Welcome back to a jam-packed edition of The Best & the Brightest, featuring highlights from a leaked No Labels call: their “unity ticket” plans, fundraising strategy, the Harlan Crow wild card, and the Joe Manchin of it all. Also, a few words on the return of T.J. Ducklo. But first…

• Eat. Pray. Click: The now seemingly interminable White House Correspondents Association’s weekend, where everyone runs into everyone for five long days, is now notable only for the spats that emerge. Sometimes these little rows are public and unfortunate; other times, they are just silly.

  During a late after-hours event at the Swiss Embassy last week, Politico editor-in-chief Matt Kaminski had a “spirited” exchange with Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and former C.E.O of Politico and co-founder and current C.E.O. of Axios, who just enjoyed an enviable liquidity event when the latter was acquired by Cox for $525 million. The backstory here was a satirical article published by Politico columnist Michael Schaffer, poking fun at Axios’s evening Finish Line newsletter, in which Vandehei cameos once a week to offer pithy, Tony Robbins-esque management-philosophy advice. (Hey, I’m all for it, brother!) The occasionally spiritual wisdom marks an evolution from Jim’s earlier years as a more chest-thumping, bro-y executive.

  One Axios insider believes the piece was timed to drop on Friday just before the White House Correspondents’ dinner, when Politico’s German overlords at Axel Springer were coming into town, perhaps as Kaminski’s way to show them how wise they were to pass on Axios and buy Politico instead. At the bar of the Embassy around 1 a.m., Vandehei temporarily departed from his zen state to approach Kaminski to tell him that the piece was “bullshit,” according to a Politico insider. Vandehei said “You know it, you’re better than this,” an Axios insider said. VandeHei also said that he was able to poach two of Politico’s star reporters—Ryan Heath and Alex Thompson—because of a bad culture at Politico. Both Axios and Politico declined to comment.

  But it doesn’t seem like there was any great conspiracy here, even if the editor-in-chief has the final say in what runs. (For what it’s worth, Politico’s Weekend Edition was always going to be dedicated to the media because of the WHCA dinner.) In fact, Schaffer told me that he actually pitched the story. “It would have been a no-brainer if I worked anywhere else, of course, given the history,” he said. “I was worried people inside the shop would think it was an institutional statement instead of just my column. Once they said otherwise, I was happy to go for it.”

But part of it simply stems from the group’s undeniable and intrinsic secrecy. Most politicians and operatives always somehow find the time to offer a quote or a text, even if it’s on background. But my multiple requests for interviews with No Labels have always been rebuffed. I was once told by C.E.O. Nancy Jacobson, “What’s best for Democracy is confidentiality.” Even former senator Joe Lieberman was mum when I peppered him with questions about the group after disembarking from an American Airlines flight we both happened to be on. (Don’t worry, I let him fly in peace, for what it’s worth.)

Despite their clandestine behavior, No Labels is serious: they’re ready to put $70 million behind a so-called unity ticket. In order to offer a more comprehensive view into their thinking, I’m sharing snippets from a recent No Labels call with their supporters that was leaked to me. It evidences, among other things, that their grassroots supporters are in fact very smart, sincere, and genuinely concerned about what the group is doing. Jacobson, for her part, was characteristically blunt. She said that they have been “Pearl Harbored” by a memo by another rival 501(c)4 centrist think tank, Third Way, that was published in March. When one caller expressed concern about accepting donations from Harlan Crow, the Republican real estate billionaire who has been funding Clarence Thomas’s lifestyle, Jacobson remarked, “If you don’t want that, this isn’t the place for you.”

In the end, Joe Manchin makes a cameo from his cell phone during which he sounds very much like a candidate. And yet while Jacobson says the group is “out of the cave,” there is still plenty we don’t know, such as the identities of their donors. The below has been condensed and edited for clarity. The supporters on the call have not been named to protect their identities. No Labels did not respond to a request for comment.

Nancy Jacobson, C.E.O. of No Labels: And if you haven’t donated to us this year, well, we need your money. We’d love you to fund our convention for No Labels. We’d love if you could sign up with us, that would be great.

New Caller: What is the schedule for ballot access? When do you expect to be on the ballot access for all 50 states? Given that there’s already been legal action against [the group], do you expect more legal action and what do you plan to do to proactively prepare for that rather than being blindsided when it does happen?

Jacobson: We don’t like to say in advance exactly where we’re going because that’s when you start getting the legal action and it’s really hard. …Sometime later this year, into early next year, it’s roughly 20 states that we hopefully qualify [for]. And the Arizona predicament there, the secretary of state there is fighting alongside us and feels very confident we’ll win that.

Caller: Do you still think you’ll be on all 50 states?

Jacobson: Yeah, we have a plan for that.

Caller: Do you think it’s likely?

Jacobson: Yes, in some states the candidate will have to do just candidates because you have to put their name in but you’ve got to have a plan. The candidate will do it. It’s even actually easier for the candidate to do it themselves.

Jacobson: I say that we were Pearl Harbored. Right, [Third Way] attacked us, they come out with a memo, they brought us out of our cave. We were just planning to be the group, get the ballot, keep our heads down, find the leadership in the states, and then have the movement be born if it was revealed in Dallas. That was always the plan. We thought it would be a national sensation—ticket comes out, people galvanize, that’s when the movement would really start. Things have changed. We’ve come out of the cave, they brought us out, we’ve come out, we’re now much more public. You’ll be happy to know that we’re meeting with a team next week, supposedly best-in-class advertising firm. It’s money we don’t have now—we’re going to have to make a major push and spend day and night to try to raise this money—but they really believe the time to build the movement is now and the way to do it is with more advertising and be out there.

Same caller: I’m sort of suggesting movement building without money.

Unity 2020 was able to get 30,000 people in a handful of months. I’m hesitant to donate to something that has an escape hatch. It’s always phrased as an insurance policy if the nation wants this—we may do this, we may not do this. I’d give you $10,000 today if you said, we’re doing this, torpedoes full speed ahead, we’re doing this. I’m hesitant to give you $100,000 if [I don’t know the plan] will go through.

Jacobson: Listen, we have to rely on all of you to help with the movement building. You’re right, we don’t have to spend more, but really to build this to the next level, we really do. And so we’re going to count on people to bring their people in. We’re just authentically true. I understand the Catch-22, we’re authentic. We’re not looking to spoil. We’re not going to do it. I understand if people don’t want to be on that journey with us. If we can do it and win and build a unity government, we’re going to do this. And I understand if people don’t want to be on that journey, I understand that. Not everybody wants to buy the insurance.

Clancy: This 2024 insurance project is part of what we’re doing, but it’s hardly the only thing we’re doing. When you’re talking about the ideas, the digital assets—we need to build digital assets anyway. To build out this community, this common sense majority. If in a year from now, we don’t nominate a ticket, but there’s more energy behind the movement, more governors, House and Senate members who want to fly the flag for it and if our congressional allies have more influence to actually force things towards the center, then that’s success. There are lots of paths to success for us.

Jacobson: That is not the way we are intending to message it.

Clancy: The foundation that No Labels is always going to stand on is that we’re the voice of this majority. We’re providing something that the rest of the political universe refuses to provide them. There’s no shortage of people in Washington that are telling the public what they’re supposed to feel. And if we find ourselves in a position [where] we’re sort of parsing which candidates are less appealing, that’s a loser every time. When two-thirds of the people say I don’t want a rematch. I’m sure people have very different reasons for not wanting Trump and not wanting Biden. It’s not for us to parse those things. It’s to have the clarity to say if there’s an election the public clearly doesn’t want, why can’t we inject some competition in the process? To actually bring our leaders more to where the public wants them to be.

Same Caller: Exactly Ryan, and we have to make that clear because if we come across that we’re going to make the decision, that is so going to backfire. People ask, do you have candidates in mind? When you say, no we’re not doing that right now, it comes across as not very professional. There needs to be some kind of response. I think whether it’s there are people coming to us, we’re not making any decision, we’re talking to a few people, something. But to just say no, we’re not—I think leaves the wrong impression.

Jacobson: This is all helpful.

Jacobson: When there’s a competition in the marketplace, which we are, the quickest, fastest way to slice us down and dismiss us was that argument. And we knew that a year and a half ago, that was always going to be the argument. We knew the most important thing is to prosecute the case that we weren’t going to be a spoiler, but that is how they dismiss you. How does anyone know anything? When we see these poll numbers, it’s the most striking thing. We haven’t seen an independent moderate since Ross Perot; we know nothing. You can look at these two candidates. Keep an open mind. Don’t let the competition out there, they want to control it, that’s the way to do it. I
agree with you—we’re only going to do this to win it, and there are so many off ramps.

Clancy: This idea of the uncertainty around it: It sounds clever when some of the critics say it, this is going to help Trump. And then do you step back and say, do we all agree that the most important thing in politics is the candidate? Right? If there’s not even a candidate, how can you say what role they’re going to have on the race? Different independent candidates have different kinds of impact.

So here’s an example: Ralph Nader was a spoiler for the Democrats. Of course he was, because he was a left wing protest candidate, so the only column he was going to pull out of was Al Gore’s. On the other hand, Ross Perot made a vast appeal to the middle of the country and he pulled evenly from both sides, so there’s a lot of pseudo-certainty about how this would impact the race, that’s not based on anything other than, as Nancy mentioned, it’s a very easy way to cut this down before it gets momentum.

Jacobson: Look me up. I’m actually from Indiana. I worked with [Democrat] Evan Bayh for 15 years. We came up with the idea 15 years ago when Evan Bayh resigned from the Senate. I realized that I didn’t want to work for another politician again. I wanted to work for a movement to the center. Because I was the third person hired by Bill Clinton in 1991. I came to Washington to work for Gary Hart. What’s interesting is that I know that people are going to stir up fears about all of us. What can I say? Where am I personally? Even though I’ve been on the Democratic side and we have Democrats and Republicans in here. If you want to sort of say it’s not about the party and you really care about the country, this is really the place for you. If you don’t want that, this isn’t the place for you [caller], and we may not be the place for you. That’s what I would sort of say. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to anyone here but there’s going to be great campaigns out there, there’s going to be a Republican campaign, a Democratic campaign. This is a mission that cares about the country. That’s what I’d say to you, make that decision and you know we’re not going to be for everybody, and that’s okay.

Jacobson: If this is not a national sensation and the crowd is not coming out and the crowds are not coming out, then it’s not happening, we’re getting out of this. We can get out of this by the end of August, pull the plug, [that’s the] latest we can get off the ballot. I know there’s a lot of fears about all of this. What I’d love to hear on these calls is a more can-do spirit of, why can’t we convince other people, why can’t we do this? I know it’s a lot of dark and a lot of doom. [Caller], would we ever be here if we were ever fearful of fear?

Joe Manchin: The hope is to keep the country that we have, and you cannot do that by forcing the extreme sides on both parties. And basically it is about putting the country first. I applaud No Labels and I applaud everyone who cares about our country to forget about this political environment that we have, and let’s try to make people come back together for the sake of the country, not just for the sake of the party. That’s all we’re talking about. There shouldn’t be a debt crisis, there shouldn't be any of these crises that they’re fabricating if they did what was good for the country. And we gotta get out of that stereotype that we have right now. It’s crippling us.

There’s enough people like you that care about our country, and not this political system that we have that’s not serving anybody. It’s not serving themselves, they’re just so selfish they can’t see it. So we’re going to hold their feet to the fire and make them do the right thing.

I just came back from Ukraine, and I can tell you how precious the freedoms that come with democracy [are]. How precious [it is] to see people fighting for something with overwhelming odds for something that we take for granted. And to be the leader of the free world, you’ve got to lead, you can’t be this dysfunctional. We’ve got to do better, we can. Don’t give up. God bless you all.

Washington is a city of second, third, and sometimes even fourth chances, where personal scandals rarely end a career. As Michael Schaffer once put it, “you’ll always eat lunch in this town again.” So it goes for T.J. Ducklo, the former White House aide who resigned in 2021 after a verbal altercation with me that was unprofessional and deeply personal. Ducklo, of course, is now heading back to Biden world in a communications job on the campaign. His return has been smoothed by effusive comments of support from female colleagues, in advance of the official announcement, lest anyone kick up dust about the whole thing.

The truth about Ducklo, with whom I had never interacted before the incident on the night of Biden’s inauguration, is that he was a very aggressive defender of the president, which naturally rubbed some reporters the wrong way. Some thought he was demeaning, but nobody who approached me afterward said that he had ever crossed the line as he did with me. For what it’s worth, I never wanted Ducklo to be fired from the White House. I learned after our altercation that he was suffering with lung cancer during the campaign. But as with all things in Washington, it often comes down to how you manage the scandal rather than the scandal itself.

I always thought that it could have been resolved if Ducklo and I had sat down together and a real apology was exchanged. Instead, Ducklo sent me a two-line email apology and Biden’s top advisor Anita Dunn called my editor to argue that I broke our “off the record” agreement by outlining the incident in an internal memo at the time. For a full month, I felt shunned by the White House, and by Dunn, who warned young press aides about reporters who break off the record, I was told, winking and nodding about what happened between me and Ducklo. “Reporters can’t be trusted,” Dunn said, according to a witness. (“Anita was emphatic to the team that TJ’s comments were totally inappropriate and that no staffer ever could behave that way under any circumstances, regardless of ground rules,” said Saloni Sharma, a senior advisor for communications in the White House.)

For what it’s worth, I had never met Ducklo or his then-girlfriend, Alexi McCammond, before reporting on their relationship. The story was actually brought in by my colleagues at Playbook, since I had just returned to covering politics in D.C. after hosting two podcasts about the victims abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I was just catching up on the latest micro-drama enrapturing the town: a White House deputy press secretary, and an Axios reporter who covered the Biden campaign openly dating—what a scandal!

I won’t rehash the words that were exchanged after Ducklo called me, but since he was forced to resign from his dream job, we sat down together for coffee months later and had a long talk. And he seemed to be genuinely sorry. He said he had learned from the experience and vowed to never talk to a reporter or person like that again. I trusted him. Everyone has bad days and they shouldn’t have to pay for them for the rest of their lives. In fact, I told anyone who privately reached out to me about hiring Ducklo that I believed he deserved another chance.

There are some people who deserve to be canceled, but T.J. Ducklo is not one of them. I even did some extracurricular reporting, checking in with other reporters who had also described him as aggressive, or said he called them names they didn’t like, but they all said it was just angry flack behavior. T.J. and I have spoken many times since. He’s kept me posted on how things are going in Nashville. And I truly believe that he’s coming back in a stronger way, more aware of the impact of his power.

In fact, he told me in an email: “It’s really important to me that I show I’m not the person who acted so horribly in our conversation. While that conversation was very unique in how inappropriate and over the line it was, I don’t have to be one of those D.C. flacks who can get combative to get their point across. You can be a passionate defender of your boss without being sharp with people. There’s a human side to all this work I better appreciate now and I hope I get the chance to make good on.” I hope he keeps that commitment and I wish him the best.