Reverse Lawfare: The Fight for Trump’s Agenda in the Courts

As Attorney General for Missouri, Eric Schmidt racked up a series of legal victories on everything from government censorship to government overreach during the COVID crisis.

Now a U.S.

Senator, Schmidt has published a new book that lays out what he calls the last line of defense for the country: taking the legal fight to the left in the ports.

In this episode, we sit down with Senator Schmidt to discuss the legal strategy he employed to promote conservative priorities and what battles he sees on the horizon.

I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

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So joining us now to discuss his new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court is Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri.

Senator First, thank you so much for coming on.

It's great to be with you.

Now, I wanted to start with a quote from President Trump about you and your new book.

He said, Eric is a fighter who beat back Biden's disastrous policies as AG and in the U.S.

Senate.

He's been working hard to defend our America first agenda from the radical left.

Couldn't have gotten a better recommendation from Trump there.

First, how well do you know the president?

Oh, I've gotten to know President Trump really well over the course of several years now, starting when I was AG and then, of course, when I ran for the Senate and then even his time out of office, went back to Butler with him,

been on the campaign trail a bunch.

I get to play golf with President Trump, went to the Super Bowl with President Trump.

So

I can consider him a friend, but more importantly than that, I think for the country, I think he's the most consequential president in my lifetime.

And this comeback that

he pulled off in November is historic, to say the least.

Now, as he highlighted in that quote, you guys have alignment on a lot of your priorities.

And I wanted to talk about that, what you've done legally in that realm.

It's been Democrats who've been able to stop GOP policies and initiatives using the courts in the past, but you've really worked to turn that around.

For those who haven't tracked some of your wins as Attorney General of Missouri, can you tell us about some of your legal battles?

Yeah, and that's really honestly why I wrote the last line of defense, which you can get on Amazon right now, is to, you know, right now, the book starts with in November of 2024, the fever broke, right?

So the American people weighed in and we're celebrating a lot of those successes that President Trump promised and is now delivering.

But if you go back in time, just a few years, these were some dark years during the Biden era.

This was, you know, the age of lockdowns, compulsory COVID shots, DEI struggle sessions, blatantly open borders, a censorship regime that was really, really vast and suppressed the First Amendment rights of Americans.

And each one of those fronts, when I was Attorney General in Missouri, the job I had before this, we saw that landscape and we stood up and we fought back and we won.

So take the vaccine mandate, for example.

We filed suit.

We took that to the Supreme Court and we won.

The student loan debt forgiveness scam that would have cost taxpayers a half a trillion dollars.

Missouri filed the lawsuit.

We took it to the Supreme Court and we won.

We filed the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit that unveiled and really uncovered this vast censorship enterprise, this sprawling leviathan of government agencies.

tilted at the American people to suppress their speech.

And you got to remember, this was before the Twitter files.

This was before the congressional hearings.

We really brought that, you know, to

the American people.

And then, you know, even at a local level, I was the only AG in the country that was suing 50-plus school districts for forcing the masking of our kids.

And we were able to beat that back too.

So I think the lessons there, you know, that's the playbook.

You got to stand up and you got to fight, which is why I wrote the book.

Yeah, as almost as a disclosure statement here, but Daily Wire was part of some of these fights.

The vaccine mandate also legally fought that.

We're at the center of a lot of these censorship efforts.

That, again, there's alignment between us and you and your work as an AG.

Of those cases, what do you think were some of the more consequential in terms of shaping the direction of conservative, conservative legal strategy going forward?

What do you think are the most important takeaways?

Well, when I was in college in the late 90s, I was always, I was conservative, but I was always a little envious of liberals

in that they were viewed as sort of

the protectors of free speech.

And they have totally lost the plot on that now.

That is not what they're interested in.

They're about power and control.

And I think conservatives, beginning with the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit, I think we've seen this renaissance of free speech now.

I'm really proud of that work because when we filed that in May of 2022, it was labeled a conspiracy theory.

There's no evidence.

This is just you're trying to get publicity.

And one of the strategic decisions we made in that litigation, which is a little unusual, normally when you file a lawsuit like that, you seek an injunction right away to get the government to stop what they're doing.

But we knew it was high profile.

We knew we were, you know, the tip of the the iceberg was Jin Saki at the podium talking about flagging things for Facebook or this disinformation governance board they had floated, which is crazy.

So we needed more.

So we sought discovery first and the judge granted it.

So that, to me, was the, was sort of this eye-opening moment.

We saw the reams of emails and text messages, a secret portal that they had with social media companies to censor speech.

They started on day three of the Biden administration.

Then we got to take the deposition of Anthony Fauci, which you can read about in the book, took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI agent in charge of pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story.

They knew it was real, and they were telling the social media companies, you got to censor this because it is a Russian hack and leak operation.

I mean, it's really mind-blowing, honestly, that this was happening in this country.

But I think that lawsuit in particular was telling.

And then I would just also say writ large, what was going on during COVID was total insanity.

I mean, people who never should have had that kind of power had it and were exercising it in ways that you couldn't imagine.

And I say in the book, you know, power doesn't necessarily corrupt, but it does reveal.

And what it revealed about the left were their true intentions, which was to control the public.

And whether it was enforced masking of kids or making the guy who, you know, drives a forklift force him to get a vaccine that he may have objected to, or he would lose his job.

I mean, this stuff was pretty wild.

And so, again, the book, Last Line of Defense, which you can get on Amazon right now, goes through all this stuff stuff and says, you know, this stuff was crazy.

We fought back.

We won.

We can't ever let this happen again.

You know, it's amazing.

You're talking about Twitter files, but a lot of the things you guys helped expose with just emails, little innocuous, quote unquote, emails from one unelected bureaucrat to something like a Facebook has massive impacts for millions, millions of people.

The implications are huge.

The transparency, the disclosure of some of this information, like you said, with the deposition, just getting some of this information out, getting some light on it.

Is that part of the key moving forward to prevent these kinds of abuses of public power?

Absolutely.

Because again, look at what the media did.

They ran cover for Biden, you know,

his incompetence, his being sort of out to launch.

They ran cover for all of this.

And so what you guys do, this more diffused media environment is good now because actually information can get out there.

The middlemen are losing control, literally and figuratively.

They're losing it.

And that's a good thing.

And so when you get that kind of information out, it helps inform the public debate.

And I would also say that

this wasn't just one person trying to influence one company.

This was a whole of government effort.

I mean, the CDC, we took the deposition of somebody at the CDC.

They were providing words and phrases to social media companies to censor.

And then you'd have this back and forth exchange.

Is that enough?

You need to do more.

This is coming from the highest levels of the White House.

I mean, the FBI, the CDC, CISA, which is an agency most people have never heard of, it's in charge of cybersecurity.

They were in on it.

They were saying, they were flagging posts for

social media companies to censor.

And they outsourced it, even not just to social media companies, but Stanford and University of Washington, these NGOs.

It is sprawling and it was uncovered.

And I think what you're seeing now is some of the transparency Tulsi Gavard's providing and other, you know, other agencies to show the links to which the Biden administration, when the Democrats had power, what they were willing to do with it, which is why everybody has to stay engaged.

And I think, again, the book, Last Line of Defense, kind of recounts these war stories and then provides a roadmap.

Looking forward, what do you think the next front in the legal fight against government overreach will be?

Well, I think,

you know, the dismantling the administrative state has to be at the core of all of this, because if you look at really the fruit of the poisonous tree, the poisonous tree is this, this, it started with Woodrow Wilson, really talk about in the book, like, how did we get here?

It's this belief among progressives of people like Woodrow Wilson that the experts

are going to know better better than the people.

And we saw that, of course, play out during COVID, but they had this, again, leviathan of agencies set up now.

So we've got to dismantle it.

We've got to take that power away, return it back to people who are accountable, whether it's an Article I branch specifically.

Like, for example, if you've got some rule or regulation that you think is such a great idea, department of whatever, if it has an economic impact of, pick the number.

Before it can go into effect, Congress should have to vote on it.

That would provide a lot of accountability, right?

Because the people in Missouri then would say, we like how Eric Schmidt voted, or we don't like how Eric Schmidt voted.

We'll send them back or we'll send them home.

And that's really what this system was created by our founders was accountability and self-government.

When you have a you know, a faceless bureaucrat in an agency no one's heard of, that's not accountability.

Like no one knows who that person is.

And so I think that's the structural kind of reform that we need.

You often frame these legal challenges as part of a broader cultural and political struggle.

How do you balance winning cases in court with sort of winning hearts and minds outside the courtroom?

Yeah, I think, again, the book, The Last Line of Defense, it's instructive here because what we did, take mass mandates, for example, even at the local level.

So I saw the corruption at the highest levels of government.

But then also,

why is a superintendent in Springfield, Missouri, you know, hiding documents related to CRT?

And why are they forcing the masking of our kids?

Because honestly, a lot of that stuff's being pushed from the federal level.

They get buy-in and then it plays out at the local school district.

And so for me, it was

not only were we right on the law, they didn't have the authority to do this kind of stuff, but also

winning the argument with the people, right?

To expose it, to talk about it.

That's why you saw some of these school boards turn over.

And to this day, in Missouri, when I'm at a grocery store, the most common, you know, infrequent comment I get, usually from a mom, is somebody coming up to me and saying, you know what, thank you for fighting for our kids.

Because that was a time, remember, not everybody was willing to stand up.

They didn't want to be, you know, they had jobs and they didn't want to be fired and they didn't want to, you know, kind of stand out in that way.

And it really takes leadership, I think, to stand up and say, you know what, I know.

what everybody's thinking about this and somebody's got to do something about it.

And that was my, that was the time that I, when I was AG, g that's what my calling was and really kind of hold the line and fight back until um you know the cavalry arrived and i think that's what happened in 2024.

final question a pretty broad one has the legal landscape and maybe cultural landscape as well shifted now in favor of more conservative priorities Yes.

And I think that's, again, the call to action of the book is it's not really written for lawyers.

I mean, I mean, I hope lawyers read it because there are some lessons here.

But really, you know, for your audience, for other people who are very interested in these sorts of things, that this is a front that we have to fight in.

And I do think the terrain is good for us in the sense that we have a relatively conservative Supreme Court now that views.

And what I mean by that is not from like a political point of view, but basically making decisions on what the law says or what the Constitution says, not what they want it to be.

Not this living constitution nonsense that a lot of professors, when I was in law school, were still talking about, but actually an originalist view, a textualist view of what the statute or constitution actually says.

So we've got firm footing there.

President Trump had appointed over 200 judges in his first term, but Biden did two.

And so now we're back in that where President Trump gets to appoint judges.

But I also think you see some of the things that have played out already.

The left has tried to stop the deportations.

They've been unsuccessful.

They tried universal injunctions.

The Supreme Court slapped them down there too.

So I think as these cases, people can get frustrated, rightfully so, over some district court decision.

But as they make their way through the appellates courts and the Supreme Court, by and large, President Trump has been successful and I think he'll continue to be successful.

You know, we're watching one of the most transformative, probably the most transformative, bold administration we've ever seen.

I mean, just objectively speaking, we've never seen this many radical changes this quick from a president and a lot of wins, like you said, in the courts.

Senator, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

That was Senator Eric Schmidt talking about his new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.

And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.