Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode,
Speaker 1: I want to let you know that you can binge
Speaker 1: the entire season of Fiasco Bush v goor right now
Speaker 1: ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
Speaker 1: for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple podcast showpage, or
Speaker 1: visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode
Speaker 1: previously on Fiasco. Many in this nation are getting anxious.
Speaker 2: There are battles going on in county offices all over
Speaker 2: the state.
Speaker 3: Republican demonstrators storm the hallways.
Speaker 1: They were pounding on the glass, and I mean people
Speaker 1: were really fired up.
Speaker 4: There would be no more counting of votes in Miami.
Speaker 5: Gore made a conscious decision that he would fight in
Speaker 5: the courts, but not on the streets.
Speaker 6: Let's turned out a Palm Beach County where the canvassing
Speaker 6: board is trying to be the deadline of five pm today.
Speaker 7: The Secretary of State has apparently decided to shut us
Speaker 7: down with approximately two hours left to go.
Speaker 1: Hi hereby declare Governor George W.
Speaker 8: Bush the winner of Florida's twenty five electoral vez what.
Speaker 9: By any reasonable standard, is an incomplete and inaccurate count.
Speaker 1: When Secretary of State Catherine Harris certified the results of
Speaker 1: the Florida election for George W. Bush. The Texas governor,
Speaker 1: took the opportunity to affirm the inevitability of his presidency.
Speaker 10: Secretary Cheney and I are honored and humbled to have
Speaker 10: won the state of Florida, which gives us the needed
Speaker 10: electoral votes to win the election.
Speaker 1: It was a strategy that Bush and his team have
Speaker 1: been using since the recount started. Whenever possible, they would
Speaker 1: try to make it seem like Bush was already president elect.
Speaker 1: They would leak the names of cabinet members he was
Speaker 1: recruiting in Texas.
Speaker 11: Today, Governor Bush had a conspicuous meeting with General Cole
Speaker 11: and Powell have.
Speaker 1: Him give speeches and settings that evoked the White House.
Speaker 12: I understand there are still votes to be counted, but
Speaker 12: I'm in the process of planning in a responsible way
Speaker 12: a potential administration.
Speaker 1: And they would insist over and over that he had
Speaker 1: already won Florida, not once, but twice. After the certification ceremony,
Speaker 1: there was an extra element of posturing to Bush's rhetoric,
Speaker 1: because even though the election in Florida was now technically over,
Speaker 1: Bush knew full well that the Gore campaign was not
Speaker 1: giving up.
Speaker 10: The Vice President's lawyers have indicated he will challenge the
Speaker 10: certified election results. I respectfully ask him to reconsider.
Speaker 1: Gore and his lawyers had just one move left. They
Speaker 1: were going to formally contest the outcome of the election,
Speaker 1: and they would do so by filing a so called
Speaker 1: contest lawsuit, naming the Bush campaign and the Florida Secretary
Speaker 1: of State as defendants.
Speaker 13: Obviously, the great sensitivity in the Gore campaign now to
Speaker 13: make the case to the American people that know this
Speaker 13: is not over.
Speaker 1: The Gore team had fought desperately to avoid the situation
Speaker 1: they now found themselves in. If only they could have
Speaker 1: put more points on the board before Florida's vote count
Speaker 1: was certified, it could have been Bush trying to overturn
Speaker 1: the outcome of the election. Instead, Gore was now officially
Speaker 1: a sore loserman trying to claw his way back from
Speaker 1: the dead, and he was running out of time.
Speaker 9: As Florida's ticking clock becomes a second adversary in the
Speaker 9: desperate search for votes.
Speaker 14: They need decisions, they need them yesterday. They need counts,
Speaker 14: they need the counts right away.
Speaker 2: We've gone from protest certification last night, and now contest.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an uphill battle. Not impossible, but
Speaker 1: I think it's very difficult Roe to hoe. The Gore
Speaker 1: team's mission was to convince a judge that the election
Speaker 1: results did not accurately reflect the will of Florida voters.
Speaker 1: Step one was to figure out what happened before, during,
Speaker 1: and after election day that cast doubt on the legitimacy
Speaker 1: of the outcome.
Speaker 15: The big question as we approached the contest phase was
Speaker 15: what should we be contested.
Speaker 1: This is Jeremy Bash in two thousand. He was a
Speaker 1: twenty nine year old doing policy work for the Gore
Speaker 1: campaign when the recount started. His law degree earned him
Speaker 1: a junior spot on the legal team in Tallahassee. I
Speaker 1: had never practiced law a day in my life. I
Speaker 1: had served as a law clerk for a federal judge.
Speaker 15: But on election night they said, anybody who's a lawyer,
Speaker 15: if you were working in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Gore
Speaker 15: campaign headquarters, you were told to go home and pack
Speaker 15: for three days and come back and end up having
Speaker 15: to last thirty six days for the full recount.
Speaker 1: Bash had been in Florida for about three weeks when
Speaker 1: Bush's victory was certified and the contest phase of the
Speaker 1: election began. Basher remembers listening in as the campaign's top
Speaker 1: lawyer's brief Gores and his political advisors on what could
Speaker 1: happen next.
Speaker 15: The legal team presented to the campaign leadership a variety
Speaker 15: of options, and in that meeting we laid out all
Speaker 15: the various ways we had suspected that either Democrats' effort
Speaker 15: to vote had been denied or Republicans engaged in some
Speaker 15: quote unquote dirty tricks to prevent Democrats from voting.
Speaker 1: Some members of the Gore team felt they should include
Speaker 1: as many grievances as possible in their complaint. They favored
Speaker 1: a two pronged approach, fighting to count likely Gore votes
Speaker 1: that had been unfairly thrown out, while also fighting to
Speaker 1: throw out likely Bush votes that had been unfairly counted.
Speaker 1: In this maximalist version of the contest lawsuit, the Gore
Speaker 1: lawyers would object to the counting of military ballots that
Speaker 1: lacked proper postmarks and signatures. These were the overseas absente
Speaker 1: ballots you heard about in our previous episode. They would
Speaker 1: also bring up a controversy involving thousands of absente ballot
Speaker 1: applications that had come in without voter ID numbers. Republican
Speaker 1: officials had quote unquote fixed the applications by writing in
Speaker 1: those ID numbers by hand after they were received, and
Speaker 1: the resulting ballots have been counted. Anyway, not everyone on
Speaker 1: the Gore team wanted to go into the contest guns blazing.
Speaker 1: Here again is Jeremy Bash.
Speaker 15: My view was that if we were going to take
Speaker 15: this thing to court, if we were going to file
Speaker 15: the first contest of a presidential election in US history,
Speaker 15: it should be on the strongest, narrowest, most ironclad grounds
Speaker 15: that we could stand on. We didn't want the voters
Speaker 15: to think that we were throwing everything against the wall
Speaker 15: to see what would stick, that we were really focusing
Speaker 15: only in the areas where we thought that a full
Speaker 15: recount was necessary.
Speaker 1: Bash had arrived at this conclusion by way of his
Speaker 1: daily interactions with journalists who were covering the recount and
Speaker 1: who would come to him with questions about the Gore
Speaker 1: teams legal strategy.
Speaker 14: There was this.
Speaker 15: Deep skepticism about what we were doing, and in general,
Speaker 15: their approach and their attitude was Gore is trying to
Speaker 15: undertake these herculean efforts to reverse the election.
Speaker 16: Result, any sign that he's considering a concession speed.
Speaker 3: The time is fast approaching to accept the certified results
Speaker 3: in Florida and conceive the.
Speaker 7: Election, and one Congressional Democrat has said publicly that Gore
Speaker 7: should throw in the towel.
Speaker 15: It was quite dispiriting, actually, because the whole vibe of
Speaker 15: the reporting was that Gore was behind, we were behind,
Speaker 15: and that we were trying to do something fairly unprecedented
Speaker 15: American history to undermine what had already been decided.
Speaker 17: Apparently, many Americans are ready for this election to be over.
Speaker 17: A new ABC News Washington Post poll shows sixty percent
Speaker 17: of people say Vice President Al Gore should concede the election,
Speaker 17: but thirty.
Speaker 1: In the end, Gore's lawyers decided to limit the scope
Speaker 1: of their lawsuit rather than going with the kitchen sink approach,
Speaker 1: So instead of trying to get any Bush votes thrown out,
Speaker 1: they would focus exclusively on getting more Gore votes counted
Speaker 1: first and foremost. That would mean asking for the unfinished
Speaker 1: hand recounts in Palm Beach and Miami Day to be completed,
Speaker 1: this time using a more lenient standard for determining voter intent.
Speaker 13: The Democrats trying to make the case now that there
Speaker 13: are roughly fifteen thousand or so votes that have never
Speaker 13: been counted or at least never manually inspected.
Speaker 1: When it came time to pull together the documents for
Speaker 1: the contest filing, Jeremy Bash stood by the office printer
Speaker 1: with Dexter Douglas, another lawyer working for the Gore campaign.
Speaker 1: Together they waited for a copy of the complaint to come.
Speaker 15: Out, and we were waiting and waiting and waiting, and
Speaker 15: I said, it feels like Dexter were sitting here waiting for.
Speaker 1: A baby to be delivered. Douglas, who died in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: had been agitating for a more aggressive approach. He thought
Speaker 1: the Gore team was making a mistake and being so
Speaker 1: focused and meek.
Speaker 15: And he said, well, is it going to be a
Speaker 15: boy or a girl? And we kind of chuckled about that,
Speaker 15: and then when the paper rolled off the printer, we
Speaker 15: both read it and he said, well, it's a boy.
Speaker 15: It's got very small balls, but it's a boy.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say how much of a chance Al
Speaker 1: Gore really had at this point, but the Bush campaign
Speaker 1: and their allies were not taking anything for granted. While
Speaker 1: Gore's lawyers took the extraordinary step of contesting election, Republicans
Speaker 1: in the Florida State Legislature were setting the stage for
Speaker 1: hail Mary of their own.
Speaker 18: The state legislature here in Tallahassee is moving rapidly to
Speaker 18: try to take control of this election away from the courts.
Speaker 1: If the plan worked, the Republicans in the Florida State
Speaker 1: Legislature would be able to deliver the state's twenty five
Speaker 1: electors to Bush. No matter what. I'm Leon Nafock from
Speaker 1: Prolog Projects and Pushkin Industries. This is fiasco Bush v.
Speaker 17: Gore.
Speaker 18: The Republicans here in Tallahassee brought down the hammer tonight's.
Speaker 14: Leu essentially wipe out the entire election.
Speaker 19: If you do not like political chaos, it's about time
Speaker 19: to head for the storm.
Speaker 7: Seller.
Speaker 20: When they had offered me the bulletproof vest I think
Speaker 20: that scared me more than anything else.
Speaker 3: Dead Those couple of hours today were just positively.
Speaker 1: Explosive Episode five contingencies. As a threat of a constitutional
Speaker 1: crisis hangs over Tallahassee, both Democrats and Republicans prepared a
Speaker 1: cross line never before crossed in modern politics, the Florida
Speaker 1: State Legislature was a lopsided body. In the state Senate,
Speaker 1: Republicans outnumbered Democrats twenty five to fifteen. In the State House,
Speaker 1: Republicans outnumbered Democrats seventy seven to forty three. It was
Speaker 1: a factive life in Florida that if Republicans in the
Speaker 1: state Legislature rallied around an idea, they could take it
Speaker 1: all the way without any Democratic support.
Speaker 21: Good afternoon, everyone. I hope those of you that aren't
Speaker 21: from Florida are enjoying your Florida vacation and our economy
Speaker 21: appreciate your help.
Speaker 1: That's John McKay, the Republican president of the Florida State
Speaker 1: Senate at the time of the recount. A few hours
Speaker 1: after the Gore team filed their contest lawsuit at the
Speaker 1: Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee, McKay held a press conference.
Speaker 1: He took the opportunity to lay out his view of
Speaker 1: how the state legislature can help rescue Florida from its
Speaker 1: ongoing political nightmare.
Speaker 21: The US Constitution and the federal law vest the legislature
Speaker 21: with the ultimate authority to designate the manner of appointing
Speaker 21: presidential electors.
Speaker 1: To grasp what McKay was proposing. It helps to have
Speaker 1: a literal understanding of what the electoral college is and
Speaker 1: what it means in practice to be a presidential elector.
Speaker 1: Most people don't realize that when they vote for president,
Speaker 1: they're not voting directly for their candidate.
Speaker 22: They think they're voting for a presidential candidate, and they're not.
Speaker 22: They're voting for electors that have been put up by
Speaker 22: each of the parties.
Speaker 1: Basically, each state gets to pick a certain number of
Speaker 1: electors to represent them in the electoral College, and when
Speaker 1: you vote for president on election day, you're actually voting
Speaker 1: for the electors that have been chosen by your candidate's
Speaker 1: political party. So, for instance, when Bill Clinton won Florida
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, the Democratic Party sent a slate
Speaker 1: of twenty five Democratic electors to vote in the electoral College,
Speaker 1: Florida's behalf. All of this happens on a strict schedule.
Speaker 1: In two thousand, all five hundred and thirty eight electors
Speaker 1: around the country were supposed to cast their votes on
Speaker 1: December eighteenth.
Speaker 9: By December eighteenth, those electors must send their votes to Washington.
Speaker 9: On January sixth, the new Congress certifies the vote. January twentieth,
Speaker 9: a new president is inaugurated, so.
Speaker 1: A little over a month before the new president would
Speaker 1: be inaugurated. Crucially, federal law also called for each state
Speaker 1: to choose its electors six days before the electoral college
Speaker 1: vote took place.
Speaker 9: December twelfth is key the day Florida certifies its electors.
Speaker 1: On the day Gore filed the contest lawsuit and Florida
Speaker 1: Senate President John McKay gave his press conference that was
Speaker 1: a little more than two weeks away.
Speaker 21: If unresolved by the twelfth, then the Legislature has the
Speaker 21: authority and may have the responsibility to step in to
Speaker 21: determine and communicate to Congress Florida's electors.
Speaker 1: It was McKay's view that all the suing and hand
Speaker 1: counting and contesting that al Gore was doing was placing
Speaker 1: Florida's electoral votes in jeopardy. McKay and his fellow Republicans
Speaker 1: feared that if all the legal wrangling wasn't over by
Speaker 1: December twelfth, Florida would be left out of the electoral
Speaker 1: college vote altogether, and none of Florida's six million ballots
Speaker 1: would count At all. The Republicans found their solution in
Speaker 1: Title three, Chapter one, Section two of the US Code,
Speaker 1: which said that the state legislature had the power to intervene.
Speaker 1: Here again is McKay.
Speaker 22: I did not want Florida's voters votes not to be counted,
Speaker 22: and if I remember correctly, about six million people voted
Speaker 22: that year. I wanted to make sure those votes were counted,
Speaker 22: and I hoped that the court system would resolve it.
Speaker 22: But if they didn't, the legislature had to be prepared
Speaker 22: to go into session or else everyone's votes in Florida
Speaker 22: would not be counted.
Speaker 1: The Democrats in Florida did not buy this rationale, convinced
Speaker 1: that the Republicans were scheming to deliver Florida's electors to Bush,
Speaker 1: regardless of how Gore's contest lawsuit turned out or who
Speaker 1: ultimately prevailed in the state's popular vote.
Speaker 18: Angry Democrats charging today, but that would be little more
Speaker 18: than a naked attempt to fix the election for George W.
Speaker 9: Bush.
Speaker 23: We should not serve as an insurance policy for a
Speaker 23: Bush presidency.
Speaker 6: To go down this road is to shake the very
Speaker 6: foundations of.
Speaker 1: Our democracy as they saw it. McKay and the Republicans
Speaker 1: were laying the groundwork for a power grab, an unconscionable
Speaker 1: and run around Florida's electorate.
Speaker 14: They were going to change Florida law after the fact
Speaker 14: to say that the ballots people would cast an election
Speaker 14: date had zero impact on Florida's electors. That instead that
Speaker 14: the legislators would meet and they would elect a slate
Speaker 14: of electors.
Speaker 1: This is Ron Klain, who served as the top legal
Speaker 1: strategist on Gore's recount team in Florida.
Speaker 14: So they would essentially wipe out the entire election.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 14: Their basic argument was, Hey, it's a mass it's confusing.
Speaker 14: How about this, how about we let these fine legislators
Speaker 14: over here decide whether not Bush or Gore will be president.
Speaker 1: McKay rejects this characterization. He told me that he only
Speaker 1: grudgingly endorsed the idea of the so called en run,
Speaker 1: and though he was prepared to carry it out if
Speaker 1: it looked like Florida's electors wouldn't otherwise be seated in time,
Speaker 1: he shuddered to think of the president it would say.
Speaker 22: I was concerned, and I'm still concerned that if you
Speaker 22: had similar circumstances and you had a rabbit legislature that
Speaker 22: the partisanship would trump comments sense. And I thought that
Speaker 22: the legislature acting to select a presidential candidate could, perhaps
Speaker 22: one hundred years from now, give precedent where a legislature
Speaker 22: might do that. And I didn't want to be part
Speaker 22: of giving somebody a blueprint for ill purposes.
Speaker 1: You didn't want to do this right because you didn't
Speaker 1: want to set a precedent for someone else down the
Speaker 1: line to take over RISI and the Democrats as they
Speaker 1: saw you doing, they said, that's what you're doing. You're
Speaker 1: trying to take over this election. So what was your
Speaker 1: rebuttal to that?
Speaker 22: My rebuttal would have been had anybody ask me that question.
Speaker 22: I've postponed this as long as I can possibly postpone
Speaker 22: it without jeopardizing the votes of six million Floridians.
Speaker 1: Even as plans for the legislative endron solidified in the Capitol,
Speaker 1: Gore's effort to contest the election was just getting started.
Speaker 24: We're expecting in ten minutes for two lawyers for al
Speaker 24: Gore to walk into this courthouse, the Leon County Circuit
Speaker 24: Court in Tallahassee and officially challenged the results of the
Speaker 24: presidential election. In the United States of America in the
Speaker 24: year two thousand.
Speaker 14: The two lawyers.
Speaker 1: It was November twenty seventh when Jeremy Bash and Dexter
Speaker 1: Douglas took the contest lawsuit out of their office printer
Speaker 1: and walked it over to the courthouse. Cameras flashed around
Speaker 1: them as journalists tried to capture the historic.
Speaker 16: Moment as the attorneys for al Gore come into that
Speaker 16: courthouse and file their contest to the results. As you
Speaker 16: can see here walking across with some degree of consciousness
Speaker 16: and ceremony, albeit somewhat informal.
Speaker 1: Here again is Jeremy Bash.
Speaker 15: I held the pleadings in my hand, and I slid
Speaker 15: the complaint under the glass window. It was the first
Speaker 15: contest of a presidential election US history that I filed
Speaker 15: with my own hands. And the staff at the Leon
Speaker 15: County Courthouse took the pleading. They turned their back on us,
Speaker 15: and they went to the back of their workspace and
Speaker 15: they spun a wheel.
Speaker 22: What will happen is it will be assigned to a judge.
Speaker 14: A judge will then.
Speaker 1: Set a date for a The wheel, which was actually
Speaker 1: just a computer program, would determine which judge the Leon
Speaker 1: County Circuit Court would be assigned to preside over the contest.
Speaker 1: Going into the Scampbell, Tallahassee Native Dexter Douglas had given
Speaker 1: the Gor team permission to be optimistic. In his opinion,
Speaker 1: most of the judges in the pool would be receptive
Speaker 1: to their arguments.
Speaker 15: And they pulled a name off of the wheel and
Speaker 15: they came back and they said, you have been given
Speaker 15: Judge sauls that's what the wheel has given you. And
Speaker 15: Dexter Douglas he motioned at me like, don't say anything,
Speaker 15: but he kind of just shook his head and he said,
Speaker 15: can I of motion?
Speaker 1: Come with me?
Speaker 15: And we scurried back down the hallway into the elevator.
Speaker 15: We were followed by the press, and once the elevator
Speaker 15: doors closed and the press was out of earshot, Dexter
Speaker 15: just said to us, he said, that's a bad seed.
Speaker 1: That's a bad draw. Judge Saws is not good for us.
Speaker 1: Judge N. Sanders Saws was a lifelong North Florida Conservative.
Speaker 1: He also had a contentious history with the Florida Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: which many Republicans perceived as being biased towards Gore.
Speaker 7: Judge N. Sanders Salt and his rn ends with the
Speaker 7: Florida Supreme Court, his being a very strict constructionist, and
Speaker 7: here's a case.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately the Gore team realized they had to get
Speaker 1: the contest lawsuit out of Saualz's courtroom one way or another.
Speaker 1: They briefly considered asking him to accuse, but they decided
Speaker 1: against it. Instead, they set out to lose as quickly
Speaker 1: as possible. Here again is Gore recount strategist Ron Klain.
Speaker 14: In the few minutes after it happened, as we were
Speaker 14: sitting around discussing trial strategy, and it was very simply this,
Speaker 14: we need to lose, and we need to lose fast.
Speaker 1: The faster they could get a ruling out of Saulves.
Speaker 1: The Gore team vigured, the faster they could appeal the
Speaker 1: case and get it in front of the Florida Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: At least there they would have a chance.
Speaker 11: As the battle on the Florida Arena shifted to the
Speaker 11: legal arena, the Gore campaign brought in a heavyweight. His
Speaker 11: name is David Boys, and he's a legend in his
Speaker 11: own time, a New York lawrior with an enviable record
Speaker 11: in a quirky personal style.
Speaker 1: David Boys was in a meeting with Calvin Klein when
Speaker 1: one of Gore's friends called his law offics and asked
Speaker 1: him to join the recount effort Florida. Boys was representing
Speaker 1: Klein in a trademark case that was supposed to go
Speaker 1: to trial soon, but he wasn't about to say no
Speaker 1: to helping the Vice President.
Speaker 5: Even at that stage. We knew it was an important case.
Speaker 5: We knew it was a case that was going to
Speaker 5: involve historic decisions, and to have an opportunity to have
Speaker 5: a front row seat and maybe even be a participant
Speaker 5: was something that would have been hard to turn down.
Speaker 1: Boys had won some of the most spectacular lawsuits in
Speaker 1: the past fifteen years. He had represented the federal government
Speaker 1: in the monopoly case against Microsoft. He had also represented
Speaker 1: the New York Yankees in an anti trust suit against
Speaker 1: Major League Baseball. Boys was known for speaking in court
Speaker 1: without notes and for showing up to arguments wearing sneakers
Speaker 1: to fill out the picture of the eccentric genius. He
Speaker 1: was frequently seen eating candy or ice cream.
Speaker 9: Last year's Lawyer of the Year, according to the National
Speaker 9: Law Journal, profiled in Vanity Fair and People Magazine, the
Speaker 9: litigator in cheap.
Speaker 1: Boys was responsible for crafting the lose fast strategy in
Speaker 1: front of Judge Salls. Instead of calling dozens of witnesses
Speaker 1: in order to prove that manual recounts were needed in
Speaker 1: Palm Beach and Miami Dade, Boys just wanted to keep
Speaker 1: things moving. The December twelfth deadline for seating electors was
Speaker 1: weighing on him, and if the Gore team's end game
Speaker 1: was to get the case to the Florida Supreme Court
Speaker 1: and then have the ballots counted by hand, they had
Speaker 1: to get through the SAAL's trial as efficiently as possible.
Speaker 1: To save time, Boys asked Saals to order the ballots
Speaker 1: from Miami Dade and Palm Beach transported to Tallahassee. That way,
Speaker 1: if the judge did decide to do a manual recount,
Speaker 1: at least the ballots would already be there.
Speaker 5: We wanted to get the ballots up in Tallahassee so
Speaker 5: that they could be counted quickly. We didn't want to
Speaker 5: waste another day after a decision getting the ballots up
Speaker 5: there to be counted.
Speaker 1: After Judge Sauls granted Boys's request, the one point one
Speaker 1: million ballots cast in Miami Dade in Palm Beach were
Speaker 1: placed in boxes and driven up to Tallahassee in trucks.
Speaker 11: More than four hundred and sixty thousand ballots from Palm
Speaker 11: Beach County were packed into a rider truck and driven
Speaker 11: to the state capitol in Tallahausee today.
Speaker 1: A woman named Ivy Corman, who worked in the Miami
Speaker 1: Dade Election Supervisor's office, was assigned to watch over the
Speaker 1: ballots as they made the trip.
Speaker 25: When all of the ballots needed to go up for
Speaker 25: storage in Tallahassee, it was loaded by warehouse personnel. We
Speaker 25: got it all in there, everything was locked up, and
Speaker 25: that was it, and we just took.
Speaker 15: Off the six hundred thousand ballots more than two tons worth,
Speaker 15: that were loaded up and sent by truck from Miami
Speaker 15: to Tallahassee.
Speaker 1: Today, as the truck sped down the highway, flanked by
Speaker 1: law enforcement vehicles, TV news helicopters glided above and broadcast
Speaker 1: the journey live.
Speaker 3: The election battle as television spectacle. In the company of
Speaker 3: police SWAT teams. More than a million ballots from Miami
Speaker 3: Dade and Palm Beach Counties driven in the convoy to
Speaker 3: the state capitol Tallahassee.
Speaker 1: And then the IVY Corman remembers feeling like she was
Speaker 1: part of a huge production.
Speaker 25: They had the SWAT team come and we were going
Speaker 25: to have a policeman, a SWAT member, and myself with
Speaker 25: the ballots in one truck, then an empty truck in
Speaker 25: case this truck broke down, then another policeman. Then we
Speaker 25: had cars of Republican officials, Democratic officials, We had newspaper reporters, everybody.
Speaker 25: There must have been at least a caravan of thirty
Speaker 25: cars and a helicopter.
Speaker 26: The final installment of that million ballot convoy delivered from
Speaker 26: Miami today.
Speaker 1: Caravan arrived in Tallahassee in the late afternoon of December. First,
Speaker 1: did you help unload the truck?
Speaker 27: I hack?
Speaker 25: No, No, I didn't. We signed over custody to the
Speaker 25: Leon County Supervisor of Elections and said goodbye, thank you,
Speaker 25: and that was that.
Speaker 1: In the end, despite repeated prodding from the GORGE team,
Speaker 1: Sauls declined to count or even look at the ballots
Speaker 1: that had come in from Palm Beach and Miami Dade. Instead,
Speaker 1: he listened to testimony from a handful of expert witnesses,
Speaker 1: including a statistician who had studied voting technology and an
Speaker 1: inventor who had helped design the punch card machine.
Speaker 26: Their expert witness points to flaws in the bodomatics design,
Speaker 26: years of wear, and voter confusion.
Speaker 9: This cover this machine is fall to the brim with Chad.
Speaker 1: On December fourth, after two days of testimony, Sauls was
Speaker 1: ready to rule.
Speaker 28: We were watching Judge Sanders Saul's courtroom. The attorneys have
Speaker 28: filed in David Boyce and his legal team. They are
Speaker 28: waiting for the judge's decision, which we expect to be
Speaker 28: announced within a matter of minutes.
Speaker 9: Here while we wait.
Speaker 1: For that, Saul's read his decision out loud in court.
Speaker 1: He was ruling against Gore on every aspect of his complaint.
Speaker 12: In this case, there's no credible statistical evidence and no
Speaker 12: other confidence substantial evidence to establish a reasonable probability that
Speaker 12: the results of the state wide election in the state
Speaker 12: of Florida would be different.
Speaker 13: Judge Saws turned down pretty much every element of the
Speaker 13: Gore case presented over this weekend.
Speaker 1: For Jeremy Bash and the other Gore lawyers have been
Speaker 1: expecting Sauls to rule against them. In fact, they already
Speaker 1: had their appeal notice ready to go.
Speaker 15: I was sitting in the court when Judge Saws issued
Speaker 15: his ruling, and I had the appellate notice already written.
Speaker 1: It was in a Manila folder.
Speaker 15: And as soon as Judge Sauls issued his ruling, the
Speaker 15: trial team motioned to me go. Within a matter of minutes,
Speaker 15: I was down at the Florida Court of Appeals, banging
Speaker 15: on the window, banging on the door, hoping anyone would
Speaker 15: come forward so I could hand them this document. Finally
Speaker 15: we found someone to take the document.
Speaker 1: It was official. The contest lawsuit was being kicked up
Speaker 1: to the Florida Supreme Court.
Speaker 29: Yeah.
Speaker 30: Actually, Joey, I've already been on the phone with two
Speaker 30: Gore campaign spokesman on this.
Speaker 14: The first, Doug Hadaway.
Speaker 30: I said that quote, everybody expected this to be a
Speaker 30: Florida Supreme Court by dinner time today, regardless of what
Speaker 30: this judge said.
Speaker 14: So here we go.
Speaker 4: Most of you have reported that both sides said today
Speaker 4: that if they lost, they would appeal to the Florida
Speaker 4: Supreme Court. We said it, they said it. They won,
Speaker 4: we lost, We're appealing. This is going to be resolved
Speaker 4: by the Florida Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: The Florida Supreme Court's decision to hear Gore's appeal in
Speaker 1: the contest lawsuit was like a bat signal to the
Speaker 1: Republicans and the Florida State Legislature. Suddenly it seemed all
Speaker 1: the more crucial to have a backup plan in place.
Speaker 1: Who could say how long the case would take to
Speaker 1: resolve itself, and now that these liberal judges had their
Speaker 1: hands on it, who could say whether it would be
Speaker 1: resolved in the right way.
Speaker 18: The Republicans here in Tallahassee brought down the hammer Tonight's
Speaker 18: essentially telling Vice President Gore they'll award the state's presidential
Speaker 18: electors to Governor Bush.
Speaker 1: Not The Florida State Legislature was going into a special
Speaker 1: session in order to start the process of seating Florida's
Speaker 1: twenty five electors.
Speaker 11: The Republican controlled state legislature is taking no chances. It's
Speaker 11: now scheduled a special session to name electors, just in
Speaker 11: case their process is stalled or the state Supreme Court
Speaker 11: rules against Governor Bush.
Speaker 1: Tallahassee Democrats were furious, and they tried to link the
Speaker 1: plan to George Bush's campaign and his.
Speaker 26: Brother Jeb Sadly, I have to say that I believe
Speaker 26: this is orchestrated and the only thing missing from the
Speaker 26: proclamation today was the postmark from Austin, Texas.
Speaker 18: The Democrats are seething tonight's a senior Gore advisor telling
Speaker 18: NBC News quotes, the American people will not accept the
Speaker 18: decision by Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his friends in
Speaker 18: the Florida legislature to take the decision away from the
Speaker 18: people and the independent courts.
Speaker 1: Gore advisor Ron Klain thought it was time for his
Speaker 1: team to make a contingency plan of their own.
Speaker 14: There are a lot of ways in which we thought
Speaker 14: it was possible that we would have won, and had
Speaker 14: a court ruling said we won, and still the Republican
Speaker 14: y legislators would have gathered at the Florida State Capitol
Speaker 14: at the appointed time and hour and cast their votes
Speaker 14: for George Bush. And so we needed a strategy to
Speaker 14: deal with that.
Speaker 1: That strategy would come to be known internally as Plan X.
Speaker 1: Claim called it the Gore team's most extreme thought.
Speaker 14: You know, the electoral College doesn't really meet all in
Speaker 14: one place at one time. When we say the electoral College,
Speaker 14: what it is is each state separate electors. They gather
Speaker 14: in their state's capital. They cast their ballots there, and
Speaker 14: the ballots are then transmitted to the Archivist of the
Speaker 14: United States. Now, one of the intriguing things about Florida
Speaker 14: is it actually has two state capitals.
Speaker 1: Of course it does, but to be clear, Claan means
Speaker 1: Florida had two state capitol buildings. They were both in Tallahassee.
Speaker 1: One was fully functional and had been in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: The other dated back to the nineteenth century and had
Speaker 1: been converted into a museum of Florida history after the
Speaker 1: new one was built. Now, I know this is going
Speaker 1: to sound convoluted, but that's because it was. The electoral
Speaker 1: College was scheduled to vote for president on December eighteenth.
Speaker 1: That was the only day the country's five hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty eight electors could legally cast their votes. So if
Speaker 1: the contest lawsuit ended up going Gore's way after the eighteenth,
Speaker 1: and he picked up enough votes to overtake Bush's lead,
Speaker 1: it would still be too late for the Gore campaign
Speaker 1: to make it count in the electoral College. To avoid
Speaker 1: that situation, ron Clam moved to take advantage of an
Speaker 1: ambiguity in Florida law which specified that the state's electors
Speaker 1: had to gather in Tallahassee, but didn't specify where exactly
Speaker 1: they had to go.
Speaker 14: And we had a plan, a contingency plan to have
Speaker 14: our electors come to Tallahassee and meet in the old
Speaker 14: State Capitol building and cast their votes for al Gore
Speaker 14: and send those votes to the archivist, even as the
Speaker 14: Bush vote electors were meeting in the new State Capitol
Speaker 14: and casting their votes for George Bush.
Speaker 1: Claim knew that Plan X was a zany idea. In
Speaker 1: the same way Senate President John McKay didn't cherish the
Speaker 1: prospect of the legislative end run. Claim didn't really want
Speaker 1: to go through with it, but he felt that the
Speaker 1: Florida Republicans were giving him no choice.
Speaker 14: Now, again, we wouldn't have done that unless we had
Speaker 14: a court order saying that we thought our electors were
Speaker 14: the right electors. But you know, we really were planning
Speaker 14: for every possible contingency here.
Speaker 1: You might be wondering what would have happened if Florida
Speaker 1: had sent in two sets of votes, one from a
Speaker 1: slate of Bush electors, the other from a slate of
Speaker 1: Gore electors. Al Gore actually had the same question. His
Speaker 1: friend Walter Dellinger, the former Solicitor General, told him the
Speaker 1: dispute would be resolved in the US Congress.
Speaker 31: Here's Dellinger, because the Constitution gives Congress the authority to
Speaker 31: count the ballots, and any dispute over you know, who
Speaker 31: won a particular electoral vote could be resolved by Congress.
Speaker 1: In this scenario, two envelopes from Florida would be given
Speaker 1: to Congress, one saying that the state's twenty five electors
Speaker 1: had voted for Gore, and the other one saying that
Speaker 1: they had voted for Bush. The official count would be
Speaker 1: overseen by the President of the Senate otherwise known as
Speaker 1: the sitting Vice President otherwise known as Al Gore.
Speaker 31: When the votes are open in front of both houses assembled.
Speaker 31: When the vote is announced, that vote can be overturned
Speaker 31: or rejected only by an action of both the House
Speaker 31: and the Senate. Vice President. Gore is listening eagerly as
Speaker 31: I am explaining what happens, that whatever envelope.
Speaker 1: Is opened will be.
Speaker 31: The vote of Florida. And he says, who decides what
Speaker 31: envelope to open? First?
Speaker 1: Good question. That was my next question too.
Speaker 31: And I said, you will still be the presiding officer
Speaker 31: of the Senate. You'll be the one to choose which
Speaker 31: ballot to open.
Speaker 1: Gore wouldn't get to unilaterally declare himself president, but still
Speaker 1: he knew how it would look.
Speaker 31: And he looked at me and said, well, I just
Speaker 31: have one question. Did they have to wait for me
Speaker 31: to be sworn in before beginning appeacement proceedings or could
Speaker 31: they start right then?
Speaker 1: More after the break.
Speaker 3: Live pictures here of the tense city that has grown
Speaker 3: outside the Florida State Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: As the Florida Supreme Court prepared to hear Al Gore's
Speaker 1: appeal in the contest lawsuit, Tallahassee was getting more hectic
Speaker 1: and media saturated by the day. Even the lawyers, especially
Speaker 1: David Boys from the Gore side and local Florida attorney
Speaker 1: Barry Richard from the Bush side, walked around like celebrities.
Speaker 1: Here's boys.
Speaker 5: Everybody recognized Barry Richards and myself. You know, people driving
Speaker 5: by would shout out to him, don't let them steal
Speaker 5: the election, or our supporters would you know, don't let them,
Speaker 5: you know, bury our ballots. So, I mean, somebody was
Speaker 5: always yelling out to you, either encouraging you or trying
Speaker 5: to discourage you.
Speaker 18: Today, hundreds of pro GOURG demonstrators rally outside the state Capitol.
Speaker 1: News trucks flooded the area. Protesters arrived early each morning,
Speaker 1: and with them a crowd of attention seekers who were
Speaker 1: less motivated by politics. By the presence of cameras.
Speaker 2: There were people dressed in clown outfits. They were having
Speaker 2: a lot more fun out there than I was having
Speaker 2: inside the building.
Speaker 1: That's Charles Wells. He was the Chief Justice of the
Speaker 1: Florida Supreme Court in two thousand.
Speaker 2: There was a lady that brought her pet skunk, and
Speaker 2: it was a great act because you can make that
Speaker 2: skunk do backwards sumrsaults.
Speaker 1: It was against this backdrop that in December seventh, the
Speaker 1: Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gore v. Harris.
Speaker 27: Americans maybe just hours away from their clearest few yet
Speaker 27: of will be the next president. A live picture right
Speaker 27: now from the Florida Supreme Court any moment. Oral arguments
Speaker 27: will begin here in this courtroom.
Speaker 1: The question before the court was whether Judge Sauls had
Speaker 1: aired in denying the Gore team's contest petition. The legal
Speaker 1: standard at play was not exactly objective. According to Florida law,
Speaker 1: the losing candidate had to show that there had been
Speaker 1: counting errors that placed the result of the election in doubt.
Speaker 1: But what that meant was up for interpretation.
Speaker 32: Good morning, and welcome once again to the Florida Supreme Court,
Speaker 32: where we'll have oral argument this morning in the case
Speaker 32: of Gore versus Harris.
Speaker 1: In one corner stood David Boys and the other Barry Richard. I.
Speaker 1: Though they looked like sworn enemies in the courtroom, the
Speaker 1: truth was they liked each other, and when they weren't working,
Speaker 1: they'd been hanging out together at a sports bar in
Speaker 1: your Boys's hotel.
Speaker 5: We were so deep into the weeds of this that
Speaker 5: in some senses, we were each the only person the
Speaker 5: other could talk to that cared enough about some of
Speaker 5: these details to really be interested in talking about it,
Speaker 5: even your children and your wife. It's my eyes begin
Speaker 5: to glaze over sometimes when you are really deeply involved
Speaker 5: in one of these complicated cases.
Speaker 1: Boys and Richard took pleasure in competing with each other.
Speaker 29: One of the things made it so much fun for
Speaker 29: me is that David and I were sparring with each
Speaker 29: other for the fun of it.
Speaker 1: This is Barry Richard.
Speaker 29: I've never been much of an athlete, but I suspect
Speaker 29: that professional athletes enjoy what they do most when they
Speaker 29: are opposing to somebody else who they feel is at
Speaker 29: the top of his game, and.
Speaker 1: David Boys at the toughest game.
Speaker 29: So it was a great challenge, and it was fun,
Speaker 29: it was intellectually stimulated, and I got famous.
Speaker 1: So that was the dynamic at play between David Boys
Speaker 1: and Barry Richard, who they sparred with each other at
Speaker 1: the Florida Supreme Court in.
Speaker 4: Which we have identified specific votes, many of which were
Speaker 4: agreed by the district Court, were votes in which you
Speaker 4: could clearly discern the voter's intent, and fifteen.
Speaker 1: The positions they took will sound familiar to you. Richard
Speaker 1: argued that the recount process had already played itself out
Speaker 1: fair and square, while Boys made the case that getting
Speaker 1: an accurate vote count should take precedence over any other consideration.
Speaker 5: The simple argument that I made to the Florida Supreme
Speaker 5: Court was that Florida law for one hundred years had
Speaker 5: held that what was important was to discern the intent
Speaker 5: of the voter, and that in order to discern the
Speaker 5: intent of the voter. In a close election, you would
Speaker 5: have a manual recount.
Speaker 1: It was clear from the questions that they were asking
Speaker 1: that some of the Florida justices were sympathetic to Boys's argument,
Speaker 1: while others were not. Among the sympathetic ones was Justice
Speaker 1: Barbara Perrienti, who was frustrated with Judge Sauls for refusing
Speaker 1: to look at the ballots from Palm Beach and Miami Dade.
Speaker 8: He never looked at a single ballot. They had been
Speaker 8: brought up there, he had ordered them up. He never
Speaker 8: looked at them.
Speaker 1: Perry Andy thought it was obvious that looking at the
Speaker 1: ballots was the best way to figure out who won
Speaker 1: the election. At one point during the hearing, she and
Speaker 1: one of her colleagues started asking why Gore was only
Speaker 1: seeking manual recounts in two counties rather than the whole state.
Speaker 4: When you have a very close election, you have to
Speaker 4: have a manual review of those ballots in order to
Speaker 4: have an ac retality.
Speaker 8: So why wouldn't that apply to all the other counties,
Speaker 8: at least the punch card counties where there are under
Speaker 8: votes and those votes also haven't been counted, and.
Speaker 23: You've demonstrated that there's legal votes that have not been counted.
Speaker 23: Why would that not exist in other counties? And why
Speaker 23: would this not require, if any judicial relief that be
Speaker 23: applied in a statewide undervote.
Speaker 4: I think there are two.
Speaker 1: Prior to oral arguments, a statewide manual recount wasn't even
Speaker 1: really on the table. Gore had proposed the idea once
Speaker 1: in a televised a dress back in mid November, but
Speaker 1: Bush had promptly rejected it. Now, with just days left
Speaker 1: until the December twelfth Electoral College deadline, it seemed as
Speaker 1: though some members of the Florida Supreme Court thought a
Speaker 1: statewide manual recount was a pretty good idea. Here again
Speaker 1: is Perriente.
Speaker 8: How do you favor three counties with counting under votes
Speaker 8: when you don't do it equally for all counties?
Speaker 1: A statewide manual recount had the potential to be transformative,
Speaker 1: though it was hard to predict how exactly the vote
Speaker 1: total would change. The fact that thousands of discarded ballots
Speaker 1: might now be back in the mix meant that Gore
Speaker 1: would have that many more chances to cut into Bush's lead,
Speaker 1: But not everyone was enthused. Chief Justice Wells had been
Speaker 1: preoccupied with the upcoming deadline for seating Florida's electors, and
Speaker 1: it struck him as lunacy to try to undertake such
Speaker 1: a gargantuan task with so little time left on the clock.
Speaker 2: I think it became pretty obvious the questions that were
Speaker 2: being asked that the December twelfth deadline was not bothering
Speaker 2: some of my colleagues like it was bothering me.
Speaker 1: After oral arguments, as the justices began to conference, peri
Speaker 1: Anti took the position that recounts were clearly needed in
Speaker 1: Palm Beach and Miami Dade, but the only way to
Speaker 1: be fair to every voter in the state, Parentti thought
Speaker 1: was to hand count all the undervotes that had been
Speaker 1: cast across Florida. Some of Perianti's colleagues, including Chief Justice Wells,
Speaker 1: just didn't think that was possible.
Speaker 8: I think there was a belief that there was no
Speaker 8: way that this court could end up ensuring that every
Speaker 8: vote would be counted, that there would always be questions,
Speaker 8: and so it was better at that time to keep
Speaker 8: our hands off and let the controversy because we were
Speaker 8: approaching a time where it was a feeling that Florida's
Speaker 8: vote needed to be counted in the Electoral College, and
Speaker 8: if it lasted much longer, it wouldn't have been.
Speaker 1: Justice Wells had a more fundamental objection as well, in
Speaker 1: erase this impossibly tight there was simply no way to
Speaker 1: arrive at an objectively accurate vote count.
Speaker 2: It become evident to me that we were not going
Speaker 2: to ever get to a point in which the margin
Speaker 2: of victory exceeded the margin of error here to an
Speaker 2: extent that we could refine it by continuing to a
Speaker 2: recount that was so uncertain as to how it was
Speaker 2: going to be done, and so that we had to
Speaker 2: conclude it.
Speaker 27: Well.
Speaker 1: Tensions are high, Questions are being asked, what is the verdict?
Speaker 18: We should find out shortly, we believe.
Speaker 1: On the afternoon of December eighth, the justices of the
Speaker 1: Florida Supreme Court released their decision for.
Speaker 32: A couple of minutes away from hearing from the Florida.
Speaker 19: State Supreme Court.
Speaker 7: The scene there and the steps of the Florida Supreme
Speaker 7: Court in Tallahassee, Florida, we understand.
Speaker 1: The job of relaying into the public fell to the
Speaker 1: court spokesman, Craig Waters. Waters had been summarizing the decisions
Speaker 1: of the court and communicating with the press since early
Speaker 1: in the recount. Whenever reporters saw his podium getting set
Speaker 1: up on the steps of the Supreme Court building, they
Speaker 1: knew he would soon be coming out to deliver some news.
Speaker 1: The crowd of reporters covering the recount had been growing
Speaker 1: so much that with each announcement, Waters was forced to
Speaker 1: move his podium up the steps to make room for
Speaker 1: more spectators. By December eighth, he was perched near the top.
Speaker 7: We could see the state troopers and the court security
Speaker 7: officers in playing clothes. We understand that the court spokesman,
Speaker 7: Craig Waters will be out very very shortly.
Speaker 1: Tensions have been rising throughout Tallahassee for nearly a month
Speaker 1: by this point, and Waters knew that he was about
Speaker 1: to reveal the most paradise i'm shifting news development the
Speaker 1: court had delivered to date.
Speaker 20: It was a frightening thing in a lot of ways.
Speaker 20: When they had offered me the bulletproof vest, I think
Speaker 20: that scared me more than anything else. Did this idea
Speaker 20: I have to wear a bulletproof vest. My god, what's
Speaker 20: going on here? That's not the Tallahassee I know. Hello,
Speaker 20: I'm Craig Waters.
Speaker 6: Spokesman for the Florida Supreme Court. The Court today has
Speaker 6: issued its opinion in the case of Albert Gored Junior
Speaker 6: versus Catherine Harris, George W.
Speaker 22: Bush, and others.
Speaker 6: Paper copies of that opinion.
Speaker 20: I got out onto the to the podium and I
Speaker 20: began reading. I had these lights shining in my face,
Speaker 20: so I couldn't see the crowds very well because I
Speaker 20: was blinded. But there was a large piece of metallic
Speaker 20: equipment nearby that fell over. And the thought that went
Speaker 20: through my head at that particular point in time, is
Speaker 20: my God, there's the bullet.
Speaker 6: By a vote of four to three, the majority of
Speaker 6: the Court has reversed the decision of the Trial Court
Speaker 6: in part. It has further ordered that the Circuit Court
Speaker 6: to the Second Judicial Circuit here in Tallahassee so immediately
Speaker 6: began a manual recount of the approximant of the.
Speaker 1: Approximate Chief Justice Wells had been outvoted. After all the
Speaker 1: confusion and delays in Palm Beach and Miami Dade, every
Speaker 1: county in the state that hadn't already done so was
Speaker 1: now going to recount their undervotes by hand.
Speaker 17: This was an even more to stunning decision than the
Speaker 17: Florida Supreme Court's first in favor of al Gore, and
Speaker 17: it sets into motion a potentially chaotic series of events.
Speaker 19: If you do not like political chaos, it's about time
Speaker 19: to head for the storm seller, because up until about
Speaker 19: a few moments ago, I think most people were expecting
Speaker 19: the Florida Supreme Court to kind of go along with
Speaker 19: Judge Sauls and bring this to an end, and people
Speaker 19: were draft in al Gore's concession speech.
Speaker 3: Those couple of hours today were just positively explosive. There's
Speaker 3: been an enormous shift in the political ground.
Speaker 1: For the Gore team. It was like getting an extra life.
Speaker 1: Here again is Jeremy Bash.
Speaker 15: We were overjoyed, and we had popped the court work
Speaker 15: on some wine and cracked open some beers and we
Speaker 15: had a little celebration there in the law offices that
Speaker 15: we were working out of. This was far beyond what
Speaker 15: we had requested, and it was a massive opportunity for
Speaker 15: us to take a lead in the tallies, which we
Speaker 15: thought would be critical to regaining some of the political
Speaker 15: momentum that we had clearly lost.
Speaker 1: The problem once again was time. The Electoral College deadline
Speaker 1: was now just a few days away, and if it
Speaker 1: started to look like Florida wouldn't be done counting votes
Speaker 1: by then, the Republicans in the state legislature were ready
Speaker 1: and willing to use their power to bring the election
Speaker 1: to an end. As it turned out, they weren't the
Speaker 1: only ones. On the next and final episode of Fiasco,
Speaker 1: the Florida recount heads to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 10: Justice O'Connor s this is a mess.
Speaker 14: We got to stop it now because if we don't
Speaker 14: stop it now, it's going to go on and on,
Speaker 14: and it's going to get worse, and Bush is gonna
Speaker 14: win in the end. Anyways.
Speaker 1: Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects and it's distributed
Speaker 1: by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons,
Speaker 1: Madeline kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Nafock. Our script
Speaker 1: editor was Daniel Riley. Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer,
Speaker 1: and we received additional editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our
Speaker 1: music and score are by Nick Silvester of god Mode,
Speaker 1: with additional music from Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is
Speaker 1: by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at
Speaker 1: Chips and y audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Rayphiel
Speaker 1: and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special
Speaker 1: Thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and
Speaker 1: documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the
Speaker 1: link in the show notes. Thanks to c Span and
Speaker 1: NBC News Archive, CNN and Channel twenty, and Palm Beach
Speaker 1: with the archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.