An Undue Risk of Conviction

Welcome to the new edition of the Trump trials. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’re joined by Ben Wittis of Law Fair Boy. There is so much going on here. I mean, I need to have scorecard.

We have the document case down in Florida. We have the election subversion case in Washington, DC. We have the rack tiering case in Georgia. We have a fraud case in New York. And indeed, I forget, we also have the felony charges about paying Hush money to a porn star also in New York.

But before we get to that, Ben, there’s just so many other things that we just have to get to. And I I apologize in advance because I did not warn you that there would be math today. But I wanna talk about the fact that at a moment of international crisis, the House of Representatives is absolutely paralyzed. No speaker can’t get anything done. As you and I are talking, there’s no there’s no really no indication that anybody would want this.

Hey, I’m sure there’s cool things about being a speaker. I mean, I’ve been in the office. They got a great porch, you know, get people call you, mister speaker. You get the gavel. Kevin McCarthy gets the portrait.

You know, there’s a certain amount of power and ego. But it is, I think, objectively speaking, the shittiest job in Washington, but Steve scalise wants it. And here’s the math. The Republicans get together to vote on a speaker, and they vote one hundred and thirteen votes for Steve Scalia, ninety nine for Jim Jordan, Actually, it was closer than that. If you take out the members of Congress that don’t actually get to vote, scalise only gets about a hundred and ten votes.

Which means that he has to flip a hundred and seven votes in order to get, and here’s the key number, two hundred and seventeen votes to be elected. As of this morning, punch bowl is estimating that there are twenty to thirty hardcore never scalise votes. And so you remember, to use your memorable phrase that the crazed was it the crazed Slathering Jackal caucus? The crazed Jackal caucus took out Kevin McCarthy. Now it’s a whole new group of of Jackals, including George Santos, newly reindicted, who basically is has decided he’s not gonna vote for scalise unless he gets some guarantee they won’t expel him, but There’s no indication that anyone I mean, anyone in this caucus is going to get to two hundred and seventeen votes.

Which doesn’t bother apparently some Republicans because they’re not serious about governing. They’ve just sort of given it up. And And as in just an indication, let me just get this off my chat. How deeply unserious all of this is as the world becomes more dangerous. The fact that For a couple of days last week, people were actually talking about Donald Trump being elected speaker and that ninety nine members of the conference act actually voted for Jim Jordan.

I mean, Ben in a rational world, no grown up would even contemplate the possibility of putting Jim Jordan in that position. But here we are, absolute chaos in the House of Representatives, and it would be funny if the stakes were not so immensely serious.

Well, so first of all, let me emphasize the stakes being serious issue. And particularly for their series in a different way than they were before the attack in Israel last weekend. Right now, we have a ticking clock toward a government shutdown. We have a separate ticking clock toward Ukrainian insolvency, that, by the way, as soon as European countries realize the US is not good for its commitments to Ukraine, they will all start falling off as well. Our example is the only thing that keeps the European countries honest here, at least the western European countries.

And, of course, to anybody who thinks that the United States Republicans purport to believe should be leaping to you know, create an aid package for the Israelis in response to what has happened there. That is not happening now either. None of that can happen until we get a speaker. So I don’t it almost doesn’t matter what your politics are. There’s something whether it’s that you believe we should have a government or that you believe that we should do what we can for the Ukrainians or that we should do we can for the Israelis.

I happen to believe all three, but most people believe at least one of those things.

Right.

You can’t do any of them if you don’t resolve the speaker issue. So let me just propose the following resolution to the speaker problem. You’re right. It’s the shittiest job in Washington. No sane person would want it.

I certainly don’t want it. But I am willing to be the temporary speaker just to get us through the crisis kind of like the I’ll insist upon a dog shirt, of course, and the speakers podium, but I’m willing to take it on for the country for a short period of time. Sort of like the emergency Israeli government, and I think there should be three hundred votes in Congress for that.

No. This this is not more bizarre than some of the fan fiction were out there. Look, I mean, in case people are, you know, are smoking the Hopium Republicans are not gonna team Jackfrey’s, speaker, but it’s not inconceivable that you could have some sort of a centrist unity government, at least on temporary basis. I mean, the math is there. Right?

If you had six or seven Republican say, okay, elect a reasonable non insane Republican as speaker And then we will make certain concessions about how, you know, how the floor operates, what it brought up for a vote. But, hey, you know, stop with the reasonableness

Well, how about just this a figure who’s totally above politics Yeah. Who nobody knows what they believe, like Taylor Swift,

I was gonna mention Taylor Swift. Yeah.

You know, like, I think Taylor, like, just a temporary speaker. We’re not talking about long term or anything.

Oprah. Oprah. Tummy thing. Tom Hanks. I mean, just somebody who would be a figure of of unity.

Right. Speaking of Donald Trump, and the the total unseriousness of congressional politics, which leads us into the total unseriousness of American politics in general. I don’t know that this has gotten as much attention as it deserves mainly because there’s just so much going on. The zone is so flooded. And as Soundbyte that shows that Donald Trump is completely deranged and narcissistic is not exactly breaking news.

I get it. But, Ben, I just have to play this clip We’ll do this as a palate cleanser, and I apologize for people who can’t stand listening to his voice. This is Donald Trump once again. In his warped world, saying how smart Hezbollah was, how smart all of these butchers and terrorists are Let’s play it because it’s not taken out of context.

And then two nights ago, I read all of Biden’s security people. Can you imagine national defense people? And they said, gee, I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack from the north because that’s the most vulnerable spot. I said, wait a minute. You know, hezbollah is very smart.

They’re all very smart. The press doesn’t like when they say him. You know, I said that president Xi of China, one point four billion people. He controls it with an iron

really.

I said he’s a very smart man. They killed me the next day. I said he was smart. What am I gonna say? But hesitate, they’re very smart, and they have a national defense minister or somebody saying I hope Hezbollah doesn’t attack us from the north.

So the following morning, they attacked. They might not have been doing it, but if you listen to this jerk, you would attack from the north because He said that’s our weak spot.

Okay. The stream of consciousness, the ignorance, the Bulwark, the I mean, Ben, Alright. Really?

So let’s unpack it for a moment.

Oh, heck. Okay.

Well, let’s actually unpack it. So first of all, Hezbullah is in fact the most capable fighting force the Israelis’s face. One doesn’t have to praise or secretly admire them as Trump evidently does linking them in his mind to Xi Jinping and other dictators who very smart. They’re very smart to say that this is a very serious force. It is not true that the North is Israel’s weak spot, the north is heavily heavily garrisoned.

And these are the two most serious fighting forces in the Middle East that square off against each other. It’s a heavily garrisoned part of Israel. It runs across the Lebanese border is, along with the Syrian border is one of the most guarded and, seriously defended areas of the country precisely because Israel knows that knows that Hezbollah can strike at any time, Has Balla’s strikes were in no way brought on by the statement that was really a warning to Hezbollah, stay out of the conflict, and the type of communication that Israel and Hezbollah have which is mostly done through public statements and occasional attacks. So Hezbollah sends a message by sending a few missiles across the Israelis respond by with a few airstrikes. Right?

These are forms of communication, and they’re very sophisticated, by the way. And so an Israeli, or a US statement stay out is not a warning that this is, you know, the soft underbelly. It’s a messaging thing. And whether Donald Trump knows that and is lying or whether he’s just stream of conscious ing, but it’s an absurd thing to say. And, you know, it does, as you point out, and as Liz Cheney pointed out, it does kind of play into his kind of weird weird sort of fantasy love affairs with these highly authoritarian and brutal regimes And it’s also, you know, disgusting.

It’s also just a reminder that the thinking process that goes on in Donald Trump’s mind is is convoluted at best. But this is an interesting point. I think this whole idea that we are projecting a weakness, Biden projects weakness, and Donald Trump projects strength. Right? That’s He is strong.

And somehow he thinks that his admiration and his willingness to suck up and praise people like Putin and Xi and the terrorists in the Middle East and Kim Jong un somehow puts him in the category of being strong when what it does is basically says This guy can be played by every strong man in the world. Every strong man in the world looks at Donald Trump and says, I know exactly how to manipulate this guy. I’m not afraid of him. All I have to do is kiss his ass, say something nice about him. So Vladimir Putin does not think Donald Trump is strong like me when he sucks up He thinks Donald Trump is sucking up to me.

What a weakling. I can take this guy.

And look, nothing about the behavior of any US politician, even Donald Trump, brought on what Hamas did. What Hamas did and what Hezbollah is doing now are conditions based. They have to do with, you know, what they think they can get away with, what they’re operationally capable of pulling off, they have to do with their own interests, They may have something to do with Iran. They may not. They have to do with Israeli security failures.

They have nothing to do with what US politicians are saying.

I don’t think Hamas is sitting around going, hey, look. Do you see what this American politician said on Twitter here? Let’s launch the attack. Let’s go. Did you see the latest speech from Joe Biden?

Let’s go. Let’s do these things.

But here’s the thing that does matter about US patience. And by the way, you know, to everybody on the left and center left who wants to blame Donald Trump for what happened in Israel, it’s nonsense. This was not Donald Trump’s fault.

Right.

But what does matter when politicians say these things now is what message it sends to, for example, the US Congress about whether to choose a speaker and get on with business. It matters to the image of unity that we can project to the world about how we are going to respond how we are gonna support an Israeli response, how we are gonna put limits on an Israeli response when half of the country turns around and blames Joe Biden for this, you know, and Trump is praising Hezbollah and, you know, the left is glorifying Hamas it really constrains the US policy response in a way that is very unhelpful.

Well, I think the one of the things that we’ve seen though is that Israel, which, you know, historically been so unified and so strong was caught up in its culture wars, its division, and that kind of division, that kind of soft civil war obviously invited something. And and I think that should be a lesson for the United States that we assume that we are still, you know, the fortress of democracy, but we can mean, the whole world is watching as we tear each other apart is that we divide. You mentioned something. I included in my newsletter. You’re really thoughtful piece that you wrote over the weekend, you know, in the hours after the attack by Hamas, all of the ways not to respond.

And I wanted to ask you about one thing in particular because one of your statements was essentially, and I’m I’m going to paraphrase it. That very few problems are solved by the willful murder of civilians. Right? It was something like that.

It was a little stronger than that. Was there are no problems, the solution to which are the intentional murder of civilians.

Okay. Now What kind of reaction did you get to that? Because I saw that you commented on that. What was the response to what I think was a deeply moral statement that ought to have been agreed to by all people of goodwill.

First of all, I made a point of not including ethnicities in in this because I actually feel the same way about the intentional killing of Palestinians and, you know.

Yeah.

It was not in any sense meant as a chauvinistic Jewish statement. And to the extent that anybody in the IDF is engaged in the intentional targeting of Palestinian civilians. That person is a war criminal and, should be put on trial for it. I posted it because I actually think that the rush to have a take rather than to state, you know, a moral idea is very destructive in a time like this. And you know, everybody kind of wants to say either the Israelis are entitled to respond, therefore, whatever they do is fine, you know, etcetera or free Palestine from the river to the sea, you know, People who know nothing about the conflict are sort of lining up to do these kind of sometimes neurotically detailed moral posturings about whether forty or some lesser number of children were beheaded.

And my point was simply Can we break through to higher ground and look at it from forty thousand feet? What’s the moral principle? And the moral principle is whatever your grievance, whether it’s right or wrong, well, however, just or unjust your cause. However, you know, brutal your you may perceive your oppression to be or it may in fact be. The willful murder of civilians is murder.

And by the way, if you think about the movements, including the violent movements in history that we think of with approbation. They were not engaged in massacres of civilians. Right? First of all, the vast majority of responses to this are people licking like. And so I I don’t wanna overstate the following, but there was a remarkable number of people who had to add comments to it that problematize what I think is a very simple moral statement.

So people saying, yes, but, or would you say this if or Mhmm. What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There’s a whole, like, what about US strategic bombing in World War two Right. Or x, y, and z, all from, like, quite different perspectives. Most of them hostile to Israel, but I was just surprised at how many people could not simply sign on to the basic proposition that political murder is bad.

I was struck by that as well. And I think a lot of the reaction to all this was shocking. And I do think that’s a moment to step back and go, okay, how depraved you have to be to minimize, ignore, or even justify some of the crimes. Now I I I know that it’s it’s almost impossible. I use the word almost advisedly, almost impossible to justify, the murder and decapitation of babies.

So instead, we had a lot of people who were saying, well, Okay. Was that confirmed? Were they really decapitated? Aren’t they just murdered? I mean, as if somehow that was gonna change it.

But there was this deep denial, like, Let’s not do.

And also arguing over the number of babies. Right? That that it’s outrageous that there were forty You said there were forty.

Yeah.

When really there’s only x confirmed cases. Look, I don’t know how many babies were decapitated. And, you know, if the number is zero, that’s good, I suppose, that they were merely murdered and not decapitated. It strikes me as a kind of weird moral fetish to fight over that sort of thing. We’re dealing with a massacre of a thousand more or more people

In this and other people.

Detain yourself morally with fighting over the details.

In my newsletter this morning, I linked to something that I was kind of of really struck to find it in writing. It’s this group’s students for justice in Palestine, and they’re putting out a toolkit for protests. And they specifically say we need to normalize, violence And they actually have a a little section where they talk about framework is more important than facts. Don’t get bogged down in facts. Don’t argue about facts what you should be pushing is the ideological line.

This is part of our our lives that people will will pick the narrative that they want, and then they will choose the facts that fit that particular narrative. But this group, so anxious to justify and rationalize the murders of Hamas, put it down in writing Like, no, we need to contextualize these atrocities. Do not allow the zionist to, bug you down in fact. Because that will just lead to a back and forth about what is factual. We need to go to the framework by which they mean our ideological priors.

Which is whatever that Hamas is right that we need to destroy all of Israel, you know, from the river to the sea and all of that. But it’s interesting. The the way in which They have really embraced this idea that we can normalize exactly the kind of thing that we’re talking about, and that’s their word. Normalize, utilize it and put the framework or ideological agenda ahead of mere facts. And now this is not the whole left but it is the pro Hamas left, and we we shouldn’t take our eyes off this.

The left, even the non pro Hamas left, but the left the part of the left that so hates Israel that it is willing to either justify or ignore or sort of bat away really horrific stuff in order to focus on Israel. This is a very old problem. It goes back to, you know, communist party days and it’s a Sarah Longwell standing problem. One of the challenges of the growth of the left as part of the Democratic coalition, which is something that I’m, you know, there are areas in which I have a lot in common with the left. There are areas that I really do not.

But I observed sociologically that this is a more significant part of the democratic coalition than it used to be. One problem with this is the importation of this. I’m just gonna say it out loud. This anti Semitic component of the left into the more mainstream components of the Democratic Party. I Will Saletan a general matter, the Democratic party is right now handling this very well.

Joe Biden is. Yeah. Joe Biden is. A lot of the

members of Congress have too. And I think the party apparatus has done a pretty good job. The problem is not in the party. The problem is in the cultural institutions. University is elite intellectual for, in which it is just acceptable to say things about Zionists when, of course, what you mean is Jews, and a synagogue in Portugal was defaced with the words free Palestine.

This was not an Israeli institution. It’s a Jewish institution. Right? And the inability to distinguish between the political currents that you object to and the policy seas of the Israeli government that you object to, by the way, many of which are very objectionable. And the legitimacy of the Israeli state to begin with, and the inability to distinguish between the Israeli state and the Jews who live down the street from you, this is very dangerous stuff, and the left needs to guard against it.

It needs to be watchful about this stuff. And look, you know, Michael Harrington, the great American socialist founder of DSA.

The Democratic socialist of American.

Yeah. Democratic socialist of America. He was a anti authority Carrian socialist wrote the the book that inspired the war of po on poverty. I mean, this is a this is a great American figure would be appalled that the DSA is today justifying murder.

And this is a watershed, I think, for some of these organizations. I mean, the democratic socialist of America, you know, went so far that they had to be repudiated by members of Congress who had been aligned with him. There was one congressman, I think, from Minnesota who said I’m out. I’m I’m done. AOC has denounced them.

Ricie Torres, a democratic, congressman who’s been very, very pro Israel, very critical of DSA says, this is the beginning of the end for them, that they will lose their political influence in clout. Also gonna be a crisis moment for groups like Black Lives Matter. Now I don’t know whether or not some of these Black Lives Matter, units speak for the general organization or who they they are, but there was a rather strong and some really, really deeply offensive pro Hamas propaganda coming out from them. Now BLM had widespread support. So for them to put out literature showing Hamas terrorist and hang gliders, you know, coming down was a I mean, it was a disastrous miscalculation, but maybe it disposes rifts within that organization that they’re going to have to deal with.

They’re going to have to deal with them, or they will be completely marginalized in American society.

The region of Israel that was attacked most intensively, which is the, you know, a set of small towns, Moshevs, and Kibut seem right along the Gaza fence is an area that I’ve spent a lot of time in over the years. And I just want people to understand the degree of proximity that these towns the city of Sterot, which is the sort of biggest town, right, in the area, the downtown from the center of the city into Gaza is less than a mile.

Less than a mile.

It’s less than a mile. It’s it’s about a, you know, kilometer and a half, maybe. It’s really it’s nothing. One of the kibbutzim that was attacked, or Mosav that was attacked the lands literally go up to the wall. And there is a woman who lives in this town.

I believe she is okay. I’m not sure She is a potter, and she makes little pieces of painted pottery that she when you when you visit this Mosab, she gives you one and invites you to put it up on the wall in these sort of ceramic murals that are all peace signs. These are communities that have been there for a really long time. These aren’t people who, like, are like Westbank settlers who choose to live in conflict zones. These are towns that have been there for a long time, and I just, you know, want people to understand that On both sides of this conflict, there are millions of people who did not ask for this.

Right. This is very important. This is very important. And unfortunately, they will be suffering. Okay.

So Ben, let’s switch gears to the main event today. Which, of course, are the many, many, many trump trials. Where should we begin? Let’s start with this. The documents case, what’s going on there, Washington Post, notes that there was kind of a dazzling detail, a tantalizing detail in one of the filings by the special council’s office earlier this week.

Government lawyers arguing, you know, against a motion to delay the trial until after the election. Jack Smith’s office is saying the defendants are making distorted and exaggerated claims in the request for delay. And and here’s the the detail. They wrote, special counsel’s office wrote that the classified materials at issue in this case were taken from the White House and contained at Mar a lago is not in dispute. What is in dispute is how that occurred, why it occurred, what Trump knew, and what Trump intended in retaining them all issues that the government will prove at trial primarily with unclassified evidence So what do you make of that?

Look, the Mar a Lago case is as an evidentiary matter, the most open and shut of these cases. There are no complicated legal issues you’re not allowed to have this classified information in your possession. When you notice it, you have to give it back. You’re not allowed to drain your swimming pool to try to you’re just not allowed to do this stuff.

And so They’re also just signaling that it knows what Trump’s intents was and plans to prove it. Now do we know what they’re talking about there?

Yeah. I think we do. Well, there’s no classified information involved in any of the obstruction stuff.

Yeah. Right.

Remember also that they have a number of cooperating witnesses. Some of whom are still in his employ who instructed to or asked or sort of, you know, to make things disappear. Right? A folder of files disappear. So they are not gonna have trouble establishing intent without reference to classified information.

The only thing you need identified information for is proof that he had classified information.

Right.

What it says doesn’t really matter very much. The only relevant fact is that it was properly classified.

Okay. So also, Trump’s lawyers are responding, with some very, very wrong language. They put out a reply memorandum saying that Jack Smith is trying to deprive Donald Trump of his due process rights by seeking to get a verdict against for election day no matter what the cost. This is from the New York Times account. New York Times calls the arguments lacerating.

The language is lacerating some the strongest language yet used by attorney Christopher Kice. This is from the memorandum. The fact they continue to contend that it is appropriate and not a violation of president Trump due process rights to push forward with back to back multi month trials in different districts with wholly different facts over a defendant’s objections reveals a central truth about these cases. The special council’s office is engaged in a reckless effort to obtain a conviction of president Trump prior to the twenty twenty four election no matter the cost, the court should not permit this abuse of the criminal justice system. So in other courtrooms, I would say that, they’re obviously appealing to the court public opinion or they’re setting up for appeal, but this is an Aileen Cannon’s court.

So give me a sense about this very aggressive very political argument that they’re making.

Donald Trump and his lawyers know that if this case goes to trial, he is gonna be convicted. Or there is an undue risk of conviction. This is an overpowering case as an evidentiary matter. He also knows that his best defense in all of these cases is to win the presidency and make them go away. He has clearly seen in the Washington case that Tanya Chuckkin is not amenable to this argument.

And Aileen Cannon, who is a much more sympathetic judge. Let’s put it that way. And is also Nice

way to put it.

Really slow. I don’t mean that in the sense of stupid. I mean the sense of moving at the speed of a of a freight train on, you know, on heroin. She took two months to issue a routine protective order. Which was completely without explanation, by the way.

Just she’s ordered these briefings on SIPA that are, like, she wants a dissertation from each side, which they’ve now filed, by the way. She’s taken her own suite time about scheduling Garcia hearings, which are happening today. And so I think they they see two factors that are very appealing to them. One is they know she’s sympathetic and capable of issuing wildly inappropriate legal orders inflected by that sense of sympathy. And number two is she’s not fast and she’s doesn’t seem to have a fire under her butt to move at a reasonable pace.

So I think what you’re seeing in this in this very aggressive sound is like, well, can we combine the sense of lack of urgency with the sense of sympathy and get what we really need, which is a delay. By the way, in Washington, they have another way to get a delay. And so if you can get a delay in South Florida because you kinda bully the judge a little bit and she she gives you what you want, you may be able to win on both fronts.

Okay. Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about what’s going on in Judge Shutkins. What is the way they hope to delay the case in DC because judge Chutkin does not appear to be amenable to any sort of delay.

Correct. So a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece with my colleague, Sarafin, about the executive immunity arguments that they had promised to file. And we argued following the Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who I wanna give her credit was the first person to notice this. We evaluated Ruth’s claim and she’s right that when Chuck in rejects this motion to dismiss on the grounds of executive immunity. This will be ripe for immediate appeal.

And there there are bizarre technical reasons for that that we can go into if you want, but but I think everybody who’s looked at it closely agrees with this. So there’s no way I don’t think that Judge Hutchkin is gonna grant this motion. There is some chance that the Supreme Court could grant this motion in some respect. I don’t think there are five votes for dismissing this case on this basis, but the idea of of some degree of executive immunity is not completely crazy. And we’ve never had to figure out what the parameters of it are because, of course, no former president’s ever been indicted before.

Okay. So executive immunity just sounds like the doctrine that quite literally the president is above the law.

Let’s break it down a little bit. It’s a a complicated idea. A judge is immune from criminal prosecution for their judicial rulings. Right? A prosecutor if you are, you know, acting as a prosecutor and acting in good faith, you have immunity for doing your job.

Right?

Yeah. But you’re not immune if you go and you knock over a liquor store. Correct. If you’re stalking an ex girlfriend or boyfriend, or anything else that outside of the scope of your official duties.

Exactly. So here’s now where it gets complicated. The president We’ve never determined whether the president has criminal immunity at all. Yeah. Because again, we’ve never indicted one before.

And so most people agree, I think that there’s some presidential immunity, but we don’t really know. We do know the answer in the civil context. Because Richard Nixon got sued and the Supreme Court ruled that the president had absolute immunity in the civil context for anything within the outer parameters of his role as president, which is a very expansive understanding. So the first question is, is there the same immunity available as a criminal matter? We don’t know.

Number two, if there is, is the conduct within January sixth within or outside the outer perimeter of presidential conduct. I would hope the answer to that is that it’s outside, but, you know, Yeah. There are some really conservative people on the Supreme Court, right, really executive power friendly people on the Supreme Court. And number three, If there’s some other theory of presidential immunity, how does that interact with the facts alleged? Here is what we know.

We know that the government thinks which which is also, by the way, the guardian of executive prerogatives. Right? So the justice department has thought this through and thinks that the president is not immune. The former president is not immune for these charges. What we don’t know and we’re gonna learn when they respond to this brief is what their theory is.

We pretty well can assume that Tanya Chuckin will not go for this, but this is gonna be a difficult issue at the appellate level. And all of that is gonna be litigated before trial, I think. And it could very well cause a delay.

Okay. So one other development done last week there in this particular case, Jack Smith asking Judd Schutkin to protect the identities of prospective jurors in the case, arguing that that is needed, quote, in light of the public attention that is expected and the defendant, Donald Trump’s record, of using public social media platforms in an intimidating manner, they’re also revealing the twenty five potential witnesses, have cited attorney client privileges leave that aside. But it is interesting that we’re seeing more requests for protective orders acknowledging what Donald Trump and his supporters prepared to do to witnesses and, prospective jurors.

Look, you’re seeing this now in all of the cases, issues about, you know, security of the grand jurors in in Fulton County who’ve been docked and identified. You’ve seen issues about the clerk, the judicial clerk in in Judge Erdogan’s courtroom in the civil case in New York. And you, of course, have a pending motion for a non gag order in Judge Chuckens courtroom. The only place where you’re not seeing this happen is in South Florida because, of course, Trump actually knows better than to sock his, gift horse, judge Eileen Cannon in the mouth. And so it’s gonna continue until I mean, I think until some judge issues an order that he flagrantly violates at which point you’ll see what capacity any of these courts have to enforce anything on him.

So, D. A. Funny Willis is engaging in a war of words with, the deeply deplorable Jim Jordan Jordan has been requesting information about the district attorney’s office and about their prosecution. And she writes a letter to him saying a charitable explanation of your correspondence is that you are ignorant of the United States and Georgia constitutions and codes. A more troubling explanation is that you are abusing your authority as chairman of the committee on the judiciary to attempt to obstruct and interfere with a Georgia criminal prosecution.

Now there are Republicans in the Georgia legislature that appear to be, determined to use their power to go after Fony Will Saletan seriously should we take that threat? Are Republican and Georgia actually going to try to kneecap her as a way of protecting Donald Trump in that prosecution?

So I think they are, and I think one reassuring thing was that the governor a few weeks ago Right. You know, my enthusiasm for Brian Kemp is under role, I assure you, but he did exactly the right thing in this instance. There’s this new disciplinary committee that they are gonna try to invoke. Fammie Willis honestly hasn’t done anything that is disciplinable. Yeah.

She’s made a political judgment that people can reasonably disagree with, which is a decision to invest an enormous amount of resources in this one case in a jurisdiction that has a very serious street crime problem. And I think, you know, that’s the kind of thing that you run against somebody for doing or, you know, is ripe for political criticism. She has also engaged in a particularly grandiose formulation of this indictment. And I think it’s fair to as many defense lawyers have. There was an excellent podcast by the Atlanta Journal Constitution in which they had a number of defense lawyers criticizing this decision.

You know, she’s she’s taken on a very grand version of this. And, you know, you’re gonna start seeing at the end of this month when the first of these cases goes to trial, whether she’s capable of actually litigating this case successfully, I’m remaining agnostic about that. So I don’t wanna say that Fannie will is is above criticism by any means. That said, she has not done anything that the state legislature has an interest in reining in legitimately. And so I I think the fact that Republican members of the Georgia State Senate are are agitating for this is really much more similar to members of Congress kind of going after Bob Mueller or Jack Smith, and it is a legitimate criminal justice kind of concern.

Okay. So next week, we’ll try to catch up on what’s going on in the New York fraud case. We’ve had some interesting testimony. I think we know how that case is going to turn out. And as you point out, we’re already starting to see the pretrial arguments, from Kenneth Cheesboro in Sydney Powell.

That’s gonna be taking place this month. So we’ll have that to talk about next week. Ben Willis. Once again, so much ground to cover. Thanks for joining me.

I appreciate it very much.

We’ll be back next week. And we’ll do this all over again.

We will. And we will be back tomorrow. And we’ll also do this all over again. Thanks, Ben. Have a great

Thank you. Bullbrook podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered

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