The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The White House can’t get its story straight on President Trump’s threats to rig the midterms. Earlier this week, Trump explicitly called on Republicans to “nationalize” the elections—a direct threat. After this blew up, Karoline Leavitt rushed out to reassure people about Trump’s intentions.

But then Trump wrecked Leavitt’s spin by confirming that, yes, he does want Republicans to take over the elections. Meanwhile, in the background, Steve Bannon is saying, in effect, that ICE will, in fact, be doing voter intimidation in the midterms.

And after that, Leavitt went out and snapped at a reporter in anger for asking a reasonable question about whether ICE will be at polling places or not. In short, they’re all over the place. So how seriously should we take these threats, and what should we make of them? We’re checking in with election law expert Rick Hasen, who’s been warning that the threat is very serious indeed. Rick, nice to have you on.

Rick Hasen: Good to be with you.

Sargent: So let’s start with what Trump said earlier this week. Here it is: “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Rick, what does “nationalize the voting” actually mean? What does Trump mean by it? And why should we worry about it?

Hasen: So, we don’t know exactly what Trump means by “nationalize the vote.” It’s possible for the United States to have a system where we run our elections the same in every state—at least Congress would have some powers to do that in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution.

I don’t take Trump’s statements about nationalizing the vote seriously as an actual proposal, but I do take it very seriously as an indication that he’s thinking about how to mess with the midterm elections. Because I think he’s very afraid that Democrats are going to take control of one or both houses of Congress and make the last two years of his term very unpleasant.

Sargent: Well, he certainly has a lot to worry about there. Let’s listen to how Karoline Leavitt tried to spin it when asked what Trump meant by all this.

Reporter (voiceover): What does President Trump mean when he says Republicans ought to nationalize voting? What does that look like in practice?

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): What the president was referring to is the SAVE Act which is a huge common sense piece of legislation that Republicans have supported, that President Trump is committed to signing into law. It provides very common sense measures for voting in our country, such as voter ID.

Sargent: Rick, I don’t think Trump was referring to the SAVE Act when he called for “nationalizing” the elections. He said Congress—meaning Republicans—should take over the administration of elections in states that he falsely claims have voter fraud in them. And so, to your point about how it’s not an actual proposal, it’s sort of more of an amorphous threat—he did mean it as an amorphous threat, right? And Karoline Leavitt’s spin is bullshit, isn’t it?

Hasen: Yeah, sure. They can’t get their story straight—just like they can’t get their story straight about why Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is at the Fulton raid where they’re seizing actual ballots. I mean, there’s a lot of reason to be worried about what this administration is going to do, even if there’s not going to be some plan to have the federal government actually take over elections.

What I’ve heard Trump say more than once is that he believes that states are the “agents of the federal government.” They’re like administering it for the federal government. And in fact, that’s not how our constitutional design is. Our constitutional design gives states the power to run even federal elections unless Congress affirmatively overrides. And you may remember back in the summer, Trump issued an executive order about voting. Well, parts of that executive order have been challenged in court, and we’ve had more than one court say the president has no role to play in the conduct of federal elections. So there are........

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