across the State Department, which did not exist in 2001.

Sean Cole

People didn't have computers on their desks in the State Department in 2001?

Garrett Graff

The average State Department employee at headquarters in Washington, DC in 2001 did not have a desktop computer.

Sean Cole

Or any kind of computer. No laptop. Nothing.

Garrett Graff

And Colin Powell was indeed shocked by that. So he bought 44,000 new computers. And when he would travel the world as Secretary of State, he would always sit down in embassies when he was visiting. He would find a computer, sit down, and check his own e-mail, in part as a test to see how well the organization and the embassies overseas were actually using the computers that he was giving them.

The shame of almost all of government is that government is, in many cases, the least sophisticated technology user in American society. You see this in our nuclear missile systems, where our nuclear ICBMs in their missile silos still rely on, like, floppy disks, which the average person in America hasn't used since they played Oregon Trail in elementary school.

[LAUGHTER]

Sean Cole

So Hillary's staff decided that it would be easiest for her to use her personal e-mail account for everything, the e-mail that was governed by her own private server.

Garrett Graff

It really just doesn't seem like anyone thought that deeply about this. Just, no one was really paying attention to the big picture. Collectively, Hillary Clinton's inner circle and the State Department leadership stumbled into this set up that very few people seem to have actually given any thought to the political implications of it.

Sean Cole

Her aide, Huma Abedin, said she didn't recall any conversations about whether this was permissible. And as far as the rules for preserving e-mails under the federal laws, both Hillary and Huma told the FBI they figured any e-mails sent to an official State Department address by Hillary Clinton would be captured and preserved. They were later told, that's not how are you supposed to do it.

The main accusation against Hillary, of course, is that she set up a private server to avoid scrutiny and cover her tracks. But what the FBI investigation found was that her aides were mostly uninterested in how or where her e-mails would be preserved. Huma Abedin, who herself had an account powered by the server, told the FBI she didn't know the server existed until after Hillary left the State Department.

Cheryl Mills, who was Hillary's chief of staff at the State Department, says she wasn't even sure she knew what a server was at that point. Which brings us to those two words you hear all the time in the coverage of E-mail-Gate-- private server. That sounds shady, right? The Clintons have a private e-mail server in their basement?

Except what that means is that they had a computer that runs their e-mails, sends and receives and stores them. Lots of small businesses have an e-mail server. This American Life has one in a closet about 15 feet from where I'm sitting. And after Bill Clinton left the White House, he basically had a small office with a staff who needed e-mail accounts. So he had an e-mail server, an old Apple machine.

When you hear in the news that a server was installed in their basement just for Hillary, that's not true. A server was installed, but it was just an upgrade to the gear Bill Clinton already had for his staff. Less than a year into Hillary's tenure at the State Department, a couple of IT folks started to catch on that she was using a personal e-mail account. And there was some generalized brow-furrowing about making sure her staff was complying with the Federal Records Act, which requires all official communications be preserved.

And it was after Hillary left office in 2013 that the trouble really started. Some Russian and Ukrainian hackers found the server and tried to break into it. They didn't succeed. But Hillary's aides were spooked. And they scrambled to secure her e-mail. They decided to change her e-mail address. But then, they worried that they'd lose all the existing messages.

It had happened in the past. When Hillary was a senator, she used an AT&T e-mail account. And AT&T didn't archive old e-mails. So whenever she got a new BlackBerry, she'd lose everything. So this time, again, it's 2013. It's up to her staff to save the e-mails, not a very complicated process.

But rather than give it to an IT guy, an aide named Monica Hanley grabbed a laptop from Bill Clinton's Harlem office, brought it back to her apartment. And another staffer walked her through the steps of backing up the e-mails over the phone. She backed them up to a thumb drive too. After which, she lost the thumb drive.

Then the server was moved out of Hillary Clinton's basement to a tech management company in New Jersey, called Platte River Networks, or PRN, as the guy who originally installed it and ran it wasn't working for Clinton anymore. Monica Hanley then tried to upload all of the e-mails she had transferred onto the laptop-- five years worth-- to the new PRN server, remotely from afar. She tried this a couple of times. But it kept not working.

Garrett Graff

So she ends up just FedEx-ing the whole MacBook to one of the IT staff. And then--

Sean Cole

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There are e-mails on a laptop that potentially have State secrets within them that are being FedExed across the country?

Garrett Graff

Yes. Although I don't think it seems clear that anyone involved actually thought that there were classified information inside of these e-mails.

Sean Cole

But there was. At the end of 2014, the State Department made a formal request to former Secretary Clinton to hand over all of her work-related e-mails. The House Committee investigating the attack in Benghazi wanted to see them. Also, the State Department just didn't have any record of her communications while in office. Hillary and her staff handed over 30,000 e-mails, printed out, which amounted to 55,000 pages, 12 bankers boxes full of messages.

Her legal team determined which ones were work-related by using search terms, like .gov and names of Hillary's staffers. When they were done, they asked Hillary, do you want us to keep the personal e-mails? She replied, I have no use for them anymore. So they got rid of them.

And this is where the narrative in the FBI interviews becomes like many other stories about Hillary Clinton, in that how you understand it depends on what you think of her. If you believe she's a sneaking, corner-cutting, conniver who does whatever she wants, this part of the story will totally convince you of that. After all, she destroys emails. But if you think she basically means well and is the focus of a seemingly endless witch hunt to pick apart every single thing she does, what she said about this in a press conference might seem entirely reasonable to you. Quote, No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.

Hillary Clinton's team ended up deleting 33,000 messages. You've probably heard this part. Then, the FBI resurrected about half of the deleted e-mails and discovered some of them were related to her time at the State Department. But FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress that the FBI, quote, "didn't find any evidence of evil intent and intent to obstruct justice."

In the e-mails that weren't deleted, there were 52 e-mail chains that contain information that was classified to some degree at the time there were sent. Eight of those e-mail chains contain information that was classified as Top Secret. By definition, we don't know what that information is or how damaging it might be to national security. But Garrett Graff says, a lot of times with our government, it's hard to pin down what the term "classified" even means.

Garrett Graff

The average American, when they hear "classified information," thinks that that's a black-and-white term.

Sean Cole

Right.

Garrett Graff

That's binary. It is either classified, or it is not.

Sean Cole

Right.

Garrett Graff

And the government classification system is actually much messier than that. Different corners of the government may consider different things classified. Information on one day might be unclassified but might be classified on a later day, or vice versa.

Sean Cole

Like, retroactively classified, basically.

Garrett Graff

Yeah, what in the business is called "up-classified."

Sean Cole

For instance, if something unclassified went to the National Security Council, someone there could decide to classify it. And that designation couldn't be changed back by someone downstream. And then, some information was classified, even though it's common knowledge. Under government secrecy law, Hillary and her top aides, discussing a New York Times article about the drone program-- that's considered a classified correspondence, because it's tacit admission that the drone program exists.

Which everybody knows. Because it was in the New York Times.

Garrett Graff

There's this one e-mail-- probably the most famous e-mail of all of them-- involving this condolence call to the East African nation of Malawi, where the president had just died. And the Vice President had taken over. And Hillary Clinton was supposed to call.

And it's this very innocuous e-mail. The line says, the purpose of call-- express condolences. And Hillary Clinton looks at that and says, I can't believe that that was actually classified. Like, that doesn't really make any sense to me.

Sean Cole

I've seen this e-mail. And it is confusing. It says "unclassified" at the top and a case number. And then, it says "classified" lower down. The innocuous part is marked with a C in parentheses, which means Confidential, the lowest of the three levels of classification the government uses. And then at the bottom, it says "unclassified" again.

Hillary Clinton has said she didn't know that the c in parentheses meant the paragraph was classified. Again, what you make of that depends on how you see her. Either she's lying, or she just didnt know something basic about classified materials.

On Sunday, James Comey wrote to Congress saying the FBI had finished going through a whole slew of newly discovered emails. They were on a laptop that was confiscated in the investigation of Huma Abedin's husband, Anthony Wiener. Comey said nothing in the emails changed the conclusion that the FBI came to in July. That there was no criminal intent. But that Secretary Clinton and her colleagues, quote, were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

I should mention something Garrett Graff told me a few times. He's a reporter, he said. And somewhere in the darker part of his heart, he always kind of wants to uncover some sort of wrongdoing, some juicy conspiracy. And he's almost disappointed when he doesn't. But the times that he doesn't, those turn out to be all of the times.

Garrett Graff

Well, this scandal underscores to me so much of what I have experienced in covering politics and national security for a decade. Which is, whenever you hear a government conspiracy theory, the almost universal truth is that the explanation is more likely either bureaucratic bungling or outright incompetence.

Sean Cole

In a sense, this would be the easiest and most candid way Hillary Clinton could explain herself. Please forgive me. I and my staff, we just weren't that focused on my e-mails. We didn't care very much about that. We had other things to think about. Yeah, I guess it's not surprising she doesn't explain it that way.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our program.

[MUSIC -- "CHANGE THE SUBJECT" BY THE DAN COLLINS BAND]

Ira Glass

Knowing What We Know-- so if you're following the news at all, you know that Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton's top aides, is married to former congressman Anthony Weiner who just this week reportedly checked himself into a sex addiction clinic. Because after two public apologies when he was caught sending pictures of his crotch to random women online, he then went on to send a crotch shot to a 15-year-old girl and allegedly had a whole online sexual relationship with that girl.

That triggered investigation. And as you probably know, his laptop and phone were seized. And then, while authorities were looking on his computer, they found e-mails between Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, and Hillary Clinton. And those e-mails, of course, are what led the FBI to investigate another round of Clinton e-mails. And that, of course, is what led to the dramatic drop in Clinton's poll numbers and, incidentally, to Donald Trump saying, thank you, Huma. Good job, Huma.

If there's one person in the world who might understand what it's like for Huma Abedin to be a public figure and a woman repeatedly paying a public price for her husband's extramarital sex life-- she's in luck-- the one person in the world who might understand this best is probably her boss, Hillary Clinton. What is it like when they talk about this?

OK, obviously, they're not going to do it over e-mail. This requires face-to-face conversation. This then is the conversation that we imagine they had last Friday. That's the day the news broke that Weiner's laptop-- because of his lap-- would change the focus and direction of the presidential election. Or should I say the presidential-- never mind. This, then, is the first conversation they have with that news hanging between them.

Huma is the first one to speak.

Ira Glass

Actresses Tami Sagher and Cady Huffman playing the parts of Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton. [MUSIC -- "ONLY YOU" BY YAZ]

More coming up. Cops try to catch a squirrel in an attic and other stuff that has no national importance at all that will not affect the fate of the nation in any way, stuff we have dug up from our archives to provide a break from current events, as we head into these last days before this election. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

And with that in mind, we have arrived at Act Three of our show. Of Mice and Men. This story is from a live show that we did on stage in New York. It's from comedian Mike Birbiglia.

Ira Glass

Mike Birbiglia--

Ira Glass

His movie Don't Think Twice is available for pre-order on iTunes. It comes out there in a week.

[MUSIC -- "MICE!" FROM 3HREE, THE NEW MUSICAL]

Ira Glass

Squirrel Cop-- so we close our program today with this story from a police officer in a suburban community on the East Coast.

Ira Glass

When that interview first ran on our program a long time ago, our interviewee, who asked not to be named on the radio, has now been on the force for 31 years.

[MUSIC -- "ELECTION DAY" BY NOBLE SISSLE & EUBIE BLSAKE]

Well, our staff-- Elna Baker, Elise Bergerson, Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivas, Sean Cole, Emily Condon, Whitney Dangerfield, Neil Drumming, Karen Duffin, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Stephanie Foo, Kimberly Henderson, Chana Joffe-Walt, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Julie Whitaker.

Research help today from Christopher Swatela, Benjamin Fallon, and Michelle Harris. Music help from Damian Gray.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

And just a little program note. We have all kinds of things on our website for the election, including daily election animated cartoons by Chris Ware and John Kuramoto. We've been posting a new one every day on our site. We're going to keep it going through the week of the election.

Also on our website, videos-- yes, videos-- of the songs that Leslie Odom, Jr., Neil Patrick Harris, and John Ellison Conlee did for our show, singing as, respectively, President Obama, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and RNC Chair Reince Priebus. The videos are so wonderful if you haven't seen them, I have to say, especially the Paul Ryan, Neil Patrick Harris.

Also on our website-- I'm not done yet-- in response to listener demand on Twitter, true listener demand, we are also now offering MP3 downloads free of the three election songs. So OK, all of that-- the cartoons, the music videos, the MP3s-- at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Easy to remember name.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thank you, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he takes our show so personally, so, so personally. He has told me, he feels like it's me and the other contributors speaking directly to him, like we were there in the room.

And at the end of every episode, he turns to his radio. And he says--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC -- "SQUIRREL" BY THE WANT]