--:-- Mark Garrison: Good morning. It's Friday, June 17th. I'm Mark Garrison, in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Mark Garrison: We now know a lot more about John Eastman, the lawyer advising Trump on overthrowing the election. He created the legal argument Trump used to suggest that Mike Pence could single-handedly overturn the election results.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Yesterday, in the third January 6th committee hearing, we heard audio of Pence saying that what the president asked him to do was illegal.
--:-- Mark Garrison: I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. But President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.
--:-- Mark Garrison: We also heard a lot yesterday from the vice president's chief counsel, Greg Jacob. He testified that even Eastman himself knew this plan violated the Constitution.
--:-- Mark Garrison: I said, John, if the vice president did what you were asking him to do, we would lose nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, wouldn't we? And he initially started it, well, I think maybe you would lose only 7-2. And after some further discussion acknowledged, well, yeah, you're right, we would lose 9-0. Still, Eastman moved forward, as did Trump, with advocating for this plan.
--:-- Mark Garrison: After the January 6th attack, Eastman sought a presidential pardon. Here's House committee member Pete Aguilar.
--:-- Pete Aguilar: In fact, just a few days later, Dr. Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani and requested that he be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon. Dr. Eastman's email stated, quote, I've decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Eastman never got his pardon. The committee tried to make the case that his and the president's actions not only broke the law and jeopardized our democracy, but they also put Pence's life in danger. At one point rioters who stormed the Capitol were within 40 feet of him.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And a confidential informant from the Proud Boys told the FBI they would have killed Pence if given a chance.
--:-- Mark Garrison: There are a lot of questions about whether the Department of Justice will explore criminal charges as a result of these hearings, and there's some interesting tension playing out right now around that issue.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The DOJ says the committee's hindering its criminal investigation by not sharing transcripts of witness interviews. Committee Chair Benny Thompson says the committee will cooperate, but that the DOJ has to be patient.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And we know at least one important person was watching yesterday. Attorney General Merrick Garland said earlier in the week that he'd be tuning in.
--:-- Mark Garrison: In the backdrop of the January 6th hearings is the anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Fifty years ago today, five men got caught trying to get into the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Eventually, America learned they were part of a much larger effort, secretly backing President Nixon's re-election. Their arrest was the beginning of his downfall and more.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Watergate was a constitutional crisis. Dan Baltz is chief correspondent at the Washington Post.
--:-- Dan Baltz: I mean, we obviously had never seen anything like it. It was the central story of our time, and we were all revolving around it in one way or another.
--:-- Dan Baltz: His latest piece focuses on the enduring impact of that central story and how it fundamentally changed the country.
--:-- Dan Baltz: I think you have to think of Watergate as part of a several-year moment in American history where we went from a time of idealism and trust to a time of shattered idealism and shattered trust.
--:-- Dan Baltz: The numbers back that up. In 1964, more than three-quarters of Americans told pollsters they trusted their government. A decade later, through the Vietnam War, assassination of Martin Luther King, and Nixon's resignation, that trust number had fallen to 36 percent.
--:-- Dan Baltz: It has never gotten back to pre-Watergate levels.
--:-- Dan Baltz: And Bolt says one irony of this is Congress, governmental institutions, they basically did their jobs dealing with Watergate. So even if the system worked, the story that was being told was so ugly and so dispiriting that that was the real takeaway that people had that they could not believe, they could not trust the most senior officials in the government.
--:-- Dan Baltz: And that I think has had a lasting impact.
--:-- Dan Baltz: Balz draws a direct line from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. He says that Trump presidency can be seen as a culmination of the trends that started around the time of Watergate from the distrust in institutions to a polarized country.
--:-- Dan Baltz: And there have been many parallels drawn between Nixon and Trump's actions.
--:-- Dan Baltz: I think one of the things that some of the historians I talk to would say is that Trump learned from Nixon that, in a sense, you can try to get away with almost anything. And if you can get away with it, all the more power to you.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein owned the Watergate story for The Post all those years ago. They've written an essay with their own take on Nixon and Trump, which you can read on the Apple News app.
--:-- Mark Garrison: The NBA has a new champion. Here's the moment Golden State took down Boston last night.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And that'll do it. It's over. The Golden State Warriors return to a familiar place. They're on top of the NBA world. The Warriors beat the Celtics to win their first title since 2018.
--:-- Mark Garrison: They became the first team ever to go from the NBA's worst record to a championship in a three-season span.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Here's Apple News Sports Editor Eric Malinowski.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: They were down 14-2, four minutes into this game. And you're thinking, well, we are definitely heading back to San Francisco for a Game 7 on Sunday. And then they turned it around. Their defense woke up. From there, they were able to dominate against the younger and very aggressive Celtics.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: Malinowski wrote the book on the Warriors. It's called Beta Ball.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: His key takeaway from last night is the most valuable player award winner. The biggest thing that anyone is going to remember is, in fact, the play of Steph Curry.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: This was, in many ways, a capstone on what is already really a legendary career in the NBA.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: But there was some narrative around his play and his career and the fact that he had never won an NBA Finals MVP award.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: And all of those narratives that have semi-plagued him throughout certain stretches of his career, they've all evaporated now.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: They simply do not exist.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: Curry had a huge night with 34 points, 7 rebounds, and 7 assists.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: And really he has really elevated himself into the conversation of quite possibly the greatest point guard to ever play in the NBA.
--:-- Eric Malinowski: And to be frank, it may be a long time if ever before we ever see another player of this level of caliber and influence play in the NBA.
--:-- Mark Garrison: You can read ESPN's take on the game along with other highlights and analysis in the Apple News app.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Psychologist Lori Santos teaches the most popular course at Yale.
--:-- Lori Santos: The first time I taught the class, which was in 2018, a quarter of the entire Yale student body enrolled in the class. So over a thousand students.
--:-- Lori Santos: We had no classrooms on campus that could fit all these people. So we had to teach the class in a concert hall. It was all really surreal.
--:-- Lori Santos: The class teaches people how to be happy, and students say it works.
--:-- Lori Santos: The demand for it led to the creation of a free online version. Millions of people have taken it, including someone we know.
--:-- Lori Santos: A big theme of this class is teaching people what they get wrong about happiness.
--:-- Lori Santos: I think we have this misconception that people are either happy or they're not, but the evidence really suggests that through your behaviors and your mindsets, there are lots of simple things you can do to feel better that we often don't even expect.
--:-- Lori Santos: Santos says many of us want to be happier, but the stuff we think will help generally doesn't do it.
--:-- Lori Santos: After you're earning a middle-class income, earning more money doesn't make you much happier.
--:-- Lori Santos: There's evidence that if you're earning around $75,000, doubling or even quintupling your income won't actually affect your happiness at all.
--:-- Lori Santos: It won't decrease your stress. It won't increase your positive emotion. It just doesn't have the effect, we think.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Shumita's taken this class, and this week, while she was away in India, she finished one of the assignments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oh, Shumita, it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I really, really love you. I love you so much, too. Both of you.
--:-- Mark Garrison: There's a lot more to that scene. You can hear it, along with Shumita's whole conversation with Laurie Santos, on this weekend's episode of In Conversation.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Just search for Apple News in Conversation in the Apple News app or the Podcasts app.
--:-- Mark Garrison: Enjoy that weekend listen.
--:-- Mark Garrison: And as for this show, we're off Monday to mark Juneteenth. Shamita is back with us on Tuesday.
