The Trials of Trump

How

much legal trouble is Donald Trump really in? Are the walls closing in? Or are we about to find out that some people are in fact above the law? Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes, and this is the first installment of a new companion pod cast the trials of Trump that will be featuring every Thursday.

We all know the headlines, the federal and state prosecutors who may or may not be closing in on the former president, the civil suits, the discovery, the indictment. But we thought we’d take a deeper look and try to separate out the substance from the hype so every week. We’ll bring you up to speed on the major legal issues surrounding the former president and key Trump world players, the sedition trials in DC, the New York indictment, the Jack Smith probes of January six in the Mar a Lago document case. The election probes in Georgia and the Gene Carol trial that’s going on right now, we are partnering with the folks from law fair whose experts can cover the waterfront or all of the current potential prosecutions and civil cases. So, obviously, on today’s inaugural show, we’re gonna be joined by the one and only Ben Wittis.

Editor in chief of law fair, and fashion icon who joins us from London, England. Good afternoon, morning, Ben, Hello, Charlie. You know, I we saw each other in an undisclosed location the other day. And

now

Phoenix, Arizona.

Yeah. And and it may have been Arizona. I did notice that you you outed the undisclosed location on the show the other day, and

I did.

Yeah. And then immediately said that it wasn’t the undisclosed location. But now that we’re not there anymore, we can admit that it was Phoenix, Arizona. It was Phoenix, Arizona. And

so I appreciate you doing this because I get a little bit jet lag going two time zones, but you went from Phoenix to London. So thanks for doing this.

I

did. I flew overnight. Oh my god. I got to London. I, you know, took a shower and changed dog shirts.

And then immediately went out to case the Russian embassy

here and just see what kind of a target it would be. So let’s talk about what we’re going to be doing on this podcast. We’re gonna be talking about all the legal issues. And I think the real importance of this is that sometimes we all get caught up in the flood of breaking news and things seem really, really big one day and then two days later, it turns out it’s not that big a deal or there are so many different threads that are happening at once. It’s kind of hard to keep track of all of them.

And hopefully, we’ll be able to do this, you know, along with your team. Could I just start with just one point before we get into the developments of the week? I was thinking about the Fox Dominion lawsuit that was settled last week. And it underlines again something that I’m not sure that people outside the legal profession fully understand, which is the power and the danger of discovery, that every time you go into litigation, whatever the outcome of the case, information is going to come out that is often incredibly interesting, provocative, and damaging. And that certainly was the case, the story about this Fox lawsuit, about how much we learned about them, even before anyone stepped into a courtroom.

Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because this is always the danger of any litigation, you know, including civil

leaving aside the criminal prosecutions. Yeah. It’s exactly right. I mean, litigation, we think of it as about the outcomes. Mhmm.

But it is also a process and it is the most powerful instrument of reporting you know, that the system can generate when one party sues another, there’s no other way we’re gonna learn this stuff. About Fox News other than, you know, perhaps massive leaks or a criminal investigation The only way you learn something like what all their anchors are saying to each other is when somebody soothes them and that material comes out in discovery. And, you know, in this case, That material was extremely damaging to Fox. And I think it was probably extremely damaging to Tucker Carlson as well. Well,

I think that that’s apparent, which is also one of the reasons why so many of these cases settle because people not only don’t wanna go through a trial. They don’t wanna go through the risk of a jury trial, but they also don’t wanna go through the nightmare of of discovery. And so, you know, Donald Trump is in a unique position because he can’t really well, I mean, he has settled cases in the past, but he’s in a position now where it becomes much more difficult. So who’s not bringing this up because there are sort of multiple dimensions to what might come out of the trial, what, you know, testimony, you know, might be presented to the grand jury, but also In discovery, you’re allowed to ask questions and get information that you might not be allowed to get into a courtroom. Is that correct?

I mean, the rules are somewhat different. So the risks are different.

Yes. So it’s important to distinguish between civil discovery and criminal invest negative matters. They proceed under very different rules, but a good general rule in civil discovery is you’re allowed to request anything in discovery that might reasonably be expected to lead to admissible material. And so the standards of discovery are just way, way broader than what will actually show up in court. But of course, the stuff that is produced in discovery can as Dominion showed, show up not as, you know, admissible evidence in a trial, but in a motion for summary judgment, for example, or, you know, motion for sanctions.

Right? This stuff can find its way into the public domain in lots of ways that are totally kosher before you get even two things like leaks or improper disclosures that may violate a protective order for example.

I wanna get to the specific investigations involving Donald Trump, the Jack Smith related investigation. But let’s start with this ongoing kind of in the background music. I thing for the last year, the seditious conspiracy trials going on in Washington DC, and the jurors are in the midst right now of deliberating in the case against five members of the Proud Boys. Who stormed the capital on January sixth, and these five faced multiple counts including seditious conspiracy, which is a civil war. Charge for planning to overthrow the government.

You wrote about this case recently. You called this probably the single most important criminal case yet. On January sixth related matters. So explain.

Yeah. So the Proud Boys case, first of all, it’s the third trial that has involved seditious conspiracy trials. The first two are both oath keepers’ cases Proudleys and oathkeepers are different from one another. The oathkeepers, they talked a big game, they marched in what’s called stack formation in that very famous video of a bunch of them going up the stairs. They cashed a lot of weapons, but they didn’t actually do very much in the January sixth context you know, and one of the weird things about the trial was this disparity between what they actually did, which was kind of go in after other people had gone in and stand around and take selfies with the, you know, frankly revolutionary talk in a lot of their group chats and stuff.

By contrast, the Proud Boys are really the pointy end of the spear on January sixth. Most of the breaches, if you look at the key breaches of the police lines, there are Proud Boys involved in each of those breaches. You know, the initial breaches. The case that the Proud Boys actually got January sixth to happen as a storming of the capital rather than as a set of protests or a lot of yelling or sporadic violence is a nontrivial case. And so I think this is a deeply important case.

It’s the case with the highest charge that is seditious conspiracy against the people who were most instrumental in making this a actual violent insurrection rather than any of the other things it could have been. Other than, of course, the political Echelon, including Donald Trump, if you’re thinking about the kind of ground level violence that happened on January six, this is sort of ground zero in it. One

of your colleagues, Roger Parloff, who’s a senior a law firm has been covering this case. As he described it, the problem always saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army and they thirsted for violence and they really did heed Trump’s call to attack the capital. And his report suggests that the DOJ attorneys have delivered, you know, Chris, concise closing arguments you know, citing, you know, the kinds of things that they said and did. It’s also interesting that one of the defendants in this case who was named Zach Rell is the son and grandson of cops, a police officer, anyone who’s on a witness stand. Prosecutors asked him whether he had actually pepper freight officers, and he’s not that I recall, and and they showed him images of him appearing to do just that.

So here, the son and the grandson of police officers, pepper spraying capital police officers. I mean, just kind of amazing. He also shared messages to his mother where he wrote he wrote to his mother I’m so fucking proud, referencing the raid. I mean, this is this is really interesting. I mean, so Well,

he is a proud boy. After all. He is a Proud Boy. On the subject of the Proud Boys, this is a trial that went on for more than sixty days. It’s a huge investment in prosecutorial time and energy.

And there are exactly two news organizations that had reporters in the room for the entire thing. One of them is law fair. We had Roger watched the whole trial and live blogged the whole trial both on Twitter and Lofair. The other is the empty wheel blog who had Brandy Buckman there. I mentioned this both to Pat, both us and them on the back, but also just to note that these trials are to cover them is a real investment in time and energy and, you know, a lot of media organizations make the decision not to do it.

And, you

know, that’s odd given how important January sixth is to our national life. That really is extraordinary because These are among the most important trials, but we’ve moved past it so far that none of the major news organizations are even covering it anymore. Which may explain a lot of other things that are happening.

Exactly. And and to be fair to them, it’s not as quite as exciting as, you know, filming Donald Trump’s plane — Yeah. — take off to an arraignment. You know, in New York. But when the Proud Boys jury comes in, you can bet that the major media organizations will all have people live tweeting it Will Saletan have, you know, active live coverage of it.

But when that real testimony happened, there was nobody there except us except Brandy. And as you think about the stuff that is coming down the pike, the decisions that organizations make about which hearings to cover, which hearings not to cover, and how many media organizations cover them end to end, these are gonna be important decisions over the next few years. Very

important. Okay. So the Jack Smith related investigation, Donald Trump spent on kind of a losing streak or not kind of. He tried to stop Mike Pence from testifying to the January sixth grand jury, the Court of Appeals, in DC on Wednesday rejected Trump’s attempt to block Pence’s testimony before that grand jury. So not much of a surprise, but Donald Trump really doesn’t want Mike Pence to testify.

So give me your sense of what Pence might say and why Trump was so adamant about trying to block him.

Well, so this goes back, actually, more than twenty years. You have to go back to the Bill Clinton Monika Lewinsky cases before which this was an open question whether, you know, a presidential adviser could assert executive privilege before a grand jury in the star investigation of Will Saletan. That was answered definitively by the DC circuit Trump, White House officials or Trump keeps asserting it with respect to trying to get White House officials now, including the vice president, not to testify. He keeps losing because it’s actually very clear law since the star investigation. In the DC circuit that you can’t usefully a certain executive privilege claim in a situation like this before a grand jury.

It’s a tough question in front of congress. It’s not a tough question in front of a grand jury. And so there was never much doubt what the DC circuit would do with this question. Remember that Mike Pence himself had also asserted you know, a speech and debate clause, privilege as the president of the senate, judge Boseberg ruled that that couldn’t prevent him from testifying, but that there were probably questions he couldn’t be asked as a result of that. So I think net result is that Mike Pence will testify.

He will not testify about things that happen that that day while he was presiding as president of the senate, and he won’t testify as to other things that, you know, may involve legislative activity on his part. But I think from the prosecutor’s point of view, the critical thing is whether he will testify about his interactions with Donald Trump in the days leading up to January sex. And I’m certain that that’s what the prosecutors wanna get from him. They will now have a chance to do that in front of a grand jury and we’ll see how cooperative Mike Pence is and how aggressive he is about asserting that he doesn’t have to answer questions because, you know, among other things, he’s the fifty first senator. It’s

certainly

a sign of how aggressive Jack Smith is being that he would have subpoenaed the former vice president.

It’s more than that. It’s not just a sign of that he is being aggressive though it is that. Mhmm. It’s also a sign that he’s almost done.

You think so?

Yeah. Because you don’t bring in Mike Kent. You don’t bring in the vice president until the end of an invest stigation. He’s not, you know, one of the things you’re trying to show is that Donald Trump meaningfully sought to impede the transition of power and generally Bulwark your way off the witness chain, not down. And so, you know, you start with the the low grade White House staffers.

But recently, they’ve heard from Mark Meadows, now they’re hearing from Mike Pence. They’re hearing from the very senior people, and that’s something you’re gonna do toward the end of an investigation. So I think the January sixth investigation, there are probably still some outstanding litigations, some of which we know about, some of which we don’t know about. But I think they’re really getting to the end of that. I think they’re also getting to the end of the Mar a Lago investigation.

And so whether that means we’re weeks or a couple of months away from charging decisions I don’t know, but I don’t think we’d be hearing from Mike Pence if we were in the middle of things. Well,

that makes sense, but it also raises this question of the timeline. Because they have to be very cognitive of the fact that the the longer it goes, the deeper into the presidential campaign becomes, they’re looking at a possible trial in twenty twenty four. So give me your sense of how that political timeline factors in, because I remember I was on one of these Secret Podcast and one of the observers basically said circle late spring as the latest time that they would bring criminal chart is given, you know, the lag time between an indictment and a trial. Well, we’re getting close to late spring. So in your head, what do you think is this time which of course we don’t know.

I don’t buy the late spring as deadline notion. So let’s work backwards from actual policy. So there is a an effective policy at the justice department that you do not take overt actions in criminal investigations against named politicians on ballots within sixty days of the election. Mhmm. So of a general election or a primary election?

Is there a distinction there? Probably including a primary. Okay. Okay. So I think you can assume that something that doesn’t happen.

Actually, the primary question is an interesting one But let’s say, for sixty days before an election, so right around the turn of the year, maybe a little bit before, it’s gonna be pretty close to a matter of policy that you don’t do anything brand new. Now, usually, that’s thought of in the context of a general election sense. Right. But I think that as a prudential matter, they’re gonna say, hey, we don’t want to be indicting the presumptive nominee. It’s one thing to have already indicted him and to have the voters decide that we don’t care if he’s under three or four indictments.

We’re still gonna choose him as the nominee. Then you proceed with the litigation. But once the person is identified as the nominee, it has a real ugly kind of Banana Republic feel to then go, you know, indict him at that point. This

seems to be part of Trump’s strategy, though. I mean, he announced early. I think he thought that he could preempt an indictment. And now, of he’s, you know, vigorously doing what he does to clear the field. I mean, it is not inconceivable that given the republican party and given the way the leaders are behaving, that he might be the presumptive nominee by June.

So what does that do to all of this? The presumptive nominee by June Let’s be

clear about terms.

Yeah. Okay. I

mean, if you are the presumptive nominee because you’ve secured enough delegates to be nominated. Okay. That’s a bit of a different matter than not

just the pundit class.

Right. It’s not just like a lot of people think you’re gonna be chosen the polls show. I think as a functional matter, the picture is really different once people start voting in primaries. But before that, And again, the sixty day clock is really about general elections, not about the primary season. But let’s just say as a prudential matter, I think they will be very aware of the primary clock.

I think that means they have this year to bring whatever cases they are gonna bring.

Okay.

And realistically, that means Well, to be precise, three major decisions from Jack Smith. One is the Mar a Lago case. This is probably the cleanest case they have against Trump. It also appears to be almost finished as an investigative matter. The second is, are you going to bring a major January sixth case against the political Echelon?

The Jeffrey Clarks, the John Eastmans, the Mark Meadows, the Rudy Giuliani’s. Right? And then the third question question is, are you going to name Trump in that indictment? Mhmm. Or are you gonna say, hey, that raises a whole lot of presidential power defenses that I don’t wanna deal with given that I’m gonna indict him in the Mar a Lago matter anyway.

And that’s clean. So I think the question of what is the major January sixth political Echelon case look like is a two part question. One is, do you bring it at all? And I’m quite sure the answer to that will be yes. But the second question that I’m not sure about is, is Trump, you know, named or unnamed a sort of unindicted co conspirator in that case, or is he a FENDENT IN THAT CASE AND I’M NOT AT ALL CERTAIN ABOUT THE ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION.

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One more question about what’s going on with the Jack Smith investigations, and I haven’t paid that close attention to it. But MSNBC reported that one of the whistleblower’s over at Fox News, Abby Grossberg, has these audio tapes that she recorded while she was at the network, including one where Ted Cruz is outlining what sounds like a plan to Fort Certification of Biden’s win on January sixth. He’s talking about it with Marina Bartorama, and the special counsel’s office has requested copies of the recordings according to Grossberg’s attorney. In the recordings that were played on MSNBC a couple of nights ago, you know, crews discusses blocking the certification of Biden’s win and then establishing a commission which would investigate claims of fraud and that might potentially overturn the election. And so how does that factor in the fact that Ted Cruz is talking to Maria Bartoromo about that?

I mean, what does it tell you that this special counsel was interested enough to actually ask for those recordings.

So remember that Ted Cruz said all of that stuff publicly too. Well, that’s right. That’s you know. And so, query whether there’s anything in there that isn’t what Ted Cruz was saying when the cameras were on and what he was tweeting. I mean, the idea of eighteen seventy six, like commission was very much part of his public rhetoric too.

Mhmm. That’s said, if you’re the special council, you want everything and if there’s tape in which cruise is pondering blocking certification, you probably wanna know what’s on it. So I wouldn’t read too much into it in the sense that I do think the job of a special council’s office is to gobble up all of that material both doesn’t

mean they’re necessarily gonna use it.

It doesn’t mean they’re actually gonna use it. It it couldn’t mean merely that they wanna know the universe of things that are said That said, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that they’re — Mhmm. — checking out whether other people may have exposure too, including Ted Cruz. So I I don’t think the mere fact that they asked for it is that indicative of anything except it’s a very active invest stigation, and they will collect whatever they think is relevant.

Again, we’re in the area of speculation, but what is hold up do you think with Fannie Willis down in Georgia? She had, you know, said earlier this year that Charlie Sykes were imminent. And this week, we heard that we might not be seeing anything until late summer, early fall. So what do you think is going on there? I mean, the grand jury is done.

The grand jury has turned in its report. There’s been a little bit of, you know, controversy about all of that. But what do you think is happening there? Is it a new evidence or are they just dragging their feet Any thoughts at all?

Alright. Let me first tell you everything that I know — Mhmm. — that is purely a matter of fact and then I will, separately from that, offer a little bit of speculation about what it could mean. Fanny Will Saletan early January in a hearing said to the judge that presided over the special grand jury that charging decisions were imminent. Mhmm.

If you listen carefully, she did not say that charges were imminent. Okay. And so one possibility is that the two are not inconsistent and she’s made her charging decisions, and now she is in the process of preparing a case for presentation to the regular grand jury that would have to indict people. So the special grand jury can’t indict. All it can do is investigate and prepare it to report.

So one possibility is that actually nothing changed. She said truthfully that charging decisions were imminent, they were imminent, she’s made them, and now she’s working on implementing it, and that just takes some time. Here’s some other things we know. We know that just as the special grand jury was finishing its work in December, The January sixth committee dumped two fifty depositions into the public domain. And that came too late for the special grand jury to consider any of it.

But if you’re the prosecutors who are then gonna bring cases based on the special grand jury work, you undoubtedly have a due diligence obligation to go through all of those two hundred fifty, at least the ones that could be relevant to your case with care and make sure that the testimony is consistent with the testimony many of those same witnesses gave to you — Yes. — or that there isn’t material that contradicts or that there isn’t material that requires that you then go interview further people. So a second possibility is that the January sixth committee threw a bit of a wrench into their spokes just with the way it wrapped up its business. And then a third factor which has spilled out into the public a little bit is that there are clearly negotiations between Fannie Willis and some of the Georgia fake electors over immunity deals. And these discussions have been complicated by the fact that a whole bunch of potential defendants in these cases are represented by the same lawyers — Mhmm.

— who are, you know, closely aligned with Donald Trump. It’s very similar situation as developed with Cassidy Hutchison in the January sixth committee matter. And Fannie Willis recently went into court and sought to disqualify one of those lawyers on grounds of conflict of interest because the lawyer was representing multiple people whose interests were not necessarily Sarah Longwell. And so one possibility as well is that it’s been delayed by the fact that, you know, she thinks that there are people who might want to offer information in exchange for immunity, who are not in a position to do so because of who their lawyers are. And so resolving that may be a time commitment.

I do think, however, that Fanny Willis, in a way that didn’t get enough attention this week, kinda showed her hand which is to say she wrote a letter to the court asking for a whole bunch of protective resources around the court, around her office in the context of indictments that were going to come over the summer. And, you know, that is undoubtedly a reference to the letter was in the context of this case. And so it’s not subtle what she’s talking about. She’s gearing up for a New York like Case and needs a degree of police presence that that court has never had to deal with. So I think she’s basically said that sometime between in July or August, she’s going to bring a case against Donald Trump.

She hasn’t said that explicitly, but I I cannot understand another way to read what she has said.

So let’s talk about one of the cases that I’m gonna admit that I’m agnostic kick about and have not paid a lot of attention to. And I, you know, me a couple here, but the e Jean Carol’s civil suit is is underway and it is it’s quite extraordinary. I mean, this is This is a civil trial of former journalist device columnist cable TV host suing Donald Trump seeking damages for battery in connection with rape allegations as well as for defamation. Now Trump is calling her case a hoax on the line. We’ll get to that in just a moment.

Cases being brought under a law that grants sexual assault victims one year to seek redress for a long ago event. Yesterday, she testified she told this Manhattan jury, this harrowing story of being raped in a dressing room at Burgdorf Goodman in the nineteen nineties described this brutal attack. She tried to fight off. She testified she’d been traumatized. She said she was initially laughing and joking with Trump, but then her voice trailed off she described it turning into something else.

Now Trump hasn’t indicated whether he’s gonna testify. He’s not going to, I don’t think. But on truth social, He called the case a made up scam and a fraudulent false story. The judge in response suggested that Trump was trying to influence the jury and that If you kept doing that, that this might lead to a contempt citation. So this seems like a very, very unusual case.

Talk to me about it?

Yeah. So unfortunately, because it’s a federal case, you know, there are no cameras, there’s no audio, and law fair because it doesn’t involve national security issues. We don’t have somebody in the room. You know, I am working off of the same news stories that everybody else is. That said, I have followed the Eugene Carol story fairly closely since she came forward — Mhmm.

— I can’t think of any reason to disbelieve her. You know, she is not somebody who came forward during the campaign and tried to get a payout, like, you know, like Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal, she has turned her life upside down over these allegations. And by the way, the story is so weird that it could only be true. If you were gonna make something up, would you make up that you had never met, but you recognized each other on the street outside of Burgdorf and Goodman’s and, you know, got to chatting and kind of enjoyed each other’s company. And then he kind of coaxed you inside to try on some stuff and then raped you.

I mean, that is such a weird story. It could only be true, in my view. And I guess the other thing is that, you know, in any one of these he said, she said situations involving Donald Trump, why on Earth would you ever choose to believe him given the volume of allegations of sexual assault that he’s faced and the boasting of it that he’s engaged in he can dismiss that boasting as locker room talk, but it does seem to me that when lots of women say you’ve assaulted them, And when you’ve said that, you know, you grab them by the pussy and, you know, if you’re a star, they let you do it, I can’t think of a reason why a jury wouldn’t take this pretty seriously except, of course, that juries are very mercurial animals. And today, by the time anybody hears this, Trump’s lawyers will have spent a number of hours cross examining her. And so, you know, it’s gonna be very ugly for her, but I Well, in my opinion, it is likely a highly meritorious case, and I think a jury is likely to find that although predicting jury behavior is always tricky.

Well, she

has had some lapses in memory in her testimony, which I’m guessing is going to be exploited under cross examination. There’s one other weird little flex in this story that we made much of in Trump world which is that according to the reports that I’ve read, that Jean Carol was persuaded to go after Trump in a meeting that took place at Mollie John Faste apartment, and she was persuaded by George Conway, both of whom were very, very well known. Andy Trump figures. So I believe that the judge excluded that testimony, right, from the actual trial, but your thoughts about it, that you clearly have you know, people who have been very, very, very publicly associated with anti Trump politics playing a role in talking her into bringing this case, is there any relevance to this? How does this play in the in the Court of Public Opinion?

Or is it irrelevant completely?

Well, It’s probably not irrelevant to the court of public opinion. The judge has, you know, not permitted this to be a part of this case. And so it may be irrelevant to what the jury hears. This is actually an issue. I know something about in my personal life because, you know, George and I are our friends and we’ve talked about this issue a lot over the years and — Mhmm.

— George has spent a large amount of time with women who have accused Trump of assaulting them. There is something of a sorority of these women and and George has been a supporter of a lot of them, including in important moral support sort of ways. I think he’s, you know, worked to get lawyers for them and George and Mollie who is also a friend, you know, are close. And she has been involved in this stuff too. And so it doesn’t particularly surprised me that they learned about Eugene Carol or met her and tried to persuade her to go public with the story or offered moral support in in her doing so.

That’s kind of a role that George has played And by the way, you know, for those who remember George’s role during the Paula Jones litigation, against Bill Clinton. That was kind of the role he played then too. He actually does care about this stuff. And so I I don’t think it’s surprising if you know George and you know how strongly he feels about the former president’s sexual assault for Klivity’s. And I don’t think it really bears very much on Eugene Carol’s credibility that George would want her to be as public about it as she’s comfortable being.

One

last development that I wanted to ask you about, the Manhattan DA is seeking to prevent Trump and Trump’s team from publicizing evidence obtained during discovery. We talked about discovery a little bit earlier. So you have the New York prosecutors. Arguing that Trump should be barred from sharing evidence that his attorney receives through discovery with the media or the public. So they want a protective order limiting what documents he can view and where he can view them.

And, of course, Trump’s attorneys are saying that, you know, they I mean, obviously, they’re gonna say they have a first amendment right to speak publicly about the case. The prosecutors are saying yes, but not about materials they receive through discovery. So sort that out. How can you tell the former president that he can’t say what he obtains legally through discovery? How does this work?

Right. So this was an issue that was discussed at the arraignment. And for those who want a detailed account of exactly what was said at the arraignment on this issue. Anna Bauer and I have a very detailed summary of the arguments that took place at the arraignment on law fair, including on this precise issue. At the time, the prosecutor said to the judge that they were near an agreement with the defense on a protective order covering discovery that agreement appears to have fallen apart or they were less close than they thought they were because they have now the negotiations have failed and the prosecutors have apparently moved the judge to issue a protective order on their terms.

So that’s the background, and of course Trump will oppose that. There is nothing unusual about a protective order, protecting discovery that the government produces in the context of a criminal case. It’s obliged to produce certain material under all kinds of both federal rules and state level rules. And sometimes that material is is sensitive for one reason or another. The specific concern here is that Trump has gone after in public, the prosecutors, the judge, the judge’s family, the judge’s daughter, right, And so there is a concern on the part of the prosecution that if they start giving out witness related information.

Trump will start talking publicly about witnesses and other matters in ways that could be very scary or dangerous for them. It almost feels inevitable. It feels almost inevitable. And so the actually, there was a part of the arraignment where they seemed to acknowledge that it was almost inevitable and they said the significance of the protective order was that if he did it, it would be enforceable as a contempt. In other words, they want a clear order that you’re not allowed to do this stuff so that when he does it, the court has a remedy.

The specific issue that the defense has balked at is that the prosecution wants Trump to have access to some of this material only in his lawyer’s offices and not be able to take it out with him. They basically want him to treat it almost like the way we handle classified information. Mhmm. And the lawyer’s like, he doesn’t come to my office. I go to Mar a Lago.

And so there’s a bunch of just handling of documents issues that I think the judge is gonna have to make decisions about. And, you know, it’s an early test of how the prosecution and defense in this case can work together, and it It is not a promising one. Ben Willis, of course, is the editor in chief of law affairs senior

fellow in government studies at the Buckingham institution, e writes the dog shirt daily on Substack. And the most impressive thing about our inaugural trials of Trump Podcast, Ben, is that you did this while being jet lagged from flying over from Phoenix, Arizona to London. I appreciate it so much. I hope you have a great time in London. We’ll do this again next Thursday.

I look forward to doing this weekly and bringing other law fair people with us because we have a really deep crew on all these issues, and

it’ll be great to introduce a lot of them to the Bulwark world. I am very excited, very much looking forward to this. So thank you all for listening to Thursday World War podcast in the inaugural edition. Of the trials of Trump will be back tomorrow. And because it is Friday, I’ll be joined by Tim Miller.

On Monday, it will be my colleague. Will Saletan. Have a great weekend. Bullwhip podcast is produced by Katie Cooper. And engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary and humor, useful idiots, with the Halper and Aaron Mate.

Check out this story that comes via wedding planner, Georgia Mitchell. I’d say that’s a deal breaker if you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother. The thing is, she’s here in the in hand. So —

Right. — we really —

did responsible journalist in you, Erin. It’s just an allegation. Yeah.

None of my sources have confirmed this story. Right. So Ten

agreeable, if true. And definitely a deal breaker.

Useful idiots. Wherever you listen.