Trump Is Going Down

Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m your host Tim Miller in for the great Charlie Sykes for the next two days. As is tradition on Thursdays, we’re here for the jump trials.

You can tell by the dramatic music switch. But before I get to Ben, a couple quick plugs. Charlie Sykes has been crushing it on YouTube, you podcasters might not have noticed. But YouTube is an awesome place for the board to build new audience. So we’re putting some exclusive live interviews over there.

I did one with Alex Jonathan Last week. So if you haven’t yet, please subscribe to our YouTube page, help teach the algorithm overlords that the bulwark is loved by to people. And while you’re over there, also subscribe to the next level feed on Wednesdays. I’m always with Sarah and JBL. And on Sundays, we’re trying to give y’all lighter, more fun weekend to you.

So if you’re enjoying Charlie’s daily interviews, which I know you all are, come on over the next level. On Sundays, we’re getting outside of politics a little bit. We’ve had Bradley Whitford, Reed Hoffman, Pablo Torre, Eugeuno Diaz, Jane Lynch. We also bring in some politicians and get to the lighter side of their life. We’ve had Tammy Baldwin recently.

So I think you’ll enjoy adding that to your weekend roster on the next level wherever you listen to podcasts or over on YouTube. So with that, Let’s get down to business. In lieu of Fun, I’d like to welcome my good friend, Ben Whitis, editor in chief of Law Fair, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings institution and the author. Of dog shirt daily on substack. He’s in a dog shirt right now.

I’m looking at him. Benjamin, what’s up, man?

You know, it’s another beautiful week in Washington. More excitement than you could possibly imagine.

Is that true?

No. No. It’s not true. I did have a remarkable fourth of July, however. Work.

I’m happy that you did. And I hope that people can’t notice, but if you catch me slightly mumbling, I had a my best friend’s four year old jumped on me in the pool and Tomahawk kicked me while I was pretending to be a sea monster.

I heard about that on the next level and I was really on the side of the four year old.

Sure. Yeah. And anyway, you know, it it hurts. You know, when you when you’re in the audio business, it does hurt to have a huge gash on your lower But anyway, we’ve got a lot to cover. Before we get to your territory, I’m here on the Trump trials.

I feel like an impostor over here on the Trump trials. So before I let you kind of cook and demonstrate your expertise on the legal stuff. Let’s do a little pallet cleanser, on the demise of Elon Musk.

Yeah. He threw me off his platform, man. I am all about his demise.

So this is what I’m wondering. Since you’ve been banned from Twitter, are you thrilled? That Mark Zuckerberg’s new threads app may finally be the Twitter killer once and for all, or are you lamenting that your social media addiction might return. I’ve just been dying to hear.

No. So I am pleased so far with threads. I think it’s a noble attempt. It’s got some of the problems of Instagram. You know, my view of all of these new Twitter killer apps is that I am subscribed to all of them.

I’m on Blue Sky. I’m on Post. I’m on mastodon. I’m on spoutable. I’m on threads.

I I’m trying them all, and I will go with whichever one wins. I don’t have this thetic or moral preferences among social media sites, I only care about, you know, which ones are effective for helping me reach people.

What I’m hearing is it seems like you need a cleanse. Okay? You get banned from one social media app and you’ve joined five.

Yes. Exactly. You might need

to go you might need to go out into the woods a little bit, but okay. My brief take and I have no really love for Zach he did a kind of a disconcerting interview recently with the guy’s name is Lex, who interviews all these tech titans, you know, where he was getting a little kind of COVID conspiracy curious, you know, and talking about how some of the other apps had it right on some of the COVID stuff. And he wishes they would not have been so, you know, draconian about cutting out some of the misinformation. So that was kind of a concerning comment that he made. So I don’t have any love for Zach.

But The thing about threads is I do want Elon to suffer and I do want Twitter to die and and his endorsement of not. Like, what he has done has gone far beyond the pale of anything Zocca’s ever done promoting and endorsing insane, racist, and conspiratorial views. And Zuck just has the best advantage to do it because when stuff happens, People still went to Twitter. Right? People still want the people that they follows instant reaction.

If it’s on over on mastodon and Blue Sky, you can’t figure out where to go. People are just gonna default back to Twitter here because Instagram already has so many people. And these threads accounts are based on your Instagram account. If you haven’t downloaded it yet or if you haven’t seen that, I think there’s this critical mass over there, and I think that’s why it ends up winning. So maybe that’s an argument for why Facebook is a monopoly, but I think that that’s probably how it’s gonna shake out.

I don’t know how it’s gonna shake out, and I’m committed to being agnostic about it because I wanna be wherever wins. That said, they got ten million users within their first few hours of operation and that’s a reflection of you know, the integration with Instagram. And that’s going to be very powerful. The question for our purposes is can they attract a journalist can they attract the discussion people who were never part of Instagram because it’s not accept the people who love taking selfies, it’s not a platform that’s optimized for text.

Yeah. Okay. So I wanna get to some Scoda stuff. We had some listeners who were unhappy with our takes on the next level yesterday, so I’m gonna get your takes. And I have a long newsletter today about Skotis and norms, but I wanna save that for the end.

And do the traditional Trump trial stuff here to start. And my first question though for you before we get into the specific cases is biggest picture. I wanna put myself in as, like, just your generic resistance consumer. Who has no legal expertise, who’s not a lawyer who’s been watching all this very skeptically, hoping that that Trump finally gets his but very skeptical that will ever actually happen. We have a lot more information than we had two months ago about the scope of the, you know, Jack Smith cases in particular, also a little bit about Georgia and New York.

And I’m just wondering where you stand today, Ben, on the likelihood that Donald Trump actually gets what’s coming to him from the legal system. And not only the likelihood, but what a timeline would be for that.

So I want to clarify the question before I answer it.

Please.

When you say gets what’s coming to him, do you mean gets convicted of significant crimes or do you mean gets prison time above a certain level? What like, what what’s your definition of what comes what’s coming to him?

You know, I I think that’s for you to answer. Right? And so me as your average viewer of all this is going, I like to see Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit. Alright? Orange is the new orange.

I wanna see him behind bars. Okay? But that is maybe wishful thinking. And so I want you to temper my wishing or maybe stoke it. I guess that’s what I’m coming to you for.

You’ve been following this closer. You have a better sense for, you know, kind of how I think Jack Smith in particular is thinking about this, you know, based on relationships you’ve had in the past with special councils. I’m curious where where your levels of expectations are as we stand here fourth of July. Twenty twenty three.

Yeah. So I fully expect Donald Trump will be indicted for more felonies and will be convicted of at least quite a few of them. I have been confident for a long time that Donald Trump is facing serious criminal liability and will be convicted of serious felonies both at the state and federal levels. Let’s start by sort of debunking a myth that has arisen partly intentionally about the current case in Mar a Lago and partly by accident. Which is that this is kind of a minor ish case, you know, presidents mishandled material and Trump’s getting charged and some people don’t get charged.

This is a barn burner of a case. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before at the senior levels, the volume of information is huge. The sensitivity of that information is like bigger than snowden. This is serious stuff, and the conduct is, I think, the technical term is unbelievably fucking outrageous in the sentencing guidelines, you know. And let’s also put out just on the table that the evidence is overpowering and that Trump has publicly admitted to everything that matters in serial statements.

So Trump is going down for this one way or another. And by the way, this case is so overpowering that under normal circumstances, it would never get past the plea phase. This is the kind of case that always pleads out because defendants can’t afford, not financially, but they can’t afford the possible prison time associated with going to trial. Like, don’t let anyone at national review or at you know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, what about this or diminish it? It’s a big deal case and the only thing that mitigates my sense of it as quite dire for Trump is that the judge is somebody who is very favorable to him.

And that can introduce all kinds of mischief. Now, the timeframe to go back to your question. The time frame is long, and the reason that the time frame is long is not just that Aileen Cannon is the judge, But because there’s thirty one charges involving specific classified information, sepa cases classified Information Act, take a long time. I had a conversation on the Law Fair podcast with a former CIA lawyer named Brian Greer who worked on a lot of these cases, he said flatly there is no way this case goes to trial before the turn of the presidential administration. That had nothing to do with Aileen Cannon and it just had to do with the complexity of the case.

Well, that’s balloon deflating. So I was planning a big kind of mardi gras style

Monosa’s thirty going No.

Much bigger than Mimosas. I had I had costumes and it was gonna be a whole deal, but that’s probably a twenty twenty five thing.

I would say it is a not soon thing. But that’s only one of the cases. I don’t see any reason why the Alvin Brad case in New York doesn’t go to trial if not on time, certainly in the spring sometime of next year. And then there’s Fanny Willis, who is going to bring her case within the next month or so, the docket in Fulton County is not exactly the fastest thing in the world, but that’s going to pile up. And then there’s the big wild card, which nobody knows the answer to, which is what is Jack Smith gonna do in the January sixth case.

So I would say there is likely to be some criminal accountability before the election. It’s not going to be on the biggest stuff a January sixth case, if it does happen, won’t have the same classified information problems that the Mar a Lago cases gonna have and could move faster. Also will be in DC where we may have a more professional judge. The bench here is superb. So I think the chances that you’re going to get serious criminal accountability are overwhelming.

They’re chances that you’re gonna get it on a time frame that is what you want is less overwhelming.

I like the word overwhelming. Let’s then start to look at a couple of these in particular. There are news items at least this week on two of these fronts. One, was a judge ordering the release of more information from the Mar a Lago search warrant. Some of the Bulwark to help portions were released.

There was one of which you texted to me. I think you found a particular interest. So what have we learned additionally from the Marlago search warrant case?

So this was important like, little nugget of gold so to speak in the Mar a

lot in search warrant. Unintended.

Yes. Funintended. The door of the storage room at Mar a Lago in which classified materials were stored is painted gold

class.

Just like the radiators at the Trump Hotel in Washington, you know, that’s the fact that’s gonna make the difference to people. Now look, there’s not a whole lot of new information in the search warrant because it’s, you know, a year older than the indictment, and But there are interesting tidbits, for example, the search warrant confirms what we all suspected which was that the FBI had surveillance video that they were using to track the movement of boxes and stuff But the story is very much the same as the story in the indictment, which is not surprising because the FBI did the investigation that led to the search warrant, which was then part of the investigation, which led to the indictment. The big important aspect of this is that, you know, a whole lot of information is gonna come out about this investigation. Over the course of the discovery in the case and the Trump lawyers are going to try to use all of it to make the investigation look bad. And so I think what you’re going to see is how important it is you know, we’ve heard a lot of criticism of Merrick Garland.

This is a justice department that will have been extremely careful to dot every eye and cross every and will have been thinking about this litigation a year and a half ago as it conducted this investigation and you’re going to start see the dividends of that caution, all of which takes time that people complain about, but the caution and care really pays off you then have to litigate things, which is what we’re gonna see now.

Yeah. And the other new developments, if you will, in that and specifically in the Marilago case, related to the Trump’s aide Walt Nada. He has his arraignment scheduled for this morning after it has been twice delayed. In the affidavit that came out, one of the quotes here is that witness five, who has been reported to be Walt Naught of by several news organizations, removed sixty four boxes from the storage room between May twenty four, June one twenty twenty two, but only returned twenty five to thirty boxes to the storage room. June two, twenty twenty two, and it can’t be seen from the video footage where the boxes were moved when they were taken.

So I think that sheds a little bit more light about why Walt is such a key part of this investigation, and now he’s gonna have his day in court, you know, after, I guess, he struggled trying to find local counsel. Maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally. What what’s your take on on his arraignment and, you know, the new information about the video?

The new information about the video actually is only sort of new. So the fact that he removed sixty plus boxes and only returned thirty of them is, of course, an important fact in the indictment itself. It’s one of the ways that the government is going to try to prove that Donald Trump went through those boxes, right? That he interfered with the ability of his own lawyer, mister Corcoran, to return the classified material that he owed the government, What is new in there is again what we suspected which is that the way the government knew this is because of surveillance video. Look, Walt Nada and I have not checked yet this morning whether the arraignment actually happened, I think it will be difficult for him if it did not.

But, you know, by the time anybody listens to this, presumably Walt Nado would have been arraigned. I think the significance of his trouble finding local counsel is one of two things, and I’m honestly not sure which it is. One is it could just simply reflect the chaos of the Trump legal team at the end of the day, they’re not reliable about paying their legal bills. In fact, they’re reliable about not paying their legal bills. And they may just be having trouble finding lawyers to represent even ancillary figures like NADA who is you know, not the important character here.

The other possibility is that it may be intentional as you allude. You know, they may just be playing games with the court. If that is what’s happening, you know, that’s the kind of thing that tries the patience of judges, even judges who are

I wanna get to this on South Florida’s acceptable district foot and so we’re taping this at eleven eastern time here on Thursday and not as arraignment was scheduled for ten. Was pushed back to eleven. So he should be getting arraigned any minute. Interestingly, Mark Caputo reported the lawyer he finally found, Sasha, Dabin, d a d a n, is a Florida state representative, Trump supporter. So, you know, he found somebody a team

to do it. Yeah.

Lawfair had a column that was maybe zagging against the conventional wisdom about, you know, whether South Florida, you know, might be a district where Trump could hear a fair trial. I think there’s a lot of folks who are maybe concerned both with Canon and with the Florida Manitude of a potential jury that this wasn’t gonna be, you know, maybe the best place for Jack Smith to find accountability for Trump. What’s your take on the piece from Stephanie Pell.

Right. So Stephanie Pell, who is a Lawfair senior editor who mostly works on cyber security issues, but Stephanie had a prior life as a federal prosecutor in of all places, the Southern District of Florida. Where she worked on the prosecution, people may remember this name of Jose Padilla, who was the gentlemen who in the immediate aftermath of nine eleven was suspected of trying to plant a dirty bomb in the United States he was eventually charged for other things. Stephanie prosecuted him. Her point in the piece is that, first of all, leave aside the merits of Aileen Cannon as a judge, you know, people are making assumptions about what the Florida court is capable of in a classified and a heavy duty politically sensitive classified information procedures act case, and she rightly reminds readers that there have been a number of important such cases prosecuted in Southern District of Florida including the Padilla case But perhaps more importantly, the Noriega case, the case of the former Panama dictator, that was one of the biggest Scepa cases that has ever been prosecuted, and it was handled there.

And so her point is that there are, to the extent that Eileen Cannon you know, kinda needs help, which I think a lot of young judges would probably need some help on this case like this. There are judges in that district who are quite experienced with this sort of thing. I think she would concede it’s not the most experience bench in this type of national security litigation, but it’s not the least either. You know, the other thing I would say just in terms of can you get a fair jury in South Florida? I actually think people, like, leave aside the question about Eileen and Canon.

People need to cut the people of South Florida break.

I was looking at the crowd at that Miami heat game. And I’m just telling you, there’s some folks in there that I wouldn’t want on this jury. Alright. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Yeah. And that is why there are strikes for cause and peremptory strikes, so you can get rid of the Miami Heat fans. Look, every day in every jurisdiction of the country, jurries get empaneled and they swear an oath to, you know, follow the evidence as presented before them and follow the instructions of judges. And every day they do it. And, you know, there are people in the MAGA world who insist that nobody can catch a break from a jury in the District of Columbia in these not January sixth cases.

And every day these cases have, you know, that have gone to trial. There aren’t that many that have gone to trial. Juries have made careful distinctions between, you know, what Stuart Roads did and what Enrique Tario did and what lower level keepers and Proud Boys, did jurors take their responsibility seriously, defense lawyers get to help pick them, prosecutors get to help pick them. And by the way, there’s no choice. There’s a constitutional requirement that you bring a case in appropriate venue.

The appropriate venue for this case is South Florida, the Justice Department acknowledges that. And so that’s just the cards that people are dealt. And, you know, I just remind people that the South Florida jury pool includes all the Miami beach people that you’d wanna party with.

So The Vindmans have moved down there, you know? Maybe you can get raped

on there. The Vindmans are

down the jury.

Yeah. Exactly. So just chill people, we’re gonna get a jury, we’re gonna get a trial, the evidence is really, really bone crushing, it’s gonna be okay.

Okay. I like that positivity. I wanna get you probably the most alarming and and maddening story of the week about the gentleman who wrenched by the Obama’s home. But the other kind of news since last time in the podcast was about a call that we knew about, which was Trump trying to pressure Arizona governor, Doug Ducey, you know, maybe he didn’t feel like he had the confidence to bully him that he did with Brad Raffinsburger, but called up some more intent, and it appears as if now that is another thread that Jack Smith is pursuing in addition to the call that Trump made to do see and pressuring Pence to call Ducey. I’m just wondering, you know, what your thought is on that and just the broader kind of Jack Smith, the January sixth side of the Jack Smith efforts.

Yeah. So unlike the Mar a Lago side, even before the indictment, the Mar a Lago side, we always had a lot of visibility into And we had it because there was a search warrant, you know, because Trump kept announcing things about it. It was not a leaky investment negation at all, but it was there was a lot of witnesses were talking about things and we had a lot of visibility into this. We have comparatively much less visibility into the January sixth investigation. We know it is very active, we know some things that it has been looking at because, you know, who goes in, like Mike Pence goes in, to the grand jury, you know what they’re talking about.

Right? We’ve seen there’s some litigation that has shed light on it, and I think one of the things that we know is being very actively looked at is Trump’s efforts to pressure people of different varieties with respect to state officials with respect to fake electors, you know, all these different components of his activity not necessarily with respect to the violence on January sixth, but with respect to the attempt to overturn the election. In that sense, it is altogether unsurprising that one interesting thing to the grand jury and to Jack Smith would be the Arizona affair, which you’ll recall from the January sixth committee, you know, there was some serious pressure on Rusty Bowers, on local Maricopa County, officials pressure that, by the way, continued until they were recently announced they weren’t running for reelection again. Right? Like, People have been really terrorized, and the president’s personal role in some of that is an obvious area for them to be looking at and they are.

And I think that’s really all we can say with confidence. I do think the January six investigation that there is some reason to believe it is wrapping up at this point, but I’m not confident of that. You know, there’s a limited window of time for them to act before you really do get into the election season and things become politically difficult. I do think this summer is crunch time in a lot of ways. That said, we really don’t know very much

TikTok. Okay. Yeah. My one other straight observation on that on the Arizona thing in particular is you know, it doesn’t really cover Mike Pence in glory. You know, the more you look into this situation.

You know, and Pence who obviously does the right thing in the end, it seems does make a couple of calls. Into Ducey on Trump’s behalf since Ducey is is like ghosting Donald Trump. So Ducey turns out to look okay in this situation, but Pence does kinda nudge do see it a few times. And and, you know, we know famously that he also called Arizona Dan Quail or at least Arizona by move. He’s a fellow Indiana originally.

To get his opinion on whether, you know, Pence could actually try to overturn the election on January sixth. So it’s just noteworthy how far down the field this gets even among the team normal crowd.

Look. I think Mike Pence, that is actually consistent with a huge amount of Mike Pence’s oveRA, which is I will go very far, but there is a line. Trump ultimately found the line that he wouldn’t cross.

Yeah.

And that bravery in not crossing that line is real, and he, you know, it causes a significant constituency for his being hanged, but it is worth remembering that, like, that line did have to be found.

Yeah.

He wasn’t, like, out of the gate in November — Right.

—

saying, I’m really sorry we lost this election. Let’s have a transition befitting the office of the presidency. Remember, there was no transition.

Exactly.

The Trump administration refused to cooperate with the transition.

Right.

By contrast, I just wanna remind people of this because I think it’s super moving. Barack Obama was once asked by the New Yorker about his feelings about George w Bush with whom, of course, he had such profound political disagreements. And he said that the greatest gift that Bush ever gave him was a beautiful and seamless transition and that he instructed his people to give every information, they could, every cooperation they could to the incoming Obama administration. And it’s like That is what the presidency is supposed to be, and it was moving to Obama.

Yeah. And even more on the other end is what Obama did — Yes.

—

with Trump. And Obama’s have been met with Trump. Hard stomach.

But Pence did not feel the need to ever say, you know, we should be doing that.

Right. Or try to do it himself.

Or try to do it himself.

If he

could have held a meeting with Kamala and Biden, it just if Trump didn’t. Also, you

go into Georgia. This is my rant to reminder that on January fifth was the Georgia runoff, both republican candidates were running on an explicit proku platform. Who I believe are the only two major party candidates to run on a pro coup platform since the civil war. You know, saying that they would if they got in there, they would overturn the, like, and and reinstall Trump, and Pence campaigns for them.

Pence didn’t have anything to say about that.

Yeah. No. He can’t be supported them.

Right. I mean, I am all for honoring Mike Pence for defending the line that he found.

On January six.

On January seven.

But up to January five, November through January five, he was pretty dicey.

He found it a few days earlier, is why there’s this pressure campaign on him. And he I really do think it’s important for Democrats and Pence haters to understand that it is no small thing that he found the line and defended it. Of

course, sure.

But I also think it’s really important never to lose sight of the fact that that line had to be groped for and, you know, felt with fingertips and before he found the line, he rode with Trump a very long way, not just on the lawlessness stuff, but also in the less in participating with the election overturning stuff than in not actively refusing it.

Agree. Speaking of things that that curdle my blood, I have more of a comment than a question on this story. So I’ll do that and then you can kind of respond. But people haven’t seen it Taylor Toronto. I think actually that’s an appropriate intro for people who haven’t seen it.

It’s pretty insane that this story is not a wall to wall leading the news item. And maybe in my channel, we should have started the podcast with this. Because in any other instance, where it was any other political figure besides Donald Trump, who stoked a lone wolf terrorist attack or at least attempt on a political foe.

You should slow down and tell the story because I bet there are a lot of who don’t know who Taylor Toronto is and don’t know what happened past week that the press doesn’t seem to care very much about. Okay.

Donald Trump puts on truth social, a post where he links to some article about how he’s battling the shadow government. I’m not sure what the article was sourced from, but whoever it was irresponsibly included the Obama’s address. It’s part of a insult in the article about Obama and, you know, his access to the deep state and and how he accessed this five million dollar mansion in DC. Links the address in DC. Trump posted on Truth Social.

Taylor Toronto, who breached the capital on January sixth, rebleated that. I guess that’s what we’re calling that or rebleat. Got them surrounded exclamation point with a red square around the Obama. Address. So, you know, not exactly hiding his intentions here.

He then drove a van full of weapons to Obama’s neighborhood where he was appears to be casing the neighborhood according to prosecutors and was live streaming from his van onto his YouTube channel about his plans to target the former president and his wife. You know, again, we we had some of these instances with supreme court justice. We had some of these incidents, obviously, of Steesk lease, and there’s been a bipartisan, you know, effort of, you know, you can’t stop crazy people trying to do crazy things. But we have here a case of somebody that that was motivated by a post by former president Trump. Bringing weapons to essentially the doorstep of former president Obama with an intention to act, and there is silence.

I I I guess I started with a media criticism, but maybe more apt is there is silence from republican leaders, from the Supreme Court justices who are getting all outraged went right correctly when they’re getting outraged when someone went to Kavanaugh’s house. The fact that this happens, I think, is a reflection of a very dangerous political culture that we’re at right now that is being stoked disproportionately viable a wide margin on the right. And, you know, frankly, I think that we’re lucky that we haven’t had more successful efforts in the line of Taylor Taranto. So I’m curious just for your response to all of that.

Yeah. So I have a lot of thoughts on this. Some of them very personal. And I wanna start with the fact that Taylor Taranto was stopped because he tripped over secret service stuff. Secret Podcast has this very significant presence in that neighborhood because the Obama’s live there.

They used to live next door to of all people Jared and Ivanka, who had the house next to them, who were also under Secret Service Protection. I think they’ve left that house and moved to Florida, but and then there are significant diplomatic facilities in that immediate neighborhood as well. And so you can do all kinds of crazy things on social media, But when you actually come to one of those neighborhoods, one of those houses that is undersecret service, protection, then you’re really playing the big leagues all of a sudden and the secret service with whom for my own reasons I have a lot of interactions as part of my projections on Russian diplomatic facilities. I deal with them all the time. These are very serious people and they’re good at what they do.

And I think the fact that the Obama’s are okay and that all those weapons in the van stayed in the van and that mister Toronto is in federal custody is, you know, a reflection of people rag on the Secret Podcast every time, you know, a deer gets on the White House lawn or something, whatever. It’s a flawed organization in some ways, but on their core protect mission. They’re very, very effective and we owe them a debt of gratitude on this one. They were chasing him good and hard So in a world of social media and political polarization, you’re gonna have your Steve Scalia situations where, you know, somebody who supports Bernie Sanders, shoots Steve Scalia, and that’s, you know, a disaster and, you know, I don’t know what you do about that. Some combination of social media, radicalization and gun culture, those things are really dangerous.

And you know, sometimes it’s from the right and sometimes it’s Pulse Nightclub, right, it’s, you know, ideologically motivated people, sometimes you have your, you know, your left crazies like the Steve’s Glaces. And I’m generally against blaming politicians for the people who do crazy horrible things in their names or who support them. I I just think that’s cheap. This is different. Trump doxxed the Obama’s.

He gave out their address, and he does it knowing that he has violent followers. He encourages his violent followers. He talks about them as, you know, second amendment people. Right?

Stand back and stand by in the twenty sixteen campaign. How many times he, you know, knocked down a lot of them. Right? He has been far outside even the outer edge bounds of what was acceptable political discourse on you know, when it comes to inciting violence — Exactly.

—

far before January sixth and then and then obviously, you know, on January sixth and and then they’ll fall out

And, you know, when you send out somebody’s address to I don’t know how many people follow his bleats, but it’s it’s a substance, not Twitter, but it’s not the trivial number.

It’s more than I would wish.

Right. And they are self selected for a propensity to both do what Donald Trump says and frankly to a certain violent type of rhetoric and behavior. And you send that out intentionally, and then somebody goes and goes to that address. You bear a certain amount of responsibility for that. It’s the obvious and frankly, clearly, intended outcome of of the original bleat, and you’re dealing with a activated armed cadre of potentially violent people.

Some of whom are out on supervised release from their previous violent episodes on behalf of Donald Trump by the grace of the court system in Washington.

This is just really quick on that on the previous release. This is the other thing that pisses me off about this and all these Republicans. And you have the JD Vance as the world and the Blake Matt. It’s not just the Marjorie taylor Greens, but, you know, it’s Ted Cruz, doing the whole oh, the January sixty four being targeted. Yeah.

This is happening across conservative media. You know, the false equivalence between the, you know, BLM arrests. Like, this is very common throughout conservative media. And here we are. Having a case like this where somebody is out on prerelease, essentially doing a political assassination targeting of former president Obama.

And silence from that you know, like, there’s there is no responsibility, you know, from anyone in the MAGA world to say, hey, this is going too far. There’s nobody trying to reign Trump in or reign Trump supporters in even in the least. You know, I it’s it’s too much maybe to ask them to moderate on policies or to work with Democrats or to say something nice about Joe Biden, but to at least try to reign in the extreme violent rhetoric and, you know, tamp down this notion that the people that acted on January sixth are, you know, are being what a target about a government. You don’t see that at all even in the face of a new story like this. And that’s something that really pisses me off.

I agree with that although I will say people who committed criminal activity on January sixth have been targeted, and that’s absolutely right.

Right.

That’s called crime control. Right? And we’ve seen real benefits

Unfairly targeted. No. Yeah. No. No.

No.

This is bullshit. I just wanna but I I just wanna say the goal here is to have a chilling effect. And it’s a chilling effect on insurrectionary violence. It’s called in the crime world deterrence. Bulwark.

And let me give you two examples of it working. One, we had an arraignment of Donald Trump in New York. There were substantial fears of violence, there was no violence. Would that have happened if you hadn’t prosecuted a thousand? A thousand?

People who committed violent or otherwise illegal acts on January sixth? I don’t know.

Great point.

Second, we had a second arraignment of Donald Trump in Miami, Florida. There were protests. There was a lot of anger expressed. It wasn’t violent. Nobody was hurt.

I don’t think anybody was arrested. Would that have happened if you hadn’t had prosecutions of a thousand people for not following the law and for trying to, you know, storm the capital on January sixth. I doubt it. And so, you know, again, people criticize the way the justice department has privileged sequentially the violent street protesters of January sixth, but there was a reason for that originally, and it was to prevent violence at Joe Biden’s inauguration. And they made a decision, the US attorney’s office and the and the justice department, this before Merrick Garland is even in office, that the priority was to take people off the streets who might engage in violence on the inauguration and thereby deter violence.

We’re seeing a lot of benefits of that, and that is what happens when you target the right people for criminal prosecution. And so to JD Vance, I would say Yeah. We’re targeting. The Justice Department is targeting the criminals and insurrectionists of January sixth. And that’s great.

Damn right. Okay. It’s been a good show, long show. We’re over, but I did promise people at the top we get bins opinion. We had some listeners We thought we were a little too generous to the Supreme Court yesterday on the next level.

Folks can listen to that if they want. And morning shots this morning, I wrote about my kind of conflicted view on this question of whether we need court reform. I strongly believe that Mitch McConnell, I wrote the word stole, but you can define it how you want. Outside of fair game procured a supreme court seat that otherwise would have gone to a democratically appointed judge, either Merrick Garland in the first instance or whoever Biden would have appointed in lieu of Amy Coney Barrett in the second instance. And so I’m sympathetic to the ideas for reform, but on the other hand, I’m also sympathetic to president Biden’s view.

And I think that he he deserves a lot of credit for being norms protecting and that that this court has in a lot of ways zagged away from what MAGa partisans would have wanted on voting rights and and democracy and other issues. So there’s a ton there We’re overtime. I just wanna put in a quarter and get Ben Willis’s take on Supreme Court. Do we need reforms? Where are you at?

Where do you fall down on, you know, how how normsy the current six three supreme court is? And what should be done about it, if anything?

Alright. This is a huge topic and And you

have two minutes. Go ahead.

I have two minutes. So here we go. I totally understand liberal fury at the end of this term. I totally understand it. You know, between the end of this term and the end of last term, this is some significant percentage of the liberal nightmare of what happens when you put a bunch of conservatives on the court.

That said, I am still normsy about the whole thing. I was

giving you a chance to win over the listeners who are mad at us, Ben, but I guess we’ll have to do Tommy Vuor tomorrow, you know, and maybe he’ll do it.

I’m too normsy to win people over on this. Let me tell you the big thing that the court reform movement misses, and it is the actuarial tables. You know, Supreme Court justices don’t last that long if you think about them in groups of nine. And if you win elections, this problem will take care of itself. And one of the great things, there’s an old saying the Supreme Court follows the election returns.

Which is a famous sort of saying from the legal realist movement. And the reason it follows the election returns is that justices eventually die and get replaced or retire and get replaced. So my big message on this is I don’t wanna tell you it’s not as bad as you think. Listeners don’t need my patronizing sense of that. We need to keep the MAGa people out of power.

And if you keep the MAG of people out of power, the Supreme Court problem over the next decade will take care of itself. That’s not a satisfying answer to people who feel strongly about affirmative action or who feel strongly about abortion rights. Which I am certainly in the latter camp and to some degree, I’m in the former camp. I do think that the world of putting the structure of the court on the table every time the court gets way out of line is a bad idea, and it’s one that Mitch McConnell has more to gain from than I do. One exception to that.

I do think term limits for Supreme Court nominees is a good idea, has always been a good idea and could be a basis for something bipartisan on this since it is broadly supported by something like eighty percent of the public.

Yeah. I think the Republicans feel like they’re in pretty good shape right now. And I don’t know why they’d want a constitution changing bipartisan move on that. I I do hear you. I agree with your sentiments entirely about the elections.

I think that the pain that the left feels here is is made more acute by the fact that this additional seat was garnered over you wanna put by a president that didn’t even win a majority of the support. Right? And and this is where you get in the tyranny of the minority stuff. Ben, we’re gonna have to do more of this on, like, in a little fun remake or something at some point because we’ve gone way over.

It’s gonna happen people. Three Cooper is

gonna kill me. I’ve gone way over. It’s been a wonderful show. You will see me back here tomorrow with Tommy Vietor

while Charlie is on holiday, and so tune in then. We’ll do it all over again. Peace.

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