michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today: Despite a late entry into the Democratic presidential race, Michael Bloomberg has surged in the polls and is winning key endorsements before he’s even on the ballot. Alex Burns on the hidden infrastructure of influence and persuasion behind Bloomberg’s campaign and the dilemma that it poses for Democrats.

michael barbaro

It’s Tuesday, February 18. So Alex, Happy Valentine’s Day.

alexander burns

Happy Valentine’s Day.

michael barbaro

Thank you. You know, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I want you to watch this ad, Alex, and read what’s being played on the screen.

alexander burns

OK. It says, “Roses are red. Violets are blue. Your associates are criminals. What does that make you? America deserves better. Defeat Trump.” And it says, “Paid for by Mike Bloomberg 2020.”

michael barbaro

Alex, what are we seeing here?

alexander burns

Well, we’re seeing the kind of in-your-face taunting of the president’s former associates who are in jail or about to go to jail. People like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. Their faces sort of surrounded by hearts and flowers. That all adds up to this crowd-pleasing taunt directed at the president by this campaign that has enough money to do anything.

michael barbaro

What kind of money are we talking about?

alexander burns

Well, we’re talking about at least $400 million so far. That’s an astonishing sum of money for any campaign, let alone a campaign that has only existed for about three months. And that $400 million has gone heavily into TV advertising, a lot of digital advertising, a lot of polling, an enormous amount of staff that they say that they have over 2,000 people on staff right now. That’s larger than most campaigns are in a general election. And this is a primary campaign.

michael barbaro

And it is only February.

alexander burns

Right, and our reporting is that Mike Bloomberg has essentially directed his campaign to spend whatever it takes.

michael barbaro

And is all that spending working?

alexander burns

Well, it’s gotten him pretty far in not a lot of time. He has gone from not a candidate to somewhere in the double-digit range in the polls. He’s either second or third in a lot of national polls, depending on what time period exactly it was taken in. He’s caught up in some places to Joe Biden, who has obviously had a bit of a rough patch recently. And so if the theory of the Mike Bloomberg campaign was, spend whatever it takes in the winter so that if Joe Biden takes a dive, you’re the guy waiting, I would say that strategy has worked pretty well so far.

michael barbaro

Right. And I’m reminded of the fact that it has worked without Mike Bloomberg ever even showing up on the debate stage, which is normally how a candidate rises in the polls.

alexander burns

In some ways, it might work because Mike Bloomberg hasn’t showed up on the debate stage yet. And I’m not just saying that to be sort of snarky, that he has managed to create this idealized version of Michael Bloomberg —

archived recording (michael bloomberg) Anyone hear the slogan, “Mike will get it done?”

alexander burns

— and broadcast it to the country —

archived recording (michael bloomberg) Let me tell you what “it” is.

alexander burns

— with these hundreds of millions of dollars in television ads.

archived recording (michael bloomberg) As president, I’ll offer common sense plans, and I will get it done. So let’s stay on the offensive.

michael barbaro

So this idea that Michael Bloomberg is trying to buy the Democratic primary — or at least buy his way into it — it’s not untrue, at this point.

alexander burns

No. His position in this race is totally inseparable from the amount of money that he has spent on his campaign. We had two people dive into this race at the 11th hour. One was Mike Bloomberg, with his $400 million campaign. The other was Deval Patrick, the two-term governor of Massachusetts, one of the few African-American governors in American history. Mike Bloomberg is now somewhere in the mid-teens in the polls. Deval Patrick dropped out after the New Hampshire primary. And in fact, Mike Bloomberg, who was not on the ballot in New Hampshire, got more write-in votes in that state than Deval Patrick got as a candidate listed on the ballot.

michael barbaro

Wow.

alexander burns

It’s the power of television advertising in a state that overlaps heavily with TV markets that Michael Bloomberg is in all the time.

michael barbaro

Right.

alexander burns

But if you think his spending in this campaign has been consequential, the picture is actually much broader and deeper than that.

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alexander burns

He has been spending not hundreds of millions of dollars over months, but billions of dollars over years to build a political and philanthropic empire for himself, and a national profile and network of influence that we are now seeing applied in so many ways in this race.

michael barbaro

And this, Alex, is the investigation that you have been working on these past few weeks.

alexander burns

That’s right. My colleague Nick Kulish and I have spent actually the last couple months sort of combing through all the spending that Mike Bloomberg has done in the political arena and in philanthropy, essentially over the course of his public career, and trying to track where that money has gone and what kind of friends it has made for him. Mike Bloomberg is worth estimated around $60 billion. It’s a fortune built on a financial information and news company. And he has used that money to advance a whole range of causes that he personally cares about, as well as the politicians who he sees as strong leaders for those causes, for well over a decade at this point. Those activities have accelerated dramatically since he left office as mayor.

michael barbaro

Which was 2013.

alexander burns

Right.

michael barbaro

And what are some examples of the causes and the characters who receive this money?

alexander burns

He gives an enormous amount of money to causes like fighting climate change, like advancing gun control policies. And more recently, like electing Democrats for the sake of electing Democrats.

michael barbaro

And what’s complicated about that?

alexander burns

Well in the context of an election, what’s complicated is that you have somebody who can make or break your cause or organization or campaign with his personal checkbook.

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So one example. At the end of September in 2018, Emily’s List, the premiere pro-choice women’s Democratic group in the country, is hosting a major fundraising luncheon in New York. Every announced speaker is a prominent Democratic woman except for one, who’s Mike Bloomberg. Shortly before the luncheon, I am out in Seattle as Mike Bloomberg is engaging in all kinds of public-minded activities. And we do an interview, and I ask him about the #MeToo movement. He is somebody who is trying to position himself, now nationally, as a progressive.

archived recording Tonight, new questions about Michael Bloomberg and the company he founded that made him a billionaire.

alexander burns

But he himself has been accused of making all kinds of crude remarks to and about women.

archived recording You have been accused in the past of making lewd and sexist comments, and fostering a frat-like culture at your company that was uncomfortable for some female employees. ABC has actually spoken to several women who want to share their stories, but you won’t release them from their N.D.A.s. As Senator Warren put it — she was here last week — she said if your company has an enviable record, what do you have to hide? Why not — archived recording (michael bloomberg) We don’t have anything to hide. But we made legal agreements, which both sides wanted to keep certain things from coming out. They have a right to do that.

alexander burns

As a corporate leader, he ran a company that has faced serious discrimination allegations.

archived recording (michael bloomberg) Did I ever tell a bawdy joke? Yeah sure, I did. And do I regret it? Yes, it’s embarrassing. But you know, that’s the way I grew up. archived recording What kind of a joke? archived recording (michael bloomberg) Bawdy.

alexander burns

So when I ask him about this, his response is to say that a lot of the things that he has heard coming out of the #MeToo movement are alarming, but he doesn’t know how true they are. And he specifically raises the case of Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor, who for years taped his show in the offices of Mike Bloomberg’s company.

michael barbaro

And is a friend of Mike Bloomberg.

alexander burns

And is a personal friend of long standing. And he said that essentially, he wasn’t going to judge him one way or another until a court adjudicated the issue. And then he acknowledged that a court would probably never adjudicate the issue. This is not a sentiment in keeping with the progressive moment at all. Certainly not in keeping with the perspective of Emily’s List.

michael barbaro

In fact, you might even say it’s the kind of thing that would get a person disinvited from a speaking slot at a luncheon for Emily’s List.

alexander burns

And it very nearly did. What our reporting indicates is that Emily’s List was mortified by his comments in that interview, and that there was a very serious internal debate about whether to ask him not to appear at the luncheon. But that ultimately, the leaders of the organization decided that he was somebody they could not afford to alienate. And what ended up happening was, in late September, Mike Bloomberg got up at this Emily’s List luncheon in New York. In the background, the Kavanaugh hearings are raging in Washington. And he announces that he is going to spend more money helping elect women to office than anyone else in history. He ends up spending more than $100 million supporting Democrats in the midterm elections, including helping elect 21 new members to the House of Representatives. Of the 21 winning members he supported, 15 were women.

michael barbaro

Wow.

alexander burns

So if there are things about his world view and his personal conduct and his business record that make progressive women very uncomfortable, there is nothing uncomfortable about the way he used his checkbook in 2018.

michael barbaro

What’s another example of the complexity of Mike Bloomberg’s money?

alexander burns

So I spoke to a number of people, current and former employees of the Center for American Progress — major a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C. — about a report that was being prepared in February of 2015. It was about Islamophobia in America. And we reviewed a draft of the report. And the draft included a whole chapter of more than 4,000 words about the New York Police Department under Mike Bloomberg and its surveillance of Muslim Americans.

michael barbaro

This was a very invasive style of policing. It involved going into mosques, getting into communities with undercover police officers. It was highly unusual.

alexander burns

It was. And in the draft of this report, it was held up as an example of really the most sophisticated, institutionalized form of Islamophobia and discrimination in law enforcement.

michael barbaro

Pretty damning.

alexander burns

Except it was never published.

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

alexander burns

When the draft was submitted, one senior official at the Center for American Progress pointed out that if it were published in its current form, it would draw a strong response from Bloomberg’s world. And when the report was published, not only was the chapter entirely removed, but Mike Bloomberg’s name was never mentioned.

michael barbaro

Not once.

alexander burns

Not once.

michael barbaro

And does Mike Bloomberg give to the Center for American Progress? Or is this about the very real possibility that someday he will give, or he will give to causes near and dear to this group?

alexander burns

It’s both. At the time the draft was submitted, Bloomberg had already given nearly $1.5 million in grants to CAP. Since then, he’s given an additional $400,000, as far as we know.

michael barbaro

What do these two stories tell you?

alexander burns

What they tell you is that Mike Bloomberg’s money has become this gravitational force unlike any other in Democratic politics, where people are tailoring their activities and their agendas to try to align themselves with him, even if he’s not explicitly asking them to. In the case of that CAP report, the folks on the Mike Bloomberg side said they were never aware of this report being prepared or the controversy around its preparation. We have no reason to believe —

michael barbaro

It’s self-censorship.

alexander burns

Right. We have no reason to believe, based on our reporting, that anyone who works directly for Bloomberg said you need to remove that chapter. But the chapter was removed.

michael barbaro

In other words, the Democratic world wakes up every day with some level of fear that they might offend Mike Bloomberg and a desire to please him.

alexander burns

And this is what you’re now seeing happen on a national scale in this campaign. It’s not that you’ve seen some massive stampede of support towards Mike Bloomberg within the Democratic establishment. But what you have seen is people who may have been critical of him in the past, when he was a Republican, not necessarily speaking up so loudly in this campaign. You have seen people who might be offended by elements of his record as mayor coming out and either endorsing him for president or calling him a very plausible contender for this Democratic nomination. And you have seen, of course, on the strength of all that television advertising, Mike Bloomberg tell a story about who he is and what he has done with his money that Democratic voters seem to find pretty appealing.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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michael barbaro

So, Alex, just how much money are we actually talking about? What did the investigation that you and Nick did find about the scale of this? I covered City Hall for many years when Bloomberg was mayor. And when I covered City Hall, we actually did an investigation into how much money the mayor was giving away during that period. And I remember the number being pretty staggering.

alexander burns

It was. It was in the range of $260 million. And what Nick and I found in this investigation is that at the time that story was written, the true number was about 10 times that.

michael barbaro

I’m sorry?

alexander burns

Yeah, it was about 10 — look, you did a great job with the information that was available.

michael barbaro

[LAUGHTER]

alexander burns

In the course of reporting this story though, what became clear to us was that there is the philanthropy that we know of — that’s disclosed on tax forms or that’s announced publicly. And then there’s other kinds of philanthropy that Bloomberg engages in that is much, much harder to track down. In fact, impossible to track down without cooperation of some kind from Mike Bloomberg himself. And what it all adds up to is more than $10 billion —

michael barbaro

Wow.

alexander burns

— of giving on philanthropy and spending on politics. And it’s overwhelmingly weighted towards philanthropy. So when we think of the spending on this campaign, or on his mayoral campaigns or on the Democratic Party, it is a fairly small fraction of the money that Mike Bloomberg gives away as a matter of course.

michael barbaro

I think I understand the power of that philanthropic giving from the examples you gave around Emily’s List and the Center for American Progress. Can you give us a little bit more a sense of his giving to candidates?

alexander burns

Well, for years his political giving was really agenda-driven and issue-driven more than it was driven by the party label associated with a candidate. What our reporting showed is that Bloomberg has spent about $270 million on a pair of organizations, one that kind of grew out of the other. The first is called Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which he operated from within City Hall. After the Sandy Hook shooting, that morphed into a group known as Everytown. Now, arguably, the anchor gun control group in the country. And what that money has gone to over the years has been a range of causes associated with the gun issue, whether it’s Democratic candidates, Republican candidates, litigation related to gun laws, helping lawmakers in different states and cities draft gun laws and then defend them in court, providing cities and states that are thinking of passing gun control laws with data to justify it. And for years, he was a sort of party-neutral donor. If you were with him on guns, he was with you. And most of the people who were with him on guns were Democrats. But if you were, for instance, Senator Pat Toomey — very conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, who agreed to introduce background checks legislation in the Senate — Mike Bloomberg ended up spending almost $12 million in the 2016 election helping Toomey get re-elected.

michael barbaro

Wow. And is it clear to you that as with Mike Bloomberg’s other philanthropic donations, that these political donations have resulted in the same kind of reticence to cross him, to challenge him?

alexander burns

You know, one of the most vivid anecdotes that we heard about the gratitude the candidates feel to Mike Bloomberg came from just a couple weeks ago, when he went to Capitol Hill to ask lawmakers there for their support in the presidential race. And normally, when a presidential candidate goes up to the Hill, they kind of go hat-in-hand, meeting with members of Congress and saying, could I please have your support? In at least one meeting that we heard about with the new Democrat coalition — it’s a group of moderates in the Democratic caucus — Bloomberg sits down and the lawmakers go around the table introducing themselves to him. And according to two people who were in the room, one after another began by saying, thank you so much. You spent this much in my race. Or you supported me in my last two elections. And many of those people have not endorsed him. But most of them haven’t endorsed somebody else. And the Bloomberg advisers that we have spoken to have again stressed that we have never promised or implied that you will get support in the future in exchange for an endorsement. But every Democratic member of Congress in a tough race can look at what Mike Bloomberg did for the party in 2018 and draw their own conclusions.

michael barbaro

So how are we going to see all of this, everything that you’ve been describing here, play out in the Democratic primary as Bloomberg actually starts showing up on the ballot?

alexander burns

Well, what we’ve already seen in the Democratic primary is that as he’s gone around the country, he has been able to reliably find important partners to appear with him or host him, who have often benefited from his philanthropy or his political spending in the past. Take the San Francisco Bay Area. You have had, just in that one metro, Mike Bloomberg has spent on school board races, on —

michael barbaro

School board races?

alexander burns

School board races. On ballot initiatives to tax soda and ban e-cigarettes. That’s all political spending. And from his philanthropy, he has given out dozens of grants to museums and dance companies and climate organizations. And the mayor of San Francisco, one of the most prominent politicians in the state, has endorsed him for president. Now, we can’t say that Mayor London Breed endorsed Mike Bloomberg just because he has put all this money into San Francisco. But for a mayor who’s thinking about who to support, it’s just an inescapable factor to think about. That this is a guy who has underwritten not just politicians here, but other institutions that make up kind of the civic and cultural backbone of the city. None of the other candidates is really competing for this kind of support right now in the same way. Because they have been tied up in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now Nevada and South Carolina. And when they have been doing that, Mike Bloomberg has been jumping across the country on a private jet, meeting with prominent local officials, many of them prominent African-American officials, to ask them to consider supporting his campaign. And he has done that actually with quite a bit of success so far.

michael barbaro

And why is it important that he’s cultivating black elected officials?

alexander burns

I think there are two big reasons. One of them is that his own record as mayor is going to be troubling to a lot of African-American voters. His policies on law enforcement, his view of invasive searches, largely targeting black and Hispanic men.

michael barbaro

Stop-and-frisk.

alexander burns

Stop-and-frisk. So if he is going to reassure African-Americans, who are the cornerstone of the Democratic Party, that he’s an acceptable candidate, he needs to convince leaders within the black community to help him make that case.

archived recording (michael tubbs) [APPLAUSE] Good morning. Yes, welcome to Stockton. My name is Michael Tubbs. I have the honor of being the mayor of the great city of Stockton. I’m excited —

alexander burns

When I was in California with Bloomberg late last year, he got the endorsement of the young black mayor of Stockton —

archived recording (michael tubbs) We have to have a candidate with the record, with the resources and the relationships, to not just make sure we beat Donald Trump, but make sure something like Donald Trump never happens again.

alexander burns

— who is a very progressive guy on basically everything, who stood next to Bloomberg. And when they got a question about stop-and-frisk, said —

archived recording (michael tubbs) I think we all recognize now in 2019 that stop-and-frisk is not a good policy. It’s terrible. Courts have decided, he’s apologized and moved on. I think two things for me. Number one: If you look at every candidate in the field, there’s an issue with criminal justice. You have folks who wrote the ‘94 crime bill, which created mass incarceration. You have folks who voted for the ‘94 crime bill. You have folks who supported Ronald Reagan. So there’s not a candidate in 2019 who has a criminal justice record that’s where we are today. So I think the —

alexander burns

— nobody in this campaign has a perfect record on law enforcement. And Mike Bloomberg has the resources and the record to defeat President Trump.

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michael barbaro

I want a pause on this. Because for a black mayor to be asked about stop-and-frisk and to say, eh, no one’s perfect. The reason that would seem quite striking is that stop-and-frisk was a policing policy deemed unconstitutional, as practiced in New York under the Bloomberg administration, that disproportionately targeted black and Latino men. And by many accounts, not just humiliated them, but kind of generationally scarred the black community in New York.

alexander burns

Right. And it might get tougher as you see more and more video and audio of Mike Bloomberg talking about stop-and-frisk, as we have seen in the last few days.

archived recording A scratchy recording of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been circulating on social media since Tuesday, appearing to show the billionaire presidential candidate defending the city’s stop-and-frisk policy in starkly racial terms. Quote, “We put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why did we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is.”

alexander burns

A lot of these mayors don’t particularly want to be on the hook for defending every offensive or divisive turn of phrase that Mike Bloomberg has used over the years. But at least on the surface level, there have been enough signals of reassurance — he has apologized for the policy — that these mayors who see him as an ally on a whole lot of other things, have been willing to get on his side in the primary.

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Because the only path for a moderate candidate to the Democratic nomination is at least with some significant support from black voters. Right now, one of the biggest questions in the race is whether Joe Biden is going to hang on to the support that he has had from African-Americans all along, or whether, as he struggles in these largely white early states, those voters are going to look elsewhere. And what Mike Bloomberg hopes is that they will look to him.

michael barbaro

And from everything you’re saying, underlying that strategy of reaching out to African-American leaders, African-American elected officials, and then kind of taking them from Joe Biden is this kind of philanthropic juggernaut of Mike Bloomberg.

alexander burns

It’s being able to indicate, or explicitly say, that he has been their friend on a lot of other things. And a lot of other things can involve gun control. It can involve public education or public health. But a whole lot of that comes out of the activities of Mike Bloomberg’s foundation and the activities of his political vehicles.

michael barbaro

So this is what you were talking about earlier, Alex. This dilemma that Democrats are facing. It’s the same one that progressive groups have been facing for years, groups like Center for American Progress. How much can they overlook, in terms of Mike Bloomberg’s record, in exchange for getting this extraordinary financial support in causes that they believe in and that he believes in?

alexander burns

Right. If you believe that the Democratic Party is a party deeply concerned about economic inequality and about the disproportionate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small number of people, it seems really incongruous to think that Mike Bloomberg could be a plausible candidate for the nomination, even setting aside issues like stop-and-frisk or his conduct with women.

michael barbaro

But!

alexander burns

But for a lot of Democratic voters, in an election that they regard as a national emergency, if the only question is who can beat Trump, people are at least apparently open to the idea that a guy with $60 billion, who has shown that he knows how to use it, might be that candidate.

michael barbaro

And not just a billionaire willing to use that money. But a billionaire who represents their agenda, right? I mean, there has for a long time been this anxiety within the Democratic Party, within progressive America, over concentration of wealth. Over the power of the oligarchy. But if the oligarch is their oligarch, and spends all his money on their causes, then that really, really complicates this, right?

alexander burns

Absolutely. He has put before Democratic voters a pretty clear proposition, which is that on the one hand, they may be offended by his wealth and a number of other things about him. But if they’re offended by his wealth, do they care more about that or about climate change, which he has used his wealth to try to address? In some ways, it’s not a perfect comparison. But you could think about it as related to the choice that Republican voters made in embracing Donald Trump. This was a guy who, in almost every outward respect, should have been completely offensive to socially conservative voters who ultimately embraced him. And they embraced him because they decided, if we are going to live in this morally degraded, libertine country where our values are under assault, well, this guy may be a Hollywood celebrity libertine, but he is our Hollywood celebrity libertine.

michael barbaro

Right. There’s a pragmatism do it. He was going to do their bidding. And effectively has, when it comes to things like conservative judges on the Supreme Court.

alexander burns

Absolutely. So if you’re convinced that your best option to save the Supreme Court, to deal with climate change, to deal with gun violence, is by embracing a guy who’s just going to buy his way to victory on that stuff, well, buying your way to victory might be a more desirable proposition than losing.

michael barbaro

You know, it strikes me that this would become an even more complicated issue if Bloomberg — and this is by no means assured. In fact, it still seems quite improbable. But, who knows? — if he becomes the nominee and becomes president. Because then you would have a president who would be among the nation’s premier philanthropists, political donors. And there would always be a question hovering over why someone supports him, why someone is endorsing his legislation, showing up at the White House for a signing ceremony, right? And there would always be this sense that he would probably level internal opposition within the world of the Democrats, because they would want access to his money.

alexander burns

And potentially level opposition on the other side, too. Because we’ve never had a president who was willing and able to say, if you vote for my bill, I will help you win re-election. And if you don’t, I will spend $100 million dollars trying to defeat you.

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michael barbaro

And his message would be, yeah, I’m really rich. So you just have to trust me. And you have to trust my moral compass.

alexander burns

It’s what’s in his ads that we’ve been talking about. He’s putting it in front of people right now, this idea that he’s a self-made billionaire who has put that money to causes that you, the Democratic primary electorate, care about. It doesn’t take some great feat of imagination to get voters thinking about what that would mean in the general election and what that could mean for a president.

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michael barbaro

Thank you, Alex.

alexander burns

Thank you.

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archived recording (joe biden) $60 billion can buy you a lot of advertising. But it can’t erase your record. There’s a lot to talk about with Michael Bloomberg. You’re not —

michael barbaro

Over the weekend, after largely ignoring Mike Bloomberg for weeks, the top Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden on “Meet the Press,” began attacking him for his past statements and policies, especially stop-and-frisk.

archived recording (joe biden) His position on issues relating to the African-American community, from stop-and-frisk to the way he talked about Obama, I mean —

michael barbaro

At a rally in Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders delivered a similar attack.

archived recording (bernie sanders) Regardless of how much money a multibillionaire candidate is willing to spend on his election, we will not create the energy and excitement we need to defeat Donald Trump if that candidate pursued, advocated for and enacted racist policies like stop-and-frisk, which caused communities of color in his city to live in fear.

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michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

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